The COMPLEAT
Collected SFF Works

of

John W. Campbell, Jr.
1910-1971

Table of Contents

When The Atoms Failed		Novelette	1930	
The Metal Horde		Novella	1930	
The Voice of the Void		Novelette	1930	
Piracy Preferred	Infinity 01.1	Novella	1930	
Solarite	Infinity 01.2	Novella	1930	
The Black Star Passes	Infinity 01.3	Novella	1930	
Islands of Space	Infinity 02	Novel	1931	
Invaders from the Infinite	Infinity 03	Novel	1932	
The Derelicts of Ganymede		Novelette	1932	
The Electronic Siege		Short Story	1932	
The Last Evolution		Novelette	1932	
Space Rays		Novelette	1932	
Beyond the End of Space	Atkill 01	Novella	1933	
The Mightiest Machine	Mightiest Machine 01	Novel	1934	
The Incredible Planet	Mightiest Machine 02	Novel	1949	
The Machine	The Machine 01	Short Story	1935	
The Invaders	The Machine 02	Short Story	1935	
Rebellion	The Machine 03	Novelette	1935	
The Battery of Hate		Novelette	1933	
Twilight		Novelette	1934	
The Irrelevant		Short Story	1934	
Atomic Power		Short Story	1934	
Blindness		Short Story	1935	
The Conquest of the Planets  		Novella	1935	
The Escape		Short Story	1935	
Night		Novelette	1935	
Elimination		Short Story	1936	
Frictional Losses		Novelette	1936	
Uncertainty		Novella	1936	
The Planeteers		Novel	1936	
Forgetfulness		Novelette	1937	
Out of Night	Sarn 01	Novelette	1937	
Cloak Of Aesir	Sarn 02	Novelette	1939	
Dead Knowledge		Novelette	1938	
Who Goes There?		Novella	1938	
The Elder Gods		Novella	1939	
Planet of Eternal Night		Novella	1939	
The Moon Is Hell		Novel	1951	
The Black Star Passes	Infinity 01 (rev)**	Novel	1953	
Islands of Space	Infinity 02 (rev)**	Novel	1956	
Invaders from the Infinite	Infinity 03 (rev)**	Novel	1961	
The Idealists		Novelette	1954	
Marooned		Novella	1976	
All		Novella	1976	
The Space Beyond	Atkill 02	Novel	1976	

All Science Fiction and Fantasy fiction stories are include. 

**The "Invaders from the Infinite" trilogy are included in both their pulp originals from the 1930's and their highly revised 1950's Ace Book versions.  

When The Atoms Failed
Amazing Stories – January 1930

Author's Foreword

	When the events of which I am to tell took place all the world was interested only in their final outcome, but when that last awful day was ended, and time enough had passed to give our world a chance to find a way to apply and use the awful forces it had had forced upon it, or, indeed, had even found how to control their immense energies, men began to wonder about the true story of the Invasion.

	I had always been a writer, first newspaper work, then a book or two. Perhaps because of this the world expected that an account would soon be presented. But had those millions seen that awful battle, seen those mighty wrecks on the hot sands, even then might they understand my dread of telling of that titanic defeat in a conflict in which the weaker was a million times more powerful than any force man had previously seen! It still burns in my memory, that awful scene in its desolate setting—the vast rolling desert below, seared, blasted, fused in great streaks where the intense, stabbing heat rays had cut it, mighty craters blasted in its surface where the terrific explosions of the shells had heaved thousands of tons of sand into great mounds, and those ghastly wrecks that lay crushed and broken on the hot sands below, bathed in the ruddy light of the sun of sunset, now slowly sinking behind the distant purple hills, as the last of the Invaders crashed on the packed sands below.

	Two men of all Earth's billions saw that scene—but those two will never forget—as Stephen Waterson and I can testify.

	Ten years have passed, ten years of stupendous change, readjustment, and cosmic conquest. Ten years in which a world has been added to man's domain, yet still sharp and clear in my memory is the picture of those shapeless masses, those lumps of glowing metal, that lay on the sands beneath us, the sole vestiges of the mighty ships of Mars.

	Never have I wanted to think long on that scene of titanic destruction, destruction such as man never before knew, but friends have convinced me that it is my duty as one who lived in closest contact with the facts, and one of the two men who saw that last struggle, to tell the story as it unrolled itself before me.

	Brief it is. The entire event, for all its consequences, lasted but two days—days that changed the history of a Universe!

	But in this march of mighty events, I was but a spectator, and as a spectator I shall tell it. And I shall try to depict for you the character of the greatest man of all the System's history—Stephen Waterson.

Waterson Laboratories
May, 1957
David Gale.

-

	It was late afternoon in May, 1947, and the temperature had climbed to unbelievable heights during the day. It seemed impossible to work with that merciless sun beating down on the roof. It is odd that a temperature of 95° in May should seem far higher than a similar temperature in July. On the top floors of the great apartments it was stifling. The great disadvantage of roof landings for planes had always been the tendency of the roofs to absorb heat in summer, yet on the topmost floors of those apartments people were living, and in one of those apartments a man was trying to work. Heat was a great trouble, but he found thoughts of hunger in the not too distant future an even greater inspiration to work. The manuscript he was correcting was lengthy, but this was the final revision, which was some comfort. Still the low buzz of the telephone annunciator was a relief. It was so much easier to talk. He took up the telephone. "Gale speaking."

	"Hello Dave, this is Steve. I hear you are having a bit of hot weather in New York today. I have a suggestion for you—I'm coming to pick you up in an hour and a half, and if you will be ready on your roof then, in a camp suit, and with camp clothes for about a month packed, I can guarantee you some fun, providing, of course, that you're still the man I knew. But I can't guarantee to return you! Meet me on your roof in an hour and a half."

	"Well, I'll—now what's up? So he isn't sure I'll get back—and he calls that a 'suggestion'! Anyhow it sounds interesting and I'll have to hurry. I wish he'd get into the habit of warning a fellow when he is going to start one of his expeditions! And I may not come back—I wonder where on Earth he's going now—and where he was then. The only reason he gives me an hour and a half is because it will take him that long to get here. He would drop in on me without any notice otherwise. In that case he must be about three hundred miles from here. But where?"

	An hour and a half later he was on the roof, watching the darting planes, there were a good many, but by far the larger part of the world's business and pleasure was on the ground in those days. Still the crimson and gray special of Waterson's ought to be easily visible. He was late—unusual for Steve. Gale hadn't seen him in more than a year—probably been working on one of his eternal experiments, he decided.

	Still he searched the skies in vain. Only the regular planes, and one dirigible—tiny in the distance—it seemed to be coming toward him—and it certainly was coming rapidly—it couldn't be a dirigible—no gas bag could go that fast—then he saw the crimson and the gray band around it—it was Steve.

	And now as it darted down and landed gracefully on the roof beside him, he saw that the machine was but thirty-five feet long, and ten or so in diameter. Suddenly a small round hatchway opened in its curved, windowless side of polished metal, and a moment later Stephen Waterson forced his way out. The door was certainly small, and forcing that six-foot-two body in and out through it must have been a feat worthy of a magician. Gale noticed that he would just about fit it, but the giant Waterson must have intended to use it very infrequently to make it that size.

	"Hello, Dave—how do you like my new boat? But get in, we're going. There, your bag's in already."

	"Good Lord, Steve, what is this? I gather you invented it. Certainly I never saw nor heard of it before," said Gale.

	"Well, Dave, I suppose you might say I invented it, but the truth is that a machine invented it—or at least discovered the principles on which it is based."

	"A machine! A machine invented it? What do you mean? A machine can't think, can it?"

	"I'm not so sure they can't, Dave, but get in—I'll tell you later. I promised Wright I would be back in three hours, and I've lost ten minutes already. Also, this machine weighs three thousand tons—so I don't want to leave it on this roof longer than is absolutely necessary."

	"But, Steve—let me look at it. Man, it is beautiful. What is that metal?"

	"Try the inside, Dave—there!"

	Dave Gale was rather good sized—five feet ten, and weighing over one hundred and sixty pounds, but Waterson was in perfect physical condition, two hundred and ten pounds of solid muscle, and Gale had been popped into the hatch like a bag of meal, so quickly was it done.

	Now he turned to look at the tiny room in which he found himself. It was evidently the pilot room, and around the front of the room there ran a clear window, curved to fit the curve of the ship's walls, and about three feet high, the center coming at about the level of the eye of a person sitting in either of the two deeply cushioned chairs directly facing it. The chairs were evidently an integral part of the machine, and from the heavy straps attached to them it was obvious that the passengers were expected to need some support. The arms of each chair were fully two feet broad, and many small instruments and controls were arranged on their polished black surfaces. Waterson had seated himself in the right hand chair and strapped himself in. Gale hastened to secure himself in the left chair.

	"Take it easy Dave, and be prepared for a shock when we start." "I'm ready Steve, let's go!" Waterson moved his right hand a bit, and a tiny red bulb showed on his left instrument panel; many of his instruments began to give readings and several on Gale's board did so also. Another movement, and there was a muffled hum of an air blower. Then Waterson looked at Gale and turned a small venier dial—Gale had been watching intently—but suddenly the look left his face—and was replaced by a look of astonished pain. The entire car had suddenly jerked a bit, then that peculiarly unpleasant sensation connected most intimately with a rapid elevator or helicopter starting from rest had made itself unpleasantly pronounced. Gale's pained and somewhat sick expression caused Waterson's smile to broaden.

	"Whew—Steve—what is this—why don't you warn a fellow of what's coming!"

	"I did warn you, Dave," answered Waterson, "and if you will look out, I think you will understand this."

	The car was rising, at first slowly, but ever faster and faster, from the roof, not as a helicopter rises, not as a dirigible rises, but more as a heavy body falls, with high acceleration ever faster and faster. Soon it was rising quite rapidly, straight up. Then another tiny red bulb flashed into life on Waterson's switchboard, and the ship suddenly tilted at an angle of thirty degrees. Then it shot forward, and continually accelerated an already great speed, till New York lay far behind, and then the sky became dark and black, and now the stars were looking in at them, not the winking, blue stars of Earth, but the blazing, steady stars of infinite space, and they were of every color, dull reds, greenish, and blue. And now as they shot on across the face of Earth far below, Gale watched in rapture the magnificent view before him, seeking the old friends of Earth—Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the other familiar, gleaming points. Then he turned his gaze toward the Sun, and cried out in astonishment, for the giant sphere was a hard, electric blue, like some monster electric arc, and for millions of miles there swept from it a great hazy, glowing cloud, the zodiacal light, almost invisible from Earth, but here blazing out in indescribable beauty.

	"We're in space! But, Steve, look at the sun! What makes it look blue? The glass of the window isn't blue, is it?" said Gale excitedly.

	"We're in space all right—but it isn't glass you're looking through; it is fused quartz. Glass that thick would crack in a moment under the stress of temperature change it has to undergo. The sun looks blue because, for the first time in your life, you are seeing it without having more than half its light screened off. The atmosphere won't pass blue light completely and it cuts off the ultra-violet transmission very shortly after we leave the visible region of the spectrum. The reason the sun has always looked yellow is that you could never see that blue portion of its spectrum. Remember, a thing gets bluer and bluer as it gets hotter. First we have red hot, bright red, yellow, white, then the electric arc is so hot that it gives blue light. But the sun is nearly two thousand degrees centigrade hotter than the electric arc. Naturally it is blue. Also, I'll bet you haven't found Mars.

	"No, Steve, I haven't. Where is it?"

	"Right over there. See it?"

	"But that can't be Mars. It's green, green as the Earth."

	"But it is Mars. The reason Mars looks red from Earth is that the light that reaches us from Mars has had to go through both Its own atmosphere and through ours, and by the time it reaches us, it is reddened, just as a distant plane beacon is. You know how a light in the distance looks red. That is what makes Mars look red."

	"Mars is green. Then it is possible that the life on Mars may be the same as that of Earth!"

	"Right, Dave. It probably is. Remember that the chlorophyl that gives the planets their color is also the material that can convert sunlight energy into fixed energy of starches and sugars for the plant, and probably the same material is serving in that capacity all over the universe, for carbon is the only element of the more than a hundred that there are that can possibly permit life's infinitely complicated processes to progress."

	"But I thought there were only ninety-two elements."

	"There are ninety-two different types of atoms, but if you have half a dozen men all doing exactly the same thing, can you call them 'a man'? They have found more than six different kinds of lead, two different kinds of chlorine, several different kinds of argon, and many of the other elements are really averages of several kinds of atoms, all of which do exactly the same thing, but have different weights. They are called isotopes. We say the atomic weight of chlorine is 35.457, but really there is no atom that has that weight. They have weights of 35 and 37, and are jumbled together so that the average is 35.457. Really there are over a hundred different kinds of atoms. In my work on this ship I found it made quite a difference which kind of chlorine atom I had."

	"Well, how does this machine work, and what do you mean by saying that a machine invented it?"

	"Dave, you know that for a number of years the greatest advances in physics have been made along the lines of mathematical work in atomic structure. Einstein was the greatest of the mathematicians, and so the greatest of the atomicists. Now, as you well know, I never was too good at mathematics but I did love atomic structure, and I had some ideas, but I needed someone to work out the mathematics of the theory for me.

	"You remember that back in 1929 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology they had a machine they called the integraph, an electrical machine that could do calculus too complex for Einstein himself to work out, and problems it would take Einstein months to solve, the machine could solve in a few minutes. It could actually do mathematics beyond the scope of the human brain. The calculus is a wonderful tool with which man can dig out knowledge, but he has to keep making his shovel bigger and bigger to dig deeper and deeper into the field of science. Toward the end of this decade, things got so the tail was wagging the dog to a considerable extent, the shovel was bigger than the man—we couldn't handle the tool. When that happened in the world once before they made a still bigger shovel, and hitched it to an electric motor. All the integraph did was to hitch the calculus to an electric motor—and then things began to happen.

	"I developed that machine further in my laboratory, and carried it far beyond the original plans. I can do with it a type of mathematics that was never before possible, and that mathematics, on that machine had done something no man ever did. It has found the secret of the atom, and released for us atomic energy. But that wasn't all, the machine kept working at those great long equations, reducing the number of variables, changing, differentiating, integrating, and then I saw where it was leading! I was scared when I saw what those equations meant. I was afraid that the machine had made an error, I was deathly afraid to test that last equation, the equation which the machine was absolutely unable to change. It had been working with the equations of matter, and now it had reached the ultimate, definitive equation of all matter! This final equation gave explicit instructions to the understanding; it told just how to completely destroy matter! It told how to release such terrific energy, I was afraid to try it. The equations of atomic energy I had tested and found good, I had succeeded in releasing the energy of atoms.

	"But the energy of matter has been known for many years; simple arithmetic can calculate the energy in one gram of matter. One gram is the equivalent of about ten drops of water and that much matter contains 900, 000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs of energy, all this in ten drops of water! Mass is just as truly a measure of energy as ergs, as foot-pounds or as kilowatt hours. You might buy your electricity by the pound. If you had five hundred million dollars or so, you could buy a pound. You have heard of atomic energy, of how terrifically powerful it is. It is just about one million times as great as the energy of coal. But that titanic energy is as little compared to the energy of matter itself, as the strength of an ant is compared to my strength. Material energy is ten thousand million times as great as the energy of coal. Perhaps now you can see why I was afraid to try out those equations. One gram of matter could explode as violently as seven thousand tons of dynamite!

	"But the machine was right. I succeeded in releasing that awful energy. I happened to release it as a heat ray, and the apparatus had been pointed in the direction of an open window luckily. Beyond that was just sand. The window was volatilized instantly, and the sand was melted to a great mass of fused quartz. It is there, and will be there for centuries, a two-mile streak of melted sand fifty feet broad! It makes a wonderful road of six foot thick glass—The machine showed me a thousand ways to apply it. I am driving this ship by means of an interesting bit of apparatus that the calculating machine designed. You remember Einstein's general relativity theory said that mass, gravity, bent space; but as it didn't fall in, as it would if attracted and not resisting, it must be that it is elastic. The field theory that he brought out back in 1929 showed that gravity and electrostatic fields were at least similar. I found, with the aid of my machine, that they were very closely related. I charge the walls of my ship strongly negative, then I have a piece of apparatus here that will distort that electrostatic field so it cuts off gravity—and the ship has no weight. The propulsion is simple also. I told you that space was elastic. I have a projector, or series of projectors all around the ship which will throw a beam of a ray which tends to bend space toward it. The space resists, and since the mountain won't come to Mahomet, Mahomet goes to the mountain—and the ship sails along nicely.

	"The only theoretical limit to my speed is, of course, the velocity of light. At that speed any body would have infinite mass, and as you can't produce an infinite force, you certainly can't go any faster, and you can't go that fast in fact. If I accelerated one of the little five gram bullets I use in that machine gun to the speed of an alpha particle such as radium shoots off, not a very high speed in space, it would require as much energy to get it up to that speed, 10,000 miles a second, as five thousand fast freights, each a thousand tons apiece, would require to get up a speed of a mile a minute. You see that there is no possibility of getting up any speed like that even with material energy—it is too expensive even with that cheap energy—for it costs just as much to slow down again!

	"The interesting thing about this energy is that scientists have known about it for a good many years, and while hundreds of people told about atomic energy, no one outside of the scientists ever spoke of the far greater energy of matter. The scientists said that the sun used that energy to maintain its heat—forty million degrees on the interior of the sun. They said man could never duplicate that temperature nor that pressure that prevails at the interior of the sun. They therefore said that man would never be able to release that energy. But the sun had to raise thousands of tons of water, and blow that vapor many miles, and do a lot of other complicated things before there was any lightning. Man would never be able to reproduce those conditions, and he would never be able to make lightning. Besides, if he did, what good would his electricity do him; it would be so wild, and so useless.

	"But man discovered other ways of releasing his energies and converting it into electricity in a way that did not exist in nature. Manifestly it is possible to do the same with the energy of matter, and I have done it.

	"The object of this trip, Dave, is exploration. I am going to the other planets, and I want you to come along. I believe I am prepared for any trouble we may meet there. That machine gun shoots bullets loaded with a bit of matter that will explode on impact. There is only a dust grain of it there, but it is as violent as ten tons of dynamite. If I exploded the entire shell, remember I would get the equivalent of thirty-five thousand tons of dynamite—which is manifestly unsafe. There are also a series of projectors around the car that project heat rays. These rays are capable of volatilizing anything that will absorb them. The projectors of all the rays have a separate generator unit directly connected. The unit is built right into the projector, but controlled from here. They are small, but tremendously more powerful than any power plant the Earth has ever seen before—each one can far outdo the great million and a half horsepower station in San Francisco. They can develop in the neighborhood of fifty million horsepower each!"

	"Lord, Steve, I'm no scientist, and when you speak glibly of power sources millions, billions of times more powerful than coal, I'm not only lost, I'm scared. And you have a couple of dozen of those fifty-million-horsepower-generators around this ship. What would happen if they got short-circuited or something?"

	"If they did, which I don't believe they will, they would either explode the entire ship, and incidentally make the Earth at least stagger in its orbit, or fuse it instantaneously and so destroy themselves. I might add that we would not survive the calamity."

	"No, I rather guessed that. But, Steve, here in the utter cold and utter vacuum of space I should think that it would be hard to heat the ship. How do you do it?"

	"The first thing to do in any explanation is to point out that space is neither empty nor cold. In the second place, a vacuum couldn't be either hot or cold. Temperature is a condition of matter, and if there is no matter, there can be no temperature. But space is quite full—about one atom per cubic inch. There is so much matter between us and the fixed stars that we can actually detect the spectrum of space superposed on the spectrum of the star. The light that the stars send us across the intervening spaces comes to us laden with a message of the contents of space—and tells of millions of tons of calcium and sodium. Even the tiny volume of our solar system contains in its free space about 125,000,000,000 grams of matter. That doesn't mean much to an astronomer—but when you remember that every gram of that can furnish as much energy as 10,000, 000,000 grams of coal, we see that it isn't so little! And as space does have matter, it can have a temperature, and does. It has a temperature of about 15,000 degrees. Most of the atoms of that space have escaped from the surface of stars and have a temperature about the same as that of the surface of the stars. So you see that space—utterly cold—is hotter than anything on Earth! The only difficulty is that it takes a whale of a lot of space to contain enough atoms to weigh a gram, and so the average concentration of heat is so low that we can say that space is cold. Similarly a block of ice may contain far more heat than apiece of red-hot iron. Nevertheless, I would prefer to sit on the ice."

	"Quite so, I see your point, and I believe I'd prefer the ice myself. But that's interesting! Space isn't empty, it's not cold, in fact it's unusually hot!"

	"Now we've started this let's finish it, Dave. It is hot, but not unusually hot—if anything it is unusually cold! The usual, or average temperature of all the matter in the universe is about one million degrees, so space at 15,000 is really far below the average, and so we can say that it is unusually cold. The temperature of the interior of the stars is uniformly forty million degrees, which brings the average up. But it is the unthinkably great quantities of matter in interstellar space that brings the average down. Remember that the nearest star is four and a half light years from us, and between the stars there is such a vast space in which the matter is thinly distributed that the few pinpoint concentrations of matter have to be extremely hot if they are to bring the average up any appreciable amount. But here and there in this vast space there are a few tiny bits of matter that have cooled down to terrifically frigid temperatures—temperatures within a few degrees of absolute zero, only two or three hundred degrees above; spots of matter so cold that hydrogen and oxygen can unite; so cold that this compound can even condense to a liquid; so cold that life can exist. We call those pinpoints planets.

	"In the interstellar range of temperatures we have everywhere from absolute zero to forty million above. Life can exist between the temperatures absolute, of about two hundred and three hundred and twenty—a range of one hundred degrees in a range of forty million. That means that the temperature of this planet must be maintained with an allowable inaccuracy of one part in four hundred thousand! Do you see what the chances of a planet's having a 'habitable' temperature are?

	"But we are near my laboratory now, Dave, and I want to introduce you to Wright, my laboratory assistant, a brilliant student, and an uncannily clever artisan. He made Bartholemew, as I call the mathematics machine, and most of the parts of this ship. He had heat rays to work with, and had iridium metal as his material, and plenty of any element. He had a fine time working out the best alloy, and the best treatment. The shell of the car is made of an alloy of tungsten, iridium and cobalt. It is exceedingly tough, very strong, and very hard. It will scratch glass, is stronger than steel, and is as ductile and malleable as copper—if you have sufficient force. Iridium used to sell for about 250 dollars an ounce, but these powers allow me to transmute it, which renders it cheap for me. After this, sodium metal will be cheaper than sodium compounds!"

	"I wish that that trip had not been so short, Steve. There were a lot of things I wanted to ask you. Where are we now? I don't seem to recognize this country."

	"We are over Arizona—see there is the laboratory now—off there."

	"What, Arizona! How fast were we going?"

	"We were going slowly, considering we were in space, but considering our proximity to the Earth we were going rapidly. The actual speed is difficult to determine—remember we had cut loose all ties of gravity, and I had to follow the Earth in its orbit, and the whole solar system along through space. From here to New York City is about three thousand miles, and as we made the trip in just under one hundred minutes, we traveled at a speed of thirty miles a minute, or half a mile a second."

	"Well, the airplane speed record was about four hundred and twenty, wasn't it—I mean an hour—you have to specify now! You set a new record I guess!"

	They were slanting down through the atmosphere toward the distant low building that had seen the construction of that first of Earth's space cruisers. The long gentle glide slowly flattened out and the car at last glided slowly, gently through the open hangar doors. Wright was there to greet them, but Waterson called out that he. would stay in the ship a few minutes to show Gale around.

	"Steve, you sure picked a desolate place to work in. Why did you go way out here?"

	"For two reasons. First I wanted a place that was quiet; and second I wanted a place where I could safely work with atomic energy—where explosions, premeditated or accidental, would not blow up an entire city. Did you notice that crater off to one side as we came in? That is where I tried out my first bullet. I hadn't gotten a small enough charge in it. I had nearly a milligram—a hundredth of a drop of water. But come, I guess you saw the pilot room. I'll show you how to run the ship tomorrow."

	He led the way to the rear end of the pilot room, where a small door opened in the smooth, windowless metal partition. It too gleamed with that strangely iridescent beauty of metallic iridium.

	"This bunk room should appeal to an apartment house addict. I had about eleven feet I could use to make it, and it is just a bit crowded."

	Considering Waterson's six-feet-two, a room eleven feet long, ten feet high, and about as wide, would certainly be crowded if there was anything or anyone else in the room. As the bunk room was also dining room, galley, and chart room, it was decidedly crowded. One thing that particularly interested Gale was a small screen on which were a series of small lights, projected from the rear.

	"What is that, Steve?" he inquired.

	"That is my chart. It is the only kind of chart you could well expect on board a space ship. The lights are really moving and maintain the relative positions of the planets. I think we will go to Mars first, because it is now as close as it will be for some time. I want to go to Venus soon, but that is on the other side of the sun. I will find that there are detours even in space when I go there!"

	"That's quite a chart! I suppose you have more accurate ones too?"

	"No, I have no need of more accurate ones. I start for my objective, and it is so big I can't miss it!"

	"That's true too! But I haven't seen any apparatus for taking care of your air. I suspect that door over there hides something."

	"It does. It leads to the store room and the apparatus room. There are all the tools I carry, the air purifier and water renewer. Remember that the break-up of the atomic energy gives me unlimited amounts of electricity, so I have all the electric power I can use. I find that there is a way to electrolyse carbon dioxide to carbon and oxygen. In this manner I recover the oxygen for the air—at least part of the necessary oxygen—and at the same time remove the menace of the CO2. There is considerable oxygen fixed as H2O, however, so I installed an electrolyser to take care of that. The moisture of the air is in this way kept down to a comfortable maximum. The same apparatus is useful for reducing the water. All the water I have I must carry in tanks, which require space. I am able to make them considerably smaller by taking the water, passing it through this electrolyser, reducing it to hydrogen and oxygen, burning them to water again, and thus getting pure H2O. The one difficulty is in getting rid of the heat. Remember that all the heat I lost I must lose by radiation. But the sun is radiating to me. I receive heat at exactly the same rate the Earth does and I have no protective atmosphere, so the tendency is to reach a super-tropical temperature. The easiest solution of this problem is to go with the ship at such an angle to the sun that the shadow of the exposed surface shades the greater portion of the ship, then by adjusting the angle of the ship, I can adjust the ratio of radiating to receiving area to any value I wish, and get almost any temperature I need."

	"That is an idea. I never heard of electrolysing carbon dioxide, though. Tell me—how do you do it?"

	"That is a process I developed. It requires considerable explaining. However, I am doubtful whether it wouldn't have been easier to convert the stuff directly to oxygen by transmutation."

	"Steve, I notice you have plenty of light, but why not have windows?"

	"I have no windows except in the main pilot room. The trouble with windows is that they reduce the strength of the shell. Also, as this is a sleeping room, and there will be no night in space, why not have it this way? I need considerable strength in the walls of the ship, because the accelerations that I use in starting and turning and stopping are really rather a strain on any material. The outer wall is a six-inch iridio-tungsten alloy shell, with two openings in it, the window, and the door. The rest is absolutely seamless, one solid casting. The window is so designed, in connection with the placement of the ray projectors that it doesn't weaken the shell. There is no framework, but the two partitions across the ship are each six inches thick, and act as braces. The inner wall is a thin one-inch layer of metal, supported by the outer shell, and separated from it by small braces about two inches high. This intervening space has been evacuated by the simple process of going out into space and opening a valve, then closing it before returning to Earth."

	"That one-inch layer of metal of yours is bothering me. There is something strange about it, and all the trim and mouldings in here. The green I suppose is to relieve eye strain, but it is not the color itself that seems strange. It is the impression I have that the metal itself is of that beautiful leaf green shade, and that it is the metal in the chairs, table, and racks that gives them that color."

	"Quite right Dave, it is."

	"But Steve, I thought that there were no more elements to be discovered. In the collection at the Museum in New York they had all ninety-two, and I saw no colored metals."

	"In the first place, remember I told you there really were more than ninety-two elements, and I don't believe they had all the ninety-two there, for there are several elements that disintegrate inside of a few days. They couldn't keep those. But these metals are compounds."

	"Compounds! Do you mean alloys?"

	"No, chemical compounds, just as truly as salt or sulphuric acid. They are related to tetra-ethyl-stibine, Sb (C2H5)4, which is a compound that acts like a metal physically and chemically. It is too soft to be any good, but there are hundreds of these organic compounds of carbon. There are red ones, green ones, blue ones, and a thousand different ones, soft, brittle, liquid, solid; some are even gaseous."

	"Colored metals! What a boon to artists! Think what fun they will have working in that stuff!"

	"Yes, but it is also useful for decorative purposes, although the large molecule makes it too soft to be used as a wearing surface."

	"Well Steve, you sure have a mighty fine little ship! What do you call it? You said that you called the mathematics machine 'Bartholemew.' What do you call this?"

	"As yet it has not been named. I wanted you to suggest some name for it."

	"That's a sudden order, Steve. What have you thought of?"

	"Well, I thought of calling it fluourine, for the chemical element which is so active that it cannot be displaced by any other, but will, on the other hand force any other non-metal out of its compound. Then I thought of Nina, the name of Columbus' ship which first touched a new world, and Wright reminded me that Eric, the Red's son Lief landed here in about 1000 and suggested Eric as a name."

	"Well, that's a good assortment. Why pick on me?"

	"We thought you ought to be good at inventing names, since you had written several books."

	"That is a fine excuse! I get mine from old magazines! But I might suggest 'The Electron.' It sounds well, and I remember that you said that you charged it negatively to cut out the gravity of the Earth and an electron—or is it a proton that has a negative charge?"

	" 'The Electron'—sounds good—and the idea is good. An electron has a negative charge. Wright also suggested the 'Terrestrian,' as it would be the first ship of Earth to visit other worlds. It is between 'Electron' and 'Terrestrian' now. Which do you like better?"

	"I prefer 'Terrestrian.' It has more meaning."

	"Well, we'll tell Wright about it. In the meantime, come into the laboratory and meet Bartholemew."

	Bartholomew was at the moment engaged in tracing a very complicated curve, the integral of a half dozen or so other curves. Wright was carefully watching the thin line left by the pencil. There was a low steady humming coming from the machine, and a bank of small transformers on the other side of the room connected to it. Wright turned off the machine as they entered, and after greeting Waterson and meeting Gale, proceeded at once with an enthusiastic description of the machine. He was obviously proud of the machine, and of the man who had developed it. The entire machine had been enclosed in a metal case when Gale entered, but now Wright opened this, and Gale was decidedly surprised to see the interior. He really had had no reason to form any opinion of the machine, but he had expected a maze of gears, shafts, levers, chains and every sort of mechanical apparatus. Somehow the mention of a machine for doing mathematics conveyed to him that impression. The actual machine seemed quite simple—merely a small cable leading from the separate "graph interpreters," as Wright called them, to the central integrater, and hence a small motor carried the integrated result into practice and put it on paper strips.

	This machine made possible a type of mathematics hitherto unknown. This new calculus was to the previous integration what integration was to addition. Integration is an infinite summation of very small terms, and this new mathematics was an integration in an infinite number of dimensions. The beginner first learns to integrate in two dimensions. Then come three. Einstein had carried his mathematics to four. The machine seemed to work in an infinite number of dimensions, but the conditions of the problem really chose the four out of infinity that were under discussion. An infinite number of dimensions has no physical meaning. It might be put this way, Wright said: there are an infinite number of solutions to the equation x = 2 + y, and as such it has no meaning. But if for example you say also that 2y = x, then auto-mathematically you choose two of an infinite number of values that fit the problem in hand. A man might have done all this machine did, had he lived long enough and been patient enough. This machine could do in an hour a problem that would have taken a man a lifetime. Thus it had been able to develop the true mathematical picture of the atom.

	Over the supper table that night they had a final discussion as to the name of the ship. It was decided that the name should be "Terrestrian," and plans were made to christen it in as scientific a manner as possible. Considering that the shell was made of iridium, and therefore highly inert to chemical action, they decided on a bottle of aqua regia which dissolves gold and platinum, and does not attack iridium. A bottle was prepared, and they were ready for the christening in the morning. Just as they decided to call the day done, the telephone rang. It was Dr. Wilkins of Mt. Wilson calling Waterson. The conversation was rather lengthy, and Wright, who had answered, told Gale that Dr. Wilkins had called before, about two months ago, on a question in astrophysics, and Waterson had been able to give the answer. This time however, Dr. Wilkins, it seemed, was greatly agitated. Just then Waterson returned.

	"Gale, it seems we chose our name well. Also I am lucky in having you here. I must go to Mt. Wilson at once, I'll be back about dawn, and I'll tell you two all about it then. I've got to hurry. So long."

	A moment later the two men heard the hum of the motor as the hangar doors were opened. Another moment and the entire countryside was flooded with a blaze of bluish white light, that illuminated the desolate dry desert for miles, and for all those weary miles it was an unending, rolling surface of sand. In the glow of sudden light, great strange shadows which started up by the buildings gave weird effects on the sand, but with it all there was a rugged and compelling beauty to the little world which the light had cut from the darkness. There was a sudden whistle of air, and the light faded as the car shot off toward Mt. Wilson.

	"What a mass of sand there is around here! It would seem almost like a dried up ocean bed," said Gale.

	"I suppose there is a lot of sand in the world—there should be though, it is the direct compound of the two most abundant elements on Earth, silicon and oxygen."

	"Wright, I've often wondered why it is that oxygen, which combines with almost anything, should be found free in nature. Why is it?"

	"I don't know, I'm sure. At that I suppose one reason is that there is so much of it. Just a very small fraction less than half of the Earth's surface layers is oxygen. It forms over forty-nine percent of it to a depth of ten miles at least. It is the second most active element on Earth—in the universe for that matter, and of the active elements there is only one with which it can't combine, namely, fluorine. Of course it can't combine with the inert gases, so I say the active elements. I suppose it is left free principally because there was nothing else to do. Apparently there weren't enough partners to go around. At that it did a mighty good job of it! Forty-seven per cent of the solid crust is oxygen, 85% of the water is oxygen, and 20% of the air is free oxygen. Well, let's not look so favorable a gift horse in the mouth. If it hadn't been left free, where would we be?"

	The discussion soon died down and the men retired for the night, each wondering what it was that had called Waterson away so suddenly, and each determined to be on hand when he returned in the morning.

	The coming of the light of dawn had, perforce, put an end to the activities at Mt. Wilson, so it was shortly after sunrise that the two men heard the hangar doors open. And it was very shortly after sunrise that they had dressed and gone down to greet Waterson. The worried look on his face told a great deal, for both men knew him well, and when Waterson looked worried there was something of tremendous import under way.

	"Hello. Had a good night Dave? I have something that is going to interest you—and two and a half billion other human beings. They have discovered something at the Mt. Wilson observatory that is going to change our plans quite a bit. We had intended going to other planets to visit the inhabitants, but we won't have to go. They are coming to us; furthermore, twenty ships are coming, and I have an idea they are good sized ships. But Wright, I think you had better start breakfast. We can discuss it at the table. I'm going to wash, and if you will help Wright, Dave, I think we will be at work pretty soon." Waterson left the room, and the two men looked at his retreating figure with astonishment and wonder. An announcement that our planet was to be invaded from space is a bit hard to take in all at once, and particularly when it is given in the matter of fact way that Waterson had presented it, for he had known it now for over ten hours, and had been working on it during all that time.

	At the table the explanation was resumed:

	"The ships were first sighted in the big telescope when they turned it toward Mars last night. You remember that Mars is at its closest now, and they saw these spots of light on the disc of Mars they were at once excited and started immediate spectroscopic and radiometric observations. The fact that they showed against the disc of Mars meant that they were nearer than the planet, and by measuring the amount of energy coming from them they tried to calculate their size. The results at once proved that they could not be light because of reflection, for the energy that they emitted would require a surface of visible dimensions, and these were points. Their temperature was too low to be incandescent, so they were violating all the laws of astrophysics. By this time they had shifted sufficiently to make some estimate of their distance, shifted because of the movement of the Earth in its orbit, Dave, and so they were covering a different spot on the disc of Mars. Allowing that they were going in a straight line, the were some ten and a half million miles away. The spectroscope showed by displacement of one of the spectral lines that they were coming toward us at about 100 miles a second. The line of their flight was such that they would intercept the Earth in its orbit in about thirty hours. That means that we have about twenty to work in.

	"It doesn't take any alarmist to guess that this means trouble, They would not be coming in twenty ships if they were coming on a peaceful mission. Also considering that they come in only twenty ships it shows that they have considerable confidence in those twenty. Since they are coming here without first sending a scouting party of one or two ships, I suspect that they already know that the conditions of Earth are suitable to them. To determine our conditions would require exceedingly powerful telescopes, but they are helped by the thin air of their planet. I believe that they can actually see our machines and weapons, and that they know just about what we have. I think that they are counting on cleaning up the world very easily—as indeed they would but for one factor, for they have atomic energy. Wright, do you remember that we decided to use electronic rockets to drive the car, once we discovered atomic energy? And that having discovered material energy, we naturally decided not to? Well, they have electronic rockets. This makes me feel sure that that means that they have atomic energy, but have no material energy."

	"Fine Steve. Your reasoning is most admirable—but will you please translate 'electronic rocket' and a few of those other terms into English? And otherwise make yourself clear to the layman?"

	"Well, I suppose I have no right to call a cathode ray tube an electronic rocket, but when a cathode ray tube gets that big it really needs a new name. The idea is the same as that of a rocket. You know the experiments the Germans, the millionaire Opel, and others carried out in 1927 with rocket automobiles? They had a terrible time with their rockets because the heat of one set off the next. The result was a disastrous explosion—and they had a whole ocean of air to cool them! What would a rocket do in free space? Also remember the principle of a rocket is that you shoot particles out of the rear at a very high speed and thus impart the kick to the ship. The electronic rocket does the same thing—but instead of shooting molecules of hot gas, it shoots electrons, a giant cathode ray tube such as Coolidge had in 1927, but his was so small that the kick was immeasurable. Remember that as the velocity of the electrons approaches that of light, the mass increases and so the electrons as shot from a cathode ray rocket may weigh as much as a milligram. The problem of propulsion then is not hard with atomic energy to supply the terrific voltages needed to run the tube. But the cathode rays are going to be their first weapon. Cathode rays are absorbed by any object they hit, and their terrific energy is converted to heat. They are deadly in themselves, and the heat is of course deadly. They will also have heat rays. I can make a heat ray with atomic energy, though mine is derived from material. The only way we can fight them is to know beforehand what we are to meet. This is to be a war for a world, and the war will be a battle of titanic forces. The weaker of the forces will be a million times greater than anything man has ever known before, and either of these two forces would, if fully applied, blast our planet from its place around the sun! Such forces can not be withstood. They must be annulled, deflected, or annihilated by some greater force. Only when we know what to expect can we fight them and live. Remember, if they once succeeded in getting one weak spot in our armor, we can never have another chance, and the world can never hope to fight them—mere armies and a navy or two, with a couple of air forces thrown in—what would they amount to? The energy of atoms could destroy them like paper in a blowtorch—think what would happen to one of those beautifully absorbing grey battleships if a heat ray touched it! Their eighteen-inch steel armor would not melt—it would boil away! A submarine would be no safer—they could explode the water about it into steam and crush it. The effect of a heat ray in water is just that—the water is converted to steam so suddenly that there is a terrific explosion. The cathode rays could sweep an army out of existence as hose might wash away an army of mud soldiers. They won't have gases. They will have no use for them. They could wipe a city off the map, leave only a great crater in the scarred Earth, while men were getting ready to lay a gas barrage. A shell would certainly just bounce off of the armor of my ship and I suspect that it would do the same with the Martian ships. Earth has only one weapon that can even bother them! And that one weapon is the one factor in the equation. I have suggested two weapons they will have, the cathode rays and the heat ray. They will, of course, have others; they will have atomic bombs, and I am sure that they will find us so dangerous that they will be willing to lose a ship and crash us. This gives us something else to avoid. Can any of you think of something else?"

	"Good Lord Steve, haven't you thought of enough?"

	"Plenty, Dave, but it isn't considered good form in military proceedings to permit the enemy to surprise you. In fact, it is highly probable that if he does, you will get a new form, one more adapted to aerial transit."

	"Yes, that's true, too. But I remember reading once that ultra-violet light was invisible, and very dangerous to the body. I wonder if they will use that?"

	"They may, but I greatly doubt it. Air is very nearly opaque to ultra-violet light, above a certain limit, and below that limit it is not very harmful. The infra-red heat rays, though are going to be a very great menace. I can't think of any way to make them harmless. Of course, the polished iridium shell of the ship will protect us from the sides, as the heat will all be reflected. The difficulty will be that the heat will fuse the window, and thus attack us. The quartz glass is nearly opaque to heat rays, as is all glass. Being opaque, it absorbs it, 'cuts it out' as we say. The result will be that the glass will melt instantly, whereupon we will go very quickly. The idea of putting a polished metal shutter before the window is one we will have to adopt, but we must modify it somehow. The heat rays will be turned back all right—and so will the light rays. The question is to shut out heat and let in light. Any suggestions?"

	"I wonder if there isn't some selective reflector that we could use, Dr. Waterson?"

	"That is a good idea, Wright—but I don't know of any that will pass all the light and reflect all the heat!"

	"What is a selective reflector, Steve?"

	"There are lots of things that have that property Dave, gold leaf is one, it can transmit green light—that is you can see green light through it, but it reflects yellow light—the complement of the green it transmits. There are a great many organic dyes that are one color when you look at them and the complement of that color when you look through them. The trouble is we need one that transmits the visible portion of the spectrum—and boy—that's it, Wright, that's it—spectrum—take a totally reflecting diffraction grating, reflect out all that part of the spectrum that we don't want, take what we do, pass it through a prism to recombine it to white light, then through lenses so we can see as if through a telescope!

	"Again it sounds good, but I'd like to hear it in English, Steve."

	"The idea is to take a diffraction grating, a piece of metal with, usually 14,438 lines to the inch ruled on it, and previously highly polished, so that it reflects most of the light that hits it. Now it is reflected at different angles, so that we have a spectrum. The spectrum spreads out light and heat waves as well—I use the reflection grating as no material will pass the heat rays, and it then is possible to reflect out of the car again those rays we do not want. The light, which we do want, we will pass through a prism which will recombine it to white light. A prism can either split up light into different colors, or recombine them to white. Lenses then will be needed to make the images clear. The effect will be much the same as a telescope. And that takes care of the heat waves. The cathode rays, luckily won't bother us for the car is already charged strongly negative, and negatively charged electrons will be strongly repelled, as they arc in the grid of a vacuum tube, so they will never hit us. The bombs constitute the worst menace. The only defense we have against them is the very doubtful one of not being there when they are. That is a good policy in any case.

	"As a last precaution—a bit grim—I will arrange it so that if the 'Terrestrian' is damaged to the point of utter helplessness we can, by pushing a single button, explode the entire car—as material energy. It will utterly destroy everything within a radius of a hundred miles, and damage everything within a much greater radius. I believe it will not be serious enough to change the Earth's orbit, though."

	"Good—cheerful man, aren't you, Steve! Now what have we to meet that delightful array?"

	"We have things even more delightful. Our heat ray is considerably more powerful, I imagine. It is generated by a force ten thousand times as great. Our bombs will be worse. Wright, I wish you would make about a hundred shells that will explode with the fully thirty-five thousand ton equivalent of dynamite. And then we will have everything they have that is going to be effective, and have it in a more concentrated form. Can any of you suggest anything else?"

	"Steve, you said that your car was nearly pure iridium on the outside, and that is very inert. The outside of this ship will be polished too, won't it?"

	"Probably—though I don't believe they were expecting to meet a heat ray."

	"Well, I wonder if there isn't some chemical you could spray out that would tarnish their ship, without hurting your iridium ship? Then it wouldn't be polished and would absorb your heat rays."

	"That's a good idea, Dave. I might use a sulphide—nearly all sulphides are colored, and form very easily and rapidly. Or I might use liquid ozone. That will tarnish almost anything to an oxide, which is also apt to be colored. I could certainly heat the ship that way, but I wonder—I'm afraid that the oxide or sulphide would break down too easily. There is only one metal that they might use on which that would work, namely steel. Iron sulphide is black, stable, and will not decompose readily. The oxide forms readily, is highly colored, and will not decompose before the metal is incandescent, or even melted. The only difficulty is that steel is so readily attacked, that they wouldn't use it. They would probably coat it with an inert metal, silver for instance. That forms a black sulphide very readily. I'm afraid that won't work Dave. But Wright, I think that it would be a good idea to develop a few of those field theory equations in a different way. Try integrating number two-six-thirty-nine—I think that's it—and between the limits of equation one-four-twenty-three and zero. I have an idea that a little development of that idea will give us a beam that will be very useful. We haven't time to make much apparatus, but I think the result will be near enough to the space curving projector to allow us to change the extra projectors we have in the laboratory to fit. Also, try calculating the arrangement we will need for the heat eliminator, please. I'm going to give Dave his first lesson in space navigation. We'll be back about noon—if at all!" But Gale caught the wink, so the effect was lost.

	Ten thousand miles out in free space the practice began. As Waterson pointed out, it would require some mighty poor handling to hit the Earth now. For the first time in Gale's life he could practice with a machine with no fear of hitting anything.

-

	When the ship slanted down in a long graceful glide, to enter the hangar doors that noon, Gale was in control. The controls of the ship were remarkably easy to master and extremely simple. The one thing that was hard to master was the tremendous range of power. It could be changed in a smooth climb from a fraction of a horsepower to billions! The first attempts had been a bit hard on the passengers, the seat straps coming in for their share of use.

	When they returned to the laboratory, they found Wright had just prepared a light lunch, and at once began to demolish it. Six hours between breakfast and lunch is conducive to a husky appetite.

	Wright had finished the integration on the machine, and had calculated the mathematics of the heat eliminator in a little less than four hours. The results were very satisfactory, and in the remaining time he had converted six of the extra projectors to their new use, and had them ready for installation. After lunch the men began on the construction of the heat eliminators. Two were to be installed, one for the observer as well as one for the pilot. The heavier work of installing the projectors and the iridium shield was reserved for later in the afternoon.

	By six that evening, the new projectors were completely installed and the connections made, and the great iridium shield was cooling from blinding incandescence in its mold. It would be installed that night, but now they felt that a rest and a meal were due them. They had been working under a great strain that afternoon, for they knew that they must get that machine ready before the Martians reached Earth, and there was a great deal to do. After the brief dinner they went out to the shining "Terrestrian." As yet, the new projectors had not been tried.

	Gracefully the great shining shell backed out into the ruddy glory of the sinking sun, the red light had turned desert to a sea of rolling fire, with here and there a wave that showed dark—a mound. In the far distance the purple hills of Nevada seemed like distant islands in this burning sea, and above it rode this lone, shining ship, magnificently iridescent in the setting sun. Now it stopped, hovered, then suddenly a pile of metal ingots that lay to one side of the laboratory leaped into the air and shot toward it—then paused in mid-air, hung poised for an instant, then sank lightly to the ground. Now the sand of the desert began to roll into some strange wave that began just beneath the ship, then sped away—further—till it died in the far distance, by means of an invisible beam. A wall of sand thirty feet high had been built in an instant, and it extended as far as the eye could reach! Now the ship settled, and slowly, light as a feather for all its three thousand tons of metal, it glided into the hanger.

	"Man Steve, that works! How long a range has it? And please tell me about it now you are sure it works!"

	"I don't know just how long a range it has—it affected the sand as far as we could see, and we were using very little power. It projects a beam of gravity, and theoretically at least it has an infinite range; and it certainly has a whale of a lot of power. I can use a good deal of the power too, for the strain of the attracting is taken off the mountings and the ship, and put on space itself! The gravity projector is double and projects a beam of the gravity ray forward and an equally powerful beam of the spacecurve behind. The two rays are controlled by the same apparatus, and so are always equal. The result is that no matter how great a load I put on it, the entire load is expended in trying to bend space!"

	That night work was carried on under the floodlighting from the ship's great light projectors. The entire region was illuminated, and work was easy. Waterson had been instructed to take a rest when he seemed bent on continuing his work. Even his great body could not keep up that hard labor forever, and forty-eight hours of work will make any man nervous. With a crisis such as this facing him, he certainly needed rest. He agreed, provided they would call him in two hours. Two hours later Gale walked about a mile from the laboratory and called. He then returned and continued his work on the placement of the shield. It had been placed, polished, and tiny holes bored in it for the heat eliminator inside of four hours. It was operated by an electric motor, controlled from within. It could be lowered and leave the window clear, but when in position its polished surface made it perfectly safe against heat rays. The work had just been completed, when Waterson reappeared looking decidedly ruffled.

	"Say, I thought you two promised to call me in two hours! It's been just four, and I woke up myself!"

	"But Steve, I did call you and you didn't hear me. I didn't say I'd wake you in two hours."

	It was shortly afterwards that news of the coming invasion was made public. And with the news came the wild panics, even mad, licentious outbreaks all over the world. Man saw himself helpless before mighty enemies whom he could not resist. Never had such a complete disruption of business taken place in so short a time. Things were done that night in a terrible spirit of "we die tomorrow, we play today." The terrible jams in the cities caused deaths of hundreds of thousands. They wanted to flee the cities, get into the woods and hide like some animal. Within an hour no news could reach most of them, and though Waterson had told of his ship, told immediately, given every government official announcements concerning it, still the mad dance went on. But to those that had stayed near the radio sets, this news brought relief. No television pictures of it could be broadcast for many hours, as there was no portable equipment within several hundreds of miles, and the men were working on the ship.

	That night the three men took turns watching by the radio set for news. The Martians were due to land somewhere on Earth that morning. It would probably be a temporary landing in some land that was just at dawn. And it was so. But the "Terrestrian" must not be taken by surprise.

	Waterson was to have the morning watch. Unlike the others, he did not sit by the radio set. He answered the few messages he received, but the entire four hours of his watch he spent working with Bartholemew. The equations he was working with seemed new, strange, and they had terrific import to the understanding. It was but a few minutes before the Martians landed when he had gotten the final result. At once he called the two others.

	"Wright, if that equation means what I think it does, we have something that will give us a tremendous advantage! I feel sure that the Martians have actually worked out the problems to meet them. But as they may land any minute now, let's begin on this. We need two of these projectors in front, and two at the stern. If you will start on the actual projectors, I'll start the instrument end. Come on Dave."

	And so all three heard the announcement that the Martians had landed. Twenty mighty ships had settled down in the arid land of Nevada. The ships were a bare five hundred miles from them! The dry air of the desert was probably best suited for Martian lungs. Army planes had been cruising about all night waiting for the enemy, waiting to learn definitely what they were to face. It was Lt. Charles H. Austin who sighted them. He first saw them while still on the very outskirts of our atmosphere, and reported them at once, turning his television finder on them. Great balls of purple fire they seemed as they sank rapidly through our atmosphere. The great ships floated down and as they came within a mile or so of him, he was able to see that the great flaming globes of light were beneath them, seemingly supporting them. A breeze was blowing from them to him, and the air, even at that distance, was chokingly impregnated with oxides of nitrogen and ozone, from the forty mighty glowing spheres. They were fully an hundred and fifty feet in diameter, but the ships themselves, illuminated by the weird light of the glow of their sister ships, were far greater. Each was three thousand feet long, and two hundred and fifty feet in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of tons those mighty machines must have weighed, and the fiery globes of ionized air that shone under the impact of the cathode rays alone told how they were supported.

	Now, two by two they sank, and came to rest on the sands below, and as they came near the ground the glowing ray touched the sand, and for that moment it glowed incandescent, then quickly cooled as the ray was shut off. At last the mighty armada of space had settled on the packed sands, and now there sprang from each a great shaft of light that searched the heavens above for planes. By luck the plane of the observer was missed, and the television set clicked steadily on as the questing beams were reduced to live, and now the ground was flooded with blinding light. A moment later the side of one of the great ships opened, and from it a gangplank thrust itself. Then from it there came a stream of men, but men with great chests, great ears, thin arms and legs; men that must have stood ten feet high. Painfully they scrambled down the plank, toiling under the greater gravity of Earth. But what a thrill must have been theirs! They were the first men of this system to ever have set foot on two planets! And some of those men were to step forth on a third—the first men to visit it too!

	Painfully now they were coming from their huge interplanetary cruisers, slowly they plodded across the intervening space to their comrades, pouring from their sister ships.

	Then suddenly the television screen was white—a blinding searchlight had at last picked up the plane. Wildly the pilot dived, and now there came a picture of all those men looking upward, their first glimpse of the works of man perhaps. But the beam that had been eluded was reinforced in a moment—then there came a dull red beam—a flash—and the screen was smoothly dark.

	Waterson and his friends feverishly worked at their tasks. There was no doubt about the inimical intentions of the Martians now. They had destroyed a man without reason. And the projectors were rapidly taking shape under the practiced hands of Wright. Dawn broke, and the men stopped for breakfast, but still the work on the projectors was not done. Many parts were so similar to those of the other projectors that they could use the spare projectors for parts, many others were new. It was shortly after breakfast that the news of the Martians' landing came. They had started now on the famous Day of Terror. But still the men in the laboratory worked at their tasks. The "Terrestrian" had been christened according to plan, and was now ready to start at any moment, but the new projectors were an additional weapon—a mighty weapon.

	All matter is made of atoms, grouped to form molecules, combinations of atoms, or a molecule may contain but one atom, as is the case of helium. The atoms within the molecule are held to each other by electro-static attraction. The molecules of substances like wood are very large, and hold to each other by a form of gravity between the molecules. These are called amorphous substances. Water is a liquid, a typical liquid, but we have many things that we do not recognize as liquids. Asphalt may be so cold that it will scarcely run, yet we can say it is a liquid. Glass is a liquid. It is a liquid that has cooled till it became so viscous it could not run. Glass is not crystalline, but after very many years it does slowly crystallize. The molecules of a liquid are held together by a gravitational attraction for each other. But in crystals we have a curious condition. The atoms of salt, sodium chloride, do not pair off one sodium and one chlorine atom when they crystallize; perhaps a million sodium atoms go with a million chlorine atoms, and give a crystal of sodium chloride. Thus we have that a crystal is not n(NaCl) but it is NanCLn. Thus a crystal of salt is one giant molecule. This means then that the crystal is held together by electrostatic forces and not gravitational forces. The magnitude of these forces is such that if equivalent weights of sodium and chlorine atoms could be separated and placed at the poles, the chlorine atoms at the north and, eight thousand miles to the south, the sodium, over all the distance the twenty-three pounds of sodium would attract the thirty-five pounds of chlorine atoms with a force of forty tons!

	So it is that in all crystals the atoms are mutually balancing, and balanced by perhaps a dozen others. The electrostatic forces hold the crystals together, and the crystals then hold together by gravity in many cases; otherwise they don't hold together at all. A block of steel is made of billions of tiny crystals, each attracting its neighbor, and thus are held together. But this force is a gravitational force.

	Now what would happen if the force of gravity between these crystals were annihilated? Instantly the piece of metal would cease to have any strength; it would fall to a heap of ultra-microscopic crystals, a mere heap of impalpably fine dust! The strongest metal would break down to nothing!

	Such was the ray that Waterson had developed. It would throw a beam of a force that would thus annul the force of gravity, and the projector had been made of a single crystal of quartz. Its effects could be predicted, and it would indeed be a deadly weapon! The hardest metals fell to a fine powder before it. Wood, flesh, liquids, any amorphous or liquid substance was thrown off as single molecules. It would cause water to burst into vapor spontaneously, without heat, for when there is no attraction between the molecules, water is naturally a gas. Only crystals defied this disintegration ray, and only crystals could be used in working with it.

	But while the men in the lonely laboratory in Arizona were finishing the most terrible of their weapons, the Martians were going down the Pacific coast.

	When morning dawned on our world, it found a wild and restless aggregation of men fleeing wildly from every large city, and with dawn came the news that the Martian armada had risen, taking all its ships, and was heading westward. Straight across Nevada they sailed in awful grandeur, the mighty globes of blazing cathode rays bright even in the light of the sun.

	Across the eastern part of California, and with an accuracy that told of carefully drawn maps, they went directly to the largest city of the West Coast, San Francisco. There they hung, high in air, their mighty glowing spheres a magnificent sight, motionless, like some mighty menace that hangs, ever ready to fall in terrible doom on the victim beneath. For perhaps an hour they hung thus, motionless, then there dropped from them the first of the atomic bombs. Tiny they were. No man saw them fall; only the effects were visible, and they were visible as a mighty chasm yawned in sudden eruption where solid earth had been before. One landed in the Golden Gate. After that it looked as a child's dam might look—a wall of mud and pebbles. But pictures and newsreels of the destruction of that city tell far more than any wordy description can. Once it had been destroyed by earthquake and fire, and had been built up again, but no phenomenon of Nature could be so terrible as was that destruction. Now it was being pulverized by titanic explosions, fused by mighty heat rays, and disintegrated by the awful force of the cathode rays. We can think only of that chaos of slashing, searing heat rays, the burning violet of pencil-like cathode rays, and the frightful explosions of the atomic bombs. It took them just sixteen minutes to destroy that city, as no city has been destroyed in all the history of the Earth. Only the spot in desert Nevada where the last battle was fought was to be more frightfully torn. But in all that city of the dead there was none of the suffering that had accompanied the other destruction; there were none to suffer; it was complete, instantaneous. Death itself is kind, but the way to death is thorny, and only those who pass quickly, as did these, find it a happy passing.

	And then for perhaps a half hour more the great ships hung high above the still glowing ruins, supported on those blazing globes of ionized air. Then suddenly the entire fleet in perfect formation, turned and glided majestically southward. The thousands of people of Los Angeles went mad when this news reached them. AH seemed bent on escaping from the city at the same time, and many escaped by death. It took the Martians twelve minutes to reach Los Angeles, and then the mighty shadows of their hulls were spread over the packed streets, over the thousands of people that struggled to leave.

	But the Martians did not destroy that city. For two hours they hung motionless above, then glided slowly on.

	All that day they hung over the state of California, moving from point to point with such apparently definite intention, it seemed they must be investigating some already known land. No more damage did they do unless they were molested. But wherever a gun spoke, a stabbing beam of heat reached down, caressed the spot, and left only a smoking, glowing pit of molten rock. A bombing plane that had climbed high in anticipation of their coming landed a great bomb directly on the back of one of the great ships. The explosion caused the mighty machine to stagger, but the tough wall was merely dented. An instant later there was a second explosion as the remaining bombs and the gasoline of the plane were set off by a pencil of glowing cathode rays. But when no resistance was offered, the Martian fleet soared smoothly overhead, oblivious of man, till at last they turned and started once more for the landing place in Nevada.

	The last work on the projectors had been finished by noon that day, and they were installed in the ship immediately. Then came the test.

	Again the "Terrestrian" floated lightly in the air outside the hangar, and again the pile of ingots leaped into the air to hang motionless, suspended by the gravity beam. Then came another beam, a beam of pale violet light that reached down to touch the bars with a caressing bath of violet radiance—a moment they glowed thus, then their hard outlines seemed to soften, to melt away, as still glowing, they expanded, grew larger. Inside of ten seconds the ingots of tungsten, each weighing over two hundred pounds, were gone. They had gone as a vapor of individual crystals; so gone that no eye could see them! The ray was a complete success, and now as the "Terrestrian" returned to its place under Waterson's skillful guidance, the men felt a new confidence in their weapon! The projectors of the disintegration ray had not yet been fitted with the polished iridium shields, and without these they would be vulnerable to heat rays.

	It was during the installation of these that the accident happened. Wright had already put the left front projector shield in place, and was beginning on the right, but the small ladder from which he worked rested against the polished iridium surface of the car, and as this was rounded, he did not have a very secure perch. The shield weighed close to a hundred pounds, for iridium is the heaviest known metal, and it was constructed of inch-thick plates. While trying to swing one of these heavy shields into place, the changed direction of the force on the ladder caused it to slip, and a moment later Wright had fallen to the floor.

	The heavy shield had landed beneath him, and his weight falling on top, had broken his right arm. Wright would be unable to operate any of the mechanism of the "Terrestrian," which required all eyes, arms and legs to work successfully. While Waterson installed the remaining shields, Gale hurried Wright to the nearest town in Waterson's monoplane.

	It was three-thirty by the time he returned, and Waterson had mounted the shields. His great strength and size made the task far easier for him, and the work had been completed, and the shields finally polished, and welded in place.

	The entire afternoon the radio had been bringing constant reports of the progress of the Martians. As they were doing no damage now, and were over a densely populated district, where any battle such as would result should the "Terrestrian" attack them would surely destroy a considerable amount of valuable property, Waterson decided to wait till they had left California. To the west was the ocean, and a conflict there would do no damage. To the east was the desert, and to the south was the sparsely settled regions of low property value. Only to the north would the value of the property be prohibitive to a final encounter.

	When, at about five, news came that the Martians were returning to the desert landing spot in Nevada, Waterson at once set out to intercept them, and as his tiny car was prepared and waiting, the Martian armada came in sight, at first mere glistening points far off across the purple desert hills, but approaching hundreds of miles an hour.

	Yet it seemed hours while those glowing points neared, grew and became giant ships, though still miles away. When at last the leader of the Martian fleet came within about a half mile of its tiny opponent, without slowing its rapid flight, there sprang from its nose a glowing violet beam that reached out like a glowing finger of death to touch the machine ahead. But that machine was strongly charged with a tremendous negative potential,

	And now the "Terrestrian" went into action, retreating before the bull-like rush of its mighty opponents. The twenty great ships were drawn up in a perfect line formation, a semicircle, that each might be able to use its weapons with the greatest effect without interfering with its neighbor. Now from the gleaming ship ahead there sprang out a dull red beam, a beam that reached out to touch and caress the advancing ships. Six mighty ships it touched, and those six mighty ships continued their bull rush without control, spreading consternation in the ordered rank, for in each the pilot room had instantly become a mass of flame and glowing metal under the influence of the heat ray. The other fourteen ships had swerved at once, diving wildly lest that beam of red death reach them, but three great hulks dived, and in a dive that ended in flaming wreckage on the packed sands, ten miles below. The other three ships that had felt that deadly ray regained control before touching the earth, but those three that went down, mighty cathode rays streaming, struck and formed great craters in the sand.

	But again that ray of death stabbed out, for one Martian had incautiously exposed his control room, and in an instant it too was diving. The mighty ray tubes forcing it on, it plunged headlong, with ever greater velocity to the packed sands below. An instant later there was a titanic concussion, an explosion that made the mighty Martians rock, and stagger drunkenly as the blast of air rushed up, and a great crater, a full half mile across, yawned in the earth's surface. Every atomic bomb in that ship had gone off!

	The three ships that had been rayed retreated now, and left thirteen active ships to attack the "Terrestrian." The shield had been placed long before, and now as the Martians concentrated their heat rays on the glistening point before them, it was unaffected. While they were practically blind, they could not risk an exposure to that heat ray.

	"Steve, I thought that heat ray was entirely cut out by the heat eliminator. How is it I could see your beam?"

	"You can't see heat anyhow—and it does cut out all the infra-red rays. The reason you can see that beam is that I send a bit of red light with it so I can aim it."

	Again the Martians had drawn up into a semicircle, with the "Terrestrian" at the centre—and now there suddenly appeared at the bow of each a flash of violet light. At the same instant the ship before them shot straight up with a terrific acceleration—and it was well it did! Almost immediately there was an explosion that made even the gargantuan Martian ships reel, though they were over ten miles from the spot where the explosion occurred,

	"Nice—they use a potassium salt in their explosive, Dave. See the purple color of the cannon flame?"

	"Yes, but why not use the atomic energy to drive the shells as well as to explode them?"

	"They couldn't make a cannon stand that explosion—but move—he's trying to crash us."

	The Martians seemed intent on ramming the tiny ship that floated so unperturbed before them. Now three great ships were coming at them. Suddenly there was a sharp rattle of the machine gun, then as that stopped, the "Terrestrian" shot away, backed away from the Martians at a terrific speed. Gale had never seen the explosive bullets work, and now when the three leading Martian ships seemed suddenly, quietly, to leap into a thousand ragged pieces, giant masses of metal that flew off from the ruptured ship at terrific speed, and with force that made them crash through the thick walls of their sister ship, it seemed magic. Those great ships seemed irresistible. Then suddenly they flew into a thousand great pieces. But all was quiet. No mighty concussion sounded. Only the slight flash of light as the ships split open. Titanic ships had been there—a deadly menace that came crashing down at them—then they were not there! And more, another ship had been crushed by a great flying piece of metal. Only the fact that these three had been well in front of the rest had saved the main part of the Martian fleet. The atomic generators of the one ship must have been utterly destroyed, for the great, glowing spheres of ionized air that showed the cathode rays to be working, had died, and the great ship was settling, still on an even keel, held upright by the gyroscopes that stabilized it, but falling, falling ever faster and faster to the earth, over twelve miles below.

	"Steve—did—did I do that? Why didn't I hear the explosion?"

	"You sure did, Dave, and made a fine job of it—three hits out of three shots—in fact four hits with three shots. The sound of the explosion can travel through air, but we are in free space."

	But nine ships still remained active of the original twenty of the Martian Armada, and these nine seemed bent on an immediate end to this battle. This tiny thing was deadly! Deadly beyond their wildest dreams—if it continued to operate, they wouldn't—it must be destroyed.

	Again they attacked, but now the cathode rays were streaming before them, a great shield of flaming blue light. Again the thin red beam of death reached out, caressed the ships—and the pilot room became a mass of( flames. But they had learned that the ships were controlled from some other part; they were coming smoothly on! Again came the sputtering pop of the machine gun. But it, too. seemed useless—the mighty explosions occurred far from their goal—the cathode rays were setting off the shells, And now one of the nine left the rank and shot at the "Terrestrian" with a sudden burst of speed. On it came at a terrific speed—one mile—three quarters—a half—Then there came a new ray from the bow of the tiny glistening ship. It seemed a tiny cathode ray, as it glowed blue in the ionized air, but, like the ship, it was strangely an iridescent violet—and as it touched the hurtling Martian, the great ship glowed violet, the color seemed to spread and flow over it, then it stopped. The ship was no longer glowing—and the strange ray ceased. But where the titanic, hurtling ship had been a moment before, was a slight clouding—and a few solid specks—small—the ship was utterly destroyed!

	The other Martians withdrew. Here was something they could not understand. Heat they knew—explosions they knew—but this dissolution of a titanic ship—thousands of tons of matter—and in a fraction of a second—it was new; it seemed incredible.

	But now again they formed themselves—this time they made a mighty cube, the eight ships, each at one corner—and five miles on a side the mighty cube advanced, till the "Terrestrian" formed a center to it. Now the great ships slowly closed in—but still the glistening ship remained in the center. There was plenty of room to escape—then suddenly, as the cube contracted to a three mile side, it moved. Instantly there came from all the great ships around it, a low but tremendously powerful hum—such a hum as one could hear around a power sub-station in the old days—the hum of transformers—and the tiny ship suddenly stopped—then reversed, shot back to the center of that mighty cube, and hung there! Now swiftly the cube was contracting—and still the tiny car hung there! It was jerking—but it moved only a few hundred feet each, time—then suddenly it started—went faster—faster—then there was a distinct jar as it slowed down—almost reversed—but again it continued. At last it shot outside the wall of that cube and shot away with a terrific acceleration.

	"Whew—Dave, they almost got us that time! That was a stunt I had never thought of—though I can see how it is done. They have tremendously powerful alternating current magnets on each of those ships. This car is non-magnetic, but a conductor, so there are induced in it powerful currents. You notice how hot it has grown in here—you can scarcely breathe—they induced terrific currents in our outer as well as in our inner shell. The result was that we were repelled from the powerful magnets. They were placed at the corners of a cube, so the only place that we could stay in equilibrium was in the exact center. When I tried to escape, I had to go nearer one of the poles, and the repelling force became greater. Then the ships on the far side shut off their magnets, so that they no longer repelled me—and I started to fall back—but I was able to pull out. The terrific acceleration I got just after leaving the cube was due to the repulsion of their magnets. You see it was very sizable! Had I had atomic energy only, I would never have gotten out of that field of force. I can, because of my material energy, escape every time. See—they are going to try again—let them—when they get close, we can turn on the disintegration ray and pick off the top ships. Then the bottom ships!"

	Again the "Terrestrian" was held in that titanic field of force—that field was so great that all magnetic compasses all over the Earth were deflected, and the currents induced in the telephone lines, telegraph lines, power transformers and all other apparatus were so great that many lines in the vicinity were melted. The cube contracted to a mile dimension before the glowing, iridescent ray of death reached out to dissolve that first ship—then a second—a third—a fourth—and the Martians were in the wildest confusion—the cathode rays prevented the "Terrestrian's" bombs from striking, but it also made their own projectiles useless. They had been sent to conquer this new planet for their race—and they were failing. They could not rush that tiny ship—for the deadly disintegration ray would only destroy the ship before they had had a chance to crash into the "Terrestrian." It seemed hopeless, but they tried once more.

	Now from every side the ships of the Martians came at their tiny opponent, mighty hurtling hulks of hundreds of thousands of tons—it seemed they must get that tiny ship—there seemed no opening. The three damaged ships had joined in this last attempt—and as the seven gargantuan ships charged down at the "Terrestrian," there sprang from it again the pale beam of disintegration—and one of the four remaining undamaged ships ceased to exist. The gap was closed—another ship was gone—and a third flashed into nothingness as the tiny opponent swung that deadly beam—then it was free—and turning to meet the four remaining Martians.

	But now they turned—and started up—up—up. They were leaving Earth! And now, as the blazing sun sank below the far horizon of distant purple hills, one faltered, the burning violet spheres went dark, and it plunged faster and faster into the darkness below—down from the glowing light of the ruddy sun into the deep shadow far below—down to the shadow of! Death—for the damaged generators had failed. And as that last great ship crashed on the far sands, the violet globes of light of the others were dying in the rare air far from Earth. The Martians had come, had seen and had been conquered.

	"Steve—they are going—we have; won. This planet is ours now—man] has proven it. But they may bring; reinforcements—are you going to let! them go?"

	"No, Dave, I have one more thing I want to do. I want to give art object lesson."

	The tiny ship set off in the wake of the defeated giants—faster and faster. It was overhauling them—and at last it did—just beyond the orbit of the Moon. The undamaged ship was leading the train of four ships as they went back. Their world must have been watching—must have seen that battle—must have known. And now they were returning.

-

	As the tiny ship came up to them the Martians turned at bay it seemed—and waited. Then from the tiny ship before them there came a new ray—invisible here in space—but a ray that caught and pulled the great ship it touched—the undamaged ship. In an instant it was falling toward the "Terrestrian"—then its great cathode tubes were turned on—invisible here in space also. Now it stopped, started away—but greater and greater became the force on it. It was a colossal tug of war! The giant seemed an easy victor—but the giant had the forces of atoms—and the smaller had the energy of matter to drive against it. It was a battle of Titanic forces; with space itself the battleground, and the great ship of the Martians was pulling, not against the small ship, but against space itself, for the equalizing space distorting apparatus took all tension from the "Terrestrian" itself. The great cathode ray tubes were working at full power now, yet still, inexorably, the Martian was following the "Terrestrian!" Faster they were going now—accelerating—despite the mighty cathode rays of the Martians!

	Of that awful trip through space and the terrible moments we had in the depths of space, you know. At times it seemed we must annihilate our giant prisoner, but always Waterson's skillful dodging avoided the bull rushes of the Martian. He would strain back with all available tubes, then suddenly turn all his force the other way—try to crash into us. It was a terrible trip—but toward the end he had decided to follow—and came smoothly. The strain of expecting some treachery kept us in suspense. Two weeks that long trip to Venus took. Two of the most awful weeks of my life. But two weeks in which I learned to marvel at that ship—learned to wonder at the terrific and constantly changing tugs it received—terrific yanks to avoid the hurtling tons of the Martian. I thought it must surely weaken under that continued strain, but it held. We had to get whatever sleep we could in the chairs. No food could be cooked, the sudden jerks threw us in all directions when we least expected it—but at last we reached the hot, steaming planet. Glad I was to see it, too!

	The "Terrestrian" left its giant prisoner there, and as it rose through the hot, moist air it rose in a blaze of glowing color, for every available projector on its tiny surface had been turned on as a light projector—it was a beautiful salute as we left, red, blue, orange, green—every color of the spectrum blazed as a great, glowing finger of colored light in the misty air.

	It took us but three days to return—Waterson admitted he went at a rate that was really unsafe—he had to put in another charge in the fuel distributer—water—and it held nearly a pint, too.

	When at last we reached Arizona again, Wright was there to greet us—and so were delegates of every nation. It was supposed to be a welcoming committee, but every one of the delegates had something to say about why the secret of material energy should really be given to his country.

	Waterson refused to give out the secret of that energy though. He demanded that the nations scrap every instrument of war, and then meet in the first Terrestrial Congress and write laws that might apply material energy to the ends of man, not to the ending of man!

	It seems strange, the persistence with which the governments of the world held fast to those old battleships and guns! They were hopelessly useless now, yet they would not agree to that term of the agreement! It required Waterson's famous ultimatum to bring action.

	"To the Governments of the Earth:

	"For centuries and millenniums man has had wars. One reason has been that he has had the tools of war. The tools of war are going to be abolished now. Every armored cruiser, battleship, destroyer, submarine, aircraft carrier and all other types of war craft will be taken to the nearest port, and every gun, cannon or other weapon of more than one mile range loaded on those ships. They will then be taken to the nearest ocean, and sank in water of a depth of at least one mile.

	"In the first place the weapons would be useless. The ship, I now have, has shown that. There will be no economic loss as the type of power they use is now obsolete. The iron and other materials they contain can be produced directly by new methods that are simpler than salvaging that metal. They are, however, curiosities that the future will be interested in. The navy department of Japan will select the finest ship of each type from each of the navies of any other country, and I will then transport that ship to a selected spot well toward the center of the Sahara desert where they will be set up as museums of naval history.

	"This is to be done within seven days, or the 'Terrestrian' will do it more completely. It must be done for the good of our race, and at last there is a power that can get it done—the 'Terrestrian!' "

	Needless to say, it was done. We all know the result. No armies meant no national-spirit—no race jealousies can exist unless there is some one to stir them up, and now it is to the benefit of no one to do so!

	The laws that made possible the application of Waterson's new energies are well known—and this manuscript is not the place for quotation of international and interplanetary law. It was a great problem, and we must acknowledge the aid of the Martians in solving it. Their experience in the application of atomic energy was immensely valuable. The light beam communication that Waterson made possible has done as much for us as have the energies he released.

	And the peace that exists between these two races must always exist, for they are the only neighbors Earth can ever have. And they did not damage us much. We still feel a bit of dread of them I suppose, but statistics have shown that the trouble man himself caused in his wild panics did far more damage than did the Martian heat rays.

	May God help these twin races, so close both in bodily form and place of birth, to climb on in friendly rivalry toward better things through the eons, as long as our sun can yet support life on the globes that wheel around it, migrating from planet to planet as the race grows, and the planets cool, settling on them as the Martians have settled on Venus.

	And thanks to Stephen Waterson's foresight and vision in establishing the Supreme Council of Solar System Scientists, we dare hope this may come true.

The End

The Metal Horde
Amazing Stories – April 1930

WHAT with calculating machines and robots and now perhaps even mechanical airplane pilots, there seems no limit to the possibilities in the realm of working machinery. We have seismographs that can locate the place of distant earthquakes, and machines that can solve, in a comparatively short period, problems in the higher calculus that would otherwise take brilliant mathematicians an endless time to do. It seems to us quite logical that machines might some day, perhaps in the distant future, be developed to solve for our scientists now apparently insoluble problems. Or they might even be made to state their own problems and work them out—in other words, it might some day be possible to have a machine with almost a working brain. According to our author, this will be possible and his final explanation of his idea is exceedingly clever and novel. There is no question Mr. Campbell knows his science and he has by this time proved his ability to weave a great deal of sound science into an absorbing scientific fiction story of exceeding plausibility.

-

	IT would seem lack of generalship that permitted them to be discovered so soon, for had we not picked up those signals from the ether we should not have received that warning that meant so much to us, and it might well have been that this system would have acquired a new population. For it would have needed but little to shift the balance the other way! Once I watched Steven Waterson save the civilization of the Earth, but now I saw him in a greater role, for it was he who made possible the defeat of the Sirians. But even had his brilliant mind succeeded in working out the problem of the de-activating field without the precious hours gained by that warning, many millions more would have died before they could have escaped from Mars.

	I was in his laboratory at the time he received the messages from the System government telling the import of those strange tone-signals out there in, space. I seem fated to be with that man every time some great event breaks on the System. I was with him when Dr. Downey announced his discovery of the secret of old age—or, better, its prevention. Waterson was forty-two now, in years, but in body he was still twenty-eight for it was late in 1947 that he had taken Dr. Downey's treatment.

	Those strange tone-signals had been heard faintly for days, but it was not until July 8th, 1961, that they were located in space, and then man began to realize something of the message they might bear.

	Waterson asked me to accompany him to the System Capital on Venus, and I was present at that first Cabinet meeting, and at each succeeding meeting. Again I was close to the facts—and again Waterson has asked me to write a chronicle of that terrible War.

	It was not till the signals had definitely been located as originating far out in space that man began to take more than a mildly curious interest in them. They were coming from the Metal Horde that was even then sweeping across space at a thousand miles a second to the planets ahead.

	Their goal of ages was in sight. Sixteen hundred years of ceaseless rushing flight had at last brought them near.

	When our ancestors were beginning to grumble under their Roman lords, in the time of Horlak San, when his mighty armies were sweeping their way across Mars under the newly developed heat rays, spreading death and civilization at one time, that menace started on its expedition.

	When the Normans invaded England, when the mighty empire that the San dynasty had maintained over all Mars was crumbling, that journey was half done.

	When Columbus first set foot on the shores of America, when Koral Nas formed the great union of the federated nations of Mars, that trip was three-quarters done.

	But it was seven-eighths completed when Mars developed the first crude atomic engines, and when Priestly of England discovered oxygen.   And during the two centuries of flight that remained before they reached their goal, there developed on those tiny planets the instruments that were to throw that mighty force down to defeat.

	But I am to tell you of that war as I saw it; we have fell seen it—all too closely! It was really but a little more than a month that that Menace of Metal hung over us there on Mars, but to us it seemed years, except to the frantically working scientists, striving desperately to discover some weapon to defeat them. David Gale.

-

	A TINY glistening mote in space it was, as it sped toward the shining planet before it—the rapid flight of the car aided by the gravity of Venus. The call had been urgent, and the Earth had been in superior conjunction, that meant a full twenty-hour trip, even at 1000 miles a second, but now they were approaching the planet and the pilot was losing speed as rapidly as possible. There was a limit to what he could stand, though, and it took him many thousands of miles to bring the machine down to a speed compatible with atmospheric conditions of the planet.

	The air of the planet seemed thick with traffic, mighty half-million ton lift freighters and passenger ships setting out toward Earth, smaller private machines, but none were slower nor faster than the others, for all were limited only by the acceleration they could stand. There was only one speed limit, that of economical, safe operation, for with all space to move in, there was no need of speed laws. Yet it seemed impossible to make any more than two thousand miles an hour through this slow moving air traffic—then there shone a little emblem on the bow of the little iridescent metal ship, and a huge freighter swerved respectfully aside. As by magic a lane opened through the thick traffic as the sign of the System President shone out.

	The little ship darted along the ground a short way, then rose vertically, only to settle lightly on the roof of the great System Capitol. Two men came out and walked quickly to the elevator entrance, where three guards, armed with disintegration ray projectors, greeted them with a stiffly military salute. The larger of the men responded with a smile, and a brief salutation in the common language of the System, for these great men were Martians, each well over eight feet tall. They entered the lift, and quickly sank down one hundred and fifty stories to the Governmental Offices. They proceeded directly to the great Cabinet chamber, down through the long halls, lined on each side by huge murals depicting scenes in the history of the three planets. Then they came to the cabinet room and entered.

	Thirty-nine men were seated there now, but as the two entered, they rose, and waited for the President to be seated. The forty greatest living men were in that room that day and all worked together, for they were scientists who had learned the value of cooperation. There was. no rivalry, for each was the greatest in his own field and had no aspirations toward any other branch of science. And none but conceded the power of the Presidency gladly to the greatest of them, Steven Waterson of Earth.

	"Gentlemen of the Cabinet, I am beginning to believe it is time we had something added to the Constitution forbidding Members of the Cabinet to rise on the entry of the President." Waterson deeply appreciated that compliment, as they all knew, but he could not feel at home in an atmosphere of diffidence. He was a scientist, a planner, not a diplomat. "I am sorry I was forced to make you gentlemen wait for me, but as you see," he continued, pointing to the great map of the System on the ceiling of the Cabinet chamber, where the slow motion of the planets in their orbits was being accurately traced, "Earth is in superior conjunction at present, and I could not make better time.

	"I see from this memorandum that has been prepared for me that Mansol Korac, Martian Astrophysicist, is to be our first speaker. I take it you have had no official discussion as yet?"

	He was correct in this assumption for the men had convened shortly before at his radio announcement that he would land within an hour.

	Some years before there had been some agitation to have the Cabinet meetings carried on by Radio-vision plates, but the low speed of light had made the speeches a terrible failure, as they would frequently have to wait ten or even fifteen minutes while the radio messages were reaching them. Over short distances that method was practicable, but between planets light is too slow, it cannot be used.

	"Some time ago our radio engineers developed a new instrument for detecting exceptionally short waves. They really came under the category of the longer heat radiations, but were detected electrically. While experimenting with this device they have been consistently picking- up signals apparently originating in free space. At first these signals were exceedingly weak, but their intensity has grown uniformly and rapidly, and from the results some amazing conclusions have been drawn.

	"They are originating at some source or sources out in space in the direction of the sun Sirius. I was asked to help the radiation engineers under Horus Mai in the calculation of the Astrophysical aspect of the problem. I believe that there are some man-made vehicles out there in space sending those signals. No man of the System has ever had reason to venture beyond the orbit of Neptune for any great distance; there would be no reason for it, as none of the outer planets are habitable. The rate of increase of the signal strength, coupled with observations made from Earth, Mars and Venus, have made it evident that they are at present about one and a quarter billion miles away, but approaching us at the rate of 1000 miles a second. This means that in approximately two weeks they will reach our planets.

-

	"AS to their point of origin we can only make guesses really. They are coming toward us with Sirius—and thousands of other stars—at their back. Of all, Sirius is the nearest, being approximately nine light years away. This means that they must have spent at least 1600 years on that trip across space. Dr. James Downey of Earth has recently shown us how to lengthen life almost indefinitely, so the problem of old age need not be considered. A supply of air and water would, of course, be no great problem with the Waterson apparatus for electrolyzing CO back to carbon and oxygen, using atomic energy fuel. Water, of course, is merely transmuted and recombined and thus automatically purified for use. A sufficient reserve of very dense materials could easily be carried that would make up for any losses by transmutation to the necessary gases. As yet we have not been able to make foods from energy, carbon, and oxygen and hydrogen, but I believe you, Dr. Lange, have made very considerable progress along that line, have you not?"

	"I intended announcing at this meeting," said Dr. Lange, "the development of a commercial method of manufacturing any one of the sugars and several proteins directly from rock or water, by a transmutation and building-up process. The method has been developed."

	"Then," continued the Martian, "there would be no need of carrying any great amount of food. That problem is settled.

	"As there would be no resistance encountered in space, once the machine had been accelerated to its definite speed of 1000 miles per second, on leaving Sirius it would be able to make the trip across space with no expenditure of energy, until it reached its goal and slowed down to the speed of a planet. Hence no great amount of matter-fuel would be needed to drive the machine.

	"But the problem of heating seems to me to be insoluble. Interplanetary space we have the radiations of the sun to depend upon, and they are decidedly sufficient, usually superfluously so. But in the infinite depths of interstellar space, there is only darkness and a perfect reservoir for radiations. There would be continuous cooling by radiation, and no sun to warm the ship. I could understand how the ship might carry enough matter to warm it for one hundred years, but in sixteen hundred years so much energy must be radiated that the entire mass would not suffice. Nothing short of an entire planet would be sufficient. Polished walls would reduce the radiation, but still it would be too high. I can not understand it—unless these men can endure a temperature of but twenty or thirty degrees above absolute zero—then they could make it quite readily—but two hundred and forty degrees below zero Centigrade means that air—nearly everything would be solid, except a few rare gases. No it seems impossible—yet we have the evidence! I can not understand how they have made this terrible migration, but I know that there are many different units. I believe two thousand or more was the number you mentioned Horus Mal?"

	"There seem to be a very considerable number of separate signals that we can distinguish. I consider the two thousand a very conservative estimate," replied Horus Mal, the Martian radiation engineer.

	"Then," continued Mansol Korac, "we must decide on some plan of meeting them."

	The Martian sat down and for some time there was silence in the great hall. At last President Waterson rose slowly to his feet. His face showed his concern. In times of emergency he always felt that these men here were responsible for the welfare of the twenty billions of human beings they controlled. And he was their leader, and therefore the responsibility was his.

	"Mansol Korac, could you point out to us the approximate location of the approaching ships?" asked Waterson and handed him a small hand light and pointed to the great map of the system above them.

	"I cannot be very exact, Mr. President; I do not know their location very definitely, but I should say about here, proceeding thus." The dazzling beam of white light stabbed up to the ceiling high above, and a sharp circle of light a foot across appeared, just within the orbit of Uranus, but well beyond Saturn. Then it slowly moved inward toward tiny glowing Mars. They were within the Solar System, but had not yet reached the Inner Ring of planets. Doubtless they who could make a trip across the great Void had the energy of matter at their disposal, and probably the disintegration ray. They would have no difficulty with the planetoids, they could merely beam them out of existence if they came too near.

	The light snapped out, and each member of the cabinet turned toward Waterson again.

	"Gentlemen, we see that they are within the Solar System already and appear to be heading directly for the Inner Ring, and Mars in particular, I do not know whether they come in peace or as invaders, but I think I can reasonably say that they are probably invaders. We all agree that they have made a trip of some 1600 years' duration. We all recognize the difficulty of such a trip. There are over two thousand ships in their fleet. I would not send so large a fleet to investigate the Outer Ring, but to send that great number of ships on a mere exploration trip of 1600 years—I do not think it is consistent. Then, too, we must allow them a life span of over three thousand years if we are going to admit that this fleet is for exploration, for it would be three thousand two hundred years before they could bring back news of their trip. In the meantime they might well have been wiped out by some stellar catastrophe, or they might have developed means of seeing us directly in nine years, the time light takes for the trip. Much as we would prefer peace, I fear we must prepare for war. But we can always go out to meet them peacefully, in a great battle fleet. That might convince them that it is better to deal peaceably with us and it would at least be a protection. I suggest that we have a discussion on this, and take a vote."

	But there was no discussion, and the vote was unanimous, for the President's suggestion was the logical thing.  They had to be prepared for either peace or war.

	Then came the discussion of weapons. There was pitifully little to discuss. The interplanetary patrol fleet was a mere police force, designed to destroy meteors, turn comets or asteroids. There was no real naval fleet. But mechanical devices had reached a great peak of perfection and the little space ships were so cheap, so easily operated, and so eminently safe, that nearly every family had several, and new ones were always in. demand. There were mighty factories to meet this demand. Twenty billion people can absorb a tremendous number of machines. That was the greatest protection we had, and it was that quantity production, developed by the American, Ford, that made Waterson's campaign possible. But we were to learn much of quantity production methods before that war was over!

-

	ORDERS were issued that evening to all the great plants over all three planets to begin work on a great quantity of ten-man-high speed ships. They were to be arranged with mountings for machine guns firing explosive bullets loaded with material explosive, each one equal to 100 tons of the old fashioned Dynamite, with special mountings for Dis ray machines. The disintegration ray machinery was to be built by the companies employed ordinarily in making private power plants, hand lights, and the jumping belts. These belts had small projectors that threw a directional beam of force that tended to deform the curvature of space, at that point, and the result was a force that pulled the projector forward, for the space before it acted like a spring. If a magnet be held near a steel watch spring, the spring

	Will bend, but it will try to straighten out and pull the magnet forward. If the magnet could pass through the spring it would progress, as the space curver apparatus was pulled through space. This was the principle of every ship now built, from these tiny two-kilogram (nearly five pounds) machines capable of lifting a man into the air, to the titanic new passenger-freight liners carrying as high as three quarters of a million tons.

	The principle of the disintegration ray was not greatly different, and so the machines designed for turning these out in quantities were used to make the Dis ray apparatus with no great changes.

	The heat ray projectors were made in quantities for every purpose, they were used for cooking, for welding metals, for warming the home, for melting down cliffs to make way for a building or a tunnel for water, for heating the mighty space ships, for anything to which heat might be applied to advantage. These would make very effective weapons but for the fact that heat rays could be reflected. They would bounce off the car of the enemy without doing any damage if it were polished, as no doubt it would be.

	Great liners of space were requisitioned and fitted with Dis rays, and with mighty attractor beam apparatus that would grip and hold anything short of another liner. Each of the ten-man-cruisers had a smaller attractor beam by which they could grip an adversary and hold to his tail with the tenacious grip of a bulldog and yet not weary the pilot with violent movement. These ships were exceedingly powerful, and their speed was limited only by the accelerations the passengers could stand.

	But all the scientists of the System were working desperately to design some new weapon, some new machine that was a little faster, a little more powerful; although with resistance in space and with the tremendous energies of matter at their disposal, there was little lack of power as far as the speed of the ships were concerned. Ten thousand times more powerful than the titanic energies of atoms, this energy had defeated the Martians that memorable day in May, 1947, and it was a full ten billion times more powerful than the energies of coal, of oil, of the fuels man had known before that day. But they needed a machine that could project the Dis ray farther. Twenty-five miles was the limit, beyond that the tremendous electrical field that was used to direct it must be built up to so high a voltage that there was no practical way of insulating it. They must be satisfied with the twenty-five mile range—but the scientists were working at increasing the range.

	They had two weeks before the Sirians would reach Mars, and in those two weeks much was done. There was a very carefully laid out system in all notices; the absolute truth was laid before the public, but there was also laid before them the evidences of Man's power. There were no panics. This was no weird thing to them, the landing of a fleet from another world; it was as commonplace to them as the landing of a fleet from the other side of the ocean had been a generation ago. The element of the unfamiliar was gone, and with it had gone the element that produces panic, that reduces the efficiency of a nation or of a System.

	New production machines had to be built, new designs worked out, new dies cut, but it was done with the quickness that a generation of mass production had made possible, it was not new to them, this change of design overnight.

	It required most of those two precious weeks to get the great machines working once more at their tasks, but at last a steady stream of ten-man cruisers was being poured out, 5000 an hour, night and day, from the factories of three planets. But there was only one day to work before the Invaders would reach Mars, and the fleet was gathered, 120,000 ten-man ships, manned by the volunteers of three worlds.

	But in the meantime Waterson had had built for himself a ten-man ship with triple strength of walls, and triple power plant installation, and an extra energy generator. He was experimenting with it, no one knew on what.

	At last the invaders were seen. Far out in their course the scouts had met them. Those scouts were destroyed, without provocation; they did not even have time to finish their reports, but we learned enough.

	Mars was a deserted planet now. All its population had moved to the other worlds. Most of them moved to Earth, on the other side of the sun. Only the workers in the great factories remained. They were not compelled to. They were told of the danger of their position, but those factories could contribute 1500 ships an hour, and they were manned. The fleet had gathered on Mars, awaiting the news of the Sirians, when the report of the scouts was flashed across the ether.

	They told of a great horde of metal ships, shining, iridescent, ranging in size from tiny darting machines, ten feet long by one and three-quarters in diameter, mere torpedoes, to great transport ships. And there was a single spherical ship. A great sphere that floated in the center of a bodyguard of the thousands of its followers. There were literally hundreds of thousands of the little torpedo-ships, a few dozen of the cargo ships, and a few ships that seemed more like scouts of some sort. But it was apparent that the little torpedo-ships were the real fighters—tiny ships that spun and turned and darted like an electron in ionized gas. It seemed impossible that a man could stand those sudden turns at several miles a second, but they watched them, and went into nothingness as the Dis ray reached out from those tiny ships and caressed their ships.

	They, too, had Dis rays—it would be a terrible battle, for man had that same force, a force so deadly they had feared to use it in industry. But man had the advantage of numbers.

	The men on the fleet who saw those television plates glowing with the story of what was taking place out there in space decided that those torpedo-ships must be guided by radio. If they were it would be a simple matter to wreck that system by using a powerful interference that would drown out the directing wave and make its ships unmanageable.

	The System Capital was temporarily moved to the Waterson Laboratories on Earth. There the forty men had gathered around great television plates and were watching the battle of the scouts. They were not to go to that battle front.   The System needed them.

-

	IT was midnight on the part of Mars where the Sirians first struck. The fleet of the Solar System was massed there to meet them. They seemed headed for the mighty gleaming city of Metal, below. Dornalus, the second city of old Mars; was there, and they seemed bent on reaching it. As the Sirians drew near they threw forward a great shield of the torpedo-ships; then the great generators on the Solarian fleet forced tremendous etheric currents into space, and waited to see the motions of the tiny ships become erratic, but they darted about as steadily, as easily as ever. These Sirians must be small men! And they must be from a massive world, a world that had accustomed them to great accelerations.

	Below them the city was deserted except for vision projector machines that hummed steadily, automatically, from a thousand points. They were broadcasting the message to the worlds and to the commanding officers on the other side of Mars. These men had direct control of the battle. They could not control it from Earth, for radio waves travel too slowly. Twenty minutes each way the waves took and in forty minutes the battle was more than over. It lasted only fifteen minutes—minutes of terrific carnage!

	As the two great fleets came into contact, the Solarians drove into the mass of tiny ships, their Dis rays flashing in every direction. They had one advantage in that they sprayed nine streams of death from each of their craft; but the torpedo-ships were so unbelievably fast that it was nearly impossible to hit them. And they seemed to have no compunction about raying one of their own ships if a more than equal amount of damage was inflicted on their enemies. Logical, no doubt, but how inhuman.

	The sky above the city became a blazing hell of Dis rays, heat rays, and exploding shells. The explosives were not safe, for they threw great flying fragments that could pierce the wall of a ship and send it down. They damaged friend and foe alike.

	The Solarian fleet had a solid projectile of a single giant crystal of copper that was immune to the Dis ray. It could penetrate the walls of a ship and bring it down. But the explosive bombs were more often than not exploded or merely disintegrated before they reached their goal. A crystal of any sort was immune to the Dis ray, but it was not a protection against it. There was no known way of deflecting the Dis ray except by that special electrical field that directed it, and that could not be made to surround a ship. The copper crystals were used mainly to destroy the Dis ray projectors of the enemy. They were fired at the faint glow, and with luck they would hit the machine and instantly wreck the projector. More than one machine disappeared as its own Dis ray projector, wrecked by the fifteen-inch copper crystal, suddenly spread in all directions.

	The sphere and its escort of transports hung back, surrounded by a great number of the torpedo ships. They did not join in the fight.

	And at last the Solarian fleet was recalled. It was not right that they should make such heavy sacrifices. The city must fall, and it would be easy to crush the Sirians with a larger fleet. At the rate of 5000 Solarian ships an hour, they might well do so in three days. So the Solarians left, and behind on the ground there were a few ships; a great number had been rayed into nothingness. The Sirians had won this first victory, but the Solarians could soon make up for this loss. They had twenty billions to back them up, and they had the resources of three planets. It seemed as though the invaders could not last long, but we had yet to learn the true meaning of mass production.

	No man could hang around the encampment of that alien race.   But above them television broadcasts were suspended, and some were installed in the buildings of the city. But these were of no avail, for the Sirians seemed obsessed with the idea of making Mars a true sphere. They proceeded to level the great city with Dis rays. No news projector could remain there, of course, and several news projector men lost their lives. It was foolhardy to stay in that city; they had been forbidden, but nothing will keep a newsman out of a chance for a scoop. The projectors which hung above continued to show a weird scene.

	The great sphere and its attendant transports sank gently to the ground and formed a great wheel, with the sphere as the hub and the transports as radiating spokes and the rim. High above them the darting torpedo-ships were wheeling in constant circles. It seems a miracle that not all of those news projectors were destroyed, but some did last till the early rays of the sun set them off as shining targets for the flashing Dis rays. It was a weird scene they showed!

	Now from the sides of the great transports came, not men, but great machines, machines that lumbered along on caterpillar treads to set themselves down beside their parent ship, one from each ship, and proceeded to dig themselves in, about three feet deep. Then all seemed quiet, except for a steady hum from the great machines, fifty-eight in all there were, great machines—fully two-hundred feet on a side. They worked there quietly now, and the men within them must have been totally covered, for they could not be seen. Apparently the Sirians dared not come out into the Martian atmosphere. And now something was happening that startled all the billions of watchers on the three planets. In the top of the great machines was a small trapdoor. Through this, there came a torpedo-ship that floated up a few feet, then darted off to join the wheeling machines above. Then eleven seconds later another came forth—another—each machine there was sending them out now. One by one those machines released a torpedo-boat—one every eleven seconds, with the regularity of a clock.

	At first men could not grasp the significance of this—but soon it became obvious. These wonderful machines were complete factories in themselves, portable, mass production factories for producing those torpedo-ships, and one each eleven seconds came from the end of the production line, complete. The noises there were no longer a gentle hum. There was a whir and rattle of machines. It was not loud, though considering the mighty works that must have been going on inside. But steadily now, that darting fleet of torpedo-ships was increasing the power for all this work was obvious to these men who used similar processes in their work.

	From the soil below them the machines dug masses of matter, and carrying it up into the machine transmuted its elements, into the elements necessary to their machines, then molded them, and automatically assembled them. It would require very little supervision, but that production rate was staggering! One each eleven seconds meant 325 completed machines an hour.

	There were no signs of any men entering these ships, or the machines, so it seemed there must be some means of distant control that man knew nothing of, for it was improbable that all those men could have been in the parent machine from the beginning. No wonder the Sirians could lose these machines so freely. The ability to make them automatically from anything meant they cost practically nothing and could be produced in limitless quantity. The notion that Man was to be an easy victor was fast disappearing. These machines were coming to form an ever-growing cloud of wheeling ships. Still, man had destroyed fully half their fleet in that desperate struggle; they must spend some time in making up those losses. But Man had lost nearly a third of his great fleet. Four hundred thousand brave men had been lost. It was not even a victory, and it had cost Man far more than it had cost the Sirians. They had learned something from them, though. Perhaps radio control would enable man to do an equal amount of damage. Orders were put through to make an experimental fleet of thirty thousand radio-controlled machines.

-

	IN the meantime a new thing was attracting the attention of the people on the planets. A new set of machines was issuing from the transports. These were smaller than that first set—low and squat—but they seemed far more flexible in their movement. They went off in orderly line to a point a few miles distant from the main encampment and there formed themselves into two groups. One group remained still, but began to glow faintly, and a hum came to the televisors above. Then there began to flow from a spout on the side of each a steady stream of molten metal. This was poured into a somewhat similar arrangement on the other group, then these moved quickly away, and with their strange handlike appendages began to work quickly at a great rounded hull that was rapidly forming. The men watching understood. It was to be another cargo ship. Rapidly this hull grew under their swift manipulation, till it was completed in three and a half hours. An entire ship, except for the machinery, was completed. And now they began to work on another, and as they fell to work there started from the original cargo shops a long line of small, quick moving machines, machines that could run along the ground or drive through the air, and they were covered with arm-like appendages. Soon these reached the newly built hull, and quickly they were at work, getting material from the strange squat machines, entering the hull, and working at it. The second hull was nearly completed when one of the smaller machines flew back to the original encampment and went up to the sphere. From it it drew a strange metal case, oblong, from which led a great heavy cable. This it carried back to the now completed ship and installed it somewhere inside. Then the ship rose easily from the ground and floated around a bit, landed again, and immediately there came out of it one of the torpedo-ship machines! None of these had gone in, it had been made by those slim, quick worker machines! And now there lumbered out a second machine—one of the strange hull maker machines—then two of the worker machines came out, where only one had gone in. The ship was complete, even to its strange crew! And now that strange crew was already at work, making others!

	With the coming of dawn the televisors were rayed out of existence. But that evening more were installed, and every night during all that invasion there floated above them those noiseless televisors. They destroyed many, but many remained.

	That night showed us a fleet of nearly a half million of the tiny torpedo-ships, and a rapidly growing cargo ship camp. There were more than a hundred now, for as each was completed, the machines made could aid in the more rapid construction of the next.

	And that night they began their work of leveling Mars. That great fleet spread itself out over all the surface of Mars, and with flaming heat rays and the terrible Dis rays they cut down every remnant of the Martian hills. Twenty-four hours later the entire planet was one vast featureless plain. And on that plain there had been established eight camps. During this time the cargo ships had been moving, and during that twenty-four hours they did nothing. But Man was prepared. The radio-controlled fleet was ready to be given its first try.

	The entire fleet was assembled above the surface of Mars, above that original camp, where still rested the one sphere. Then from far out in space the great control ships directed the dive of the radio-control-ships, making the distance one-twentieth part of a light second. The men directing the ships were no faster than that, could not respond sooner, and the greater distance gave them greater safety.

	But now the radio-controlled ships were released, and permitted to drop, uncontrolled. They wished to give the Sirians no warning. Then when the ships were scarcely ten miles from the Sirian fleet, they were brought under control, headed nose down in a power dive, straight through the surprised upper layers of the fleet, and with Dis rays glowing they drove straight for the ships below. Suddenly, there were great gashes in the ground beneath, and twenty of the cargo ships were gone in that first rush, and three more followed quickly. But while literally thousands of the Sirian torpedo-ships had been rayed, nearly half of the thirty thousand radio-controlled ships of Man were gone. And now they had to apply full power to prevent striking the ground. But twenty-two of them continued on in straight fall toward the great sphere. They were rayed by a hundred ships before they could get really separated from their companions. And now the fast radio ships were destroying hundreds of the Sirians, they were formed in a vertical column reaching up ten miles, one above the other, with the nine Dis ray projectors going full blast and spinning as rapidly as was safe lest the machines fly apart due to centrifugal force, for the Dis ray will work practically instantaneously. The top ship was preventing the torpedo-ships' attack from above. Suddenly each of the ships stopped spinning; its Dis ray went out and they dropped like rocks. The radio control had been drowned out by powerful interference; they were no longer under the influence of the men, and they had ceased to function. The radio-controlled-ships would no longer be useful against the Sirians.

-

	NEARLY the entire fleet of the Sirian torpedo-ships had been wiped out by that spinning column. Now thousands of the manually-controlled ships dove down at the weakened fleet. Every one of the remaining ships shot up to meet the advancing fleet; there were still several thousand of the torpedo ships. And now the sphere rose with them, and among them. Suddenly the entire mass came together in the shape of a greater sphere with walls of torpedo-ships, and as it formed the torpedo ships snapped on their Dis rays, and started the entire surface of the sphere spinning! They seemed invulnerable in this formation, but they quickly moved away across the surface of the planet, the larger part of the Solarian fleet following, wondering what to do about it. It seemed impossible to attack the sphere of destruction.

	But the cargo ships were left unprotected, and in a moment they had been beamed out of existence. The Sirians had lost many hours' work on this battle! And they lost more before the mighty fleet of torpedo-ships from the other camps rescued them. For now and then an explosive shell would penetrate the screen of disintegration rays. But within the outer shield was a second, virtually a shield of metal, for the metal sphere was surrounded by a solid mass of the torpedo-ships. But many of these were destroyed. More, too, were put out of commission by the copper crystals.

	On the arrival of the great fleet from the other camps the tables were turned. The control ships had too low an acceleration, and there were too many ships for the ten-man machines to get, though they tried to make a screen of Dis rays that stopped the ships till they were rayed out of existence. Many of the control ships were lost and many of the ten-man ships.

	It was then that Waterson announced two things that gave the Solarians new hope.

	It was the fifth of August when the announcement was made. And it was the same day on which nearly the entire fleet from all the camps on Mars started off for Venus, but the movement was detected almost at once, and from great underground bases on Mars the Solarian fleet sent out fifty thousand ten-man ships. These ships skimmed along close to the ground, and their polished metal had been sprayed with a drab paint so that they seemed but shadows that became practically invisible as they sped along, widely separated, but rapidly converging on the site of the Sphere's camp. This had remained on Mars, guarded by so small a number of ships that it was evident they expected the Solarian fleet to go to Venus, as no doubt would have been necessary but for this swift counter raid.

	So perfectly camouflaged were the Solarian ships, that they got within ten miles of the camp without being discovered. Then, as their Dis rays flashed out, the entire group of the torpedo ships dove on them. There were nearly one hundred thousand of the ten-man ships, diving down at them in a zigzag course that made them impossible targets, but the fleet had been approaching from all sides, and now the entire Sirian defense was concentrating on the machines attacking from the north. Those from the south crept in behind them, and suddenly the sphere started into the air, then went flying out into space at terrific speed. It barely escaped the Dis rays of the attackers. Only its tremendous acceleration saved it. Now several thousand of the torpedo ships shot after it, the rest falling into the form of a great disc to block the path of the pursuers. Man had long been accustomed to two dimensional maneuvering, but the ease with which these Sirians fell into complex three dimensional formations showed long practice in the art of warfare in space.

	That raid was successful in that it forced the immediate return of the Sirian fleet, and very nearly destroyed the sphere. Over seventy-two thousand of the torpedo ships were destroyed, but we lost two thousand ships and twenty thousand men. But Waterson announced that the Sirians would no longer be able to escape because of their greater acceleration. He had discovered a method for using an attractor beam of a short range but considerable power to be used with an electro-magnetic device that would automatically turn on the instruments in such a way that no matter what the accelerations might be, no matter how great, as long as they were within the limits of the ship's strength, the accelerations and centrifugal forces would be instantly neutralized, thus making possible violent maneuvers that the sudden forces had hitherto made impossible. A demonstration of his new ship had confirmed it. He took up a number of the Cabinet in his special machine, and turned hairpin turns at ten miles a second! The acceleration would have been instantaneously deadly had those neutralizers failed. They might as well have been under a half million ton freighter as it landed, as undergo those accelerations! But in that perfectly balanced room, it was not detectable. The ship's hull was made triple strength, as were the power projectors, and the generators. It was powered like a freighter, and could reach its full speed of 1,000 miles per second at an acceleration 5,000 times that of Earth's gravity. Waterson, who weighed two hundred and ten pounds on Earth would have weighed over five tons! It meant that the Solarian fleet would no longer be handicapped by the greater flexibility of the enemy ships. The plants that had been manufacturing the machines had already closed down temporarily, while the dies for these new machines were being made. But within thirty-six hours the first of the machines was being turned out.

	And now a great crew of young men were being gathered to man them. They were all volunteers. There were to be one million ships, and that meant ten million men would be needed. Only modern methods could have made that possible, but with three populations, totaling over twenty billions, a sufficient number of volunteers came forward to make the work easy. As fast as these men came to the conscription stations, they were put into the new machines. And here also modern methods had helped. The Waterson system of material energy release had been so successful, that the price of a completed car had dropped to well under one hundred dollars for the small two-man machines. And even for the interplanetary models not more than two thousand dollars needed to be paid, for the raw materials were absolutely free, the labor was mechanically reduced to almost nothing, and as the energy that drove these machines was as cheap as the raw materials, they merely charged enough to make the venture pay a decent return on investment and to pay the wages of the few machine supervisors and the office staff. Men worked five days a week on three-hour shifts in the factories, but longer hours and more pay went to the builders, to the men who had to manually control the building construction machinery, for law forbade the building of offices on the mass production scheme, since that meant an unvaried, monotonous city. But everywhere wages were high, for wages depend, not on the amount of work men do, but on the amount of finished product they can turn out. The men accomplished more, and were paid more, but they worked less. It had taken many years to finally convince the Earth of that, but the example of American labor, with its shorter hours and higher wages was proof enough. And then the influence of the mighty energies Waterson had released made it even more apparent. Mars had already developed the system under the force of the released atomic energies.

	High wages and cheap machines had meant that everyone owned one. And so absolutely safe were they that they commanded perfect confidence. This had been a big factor in the making of this mighty fleet.   Everyone knew now to operate the machines, so it was easy to fill the places on the machines with pilots.

	Nevertheless, special training was necessary to overcome the caution against quick turns that long experience had instilled in them all. Each accepted applicant was taken up in one of the new machines, and given a breath-taking ride—a ride that consisted in diving toward the Earth with terrific sudden acceleration. Then, just when the student felt certain they would crash and become a mass of molten metal, the ship was brought up, not a mile from the ground, to settle gently; then, when they almost touched the ground, they leapt into the air again with an acceleration that shot them out of the atmosphere with the velocity of a meteor, while the outer wall of tungsto-iridium ahoy glowed cherry red. Then came sharp turns at ten or twenty miles a second, till at last the students no longer gripped the arms of their seats in anticipation of a sudden acceleration. Then they were taken down and given a ship to experiment with.

	But none of these men had ever handled a weapon of the sort they were to use, so mimic battle practice was held, with the glowing rays of a harmless ionizing beam instead of the deadly Dis rays.

-

	DAILY reports were coming from the Martian scouts as time went on. The Sirians, too, had decided to do some fleet-building, for nearly three-quarters of their fleet had been destroyed. The production rate of man's factories, 120,000 a day, had gained a slight lead. It would require ten days before a fleet of a million could leave for Mars with a home guard of two-hundred thousand ships.

	The destruction of the Martian plants had lowered the production rate to about 3,500 an hour, but shops put up rapidly on Earth and Venus had quickly brought the production-rate back, and it would be nearer 7,000 an hour by the time the last of the fleet had been finished.

	The spinning sphere formation of the Sirians had been almost invulnerable, and an exceedingly destructive formation. The Solarians had chosen several thousand of their crack pilots to practice this maneuver, but despite almost constant practice during the entire ten days, it was a miserable failure as soon as they tried to progress. Standing motionless it was a very effective procedure, but the spinning column was decided on as more effective as long as they had no ship to protect. There were twenty groups that practiced that maneuver.

	And then Waterson announced that an associate of his, working in his laboratory, had developed a method for using a triple electrical field to direct the Dis ray, making possible a ray with a range of over sixty miles. This would be absolutely fatal to the spinning sphere system of the Sirians. The Sirians very evidently did not know how to project the Dis ray any further than twenty-five miles. The ability to stand off and hit them would break down the sphere of Dis rays very quickly. There was only one objection. The rays were very powerful, so powerful that they required triple power generators, but the special field of electrical force was the worst problem. The field could not be made sufficiently strong if a single layer of the force was used, but the invention of a method to back up the first with two other layers of equal voltage, thus getting nearly three times the effect without exceeding the capacity of the insulation, had made the new machine possible. This special field was produced by circularly moving cathode rays, or exceedingly high velocity electrons, and therefore could be produced only by atomic methods. This meant ten thousand times the amount of fuel a similarly powered material engine would have required, but material energy of course yields only wave motions of the transient or unstatic type, a type that cannot stand still. Atomic energy can yield static-waves as well as unstatic; the electron can stand still, and is a perfect example of the stationary wave.

	These limitations, in turn, meant that a tremendous weight of equipment was needed. And a corresponding great volume of space was required. In the end they had to use specially reinforced freighters to carry the great projectors, each of which could carry but two projectors. Due to their long range, however, the ships were at least self-protecting. There was not time to make and equip more than twenty-eight of these ships before the fleet was scheduled to start. They were completed ahead of time. Some of their trial trips more than fulfilled the best hopes of the inventor. Dr. William Carson, the physicist who developed it insisted that it was really Dr. Waterson's suggestions that made the thing possible.

	We had learned something of spatial warfare formations from the Sirians. Now we were to learn a bit of the strategy of spatial warfare.

-

	THE Solarian fleet sailed for Mars on the fifteenth of August, 1961. They were a scant twenty million miles from their goal when a report came from a scout that something was happening down in the Sirian camp. Almost immediately after that the Sirians flooded our entire system with so terrific a barrage of radio frequency static that communication was impossible. They could not transmit from Earth to Venus, and the communication was very poor even from one side of Earth to the other, despite the fact that over a half billion kilowatts were used. So intense was this barrage, that if two of the torpedo ships near the sending apparatus came within twenty or thirty feet of each other, great crashing sparks leapt across, and instantly they were fused. Scouts saw this happen twice.

	The Solarian fleet continued on for Mars. They should cover the remaining distance—twenty million miles—in five hours by pressing the ships a little, although higher speeds made the rate of approach of asteroids so great that they frequently could not be detected before they collided with the ships.

	Only two and a half hours later a scout came into sight at terrific speed. He must have been doing over two thousand a second, an exceedingly dangerous rate—but his acceleration neutralizer enabled him to slow down safely. He reported that the entire Sirian fleet had risen from Mars, leaving a very few machines behind—this time taking the sphere with them—and had set out for Earth! Earth was on the other side of the Sun—a long two hundred and twenty million miles to go! The Sirians had a lead of three hours. They had as great a speed as the Solarians and would reach Earth before the Solarians. But they would at least be delayed by the two hundred thousand ships—more now, for the steady production would have built the quota up to over six hundred thousand, or a million by the time they could return. The Sirian fleet had been built up to nearly three million though, which could easily crush the fleet of a million, and the second million later—separately. The trip would take them sixty-two hours. Scouts had been sent ahead to Earth at a dangerously high speed to communicate the news, and the entire fleet had increased its speed to a rate that was considerably higher than safety warranted, but a continuous play of Dis rays was considered sufficient safety at fifteen hundred miles a second. The Sirian fleet had been reported to be making thirteen hundred and fifty, so the Solarians should pass them, or meet them, just shy of the Earth, where the other fleet would be waiting. They should have no difficulty to crush the Invaders with the two million ships.

	The radio interference was being maintained by a ship anchored somewhere in space. It was no doubt well protected, and to attack it successfully would have meant the loss of a large number of ships, for the time spent in the attack would delay them irreparably. They must continue to Earth.

	There were no scouts from the Sirian fleet—yet there should have been, for over a thousand ships had been following them, far behind. None ever reached Earth to warn the fleet. Every one of them was destroyed. But when the Sirian fleet was well on its way—it turned—and headed for Venus! They had purposely let that one scout reach the Solarian fleet with the news that the fleet was headed for Earth—then they redirected their course. The scouts from the Solarian fleet did reach Earth—but soon after the last of the scouts following the Sirian fleet had been destroyed, their radio barrage was lifted. All the ships on Venus were concentrated on Earth, and Venus was left unprotected.

	Twenty hours after the fleet had turned back, the radio barrage was again lowered over the System. It was ten hours later that the Sirians reached Venus.

	While the radio barrage had been lifted, Waterson had had an idea that there should be some protection for the planet. It did not seem that the planet should be completely stripped of its defenses, and he had suggested that at every city great Dis ray machines of the sixty-mile range type be set up. His suggestion was followed, and at every city on Venus the great machines were installed. There were many of them now, for during the hundred hours the main fleet was in flight the new machines had been put on a quantity production basis. But all the ships that were equipped with them, were sent to the defense of the unattacked Earth! And it was those machines that prevented the landing of the Sirians. They came to the night side of the planet, of course, coming from Mars. It would be thirty hours before they would be expected on Earth—thirty hours before the main fleet would reach the planet—and then there would be the 160,000,000-mile trip to Venus if they were to get there in time to rescue the planet.

	But the Sirians could not approach within beaming distance of the cities, and all those that did try to do so, were, brought down as a cloud of powdery dust. It was Waterson's caution that saved the billions of people on Venus.

	But were they to be saved ? The Sirians decided they must destroy the works and the people on Venus, so they made one desperate effort. They had at least sixty hours to work in, and now they had a plan that would require time. They retired some hundred miles from the planet, then the entire fleet, torpedo ships, cargo boats, and the entire body guard of the Sphere lined up, and then switched on powerful attractor beams. Immediately, the combined effect of over three million of these emanations took hold on the planet, and great tides began to rise in its mighty oceans. Many lives were lost in the seaside towns, when the tremendous waves rushed in over the land. But astronomers on the planet and most of the System's scientists were there to watch the Sirians on Mars through their great telescopes. And these astronomers saw what the Sirians intended, and saw that they were well on their way to fulfilling their aim.

-

	A PLANET is balanced in its orbit about its parent sun with the delicacy of a diamond on a jeweler's scales. But, like the diamond, if it be displaced by some force, it reaches a new state of equilibrium. Thus, if the diamond is further lowered in the scale by adding a small weight, it soon reaches a new point of equilibrium. No conceivable force, therefore, could be great enough to displace the planet in its orbit more than a few million miles by pulling it either in toward the sun, or out from it, and as soon as that force was released, it would spring back to its original position as the diamond would regain its balance on removing the disturbing weight. For the sun pulls on a planet with a titanic force; it draws it in with the apparent force gravity, and another similar, but opposite force, centrifugal force of its revolution in its orbit, is constantly tending to throw it into the depths of space. These are the two forces that are always balanced. Suppose the planet is drawn nearer the sun; it revolves in a smaller orbit—and it revolves in that smaller orbit with a higher speed—for it has fallen in toward the sun; it has gained speed as any falling body would. It has gained speed in the direction of the sun. but this has operated to increase its rotational speed. Thus it has gained a greater centrifugal force—you can see the effect with a bit of chalk on the end of a string. The smaller the circle it swings in, the greater the tendency to fly outward. But as long as we continue the force that was added to draw it in, it will remain in equilibrium. Remove this extra force and at once the planet will fall away from the sun, losing speed as it does so, till it has reached a point where it is once more in equilibrium with the force drawing it inward.

	Now reverse the problem. Let us draw it away from the sun. Now the orbit is longer, and it has lost speed in moving from the sun. It cannot stay here, it is not in equilibrium, unless the force that drew it out is maintained. To free the planet from the sun, one would have to lift hundreds of quintillions of tons of rock through billions of miles, against the terrific gravity of the sun. It is too much.

	Thus we see that as long as the planet revolves in its orbit, it will never fall, and to pull it away from the sun is impossible as long as it revolves in its orbit. But if it slows down in its flight about the sun it at once has less centrifugal force. It automatically falls toward the sun until it has gained velocity enough to establish a new orbit of equilibrium. If this energy, too, is withdrawn; if it is made to stand still in its orbit; it will fall straight to the sun. It is the only way such a thing might be done. And it would take the energies of matter, and strain that to the utmost, to accomplish it.

	This was the plan of the Sirians. Three million ships were dragging like a Titanic brake on the planet as it wheeled in its orbit, and slowly, steadily it was falling into the blazing furnace of the sun. Their ships were not designed for this task, but they could do it in the sixty hours at their disposal. In a short time it would be falling directly toward the sun, but it would take many hours for the seventy-million-mile fall. Even if it were stopped before it reached the sun, any place within twenty million miles would be unbearable.

	It was the distressed planet itself that warned the people on Earth and the men of the fleet that the Sirians would never reach Earth, for the radio was still dead. But the fleet turned for Venus at once. They were far to one side of the path to Venus, and they would have to turn, but it would take them thirty, instead of sixty hours to reach Venus. And the other fleet was coming from Earth. They were not quite a million strong, but those machines that had been produced on Venus would come also, and that would bring the total numbers up to over a million, and with the main fleet the number would be well over two million. There were also three hundred of the long range Dis ray ships now, for many more had been produced and Venus would supply an equal number.

-

	WE can only admire the wise action of the Commandant of the Venerean fleet, Mals Hotark, in not sending his pitiful fleet of a few thousand out to fight with the Sirians. The members wanted to, the people of Venus wanted him to, but he wisely waited until he saw the fleets of the System approaching. It would have done no good, and lost many lives, and valuable ships to have gone in advance to the attack.

	Many people tried to leave Venus, but enough machines were freed of the task of stopping the orbital motion of the planet to patrol the heavens and keep the people from leaving. They beamed thousands of private cars out of existence; it seemed unnecessarily cruel.

	The two great fleets were drawing nearer to the planet, converging, and at last they got so close that they could carry on a radio communication by using the terrific power of over two billion kilowatts of energy. The amount of power that Sirian machine was throwing off has been estimated at a minimum of fifty billion kilowatts. We know that enough power could be picked up from a hundred meter aerial on Earth to operate a small, high frequency motor.

	When radio communication was established, they agreed to wait until they could join, for the fleet from Earth was two hours ahead of the main fleet. The loss of time was made up for in greater efficiency of action. They would need it all. At last they joined fleets, one mighty disc of two million airships, they flew on through space at a steady rate of five and three-quarter million miles an hour. They arranged themselves in a mighty cone as they came nearer Venus. Already the machines had slowed it down so greatly that the planet was over a million miles out of her orbit, and rapidly adding to this mileage.

	But now as the great cone approached, the great ships with the long range Dis rays leading, they were discovered. The cone formation was chosen, for that is the three dimensional equivalent of die two dimensional V that man had used in war on earth for thousands of years.

	Now began the greatest battle in the history of the System. Here were two mighty forces slashing at each other with terrific disintegration rays, fighting in the great Void, and five million powerful ships darting around, slashing, stabbing with a death that struck with the quickness of light.

	As the great cone of the main fleet attacked from one side, there was a smaller cone attacking the Sirians from the other, but long before the Sirians could bring their rays into effect the long range rays had torn great holes in their ranks. The Sphere had retired with its escort at once, going swiftly to Mars. The main fleet was too busily engaged in fighting the Sirians' main fleet to worry about the Sphere at present.

	A dozen times the great spinning sphere formation was tried by the Sirians, but each time a withering blast of the long range Dis ray cut it up as a tool held against a spinning block of wood cuts it down in the lathe. Their strongest formation was useless, and they could no longer outmaneuver the Solarians, the new ships could turn and dart as quickly as they, or even more quickly. The big Dis ray ships were not equipped for fast fighting, so when there were none of the spinning sphere formations to break up, they retired to a safe distance, and waited for any ships that might attack them. Few did. It proved suicidal. But steadily the forces of man were conquering. In a hell of flashing Dis rays, the new ships were proving their worth. The flaming rays had seared the land below for many miles, but the fleet of the Sirians was fast going. The new fast ships of man could dodge the rays of the Sirians, turn and dart on the tail of their attacker, then hang there, the attractor beam giving them an added grip until they could flash the machine into nothingness with the Dis ray. They turned, ducked, darted ahead with terrific speed, suddenly stopped, and then were going full speed again. And another Sirian ship was gone. Now it was the delicate apparatus of the Sirians' ships that suffered; the}' could not keep up with the sudden turns of this flexible adversary. And their great fleet had been reduced to a scant quarter million, but we had lost nearly a half million ships, five million men, in that Titanic struggle. Such a battle could not last long. It was impossible. Nothing could stand before the Dis rays, and with those turning, darting ships, sooner or later every ship must come under the influence of those rays. But now the last of the torpedo-ships were fleeing into space. But we did not care to have to fight them again—and they too were rayed out of being. They could no longer dart away from us before we could catch them—that was for us now!

	But now the fleet returned to a greater task. Venus had been falling toward the sun, and was nearly a million and a quarter miles off and within her orbit. Now a great fleet of cargo carriers from Mars, Venus and Earth came up, and with them came wrecker ships, capable of picking up on their powerful attractor beams an entire million-ton passenger-freight liner—great liners themselves, all equipped with attractor beams. Soon they were all using their power to bring die planet back to its normal speed. It did not take the ships of that mighty fleet, many specially designed for heavy listing and towing, many designed for tremendous loads, very long to bring the planet back to its age-old orbit.

	In former days we would have found a world wrecked by panic. But this later generation had learned to trust in the powers of the ships they had, and there had been little of the terrible panic that would have affected the world of a generation ago. Then, too, they knew that with the demonstrated power of the long range Dis rays, they could safely convoy a fleet of the great passenger liners to safety.

	What helped also was the fact that the human mind cannot grasp the full significance of the fall into the sun. If you were told that the planet you were on was sinking toward the sun, you would, be surprised, horrified, and would probably try to make a bargain-buy on real estate, while the other man sold his to get his money out. You would simply fail to comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe. It has never happened, and never will, the mind says, and we unconsciously believe it. Your neighbor would joke about it to you. Of course many would leave, but most people would stay till the actual physical heat of the sun drove them off. We are constituted that way.

	But now the radio barrier was down, and news from the Martian scouts made men hesitate. The remaining cargo ships had settled on Mars and were even now pouring out their strange crews. But they were not building cargo ships. Every one of the worker machines were kept in action constructing duplicates of themselves as rapidly as possible. Already a great number of them had been made—over seven hundred of the machines it was estimated—and now these were engaged in similar work. The number grew in a steady geometrical series.

	But the scouts were driven away by the torpedo ships. Then there was no news of the operations until nightfall permitted the scouts to creep up and install the usual floating vision machines.

	Then at last we understood the reason for this tremendous number of inoffensive worker machines. There was a great seething mass of metal around the workings now. Great blazing lights illuminated the scene as brightly as day. There was a great horde of shining metal machines working swiftly about the great plain. There seemed to be thousands of them now, and they were all busily at work on great machines—the torpedo-ship machines! There must have been nearly a thousand already completed and already the fleet that had escaped had been built up to many thousands by the rapidly working machines, and a steady stream of long glistening shapes rose—only to be lost in the darkness beyond. Steadily the great machines were being put together, and steadily the great fleet was being augmented.

	Before morning that fleet had reached two hundred thousand, and was now growing at the rate of twenty-five thousand an hour. Steadily this rate was increasing. The fleet was too large to be attacked by man's weakened fleet, for the delay in putting Venus back in its orbit had given the Sirians a chance to build up an invulnerable fleet. The added time of the trip to Mars meant a still greater fleet. Already their production rate was far greater than Man's. Man could not hope to compete successfully. We were learning the meaning of quantity production.

	Had it been possible to attack them with the long range Dis rays it would have been tried, but the plan was hopeless. Before the fleet could reach them there would be 100,000,000 miles to go to reach them, and it would take approximately twenty hours, in which time, at the present rate of increase, the Sirian fleet would have reached a total of three million again. They would all concentrate their attack on the long range Dis ray ships. No Solarian ships could help without interfering with the action of the Dis ray ships, and they would need help, for each ship carried only two beams. More could not be carried. They would merely be held at bay, unable to attack their goal, useful only in breaking up the spinning sphere formation, but that could be prevented. The Solarians had learned that trick from the Sirians. The Sirians had succeeded in breaking up every spinning column formation by simply getting into the midst of it before it was formed completely. It required perfect coordination of several machines to do it, but it was always done. The long range Dis rays were excellent now in defending a city, but useless for attack because of the terrific weight of the apparatus. They could not attack the Sirian fleet. If they did the production machines would have been so built up by the time they reached the planet that any ordinary rate of destruction would be easily equaled by the production! Within three days it was decided that the Sirian fleet would be built up enough to attack. They would then attack our planets, no doubt.

-

	A CABINET meeting was called at the Waterson laboratories on Earth. There Waterson first demonstrated the weapon that finally conquered in the terrific struggle. Before the members, on the Cabinet table, was a small portable material energy disintegrator, a machine that gave off its energy as light. There was a second machine at the other end of the table, a machine that occupied about two cubic feet of space, and on one side of it was a small switch and a dial; on the other was a familiar looking projector. Dr. Waterson spoke:

	"Gentlemen of the Cabinet: I have here a new machine that my laboratory has developed. I will demonstrate its action first." The light was switched on, throwing a brilliant shaft of light against the ceiling. Then Waterson snapped on the switch of the new machine, and there appeared a strange beam of blueish, ionized air. But unlike any other known ionizing beam, it was shot through with streamers of red fire, long, hair-thin streamers that wavered and flickered in the blue tube of the ionized air. It reached out, touched the light generator, and passed on, through a series of plates of different materials. But the instant that strange beam struck the light-machine, it went out. Then a moment later, when the new machine was turned off, the light snapped back on.

	"Gentlemen, this machine will produce a field, directional in this case, that will so modify the properties of space as to make it utterly impossible to disintegrate matter into energy. There is some tendency to fix energy as matter. I think that will be interesting to us in the event that this war is successfully concluded. But at present we are interested in the properties of the beam in that it will stop the disintegration of matter. The process depends on the modification of the properties of space. It is well known that in ordinary space, such as we know, there are twenty coefficients of curvature. In ordinary empty space, ten of these have zero values, and the ten principal coefficients have certain non-zero values. This machine so affects space that it makes all the coefficients of space have non-zero values, and fixes these values to suit its own purposes. The results are amazing. I have done some things with this machine that makes me truly, afraid. But we are interested in it because certain of the values we can assign operate to force space to take such curvatures, that any change of the condition of matter to condition of energy is impossible. On release of the ray, the space returns to its normal curvature.

	"Working out the theory of this machine has been a tremendous task. Even the great calculating machine, the new integraph developed last year, and it is a far cry from that first one that M. I. T. developed in 1927, required many weeks of work to solve the problem in twenty coefficients of space. In so doing at one stage we had to assume a space of twenty dimensions in order that the correct values in the four true dimensions might be determined.

	"But there is still a great deal of work to be done. We must develop practical machines of a range of many miles. There is no difficulty in using the ray, since, as it is a condition of space, not a vibration, it is impossible to stop it by any shield. There is only one way to work with it, to create it directionally. We make the field by projecting certain strains along a beam, then once started the field follows that line to a distance dependent on the strength of the generator.

	"But this will require at least five days to get into working form. I suggest that in the meantime Venus makes several million of the long range Dis ray projectors, and distribute them all over the planet, to be turned on from a central station, or by their own separate crews. I have no doubt that the Sirians will attack that planet before we are ready to attack them. Earth, too, must be prepared. But in the meantime we can begin the work on the new de-activating field projectors, as I call them."

	Waterson was right. It was three days later that the Sirian fleet left for Venus with a number of torpedo ships so tremendous, it is absolutely inconceivable. There were over two hundred million of the ten-man machines! When they started to settle about Venus, the sky was so filled with them that it was literally dark for many miles. They attacked at Horacoles the System Capital, but the fields of the great Dis rays were too much for them. Neither bombs nor Dis rays could reach through. The air was dense, and filled with artificial smoke to prevent the transmission of heat rays and great winds were created for the purpose of carrying the heat away; but this was done automatically by the expanding air before long. They could not attack the city. All over the face of the planet were the great Dis ray emplacements. Great ships hung even over the great rolling oceans, sending the blue rays of ionized air up like some column that was to hold the Sirians from the Planet. And they did.

	But now again they began to slow down the planet—not gently as they had had to before—-but rapidly. The planet would have been pulled to pieces, except that the very attractor beams that were pulling on it tended to relieve the stress. But the cargo ships of Venus were pulling to keep the planet in motion. It was a strange thing to contemplate! Two mighty forces, one a fleet of two hundred million small ships, the other a force of as many thousand huge freight carriers, having a tug-o-war for a planet! But the odds were too great. Slowly the Sirians won. The planet was steadily dropping toward the sun. Now it seemed no fleet could come to aid them, and the Sirian fleet was being augmented constantly by a steady stream of ships from Mars. It was the sixth day after the announcement was made that Waterson had a fleet ready to attack the Sirians. The Venerians also had a fleet ready, prepared by the directions of Waterson's engineers sent by radio-television and radiophone. They were ready to attack, and the Terrestrian fleet arrived at Venus just six days after the announcement of the new weapon.

	The practical projector of this new ray had been quite heavy, and they had been mounted in groups of twenty projectors on special hundred-man ships, using the same acceleration neutralizer used on the ten-man ships. They were arranged to throw a wide beam, so wide that the new ships with twenty, could prevent any action in a field of over two hundred miles depth, and in a cone with a base of six hundred miles diameter. The ships they had could approach within a hundred miles of the Sirian fleet, without being seen, for they were painted black therefore and showed no lights. In the darkness of the void they were easily hidden.

-

	THE entire expedition went as planned. The radio barrage had not been turned on, and they were in constant communication with the Venerians. The two fleets were to attack simultaneously, over different areas, so that between them they could wipe out so large a number of the enemy ships that the fleet of two million could easily handle the task.

	Hidden in the utter dark of the void they crept up on the Sirians. They were in the sunlight, but the black coating kept them invisible, while the Sirian ships shone brilliantly. Then at last the tip of the great cone formation was within easy striking distance of the fleet. There reached out the strange ray, and here in space it was utterly invisible. But suddenly the ships within its range began to waver, to fall together under mutual gravitation. With one swoop they all shot toward the ships in space that had paralyzed them, for the attractor beams had been turned on them. As the great mass of ships fell rapidly toward them, long range Dis rays reached out, and they melted into clouds of shimmering dust. Great swaths were cut through their ranks. A similar scene was taking place far to the left of the Terrestrian fleet where the Venerian fleet was working havoc among the invaders. Now the last of the ships had been rayed into nothingness and a great fleet of the Sirians were rushing forward to attack for the ships invisible on account of their black line had been electrostatically located now. But as the Sirians came within one hundred miles of the other fleets, the ships all ceased to accelerate, to change direction; they just drifted straight into that cone of Dis rays. All walls of the de-activating field were lined with the ten-man ships, their shorter range Dis rays prevented any Sirians from escaping. Bright lights shone out on the Solarian fleet now—they wanted the Sirians to attack. The original cone formation had shifted rapidly; now it was a double cone; then it changed to a quadruple cone. There were six hundred of the de-activator ships and these were arranged so that they shot their rays off in four directions, making four cones of de-activated space, with the fleet of deactivator ships at the apex. Thus they were protected on all sides, and quickly, as the Sirian fleet spread out, more ships rose and there were six cones branching out. In the center rested the main mass of the fleet, the long range Dis ships, their attractors pointing out into the cones to draw the disabled ships of the Sirians into the range of their Dis rays, emanating in thousands from the ships lining the sides of the de-activated cones of space. The fleet was invulnerable and so sudden and complete was the failure of their power in these de-activated regions, that they did not seem to have time to warn their fellows. Many millions of the ships were lost before the wild charge could be checked; then the six-cone formation entire began to move slowly around; the Sirians, waiting to see what was to happen, were caught before they were aware that they were in danger. Many, too, were caught by the powerful attractor beams of the heavy ships within—drawn in by the greater power of the heavy ship, till their power failed. But at last the Sirians had learned the effective range of this new power and tried hard to avoid it. The six-cone formation was immediately broken up, and the six hundred de-activators went out individually, each followed by a swarm of the ten-man ships to disintegrate the ships caught in the de-activating cones. The Terrestrian ships were marked by a blazing blue light, so that if they too were caught in the de-activating field, they were not disintegrated. Only those around them were, and they were then released, as the ray did not seem to have any injurious effects on man, except to give him strange dreams. In some way the brain was stimulated by the ray, as long as the ray was used.

	The de-activator ships were completely self-protecting; they could stop any number of attackers from any direction, provided the paralyzed ships were disintegrated as soon as caught, for if too many were piled up, the tendency of the matter to disintegrate in the engines, plus the natural tendency of the space to resume the normal curvature, caused the ray to become ineffective as it was overpowered, and one ship was lost in this way. Too many ships piled up, and only part of them could be rayed out by the ship itself, and there were not a sufficient number of helping ten-man ships. But the mighty fleet of the Sirians was-already beaten. They still outnumbered us ten to one, but they could not fight this new force. They began a running fight to Mars, and now the Solarians were united. Rapidly they wiped out the edges of the fleet, and gradually worked in toward the center. But the Sirians could not fight back—they could use only the explosive shells, and few of them reached their goal. They were disintegrated, or missed. Not more than three thousand men were lost in that entire engagement.

	But now the Solarians tried a plan to capture the Sphere. A large number of the ten-man ships dropped out of the main fleet, but not enough to make it noticeable to the hard-pressed Sirians. These were joined by one hundred of the de-activator ships. Then these, all capable of higher speeds than the main fleet, set out at the highest speed that could safely be maintained, and darted toward Mars. Undetected they rushed past the Sirian fleet and passed on toward Mars. They reached the planet fully three hours ahead of the main fleet. By the time the main fleet had arrived, it came unattended, for the last of the mighty fleet of two hundred million torpedo-ships had been turned to impalpable dust, floating in space.

	The advance guard arrived without warning, and as they had expected, found the Sphere resting on the ground, protected by a great fleet of the torpedo-ships. There were nearly a million ships there, with the great machines rapidly making more. However, all were grouped in an area that could be covered by the cone of the de-activating beam. And out in space, the ship commanders decided on a plan. Fifty of the de-activator fleet took positions high above the Sirians, and the rest went with the entire fleet of the ten-man ships. These were to approach the camp from the ground. Lying close to the ground, they would be hard to see in the disappearing light. At a fixed moment, all the ships above were to turn on their de-activator rays, which would be plainly visible in the Martian atmosphere, while the ground fleet of fifty de-activators were to use their rays from the side. The ten-man ships were to form a circle around the camp at a safe distance from the de-activator rays, for they would crash when their power failed, if they were caught by the de-activator rays. But they wanted to capture the sphere in good condition, so they arranged to have the space directly above it unaffected by the de-activator field, lest some torpedo fall on it and destroy it. This would leave an exit for the torpedo ships, except that at a point a mile or so above the Sphere, a cross-ray made escape impossible.

	The rays were turned on. Instantly the fleet of nearly a million torpedo-ships fell wildly out of control, down through the blue glowing air, in which great streamers of glowing red seemed to waver and twist. Just outside the curtain of destruction waited the entire Solarian fleet. Slowly they closed in till their Dis rays swept all the ships within sixty miles of the edge out of existence; then rapidly the de-activator beams were forced ever sharper and sharper, till at last only die Sphere and a few hundred of the torpedo-ships, several hundred of the torpedo-ship constructors, and the corresponding cargo ships and worker machines were left. These had been saved for investigation by the scientists, for they were helpless.

	But the war was over now. The Sirians had been destroyed, or reduced to mere museum pieces. Now the Scientists came to investigate the Sphere. There was much we wanted to learn from the creatures of the Sphere. But it was a strange story that the Sirian sphere had to tell.

-

	AEONS ago there lived on a great planet of Sirius a race of intelligent men, shaped as we are, but smaller due to the greater gravity of their planet. And these men had developed a high civilization, a civilization different from ours, in that they learned early about mechanics, but chemistry and physics merely developed from the needs of the great mechanical engineers. Electricity was used as a powerful aid in their machines, and in their processes; it was a by-product, not an end.

	Gradually their machines eliminated more and more of their work; they became more and more complicated, but more and more trustworthy. Men began to experiment with physics and found that their calculating machines needed development. It was easy to add first one step, then the next. More and more the machines could do. The mathematics became more and more complicated, and the machines developed the equations, found they could not handle them and passed them out as unfinished results. Finally one man used the machines to calculate the design of a machine that would be able to do these new equations. He built it, but the calculations were wrong. The machine had correctly solved his problem, but he had stated it wrong. It resulted in a machine that would solve only simple problems, but it did something no other machine had ever done. Given irrelevant data it would choose the correct facts and solve the problem. It was a step, a short step toward a machine that really thought.

	Progress thereafter was rapid. The machines built machines, had been doing it for decades in fact, but now they did one thing more—they designed them. Now the problem could describe the type of machine needed, and the worker machine would design it, and turn out the completed machine! But these machines were rapidly perfecting the beginning that man had made. Within a decade after that first discovery of the principles of mechanical thought the machine was made that could not only solve problems, but could also originate them. They had developed a brain. It was a great machine, which occupied an entire building, with its massive framework bolted down to the ground.

	Man began a rapid decline, for the machines did all his work. With the construction of a machine that could originate a problem, man made a mistake. He had created a machine that was more powerful than he, except that it was immobile. And this machine originated a new machine, a machine that would release the energy of matter! It had developed this because it had been able to see that such energy existed. Man's machines could have solved it long ago, but the problem had never been stated. Now came a machine that could state its own problems—and solve them.

	And with this new energy it designed a new brain machine. A brain machine such as no man's brain could conceive—a machine that could move! For it was powered by the energy of matter, and could move as no other machine had ever moved before—out into space!

	Still the machines worked for the Sirian man, and he learned of the new discovery, and began to design a new brain machine.

	Some of the Sirians realized the danger that was facing them, and they had continued long researches on man's brain, and at last had discovered the secret of giving a machine that emotion we call devotion, loyalty, or gratitude. And they built a great machine on that principle and used material energy to power it. It was a success. It could think original thoughts. It pointed out the danger of the existing machines—they were stronger than man. It was only man's mobility and ability to control all mobile machines that had made him superior, for a brain without a tool, or body is helpless. And now that was lost. The existing brain-machines should be destroyed, and new ones built, using the principles that it was designed on.

	But the mischief was done. The new brain-machine, designed by a machine, had done it. A machine had been built that was controlled by thoughts, a machine that could be controlled by the machines. Each of these machines was given a small brain, equipped with televisor sight and hearing, and it was powered by material energy. They could run for years without outside care, for the thinking machinery they had was sufficient to keep them oiled, and to make them seek repairs when they were damaged. They were susceptible to thought forces, and did as the thought waves suggested and reported to «the control brain exactly what was going on about it.

	And now this new brain developed a space-flyer to carry these machines, and man could not help knowing, for its every thought was recorded, for man's use. Then one day this record was found destroyed. The next day the brain machine had left the planet, and taken with it the new space-flyer and the new telepathically controlled machines.

	To the outermost planet of the System of Sirius the great machine fled. For years it remained there waiting, thinking. Then at last it called its worker machines into action. A new machine grew up from the stores of metal that the space ship had brought with' it, at last the metal was used up, and the machine was not completed, so the space-flyer was sacrificed for the completion of the machine. The new machine was started. From its lip-like spout there poured a steady smooth stream of molten metal, and the rock on which it rested was eaten away.   The first transmuting metal producer was made.

	Decades passed, and only a small percentage of man developed. The rest sank deeper and deeper into a life of ease. The planets were all explored by the hardy ones, and no trace of the brain-machine was ever found, for it had discovered the Dis fay, and sunk deep into the ground, hollowing a great cave to live and work in.

-

	BUT back on that planet, the scientists had developed machines that surpassed it in power, and finally one of these picked up a thought message from that distant machine that told its story. It was a thought that had not been consciously radiated, only the marvelous sensitivity of this new machine could have detected it, but now the men knew. It was too late to do much to prevent it, for they had no weapons. But the machine did. It was preparing to drive man from the planets, to rule there in his stead, with a population of machines!

	The scientists quickly built a great space-flyer, a gigantic machine of over ten miles diameter, a huge sphere. And in that they established laboratories, workshops, machines, and living quarters. They took with them the finest men and women of their race, and sailed out into space, taking an orbit about the sun of Sirius. They were comfortable there in an equitable temperature, their ship lighted by the sun on one side, and dark on the other, steadily revolving on its axis like a miniature world. The foods of the people were chemically prepared, for the brain-machines had taught them how. The air was repurified constantly by machines that regulated the percentage of the gases to the thousandth of one per cent. But the entire ship was painted black. It could not be discovered floating there in space, so tiny in the vastness of a system!

	It was two weeks after they sailed that the machine-brain attacked. It sailed out of its hiding place with thousands of great ships, armed with Dis rays and with explosives, with heat rays and attractor beams. The population of those worlds was wiped out in a week, and the rule of the Metal Horde began.

	The original brain built other brain machines to direct its affairs on other planets, and to do the work it did not wish to do itself.

	For nearly a century those men lived in space, making swift forays on a planet with a fleet of cargo ships, that revolved about the main ship like satellites when they were not being used. In these trips they would bring back tons of rock, and leave most of it stored in the ships, dumping them into the reservoir of the parent ship when it was needed.

	Then a swift ship was developed. A ship that could start and stop more quickly than any made before—a ship with acceleration neutralizers. But the machine brains of the Metal Horde never learned the secret. With a small fleet of these, the men drove an attack at the unprotected main brain machine. There were no men known to live in the system. No other known machine could move without the knowledge of that main machine, but these could. They too had the Dis ray now, and they destroyed the main brain machine. They were lost in the ensuing fight, but that machine was destroyed.

	All the remaining machines were equally powerful. Any one of them could have built a brain machine that could easily conquer the others—but it too would have to bow to its creator. They fought it out. The men had known this would be the result.

	It was a war such as the system had never before seen. Each force was equal, and could not ally itself with any other, for the machines could not lie or state other than their thoughts, and each wanted supreme power. They developed new weapons, weapons whose strength lay in their number. One by one the machine brains had gone down to defeat, the men of that ship helping to disturb the balance of forces by ever so little, yet always enough to throw one side down to defeat, yet always remaining in hiding. At last there remained but one machine-brain, and its weakened force necessitated its return to the devastated planet. With the destruction of the other brain machines, the remaining machines that they had previously controlled, automatically obeyed the new master as perfectly as they did the old.

	They returned to find a new fleet awaiting them. But it was not a vast fleet such as they had encountered before. At once the torpedo-ship machines settled to the ground and began turning out their weapons. But it was all over before they could enter as an important factor. These ships had a new weapon. It was a ball of glowing blue light that was driven along a beam of some vibration, and as it touched any ship, the ship instantly volatized so suddenly as to constitute an explosion. The balls of light lasted about a minute and a half each, but were replaced as quickly as they were used. When they were finally used, they would die down to a dull red glow, then suddenly wink out. They could be swept from one ship to another, taking toll of ten or twelve ships each, and the beam that guided them could drive them with the speed of light and supply an infinite acceleration. They were glowing balls of concentrated energy of some sort, and as such could travel with the speed of light.

	But they were effective to the nth degree. The entire fleet of that one remaining brain machine would have been lost, but it retired into space, racing away at top speed, out into space, with the remaining remnant of its great fleet.

	And sixteen hundred years it had raced across space, to be destroyed at last by another race of men. The battle was over, and the machine awaited its destruction.

	We rayed it out of existence. It was too great a menace to keep.

	Some people still do not believe that those Sirians were truly machines. They can not believe that a machine can have intelligence, but certainly Waterson's calculating machine has intelligence of a sort. And they ask, what would a machine want to exist for? It would have no aim, nothing to perform. Why should it want to live, or exist?

	We might ask what it is human beings want to live for. If there is an after-life, it is certainly not that that we live for. I am sure no man wants to die. Yet what aim have we? What function must we perform? Why should we wish to live? Our life is a constant struggle, the machines, at least, had eliminated that. There seems to me no reason why a machine should want to live, but certainly it has less reason to pass out of existence than we have!

	That war was destructive—terribly so. But it has brought its compensations. More than fifteen million human beings lost their lives in that great struggle, either in the battles in space, or caught in the Dis rays during that battle on Venus.

	But those fifteen millions have died a painless death, and twenty billions live because of their sacrifice. And it was not a vain sacrifice. We have learned much in return. No machines man ever made equaled the machines we captured there on Mars. And man will never experiment on the lines of the machine-brain. He has been warned. The brain-machine we captured was destroyed without investigation. The machines we use, the wonderful worker machines, have been modified to permit of radio control.

	And Stephen Waterson's discovery of the de-activating field not only helps in law enforcement, but makes war with material energy impossible. No, in all, we have lost little.

	Mars lost its cities, its forests, its ancient civilization. New cities are being built on the modern plan, larger, finer, more beautiful; the forests are being replaced; but the records, the relics of a civilization have been lost forever. In that we have lost much. Though all moveable things were moved when the warning came, there was much that could not be moved. The great palace of Horlak San was destroyed, but it is being rebuilt in the exact spot, in exactly the same manner. It is a worth-while project, but there is much which cannot be restored.

	It will be eleven more years before we will know whether we can ever communicate with the Sirian men. The speed of light is too low for rapid communication, and as the first signals were sent out in September, 1961, and it is now September, 1968, the signals are not due to reach Sirius for two years more. Then it will be 1979 before we can hope to receive their reply. I often wonder if they will ever get those signals. I can remember distinctly the recoil of the great projector as the mighty surges of light flashed out across the universe. It seemed like some great gun—the back pressure of the light was so great. And what will those replies tell us? It is interesting to speculate on that subject.

The End

The Voice of the Void
Amazing Stories – August 1966

Now that Doc Smith is gone, the mantle of super-science fiction falls on the capable shoulders of John W. Campbell, who—both as writer and editor—is primarily responsible for most of what is modern about the science fiction of our time. Back in the thirties, of course, he was the exciting new author of super-science epics like "Invaders from the Infinite" and—shortly after that—the wonderfully "modern" Don A. Stuart stories. Since then, however, not too much fiction has come from the Campbell typewriter—primarily because he's much too busy turning out some of the most provocative editorials in the field—but after you read "The Voice from the Void," we think you'll join us in hoping that the hiatus is only temporary.

-

	Perhaps you or I would have hesitated to call him human, this strange small man. He seemed lost in the great dim-lighted observatory. On all sides of the room panels of some polished black material glistened in the ruddy light, and on all their great surfaces were instruments and faintly glowing screens. High above the smooth floor a great transparent roof was hung in a half-glimpsed arch, glasslike it was, but the lack of beams told of a strength and toughness no glass ever knew. Through it came every vibration that struck it, infra-light or ultra-light. Now in its center there glowed a great mass of lambent red flame, the dying sun. To Hal Jus, astronomer, the room was flooded with light of the noon-day sun. The dull red glow that gave even his pale face a ruddy glow was to him pure white. But then Hal Jus could see heat, and to him blue light was a scientific term for a thing beyond human vision.

	Ten billion years had wrought strange changes in the human race. For ten thousand thousand millenniums they had lived on the planets of the solar system, but now the mighty sun was dying. There had been no decadence in this race, through all their history had come a constant fight with a persistent enemy, Nature. But it was a kindly enemy, for the contest had constantly developed man to meet the new emergencies.

	Ten thousand years ago the sun had grown too cool to supply heat enough for man; it was no longer possible to live on the frozen planets, and the two greatest of them had been hurled across the system to feed the dying fires. Jupiter and Saturn had been sacrificed. Neptune and Uranus had long since escaped from the weakened clutches of the vanishing sun, and now of the family of original wheeling planets, only four were left: Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. And now again the fires of the system were dying too low. One and a half million tons of matter must be destroyed every second in that titanic furnace to supply a comfortable amount of heat. In our day three million tons of matter vanish every second, to be poured out as a mighty flood of heat and light that sweeps across the depths of space to us. The inner planets had been drawn far closer to the parent body, but even these heroic measures were failing.

	Hal Jus worked at the controls of the electroscope for a moment and on one of the lambently glowing screens an image began to form, grayish at first, then quickly taking form and color. A great sphere swam on the screen; slowly as Hal Jus increased the power the body seemed to come nearer—it grew larger, it filled the screen, then rapidly there came a picture of low, age-old hills, worn low till they scarcely lifted their heads above the surrounding country. A mighty city of glistening metal buildings rising tier on tier a few miles north seemed to dwarf the hills into utter insignificance. Once a hill had lifted its proud head far into the blue of a two-hundred mile thick belt of atmosphere, but now the once mighty Mt. Everest alone remained as a relic of the high-flung mountains that old Earth had once known.

	High in the jet black sky, a scant hundred miles from the ground below, a mighty space-freighter was taking off for Venus. The thin belt of atmosphere permitted it to reach a high speed quickly. Already it was in full stride and heading at 1,000 miles a second for Venus.

	The scene on the screen blurred, grew gray, and faded out. Hal Jus was shifting the great electroscope tube. Again the screen glowed, and again an image appeared. It cleared quickly, then suddenly leaped into full life and color. The scene showed mighty machines working in a great pit of freshly tumbled soil. It was a land of intense shadow and where the dim red light of the distant sun did not touch, there was intense, utter blackness. There was no atmosphere here. And now, as a great freighter swung low, a machine on the ground below turned on a ray that stabbed out sharp and brilliant; a moment later the freighter tug lifted a half-million-ton piece of the planet on its attractor beams and rapidly gained headway as it shot off toward distant Venus.

	The view became wider, the figure of the machines smaller. Then, as Hal Jus increased the observation distance, the entire planet came into view, as much of the planet Mars as was left. The great excavations were extending over all the surface. They were paring it down from all sides lest they disturb the balance of the planet.

	Again the scene went blank. Now there formed on it a view of the starry heavens with glowing pinpoint stars. Suddenly this began to expand; star after star was forced from the field as the growing picture centered on one that burned bright in the center of the field. Mighty Betelguese glowed in the center of the field. It was a blurred image, like a tiny disc, but tremendous as was the power of the instrument, it could not have enlarged the image to that extent. The disc-like appearance was due to the tremendous brightness of the star spreading a bit on the sensitive vision receiver cell.

	Slowly the new mighty instrument swept over the field. Here and there a star would leap out of the darkness to form a burning disc, as one of the stars distant less than a dozen light years, swept across the field. Then at last came a star that blazed out as a burning disc an inch and a half across, emitting long tongues of shooting flame. Slowly it crept across the field. The instrument was adjusted for the motion of the Earth and this slow creeping was due to the motion of the star through space. Around it, far off across the field, circled a lone, small planet. Hal Jus watched it a while, then turned with a call of greeting, snapping off the current in the mighty instrument as several men walked in. They were seated now in several rows of chairs before the largest of the screens that were suspended on the walls of the room.

	For ages men had known that the sun was dying. In our day men can tell that within the next ten or eleven billion years it will become a closed star—not a cold star but a closed star. The energy of the sun comes from the destruction of the matter of which it is composed, which becomes floods of energy. This change is possible at a temperature of 40,000,000 degrees C, but below that it cannot take place. Thus, at the center of the sun, where this change is taking place, the matter is at that terrific temperature. As the sun grows older, more and more of the matter sinks into the center and reaches the region of awful heat. The atoms are so violently colliding with each other at that temperature, that the atoms themselves are knocked to pieces by the violence of their collision. If the molecules of a substance collide sufficiently violently, they are broken up. Thus, at 5000 degrees, the molecules of water collide so violently that they cannot maintain themselves, and the shock breaks them down into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. But at 40,000,000 degrees the atoms collide so violently they are decomposed into protons and electrons. At this temperature, a further, subtle change takes place, and the electrons and the protons suddenly are gone, and in their place is an equal mass of energy. For energy in any form has mass, and mass in any form is a measure of the energy content. Thus to say "one gram" is an easier way of saying "nine hundred million million million ergs," but the two mean the same to Nature. Now an atom is something like a porcupine with his quills up; it is much bigger in looks than in fact, only an atom has much longer "quills.'' An atom has much more empty space than anything else. Suppose our porcupines have quills a mile long. If all those quills are on end we won't be able to pack the animals very closely, but if we can induce them to become more friendly and lay the quills down, then the density of our imaginary population of porcupines will be greatly increased. Similarly the atoms, with the electrons revolving in wide orbits, occupy a much greater space than they really need. In the tremendous heat of the Sun, the atoms are so battered, the electrons are knocked off the nuclear protons, and we can imagine the quills now lying down. The density will be far greater. This is demonstrated by the density of some stars which are now known to have a density of over 1000. This is the result of packing the electrons and protons in the center, which is gradually going on in all stars.

	Gravity increases four times if the distance is halved. As the matter inside becomes denser and denser, the star contracts, till finally its density reaches a tremendous figure.

	The Sun in Hal Jus's day was becoming a closed star. Long since the X-rays had ceased. Gradually the ultra-light and the blue light had diminished; the red and infra reds had been accentuated; for the light was changed by the passage through that intense gravitational field. Hal Jus had, less than two thousand years ago, predicted the exact time of the Sun's final decay. After ten more years, the Sun would be unable to support its family. The planets they now inhabited—Earth, Venus and Mercury—were supported artificially. The atmospheres of all the planets had long since slowly dissipated into space, and with them had gone the water. These vital things were being replaced constantly by transmutation of the elements of the rocks of the planets. Long ages ago Earth had had a large satellite, which had been used through the ages to supply energy for the factories of man, and to supply the necessary atmosphere. The satellites of Mars had gone as had Saturn with its rings, Jupiter with its satellites, along with the asteroids; but before it escaped, much of Neptune had been freighted to the habitable planets. And now, since Mars had grown too cold, it too, was being sacrificed. Already it was honeycombed with great caverns that had been used as sources of materials and energy. Now it was being split up into small parts, and freighted to the other planets. Already the work was well under way. Mars was furthest from the sun, and smaller than Venus or Earth.

	But when men were assured that there was no hope of life in the solar system for more than half a lifetime, they began an even more frantic search for still another way to overcome this last crushing blow of Nature.

-

	But at last a thing was announced that switched the endeavor of the scientists to a new line. The impossible was done. Einstein had said that it was impossible to signal faster than light. But it had been done. A scientist had signaled the seventy-five million miles from Earth to Venus in so short a time that the carefully prepared cathode ray oscillograph could not detect it. The signal was sent by radio and by the new method exactly simultaneously, and when they reached the station on Venus, the difference in time was just long enough for the radio to make the trip. It was a modification of something that we know in our day, a modification possible only to these descendants of ten billion years of science. Phase velocity we know. When X-Rays pass through certain materials, the index of refraction is less than one, and this can only be true if the velocity in those materials is greater than the velocity of light. The true velocity of the rays is not, but there is a second velocity, the phase velocity, that under those circumstances is greater than the real velocity of light.

	Phase velocity is due to a wave traveling along the wave chain. A man can go faster than the train he is riding on by walking toward the engine, but practically speaking he cannot reach the station before the train. Similarly, the phase velocity cannot reach the station before the light or X-Rays do. But for countless ages the light has poured forth from the sun, and a message sent down that long train would be able to go many, many trillions of miles at a speed far greater than that of light. That was the new hope of life. For man must escape from the dying sun or perish with it. And now the experiments were pushed forward with new hope.

	Then a brilliant young physicist, scarcely through the seventy-year course in one of the great technical institutes, devised a new machine that brought the idea considerably closer to complete success. Television had been invented many years ago and constantly improved. Long since had they gotten away from the scanning apparatus, and the principle was well nigh forgotten, but in some dusty, neglected volume Morus Tol discovered the diagrams. And with a simple arrangement of known machines he made a wonderful mechanism that had been worked on for many, many ages. He made a scanning machine that worked in the fourth dimension, thereby being enabled to scan all the other three simultaneously. His first experiments led to amazing images, which, thrown on a fourth dimensional screen, could be seen to pick up solid bodies. The work of lifting them was done by the motor driving the fourth dimensional projector. The drag of the body's weight tended to throw the image out of adjustment, but by making a very powerful motor, they could show the image of a man lifting thousands of pounds! The images were absolutely solid. The man did no work.

	And then came new developments. The experiments were safer now. Wherever danger was incurred, the scientist merely made his image do the actual experiment! But Morus Tol still led the field. It was he who finally developed the apparatus that could project the images and have them come into three dimensions, being without the aid of a projector at the receiving end. Already the machines had been used in connection with the phase-velocity signaling system.

-

	It was while he was working on the development of his apparatus that the fatal accident occurred and killed him. Luckily he had kept a careful record of all his experiments, and men were able to duplicate them with the aid of remnants of his apparatus. He had been working on the actual making of the images; he wanted to be able to keep them real without the machine; in other words, he wanted to give them actual existence; he wanted to reconstruct, atom for atom, the object under his fourth dimensional scanner.

	He had been trying to find some ray that would respond to the individual characteristics of the atoms under consideration. He had found it, but finding it he had met his death. The ray had attacked him somehow. It does not seem likely that he experimented on himself without trying it on some inanimate body first. But perhaps he did. At any rate, it did what he hoped, it scanned him and recognized each individual atom, and each separate molecule, and as far as it went, it was successful. But in scanning him the ray released all the energy in the atoms of his body. He was killed instantly and most of his apparatus was utterly ruined. However, enough was saved to make a beginning possible for the others. And on this basis they built.

	As the ray scanned and recognized an atom it drew out its energy, to leave it free. This had fused the apparatus, stopped the ray, and killed the scientist. Knowing the danger, others experimented. By draining the energy away safely they scanned a small object, and sent the signals to another station where, by feeding the necessary energy into the machine, they were able to reconstruct it. The first step had been taken.

	But it required many years to develop this apparatus. Now came the greatest problem of all. They must find some means to send the material image to a predestined terminal without having a station there to receive it. This could be done with a three dimensional shadow image. Could they do it with the solid bodies?

	The ten thousand years had dwindled steadily —five thousand had passed before the development of the fourth dimensional scanning. Morus Tol was still a young man when he was killed, but with four thousand two hundred years yet to go, they met their hardest problem, and they were without a genius to solve it.

	The long years had dwindled to less than two centuries before there came a man who solved the problem of a refinement of the vibration control. It is as impossible for me to describe the machines of that day as it would be for a blind man to describe red to another. It is a thing inconceivable to each. But it was done—only to find that the shock of the journey killed all living creatures. And then, ten short years before the sun at last faded forever, the last bridge was crossed. A man in a space ship was projected from a laboratory on Earth to a point near Venus. All the System watched that demonstration through the news machines.

	Long since they had decided where they would go. Now that they could travel with almost infinite speed, they chose a goal that would be safe to life for aeons to come. BETELGUESE! It was their goal now.

	And now out in space the great sending station was constructed. The ship to be sent was put in position before it; the scanner viewed it; and the signal for each atom and each molecule followed each other in swift flight on the train of light waves that was their wire. One billion miles from Betelguese the ship would be reintegrated from the energy sent along the beam of the phase-velocity sender.

	And now, in the observatory of Hal Jus, the greatest men of the system had gathered to watch those men far out in space. With them had been sent another machine to be operated by one man, a miniature phase-velocity sender that could, if necessary, send the ship back. This was to be stationed in space, going in an orbit about the mighty star.

	Now, above the soft whirr of the news-casters focussed on the great screen, there came an audible sigh of excitement, as there flickered on the great screen a dim gray image, blurred and indistinct. Well it might be. Sent on the phase-velocity projector across the universe, it was bringing them the scene within the re-created ship—suddenly the great screen was filled with a brightly lighted scene, and through the sound pick-up came a subdued hum of the mighty engines in the power room. Through the windows of the ship they could see a brilliant shaft of bluish light pouring over the floor. Out through the main pilot's window they saw the blazing field of stars—and there they saw one dim red one, barely discernible. Probably if they had been there they could not have seen it. Only the super-sensitiveness of the machine made it visible -their sun as it looked millenniums ago! For the light had been traveling slowly for thousands of years to reach the distance their machine had reached in less than an hour.

	The men had been anesthetized before the process began, and now they lay in deep sleep. The automatic controls were running the ship, taking complete charge of it.

	Strange these men would seem to us. They were under four feet in height, with great barrel chests, long arms and short legs. The dying planets had scant atmosphere, and economy advised a low pressure of the precious gases, lest too much diffusion take place; and Mercury, the smallest planet, put a distinct limit to the pressure. They journeyed from one planet to the other so frequently that an equal pressure on each was almost a requisite. The long arms ended in slender, delicate fingers that were the most perfect tools ever developed. And the toes, too, had become highly prehensile. The many machines that man had built had required all his directing powers. The feet had at first been used only to push pedals, but gradually there came other purposes. Those members could be so useful!

	The head was not much larger than ours, but the high, straight forehead seemed much larger on the small man. The brain was deeply creased, the convolutions so complex that, without increasing the size greatly, the surface had been multiplied many times. And it is the surface area that counts. Their large eyes seemed to hold a gentle benignity that would so transcend us as to leave us contented to watch only; still, there was in them a fire of ambition, of hope and of adventure. But we can no more hope to understand their personality than a child of a few days can understand us.

	But now the men in the car out in space were stirring; consciousness was returning. The Commander approached the view plate now.

	"Sir, I wish to report a successful trip. Betelguese is within one billion miles. One man has died, but the ship's doctor will have him around shortly, as his body temperature is still above 95. We will head for the nearest planet, connecting you now with the outside view plate."

	The screen went dark a moment later, the gray surface showed thousands of gleaming points, distant stars, and here and there were a few tiny discs. These, then, must be planets of this mighty sun. Rapidly one of them was growing, expanding. Soon it was an inch across; then it grew rapidly till the shining disc covered all the glowing screen. They had been approaching at 2000 miles a second, but they slowed down to the more moderate pace of 100 miles per second.

	Now they saw a strangely glowing light coming up from the planet below. It seemed to approach quickly-then the screen went blank, to be lighted a moment later by the scene within the ship. There was a rapid but efficient scene of action. The commander stepped up to the view plate. Just as he began to speak, the screen went gray, the image blurred, then cleared for a moment; there was an expression of sudden astonishment and surprise on the face of the young commander-then again the screen was dark.

	Three hours they waited, but there was no sign from the far-off ship. Silently the men filed out. But day and night that screen was watched. It was late in the evening of the second day that they were at last rewarded for their vigilance. The screen was suddenly shot over with a streak of brilliant red; it glowed green, then went dully gray. A few minutes later it was again illumined but now the gray field resolved itself into distorted images; men seemed working frantically over the instrument, then the queer chirping sounds of the voices suddenly underwent a change. The screen cleared; then sharp and distinct came the words across the void and the picture of that far-off scene. They were looking from the top of a great rugged cliff of sharp rock such as no living man had ever seen, and the scene beyond was even more strange to their eyes! Great wooded hills rolled off into the distance, and over the carpet of bright green was flung a marvelous canopy of blue, in which there was set a wondrous jewel that flamed blue in majestic splendor. As large as the sun from Mercury it was, but so bright one could not look at it. And in the far distance there rolled a mighty ocean of sparkling water. Such a scene no living eye had ever seen, save in the ancient records, where there were shown the great space flyers hanging over mighty stretches of such water. But in the center of the field was that which riveted the attention of all. There they could see the twisted wreck of the mighty flyer. The great beams were bent and torn apart, the instruments and machinery were wrecked, and to one side there was a great pit that the machinery had blasted in the soil before it was shut off.

	The projector now showed the members of the crew of the ship working busily at the makeshift apparatus. They were using hand disintegrators for power supplies. The apparatus was that which they could salvage from the wreck, and faulty. Frequently as they watched they would see the connections arc across, the scene would fade, then come back as quick work repaired the connection. The disintegrator power units were much overloaded and heated so badly that they had to run them in relays. They could not attach more; there was insufficient cable.

	"Sir, we were attacked by hundreds of strange beings. They seemed pools of force, living, sentient beings, but the electronic-activity indicators indicated a frequency that denotes atomic forces. I believe they are beings living on atomic energy. They have no material body. Heat rays do not affect them in the least. They shed disintegration rays as a repulsor screen does meteorites.

	They are unaffected by our most powerful explosives. They have tremendous power. One of them took our space ship and threw it violently away with so terrific an acceleration that the neutralizer was damaged overcoming it. We tried to flee from them, but they seem to be able to go with a speed approaching that of light, and easily overtook us. Finally they forced us near this, the sixth of the ten planets, and threw us down. The machine was wrecked, but the neutralizer, crippled as it was, saved us. The matter disintegrator was broken open, and the power ray tore up the ground a bit. The atomic creatures are hunting us, I believe -they are-there they come—they can blanket our power somehow—"

	The screen went gray-black. Never again did they hear from that expedition. But that voice across the void had served as a warning to those that followed.

-

	It was scarcely a month later that a second expedition of ten ships was projected, one after the other, across the infinite void. These ships were fully armed, but they had come to investigate, not to fight. The enemy seemed to have some strange weapon that they could control from a distance; it was a weapon not inconceivable to these people, merely one unknown. That the Things were in truth living beings was incredible; it was the terrible shock of the sudden attack that must have made the men engender any such strange belief. But the expedition now on its way would solve the problem, no doubt. Again came that silent meeting in Hal Jus's great domed laboratory. The greatest men of the System had assembled; they were being called in, in consultation, to examine the weapon of the enemy. Hanlos Tonn, the System's greatest Moleculist, as they called chemists, was there. Tal Nos, the genius of Physics, and Tornok Lor, the great Atomist, and the greatest specialists in every line were present at that conference.

	And now before them the great screens glowed mistily. Then slowly they cleared to show in gray outline the interior of the far-off ships. Each ship was represented by a great screen. And now, as the ship gained solidity, the screens cleared, the images became sharp and strong, color filled them out with greater detail. Then slowly the men stirred. They moved with returning consciousness, and took over the control of the ships from the automatic controls. One by one they reported back to headquarters. There were only forty-seven seconds delay in the time of transmission of signals now, so they maintained two-way communication.

	The outside projectors were switched on and the fleet fell into a small cone formation. With the flagship in the lead, they set out to investigate the planets from a distance. The electroscope on the flagship should permit them to make fairly close surface examinations from a safe distance.

	Ten planets they found circling the mighty star.

	Three of the planets would be directly habitable for man. But on none did they find the great cities they had expected to see. They only saw strange globes of lambent fire darting about. From planet to planet they went, the red glow lighting a great sphere twenty feet in diameter, but for a hundred feet about it the air glowed purple under the ionizing force of some strange radiance. When they moved, they were shooting comets, with brilliantly glowing heads of red and long tails of blue. But they seemed to live on all the planets. Even in the blazing minor star they lived, darting in and coming out of its flames as unconcernedly as a Solarian ship would dart in or out of an atmosphere. Could it be that those men had spoken the truth? It seemed incredible—impossible—but these men had learned millions of years ago that nothing is impossible, and were ready to credit anything if they had reason to believe it so.

	For two days those great ships wheeled above the planets, deep in space, undetected. Then one of the glowing Force beings passed close—a scant ten thousand miles away, and through the electroscope, and by means of the electronic activity meters, by spectroscope and pyrometer, by all the complex instruments of their age, they studied him. And the result was conclusive. They were living, sentient beings-Force creatures, conscious pools of titanic energies, forces so great they lived by, that no material body could serve them, and their limbs were the forces that nature had given them. Those forces, which man had spent thousands of years in discovering, a kind nature had given these beings. But in return she seemed to have decided that they needed no brains, for they possess no intelligence. Had man waited another billion years, there might have been intelligence developed in these strange creatures. What an intelligence it would have been—an intelligence based on forces of atomic nature!

	But they too had been discovered. In. some strange way the creature had sensed them, and sent a call to his friends, for across all the system they could see the strange creatures racing at a velocity that could not be much short of that of light, for while the men were material, and as such could not travel at that speed, the force beings, by their very natures akin to light, could very probably attain to that motion.

-

	The battle was on. At first the force beings hung in a sphere, a three-dimensional cordon, about the ships, then suddenly their lambent red glowed more strongly, and the screens in the far-off laboratory went dark. They had in some way prevented the transmission of further messages. The men at once formed the ships in a great tube, with the one scanner ship in the center, and then one by one they dropped out and were sent across the void—back to the Sun.

	Then one of the watching creatures darted forward, toward one of the great ships hanging there in space. As he came within range a disintegration ray flashed out, touched him, and was shed from him in great leaping sparks as the energy was met and opposed. A heat ray leaped forth—the creature paid no attention to that, did not even bother to oppose it—only circled closer. A stream of explosive bullets were launched at it, but they affected it no more than the heat ray. It seemed hopeless. And now the creature hung there, and suddenly he underwent a strange change. In the glowing center of his strange force-pool there suddenly appeared a strange nucleus of glowing violet light, a nucleus that spread throughout the twenty-foot sphere of lambent red force. But it was shot through by strange streamers of waving angry red. Then these strange streamers of fiery red seemed to condense to two main streamers that reached out and out—and touched the great ship. There was a blinding flash of red light -and in place of the great ship there floated a slow cloud of fine, fine dust that glowed softly in the light of the blazing sun. Then the strange streamers seemed to contract, to lessen, and with them the strange purple light from the creature. Slowly, gently he floated away. Of the fleet of ten great ships, and the accompanying matter sender, six ships returned. The rest floated out there in the interplanetary space around Betelguese.

	The men of the system had data to work on, but a great deal of work was yet to be done. They must find some way to destroy these pools of force. Only forces could affect them, and they must find one that was fatal to them. Only ten short years remained to them, so, although no weapon had been developed, a great battle fleet was started, that the ships might be ready when at last the weapon was developed.

	And on all the worlds great works were to be done. The records of a civilization ten thousand thousand thousand years old must be collected and prepared for their journey across the void. The exhibits from museums, ages old, must be packed with tender-est care. They had strange exhibits there of the first beginnings of civilization, tools and weapons of savage man, strange things that killed or injured by throwing small bits of metallic matter at the enemy. Strange clumsy vehicles they had, made of metals that corroded so rapidly as to fall to pieces in a brief 1,000 years or so, unless they were preserved in an atmosphere of argon and driven by great clumsy engines tapping the slight energy of molecules with an efficiency of hardly 10 per cent. Other machines that had been intended to drag man through the air, not supported by forces, but held up by air! Then came the first ancient anti-gravitors; then the swifter machines propelled by the energy of matter.

	Exhibits unutterably ancient they had, and these must be sent across all that void. Invaluable archives they were.

	But with them must go their own great machines, mighty mechanisms for producing their foods, for making their ships; the thousand and one things that went to make up the great structure of their age-old civilization. And huge sending stations of inconceivable power had to be erected to transmit them. Titanic projectors capable of sending a machine weighing a quarter of a million tons in one scanning. Other machines were so huge that they must be cut into sections and sent in pieces.

-

	A greater work—a quieter, invisible work—was being done by tireless workers in the laboratories. Fifty-three hours a day they worked in the great government laboratories on Earth. On Venus the shorter day made shorter hours desirable. But steadily the scientists were working on their problem. At last the Minus Energy was developed. They were to try it out before equipping the entire fleet with it. At last ten ships were equipped and sent with a scanner machine to Betelguese.

	Now they courted an encounter with the Force Giants. They were soon satisfied, for thousands of them came at terrific speed the moment they attacked one. That first one had floated into range as they threw a searchlight on it; then, as it began to color with the deadly violet and red destruction, a tiny projectile was launched at it. Not more than six inches long by two in diameter it raced at its target at nearly a thousand miles a second. It was carefully followed by the anxious watchers at the ship's electroscopes — it reached the floating Thing— hesitated briefly, and exploded.

	But perhaps you or I would not have termed that action explosive. That little projectile contained several pounds of half-destroyed matter. It had been used as a fuel in an industrial plant, till it had been about half annihilated, and now it was in that curious borderline condition, when it had a tremendous tendency to absorb energy and become matter again, and an equally tremendous tendency to release its energy and become free energy as light or heat. The conditions determined one or the other, and the new Minus Force shells were used under conditions of space that made them exert a tremendous tendency to become matter. Billions of billions of ergs of energy they could absorb, and would absorb. They drew it from all the surrounding ether so rapidly that it had the effect on all surrounding substance or sources of energy of being in contact with something at a temperature far below absolute zero. The result was obvious. When it was setoff, all light, heat, or any other energy within a region of ten miles or so, was instantly drawn to it, until it had been satisfied. It was an energy vacuum shell.

	That first Atomic Giant did not last long enough to warn the others. It was an entirely unexpected form of attack, and when the light of the mighty sun could once more be seen through the spot where the Minus Force had been sent, the Atomic Creature was not there, all its great forces had been drained from it. And, being only a pool of force, it vanished.

	But now there came from all directions great streams of the Atomic Giants. They seemed to suddenly appear close at hand, apparently coming from nowhere. They traveled as fast as light, therefore they reached them as soon as the light, so that their approach was invisible. Only when they slowed down could they be seen. And now from each ship came steady streams of these Minus Force shells. Thousands of the energy-absorbing projectiles flew in amongst the massed attackers -and many of them took effect, drawing the energy from the great creatures, destroying them utterly. The weapon was a success! They fired a second volley when others of the creatures came within sighting range—but they did not affect the Atomic Giants this time. Great dark patches appeared, but the creatures that had been there before, were there now, as powerful as ever, quite uninjured! What did it mean?

	They did not know. They only knew that the enraged creatures were closing in on them, closer and closer—and now the ships , were being sent back to the system as rapidly as possible—one-two — three — four — but more could not get through—the others were cornered, marooned in infinity by the destruction of the sender. The Force Creatures, utterly immune to the Minus Force shells attacked unchecked, gripped it with strange forces, limbs, hands or gripping force, that tore through the foot-thick alloy like so much tissue paper, metal, which was fifty times as strong as our frail steel, a metal whose molecules had been designed by the scientists of the race millions of years ago, and in all those ages no stronger, more inert metal had ever been found. But now that tough envelope was torn open, for the forces of atoms were greater than the forces of molecules, and the creatures used those forces.

	But those marooned ships were lost—destroyed soon by the vengeful giants. And the forces of man on the far-off planets of a far-off sun were worried anew. Their weapon was a failure after all. Some new thing must be developed. But how did it happen that the first attempts were successful? The scientists believed it was due to the fact that the first attempts were utter surprises to the creatures—they were taken before they could prevent the loss of their energy. In some way they were able to build a barrier about themselves that prevent the loss of energy, even as it prevented the penetration of the energy of the disintegration ray.

	But man must develop some new, some stronger weapon. The time was getting too short for more failures. For Hal Jus had announced a discovery that made men even more anxious to abandon their age-old home. The Sun was to become a nova. These flaming stars had been known and studied for ages. Dim, old stars they were that suddenly flared up for a brief period of intense activity, then quickly faded back even lower than before. It behooved man to move quickly. A mighty people that for ten billion years had slowly built up the mighty structure of their science had to move.

	Many weapons were tried, many expeditions of two or three ships made the trip, and attempted to destroy the creatures. Some succeeded moderately well, others met with ghastly failure.

	Two brief years now remained to them. Expeditions to many of the younger stars within range of their great projectors were made, but always they brought back bad news. Here they found no habitable planets; there the sun had not yet developed planets, and there was no time to stop to make and cool off a planet. That would require a century, even for one as small as Mercury. They must migrate to Betelguese. But Toralk, the mighty sun without planets, was kept in mind. If necessary, they could make the planet, and while it cooled, float in space, living in their mighty ships, making air and food and all their needs from matter torn from the sun. The great battle fleet of thirty thousand ships was ready. Each ship, two thousand one hundred feet long and three hundred feet beam, was ready to start. They merely awaited the hoped-for weapon.

	At last it was discovered. Another of the test trips was made. Three small ships went, and one sender, that they might return.

	In the depths of space they were re-integrated, and now they slowly proceeded to the blazing star before them, then hovered near one of the circling planets. In a moment they were discovered, and literally thousands of the glowing creatures darted up from the green, brightly lighted world below. These creatures had learned that these ships were hostile and as they drew near, they were already changing to that fatal violet, streaked with red. Great flaming streamers of force reached out to the ships, but in that instant the ships suddenly seemed to shimmer, as an object seen through heated air, and around them there was a strange, pale radiance, a radiance that seemed to have substance. It seemed to flow, to move, yet always remained as a strange, half-visible, milky shroud, that surrounded the ships. And then the streamer of glowing death reached out—touched it—and disappeared! The creatures leaped back, as though in pain, writhing away. The usual color of the creature was suffused by a pale, but growing green—then as the red was more and more overcome by the rising green, the glowing shape grew misty—then like a puff of vapor before a breeze it was gone—the great Atomic Giant had been mortally wounded and before their eyes, had died. Instantaneous dissolution had taken place. The others held back in fear.

	There was something new to combat and they went cautiously. Now there leapt out from the nose of the ship a long beam of the milky, glowing ray—it touched one of the great creatures—there was a slight flash of light—and it was gone. Then the glowing ray swept around and erased those forms there in space, erased them as one might wipe the image from the screen with the flick of the switch. And then, precipitately they fled. They were beaten; they could not attack this new ship.

-

	Across the void it was sent, while the few men left in the ray machine awaited the coming of the mighty battle fleet that would soon be ready. Around them glowed a pale, scarcely visible field of light. Defenseless they seemed as they lived and slept in the car swinging in its orbit about the blazing sun, but many of the Atomic Giants found the mighty strength that lay hidden in that thin wall of scarcely visible vibration. And constantly the men were observing the planets and communicating the data to the leaders on Earth and Venus.

	And in the System wild activity was going on. The entire force of the machines of all the planets was concentrated on the production of the great generators of this new force. It was simple in principle. The Atomic Giants lived by using as their "fuel" the energy of the atoms. We live by burning the carbon and hydrogen of our foods with the oxygen of the air. If the supply of either oxygen or food were cut off, the incombustibility results and we die. If oxygen is cut off, we die because the carbon compounds will no longer burn. If food is cut off, we die because there is nothing to consume the oxygen with.

	The Atomic Giants needed no oxygen or carbon—any element would do. But they needed elements that they could decompose for their energy. Any atom under normal conditions would do, but if that atom was made incombustible they too died. This new force that was so deadly to them, was a force created by the energy of matter. The electrons of matter were altered by the application of terrific spatial strains, and they would no longer react in the same way and would not decompose as did the normal electron. They merely prevented the use of atomic energy wherever they were. Thus the "fuel" of the Atomic Giants was made incombustible and they died.

	But there was a tremendous amount of work to be done before they could be ready for the great offensive to be carried across space. The great ships were rapidly being equipped with the electron projectors-and assembled in long rows outside the great transmitting stations, awaiting the final start.

	It was nearly two weeks before the great fleet was ready. Then they were all assembled, ready to start. The control ship went first. Since the cessation of the release of atomic energy did not affect the release of material energy, they did not have to worry for the safety of the men when projected out into space. They would regain consciousness soon enough, and the wonderful automatic devices that ran the complex mechanism would hold it in place, maintain its temperature and the distance of the one ship from the other. The protective shield of the strained electrons would protect them.

	In the darkened observatory on Venus, many men were watching in silence. The room was absolutely silent; only the smooth, gentle hum of the smoothly operating news-casters marred the utter quiet. They had come to observe, not to comment, and they waited quietly.

	There was a flash of light on the screen and the image became clear and sharp. They seemed to be in a huge room, the walls were lined with small electrovision boards, tier above tier of balconies ran around the sides of the great room, and in the center rose a mighty cylinder. The entire wall area of the great room was covered with the projectors, and before each one sat a man. But the mighty cylinder in the center was carefully walled off. Now, as they watched it, it suddenly glowed faintly bluish—the air about it was being ionized — there arose a faint, deep hum; then there appeared about it an intense corona of air, ionized under the titanic forces within it -tiny shooting sparks crackled blue over all its polished surface—

	The view faded; another replaced it. Now they seemed to be in a smaller room, a room whose front wall was lined with a series of large view boards. Twenty of these boards there were, and on each was the image of a room whose metal walls glistened in the light of the dull red sun. They were looking into the operating room of the greatest of the ships— the flagship. This ship, unlike the others, was a cube, surmounted by a smaller cube control-top. The mighty cylinder inside generated a field that surrounded all the ship with the protecting force, but triply intense. The fighting machines were two thousand one hundred feet long, and three hundred beam. These carried powerful protective force generators, but also they carried fourteen sets of the projectors, three along each side, the top and the bottom, and one at each end. Inside, the terrific energy needed to operate these was being generated in smoothly humming machines. Titanic they loomed above the tiny men tending them. These same giant machines would, later, with a few simple adjustments, furnish the power for the receiver machines to receive the things from the Solar System. But now they were engines of war. Over each thousand of these great ships was a division leader. The twenty division leaders were represented by the twenty view boards in the flagship. The individual ships were each represented by one of the boards in the central control room, so that in any case they knew the fate of every ship, and aid could be sent them.

	Now the scene on Hal Jus's screen became misty—the ship was being sent into space. It would be close to an hour before the scene reappeared. Now they shifted the adjustment to watch the sending of the armada of space.

	With the many stations in operation, the work went along smoothly and within two hours all were there. The twenty thousand ships had automatically assumed the formation of a mighty cone; the three dimensional equivalent of the flying wedge of their remote ancestors.

	Gradually now the men within were awakening. The scene in the control room shifted to the flagship's engine room, as clicking relays shifted the connection to another viewplate on the distant ship. The mighty engines loomed huge above the tiny cots of the sleeping engineers. Here too was the mighty cylinder, but now it was seen as the core of a gigantic coil, into which ran great cables from huge, soft-purring generators. Even the forces of material energy required straining to operate that great electron distorter.

	Hal Jus pushed another button. Again the tiny relays out in space reconnected him. The commander was awake. The control room was soon a scene of the greatest activity. As soon as the necessary weapon had been discovered, the plans for the great action had been sketched. The formations were rapidly being worked out.

	The great fleet was divided into ten parts of two thousand each, and to each of the nine smaller, cool planets one of the ten divisions went. The tenth stayed as a guard to the flagship. Now they went in ten great cones of glistening ships, a mighty armada of space, coming across the void to conquer the new universe for Mankind. And now they separated as they drew closer to the System, for the ships had been re-formed nearly four billion miles from the central sun, Betelguese.

	The expeditions swept along over and close to the surface of the planets they had been sent to investigate. Heat, cold, size, made no difference to the Atomic Creatures and all the small planets would be taken first. The smaller planets would be attacked first. The creatures would probably flee to the outer planet, but it was necessary to plan to attack them there.

	Low over the sunlit surface of a great planet they were swinging; below them there rapidly unrolled a terrain of mighty forests of green trees, vast green meadows of gently rolling land, and all bathed in the blinding glory of a blazing white sun. What a scene for eyes that had been starved of light for countless years! What a land of hope and promise and pleasure it seemed to these small gentle men. For generations the only plants they had seen were the poor small things raised artificially in the museums. Here they saw magnificent trees that towered two hundred feet into the air, in wondrous profusion of leafy green.

	Now they were swinging over mighty oceans, gigantic patches of water that were larger enough to cover all the surface of their smaller globes, for this planet was large as the long gone Neptune, or Uranus. How wonderful those vast areas of magnificent blue water, sparkling brilliantly in the light of the gigantic sun seemed to them. Each man, before he started on this expedition, had his eyes treated that the new light would not be too bright and that it might appear white to him, so that now they could fully appreciate the wondrous beauty of the scene beneath.

	And wondrous it was to men who had never seen water except as it had been manufactured in their great plants for community use. No oceans, no rivers, no lakes had there been in their system for over five billion years.

	Now they were following a mighty river, a river larger than any that Earth had ever seen, for it drained a vast area of a humid planet. Yet it was a new planet, with mighty mountain ranges, mountains that towered in mighty snowcapped peaks in the blue distance, over wide ranges of green forest! What a sight it was for the eyes of these men! What a wondrous country! And now, as they rounded the bend in the great river, they cried out in excited wonder, for before them the great river, vaster than three Amazons was pouring over a mighty ledge of rock, nearly four hundred feet in height; and from it rose a tremendous wave of sound that made the great ships tremble with the force of it, as they slowed to- a few hundred miles an hour to watch the gigantic cascade. Then on again— There was much to do ere they could claim this beautiful country.

	And on a low ridge among the mighty mountains they came upon a grim reminder that it was not theirs yet. A great hole lay carved out in bare soil -a sharp contrast with the rich green of the country. Here and there they saw scattered brightly shining bits of metal and a section of heavy metal armor plate, torn and twisted by some enormous strain. To one side lay a heavy girder, torn and bent into a U. They recognized the spot whence the voice of the lost expedition had come across the void to them. Careful electroscopic and photographic studies of the spot were made before they moved on.

	The Atomic Creatures feared them now, it seemed, for though they had come even to one of the planets, they had seen none of the enemy. Surely there must be many hiding!

	On the other side of the great mountain range they found their answer. Here, too, was a vast area of green, rolling meadow, but far out across it they could see a great bare spot, where only the dark, raw soil was visible. They swung the armada toward it and shot forward to investigate, but before they had come within a thousand miles of the spot there suddenly appeared as from nowhere an army of the Atomic Giants. No doubt this bare spot was their home, and from the great area it seemed that they must inhabit it in great numbers. The powerful radioactive effects of their forcefields no doubt killed every plant.

	These creatures were not entirely defenseless, for if their numbers were great enough they could exert a powerful interfering force and break down the protective field. But they knew that many would be required. And now all in an instant the battle for this world was on, the great creatures striving to destroy the ships, while burning rays of milky radiance stabbed and slashed at their strange glowing force-pools. Soon they found the vulnerable point of the ships and began to attack single ships in numbers. Slowly, slowly the milky radiance would contract, while the smooth purring of the mighty generators rose to a throaty hum, then became a vicious snarling roar. The great electron distorter cylinder would become a mass of shooting sparks, crackling, snapping till the atmosphere about it was alive with twisting streamers of flame twelve to twenty-four inches long. Then slowly it would heat -and if the attack was still unbroken, there would be a queer sighing hum from the generator, and a slight explosion—and the ship was gone. The generators, however, would withstand the attacks of ten or eleven of the creatures safely, and the other ships would come to the rescue — but many times there were no free ships in the neighborhood, and all available power must be turned into the ray generators, the slashing beams cutting at the many opponents. Even the propulsion apparatus was robbed of energy that every last meg-erg might be fed into the ray generators. Thousands of the Atomic Giants were destroyed, their color turning that strange green, then they suddenly were snuffed out. But sixty-two ships were lost. Still many remained when at last the Atomic enemy fled suddenly into space. There was no way of following their motion, they merely disappeared, going off with the speed of light. Then the visitors explored all that world, and nowhere did they find any more creatures.

	But now the reports from all the other planets were coming in, and in every case eventual victory was secured. On two planets the issue was for a time in doubt, for there seemed to be great centers of the creatures here. However, there was no difficulty in discovering where the remnant had fled to! The electronic activity readings of the outermost planet, the minor sun, had risen 12.5 per cent. Since a star does depend on atomic energy it was easy to see that the creatures had sought refuge here. The range of the present ray was too short to permit attack on that planet. The blazing furnace drove them back to a distance of a million miles as the least distance of safe approach. They could not attack the creatures here. What could they do? They must exterminate them before the people moved to their new planets, for the creatures could make a raid, destroy a city, and be gone before the battleships could leave their docks.

	The control ship proceeded directly to the most pleasant of the planets, with its guard, and the other ships were sent to watch the planets lest the Atomic Creatures return. Then on the planet the men began to set up one of the great receiving stations. From the sides of the ships ran mighty power cables to the powerful station. Then across space there came expert engineers, workmen, instruments and tools, working machines, constructor robots, and then great pieces of machinery so huge they could send only one section at a time. With these a new station was built to replace the temporary one.

	Already a small city was developing it seemed. But back on the old planets, mighty works were being undertaken. They were building two thousand ships, the biggest ships that had ever been built. Millions of tons they weighed, and each ship was one vast power plant. Down through the heart of it ran a mighty cylinder of glistening metal. A tiny control room, invisible among the titanic machines, governed all its vast energies. It was a gargantuan projector of the nullifying field, a mighty ship that could hurl its energies into space to form a field of the force that could reach out across a million and a half miles. Two thousand of these vast machines were being built. Gigantic power plants they were. But these peacefully minded men designed them so that, their work done, they could be easily converted into merchant cargo ships, and the mighty generators could be used to light and heat their cities.

	In less than two weeks the great ships were ready, and were resting on the surface of the great world out there across space, ready for the attack. The last mighty form had but just floated, light as a feather from the huge receiving station, and now they lay in a row. So vast they were that they seemed unreal, figments of some strange dream. Mighty cigar-shaped hulls of four-foot armor plate, half sunken in slight depressions they lay now, their terrific weight making the soil flow like some semi-liquid mass. Nestled between two of the gargantuan ships there rested the control ship. Now, one by one the fleet of the mighty bulks rose gently, gracefully into the air, formed in a perfect cone, with the control ship scarcely visible in this congregation of giants, following behind the leading ship.

	Out to that minor sun they flashed, and around it they formed a great sphere of ships. Then each of the mighty projectors, nose pointing to the blazing sun below, turned loose its powers. Through special filters they could watch the field forming. First it was a thin shell that surrounded the entire planet as the projectors threw it into position. Ten thousand small ships were occupied in maintaining the field of electrons in place with their projectors. Already the shell of force was thick and strong. Unless the Force Creatures made a concerted effort at some one point, they would soon be doomed.

	They did this. There must have been many, many thousands of them. The field was almost broken, it was bulging out, scattering under the drive of their energies. Soon they would have broken through, but one of the great projector ships reached the spot before the field had quite yielded, and condensing his field projector till it was a ray, they could see the field suddenly fall in, driven in by the awful power of that titanic driving.

	It took them sixty-three hours to completely establish that mighty energy field. Naturally the star, which made no use of Atomic energy, was quite unaffected. But when, at the end of three weeks, the energy field had slowly dissipated itself into space, there were no more of the Atomic Giants.

	Now the four habitable planets were at once settled upon. Already they had been carefully mapped, and the Supreme Council had drawn up a plan for the use of the vast planets. More area there was than they needed now, by far, so the cities were scattered widely over the globes. Mere planetary distances meant nothing to them. And all the areas between were carefully preserved as vast, natural parks. Through them wound roads for the little ground cars, so that the people might better see the beauties of the place. And some of the harmless animals would be permitted to live that the future population might know them. It was to be the fulfillment of a millennium-old dream —a warm, sunlight world, a kindly, young world where nature supplied the air, and the water, and the warmth in great abundance.

	It was a kindly nature they seemed to have met here. And the work began.

	Dozens, hundreds of the great receiver stations were set up. And at each station there would grow a great city. Now there poured across the infinite void a mighty influx of machines and workers and tools. These were the first, for they must build the cities for the billions to come. Rapidly the work went on as the skilled artisans directed the mighty machines in their labors, and on the surface of this new globe there rose from the ground mighty walls of lustrous, gleaming metal, reflecting the sun in a million different colors, a wondrous city of flashing, changing light, for the metal walls were automatically ruled with thousands of lines to the inch, a titanic diffraction grating that sent up a rainbow of changing, flashing color. A mile and a half into the air towered the buildings of the cities, and already the commerce was building up as the great receiver stations discharged their steady stream of immigrants.

	One and a half years it took them to move all their treasures and priceless records, all their goods, all their machines and themselves across the void into their new cities. One and a half years of swift, efficient labor that transformed these new worlds into civilized planets.

	But now they had twenty billion years to live ere these planets, too, would be dark, cold and sunless. And then they could easily move to some other distant system. But why wait till the Sun grew cold? They were already making investigations. Out across space there still glowed countless millions of unexplored stars! Now there would be no population limit to their peoples; there would be expansion, and since each man lived from two to three thousand years, the expansion could be rapid.

	Four of the planets were naturally habitable, but five there were which should be so in the future. There was one yet a glowing planet, still hot from its formation. Two were so far from the major sun that they were cold to absolute zero, save when they were in conjunction with the minor sun. These the engineers and astro-physicists had investigated. They would be drawn nearer the sun when the population warranted, and one more that turned on its axis but once a year could easily be started rotating. Air and water it lacked, but that would be easy to supply. And a last planet was so close to the mighty blazing Betelguese that it was kept dull red by the titanic furnace so near it, a scant thirty million miles away. That would be drawn to a more comfortable distance. There was indeed room for much expansion in this system.

	But still there was the urge of exploration, of adventure. There might be other battles to fight, other worlds to conquer! Already mighty exploration ships were being prepared to dispatch to half a dozen systems. Perhaps they would bring commerce; perhaps it would be wider domain. But it was that same lure of adventure that had driven the first caveman from his rocky cliff to explore the wilder lands. It was the love of adventure, another name for ambition. It would take more than ten thousand thousand years to kill that!

The End

Piracy Preferred
Arcot, Morey and Wade 01.1
Amazing Stories – June 1930

	ONCE again our young author offers us a rare combination of accurate science with excellently written fiction. It is perfectly possible to get sunburned in a dark room into which only ultra-violet rays of light-—so called—penetrate. The same rays can make some substances visible and fail to do so with others. A word can be written with a colorless, clear solution so as to be completely invisible on paper, except under the proper light. Why, therefore, is it not possible to go ahead of these phenomena and penetrate further into the secrets of invisibility and visibility. Mr. Campbell, in looking ahead to the future of aviation, propounds some ingenious ideas, always based on sound scientific fact, as to the possibilities of this most interesting of subjects—aviation. This is an excellent bit of scientific fiction.

-

	HIGH in the deep blue of the afternoon sky rode a tiny speck of glistening metal, scarce visible in the glare of the bright sun. The workers on the machines below glanced up for a moment—four twenty-one it must be—then bade to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators. Even this little break in the afternoon program was of interest in this dull monotony of green. But they would soon be starting back to the plantation city. These endless fields of castor bean plants had to be cultivated, but with the great machines that did the work it required but a few dozen men to cultivate an entire county. Indeed, so vast was the area, that little helicopters were, even now resting on the big cultivator, that they might fly back at the end of the day, leaving the machine where it was, ready to use in the morning.

	High above them the passengers of the huge plane looked down for a moment perhaps, but continued with their papers or books immediately, for this long monotonous trip was most annoying to them. It seemed unnecessary to spend six good hours in a short 3,500-mile trip like this. There was nothing to do either, not like the trans-Pacific liners, for though they spent nearly ten hours in flight they at least had club rooms and a swimming pool. There was nothing to do, nothing to see, except a slowly passing landscape ten miles below. No details could be distinguished, and the steady low throb of the engines, the whirring of the giant propellers, the muffled roar of the air, as it rushed by, combined to form a soothing lullaby of power. It was all right for pleasure seekers and vacationists, but the business man was in a hurry.

	The pilot of the machine took a last glance at the instruments, wondered vaguely why he had to be there at all, then turned, left the pilot room in charge of his assistant, and went down to talk with the chief engineer.

	His vacation began the first of Sol, and as this was the last of June, he was still rather wondering what would have happened if he had done as he had been half inclined to do—quit the trip and let the assistant take her through. It would have been very simple—just a few levers to manipulate, a few controls to set, and the instruments would have taken her up to ten or eleven miles, swung her into the great westward air current, and leveled her off at five hundred and sixty or so an hour toward 'Frisco. They would hold her on the radio beacon course better than he ever could. Even the landing would have been easy. The assistant had never landed a big plane, but if he had been shown which control to reset, the instruments would do it. If he forgot his instructions, he would merely have to leave it alone and in ten minutes it would land automatically—if an emergency pilot didn't come up by that time in answer to the automatic signal.

	He yawned and sauntered down the hall. He yawned again, wondered what made him so sleepy—he hadn't been out the night before—oh—why—worry—.

	He slumped limply to the floor and lay there breathing even more and more slowly.

	The officials of the San Francisco terminus of The Transcontinental Airways Company were worried. The great Transcontinental express had come to the field, following the beam radio signals, and now it was circling the field with a small red-and-white flag flying, the automatic signal for an emergency pilot. They were worried, and with good reason, for on this express a large shipment of negotiable securities was being sent.

	There were nearly nine hundred thousand dollars' worth of bonds. But what could attack one of those giant ships. It would take a small army to overcome the crew of seventy and the three thousand passengers!

	The great ship was landing gently now; the long series of broad rollers on its keel touching the ground evenly; its tremendous weight distributed over a great area, lest it sink into the springy, rubber-faced landing surface.

	The small field car ran over to the great plane rapidly. Already the elevator was in place beside it, and as the officials in the car drew up under the giant wing they could see the tiny figure of the emergency pilot beckoning to them. Quickly they entered the portable elevator and were carried rapidly up to the fourth level of the ship.

	What a sight met their eyes as they entered the main salon of the giant plane! All the passengers lay sleeping in their chairs, but on closer examination it became evident that they were not breathing. The ear could detect no heart-beat. The members of the crew lay at their posts, as inert as the passengers! The assistant pilot lay on the floor beside the instrument panel—he had apparently been watching the record of the flight. But there was no conscious man on board!

	"Dead! Over three thousand people! It seems impossible—how could they have done it? Gas, I suppose, drawn in through the ventilator pumps and distributed to all the compartments of the ship. But I can not conceive of any man being willing to kill three thousand people for a mere million!

	"Did you call a doctor by radio, Pilot?" The field manager was greatly depressed.

	"Yes, sir. He is on his way. There is his car now."

	"Of course they will have opened the safe—but let us see how it was done. I can only think some madman has done this—no sane man would be willing to take so many lives for so little." Wearily the men descended the stairs to the mail room in the hold.

	The door was closed, but the lock of the door was gone, apparently the magnesium-beryllium alloy had been burned away. They opened the door and entered. The room seemed in perfect order. The guard was asleep in the steel guard chamber at one side, it seemed from the doorway; the thick, bullet-proof glass made his outlines a little blurred, and the color of his face was green—but they knew there too must be that same white pallor they had seen on the faces of the passengers and crew. The delicate instruments had brought in the great ship perfectly, but it was freighted with a cargo of dead! They entered the room further, and proceeded to the safe, but it was opened as they had expected, the six-inch tungsto-iridium wall had been melted through. To the worried and depressed men this did not bring the surprise it ordinarily would have. They only glanced at the metal, still too hot to touch, and looked about the room. The bonds had been taken. But now they noticed that over the mail-clerk's desk there had been fastened a small envelope. On it was printed:

	TO THE OFFICIALS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT

	Inside was a short message, printed in the same sharp, black letters:

-
To the Officials of the San Francisco Airport

	This plane should land safely. If it doesn't, it is your fault, not mine, for the instruments that it carries should permit it. The passengers are NOT dead! They have been put in a temporary state of suspended animation. Any doctor can readily revive them by the injection of seven c.c. of deci-normal potassium iodide solution for every 100 pounds of weight. Do Not Use Higher Concentrations. Lower concentrations will act more slowly.

	You will find that any tendency toward leprosy or cancer will have been destroyed. It will kill any existing cancer, and cure it in about one week. I have not experimented with leprosy beyond knowing that it is cured very quickly.

	This is an outside job. Don't bother the people in the car.

	The gas used cannot be stopped by any material I know of. You can try it with any mask—but don't use the C-32L. It will react with the gas to produce a permanent suspension of animation. I would advise that you try it on an animal to convince yourselves.

	I have left stock in my new company to replace the bonds I have taken.

	Piracy Incorporated is incorporated under my own laws.

The Pirate.
-

	On the desk beneath the note was a small package which contained a number of stock certificates. They totalled $900,000, listed apparently as "Piracy Preferred," the stock of the new corporation, "Piracy, Inc.".

	"Piracy! Pirates in the air! In 2126 we have a pirate attacking our air lines. But thank God he did not kill all those people. 'Piracy Preferred.' Well, I think I would prefer the bonds myself. But if the Air Guard can't catch that fellow, I'm going to buy up his stock. From present appearances it looks to me as if it would pay big dividends! Ah, Doctor, you look worried! No wonder! But cheer up. If what this pirate says is true, we can resuscitate them, and they will be better off for the experience!"

	"I am afraid that you will never be able to bring those men back to life again, sir. I can't detect any. heart action even with the amplifier. Ordinary heart action sounds like a cataract through this instrument. I can see nothing wrong with the. blood; it has not coagulated as I expected, nor is there any pronounced hydrolysis as yet. But I am afraid I will have to write out the death warrants for all those men and women. One of the people on that ship was coming to see me. That is how I happened to be on the field. Perhaps it is better so. That poor woman was suffering from an incurable cancer."

	"In this case, Doctor, I hope and believe you are wrong. Read this note!"

-

	IT was two hours before the work of reviving the passengers could be begun. Despite all the laws of physics, their body temperature had remained constant after it reached seventy-four, showing that some form of very slow metabolism was going on. As they were one by one put into the large electric blankets, and each given the correct dose of the salt, the men waited anxiously for results—and within ten minutes of the injection the first had regained consciousness!

	The work went forward steadily and successfully. Every one of the passengers and crew was revived. And the Pirate had spoken the truth. The woman who had been suffering from cancer, was free from pain for the first time in many months. She was cured!

	The papers were issuing extras within five minutes of the time the great plane was landed, and the radio news service was broadcasting the first "break" in a particularly dead month. All this June the news had been dead, and now it looked as though the month of So! was going to begin with a bang! And now with time to think and investigate, the airport officials went over the ship with the Air Guard, using a fine-tooth comb. It was soon evident that the job had been done from the outside, as the Pirate had said it was. The emergency pilot testified that when he entered, he found a small piece of wire securing the air lock from the outside. This had certainly been put on while the ship was in flight, and that meant that whoever had done this, had landed on the great ship with a small plane, anchored it in some way, then entered the plane through the air lock at the ten-mile height. That required that he should wear a suit to protect him both from the intense cold and from the low pressure. He had probably flown across the path of the plane with his plane, leaving a trail of the gas in its way to be drawn in through the ventilator pumps. It had been washed out by the incoming good air later, for the officials had not been affected; nor had the emergency pilot been acted on when he entered.

	Now the investigation led them to the mail-room. The door had been opened by melting or burning out the lock. The heat of the combustion of the magnesium was enough for that, but the beryllium and special anti-combustion catalyst made this very difficult. But now they realized the truly amazing fact: the safe had been opened by melting it through. There was practically no oxidation of the cut itself, but the metal near by, which had been incandescent no doubt, was coated with a thin layer of tungsten oxide. The iridium content really prevented oxidation, and with a melting point of 3500 degrees centigrade it meant that the Pirate must have an entirely new torch. This would be as great a boon to the metallurgical industries as the cancer cure would be to the medical. It had been impossible to weld the valuable tungsten alloys they had prepared, and so they were useless. If they could only be worked, their ability to stand high temperatures would make them invaluable.

	A bond shipment was due the next day, and so they would be on the watch for it. It would get through safely, for men were put on board in steel tanks hermetically welded behind them, with oxygen tanks sealed within to supply them with clean air. Automatic apparatus was arranged to keep them supplied with the correct amount of oxygen without effort on their part. The waste gases were collected by alkali, a small electrically driven pump taking care that the flow was maintained. The front of the tank was equipped with a bullet-proof glass window, and by means of electrically operated controls the man inside could control a machine-gun. Thus he was perfectly protected from the Pirate's gas and able to use his gun.

	The ship was accompanied by a patrol of Air Guardsmen. Yet, several cancer cases were going with the hope of being gassed.

	It seemed that the Pirate's "patients" were due to be disappointed, though, for he certainly could not attack while the plane was under the protection of a patrol of Air Guardsmen; besides which, the men inside were protected by the steel tanks.

	When the plane reached the neighborhood of San Francisco the Air Guardsmen were disappointed, for there had been no sign of an attack on the plane. The Pirate might well retire permanently on a million, if he were alone, as the singular signature would indicate; but it seemed doubtful and it was much more probable that he would attempt another attack in any case. Well, that just meant watching all the planes from now on. That was a tremendous job for the Air Guard to handle! There was a vast network of plane lines! The leader of the patrol turned in an easy bank to descend the ten miles to earth, and his planes followed him. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of red and white on the silvery surface of the giant plane. THE PLANE WAS GIVING THE AUTOMATIC SIGNAL FOR AN EMERGENCY PILOT! That could only mean that the plane had been gassed under the very eyes of his men!

	The bonds were gone and the passengers gassed, but incredible as it was, the men aboard in the steel tanks were as thoroughly gassed as the rest! The note was brief, but as much to the point as was the absence of the bonds.

-
To the Officials of the Airport

	Restore as usual. The men in the tanks are asleep also—I said this gas would penetrate any material. It does. A mask obviously won't do any good, as the gas will permeate the skin. Don't try that C-32L mask. I warn you it will be fatal. My gas reacts to produce a poisonous substance when in contact with the chemicals used.
The Pirate.

-

	ON the thirty-ninth floor of a large New York apartment two young men were lounging about after a strenuous game of tennis. The blue curls of smoke from their pipes rose slowly, to be drawn away by the efficient ventilating system. The taller of the two seemed to be doing most of the talking. In the positions they had assumed it would have been rather difficult to be sure of which was the taller, but William Morey was a good four inches taller than Richard Arcot. Arcot had to suffer under the stigma of "runt" with Morey around—he was only six feet tall. But the chosen occupation of each was physical research, and in that Arcot could well have called Morey "runt," for Arcot had only one competitor in that field—namely, his father. In this case it had been "like father, like son." For many years Robert Arcot had been known as the greatest American physicist, and probably the world's greatest. More recently he had been known as the father of the world's greatest physicist. Arcot junior was probably one of the most brilliant men the world had ever seen, and he was aided in all his work by two men who could help him in a way that amplified his powers a thousand fold. His father and his best friend, Morey, were the complementary and balancing minds to his great intelligence. His father had learned through years of work the easiest and best ways of performing the many difficult feats of laboratory experimentation. Morey had a mind that could develop the mathematical theory of a hypothesis far more readily than Arcot could. Morey had a mind more methodical and exact than Arcot, but Arcot had a mind that could grasp the broad details of a problem and get the general method of solution developed with a speed that made it utterly impossible for his friend to even follow the steps he suggested.

	Since Arcot junior's invention of the multiple calculus, many new ramifications of the old theories had been attained, and many developments had been possible.

	But the factor that made Arcot most successful in his line of work was his ability to see practical uses for things, an ability that is unfortunately lacking in so many great physicists. Had he collected the royalties his inventions merited, he would have been a billionaire twice or thrice over. Instead he had made contracts on the basis that the laboratories he owned be kept in condition, and that he be paid a salary that should be whatever he happened to need. Since he had sold all his inventions to The Transcontinental Airways, he had been able to devote all his time to science, leaving them to manage his finances. Perhaps it was the fact that he did sell these inventions to the Transcontinental that made these lines so successful, but at any rate President Arthur Morey was duly grateful, and when his son was able to enter the laboratories he was as delighted as Arcot.

	Now these two were boon companions. They worked, played, lived and thought together.

	Just now they were talking about the Pirate. This was the seventh day of his discovery, and he had been growing steadily more menacing. It was the. great Transcontinental Airways that had suffered most repeatedly. Sometimes it was the San Francisco Flyer that went on without a pilot, sometimes the New York-St. Louis expresses that would come over the field flying the red-and-white flag of emergency. But always the people were revived with little difficulty, and each time more of the stock of "Piracy, Inc." was accumulated. The Air Guard seemed helpless. Time and again the Pirate slipped in without their knowing it. Each time he convinced them that it was an outside worker, for the door was always sealed.

	"Dick, how do you suppose he gets away with the things he does right under the eyes of those Air Guardsmen? He must have some system; he does it every time."

	"I have a very vague idea. I was going to ask you today, if your father would let us take passage on the next liner carrying any money. I understand the insurance rates have been boosted so high that they don't dare to send any cash by air any more. They have resorted to the slow land routes. I guess they pay for it, though, in the loss of interest, while the money is out of circulation. Is there any money shipment in sight?"

	"No, but I have something that is just as good, if not better, for our purpose. The other day several men came into Dad's office, to charter a plane to carry than to San Francisco, and Dad naturally wondered why it was they had been referred to the president of the company. It seemed to him to be a job for a clerk. It seems the difficulty was that these men wanted to hire the ship so they could be robbed! A large group of medical men and cancer victims were going for the 'treatments.' Each one of the twenty-five hundred going was to bring along one hundred dollars. That meant a total of a quarter of a million dollars, which is to be left on the table. They hoped the Pirate would gas them and thus cure them! Dad could not officially do this, but told them that if there were too many people for the San Francisco express, two sections would be necessary. So I believe that they are going on that second section. Only one hundred dollars! It seems a very cheap cure for cancer at that!

	"Another thing: Dad asked me to tell you that he would appreciate your help in stopping this ultra-modern pirate. So if you go down and see him in the morning, you will doubtless be able to make the necessary arrangements."

	"I will do so gladly. I wonder, though, if you know more about this than I do. Did they try that C-32L mask on any animal?"

	"The Pirate was telling the truth. They tried it on a dog and he went to sleep forever. But do you have any idea how that gas does all it does?"

	"I don't know what that gas is, but I can tell you some things that you may not know. Did you know, for instance, that carbon monoxide will seep through a solid plate of red-hot steel? That has been known for some three hundred years now, and I have to hand it to this Pirate for making use of it. Even in the war of 2075 they didn't think of it! He has just found some gas that has these sleep-producing properties in very low concentrations, and at the same time is able to penetrate to an even greater extent than carbon monoxide. It is just an amplification of known properties."

	"I was wondering how he stores that stuff. It reminds me of the old farmer and his smart son who had almost discovered the Universal Solvent.

	" 'Well son,' said the old farmer, 'I suppose it'll be a durned good thing ta have, but what you going to keep it in?' Similarly, if this gas leaks through everything, what are you going to keep it in? I wonder if he doesn't make it as fast as he uses it, by allowing the two constituents to react? It might well be simple enough to store them separately, and the airstream blowing past him would carry the gas behind him, so permitting him to lay a stream of it in front of the big plane. Is that about it?"

	"That was about what I had figured. One of the things I want to do when I go with that Invalid Special tomorrow is to get some samples for analyses."

	"Whew, that's a pretty big order, isn't it, Dick? How are you going to handle it, or even get it into your apparatus?"

	"Easily enough as far as getting the sample goes. I have already had some sample bottles made. I have one of them in the lab—excuse me a moment." Arcot left the room, to return a few minutes later with a large aluminum bottle. ''This bottle has been pumped out to a very good vacuum. I then swept it out with helium gas. Then it was pumped out again. I hope to take this into some gas-filled region, where the gas will be able to leak in. but the air won't. When it comes to going out again, the gas will have to fight air pressure, and will probably stay in. I cannot hope to find its molecular weight by any normal means. Probably the Pirate doesn't know it—but I will be able to get a known weight of the sample, the weight being the difference between the weight before and after the gas attack. That is why I used helium in sweeping the bottle out. It will not be in the compound, that is certain. It is absolutely impossible for it to combine. It will weigh very little and won't offset my readings, and won't react with the gas itself. I can't hope to learn much that will be very useful, for the organic tables are so blamed complex, that a mere empirical formula won't mean a thing. C2H6O is the formula for ethyl alcohol—or it's the formula for methyl ether. It may be a single, double or triple bonded compound—but I can't tell. I will be able to get the empirical formula, though, for any organic compound is apt to decompose easily, and I will just heat my cylinder in a furnace till the gas is broken down, then it will be easy to analyze the residue."

	"I am not a chemist! You know that, but I know that the amount of gas you will get in that bottle will not weigh as much as a gram. Now how do you intend to analyze that?"

	"They have been making analysis runs on such small amounts of compounds that they had to use powerful lenses in watching the reactions! Two hundred years ago an Austrian developed micro-analysis. Remember that in organic chemistry it is frequently necessary to make an analysis of some substance that has been derived only after many long months of hard work. Frequently the entire sample will weigh not more than a hundredth of a gram. The chemist must run at least three or four analyses on that. He had to work with pinhead amounts! It will be no great amount of labor for Jackson to work it out. It will probably irritate his chemist's soul to make an analysis and have to stop at the empirical formula, but I don't see how he can do any more!"

	"Beautiful scheme! I hope you can find out something about it!"

-

	THE next morning saw Arcot in President Morey's private office, having a long conference with him. At the end of it, he left the office, ascended to the roof, and climbed into his small helicopter, rose to the local traffic level, and waiting his chance, broke into the traffic bound for the great airfields over in the Jersey district. A few minutes later he landed on the roof of the Transcontinental Airways shops, entered them, and went to the office of the Designing Engineer, John Fuller, an old schoolmate. They had been able to help each other before, for Fuller had not paid as much attention to theoretical physics as he might have, and though he was probably one of the outstanding aeronautical designers, he often consulted Arcot on the few theoretical details that he needed. Probably it was Arcot who derived the greatest benefit from this association, for the ability of. the designer had many times brought his theoretical successes to practical commercial production. Now, however, he was consulting Fuller, because the plane he was to take that afternoon for San Francisco was to be slightly changed for him.

	He stayed in Fuller's office for the better part of an hour, then returned to the roof and thence to his own roof, where Morey junior was waiting for him.

	"Hello Dick! I heard from Dad that you were going this afternoon, and came over here. I got your note and I have the things fixed up here. The plane leaves at one, and it is ten-thirty now. Let's eat lunch or its equivalent, and then start. Dad asked me to see how good that engineer on this plane is at explaining the stuff. You know the engineers are supposed to be able to tell those visitors, who have passes, all about it. I am going to try to get there early, and we have passes—John Smith is yours and mine is Charles Black. Let's see—we'll be English."

	It was half-past eleven when they reached the flying field. They went directly to the private office which had been assigned to them aboard. It was right next to the mail-room, and through the wall between the two a small hole had been cut. Directly beneath this hole was a table, on which the two men now set up a small moving-picture camera they had brought with them.

	"How many of the gas sample bottles did you bring, Bill?" asked Arcot.

	"Jackson had only four ready, so I brought those. I think that will be enough from what he said. Have we got that camera in place right now?"

	"Everything's O. K. I believe. Let's see your engineer."

	The chief engineer was lounging about in a large chair in his cabin. The walls of the little metal room were lined with meters and rheostat controls. He wished they would get started. He was a little disgruntled at present, his mates had been kidding him at the lunch room—he was now "chief engineer of the Invalid's Flying Wheel Chair"! He was rather glad to be gassed on these trips. It made the trip even shorter. He glanced up at the long rows of meters and smiled. What did they spend all that money for? No one ever paid any attention to those things except once in every month, when the planes were run by the shop specialists; then they checked things up, but the automatic devices managed the whole thing anyway. His principal duly lay in keeping his men at the engines, and inspecting the apparatus occasionally. But if anything went wrong—a plane had had trouble three years ago and descended to the six-mile level before the engineer had been able to get the machines working correctly again. No hum—hullo—some visitors. Well, here was a little diversion while he waited for the starting signal. English they were.

	"President Morey sent us to see you. We are trying to collect some material on American lines, and we are touring your country. We would greatly appreciate it if you would just tell us the story from the beginning." Hmmm, friends of the president himself—well—

	"I'll be glad to help you all I can, Mr. Smith. What would you like to see first?"

	"Well, I think we'd best see the engines first, if possible."

	"All right, sir. I guess we can go down to the main engine room in the nose of the ship. This is the Chief Engineer's control room. That board there represents the main engine. It covers most of that side of the room; there are most of the controlling relays for starting and running it. The engines are really run by the control mechanisms. You know those were begun over two hundred years ago, and through that time they have passed through all the stages. First they were indicators, watched by men who then acted on their information. Then about that time relays were developed to control the action of the big planes that developed. The first of these was the DO-X, the one they have in the National Teutonic Museum. They got so big one man couldn't handle them, and then the relays took over the job. By that time the instruments had become more accurate, and they just hooked the relays directly to the instruments.

	Now we have these ships. Each airline has a radio beam station at each end, and several scattered along the way. These direct the instruments which control the direction of the ship. The height is controlled by the radio reflection altimeter. This gives us ground height, the altitude from the ground itself, not from sea level—it makes it possible for these big planes to land themselves automatically. The plane will no doubt be gassed, as you probably know, and it will then continue its way controlled automatically. Freight lines frequently operate that way during rush periods. No pilot goes on them, and no crew. There is a landing beacon that projects a radio wave from the exact center of the field. The plane heads for this, then lands gently. A fall of a foot or so is easily taken care of by the shock absorbers.

	"You noticed the roller landing gear? That has not been adopted widely abroad as yet, but it makes for easier landings. The weight of the ship is distributed over much greater area, and it does away with a tremendous amount of head resistance. These rollers have been nearly completely countersunk, and wheels cannot be.

	"Here is the main engine room. That engine there develops about 25,000 horsepower. There are two smaller engines, one on each side, out in the wings. These develop only about 15,000 apiece. These are the usual American type engine, the Arcot coal engine, patterned after the old Diesel engine. They were developed by Arcot senior about fifty years ago, and have been little improved since, though young Arcot has added a new type of vibration damper. They burn powdered coal, by the compression ignition method. Coal is powdered to an exceedingly fine dust and blown into the cylinders, where the up-stroke compresses the air to about 1,500 pounds to the square inch. The fuel is burned with about thirty-nine percent efficiency, as compared to the old di-phenyl-oxide vapor turbines which developed about ten per cent at best. The fuel is solid, and easily handled, and further, there is no fire risk.

	"The engines have sixteen cylinders of rather small size, for it was found that small cylinders with great pressures and several in number gave higher efficiency and less vibration than fewer large ones. The big mechanism up there reduces the speed of the engine shaft to a speed that can be used on the props. The main prop is forty feet sweep, the two others are each thirty feet.

	"When the oil supplies gave out in 2060-80, the engineers were mighty hard pressed. Fuel they had in the form of coal. For many years the problem had been staring them in the face, and they had really solved it. Of course there still remained the oil shales, but they could not be worked economically because of the cost of extracting the oil. It was cheaper to import the lubricants they had to have. These they tried to eke out with copious amounts of graphite, and re-refining. Then about 2070 some genius, many claim the honor, got the very sensible idea that it was time they started raising their own oil. Now, as we fly over western Kansas, you will see vast fields of green plants. From there, clear across the country, the green will continue. They are the gigantic plantations where our oil and most of our fuel is grown. The cornstalks are used as fuel and a dozen other things by fermentation by particular bacterial ferments. Alcohol is the usual product, but many others can be obtained. Further west, the staple crop is castor oil beans. That is the source of our lubricating oil. Some man dug the secret out of some century and a half-old book, for in the days of the development of the automobile it was found that the petroleum was not good enough at that time, to use in the expensive racers, and they used castor oil, which did not trouble them by dissolving the gasoline. That big tank up there is the main supply. It is loaded with synthetic graphite also, for even that needs a little thinning to go round. Our fields aren't big enough yet. The castor oil bean plant is one of the necessities of this country. It supplies our oil, and it helps supply our alcohol. Of course, we do use hydrogenated coal to a slight extent still, but the main fuel is alcohol. How do you manage in England? You do not have enough area for castor oil production, and not enough coal left."

-

	ARCOT and Morey had not been prepared for this, but Morey happened to be up on those facts at present from a recent trip to European cities.

	"Why, we are using methyl alcohol as our fuel. Your ethyl alcohol used commercially can be prepared by fermentation with your great area, but we have been forced rather to extremes. As you know, we are now synthesizing the staple items of our food directly. Our coal too is nearly exhausted and we are beginning to wonder if the old idea that Englishmen had was so good. You know we used to sell our coal by the millions of tons to ships every year. Now we need it badly. We have been forced to use our great deposits of limestone and other carbonates as our source of carbon. The usual practice is to electrolyze sea water for the chlorine and the sodium as well as the hydrogen. The H and the CI are burned together to give the acid. This is used to treat limestone to produce the CO2 needed in industry, the heat of the reaction producing CO2 by the direct decomposition of the limestone. The calcium chloride is now a very important by-product, while the CO2 thus obtained is used to produce the necessary foods and fuels. The usual system is to treat it with hydrogen gas and produce methyl alcohol. This is then synthesized up to sugars and other simple foods. The power we use comes directly from the sea by the process of using the difference in temperature of the sea water at great depths and on the surface. The power stations have been built all along the coast now, and great transmission lines reach inland to supply the cities with power.

	"There are no chimneys in England today. The newest process looks as if it had great promise; it is simpler than the old methods, and uses far less energy. They pass air through a liquid under great pressure, and in this way absorb the CO2 content of the air. The thing becomes most interesting to look on in the whole! The energy comes from the sun. It is used to stabilize carbo-hydrogen compounds, the carbon coming from the air as CO2 and the hydrogen from water. The resultant foods are used by the developers of the machine, and we have at last gotten back to the model the plant offered millions of years ago! This time, with the sun as our source of energy, we don't have to worry about running out of fuel!"

	"In this country, Mr. Black, we have been forced to use our coal very sparingly for all but absolutely essential industries. We need it for metallurgical processes. What do you use?"

	"That was one of our big problems. We now find it necessary to get most of our metals electrolytically, the power being generated, as I state, from the sea. It is cheap, and our costs are not so much greater than yours, and our supply of power will last forever. The only trouble is that the metals are showing signs of exhaustion. As you know, we now have to import practically all our metals except iron, but even that shows signs of giving out. France is in a like condition, her coal and iron are nearly gone, and even Germany is feeling the stress pretty badly. Russia and Siberia, with their vast area, have little to worry about. They are still producing oil in plentiful amounts. Their platinum alone seems to be exhausted. But the day will come! I wonder what we will do when there is no more high-grade iron ore?"

	"Let's not think about that. It probably won't come in our day."

	"Probably not; still, there is the question."

	While the men had been talking, the great landing field had been gradually dotted with people moving over toward the great ship. It would start now in about twenty minutes. The engineer suggested that they go upstairs and watch things from the pilot's room.

	"See the big tubes on top of the roof of the station there? Those are the radio beacon generator tubes. They, and others like them in San Francisco, will be directing the ship as she flies along her route, ten miles up. As in the European lines, we fly at about ten miles, thus avoiding any danger of mountains, cutting down air resistance, and increasing the safety factor of landing. With the main engine alone going, we can reach San Francisco from New York once we get altitude. With none of the engines going we can always glide to one of the big cities, for a safe landing. So great is the area of gliding range that there is no place on all earth where we would not be within reach of a safe landing. There is no danger of the engines failing anyway, so we really don't have to worry. Should they have a breakdown after the pilot and the crew have been gassed, the instruments will cut them out automatically lest they wreck the ship, and then it will make a safe automatic landing at any nearby city, by picking up the strongest of the local guide beacons. Usually, if there is any emergency, the pilot sits back and just lets the machines handle it. They never make a mistake, as long as they are working. When they stop working, the pilot takes charge. But they have never been known to stop working. That large case over there conceals a big battery of constantly charged storage cells that operate the instruments. We do not take any chances on power failure.

	"See—they are getting ready to take-off. They will close the air doors soon. I must go back to my office, but you can stay here and talk to the pilot—he won't have anything to do anyway!"

	"No, I won't, Chief, but that will be because the pilot's had sense enough to invent machines to make life easy!" returned the pilot. "But I will be glad to help you gentlemen if I can. There—hear that whir—now it has almost gone. They started the ventilator machinery. That will draw air in from outside, and pump it up to the necessary pressure for breathing in the ship, no matter what the external pressure is. There is a much bigger pump attached similarly to each of the engines to supply it with the necessary oxygen. You would think that this would take a lot of the power from the engines, but any loss in pumping the air in is made up by the lower back pressure on the exhaust. Now the engines are starting—feel the momentary vibration—then it goes as they get under way. The props haven't been thrown in gear as yet. The air-tight door is closed now; the portable elevator is backing off, going back toward the field house. I don't think it is particularly portable! But, then, one wouldn't say a thing like this machine looked very capable of flight while it is on the ground, yet in the low resistance air, ten miles up, we will make over six hundred at times. Well, it's one now, and the starting signal is due. I am afraid I must be excused now."

	Arcot and Morey returned to their room, convinced that both pilot and engineer were intelligent and courteous.

	"Well, now we have a nice long wait till we get to San Francisco and back, Dick, but you will have something to tell then!"

	"I hope so, Bill, and I hope that as soon as we get there, we can get ready to take the midnight plane from San Francisco, which will get us in at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, New York time. I wish you would go right to your father's office and ask him over to our place for supper, and see if Fuller can come too. I think we will be able to use that molecular controller on this job; it is almost finished, and with it we will need a good designing engineer. Then our little movie show will no doubt be of interest!"

-

	THERE was a low rumble that quickly mounted to a staccato roar as the great propellers began whirling and the engines took up the load. The ground began to flash behind them; the giant plane was waddling awkwardly across the surface, like a great duck, then suddenly, as flying speed was reached, there was a slight start, the roaring bark of the engine took on a deeper tone, the rocking stopped and the ground was dropping away. Like some mighty wild duck, the plane was in the air, a graceful, sentient thing, wheeling in a great circle as it headed back for San Francisco, for the wind had been from the cast when the ship took off. Now the plane was climbing steadily in a long bank; up, up, up she went, and gradually the terrific roar of the engine died to a low throbbing hum as the low pressure of the air silenced the noise, a sound proof vacuum was around them. Below them the giant city was contracting as the great ship rode higher. The tiny private helicops were darting about below them like streams of nigh invisible individuals, creeping black lines among buildings of the cities. The towering buildings shone in the noon sun in riotous hues as the colored tile facing reflected the brilliant sunlight with glowing warmth of color.

	It was a city of indescribable beauty now. It was one of the things that made this trip so worth-while.

	Now the shining city was dropping behind them, and only the soft green of the Jersey hills, and the deep purple-black of the sky above surrounded them. The sun was blazing high in the nigh-black heavens, and the rarefied air gave such slight diffusion effect, that the corona was readily visible with the aid of a smoked glass. Around the sun, long banners in space, the Zodiacal light gleamed dimly. Here and there some of the brighter stars gleamed in the dark sky.

	Below them the landscape was swinging slowly by. Even to these men who had made the trip dozens of times, the sight was one to inspire, and hold one's attention, it was such a thing as had never been visible before the development of these super-planes. Whole flying observatories had been made that had taken photographs at heights of fifteen miles, where the air was so rarefied that the plane had to travel close to eight hundred miles an hour to stay up. Giant power was needed to maintain this speed, and only on rare occasions were the machines taken so high, but the flexibility allowed far better observation of solar eclipses than had ever been possible, for but once in a century would an eclipse occur in the region of a large observatory.

	Already ahead of them Arcot and Morey could see the great splotch of color that was Chicago, the mightiest city of the Earth. Situated as it was in tire heart of the North American continent, with great water and ground landing facilities and broad plains about it, it made a perfect air-port, and the sea no longer meant much, for it was now only a source of power, recreation and food. Ships were no longer needed. Planes were faster, and the air resistance being so much less, it was more economical also. With its already great start toward ascendancy, Chicago had rapidly forged ahead, as the air lines developed with the great super-planes. The European planes docked here, and it was the starting point of the South American lines. But now, as they swung high above it, the glistening walls of soft-colored tiles made it a great mass of changing, flashing color beneath them. As they passed they could see a great air "liner, twice the size of their plane, taking off for Japan, its five giant propellers visible only as flashing blurs as it climbed up toward them. Then it was out of sight.

	It was over the green plains of Nebraska that the Pirate worked, so there the men became more and more alert, waiting for the first sign of abnormal sleepiness. The tenseness made them yawn, and each immediately wanted to start the camera lest they miss the raider. They soon realized, however, that it was only their nervousness that made them yawn so. They sat quietly, not talking, listening intently for some new note, but knowing all the while that any sound the Pirate might make would be more than drowned out in the whirring roar of the air sweeping past the giant airfoils of the plane.

	It was Arcot who first began to feel sleepy, and soon he decided that it was not imagination. He glanced sleepily toward Bill, who was already lying down. He found it a tremendous effort of the will to make himself reach up and close the switch that started the little camera whirring almost noiselessly. It seemed he never pulled his arm back—he just—lay there—and—

	A white uniformed man was bending over him as he opened his eyes. To one side of him he saw Morey smiling down at him.

	"You're a fine guard, Arcot. I thought you were going to stay awake and watch them!"

	"Oh, no, I left a much more efficient watchman! It didn't go to sleep—I am willing to bet!"

	"No, it may not have gone to sleep, but the doctor here tells me it has gone somewhere else. It wasn't found in our room when we woke up. I think the pirate found it and confiscated it. All our luggage, including the gas sample bottles is gone."

	"That is all right. I arranged for that. The ship was brought down by an emergency pilot and Fuller had him fixed for me. He took care of the luggage so that no member of the pirate's gang could steal it. There might have been some of them in the ground crew. They will be turned over to us as soon as we see the emergency man. I don't have to lie here any longer, do I, doctor?"

	"No, Dr. Arcot, you're all right now. I would suggest that for the next hour or so you take it easy to let your heart get used to beating again. It stopped for some two hours, you know. It is hard to change a habit of some twenty-five or six years, but once changed, it is hard to change back. You will be all right, though."

	Five men were sitting about the table, discussing the results of the last raid, in particular as related to Arcot and Morey. Fuller, and President Morey, as well as Dr. Arcot, senior, and the two young men, were there. They had consistently refused to tell what their trip had revealed, saying that pictures would speak better than they could. So now the men adjourned to the library where a small motion picture projector had been set up. As they seated themselves in the darkened room, Arcot set up the small screen, then returned to the projector and stalled it. At once they were looking at the three dimensional image of the mail-room aboard the air liner.

	"I have cut out a lot of useless film, and confined the picture to essentials. We will now watch the pirate at work."

	Even as he spoke they saw the door of the mail-room open a bit, and then, to their intense surprise, it remained open for a few seconds, then closed. It went through all the motions of opening to admit someone, yet no one entered!"

	"Your demonstration doesn't seem to show much yet, son. In fact, it shows much less than I had expected," said the senior Arcot. "But that door seems to open easily. I thought they locked them!"

	"They did, but the Pirate just burned holes in it, so to save expense, they don't anymore."

-

	NOW the scene seemed to swing a bit as the plane hit an unusually bad air bump, and through the window they caught a glimpse of one of the circling Air Guardsmen. There suddenly appeared in the air a bit of flame. It hung in the air above the safe for an instant; described a strangely complicated set of curves; then, as it hung for an instant in mid-air, it became a great flare. In an instant it narrowed down to a little point of brilliant red flame. This described a complex series of curves and touched the safe at the top. In an inconceivably short time the eight-inch thickness of tungsto-iridium alloy was glowing incandescent and running around molten; a large flare of the red flame sprang out to surround the point of flame, and this blew the molten metal to one side, a shower of brilliant sparks. It was cutting the metal rapidly now, not burning it, but blowing it to one side, perfectly fluid.

	Soon the torch had cut a large circular piece of metal nearly free, and it would soon drop into the safe. Now the torch left the safe, again retracting itself in that uncanny manner, no force seeming either to supply it with fuel or to support it thus, yet it burned steadily, and worked rapidly and efficiently. No, in mid-air, it hung for a second.

	"I'm going to work the projector for a few moments by hand so that you may see this next bit of film." Arcot moved a small switch and the machine blinked, giving a strange appearance to the seemingly solid images that were thrown on the screen.

	The pictures seemed to show the flame slowly descending till it touched the metal again. Again the metal glowed, then, as suddenly as the extinguishing of a light, the safe was gone! It had disappeared into thin air! Only the incandescence of the metal and the flame were visible.

	"It seems the pirate has solved the secret of invisibility. No wonder the Air Guardsmen couldn't find him!" exclaimed Arcot, senior.

	The projector had been stopped exactly on the first frame, showing the invisibility of the safe. Then Arcot backed it up.

	"I think you are right, dad," he said, "but notice this next frame."

	Now there appeared a picture of the room again, the window beyond, the mail clerk asleep at his desk, everything as before, except that in the place of the safe, there was a shadowy, half visible safe, the metal glowing brightly, and beside it there was visible a shadowy man, holding the safe with a shadowy bar of some sort. And through both of them the frame of the window was perfectly visible, and, ironically, an Air Guardsman.

	"It seems that for an instant his invisibility failed here. Probably it was the contact with the safe that caused it. What do you think, dad?" asked Arcot, junior.

	"It does seem reasonable. I can't see off-hand how his invisibility is even theoretically possible. Have you any ideas?"

	"Well, dad, I have, but I want to wait till tomorrow night to demonstrate them. Let's adjourn this meeting, if you can all come tomorrow."

	The next evening, however, it seemed that it was Arcot himself who could not be there. He had asked Morey, junior, to tell them he would be there later, when he had finished in the lab.

	Dinner was over now, and the men were waiting rather impatiently for Arcot to come. They heard some noise in the corridor, and looked up, but no one came.

	"Morey," asked Fuller, "what did you learn about that gas the pirate was using? I remember Arcot said he would have some samples to analyze."

	"As to the gas, Dick found out but little more than we had already known. 
It is a typical organic compound, one of the metal radical type, and contains one atom of thorium. This is a bit radioactive, as you know, and Dick thinks that this may account in part for its ability to suspend animation. Thorium has a valence of four, as have many of the semi-organic metal radicals. It is thus able to replace carbon in some structures. However, since it was impossible to determine the molecular weight, he could not say what the gas was, save that the empirical formula was C62Th H30O27N5. You can see it is a very complex molecule. It broke down at a temperature of only 89° centigrade. The gases left consisted largely of methane, nitrogen, and methyl ether. Dick is still in the dark as to what the gas is. Look over there!"

	The men turned with one accord toward the opposite end of the room, looked, and seeing nothing particularly unusual, glanced back rather puzzled. What they then saw, or better, failed to see, puzzled them still more. There was no doubt Morey could not be seen.

	"Why—why where—ohhhh! Quick work, Dick!" The senior Arcot was laughing heartily, and as the astonished and curious pair looked toward him, he stopped and called out, "Come on, Dick! We want to see you now. And tell us how it is done! I rather think Mr. Morey here—I mean the visible one—is still a bit puzzled." There was a short laugh from the air—certainly there could be nothing else there—then a low but distinct click, and both Morey and Arcot were miraculously present, coming instantaneously from nowhere, if one's senses could be relied on. On Arcot's back there was strapped a large and rather hastily wired mechanism—one long wire running from it and out into the laboratory. He was carrying a second piece of apparatus, similarly wired. Morey was touching a short metal bar that Arcot held extended in his hand, using a table knife as a connector, lest they get radio frequency burns on making contact.

	"I have been very busy getting the last connection of this portable apparatus rigged up. I have the thing in working order, as you see—or rather, didn't see. This other outfit here is the thing that is more important to us. It is a bit heavy, so if you will clear a space, I will set it down. Look out for my power supply there—that wire is carrying a rather dangerously high E.M.F. I had to connect with the lab power supply to do this, as I had no time to rig up the beautiful little mechanism the pirate must have.

	"I have duplicated his experiment. He has simply made use of a principle known for some time, but as there was no need for it, they haven't used it. It was found back in the early days of radio, as early as the first quarter of the twentieth century, that very short wavelengths effected peculiar changes in metals. It was shown that the plates of tubes working on very short waves became nearly transparent. The waves were so short, however, that they were economically useless. They would not travel in usable paths, so they were never developed. Furthermore, the apparatus developed could not be made to handle them. In the last war they tried to apply the idea for making airplanes invisible, but they could not get their tubes to handle the power needed, so they had to drop it. However, with the tube I recently got out on the market, it is possible to get down there. I think our friend the pirate has developed this thing to a point where he could use it. You can see that invisibility, while interesting, and a good thing for a stage and vaudeville, is not very much of a commercial need. No one wants to be invisible in any honest occupation. Invisibility is a tremendous weapon in war, so the pirate just started a little private war, the only way he could make any money on his invention. No one wants it. People can't use an invisible plane—they would run too much risk of being crashed. If two of the blamed things were in the neighborhood, it could never be known when one might run into the other.

	"His gas, too, made the thing attractive. He had probably discovered that before."

-

	"THE whole thing looks to me to be the work of a madman. He is not violently insane; probably just has one particular obsession. His scientific bump certainly shows no sign of weakness. He might even be some new type of kleptomaniac. He steals things, and he has already stolen far more than any man could ever have any need of, and he leaves in its place a 'stock' certificate in His own company. He is not violent, for hasn't he carefully warned the men not to use the C-32L mask? 

	"And his careful instructions as to how to revive the people! He is insane in one branch only. But he has developed this machine for invisibility, and naturally he can fly in and out of the air guard, and they will never know he's there, provided their microphonic detectors don't locate him. But they have a mighty poor chance. I believe that he uses some form of glider. He cannot use an internal combustion engine, for the light of the explosions in the cylinders would be as visible as though the cylinders were made of clear fused quartz. He cannot have an electric motor, for the storage of his energy would be a weighty matter—the cells would necessarily weigh too much. Furthermore, if he were using any sort of prop, the noise of the air around it would give him away. If he used a glider, the noise of the great ship so near would be more than enough to kill the slight sounds. The glider could hang above the ship, then dive down upon it as it passed beneath. He has a very simple system of anchoring the thing, as I discovered to my sorrow. He has a powerful electro-magnet and just turns that on when he lands. The landing deck of the big plane was right above our office aboard, and I found my watch was doing all sorts of antics today. It lost an hour this morning, and this afternoon it gained two. I found out it was very highly magnetized—I could pick up needles with the balance wheel. I demagnetized it; now it runs all right. I noticed you do the same thing to yours later, Bill."

	"I had to. It took me twenty-five minutes to walk two blocks, according to my watch. The next two blocks I did in a minute and forty-five seconds."

	"But to get back, he anchors his ship, then, leaving it invisible, he goes to the air lock, and enters. He wears a high altitude suit, and on his back he has a portable invisibility set and the fuel for his torch. The gas has already put everyone to sleep, so he goes into the ship, still invisible, and melts open the safe.

	"His power supply for the invisibility machine seems to be somewhat of a problem, but I think I would use a cylinder of liquid air, and have a small air turbine to run a high voltage generator. He probably uses the same system on a larger scale to run his big machine on the ship. He can't use an engine for that either.

	"That torch of his is interesting, too. We have had atomic hydrogen welding for some time, and atomic hydrogen releases some 100,000 calories per mole of molecular hydrogen, two grams of gas give one hundred thousand calories. Oxygen has not been prepared in any commercial quantity in the atomic state. From watching that man's torch, from the color of the flame and other indications, I gather that he uses a flame of atomic oxygen-atomic hydrogen for melting, and surrounds it with a preheating jacket of atomic hydrogen. Since oxygen has two valences instead of one, its heat of formation is greater. The center flame probably develops a temperature of some 4000° centigrade, and will naturally make that tungsten alloy run like water. But there has never been any commercial way of storing atomic hydrogen; it has always required a big electrical power supply, and expensive apparatus. Since this fellow was able to use it as a portable welding and cutting tool he has a means of storing it. I rather believe he dissolves it in some substance. Remember the difficulties they had in storing acetylene? They could not store it in the liquid state as it would often explode. They finally solved the problem by dissolving it in acetone. I think that the pirate has found some liquid that will store his atomic hydrogen under slight pressure. That is the only way he could produce the results he has. Now, as to this machine here.

	"It is, as I said, a machine which impresses very high frequencies on the body it is connected with. This puts the molecules in vibration at a frequency approaching that of light, and when the light impinges upon it, it can pass through readily. You know that metals transmit light for short distances, but in order that the light pass, the molecules of metal must be set in harmonic vibration at a rate approaching the frequency of light. If we can impress such a vibration on a piece of matter it will then transmit light very freely. If we impress this vibration on the matter, say the body, electrically, we get the same effect, and the body becomes perfectly transparent. Now, since it is the vibration of the molecules that makes the light pass through the material, it must be stopped if we wish to see the machine. Obviously it is much easier to detect me here among solid surroundings, than in the plane high in the sky. What chance has one to detect a machine that is perfectly transparent when there is nothing but perfectly transparent air around it? It is a curious property of this vibrational system of invisibility that the index of refraction is made very low. It is not the same as that of air, but the difference is so slight that it is practically within the limits of observation error; so small is the difference that there is no 'rainbow' effect. The difference of temperature of the air would give equal effect.

	"Now, since this vibration is induced by radio impulse, is it not possible to impress another, opposing radio impulse, that will overcome this tendency and bring the invisible object into the field of the visible once more? It is; and this machine on the table is designed to do exactly that. It is practically a beam radio set, projecting a beam of wavelength .09 meter, a wavelength that alone would tend to produce invisibility, but in this case it will make me visible. I am going to stand right here, and Bill can operate that set."

	Arcot strode to the middle of the room, and then Morey turned the reflector of the beam set on him. There was a low snap as Arcot turned on his set, then he was gone, as suddenly as the coming of darkness when a lamp is extinguished. He was there one moment, then they were staring at the chair behind him, knowing that the man was standing between them and it, knowing that they were looking through his body. It gave one a strange feeling, an uncomfortable tingling along the spine. Then the voice—it seemed to come from the air, or some disembodied ghost as the invisible man called to Morey.

	"All right, Bill, turn her on slowly."

-

	THERE was another snap as the switch of the disrupter beam was turned on. At once there was a noticeable fogginess in the air where Arcot had been. As more and more power was turned into the machine, they saw the man materialize out of thin air. First he was a mere shadowy outline that was never fully above the level of conscious vision. Then slowly the outlines of the objects behind became dimmer and dimmer, as the body of the man was slowly darkened, till at last there was only a wavering aura about him. With a snap Morey shut off his machine and Arcot was gone again. A second snap and he was solid before them. He had shut off his apparatus loo.

	"You can see now how we intend to locate our invisible pirate. Of course we will depend on directional radio disturbance locating devices to determine the direction for the invisibility disrupter ray. But you are probably marvelling at the greatness of the genius who can design and construct this apparatus all in one day. I will explain the miracle—I have been working on short wave phenomenon for some time. In fact, I had actually made an invisibility machine, as Morey will testify, but I realized that it had no commercial benefits, so I did not experiment with it beyond the laboratory stunt stage. I am still working on a somewhat different piece of apparatus that I believe we will find very relevant to this business. I will ask you to adjourn after tonight's meeting for another twenty-four hours till I can finish the apparatus I am working on. It is very important that you be here, Fuller. I am going to need you in the work to follow. It will be another problem in design if this works out, as I hope it will."

	"I'll certainly make every effort to be here, Arcot," Fuller assured him. "I can promise you a tough problem as well as an interesting one. If the thing works, as I expect it to, you will have a job that will certainly be a feather for your cap. Also it will be a change."

	"Well, with that inducement, spoken by you, I will certainly be here. But I think that pirate could give us some hints on design. How does he get his glider ten miles up? They have done some gliding already. The distance record took someone across the Atlantic in 2009, didn't it? I know they have about stopped, but it does seem that ten miles straight up is a bit too steep for a glider. There are no vertical air currents at that height."

	"I meant to say that his machine is not a true glider, but a semi-glider. He probably goes up ten miles or more with the aid of a small engine, one so small it takes him all morning to get there probably. It is very seldom anyone goes that high. Of course, there are some who are trying the ceiling of their new machines, but they are mighty few—it is too long drawn out a procedure. It wouldn't pay for the big Transcontinental planes to go that high, just the sheer power and work done getting there would be prohibitive if they couldn't use it all on the last part of the flight by gliding. You know that better than I do. And it would be easy for a plane to pass through the lower traffic lanes, then, being invisible, mount high and wait for the air liner. He can't use a very large engine, for it would drag him down, but a hundred horsepower or so would weigh only about 50 pounds if one of the new tungsto-iridium blade turbine engines is used. I think we can draw a pretty good picture of his plane from scientific logic. It probably has a tremendous wingspread and a very high angle of incidence to make, it possible to glide at that height, and the engine and prop will be almost laughably small."

	The next evening the meeting was resumed, and there was considerable questioning as to the nature of the discovery that Arcot was going to announce, for even his father did not know. The two men worked in separate laboratories, except when either had a particularly difficult problem that might be solved by the other. All knew that the new development lay in the field of short wave research of some sort, but they could not find out in what way it concerned the problem in hand.

	At last the meal was over, and Arcot was ready to demonstrate.

	"Dad, I believe that you have been trying to develop a successful solar engine. One that could be placed in the wings of a plane to generate power from the light falling on that surface. In all solar engines, what is the greatest problem to be solved?"

	"Well, the more I investigate the thing, the more I wonder which is the greatest. There are a surprising number of annoying problems to be met. I should say, though, that the one big trouble with all solar engines, eliminating the obvious restriction that they decidedly aren't dependable for night work, is the difficulty of getting an area to absorb the energy. If I could get enough area, I could use a very low efficiency and still have cheap power, for the power is absolutely free. The area problem is the greatest difficulty, no doubt."

	"Well, I think you have a fairly good area to use, if you can only harness the energy it absorbs. I have really developed a very efficient solar engine. The engine itself requires no absorbing area, as I want to use it; it takes advantage of the fact that the earth is absorbing quintillions of horse-power. I have merely tapped the power that the earth has already absorbed for me. Come here."

	He led the way down the corridor to his laboratory, and switched on the lights. On the main laboratory bench was set up a complicated apparatus of many tubes and heavy bus bar connecters. From the final tube two thin wires ran to a long tubular coil. To the left of this coil was a large relay switch, and a rheostat control.

	"Turn on the relay, dad, then slowly rotate the controller to the left. And remember that it is rather powerful. I know this doesn't look like a solar engine, and nine o'clock at night seems a peculiar hour to demonstrate such a thing, but I will guarantee you results—and probably more than you expect."

	Dr. Arcot stepped up to the controls and closed the switch. The lights dimmed a bit, but immediately brightened again, and from the other end of the room came a low, steady hum as the big transformer took up the load.

	"Well, from the sound of that ten K.W. transformer there, if this engine is very efficient we ought to get a terrific amount of power out of it." Dr. Arcot was smiling amusedly at his son. "I can't very well control this except by standing directly in front of it, but I suppose you know what you're doing."

	"Oh, this is a laboratory model, and I haven't gotten the thing into shape really. Look at the conductors that lead to the coil; they certainly aren't carrying ten K.W."

-

	DR. ARCOT slowly rotated the rheostat. There was a slight hum from the coil; then it was gone. There seemed to be no result. He rotated it a bit more; there was a slight draught in the room apparently, but he could see no startling results, so he rotated the rheostat considerably more. This time there was absolutely no doubt as to the results. There was a roar like a fifty-foot wind tunnel, and a mighty blast of cold air swept out of that coil like a six-inch model of a Kansas cyclone. Every loose piece of paper in the laboratory was driving madly before the blast of air that had suddenly leapt out. Dr. Arcot was forced back as by a giant hand, but in reeling back his hand was lifted from the relay switch, and with a thud it had opened the circuit. In an instant all the noise was gone, and only a slight drifting of the air in the room told of the blast that had stirred it up so.

	The astonished physicist came forward and looked at it a moment in silence, while each of the other men watched him. Finally he turned to his son, who was smiling at him with a bit of a twinkle in his eye.

	"Dick, I think you have 'loaded the dice' in a way that is even more lucrative than any other method ever invented! If the principle of this machine is what I think it is, you have certainly solved the secret of a sufficiently absorbing area for a solar engine."

	"Well," remarked the elder Morey, shivering a bit in the chill air of the room, "loaded dice have long been noted for their ability to make money; but I don't see how that explains that working model of an Arctic tornado. Brrr—it is still too cold in here. I think he will need considerable area for heat absorption from the sun, for that engine certainly does cool things down! What is the secret?"

	"The principle is easy enough, but I had considerable difficulty with the application. I think it is going to be rather important though—"

	"Rather important," broke in the inventor's father. "I should think it will be considerably more than that! It is the biggest thing since the electric dynamo! It puts airplanes in the junk heap! It means a new era in power generation. It makes it certain that we will never have to worry about power! It will make interplanetary travel not only possible, but commercially economical."

	"Dad seems to think it is a marvelous machine! But, seriously, I believe it will antiquate all types of airplanes. It is a direct utilization of the energy that the sun is kindly supplying. For a good many years now men have been trying to find out how to release the energy of atoms, or more powerful yet, the energy of constitution of matter. It always reminded me of experimenting with fire on a pile of gunpowder. Of course you could stand there holding the match quite safely, but if someone burned his fingers and dropped the match—

	"But why do it at all? The sun is doing it already, and on a scale so gargantuan that we could never hope nor desire to approach it. Three million tons of matter go into that colossal furnace every second of time, and out of that comes two and a half decillion ergs of energy* (*2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 2.5 decilion.). With a total of two and a half million billion billion billions of ergs to draw on, man will have nothing to worry about for a good many years to come! That represents a flood of power vaster than man could comprehend. It would fuse the earth so quickly, you wouldn't have a chance to worry about the hot weather! Why try to release any more energy? We have all that to use; we may as well tap that vast ocean of power.

	"We have been doing that to an extent. Plants have done it for countless ages and more recently man has imitated by absorbing the power from the ocean's heat. But I would hate to estimate their efficiency. The solar engines developed so far are more efficient, of course; they run as high as thirty per cent, but as Dad says, they are tremendously bulky, only dirigibles can use them, and then they are effective only during the day. Dad has told you we need a larger heat absorbing area, and also, if it is going to work during the night, we must have some means of storing the heat energy to use after Sunset Now I think the earth would make a very nice storage basin; it certainly has a very comfortable area. And furthermore, it has a nice thick blanket of air and water that hold a tremendous amount of heat for night use. But it has always been a little hard to use that energy as we wish, though it is all there—more than we can use. But just try and get that energy out! Just think of the terrific amount of power there is stored in the millions of tons of water on the earth. There is only one thing that prevents us getting it out, the law of probability. That's why Dad mentioned loaded dice, for dice, as you know, are the classical example of probability when they aren't loaded. Once they are loaded, the law still holds, but the conditions are now so changed that it will make the problem quite different. Still the law holds. I'll admit that dice always seem to show the wrong face, but with a very great number of trials each face will show an equal number of times. The more trials you make, the more nearly does this approach to exactitude. Similarly there are many other illustrations of the law of probability. If you take an infinite number of chances, it always works out, but if you take any finite number of chances, it won't.

	"The ideal case of an infinite number of chances is very nearly approached in one instance.

	"Molecules in matter which has any heat at all, are moving rapidly, colliding, rebounding, and moving off. There are immense numbers of molecules in the tiniest grain of dust your eye. can see. When you consider the conditions in a liter of helium gas in a container, you can consider that there are an infinite number of molecules in it, to all practical purposes. In it, then, there is an equal chance for any molecule to go in any one direction, and the chances are that there is an equal number of molecules going in each direction. Thus we have our helium gas composed of a tremendous number of molecules, each dashing along at several miles a second, and an equal number dashing in the opposite direction at an equal speed. They are so thickly packed iu there, that none of them can go very far before it runs into another molecule and bounces off in a new direction. But there is a chance that all the molecules should happen to move in the. same direction at the same time. How good is this chance? One of the. old physicists of Einstein's time, a man named Eddington, expressed it very well when he said:

-
	'If an army of monkeys were playing on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favorable than the chance that all the molecules in a liter of gas should move in the same direction at the same time.'
-

The very improbability of this chance is the thing that is making our problem appear impossible.

	"But similarly it would be improbable—impossible according to the law of chance—to throw a string of aces indefinitely, or that one should deal a deck of cards and always deal thirteen of a kind in each hand. It is impossible—unless some other force influences the happening. I f the dice have bits of iridium stuck under the six spots, they will throw aces. If the cards are stacked, they will always deal thirteen of a kind. Chance makes it impossible to have all the molecules of gas move in the same direction at the same tune—unless we stack the chances. If we can find some way to influence them, they may do so.

	"What would happen to a metal bar if all the molecules in it decided to move in the same direction at the same time? Their heat motion is normally carrying them about at a rate of several miles a second, and if now we have them all go one way, the entire bar must move in that direction, and it will start off at a velocity as great as the velocity of the individual molecules. But now, if we attach the bar to a heavy car, it will try to start off, but will be forced to drag the car with it. and so will not be able to have its molecules moving at the same rate. They will be slowed down in starting the mass of the car. But slow molecules have a definite physical significance, molecules move because of temperature, and lack of motion means lack of heat. These molecules that have been slowed down are then cold; they will absorb heat from the air about them, and since the molecule of hydrogen gas at room temperature is moving at about seven miles a second, when the molecules of the confined gas in our car, or the molecules of the metal bar are slowed down to but a few hundred miles an hour, their temperature drops to some hundreds of degrees below zero, and they absorb energy very rapidly, for the greater the difference in temperature, the greater the rate of heat absorption. Of course, in running our machine we must exercise caution, for the bar will try to start off at the full speed instantly, and fastened or not, that is the speed it will go unless its power is applied gradually.

	"In practice I think it will be best to use helium in a copper container, since helium has a very low freezing point, and having a very light molecule, it goes at very high speeds when at room temperature. The copper will carry the heat to it better than any other metal, and that will permit the use of absorbing fins.

	"We will be able to accelerate the car very rapidly to a speed of several miles a second at very high altitudes no doubt, and as we will be able to use a perfectly enclosed streamlined car, we will be able to get tremendous speeds. We will need no wings, of course, for by just putting a small unit pointed vertically, we will be able to support the car in the air. It will make possible a machine that will be able to fly in reverse and so come to a quick stop. It will steer us or it will supply us with electrical power, for we merely have to put a series of small metal bars about the circumference of the generator, and get a tremendously powerful engine. For ground cars, where speeds of over one hundred and fifty miles an hour are impractical, we will use a metal bar, as that is so much more directable, and less subject to gas leaks and failures, though there will be little chance of either in a welded inch-thick copper power unit.

	"But for our present need, it means a tremendously powerful engine, that we can make invisible.

	"I believe you can guess the source of that breeze we had there? It would make a great device for cooling and ventilating theaters and apartments!"

	"Bill Arcot," began Morey, "I would like to be able to use that invention. I know enough of the economics of the thing, if not enough of the science, to know that the apparatus before us is absolutely invaluable. I could not offer to buy the rights on it, but I want to use it if you will let me. It means a new thing in transcontinental airliners! Fuller, I want you to help Arcot with his problem for the ship to chase the Pirate. I will give you the contract to design the new airliners. It will cost us billions to get those new machines out, but there will be no fuel bills, no oil bills, and the cost of operation will be negligible. Nothing but the Arcot short wave tubes to buy—and each one is good for twenty-five thousand hours service!"

	"You will get the rights on this if you want them naturally," said Arcot. "You are maintaining these laboratories for me, and your son here helped me work it out. But if Fuller can move over here tomorrow, it will help things a lot. Also I would like to have some of your best special mechanics to make the necessary machines, and to start the power units."

	"Bill," replied Morey, "you know that these labs are yours, and anything developed in them is yours, and that Dick is officially one of your employees. I will have the men here tomorrow. Do you want to keep this invention secret?"

	"Why I only did some mathematics. But I do think it would be best to keep it a secret, because if the Pirate hears about it, he may get cautious and quit his work," Dick pointed out.

	"I hadn't particularly intended to keep it a secret, but I guess you are right, Dick."

-

	EARLY the next morning Fuller moved his materials over to the laboratory, and set up his table for work. Then, with the aid of Arcot and Morey, the design of the new machine was begun.

	"First, let's get some idea of the most advisable shape," Fuller said. "We will want a streamlined shape; roughly speaking, a cylindrical shape modified to fit the special uses to which it will be put. You no doubt have more of the general plan in mind, Arcot. Suppose you sketch it for us."

	"Well, I thought it would be best to design it also as an experimental ship. We don't know much about this yet, and we have to work it out. You will have plenty of fun figuring out strains in this machine, so let's be safe and use a factor of safety of 5. That will also give us a heavier machine to do the testing with."

	"In the first place, it must be proof against the Pirate's gas, for we won't be following the regular lanes with instruments to guide us safely, if we go out. I have thought that over, and I think that the best system is just what we used in the sample bottles—a vacuum. His gas is stopped by nothing, so to speak, but there is no substance that will stop it! It will no doubt penetrate the outer shell, but on reaching the vacuum, it will tend to stay there, between the inner and outer walls. Here it will tend to collect, since it will be fighting air pressure in its attempts to go either in or out. The pressure inside will force it back, and the pressure outside will force it in. If we did not pump it out, it would soon build up pressure enough to penetrate the interior wall. Now, since the stuff can leak through any material, what kind of a pump shall we use? It won't be pushed by a piston, for it will leak through either the cylinder walls or the piston. A centrifugal pump would be equally ineffective. The obvious solution is a mercury vapor pump, which will, of course, take it out, and keep a high vacuum, the difficulty thing that that kind of a pump has too low a volume of rating. We never would make any progress. The thing would be impossible but for our new machine. With it we can just have a number of openings in the wall of the outer shell and set in them, one of these molecular motion directors, and direct the molecules out! They can't come in through it, and they will tend to go out. That will protect us from the Pirate's gas.

	"But now comes another difficulty. If we protect ourselves against the Pirate's gas by a vacuum, we must remember that our vacuum is an equally good protection against heat! Since our generator is intended to run on heat energy, it will be rather chilly inside if we don't remedy that. Of course, our power units will he placed outside, where the blast of air will warm them, but we really won't have a very good streamline effect if we hang a big electric generator outside. The solution is obvious—if we can't bring the generator to the air, we must bring the air to it. We will have all the power equipment in this room here in the back, and the control room up in front, here. The relays for controlling will be back here, so we can control electrically the operation of the power equipment from our warm, gas-tight room. If it gets too warm in there, we can cool it by using a little of the heat to help accelerate the ship. If it is too cold, we can turn on an electric heater run by the generator. The air for the generator can come in through a small sort of scoop on top, and leave through a small opening in the rear. The vacuum at the tail will assure us a very rapid circulation, even if the centrifugal pump action of the enclosed generator isn't enough.

	"For experimental purposes we will want the generator to be greatly over power so that we can make tests over a greater range. I don't believe we will need more than one hundred kilowatts altogether, but we should install about a thousand, for convenience—A.C., of course, so we can send it through transformers. We will need batteries in the keel for starting the generator. Once the speed is high enough, it will be self-supporting, but it can have a small auxiliary D.C. machine to recharge the batteries and to run the relays. About ten kilowatts will do there.

	"But let's begin making actual figures on this."

	For the rest of the day the three men were working on the general plan of the new ship, trying to calculate the strengths needed, supplementing mathematics with actual experiments with the machines on hand. It was decided to put the batteries inside the main control room, lest they freeze at extreme altitudes.

	It would be two days before they had finished. The calculating machines were busy continuously, for here there were few rules that experience could give them. They were developing something entirely new, and though they had as a designing staff three of the foremost mathematicians in the world it was a problem that tested them to the utmost

	By the evening of the first day, however, they had been able to give the finished designs for the power units to the mechanics who were to make them. The order for the storage battery and the standard electrical equipment had been placed at once. By the time they had completed the drawings for the main castings, the materials were already being assembled in a little private camp that Morey owned, up in the hills of Vermont. The giant freight helicopters could land readily in the wide field that had been cleared on the small plateau, in the center of which nestled a little blue lake and a winding trout brook.

	The mechanics and electrical engineers had been sent up there already—officially on vacation. The entire program could be carried out without attracting the least attention, for such orders from the great Transcontinental lines were so frequent that no importance was attached to them.

	Four days after the final plans had been completed the last of the supplies were being assembled in the portable metal shed that was to house the completed machine. The shining tungsto-steel alloy frame members were rapidly being welded in place by the cathode ray welding torches in the hands of skilled artisans.

	Already at the other end of the shop the generator had been arranged for use with the molecular motion power units. The many power units to drive and support the ship were finished and waiting installment as the party quit work on that fourth evening. They would be installed on the frame in the morning, and the generator would be hoisted into place with the small portable crane. The storage batteries were connected up, and in place in the hull. The great fused quartz windows were resting in their cases on one side of the room, waiting the complete application of the steel alloy plates. They were to be over an inch thick, an unnecessary thickness, perhaps, but they had no need to economize weight, as witnessed by their choice of steel instead of light metal alloys throughout the construction.

	The three men had arrived late that afternoon in a small helicopter, and had gone directly to the shops to see what progress had been made. They had been forced to remain in New York to superintend the shipment of the necessary supplies to the camp site, and since no trouble was anticipated in the making of the steel framework, they had not felt it necessary to come. But now they would be able to help, and to superintend the more delicate work.

	"She is shaping up nicely, isn't she!" Arcot was gazing at the rapidly rounding frame with a critical eye. Unhindered as they were by the traditional shapes, by wings or other protuberances, they had been able to design a machine of striking beauty. The ship was to be left in the natural shiny metal, the only protection being a coat of the newly discovered "passivity paint"—a liquid chemical that could be brushed or sprayed on iron, chromium, nickel or cobalt alloys rendering them passive to practically all chemical agents. Iron can be rendered "passive" by treating in very concentrated nitric acid, the result being a piece of iron that is unattacked by nitric acid, sulphuric, or even aqua regia, which will dissolve gold and platinum, and to a certain extent, iridium. This new "paint" produced a much more permanent passivity in iron, leaving the iron or steel as shiny as ever, but overcast with a beautiful iridescence, and immune to the most powerful reagents.

-

	THE three men walked around the rapidly growing hull, and looked with excited interest at the heavy welded joints and the great beams. The ship seemed capable of withstanding a fall of several hundred feet with little damage. The location of the power units was plainly visible, and easily recognized, for at each point there came together four or five great beams, welded into one great mass of tough metal, and in it there were set the heavy tungsten bolts that would hold the units in place. Stronger than steel, tungsten had a great advantage here, for its long fibrous structure made it peculiarly resistant to shearing strains.

	They inspected each joint minutely for signs of flaws, using a small portable X-ray fluoroscope to see the interior of the metal. Each joint seemed perfect. They retired, satisfied everything was ready for the work of the next day.

	The morning began early with a long swim in the lake, and a hearty breakfast of country farm produce, a thing rare to these city-bred men. Then the work on the great framework was continued, and that day saw the power units bolted in place, removable if change was thought advisable. Each power unit was equipped with long streamlined copper fins lying close to the rounded hull, that they might absorb heat more rapidly.

	Day by day the structure neared completion, and, with the large crew of specially skilled workers, the machine was practically complete within a week. Only the instruments remained to be installed. Then at last even these had been put in place, and with the aid of Fuller, Morey, junior, and Ids own father, Arcot had connected their many complicated circuits.

	"Son," remarked Arcot's father, looking critically at the great switchboard, with its maze of connections, its many rheostats and controls, and its heavy busbar connectors behind it, "any man who can keep his eye on those instruments must be a close relative of the insects with their many-faceted eyes. I certainly hope you have a good-sized crew to operate all those controls! We have spent two days of hard work getting all those circuits together, and I'll admit that some of them still have me beat. I don't see how you intend to watch all those instruments, and at the same time have any idea what's going on outside."

	"Oh," laughed Arcot, junior, "these aren't intended for constant watching. They are merely to aid in efficiency tests and tests of different kinds. I will set the controls for ordinary work, but first I will have to experiment to determine at what values they will work best. I want to experiment with this machine so I can determine the necessary powers and the lowest factor of safety to use in building other machines. I want to use this as a flying laboratory for the necessary experiments. The machine is very nearly completed now. All we need is the seats—they are to be special air-inflated gyroscopically controlled seats, to make it impossible for a sudden twist of the ship to put the strain in the wrong direction. Of course the main gyroscopes will balance the ship laterally, horizontally and vertically, but each chair will have a separate gyroscopic mounting for safety. I want you to remember that this is an experimental model, and not the finished ship. No machine, in all the history of invention, was truly perfected by any one man. I have had the thoughts of four men helping me on this, and the practical suggestions of experienced mechanics, the ideas of old workers, and I believe that the machine will function perfectly, but I want to be able to watch the working of every smallest piece of the structure.

	"I will practice the manipulation of the machine for at least four days before I try to chase the Pirate. I would ordinarily recommend the greatest haste, but the man has stolen close to ten millions now, and is still at it. That would not be done by anyone in his right mind. Just think, the War Department thought that gas so important that they have obtained a pardon for him on condition they he permitted to have the secret of it. They demand the return of the money, and I have no doubt he has it. I am firmly convinced that he is a kleptomaniac. I doubt greatly if he will stop taking money before he is caught. Therefore it will be safe to wait until we can be sure of our ability to operate the machine smoothly. To start out without practice when we are operating such a tremendously powerful airship would be suicidal. Also, I am having some of those tool-makers make up a special type of molecular motion machine for use as a machine gun. The bullets are steel, about three inches long, and as thick as my thumb. They will be perfectly streamlined, except for a little stabilizer at the tail, to act as a guider. They will not spin as a rifle bullet does, and so there will be no gyroscopic effect to hold them nose on, but the streamlining and the stabilizer will keep them on their course. I expect them to be able to walk right through many inches of armor plate, since they will have a velocity of over four miles a second.

	"They will be fed in at the rate of about two hundred a minute—faster if I wish, and started by a small spring. They will instantly come into the field of a powerful molecular motion-director, and will at once be shot out with terrific speed. It will be the first rifle ever made that could shoot bullets absolutely parallel to the ground. The bullets would go on forever without hitting the earth if I shot them when up above the air, for they will follow an orbit! At five miles a second, a thing is in equilibrium between centrifugal force tending to throw it away from the earth, and gravity tending to pull it down, as you know. It will be accurate at all ranges, allowing for wind-carriage only.

	"But that is all we can do today. The guns will be mounted outside, and controlled electrically, and the charts will be installed tomorrow. By the day after tomorrow at eight A. M. we ought to take off!"

	Later that evening they strolled down for a last swim, for strong moonlight was flooding the Vermont countryside.

	As they returned from the swim, Morey noticed that Arcot was standing off to one side looking up at the moon.

	"Thinking of visiting the moon, Dick? I wonder if you could?"

	"I don't know, Bill—but—it isn't impossible now!"

	The work the next day was rushed to completion far earlier than Arcot had dared to hope. All the men had been kept isolated at the farm, lest they accidentally spread the news of the new machine. It was with excited interest that they helped the machine to completion. The guns had not been mounted as yet, but that could wait. Three-thirty of the afternoon found the machine resting in the great construction shed, completely equipped and ready to fly!

	"Dick," said Morey as he strode up to him after testing the last of the gyroscopic seats, "she's ready to fly! I certainly want to get her going—it is only three-thirty, and we can go around to the sunlight part of the world when it gets dark at the speeds we can travel. Let's test her out now!"

	"I have sent for a U. S. Air Inspector. As soon as he comes we can start. I will have to put an 'X' license indication on her now. He will go with us to test it. There will be room for three other people aboard, and I think that you and Dad and I will be the logical passengers. Look, there is a Government helicopter coming. I guess we will start soon. Tell the men to get the blocks out from under it and tow it out on the rollers. Get it at least ten feet beyond the end of the hangar. We will start it straight up, and climb up to at least five miles, where we will have room to make mistakes safely. When we learn to operate this thing, we want to remember that the machine is infinitely more powerful than anything cither of us ever laid our hands on before. While you are tending to that, I will see if I can induce the Air Inspector to take a trip with us."

	Half an hour later the machine had been rolled entirely out of the shed. The great rollers sank deep into the soft turf of the soil as the two-hundred-ton burden pressed down on them.

-

	THE great machine was a thing of beauty as it rested in the bright sunlight. For the first time the machine was out of the dimness of the construction shed, and its true features and lines were apparent. The four men who were to ride in it on its maiden voyage were off to one side looking at the great-gleaming metal hull. The long sweeping lines of the sides told a story of perfect streamline, and implied high speed, even when it rested thus inert on the ground. The bright, slightly iridescent steel hull shone in silvery contrast to the gleaming copper of the power units' heat-absorption fins. The great clear windows in the nose and the low, streamlined air intake for the generator seemed only to accentuate the lines of the graceful machine.

	"Lord, she's beautiful, isn't she, Dick!" exclaimed Morey, looking at the glistening hull.

	"Well, she did shape up nicely on paper, too, didn't she. Oh, Fuller, come and look at your masterpiece. It is even better looking than we thought, now the copper has added color to it. Doesn't she look fast? I wish we didn't need physicists so badly on this trip, so you could go on the first ride with us."

	"Oh, that's all right, Dick, I know the number of instruments in there, and I realize they will mean a lot of work this trip. I wish you all luck. The honor of having designed the first ship like that, the first heavier than air ship that ever flew without wings or helicopter propellers—that is something to remember. And I think it is one of the most beautiful that ever flew, too."

	"Well, Dick," said his father, "let's get under way. I am anxious for the test."

	The four men entered the ship and were strapped in the gyroscopic seats. One by one they reported ready.

	"Officer, I want to explain that these seats may seem to be a bit more active than one generally expects a seat to be, but in this experimental machine, I have provided all the safety devices I could think of. The ship itself won't fail, of that I am sure, but the power is so great it might well prove fatal to us if we are not in a position to resist the forces. You know all too well the effect of sharp turns at high speed and the results of the centrifugal force. This machine can develop such tremendous power that I have to make provision for it. You notice that my controls and the instruments are mounted on the arm of the chair really; that permits me to maintain complete control of the ship at all times, and still permits my chair to remain perpendicular to the forces. The gyroscopes in the base here cause the entire chair to remain stable if the ship rolls, but the chair can continue to revolve about this bearing here so that we will not be forced out of our seats. We will always be 'sitting up' and never lying down or leaning back, as we would seem to be, if the chairs did not vary in position with the forces. The air inflation makes them more comfortable. I sincerely hope you will find the machine safe enough for a license. I know the necessary maneuvers required by law, but I am not used to handling this ship, and I will have to take it straight up first. There is no one in the vicinity to be hurt by any accidents, so with your permission, I will start."

	"All right, Dr. Arcot. If you and your father are willing to try it, I am," replied the Air Inspector.

	"Ready, Engineer"?" asked Arcot.

	"Ready, Pilot!" replied Morey.

	''All right—just keep your eye on the meters, Dad, as I turn on the system. If the instruments back there don't take care of everything, and you see one flash over the red mark—yank open the main circuit. I'll call out what to watch as I turn them on."

	"I am ready, Son."

	"Main gyroscopes!" There was a low snap, a eliciting of relays in the roar compartment, and then a low hum that quickly ran up the scale. "Main generators!" Again the clicking switch, and the relays thudding into action, again the rising hum. "Seat-gyroscopes." The low click was succeeded by a quick scream that died in inaudibly high frequency as the separate seat-gyroscopes took up their work. "Main power tube bank!" The low hum of the generator behind changed to a momentary roar as the relays threw the load on. In a moment the automatic controls had brought it up to speed.

	"Everything is working perfectly so far. Are we ready to start now, Son?"

	"Main vertical power units!" The great ship trembled throughout its length as the lift of the power units began to pull on it. A special instrument had been rigged temporarily on the floor beside Arcot, that he might be able to judge the lift of his power units; it registered the apparent weight of the ship. It had read two hundred. Now all eyes were fixed on it, as the pointer dropped quickly to 150—100—75—50—40—20—10—there was a click and the instrument flipped back to 300—it was registering in pounds now! Then the needle was at zero, and the mighty structure floated into the air, slowly moving down the field as a breeze carried it along the ground. Now the men outside saw it rise swiftly into the sky, straight toward the blue vault of heaven. In two or three minutes it was disappearing. The glistening ship shrank to a tiny point of light; then it was gone! It must have been rising at fully three hundred miles an hour! The fastest racing helicopters seldom rose faster than that! The record was three hundred and thirty-two miles an hour!

	To the men in the car there had been a tremendous increase in weight that had forced them into the air cushions like leaden masses. Then the ground was dropping away with a speed that made them look in amazement. The house, the construction shed, the lake, all seemed contracting beneath them. So quickly were they rising that they had not had time to adjust their mental attitude. To them all the world seemed shrinking about them. Now they were at a tremendous height, over twenty miles they had risen into the atmosphere; the air about them was so thin that the sky-seemed black, the stars glazed out in cold, unwinking glory, while the great fires of the sun seemed reaching out into space like mighty arms reaching—reaching to draw back to the parent body the masses of the wheeling planets. About it, in far flung streamers of cold fire the mighty zodiacal light stretched out into space, an Aurora on a titanic scale. For a moment they hung there, while they made readings of the meters.

	"I never began to let out the power of this thing. When these are made commercially, we will have to use about one horsepower generators in them, or people will try to see how fast it will go and will die of the terrific acceleration and leave the car, like some vast bullet, streaking on through the sky at ever greater speeds, till at last it throws itself off into space. This would make it a menace as well as a blessing. I will have to be careful myself!"

-

	FOR several minutes the machine was tried out at this height, testing various settings of the instruments. It was definitely proven that the values that Arcot and Morey had assigned from purely theoretical calculations were correct to within one-tenth of one per cent. The power absorbed by the machine they knew and had calculated, but the terrific power of the driving units was far beyond their expectations. They had estimated the power of the machine as great, but even they had been unable to calculate the power released.

	"Well, now we're off for some horizontal maneuvers. I believe I have satisfactorily demonstrated the machine's ability to hold itself in the air, to climb at a safe rate to a considerable altitude. The air pressure controls seem to be working perfectly. I am now going to give the necessary proof of ability to maintain traffic speed—I believe they now require over two hundred miles an hour. I will accelerate it at the greatest safe value."

	Suddenly the seats swung beneath them a bit; then, as the ship shot forward with ever greater speed, ever greater acceleration, it seemed that it turned and headed upward, although they knew that the main stabilizing gyroscopes were holding it level. The seats swung beneath them as the acceleration became greater and greater. In a moment the ship was headed out over the Atlantic at a speed no rifle bullet had ever known. Faster and faster the plane streaked along, until it became an almost invisible blur. The radio speedometer needle pushed farther and farther over as the speed increased to unheard of values. Before they left the North American shoreline they were going over one mile a second. The speed increased terrifically, as the men labored under weights of seven to eight hundred pounds apiece. They were over the middle of the Atlantic before Arcot gradually shut off the acceleration, letting the seats drop back into position. Once more they were able to judge up and down with some definite standard.

	They had been able to watch the sun sink rapidly toward the horizon. It was night on the water rolling far beneath, but the sun's rays still reached them where they were.

	"What speed did we reach, Dr. Arcot—look—there is the coast of Europe. Watch it come toward us. How fast are we going?" asked the Air Inspector.

	"The air resistance is slowing us down. We were traveling at the rate of three miles a second before I decreased the acceleration. Now it has fallen to two and a half!" Dr. Arcot answered.

	"That decidedly checks off the speed requirement. But how do you measure such terrific speed? You have no means of using the air blast at that rate. What is the system?"

	"I had to develop one—but it is only accurate to about one part in a hundred now. That's near enough for our work. For ordinary speeds we use the automatically barometrically corrected airspeedometer, but this piece of apparatus depends on the use of radio. You do not change the speed of light no matter how fast the source is moving, but for that reason, if the source is moving toward you, the waves get packed in closer together than they would ordinarily. The same is true of a radio wave. I send out a radio wave from a very small set in the nose of the ship, and pick it up by a set in the rear of the ship. By means of the usual velocity measuring apparatus I find the velocity of the wave as picked up by the set in the rear. That is electrically registered here, but instead of registering it as 186,285 miles per second, with the appropriate number of tenths and hundredths of a mile per second, it subtracts the discovered value from the correct value, the difference being, our speed. I hope to get it more accurate in the future, but it is the only serviceable means at hand now.

	"I'm going to try to see what the ultimate ceiling of this machine is. Remember, it must have a ceiling, since it depends on the operation of the generator to operate the power units. This, in turn, depends on the heat of air. Of course the main power units, being outside in the sun's rays, are warmed to an extent by them. I don't know how high it will work."

	The ship was put into a vertical climb, and steadily the great machine rose, at a low rate lest they overshoot the mark, and have the wrong result. Soon, however, the great generator behind began to slow down, the automatic controls could not bring it up to a sufficient speed. The readings of the instruments were dropping rapidly. The temperature of the exceedingly tenuous air outside was so close to absolute zero that it was nearly impossible to get sufficient energy from it.

	"Get up some forward speed so that you will have the aid of the air scoop to force the air in faster."

	"Right, Morey." Arcot slowly applied the power to the forward propulsion units. Slowly they took hold, and the ship began to move forward again. The increase was apparent at once. The machine quickly gained power and she was rising again. But at last, at a height of fifty-one miles, the ship would rise no farther. The cold of the cabin became unbearable, for every kilowatt of power that the generator could get from the air outside was needed to run the power units. The air, too, was getting bad, for the pumps could not supply enough, and the oxygen tanks had not been carried on this trip. Now they were dropping, dropping, the machine was held stable by the gyroscopes, but she was dropping freely, the power of the generator being used to warm the cabin once more. But the machine had fifty miles to fall, and as the air resistance of the denser air mounted, they could begin to feel the weight return as the air slowed them down in their fall.

	"You've passed, but for the maneuvers, sir! The required altitude was passed so long ago—why we are still some miles above it, I guess! How fast are we falling?" The Air Inspector was decidedly impressed.

	"I can't tell unless I point the nose of the ship down, for the apparatus works only in the direction in which the ship is pointed. Hold on, everyone, I am going to start using some power to stop us."

	It was night when they returned to the little field in Vermont. They had established a new record in every form of aeronautical achievement except endurance! The altitude record, the speed record, the speed of climb, the acceleration record—all that Arcot could think of had been passed. Now the ship was coming to dock for the night. In the morning it would be out again. But now Arcot was sufficiently expert with the controls to maneuver the ship safely into the hangar. They finally solved the wind difficulty by decreasing the weight of the ship to about fifty pounds, so enabling the three men to carry it into the hangar!

-

	THE next two days were devoted to careful tests of the power factors of the machine, the best operating frequency, the most efficient altitude of operation, and as many other tests as they had time for. Each of the three younger men took turns operating it, but so great were the strains of the sudden acceleration, that Arcot, senior, decided it would be wisest to stay on the ground and watch.

	In the meantime reports of the Pirate became fewer and fewer as less and less money was shipped by air.

	Arcot spent four days practicing the manipulation of the machine, for though it handled far more readily than any other machine he had ever controlled, there was the danger of turning on too much power under the stress of sudden excitement. Yet he could not afford to lower the limit of available power, for there must be a margin of at least 32 feet per second to cover the effects of gravity.

	If they were flying against it, they would need 64 feet per second per second more acceleration than if they were flying with it. The "feel" of the ship could be gotten by practice only. He must make his actions instinctively in emergencies, and the battle with the Pirate was apt to be a long series of emergencies, for certainly the Pirate had some weapons other than his gas. No standard machine gun could throw a bullet through the inch-thick armor-plate walls of the machine, and as these were double, there was slight chance of any known ship carrying a gun heavy enough to pierce these double walls, which were yet light enough to land on the Transcontinental plane without disturbing its equilibrium.

	The night before, Arcot had sailed the ship down and alighted on the roof of Morey senior's apartment, leaving enough power on to reduce the weight to but ten tons, lest it fall through the roof, while he went down to see the President of the Lines about some "bait" for the Pirate.

	"Send some cash along," said Arcot, when he saw Morey, Sr. "Say a quarter of a million, make it more or less public knowledge, and talk it up so that the Pirate may think there is a real haul on board. I am going to accompany the plane at a height of about a quarter of a mile above. I will try to locate him from there by means of the radio disturbance locater, and if I have my apparatus on, I naturally can't locate him. I hope he won't be scared away—but I rather believe he won't. At any rate, you won't lose on the try!"

-

	AGAIN Morey and Arcot were looking at the great Jersey aerodrome, out on the great fields that had been broad marshes centuries before. Now they had been filled in, and stretched for miles, a great landing field, close to the great city across the river.

	The men in the car above were watching the field below, hanging inert, a silent dot of glistening metal, high in the deep velvet of the purple sky, for fifteen miles of air separated them from the Transcontinental machine below. Now they saw through their field-glasses that the great machine was lumbering slowly across the field, gaining momentum as it headed westward into the breeze on the take-off. Then it seemed to be barely clearing the great skyscrapers that towered twenty-four hundred feet into the air, arching over four or six city blocks. From this height they were toys made of colored paper, soft colors that glistened in the hot noon sun, and around and about them were weaving lines of flashing, moving helicopters, the individual lost in the mass of the million or so swiftly moving machines, for only the higher, steady moving levels of traffic were visible to them. Below these they knew were other and still other levels of machines, hanging motionless or creeping along at thirty or forty miles an hour, rocking slightly, despite the gyroscopic stabilizers as the terrific air-wash of thousands of whirring blades hit them, varying each moment as the crowded traffic moved.

	"Just look at those cars in the traffic below there! Thousands and thousands coming back into the city after going home to lunch—and every day the number of helicopters is increasing! If it hadn't been for your invention of this machine, they would have been impossible soon. The airblast in the cities is unbearable now, and getting worse all the time. Many machines can't get enough power to hold themselves up at the middle levels; there is a down current of over one hundred miles an hour at the 400-foot level in downtown New York. It takes a racer to climb fast there!

	"If it were not for the gyroscopic stabilizers, they could never live in that huge air-pocket. I have to drive in through there. I'm always afraid that somebody with an old worn-out bus will have stabilizer failure, and it will work havoc with hundreds below." Morey was a skillful pilot, and realized, as few others did, the dangers of that downward airblast that the countless whirring blades maintained in a constant roar of air. The office buildings now had double walls, with thick layers of sound-absorbing materials, to stop the roar of the cyclonic blast that continued almost unabated twelve hours a day.

	"Oh. I don't know about that, Morey," replied Arcot. "This thing isn't all to the good. Remember that if we had about ten million machines hung in the air of New York City on the heat contained, there would be a noticeable fall in the temperature. It would undoubtedly drop to a temperature that would produce an Arctic climate year in and year out. You know, though, how unbearably hot it gets in the City by noon, even on the coldest winter days, due to the heating effect of the air friction of all the thousands of blades. I have known the temperature of the air to go up fifty degrees, due to the heat of the engines and the friction of the blades. The solution of the thing is obvious. There will be a sort of balance between the two types of machines. It will be a terrific economical problem, but at the same time it will solve the problem of the great companies who have been fermenting grain residues for alcohol. The castor bean growers are also going to bring down their prices a lot when this machine kills the market. They will also be more anxious to extract the carbon from the cornstalks for reducing ores of iron and of other metals. It will no doubt have to be worked out eventually at any rate." As the ship flew high above the Transcontinental plane, the men discussed the economic values of the different applications of Arcot's discoveries from the huge power stations they could make, to the cooling and ventilating of houses.

	"Arcot, you mentioned the cooling effect on New York City; with the millions on millions of these machines that there will be, with huge power plants, with a thousand other different applications in use, will not the terrific drain of energy from the air cause the whole world to become a little cooler?" asked Fuller.

	"I doubt it," said Arcot slowly. "I have thought of that myself. Remember that most of the energy we use eventually ends up as heat anyway. The lights we use turn the electricity to light, whence it is radiated to be absorbed by materials that convert it into heat. Motors give off heat and mechanical energy. The propellers convert the mechanical energy to motion of the molecules of air—heat again. The forward drive of the airship is converted into heat through air-friction. Only the energy we store as chemical energy is maintained—and eventually that leaks back into the air. In return, just remember the decillions of ergs of energy that the sun is giving off—true, we don't get more than an infinitesimal portion of that energy—but what we do get is more than enough for us. Power houses can be established very conveniently in the tropics, where they will cool the air, and the energy can be used to refine metals or to stabilize the carbon of carbon dioxide from the air. I understand from something Dad said last night that that is what he is working on now. He has devised a method for electrolyzing carbon dioxide in a solution in a compound Jackson worked out for him. That brings us to carbon, the true starting point for any organic synthesis. With that we will have an unlimited supply of acetylene, the one indispensable hydro-carbon in modern synthesis. That means that the surplus heat of the tropics will find a use. Together with the weather control possible by the direction-control of great winds, we could set huge director tubes on top of mountains, and blow the winds in whatever direction best suited us, not the blown wind itself, but the vast volume of air it carried with it, would be able to cool the temperate zones in summer from the cold of the poles, and warm it in winter with the heat of the tropics. Similarly the tropics would, in this way, be cooled. Of course the control could not be perfect, but it would bring about a vast improvement. I think, however, that we will find this machine to be of great benefit. I don't think it will appreciably lower the mean temperature of the earth.

	"And there is another thing it may make possible in the future—a thing that is hard to accept as a commercial proposition. We have sources of energy now, but we have no sources of materials that will last indefinitely. Copper is becoming more and more rare. Had it not been for the discoveries of the great copper fields of the Sahara and in Alaska, we would not have any now. Platinum is exhausted, and even iron is becoming more and more valuable, for low-grade iron ores cannot be worked. We are facing a shortage of metals. Aluminum, magnesium, calcium, and iron exist in vast quantities, but they are largely in low concentration ores. Do you realize that within the next two centuries we will be unable to maintain this civilization unless we get new sources of materials? History shows us civilization after civilization falling before the invading hordes of barbarians—men who were better equipped to fight for what they wanted. Within two centuries our civilization will be helpless for lack of essential metals. Iron can be gotten from the frames of the skyscrapers as they are replaced by little glass buildings. Glass, or silicon dioxide, practically constitutes a huge percentage of the earth's crust. Silicon represents 28% and oxygen over 47%, so in the available matter of the earth, two elements alone constitute more than three-quarters of the resources. Luckily, the next most abundant element, and the next few are metals, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium. (I am not certain about the order of calcium and magnesium.) Together, these total about 23%. That means that the first seven abundant elements constitute 98% of our available resources. All the other elements on earth do not total more than 2%! That means that, including the vast quantities of hydrogen, nitrogen, and all other non-metals, chlorine, sulphur, and even carbon, and many metals such as copper, lead, zinc, tin, silver, tungsten, molybdenum, beryllium—all the other 85 elements—total only two per cent! Every time I think of those figures it frightens me. Aluminum, iron, and magnesium are useful for our work. Calcium, sodium, potassium—we cannot use them; they are soft, and so active that they corrode rapidly in the air. In the 98% of the available matter of the earth, three elements are useful. In the two per cent lie all our other materials, except glass. Well, it looks as if we had better start using glass a great deal more!

	"But we have one other chance now. This civilization is doomed if we don't get more elements from somewhere.

	"The solution is—there are eight*(*Since this story was written, a ninth planet was discovered.) planets in this solar system! Neptune and Uranus are each far vaster than Earth; they are utterly impossible for life as we know it, but a small colony might be established there to refine metals for the distant earth. We might be able to build tight-closed cities. But first we could try the nearer planets—Mars, Venus, or some satellites such as our Moon. I pray that this machine will make it possible."

-

	FOR some time they sat in silence in the machine as they swept along, high above the green plains of Indiana. Chicago lay like some monster jewel far off on the horizon to the right and ahead. Below them the huge bulk of the Transcontinental plane seemed a toy, five miles below, as it swung slowly across the fields—actually traveling over six hundred an hour. They too seemed almost motionless as the landscape swung slowly past beneath them. At last Morey spoke.

	"You are right, Arcot. We will have to think of the interplanetary aspects of this some day. Oh, isn't that Chicago off there? We had better start the vacuum gas protector. And I will turn the radio disturbance indicator on to the general reception aerial till we see some signs of action."

	The three men forgot the impending danger of the shortage of metals. There were a number of adjustments to make, and these were quickly completed, while the machine forged evenly, steadily ahead. The generator was adjusted to the maximum efficiency, the various tubes were tested separately, for though they were all new, and each good for twenty-five thousand hours, it would be inconvenient, to say the least, if one failed while they were in action. Each tested perfect, and though they could not hear the even hum of the generator behind them, due to the approximate vacuum at this altitude, they knew from the smooth functioning of the various relays that governed it as the loads on it varied, that it must be working perfectly, at something less than one-half maximum rating. There was a reassuringly large factor of safety in all parts of this machine, which was a good thing on an experimental machine, but left no factor of safety for Mr. Average Citizen's pocket book, if put on the commercial production in this form.

	Steadily they flew on, waiting tensely for the first sign of a glow from the tiny neon tube indicator on the panel before Morey.

	"This looks familiar, Dick," said Morey, looking about at the fields and the low line of the blue mountains far off on the western horizon. "I think it was about here that we took our little nap in the 'Flying Wheel Chair,' as the papers called it. It would be about here th—LOOK! It is about here! Get ready for action, Fuller. You're taking the machine gun, I'll work the invisibility disrupter, and Arcot will run the ship. Let's go!"

	On the board before him the tiny neon tube flickered dully, glowed for a moment like a piece of red-hot iron, then went out. In a moment it was glowing again, and then quickly its brilliance mounted till it was a line of crimson. Quickly Morey snapped the switch from the general radio disturbance detector to the beam receiver, that he might locate the machine exactly, the receiving set being arranged to pick up the signals emanating from points in the beam only, and the same control kept the projector of the indivisibility disrupter in constant coordination, so that the sighting of the receiver automatically directed the disrupter beam at the same point. Quickly the beam was scanning the sky below them, as it searched for the plane of the Pirate. It was fully a minute before the neon tube flashed into life once more. The pirate was flying just ahead of the big plane, very likely gassing them. All around him were the Air Guardsmen, unaware that the enemy was so near. As the disrupter beam could be projected only about a mile, they would have to dive down on the enemy at once, and an instant later the great plane beneath them seemed to be rushing toward them at terrific speed.

	The two radio beams were constantly kept focused on the plane of the Pirate. When they were about two miles from the two machines below them, the neon tube blazed up brilliantly as the energy of the two machines clashed. The Pirate was trying to maintain his invisibility, while the rapidly growing strength of the machine above was trying to batter it down, the resulting interference radiating a large amount of energy. The strength of Morey's beam was growing at a tremendous rate, as the two machines approached at nearly three hundred miles an hour. In a moment the ammeter connected with the disrupter beam began to rise so rapidly it seemed dangerous, for despite the ten-kilowatt set being used to project the beam, the resistance of the apparatus on board the pirate ship was amazing. Now, however, there was a rapidly solidifying cloud before them, as the interference of the beam Morey was sending broke down the molecular oscillation that permitted the light to pass freely through the machine. Suddenly there was a circle of blue light about the shadow form, and a moment later the ionized air relapsed into normal condition as the pirate's apparatus broke down under the strain. At once Morey shut off his apparatus, convinced from the suddenness that the pirate's apparatus had been blown out, the tubes unable to stand the strain of the larger tubes on board their machine. He glanced up to look at the pirate as he finished his job. He cried out in astonishment as Arcot called to him, "Morey—look at him go!"

	Morey was too late to see him go. Already the plane had shot off with terrific speed. It had shot up and to their left, at a rate of climb that seemed unbelievable—except that the long trail of flaming gas told the story! The plane was propelled by rockets! The terrific acceleration carried it out of their range of vision in an instant, and as Arcot swung the ship to bring him again within the range of the windows, they gasped in astonishment, for already he was many miles away, a long trail of flaming gas marking his swift flight! There was a terrific wrench as Arcot threw on all the power he dared, then quickly leveled the machine out, following the pirate at lightning speed. He increased the acceleration further as the men grew accustomed to the force that weighed them down. Ahead of them the pirate was racing along, but quickly now they were overhauling him, for his machine had wings of a sort! They produced a tremendous amount of head resistance at their present velocity, for already the needle of the radio speedometer had moved over to one mile a second. They were following the fleet plane ahead at the rate of 3600 miles an hour. The roar of the air outside was a tremendous wave of sound, yet to than, protected by the vacuum of the double walls, it was detectable only by the vibration of the car.

	And naturally the rarefaction of the air operated to reduce the sound.

-

	RAPIDLY the lead of the pirate's machine was cut down, as their acceleration became greater. It seemed but a moment before he would be within range of their machine gun. Suddenly he nosed down and shot for the ground, ten miles below, with the full speed of his machine. In an instant Arcot had swung his machine in a loop that held him close to the tail of the pirate. The swift maneuvers at this speed were a terrific strain on both men and machines—the acceleration seemed crushing them with the weight of four men, as Arcot followed the pirate in a wide loop to the right that ended in a straight climb, the power rocket ship standing on its tail, the rocket blast roaring out behind, a stream of fire a half mile long. It was climbing at a speed that would have distanced any other machine the world had ever seen, but the tenacious opponent behind him clung ever tighter to the tiny darting thing. He had released great clouds of his animation suspending gas. To his utter surprise, the ship behind had driven right through it, entirely unaffected! He, who knew most about the gas, had been unable to devise a material to stop it, a mask or a tank to store it, yet in some way these men had succeeded! And that hurtling, bullet-shaped machine behind! Like some miniature airship it was, but with a speed and an acceleration that put even his to shame! It could twist, turn, dive, rise and shoot off on the straight-away with more flashing speed than his machine displayed. Time and again he tried complicated maneuvers that strained him to the utmost, yet that machine always followed after him!

	There was one thing to do. In outer space his rockets would support him. In a straight climb he shot up to the blazing sun above, out into space, while the sky around him grew black, and the stars shone in solemn splendor around him. But he had eyes for only one thing, the shining car that was rising with more than equal speed behind him. He knew he must be climbing over two thousand miles an hour, yet the tracker came ever closer. Just out of sighting range for the machine gun now ... in a moment ... but, she was faltering!

	The men in the machine behind sat white-lipped, tense, as the whirling shocks of sudden turns at terrific speed twisted the gyroscope seats around like peas in a rolling ball. Up, down, left, right, the darting machine ahead was twisting with unbelievable speed. Then suddenly the nose was pointed for the zenith again, and with a great column of flame shooting out behind him, he was heading straight toward space!

	"If he gets there, I lose him, Morey!" said Arcot. The terrific acceleration of the climbing car seemed to press them to their seats with a deadly weight. It was a labor to talk—but still the car ahead was shooting ahead—slowly they seemed to be overhauling him. Now that the velocities were perforce lowered by the effects of gravity, and the air resistance of the atmosphere was well nigh gone, only the acceleration that the human body could stand was considered. The man ahead was pushing his plane ahead with an acceleration that would have killed many men!

	Slowly the acceleration of the machine was falling. Arcot pushed the control over to the last ampere, and felt the slight surge, as greater power rushed through the coils momentarily. Soon this was gone too, as the generator behind faltered. The driving power of the atmospheric heat was gone. More than sixty miles below them they could see the earth as a greenish brown surface, slightly convex, and far to the east they could distinguish a silvery line of water! But they had no eyes but for the column of shooting flame that represented the fleeing raider! Out in airless space now, he was safe from them. They could not follow. Arcot turned the machine once more, parallel to the earth, watching the plane above through the roof window. Slowly the machine sank to the fifty-mile level, where there was just sufficient air to maintain it in efficient operation.

	"Well, he beat us! But there is only one thing for us to do. He must hang there on his rockets till we leave, and we can hang here indefinitely, if we can only keep this cabin decently warm He has no air to cool him, and he has the sun to warm him. The only thing that is worrying him right now is the heat of his rockets. But he can throw most of that out with the gases. Lord, that's some machine! The principle is easy to see. He uses his atomic hydrogen stored in the way he has, and thereby can store, in very little space, a gaseous material that yields 100,000 calories for every two grams. He can run a real machine on that! But eventually his rockets will give out, and down he will come, so we will just hang here beneath him and—whoa—not so fast—he isn't going to stay there, it seems; he is angling his ship off a bit, and shooting along, so that, besides, holding himself up, he is making a little forward progress. We will have to follow! He is going to do some speeding, it seems! Well, we can keep up to him, at our level."

	"Dick, no plane ever made before would have stood the terrific pulls and yanks that his plane got. He was steering and twisting on the standard type air rudders, and what strains he had! That unique type of plane must be extremely strong. I never saw one shaped like his before, though—it is the obvious shape at that! It was just a huge triangular arrowhead! Did you ever see one like it?"

	"Something like it, yes, and so have you. Don't you recognize that as the development of the old paper gliders you used to throw around as a kid? It has the same shape, the triangular wings with the point in the lead, except that he undoubtedly has a slight curve to the wings to increase the efficiency. I hope that man is only a kleptomaniac, because he can be cured of that, and I can then have a new laboratory partner. He has some exceedingly intelligent ideas! His idea of copying the birds was good—except that he carried it too far. The idea of flying was good, but the birds have a method that man can't imitate. The birds have flapping wings, and their wings are shaped to work well when they flap. Man tried for a while to make a machine that would flap its wings. He generally got killed in the attempt. Finally he decided to try having the wings there, just as the birds do, but not flapping them. He tried to imitate the bird in gliding flight. That was rather foolish, for the birds' wings are made to flap, and when they glide, they are using them for a secondary purpose. Man stands on two jointed bone columns, carefully made and fitted together with some of the most wonderful mechanical features we know of. Why not build buildings, and stand them on similar mechanisms? Simply because legs have only a secondary use in supporting members. They were primarily designed for locomotion.

	"Similarly a bird's wings were designed for movement. Then, too, a rotary motion is so much more efficient than a reciprocating motion. The wheel is beyond a doubt a better way to get over ground than the leg. Why didn't Nature use it? A wheel is not such a good thing to climb trees with, and trees are very useful if a saber tooth tiger happens to be in the neighborhood. Evolution did not favor it. Can you imagine a bird with a propeller on its beak? The propeller is more efficient than the flapping wing, but Nature couldn't use it—it was a matter of design. Imagine, if you can, a bird with a bone propeller on its beak—or somewhere, driven by a bone crankshaft, turned, by muscles—muscles arranged like the cylinders of an engine! It just couldn't be done. Nature had to use the flapping wing.

	"And man, seeing the bird fly, decided that was the way to fly. He found he couldn't do it, but it took him hundreds of years to find some other way than merely approximating the bird.

	"Do you remember how the little paper gliders of our school days used to soar and bank and turn with perfect control; they never stalled in the air, never stayed in a nose dive, never went into tail spins and were, structurally strong enough to be made of thin paper. The standard and only figure that is used in bracing things anywhere is the triangle; it is the unit of strength. It can't he deformed as can a square, it is geometrically better. Why not use it! No wonder the pirate's ship would stand the strains he put on it. No wonder it makes an excellent glider. Of course it would.

	"He is an ingenious man, but I wish he didn't store quite so much hydrogen in his rocket tubes! It is unbearably cold in here, and I can't sacrifice any power to heat. it. The rocket ship up there seems to be getting more and more acceleration in the level. He has me dropping steadily to get air to run the generator. He is going fast enough!"

	They followed beneath the pirate, faster and faster as the rockets of the ship began to push it forward more and more.

	"Dick, why is it he didn't use all his rockets at first instead of gradually increasing the power this way?"

	"If you were operating the ship, Morey, you would understand. Look at the speedometer a moment and see if you can figure it out!"

	"Hmm—4.5 miles per second—buzzing right along—but I don't see what that—good Lord! We never will get him at this rate! How do you expect to get him?"

	"I am still in the dark on that subject. But Arcot, I wonder why it is that he doesn't have to use all his rockets!" said Fuller.

	"He is going 4.5 miles a second. When he reaches 5 miles a second he will never come down from his hundred and fifty mile high perch. He will establish an orbit! He has so much centrifugal force already that he has very little weight We are staying right beneath him, so we don't have much either. Well, there he goes in a last spurt. We are falling behind pretty fast—there we are catching up now—no—we are just holding parallel! He's done it! Look!"

-

	ARCOT pulled out his. watch and let go of it. It floated calmly in the air for a moment, then slowly drifted back toward the rear of the room. "I am using a bit of acceleration—a bit more than enough to maintain our speed. We are up high enough to make the air resistance almost nothing, even at this velocity, but we are held back enough to require some power. I don't know—"

	There was a low buzz, repeated twice. Instantly Morey turned the dials of the radio receiving set—again the call signal sounded. In a moment a voice came in—low, but distinct. The power seemed fading rapidly.

	"—am the Pirate—help if you can. Can you get outside the atmosphere? Exceed orbital speed and fall out? Am in an orbit and can't get out. Fuel reserve gage stuck, and used all my rockets. No more power. Can not slow down and fall. I am running out of compressed air and the generator for this set is going—will take animation suspending gas—will you be able to reach me before entering night?"

	"Quick, Morey—answer that we will."

	"We will try, Pirate—think we can make it!"

	"O. K.—power about—now	"

	The last of his power had failed! The pirate was marooned in space! They had seen his rockets go out, leaving the exhaust tube glowing for a moment before it, too, was dark, and only the sun shining on the silvery plane made it visible.

	"We have to hurry if we want to do anything before he reaches night! Radio the San Francisco fields that we will be coming in soon, and we need a large electromagnet—one designed to work on about 500 volts D. C, and some good sized storage cells; how many will have to be decided later, depending on the room we will have for them. I will start to slow down the ship now. We are somewhere west of the Hawaiians, I believe, but we ought to be able to do the trick if we use all the power we can."

	Morey at once set to work with the radio set to raise San Francisco airport. He was soon in communication with them, and told them that he would be there in about one hour. They promised all the necessary materials; also that they would get ready to receive the pirate when he was finally brought in to them.

	"Arcot," asked Fuller, "why don't you just circle around and head back, taking advantage of your speed, instead of killing it in one direction, only to develop more in the other?"

	"The circle I would have to turn in would have to have a thousand mile radius, because any smaller circle would mean a centrifugal force that would be fatal to us. I will be able to turn soon, but I must slow down, first.

	It was nearer an hour and a quarter later that the machine fell to tire great San Francisco landing field, where the mechanics at once set to work bolting a huge electro-magnet on the landing skids on the bottom of the machine. The most serious problem was connecting the terminals electrically without making holes in the hull of the ship. Finally one terminal was grounded, and the radio aerial used as the other. Fuller was left behind on this trip, and a large number of cells were installed in every possible position. In the power room, a hastily arranged motor generator set was arranged, making it possible to rim the entire ship from the batteries. Scarcely had these been battened down to prevent sliding under the accelerations necessary, titan Arcot and Morey were off. The entire operation had required but fifteen minutes.

	"How are you going to catch him, Arcot?"

	"I'll overtake him going west. If I went the other way I'd meet him going at over 10 miles a second in relation to his machine. He had the right idea. He told me to fall out to him at greater than orbital speed. I will go just within the earth's atmosphere till I get just under him, holding myself in the air by means of a downward acceleration on the part of the regular lifting power units. I am going to try to reach eight miles a second. We will be overhauling him at three a second, and the ship will slow down to the right speed in falling out to him. We must reach him before he gets into the shadow of the earth, though, for if he reaches 'night' he will be without heat, and despite the fact that he is in a suspended animation condition, he will die of cold. I think we can reach him, Dick!"

	"I hope so. Those spare cells are all right, aren't they? This acceleration is hard on anything. We will need those! If they don't function when we get out there, we will fall clear off into space! At eight miles a second, we would leave earth forever!"

	"But Dick, I don't see how you can get eight miles a second, when helium atoms at room temperature don't move that fast. They won't drive a car that fast will they?"

	"Right you are Morey—but for one fact. How fast are helium atoms going at room temperature? Earth goes nineteen miles a second, so they must be going fast enough! They are always trying to go just six or seven miles a second faster than we, no matter how fast we go! It will be willing to drive us at eight miles a second. But we don't want to get too high and find the generator won't give power enough to slow us down so we can fall, nor power enough to pull us down against centrifugal force!"

	The ship was accelerating steadily at the highest value the men aboard could stand safely. The needle of the speedometer was creeping steadily across the dial. They were flying at a height of forty miles that they might have enough air and still not be too greatly hindered by air resistance. The black sky above them was spotted with points of glowing light, the blazing stars of space. But as they flew along, the sensation of weight was lost; they had reached orbital speed, and as the car steadily increased its velocity, there came a strange sensation! The earth loomed gigantic above them! Below them shone the sun! The direction of up and down was changed by the terrific speed, the needle of the speedometer was wavering at 7.8 miles a second. Now it held steady!

	"I thought you were going to take it up to eight miles a second, Dick?"

	"Air resistance is too great! I'll have to go higher!"

	At a height of fifty miles they continued at 8.1 miles a second. It seemed hours before they reached the spot where the pirate's machine should be flying directly above them, and they searched the black sky for some sign of the shining dot of light. With the aid of field glasses they found it, far ahead, and nearly one hundred miles above. Things here in the clear space were far more visible than they would have been if seen through the dull atmosphere.

	"Well, here we go! I'm going to fall up the hundred miles or so, till we are right on his path; the work done against gravity will slow us down a little, but I will have to use the power units somewhat. Did you notice what I did to them?"

	"Yes, they were painted a dull black. What was the idea?"

	"We will have no air, from which to get heat for power out here, so we will have to use sunlight. I am using it now to slow us down as much as possible. That, together with the air resistance and the energy needed for raising the car one hundred miles, will be enough to slow us down, I think!"

	At last the tiny silver dot had grown till it took on the form of the plane it was. They were drawing up to it now, slowly, but steadily. At last the little machine was directly beneath them, and a scant hundred yards away. They had long since been forced to run the machine on the storage batteries, and now they applied a little power to the vertical power units. Sluggishly, as they absorbed the sun's heat, the machine was forced lower, nearer to the machine below. At last a scant ten feet separated them.

	"All right, Morey."

-

	THERE was a snap, as the temporary switch was closed, and the current surged into the big magnet on the keel. At once they felt the ship jump a little under the impulse of the magnet's pull on the smaller machine. In a moment the little plane had drifted up to the now idle magnet, touched it and was about to bounce off, when Morey again snapped the switch shut and the two machines were locked firmly together!

	"I've got him, Dick. Now slow it down till it falls. Then we can go and wait for it. Being a glider, it ought to be quite manageable!"

	Now the energy of the power units on the roof of the machine began to slow down the two machines, the magnet grinding slightly as the momentum of the plane was thrust upon it. They watched the speedometer needle drop. The speed was sinking very slowly, for the area of the absorbing fins was not designed to absorb the sun's heat directly, and was very inefficient. The sun was indeed sinking below their horizon; they were just beginning to watch that curious phenomenon of seeing dawn backward, when they first struck air dense enough to operate the power units noticeably. Quickly the power was applied till the machines sank rapidly to the warmer levels, the only governing factor being the tendency of the glider to break loose from the grip of the magnet. 

	At fifty miles the generator was started, and the heaters in the car at once became more active. There was no heat in the car below, but that was unavoidable. They would try to bring it down to warm levels quickly.

	"Whew, I'm glad we reached the air again, Dick. I didn't tell you sooner, for it wouldn't have done any good, but that battery was about gone! We had something like twenty amp-hours left! I am giving the recharge generator all she will take. We seem to have plenty of power now."

	"I knew the cells were low, but I had no idea they were as low as that! I noticed that the magnet was weakening, but thought it was due to the added air strain. I am going to put the thing into a nose dive and let the glider go down of itself. I know it would land correctly if it had a chance. I am going to follow it, of course, and since we are over the middle of Siberia I think it would be a good idea to start back."

	The trip back was necessarily in the lower levels of the atmosphere, that the glider might be kept reasonably warm. At a height of but two miles, in the turbulent atmosphere, the glider was brought slowly home. It took them nearly twenty hours to go the short distance of twelve thousand miles to San Francisco, the two men taking turns at the controls. The air resistance of the glider forced them to go slowly, they could not average much better than six hundred an hour despite the fact that the speed of either machine alone was over twelve hundred miles an hour.

	At last the great skyscrapers of San Francisco were showing on their horizon, and thousands of private planes started out to meet them. Frantically Arcot warned them away, lest the air blast from their props tear the glider from the magnet. At last, however, the Air Guard was able to force them to a safe distance and clear a lane through one of the lower levels of the city traffic. The great field of the Transcontinental lines was packed with excited men and women, waiting to catch a glimpse of two of the greatest things the country had heard of in the century—Arcot's molecular motion machine and the Air Pirate!

	The landing was made safely in the circle of Air Guardsmen. There was a small hospital plane standing beside it in a moment, and as Arcot's ship released it, and then hung motionless, soundless above it, the people watched it in wonder and excitement. They wanted to see Arcot perform; they clamored to see the wonderful powers of this ship in operation. Air Guardsmen who had witnessed the flying game of tag between these two super-air-machines had told of it through the press and over the radio.

	"Come on, Morey, let's give them a real show, then go home and sleep!"

	"All right, Bill. The invisibility act ought to give them a thrill!"

	There was a sharp click as Morey turned on a switch—then from the crowd below came a mighty roar of amazement! The ship was gone! Gone completely in an instant! They turned to each other in astonished inquiry, and then came another cry of astonishment as it suddenly appeared, hanging in the air a thousand feet above the point of its disappearance! Then it began a series of loops, turns, twists and maneuvers utterly impossible to any other machine. It hung motionless in the air for an instant, then shot up toward the hot, mid-afternoon sun with a speed that left the watchers gasping with astonishment—and continued on its way to New York.

	Two weeks later Arcot had a visitor from the West Coast—a handsome young man of about twenty-eight. Morey was with him at the time. The young visitor looked rather pale, but his six-feet-three made even Morey look to his laurels!

	"Well, I heard you were of fairly good size, Wade, and it is no wonder we had such a whale of a chase catching you!" said Arcot, smiling at him. "Just think, even old earth couldn't throw you down! We had to go out and help bring you in! But, speaking seriously, I hope you have brought your things with you, because if you are willing I think the Transcontinental can afford to let me have a new Lab worker. Dr. Marsh says you will be a great help to me now! After looking over your different pieces of apparatus, both at the Rocky Mountain Perch, as you called it, and in the plane, I am of the opinion that we had better keep all the good rivals in the family, so to speak. That was a neat piece of work on the storage of atomic oxygen! Is it all right for you to get the old head to work so soon?"

	"Dr. Marsh seemed to think so, Dr. Arcot, and I am not in the habit of forcing opportunity to bruise his knuckles! I am with you!" But if the idea for the Atomic Hydrogen storage comes through—"

The End

Solarite
Arcot, Morey and Wade 01.2
Amazing Stories – November 1930

	THE lights of the great Transcontinental Airport were blazing in cheering splendor. Out there in the center of the broad field a dozen men were silhouetted in the white brilliance, looking up at the sky, where the stars winked cold and clear on the jet background of the frosty night. A slim crescent of the moon showed in the west, a thin sickle of light that in no way dimmed the cold flame of the brilliant stars.

	There seemed one now that moved across the motionless field of far-off suns, one that shot toward the airport in a long, swift curve. The men on the broad plane murmured and pointed up at it as it swept low over the blazing lights of New York. Lower it was now, the towering city behind it. Half a mile into the air the buildings rose in shining glory of colored tile that shone brightly in the sweeping play of ever-changing colored floodlights, while above, like long fingers of crimson and green and gold, every color of the rainbow—the long beams of the spotlights reached out into the night.

	One of them picked out the descending machine, and it suddenly leaped out of the darkness as a shining, stream-fined cylinder, a cylinder with a great halo of blue fire, as the beam of the spotlight set it off from the jet black night.

	In an instant the ship was vast before the eyes of the waiting men, and it had landed gently on the field, was rolling smoothly, gracefully toward them.

	Two dozen men climbed from the great ship, shivering in the icy blast that swept across the field, spoke a moment with the men on the field, then climbed quickly into the grateful warmth of the waiting field car. In a moment they were moving rapidly toward the lights of the field house, half a mile off.

	Behind them a huge ship leapt straight into the air, then suddenly pointed its nose up at an angle of thirty degrees and shot high into the air at an unbelievable speed. In an instant it was gone. At the field house the party was breaking up rapidly.

	"We want to thank you, President Morey, for your demonstration of the new ship tonight. I am sure we all appreciate the kindness you have shown the press, and you, Dr. Arcot, for answering our many Questions about the new ship." The reporters were filing out quickly now, anxious to get the news into the morning editions, for it was after one o'clock now. Each was taking a small slip of paper from the attendant standing at the exit, the official statement of the company. At last all had left but the six men who were responsible for tins wonderful new machine.

	This night had witnessed the official demonstration of the first of the Arcot-Morey molecular motion ships. Small as this ship was, compared to the titanic ships that were to come, yet it had a passenger capacity of over three thousand, as great as that of any of the existing winged planes, and its speed was terrifically greater. The trip from the west coast to the eastern had been made in less than one hour. At a speed close to one mile a second the great ship had shot through the thin air, twenty-five miles above the dark earth. Propelled and sustained by the energy of heat, it needed no wings and could attain terrific speed. In all matter the molecules are in rapid motion, the motion being responsible for their temperature, but this motion is ordinarily in every direction, the uncountable billions of molecules each moving in a different direction, the law of averages balances out their individual motions, and they make no progress. Just four months ago Arcot, Junior, working with Morey, Junior, had discovered that very high frequency electrical vibrations could be made to affect these molecules and make them all move in the same direction. If all the molecules of a piece of matter move in the same direction, obviously the entire body is moving in that direction.

	In this car a huge bar of metal was so affected, and its molecules all tried to move forward, but the mass of the car held it back, and the molecules were slowed down. Slow-moving molecules mean a low temperature, and at once these molecules absorbed heat from the molecules of the surrounding air, and swiftly the great car was accelerated. Similar devices steered the great ship and another series of such power units directed upward held it motionless vertically, or made it rise or sink.

	No matter what the speed of the ship, the molecules were always trying to go faster, for who can say how fast the molecules of the earth's atmosphere are moving? They have their individual motions; in addition the earth spins on its axis, the entire planet revolves about the sun, while the whole system moves on through space at ten miles a second. Thus there was no limit but the speed of light to the velocity that the car could attain.

	This invention had been turned over to the Transcontinental Air lines, whose president was the father of Morey, Junior, the co-inventor of the new apparatus.

-

	ARCOT was a theoretical physicist but Morey was a mathematician, and it was with his aid that Arcot was able to get the mathematical equation of his ideas. Arcot seemed always to be able to sense the solution to the problem with a brilliant leap of genius, the general answer, but it was Morey's careful mathematical proof, following and amplifying the ideas Arcot outlined, that led to their successful operation.

	"Arcot," said Morey, Senior, after the pressmen had left the room, "as President of this company I certainly want to thank you for the tremendous thing you have given us to use. As your friend and as a citizen, I want to thank you for the wonderful weapon. War is impossible.

	"You have 'sold' us this machine—but how can we repay you? Before this, time and time again, you have sold us your different machines, the ideas that have made it possible for our line to attain its present high position in the world transportation network. All you have ever accepted is the laboratory you use, its upkeep, and a small amount annually. What can we do to show our appreciation this time?"

	"Why," answered Arcot smiling broadly, "you have not stated the terms correctly. Legally I have the laboratory in which to work, which your Company maintains, and whatever amount of personal income I wish to draw. There isn't even a 'within reason' clause in it. As a matter of fact, it should read that I have a fully equipped lab to putter around in, all the time I want to amuse myself, all the money I want—and the laboratory to amuse myself in. What more could I want?"

	"I suppose that is all true—but when you draw only about six thousand a year for personal expenses—why a good clerk could get that—and you, admittedly the most brilliant physicist of the earth, are satisfied! I don't feel that we are paying you properly!"

	"But the clerk might have a family—I haven't—how could I use the money if I did draw more? But you can repay me this time," added Arcot more seriously, "for this latest thing has made a new thing possible. I have always wanted to be able to visit other planets—it has been the dream of many a scientist for the last three centuries. This machine has made it possible. If you are willing—we could start by the spring of 2117. We have all been busy working on that ship; finally the first of the molecular ships is finished. I want to start work on the first interplanetary ship. For this I will need to have Fuller's help. Now that he has finished his work in designing that ship—I think he will be willing to help on my problem—he said so this evening. The proposition will be expensive, of course, and that is where I must ask you to help me. I think, however, that it may be a paying proposition, at that, for there will no doubt be many new sources of materials on the other planets."

	They had walked out to the shed where Arcot's private molecular motion car stood, the first machine that the world had ever seen, that used the heat of the sun to drive it and maintain it Thoughtfully the president of the great Transcontinental Lines looked up at it. Small it was compared with the great machine that had just brought them east, but of the same swift type. It was a thing of graceful beauty here even as it rested on the ground, its long curving streamlines giving it wonderful grace. The men stood in thoughtful silence for a minute—the young men eager to hear the verdict of their prospective backer.

	"If it were the money you asked for, Arcot, I would gladly give you double the sum, but there is only one thing that worries me. I know perfectly well that if you do go, my son will go with you, and Fuller and Wade will naturally go too. Each of you has come to mean a lot to me. You and Fuller have known my son since college days. I have known Wade but three months, but every day I grow to like him more. There is no denying the fact that any such trip is a terrifically dangerous proposition. But if you were lost, there would be more than my personal loss. We would lose some of the most brilliant men on earth. You, for instance, are conceded as being the world's most brilliant physicist; Fuller is one of the greatest designing engineers; Wade is rapidly rising into prominence as a chemist and as a physicist; and my son is certainly a good mathematician.

	"But you men should know how to get out of scrapes just that much better. Certainly there are few men on earth who would not be willing to back such a group of men—or any one of you, for that matter! I will back your trip! But although I know that Arcot and my son can handle a gun fairly well, I don't know so much about Wade and Fuller. What experience have you two had?"

	"I think my greatest recommendation will be as cook on the trip, Mr. Morey. I have done the cooking on a number of camping trips and I think that food has a considerable effect on the success of an expedition. I can shoot a bit, too," said Fuller.

	"I come from the west, and have had a good bit of fun in the Rockies; there are still some mountain lions and some deer there. I also have a speaking acquaintance with the new gun, which Arcot developed in connection with his molecular motion. But there is so little you know about me—and most of it bad—I don't see how I really get in on this opportunity—but I certainly don't intend to keep the old boy knocking—I am with you, since I am invited!"

	Wade had been known as the Pirate—and it was through Arcot's efforts that he had finally been cured. It was found that he had been suffering from kleptomaniacy induced by a blood clot in the brain, and after a simple operation, performed by one of the leading surgeons of the country, he had been restored to normal, as one of the world's foremost scientists. He had at once been invited to join Arcot in his lab, to keep, as Arcot explained, all possible competition in the family! Since then Wade had proved himself well worthy of his position.

	"You're invited all right, Wade—on one condition—that you just forget all about what happened under the influence of the blood-clot.

	"Then you will definitely support us?" Arcot was jubilant.

	"Yes, I think I will," replied Morey, Senior, seriously, "for I think it is worth doing. There may be great advantages coming from the trip."

	The tremendous advantages that actually did come from the trip, Mr. Morey could not, of course, foresee, but we certainly must be thankful that he did decide to back this trip.

	"I want to thank you for that, Mr. Morey—wait till Dad gets back from that European conference—he can help us too!" Arcot had evidently been making his plans for the trip!

-

	THE young men climbed into the ship, to start for their apartment. Arcot was piloting, and out into the cold night air the ship rode easily, then up, up, up—up through the dull atmosphere, till they hung fifty miles up, on the outer verge of the airy blanket. Here in space they looked out in silent thought at the magnificent blazing stars of space. Here, where the dust-laden air could no longer mask their true colors, the stars shone unwinkingly, steadily, and in a glory that no man has ever seen, save thus far out in space. No longer were they all the same scintillating blue, all alike, as we see them from earth, but here they shone in a wonderous riot of color, as varied and as beautiful as the display of colored floodlights in some great city. They were tiny pinpoints of brilliant color, they were red, and green, and orange; there were yellow ones and deep blue ones—they shone in intense brightness, and each was tiny beyond comprehension; here, with no atmosphere to diffuse their brilliance, each was tiny to the vanishing point, mere points of light on a soft black that has no equal, the utter black of space, where there is nothing visible. Here no air blurred the stars to great pointed splotches.

	Then slowly Arcot let the machine settle to the blazing city miles below.

	"I love to go out there and look at those cold, pinpoint lights; they seem to draw me out there to investigate—the lure of other worlds. There always has come a sense of unfulfilled longing—the desire to go—and never before have I been able to hope to. Now—I will be out there by next spring!" Arcot paused and looked up at the mighty field of stars that arched over his head to be lost on either horizon. It was a wonderful night!

	"Where shall we go first, Dick?" asked Wade softly as he gazed out at the far-off suns of space. One wanted to talk softly here—there was a mighty grandeur about it that lured, yet oppressed one.

	"I have thought of that for the last four months. I have looked up statistics, and now that it is decided that we will start, we must decide where we are to go.

	"Of course we cannot leave the solar system. There are not many places we can go, let us eliminate them one by one, beginning with the sun and working out.

	"Obviously we will not go to the sun. Mercury circles the sun at a distance of 36,000,000 miles. It is the smallest of the major planets—only slightly larger than the moon, and very like it in many ways. It is easy to eliminate that—for it revolves always with the same face to the sun. The tremendous tidal action of the sun has through the ages, slowed Mercury's axial the sun, and once in those eighty-eight days it turns on rotation till it merely keeps the same face toward the sun. Once every eighty-eight days it revolves about its axis. Thus always it faces the sun on one side and space with the other. One side is as hot and bleak as a lava bed, the other as cold as far off Neptune.

	"Again it is too small to maintain an atmosphere. It has neither air nor water. Were we to visit it we would find no life, and could not leave the ship.

	"This also applies to the moon, so thus we eliminate two possibilities and into the bargain I might say that the moon is so readily investigated telescopically that it scarcely repays investigation in this way.

	"Next out from the sun is Venus—the beautiful planet. Venus gets twice the radiation from the sun that our earth does, and she is nearly the same size, her diameter is 7,700 miles while that of the earth is 7,900. The entire planet is coated with a perpetual layer of heavy clouds, that has never broken but once since men have observed it. These clouds mean that it will reflect a tremendous amount of light, and so it does. In fact so brilliant is the planet from our earth that it can be seen at midday, when in the right position, and on moonless nights, will cast a shadow.

	"The mass is about 82 per cent, that of the earth, so that the gravitational force will be about 85 per cent, due to the lesser radius. Thus Wade, who weighs almost exactly 200, will weigh about 170 there.

	"The very clouds that hide the surface from us, show that the planet has a deep atmosphere. Measurements, made of the amount of heat radiated from the night side of the planet as long ago as 1928 showed that the amount of heat radiated required that the planet have a fairly short day. The absence of markings in the smooth layer of clouds makes it impossible to know the length of the day. The only time there was any break in the clouds was about four centuries ago, when two men observed the break, which lasted several days, and each got a result for the length of the day, but the results were rather surprising! One was twenty-three hours, and the other twenty-four days. They can, however, be reconciled. If the one man observed the break in the clouds once each night that it lasted, at the same hour, he would see that, in twenty-four hours, the twenty-three-hour planet would have made one turn, and a bit more. In twenty-four days he would have found that it was again as it was the first night, for the planet would have gained one revolution on the earth. There are obviously two possible interpretations.

	"Venus is the planet of mystery—most like the earth, it is ever shrouded in clouds.

	"It is but 67,000,000 miles from the sun, and we are particularly fortunate, in that next spring it will be in conjunction with the earth, and we will be but about thirty-five million miles from it.

	"As you see I rather favor Venus—it is a mystery, and we could leave the car to explore that planet.

	"Mars is next to be considered. It is now at superior conjunction, or about two hundred and thirty million miles off. I think that eliminates it for the present, and into the bargain, no human being could live on that planet by any stretch of the imagination. In daytime he would almost fry, and at night freeze solid. That life might develop there is certainly conceivable, but we would not be able to explore it. It is also too small to have a very dense atmosphere.

	"Jupiter, the giant of the Solar system is next. Did you know that at one time, people on a planet circling one of the nearer stars would have said the sun was a double star? When Jupiter was first thrown off from the sun it was a mighty glowing sea of fire, of about one one-hundredth the brilliance of the sun. This would certainly be recorded as a double star. Jupiter, whose mass is about one one-thousandth that of the sun, is big enough to swing it a bit. The center of gravity of the solar system is not in the center of the sun, but leans toward Jupiter quite appreciably.

	"Jupiter has so great a mass that the gravity would be fatal, but the quick rotation so reduces it, by centrifugal force, that a man might be able to stand it. Though. Jupiter measures a quarter of a million miles around at the Equator, it spins on its axis once every ten hours—or really a bit less.

	"Jupiter is certainly very interesting in itself, but there are even more interesting things about it, for it is, as I said, a sort of a second, smaller sun in the solar system, a cold sun now it is true, but still a sun. Like the greater sun, it has a system of planets, more or less extensive. Some, indeed, are larger than some of the planets of the sun. Both Mercury and Mars are smaller than Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter's satellites. This might be well worth exploring, but it too has such a small size that there is no great atmosphere. We can not leave the car, and there is no great joy in exploring a planet unless you can really get out and stand upon its surface. Of course we can use altitude suits, and so make our explorations, but the temperature is so low, and the air so rare, we would be sure to need oxygen tanks and heaters.

	"The outer planets all have one big difficulty—there are so many asteroids in the ring of asteroids, we will be greatly menaced by them. And into the bargain they are so far away that I think we had best wait till later trips. That leaves the choice really between Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The choice as far as I see it is not very great. What do you vote?"

	"Well, I quite agree with you Arcot—it is more fun to explore an unknown planet than one that can be observed telescopically. I vote Venus," said Morey. Each of the others agreed with Morey that Venus was the logical choice.

	By this time the machine had sunk to the roof of their apartment, and the men disembarked and entered. The next day they were to start the actual work of designing the car!

-

	IT was late the next morning when they began their work, for it had been well after two when they finally reached the apartment. But when they had begun the job, it went forward steadily till the light faded that evening. So absorbed were they that noon and lunch hour passed unnoticed.

	"When we start this work," Arcot had begun, "we want to first design the ship for the conditions we expect to meet, and for the maximum convenience and safety. I believe I have thought of this trip longer than the rest of you, and for this reason I will give my ideas of what will give the greatest safety.

	"Venus is probably a younger planet than the earth. It is far nearer the sun than we, and gets twice the heat that the earth does. In the long-gone time when the planets were cooling I believe that Venus required far longer than earth, for the inpouring heat would tend to prevent its cooling. I imagine Venus today as a mighty world of rolling oceans of water, that beats on rugged shores of rocky islands, small spots of land in the vast watery area, while frequent fogs and mists swirl about the low hills, and through it all a tremendous oppressing heat burns down through the thick clouds. The surface temperature is probably about 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

	"There is little land, for Venus has no moon, and hence there has been no great tendency for the water to collect in any one place. The gigantic hollow that was left when the moon was torn free of earth made a great basin that caught the water, and left vast areas of land dry.

	"On Venus there was no such basin, and there is probably little dry land.

	"What life has developed must be largely aquatic, and the land is probably far behind in evolution. Then again—Venus is the planet of mystery-—we can only guess. But we do know what things we are going to need and what we will need to cross space.

	"Of course the main driving force will be the power units. These will get their energy from the rays of the sun by absorbing them in a great copper disc about twelve feet in diameter—the ship will have to be more of a disc than a cylinder. I think a ship a hundred and eighty feet long, fifty feet wide, and twenty feet deep will be about the best dimensions. The power units will be strung along the top of the ship in double rows—one down each side of the roof. In the middle of the roof will be a series of fused quartz windows, opening into a large room just under the outer shell of the ship. We will obviously need some source of power to activate the power tubes that run the molecular motion-power units. We will have a generator run by molecular motion-power units in here, absorbing its heat from the atmosphere in this room. The air will be heated by the rays of the sun of course, and in this way we will get all our power from the sun itself.

	"Lest this absorption of energy result in making the ship too cool, due to the radiation of the other side away from the sun, we will polish it, and thus reduce the unlighted side's radiation.

	"The power units will not be able to steer us in space, for they will all be on the roof, and those: on the sides, which will steer us in the atmosphere by the usual method, will be unable to get the sun's power; they will be shaded. For this steering in space, we will use atomic hydrogen rockets, storing the atomic gas by the Wade method in huge tanks in the hold. We will also have a battery down there for starting the generator and for emergencies. The air will be swept free of carbon dioxide by bubbling it through water under very high pressure, when the highly soluble carbon dioxide will remain in solution. It will be easy to keep the air clean and moist in this way, and at the same time remove the carbon dioxide into space. The water can, of course, be freed of the gas, and used again. Since we will have plenty of power, this system will be less bulky than the chemical absorption method, and more enduring. We will carry an emergency chemical plant however—-

	"The oxygen will be stored under very high pressure in tanks distributed all over the ship—anywhere so they will fill-in loose space that has no other use. We will carry a six months' supply. We will also carry an electrolysis outfit for turning water into oxygen and hydrogen. We can use the heat of Venus' atmosphere to run the generator and break up the water, then compress it and recharge the tanks, while the hydrogen will be broken into atoms, and used to recharge the atomic hydrogen tanks.

	"The most important single piece of equipment will be the apparatus for avoiding meteorites. There is really no tremendous number of them at this season, but we must be protected against them for it only takes one of them to finish us! The idea I had in mind was to take advantage of the usual form of radio altimeter, depending on the reflection of the radio wave from any material object. We can have a series of them scattered all about the ship—each pointing in a different direction. If anything comes within a hundred miles of us the altimeter covering that sector will at once set automatic machinery in operation, and the rockets will shoot the ship out of the path of the meteor. We will need greater accelerations than the power units can give us in space. Of course, in the air the power units are very powerful, but in space the sun will not supply heat very fast. The absorption discs will be made to lie flat to the side of the ship, of course, and painted dull black to absorb every bit of energy. In the air they will be fully efficient and have very little resistance, for they will cut the air like a knife."

	All that day Arcot and the other men discussed the various pieces of apparatus they would need, and toward evening Fuller began to draw rough sketches of the different machines, the mechanism that had been agreed upon.

	The next day, toward evening, they had really solved the rough details of the ship, but now began the greater task of calculating the stresses and the power factors.

	"We won't need any tremendous strength for the ship while it is in space, for then there will be little strain on it. It will be weightless from the start, and the gentle acceleration will not strain it in the least, but we must have strength, so that it can maneuver in the atmosphere.

	"Remember, when we leave earth we will do it by centrifugal force, for I can make much better speed in the atmosphere where there is plenty of power to draw on, than in space where I am dependent on the slow absorption of the sun's energy. We will start about the earth, forming an orbit just within the atmosphere, that is going at five miles a second. Then gradually we can increase the speed to about ten miles a second. At that speed the ship will tend to fly off the earth under its own centrifugal force; earth's gravity will no longer hold it. We will have to use the power units working downward to keep it from flying into space before we are ready. Then when we do release it, it will be entirely free of the earth, and no more work will be needed to overcome the earth's pull.

	"We are, on the earth, going 19 miles a second about the sun, so in space we would still be going at that rate, and would remain a captive of the mighty sun, rotating in the earth's orbit, yet not attached to earth, for any body rotating at 19 miles a second about the sun will automatically fall into the earth's orbit.

	"Venus rotates at 12 miles a second. To reach Venus we will not start toward it, but will use our acceleration away from it. This will allow the car in its rotation about the sun, and it will fall toward the center of attraction. The fall will, however, restore some of its speed, and a new orbit will be formed. This process will be continued, falling from orbit to orbit, till we at last fall into the orbit of Venus, and then we will let Venus catch us in its gravity, and we will fall to the planet. A similar process, reversed, would carry us to Mars. If we were to force the car toward the sun by means of the power units without slowing down its rotational speed, the moment we released the power, the ship would bounce back to the earth's orbit like a ball on the end of a rubber band!

	"When we leave earth—at ten miles a second, as I said—we will shoot off in the direction that will oppose the earth's movement, thus reducing our orbital speed of 10 miles a second, and causing us to fall in toward the sun. Of course we will gain speed again by the fall, so we will not fall beyond the orbit we want, but the trip will be tremendously shortened, and the higher the speed of leaving the earth, the quicker the trip." This came from Arcot.

-

	THE plans continued with exasperating slowness. The details of the work were amazingly complex, for all the machines were totally new. It was close to a week before even the power units could be ordered and the first work on the ship started. After that the orders for materials left the office daily. Still, it was late in November before the last order was sent out. Now they must begin work on other parts of the expedition—food supplies and the standard parts of the equipment. Also Arcot had decided to make a special ventilated suit. This was to make use of a small molecular motion director apparatus to cool the air, and blow it through the suit. The energy extracted by the apparatus in blowing the air about would cool it to a more comfortable temperature, for Arcot expected to find the temperature about 150 degrees, and so moist as to be unbearable, and eventually fatal to men of earth. The apparatus consisted of a small compressed air-driven generator and a power tube bank that could be carried on the back. It weighed, complete, about fifty pounds, but due to the lesser gravity of Venus this would be reduced to about 43 pounds, and that was but about fifteen pounds more than the difference that gravity would make on the weights of the men themselves.

	"Arcot," Wade had said when he saw the apparatus completed and the testing machine ready, "I was just noticing how similar that is to the portable invisibility apparatus I developed as the Pirate. I wonder if it might not be handy at times to be invisible—we could incorporate that with a slight change. It would not add more than five pounds, and those tubes you are using are easily strong enough to carry the extra load."

	The invisibility apparatus Wade mentioned was the electro-induction apparatus he had invented that past summer, and by which he had been able to enter the planes of The Transcontinental Lines unseen. It had been known that X-Rays penetrated metal by setting the molecules in rapid oscillation in step with themselves, then passing readily through the vibrating molecules. Wade had applied this principle to light—but in order to set up the vibration that made all substances perfectly transparent, he had used very short radio waves; the electrostatic conditions would set the molecules in vibration, and at once they were made perfectly transparent. The invisibility was almost perfect, and when the ship was in the air, it was utterly impossible to see it.

	"Great idea, Wade," said Arcot. "It might be very useful if we met some savages. The disappearance stunt would make us gods or something. And now that you mention it, I think we can install the apparatus in the ship. It will require almost no power, and might save our lives some time."

	Undoubtedly it was this simple suggestion of Wade's that led to the eventual salvation, not only of the expedition itself, but of two worlds.

	The work was going on steadily now at the great Transcontinental Shops where the machine was being made. The manufacture was being kept as much of a secret as possible, for Arcot feared the interference of the crowds that would be sure to collect, and since the ships directly adjoined the air field, it meant that there would be helicopters buzzing about the Transatlantic and Transcontinental planes.

	The work to be done required the most careful manipulation and workmanship, for one defect in space meant death. The trip would take them six days, and in the three days before they could reach either planet, much might happen to a crippled ship.

	To the men who were making the trip, the waiting seemed most exasperating, and they spent the days before they could begin the installation of the electrical apparatus in the completed hull in purchasing the necessary standard equipment, the standard coils, tubes, condensers, the canned food supplies, clothes, everything that they could imagine as of possible utility. They were making the ship with a great deal of empty storage space, for Arcot hoped the trip would be a financial success.

	The crust of the earth, that part of the earth that man can hope to use as sources of supplies, is built up of ninety-two elements. But of these ninety-two, seven account for more than 98 per cent of the material, one alone, oxygen, accounts for 50 per cent, and after oxygen comes silicon, which represents 28 per cent. The first seven elements are oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium. Of these seven elements, each one of which represents a higher percentage of the material than all the other eighty-five elements combined, there are three that man can use as building materials. Aluminum, iron, and magnesium are useful metals, but quartz, silicon dioxide, is the only other useful building material obtainable from that list. And not all of those 92 had been discovered in 2116.

	These small percentages of copper, zinc, lead, chromium, tungsten, beryllium, manganese, molybdenum, silver, platinum, and vanadium meant a starvation of metals. Platinum was exhausted already; iridium was gone; copper was nearly exhausted; silver was becoming more and more important as the other metals became rare; lead was now so rare that it was cheaper to line acid vats with silver than with lead.

	But there were many uses for which the metals were irreplaceable. Arcot hoped, with reason, that Venus might yield vast new sources of these nigh-exhausted metals. Our civilization is founded on metals, and it is only through them that it can remain strong. We must get new sources, or civilization will be lost. Arcot hoped to find such sources on Venus, and the ship was prepared to carry back samples of the ones found.

	On the outward trip some of this space would be filled with the many things that they would consume en route. In addition they were carrying a great many spare parts, spare tubes, spare power units, spare condensers—a thousand and one odd parts. Arcot intended that they should be able to make an entire new power switchboard and motion director unit if anything should go wrong, and he certainly had all the apparatus. As we know now, it was well he provided it.

	At last came the day when the last connection had been soldered, and the last joint welded. The atomic hydrogen tanks had been filled, and under the ship's own power the oxygen tanks were filled and the battery was charged. They were ready for a test flight!

	The great ship was standing on the floor of the shed now, waiting the start.

	"Oh fellows—come here a minute!" Arcot called to the other members of the party. "I want to show you something."

-

	THE other men walked quickly to the bow where Arcot was standing, and followed the line of his vision, looking in wonder to see that everything was right. They turned curiously to him, and he pulled from his coat a large glass bottle, sealed shut. "What's that for?" asked Wade curiously. "We are about to start on the first cruise, and I have been wondering if it isn't time we gave the machine a name?"

	"Great—I had been thinking of that too—what are we going to name her?"

	"Well," said Arcot, "I had been thinking of Alexander—he longed for other worlds to conquer!"

	"That's a good one—I have been thinking of naming it too—I guess we all have—but I was thinking of Santa Maria—the first ship to discover the New World," suggested Morey.

	"I was thinking more of its home," said Wade. "I was thinking of calling it Terrestrian."

	"Well—it's your turn, Fuller—you designed it. What do you suggest for your masterpiece?" asked Arcot.

	"I was thinking also of its home—the home it will never leave. I like to think that we might find people on Venus, and I would like to have a name on it that might be translatable into more friendly and less foreign terms—why not call it Solarite?"

	"Solarite—a member of the solar system—it will be that, always—it will be a world unto itself when it makes its trips—it will take up an orbit about the sun—a true member of the solar system. I heartily agree with that name." Arcot turned to the others. It was agreed upon unanimously.

	"But still I am curious about that glass bottle; it is so carefully sealed, rather imagine that there is some gas in there—but what is the object?" asked Morey with a puzzled smile.

	"Wrong—it hasn't any gas in it—which is the reason for sealing it so carefully. What more appropriate for christening a space ship than, a bottle of high-grade vacuum? 

	"We can't have a pretty girl christen this ship, that's sure. A flying bachelor's apartment christened by a mere woman? Never! We will have the foreman of the works here do that. Since we can't have the ship slide down the ways or anything, we will get inside and move it when he smashes the bottle. But in the meantime, let's have a symbol painted on the bow. We can have a blazing sun, with eight planets circling it, and the earth painted very much more conspicuously; below it we can have SOLARITE printed."

	The christening took place, and at last the ship was ready for the first trip into its natural medium—nothing. They were rising smoothly now, high into the air! At last they disappeared from the sight of the ground crew. It was shortly after noon when they left, but the sun was a great ball of fire low in the west when they returned, dropping plummet-like from the depths of space, the roar of the air about the hull, a long scream that mounted from a half-heard sound in the outer limits of the earth's atmosphere, to a roar of whining air as the ship dropped swiftly to the field and shot quickly into the hangar. Instantly the crew was running to the tide of the ship, as the door of the ship opened. Something was wrong!

	"Hey, Jackson—call the field doctor—Arcot had a little trouble out there in space!" In a moment the man designated was returning with the doctor, leading him swiftly down the long metal corridor of the Solarite to Arcot's room aboard.

	There was a mean-looking cut in Arcot's scalp, but it was not serious, though he had been knocked unconscious by the blow that made the cut.

	"How did this happen?" asked the doctor as he bathed the cut and deftly bandaged it.

	"There is a mechanism on board here that is designated to get the car out of the way of meteors while we are in space, and it works automatically. Arcot and I were just changing places at the controls. During the time while neither of us was strapped into the seats, a meteor came within range and the rocket tubes shot the car out of the way. We both went tumbling over to the side of the ship as it jumped, and Arcot landed on his ear. I was luckier, and was able to break my fall with my hands, and then land on my chest, but it was a mean fall—for under the great acceleration developed we had about double weight, so, though it was only about seven feet, we might as well have fallen fourteen," explained Morey. "We took turns piloting the ship, and Arcot, who started, was about to bring us back, when that shock just about shook us all over the ship. We will have to fix that!"

	The doctor was through now, and he began to revive his patient. In a moment he stirred and raised his hand to feel the sore spot. He was not yet fully conscious. In ten minutes he was conversing with his friends, however, slightly the worse for a very severe headache. The doctor gave him a mild opiate, and had him sleep off the effect of the blow in the car. The room where he was had been designed for his use, and was already fully equipped.

	"Doctor Bailey, would you like to look over the ship?" asked Wade.

	Naturally the doctor was quick to take the chance, and they started forward to the control room. Here the great fused quartz windows gave them a clear view in all directions except to the rear. There were five seats arranged in a semicircle before the main front window. The central seat was equipped with arms as broad as small tables, and on these arms there were instruments and controls. In the rear of the room was the main manual control board, its broad black surface dotted with dials and controls in a sequence unintelligible to the doctor.

	"This is the main control board here—the ship can be controlled entirely from this point. The control that we will actually use in most of the maneuvers, the speed control, the directional control, the ones that control our simple motions, are handled from the pilot set there. That is the system used in working while in the atmosphere when we will be turning quickly. In space, if we do take over the manual control, the machine will be controlled from this board. As a matter of fact the course will be worked out by the mechanical director apparatus downstairs. The power room is a combined chemistry and physics laboratory, and automatic control room. I will start the generator, and you can listen to the relays down there automatically adjusting to the load. At the same time you will hear it sucking air in through the vent to warm the molecular director power units that drive it. When in the atmosphere, it pulls in air to warm it—out in space it gets heat from the sun."

	They left the pilot room and walked on down the long corridor. On either side of the metal-walled hall there were rooms, and along the roof of the corridor there was a series of rungs like the steps of a ladder

	"What is the purpose of those rungs there?" asked the doctor curiously.

	"Those are for descending the ship in space. We will have acceleration forward only, and when we are it space the back of the ship is down. That is why I say the power room is downstairs—it is the last room in the ship. In space we actually slide down that pole there; it is easier and quicker. Holding on with one hand, we can break the hundred and twenty foot fall easily, for the acceleration, and hence our weight, will be very small. Did you notice that the beds are arranged to strap the sleeper in position? The changing acceleration would throw him all over if we didn't. The walls of the ship are made of steel, the usual tungsten iron alloy and are highly magnetic. The result is, it is easy to walk about by means of magnetic shoes. The side walls will be the floor, and that will complicate matters, but we thought it best to design the ship for maneuvering in the air of some planet, since it is fully automatic in space.

	"There are six bedrooms. There are only four going on this first trip, but that provides for future use. There is, of course, a kitchen also—but most of these rooms are storage rooms. There is a large battery just under the floor here, and beside it, filling in the curve of the ship, a large water tank. These are within the double walls of the ship, where it will be warm, to prevent the possibility of freezing them. We are expecting a warm climate on the planet Venus, so we are protecting the occupants of the ship from the heat while we are there by having double walls, with a vacuum in between. Hear that low hum? There are large gyroscopic stabilizers exactly in the center of the ship, holding it stable along all three axes, length, breadth and height"

	Arcot spent the night aboard the ship, to wake the next morning feeling fully recovered, while the wound in his scalp was fully healed now, by the action of the samvernite used in dressing it.

-

	THE ship was fully equipped now, and the time for leaving had been set for the following Saturday, three days off. There were great supplies of stores to be carried aboard in the meantime, and the men worked busily carrying the packages aboard, and storing them carefully. Great care had to be exercised in this work, lest the cargo slip free when the accelerations of the Solarite were varying, and batter itself to pieces, or even wreck some vital part of the ship. It was nearly noon Saturday before they could say that the first ship that ever was to leave the bounds of the earth's gravity was ready to start!

	Gentry the heavily laden ship lifted from the floor, and slowly it went out into the bright sunshine of the early February day. Beside it was riding the little ship that Arcot had first built, piloted by the father of the inventor of the ships. With him rode the elder Morey and a dozen pressmen. The little ship was badly crowded now as they slowly rose high into the upper reaches of the earth's atmosphere. The sky about them was growing dark—they were going into space!

	At last they reached the ultimate ceiling of the smaller ship, and it hung there while the Solarite went a few miles higher, then slowly, but ever faster and faster they were plunging ahead, gathering speed, they watched the radio speedometer creep up—1—2—3—4—5—6—stead-fly it was rising as the acceleration pressed them hard against the back of the seats—8 9 still it was rising as the hum of the generator back there became a low snarl—10—11—12—they were rocketing at twelve miles a second, the thin air about the ship was shrieking in a thin scream of protest as it parted on the streamlined bow. The vertical power units were driving the ship toward earth—still it hung on the centrifugal force—they seemed flung from earth with a weight of more than 300 pounds apiece. Even tins thin air offered considerable resistance at this terrific speed, and the thin air gave little heat so the power was low—still the speed rose slowly—and reached fifteen miles a second. Now the sun was really pulling them; they were falling toward the sun—away from the earth—the shrill screech of the air outside could not reach them through the vacuum walls, but there was a microphone on the outside that they might hear, and through the loud speaker in the control room came the thin wail of the air—then Arcot shouted to them in warning:

	"Hold on—we are going to lose weight—out into space!"

	There was a click, and a sudden sensation of falling—the ship seemed to reel beneath them—the angry snarl of the overworked generator died in an instant as the thudding relays cut it out of the circuit—they seemed falling with terrific and ever-increasing speed—they looked down—saw the earth shrinking visibly as they shot away at more than five miles a second—they were traveling fifteen miles a second ahead and five a second straight up. The men were watching with intensest interest as the heavens opened up to them—the air was left far behind, and they could see stars now a scant degree from the sun itself, for no air diffused his blinding glory. The heat of the rays seemed to burn them, there was a prickling pleasantness to it now, as they looked at the mighty sea of flame through smoked glasses. The titanic flames of the corona reached out like the arms of some flaming octopus through thousands of miles of space—huge arms of flaming gas that writhed out in vain attempts to reach and drag back the whirling planets to the parent body. All about the mighty sphere, stretching far into space, a wan glow seemed to ebb and flow, a flow of swift-changing color, mighty streamers of light that waved and fluttered a million miles in space. The colors seemed to flow with majestic slowness, but it was only the mighty scope of the thing that gave it this appearance, for these colors flashed about at close to the speed of light. It was the zodiacal light, an aurora borealis on a scale inconceivable!

	Arcot was working rapidly with the controls, the absence of weight that gave that continued sense of an unending fall, aided him and his assistants now in their rapid work of changing the controls from an air flyer to a space ship. The air scoop that had carried the air to the generator was closed off in a moment; there was a hiss of gas as the air was flooded into the room, and a moment later the hull vibrated with the acceleration of the generator as it again picked up speed. With the leaving of the air that warmed and drove it as they fell out into space, the machine had been robbed of its source of power, and it had stopped. Now again it was working smoothly, using the heat of the sun. The lights of the ship flashed on again as the machine gained speed, and they had some slight weight once more as the steady pull of the power units recommenced, the pull that would continue unceasingly till they at last fell into the atmosphere of Venus.

	At last the work was done and the ship was going on its way under the control of the instruments that would guide it across all the millions of miles of space and land it on Venus with the unerring certainty of a machine. The photo-electric telescopic eye was watching the planet constantly, keeping the ship surely and accurately on the course that would get them to the distant planet in the minimum of time.

	"Better start the ozonator, Wade—we don't want to get an overdose of ultra-violets! We will be able to look around in a minute—and for the next five days or so we will have the same things to look at!" said Arcot

	The ozonator was a simple apparatus designed to keep the correct amount of ozone in the air of the machine, for on earth there is a layer of the gas in the atmosphere that filters the sunlight to the same type of rays at all times, the type that the human body has become accustomed to. Through countless eons man has lived in this environment, and this is what he must have. Less, as was found out in the first half of the twentieth century would result in disease; more would result in burns.

	The ozone was the gas that regulated the supply in such a way that man had become accustomed to it. Had there been none, man would have developed an ability to adjust himself to changes in ultra-violet light just as he has become accustomed to changes in temperature.

	At last the work of preparing the ship for the trip was over, and the men could rest and use their time to observe the beauties of the skies as no man had ever seen them during all the billions of years of time that this solar system has developed—unless it be, as some think, that Mercury once had a population ere it became the desert waste it is, and that all of us, all in the solar system, are descendants of that long dead race.

	The lack of atmosphere made it possible to use a power of magnification that no terrestrial telescope may use.

	The blurred outlines produced by the shifting air prohibits magnifications of more than a few hundred diameters, but here in space they could use the greatest power of their telescope. With it they could look at Mars and see it more clearly than any other man had ever seen it, despite the fact that it was now over two hundred million miles away, and at times it comes to one sixth that distance from the earth.

	But though they spent much time taking photographs of the planets and of the moon, and in making spectrum analyses of the sun, they found the time passed very slowly. Day after day they saw measured on the clocks, but they stayed up, and found they needed little sleep, for they wasted no muscles. Their lack of weight made them lack fatigue. However, they determined that during the twelve hours before reaching Venus they must be thoroughly awake, so they tried to sleep in pairs just before coming near the planet. Arcot and Morey were the first pair to seek the arms of Morpheus—but Morpheus seemed to be a mundane god, for he did not reward them, and at last it became necessary to take a mild opiate, for their muscles refused to permit the tired brain to sleep. It was twelve hours later when they awoke, to relieve Wade and Fuller.

	They spent most of the twelve hours before them now in playing games of chess. There was little to be done. The silver globe before them seemed unchanging now, for they were still so far away it seemed little larger than the moon docs when seen from earth.

	But at last it was time for the effects of the mild drug to wear off, and for Wade and Fuller to wake soon from their sleep.

	"Morey—I wonder if it might not be interesting to observe the reactions of a man waking suddenly from sleep to find himself alone in space?" Arcot was staring thoughtfully at the control that would make the ship perfectly transparent, perfectly invisible. There was an expression of perfect innocence on his face—but a twinkle of humor in his eyes.

	"I wonder if it would?" said Morey grasping Arcot's idea. "What do you say we try it?" Arcot turned the little switch—and where there had been the ship, it was no more—it was gone!

-

	FULLER stirred uneasily in his bed, tight strapped as he was. The effects of the drug were wearing off. Sleepily he yawned—stretched, and blindly, his heavy eyes still closed, released the straps that held him in bed. Yawning widely he opened his eyes—with a sudden start he sat upright—then, after giving an excellent phonetic imitation of a wild Indian on the warpath, he leapt from his bed, and started to run wildly across the floor, his eyes raised to the place where the ceiling should have been calling lustily in alarm—then suddenly he was flying up—and crashed heavily against the invisible ceiling! His face was a picture of utter astonishment as he fell lightly to the floor—then slowly it changed, and took on a chagrined smile—he understood!

	He turned in amazement as loud cries suddenly resounded from Wade's room across the hall—then there was a dull thud, as he too, forgetting the weightlessness, jumped and hit the ceiling. Then the cries were gone, like the snuffing of a candle. From the control room there sounded loud laughter—and a moment later they felt more normal, as they again saw the four strong walls about them, and could again see the feet they stood on.

	Quickly they dressed now, and each stepped out into the main hall, just in time to meet each other.

	"Wade, did you hear those two morons up there? Such a sense of humor! Well, I suppose we must expect such things from them. I think it should be a lesson to us not to trust anything so valuable as this ship in the hands of a weak-minded pair like that again. One of us must always be on guard," said Fuller seriously—and rather loudly.

	Wade sighed heavily and shook his head.

	They were approaching the planet visibly now. In the twelve hours that had passed they had covered a million miles, for now they were falling into the planet under its attraction. It glowed before them now in wondrous splendour, a mighty disc of molten silver, far more beautiful than the moon ever was—a silver that made the moon a dull and tarnished globe in comparison. The strength of the reflected light was such that at their present distance of three quarters of a million miles it was almost uncomfortably bright. They could read a book with ease.

	For the last twenty-four hours they had been trying to reduce their speed relative to Venus, lest they be unable to form an orbit about the planet, and. shoot around it and back into space. Their velocity had been over a hundred miles a second part of the way, but now it had been reduced to ten. The gravity of the planet was urging them forward at ever increasing speed, and their problem was more difficult to solve.

	"We will never make it on the power units alone, out here in space," said Arcot seriously—"We will just shoot around it. I tell you how we can do it, though. We will go around it, entering its atmosphere on the daylight side, so that we won't be frozen to death in its shadow, and shoot into the upper limits of its atmosphere. There the power units will find some heat to work on, and we can really slow down. But we will have to use the rocket tubes to get the acceleration we will need to drive the ship into the air."

	There was a sudden clanging of a large bell—everyone dived for a hold, and held tightly. Not an instant later then there was a terrific wrench as the rocket avoiding mechanism threw the plane out of the way of a meteorite.

	"We are getting near a planet. That is the third meteorite we have met since we were more than a million miles from earth. Venus and earth and all the planets act like giant vacuum cleaners of space, pulling into themselves all the meteorites within millions of miles by their gravitational attraction,"

	Swiftly the planet before them was expanding—growing each instant vaster. It had changed from a disc to a globe, and now, as the molten silver of its surface seemed swiftly clouding, it turned grey; then they saw the true appearance, a vast field of rolling, billowing clouds!

	They were shooting about the planet now at ten miles a second, far more than enough to carry them away from the planet again, out into space once more if not checked.

	"Hold on everybody—we are going to turn toward the planet now!" Arcot depressed a small lever—there was a sudden shock, and all the space about them was a blazing furnace of huge, deep-red atomic hydrogen flames.

	The ship reeled under the sudden pressure, but the heavy gyroscopic stabilizers caught it, held it, and the ship remained on an even keel. Then suddenly there came to the ears of the men a long drawn whine, faint—almost inaudible—but there it was—the ship seemed slowing down. The loud-speaker was rapidly increasing its power—the Solarite was entering the atmosphere of a new world—the first machine that man ever made to thus penetrate the air of other worlds!

	Arcot was working busily now—quickly he snapped open the control that had kept the rocket flaming, turning the ship to the planet—driving it into the atmosphere—now they could get their power from the air that each instant grew more dense about them.

	"Wade—in the power room—emergency control post—Morey—control board there—hang on, for we will have to use some husky accelerations."

	Instantly the two men were diving for their posts—literally diving, for they were still nearly weightless.

	Arcot pulled another lever—there was a dull snap as a relay in the power room responded—then the lights wavered—dimmed—then in an instant the generator was once more humming smoothly—working on the atmosphere of Venus!

	Working feverishly now—they had but a short time to change back from space-ship to air-ship—in the atmosphere of a new world. In a moment the power units were again operating, and now they produced a force that made the men grasp their holds tightly, as they sucked a plenitude of power from the surrounding air.

	The loud-speaker had shrieked louder and louder, till it poured forth a deafening wave of sound. Now it was silent, for Fuller had opened the circuit. Around them the rapidly increasing density of the air made the whine grow to a roar—the ship was growing slightly warm from air friction, despite the extremely cold air at this altitude—more than seventy-five miles yet from the surface of the planet.

	They were dropping rapidly now—their radio-speedometer had fallen from ten to nine—then slowly, but faster and faster as more heat could be extracted from the air it had fallen 8—7—6—5—4—now they were well under orbital speed, falling under the influence of the planet, the struggle was over—the men seemed to loosen up, the ship was running quietly now, the smooth hum of the air rushing over the great power units coming softly through the speaker again, a humming melody in their ears—the song of a new world.

-

	SUDDENLY the blazing sun was gone—they were floating in a vast world of rolling mists—mists that struck the car with tiny clicks, which, in the millions of particles that were hitting each instant, summed up to a steady roar in the microphone.

	"Ice—ice clouds! We will drop down below the clouds, probably they extend for miles. Look, already they are changing—snow now—in a moment it will be water—then it will clear away—and we will be in the steaming air of Venus!"

	For ten miles—ten endless miles it seemed they dropped through clouds utterly impenetrable to the eye—then slowly the clouds became thinner; there appeared brief clear spots, spots into which they could see short distances—then here and there they caught glimpses of green below—was it water? or land?

	Then with a suddenness that startled them, they were out of the clouds, shooting smoothly along at one mile a second over a broad plain—it seemed to stretch for endless miles across the globe, to be lost in the far distance to the east and west, but to the north they saw a low range of hills that rose blue and misty in the distance.

	"Venus—We made it! The first men to ever leave earth—I'm going to start the old sender and radio back to them! Man—look at that stretch of plain!" Morey had jumped to his feet and was starting across the control room. "Lord—I feel like a ton of lead now—I sure am out of condition for walking after all that time just floating!"

	"Whoa—wait a minute there, Morey—you won't get anything through to them. The earth is on the other side of Venus now—it is on the night side, remember—we are on the day side. There are 7700 miles of rock and metal between here and the free space—then it has 45,000,000 miles or so to go before it hits the earth's atmosphere, and since you are using beam sending, it will have to penetrate the 8000 miles of earth before it reaches old New York. As I see it, we are now on the daylight side of this planet—which corresponds in time to the night side of earth. Thus, in about twelve hours we will be able to send a message. In the meantime, take the controls while I make a test of the air here, will you, Morey?" Arcot, relieved of the controls, rose and walked down the corridor to the power room where the chemical laboratory had been set up. Wade had already collected a dozen samples of air, and was working on them.

	"How is it—what have you tested for so far?" asked Arcot.

	"Oxygen and C02. The oxygen is about twenty-two percent, or, considering the slightly lower air pressure here, we will have just about the right amount of oxygen. CO2 is down to about one-tenth of one percent. That means that there must be a lot of animal life here considering the obvious plenitude of vegetable life.

	"But one thing surprises me, I had a piece of titanium ribbon in there—the oxygen I took out with phosphorus, and it won't burn. Titanium burns brilliantly in nitrogen, of course—in the earth's atmosphere the titanium will burn nearly as well after the oxygen is out as before. I can't get it—the atmosphere is O.K. for terrestrial life apparently; that mouse there is living quite happily."

	"Whatever the other seventy-five percent or so of diluting gas is, I don't know. Of course, I took out the water—passed it over calcium oxide. Magnesium ribbon won't burn in it, so it isn't any oxide—though I couldn't think of any it might be—if it were CO2 it would dissolve in the ocean at anywhere near that concentration. What do you make of it?" Wade was frankly stuck—it was beyond him.

	"Well—let's see. That mouse is living peaceably long enough—so it can't be very deadly—I think it would like to smell it." Arcot picked up the jar, and moved the glass cover to one side, and sniffed cautiously. "Quite odorless. I rather expected that—all gases that are reasonably inert are odorless. Is it very soluble in water? No, it can't be—there are large oceans here all right—fifty percent humidity and the temperature at five miles is one-ten! A hundred and ten degrees five miles up! I wonder what it's like at the surface—worse than Death Valley in July,"

"But let me see that gas again—what is the molecular weight of it?"

	"

	"Haven't made any careful measurements—couldn't with the ship jumping as it has been—but as near as I can tell it is about 35 or 34—nearer the 35."

	"Hmmm, allowing it is an element—if it isn't, either the magnesium or the calcium oxide should have done something to it—that means it isn't chlorine—we knew that anyway—but that has a molecular weight of 71; it can't be anything above that—wait a minute—of course—hooo—stupid—it's argon! No wonder it wouldn't attack magnesium or titanium! I wonder how we were so thick as to miss it! It is a little light—but I'll bet there is considerable nitrogen in it and that would make it come down toward 28, and probably there is a lot of helium and neon and the other inert gases in it. But what an atmosphere! No great amount of nitrogen; that means that life will have a sweet time extracting it from the air—but wherever there is life—it finds a way of doing the impossible. Test it more accurately, will you—you try for nitrogen and I will try the component inert gases."

	They ran the analysis rapidly, and in a very short time—less than an hour—their results stood at 23 percent oxygen, 14 percent carbon dioxide, 68 percent argon, 6 percent nitrogen, 2 percent helium, 5 percent neon, .05 percent hydrogen, and the rest krypton and xenon apparently. The analyses of these inert gases had to be done rather roughly in this short time, but it was sufficient to balance fairly accurately. On ionizing the gas in a small tube, they found that, unlike the bluish glow of earth's air it gave off a reddish grey color—a curious light of a ghostly hue.

-

	THE two chemists reported back to the control cabin. The others had been observing everything within range with the aid of the small telescope they had brought along. The hills seemed quite distant, but Arcot pouted out that it would be a very misty day on earth now, with such a high humidity. The slight difference in the radius of curvature of the sphere was, of course, unnoticeable.

	"Well, we will be able to breathe the atmosphere of Venus with ease. I believe we can go on now. I have been surprised to see no water in sight, but I think I see my mistake now. You know the Mississippi has its mouth further from the center of the earth than its source; it flows up hill! The answer is, of course, that the centrifugal force of the earth's spin makes it tend to flow in that way. Similarly, I am sure now that we will find that Venus has a vast belt of water about the middle, and to the north and south there will be two great caps of dry land. We are now on the northern cap.

	"We have the microphone turned way down. Let's step up the power a bit and see if there are any sounds outside," said Arcot and walked over to the power control switch. An instant later the loud-speaker was humming softly. There was a light breeze blowing. In the distance, though, forming a dull background for the entire hum, there came a low rumbling that seemed punctuated now and then by a greater burst of sound.

	"Must be a long way off," said Arcot, a puzzled frown on his face. "Swing the ship, around so we can see in what direction the sound is loudest," he suggested.

	Slowly Morey swung the ship around on its vertical axis. Without a doubt, something off in the direction of the hills was making a considerable noise.

	"Arcot—if that's a fight between two animals—two of those giant animals that you said might be here—I don't care to get near them!" Fuller was listening to the sounds, and looking off across the plain to the low hills in the blue distance.

	"If it is two animals fighting—we will leave this planet while we still can! Any animal that can make a racket tike that—well, I don't think it can exist!" Arcot was smiling to think of the size lungs that roar would require.

	The microphone was shut off while the Solarite shot swiftly forward toward the source of the sound. Quickly the hills were growing, the blue mistiness disappeared, and they showed as bleak harsh rock; but as they came nearer they saw over the tops of the hills now, flashes of light that intermittently came into being.

	"A thunderstorm! Ho—that's good—there is your animal. Fuller!" laughed Wade.

	"Not so fast, Wade—his animal is there—the only animal in all creation that can make a noise like that! Look through the telescope—see those dots wheeling about there above the flashing lights—there one got hit—there are no clouds there—no thunderstorm—the only animal that can cause that racket is man! There are men over there—and they aren't in a playful mood! Turn on the invisibility while we can, Morey—and let's get nearer!"

	"Men—look out—here we go!" Morey slipped a tiny switch set in one side of the instrument panel—then, before the relay below could move, he had flipped it back.

	"Here—you take it, Arcot—you always think about two steps ahead of me—you are quicker and know the machine better, anyway." 

	Quickly the two men changed places. 

	"I don't know about that, Morey," said a voice from the air—for Arcot had at once thrown the ship into invisibility—the ship was gone like the light of an extinguished candle. "The longer we stay here, the more mistakes I can see that we made in our calculations of what would happen. I see what put me off so badly on the estimate of the intelligence of people found on this planet! The sun gives it a double dose of heat—but also a double dose of X-Rays! Since about 1928 it has been known that X-Rays speed evolution. Just the same, we may be able to find friends here more quickly if we aid one. side or the other in the very lively battle going on there. Now, before we go any further, we want to decide whether or not to aid either side."

	"I think it is a fine idea. But which side are we to aid—and what are the sides. We haven't even seen them yet Let's go nearer and take a good look at them; certainly we ought to know that before we decide," said Fuller.

	"Yes—but are we going to join either side at all after looking?"

	"Oh, that's unanimous!" said Wade, excitedly. 

	Quickly the invisible ship darted forward. Soon they had passed the barrier of the low hills, and were again out on a broad plain. Suddenly all the men gasped in surprise! Well they might! There, floating high in the air, above a magnificent city, was a machine such as no man had ever before seen! A titanic airplane it was! Yet so monstrous, so gargantuan, that it beggared description. Fully three-quarters of a mile the huge metal wings stretched out in the dull light of the cloudy Venerian day; such a titanic machine it was that' it seemed to dwarf even the mighty city beneath! The roar of its mighty propellers came as a rumbling thunder to the Solarite. From it were coming the flashing bursts of flame. Now, on closer inspection, it was possible to make out what seemed a swarm of tiny gnats flying about the mighty plane. They seemed to be attacking the giant as vainly as the gnats might attack an eagle, and as foolhardily, for they could riot damage the mighty machine. Their flashing bombs that rained down upon it burst in blasts of yellow flame as harmlessly as so many firecrackers.

	All that mighty machine was covered with heavy metal plates, ten inches thick, and of metal so tough that when the powerful bombs hit it they were ineffectual, though they blew great craters in the soil below. Yet from it poured a steady stream of bombs that seemed to burst with a great flash of heat and light, and in an instant the tiny planes they struck darted down an incandescent mass of metal.

	Yet the giant seemed unable to approach the city—or was it defending it? No, for it was from the city that the vainly courageous little ships poured out. But certainly it was not these ships that kept the titanic battleship of the air at bay?

-

	CONSTANTLY the great ship was sending its bombs toward the city, only to have them fall short of it. But slowly, around the city, there was appearing an area of red hot, molten rock and dirt, and steadily this was moving inward as more and more shells from the great plane struck it. Then suddenly the battleship of the air turned toward the city and made a short dash inward on its circling path. Instantly it was apparent why the ship had not attacked the city directly, for up from the ground, a few hundred feet from the ring of molten rock, there leaped a long ray of hissing white flame. It reached up and seemed almost to touch the great machine. Then, as the titanic plane rolled, and side-slipped out of the way, it passed, harmless, a little shy of the monstrous wing.

	"Which? I say the city. No one should destroy so magnificent a city. Also they are losing, which will make our aid all the more welcome," suggested Arcot.

	"The city it is, I guess." All the others agreed, so Arcot started nearer. "But what in the world can we do to that huge thing? It has perfect invulnerability through size alone. It will be like attacking a battleship with a rowboat, as the old mariners would have said." Fuller was looking fascinatedly at the scene before him—though no one could tell just where he was gazing, since the entire ship was as invisible as air.

	Now it seemed that one of the men of the city had a system to wreck the giant plane—the mighty propellers. There were fifty of these strung along each of the titanic wings; the giant monoplane seemed to be vulnerable only there—for if enough of these could be broken, eventually they would be able to blow holes in its armor, while it lay helpless on the ground. They had apparently tried to bomb the gigantic metal blades, but the rushing, swirling air currents had thrown the bombs aside, or smashed them against the thick armor. Now one of the little planes darted forward and dove at full speed directly against one of the propellers! But the sacrifice was in vain—there was indeed a terrific crash—one that made the loud speaker in the invisible Solarite tremble. Yet the mighty blades were functioning as smoothly as ever!

	Indeed, it seemed that the Solarite would be as utterly helpless as any against that titanic machine. Now Arcot was climbing the machine high into the sky above the great plane. There was a full mile drop between them when he released the sustaining force of the Solarite and let it drop, straight toward the source of the battle-falling freely, ever more and more rapidly; they were pushing at the mighty plane below at a pace that made their hearts seem to pause—then suddenly Arcot cried out, "Hold on—here we stop!"—they seemed a scant hundred feet from the broad metal wings of the great plane, which was hanging beneath them, totally unaware of the Solarite. Then suddenly there was a tremendous jerk, and each man felt himself pressed to the floor of the machine with a terrific weight that made their backs crack with the load. Almost unconscious they seemed. Below them was nought but a mighty sea of roaring red flames—a hell of blazing gas that roared like a million bombs at once. The Solarite was sitting down on the rockets! All six of the rocket tubes in the bottom of the car had been opened wide, and streaming from them in a mighty blast of incandescent gas, the atomic hydrogen was shooting out in a mighty column of gas at 3500 degrees centigrade. In an instant the great plane was incandescent where the gas touched it, and in an interval so short that it was almost immeasurable, the fall of the Solarite had been checked, and it was rebounding high into the air again. As soon as Arcot could, he reached a hand that was weighted down with the load of six gravities and pulled shut the little control that had sent those mighty torches flaming out. Then an instant later they were racing ahead lest the plane shoot bombs toward the gas columns.

	Then at last they were able to look at their work! No longer did they see the mighty plane unscathed, invulnerable, for now there glowed six great craters of incandescent metal that almost touched and coalesced. The great plane itself was reeling, staggering, plunging downward, but long before it reached the hard soil below it was brought out into level flight, and limping, for several of its engines were dead now, it circled and made off toward the south. The horde of small planes followed, dropping a rain of bombs into the glowing boles in the ship that made them grow swiftly larger. But now the men of the ship had to a large extent recovered from the shock of the attack and were fighting back. In a moment—just before the ship passed over the horizon and out of sight, the Terrestrians saw the great props that had been idle, suddenly leap into life, and in an instant the giant had left its attackers behind—fleeing, wounded from its invisible foe.

	It was agreed that they return to the city and become visible.

	Again they turned, and slowly went back, still invisible, to the approximate spot where they had destroyed the invulnerability of the Giant. Then suddenly, out of nothing, the Solarite appeared. In an instant a dozen of the tiny two-man planes were darting toward it. Just that they might recognize it, Arcot shot it up a bit higher with the aid of the keel rockets at one-third power. Still, the typical reddish flame of atomic hydrogen was instantaneously recognizable.

	Little these planes were, but shaped like darts, and swifter than any plane earth had—they shot along at 1000 miles an hour readily, as Arcot soon found out. It was not a minute before they had formed a long line that circled the Solarite at minimum speed, then started off in the direction of the city. On impulse Arcot followed after them, and instantly the planes shot their velocity up. It was quickly indeed that they reached a thousand miles an hour, and rocketed smoothly along.

	The city they were approaching was an inspiring sight—mighty towers that reached their graceful lines a half mile in the air, their sides of brightly colored material of some kind gleaming in warm hues seemed to make the entire city a gigantic jewel—one lone piece of architecture, for here no individuals were looming out. There was no irregular skyline, but every unit tended toward the gigantic edifice that rose, its gleaming tower of black and gold a full half mile in the air.

	The outer parts of the city were evidently the residential districts, the low buildings and wide streets with the little green lawns showing the care of the individual owner. Then came the apartment houses and the small stores; then they rose in gentle slopes, higher and higher, towering at last to a mighty pinnacle of beauty—a single resplendent jewel of flashing color, designed as a whole, and not in a multitude of individually beautiful, but in harmonious units, like some wild mixture of melodies, each in itself beautiful, but mutually discordant.

-

	NOW the Terrestrians were following their escort high above these great buildings, following them to the great central tower. In a moment they were above it, and in perfect order the ships of the Venerians shot down to land smoothly, but at high speed. On the roof of the building they slowed with startling rapidity, held back by electromagnets under the top dressing of the roof landing, as Arcot learned later.

	"We can't land on that—this thing weighs too much—we'd probably sink right through it! I'll go down into the street there and land—it looks wide enough!" Arcot maneuvered the Solarite over the edge of the roof, and then dropped it swiftly down the half mile to the ground below, just above the street level he held it up, and lowered it gently, giving the hurrying crowds plenty of time to get from beneath it.

	Then, in anxious curiosity, he landed it, and looked quickly at the crowd of Venerians who had gathered in the busy street, coming out of the buildings where they had, no doubt, sought shelter during the raid. It was a rapidly growing crowd as the Terrestrians looked interestedly at these people of a new world—a people that no man had ever seen.

	"Why," said Fuller in startled surprise, "they look almost like us!"

	"Of course," laughed Arcot—"and what did you expect. There are certain prerequisites that any intelligent creature must have. He must have a brain, of course, but also he must have tools, for that is the only way the intelligence of the brain may be expressed. To not only give him those necessary tools, but also to permit him to hold his brain case more out of harm's way, and get a wider range of vision, he stands on his hind legs, thus freeing his forelegs for work.

	"The first requisite of any animal that is to rule the planet of his home, is that he have physical strength enough to cope with the problems about him. He must be strong enough to fight his enemies. But since he also has intelligence, he must be strong enough to use the tools he makes. It would seem an elephantine beast was the obvious candidate for intelligence—but he isn't. On earth, Nature tried out the giant reptile and discarded it. He was so big he didn't have to develop intelligence, perhaps. Then the insect—Nature tried that—developed intelligence there—but it was so small, that it couldn't do much toward changing the face of the earth to suit itself, so it, too, was put aside. Then, in a creature half way between the two, Nature found the best possibilities. But the greatest asset she gave man was the thumb; with it he is able to hold the tools he makes, among many other things, and it is the thing that has done most toward developing man's intelligence.

	"But further on the question of size. If man was much bigger, he would be fragile. Can you imagine an elephant jumping? No, he couldn't; he would break his legs under his own weight if he did. A thing that size can't be agile as Man had to be.

	"But here, on this planet, we have a lesser gravity, and to the degree of that lesser gravity the animals could be larger than those of earth, without exceeding the breakage limit. I think that explains the size of those Venerians."

	Certainly it needed some explanation, for in all that crowd, only the obviously young were under six feet. The average seemed to be seven feet, with rather large chests—well-built men and women, who would have seemed very much human indeed, but for a ghastly, death-like blue tinge to their skin. Even their lips were as bright a blue as man's lips are red. The teeth seemed to be as white as any human's, but their mouths were blue.

	"Why, they look as if they had all been eating blueberries!" laughed Wade. "I wonder what makes their blood blue? I have heard of blue-blooded families, but these are the first I have ever seen!"

	"I think I can answer that, also—I have been reading about various forms of life recently," said Morey slowly. "It seems odd to us—but those people have their blood based on hemocyanine. In us, the oxygen is carried to the tissues, and the carbon dioxide carried away by an iron compound, hemoglobin, but in many animals of earth, the same function is performed by a copper compound, hemo-cyanin, which is an intense blue. I am sure that that is the explanation for these strange people, By the way, did you notice their hands?"

	"Yes, I had. I know they are different from ours, but I haven't had a good look at them and can't say in what way they are different. They strike me as having one too many fingers—look—there—that fellow is pointing—why—his hand has not too many fingers, but too many thumbs! He has one on each side of his palm! What good does that do him—let's see, if I put one hand on top of the other, palm to back, I get the same effect—say it would be handy in placing nuts and bolts, and such fine work, would it not?"

	Suddenly a lane opened in the crowd, and from the great black and gold building there came a file of men in tight-fitting green uniforms, a file of seven-foot giants. Obviously they were soldiers of some particular branch, for in the crowd there were a number of men dressed in similar uniforms of deep blue.

	"I think they want one or more of us to accompany them. Let's flip a coin to decide who goes—two better stay here, and two go. If we don't come back inside of a reasonable period of time, one of you might start making inquiries; the other can send a message to earth, and get out of harm's way till help can come. I imagine these people are friendly now, however—else I wouldn't go."

	As Arcot finished, the leader of the troop stepped up to the door of the Solarite, and coming to what was obviously a position of attention, put his left hand over his right breast in an equally obvious salute, and waited.

	The coin was flipped with due ceremony—it was to decide which of them were to have the distinction of being the first Terrestrians to set foot on Venus. Arcot and Morey got the luck, and they quickly put on the loose-fitting ventilated cooling suits that they might live comfortably in the hot air outside—for the thermometer registered 150!

	The two men quickly walked over to the entrance door of the air lock, entered, closed it behind them, and opened the other door. There was a slight rush of air as the pressure outside was a bit lower than mat inside. At once there was a singing in their ears, and they had to swallow several times to equalize the pressure. The guards at once fell into a double row on either side of them, and the young officer strode ahead. He himself had curbed his curiosity after the single startled glance he had given these strange men. Only their hands were visible, for the cooling suits covered them almost completely, but the strange pink color must indeed have been startling to his eyes; also their dwarf stature, and the strange suits they wore. The men of his little troop, however, as well as the people in the crowd about them, were not so disinterested. They were looking in eager amazement at these men who had but just saved their city, these strange small men, with their queer pink skin. And most surprising of all, perhaps, the inner thumb was missing from each hand!

	But soon they had passed beyond the sight of the crowd, which was held in check by a handful of the deep blue uniformed men.

	"Those fellows would never hold such a Terrestrial crowd back if visitors from another planet landed!" remarked Morey wonderingly.

	"How do they know we are visitors from another planet? We suddenly appeared out of nowhere—they don't even know our direction of approach. We might be some strange race of Venerians as far as they know, though their swift planes must have carried them over all Venus long before now!" Arcot replied.

	They had walked quickly up to the great gold and black entrance, and passed through the great doors that seemed made of great masses of solid copper, painted with some clear lacquer that kept the metal lustrous, the rich color shining magnificently. They stood open wide now, as indeed they were always. To these men of a copper starved world, where copper was practically as dear as silver, this seemed a tremendous investment. Even the giant Venerians were dwarfed by these mighty doors as they passed through into an equally vast hall, a mighty room that must have filled all the front half of the ground floor of the gigantic building, a hall of graceful columns that hid the great supporting members. The stone, they knew, must serve the Venerians as marble serves us, but it was a far more handsome stone. It was a rich green, like the green of thick, heavy grass in summer when the rain is plentiful, rich and thick, a soft wavy green. The color was very pleasing to the eye, and restful too. There was a checker-board floor of this green stone, alternated with another, a stone of intense blue. They were hard, and the colors made a very striking pattern, pleasingly different from what they had been accustomed to, but common to Venus, as they soon learned.

	Arcot dropped quickly to one knee, and started to examine the green stone closely, felt of it an instant, then jumped up in surprise, shaking his hand; a moment he looked surprised—puzzled. Then he laughed. The guards who had been accompanying them had halted, and were watching them with interest and amusement—examining the material of a common floor!

	"Why—I forgot—I won't again, though—look out that you don't touch anything unnecessarily, Morey—everything here is at a temperature of 150 remember, and is most unpleasantly hot. I almost burned my hand! It was more surprise than anything else that made me jump, but I think I know what that green stone is—it's chromic carbonate in some natural form that we don't have on earth. These fellows might just as well say that a stone, such as marble, couldn't exist, because they had never seen it—and man has never yet duplicated the work of nature in making Iceland spar—crystallized calcium carbonate, yet it is chemically the same as limestone! But let's move on—they are obviously waiting for us."

-

	THERE were many soldiers in the great hall that they were crossing, and as the little party walked on, they stopped and looked in surprise at the strangely hooded figures.

	At last the party had crossed the great hall, and stopped beside a large doorway. The officer stopped for a moment, pointed out two of his men, who remained, while the others walked quickly away. The diminished party stepped through the doorway into a small room whose walls were lined with copper apparently, and an instant later, as the officer pushed a small button, there was a low hiss of escaping air, and a copper grating sprung quickly up across the opening of the elevator. Then another button, and there was the familiar sinking feeling as the car rose, a low hum seeming to come from the lower part of the car.

	The car rose swiftly through a very considerable distance—up—up. It seemed that no car could work over that great climb.

	"They must have some wonderfully strong cables here on Venus!" Morey exclaimed. "The engineers of the Terrestrial buildings have been wondering for some time how to get around the difficulty of shifting elevators. The idea of changing cars doesn't appeal to me, either—but we must have risen a long way!"

	"I should say so—I wonder how they do it. We have been rising for a minute and a half at a very fair clip—there we are—I want to look at this car!" Arcot at once stepped over to the little row of buttons on the control board, looked at it closely, then stepped out quickly and peered down between the car and the shaft as the copper grating fell, simultaneously pulling down with it the door that had blocked off the hall-way.

	"Come here, Morey—simple system at that! It would be so, of course—look—they have tracks, and a regular trolley system, with cog rails alongside and the car just winds itself up! They have an electric motor underneath, I'll bet, and just run it up in that way. They have never done that on earth because of the terrible cost of running the car up without any counterbalance—it would be too expensive—require too much power. I think I see the solution—the car has electro-dynamical brakes, and going down, just slows itself down by pumping power into the line to haul some other car up. This eliminates the difficulty of cables that can't carry their own weight very nicely. The counterbalance means that at least a mile of cable must be used in raising the car one-half mile, actually some six miles of wire cable—this is a mighty clever scheme!"

	As Arcot straightened, the officer beckoned to him to follow, and started down the long corridor which was lined on either side with large doorways, on which there was painted in black characters some inscription, evidently the directory of the floor.

	Through a long series of the branching corridors they at last reached one that had but one exit, into a large office, into which the young officer led them. Immediately he snapped to attention, spoke briefly and rapidly, saluted and retired with his two men.

	The man before the Terrestrians now was a tall, kindly faced old gentleman, his straight black hair was turning slightly to a very light blueish, almost a grey, in spots, but the kindly face, the smiling eyes, and an air of sincere interest seemed to illumine the entire countenance. He looked curiously, questioningly at the two men before him, looked at their hands, his eyes widening in surprise; then he stepped quickly forward, and extended his hand, at the same time looking toward Arcot.

	At once Arcot understood him and extended his hand. The Venerian took it in his hand—then with an exclamation on the part of each, they mutually released each other, for Arcot felt a decidedly uncomfortable degree of heat, almost scaldingly hot, just as the Venerian felt a degree of intense cold! Each seemed staring from his hand to the hand of the other in surprise, then a smile lighted the face of the Venerian as he very emphatically put his hand at his side. Arcot smiled at him, and said to Morey in an animated tone:

	"They have a body temperature of at least 170 Fahrenheit. It would naturally be above room temperature, which is 150 here, so that they are most unpleasantly hot to us. Many forms of earth-life would be killed by that temperature, but there are, of course, different forms of life here on Venus, modified to stand that temperature as natural. I hope these fellows don't have fevers! They would be apt to boil over!

	"But really they have some 40 degrees leeway, and as the temperature of the human body varies never more man eight degrees, they are safe enough, I guess."

	"But they must have to boil all their food under increased pressure here; a difference of 40 degrees would probably be insufficient!"

	The Venerian had picked up a small rectangle of black material, smooth and solid. With it as a tablet he drew quickly on it with a pencil of copper, apparently. In a moment he handed the tablet to Arcot, who reached out for it, then thought better of it, and motioned that he didn't want to burn his fingers. The old Venerian held it where Arcot could see it.

	"Why, Morey, look here—I didn't think they had developed astronomy to any degree, because of the constant clouds, but just look here. He has a nice little map of the solar system, with Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and all the rest on it. He has drawn in several of the satellites of Jupiter and of Saturn too."

	The Venerian pointed to Mars and looked inquisitively at them. Arcot shook his head and pointed quickly to earth. The Venerian seemed a bit surprised at this, then thought a moment and nodded his head in satisfaction. He looked at Arcot intently a moment. Then to Arcot's amazement, there seemed to form in his head a thought—at first vague; then quickly it took on definite form.

	"Man of Earth," it seemed to say, "we thank you—you have saved our nation"—(there seemed to be a name idea here, but a name is merely a phonetic symbol for a country, just as a flag is its material symbol. It can not be impressed on the brain of one who has different physical arrangements, as can an idea, for ideas are everywhere the same.)

	"We want to thank you for your quick response to our signals. We had not thought that you could answer us so soon." The Venerian seemed to relax as the message was finished. It was obviously a great effort.

	Arcot looked steadily into his eyes now, and tried to concentrate on a message—on a series of ideas. To him, trained though he was in deep concentration on one idea, the process of visualizing a series of ideas was new, and very difficult. But he soon saw that he was making some progress.

	"We came in response to no signals—exploration only—we saw the battle—and aided because your city seemed doomed, and because it seemed too beautiful to be destroyed."

	"What's it all about, Arcot?" asked Morey in surprise, as he watched them staring at each other.

	"These Venerians have developed telepathy to a practical point—it seems I am terribly thick from his point of view, but I just learned that they sent signals to earth—why, I haven't learned—but I am making progress. If I don't get a headache or go insane from the overwork, I will find out sooner or later—so wait and see." He turned again to the Venerian who was now looking at him rather dubiously. Then quickly he turned to his desk, and pulled a small lever down. Then again he looked intently at Arcot.

	"Come with me the strain of this conversation is too great—I see you do not have thought transference on your world."

	"Come along, Morey we are going somewhere. He says this thought transference is too much for us. I wonder what he is going to do?"

-

	OUT into the maze of halls they went again, now led by the kindly, seven-foot Venerian scientist. Down through a long series of halls they went, till at last they reached a large room, where already there had gathered in the semicircle of seats a hundred or so seven-foot Venerians. Before them, on a low platform, there were two large chairs with deep cushions. To these chairs the two Terrestrians were led.

	"We will try to teach you our language telepathically. We can teach you the ideas—you must learn the pronunciation, but this will be very much quicker. Seat yourselves in these chairs and relax."

	The chairs had been designed for seven-footers. These men were six feet and six feet six, yet it seemed to them, as they sank into them, that never had they felt such comfortable chairs. They were designed so that every muscle and every nerve should be at rest. Now they seemed floating in space once more, without weight. Suddenly Arcot felt a wave of sleepiness oppress him; then slowly he grew more and more sleepy—he was tired—tired. It seemed that suddenly visions began to fill his mind-visions as he regained consciousness slowly—up from the dark, and into a dream world. It seemed he saw a mighty fleet of gargantuan planes flying above the city where he was—a fleet whose individual planes were a mile long, three-quarters of a mile wingspread—titanic monoplanes, whose droning roar as the hundreds of : whirling props stirred the air seemed to roar through all space. Then suddenly they were above him, and from each there spurted out a great stream of dazzling brilliance, an intense glow that reached down, and touched the city—There was an awful concussion in his ears. All the world about him was gone in a flash of awful brilliance; then all was dark.

	Another vision it seemed now—a vision of the same fleet hanging over a giant crater of molten rock, a crater that nestled on a plain beside low green bills—a crater that he knew had been a city. The giants of the air circled, turned, and sped far off over the horizon—Again he was with them—and again he saw a great city fuse in a blazing flash of blinding light—then again and again—around all that world he seemed to see smoking ruins of great cities, blasted red hot rock that had been cities, a world of awful desolation. Then he was with the Destroyers, riding up, up, up—out of the clouds they were, out beyond the swirling mists, where the cold of space seemed to reach in at them, and the roaring of the mighty propellers was a thin whine—then suddenly that was gone, and out of the rear of each of the titanic machines there burst a great stream of light, a blazing column of light that roared back, and lit all space for miles around—then the machines were shooting up, and away—out across space—away from the planet—on—on. Then he seemed to see them nearing another world, a world that shone a dull red, but he saw the markings and knew that it was earth, not Mars. The great planes were falling now—falling at an awful speed into the upper air of the planet, and in an instant the great light flares were gone, fading and becoming weaker as the dense air oppressed them. Now again there came the roar-of the mighty propellers. Then swiftly the Fleet of Giants was dropping, and Arcot saw it sink lower and lower; his vision saw it coming above a spot he knew must be New York—but it was a strangely distorted New York; it was a Venerian city, where New York should have been—and again he saw great bombs falling. In an instant the gigantic city was a smoking ruin—then the visions faded, and slowly he opened his eyes, looked about him. He was still in the room of the circle of chairs—he was still on Venus—then suddenly to him came the meaning of these visions—the meaning of that strangely distorted New York, of that red earth. It meant that this was what the Venerians believed was to happen! They were trying to show him the plans of the owners and builders of those gigantic ships! The New York he had seen was the New York as these men imagined it

	Startled, confused, he rose unsteadily to his feet His head seemed whirling in the throes of a terrific headache. The men about him were looking anxiously at him—he glanced toward Morey. He was sleeping deeply in the seat—now and then his face moved in some strange expression. It was his turn now to learn this new language and see the visions.

	The old Venerian, who had brought them here, walked up to Arcot and spoke to him in a softly musical language, a language that was sibilant and predominated in liquid sounds; there were no gutturals, no nasals; it was a more musical language than earth men had ever before heard, and now Arcot started in surprise, for he understood it perfectly; the language was as familiar as English.

	"We have taught you our language as quickly as possible—you may have a headache, but you must know what we know as soon as possible. It may well be that the fate of two worlds hangs on your actions.

	"These men have concentrated on you and taught you very rapidly, given you those visions of what we know to be in preparation. You must get back to your wonderful ship as quickly as possible; no time can be lost, and you must know what has happened here on our world in the last few years, and what happened twenty centuries ago.

	"Come with me to my office, and we will talk. When your friend has also learned, you may tell him." 

-

	QUICKLY Arcot followed the Venerian down the long corridors of the building. Few people they met, and these seemed intent on their own business, paying little attention to the strange man that walked through the halls with the tall old gentleman.

	At last they were again in the office where Arcot had first seen the Venerian. They sat down, and Arcot listened to a new history—the history of another planet 

	"Twenty centuries ago," the old man began /'there were two great rival nations on this planet. The planet Turo is naturally divided so that there would be a tendency thus to form two great nations. There are two enormous belts of land around the globe, one running from about twenty degrees north of the equator to about eighty degrees north. This is my country, Lanor. To the south there is a similar great belt of land, of almost identical size, Kaxor. These two nations have existed for many thousands of our years—slightly over two-thirds of the time in your years—and two thousand years ago there was a great crisis in the affairs of the world—a great war was in process of starting—but a Lanorian developed a weapon that made it impossible for the Kaxorians to win—and war was averted. The feeling was so strong, however, that laws were made that have been able to stop all intercourse between the two nations for these thousands of years. Only we know that Kaxor has studied the principles of physics, perhaps in hopes of finding a weapon with which they could threaten us once more. Lanor has studied the secrets of the human mind, and of the body. We have no disease here any longer; we have no insanity. We have studied chemistry greatly, but physics only in connection with our other studies. Recently, however, we have again taken up the study of this science, since it alone of the mam sciences had gone neglected. But twenty-five years have been spent on these researches, and in that short time we cannot hope to do what the Kaxorians have done in two thousand. The secret of the heat ray, the weapon that prevented the last war, had been nearly forgotten. It required diligent research to bring it to life again, for it is a very inefficient machine—or was. Of late, however, we have been able to improve it and now it is used in commerce to smelt our ores. It was this alone that allowed this city to put up the slight resistance that we did. We were surely doomed. This is the capital of Lanor, Sonor. The nation would have fallen but for you.

	"We have had some warning that this was coming. We have spies in Kaxor now, for we learned of their intentions when they flew one of the giant planes over one of our cities and dropped a bomb! We have been trying, since we discovered the awful scope of their plans, to send you a warning if you could not help us. That you should come here just now is one of the greatest things of the universe—a chance in a billion billion billion, I suppose—but perhaps there is more than chance behind it? Who knows?

	"But since that plane has been driven away, we can expect at any moment a new raid, and we must be prepared. Is there any way you can signal your planet?"

	"Yes—we can signal easily by—I do not know the word in your language—it may be that you do not have it—radio we call it—it is akin to light, but of vastly longer wavelength. Produced by electrical means, it can be directed like light by means of a reflector and sent in a beam. It can penetrate all substances except metals, and can leak around them, if it be not directional. With it I can talk readily with the men of earth, and this very night I will. But I want to learn of your planet. I will be able to warn our planet, but I will also want to tell them of yours. There is much to be gained by a knowledge of your planet and its resources!

	"You say your people have studied chemistry. We have, too. And we have studied physics much, but we have studied the mind very little. The body we have studied, and we know enough to care for it. We, too, have well nigh eradicated diseases. But we have had a civilization of metals for many years now, and there are many metals we lack. This trip to your planet was partly in interest of finding more supplies.

	"Here you use copper very lavishly. Is it plentiful?"

	"On Turo," said Tonlos, "we have two elements which constitute a very large percentage of the available resources. Oxygen constitutes forty-two percent, and silicon about ten percent

	"Next in abundance is 'morlus,' which constitutes about 7 percent."

	"Morlus—I have the word in your language—but I do not know the element. What is it?" asked Arcot.

	"Why—here is some!"

	Tonlos handed Arcot a small block of metal that had been used to hold a thin sheet of metal flat on a table in one corner of the room. It seemed a fairly dense metal, about as heavy as iron, but it had a remarkable blueish tint. Obviously, it was the element that composed the wings of the airplane they had seen that afternoon. Arcot examined it carefully, handicapped somewhat by the fact that he could not hold it directly, but only on a piece of cloth, since the metal was too hot. He picked up a small copper rod and tried to scratch it, but there was no noticeable effect

	"You cannot scratch it with copper," said Tonlos, "it is the second hardest metal we know—it is less hard than chromium, but far less brittle. It is malleable, ductile, very strong, very tough, especially when alloyed with iron, but those alloys are used only in very particular work, for iron is very rare. We have—"

	"Iron is rare!" exclaimed Arcot in surprise. "Why, on earth it is exceedingly plentiful. I cannot understand how it can be so rare here on Venus. And I cannot identify this element. May I take it to the ship to test it?"

	"You may, by all means. I thought from the appearance of some of your mechanisms that iron was very plentiful on your planet. But, from the fact that you do not recognize this metal of ours, I see that to you it is rare. You will have considerable difficulty getting it into solution. It is attacked only by boiling selenic add, and that dissolves platinum readily. However, it is related to manganese. The usual test for the element is to so dissolve it, oxidize it to an acid, then test with radium selenate, when a brilliant greenish blue salt is—"

	"Test with radium selenate! Why we have no radium salts whatever on earth that we could use for that purpose. Radium is exceedingly rare!" said Arcot.

	"I think I had best go on with my list," Tonlos continued. "Radium is by no means plentiful here, but we seldom have to test for morlus, and we have plenty of radium salts for that purpose. We have never found any use for radium—it is so active that it combines with water just as sodium does, it is very soft—a useless metal, and dangerous to handle. Our chemists have never been able to understand it—it is always in some kind of a reaction no matter what they do, and still it gives off that very light gas, helium, and a heavy gas niton, and an unaccountable amount of heat.

	"Next after morlus in quantity comes copper, then chromium, then calcium, beryllium, sodium and potassium, and lead, zinc and tin, all occuring over one percent Then the non-metals break in again—the most plentiful is carbon—then comes another metal, tungsten, .9 percent; then there is a long string of metals and non-metals that occur in very small quantities except for sulphur, selenium and platinum.

	"We have large supplies of platinum really—they all seem to come in lumps, not like some of them, that are spread out all over."

	"But how about aluminum? and gold? and the halogens?" asked Arcot.

	"Oh, aluminum is rather rare—we use it as a monetary standard—it is hard enough to make good coins. It seems a pity it is so rare; it is a very useful metal. And what surplus there is is used as ornaments by women and in very expensive things. It is a luxury which would make a very useful necessity if it were more plentiful. Gold—oh, yes—I had forgotten it. It is always bothering the platinum workers—and it occurs all over, it seems. It is a terrific nuisance. It is not exceedingly plentiful—less than half of one percent—but widely distributed. It is soft and sticky, so to speak. It clogs up things, and is no use whatever. It is too soft to hold, together. We have tried to use it for plating since it is non-corrosive, but it wears off right away. It won't stand heat, so we can't use it in the laboratories. We have tried using it in add chambers, but it 'poisons' many catalysts and keeps them from working properly. We cannot use it near the platinum catalysts in the sulphuric acid plants—so we use lead all over. We do use it in the concentrating pans sometimes—but it isn't worth the trouble of digging it out of the ground and hauling it here. I don't believe anyone has ever tried to develop a use for it, though it is plentiful enough I suppose. It is naturally very cheap, and unscrupulous people use it in copper to make it weigh heavier. It can be had from platinum works for the trouble of hauling it away. The halogens are very rare. We use them only as very unusual reagents. A very small percentage of them is a requisite to life processes, but very, very little. They occur to a small extent in sea water."

	"Your world is vastly different from ours," said Arcot. He related to Tonlos the different metals of the earth, the non-metals, and their occurrence. But try as he would, he could not place the metal Tonlos had given I him.

-

	AT, last Morey was brought in. He was looking very tired, and very, serious. He, also, was suffering from a headache, just as Arcot had. Arcot told him of his discoveries and of the metals of Turo, wondering why it was that the two planets, both members of the same sun, should be so different.

	"I think I know," said Morey slowly, "and the more I think it over, the more firmly convinced I am that I know the metal you can't place.

	"We have all seen pictures of the sun taken by different colored lights. If hydrogen light is used and all others are shut out, we see a picture of the hydrogen on the sun. If calcium light is used, a corresponding result is obtained.

	"This work was started back as far as 1900 or so, and in that time lots of elements have been mapped, and we have watched the elements change their locations. In this way we are getting a map of the sun showing the deposits of the different elements. We have seen hydrogen, oxygen, silicon and others, and as the sun aged, the elements must have been mixed up more and more thoroughly. Yet we have seen the vast deposits. Some of those deposits are so vast that they could easily be the source of an entire world! I wonder if it is not possible that earth was thrown off from some deposit rich in iron, aluminum and calcium, and poor in gold, radium and those other metals—and particularly poor in one element. There are some gaps in the periodic table—you know them—there is a counterpart to manganese, a heavier metal still to be found. We have located in the sun the spectrum of an element we have named coronium—and I think that you have a specimen of coronium in your hand there! Venus came from a coronium impregnated region!

	"Most of the meteorites that fall to earth have a large iron content—but remember that earth was thrown out of the sun violently, whenever it was thrown out, and with it must have come a lot of loose material that may have been thrown out and shot out into space to form long elliptic orbits that bring them near the sun once in a billion years. These pieces are really part of the earth that fall back to it as it advances in its orbit—naturally they will be high in iron—like the earth—and scientists observing them say, 'Ha—meteorites are full of iron—all planets must be full of iron!' But their logic is being unbalanced by errors, hidden by Nature. My idea sounds possible—and it does explain the facts of Venus."

	"Most of the meteorites that strike this planet are high in iron, too—but the sun is in general, too. However, we get many meteorites high in coronium, as you call it," said Tonlos.

	The discussion was soon ended, for already the air outside had passed to a murky twilight. It was nearing night now, and the Terrestrians were led quickly down to the elevator, which dropped them rapidly to the ground. There was still a large crowd about the Solarite, but the way was at once cleared for them, and a peculiar, sensation struck both the Terrestrians very forcibly. It seemed that everyone in the crowd was wishing them the greatest success—the best of things in every wish.

	"The ultimate in applause! Morey, I'll swear we just received a silent cheer!" laughed Arcot, as they stood inside the airlock of the ship once more. It seemed home to them now! In a moment they had taken off the annoying ventilating suits and stepped once more into the room where Wade and Fuller awaited them.

	"Say—what were you fellows doing. We were actually getting ready to do some inquiring about your health!" said Wade, still a bit worried.

	"I know we were gone a long time—but when you hear the reason, you won't wonder so much! See if you can raise earth on the radio yet, Morey, will you, while I tell these fellows what happened? If you succeed, tell them to call in Dad and your father, and to have a couple of phono-type machines on the job. We will want a record of what I have to send. Say that we will call back in an hour." Then, while Morey was busy down in the power room sending the signals out across the forty million miles of space that separated them, Arcot told Wade and Fuller the news that he had learned. Not only was half of Venus in danger—but earth itself was for the first time in millions of centuries in danger of attack!

	Morey finally succeeded in getting his message through, and returned to say that they would be waiting in one hour. He had had to wait eight minutes after sending his message to get any answer, however, due to the slowness of radio waves.

	"Fuller—you're the chef—if you do your job, Wade and I will start on this piece of coronium here and see what there is to learn," said Arcot. "We can be ready by the end of the hour."

	At supper table Wade and Arcot were exclaiming over the curious constants they had discovered for coronium. It was not attacked by any acid except boiling selenic acid, since it formed a tremendous number of insoluble salts. Even the nitrate violated the long-held rule that "all nitrates are soluble"—it wouldn't dissolve. Yet it was chemically more active than gold.

	But its physical constants were the most surprising. It melted at 2800 centigrade, a very high melting point indeed. Very few metals are solid at that temperature. But the tensile strength test made with a standard bar they had finally turned out by means of a carbaloy tool, the second hardest thing known, tungsten carbide and cobalt, gave a reading of over a million, three hundred thousand pounds per square inch! It was far stronger than iron—stronger than tungsten, the strongest metal heretofore known. It was twice as strong as the earth's strongest metal!

	"No wonder they can make a plane like that when they have such a metal to work with," said Fuller. The designing engineer had visions of a machine after his own heart—a machine where half the weight wasn't employed in holding it together.

	It was a little later that they got communication through to earth, and the men went to the power room. The televisor was blinking, struggling to form a clear image despite the handicap of forty million miles of space. In a moment it had cleared, though, and they saw the face of Dr. Arcot. He showed plainly that he was worried about the startling news that had reached him already, sketchy though it was. Rapidly his son outlined to him the full extent of their discoveries, and the things that earth would have to meet with.

	"Dad, these Kaxorians have planes capable of far more than a thousand miles an hour in the air. For some reason the apparatus they use to propel them in space is inoperative in air, but their giant propellers will drive them forward faster than any plane earth ever saw. You must start at once on a fleet of these molecular motion planes—and a lot of the gas Wade developed—you know how to make it—the animation suspending gas. It will be useful—and I will try to develop some new weapon here. If either of us makes any progress along new lines—we will talk each night—I must stop now—some Lanorian scientists are coming."

-

	WHILE the Solarite rested, there had been a large crowd of people gathered around it, waiting a glimpse of the Terrestrians—for now the news had spread that this car had come from earth. Now, however, a group of men was advancing toward the car, they were clothed in great furs, heavy coats that seemed warm enough to wear in the arctic regions!

	"Why—Arcot—what's the idea of the arctic regalia?" asked Fuller in surprise.

	"Think a moment—they are going to visit a place whose temperature is seventy degrees colder than their room temperature. Into the bargain, Venus never has any seasonal change of temperature, and the heavy bank of clouds that eternally cover the planet keep the temperature as constant as a thermocouple arrangement could. The slight change there is from day to night is only appreciable by the nightly rains see the crowd is beginning to break up now—it is night already, and there is a heavy dew settling now, soon it will be rain, and the great amount of moisture in the air will supply enough heat, in condensing, to prevent a temperature drop of more than two or three degrees.

	"These men are not used to changes in temperature as we are and hence they must protect themselves far more fully. Even in exploring their arctic, I imagine they never find frozen water—the heat held in by the clouds prevents that"

	Three figures now entered the air-lock of the Solarite, and muffled in their furs as they were, large under any conditions, they had to come through one at a time.

	Much that Arcot showed them was totally new to them. Much he could not explain to them at all, for their physics had not yet reached that stage.

	But there was one thing he could show them, and he did. There were no samples of the liquids he wanted, but their chemistry was developed to a point that permitted the communication of the necessary data and Arcot told them the formula of Wade's gas. This gas was somewhat radioactive in character due to the incorporation in the molecule of an atom,of the radioactive thorium, but partly due to this, it had the wonderful property of suspending animation for several months, and of permitting full recovery on the administration of a dose of potassium iodide. There was a second equally striking peculiarity—it could penetrate any material. It had been known for many centuries that carbon monoxide was able to penetrate a sheet of steel when the steel was at a dull red heat but Wade had found the reason for this property, and developed it to a far greater degree, till the gas he made was able to penetrate any material at ordinary temperatures. Combined with its anesthetic properties, it had obvious advantages as a gas for rendering the opposing forces defenseless.

	Since it was able to penetrate all substances, there were no means of storing it—like the famous universal solvent—"what'cha gonna keep it in?" The answer was that two liquids were made to react spontaneously and produce the gas, which was then projected as any other to the spot where needed.

	Arcot asked now that the Venerian chemists make him a supply of these two liquids. He felt he would be much better equipped to attack the enemy if he could but capture one of their flying forts. It seemed a strange task! Capturing so huge a machine with only the tiny Solarite—'but Arcot felt sure he would be able to do it, if he but had a supply of that gas.

	There was one difficulty—it required a considerable portion of chlorine gas to make it—though the chlorine itself was not part of the product; one step in the synthesis required it. Since chlorine was rare on Venus, the men were forced to sacrifice most of their salt supply, but this chlorine so generated could be used over and over again. Realizing the importance of the gas, the Lanorians agreed to synthesize it.

	It was quite late when the Venerians had left, to go again into the hot drizzle of the rain. The rain was, as Arcot found, really scaldingly hot, but to these Venerians it appeared as a cold drizzle. But it was as natural to them as was the air, the ocean or the sunshine. They merely accepted it as one of the things that were.

	The building before which the Solarite now rested was the capital building of Lanor. There were here the government laboratories and the National College. With the help of these two institutions it was hoped that the work of making the necessary materials would progress rapidly.

	Shortly after the Venerians left, the Terrestrians turned in for the night, leaving a telephone connection with the guard outside. In view of the tremendous results the Solarite would bring into the balance of this war, Lanor had had a special guard established about it

	The dull light of the Venerian day was filtering in through the windows the next morning when the Terrestrians awoke. It was eight o'clock, New York time, but Sonor was working on a twenty-three hour day. It happened that Sonor and New York had been in opposition at midnight two nights ago, which meant that it was now ten o'clock Sonorian time. The result was that Arcot and Morey, the first up, found the Venerian world in full swing of its morning business. Quickly they called the others, and while Fuller was preparing the morning meal, Arcot left the car to speak to the officer in charge of the guard about the ship.

	"We need some pure water—water free of copper salts. I think it would be best if you can get me some water that has been distilled. That is, for drinking. Also we need about two tons of water of any kind—the ship's tanks need recharging. I would like about a ton of the drinking water." Arcot had to translate the Terrestrian measures into the corresponding Venerian terms, of course, but still the officer seemed puzzled. Such a large amount of water would mean a real problem in getting it here. Could the Solarite be moved to some mere accessible place?

	Arcot agreed to have it moved to a spot just outside the city, where the water could be procured directly from a small stream. The drinking water would be ready when he returned to the city.

	The Solarite was moved to the shore of the little river and the electrolysis apparatus was set up beside it. During the previous day, and ever since they had landed on Venus, all their power had been coming from the storage cells, but now that the electrolysis apparatus was to establish such a heavy and constant drain, Arcot started the generator, to both charge the cells, and to do the work needed.

-

	THROUGHOUT the day there was the steady hum of the generator in its room, and the throb-throb-throb of the oxygen pump, as the gas was pumped into the huge tanks. The apparatus they were using produced the gas very rapidly, but it was near nightfall before the huge tanks had again been filled. Even then there was a bit more room for the atomic hydrogen that was simultaneously formed, although twice as much hydrogen as oxygen was produced. Then the Solarite rose again and shot swiftly toward the distant city.

	There was a soft red glow now, for even through the miles of clouds the intense sun was able to give some direct rays, and all the city was lighted with that warm glow. The floodlights had not yet been turned on, but the great buildings looming high in the ruddy light were wonderfully impressive, the effect being heightened by the cooperation shown, for there were no single spires, only a single mass that grew from the ground to tower high in the air, like some man-made mountain.

	The Venerian buildings had a slightly different type of architecture, in-that, though the vertical lines were always accentuated to lead the eye upward, to increase the effect of height, the horizontal lines were even further reduced by making them all curves. There were no angles, the entire outside was curving. The effect was much more pleasing than the sharp angles of Terrestrial buildings.

	Back at the Capital the Solarite again settled into the broad avenue that had been cut off now, and allotted to it as its resting place. Tonlos me}; them shortly after they had settled into place, and with him were five men, each carrying two large bottles.

	"Ah-co," as Tonlos pronounced the Terrestrian name, "we have not been able to make very much of the materials needed for your gas, but before we made any very great amount, we tried it out on a Venerian animal, whose blood structure is the same as ours, and found it had the same effect, but that in our case the iodide of potassium is not as effective in awakening the victim as is the 'sorlon'. I do not know whether you have tried that on Terrestrial animals or not. Luckily sorlus is the most plentiful of the halogen group; we have far more of it than of chlorine, bromine or iodine."

	"Sorlus? I do not know of it—it must be one of the other elements that we do not have on earth. What are its properties?"

	"It, too, is much like iodine, but is heavier. It is a black solid melting at 570 degrees; it is a metallic looking element, will conduct electricity somewhat, oxidizes in air to form an acidic oxide, and forms strong oxygen adds. It is far less active than iodine, except toward oxygen. It is very slightly soluble in water. It does not react readily with hydrogen, and the acid where formed is not as strong as HI."

	"I have seen so many new things here, I wonder if it may not be the element that precedes niton. Is it heavier than that?"

	"No," replied Tonlos; "it is just lighter than that element you call niton. I think you have none of it"

	"Then it must be the next member of the halogen series, Morey. I'll bet they have a number of those heavier elements," said Arcot.

	Later work identified sorlus as number 85, and morlus as number 93! There are but 92 elements possible on the table, as earth knows them, but Venus has several very rare, and some highly radio-active elements, that earth does not have. Their table stops at a more logical place than does our Terrestrial table. They know of a heavy inert gas, number 104.

	The gas was loaded aboard the Solarite that evening, and when Wade saw the quantity that they had said was "rather disappointingly small" he laughed heartily.

	"Small! They don't know what that gas will do! There is enough stuff there to gas this whole city out of business. Why, with that we can bring down any ship! Tell them to go on though, we can use it on the other ships."

	Again that night they spoke with earth, and Morey, Senior, told them that work was already under way for a hundred small ships. They were using all their own ships already, while the Government got ready to act on the idea of danger. It was a little hard to convince them that someone on Venus was getting ready to send a force down to earth to destroy them. However, the ships now under construction would be ready in three weeks. They would be unable to go into space, but they would be very fast, and capable of carrying large tanks of the gas-producing chemicals.

	It was near midnight, Venerian time, when they turned in. They must start the next day for the Kaxorian construction camp. They had learned from Tonlos that day that there were but five of the giant planes ready to work now, but there were fifteen more under construction to make up the fleet of twenty that was to attack earth. These fifteen others would be ready in one week—or less. When these were ready, the Solarite would stand small chance. They must capture one of the giants and learn its secret, and then, if possible fight them.

	Their opportunity came sooner than they had hoped for—or wanted. It was about three o'clock in the morning when the telephone warning hummed loudly through the ship. Arcot answered.

	Far to the east and south of them the line of scouts that hung in their little planes over all the borders of Lanor had been broken. Instantaneously almost, out of the dark, its lights obscured, the mighty machine had come, striking the tiny scout plane head on, destroying it utterly before the scout had a chance to turn from the path of the titanic ship. But before the plane was destroyed the pilot had had a chance to light a magnesium flare, a blindingly brilliant flare that floated down on a parachute, and in the blaze of white light it gave off, the other scouts at a few miles distance, had seen the mighty bulk of the Kaxorian plane. At once they had dropped to the ground, and then, by telephone lines, they had sent their message to far off Sonor. The plane they had seen had no doubt been heading for the capital!

	At once Arcot turned to the others and cried to them to get up at once. There was some real action to be had now! All day they had been doing so little toward the thing they knew must come, the battle for two worlds, they had wanted action, but they had no weapons except their invisibility and the atomic hydrogen. It would not sink a plane. It would only break open its armor. If it did sink them, they could learn nothing from it, for it would be the very things they wanted to learn about that they would have destroyed.

-

	ARCOT lifted the Solarite at once high into the air, and started toward the point on the border, where the plane had been seen crossing. In a short time Wade relieved him at the controls while he dressed.

	They had been flying on in silence for about an hour, when suddenly Wade made out in the distance the great bulk of the plane, against the dull grey of the clouds, a mile or so above them. It seemed some monstrous black bat flying there against the sky, but down to the sensitive microphone on the side of the Solarite came the drone of the hundred mighty propellers as the great plane forged swiftly along.

	Just how rapidly these giants moved, Arcot had not appreciated until he attempted to overtake this one. It was going over a mile a second now! The ship had but to go its own length in about five-eighths of a second to do this. It was a lower speed to this monster; the individual molecules of air meant less to it. It made greater speeds, both by streamlining and through sheer power, such as nothing else could approximate.

	The Solarite was hovering high above the dark ship now, the roar of the terrific air blast from the propellers below came up to them here as a mighty wave of sound that made their ship tremble! The hundred gigantic propellers roaring below, however, would distribute their gas perfectly.

	"I am going into invisibility. Look out!" There was a click as the switch shut, and the Solarite was as transparent as the air about it. Now Arcot dived the ship swiftly in front of the mighty colossus, then pulled a small switch shut. There was a low hiss from the power room—barely detectable despite the vacuum that shut them off from the roar of the plane for the whole ship trembled. The microphone had long since been disconnected. Out of the gas vent now a thin stream of a purplish gas was streaming, becoming visible as it left the influence of the invisibility apparatus, but only to those who knew where to look for it. Those men in that mighty plane could not see it—it was invisible to them as their machine bore down into the little cloud of gas—but an instant later the gigantic plane was wobbling in its course—it seemed uncontrolled! There was a sudden swerve that ended in a nose dive, straight to Venus seven miles below all the great propellers roaring, pulling it on. The pilot had fallen over his controls.

	That the ship should crash nose on into the ground below was not at all Arcot's plan, and he was greatly relieved as the plane, an instant later, when the rapid fall had removed the weight of the man on the controls, and permitted the plane to balance itself, coming again under normal conditions, flattened its dive, and started to climb up, its titanic mass rapidly absorbing its kinetic energy. Down from its seven-mile height it glided, controlling itself perfectly as Arcot released the last of the first four bottles of the liquid gas makers, putting to sleep the last man on the ship below.

	In a long glide that carried it over many miles, the great ship came down. It had sunk far, and gone smoothly, but now there loomed ahead of it a range of low hills! It would certainly crash into the rocky cliffs ahead—nearer and nearer it came—it might skim above those low hills at that—but just then there was a little dip, and head on, at nearly two thousand miles an hour, the titanic machine crashed into the rocks. Arcot had snapped the loud speaker into the circuit once more, and now as they looked at the sudden crash below, there came slowly to them the mighty waves of sound!

	The giant plane had hit the top, twenty feet or so of a nearly perpendicular cliff. There was a terrific crash that was felt by seismographs in Sonor nearly two thousand miles away! The mighty armored hull plowed its way into the rocks like some gigantic meteor, the hundreds of thousands of tons crushing the rocky precipice like tissue paper, grinding the rocks to powder, and shaking the entire hill. The cliff seemed to buckle and crack. As the terrific momentum of the huge plane struck it, it was torn and twisted. In an instant the plane had been brought to rest, but it had plowed through twenty feet of rock for nearly an eighth of a mile. For an instant it hung there, perched perilously in the air, its tail hanging out over the little valley below, then slowly, majestically it sank, to strike with a reverberating crash that broke the heavy armor plate like a match-box! For an instant longer the great motors continued working, the roar of the propellers like some throbbing background to the rending crashes as the titanic wreck came to rest. Suddenly there was a series of crashing explosions, and one after the other, the entire series of motors in the left wing blew up with awful force. There was a flash of light that could be termed a blast; the terrific brilliance seemed to blind the Terrestrians watching this scene of awful desolation; then there came to the microphone such waves of sound as it could not record; the Solarite seemed to jump with each successive explosion. There was no dust at first, only they could see a fused mass of metal that they knew had been the wing, broken, rent, smashed where each of the fifty motors had been. The rocks beneath seemed powdered now, as a great cloud of dust rose. Still the motors on the other side of the ship were roaring and the giant propellers turned. It was these that blew the dust away. The Terrestrians stared in unbounded amazement as they saw playing from the gaping, broken wing a mighty beam of light of such dazzling intensity that Arcot at once restored them to visibility that they might shut it out. There was a terrific hissing, crackling roar. The plane seemed to wobble as it lay there, recoiling from that stream of flaming gas, it seemed. Where it touched the cliff there was intense incandescence that made the rock glow white hot, and from it rose clouds of vapor—BOILING ROCKS! For five minutes longer this terrific spectacle lasted, while Arcot withdrew the Solarite from the plane. The fifty motors of the remaining wing seemed slowing down now—then suddenly there was such a crash and towering flash of light as no human being had ever seen before! Up—up into the very clouds it shot its mighty flame, a blazing column of light that seemed to reach out into space. The Solarite was hurled back end over end, tumbling, falling. Even the heavy gyroscopes could not hold it for an instant, but quickly the straining hum of the motors brought the Solarite to rest in air that whirled and whined about them. They were over twenty miles from the scene of the explosion, but even at that distance they could see the glow of the incandescent rock. Slowly, cautiously they maneuvered the Solarite back to the spot, and looked down on a sea of seething fluid rock!

	"Lord—what power that thing carries! No wonder they can support that gigantic thing in the air! How can they keep such awful power under control? There is no trace of that giant plane! What titanic forces they use! We can never bring down a ship that way and examine it!" Morey was looking at the glowing rocks in awe-struck wonder. Was it possible that what they had seen was true—it was no dream? Such forces as they had seen were powers to make a world with, to fling out of space a blazing sun—these were no such forces as man should use!

	Slowly Arcot was drawing away—off into the night—into the kindly darkness once more.

	"I wonder what those forces were—they are greater than any man has ever before seen! An entire hill was fused to molten, incandescent rock, let alone the tons and tons of metal that made up that ship.

	"And such awful forces as these are to be released on our earth!" Slowly Arcot continued his way. For many seconds they sat silent as the panorama of hills glided by at a slow two-hundred miles an hour. "We must capture a ship. We will try again—we will either destroy, or capture it—-and either is to our advantage!"

-

	FOR miles they continued thus leisurely on across the vast plain. There were no great mountains on Venus, for Venus had known no such violent upheaval as the making of a moon. They seemed lost in thought, each on his own line. At last Wade stood up, and walked slowly back to the power room. Suddenly the men in the control room heard his call: "Arcot—quick—the microphone—and rise a mile!" The Solarite gave a violent lurch as it shot vertically up a mile at tremendous acceleration. Arcot reached quickly over and snapped the switch of the microphone—suddenly there came to their ears the familiar roaring drone of a hundred mighty propellers. No slightest hum of motor, only the vast whining roar of the mighty propellers.

	"Another one! They must have been following the first by a few minutes. We will try to get this one!" Arcot was working swiftly at his switches. "Wade-strap yourself in the seat there—don't take the time to come up here."

	The Solarite dived suddenly in front of the great plane, and as the nose dipped, it was invisible. They were rushing along before a mighty giant again, they were drowned in a titanic wave of rushing sound—then again came the little hiss of the gas. Now there were no hills in sight, as far as the eye could reach. In the dim light that seemed always to filter through these grey clouds they could see many miles.

	It seemed several minutes before there was any effect; these men of earth were waiting for that great ship to move, to wobble from its course. Suddenly Arcot gave a cry of surprise, startled amazement was written all over his face, as his companions turned in wonderment to see that he was partially visible! The Solarite, too, was a misty ghost car about them; they were becoming visible! Then in an instant it was gone—and they saw that the huge black bulk behind them was wavering, turning; the motors had suddenly died till the thunderous roar of the propellers was a whistling whine; the ship was losing speed! It dipped, and shot down a bit—gained speed, then step by step it glided down—down—down to the surface below. The great engines were idling now, and the great machine was running more and more slowly—Its landing speed was surprisingly low—slower and slower it went—they were near the ground now—would this ship, too, crash? Would it, too, be lost in a terrific holocaust that left the very rocks it crashed in a molten, boiling cauldron? It was within a half mile of the ground now—then it dipped once more, and Arcot breathed his relief as it made a perfect landing, the long series of rollers on the base of the gigantic hull seemed to spring enough to absorb the shock of that titanic ship and the hundreds of thousands of tons of metal as they fell through a distance of ten feet. The mighty ship rolled smoothly along the ground—there were small streams in the way—a tree or two. But these were obstacles unnoticed by the gargantuan machine.

	Its mighty propellers still idling slowly, the huge plane rolled to a standstill.

	In an instant the Solarite had landed beside it, it seemed lost in the vast shadows of the mighty metal walls that loomed up beside it.

	Arcot had left a; small radio set with Tonlos in Sonor before he started on this trip, and had given him directions on how to locate the Solarite by its means. Now he sent a message to him, telling that the plane had been brought down, asking that a squadron of planes be sent at once.

	Wade and Arcot were elected to make the first inspection of the Kaxorian plane, and clad in their cooling suits, they stepped from the Solarite, each carrying, in case of emergencies, a small hand torch, burning atomic hydrogen, capable of melting its way through even the heavy armor of the great plane.

	As they stood beside it, looking up at the gigantic walls of metal that rose sheer beside them, hundreds of feet straight up, it seemed impossible that this mighty thing could fly, that it could be propelled through the air. In awed silence they gazed at its mighty bulk.

	Then, like invisible pygmies beside some mighty prehistoric monster, they made their way along its side, seeking a door.

	"Arcot—this is senseless—we cannot do this—the machine is so vast that it will take us half an hour of steady walking to circumnavigate it—we must go in the Solarite to find the entrance!" Wade gestured hopelessly at the vast hull.

	It was well they followed Wade's plan, for the only entrance was from the top. There, on the back of the giant, the Solarite landed—its thousands of tons affecting the Titanic machine not in the least. There was a trap-door on the back of the plane that led down inside. However, the apparatus for opening this was all on the inside, so it was necessary to burn a hole in the door before they could enter.

	What a sight there was for these men of earth. The low rumble of the idling engines was barely audible as they descended the long ladder to the interior of the gigantic hull.

	It suggested no flying machine as they entered here; more it resembled some great power house, where the energies of half a nation were generated. They entered directly into a mighty hall that extended for a quarter of a mile back through the great hull, and completely across the fuselage. To the extreme nose it ran, and throughout there were scattered little globes that gave off an intense white light. The great room was lighted from end to end. There were translucent bull's-eyes obscuring the few windows.

	All about, among the machine, lay men, dead they seemed, though the two Terrestrians knew that they could be restored to life readily. The great machines they had been tending were humming softly, almost in-audibly. There were two long rows of them. Down all the great hall they were, mighty generators they seemed, generators that loomed twenty feet high, but from their peaks ran great tubes two feet thick of solid fused quartz. Then from these led other rods of fused quartz, rods that led down through the floor, but these were more slender; scarcely over eight inches thick.

	The huge generator-like machines were disc-shaped, except that on one side of each there was a little cylinder at the center, like a bearing. From these, too, there ran a quartz rod, down through the floor. The machines on the further row were in some way different; those in the front half of the row had the tubes leading down to the floor below, but they had no tube leading to the roof above; instead, there were many slender rods leading over to a gigantic switchboard that stretched along all one side of the great room. Only the front half had instruments on, and few of these instruments had controls. But everywhere were the great quartz rods, leading about like some complicated water system. They were usually painted black though the main rods leading from the roof above were clear as the crystal they were made of.

	The Terrestrians looked at these gigantic machines in hushed awe—they seemed impossibly huge—it was inconceivable that all this was but the power room of an airplane!

-

	DOWN to the next floor they went. Down a long staircase, down, down, down many feet, for now they reached the main room, it seemed. It was as long as the one above, and higher, yet all that vast space was taken by one single, titanic coil that stretched from wall to wall! Into it, and from it there led two gigantic columns of fused quartz. That these were rods, such as those smaller ones above was obvious, but each was over eight feet thick!

	Short they were, for they led from one mighty generator such as they had seen above, but magnified on a scale inconceivable! At the end of it, its driving power, its motor, was a great cylindrical case, into which led a single quartz bar ten inches thick, and this bar seemed alive now with living, glowing fires, that changed and maneuvered and died out over all its surface and through all its volume. The motor was but five feet in diameter and a scant seven feet long, yet obviously it was driving the great machine, for there came from it a constant low hum, a deep pitched song of awful power. And the huge quartz rod that led from the titanic coil-cylinder was alive with the same glowing fires that played through the motor rod. From one side of the generator, though, there ran two things that were familiar, copper bus bars. But even these were THREE FEET THICK!

	The scores of quartz tubes that came down from the floor above joined, coalesced, and ran down to the great generator machine, and into it. From it ran a similar quartz bar up to that front battery of machines that had been working upstairs, and these were alive with the strange force that lived.

	Down again they went to another floor. Here were other quartz tubes, but these led down still further, for this floor contained individual sleeping bunks, and most of them were unoccupied, unready for occupancy, though some were made up.

	Down another level; again the bunks, the little individual rooms.

	At last they reached the bottom level, and here the great quartz tubes terminated in a hundred smaller ones, and each of these led into some strange mechanism. But there were sighting devices on it, and there were ports that men might see down. It was evidently designed as the bombing room.

	Now the Terrestrians walked through the vast city of the dead to the front of the machine, and passed sleeping officers, and on the third level they came at last to the control room. Here were switchboards, control panels, and dozens of officers, sleeping now, beside the instruments they had been tending. There was a sudden thudding that made the earth men jump, as an automatic relay adjusted some mechanism.

	There was one man stationed apart, at the very bow he sat, protected behind eight-inch coronium plates, .but in them were set masses of fused quartz that were nearly as strong as the metal itself. These gave him a view in every direction except directly behind him. Obviously, here was the pilot.

	To the top level they went again, and now they entered the long passages that led out into the titanic wings. Throughout, the ship was brightly lighted. Now they came to a small room, another bunk room. There were great numbers of these down both the sides of the long corridor, and along the two parallel corridors down the wing, but in the fourth corridor near the back edge of the wing, there were bunk rooms on one side, and on the other were bombing posts.

	As they walked down the corridor further, however, along this first one, they soon came to a small room, whence came the low hum of one of the motors. Entering, they found the crew sleeping, and the motor idling.

	"Good Lord! Look at that motor! Arcot—it's no bigger than the trunk of a man's body! Yet it can spin that huge propeller at a speed that will send this ship hurtling along at a mile a second! Just think of the awful power of that big thing driving the generator! And it had a ten-inch bar of quartz leading into it! What powers did those eight-foot quartz rods carry? No wonder that machine back there blew up so terrifically!" Wade was sobered by the thought of the titanic energies that were represented by these giant rods. Slowly they proceeded down the long hall. At each of the fifty engine mountings they found the same conditions. At the end of the hall there was a stairway that led one level higher, into the upper wing. Here they found long rows of the bombing posts and the corresponding quartz rods.

	They returned finally to the control room. Here Arcot spent a long time looking over the many instruments, the controls, and the piloting apparatus.

	"Wade, I think I can see how this is done. I am going to stop those engines, then start them, then accelerate them till the ship rolls a bit!" Arcot stepped quickly over to the pilot's seat, lifted the sleeping pilot out quickly, and settled in his place.

	"Now you go over to that board there—that one—and when I ask you to, please turn on that control—no the one below—yes—turn it on about one notch at a time."

	"All right Arcot—just as you say—but when I think of the powers you are playing with—well it isn't healthy to make a mistake!" laughed Wade. He was nervous, perhaps, but the excitement of the adventure, of controlling the awful forces there in the ship behind him—they were too much of an inducement!

	"I'm going to stop the motors now." All the time they had been on board, there had been the low whine of the motors barely audible. Now suddenly, it was gone, and the plane was still as death!

	"I did it without blowing the ship up after all—now one more—we are going to try turning the power on!"

-

	SUDDENLY there was a throaty hum; then quickly it became the low whine; then, as Arcot turned on the throttle before him, he heard the tens of thousands of horsepower spring into life—and suddenly the whine was a low roar—the mighty propellers out there had become a blur—then with majestic slowness the huge machine moved off across the field!

	The motors were shut off now as they made their way again up through the ship, up through the room of the titanic cylinder coil, and then into the power room. Now the machines were quiet, for the motors were no longer working.

	"Arcot, you didn't shut off the biggest machine of all down there. How come?"

	"I couldn't, Wade. It has no shut-off control, and if it did have, I wouldn't use it. I will tell you why when we get back to the Solarite."

	At last they were out of the mighty machine, walking once more across the broad metal roof. Here and there they now saw the ends of those quartz tubes. Once more they were entering the Solarite, through the air lock, and taking off the cumbersome heat suits.

	As quickly as possible Arcot outlined to the two who had stayed with the Solarite the things they had seen, and the layout of the titanic ship.

	"I think I can understand the secret of all that power, and it is not so different from the Solarite, at that. It, too, draws its power from the sun, though in a different way, and it stores it within itself, which the Solarite does not try to do.

	"It has been known since the days of Einstein that mass is a representation of energy. It is a measure of energy, just as weight is a measure of mass. The amount of mass a body has depends solely on the amount of energy it contains. Thus, to say that a thing has a mass of one gram is equivalent to saying it contains 900000000000000000 (9x1020) ergs of energy. Similarly, the converse is true, and any energy, if it be that many ergs of energy, it has a mass of one gram no matter what form it has. That is the reason why a mass grows greater when it goes faster; it is acquiring kinetic energy, and hence more mass—the mass of the kinetic energy.

	"Light is energy, and light, therefore, has mass. That is obvious when you stop to think of it. It exerts pressure, the impact of its moving units of energy—photons. We have electrons and protons of matter, and photons of light. Now we know that the mass of protons and electrons will attract other protons and electrons, and hold them near—as in a stone, or in a solar system. Now the new thing is that photons will attract each other in the same way—by the law of mass gravitation they will attract each other ever more and more powerfully, the closer they get. The Kaxorians have developed a method of getting them so close together, that they will, for a while at least, hold themselves there, and with a little 'pressure' they will stay there indefinitely.

	"Wade, in that huge coil and cylinder we found there we saw the main power storage tanks. That was full of gaseous light-energy held together by its own attraction, plus a little help of the generator."

	"A little help? Quite a little! I'll bet that thing has a million horsepower in its motor!"

	"Yes—but I'll bet they have nearly fifty pounds of light condensed there—so why worry about a little thing like a million horsepower? They have plenty more where that comes from.

	"I think they go up above the clouds in some way and collect the sun's energy. Remember that Venus gets twice as much as the earth. They focus it on those tubes on the roof there, and they, like all quartz tubes, conduct the light down into the condensers where it is first collected. Then it is led down to the big condenser downstairs, where the final power is added, and the condensed light is stored.

	"Quartz conducts light just as copper conducts electricity—those are bus-bars we saw running around there.

	"The bombs we have been meeting recently are, of course, little knots of this light energy thrown out by that projector mechanism we saw. When they hit anything, the object absorbs their energy—and is very promptly volatilized by the heat of the absorption.

	"Do you remember that column of hissing radiance we saw shooting out from the wrecked plane just before it blew up? That was the motor connection, broken, and shooting out its energy freely. That would ordinarily have supplied all fifty motors at about full speed. Naturally, when it got loose, it was rather violent.

	"The main generator had been damaged, no doubt, so it stopped working, and the gravitational attraction of the photons wasn't enough, without its influence to hold them bound too long. All those floods of energy were released instantaneously, of course.

	"Look—there come the Lanorians now. I want to go back to Sonor and think over this problem. Perhaps we can find something that will release all that energy—though honestly, I doubt it."

	Arcot seemed depressed, overawed perhaps, by the sheer magnitude, the titanic brute force that lay bound up. It seemed inconceivable that the little Solarite could in any way be of avail against the gargantuan machine. The Lanorian planes were landing, on the wings, the fuselage, the ground beneath all about the gigantic machine. Arcot stood gazing moodily through the window, looking at the mighty bulk that rose black and austere beside him, a mighty giant, stricken now, but only sleeping; in its vast hulk lay such energies as man had never before controlled; within it he knew there were locked the titanic powers of the sun itself. What could the Solarite do against it?

	"Oh, I forgot to mention almost—in the heat of the fight back there it went almost unnoticed." Arcot was talking slowly, dejectedly. "Our only remaining weapon—except the gas, is useless now. Do you remember how the ship seemed to lose its invisibility for an instant? I learned why when we investigated the great ship. Those men are physicists of the highest order. I must acknowledge that we must realize the terrible forces, both physical and mental that we are to meet. They have solved the secret of our invisibility, and now they can neutralize it. They know that we will no longer be able to use that. They began using it too late that time, but they had located the radio-produced interference, due to the ship's invisibility apparatus, and they were sending a beam of interfering radio energy at us. We are invisible only by reason of the vibration of the molecules in response to the radio impressed oscillations. The molecules vibrate in tune, at terrific frequency, and the light can pass perfectly. What will happen, however, if some one locates the source of the radio waves by means of a standard radio directional receiver? It will be a simple process to send a beam of radio waves along that same direction—and touch our invisible car with it. The two radio waves impressed on the car now will be out of step and the interference will instantly reveal the car. The huge ship there can get vastly more energy into their apparatus than we can get in ours and naturally they can make us visible. They will do so—and we can no longer attack them either with our atomic hydrogen blast, nor with the gas—it is useless unless we can get close to them, and we can not come within miles of them. Those bombs of theirs are effective at a distance of ten miles—above that they disintegrate automatically.

	"We were protected from them as long as we were transparent, too, for the bombs could pass right through us just as they passed through the air. Only opaque bodies are susceptible."

-

	AGAIN he fell silent, standing morosely at the window—thinking—hoping for an idea that would enable them once more to have hopes of winning.

	"Wait a minute fellows—I'm going out to speak with the Commander-in-Field here. Then we can start back for Sonor—and maybe we had best start back for earth. It looks as though there is little we can do here."

	Briefly he spoke to the young Venerian officer, and told him that the ship could be left there undestroyed if he would open a certain control just before he left. Arcot showed him which one—it would drain out the power of the great storage tank, throwing it harmlessly against the clouds above. The Kaxorians might destroy the machine if they wanted to—Arcot felt that they would not wish to. They would hope, with reason, that they might recapture it! It would be impossible to move that tremendous machine without the power that its "tank" was intended to hold.

	Slowly they were cruising back to Sonor. Arcot was still standing by the window of the ship, thinking.

	Would it be that Venus would fall before the attack of the mighty planes, that they would sweep out across space, to Earth—to—Mars—to other worlds, a terrific cosmic menace? Would the mighty machines soon be circling earth—defenseless—the greatest of the 30-inch rifles would be unable to more than dent that eight inch coronium armor. It was more than equivalent to twenty-four inches of steel. They would be invulnerable; the planes would be unable to get near enough to drop bombs on them. Only the molecular motion machines would even give them a battle! Perhaps these could be armored with twenty-inch steel walls, and driven in a suicidal dive into the great propellers, or at miles a second, into the ship itself! It was the only hope it seemed! But these ships would require long hours, days, even weeks to build, and in that time the Kaxorian fleet would be ready. It would attack earth within six days now! What hope was there?

	In despair Arcot turned and strode quickly down the long hallway of the Solarite. Above him was the smooth, even hum of the sweetly functioning generator, but it could only remind him of the titanic energies he had seen led about that night. The thudding relays in the power room, as Wade maneuvered the ship, seemed some diminutive mockery of the giant relays he had seen in the mighty power room of the Kaxorian plane.

	He sat down in the power room, looking at the stacked apparatus, neatly arranged, as it must be, to get all this apparatus in. this small space. Then at last he began to think more calmly. Slowly he tried to think of the greatest forces man knew of—and there were only two that even occurred to him as great! One was the vast energies he had that very night learned of; the other was the force of the molecules, the force that drove his ship.

	He had had no time to work out the mathematics of the light compression, and it was mathematics that would give results now he knew. There remained only the molecular motion. What could he do with it that he had not done?

	He drew out a small black notebook. In it were symbols, formulas, and page after page of the intricate calculus that had ended finally in the harnessing of this great force that was even now carrying him smoothly along.

	Half an hour later he was still busy—covering page after page with swiftly written formulas. Before him was a great table of multiple integers, the only one like it known to exist in the System, for the multiple calculus was an invention of Arcot's. At last he found the expression he wanted, and carefully he checked his work, excitedly though now, with an expression of eager hope—it seemed logical—it seemed correct—

	"Morey—oh, Morey—if you can come here—I want you to do some Math for me—I have done it—and I want to see if you get the same result independently!" Morey was a more careful mathematician than he, and it was to him Arcot turned for verification of his new discovery.

	Following the general directions Arcot gave him, Morey went through the long series of calculations—and arrived at the same result. Slowly he looked from the brief expression he had ended with—

	It was not the formula that astonished him—it was the physical significance it had.

	"Arcot—do you think we can make it?"

	"I hope so, Morey. If we don't, Lanor is lost beyond a doubt—and probably the earth is, too. Wade—come here a minute, will you—let Fuller take the controls, and tell him to push it. We have to get to work on this."

	Rapidly Arcot explained their calculations—and the proof he had gotten.

	"Our beam of molecular motion-controlling energy directs all molecular motion to go at right angles to it. The mechanism so far has been a field inside a coil really, but if this is right, it means that we can project that field to a considerable distance even in air, a beam of power that will cause all molecules in its path to move at right angles to it, and in the direction we choose, by reversing the power in the projector. That means that no matter how big the thing is, we can tear it to pieces—we will use its own powers, its own energy, to rip it, or crush it. Imagine what would happen if we directed this against the side of a mountain—the entire mass of rock would at once fly off at terrific speed, several miles a second, crashing ahead with terrific power, as the molecules suddenly all moved in the same direction. Nothing in all the Universe could hold together against that! It is a disintegration ray of a sort—a ray that will tear, or crush, for we can either make one half move away from the other—or we can reverse the power, and make one half drive toward the other with all the terrific power of its molecules! It is omnipotent—hmm—but it has one limitation. Will it reach far in the air? In vacuum it should have an infinite range—in the air all the molecules of the air will be affected, and it will cause a terrific blast of icy air, air at temperatures far below zero! This will be even more effective on Venus! But we must start designing the thing at once! Take some of the Immorpho and give me some, and we can let the sleep accumulate till we have more time! Look—we are already in Sonor—we must land, Fuller—right where we were, and then come back here. We are going to need you!"

	The gorgeous display of a Venerian dawn was already starting in the East as the great buildings seemed to rise silently about them. The sky, which had been a dull luminous grey, a grey that rapidly grew brighter and brighter, was now like molten silver, through which the early rays of the intense sun were filtering. Now, the sun rose above the horizon, invisible for clouds. But still it was traceable by the wondrous shell pink that began to suffuse the ten-mile layer of clouds. The tiny droplets were, however, breaking the clear light into a million rainbows, and all about the swiftly deepening pink there were forming concentric circles of blue, of green, orange, and all the colors of the rainbow, repeated time after time—a wondrous halo of glowing color, which only the doubly intense sun could give.

	"It's almost worth missing the sun all day to see their sunrises and sunsets." The men were watching it, despite their need for haste. It was a sight the like of which no Earthman had ever before been privileged to see.

	And then immediately they plunged into the extremely complex calculation of the necessary electrical apparatus to produce the necessary fields. To get the effect they wanted, they must have two separate fields of the director ray, and a third field of a slightly different nature, which would cause the director ray to move in one direction only. It would be disconcerting, to say the least, if the director ray, by some mistake, should work in the opposite direction!

-

	THE work went on even more swiftly than they had hoped, but there was still much to be done on the theoretical end of the job alone when the streets about them began to fill. They noticed that a sizeable crowd was collecting, and shortly after they had finished, after some of those people had stood there over an hour and a half, the crowd had grown to great size.

	"From the looks of that collection, I should say we are about to become the principals in some kind of a celebration that we know nothing about. Well, we are here, and in case they want us» we are ready to come.

	The usual guard that always surrounded the Solarite had been doubled, and was maintaining a fairly large ring about the ship.

	It was shortly after that that they saw one of the high officials of Lanor come down the walk from the governmental building, walking toward the Solarite.

	"Time for us to appear—we may as well all show up for once. I'll tell you what they say afterward, Wade. They have gone to considerable trouble to get up this meeting, so let's oblige by all going out I hate to slow up the work so, but we will make it short."

	The four Terrestrians donned the cooling suits, and stepped outside the ship. It was the first time they had all been outside the ship together!

	"Earthmen, we have gathered here this morning to greet you and thank you for the tremendous service you have done us. Twice you have saved this city from utter destruction. Across the awful void of empty space you have journeyed forty million miles from your planet to visit us, only in time to discover that Venerians were making ready to attack your world. Now you have helped us, saved our cities.

	"There is, of course, no adequate reward for this service; we can in no way repay you, but in a measure we may show our appreciation. We have learned from the greatest psychologist of our nation, Tonlos, that in your world aluminum is plentiful, but gold and platinum are rare, and that morlus is unknown. I have had a small token made for you, and for your friends. It is a little plaque, a disc of morlus, and on it there is a small map of the Solar System. On the reverse side there is a globe of Venus, with a globe of earth beside it, as well as our men could copy the small globe you have given us. The northern hemisphere of each is shown—America, your nation, and Lanor, ours, thus being shown. We want you, and each of your friends, to accept these. They are both tokens of our great indebtedness to you, and symbols of your wonderful flight across infinite space!" The Venerians turned to each of the Terrestrians and presented each with a small metal disc, about three inches in diameter,

	"On behalf of myself and my friends here, two of whom have not had an opportunity to learn your language, I wish to thank you for your great help at the time when we most needed it. You have saved more than a city—you have made it possible to save a world—your earth. But the battle here is but just begun. There are now in the Kaxorian camp eighteen great ships. They have been badly defeated in the three encounters they have had with the Solarite so far. But no longer will they be invulnerable. I have learned that the first plane, the plane which was first attacked by the Solarite is still undergoing repairs. They are patching the great hole that was melted into its side. That will be completed within two days, and then, when they can leave a base guard of two ships, they will attack once more. Furthermore, they will attack with a new weapon. They have destroyed the usefulness of our weapon, invisibility, and in turn, now have it to use against us! We must seek out some new weapon. I hope we are on the right track now, but every moment is precious, and we must get back to the work on it. This address must be short Later, when we have completed the plans, we will have to give plans to your workmen, which you will be able to turn into metal, for we lack the materials. With this help we may succeed, despite our handicap."

	The address was terminated at once. The Lanorians were perhaps disappointed, but they realized the necessity of developing all the powers they could.

	"I wish Terrestrian orators spoke like that,'' remarked Morey as they returned to the ship. "He said all there was to say, but he didn't run miles of speech doing it. He was a very forceful speaker, too!"

	"People who speak briefly and to the point generally are," Arcot said.

	"Perhaps so, but it would be much more intelligible if you would tell me what these plaques they gave us are for. I hope they were gifts—they look expensive!" said Wade smiling at the little piece of blueish metal.

	Arcot told him the gist of the speech as quickly as possible. Then they at once settled back to their work.

	It was nearly noon that day before the theoretical discussion had been reduced to practical terms. They were ready to start work at once, but they had reason to work cheerfully now. Even through air they had found their ray would be able to reach 35 miles! They would be well out of the danger zone while attacking the gigantic planes of Kaxor.

	Morey, Wade and Arcot at once set to work constructing the electrical plant that was to give them the necessary power. It was lucky indeed that they had thought to bring the great mass of spare apparatus! They had more than enough to make all the electrical machinery. The tubes, the coils, the condensers, all were there. The generator would easily supply the power, for the terrific forces that were to destroy the gargantuan ships of the Kaxorians were to be generated in the plane itself. It was to destroy itself; the Solarite was merely the detonator that set it off.

-

	WHILE the Physicists were busy on this, Fuller was designing the mechanical details of the projector. It must be able to turn through a spherical angle of 180 degrees, and was necessarily controlled electrically from the inside. The details of the projector were worked out by six that evening, and the numerous castings and machined pieces that were to be used were to be made in the Venerian machine shops.

	"Wade, come here and help me reduce this, will you?" asked Arcot. He was working with Fuller on the last details of the plans. They were putting in the dimensions that the Lanorians might understand.

	"Their length unit, the 'tsorri,' is exactly 19.2 centimeters. I had a measuring rod here, and compared them—but the system is something like the metric—with this difference. Their entire mathematics is based on the duo-decimal system! Their unit, the tsorn, is divided into twelve parts, each an 'abtsorn,' and similarly multiplied to make an 'ortsorn.' Since their units are on the basis of twelve, they naturally have their lengths in a system based on twelve. Now we have to reduce the centimeters here on Fuller's drawings to equivalents in the tsorn system.

	"Remember that a new system of numbers means a new multiplication table.

	"They have digits that we don't have. They count 'or', 'tel', 'fflur', and so on, but in English they would say, one, two, three, and so on to nine. Then remember that for the next digit they have a single symbol. It happens to be something like this, /, and similarly eleven is ˅. They have twelve now, but they write it—well I can explain it better this way; it corresponds to 10. It means one times twelve. To them, 20 would mean two times twelve, or 24 units to us. Now 100 will mean twelve times twelve or one hundred and forty-four units. The difficulty comes in when we start multiplying. For instance, seven times five is thirty-five to us. They would write it, 7 X 5 =  2˅—that is 'twenty-eleven' or two times twelve plus eleven. Now by the time you introduce such things as twenty-eleven, and eleventy-eleven into your system, the old decimal system looks sort of crippled! The thing we were working on just now was the problem of reducing .2 to the duo-decimal system. Of course, I could say 1/5 in either system, but I want to put it in a duo-decimal. Let's see—five into 1 goes .2 and two to carry—the next now is 4 and then 9 and then 7 and so it's a repeating decimal. The answer is .2497. Now let's go on."

	The problem of working in a new multiplication system was decidedly time-consuming. It was hard to remember that 23 - 18 = 7 and similar peculiar things. But it was done, and at last the work was under way.

	It was night soon, and still the Terrestrians were working. The Venerian workmen had promised to have the apparatus for them by ten o'clock the next morning—or what corresponded to ten o'clock. Their day was divided into twelve equal portions—sensibly, for their numbers were on the duo-decimal system. Wade had been curious to know why they had chosen that basis. It was, of course, as good as any other, and easy to work with, no doubt, when you were accustomed to it—but why twelve? Arcot pointed out that a Venerian has six fingers on each hand, just as a man has five. When man was learning to count, he used his fingers to keep track on, and so, no doubt, had the Venerians done. Naturally they counted by twelves.

	That night Arcot sent to earth the full details of the new ray. If they did not succeed with it, or were in some way destroyed, earth would at least be able to build up the necessary apparatus.

	The time passed quickly, and it was shortly after three o'clock that morning when they finally finished the apparatus and had the controls connected to the control room and the last of the projector directors in place; they were ready, all but the projector, and Morey, Wade and Fuller turned in to get what sleep they could before ten the next morning. But Arcot told them there was something he wished to get, and took another dose of the Immorpho, then stepped out into the steaming rain. It was necessary to wear gloves to prevent the hot rain from scalding him, though the heat suit covered him otherwise. Out into the rain he went, and across to the great government building. Then up quickly to the government chemistry laboratory.

	Wade woke the next morning shortly before ten, and rose quickly, calling the others. Arcot would be back soon, so Fuller started the breakfast.

	It was scarcely ten minutes later when Arcot did return, with half a dozen Venerians following him, each carrying a large metal cylinder in a special cradle. These were attached to the landing runners of the Solarite. The men inside watched with interest as the Venerians wired them on quickly and deftly. They were arranged, however, so that the fusing of one piece of wire would permit the entire thing to drop free, but it was virtually impossible for them to come free otherwise.

	"What was that you were working on there, Arcot?" asked Wade as he entered the ship.

	"It is an idea I want to try out—and I am going to keep it a deep dark secret for a while. I think you will get quite a surprise when you see those bombs in action! They are arranged to be released by turning current into the landing lights. We will have to forego them for the present, but I needed the bombs more than the lights just now. I think they will be successful. The current will melt the wire that holds the main wire supports together. There were no other connectors leading out through the wall of the ship, so I had to use them. The mechanics have finished working on those projector parts you designed, Fuller, and they will be over here in a short time. Here comes the little gang I asked to help us. You can direct them. They will weld the parts in place, and drill the holes for the wires where you say. You know where the best places will be, since you designed the ship, so you take charge of the gang. Hang it all—when they drill into the outer wall, we will lose the vacuum between the two walls, and all that hot air will come in. This place will be roasting in a short time, and we won't be able to walk comfortably for a week! Well, we have some molecular motion coolers.

	"Oh, I wonder if we can't use the generator—oh no, I forgot that we had decided to isolate that from the main room by vacuum wall. Otherwise we could let it use the heat of the rooms. I think we had better charge up the gas tanks and the batteries as soon as this is done. Then tonight we will attack the Kaxorian construction camp. It will be best to attack them before they attack us again. I don't like the news I just got either. There have been no reports from the spies the Lanorians sent over—they are sure to spring some surprise on us soon! We had best get over there!''

-

	SHORTLY later the sound of the drills, then the whistling roar as the air sucked into the vacuum, told the men inside that the work was under way. It soon became uncomfortably hot as, the vacuum destroyed, the heat came In through all sides. It was more than the little molecular motion coolers could handle. They had been designed to work in the ship which was being heated only by the heat of the human bodies. This was too much for them, and the temperature soon rose to about a hundred and fifteen. It was not as bad as the Venerian atmosphere, for the air seemed exceedingly dry, and the men found it possible to get along without cooling suits, if they did not work. Since there was nothing they could do as yet, they had no cause to be hot.

	It was nearly dark before the men had finished their work, and the gas tanks had been recharged. All that time Arcot had spent consulting with Tonlos trying to get information about the position of the Kaxorian construction camp. Due to the long years that had passed since communications had been cut off with Kaxor, it was impossible to know much about the southern hemisphere. However, the spies that had been at work in Kaxor had gotten several maps through to the Lanorian government. The difficulty came in that Kaxor had not mapped the northern hemisphere, and therefore the two maps could not be made to align themselves very exactly. The old maps helped a great deal, but still it was impossible to do very accurate work by these means.

	It was finally determined that the Kaxorian construction camp was about 10,500 miles to the southwest. The Solarite was to start an hour after dark—they wanted to reach the camp just after nightfall, but since it was nearly four thousand miles to the west, it was necessary to wait an hour after dark in Sonor, and then make the trip, since it would be a three-hour trip, and they would in this way get there at the desired time.

	They had no fear that they would miss the camp in the dark. Such a vast landing field as would harbor those giant machines was large enough to spot at night. The lights would be visible for miles around, no doubt.

	The Solarite was moving swiftly along. The sky was slowly growing a bit lighter as they went toward the west. They were catching up on the sun. But now, as they saw the rolling ocean beneath them give way to low plains, they realized they were over Kaxorian land. The Solarite was flying very high, and as they showed no lights, and were not using the invisibility apparatus, they would be almost undetectable. Suddenly they saw the lights of a mighty city looming far off to the east.

	"Kanor, pass well to the west of it. That is their capital." Wade was at the control, Arcot was to control the projector. Now he was telling Wade the directions to follow on his course to the berth of the giant planes.

	The city had dropped far behind them now, and another, and another. They were entering a region of low hills, age-old folds in the crust of the planet, rounded off by untold ages of rains. Low they loomed against the grey horizon of the clouds.

	"Easy, Wade. We are near now." Mile after mile they shot on at about a thousand miles an hour—then suddenly they saw far off to the east a vast light that reached into the sky, and seemed to paint itself on the clouds there miles above.

	"There it is—off there—go high, and easy!"

	Swiftly the Solarite climbed into the air. They were nearly five miles above the field now. Below them they saw a field. From this height all sense of proportions seemed lost. It seemed but an ordinary field, with eighteen ordinary airplanes resting on it. One of these now was moving, and in a moment it was rising into the air! But there seemed to be no men on all the great field. They were invisibly small from this height, and as they moved about the field, overshadowed by the titanic planes, they were lost

	"They are rising—look—there are men entering those other ships! Their surprise is that they have completed the ships far ahead of the time we expected! If all that armada gets in the air, we will be helpless despite our ray—we must destroy as many as we can before they leave the ground. They are grouped and we can destroy more in less time. Quick—-drop to within a few hundred feet of the ground, and come in close to the field!"

	The Solarite sank like a stone—down they shot with a sickening lurch, as they fell the distance of five miles to the ground below. There was a sudden tremendous weight as the ship was brought to rest not more than two hundred feet from the ground. Rapidly now Wade shot it in as close to the field as he dared. The planes loomed gigantic now, their true proportions showing clearly against the brilliant light of the field. There was one mighty wave of sound coining from the loud-speaker as the planes rolled across the ground to leap gracefully into the air—half a million tons, of metal!

	From the little ship there reached out a pale beam of ghostly light, a light that was faintly grey, tinged with red and green—the ionized air as the beam. In an instant the whirr of the hundreds, thousands of giant propellers was drowned in a terrific roar of air. Great snowflakes were falling from the air before them; it was white with the solidified water vapor. Then came a titanic roar and the planet itself seemed to shake! There was a crash, a snapping and rending as a mighty fountain of dirt and rock shot high into the air, and with it, twisting, turning, hurled in a dozen directions at once, twelve titanic ships were flying high into the air! For an instant there was a silence that was oppressive, as the ray was shut off. Then again there was a roar that slowly grew to a mighty cascade of sound as the millions of tons of rock and dirt fell back. Some of it had gone miles up. Now it came down, but not with the same speed it went up. In a few moments the ground was as it had been before apparently, except that it seemed newly turned, and over it all there lay a white blanket of ice and snow. But it was quickly dissolving.

-

	HIGH above there were ten planes flying about in the air—suddenly one turned, headed for the ground far below, and was coming down at terrific speed, the wings screaming their protest as the motors pulled, ever faster, with the gravity of the planet aiding them. There was a rending, crackling crash as the wings suddenly bent back along the sides. An instant later the plane was falling freely; the wings falling, twisting, turning down. The Solarite seemed to leap as from a gun as it shot swiftly away from the spot—away and up, with a force that nailed the occupants to the floor. Then behind them was a mighty gout of light that struck to the very clouds above, and all the landscape, for miles about, was visible in the glare of the released energy.

	Back there on the plain was a great spot of loose dirt, and in the center a spot that glowed white, and seemed to bubble. It was molten.

	Nine great planes were circling in the air, then of an instant they were gone, and no man could find them, but the Solarite was darting away with a speed that defied the aim of any machine.

	High above the planes they went, for in the radio direction control Arcot could trace them. They were circling, searching for the Solarite.

	The tiny machine was invisible in the darkness, but its invisibility could not be located by the radio detectors.

	"Wade, how is it those ships can be invisible when they are driven by light, and have the light stored in them?" asked Fuller. "They are perfectly transparent. Why is it they can be made invisible without the light making them stand out?"

	"They are storing the light. It is bound—it cannot escape. You cannot see light unless it literally hits you in the eye. That cannot reach you, for it is held by its own attraction and by the special field of the big generators there."

	They seemed to be above one of the Kaxor planes now. Arcot caught the roar of the invisibility set

	"To the left, Wade—faster—hold it—left—ah!" Arcot pushed a button.

	Down from the Solarite there dropped a little canister, one of the bombs that Arcot had prepared the night before. To hit an invisible target is ordinarily difficult, but when that target is far larger than the proverbial side of a barn, it is not very difficult, at that. But now Morey was watching for the crash of the explosion, the flash of light. What sort of bomb was it that Arcot hoped would penetrate that tremendous armor?

	Suddenly there was a great spot of light—it seemed to spread with startling rapidity, a patch of light that ran, and moved. It was flying through the air at terrific speed. The light was a pale green that seemed to flow and ebb; it had a strange ghostly appearance.

	For an instant Morey and the others stared in utter surprise at it. Then suddenly Morey burst out laughing.

	"Ho—you win Arcot—that, was one they didn't think of, I'll bet! You have them on that one, and they never will put that out!"

	For an instant longer Wade looked in puzzled wonder; then he too saw the secret, and began laughing.

	"Luminous paint—and by the gallon! You had enough to paint a city with. I suppose it is radium paint, and no man has ever found how to stop radium, so they are stuck—and that plane sticks out like a sore thumb! Their invisibility may make the paint invisible, but it can't make the light it gives out invisible!"

	Indeed the luminous paint made the gigantic plane clearly visible now against the grey clouds. Visible or not, that plane was marked.

	Quickly now Arcot tried to maneuver the Solarite over another of the invisible planes, for now the danger was only from those he could not see. Suddenly he had an idea.

	"Morey—go back to the power room and change the adjustment on the meteorite avoider to half a mile!" At once Morey understood his plan, and hastened to put it into effect. The illuminated plane was diving, twisting wildly now. Suddenly Arcot focused his attention on it. The Solarite dived down toward it with sickening speed, then suddenly the gigantic bulk of the plane loomed off to the right of the tiny ship, the great metal hull, visible now, rising in austere power. They were too near, and Wade shot the machine to a greater distance—then again that ghostly beam reached out—and for just a fraction of a second it touched the giant plane.

	The titanic engine of destruction seemed suddenly to be in the grip of some Colossus so far vaster than it, that it was but a fragile toy in the terrific grip—and he closed that grip! The great plane jumped back with a terrific crash, a mighty roar of rending steel, of torn metal and snapping beams. There was a sudden crash. For an instant there came the sound as of some mighty buzz-saw as the giant propeller of one wing cut into the body of the plane as it came crushing in upon it. Then, in that instant, the great power storage tank was split open. It seemed like the bursting of a world. The Solarite was hurled back with the force of an explosion that seemed to split the very atoms of the air, and all about them was a terrific blaze of intense heat and light that seemed to sear their faces and hands with the intense rays.

	Then, in a time so short it seemed never to have happened, it was gone, and only the distant drone of the other ships' propellers came to them. There was no luminous spot. The radium paint had been destroyed in the only possible way—it was volatilized through all the atmosphere!

	The Terrestrians had known what to expect; had known what would happen; and they had not looked at the great ship in that last instant. But the Kaxorians had naturally been looking at it. The men who had never seen the sun directly, they had been looking at it, and their eyes were lidless now, for their invisibility afforded them no protection. They were temporarily blinded; they could only fly a straight course in response to the quick order of their squadron commander.

	And in that brief moment that they were unable to watch him, Arcot dropped two more bombs in quick succession. Two bright spots stuck out in the black night. No longer did these planes feel themselves invulnerable, able to meet any foe! In an instant they had put on every last trace of power, and at their top speed they were racing west, away from their tiny opponent—in the only direction that was open to them.

	But it was useless. The Solarite could pick up speed in half the time they could, and in an instant again Arcot was training the beam on the mighty splotch of light that was a fleeing plane. These planes, which had been invulnerable through sheer size, were helpless now. Through their very mass they were slow in pickup, and the lightning-fast Solarite was bearing down on them.

	Out of the dark came a ghostly beam, for an instant of time so short that before the explosive shells of the other could be trained on it, the Solarite had moved, and before it the mighty plane was crumpling, splintering under the titanic driving blow of the great wing, as it shot toward the main body of the plane at several miles a second—driving into and through it. The giant plane was twisting, turning, falling swiftly to the dark ground below—then again there came that world-rocking explosion, that mighty column of light, and there was no ship there. The companion ship had shot away from the terrific explosion with a mighty lurch, tumbling, twisting. Then there came a slow, grinding crack, and under that terrific stress the wing broke, and fell suddenly free of the plane! Turning—falling ever faster, the pilot was struggling to turn the nose of the plane up, hoping the engines might hold it from its fall. There was suddenly a mighty gout of light, a great blazing trail of light that reached out behind it—then suddenly the tail of the mighty ship was glowing white hot—flaming. Then again the plane was turning, twisting down, helpless. There was a terrific crash; the mechanical noise of its collision was followed an instant later by the greater crash, as all its energy storage was released.

	But to remind the men of the Solarite that they were not alone, there came a sudden report just behind them, and they turned to see that one of the energy bombs had just fallen short of them! In an instant the ship was shooting up at terrific speed, out of danger. It looped, turned, and was hunting, feeling with the disturbance locater for that other ship. The ships were spread out more now. In every direction they could be located—and all were leaving the scene of battle. But one by one the Solarite shot after them, and always the speed of the little ship was greater.

	Two escaped. They turned off their useless invisibility apparatus and could not be found, for, lost, in the night, they were invisible and unbeatable. Morning found the Solarite once more over Kanor, the Kaxorian capital. Arcot had learned that the language of both these peoples was almost identical. Now he was using his radio, sending his message toward the city. It was long before he got his reply. Perhaps it was that the Kaxorians were almost afraid to reply, for they had seen an awful demonstration of power!

	"I am of earth. We want only peace. We will have peace, but we prefer to have it by peaceful means, not by destroying you and your city. There is a mountain to the west of your city. In ten minutes that mountain will suffer the fate that will meet your city if you cannot agree to our terms of peace."

	Great rocky cliffs loomed before the tiny ship. They were composed of a green, heavy rock. Suddenly there reached out a thin, wan beam, a ray of light that was scarcely visible in the light of the dawn. But there was a mighty roar, a terrific tornado, and with it a fall of great snowflakes. But there was another fall. The rock suddenly moved with a terrific lunge to the right, half the mountain seemed driving against itself, moving of its own accord, and there was a vast crash of colliding rock. Then suddenly, as if by magic, great cracks appeared in the plain all about it

	The Solarite hung high above the city—and ten miles away to the west, just beyond the range of any guns that might accidentally go off. Beyond the city, off to the north, there was a vast cloud of dust settling over a mass of crushed stone. There was a low mound here, spread out wide on the flat plain. 

	We know the rest. Kaxor was but a victim of bad rulership. The ruler, lusting for greater power, seeing in the discovery of a scientist the necessary means to his ends, had made use of the discovery of the light-power condensation, and his fleet of mighty planes was the result. He had refused to yield to Arcot and the Solarite. He was found blasted by a small handlight gun. They never tried too hard to find the assassin, but many people might have been able to give information. Can we blame them? They were perhaps the most advanced people we have ever met. Their scientific discoveries are of immense value to both planets, and to those people on far out Jupiter's moons.

	But our metal supplies are no longer a source of worry. Perhaps in a million years—but who knows what man will do in a million years?

The End

The Black Star Passes
Arcot, Morey and Wade 01.3
Amazing Stories Quarterly – Fall 1930

THE title of homo sapiens may be deservedly applied to man in this day and age—after endless wars and wasting of mechanical energy—but what mysterious secrets are still bound up in nature! Some of these, if and when they are revealed, may release so much that is powerful and remarkable as to put our present-day amazing inventions into the dim background. And when all the mysteries are solved and all of nature's forces are used, what then? Will the Universe continue in the selfsame manner, forever unchanging? It seems a hardly logical thing to expect in this forever changing world. What tests man will be put to, and what obstacles he will have to overcome is still a matter for distant contemplation, perhaps, but our young author is impatient and must needs find ways and means right now. Exciting and thrilling things take place, but our old friends, Wade, Arcot and Morey, the scientific trio, are on the job, causing a quick ensuing denouement.

-

	TAJ LAMOR gazed steadily down at the vast dim bulk of the ancient city spread out beneath him. In the feeble light of the stars its mighty masses of upflung metal buildings loomed strangely, like the shells of some vast race of Crustacea, long extinct. Slowly he turned, gazing now out across the great plaza, where nested long rows of mighty, slim ships. Silently, thoughtfully he stared at their dim, half-seen shapes. I cannot call Taj Lamor human. Earth had never seen creatures such as Taj Lamor. His species had never had the opportunity to develop on Earth. Yet perhaps that race had better reason to appropriate the term homo sapiens for its members than have we, for wise they were, with the age-old wisdom of uncounted awns.

	The civilization of this race was an easy decline from vast heights of knowledge, of learning, of science. Theirs was a decadent race now. Long ages ago they had defeated their last external enemy. Their life had for long millenniums led them gently down from those vast heights, and through easy forgetfulness, and lack of strife, ambition had died; and with it had gone the incitement of adventure.

	It was for this reason that Taj Lamor's task was so difficult when he tried to organize this great expedition.

	There had been a few men who felt the stirrings of a long-buried emotion, ambition, love of adventure, and these few were throw-backs to those ancestors of long ago, whose science had built their world. These men had had a mighty struggle against the inertia of ages of slow decline, and worse than all, the secrets of their hundred-million-year-old science had been lost. Slowly Taj Lamor raised his eyes to the horizon. Through the leaping curve of the crystal clear roof of their world there glowed a blazing point of yellow fire, a great star. So brilliant was it that it cast a distinct shadow of the watcher on the metal roof. Long Taj Lamor stood gazing off at the bright point of yellow fire. He was reviewing the events of the last few years, and perhaps the events of a million centuries. Perhaps there passed before his vision a pageant, a strange pageant that covered the awful sweep of a hundred million years of civilization.

	In the far, dim past, perhaps, he saw in space fifteen planets circling a small, red sun. On those planets there was no life. Only three were fit for life, but as yet the cosmic accident had not happened. Perhaps a million years passed before there crawled about on them the first beginnings of life. Then a hundred million years passed, and that first, crawling protoplasm had become a series of strange animals, plants and intermediate growths. Then more millions of years passed, and there appeared a creature that slowly gained ascendancy over the other struggling creatures that sought their '. places in the warm rays of the hot, red sun. That sun had been old, even as the ages of a star are counted, ere its planets had been born, and many, many millions of years had passed ere those planets cooled, and then more æons sped by before life appeared. Now, as life slowly forced its way upward, that sun was old and nearly burned out. Those animals fought, and bathed in the luxury of its rays, for many millenniums were required to produce any noticeable change in those life-giving radiations.

	At last that one animal had gained ascendancy. It was the ruling genus. The last hundred million years had been entered upon now. The race of homo sapiens was rising to civilization.

	Before the eyes of the thinker passes a long line of struggling, semi-barbaric people who fought among themselves. First came stone buildings, the beginnings of engineering. With them came little chemical engines that would destroy them; warfare was developing. Then came the first crude flying-machines, using clumsy, inefficient engines. Chemical engines! Engines that were so inefficient that one could watch the flow of their fuel! One part in one hundred thousand million of the energy of their fuels they released to run the engines, and they carried fuel in such vast quantities that they staggered under its load as they left the ground! The first mechanical flight! After it, though, there came other machines and other ages. Other scientists began to have visions of the realms beyond, and they sought to tap the vast reservoirs of Nature's energies, the energies of matter.

	Other ages saw it done—a few thousand years later there passed out into space a fragile, delicate machine that forced its way out through the void, and across to another planet!

	Swiftly now, science seemed to leap up on itself, building with ever faster steps, like some crystal which, once started, grows ever faster.

	And while that science grew swiftly greater, other changes were taking place, changes in their universe itself. Ten million years had passed before the first of those changes became pronounced. But slowly, steadily their atmosphere was leaking into space. Through ages it was gradually apparent. Their world was losing its air and its water.

-

	AGAIN science helped them. Their discovery of space-travel machines had enabled their civilization to meet the scarcity of metals, but now their air and water were going. Water they could import for a while, but still it was disappearing. They must find new sources, and even the other planets were well nigh exhausted of metals. But their ten-million-year-old science aided them once more.

	Thousands of years before science had learned how to change the mass of matter into energy, but now at last the process had been reversed, they could change energy into matter, any kind of matter they wished. Rock they took, and changed it to energy, then that energy they transmuted to air, to water, to the necessary metals. Their planets took a new lease of life! But even this could not continue forever. They must stop that loss of gas, for eventually the entire planets would slowly pass into the void. The process they had developed for reformation of matter admitted of a new use. Creation! They were now able to make elements, things that had never existed in nature! They designed atoms, as, long before, their fathers had designed molecules. But even so their problem was not solved, till at last a new form of matter was made. This was clearer than any crystal, and yet stronger, and tougher than any metal known. Passing any light or heat ray, they could roof their worlds with it and keep their air within!

	This was a task that could not be done in a year, nor a decade, but when all time stretched out unending before them—

	Three planets of the fifteen were of a temperature adapted to life, and one by one these planets became vast, roofed-in cities. Only their titanic powers, their mighty machines made the task possible, but it was done.

	Slow ages drifted on, and the pageant bore only a long tale of greater triumphs of science, and here and there came the story of awful wars in the void, when the population would be halved, and all space for a billion miles about would be a vast seething cauldron of battling ships and deadly rays. Forces were loosed on the planets that swung even their mighty masses loose in their orbits, and equal or greater forces were opposed, and the worlds rocked drunkenly in their orbits, pawns in the play of titanic forces that tore space itself with the awful play of its energies, and light was unable to pass through the distorted space.

	Then came peaces, always futile. A few brief millenniums, then again the flame of war burst out, and space was again rocked with the warring of forces that dwarfed into insignificance the planets, and the stars, swinging them, helpless, in the grip of awful energies. But for each force an equal force appeared on the opposing side, and the worlds were readjusted. Yet at last they would end, and life would continue.

	But slowly, slowly there crept upon the Pageant of Time a darkening cloud, a slow change that came so gradually no man could see it, but only the records of instruments, made over thousands of years, could show it. Their sun had changed from bright red to a deeper, duller, red, and ever less and less heat poured forth from its surface. Their sun was waning!

	As its fires of life died down, the people of the wheeling worlds joined in a lasting bond; they must fight the great common menace, death from the cold of space.

-

	LIKE people huddling close to the fire as the cold blasts begin to blow, these men of long ago drew their planets closer and closer to the dying sun. Other planets were habitable now, and these others were taken possession of, and mighty roofs of the clear material were thrown over them. Life went on beneath, and above the sun was dying.

	A star cannot grow cool, but it becomes "closed," shutting in its floods of light and warmth with a blanket of intangible gravitation. A star that is burnt out cannot cool down; it lacks the terrific stores of energy needed to cool its substance, yet it lacks the energy to continue radiation. It cannot cool, yet it cannot give off any more energy as radiation. It must maintain itself at a terrific temperature in space, which seems to demand a high radiation. Too tired to stop working! Paradoxical that may seem to us, but to those people it was deadly fate. Their sun was dying and their worlds were freezing.

	Within the heart of every star there is a vast furnace where matter is converted into energy. The mass of matter is destroyed, and every gram of matter yields 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs of energy, but this energy, radiated as light and heat, has all the mass that the matter had! That light has mass is easy to prove; it is easy to show its momentum, for it exerts a very definite pressure. However, the mass of light is so slight, to have a mass appreciably great so much light is required, that we cannot ordinarily detect that mass. We feel the heat first.

	In those furnaces of the stars, matter is destroyed by heat. It is heated here to a temperature of 40,000,000 degrees centigrade. Such a temperature is incomprehensible in ordinary life, for temperature is the measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules that make up that body, but at that temperature no molecules can exist. They would be flying about at such terrific speed that their collisions would crush them. So violent are these collisions at this temperature that even the atoms are disrupted, and they are smashed, and the protons and electrons are separated. No other solar system could come nearer to ours than the orbit of Neptune—nearly three billion miles away from the sun—without disrupting the system. Similarly, no atom can come closer to its nearest neighbor than the orbit of its outermost electron. If this be knocked off, the atoms may approach more closely. This process of packing has been carried to the ultimate in the interior of stars, and the atoms are completely stripped of their electrons. Atoms so stripped can, of course, be packed very closely. When we consider how empty an atom of lead is, we can begin to appreciate the density these atoms could reach when so packed. In the center of any star these conditions are reached.

	But now let us suppose that this star cools. What will happen to the atoms? The electrons, which have been stripped off, will at once fall back into their orbits, and the atom will again become its former bulky self, mostly empty space. As this happens, it must have more room. As it cools, it expands, and expands enormously.

	As the center of a star expands, it must necessarily make room for itself by lifting out of its way the upper layers of the star. But these upper layers are, then, being lifted against gravity. Work is being done. It was our original hypothesis that the star, which was cooling, was already burnt out. It has not the energy to do this work of expansion.

-

	THE gravitational attraction at the star's surface increases rapidly, till at last a new effect becomes pronounced. It has been pointed out that light has mass. Now, any light leaving the surface of the star must lift itself away against the immense gravitational attraction at the star's surface! The result is that a condition is reached when the star has become so "packed" that no light can leave it! We have at last a body which is exceedingly hot, yet cannot radiate!

	Such a condition, the star of the system of Taj Lamor's ancestors had tended toward. Through long millions of years they had seen the life die out of their sun. Through those long years they had laid plans, and they had built their cities, had roofed in worlds, so that they might heat them artificially. They had built mighty heating plants, furnaces that burned matter, and warmed a world! Now all planets were alike habitable, and again the race expanded. They had at last reached a condition of stability, for never would conditions change again, it seemed. All external heat and light they received came from the far-off stars of the galaxy, the three hundred thousand million flaming suns that would never fail them! And now the pageant showed only a black star, with fifteen black planets circling it in awful, eternal night. A system from which no spark of light shone forth.

	Yet now their advancement was not stopped. Steadily the race went on, progressing to their goal of all knowledge. They hoped that some day, somehow, they might escape these darkened, artificial worlds of theirs, but they knew that there was no hope, for the nearest star was over three and three-quarters light years off across the void.

	So, hoping, they waited on their planets, while their scientists searched. Then, across the field of this pageant of a hundred million years of history, came scientist after scientist, and the people waited, and lived. They progressed, did the scientists, but the people merely waited. The scientists that came in these days seemed less brilliant than the old-time students, and many facts were forgotten, for the scientists of the race must come from the people and the people found it pleasant to wait. The world was unchanging, there was no strife, and no need of strife. There was no need to move—their worlds were warm, and pleasant; and safe. They were quite willing to wait.

	And so the millenniums passed, and there were museums, and libraries, and laboratories, but there were no scientists worthy of the name—it was easier, and pleasanter to watch the machines of their ancestors do the work. So skillful, and so sure!

	And so they had rested.

-

	THEN came a scene in that pageant that seemed different. For there was Space, and the infinite glories of the stars, and there was one star that glowed brightly yellow off there in far space. The star was interesting. Curious ones who still knew the meaning of adventure, true throwbacks, men who had that Divine gift of curiosity that marks the genius from the sheep, went to the museums and looked carefully at the ancient directions for the use of the telectroscope, the mighty electrically amplified vision machine, and gazed through it. Now they saw a great sun that seemed to fill all the field of the apparatus with blazing fire. Here was a sun to envy! These men who still knew the meaning of curiosity, they wanted to be there, and they looked long at its brilliance, then turned the director a bit and saw that there circled about the sun a series of planets, seven they saw, but there were two that were doubtful, so small they were.

	Taj Lamor had been with that group, a young man then, scarcely over forty, but they had found him a leader and they had followed him as he set about his investigation of the ancient manuscripts on astronomy.

	How many, many hours had he studied those ancient books! How many times had he despaired of ever learning the truth of those ancient scientists, and gone out to the roof of the museum to stand in silent thought looking out across the awful void to the steady flame of the yellow star! Then quietly he had returned to his self-set task.

	With him as teacher, others had learned, and before he was seventy there were many men who had become true scientists, astronomers. There was much that these men could not understand of the ancient works, for the science of a million centuries is not to be learned in a few brief decades, but there was much of the forgotten lore that they had relearned.

	They knew now that that young, live sun, out there in space, was coming ever nearer to them, their combined velocities bringing the two bodies towards one another at over 100 miles each second. And they knew that there were not seven, but eight tiny planets circling about that sun. There were other facts they discovered; they found that the new sun was far larger than theirs had ever been; indeed it was a sun well above average in size and brilliance. There were planets, a hot sun—a HOME! Could they get there?

	When their ancestors had tried to solve the problem of escape they had concentrated their work on the problem of going at speeds greater than that of light. This should be an impossibility, but the fact that these men had tried it, seemed proof enough to their descendants that it was possible, at least in theory. They had needed greater speeds than that of light, for they must travel light years, but now this sun was coming toward them, and already was less than two hundred and fifty billion miles away! They would pass that other star in about seventy years now. That was scarcely more than a third of a man's lifetime. In that short time they must prepare to move!

	The swift agitation for action had met with terrific resistance. They were satisfied, why move? And indifference is the most crushing form of resistance. But, while some men devoted their time to arousing the people to help, others were doing the work that had not been done for many, many millenniums. The laboratories were reopened, and the pageant once more showed humming workshops as the different machines were tested. They were making things that were new once more, not merely copying old designs.

	Their search had been divided into sections, search for weapons with which to defend themselves in case they were attacked, and search for the real principles of their space ships. They had the machines which they could imitate, but they did not understand them. The third section was less successful. They were also searching for the secrets of the apparatus their forefathers had used to swing the planets in their orbits, to move worlds about at will. They wanted to be able to take not only their space ships, but their planets as well, when they went to settle on these other worlds and in this other solar system.

	Long years must be spent in erecting their cities, but if they could bring with them their old homes, they would have places to live in in the meantime. Through the ages their population had been dwindling. Fewer and fewer people had been born, until at last, there were but four of the original planets inhabited. These people must all be moved in the short period, while the two suns swung about each other, locked for a short while in the mighty embrace of their gravities. Could they move a world, it would be far easier.

	But the search for this moving was unrewarded. The secret of the space-ships they learned readily, and Taj Lamor had designed these mighty ships below there from that knowledge. Their search for weapons had been satisfied, they had found one weapon, one of the deadliest that their ancestors had ever invented, but the one weapon in which they were most interested, the mighty force barrage that could swing a world in its flight through space, was lost. They could not find it.

	They knew the principles of the driving apparatus of their ships, and it would seem but a matter of enlargement to drive a planet as a ship, but they knew that was impossible; the terrific forces needed would easily be produced by their apparatus, but there was no way to apply them to the planet. If applied in any spot, the planet would be torn asunder by the immense strain. They must apply the strain equally to the entire planet. Their problem was one of application of power. The rotation of the planet made it impossible to use a series of driving apparatus, even could these be anchored, but again the sheer immensity of the task made it impossible.

	They were ready to start now on an expedition of exploration!

	Taj Lamor gazed down again at the great ships in the plaza below. Their mighty bulks seemed to dwarf even the huge buildings about them. Yet these ships were his—for he had learned their secrets and designed them, and now he was to command them as they flew out across space in that flight to the distant star.

	He turned, and stepped into a little torpedo-shaped car that rested on the metal roof behind him. A moment later the little ship rose, and then slanted smoothly down over the edge of the roof, to drop swiftly straight for the largest of the ships below. This was the flagship. Nearly a hundred feet greater was its diameter, and its mile and a quarter length of gleaming metal hull gave it nearly three hundred feet greater length than that of the ships of the line.

	This expedition was an expedition of exploration. They were prepared to meet any conditions on that other world, no atmosphere, no water, no heat, or even an atmosphere of poisonous gases they could rectify, for their transmutation apparatus would permit them to change those gases, or modify them; they knew well how to supply heat, but they knew, too, that that sun would warm some of its planets sufficiently.

-

	TAJ LAMOR was to lead this expedition, for he was their foremost scientist and their ablest citizen. He had designed these ships, and they had shown themselves a credit to their designer. Already many of them were in service gathering the materials of their world for transport. Now their great battle fleet of Space was ready to start.

	Taj Lamor sent his little machine quickly toward a great door in the side of the gigantic interstellar ship and lowered it gently to the floor of the huge machine. Quickly a man stepped  forward, opened the door for the leader, saluting quickly as he stepped out; then the car was run swiftly aside, to be placed with thousands of other cars like it. Each of these cars was to be used by a separate investigator, when they reached those other worlds, and there were men aboard who would use them.

	Taj Lamor made his way to a door in the side of a great metal tube that threaded the length of the huge ship. Opening the door he sat down in a little torpedo-shaped metal car that shot swiftly forward as the double door shut softly, with a low hissing of escaping air. A moment and the car was shooting through the tube, then gently it slowed, and came to rest opposite another door. Again came the hissing of gas as the twin doors opened, and Taj Lamor stepped out, now well up in the nose of the titanic, interstellar cruiser. As he stepped out of the car the outer and inner doors closed, and, ready now for other calls, the car remained at this station. On a ship so long, some means of communication faster than walking was essential. This little pneumatic railway was the solution.

	As Taj Lamor stepped out of the tube, a half-dozen men, who had been talking among themselves, snapped quickly to attention. Following the plans of the long-gone armies of their ancestors, the men of the expedition had been trained to strict discipline, with Taj Lamor the nominal Commander-in-Chief, although another man, Kornal Sorul, was their actual commander. Taj Lamor told them what he thought the best action; these other men put it into execution.

	Taj Lamor proceeded at once to his Staff Cabin in the very nose of the great ship. Just above him there was another room, walled on all sides by that clear, glass-like material, the control cabin. Here the pilot sat, directing the motions of the mighty ship of space.

	Taj Lamor pushed a small button on his desk and in a moment a grey disc before him suddenly glowed dimly, then flashed into sudden life and full, natural color. As though looking through a glass porthole, Taj Lamor saw the interior of the Communications Room. The Communications Officer was gazing at a similar disc in which Taj Lamar's features were imaged.

	"Have they, reported from Ohmur, Lorsand and Throlus, yet, Morlus Tal?" asked the commander.

	"They are reporting now, Taj Lamor, and we will be ready within two and one-half minutes. The plans are as before; we are to proceed directly toward the Yellow Star, meeting en route?"

	"The plans are as before. Start as soon as you are ready, Morlus Tal."

	The disc faded, the colors died, and it was grey again. Taj Lamor pulled another small lever on the little stand before him, and the disc changed, glowed, and was steady, and now he was watching the preparations of leaving, as from an eye on the top of the great ship. Men were streaming swiftly in ordered columns all about and into the great ships. In an incredibly short time they were in, and the great doors closed behind them. Suddenly there came a low, dull hum through the disc, and the sound mounted quickly, till all the world seemed humming to that dull note; they, were ready to leave! The warning was sounding.

	Suddenly the city around him seemed to blaze in a riot of colored light! The mighty towering bulks of the huge metal buildings were polished and bright, and now, as the millions of lights, every color of the spectrum, flashed over all the city, from small machines in the air, on the ground, in windows, their great metal walls glistening with a wondrous riot of flowing color. Then there was a trembling through all the giant frame of the mighty ship. In a moment it was gone, and the titanic mass of glistening metal was rising smoothly, quickly to the great roof of their world above them. On an even keel the ship climbed straight up, then suddenly it leapt forward like some great bird of prey sighting its victim, and the great mass was darting swiftly forward. The ground beneath sped swiftly, back, and behind them there came a long line of ships, a great mass of metal that swiftly formed behind them. They were heading toward the giant airlocks that would let them out into space. There was but one lock large enough to permit so huge a ship to pass out. They must go nearly half around their world to reach it. On three other worlds there were other giant ships racing thus to meet beyond their solar system. There were fifty ships coming from each planet; two hundred mighty ships in all made up this Armada of Space, two hundred gargantuan interstellar cruisers. These ships were intended as cargo and battleships. They were well adapted for this interstellar exploration.

	One by one the giant ships passed through the airlock and out into space. Here they quickly reformed as they moved off together, each ship falling into its place in the mighty cone formation, with the flagship of Taj Lamor at the head. On they rushed through space, their speed ever mounting. Each man seemed laboring under the load of three gravities and of four gravities as the ships flashed on at ever higher speeds. Taj Lamor watched his little speed indicator move across the dial. One hundred miles per second they attained before they passed out of the gravitational field of their little planet, and had gotten so far from their home, that its gravitation was negligible, and it was two hundred miles per second when they passed the orbit of the next outer planet. The pointer moved steadily on across the dial as the speed mounted ever higher. From two hundred to three hundred—then, before they left the outer bounds of their own system, the needle was wavering as it passed the 1,000 mark. Suddenly there seemed to leap out of nowhere another mass of shining machines that flew swiftly beside them. Like some strange, shining ghosts, these ships seemed to materialize instantly beside and behind their fleet. They fell in quickly in their allotted position behind the Flagship's squadron. One—two more fleets appeared thus suddenly in the dark, and together the ships were flashing on through space to their goal of glowing fire ahead!

	A thousand—a million miles they traveled over—and Taj Lamor was standing quietly at the window of his Staff Cabin, looking steadily out at the growing sea of flame. Already it was visible as a disc of flame. They had left their planet scarcely an hour ago, but at their present rate of 7,000 miles each second, that meant twenty-five millions of miles.

	Long the man stood gazing out through the window; then he turned, and walked slowly to the door, and started out to investigate the ship. He was not the commander now, but the scientist, the one designer and creator of this thing of power and speed and might.

-

	HOUR after hour, day after day the ships flashed on through the awful void, the utter silence relieved by the communications between themselves and the slowly weakening communications from the far-off home.

	But as those signals from home grew steadily weaker, the sun before them grew steadily larger. At last the men began to feel the heat of those rays, to realize the energy that mighty sea of flame poured forth into space, and steadily they watched it grow nearer.

	Then came a day when they could make out clearly the dim bulk of a planet before them, and for long hours they slowed down the flying speed of the ships. They had mapped the system before them, there were eight planets of varying sizes, some on the near and some on the far side of the sun. There were but three on the near side, one that seemed the outermost of the planets, about 35,000 miles in diameter, was directly in their path, while there were two more much nearer the sun, about 100,000,000 and 70,000,000 miles distant from it, each about seven to eight thousand miles in diameter, but they were on opposite sides of the sun, one well to the west of the sun, and one well to the east. It was decided to split the expedition into two parts; one part was to go to the eastern planet, and one to the western planet. Taj Lamor was to lead his group of 100 machines to the western planet at once, for this outermost planet was not of immediate interest, for it revolved at a distance of nearly 3,000,000,000 miles from its sun, and its temperature could be but a few degrees above absolute zero. Their crystal roofs would have to come first ere life could be established on it, and these would require time to construct. These other, warmer planets, were of more immediate interest.

	The great ships were slanting down over a mighty globe of water, it seemed. They were well in the northern hemisphere, and they had come near the planet first over a vast stretch of rolling ocean. These men had looked in wonder at such vast quantities of the fluid. To them it was a precious liquid, that must be made artificially, and was to be conserved, yet here they saw such vast quantities of natural water as seemed impossible. Still, their ancient books had told of such things, and of other strange things, things that must have been wondrously beautiful, though they were so old now, these records, that they were regarded much as we would regard the stories of gods and goddesses walking on the Earth.

	Yet here were the strange proofs! They saw great masses of fleecy water vapor, huge billowy things that seemed solid, but were blown lightly about in the wind. And natural air! The atmosphere extended for hundreds of miles off into space, and now, as they came closer to the surface of this world it was dense, and the sky above them was a beautiful blue, not black, even where there were no stars. The great sun, so brilliantly yellow when seen from space, was now a brilliant globe of reddish-yellow.

	And, as they came near land, they looked in wonder at mighty masses of rock and soil that threw their shaggy heads high above the surrounding terrain, huge masses of solid soil that rose high, like waves in water, till they towered in solemn grandeur miles into the air! What a sight for these men of a world so old that age long erosion had washed away the last traces of hills, and filled in the last traces of the valleys!

	In awe they looked down at the mighty rocky masses, as the titanic machines swung low over the mountains, gazing in wonder at the green masses of the vegetation, strange vegetation it was to them, for they had grown only mushroom-like cellulose products, and these mainly for ornament, for all their food was artificially made in huge factories.

	Then they came over a little mountain lake, a body of water scarcely large enough to berth one of these huge ships, but high in the clear air of the mountains, fed by the eternal snows that thawed, and flowed down to it. It was a magnificent sapphire in a setting green as emerald, a sparkling lake of clear water, deep as the sea, high in a cleft in the mountains, the water of some long-melted glacier.

	In wonder the men looked down at these strange sights. What a marvelous home! But they must forge steadily on now, they must find a place to land; then the men would be dispatched to investigate, and to map the world.

	Steadily the great machines proceeded, and at last the end of the giant mountain was reached, and they came to a great plain. But that plain was strangely marked off with squares, as regular as though plotted with a draftsman's square. This world must be inhabited!

	Suddenly Taj Lamor saw strange specks off on the far horizon to the south, specks that seemed to grow in size with terrific velocity; these must be ships, the ships of these people! They would defend their home. Now, in this moment, Taj Lamor must make his decision. Was he to withdraw and let these people alone, or was he to stand and fight for this world, this wonderfully beautiful home, a home that his race could live in for millions of years to come? He had debated this question many times before in his mind, and he had decided. There would never, never be another chance for his people to gain a new home. They must fight.

	Swiftly Taj Lamor gave his orders. If resistance was offered, if any attack was made, they were to fight back at once, unhesitatingly.

	The strangers' ships had grown swiftly larger to the eye, but still, though near now, they seemed too small to worry about. These giant interstellar cruisers were certainly invulnerable to ships so small; their mere size would give them protection! These ships were scarcely as long as the diameter of the smaller of the interstellar ships—a bare two hundred and fifty feet for the largest.

-

	THE interstellar cruisers halted in their course, and waited for the little ships to draw near. They were fast, for they drew alongside quickly, and raced to the front of the flagship. There was one small one that was painted white, and on it there was a large white banner, flapping in the wind of its passage. The rest of the ships drew off as this came forward, and stopped, hanging motionless before the control room of the giant machine. There were men inside—three strange men—but they were gesturing now, motioning that the giant machine settle to the ground beneath. Taj Lamor was considering whether or not to thus parley with the strangers, when suddenly there leapt from it a beam of clear white—a beam that was directed toward the ground, then swung up toward the ship in a swift arc! In an instant there were a dozen swift leaping beams of pale red reaching out to that ship, and as they reached it, the ray that had been sweeping up to touch the ship, was suddenly still, and for an instant the ship hung still in the air; then it began to swing crazily, like the pendulum of a clock, and then it was swinging completely over—and with a sickening lurch it was speeding swiftly, and ever faster for the soil of the plain nearly five miles below. But in an instant it was over and there was a little crater in the soft soil. The ship had driven itself nearly twenty feet into the ground.

	But the rays had not stopped with the little ship; they had reached rapidly out to the other machines, trying to reach them before they could bring those strange white rays to bear on them. Their cruisers must win, for they carried dozens of projectors, but they might be damaged; they might be forced to stay here. They must defeat those strangers quickly. The rays were lashing out swiftly, but almost before they had started, all the other ships, a hundred in all, were in action, and the flagship was darting swiftly up and away from the battle; their leader must be safe. Below, those pale red rays were taking a swift toll of the little ships, and nearly twenty of them rolled suddenly over, and dashed to destruction far below.

	But now they were in swift darting motion. The little ships, through their small size, were able to avoid the rays of the larger interstellar cruisers, and as their torpedo-shaped hulls flashed quickly out of the way of the rays, they began to fight back. They had been taken utterly by surprise. They were a little late in entering the battle, but they evidently intended to make up for lost time, for the little fleet of thirty-five ships went into action with an abandon and swiftness that made the gigantic interstellar liners helpless through its very speed. They were in a dozen places at once, leaping as swiftly forward as sidewise or vertically. They dodged and twisted, unharmed, out of the way of the deadly red beams, and were as hard to hit as some dancing feather suspended over an air jet, except that here there was intelligent direction keeping them always in the least accessible places, and these pilots showed a positive genius in thinking up new ways of making their ships difficult targets.

	And if the pilots were skillful in avoiding enemy rays, their ray men were as accurate in placing theirs. But then, with a target considerably larger than the proverbial barn door, not so much skill was necessary. They had only to touch those ships, and they began to realize that size did not make them invulnerable.

	For these smaller vessels were the ships of Earth. The people of that dark star had entered our solar system quite unannounced, except that they had been seen in passing the orbit of Mars, for a ship had been out there in space, going slowly, steadily out toward Neptune, and the great interstellar cruisers, flashing in across space, away from that frigid planet, had not seen the tiny wanderer, which was slowly climbing its long way across the two and three quarter billion miles from Earth to Neptune. But he had seen those mighty bulks, and had sent his message and warning out on the ether, racing the mighty machines in, and going at a speed nothing can exceed, and few things equal, and the radio message had been a warning to the men of Earth. They had relayed it to Venus, and the ships that had gone there had received an equally warm reception, and were even now finding their time fully occupied trying to beat off the Interplanetary Patrol.

	These ships were Arcot Molecular Motion director ships, ships that drew their power from the heat energy of the air around them. Out in space they were slow, for there was no heat, but in the planetary atmosphere, they easily matched the speed of the Interstellar cruisers. It was Arcot who had developed the principle of these machines not a full three years ago, and it was Arcot who had, with the aid of this principle, made the first interplanetary flight in the history of the solar system, going to Venus. The bonds of friendship between the two planets had grown swiftly in those three years, and they were already linked by many regular space lines. These ships made the trips as frequently as the relative positions of the planets permitted, but during the oppositions of the planets, when they were on opposite sides of the sun, they were necessarily discontinued.

	The principle of these machines was simple in theory, but it had taken much work to bring it into practice. It had long been known that the molecules of any warm body were in rapid motion. In a gas the molecular motion amounted to several miles a second at times, and this speed was always relative to the speed of the mass of the body. Should the molecules of any body all start to move in the same direction, at the same time, the result is, of course, that the entire body is moving in this direction. Arcot had developed a peculiar high frequency field that caused all the molecules influenced by it to move in the same direction. This field actually converted the heat-energy of any body into mechanical energy, the energy of heat, the random motion of the individual molecule, was changed into the ordered motion of the mass, and the energy was applied as desired. It could be made to drive a ship forward by merely putting such an apparatus on the sides, filling a small tank with helium or hydrogen gas, since the molecules of these gases move the most rapidly for a given temperature, and to the copper tank attaching copper fins which carried heat very well. These fins would pick up heat from the air about. The molecules of the gas are all made to move toward the forward end of the tank, and there they are stopped by the mass of the ship, which resists this impulse. The molecules are then standing still relative to the ship. But motionless molecules have a definite physical significance; they mean that the body is at absolute zero, and any one who has worked with very cold liquids, such as liquid helium, or hydrogen, knows to his sorrow that these very cold substances will collect heat from the surrounding air at an amazing rate. The effect is the same in the case of the helium in the copper tank; it is solidified at once, since its molecules are motionless, and immediately it absorbs heat from the air, as solid helium always will. This heat makes the molecules move once more, and they are again promptly brought to a stop. Thus more energy is abstracted from the air, and the molecules are again started moving.

	All this is repeated thousands of times a second, and the result is a steady hammering on the copper tank. This steady hammering is what we know as a gas pressure, and the pressure may easily amount to thousands of tons. The result is that the ship is rapidly put into motion, and the molecules tend to drive it ever faster. No matter how fast the ship goes, the molecules, in order to be "warm" must have a random motion of a certain number of feet per second. They will always want to go a little faster than the ship, so no matter what the speed of the ship, the acceleration will be constant.

	The power obtainable from these power-units was surprising even to experienced engineers. They were, by the very nature of them, ideal for aircraft. They could be made perfectly streamlined. The discs, or fins, which served to give the copper tank a greater heat absorbing area, were made sharp as knives, and they cut through the air with scarcely any resistance. Other power units, mounted vertically, made it possible to hold the ship level in the air without wings. These same units, mounted laterally, gave the ship even greater flexibility.

-

	ALL these features had been combined In the Interplanetary Patrol ships, ships designed to catch the speediest of the Air Pirates who had sprung up. These swift ships were easily capable of 5000 miles an hour, and at higher altitudes could make as high as 20,000 miles an hour.

	The airplane was commercially non-existent now, for with the advent of these new ships, they had immediately displaced all machines using fuels. These ships used the absolutely free energy of the sun, as collected and stored by the Earth's atmosphere.

	Planetary exploration had started almost as soon as the building of the first of the commercial molecular motion, ships was completed, and the inventor of the device, Arcot, had, with his three friends, Wade, Morey and Fuller, gone to the planet Venus. Their work there, the aid they rendered in saving the two great nations of Venus from destruction at the hands of a tyrannical ruler, had helped greatly to make friendships more secure.

	Shortly after his return to Earth, other men in similar machines had undertaken the longer voyages to the other planets. The Moon had been examined at once, and the examination of Mars followed soon after, but the vast orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune had made the trip so long, in the comparatively slow vehicles, that these planets had not yet been explored. In the depths of space it was hard to find the energy needed to drive their ships, and their progress against the gravity of the sun was correspondingly slow. Further, the orbital velocity of the planets themselves was so great, that it became a real race to catch up with them. Despite the fact that the "year" of Neptune is equal to nearly 170 of ours, the planet actually goes with terrific speed in its orbit. It is the vast extent of that orbit that makes the motion of the planet seem slow.

	It was one of these interplanetary exploration expeditions that the people of the Black Star had encountered, and it was their warning that told Earth to be on the lookout.

	Arcot, during his brief stay on Venus, had developed the most powerful weapon that man had ever seen in this system. He had found a means of projecting the molecular motion director field. This meant that anything touched by this projected field, or ray, would move in a direction controlled by it, for every molecule of any matter it touched was immediately sent with all its velocity in whatever direction the operator wished. The result could be made either very constructive or very destructive. Imagine the ease with which a workman could float a beam of steel weighing, perhaps, twenty tons, up through the air, on its own heat energy—energy which it absorbed from the air—to place it where he wanted it. To do this he need only have a little pack on his back that contained the necessary apparatus, a pack weighing less than forty-eight pounds in the commercial apparatus, and a small hand projector. Again, imagine the same workman, wishing to remove a hillock in order to make a roadway. He need only direct the beam upon it, and the entire hill would suddenly start with all the energy of its quintillions of molecules, straight into the air, and fall, powdered, on the ground about its original site; or he could remove it in small chunks.

	This was the commercial development.

	Imagine, again, a man who is bent on destroying a great ship—perhaps an interstellar cruiser. He need only direct his ray against the nose of that ship, and send the bow, using the energy of its own molecules, crashing backwards. It will suddenly leap back upon the rear and midships portions of the huge machine, striking them as though driven by some immense hammer, weighing millions of tons, and moving several miles a second! The result is obvious—utter wreckage, a twisted mass of torn girders, broken plates, and bent beams. Nothing could resist it for the simple reason that, no matter how big it was, no matter how strong it was, it crushed itself with its own size and tore itself with its own strength. Size was no immunity against this weapon, as the people of the Black Star quickly learned. They received a most hearty reception and a great send-off!

	The great interstellar ships were far too long, too clumsy to be maneuvered as easily as were their tiny opponents. They could only stand and receive. They found it most difficult to deliver even so much as a single blow, once those little machines got under way, for the interplanetary Patrolmen were skilled in ray dueling. Regular practice was held, using certain harmless rays to simulate the deadly molecular director ray. Once they realized the menace of these rays, they kept carefully out of their vicinity.

-

	THE battle was brief, for Taj Lamor, in his machine high above, saw that they were outclassed, and ordered them to withdraw at once. Scarcely ten minutes had elapsed, yet they lost twenty-two of their giant ships in wreckages.

	The expedition that had gone to Venus reported a similarly active greeting. It was decided at once that they should proceed cautiously to the other planets, to determine which were inhabited and which were not, and to determine the chemical and physical conditions on each.

	The ships formed again out in space, the other side of the sun, however, and started at once in compact formation for Mercury.

	Their observations were completed without further mishap, and they set out for their distant home, their number depleted by forty-one ships, for nineteen had fallen on Venus.

	In the meantime the Terrestrian and Venerian governments were already preparing vigorously for further inroads. It was agreed at once that this was to be a war of science, and that the men they must call in were the scientists. These conclusions were reached at once, and agreements were immediately drawn up between the two worlds to join forces, and thus eliminate all unnecessary motions. It was obvious that they would need more ships. However, they must first have a scientific report on the ships that had fallen there in western Canada, for it might be that it was possible to find some ray or force that would make them helpless, and they might find also the secret of that death ray that they had met. They must first have the scientists investigate.

	The first scientists they thought of were the men who had made possible this so successful resistance: Arcot and Morey and Wade. These men they knew would all be working In the Arcot Laboratories, and they called there at once. Arcot and his friends were to start for that battlefield at once.

	"Wade—bring Morey and come on out to the machine on the roof at once—I'll be waiting—that was a call from Washington. I will explain as soon as you get there," called Arcot as he snapped the switch of the televisophone shut. He had answered the call, and given the reply in the name of the three.

	On the roof Arcot at once moved the hangar doors open, and got into the five-passenger molecular-motion ship inside. The sleek, streamlined sides seemed to speak of power and speed. This special model was slightly faster than most machines, and as it was a research model, designed for their experiments, it carried many mechanisms that others did not, automatic controls that were being developed, among them. These had not yet reached a stage of practicability for the private machine, so there were none others in existence. They were still in the laboratory stage, but they admitted of higher speed, for no human being could control the ship as accurately as these.

	It took them a little less than a quarter of an hour to make the 5,000-mile trip from New York to the battlefield of Canada. Arcot and his friends were passed through the lines at once, and they settled to the ground beside one of the huge ships that lay half buried in the soil. The force of the impact had splashed the solid soil as a stone wall will splash soft mud, and around the ship there was a little ridge of earth. Arcot looked at the titanic proportions of these ships from space, and turned to his friends:

	"We can investigate that wreck on foot, but I think that it will be far more sensible to see what we can do with the car. That ship is certainly a mile or more long, and we would spend more time walking than in investigation. I suggest, therefore, that we see if there is not room enough for the car inside. That beats even those huge Kaxorian planes for size. I sure would have liked to mix it in the fight they must have had—nice little things to play with, aren't they?" grinned Arcot as they looked at the mighty bulk of glistening metal, twisted and distorted now, but still holding the lines of terrific power about it

	"It would make a nice playmate," agreed Wade as he looked at the rows of wicked-looking projectors along the sides of the metal hull, "and I wonder if there might not be more in there? If there are, the size of the ship would prevent them showing themselves very quickly, and since they can't move the ship, it seems to me that they will begin to be noticeable in a short time. Probably, with the engines stopped, their main rays are useless, but they would doubtless have hand weapons. I am highly in favor of entering the car. We carry a molecular director ray, so if the way is blocked, we can make a new one. Look over there—that ship is still flaming—it is a reddish flame—but almost colorless. It certainly looks like a gas flame, with a bit of calcium in it. That atmosphere looks almost as if it were combustible. If we should do any exploring in the ship, I suggest that we use altitude suits—they will be good in any case."

	There were three or four of the great wrecks flaming now, evolving great long tongues of colorless, intensely hot flame. Several of the ships had been only slightly damaged; one had been brought down by a beam that had torn the entire tail of the ship free, leaving the bow in good condition. Apparently this machine had not fallen far; perhaps the pilot had maintained partial control of the ship, his power at last utterly failing when only a comparatively short distance from Earth. This was rather well to one side of the field, however, and we decided to investigate it later. Since the ships were scattered over an area perhaps twenty-five miles square, it meant a considerable trip to that other ship.

	This ship had crashed nose first, and the nose had been utterly ruined, then the tail of the ship had fallen horizontally, after the lengthwise members gave way. The car was maneuvered cautiously into the great hole at the nose of the ship, and they entered the mighty vessel slowly. There were many heavy girders sticking oat at odd angles, any one of which seemed quite capable of wrecking the little ship, so they turned on a powerful spotlight. It soon became evident that there was little to fear from any living enemies, and they proceeded more rapidly. Certainly no creature could live after the shock that had broken these huge girders! Several times huge beams blocked their path, and they were forced to use the molecular director beam to bend them put of the way.

	"Man, but those beams do look as if they were built permanently! I would hate to ram the machine against one of them! We never would get through here on foot, and without this ray, we wouldn't get through here anyway. Look at that one—just see how it has bent—if that has anywhere near the strength of steel, just think of the force it took to do that!" said Arcot as they stopped a moment to clear away a huge member that was bent across their path. "But there it goes its molecules are pulling it around. I hate to use this too freely, though—it may put some strain on another girder, and we may have the whole structure tumbling in on us!"

	At last they had penetrated to the long tube that led through the length of the ship—the communication tube. This admitted the small ship easily, and they moved swiftly along till they came to what they believed to be about the center of the original ship. Here Arcot proposed that they step out and see what there was to be seen. As they had been the first party of scientists to arrive, they could only guess at what they would find.

	"I don't know what we'll find, fellows, but I think the engines should be in about the center of the ship. The machine seems to have landed on one side rather than on its keel, and I suspect that the sudden shock has torn the engines loose, but we may find something of interest. There is what seems to be a doorway there. I suggest that we stop, leave the ship here, and enter on foot. We can wear altitude suits and carry our ray pistols."

	The others agreed, and they at once put on their altitude suits, heavy rubberized canvas suits designed to be worn outside the ship when at high altitude, or even in space. They were supplied with oxygen tanks that would keep the wearer alive for about six hours. Unless the atmosphere of the ships was exceeding corrosive, the men would be safe.

	They decided that if one was to go, they might as well all go, for three with the ray pistols would be safer than splitting the party up. Also there might be heavy work to do, where two ray pistols would be needed.

-

	THEY found their first difficulty in opening the door. It was an automatic door, and was easily opened by compressed air—or dynamite, apparently. They finally were forced to tear it out with a ray. It was impossible to move it in any other way. The door was in what was now the floor, so the walking was bad.

	They let themselves through the narrow opening of the door one at a time, and landed on the sloping wall of the corridor beyond.

	"Lucky this wasn't a big room, or we would have had a nice drop to the far wall!" said Wade. The suits were equipped with a thin vibrating diaphragm that made speech easy, but Wade's voice came through with a queerly metallic ring, for the diaphragm had a definite period of vibration, and all tones were somewhat distorted.

	"No, that wouldn't be so nice, but we can't stay here. We may as well start. There seems to be a defect in the lighting system; it certainly is dark. Wade, use the hand light, will you? You were wise in picking it up. I had an idea that we would have all the light we needed—I don't know just how I got the impression—but I did. Look—there is a corridor sloping off to the right-down, I should say. Be careful when you go in, for if it is long, or opens into a long room, you will be due for a nasty fall," said Arcot, pointing to a dark hole in the wall, as Wade's hand-light reached out in the darkness. The place was too big to light adequately.

	"It does seem to be long," said Wade as he turned his light into it, "but it also seems to be rough. I think we can do it. I notice that you brought a rope, Arcot; I think we can use it to advantage. I'll go first, unless someone else wants to go."

	"You go first? But I don't know—if we are all going, I guess you had better, at that. It would take two ordinary men to lower a big hulk like you. On the other hand, if anybody is going to stay, you're delegated as elevator boy!"

	Wade was a fragile little fellow of about six feet four, and would certainly make a very respectable load for any one, or any two. Arcot, however, measured six feet two, and with the aid of Morey, he should certainly have been able to swing the problem, for Morey was six feet six, though not quite as heavily built as Wade.

	"Still," continued Arcot, "I think none of us will need to hold the weight of the others with the rope. I have an idea that may work out very nicety. Wade, will you get three fairly good-sized pieces of metal, something we can tie a rope to? I think we can get down here without the help of anyone else. Morey, will you cut the rope in three pieces while I held Wade tear loose that girder?"

	Arcot refused to divulge his secret till his preparations were complete, but worked quickly and efficiently. With the aid of Wade, he soon had three short members, and taking the rope that Morey had prepared, tied a length of rope to each piece of metal, leaving a piece of rope about twenty feet long hanging from each. Now he carefully tested the knots, and the holds the ropes had on the metal to make sure they would not slip.

	"Now, let's see what we can do." He took a piece of the rope and put a small loop in one end, thrust his left wrist through this, and grasped the rope firmly with his hand. Then he drew his ray pistol, and adjusted it carefully for direction of action. The trigger gave him control over power. Finally he turned the ray on the block of metal at the other end of the rope. At once the metal pulled vigorously, and taughtened the rope, then, as Arcot increased the power, he was dragged slowly across the floor.

	"Ah—it works. Come on, boys, hitch your wagon to a star, and we will go on with the investigation. This is a new, doable action parachute. It lets you down easy, and pulls you op easier! I think we can go where we want now, only don't get nervous and turn on the full power of the ray, or you will be minus one good arm, and perhaps your life."

	With Arcot's simple brake, they lowered themselves into the corridor one at a time, for they must not let the ray play on each other, as it inevitably would were one above the other. The ray was fatal to any one it touched.

	Wade went first with the light, then came Morey, then Arcot.

	The scene that lay before them was one of colossal destruction. They had indeed stumbled on the engine room. They could not hope to illuminate its vast extent with their little hand-light, but they could gain some idea of its magnitude, and of its original layout. The floor, now at a steep angle, was torn up in many places, showing great, massive beams, torn and twisted like so many wires, while the heavy floor plates were crumpled like used paper. Everywhere the room seemed covered with a film of metal, shiny and white, it looked like silver, and, after a brief examination, they decided it was silver, scattered broadcast over the walls of the room. It was some time before they could understand its source.

	"Oh—look—Arcot—Wade—that's where the silver came from!" Morey was pointing toward the dim ceiling, and as Wade turned the light in that direction they too saw. There was a network of heavy bars running across the roof, great bars of solid silver, fully three feet thick, but in one section there was a hole, as if someone had sent a disintegration ray against them, for not only were they gone, but there was a hole in the metal roof above, a hole that had plainly been fused, as had the great silver bars.

	"Lord—bus bars—three feet thick—what nice engines they must have! Look at the way those were blown out! They were short circuited by the crash, just before the generator went out, and they were just volatilized! Some juice behind them!" Arcot looked in wonder at the heavy metal bars. "Keep the light up there, I'm going to try to investigate."

	Arcot took a shorter hitch on his rope, and floated up to the roof, examining the heavy bars. He looked at them for a moment, then quickly he lowered himself. They had just been fused by the current of electricity, he was assured. They had barely entered the great room. They lowered themselves to the dim, far side, where they had been able only to distinguish vast lumps of metal. The distance must have been two hundred feet across. Carefully they lowered themselves, and gingerly stood on the piled masses of wrecked machines.

	A careful examination was impossible; they were wrecks, but Arcot did see that they seemed mainly to be giant electrical machines of standard types, but on a scale gargantuan. There were titanic masses of wrecked metal, iron and silver, for with these men silver seemed to replace copper, though nothing could replace iron and its magnetic uses.

	"They are just electrical machines, I guess," said Arcot at last. "But what a size! They seem wholly electrical, don't they, Wade?"

	"I have been looking the mass over, and they do, but there are just two things that bother me. Come here." As Arcot jumped over, nearly suspended by his ray pistol, Wade directed his light on a small machine that had fallen in between the cracks in the giant mass of broken generators. It was a little thing, apparently housed in a glass case. There was only one difficulty with that assumption. There was a large cast iron base of a generator lying on it, made of metal perhaps two feet thick, and that metal was cracked where it rested on the case, and the case, made of material an inch and a half thick, was only slightly dented.

	"Whewwww—that's a nice kind of glass to have! I wonder if we can't lay our hands on some and examine it? Oh—I wonder—yes, it must be! There is a window in the side up there toward what was the bow that seemed to me to be the same stuff. It is buried about three feet in solid earth, so I imagine it must be."

	The three made their way at once to where they had seen the window. The frame was evidently steel, or some such alloy, and it was twisted and bent under the blow, for this was evidently the outer wall, and the impact of landing had flattened the rounded side like an old can. But that "glass" window was quite undisturbed! There was, as a further proof, a large granite rock lying against it on the outside, which was not remarkable, except that the big rock had been made into little ones by the crash, quite as effectively as could be done by anyone sentenced to hard labor. The window was tough, to say the least.

	"Say—that's some building material! Just look at that granite rock—smashed into sand! Yet the window is scarcely scratched! Look how the frame that held it is torn—just torn, not broken. I wonder if we can tear it loose altogether? I'll take my ray pistol and try it from here, but if it comes loose we will have a shower of stones and dirt, so look out!" said Arcot, stepping forward. There was a thud as his metal bar crashed down when the ray was shut off. Then, as the others got out of the way, he stepped toward the window and turned his ray on it. More and more power was used, till suddenly there was a rending crash, and they saw only a leaping column of earth, and sand, and broken granite flying up through the hole in the steel shell. There was a sudden violent crash, then a moment later a second equally violent crash as the window, having flown up to the "ceiling" came thumping back to the floor.

	"Wait a moment till the dust settles, and we will see what our prize looks like," called Arcot over the din of falling stones and dirt. He had jumped back as soon as the window came loose, but nevertheless he had collected a nice little lump on his head from a falling stone. The altitude suit had offered considerable protection, but he decided that he might have done better, as he rubbed his head rather ruefully.

-

	AT last the dust had, to a large extent, settled, and they came forward, looking for the window. They found it, somewhat buried by the rubbish, lying off to one side. Arcot bent down to tilt it and sweep off the dirt; he grasped it with one hand, and pulled. The window remained where it was. He grasped it with both hands and pulled harder. The window remained where it was.

	"Uh—say, lend a hand will you, Wade—you're big enough; see if you can lift it." Together the two men pulled, but the results were exactly nothing. That window was about three feet by two feet by one inch, making the total volume about one-half a cubic foot, but it certainly was heavy. They could not begin to move it. An equal volume of lead would have weighed about four hundred pounds, but this was decidedly more than four hundred pounds. Indeed, the combined strength of the three men did not do more than rock it.

	"Well-—it certainly is no kind of matter we know of!" observed Morey. "Osmium, the heaviest known metal, has a density of twenty-two and a half, which would weigh about 730 pounds, I think we could lift that, so this is heavier than anything we know. At least that's proof of a new system. Between Venus and Earth we have found every element that occurs in the sun. These people must have come from another star!"

	"I think they do," returned Arcot, "but for other reasons. I think I know where this kind of matter exists in the solar system, which eliminates that reason. I think you have already seen it—in the gaseous state. Do you remember that the Kaxorians had great reservoirs for storing light-energy in a bound state in their giant planes? They had bound light, light held by the gravitational attraction for itself, after condensing it in their apparatus, but they had what amounted to a gas—gaseous light. Now suppose that someone makes a light condenser even more powerful than the one the Kaxorians used, a condenser that forces the light so close to itself, increases its density, till the photons hold each other permanently, and the substance becomes solid. It will be a very dense solid, and a very hard solid. It will be matter, matter made of light—light-matter—and let us call it a metal. You know that ordinary matter is electricity matter, and electricity matter metals conduct electricity readily. Now why shouldn't our light matter metal conduct light? It would be a wonderful substance for windows.

	"But now comes the question of moving it. We can't lift it, and we certainly want to examine it. We didn't do what everyone expected us to, whereas all the others probably will, and since our laboratory hasn't been brought here, we must take what we want to the laboratory. It will probably save time at that. I think we are about through here—the place is clearly quite permanently demolished. We can never find what we want here, so I think we had best return to the ship and start to that other machine we saw that hadn't been so thoroughly destroyed. Now the question is, can we move this?"

	"I think a ray may move it. Of course it may not—but I think it will!"

	"I should say it would!" said Wade, looking suggestively at the dirt scattered on the floor, and the broken window frame.

	"Not necessarily. It might have been the pressure of the dirt on the window, though I don't think so. But here is the way to decide," replied Arcot.

	He drew his ray pistol, and stepped back a bit, adjusting the pistol so the ray would direct the plate straight up. Slowly he applied the power, and as he gradually increased it, he reached a point where the plate heaved, then moved into the air.

	"It works! Now you can use your pistol, Morey, and direct it toward the corridor. I will send it up, and let it fall outside, then we can pick it up later." Morey stepped forward, and while Arcot held it in the air with his ray, Morey propelled it gently with his, till it was directly under the corridor leading up. Then Arcot gave it a sudden increase in power, and the plate scaled suddenly upward, sailing out of sight. Then, as Arcot shut off his ray, there came to their ears a sudden crash as the plate fell to the floor above.

	The three men at once regained their ropes, and "double action parachutes" as Arcot called them, and floated up to the next floor. Here they waited till the last had arrived, then again they started the process of moving the plate. All went well till they came to the little car itself. They could not use the ray on the car, for fear of damaging the machinery. They had to use some purely mechanical method of hoisting it in.

	"I think we can do it, Wade, if you will And some beams about ten or twelve feet long—not some girders that weigh half a ton themselves, but some lighter beams that we can put across our shoulders, and let you maneuver the plate upon them. Then we will slide it into the ship. If we have only about one-eighth of the weight, I think we can do it. From the feel of the pistol, I should say it weighed about 2000 pounds. Using the wheelbarrow principle will permit us to hold it."

	The two men released their rays, and permitted the plate to settle to the floor; then they began their search for beams.

	Beams there were in plenty—great, heavy stringers that could have held the greatest of the modern towers—and there were long stringers that were designed to prevent bending stresses, shaped, and built like bridge members. Whoever designed this ship, they decided, was not trying to conserve either metal or weight. They didn't seem to use anything smaller than a three-foot deep I beam. It would have taken a derrick to move the beams, let alone the plate!

	Finally they solved the problem by using the molecular director ray to swing a heavy beam into the air, then one man pulled on the far end of it with a rope, and swung it till it was resting on the door of the ship on one end, and the other rested in a hole they had torn in the lining of the tube.

	Now they maneuvered the heavy plate till it was resting on the beam; then they released the plate, and watched it slide down the incline, shooting through the open doorway of the car. In a moment the beam was moved, and the job, which had seemed next to impossible, had been very satisfactorily done, except that the plate had landed in the exact center of the car, and it was rather difficult to navigate inside the machine now. There was a slight curvature to the plate, and stepping on it was apt to cause a fall.

	The plate at last safely stowed, the three men climbed into the car, and prepared to leave.

-

	THE little machine glided swiftly down the tube through the mighty ship, finally coming out through the huge rent that had admitted them. They rose quickly into the air, and started at once for the headquarters of the government ships. The public had been kept in ignorance, and since the section where the ships had fallen was quite deserted, there were no civilians with their craning necks, always in the way of the operations that must be carried on now with the maximum of efficiency. Already there were a great number of scientists gathered about the headquarters ship. As Arcot's party arrived there first, they were now permitted to choose their, field of exploration, each of the wrecks being assigned to one group. Arcot decided at once that the nearly perfect ship lying off to the west would be their choice. They were at once assigned to this machine, and two Air Patrolmen were sent with them.

	"Lieutenant Wright and Lieutenant Greer will go with you. In case of necessity they may be able to help considerably. Is there anything we can do to help?" asked the Colonel.

	"I believe these men are all armed with the standard revolver, are they not?" replied Arcot. "I think we will be considerably safer if I arm them with some of the new director ray pistols. I have several in the tool box of the machine. It will be all right, I suppose?"

	"Certainly, Dr. Arcot. They are to be under your commands."

	The party, increased to five now, returned to the ship, where Arcot showed the men the details of the ray pistols, and how to use them. The control for direction of operation of the ray was rather intricate on these early models, and required considerable explanation. The range of even these small weapons was infinite in space, according to theory, but in air the energy was rather rapidly absorbed by ionization of the air, and the dispersion of the beam made it ineffective in space over a range of more than thirty-five miles. However, the larger ship projectors had a longer range, and these were certainly sufficient for their purpose as hand weapons.

	Again entering the little molecular motion car, they went at once to the great hull of the fallen ship. They inspected it cautiously from a height before going too close, for the ship had very obviously landed without the terrific concussion that the rest had experienced, and it was very probable that many men in the machine were still alive. The entire stern of the huge machine had been torn off, and apparently the snip was helpless to rise, bat there were lights glowing through the portholes on the side, indicating plainly that their power had not altogether failed.

	"I think we had best treat that ship with all due respect," remarked Wade, looking down at the lighted windows. "They seem to have power, and it is quite possible that they have men. The ship is scarcely dented save where the stern was touched by a ray. It is lucky they had those ray projector ships! They have been in service only about four months, have they not, Lieutenant?"

	"Just about that, sir, and they hadn't gotten the ray pistols out in quantities great enough to be distributed as yet. It was fortunate that those ships were in service," replied the Air Patrolman.

	"I wonder why they didn't greet us with some of their rays," said Morey, with a rather worried look. It did seem that there should be some of the rays in action by now. They were less than a mile from the ship, and moving rather slowly.

	"I have been puzzling over that myself," replied Arcot, "and I came to the conclusion that either the ray projectors are fed by a separate system of power distribution, which has been destroyed, or that the men are all dead."

	They were to learn later, in their exploration of the ship, that the ray projectors mounted on the ship were fed from a separate generator, which generated a special form of alternating current wave for them. This generator had been damaged by the ray of the terrestrial ship that had brought them down.

	The little machine was well toward the stern of the giant now, and they lowered it till it was on a level with the torn metal. It was plain that the ship had been subject to some terrific tension, for it had contracted at the tail here, as a rubber band contracts its cross section when stretched. The great girders were stretched and broken like wires, and the huge ribs were bent and twisted like so many pieces of lead. The tube, which ran the length of the ship, since it had been smaller than the ship, and nearly as strong as the outer walls had suffered more. It had been drawn down to about three-quarters its original diameter, and the ship could not enter. They were able to remedy this, however by using their ray. It was soon opened out, and the machine glided slowly into the dark tunnel. The searchlight reaching ahead filled the metal tunnel with a myriad deceptive reflections on the polished metal walls. The tube was lighted up for the full length ahead of them, and seemed empty. Cautiously, they advanced.

	"Wade—Morey—where shall we stop first—I think we had better investigate the engines first. They will probably be of prime importance. We know where they are. What do you say?" asked Arcot, who was at the controls.

	"I agree!" replied Wade, and Morey joined him in his approval at once.

	They ran the ship down the long tube till they again reached the door they knew must be at the engine room landing, and stepped out of the car, each wearing an altitude suit. This ship had landed level, and progress would be much easier than in the other one. They waited a moment before opening the door from the tunnel into the engine room, for this opened into a narrow corridor where but one could pass, and the corridor opened directly into the engine room, as they learned from investigation on the other ship. The three scientists explained this quickly to the air men, and they insisted on leading the way. They had been sent along for the express purpose of protecting the scientists, and it was their duty to lead.

	"I was given orders to take my orders from you," Lieutenant Wright said, "but those orders also said I was to see to it that you were protected. In this case the orders are conflicting, and I will have to use my judgment. You are needed by this world, and Venus too, more than any other three men in the system, and I certainly think we should go ahead. Besides, with the ray pistols, why worry?"

	He at last won his point, and the two officers stepped to the door, and standing off to one side, tore it open with a ray from their pistols. It fell with a clatter to the rounded metal floor of the tube, and lay their vibrating noisily, but no rays of death came from beyond. Cautiously the two officers peered around the corner of the long corridor, then, seeing nothing, leaped to the floor of the corridor, which was a bit higher than the floor of the tube, and started along it. Wade came next, then Arcot, followed by Morey, who, much to his disgust, had drawn the shortest of three match sticks.

	The corridor was perhaps thirty feet long, then it opened into the great engine room. Already the men could hear the smooth hum of powerful machines, and see the rounded backs of metal giants.

	From the engine room ahead came only the steady low purr of the giant machines, but there was no hint of human life. The men advanced steadily. At last they reached the threshold of the engine room. "Well—we haven't seen anyone, and no one has seen us," said Arcot in a low voice, "but they may be behind one of those giant engines, quite unaware of us. When they see us they will be ready to fight. Now remember, those weapons you have will tear loose anything they hit. You have some appreciation of the power of those engines, so don't put them out of commission, and have them release their energies in the neighborhood. We wouldn't last long, and it may be, if they are driven as I suspect, that the Earth itself would be disturbed by their explosion. It is only luck that some of them did not explode when the ships were brought down."

	"But look out for those men, and get them if they try for you!"

-

	CAUTIOUSLY, but quickly, they stepped out into the great room where they might be able to use all of their rays at once, instead of one at a time. Each had his ray pistol in his hand, ready for instant action, They walked out into the room, glancing swiftly about them and simultaneously the enemies caught sight of each other. There were six of them, tall men, about seven feet high, and they walked with the rather labored step of a Venerian, but they weren't Venerians, for their skin and flesh was a strange white, which looked like raw dough. The eyes of men seem to work with photographic exactitude and speed in an emergency. It seemed to Arcot that those strange pale men were advancing at a slow walk, and that he stood still watching them as they slowly raised their strange ray pistols. He seemed to notice every detail—their short, tight-fitting suit of some elastic material that didn't hamper their movements, and their strange flesh, which just seemed to escape being transparent, because it was too dense. Their eyes were strangely large, and the black spot of the pupil in their white corneas seemed intensified by contrast. Then they were leaping at him, and he responded with a sudden flick of his ray, as he flung himself to one side. Simultaneously his four companions let their rays fly toward the Invaders. They glowed strangely red here, more nearly resembling the reddish hue of the enemies' rays. It was obvious that thin atmosphere contained some other gas than our air. But those rays were still effective, and the six Invaders were suddenly gone, but not before they released their own rays. On the floor of the mighty ship there lay one man who would never rise again. Their ray had touched Lieutenant Wright.

	The Terrestrians scarcely had a chance to notice this, for immediately there was a terrific rending crash, and clean daylight was pouring in through a huge opening in the wall of the ship. The men of the Invaders had been standing before the metal wall, and when the five rays flew at them, they had been repulsed violently, going back toward the walls, and with them the section of the wall had flown out.

	Suddenly there was a second jarring thud, more as of a dull explosion; then there was a great sheet of flame in that hole—a great wall of ruddy flame that filled the gap, and swept rapidly in. Arcot swung up his ray pistol, and pointed it at the mass of flaming gas. There was a rushing column of air coming through the narrow corridor from the tube, but the flame went out, and became a roaring column of gas on the outside of the ship.

	"Lieutenant, turn your ray on that hole, and keep it there, blow that flame outside with it. You will find you can't put it out, but if you keep it outside the ship, it will be all right!" The officer swung his ray at it and relieved Arcot.

	Wade and Morey were already bending over the fallen man. They could do nothing more for him.

	"I'm afraid there is nothing we can do for him, and every moment here is dangerous. We will continue our investigation and carry him back to the ship when we leave. Does that suit you?" asked Arcot.

	"I suppose there is nothing else to do—.but why is that gas burning so—can't we put it out?" asked Morey.

	"Let's get through—the discussion comes after," replied Arcot with a smile, and turning, they set out on their investigation somewhat silenced by that figure lying on the metal floor there.

	The bodies of the Invaders were gone, and they could make no examination of them now. They must hope that some of the other investigators would find them. That was a matter for the doctors and biologists, anyway. They were investigating the engines, which seemed to overtower everything about them.

	Perhaps it was this that permitted the three other engineers of the Invaders to get so close. The only warning the Terrestrians had, was a sudden feeling of faintness as they stepped around the corner of an engine, and a slight pink haze. They leaped quickly back, out of sight, peering around the corner in wonder. There was nothing. Soon they saw a hand reaching out with a ray gun; then another hand with a different ray gun, from behind the silent engine; a sudden crash of metal, a groan and quiet. Two other men leaped from behind the great engine, just as the Terrestrians dodged further back. In an instant these others were behind another mass of metal. Arcot swung his ray up, and was about to pull the trigger that would send the huge engine toppling over, when he saw that it was running. He was afraid of the consequences and desisted. Cautiously he looked around the edge of the huge mass of metal, and watched—patiently—ah—his ray snapped out, and there was another snapping as the ray tore off the head of one of the Invaders, pulling him into its range to be instantly annihilated, then spending itself on a huge mass of metal—a mighty transformer of some sort. The thing was so huge, that in the low concentration that Arcot had used, it merely tottered a bit.

	Only a small portion had been touched, and the molecules of this portion had not been enough to tip its mighty weight over.

	There remained one man, and Arcot saw that he was certainly in action, for almost before he could dodge back there came a ray of pink haziness. To Arcot's amazement it touched his hand, outstretched as it had been when he fired, and a sudden numbness came over it. The ray pistol seemed to lose all feeling of warmth or cold. It was there; he could feel the weight of it on the muscles of his upper arm, but his forearm was deadened. In an instant his hand was out of the ray. It seemed less than a second before feeling began to return, and in less than five his hand was perfectly normal again.

	"Whew—that was a most unpleasantly narrow squeak! It hit my hand, but I must say their ray is a gentlemanly sort of thing. It seems to kill you altogether, or not at all. But we had best keep our eyes open—there goes his ray!"

	A shaft of pink radiance reached about the end of the engine, just grazing it. It would certainly be impossible to step out into the open space—but they couldn't stay here forever. There would be reinforcements soon! Evidently the mass of metal was opaque to the death ray.

	"Look—he is under that big metal bar—up there in the roof—see it? I am going to pull it down; he may get nervous and come into sight. I will be careful not to hit anything else!" said Wade, raising his ray pistol. Arcot leaped quickly forward, and held his trigger release.

	"Lord—don't do that, Wade—there may be more stuff above, or those bars may connect the different engines, and if they are necessary, and you remove them, I don't care to be here. The only way is to fight it out. This war that we have coming is going to be a war of science and rays, the most powerful weapons of science. We have a little individual duel here, and it is a duel of rays, so let's fight safe and fair. I am going to try to get around on the other side of the machine here, and see what I can do, while you fellows keep him occupied."

-

	ARCOT disappeared around the corner of the black, humming giant, and they waited anxiously for some sign of him. They waited what seemed long years, then suddenly the ray that had been playing at irregular intervals across the end of the machine, swung quickly to the other side, and simultaneously a duller red ray seemed to leap from the machine itself toward the source of the ray. The two rays met, and crossed, and by some trick of fate, they seemed mutually antagonistic, and there was a crashing arc for an instant, then both went dead, as the apparatus that generated them were blown out by the terrific momentary overload. But the Invader was, apparently carrying a spare, for the Terrestrians saw him leap toward his enemy with another projector, trying quickly to draw it from his pocket pouch. They turned their rays on him, a very low concentration Wade used, hoping only to knock him over by the repulsion effect of the directed molecules. But Morey was not so sure of the morals of the Invader, and used a higher power. Just as his projector at last came free, the ray hurled him to the left, and away from his men. He crashed into a huge motor, and the result was not nice.

	The projector had been jerked from his hand and lay off to one side on the floor. Arcot ran over to it, and picking it up, called out to his friends: "You saved me that time—I think I would have gotten him at that, if his ray hadn't affected mine in that way. I can't understand it; it doesn't seem possible—but still, our ray is really a projected electro-static oscillation, and it is quite possible that his was of the same nature, in a different frequency. They would have neutralization points, and the effects on the projectors would throw both machines out of tune, and the rays would soon reach a common mean I suppose—I am going to take this, and see if I can figure it out. I doubt it, though; the essential apparatus was in that pack on his back, just as ours was." Arcot stopped, listening to the Lieutenant's call.

	"We are all right now, I think—I hope there are no more—but by all means stay where you are, and use as little power as possible on blowing that flame outside. It uses up the atmosphere of this ship, and I think we better take it easy here! We're going to investigate; don't hesitate to call us if anything looks queer."

	The three men at last felt that they had an opportunity to inspect the machinery. For nearly a minute they looked about them in awestruck wonder. These men had been the first men of Earth to see the driving equipment of one of the titanic Kaxorian planes, and then they felt tiny beside its mighty bulk; but now, as they examined this huge engine room, they realized that even the huge plane shrank into insignificance beside this huge interstellar cruiser.

	All about them there loomed the great rounded back of huge electric motor-generator sets of some sort. Across all the roof there ran a network of gigantic metal bars, apparently conductors, but so huge they seemed, that they suggested heavy structural members. There were several as much as three feet in diameter, and apparently solid metal. The huge machines they ran into loomed fully thirty feet into the air; like a modern electric generator; they were longer than high, huge cylinders, thirty feet in diameter, and there was a group of four main machines that were each easily a hundred and twenty feet long) There were four of these giants, and many smaller machines, yet these smaller ones would easily have constituted a complete power supply for the average big city. Along each wall ran a bank of huge transformers. These seemed connected with the smaller machines generally, there being four conductors leading into each of the minor units, two intake, and apparently, two output leads, suggesting rotary converters. The multiple units, and various types and sizes of transformers made it obvious that many different frequencies were needed. Some of the transformers had air cores, and led to machines surrounded with a silvery white metal, instead of the usual iron. These, apparently, were generating current at an extremely high frequency.

	"Well—they ought to have power enough. But do you notice that those four main units have their leads radiating in different directions? The one on the left there seems to lead to that big power board at the front—or better, bow. I think it would be worth investigating," suggested Morey, pointing out the rounded back of the huge machine he meant.

	"I think there is considerable of interest in it myself. You notice that two of the main power units are still working, but that those other two have stopped? I think they have something directly connected with the motion of the ship under their control. But there is one point I think is of still greater interest. All the machines we have seen, all the conspicuous ones, are secondary power sources. There are no primary sources visible. I notice, however, that those two main conduits on the roof lead over to the right, and toward the bow. I think that it would be interesting to investigate that," said Arcot. Indeed, all the huge motors, and the generators driven by motors, were not self-sufficient sources of power. There must be some input point, and as yet they had not found it.

	"I think that would be a good idea. I was just wondering what those big conduits were made of. They certainly make nice little bus bars. They are fairly soft, and fairly ductile, as far as I can see. I tore a piece off of one of them, and it seems to me to be pure silver. You are the chemist, Wade. What do you say?" asked Morey, passing his sample to his companion.

	"I think it is—it looks like silver, but that is no proof. I want to test it, though, and the stuff would make a rather expensive, if efficient conduit. The copper we use is not as good a conductor, but it is a little lighter, and it is a lot cheaper."

	"I don't think they would have much trouble getting their silver. I think it is quite possible that the planet they come from should have a lot of native silver," replied Morey.

	As they talked they had followed the huge conductors back to their point of convergence. Suddenly they rounded the corner of one of the huge main power units, and saw before them, at the center of the square formed by these machines, a low platform of the clear light-metal. At the exact center of this raised platform, which was twenty feet in diameter, there was a small table, about seven feet on an edge, and raised about five feet from the level of the platform on stout light-metal legs. On the table there were two huge cubes of solid silver, and into these great cubes ran all those conductors they had seen. In the space perhaps six inches left between the great blocks of metal, there was a small box constructed of a new material. It was the most absolutely reflecting substance that any of the men had ever imagined. Indeed, it was so perfect a reflector that they were unable to see it, but could detect its presence only by the mirror images, and the fact that it blotted out the objects behind. Now they noticed that through the huge blocks of metal there were two small holes, and two thin wires of this same reflecting material led into those holes, but carefully insulated from the metal itself by a coating of the light-matter. The wires were led directly up to the roof, and then hung on three-foot hangers of the light-metal; they were led toward the bow.

	Could this be the source of the power for the whole ship, wondered the puzzled scientists? It seemed impossible, yet there were many other impossible things happening here, and that strangely reflecting matter was one of the strangest

	There was a low railing about the cubes, and their little center piece, apparently intended to keep men from coming in contact with it, so they decided that it was wisest to leave it alone.

	They had scarcely looked at it carefully, had not even found time to ask each other questions, when the lieutenant called to them that he could hear sounds behind him.

	At once the other men ran rapidly toward the narrow corridor that had given them entrance. The flaming gas was still shooting through the hole in the wall of the ship, and the rush of air through the corridor made it very difficult to hear any sounds there, and the same rush of air made it exceedingly difficult to walk.

	"Turn on more power if you can, Lieutenant and see if we can't draw out the enemy," suggested Arcot, while his friends got in position around the tube exit, well braced.

	As the officer increased the power of his ray, the moan of the air through the tube-like corridor increased suddenly to a terrific roar, while an additional roar came into the ears of the men, as the powerful blast of air struck a peculiarly shaped projection and set it vibrating. But no enemies came out

	"I don't think anything less than a war tank could stand that blast" said Arcot after the Lieutenant had shut off the blast from his pistol, at Arcot's signal. "It is probable that we will be attacked if we stay much longer, though. I think that I will ask the Lieutenant to stay here while we go out and get the ship ready to leave. This time you see somewhat in the condition of Hercules after Atlas left him holding the skies on his shoulders. You can't let go of that ray pistol for long, or we will have a first rate explosion," grinned Arcot. "We are going to go back first, if you men wouldn't let us come in first. We refuse to relieve you, and this time, though your orders conflict you can use your judgment only one way! We will signal you by firing a revolver, and then you can come back to the corridor, snap off your ray, and run into the ship which will be waiting.

	"We have one duty to perform first; we will carry this man back to the ship. He was a brave man, and he certainly deserves burial in the soil of his own world."

	"I think I will look up his family, too, Morey, and your father's company will have to increase my salary a little."

-

	SLOWLY the men forced their way back toward the ship, fighting their way against the roaring column of air, their burden hindering them somewhat; but at last they reached the open tunnel. Even here the air was in violent motion.

	"We had better get out of here," said Arcot feeling the draft of air coming up the tube from the open end. "I am sure we are due for an explosion."

	They got into the car as quickly as possible, and arranged to reverse it. Then Wade fired the signal shot. A moment later they saw the Lieutenant fighting his way back against the pressure of the air, which had continued for a while under its own momentum of motion.

	But by the time he was in the car, there was an ominous calm. The car was already backing swiftly down the corridor, and had gotten nearly free, when suddenly there was a dull sound ahead of them, and the car was caught on a wave of pressure, and they were hurled backwards with a terrific acceleration. They had been headed straight out. The pressure seemed uniform, and luck was with them, so they reached the open air, shooting backwards at a speed of several hundred miles an hour, the great tunnel, with its strong walls, and flared opening, acting like some gigantic blunderbus, with the car as its bullet. Arcot did not try to slow down the little ship, but drove his foot down heavily on the vertical accelerator, and the ship rocketed up with terrific speed, and the acceleration seemed to pin the men down to their seats with tripled weight. They had climbed nearly a mile before the explosion came. A terrific concussion it was, a dull thud of exploding gas, and the little ship rocked and heaved in the vortex of rushing gas, for they were scarce a full length away from the great wreck, a mile long it was, and would easily have reached up to them. The entire ship though, now, as they looked at it seemed to soundlessly disintegrate, and they realized the reason. They were rushing away from it faster than the sound it made, and they could not hear the explosion. The great ship seemed to leap into a hundred great parts. It split throughout its length, falling in huge broken masses of metal all about it. One huge fragment was thrown high into the air to fall on the ground beside it, and drive itself deep into the soil.

	But the explosion was over in an instant and there came a momentary lull. Suddenly, from the wrecked engine room, there shot out a beam of intense white light that reached down and struck the soil beside the ship, and a part of the ship itself. In an instant the soil, and that bit of the ship were glowing incandescent, and slumped molten, volatilizing, beside it. The beam suddenly began to shift, faster and faster, as the support that was holding it was melting, it twisted about, reaching forward, cutting the mighty ship in two like a hot knife melting its way through a piece of butter. It had but half completed this maneuver, when there came a sodden blast of light from the point where the beam originated, and the entire region became a lake of molten metal, while the Terrestrians flew blindly, their eyes temporarily dazzled by the light. I call it a blast of light, for so intense was it that no other word adequately describes it—a light that melted all metal about it instantaneously.

	"I think it is time we left that machine!" said Wade, looking down in amazement and horror at the pool of glowing metal that marked the last of the great ship.

	"That last flash must have been the power plant going. Don't you suppose so, fellows?" asked Arcot. "It certainly had plenty of power!"

	They looked at the mass of blazing metal in awe, as Arcot brought their flying ship to a halt, and slowly lowered it. As they descended, the roar of the explosion reached them. Though a full mile and a half away, the heat that beat up at them from the great mass of metal was so intense as to make the ship most uncomfortably warm.

	"I am wondering whether any of the other ships will do the same. We ought to warn all the others before they do," suggested Morey.

	"I believe they will come—remember what a noise that explosion made when the sound did catch us, and then, since we were going away from it very rapidly, the Doppler effect lowered the frequency of the sound so much that what we felt as mechanical vibrations, were actually sound waves. What we heard as a low, powerful rumbling, were actually high notes of the explosion, so you can appreciate the actual power of that sound. It will serve as a very effective warning to the other men," replied Arcot. Indeed, by the time they had returned to the central headquarters machine, and brought to the staff the unpleasant news of their encounter in the ship, many other machines were coming in from the other ships. Half an hour later the three men were again flying swiftly, now toward New York, where Arcot's laboratory was located.

	"Well, fellows, what are your opinions on it? Wade, you are our chemist, tell us what you think of the explosion of the ship, and of the strange color of our molecular ray in their air," suggested Arcot.

	"I have been trying to figure it out. I can't quite believe my results, yet I can't see any other solution. That reddish glow looked like hydrogen ions in the air. The atmosphere was certainly combustible when it met ours, which makes it impossible to believe that their air contained any noticeable amount of oxygen, for anything above 20 per cent, oxygen and the rest hydrogen would be violently explosive, and apparently the gas had to mix liberally with our air to reach that proportion. That it didn't explode when ionized, showed the absence of hydro-oxygen mixture. All the observed facts except one seem to point to an atmosphere composed largely of hydrogen. There were people living in it. That is the only thing that puzzles me. I can understand how the Venerians might stand a different climate, but I can't see how people can live in an atmosphere like that." Wade was greatly puzzled.

	"I came to the same conclusions myself," replied Arcot, himself rather in doubt "but I think that people might live in an atmosphere of hydrogen. It is all a question of organic chemistry. Remember that our bodies are just chemical furnaces. We take in fuel, and oxidize it, using the heat as our source of power. Those men live in an atmosphere of hydrogen. They eat oxidizing fuels, and breathe a reducing atmosphere; they have the two fuel components together again, but in a way different from our method. It is just as effective.

	"I am sure that is the secret of the whole thing."

	"Say, Arcot—I believe you're right!" said Wade with an expression of surprised belief on his face. He could see the possibility of the thing. "But I want to ask you a question. Where under the sun did these people come from?"

	"I have been thinking that over myself," replied Arcot slowly, "and I am beginning to wonder myself, and the more I wonder, the less I believe they did come from under our sun. Let us eliminate all the planets—we can do that at one fell swoop. It is perfectly obvious that those ships are by no means the first crude attempts of that race to fly through space. If they have had those ships, we should certainly have heard from them by now. It is known that they can travel in space as rapidly as we can in the upper atmosphere, and they would certainly have been here long before, if they had been living anywhere near here.

	"Even Neptune is too near for the distance to bother them any with ships like those. They came from further than that! That takes us out into interstellar space. You will probably want to ram a lot of my own arguments down my throat—there is no star near enough for the journey to be made in anything less than a couple of generations, and they would freeze in the interstellar cold doing it. Perfectly correct, there to no known star near enough to make it possible. But how about unknowns?"

	"What did they do with the star? Hide it behind a sun-shade?" asked Morey, rather sarcastically.

	"No, brainless, you ought to know better. You well know a star can't radiate forever. Stars are subject to decay as well as any thing else!"

	"Yes—also the planets that circle them are apt to become a wee bit cool, you know!"

	"Yes," admitted Arcot, "I agree with you—for all we could do, but give those men credit for a little higher order of intelligence. We saw machines there that certainly were beyond us! They are undoubtedly heating their planets with the same source of energy with which they are running their ships. I believe I have confirmation of that fact in two things. They are absolutely colorless; they don't even have an opaque white skin. Any living creature exposed to the rays of a sun, which is sure to emit some chemical rays, is subject to coloration as a protection against those rays. The whites, who have always lived where the sun is weakest, have developed a skin only slightly opaque. The Chinese, who live in more tropical countries, where less clothes and more sun is the motto, have slightly darker skins, while in the extreme tropics Nature has found it necessary to use a regular blanket of color to stop the rays. Now extrapolating the other way, were there no such rays, the people would become a pigmentless race. Since most proteins are rather translucent, at least when wet, they would appear much as those men did. We got little opportunity to observe them, but I think you all noticed that. Remember that there are very few colored proteins. Hemo-globin, such as is in our blood, and hemo-cyanin, such as in the blue blood of the Venerians, are practically unique in that respect. For hydrogen absorption, I imagine the blood of these creatures contains a fair proportion of some highly unsaturated compound, which readily takes on the element, and gives it up later. But we can discuss more in the lab."

-

	BEFORE leaving the field, Arcot had convinced the officer in charge that it would be wise to destroy these ships at once, lest one of them managed to escape, and do tremendous damage. The fact that none of them had any rays in operation was easily explained; they would have been destroyed by the patrol, if they had made any show of weapons. But now they might be getting some ready. The scientists were all through with their investigations. So the ships had been rayed apart and when Arcot had left, their burning atmosphere had been evolving mighty tongues of flame shooting a mile into the air. The light gas of the atmosphere tended to rise in a great sphere, a ball that quickly burned itself out in the air. It had not taken long for the last of the machines to disintegrate under the rays. There would be no more trouble from them at any rate! Now Morey asked Arcot if he thought that they had learned from the ships all they could; would it not have been wiser to save them, and investigate later, taking a chance on stopping any ships, keeping a patrol of air guards there.

	"I thought quite a bit before I suggested that, and I conferred for a few moments with Dr. Forsyth, the famous biologist and bacteriologist. He said that they had by no means learned as much as they wished, but they had been forced to leave in any event. Remember that pure hydrogen, the atmosphere we were actually living in, while on the ship, is quite as inert as pure oxygen, but they get very rough when mixed together. The longer those ships stood the more dangerously explosive they got. If we hadn't destroyed them, they would have wrecked themselves, and it was so exceedingly unsafe even after the short two hours, that we could not stay there. I think it was wisest. Also, Dr. Forsyth pointed out the danger of disease. We might be susceptible to their germs. I don't believe we would be, for our chemical constitution is so vastly different. For instance, the Venerians and Terrestrians can visit each other with perfect freedom. The Venerians have diseases, and so do we, but there are things in the blood of Venerians that are absolutely deadly to any Terrestrian organism. Venerians have been injected with every known Terrestrian disease, and not even been bothered by the germs. They have no immunity, but their chemical constitution is so different that they don't need it Sulphuric acid has developed no immunity to the bacteria of decay, but it is so corrosive, it doesn't need any. The Venerians, with their copper compound blood, are fatal to any Terrestrian organism, while Terrestrians are deadly to any Venerian organism. Similarly, Dr. Forsyth thinks, we would be immune to all diseases brought by the Invaders. However, it is safest to remove them first and decide later."

	The three men went rapidly back to New York, flying high above the surface of the Earth, nearly sixty miles above the ground, where there would be no interfering traffic, till at last they were over New York, and dropping swiftly in a vertical traffic lane.

	They reached the road of the Arcot Laboratories without any difficulty, and settled the machine lightly in the landing cradle. Arcot's father, and Morey's, were there, anxiously awaiting their return. The elder Arcot had for many years held the reputation of being the nation's greatest physicist but recently be had lost it—to his son. Mr. Morey senior was the president and chief stockholder in the Transcontinental Air Lines. The Arcots, father and son, had turned all their inventions over to their close friends, the Moreys. For many years the success of the great air lines had been dependent really on the inventions of the Arcots; these new discoveries allowed them to be always one step ahead of competition, and as they also made the huge transport machines for other companies, they drew tremendous profit from these mechanisms. The mutual interest, which began as a pure business relation, had long become a close personal friendship.

	Now, as the shining ship drew near, and settled swiftly to the landing cradle, the old friends ran forward together. They had learned of the attack through their sons, and had rushed to the laboratory, for the news was not to be made public immediately.

	As Arcot stepped out of his car, he called over to his father, telling them about his find, the light-matter plate.

	"I think I'll need a handling machine to move it. I want to get one, but I'll be right back." He ran to the elevator shaft and dropped quickly to the heavy machinery lab on the bottom floor, where he got a small handling machine, a tractor-like machine with a small derrick, designed to get its power from the electric mains. With a length of cable coiled on the back of the little machine, Arcot ran it on to the elevator, cast loose the power cable, and ran the car swiftly up to the roof again. Here he connected to the power line by means of the long cable, for there were connections here, designed for the handling machines. Then he ran the little machine over to the car, where Wade and Morey were struggling to get the plate into a more advantageous position. They looked up as they heard the rumble and hum of the powerful little machine. From the crane dangled a strong electro-magnet

	"What's that for? You don't expect this to be magnetic do you?" asked Wade, pointing to the magnet

	"Wait and see!" laughed Arcot maneuvering the machine into position. Soon the crane reached into the car, and lowered the magnet on the plate of crystal. Then slowly he turned the power into the magnet. In a moment the plate had set itself firmly on the magnet. Then slowly Arcot turned the power into the lifting motor. The hum rose swiftly till the full load began to come on the cables. Then suddenly the motor was whining with full power, the cables vibrating under the tension. The machine pulled steadily, then, to Arcot's surprise, the rear end of the machine rose slowly from the ground, tipping forward as the load came on the front end.

	"Well—it was magnetic, but how did you know?" asked the surprised Wade. Since the ship had been made of the gleaming, only slightly magnetic Venerian metal, coronium, the plate was obviously the thing that was holding the magnet back.

	"Never mind—I'll tell you later—jump on here and see if our combined weight won't hold the end down. I think we ought to be able to manage it," replied Arcot, smiling at the puzzled expression on his friend's face.

	As the three big men sat on the end of the little machine, the leverage was great enough to pull the plate from the floor; then they quickly backed the machine out and ran it over to the elevator, where they lowered the heavy plate. Disconnecting the cable, the five men entered the car, and rode down to Arcot's private laboratory. Here the handling machine was again brought into play, and the plate was unloaded from the car.

	"I'm with Wade in wondering how you knew, the plate was magnetic, son. I can accept your explanation that the stuff is a species of matter made of light but I know you too well to think ft was just a lucky guess. How did you know?" asked the elder Arcot

	"I really had to rather guess at this, Dad, though there was some reason in my guess. You ought to be able to think of it! How about you, Morey?" asked Arcot smiling at his friend.

	"I have kept discreetly quiet feeling that in silence I could not betray my ignorance, but if you ask me, I can only guess. I do recall that light is affected by a powerful magnet, and I can imagine that that was the basis of your guess," replied Morey. "It had been known for many years, as far back as Clerk Maxwell, that polarized light was rotated by a powerful magnet."

	"It was—and now we may as well go over the whole story, and tell Dad and your father the whole case, and perhaps in telling it we can straighten out our own ideas a bit"

-

	FOR the next hour the three men talked by turns, each telling his story, and trying to give some explanation of it, but in the end they all agreed on one thing: if they were to fight the enemy, they must have ships that could travel swiftly in space.

	"But I wonder if Arcot will now kindly explain his famous invisible light or the lost star?" said Morey rather sarcastically. He was a bit nettled by his own slowness in remembering the fact that a star could go black.

	"I cannot see what connection this has with their sudden attack. If they were there, they must have developed when that star was bright, and as a star requires several million years to cool down, I can't see how they could suddenly appear in space."

	Arcot paused before answering. He reached into the drawer of his desk beside him, and pulled out an old briar-root pipe, and carefully filled it with a thoughtful frown on his face. Contentedly he lit it then leaning back, he puffed out a thin column of grey smoke that rose straight into the air.

	"Those men must have developed on their planets before the sun cooled." He puffed slowly. "They are, then, a race millions, even billions, of years old. I had a hunch that that was so. I can not give any scientific reason for this feeling; it was merely an impression I had. It may have been induced by my beliefs, but I had a feeling that those men were old, older than our very planet! This little globe is not much over one billion years old. I felt that that race was so very ancient they might well have counted the revolutions of this galactic system as, once every twenty or thirty million years, it swung about its center.

	"When I looked at those great machines, and those little men as they handled their ray projectors, they seemed out of place. That is the only way I can express that feeling." He paused again, and the slow smoke drifted up.

	"They seemed to me to be a group of ancient Greeks in a great modem interplanetary liner. Out of place. They were intelligent, learned in their way, but they did not seem scientists, and it did not seem that they should be handling death ray projectors. It seemed to me that they were a peaceful race. I was surprised when I heard that they had resisted the attempt to arbitrate, until I heard the details of it I think this war might have been avoided at that, but for one little slip! The operator of the Terrestrial peace-ship attempted to signal the Invaders to land, and he used a searchlight. They were nervous; they were investigating a strange system and they saw a beam of some vibration, they could not tell what coming at them. In self-defense they struck back. They did not know it was light and they did not dare to wait and find out. It might not have been; I can understand their fears.

	"It must have been millions of years ago that life developed on those planets, the planets of a warm sun, for then it was younger. It was probably rather dim even then. Remember that our own sun is well above the average in brilliance and heat radiation.

	"In those long-gone ages I can imagine a race much like ours developing, different chemically, in their atmosphere of hydrogen, but the chemical body is not what makes a race, it is the thought process. They must have developed, and then, as their science grew, their sun waned. Dimmer and dimmer it must have grown, till at last their planets could not maintain their life naturally. Then they had to heat them artificially. There is no doubt as to their source of power; they had to use the energy of matter; there is no other source great enough to do their work. The atomic energy of radium would not begin to do the task. It is conceivable that their science had developed this long before their necessity came.

	"With this, must also have come the process of transmutation, and the process they use in driving their Interstellar cruisers. I am sure those machines are driven by material energy.

	"But at last their star was black, a closed star, and their cold, black planets must circle a hot, black sun forever! They knew that they were trapped for eternity if they did not escape to some other stellar system. They could not travel as fast as light, and they could escape only if they found some other near-by solar system. Their star was dead—black. Let us call that star Nigra—The Black One. They were invisible as their system swept near ours in space. But all these changes, leading to this last opportunity, must have taken many, many millenniums; We can imagine the race living in their artificially heated worlds, with artificial foods probably, and the millions of stars above them—nothing to do, and no reason to work. They would deteriorate rapidly. I am sure that this was the fate of the race, for these men did not seem to me like men who would develop the giant ships they rode in. It is only a feeling, I would not give that as an official opinion, I merely tell you of my impressions. I am certain, however, that the race would deteriorate under the conditions I named.

	"But now they have met with a rare coincidence. They have actually come near another sun. They naturally have every intention of taking advantage of it and since our sun has been plainly visible to them for many, many years, they were no doubt able to prepare. I believe that this expedition was just intended as exploration, and if they can send such huge machines and so many of them, for mere exploration, I am sure they must have quite a fleet to fight with. 

	"Let us consider the weapons they will have. 

	"We know they have that death ray, but that was not quite as deadly as we might have feared, solely because our ships could outmaneuver them. Next time they will come with a huge fleet of little ships, and they will be a real enemy. We must build a larger fleet, and we can see if the other men have discovered the secret of the projector. Unfortunately, we could not spend more time on those ships, because they were huge gas bombs, and became more explosive each second. We had to leave, and we were sure to find little in so short a time. We must investigate what we have learned."

	"Well, I had a very unique experience with the death ray," said Arcot, as he looked at his right arm. "Certainly few people that felt it lived to tell about it. I have been thinking the mechanism over, and trying to discover possibilities. I think I know what the system is.

	"You are all familiar with the catalytic effects of light. Hydrogen and chlorine will stand very peacefully in the same jar for a long time, and yet let a strong light fall on them, and a catalytic effect takes place. They combine with terrific violence. This is the catalytic effect of a vibration, a wave motion.

	"Then we have another form of catalysis. We have such things as benzaldehyde, which will oxidize if standing in the air, and crystallize out as benzoic acid, yet if just a trace of certain other phenyl compounds are present, the reaction is quite completely stopped. This is an example of negative catalysis. It certainly takes no genius to think of combining the two ideas, though it is, of course, considerably less easy to do than to think of. I believe that is the principle of the Nigrian death ray; they simply stop the chemical reactions of a living body, and these are so delicately balanced that the least resistance will upset them. Just see how closely the temperature ranges must be maintained. The human body must maintain the temperature of the brain, and the main nervous system within four or five degrees, or death ensues.

	"The Nigrians merely project a ray at their enemies, and the body changes are halted, which makes death instantaneous and painless."

-

	ARCOT halted, and sat puffing furiously a moment; in his discourse, the pipe had died down to an ember, and now he was trying vigorous puffing to restore it. At last he had it going and continued.

	"What other weapons they may have we cannot say. The secret of invisibility must be very old to them. But we will guard against the possibility by equipping our ships against it. The only reason the patrol ships aren't equipped already is that the invisibility is useless with modern criminals; they all know the secret and how to fight it."

	Arcot referred to the invisibility apparatus that had been invented by Wade—a system of rendering any material perfectly transparent by impressing on it tremendously high frequency electric impulses. It was discovered as early as 1926 that the plate of a radio tube became invisible when working on very short waves. This idea, amplified to the dimensions of the patrol ships, would make them, and everything in them, perfectly transparent. The invisible ship could, however, be located by using a short wave radio receiving set. The directorial set gave an easy method of locating its position, and by projecting a short wave beam in the same direction, the two wave forms—that which was making the ship invisible, and that which the attacker was using—fought each other, and, if the attacker could apply more power than the invisible one, the invisible ship was made visible. In any case it was readily located, and an application of luminous paint to the invisible ship made it permanently visible, for a perfectly transparent ship is not invisible if it shines. The patrol carried invisibility detectors, and luminous paint bombs, but not the invisibility apparatus."

	Arcot was puffing steadily at his pipe now, apparently waiting for questions, but each seemed so busy with his own thoughts, stirred up by Arcot's speech, that they remained quiet for some time. Finally Morey spoke up:

	"Arcot, we certainly have to get out into space somehow to fight them, but how are we going to do it? I was wondering if we could use Wade's system of storing the atomic hydrogen in solution. That yields about 100,000 calories for every two grams, and since this is a method of storing heat energy, and your molecular motion director is a method of converting heat into mechanical work with 100 per cent efficiency, why not use that? All we need, really, is a method of storing heat energy for use while we are in space."

	Arcot was silent a moment before answering.

	"I thought of that, and I have been trying to think of other and, if possible, better and cheaper and quicker ways of getting the necessary power.

	"Let us eliminate all the known sources one by one. The usual ones, the ones men have been using for centuries, go out at once. The atomic hydrogen reaction stores more energy per gram than any other chemical reaction known. But there are other ways of storing it. Let us take into account all known ways. First there is the storage battery, which is nothing but a chemical reaction. Next is the electro-static condenser, but that does not store any great amount of energy if a practical voltage is used, and there are mechanical difficulties. Then comes the induction coil, which stores electro-magnetic energy. That is far better than the condenser, but it is a method of storing energy in a rather kinetic form, you must maintain the current flowing in it. There is one more form. We must rule out plain heat storage; it is too inefficient. The only other method of storing energy is the method used by the Kaxorians in driving their huge planes. They used condensed light-energy. This was efficient to the ultimate maximum, something no other method can hope to attain. We know that mass is a measure of the energy stored, and in their method they took light, and condensed it, storing its energy by binding one photon to the next through gravitational attraction between individual photons. The ultimate maximum is the amount of energy one gram represents, being fully capable of release, and in this case they got the full four hundred and fifty thousand million million million ergs per pound out of their fuel, but they didn't need more than a pound of fuel all told in those planes. Yet they had huge reservoirs that were needed to store it. The result was still ineffective for our purpose; we want something we can put in a small space; we want to condense the light still further, but that will be the ideal form of energy storage, for then we will be able to release it directly as a heat ray, and so use it with the utmost efficiency. I think we can absorb the released energy in the usual cavity radiator," said Arcot meditatively.

	"That's true; I think that is best, but there is still the difficulty that we can't get the power storage apparatus condensed enough. It was the greater flexibility of the small ship that permitted us to win so readily, remember that. The big apparatus would make it very much more cumbersome.

	"Then too, there is a second consideration. All that energy has to be gotten from sunlight, practically, and you have to 'charge the batteries', as with any other kind of a storage device. It would require so long to get the energy collectors built that we would not be fully prepared when the Nigrians return for some more playing. I wonder how long their star is going to be near us?" said Morey junior.

	"I thought of the difficulty of storage. I was wondering about the time limit also, and I believe we can solve both, and, into the bargain, have a little laugh at our enemies. What we want is to have that light stored in a more condenser form, a form that is naturally stable, and does not need to be held bound, but requires urging to release. I was wondering—" Arcot paused, smiling quest joningly at his audience.

	"Oh—Ho—Ha—say that's rare! Whoo—I have to hand it to you—That takes all prizes—have the laugh on our enemies is right!" Wade was laughing so hard he could scarcely speak! In puzzled wonder Morey and the two older men looked at him, and at Arcot who was grinning broadly.

	"Well, it must be funny, but—Oh—I see—say that is good! I see what he means, Dad!" exclaimed Morey turning to his father.

	"The light-matter windows we found in the enemy machines contain enough bound light-energy to run all the planes we could make in the next ten years! We are going to have the enemy supply us with the power we can't get in any other way! I think you do take all prizes for ingenuity, Arcot!"

	Dr. Arcot senior smiled at first, then looked dubiously at his son.

	"I can see that there is plenty of energy stored there, but, as you said, the energy needs considerable encouragement to break free. How do you expect to do that, Son?"

	"I have an idea. I don't know how it will work, but we can try." Arcot puffed at his pipe, rather serious now, as he thought of the problems ahead.

	"But Arcot," asked Wade curiously, "how do you suppose they condense that light energy in the first place, and, their sun being dead, whence all the light? I suppose it is from the energy of matter, is it not?"

	"I think they break up matter for its energy, but of course I can't say. However, I don't know where else they could get all that energy. As to the condensation problem, I think I have a possible solution of that too; also the same solution applies to the problem of release. We haven't the secret of releasing material energy, but I think we will have before this war is over, if we have anything at all! There is that possibility!" he smiled at them. It was quite possible that man would have neither the secret of material energy, nor the sun, nor life, but there was considerable hope just now. "In any case, we won't need to worry about that for a while,"

	"How do you think they got their energy loose? Do you think those big blocks of pure silver had anything to do with it?" asked Wade.

	"Why, yes, I do think they had something to do with it. Those blocks of silver were probably designed to carry away the power once it was released. The release was accomplished in some way mysterious to me. They solved the greatest problem of the work. You can't light a fire on a barrel of gunpowder very safely. They couldn't use material apparatus to start their release of material energy, the material of the apparatus might 'catch fire' too. They had to have the disintegrating matter held apart from all other matter. This was quite impossible, if you were going to get the energy away by any method, other than by the use of fields of force. I don't think that is the method. My guess is that a terrific current of electricity would accomplish it if anything would.

	"How then are we going to get the current to it? The wires will be subject to the same currents. Whatever they do to the matter under consideration, the currents will do to the apparatus—except in one case. If that apparatus is made of some other kind of matter, then it won't be affected. The solution is obvious. Take some of the light-matter. What will destroy light-matter, won't destroy electricity-matter; and what will destroy electricity-matter, won't disturb light-matter.

-

	"DO you remember the platform of light-metal, clear as crystal? It must have been exceedingly heavy, too! That was no doubt an insulating platform. What we started as our assumptions in the case of the light-metal, we can now carry further. We said that electricity-metals carried electricity, so light-metals would carry, or conduct light. Now we know that there is no substance which is transparent to light, that will carry electricity by metallic conduction. I mean, of course, there is no substance transparent to light, and at the same time capable of carrying electricity by electronic transmission. We have, of course, things like NaCl solutions in ordinary H20 which will carry electricity, but here it is by ionic conduction. Even glass will carry electricity very well when hot; when red hot, glass will carry enough electricity to melt it very quickly. But here is just an illustration that glass is not a solid, but a viscous liquid, and it is again carried by ionic conduction. Iron, copper, silver, sodium, lead, all metals carry the current by means of electron drift through the solid substance. In such cases we can see that no transparent substance conducts electricity. Take sulphur, one of the best insulators in the worlds it will not conduct electricity, but a sulphur crystal is beautifully transparent.

	"Similarly the reverse is true. No substance capable of carrying electricity by metallic conduction is transparent. They are all opaque, if in any thickness. Of course gold is transparent, but only in leaf when it is so thin that it won't conduct! The peculiar condition we reach in the case of the invisible ship is different. There the effects are brought about by the high frequency impressed. But you get my point.

	"Do you remember those wires that we saw leading to that little box of the reflecting material? So perfectly reflecting it was that we didn't see ft. We only saw where it must be; we saw the light it reflected. That was no doubt light-matter, a light-matter, non-metal, and as such, non-conductive to light. Like sulphur, an electric non-metal, it reflected the base of which it was formed. Sulphur reflects electricity and passes light. This light-non-metal did the same sort of thing; it reflected light, and passed electricity. It was a conductor.

	"Now we have the things we need, the matter to disintegrate, and the matter to hold the disintegrating material in. We have two different types of matter. The rest was obvious, but decidedly not easy. They have done it though, and after the war is over, there will still be many machines floating around in space, and I am sure we will be able to learn the secret of material energy."

	"Well, Son, I hope you do. But I know that it is time you got working on your problem, since I am officially retired, I am going down stairs. You know I am working in my laboratory with a young man by the name of Norris, and I think we have a method for increasing the range and power of your projector for the molecular motion field. I will show you our math, later, you know there has been little development work done along that line since you did your hurried work on Venus. You had only the simplest kind of calculating machine, and I think we can do a bit better."

	"I don't know! Remember that they have been trying to develop that," replied the elder Morey, "but they did such a good job when they did do it, that no one else has improved it since."

	"Yes, Dad, what Morey here can do with a simple calculating machine, is a lot more than most scientists can do on a new Brandes-Monsun! I think you probably can improve on it, but you will find that he did a good job!" said Arcot junior. Morey was permanently attached to the three because of his keen mathematical ability. He was able to develop the mathematical facts along the lines Arcot suggested with amazing rapidity, and great ingenuity. He was probably better qualified to convert a mathematical expression into a physical law than any other man in the world. Arcot could see the basic laws, and sketch the physical background, but Morey filled in the gaps with mathematical proof. Wade found his field in chemistry, though his knowledge of physics was decidedly above par.

	"In any case, I think we had best get started on our work! It means a lot to save even twenty minutes today!"

	The party broke up—the three younger men staying in their own laboratory, while Dr. Arcot senior went down to his laboratories.

	"Oh, Mr. Morey," called out Arcot, "before you leave, I want to ask you if you can spare Fuller again, since you nave finished the work on the molecular motion fleet, I am sure he will be able to help a lot here, and it is really his right to design the first of these new space ships!"

	Fuller had been with these men in each of their adventures since the original development of the molecular motion ship. He had designed the first of them, the first little ship that had shown the power of the molecules in motion, and he had designed the first Air Liner working on a new principle. He had drawn up the plans for the "Solarite," the first interplanetary ship of the system. Certainly he had every right to be "in on" this new advance. Mr. Morey, for whom Fuller had been designing the fleet of molecular motion ships, gladly gave his approval. The foremost designer of the country, he should certainly be working with these men, the foremost scientists of the country, if not of the system.

-

	After they had left, Arcot suggested that Wade and Morey start attacking that plate of crystal, in an attempt to tear off a small piece, on which they might work. In the meantime he went into the televisophone room and started to put through a call. He wished to get in touch with the Tychos observatory, the great observatory that had so recently been established on the frigid surface of the little dead world, the Moon. The huge mirror, ten feet in diameter, allowed of immense magnification here, and stellar observations were greatly facilitated, for no one bothered them, and the "seeing" was always good.

	However, the great distance was rather a handicap to the ordinary televisophone stations, and all calls put through to it had to be made through the powerful sending station in St. Louis, where all interplanetary messages were sent and received, while that side of the Earth was facing the station, and from Constantinople, when that city faced the destination. These stations could bridge the distance readily and clearly.

	For several minutes Arcot waited while the connections were being established for the Moon; then for many more minutes he talked earnestly with the observer in this distant stations, and at last satisfied, he hung up.

	For some time he had outlined his ideas concerning the Black Star to the men in charge; then he had asked that they investigate the possibilities, and see if they could find any noticeable effects on the planets.

	Finally he returned to where his friends had been working on the crystal plate. Wade had a most decidedly exasperated expression on his face, and Morey was grinning broadly.

	"Hello Arcot—you missed all the fun! You should have seen Wade here working on that plate!" The plate had, in his absence, been twisted and bent, showing that it had undergone some terrific stresses. Having some idea of the strength of the material, Arcot could appreciate what forces must necessarily have been used. Now Wade began to make certain remarks about the properties of the plate in language that was not exactly scientific. It was more the language of a mechanic who has just released the power of the molecular director ray of his machine, only to discover it does not work, and that his last two hours' labor proved fruitless.

	"Why, Wade, you don't seem to like that stuff. Perhaps the difficulty lies in your treatment, rather than in the material itself. I think I can show you how to do it. What have you tried?"

	"Everything! I took a coronium hack saw that will eat through molybdenum steel like so much cheese, and it just wore its teeth off. I tried some of those diamond rotary saws you have, attached to a small electric motor, and it wore out the diamonds. That got my goat, so I tried using a little force. I put it in the tension testing machine, and clamped it—the clamp was good for 10,000,000 pounds—but it began to bend, so I had to quit. Then Morey held it with a molecular ray, and I tried twisting it. You know it gave me real pleasure to see that thing yield under the pressure. But it is not brittle; it merely bends.

	"And I can't cut it, or even get some shavings off the darned thing. You said you wanted to make a Jolly balance determination of the specific gravity, but that stuff is so dense you would need only a tiny scrap, and I can't break that loose!" Wade looked at the thing in greatest disgust. He would have liked to kick it, but he knew it was heavy, and very hard, so he did not.

	Arcot smiled at him; he could understand his feeling, for the stuff certainly was stubborn with any tools they had in their command. "I'm sorry I didn't warn you fellows about that, but I was so anxious to get that call through that I forgot to tell you how I expected to. make it more workable. Now, if Wade will get another one of those diamond tooth rotary saws, I'll get something that may help. Please put the rotary saw on the air motor. Use the one made of coronium."

-

	WADE looked after the rapidly disappearing Arcot in rather considerable surprise, then, scratching his head, he turned and started to do as Arcot had asked.

	Arcot returned in about five minutes with a small handling machine, and a huge magnet. It must have weighed nearly half a ton and looked quite capable of changing the north magnetic pole of the earth. This he quickly connected to the heavy duty power lines of the lab. Now, running the handling machine into position, he quickly hoisted the bent and twisted plate to the poles of the big magnet, with the aid of the derrick.

	Then he backed the handling machine out of the way, and finally returned on foot.

	"Now, we'll see whether or not we are going to win this war!" said Arcot, smiling a bit. He stepped over to the big magnet and switched on the current. At once a terrific magnetic flux was set up through the light-metal. Then he took the little compressed air saw, and applied it to the crystal plate. The smooth hiss of the air deepened to a whine as the load came on it, then the saw was scraping on the hard plate.

	To Wade's surprise and joy he saw the little diamond-edged saw bite its way slowly but steadily into the heavy plate. In a moment it had cut off a little corner of the light-matter, and this fell with a heavy thud to the magnet pole, drawn down both by the attraction of the magnet and by gravity.

	Arcot at once shut off the magnet, and stepped back. Then he picked up a pair of pliers, and gripped the little chunk of light-metal.

	 "Whew—this may be light-metal, but it certainly is not light metal! I think this little scrap weighs nearly ten pounds! We will have to reduce it considerably before we can use it. I think we can handle it now though!"

	By using the magnet and several large diamond faceplates, gotten from the great diamond mines on the moon, they were able to work the tough material down to a thin sheet; then, with a heavy press, they cut some very small fragments, and with these, determined the specific gravity.

	As Wade watched the little plates of light-metal spread out under the hard diamond face-plates, and flattening nicely he looked at them in wonder. He seemed surprised that anything could be done with the material.

	"Arcot," he began at last, "just how does that magnet make that stuff tractable? I can see how it might attract it, but I am not physicist enough to see how it can soften it. It may release some of the binding gravitation, but I know that magnetic and gravitational fields, while Einstein has shown that they are similar, are not identical, and they aren't mutually influential. Now I don't see how this affects the stuff."

	"I wasn't sure it would, but it was somewhat of a hunch. The reason it will affect it, is, that the light-matter in every photon is affected by the magnetism, and every photon is given a new motion. That stuff can be made to go with the speed of light, you know. It is the only solid that could be so affected. This stuff would be able, with the aid of a molecular motion beam, which will make all the photons move in parallel paths, to move at the full speed of each photon, 186,000 miles a second. The tremendous speed of these individual photons is what makes the material so hard. Their kinetic impulse is rather considerable! It is the kinetic blow that the molecules of a metal give that keeps other metals from penetrating it. This simply gave such terrific impulses that even diamonds wouldn't cut it. Now you know that an iron saw will cut platinum very readily, yet if they are both heated to a temperature of say, 1600 degrees, the iron is a liquid, and the platinum very soft, but now it cuts through the iron readily! The heat softens them.

	"Heat will probably have no effect at all on this, but the effect of the magnet on the individual photons corresponds to the effect of the heat on the individual atoms and molecules. The mass is softened, and we can work it I think that is the explanation; that, at least, is the reason for my original belief that I could soften the stuff electro-magnetically.

	"But Wade, I wish you would see if you can get the density of this stuff. You are more used to those determinations and that type of manipulation than we are. When you get through, we may be able to show you some results also!"

	Wade picked up a tiny chip of the light-metal, and started off toward his own laboratory. Here he set up his Jolly balance, and set to work on the tiny fragment. His results amazed him. The readings on the delicate spring when in water, and when out, were so vastly different, it seemed incredible that a substance could be so dense. At last he returned to the main lab, where Arcot and Morey were working rapidly at a large, and complicated electro-static apparatus.

	"What did you find?" called out Arcot, as he saw Wade enter the room. "Tell us your results, and in the meantime lend a hand here, will you? I have a laboratory scale apparatus of the type the Kaxorians used in the storage of light. It has been known to them, ever since they began the work on it, that their machines would release the energy with more than normal violence, if certain changes were made in it. That is, the light condenser, the piece of apparatus that stored the photons so close to each other, would also serve to urge them apart. I have made the necessary changes in the apparatus, and I am now trying to set it up to work on solid light-matter. The machine was developed for gaseous light-matter, and it is a little hard to change it over. I think we will have it in a minute. Wade, will you connect that to the high frequency oscillator there—no—through the counterbalanced condenser there. We may have to change the oscillatory frequency quite a bit, but I think we can do it. What results did you get?"

	"I don't know whether to trust the results or not," was the answer. "I think we had best use the regular volume and weight method rather than the Jolly balance. Of course the stuff must be heavy—but I still think—well, anyway, I got a density of about 103.5!"

	"Whewww—103.5! Lord! That is almost five times as heavy as the heaviest metal hitherto known, osmium is about 22, isn't it? That makes osmium about ten times as heavy as aluminum, and over twenty-five times as heavy as sodium metal. Certainly there is no good reason why we shouldn't have a substance four times as heavy as it! A hundred and twenty or thirty times as heavy as potassium and sodium!

	"There was about half a cubic foot of the material, too; that would mean about 4000 pounds for the whole mass, or two tons. There is good reason why we couldn't lift the plate!" The men had all stopped their work on the apparatus to discuss the amazing results of the density test, but now they fell to again, rapidly assembling the apparatus, for each was a trained experimenter, and though Wade usually devoted his time to chemistry, since in this group he shone better in that field, nevertheless, he was a brilliant physicist, and he would easily have been able to hold his own in most scientific gatherings.

	"I think we will have enough urge to disintegrate right here, but I want to make sure, and so, before we set up the case over it, I think we may as well put that big magnet in place, and have it there to help in the work of disintegration, if need be," suggested Arcot, and so they placed the heavy mass as quickly as possible, the little handling machine swinging it into place for them,

-

	AT last the complete apparatus was set up, and the tiny bit of light-matter they were to work on was set up on the table of a powerful Atchinson projector microscope, the field of view being in the exact center of the field of both the magnet and the coil.

	"Well, we are ready," said Arcot, as he placed the projector screen in position, and dimmed the lights in the room. A touch of the switch, and the projection screen was illuminated with the enlarged image of the tiny scrap of light-metal. "Now let's see what happens. There is the obvious possibility that instead of releasing the energy gradually as I expect, it will do it all at once, and we will have a beautiful little explosion. I should say it would be intense enough to wreck the three top floors of the building. That probably weighs three milligrams.

	"Before starting this experiment, I called up Dr. Manning, of Chicago, and told him what I was doing. He knows the line of research, so if anything happens to us, the work will not be greatly delayed. Here goes!"

	Arcot placed his hand on the switch, and smiling at his friends, closed it. This put the powerful Arcot oscillator tubes into action, and the power was ready for application.

	Slowly he closed the rheostat and put the power into the coil. The little plate of metal on the slide seemed to throb a bit, and its outline grew hazy, but at last Arcot had full power on and the release was so slow as to be imperceptible. "Guess we need the magnet after all; I'll put it on this time," Arcot said.

	He opened the coil circuit and closed the magnet circuit at half voltage, then again he increased the current through the rheostat. This time the plate throbbed quite violently, then suddenly it seemed like a bit of iodine. The dense vapors suddenly began pouring from it, and instantly those vapors became a blindingly brilliant flood of light. Arcot had snapped open the switch the moment he saw this display start, and it had had little time to act, for the instant the circuit was opened it was forced to subside. But even in this interval of time, the light aluminum screen had suddenly become limp and slumped down, molten! The room was unbearably hot and the men were nearly blinded by the intensity of the light.

	"It works! It works! That sure was hot too—it is roasting in here—open the window, will you Arcot!" yelled Wade. That display meant that Earth and Venus would have space ships with which to fight space ships! There was reason for their joy!

	Though they had made a great deal of progress already, there was still a great deal of development work to be done. They must attain an accurate system of control for the release of the energy, and they must have it under accurate and instantaneous control, a control they could trust to take care of the terrific energy at their disposal, for if it were to be used in a ship it must be practically automatic. 

	Fuller arrived later that afternoon and found the three friends already at work in developing a more compact and scientific apparatus than the stray bits of apparatus that had gone into making that first release mechanism.

	"And so you can see," said Arcot, as he finished his explanation of progress so far, "we still have plenty of work for you to do, Fuller. I am now trying to find some data for you to work on, but I can tell you this: we will need a ship that has plenty of strength and plenty of speed. There will be the usual power plant, of course; the generators, the power-tube board, and the electro-magnetic relay controls for the regular molecular motion controls. Then, in addition, we must have the regular controls for the ray projector, and that too must wait a while, for Dad is working on a projector which has a range nearly twice as great as what we have developed heretofore. The main difficulty has been that the ray wouldn't stay a ray, but spread out. He has gotten his director field so intense that the ray is nearly perfectly a cylinder, and not a cone.

	"Then we will have the driving units inside the ship now, for all our power will come from the energy of the light-matter.

	"There will be one new weapon, though. I suppose it won't be exceedingly effective, for any polished surface reflects heat, but we can try using the beams of light we release from the light-matter as a heat wave. What do you think about it, Morey?"

	"Well—to be frank, I don't think much of it. I think it would be a waste of time and material to even install a heat ray. They would be far less efficient than our molecular motion ray. I think we had best just let them alone. I have been wondering how you expect to use the light energy, though; that is what the exact absorption mechanism will be, by which you expect to get the light energy transferred to the driving mechanism," replied Wade..

	"I think the easiest way to do that is to use the ordinary cavity radiator type absorption chamber, that is 100 per cent efficient. The molecular ray being 100 per cent efficient, that means we will have a perfect machine!"

	"Maybe so, Arcot," interrupted the designing engineer, "but I don't know all the physical terms you use!"

	"Well, a cavity radiator is a mechanism whereby all frequencies of radiation are emitted proportionately. You know, Fuller, there is no single substance that radiates in the ideal way. A black body will radiate all frequencies perfectly indiscriminately, just as it will absorb all frequencies indiscriminately. The ideal black body cannot be had, but we can see that a perfect absorbing thing could be got at. What we want is a surface that will absorb all of every bit of light or heat or ultra-light that strikes it. Suppose we imagine the surface to be the surface of the hole in the neck of an earthenware jug. There is no surface there—it is a hole—but it fulfills all the other conditions, and acts as our imaginary surface would. It does, obviously, absorb everything that strikes it, for there is nothing to prevent it, and once inside, the chance of the light getting back out again is so infinitesimal that we can neglect it, for it is reflected and re-reflected from side to side. Each time the rough, dark surface takes its toll, and less light is left. In practically zero time, the light has been 100 per cent absorbed. Now I propose to absorb the energy for the ships in a big sort of thermos bottle, working on that idea. The fact that light will heat anything it strikes, is, of course, obvious, so what we will have will be a bottle-shaped cavity like this, with the neck here, and just in front of the neck a light-matter destruction apparatus, which will send all the released light energy into the cavity. The cavity itself will be painted black inside. We will use some rough black surface and this will absorb all the light energy, immediately converting it into heat energy. That is, the steel bottle here will become very warm if left undisturbed, but the steel bottle will be double, and we can have a considerable quantity of helium in the space between the double walls of the 'thermos bottle'. The gas will be on the field of the molecular motion director and will be very cold, and will promptly absorb the heat of the steel bottle; thus our driving unit is ready!

	"We will need one main horizontal unit for driving the ship forward or backward and for braking, and there will be three smaller vertical power units, controlled as usual, so we can have the desired angle of climb or vertical ascent, and three horizontal power units for turning and moving sideways. That makes one big and six small units. In space we will need all three dimensions equally, and so the sum-power of the three small ones must equal the power of the main horizontal driving unit.

	"Then there must be a generator aboard to generate the power for the power tube banks, and for the magnet for releasing the light energy, as well as the electro-static oscillator. The generator will be of the usual type, driven by power units on the rim of the drive wheel, and these can be warmed by heating their atmosphere; that will be easy enough.

	"There will also have to be heating devices for warming the ships, for they may have to go out into interstellar space. I have a notion we may pursue the Nigrians all the way to their home planets, to make sure they stay right there until their star has passed entirely out of our region. At any rate, they must have heating devices to warm them when they are as far from the sun as old Neptune, and we certainly will have to go that far. It was all right for us to go without any heating apparatus in the Solarite for then we were as near, or nearer the sun than Earth is, and hence our temperature was maintained by the sun, but out there in space, the sun will be so far away that we won't feel its rays, and if we do go to the Black Star, we will certainly feel the absence of heat. Of course, space has tremendously hot molecules in it. But there are so few molecules there that we won't get any heat from them. That device will, however, be simple enough.

	"The ships must be capable of about six or seven thousand miles a second, and that implies all the acceleration a human being can endure. Since I expect to make long trips in them, I think we will do best if we make several types of ships. Three should suffice: a small single man cruiser, with no bunk or living quarters, just a little power plant and weapon. One that can jump out of the way of a ray so quickly that it will be very hard to hit, and at the same time, because of its ray, be very dangerous. There will have to be some place for the operator of this ship to sleep and eat. I think the easiest way to solve that is to have a large fleet of mother ships—ships with a twenty-man crew, but still very active, and very deadly. These should have bunks and living quarters for the crew. Some men would be sleeping in the bunks all the time. The men could take turns running the one-man ships and sleeping. There will also be some ten-man scout cruisers. These will be used in the same way, but will have a smaller fleet of ships dependent on them.

	"We have as yet found no prospect of success in insulating against the death ray; their negative catalysis ray seems to pass right through metal if powerful enough, as it evidently is in the ship projectors, but we can't carry enough metal armor to stop it. I think our ray is more effective in any case.

	"But now let's get back to work, and you can see what you can find, Fuller. I think you might call in the engineers of all the big machine manufacturers and have them ready to start work at once when the plans are finally drawn up. Their help will make the job quicker. You had best get in touch with all the Venerian men, too. Those new works in Sorthol, Kaxor, will certainly handle a lot.

	"I suppose the Interplanetary Patrol men will want to have something to say, though they are usually pretty reasonable about taking the verdict of the scientists. They will have to be called in too, I suppose. You will have to wait to begin the actual work, but we will get our job done now, just as quickly as we can." As Arcot finished, he rose, and with Wade and Morey went toward the door. Fuller at once agreed, and headed for the televisophone room.

-

	THE three physicists at once started their work on determining the approximate factors that controlled the release of the energy. Accurate work could not be done at once, but four significant figures in their results were probably more than enough.

	Despite their utmost endeavor and the hard work of all the men of the two worlds, it was nearly six weeks before the fleet had grown to a thing of real importance. The tests they subjected the tiny ships to had been more than satisfactory. They behaved wonderfully, shooting about at terrific speed, and with all the acceleration the men could stand. They had developed a special Rocket Squad, a group of men with unusual ability to withstand the effect of the acceleration, and this squad had immediately been given the new machines and had been put in training. They were able to move with terrific speed, and get there before any other group. The strain was frequent enough to make the applicants become unconscious, but they quickly developed the muscles that had been unused for so many ages, since man began to walk upright, and they soon were able to stand even greater accelerations. This rocket squad was composed almost solely of Terrestrians, for they were used to the greater gravity of Earth, and could stand greater acceleration strains than could Venerians.

	The ships were each equipped with an invisibility locater, a sensitive short-wave directional receiver, that would permit the operator to direct his rays at invisible targets. The ships themselves could not be made invisible, for they depended in their very principle on the absorption of light-energy. If the walls of every part of the ship were perfectly transparent, they could absorb no energy at all, and they would still be plainly visible—even more so than before! They must remain visible, but they would also force the enemy to remain visible. Each ten-man ship carried an old-fashioned cannon that was equipped to hurl canisters carrying the luminous paint. They had decided that these would have advantages, even if the ships were not made invisible, for in space a ship is visible only because it reflects or emits light. For this reason, the ships were not equipped with any portholes except in the pilot room and in the observation posts. No light could escape. To reduce the reflection to the absolute minimum, the ships had each been painted with an absolutely black pigment. In space they would be exceedingly difficult targets.

	The heating effect of the sun on the black pigment when near the great star was rather disagreeably intense, and to cool the little ships they had installed molecular director power units, which absorbed the heat in acting to drive the ship. The dark surface also radiated far more rapidly than would a polished one, but they could easily warm their ships when too far from the sun.

	Each of the little ships, the one-man machines, was equipped with a small machine-gun shooting luminous paint bullets. One of these bullets, landing on a machine, made it visible for at least two hours, and as they would cover an area of perhaps thirty square feet, they were, decidedly effective.

	It was found that ray practice was rather complicated. The government had had ranges set up in the great mountain districts, away from any valuable property, but they soon found that even this was not enough. The rays very quickly demolished the targets, but they were not satisfied with that, and already showed very good progress toward demolishing the mountains as well. Since they had built all the ships with the molecular director ray only, training became a real problem. The few ships that had been made before the great war came, were not representative of the new ones, and they alone were equipped with the light-ray-training projectors. They could not afford to waste time making the light-projectors, so the problem was solved by using the barren surface of the moon and the little planetoids beyond Mars and Mars itself, as a proving ground.

	The trips out into the outer limits of the Solar System were true trips of exploration, for these were the first ships to get so far from Earth. The slow-moving solar power ships were still struggling over the belt of asteroids in most cases. The terrific danger from the many little planets here had made it impossible to continue their outward course in the, plane of the system, but had forced them to fly "above" it. The Solar System is like a great spinning wheel, all its parts lie in practically one plane and the planets revolve in orbits in that plane. The asteroids are in a flat ring about the sun, like the rings of Saturn, and all that was necessary to pass them was to leave the plane of the system and fly "above" them, dropping back to the plane on the other side of the menace. It was like passing a two-dimensional wall; just go over it in the third dimension. But this passing had been long and cold for the men in the solar power ships, and if anything went wrong with their power plant, they would be forced to remain there forever, for they would be caught in the orbit.

-

	THE ships were sent out in squadrons as fast as the ships could be finished, and the men could be brought together and trained. They were establishing a great shield of ships across all that section of the system whence the Nigrians had appeared, and they hoped to intercept the next attack before it reached Earth, for they well knew that the next attack would be in full force.

	Arcot had gone to the conference held on Venus with the other men who had investigated the great wrecks, and each scientist had related his view of things and his ideas. Arcot's idea of the black star was not very favorably received. As he had explained to Wade and Fuller, who had not gone, there was good reason for it. Though the scientists were all ready to admit that these men must have come from a great distance, and they agreed that they lived in an atmosphere of hydrogen, and judging from their pale skins, that they were not used to the rays of a sun, still they insisted on the theory of an outer planet of the sun.

	"You remember," explained Arcot, "several years ago there was a considerable discussion about the existence of a planet still further out from the sun than Neptune. It is well known that there are a number of irregularities in the orbits of the outer two planets that can't seem to fall under the explanation applicable to the other planets, and an outer planet could be given the necessary mass and orbit to do the things they observe.

	"This attack from outer space was immediately taken as proof of that theory, and it was very easily supported, too. My one good point that stood for any length of time under their attacks was the fact that those ships weren't developed in a year, nor a century, and that the chemical constitution of the men was so different. There were no new elements discovered, except the light-matter, but they are rather wondering about the great difference of earthly chemical constitution and the constitution of these invaders.

	"They had one argument that was just about enough to throw mine out, though they pointed to the odds against the thing happening. You know, of course, how a planet is formed? They are the results of tidal action on two passing suns.

	"You can imagine two mighty stars careening through space and then drawing slowly nearer, till at last they come within a few billion miles of each other, and their gigantic masses reach out and bind them with a mighty chain of gravity. Their titanic masses swing about each other, each trying to pull free, and continue its path about the center of the galactic system. But as their huge bulks come nearer, the chains that bind them become stronger and stronger, and the tremendous pull of the one gargantuan fire ball on the other raises titanic tides of flame, great streamers of gas shoot out into space, and all the space about is lighted by the flaming suns, their usual tremendous activity stirred up as by a giant poker, and even more fuel is heaped on their fires. The pull of gravity becomes more and more intense, and as the one circles the other, the tide is pulled up, and the mighty ball of fire, which, for all its existence has been practically motionless as far as rotation goes, begins to acquire a greater and greater rotational speed as the tidal drag urges it on. The flames begin to reach higher and higher and the tides, now urged from the sun by centrifugal force, rise still greater, and as the swinging suns struggle to break loose, the flaming gas is pulled up and up, and becomes a mighty column of fire, a column that reaches out across three—four—a dozen millions of miles of space and joins the two stars at last, as the stalactites and stalagmites grow together. A flaming tie of matter joins them, two titanic suns, and a mighty rope of fire binds them, while far mightier chains of gravity hold them together.

	"But now their original velocity reasserts itself, and having spiraled about each other for who can say how long—a year—a million years seems more probable—but still only an instant in the life of a star, they begin to draw apart, and the flaming column is stretched out, and ever thinner it grows, and the two stars at last separate. But now the gas will never fall back into the sun. Like some giant flaming cigar it reaches out into space and it will stay thus, for it has been set in rotation about the sun at such a speed as is needed to form an orbit. The giant mass of gas is, however, too cool to continue to develop energy from matter, for it was only the surface of the sun, and cool. As it cools still further, there appear in it definite condensations, and the beginnings of the planets are there. The great filament that stretched front sun to sun was cigar-shaped, and so the matter is more plentiful toward the center, and larger planets develop. Thus Jupiter and Saturn are far larger than any of the others. The two ends are tapering, thus Earth is larger than Venus, which is larger than Mercury, and Uranus and Neptune are both smaller than Saturn.

	"Mars and the asteroids are hard to explain. Perhaps it is easier to understand when we remember that the planets thus formed must necessarily have been rotating in eccentric orbits when they were first born, and these planets came too near the sun while gaseous, or nearly so, and Mars lost much of its matter, while the other, which now exists only as the asteroids, broke up. "But now that other flaming star has retired, wandering on through space. The star has left; its traces, for behind it there are planets where none existed before. But remember that it, too, must have planets now.

	All this happened some 2,000 million years ago. 

	"But in order that it might happen, it requires that two stars pass within the relatively short distance of a few billion miles of each other. Space is not overcrowded with matter, you know. The density of the stars has been compared with twenty tennis balls roaming about the 8,000-mile sphere that the Earth fills up—twenty tennis balls in some 270 billion cubic miles of space. Now imagine two of those tennis balls-—with plenty of room to wander in—passing within a few yards of each other. The chances are about as good as the chances of two stars passing close enough to make planets. 

	"Now let us consider another possibility. 

	"The Black Star, as I told you, has planets. That means that it must have thus passed close to another star. Now we have it coming close to another sun that has been similarly afflicted. The chances of that happening are inconceivably small. It is one chance in billions that the planets will form. Two stars must pass close to each other, when they have all space to wander about in. Then those afflicted stars separate, and one of them passes close by a new star, which has thus been similarly afflicted with that one chance in billions—well, that is then a chance in billions of billions.

	"So my theory was called impossible. I don't know but what it is. Besides, I thought of an argument the other men didn't throw at me. I'm surprised they didn't too—the explanation of the strange chemical constitution of these men of a solar system planet would not be so impossible. It is quite possible that they live on a planet revolving about the sun which is, nevertheless, a planet of another star. It is quite conceivable to me that the chemical constitution of Neptune and Uranus will be found to be quite different from that of the rest of our planets. The two filaments drawn out from the suns may not have mingled, though I think they did, but it is quite conceivable that, just before parting, the sun tore one planet, or even two or three, from the other star. 

	"And that would explain those men. 

	"My other ideas were accepted. They agreed on the idea of the release of material energy, and the source of their power, but they couldn't agree with me on that!" Arcot puffed at his pipe meditatively for several moments, then stood up, and stretched.

	"Ho—I wish they would let me go on active duty out there!" he grinned at his friends. He had been rejected very emphatically when he tried to enlist in the air patrol. The Interplanetary Governments had decided flatly that he was needed too much as a scientist to go as a pilot of a small ship.

	And over all the worlds of the Solar System the great construction plants were humming with activity. The great shops were turning out the new machines at top speed, and getting their fuel from the wrecks of the great Invaders' ships. Each machine needed only a little, however, for the energy content was so immense. And those ships had been very big.

-

	ALREADY there was a fleet of the little ships out there in space, and with every passing hour other ships left for the patrol, always adding to the fighting force that was to engage the attacking force deep in space, where no stray ships might filter through to destroy the cities of Earth or Venus. The plants were now turning out ships at such a high rate that the training of their operators was the most serious problem, and one that had been finally solved by a very abbreviated training course in the actual manipulation of the controls on the home planet, and subsequent training as the squadrons raced on their courses away from Earth. The beams used were molecular motion beams, modified however, so that they did not affect the molecules, and their presence was detected by the ionization they would produce in the atmosphere within the ship. A small electroscope was kept charged. The ray would discharge this and the men would then signal the "enemy" that a hit had been scored. In this way actual spacial warfare was carried on in practice. The training was far more valuable than any number of hours of terrestrial training, for here no ionization would serve to show the path of the rays.

	It was soon decided that there must be another service besides that of the ordinary ships. One plant was devoted to making huge interstellar liners. These ships were made nearly a quarter of a mile long, and while still diminutive in comparison to the giant Nigrian ships, they were still decidedly large. But twelve of these could be completed within the next month, it was found, and one of these must be used as an officers' headquarters ship. It was quickly recognized that the officers must be within a few hundred thousand miles of the actual engagements, for light traveled 186,000 miles a second, and they must very frequently make decisions in less than a half minute. If a message were to be sent to Earth and returned, as long as two hours for each direction was required.

	The ship must not be brought too near the front lest the officers be endangered and the entire engagement lost for want of the organizing central headquarters. The final solution had been the huge central control ship.

	The other large vessels were to be used to carry food and supplies. They were not to enter the engagement, for their huge size would make them as vulnerable to the tiny darting mites of space as the Nigrian ships had been to the Interplanetary Patrol. The little ships could not conveniently stock for more than a week of engagement, then drop back to these warehouses of space, and go forward again for action.

	Throughout the long wait the officers of the Solarian forces organized their forces to the limit of their ability, planning each move of their attack. Space had been marked off into a great three-dimensional map, and each ship carried a small replica, the planets moving as they did in their orbits. The space between the planets was divided off into definite points in a series of Cartesian co-ordinates, the sun being the origin, and the plane of the elliptic being the X-Y plane.

	The OX line was taken pointing toward one of the brightest of the fixed stars that was in the plane of the elliptic. The entire solar system was thus marked off as had been the planets long ages before, into a system of three dimensional latitude and longitude. This was imperative, in order to assure the easy location of the point of first attack, and to permit the entire fleet to come into position there. A scattered guard was to remain free, to avoid any. false attacks and a later attack from a point millions of miles distant. Earth and Venus were each equipped with gigantic ray projectors, mighty ray guns that could destroy anything, even a body as large as the moon, at a distance of ten thousand miles. Still, a ship might get through, and with the death ray—what fearful toll might be exacted from a vast city such as Chicago—with its thirty millions! Or Karos, on Venus, with its fifteen and a half millions?

	The tension became greater and greater as, with each' passing day, the men grew to expect the call from the far-flung guard. The main bulk of the fleet had been concentrated in the center of their great spherical shell of ships. They could only wait—and watch—and prepare! Hundreds of miles apart, yet near enough so that no ship of any size could pass them undetected, and behind there were ships with delicate apparatus that would detect any foreign body of any size whatever anywhere within a hundred thousand miles of them. But these ships could not be successfully operated when near each other, so over all space they reached, scattered about 75,000 miles apart.

	The Solar System was prepared to repel boarders from the vast sea of Space!

* * *

	TAJ LAMOR gazed down at the great place below him. In it there was close packed a great mass of ships, a concourse of Titans of Space, great space ships, ships that were soon to set out to win not a nation, not even a world, but to conquer a system, and to win for their owners a vast new sun, a sun that would light them, and heat them for long ages to come.

	He gazed down at the vast metal hulls glistening softly in the dull light of far-off stars, and artificial lighting system. From the distance came to him the tapping and the humming of the working machines below as they strove to put to the great ships the last touches.

	He raised his eyes to gaze at the far-off horizon, where a great yellow star flamed brilliantly against the black velvet of space, for their atmosphere was too thin to color the sky. Thoughtfully he gazed at the flaming yellow point. He had much to consider now. They had met a new race, a race of barbarians in some ways, yet they had not forgotten the lessons they had learned; they were not decadent. Between his aeon-old people and their new home stood this force of strange men, a race so young that its age could readily be counted in millenniums, but withal a strong, intelligent race. And to a race that had known no war for so many sons, it was an unthinkable thing that they must kill other living intelligent beings in order that they might live. They had no need of moving, some men had argued, they might stay where they were forever, and never find any need for leaving their planet. Their worlds would never change now. What reason had they to kill off this other race? These were the decadent sons of a mighty race speaking, and Taj Lamor had grown to hate that voice. But there were other men, men who had gone to that other world, men who had seen vast oceans of sparkling, clear water, showering from their ruffled surfaces the brilliant light of a great, hot sun, and they had seen towering masses of mountains that reached high into the blue sky of a natural atmosphere, their mighty flanks clothed with a lush-green growth; natural plants in abundance!

	Their eyes had looked down on the sparkling beauty of that sapphire jewel of liquid in its wondrous setting of green, and the blue of air behind.

	And best of all, they had fought and seen action, such as no member of their race had known in untold ages. They knew Adventure and Excitement, and they had learned things that no member of their ancient race had known for long æons. They had learned the meaning of advancement and change. They had a new ardor, a new strength, a new emotion to drive their arguments across, and those who would have held them back became enthusiasts themselves. Enthusiasm may be contagious, but the spirit of their decadence was rapidly failing before this new urge. Here was their last chance and they must take it; they would!

	They had lost many men in that battle on the strange world, but their race was intelligent; they learned quickly; the small ships had been very hard targets, while their big ships were too easy to strike. They must have small ships, yet they must have large ships for cargo, and for the high speed driving apparatus. The small ships were not able to accelerate to the terrific speed needed. Once their velocity had been brought up to the desired value, it was easy to maintain it with the infinitely small friction of space as the only retarding force; one atom per cubic inch was all they must meet. This would not hold them up, but the great amount of fuel and the power equipment needed to accelerate to the desired speed could not be packed into the small ship. Into the vast holds of the huge ships the small ships were packed, long shining rows of little metal ships. Tiny they were, but they could dart, and twist and turn as swiftly as could the ships they had met on that other world—tiny ships that darted about with incredible suddenness, a target that seemed impossible to hit. These ships would be, a match for those flashing motes, the ships of the Yellow Sun. Now it might be that their great transport and battle ships could settle down to those worlds and arrange them for their own people!

	And they had discovered new weapons, too. One of their mightiest was a new apparatus, one that had been forgotten for countless ages. A model of it was in existence in some forgotten museum on a deserted planet, and with it long forgotten tomes that told of its principles, and of its consequences. Invisibility was now at their command. It was an ancient weapon, but might be exceedingly effective!

	And one other. They had developed a new thing! They had not learned of it in books, it was their invention! They did not doubt that there were other machines like it told of in their museums, but the idea was original to them. It was a beam of electrical oscillatory waves, a beam of what we would call radio waves, projected with thousands of horsepower of energy, and it would be absorbed by any conductor. They could melt a ship with this!

	And thus that great courtyard had been filled with Giants of Space! And in each of these thousand great warships there nestled three thousand tiny one-man ships. A thousand five hundred miles the great metal bulks alone would stretch, and with them would go a great swarm of tiny stinging ships, like some horde of stinging wasps swarming about their nest.

	Here was a sight to inspire any race!

	Taj Lamor watched as the last of the working machines dragged its slow way out of the great ships. They were finished! The men were already in them, waiting to start, and now there was an enthusiasm and an activity that had not been before; now the men were anxious to get that long journey completed and to be there, in that other system!

	Taj Lamor entered his little special car and shot swiftly down to the giant bulks. Now he was stepping out of his little car, and walking over to the tube transite, ready for the trip to the nose of the giant ship. Behind him other men were quickly moving his little car to a locked cradle berth beside long rows of similar cars.

	A quarter of an hour later the people who were to remain here on this planet saw the first of the monsters of the space rise slowly from the ground and leap swiftly forward, then, one every ten seconds, the others leapt in swift pursuit, rushing swiftly across half a world to the giant space lock that would let them out into the void. In a long, swift column of sweeping ships they rushed on. Then one at a time they passed out into the mighty sea of space. Pirates of Space! From one system, careening on its way through the void, they were sweeping out to another system, to take it, and overrun it with their people! In space they quickly formed and set out.

	As by magic, far to the left of their flight, there suddenly appeared a similar flight of giant ships, and then, to the right, and above, another seemed to leap out of nothingness as the ships of the other planets came into sight. Quickly they formed a giant cone about their leader's ship, a protecting, and yet a powerfully offensive formation.

	Day after day they sped on through the darkness of the void. Then, as the yellow star flamed brighter and brighter before them, they slowed their ships till the small ships could safely be released into space.

	Like a swarm of gnats flying about giant eagles of space the little ships circled the mighty masses of the parent ships. So huge were they, that in the combined masses of the thousand ships from each of the four planets, there rested sufficient gravitational attraction to force the little ships to take orbits about them. At a hundred thousand miles about them revolved a slow turning sphere of tiny ships, scarcely visible to the men aboard the giant liners, but slowly, steadily turning. The huge ships themselves had to use some force to overcome the attraction of one ship on the other, and a slight push was used, which made it far easier to maintain their formation than would the circling of the ships.

-

	IT was well beyond the orbit of Neptune that they met the first of the Solarian fleet. The tension that had been in both fleets throughout the preceding days was suddenly snapped, and like great machines set into sudden motion, or huge boulders, balanced, given the last push that sends them spinning with destructive violence down the slope, the two great fleets went into action.

	It was only a little scout that they met at first, a little ten-man cruiser, but waiting only to receive a reply from headquarters after it had wirelessed the message of their attack, it was sent into action. Some of the generals wanted to wait and try to get the entire fleet up as a surprise attack, but it was decided that it was more important to know if the Invaders had any new weapons.

	The Nigrians had no warning, for a ten-man cruiser was invisible to them, though the terrific bulk of their ships stood out plainly, lighted by a blazing sun. No need here to make the sun stand still while the battle was finished! There was no change out here in all time! The first intimation of attack that the Nigrians had was the sudden splitting and destruction of the leading ship. Then, before they could realize what was happening, thirty-five other destructive molecular motion beams were tearing through space to meet them! The little ten-man cruiser and its flight of one-man ships was in action! Twenty-one great ships crumpled and burst noiselessly in the void, their gases belching out into space in a great shining halo of light as the sun's light struck it.

	Unable to see their tiny enemies, who now were striking as swiftly, as desperately as possible, knowing that death was practically certain, hoping only to destroy a more than equal number of the giants, they played their beams of death about them, taking care to miss their own ships as much as possible—still.

	Another ship silently crumpled and suddenly one ship right in the line of the flight was brought to a sudden halt as all its molecules were reversed. The ships behind it, unable to stop so suddenly, piled up on it in chaotic wreckage! A vast halo of shining gas spread out fifty thousand miles about, blinding further the other ships, for the radiance about them made it impossible to see their tiny enemies.

	Now other of the Solarian ships were coming swiftly to the attack. Suddenly a combination of three of the ten-man cruisers stopped another of the great ships instantaneously. There was another soundless crash, and the giant mass of wreckage that heaped suddenly up glowed dully red from the energy of impact.

	But now the little ships of the Invaders got into action. They had been delayed by the desperate attempts of the big ships to wipe out their enemies with the death rays, and they could not cover the great distances without some delay.

	When a battle spreads itself out through a ten-thousand mile cube of space—through a thousand billion cubic miles of space—it is impossible to cover it instantaneously with any machine.

	Already nearly a hundred and fifty of the giant liners of space had gone into making that colossal junk pile here in space They must protect them! And it was that flight of small ships that did protect them. Many of the Solarians went down to death under their rays. The death rays were exceedingly effective, but the heat rays were not able to get quite as long a range, and they were easily detected by the invisibility locaters, which meant sure death, for a molecular motion ray would be reaching over there very quickly once they had been located.

	The main fleet of the Solar System was already on its way, and every moment was drawing nearer to this running battle, for the great ships of the Nigrians had, although they were entering the system cautiously, been going at a very high speed, as we measure interplanetary speeds. The entire battle had been a running encounter between the two forces. The Solarian force, invisible because of its small size, was certainly getting the best of the bargain so far, but now that the odds were changing, that the small ships had come into the encounter, engaging them at close range, they were not having so easy a time of it.

	It would be many hours before the full strength of the Solarian fleet could be brought to bear on the enemy. They were not able to retire and await their arrival, for they must delay the Nigrian fleet. If even one of those great ships should safely reach the two planets behind them—!

	But within a half hour of the original signal, the Rocket Squad had thrown itself into the battle with a fervor and abandon that has given that famous division a name that will last forever.

	The small ships of the Nigrians were beginning to take a terrific toll in the thin ranks of the Solarians. The coming of the Rocket Squad had been welcomed indeed! They were able to maneuver as quickly as the enemy; the little ships, all one-man ships, were harder to spot than the Solarian ten and twenty-man ships. The Solarian one-man ships were even smaller than the Nigrian one-man ships, and some of these did a tremendous amount of damage. The heat ray was, even when working at full capacity, quite ineffective against the ten-man ships, when produced by the small mechanism of the Nigrian one-man ships, but the great rays from the monster interstellar liners were fatal. The little one-man ships could not heat a ten-man ship beyond the capacity of their molecular motion cooling plant. By absorbing the heat and turning it into motion, they literally made the enemy supply them with their power directly. They were already supplying all the power anyway, but now they even conserved this supply!

	But the one-man Solarian ships had a truly deadly plan as far as the Nigrians were concerned. The plan was officially frowned upon, for it was out and out suicide. The small ships were directed at one of the monster machines, all the power units on full force, then the man jumped from his ship, clothed in an altitude suit. Death rays could not stop it, and with the momentum gained, they could not make it less deadly with their heat rays, for, molten, it was still a deadly thing. A projectile weighing twenty-two tons, moving a hundred miles a second, is enough to destroy anything man can lift off a planet! Their very speed made it impossible to dodge them, and they usually found their mark. The fusion would destroy a molecular motion apparatus before it came within range, this was certain. And sometimes the pilot was picked up!

	The Solarians began to wonder why it was the Nigrian fleet was decreasing so rapidly—certainly they had not caused all that damage! Then suddenly they found the answer—when one of their ships—then another—and another fell victim to a pale red ray that showed up like a ghostly pillar of luminosity coming from nowhere and going nowhere! The answer was easy—the ships were becoming invisible. The invisibility detectors were being overloaded now, and the hunt was hard, while the Nigrians were slipping past them, and at the same time many of them were silently destroying their ships! The molecular motion rays were quite effective on an invisible ship—once it had been found. They were destroying the Nigrians quite as rapidly as they were being destroyed, but the great trouble was that the Nigrians were escaping them! The luminous paint bombs became effective now. All enemy ships were shot at with these missiles, and invisibility forestalled. In space, bullets go on forever.

-

	BUT the scouts had done their duty now, for, as the watchers in the rear windows cheered, they saw the dark bulk of the main fleet coming near, a scarcely visible cloud of tiny, darting metal ships. The battle so far had been a preliminary engagement of the scouts! Now came the main engagement. The huge ships of the Nigrians were forced to stop their attack, and releasing the last of the small ships, retire to a distance, protected by the screen of small ships, for they were helpless against these swift-moving ones. The small ships had all been equipped with invisibility apparatus, but now that there were plenty of Solarian ships, they were more conspicuous when invisible than when visible, for the radio detector apparatus would pick them out at once, and all that was necessary was to send a beam of molecular motion controlling vibrations down the radio beam. The Nigrians soon learned that this policy was deadly and stopped using their invisibility. The Solarians also stopped shooting their luminous outlets, for any ship, so struck, was certain to be destroyed, and if the outlets didn't hit a foe they kept on going till they did hit something! The entire Nigrian fleet was beginning to feel desperate now, for they were cornered in the most undesirable position possible; they were outside the Solarian fleet, and their ships were lighted by the glare of the sun, while the Solarian ships were all in such a position that the enemy could see only the "night" side of them—the shadowed side—and, as there was no air here to diffuse the light, they were exceedingly hard to see. Into the bargain, the radium paint was making life a brief and flitting thing! The little ships would dart suddenly forward at three or four hundred miles a second, hoping to break through the Solarian fleet, but still the Solarian beams traveled at the ultimate speed, the speed of light, and the racing ships would suddenly crumple, and a halo of glowing gas would surround them as their atmosphere escaped. The Nigrians were paying a terrific toll in this first engagement! They could not spread their death rays to cover the entire Solarian fleet, for they lacked the necessary power, and their heat rays were likewise useless here. The great ships behind could not use their rays effectively, for their small ships must be between them and their adversary.

	At last the Solarian generals tried a ruse, a ruse they hoped would work on these people, but they who had never before had to plan a war in space, were not sure that these people had not had experience in that art. The conditions of spatial warfare are far different from anything else imaginable. Here there is constant night and yet constant day. The position makes all the difference in the world. Or should one say in the universe? With the sun at their backs, the Solarians had a tremendous advantage. There were a thousand new things to consider, and not the least of these was the fact that there was perfect mobility in three dimensions. Never before had these conditions alone prevailed. Even an airplane is limited to about twenty miles range in the vertical plane, but here there were no limits whatsoever. All formations must be both defensive and offensive in all three dimensions. It required quick and accurate thinking! It was indeed fortunate for them that their enemy was even less skilled than they.

	But the Solarians had the advantage of thousands of years of planetary, warfare to rely on. This stood them in good stead now and a new ruse was on trial.

	The Nigrians were rallying rapidly now. To their surprise, the forces of the Solarians were dwindling rapidly, and no matter how desperately this remnant fought, they could not hold back the entire force of the Nigrian small ships altogether. At last it was obvious that the small ships could completely engage the Solarian ships!

	Quickly the giant ships behind formed a great dense cone of attack, and, at a given signal, the small ships cleared a hole for them through the great disc-shaped shield of the Solarian forces. And with all their rays playing straight ahead, the giant machines plunged through the disc of ships at close to 400 miles a second. They had broken through the Solarian defense, and were on their way to the unprotected planets!

	The Solarian ships had at once closed the gap behind them, and nearly twenty of the giant ships had crumpled into wreckage as a Solarian beam found it, but for the most part the remnant of the Solarian forces were far too busy with the small ships to attack the large ones! Now, as the monster engines of destruction raced on toward the planets still close to two billion miles away, they knew that, far behind them, their small ships were engaging the Solarians. Nearly all of their small ships were back there now, but all of the Solarians were held in check! They were free to attack!

	Then, from nowhere, came the terrific attack. Nearly five thousand twenty-man ships of Earth and Venus, invisible in the dark of space, suddenly leaped into life as the giant ships passed by! Their crushing destroying rays playing over the nigh-helpless bulks, the huge ships were crumbling into colossal junk heaps here in space; now, the last of their small guard of small ships stripped from them, they fell easy prey to the mass of darting ships. Faster than they could keep count, their mighty warships of space were crumbling under this sudden attack! The ruse had worked perfectly! Nearly all the ten and one-man ships had been left back there in the original disc, while all the twenty-man ships and a few hundred each of the ten and one-man ships dropped back to form a great ring twenty thousand miles further back. The Nigrian small ships had been stripped from their giant parents by the disc, and as the great ships plowed their way through, unprotected now, they had fallen easy victims to the ring formation behind!

	There was but one thing to do now. They were defeated. They must return to their far off black star and leave these people in possession of their worlds. Their great force was nearly wiped out, only the small ships remained, and these could not be completely carried in their great ships. There were too few now. They fell back swiftly, passing again through the disc, losing thirty more ships here, as the small ships formed a sphere of darting metal about them, then raced swiftly away from this great fleet of enemies. The Solarians, however, did not seem content. Their ships were forming in a giant hollow cylinder and, as the sphere of the Nigrians retreated, their rays playing behind them, the cylinder moved forward till it surrounded them, and they were racing together toward that far distant sun. The Solar end of the cylinder was closed now, closed by a group of huge ships that rivaled their own mile and a half long warships in size. The Nigrians had stopped using their rays now, and the Solarians followed them in armed neutrality, not molesting so long as they were not molested. The trip was slowed, for not all the little ships could be carried, and all must go at the pace of the slowest.

	Many days this strange flight lasted, till at last the great yellow star, our sun, had faded in the distance and was only a tiny glowing pinpoint in the far, far distance. Then, suddenly visible out of the darkness, a strange, dark world loomed ahead, and their captive ships settled swiftly toward it. Through the airlocks the great ships settled into their world. No action was taken so long as the Solarian ships were not menaced, but for eight long months these darting shapes hung above the four circling worlds of Nigra, the Black Star.

	Then at last the astronomers of Earth and Venus sent through the billions of miles of ether their message of safety. The guard could leave, and the sun they guarded would soon be too far from Earth and Venus to make any attack possible. The suns had passed, never again to meet!

	Neptune's orbit they had passed many many billions of miles away, for now the young planet circled a sun so old it was dark—black! It had been captured by Nigra!

-

	IT was a different system the men of the Solar System returned to. There were now nine planets, two new ones that Sun had captured from Nigra, in return for Neptune, and all the planets had shifted a bit in their orbits. Most of the major planets had been on the far side of the sun, far too distant to be affected by the gravity of Nigra to any permanent extent Only Neptune, Earth and Venus had been on the near side. Had they been directly in line with the wandering star they would have been pulled out from the sun by the attraction, but, like a stretched spring, the gravitation of the great mass of matter that is our sun would have pulled them right back into their old orbits when the strange force had passed on. In order to change the orbits of the planets they must either be speeded up in, their path or slowed down, or the mass of the sun must be decreased. Changing the mass of the earth would not affect its orbit to any practical degree, the mass of the earth being too slight in comparison to that of the sun to greatly alter the gravitational pull-centrifugal force ratio. However, increasing the speed in its orbit will increase the centrifugal force, without increasing the gravitational pull, and consequently the earth will fall away from the sun. If the speed be decreased, the force that keeps us from the sun is decreased and we draw nearer.

	When the Black Star passed the Sun, Earth had been rounding the sun in its orbit in such a curve that it was going almost directly away from the Black Star. The gravitational pull of the distant Star had slowed its orbital motion considerably, and as the giant brake of gravitation fell on it, the speed dropped, and Earth promptly drew nearer the sun, thus acquiring more energy, for it was a pure mechanical fall. This process had repeated itself as long as the star had been near, the iltimate result being that, when the Star had passed, Earth was eleven and a quarter million miles nearer the Sun, though the Black Star had tried to pull it away!

	The exact reverse had been true of Venus. Though on the same side of the Sun as the Black Sun, it had just been entering that position, and so was moving directly toward the Black Star. Here were the conditions that permitted the planet to fall toward Nigra, gaining speed as it did so. It therefore took an orbit which had a higher potential, further from the Sun. It moved nearly eight millions of miles from the Sun.

	What the effect will be on the planets, we cannot say yet. The effect is certainly not very great, though somewhat greater warmth is felt on Earth, and a bit less on Venus. However, the elliptic of Earth's orbit gave us the effect of several millions of miles approach and retardation from the sun each year, and the result was not tremendous. The effects will, however, be exceedingly interesting.

	And the Solar System has just passed through an experience which was probably unique in all the history of the mighty Nebula of which our Sun is an infinitesimal part. The chances that one star, surrounded by a system of planets, should pass within a hundred billion miles of another star, similarly accompanied, was one in billions of billions. That both systems should have been inhabited by intelligent races—

	It is easy to understand why the scientists could not believe Arcot's theory of attack from another sun until they had actually seen those other worlds!

	In that war of two solar systems we learned much and lost much, too, perhaps. Yet, in all, perhaps we gained, for those two planets will mean tremendous things to us. Already the scientists are at work on the vast museums and ancient laboratories that there were on them and every day new things are being discovered. We lost many men, but we have saved our worlds, and we have learned the secret of the energy of matter from them, the secret of that new light metal, and we have but scratched the surface of a science that is at least a thousand million years old!

* * *

	TAJ LAMOR looked out across the void of space toward a distant point of yellow light. Far in the distance it glowed, and every second saw it a hundred miles further from-him. They had lost their struggle for life and a new sun, he had thought, when he turned back, defeated, from that distant sun, but time had brought new hope.

	They had lost many men in that struggle, and their dwindling resources had been strained to the limit, but now there was hope, for a new spirit had been born in their race. They had fought, and lost, but they had gained a spirit of adventure that had been dormant for millions of years!

	Below him, in the great dim mass that was their city, he knew that many laboratories were now in full swing of active work. Things were being discovered, and rediscovered. New uses were being found for old things, and their daily life was changing. It was again a new race, rejuvenated by a change!

	As the great sea of yellow fire that was that strange sun had faded to a point behind their fleeing ships, Taj Lamor had felt that his race was doomed to die, as their dead planets circled a dead sun, their last chance was forever lost. But now he had hope, for new ideas had come to them, and new methods of doing things.

	Taj Lamor shifted his gaze to a blazing point of light, where a titanic sea of flame was burning with a brilliance and power that, despite the greater distance, made the remote yellow sun seem pale and dim. The blue-white glow told of a monster star, and a star that was far brighter than the sun they had left. It was the brightest star in their heavens, and it is the brightest in ours. We call it Sirius, but on their ancient star charts it was listed as a red giant, named Tongsil-239-e, which meant it was of the fifth magnitude and very distant. But in the long ages that had passed since that classification was made it had become a mighty sun; it was a star in its prime.

	How were they to reach it! It was eight and a half light years away!

	Their search for the force that would swing a world in its orbit had at last been successful. It was too late now to aid them in their fight for the yellow sun, but they might yet use it—they might tear their planets from their orbits, and drive them as free bodies across the void of space. Long ages it would take to make this trip, but they need not worry on that score. Long ages had already passed as their dark planet swung through the void, what difference if they were accompanied by a dead star? 

	True, the star they were to go toward was a double star; their planet could not find orbits about it, but they might remedy that—they could hurl the one half of the star into the other, if they thought that best, or they might tear it completely free and make the star a single star. 

	But they would escape this dead sun.

The End

Islands of Space
Arcot, Morey and Wade 02
Amazing Stories Quarterly – Spring 1931
(missing pages 220 & 226 from pulp)

WHEREAS atomic power is not yet a thing of actuality, but rather a much hoped for future realization, our young author goes beyond this still necessarily limited power. Says Mr. Campbell, there is tremendous power in the cosmos. Why limit ourselves to the mere atom as a source of power? But even his imagination, accustomed as it is to conquering vast space—even beyond our galaxy, seems somewhat appalled at the prospect of some day learning the secret of cosmic power.

Arcot, Morey, their respective fathers, and Wade are characters well known to a good many of our readers—and well liked. But that is the only relationship between "Islands of Space" and Mr. Campbell's previous stories. You cannot afford to miss this novel-length classic of science fiction. It is the best story by this author that has been published thus far.

-

	THREE young men sat in animated conversation around a table piled high with sheets of graphs, sketches of mathematical functions, and books of tensor formulae. Beside the table stood a compact Munson-Bradley integraph with seventeen graph positions, to which they frequently referred their work, checking the equations that they had already derived. These results seemed to surprise even this trio, a group which had introduced more innovations than any three men in the system's history.

	Suddenly the low hum of the annunciator interrupted their conversation.

	"That's Fuller," said one, rising and walking to the televisophone. He snapped the switch into position, and the grey screen at once misted with, color, then a sharp picture leaped out on its dull surface. "Arcot speaking."

	"Dr. Arcot," replied the man whose face was imaged in the screen, "Mr. Fuller is here, and though I know you want to see him, standing orders say I must call you up. It's all right, is it not?"

	"Yes—send him up. And now remember, I am not in to anyone but Dad, Mr. Morey senior, or the Interplanetary Chairman, and don't call if they come—, send 'em up, I'm not answering. You detectives are sometimes too efficient," smiled Arcot. "Don't call me up for the next ten hours."

	"I'll see to it, Dr. Arcot," smiled the image in the disc. "You won't be bothered, I promise."

	There was a dull click in the small loudspeaker as the circuit was broken, and the disc faded. There was a mounting hum coming from the corridor now, as the high-speed elevator completed its vertical journey of seventy-four stories. Arcot walked leisurely to the door, and as Fuller's light step sounded on the artificial rubber floor, he opened the door.

	"Hello, Fuller—what happened to you? Did you wait to come by airplane or some equally slow method? It took you a full hour to get here from Chicago. What was the matter?"

	"Hello, Arcot—hello, fellows. Sorry I kept your royal highnesses waiting so long, but just as an aside I might mention that I think it would do you a lot of good to wait once in a while," he grinned as he stepped into the room. "You fellows here don't know what it is to work, and have a real job. They give you a couple million a year to putter around in a laboratory, just do any fool thing you can think of, and then, because every now and then you stub your nose on some gadget they can use, they increase your pay another million or so, while hard-working, normal citizens of this decadent world labor for a few thousand a year. They call you a scientist, and if you want something, they spend the resources of two worlds helping you get it, all the officials on Earth and Venus dig around trying to find it—and apologize if they don't get it inside of twenty-four hours. I think it would do you a lot of good to wait once in a while." With an expression of the utmost dolor he went over to a seat by the table, looking curiously at the work that the others had done.

	Arcot and Wade were smiling, while Morey, with an expression of even greater sorrow, was looking out of the window where hundreds of graceful, slim ships floated in the air, in apparent utter defiance of all the laws of gravity.

	"Yes," he said, "and look at the millions of machines that have come from that one idea of his. The idea, mind you, that I worked out, that I brought into mathematical form, into a form that made it calculable. Five years—and the census of those things is already 24,000,000 on Earth, and 19,000,000 on Venus. And that doesn't include passenger liners, freighters, or interplanetary ships, which operate on a slightly different idea, but there again I worked out the mathematics. Yet he is called 'Earth's most brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am 'his mathematical assistant'." He shook his head solemnly. It was a hard world.

	"If," said Wade, looking at the ceiling, "you would make your quotations more accurate, they would be more trustworthy. The news said that Arcot was the 'system's most brilliant physicist', and that you were his 'brilliant mathematical assistant, who showed the greatest genius in developing the mathematics of Arcot's new theory'." Wade turned his attention to a pipe he had been filling.

	As a matter of fact he might have criticized some of Fuller's statistics, also, for he had been a bit wrong in saying Arcot received millions each year. Arcot got whatever sum he needed. He had only to ask for it. His discoveries had been of such immense value that no salary could have adequately recompensed him. But he seldom asked for more than seven or eight thousands a year, while Fuller drew a regular salary which amounted to over three times the highest of these amounts.

-

	FIVE years ago Arcot had discovered the secret of controlling the energies of heat. For several centuries it had been known that heat was nothing but a motion of the molecules of the gas, liquid or solid under discussion, the greater the temperature, the greater the motion. Heat was a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules. In every heated substance, the molecules were flying about, each possessed of considerable energy, and but for their haphazard direction, they would have caused rapid motion of the mass they made up. Every molecule was moving, bouncing off another molecule in perfect random motion, and the motion of one was exactly countered by the motion of another somewhere else in the mass, and so there was no motion of the mass as a whole.

	For many years the laboratories of the whole world had been trying to discover the secret of releasing the energy of matter. There were vast stores of energy in material substance, and they had been attempting to make this energy available. Arcot had pointed out that there was already a place within easy reach where this process was being carried out on a scale that we could never hope, nor wish, to equal. The sun was releasing the energy of more than three million tons of matter every second, between 1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and 2,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs each second. Earth was receiving a relatively minute portion of this vast energy, as heat. We would have far more than enough energy if we could only tap this vast store, caught and stored by the Earth as the heat of water, of the air, of the soil. It was being stored as the molecular motion of the air, water and rocks as kinetic energy of individual molecules.

	Arcot had realized this dream of tapping the earth's molecular energy; he had discovered a peculiar oscillatory, electro-static field which influenced the molecules, so that their motions ceased to be random, but became concentrated to one direction. He turned the molecular motion, due to the heat of the air, into actual mechanical motion.

	Imagine a bar of metal, its molecules flying about at miles a second in random motion, suddenly so influenced. At once the molecules are all moving in the same direction, so the whole bar is moving at terrific speed. If the bar should be attached to a heavy car, it would start the car moving a bit, but the energy is soon exhausted, and the car is moving slowly, but the molecules of the bar are no longer moving—and motionless molecules have a very definite physical significance—they mean a temperature of absolute zero, nearly three hundred degrees below the temperature of the air. At once the bar absorbs heat from the air, and the molecules have a new "polarized" motion, as we may call it, which is again expended in moving the car—and more heat is absorbed. The process repeats itself with inconceivable rapidity, and inside of an immeasurably short time the machine is moving, and gaining speed with a constant acceleration, which has no limit save the speed of light, for the bar, to be warm, must have a random velocity of several miles a second. Ordered velocity in a line is not heat, otherwise we would all be boiling with our heat of motion as the Earth swings in its orbit.

	Here then was a source of power, the heat energy of the air, that was inexhaustible, and further, was absolutely free. Into the bargain, this gave a system which offered perfect traction in the air, and was as effective vertically, as horizontally in all directions. The old wings, rudders, and stabilizers went the way of fuel-burning engines and steamships. The new ship of the air was a slim, graceful torpedo-shaped machine, perfectly streamlined, with the copper-fins of the power-units projecting from its sides to gather the heat of the air. The actual power-units consisted of copper tanks filled with helium under very great pressure, equipped with large copper fins to gather the air's heat. These ships were capable of 6,000 miles an hour easily.

	But Arcot had seen that his machine would operate as readily in space as in the atmosphere, provided only that enough heat could be found. The source of heat was the only deterring factor. They had built the Solorite, the first interplanetary ship, along the lines suggested by their research, and in it they had made the trip to Venus. There they found a friendly race of rational beings, and commerce between the two planets had developed.

	Many years might have elapsed before the feeling of distrust for a strange race wore off on both sides, had there not come an external force that drove both races back to the same wall, there to fight shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy of the system, not a cruel, heartless race of inimical (beings that had come from space, but a desperate race, driven by the frigid cold of space to seek a warm home, some planet circling our younger sun. Desperately they had fought for it, and we had fought back, but it was again Arcot who gave us the final weapon that saved us. The one thing we lacked was energy. We had no means of getting power enough in space to maneuver and defeat the swift, slim ships of the people of the Black Star.

	A few of their ships we brought down, when they incautiously entered our atmosphere where our fleet was more than a match for them, for the same force that drove our machines was the weapon that had defeated the titanic ships of Negra. Arcot had used the force field that produced the directed motion of the molecules as a weapon, he had projected it, and thus was able to control the motion of molecules at a distance. A ship does not work well when half of its molecules suddenly organize their motion and go left, while the rest remain where they are. In that case the ship parts company with itself so to speak, and wreckage is not an effective weapon. The Negrian ships were quickly destroyed, when we could come within striking distance of them, but the trouble we encountered in doing this was due to our lack of power.

	The wrecked ships of the Negrians themselves at last furnished us with the solution. They had windows constructed of a curious, artificial element, a material which did not exist in nature. It was made not of electricity, as are the natural elements, but of light. Light had long been known to consist of corpuscles of energy, photons, and each photon, as energy, necessarily had mass. The masses of these photons attracted each other gravitationally, and when brought sufficiently close together, they actually bound each other. This solid matter resulting from bound light-energy had many unique properties. It was perfectly transparent for one thing, and it was a perfect insulator. The transparency was what had primarily interested the Negrians, when they used it for windows, but it was, in addition, stronger, tougher, harder and more durable than any material that exists in the natural universe. Being made of light, it was not fusible, nor volatile. Men of Earth had soon learned the secret of its construction, and—which was more important to them—of its destruction. It was exceedingly dense, its specific gravity was over 100, nearly five times as heavy as any substance previously known to man. The energy stored thus in the form of bound light, they had released, and used for heating the molecular motion power-units. At once the Terrestrian ships were as flexible and as fast as the Negrian ships.

-

	THE battle that followed had decided the fate of two systems, and there in the cold, vacuous depths, of space, far from the warmth of the life-giving sun, hundreds of Earth's and Venus' bravest men had died swiftly and painlessly as the strange ray of death of the Negrians touched them, negatively catalyzing the chemical reactions of their bodies, causing instantaneous death.

	We had lost much in that great struggle out there in space, far out beyond where Saturn circles, but much more had been gained. When the Black Star had passed it left behind two planets, and with it went Neptune, and Earth had actually moved closer to Venus, as their races had moved in spirit. Deserted planets the Star had left, but they still held the vast relics of an orderly retreating civilization.

	From these relics, and from our own discoveries, we had much increased our knowledge by that war.

	But more important, Venus and Earth were now no longer neighboring planets, but members of the solar system. It was a closer, more trusting friendship.

	All men of the system had honored Arcot and his four friends as the true saviors of Mankind in that struggle, for it was their weapons that had made possible the defense. Hence, as Fuller had said, Arcot could, by merely asking for it, get anything the system had in its resources, from the lead-filled hills of Mars, to the icy plains of far Uranus, or the lux-roofed worlds that Sol had captured as the Black Star swung close in its age-long flight through space. However, he had neglected to mention that the name Fuller carried nearly as much weight as did Arcot's own.

-

	"WELL, forgetting his deplorable memory, Wade, let's find out why it was Arcot called a hardworking man away from his drafting table to come to this play room of yours. What have you got up your sleeve this time?" asked Fuller. His interest in the papers showed plainly, as he slowly reached toward them and moved them about. He could make nothing of them, however.

	"Oh," said Arcot, leaning back comfortably in his chair, "we are sorry you are so busy—we were thinking of going out to see what Antares, Betelguese, Polaris, or Sirius looked like at close range, or, if we didn't get too bored, we might run over to the giant nebula in Andromeda, or one of the others. I'm sorry you are busy—you might have helped us by designing the ship, and earned your board and weight passage. Too bad," said Arcot sadly, but with a smile in his eyes.

	"What! I thought that you have been telling me for the last five years that the reason that we can never visit the other suns in your machines is that the speed of light is too low to allow it! What has happened? Has the Lord instituted a new speed law?" asked Fuller, half serious, half joking.

	"Oh, no," said Wade, waving his pipe in a grand gesture of importance. "Arcot just decided that he didn't like that law, and made a new one himself."

	"Well," said Fuller with a puzzled air, "I could almost believe it, after some of the other 'impossible' things he's done, but considering that the speed of light is such a fundamental property of space, I can't see just how he managed!"

	"Now you've got the idea, Fuller. The speed of light, while it does act as a speed limit. Is so only because of the nature of space. It is a property of our space, not a law. It limits our speed, remember, because at that speed, due to Einstein's formula for mass increase, the mass would be infinity at that velocity."

	"Then the velocity of light is so because its velocity, 186,000 miles per second, is as much a property of space as the radius of curvature, or any of its other properties. Now, what would happen if we changed this property?" asked Arcot, looking intently at Fuller.

	"Oh," said Fuller softly, while a look of blank amazement came over his face. His racing thoughts were trying to visualize the consequences. "It would mean that the speed of light—the limiting speed of the universe, was controllable. It would mean that we would be able to go as fast, as far, and as long as we wished!" He was silent a moment, then suddenly his face clouded.

	"But Arcot—how about acceleration," he asked. "We can't reach any great velocity without accelerating for so long a time, that we would take a lifetime to make the round trip, and if we hit anything more massive than a dust grain at that speed, we would be going at so terrific a rate that we would be volatized." He looked curiously at Arcot. Then he added, "And, going faster than light, our radio meteor detectors would be useless, the beams would be going backwards when they went from behind, and would never go ahead of us so as to leave us in front!"

	"I'll have to explain my methods first, I see," smiled Arcot. He had been stuffing a pipe, and soon joined Wade in his attempts, very creditable attempts too, in laying a bluish smoke screen in the room. So far, the ventilator was overcoming their combined efforts. 

	"Fuller, did you realize that, in all the five centuries that electric currents have been known, no one has experimented with high-current densities? They just haven't done it	"

	"For the excellent reason that they couldn't," Interrupted Fuller.

	"Partly right; they only thought they couldn't. Ever since about 1900 they have been able. Their objection was that current caused heating effects in a conductor, proportional to the square of the current, multiplied by the resistance, or PR in formula. Now, the less the diameter of the conductor, the greater the resistance, so, as they made the diameter small, and the current great, the obvious necessities for high-current densities, the conductor promptly heated so rapidly that it exploded.

	"If they wanted to experiment with high-current densities, they would have to find something that had no resistance, or generate a current that wouldn't heat wires.

-

	"THE latter was impossible, and they didn't seem to think to look for the other. Now it seems utterly impossible that they didn't do it. It seems so simple, why, I can't see how they could avoid doing it! But then, perhaps, like nitroglycerine, it was discovered long before it was reported—but it blew up its discoverers. At any rate, they had a substance which they could make a perfect conductor, and indeed, did so by 1920. The substance was lead, and the method was to put it in a bath of liquid helium. They did that, and had a current circulating in a lead coil for no less than four hours; it was a closed circuit and there was no resistance, so the current simply went on flowing! It stopped at the end of four hours, for their supply of liquid helium gave out. Even then they put a current of six hundred amperes through a lead wire no heavier than a pencil-lead. They had a current density that had never been equalled. Why, oh why, didn't they continue it? The world would be two centuries further advanced now!

	"At any rate, I used what they did. I had a piece of lead wire, and put through it a current of 10,000 amperes, and of course, when the current density is of the order of 10,000,000,000 amperes per square inch, something is bound to happen. It did, and it was just what I had expected.

	"You see, of course, that, if the resistance is zero, as it was in the lead, it makes no matter what P is in the expression, PR, which is still zero if R is zero. Therefore no heat was developed, and the wire remained a perfect conductor. Just think, they had a current flowing for four hours, and at 186,000 miles per second, they did not lose any current after it had gone 186,000 miles per second for four hours, or 186,000 times 3,600 times 4, a total of—let's see—about 2,680,000,000 miles of wire by slide rule, which is almost the distance of Neptune from the sun. It may have resistance, but you could get as much current through it if it stretched from here to Uranus, as you would if it were only a foot long.

	"You see what I am driving at I could get any current density I pleased. I did. I got such a current density that things began to happen.

	"You know, of course, from the popular discussions of the light matter, lux metal, that the quanta have weight. Quanta, as energy, have mass. Planck showed that the energy of quanta could be calculated by the law E = nH where n is the frequency, and H the Planck constant. Also, it had already been known that if E is energy, M mass, and C the velocity of light then the absolute amount of energy represented by that mass is MC, and similarly, if E is energy, and so forth, then the absolute mass of that much energy is M = E/C2. That means the mass of any amount of energy in absolutely any form whatsoever. The problem can be reduced now, so that we can find the mass of a quantum, of any radiation, of frequency n, we can equate E = nH, and get MC = nH. It is obvious that the higher the frequency, the greater the mass of the quantum, What radiation has the highest frequency? The Cosmic, or Millikan rays? It has been known for many years that they had an exceedingly heavy quantum. They measured it, and computed its mass as far back as 1926 or so. They found that a quantum of cosmic rays is actually heavier than a hydrogen atom: it is more massive than the hydrogen atom. Thus we see, that a quantum of cosmic rays contains more energy than a hydrogen atom.

	"Of course, like X-rays, and light waves, they vary, but the hardest, or shortest Millikan waves are heavier than hydrogen.*( *The mass of the hydrogen atom is 1.662 X 10-24 grams, while a quantum of the Cosmic rays weighs 1.7 X 10-24. )

	"This would indicate that while the destruction of the hydrogen atom to energy, would not produce true cosmic rays of the hardest type, still they would be very similar, and certainly much harder than any X-rays. But remember, a hydrogen atom is only a proton and an electron going around together. Any proton and electron, coalescing, would produce this same type of thing. Remember, too, that both the proton and the electron are waves, and they will mutually release each other by coalescing.

	"Well, that is what happened when I caused a current of 10,000,000,000 amperes per square inch to flow through the lead wire. The electrons, driven by the. terrific urge, crashed into the protons—and the reaction took place that freed their energy as cosmic rays.

	"I had expected that and I had also expected some other things. Remember, light, with its weak quanta, make the outer electrons of an atom vibrate, but X-rays, with their more energetic quanta, cause the electrons of the inner orbits to break free. What then, would the far more energetic quanta of cosmic rays do? They are so violent that they cause the atom to fly to pieces; they actually disrupt the nuclear structure, and the atom becomes radioactive, indeed, super-radioactive. The energy of the cosmic rays is absorbed in destroying the atom. When turned on a mass of matter, the matter glows red with the heat of swiftly released atomic energy; then in a moment boils away. Nothing can stand for cosmic rays—nothing made of electricity matter.

	"I had expected this also, and I made my apparatus of lux metal and relux. Remember, we decided when we saw the Negrian ships, that they used the energy of matter, we could not find their secret but we did find that they used lux metal, and relux to work with it. Lux, a light metal, conducts light and reflects electricity, as silver, an electricity metal, reflects lights, and conducts electricity, while relux conducted electricity perfectly, and reflected light perfectly.

	"When we start a fire, we want something that won't burn to contain it. If we are going to burn matter, it may not be healthy to start the fire in material apparatus, that might catch fire, and set fire to the world. I made my apparatus of light-matter which, being of a different substance, would not be affected. It wasn't. I made my lead-in wires of relux, and, on a hunch, I made the cabinet in which I carried out the disintegration of the metal lead, out of relux. I believed that, as sulphur, in reflecting electricity does not discriminate between D.C. and low frequency A.C. or radio frequency A.C., there was no reason why relux, reflecting light, should not also reflect cosmic rays. At any rate it did.

	"My apparatus was a huge success. We liberated energy all right, and the relux reflected it about 98 per cent efficiently, but in a closed case, as in our cavity absorbers, it was absorbed by the walls, and came out as heat. And how it came out! The heat was so terrific, at that, although we could not find any traces of disintegration, of the fuel I mean, the entire apparatus was wrecked by the heat of the absorbed cosmic rays. The next time, we used a relux mirror to reflect the cosmic rays away, and across the room, where they were absorbed by a cosmic ray absorption receiver. I used rough relux, which absorbs about fifty per cent on the first bounce, and, of course, by the time it has bounced around inside the cavity receiver for a billionth of a second, it is all heat. It was lucky for us that relux doesn't melt. We used relux support, and had the thing surrounded by a second relux cabinet to make sure that no rays got loose, and set the matter about going. I knew, from the fact that the shutting off of the current stopped the disintegration, that the process was not self-supporting, so I knew that material disintegration would not take place, but atomic disintegration is, nevertheless, exceedingly dangerous. I didn't want any extra reactions.''

	"But we had plenty of excitement." Arcot smiled, in memory, as he glanced at Wade and Morey.

-

	"THE cosmic rays we released operated longer this time, for now the apparatus, as we had calculated, was able to continue in operation. The original set had operated for something of the order of a billionth of a second, I suppose. This operated for nearly a full second. Remember that that lux metal, unable to melt or volatilize, will stand no one knows how much heat—well, we came mighty near to finding out. It was almost invisible when I shut the apparatus off, and the asbestos shield slumped down molten. The heat was so great that it was radiating long X-rays and very short violets that we couldn't see, but we did feel, I had a terrific case of sunburn from the ultraviolets. The heat, as transmitted by the relux legs, melted the concrete floor into lava about their base. The temperature rose so quickly that, despite the noble efforts of the molecular motion cooling, I have some standard cooling units installed in the laboratory to keep it comfortable you know, we were driven out.

	"We left in a bit of a hurry, and came back three hours later when the temperature had dropped to about 75 degrees Centigrade. All the bottles that had contained water or any liquid less volatile than mercury, were empty—just boiled away. When we got through cleaning up the laboratory, we started in on new experiments, and we used much less power, for we had succeeded in working out a more accurate control. We had known before what limits we could use, but not how the power varies between those limits.

	"The one material that could stop the waves, was, of course, relux. Lux metal passed it like light, but the stuff would actually focus it, and we found it would also focus X-rays or any other rays we wished. Which is incidental.

	"We were working with a relux plate, reflecting the cosmic rays from the projector back into a cavity receiver, trying to find out how much energy we got from one milligram of matter. That is, trying to determine the efficiency. Morey, in the meantime, was working with a standard cavity receiver and the disintegration of light metal. I have forgotten what he was doing—he has, too, I suspect, for as he turned on his apparatus, I gave a yell, and he jumped up, shutting off his apparatus. He could see nothing then, but when it was on, the relux plate glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. It looked for all the world as though someone had done a water color of the rainbow right after the storm—then a new storm had come and remodeled the painting. The colors all ran together in weird, shifting combinations. I looked at it for a while, then started making investigations. It was the big magnet he was using. The magnetic field made the relux absorb the cosmic rays, but instead of generating heat at once, they became seats of E.M.F.

	"The result of that experiment was all the electrical power we could use. We needed that, and then some for the next step. This goes to Morey. He was fooling around with one of those adjustable Morley calculating triple integraphs, and took out one of the electric clutches, and replaced it with one of his own design. I don't yet see how it works, but it does a new stunt, and works a new kind of geometry. We use a new theory of straight lines. Euclid, you know, proved that there were 180 degrees in the angles of a triangle. He said that certain things were evident—and went ahead. Lobachefski said certain other things were evident—and proved that the sum of the angles of a triangle was anything up to 180 degrees.

	"Einstein found that the geometry of Euclid was all right here on Earth, where the curvature of space is almost zero, but when he came to consider Mercury, Euclid's geometry was all wrong. Space is curved, and there, near the terrific mass of the sun, it was so badly carved, that Euclid's planes didn't exist, and his geometry was wrong.

	"Morey has a new system, and he applied it with amazing results. We have discovered a means for giving any one of the twenty coefficients of space any value we want.

	"To do this, we are straining space out of its normal condition, and the usual condition of such strain creeps up. We have to use energy to do it, and in thus straining space, we are storing energy in it. Of course, we have stored energy as space strain for hundreds of years, the induction coil, the condenser and gravity all represent energy stored in space as a strain. The more we follow this mathematical discussion, the more it seems that all energy in the universe is but strain in space: that is, there is no matter, merely energy strain, in space; that there is energy only because space is strained there.

	"But, be that as it may, we have a new means of storing energy, and that is more to our point, the means so affects space, that it changes the speed of light, changes the limiting speed of the universe. We can go as fast as we want, for the limit, about us, is changed, by our curving space in a new way.

	"The system is fairly obvious. Remember a torus-shaped induction coil encloses all its magnetic field within it, the torus, or 'doughnut' coil, has a perfectly enclosed magnetic field. We built such an enclosed storage coil, and expected to store a few watts of energy in it to see how long it would hold it. We made the mistake of connecting it to the power lines, and it cost us a hundred and fifty dollars at a quarter of a cent per kilo-watt. After that we used the big relux plate electric generating method.

	"But that is in the essentials what we have to offer. We give you the job of figuring out the stresses and strains and so forth—we want a ship to visit our neighbors—anywhere within one thousand million light years."

	"Yes, sir—Do you want a gross, or only a dozen?" asked Fuller sarcastically. "You sure believe in big orders! And whence cometh the cold cash for the materialization of this lovely dream?"

	"That," said Morey, "is where Dad comes in. As president of the Transcontinental Lines, he is my nominal boss, as well as yours, and Arcot's, but the trouble is he is also my father. If he was just my boss, things would be all right; we could sell this secret of material energy anywhere, let alone this new storage coil, but he is my father, and when he hears that I want to go off to some other universe with you and Arcot—just try and convince him that it is a scientific necessity. Also, I have a large and healthy hunch that your father isn't going to help us any," he added, grinning at Arcot.

	"I rather fear he won't," replied Arcot gloomily. He wanted to make this trip—and knew the difficulties involved. Morey senior, as president of the Transcontinental Lines, had full control of their finances, and they themselves could not back this expedition, which would cost fully three or four million, without his consent. Now the problem was to get the money!

	"I think," interrupted Wade, "that we will stand a much better chance if we first show them a spectacular exhibition, and point out the advantages, and uses of this apparatus, then show them complete plans for the ship. They might consent."

	"They might," replied Morey smiling. "But let's try it anyhow. I am getting tired of this city, though. I want to go out to the place up in Vermont. We can use the little lab up there for all we need, and we have everything worked out anyway. There is no use staying here until we are ready to give the exhibition. And in the meantime, we can indulge in a little ativism to the fish stage of evolution."

	"Quite right. Quite right—it is only eighty-five in the city here, due to the heat taken by the machines in the air, but it will be ninety-five in the suburbs. To the mountains—let's pack up!"

-

	THE many books and papers they had collected were hastily put into the brief cases, and they went on up to the roof of the building, and there they entered their little molecular motion ship. This was one of the light energy machines, not depending on air for heat, and as such was able to maneuver in space as well as in the air. They rose slowly, looking below them at the traffic of the great city. New York had long since abandoned the rivers as a means of trade, and was using their ancient basins now as airports, while around them loomed titanic structures of glistening colored tile. The sunlight reflected from them was exceedingly brilliant, and the contrasting colors of the buildings seemed to blend from a little height, into a great painting in colors. The darting planes, the traffic of commerce down between the buildings, and the pleasure cars above, gave a series of changing, darting shadows, the long lines of ships coming in from Chicago, the world's greatest city, and from London, from Buenos Aires, from the South, and from the cities of the North, and from Russia coming the short way across the pole, like mighty black serpents wound their way into the city.

	They joined one of the northern routes, and for two hundred and fifty miles they remained with it, till the colored towers of Boston dropped behind, and they turned out on a route of their own, shooting at once toward their goal in Vermont.

	The low green hills slipped rapidly beneath them, as they swept toward the little mountain lake that offered them a place for vacation. Arcot was controlling the ship, and now he lowered it gently into the natural basin of the little mountain-locked valley. Morey senior owned all the land here. He had been forced to buy it, for as soon as it was found he had settled here, a hundred rich and near-rich had tried to get the land that their names might be associated with his. He had succeeded, and the countryside had been left alone. Arcot let the ship glide smoothly into the shed, which had seen the construction of the first of these molecular motion snips.

	"We're here—unload and get going. I think a swim and some sleep is in order tonight, before we start work on this ship. We can begin tomorrow," said Arcot, looking approvingly at the clear blue water of the little lake.

	"All right—out of the way then, little one, and let a man get going," said Wade, pushing Arcot to one side, as he started for the house. Arcot was about six feet two, and weighed close to two hundred, but Wade was another two inches taller, and, but for his height, built on the same general plan that was used in the gorilla, as far as strength and size were concerned. Though but two inches taller, he was fifty pounds heavier than Arcot, so there was some reason for his calling Arcot little. Morey, though still taller, was not as heavily formed, and weighed but a few pounds more than Arcot, while Fuller was a bit smaller than Arcot. It had been known for several centuries, that the human race was increasing in height quite rapidly; indeed it was fairly apparent in one generation. The highest mental types of humanity had, for many generations been on the average, the tallest. Partly, by a combination of these factors, and partly by accident, these men were indeed "big men," but still only slightly above the average of their time, perhaps an inch or two. The average man was over six feet tall.

	A day of fairly complete rest, save for a few wrestling matches, in which Wade consistently proved himself not only built like a gorilla, but muscled like one, too, and Arcot proved that skill was not without merit, for if he could but make the match last more than two minutes, Wade's huge muscles would find an insufficient supply of oxygen and tire quickly.

	They all rose at about nine. Arcot got up first, and shortly after, the others found it highly advisable to follow his example. He had a large Tesla coil apparatus with which he succeeded in inducing sufficient voltage in the springs of the beds to make very effective sparks.

	"Come on, Wade—get up—you, as chief chemist, are to synthesize a little coffee and heat-treat a few eggs for us. We have some work ahead today!" called Arcot, after shutting off the coil, assured that each of them had gotten a considerable distance from the bed.

	"You win, Arcot—shut it off—I want to get my trousers!" called Morey. "We're all up."

	After breakfast they went into the room they used as a calculating room. Here there were two different types of integraphs, as well as plenty of room for drawing graphs. They sat down at the table, and started their work of drawing up the genera] features of their projected ship.

-

	"TO begin with, let us decide what shape we shall use," said Fuller. "As designer, I would like to point out that a sphere is strongest, a cube easiest to build, and a torpedo shape the most efficient aerodynamically. However, we intend to be in space, not in air. Into the bargain, we will need it more as a home than as a ship, the greater part of the trip, unless, as before, we succeed in visiting them in the midst of a war. We landed on Venus just in time to get mixed up in a nice scrap, and I will admit that the aerodynamically good shape of the Solarite helped a lot then. Perhaps, for emergencies that is best. Also, it is a lot easier to look at. What about it, Arcot?"

	"Fine—we want a hull all right, but what about some engines to run it? Let's get those, too. What all are we going to put in it? Where will the apparatus be placed? I will name first the general things; facts and figures later."

	"First: We must have a powerful material energy generating plant. Now we could use the standard cavity radiator, and use cosmic rays to warm it, and drive the individual power units in that way, or we can have a main electrical power unit, and warm them all electrically. How about it? Which one?"

	"Well, I think we would be safer if we did not depend on any one plant, but had each separate as much as possible. I suggest that we have individual cavity radiators," said Morey.

	"I am still a bit in the dark as to how that electricity generation stunt works. What is the principle, Arcot?" asked Fuller.

	"I haven't any idea. All I know is that it works, and I can calculate it. You know they worked effectively with electricity long before they knew what it was. By 1930 or so they had made fair progress with it, nearly as much as we have made. The general theory is that it is caused by a motion of electrons of the metal through which the current was flowing. But the electric current went 186,000 miles a second, while electrons could not. There was, obviously, an impulse that traveled at this speed, not a current. Imagine electrons racing along a wire of the telephones toward San Francisco, from New York. It would go maybe five hundred miles at the supposed 186,000 miles a second, then would turn around, as the alternating current was reversed—but what made it turn? The answer was that no electrons actually made the trip, only impulses.

	"Now why should relux, which contains no electrons, be a conductor? I remember an old negro man who, when so perplexed, used to remark, 'De Lawd alone knows, and He won't tell.' Maybe so, but I think the reason is that the relux transmits not the electrons, but the impulses that make electrons move. Now, for some reason that, as my old friend remarked, the Lord alone knows, this relux, stimulated by the action of cosmic rays, and a magnetic field, produced a powerful E.M.F. at right angles to the lines of force. In my opinion, this current is, in reality, only the impulse that makes a current. But to get back to our question, which is more desirable? Many small units, or one large?" This from Arcot,

	"And another question: describe these cavity receivers you want to use," said Fuller.

	"They will be almost exactly like the ones we have in use with the light metal disintegrators now," replied Arcot. "They will be made of two cylinders of relux, one inside the other, like a thermos bottle. The inner one will be of rough relux, which will absorb very efficiently; the outer will be of polished relux, which' will certainly stop any stray rays, as well as act as the outer wall of our thermos bottle. The neck of the inner bottle will be filled by a cosmic-ray projector, with appropriate apparatus, which will be fairly simple, and a relux reflector which will direct all the rays inside. The space between the inner and outer bottles will be filled with helium under about two tons per square inch pressure, and this will be directly affected by the molecular motion field. These will be our main power units for use around planets and so forth. I forgot to mention, Fuller, that due to the effect that the space-control apparatus has in changing space, the near presence of an intense gravitational field interacts with it, and drains its energy. In return, the field of the ship would interact with the field of any matter near it—within a hundred feet of the walls of the ship—and blast its relations, releasing its energy, probably. It would be exceedingly dangerous, to say the least. We can not use it near a planet, so we will need the molecular motion units to get us out into space. As a matter of fact, the gravitational field of the sun is so intense that we will have to go over a billion miles out, before using the full power of the space control. The power units controlled from one electric power source, would be simpler, and as reliable, I think. Anyway the molecular motion power is controlled, of necessity, from a single generator, so, if one is apt to go bad, the other is, too."

	"Very good reasoning, Arcot," smiled Morey, "but still I am strong for decentralization. I suggest a compromise. We can have the main power unit, and the main verticals, which will be the largest, controlled by the individual cosmic-ray heaters, and the rest run by the electric power units. Just heating coils, I suppose, surrounded by the field?"

	"That was my idea, and I think your suggestion of the compromise is good," said Arcot. "Let's make it that. While we are at it, I suggest, that, since we are going to want some weapons on the ship, we use a separate control panel, and separate generating panel for the power tubes we will want in the molecular beam projectors."

	These molecular beam projectors were nothing but projectors of the field that caused the molecular motion to take place as wanted, and they were terrifically deadly. If half a mountain is thrown into the air by the sudden motion of its molecules in that direction, it is a rather difficult projectile to fight. A ship might be suddenly touched by this beam, and its bow driven back on its stern, with all the speed of its millions of molecules; the general effect being similar to that produced by a head-on collision of two ships going about ten miles a second. Funerals can be contrived, but—	

	Since a thing treated by this ray is broken by its own molecules, it is twisted by its own strength, and crushed by its own toughness. Nothing can resist it.

-

	THIS ray, produced by the same means as the power units, the field being the same, required identical generating equipment, up to a certain point, and Arcot realized that they might take advantage of this.

	"My idea," he said, "was that we might thus have two power-tube banks to generate the field. If one is broken down, we can switch in the other. We can even use both at once in case of real need; the molecular motion machines will stand it, if we make them of relux, and anchor them with lux metal beams. The projectors would be able to handle the power, using Dad's new system.

	"And we have more projection. That will give us full power; since we will have several projectors, the power needed in operating the ship will be about equal to the power taken by the projectors.

	"We might have some cosmic-ray projectors on board also."

	"Why?" asked Wade. "They would be less effective than an equal number of molecular rays. Molecular rays are instantaneously irresistible, while cosmic rays take time to heat up a place. I will admit they are rather unhealthy to deal with, but, just the same, the molecular beam is quite as dangerous, I think, even more so. Why not take more of them?"

	"True enough—they are quite as deadly as the cosmic rays, but they are nowhere near as spectacular, and we may find that mere spectacular display will accomplish quite as much as actual destruction, and, incidentally, the cosmic rays have the advantage of being more local in their action. If we want to kill the enemy, and not the captive, we want a beam which will be deadly where it hits, and not fifty yards around. We will have plenty of protection anyway; we can afford to carry a little of each."

	It was decided to take the cosmic-ray projectors also, and they went on to the engine room.

	"Since our main power plant is to be the space control apparatus," continued Arcot, "we will have to make it the most important consideration. We will have to remember that the actual apparatus we will need will throw a field about itself after the fashion of a bar magnet, that projects more before and behind than at the two sides, so I think this at once suggests that we settle the shape of the hull in favor of the torpedo shape. But we have to remember that this coil is really an apparatus for storing energy in space, and therefore we are obliged to supply it with energy to store. I suggest that we consider that. I figured out last night just about how much power we will need. Any ship we build will have a negligible gravitational field, so I left that out, but just forming the field of space as we want it will require no less than the energy of two and a half tons of matter. Now, whatever kind of apparatus we use for the conversion of matter into energy, it will mean that a whale of a lot of wire will have to go into our cosmic-ray apparatus. The coils are charged electrically, so we can have plenty of electricity, eventually, for this task, but the sheer time considerations mean a lot. It would take at least several hours to do this. If we should be taking 'French leave' of a planet, we want to move off in considerably less than several hours. I suggest that we solve the problem by having a charging apparatus which would handle the coil in a certain length of time, and another emergency apparatus, which will charge it in an equal time, so, if pressed, we can charge it in half that time. But the regular method of charging will be by means of a series, or battery, of small coils, the torodial shape, coils that keep the distorted space all within themselves, and are not themselves influenced by the distortion, while they have stored within them all the terrific energy of their charge. We can build a battery of these that we can empty into the big coil, and so charge it very quickly, and then, when we are through using the space control, can change back quickly. Any losses we can make up, of course, from the main power plant.

	"The controls we can figure out later. That will be the main power plant. How about it? Any suggestions? Of course, the engine room will also contain the big power tube banks for generating the molecular field, and we will want the air apparatus there. We can, as before, store the oxygen in tanks as a liquid; in the lux metal tanks we can safely use a pressure of five tons per square inch. The CO2 and the excess moisture can be taken out of the air readily, and, at the same time, we can eke out the oxygen supply by using the CO2 electrolysis process, and save the carbon so recovered if necessary—we might want it to synthesize things with.

	"This process is standard on the space ships, though, so we will just buy the apparatus all assembled and put in our own power leads.

	"We will want a laboratory, such as we had on the Solarite, for analysis of gases, and for general work. We can equip it with plenty of power, and with a few machines. We should be able to do anything there, that we can on Earth. And first and foremost amongst the provisions will go a large supply of all kinds of spare parts, spare tubes, spare coils, spare relux plates—everything we can possibly think of. Remember, we may want to build some things out in space.

	"I wonder—we might find the invisibility apparatus useful on the ship. We might as well install it—we can run it on the same tubes that we use for the molecular power, and it won't cost much, and may prove very valuable," said Arcot thoughtfully.

	It so happened, that Arcot was right. The apparatus he wanted to take consisted of a high frequency oscillator tube of extreme power, which caused oscillations to be set up in the ship, and the molecules as a result began vibrating. The frequency approached that of light, and as a result, light was able to pass through the material. It had been discovered originally, as far back as 1920, when the plates of radio tubes were made perfectly transparent. A body which is perfectly transparent is next to impossible to detect when it is in the air, and so the apparatus acted as a very effective invisibility apparatus. The one difficulty with the machine was that it depended on high frequency oscillations, oscillations of a frequency that permitted easy location by means of radio. Though the ship was invisible, a radio set made it highly audible. However, were this secret unknown, it was a very effective method of disappearing. And since the frequency ran so high, a special set was required.

	"It sounds to me as if you had the whole thing planned out already, Arcot," said Fuller, smiling at his friend.

	"I have. I don't start on one of these little jaunts if I don't think about it first; you know that. I am even going to offer you a new building material. Remember that they have discovered the secret of lux metal, and relux. I suggest that the hull of the ship be made of foot-thick lux, and lined inside with relux wherever we want it to be opaque. Lux would be transparent—annoyingly so. Also, if we came near a hot star, the energy we would absorb would be dangerous and we would be badly burned. We want the windows equipped with relux shutters; even the pilot room." This proved to be another wise precaution.

	"Whew—a foot of relux—and we will need a big ship—good Lord, Arcot, that thing will weigh a quarter of a million tons with all that lux metal! With metal as dense as all that—but then—we can afford it, I suppose. It would make pretty fair protection. We could hit a planetoid with that ship, and just smash right through it! And a relux inner wall! I think we ought to make it a separate wall. Say a one-inch wall of relux, that would be sufficiently strong—and then we can have a vacuum between the walls. If we get into the atmosphere of a warm planet, we will be much better off. Also, cracks in the outer wall will not leave us airless in space.

	"But what a ship! Think how beautiful it will be with that shining relux wall! The lux will be invisible! It is so transparent that it will be impossible to see it.

	"And how about size? You say it is to be torpedo shaped. That means a better-looking ship; we can make a nice, trim craft! It will be about thirty feet in diameter; we will need ten feet ceiling on each room, and two decks, and due to curvature, another ten feet can be used for storage, oxygen, water, and apparatus storage space—closets and so forth. The length will be about two hundred feet, I suppose. We will need a good bit of room for all the apparatus, and—well, that length gives more graceful proportions!"

	"That is up to you—you tell us how much the hull and furnishings will probably weigh. Make the interior furnishings of ordinary metals, it will be cheaper, lighter, and easier," specified Arcot. "The engine room will be at the rear center of the ship. The absolute stern of the ship will be an observatory, with one of the Negrian Telectroscopes. The main propulsion units—well, you know how to place them. The control room, of course, in front. We will want ray projectors on all sides and on the bottom. Most of them, of course, at the bow. We will be in space, or on those other planets, for some time, probably, so I think it is only wise to give ourselves plenty of room to move about in. But if you can prepare your estimate, we will get ours ready. While you are working at it, we will start getting up our little exhibition for Mr. Morey and Dad. And don't forget a cost estimate."

	The work was well under way, and there was every reason to hope it would go to a successful completion. The physicists went to the laboratory, while Fuller set to work on his end of the job.

-

	IT was two weeks later when the older men were invited in for a first showing of the apparatus—the new material energy apparatus. The demonstration was to take place in the little laboratory of the camp. The apparatus had been brought up from New York City, and set up three days ago. They were all ready to demonstrate their work.

	"I am not going to explain these things before the demonstration, but after," said Arcot. "Like magic, they are most astounding before the explanation is given and, like magic, they work better in the dark."

	He turned to the table, on which was mounted a small projector of searchlight type, with a rather heavy cable leading to it, and several other leads running to a small molecular motion panel, a standard make of power panel. Arcot touched a small switch, and the panel sprang into life, the meters moved, and the little pilot lamp glowed. In the path of the projector there was a large lux metal crucible, with a ring of relux, and a series of points of that material pointing down into it. These points were grounded. Inside the crucible was a small ingot of coronium, the strong, hard Venerian metal. It melted at a temperature of over twenty-five hundred degrees centigrade, and boiled at nearly four thousand. The crucible was entirely enclosed in a large lux metal case, which was lined, on the side away from the projector, with roughened relux metal.

	Arcot depressed a small switch. There came the heavy thud of a large relay and suddenly a solid beam of brilliant bluish light shot out from the projector, a beam so brilliant that the entire place was lit with its intense glow, and the heat seemed to diffuse through the room from it. It passed through the lux metal case, and through the coronium bar, and seemed suddenly chopped off by the roughened relux. As a matter of fact, that roughened relux was something new; Arcot had found a way to so increase its absorption powers, that it absorbed over ninety-nine percent of the rays that struck it.

	The coronium bar suddenly glowed red, then white, and slumped molten into the bottom of the crucible. The relux plate was already glowing intensely blue, and soon faded from sight as the wave-length of the emitted light became too short to see.

	The crucible was filled now with a mass of metal that glowed intensely white, and seethed furiously, the lowly rising vapors told of its rapid boiling, and their settling showed that their temperature was too high to permit them to remain hot without radiating. They condensed, and fell, only to boil away again. For perhaps ten seconds this went on, then suddenly a new factor was added to the performance; there was a sudden crashing arc, a blaze of blue flame that seemed to sweep in a cyclonic twisting motion about inside the crucible. The blaze of the arc, the intense light of the incandescent metal, and the weird light of the bar of radiation, seemed shifting in some fantastic play of colors. Like black magic they seemed indeed, the strange triple shadow of the man standing at the table, clothed in a long, dark cape, filled with lead particles, to protect him from the radiations as much as possible. It made a strange and impressive scene. Suddenly the relay sounded again, the bar of radiance disappeared as quickly as it had come. In an instant the relux plate was glowing violet again, then it was white, then slowly it sank to an angry red. A moment after the rays died out, the arc had stopped, and the metal was cooling rapidly. There was a heavy purplish vapor in the cabinet now, a vapor which condensed on the walls of the cabinet that enclosed it, where they were cooled by the air, into black, flakey crystals.

	The elder Arcot walked over to the table, and looked at them curiously, then at the glowing metal,

	"I wonder—As a physicist I should say it was impossible—but if it did happen I should imagine these would be the results. Well, go on with your exhibition, Son."

	"I want to know your ideas when we are through, though, Dad," said Arcot junior. "The next on the program is a little more interesting, perhaps. At least, it demonstrates a more commercial aspect of the thing."

	Morey junior had run in a small handling machine, on its caterpillar rubber treads, and with the aid of a small electro-magnet, had picked up the lux case, and its contents, and carried them off. A minute later he appeared with a large electro-magnet, and a relux plate, to which were attached a pair of huge copper bus bars. The relux plate he placed in a stand that Arcot had prepared in the meantime, directly in front of the projector. Then he placed the big magnet behind it. In a moment the magnet leads had been connected, and a coil in the form of two toruses intersecting at right angles, and fully enclosed in a relux case, so that only the shape showed, had been connected to the heavy terminals of the relux plate, an ammeter in series, with a heavy coil of coronium wire, rather a spring, for it had originally been part of a small machine's shock absorber, was in series with both. A voltmeter was connected across the terminals of the relux plate.

	The connections swiftly completed, Arcot sent the current first through the magnet, then turned on the rays. Instantly there was a sharp deflection of the voltmeter.

	"There's a switch built la the coil, so there is no current yet," he explained, as the ammeter remained steady. Shorted as it seemingly was by the relux plate, nevertheless the voltmeter read twenty-two. Arcot changed the current through the magnet, and the reading dropped to twenty.

	The rays had been on at very low power, the air only slightly ionized, but now, as Arcot increased their intensity, the air in the path of the beams shone again with that strange blue, while the relux plate, subject now to eddy currents, since there was no other path for the energy to take, began to heat rapidly.

	"I am going to close that switch into the coil now. Watch the ammeter, and the voltmeter," said Arcot.

	There was a dull thud as a heavy contact inside the coil case snapped shut. Instantly the ammeter jumped to read 4500 amperes, while the voltmeter gave a slight kick, then stood firm. The heavy coronium spring grew warm, and began to glow dully, while the ammeter dropped slightly with the increased resistance.

	The relux plate was cooler now, and the voltmeter was still steady.

	"You'll have to take my word for it, now, but that coil is storing the energy that you see flowing into it. I'll show you later. Notice that the coronium resistor is increasing its resistance, but that otherwise there seems to be little increase in back E.M.F. The power is coming from the relux plate, by a new system. The energy comes from the rays you can see there. Notice that the space within the right angle of the coils is growing dark, despite the powerful light shed by the ionized air."

	Indeed, the space within the twin coils was rapidly growing dark; it seemed to be darkening the image of the things behind it, while their outlines became blurred. In a moment the images were completely wiped out, and the region within the coils became a strangely solid blackness.

	"That is enough for the present. We have, according to the readings of the voltmeter, ammeter and chronometer, stored 20 x 4500 X 1/6 of an hour, kilowatt hours. That is a kilo-voltmeter, by the way. That is fifteen thousand kilowatt hours, and, as you can see, there seems to be no limit to how much power we can get into it. That is now worth, just from the power it contains, about forty dollars, at the regular 1/4 of a cent per kilowatt hour. I have not been using anywhere near the power I can get out of this apparatus. I am going to take some power now."

-

	QUICKLY he disconnected the ammeter, the resistance coil, and the power coil. Then he connected the relux plate directly to the power coil.

	"I can't demonstrate the amount of current this thing is swallowing now, since the current is more than any of our instruments will begin to handle. I am going to use an instrument I made for this purpose. Remember, that there are lines of magnetic force about any current, and that a north pole magnet, free to move, would follow them around and around the wire. I have here an old toy that they used to use in physics lectures and demonstrations of this in the twentieth century. It is just a magnet, bent into a jogged line, the north pole here, can swing around the wire here, through which the current is flowing, while the south pole, down here, carries the current out, and so does not swing around it. The mercury cup here makes contact between the magnet steel, the south pole, and the wire around which the north pole swings. The force that tends to swing the magnet is directly proportional to the current. My apparatus here consists of a somewhat similar machine, but I was forced to use this piece of spring metal to hold the little electro magnet that replaces the permanent one you saw in the toy. The south pole of the magnet, by the way, is this end of the spring; it is all iron. This removes the south pole sufficiently so it does not interfere. Watch."

	He pointed to a scale that read 10, 20, 30 and so on up to 100. The conductor about which this magnet was expected to rotate was a relux bar about three inches in diameter, and relux is a very nearly perfect conductor.

	Arcot snapped shut the switch. There was a sudden hum, and then they saw that the magnet was straining to circle the conductor, and that the scale was reading 95 approximately. The relux bus bar was heating slowly; then suddenly they noticed that the reading was increasing!

	"Shut off the rays—quick, Arcot—the conductors are setting up a second field in the plate and causing trouble!" called Morey, Junior. Arcot snapped open the ray switch, and at once the bar of radiance died, and the indicator dropped back to zero.

	"The scale, there, indicates, approximately, millions of amperes. That was as near as I could come. There are no such meters made now. Look at the space inside the coil. I am going to shine this ray of—well—this ray, on that dark spot, and watch what happens."

	Arcot swung the projector till it was directed at the spot of utter blackness within the center of the coil.

	"I might mention that that is a perfect vacuum there, also. Watch."

	Arcot picked up a pair of pliers, and tossed them toward the coil. They flew toward the darkness, and suddenly rebounded as though they had struck a wall of rubber. He threw them with even greater force, and they bounced back again.

	"This illustrates another thing; this is a sort of static condition. I don't have to keep the current flowing as in the ordinary induction coil. Also, well you can see for yourself, the amount of energy the coil holds. I will not try to tell you how much is in there now, and I will not discharge it, but you can see what a nice handy instrument it makes!

	"Now, Dad, what are your theories? My little demonstration is completed, I guess."

	"Well, Son, I don't know just what to say. Some of the things I saw here are 'impossible', but then, I have seen you do 'impossible' things before.

	"Those rays—they might be cosmic rays—they ionize air—they go right through that crucible filled with coronium; they seem to do something to that metal, and if cosmic rays could be generated, they would disintegrate metal, and its broken atoms would fly to pieces, and the electrons, freed, would 'boil off' into the air, leaving the mass of metal positively charged by the excess of protons. That would account for the arc we saw. Cosmic rays have a terrific energy content, and if they could be absorbed by something, and that energy converted directly into electricity, it would account for your source of power there. Further, as far as the coil goes, that is easy to understand. Any storage device stores its power by the strain in space; here you can actually see the effect of the strain on apace.

	"The source of cosmic rays I don't know, but I know that any radiation either absorbed, or radiated, must be about 860 times the diameter of the radiating body in wavelength. Heat and light waves are about 860 atomic diameters, which means the outer electron orbits. Of course, that is why we see light rather than any other wave. X-rays are given by the inner electron orbits. Cosmic rays are given only by the protons or electrons themselves radiating. This is possible only if they are destroyed. Which tells me, by scientific deduction, that my ex-laboratory assistant has proven better than any other man that ever lived. He has released the energy of matter. Right?"

	Arcot, Senior, looked toward his son smiling, questioningly.

	"Perfect detective work, Dad, I have done just exactly what you thought. The whole success of your deduction depended on the idea that I was using cosmic rays. How could you guess, or deduce, that?"

	"Partly guess—partly deduction. I remembered that you must have a new ray, as none was known that would do all that. It evidently was not an X-ray, for it went through the coronium readily. I knew that X-rays were reflected by relux, and realized that you might focus the cosmic rays. Since it penetrated the coronium, I at once assumed that the waves were shorter than X-rays, and as there is no intermediate between the innermost orbits of electrons, and the electrons and protons themselves, I decided they were cosmic rays."

	"The last step is doubtful—there is no known radiation between the two, true, but it is conceivable that a vibration of the nuclear electrons might be set up which did not destroy them."

	"Well, Son, I have never tried out mathematics on that, but I think the atom would be unstable. Aren't gamma rays of radium shorter than X-rays? Then I think that is our answer—those rays are emitted by nuclear electrons being set in vibration; the atom then becomes unstable and blows up. How does that suit?" asked Arcot, Senior.

	"Hm—a very nice theory—I think I'll look into the math of it—"

	"But right now," Arcot added quickly, turning to Morey, Senior, "I am interested in the mathematics of finance, the proposition is simply stated—"

	Perhaps it was simply stated, but it took Arcot, Morey, Junior, and Wade fully an hour to discuss the science of it. Then Fuller spent another hour over the carefully drawn plans of their ship.

-

	AT last Morey, Senior, settled back, and looked vacantly at the ceiling. They were seated now about the low table in the "pow-wow room," as Arcot called it. The study was always used for such conferences.

	"Well, boys, as usual I am in a position where I am forced to yield," said Morey, Senior, after a few minutes' low whispering to Arcot, Senior. "I might refuse financial backing, but you could sell either the rights for the relux plate, which could be used for absorbing cosmic ray energy from space, the cosmic ray projector, and material energy destruction secret, or the energy storage device for about one billion dollars, and back the expedition independently, or you could, with your names, make a request to the public for financial backing, and have the money that way." He stopped smiling.

	It was well known that either of these men could not buy anything at stores; they were promptly given anything and everything they asked for.

	"I think, however," Morey, Senior, continued, "that we can trust you. Armed with cosmic rays and molecular rays, you should be able to put up a fair scrap anywhere. Also, I have never detected signs of feeblemindedness in any of you. I think I can trust you. I'll back you all right"

	The true American Indians may be a dead race now, and the red man may be practically extinct but Arcot and his friends certainly proved that his customs were not. They executed a very creditable imitation of the War Dance, with appropriate whoops, and so signed the agreement. The ship was to be built.

	"I hate to interrupt your exuberance," said Arcot Senior, "but I should like to know the name of this remarkable ship."

	"What? Name? Oh. It hasn't any," said Wade.

	"That is indeed an important oversight. If a crew of men can overlook so fundamental a thing, I wonder if they are to be trusted."

	"Well, what are we going to call it then?" asked Arcot, Junior.

	"Solarite II might do—it will still be from the solar system," suggested Morey.

	"Yes—it will—but I think we should be more broad-minded—we aren't going to stay in this system; we will not be in this galaxy all the time. We might call it Galaxian," said Arcot Junior.

	"Did you say be broadminded? We aren't going to stay in this little dot in space—this little Island Universe!" said Wade. "Let's be broad, and call it Universite, or something like that Or, why not be equally broad, and call it Flourine! That is everywhere in the universe, and is the most active element there is. This will go everywhere in the universe, and be the most active thing ever existed!"

	"Well, that gets my vote," said the elder Morey. "I think that is a good name."

	"That is mighty good. I like the idea—but it lacks ring," said Arcot, Junior, slowly,' He paused, then looking up at the roof, repeated slowly:

-
" 'Alone, alone, all, all alone, 
Alone on a wide, wide sea, 
Nor any saint took pity on, 
My soul in agony'."
-

	He rose, and walked over to the window, looking out where the bright points of light that were the stars of space, rode high in the deep violet of the moonlit sky.

	"The sea of all space—the sea of vastness that lies between the far-flung nebulas—the mighty void—alone on a sea, the vastness of which no man can imagine—alone—alone, where no other man has ever been, alone, so far from all matter, from all mankind, that not even light racing at billions of miles each day, could reach home in less than a million years!" Arcot stopped, and stood looking out of the window.

	Morey broke the silence. "The Ancient Mariner.'' He paused. "'Alone' will certainly be right I think that name takes all the prizes."

	"I certainly agree—The Ancient Mariner—it is kind of long—we will probably call it Mariner, but I think that is the name," said Fuller.

	It was agreed on unanimously.

	This important question settled, the discussion of the ways and means and where the ship was to be built started. The final discussion was ended after three in the morning. The decisions were numerous, and weighty. The terms, that interested the young men, were that they were to have the car built as they specified; it was to be built in the main shops in Newark, the power needed was not available in the little shops here. They must have tremendous amounts of power, and the new material energy would, of course, contribute tremendously to the building of the ships. Still it would be a lengthy and all too time-consuming a job. The huge walls of lux metal would require great care in construction, for they could not be welded, and must be formed in position, and could be polished only under powerful magnets, when some of the tremendous strength and hardness was lost The effect of the magnetic lines of force in some way alters the light quantums.

-

	A LARGE force of skilled men was kept busy on the work, and yet it was two months before the last of the hull work was done. Then came the laborious work of installing the power plant, and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, the circuits to the relays—a thousand complicated circuits. The apparatus had been ordered long before. Much of it was standard; the molecular power tubes, the molecular ray projectors, the power tubes for the invisibility apparatus, and many other parts. All the relays were standard, the gyroscopes for stabilization were standard, and the equatorial electro-magnetic braking equipment that permitted motion about them at will, yet made it possible to check in any given position at will, was standard.

	The long days of work that followed, in which these three men did the complicated wiring, they alone knew about for none others on Earth understood the circuits they had to establish, meant hours of work, but at least it was work they could do and know was well done.

	During the long weeks of waiting, which preceded this period of activity, Arcot and his friends worked on perfecting auxiliary devices to be used with the ship. They wished to make some improvements on the old molecular ray pistols, and to develop cosmic ray projectors for hand use. The necessary power they stored in small coils of the new type in the hand-grip of the pistol. Despite their small size, the coils were capable of storing power for thirty hours continuous operation of the rays. The finished pistol was scarcely larger than a standard molecular ray pistol, such as is made for use with an external supply of power.

	Arcot pointed out that the explorers who had visited frigid Uranus had had great difficulty with the greater gravitation, and had they been forced to deal with inimical beings they would have been greatly handicapped. Since the present expedition hoped to go to other planets of various sizes, and various constitutions, they must be prepared. They lacked any method of getting about readily under high gravity. Also they must be prepared to meet extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. The modern "altitude" suit for use originally at high altitudes, had been developed to a point where it was perfect for use in the vacuum of space, or under heavy pressure. Made of woven lux metal wires of extremely small size, it was exceedingly tough, yet pliable, and strengthened with cords of lux metal, it was easy to manage when in space; it did not bag out and get in the way. The regular suits carried a small tank on the back with oxygen stored therein, and a small cooling coil which removed the CO2 by freezing it out. Heating was arranged for either by a small lux metal disintegrator, releasing the energy of the light metal into heat or by storing the energy in batteries.

	Arcot proposed a considerable improvement He first demonstrated it to his friends one afternoon in the shop yard.

	Morey and Wade had just been in to see Fuller about a slight change in the construction of the main molecular power unit supporting brace. As they came out, Arcot called them over to his work bench.

	He had on an altitude suit made of the lux metal wire, air-proofed by the judicious use of rubber, and with an unusual number of lux metal cords, but in this case the cords had been made into broad woven belts, extremely pliable, but extremely strong. Made of lux metal, a non-electric element, it was able to resist the attack of absolutely any chemical agent; nothing could corrode it; it offered protection nothing else could offer. Its extreme strength, however, made it stronger, pound for pound, than steel or even coronium.

	On his back was a pack of relux plated metal, it seemed. It fitted the back closely, and its rounded outlines made it seem quite comfortable. To it all the broad lux metal straps were connected, while from it ran a number of cables to a broad belt about the waist, and one thin cable ran down the right arm to a small relux tube about eight inches long by perhaps two in diameter. There were two holsters attached to the belt, obviously for holding the two pistols, molecular and cosmic, that they intended to carry. On the chest were hooks, and bolts with wing nuts. These evidently were for the oxygen equipment that now rested with the helmet on the back. This part here was made of clear lux metal so that the helmet, while capable of withstanding a terrific blow, permitted vision in any direction.

	"Watch! No explanations till later!" grinned Arcot He reached to his belt, and flipped a little switch. There was a swift humming from the pack on his belt an electric motor, picking up speed swiftly. He touched another control; then he seemed to jump a bit as the suit he wore tautened about him, then, turning a small rheostat control, the slight sounds of adjustment told of some added strain on the suit

	"So long—see you later!" he called. He pointed his right arm toward the ceiling, and sailed lightly up into the air! He lowered the angle of his arm, and moved smoothly off across the huge hangar, floating off across the shining bulk of the rapidly forming Ancient Mariner, circled the room, rising and sinking at will, then he went toward the open door.

	"Come on and watch me where there is more room," he called.

	Out in the open, he darted up high into the sir by making an adjustment at his waist, then, a mere speck in the air, he suddenly came dropping down. He landed lightly, and stood before them, swaying on his feet, poising a bit on his toes.

	"I am going to do a little jumping. Watch this and see if I don't deserve all high jump records." He grinned at them, then tensing himself, he leaped swiftly toward the roof of the great shop, nearly a hundred feet above him. He shot swiftly up at first and with strange slowness he came to rest just shy of it.

	"Whew—nearly a hundred feet! Some jump!" said Morey in mock surprise.

	"Try again!"

	"Or give me that weight annihilator, and I'll beat you at your own game," called Wade. "But come on and show us the secret!"

	"You fellows take all the joy out of life!" said Arcot, reproachfully, as he landed rather heavily before them, only to bounce several feet into the air.

	"That is a sweet little thing to have. How much load can you carry?" asked Morey, more practically.

	"I can develop up to about ten tons as far as it goes, but the human body can't stand more than about five gravities, so we can only visit planets with less than that surface gravity. However, on those planets, we will be more agile than we normally are on Earth! The principle is easy to see, of course." He deftly unhooked the main cables, and took the power unit from his back.

	"The main thing is the molecular power unit here, electrically heated, for convenience, and mounted on a small, but massive gyroscope. Quite a necessary bit of apparatus. I tried leaving it out, and almost took a nose dive under doubled gravity. The only other way would leave it rigidly coupled with the body. Result: when I used the little director unit here in my hand, I leaned forward a bit as you noticed. At once the main power was not perpendicular, but at an angle, and the angle increased till I was headed for my dear Mother Earth at a most unseemly rate. I was about two hundred feet in the air, but rapidly getting less, when I did some fancy gymnastics with the aid of the hand director, and righted myself, and applied four gravities on the main projector—and stopped with some considerable bump against the Earth's surface, instead of six feet under as I had for a time expected.

	"The gyroscope, mounted in strong and reliable bearings, keeps the unit vertical whatever I may do, and so I no longer have that difficulty. The object is, of course, to remove the hazard of excess weight on big planets.

	"The power is all generated right in the power pack here. I have a cosmic ray power plate, which I can use for charging the pistol coils, when needed, and in the meantime, for charging the starting power coil here, and to run the power unit. The molecular power tubes are standard, as is the gyroscope drive.

	"I have this secondary power-cable running down my arm to the hand director unit—merely a small size molecular motion unit. The control of degree of power is arranged by pressing the hand control lever here.

	"The intensity of the main vertical power unit is regulated by the controls on the belt I can make about 75 miles an hour with this apparatus going through the air; I have only about twenty-five pounds pull on the hand power-unit. I have made only this one so far, but I have ordered six others like, it—and sold the inventor's rights to your father. The idea of an individual flyer will sell well, I think.

	"I thought that you fellows might want one like this also."

	"I think you guessed right!" said Morey, looking at the neat apparatus in the case. "But why all the extra room?"

	"Oh, it is an unperfected invention as yet and I am thinking of putting some apparatus in there for our own private use. I'll tell you later. In the meantime I will say that we will have two spare suits in the ship, and a lot of spare apparatus."

	Each of the men tried out the new apparatus, and pronounced it highly satisfactory, and since the lux metal was an exceedingly poor conductor of heat and the fine wire made a very comfortable garment it was, all in all, a suitable piece of equipment.

	But there was much more work to be done on the fast growing ship.

-

	WADE had been given the job of gathering the necessary food supplies and anything in the way of supplies he might think of. Arcot was collecting the necessary spare parts and apparatus; Morey was gathering a small library, and equipping a chemistry laboratory with the aid of Wade. Fuller was to get together the necessary standard equipment for the ship—tables, seats, bunks, and all standard furniture.

	The long weeks we will pass over. Suffice it to say that the Ancient Mariner was ready one day, a clear warm day in late August was set for their departure, since it made no difference in this ship what time of day it was when they left Earth for their first trip, Arcot Senior, and Morey, Senior, were with them to inspect the ship. They had come in a small, private, molecular motion ship and settled beside the shining hull of the great winter-galactic cruiser, as Arcot called it.

	"Well, we came a bit later than we expected, Son, but we still expect a good show." Arcot's father smiled as he drew himself out of the little bullet-shaped car. More seriously he continued, "But I hear you do not intend to take any trial trip. What's the idea?"

	"No, Dad, we figured this was the way to make the ship, and it was all right. We are betting on that. Remember, the molecular motion will get a trial first; we will give the molecular motion power plant a trial trip when we start out toward the outside of the system, and if there is any trouble we will naturally return. But the equipment is almost all standard, so we are expecting no trouble.

	"The only part that would require a trial would be the space-control apparatus, and I don't see how we could give it a trial trip here. Remember, we must try it after we leave Earth, and get well out of the sun's gravitational field. If we tried it here, the sun's gravity would so interact with the space control, as to drain out the energy, and permit us to fly away from the sun without any gravitational attraction acting upon us. It would merely overcome gravity while its energy lasted.

	"On the other hand, when we do get out, and get started, we will go faster than light—and necessarily in a straight line—or as straight as the curve of empty space will permit. We will go a dozen light years in the first test, no doubt, so we will be hopelessly beyond the range of the molecular motion machines in an instant. We would never be able to return if we did not have the space control. In other words, if the space control doesn't work—we can never come back anyhow, and if it does, why come back? We are the only ones in the world who could fix it if anything went wrong, and with the mass of apparatus we are taking in case of emergencies, and the small power shop, and machine shop, the lab, and all, we could make a new ship in space if need be! I see no reason to call it a trial trip!"

	"Well—I suppose all you say is right. Still, a trial trip sounds cautious."

	"But we can't be cautious in this. It either works, in which case we don't need a trial trip, or it doesn't, in which case the trial trip wouldn't do us any good. We are the only ones who know how to fix it, and we will try to get back. Of course, I will not be able to signal Earth. I will send signals if anything does go wrong, so that you ought to hear from the ship in about a dozen years, at any rate." Arcot smiled as a thought struck him.

	"We may go around the universe in this machine, and be back here in time to hear ourselves talking! That beats the famous story about the man who could turn the light out and get in bed and be asleep before the room got dark!

	"But you see why we felt that there was little reason for a trial trip. If it is a failure—-we will never get back to say so; if it isn't, we will be able to continue."

	"Perfect logic, Son, but I guess we may as well give up that discussion—personally I don't like it. Let's see this ship of yours."

	The great hull had been made two hundred feet long, and about thirty feet in diameter. The outer wall was made of one foot of solid lux metal, and then came a two-inch gap, which would be a perfect vacuum, but was now filled with air, as they had not had a chance to empty it into space yet. The inner wall was one inch lux metal, and the two walls were joined in many places by small lux metal cross-braces; the lux metal being a very poor conductor of heat, and the vacuum a non-conductor, they had to be protected from such heat as they might gather, while passing through a planet's atmosphere. The inner wall was coated, on the inside, with a layer of relux, thin, but still amply able to turn the rays of any star, protecting them from heating from this source, and at the same time, its perfect reflecting ability made it almost a perfect non-radiator. But its principal use was actually to protect them from cosmic rays of space, for on the trip they expected to pass through the vast inter-galactic spaces, where the rays were presumed to originate.

	The windows consisted of spaces cleared of the relux, the lux being, of course, perfectly transparent

	The inside of the ship had been painted with a leaf-green paint, and decorated in various ways, for this was to be as much a home as anything else, and the scenes depicted in some of the pictures were intended to aid them if they visited other planets, for they were scenes of Earth and Venus, maps of the Earth and Venus, Mars and Mercury, and of the solar system, of the entire galaxy, and different stars were labeled. These relieved the monotony of the walls, and would help in relieving the expected monotony of the trip. The leaf-green color rested the eyes; the brilliant reflections of the relux would be very tiring. However, spaces here and there had been left unpainted—these served as mirrors.

	From the outside it was difficult to detect the exact outline of the ship, for the clear lux metal was nearly invisible, and the foot of it that surrounded the more visible part of the ship made a curious optical illusion. Too, the perfect reflecting ability of the relux made it difficult to see; it was more by absence than presence that one detected it. It blotted out things behind it. The great window of the pilot room disclosed the operating seats and the great switchboard to one side. Each of the windows was equipped with relux shields that could be placed in position quickly, and these were already in place over the observatory window, so nothing was to be seen here except that the long narrow portholes of the different rooms showed their lighted interiors.

	For some minutes the elder men stood looking at the ship. They had been requested to wait till it was finished before examining it, so this was their first view of the machine.

	"Come on in—see the interior," suggested Fuller.

	They entered through the one low door that opened into the grounded bow, close to the base of the ship. The heavy lux metal door was opened by machinery by the correct application of forces, but the combination depended on the use of a molecular ray in the correct place, which made it impossible for people of another world to open it, unless they had both the ray and the knowledge of the correct place. As the pale bluish beam reached out and touched the ship, flickering for an instant, the door hummed and sank back before them, then halted three feet back. They entered, and found themselves in the air lock, which would give them access to space or to other planets at will, without opening the ship proper.

	From the air lock the way lead them directly into the engine room or power room. Here they heard the soft purring of a large oscillator tube, and the indistinguishable murmur of a number of smoothly humming generators, giving the necessary alternating current, deriving their power from a large cosmic-ray relux plate which furnished thousands of horsepower. Arcot, Senior, glanced in surprise at the reading of a heavy ammeter of the new type, connected to the giant power lead.

	"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord—where is all that power going?"

	"Well—it happens that it is at a pressure of ten kilo volts, as far as you knew it might have been no power at all, for you didn't know the voltage. The ten thousand volts, and five hundred million amperes makes five trillion watts. That has been running for half an hour, and has another half hour to go. Also there are several other relux plates like that at work, doing about as well. We are pumping power into our storage coils, for use with the main power control. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to capacity, and we are carrying twenty tons of fuel, enough for ten charges. We will need not more than three tons if all goes well, but 'all' seldom does this. The twenty tons we will carry when we leave here—the matter we are using now we took direct from the shop."

-

	"SEE the large black cylinder up there?" Arcot, Junior, asked.

	Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay a great black cylinder nearly two feet in diameter, and extending out through the wall toward the rear. It was made integral with two giant, lux metal members that reached to the bow of the ship in a long sweeping curve. From one of the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.

	"That is the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration of ten earth gravities either forward or backward, and more if the human body will stand it. At that rate of acceleration the ship will weigh two million five hundred thousand tons; it weighs two hundred and fifty thousand as is. That accounts for the size of those lux metal beams.

	"In the curve of the ship, on top and sides and bottom, there are power units for motion in the other two dimensions. These we can't see, but they are smaller than this—for this one does the work that three of them must do. It is located in the gravitational center line of the ship. It runs nearly the length of the ship, as you see.

	"But there is little we can see here that is new. Those motor-generator sets over there are not new; the tube banks there are merely standard power banks for the molecular motion; the relay board there looks but little different from the standard ones, and the power control board has only a few more instruments. Come in the next room though." Arcot paused, and opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room. It was twice the size of even the large power room. The center of the floor was occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal. On this pedestal, near the roof, was a huge coil, relux encased. It was obviously in the exact gravitational center of the ship. There was one large switchboard at the extreme opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the familiar double coils with their planes at right angles, but each of these was five feet in diameter; the space within them was already darkening. From floor to ceiling they were racked, and in double rows along the side, till there was scarcely room to walk in. Each of the coils was encased in relux, the whole set being cased in lux metal.

	"Hmm—some battery of power coils—considering the amount of energy one of those can store! But what is the large one there?" asked Arcot, Senior.

"That is the main space control—remember that while a torus encloses its magnetic field within it, a bar magnet throws its lines of force all about it. So here, this coil affects the space about it, and while our power is stored in that battery of small coils, we can shoot it into this one, which will then affect all the space about it. The reason one of those coils there does not fly off as I expect it to, when we use this, is that the coil itself is not in the field, the coil is surrounding the field. On the other hand, this will move, for here the field will surround the coil, which is the condition necessary."

	"Arcot, I have always understood that we could never attain an acceleration of over ten gravities without killing ourselves. What protection have you, or how do you expect to attain this terrific speed without accelerating for a lifetime?" asked Morey, Senior.

	"Well, we would be stuck if we didn't have this new method, for the acceleration would take too long. However, in the hyperspace we are going into, a new condition exists. In this space, you never saw light standing still, did you? Now, when light is made, it is at rest, and yet it instantly attains a velocity of 186,000 miles a second. How? Light cannot go slower than that speed and exist. However, the presence of certain things in space will alter the minimum velocity. For instance, it can go more slowly through glass, for the presence of the glass alters the condition of space. Well, in this hyperspace we are creating, matter cannot exist at a velocity lower than a certain quantity, and we determine that quantity by using this apparatus. We are subject to an infinite acceleration—and we are subject to that acceleration in every particle. Remember, that we have no weight when we offer no resistance to gravity, but we yield and fall freely. We yield to the infinite acceleration, and are not hurt by it. Result—we move at the velocity we desire," explained Arcot.

	"Well—you go into a hyperspace—and move at any speed you please. I wonder then, how are you going to see where you are going?"

	"We won't. While in that hyperspace I don't expect to see anything. We will start the ship in the direction we wish to go, then go in that line when we fall into hyperspace, and since we direct our path, we can avoid stars in that way. Meteors, or objects too small to be seen, we need not worry about, for the old law correctly stated, is, two bodies cannot be in the same space at the same time. We won't be—we will be in a different space. However, the gravitational effect of a star would ruin our apparatus, and drain out the stored energy, and we would materialize perhaps in the center of a white-hot star! The moral of which is, look out for stars!"

	"Then, how are you going to see your way back; you won't be able to get a radio signal either." The elder Morey was worried lest they become lost a million light years from Earth.

	"Worse than you think! We couldn't receive a signal of any kind, nor could we keep track of Earth in any way. If we go faster than light, there being nothing in this space which can, there is no means of maintaining contact with Earth. We will never be able to get a radio signal after we get more than three hundred light years away, for before Marconi's time there was no radio, and hence no radio signals could have gone more than three hundred light years in any case.

	"There must, then, be some means of following back that which has been working for more than three hundred light years, or indeed, more than a million light years—I mean years. The answer is easy. The sun has been working for tens of millions of millions of years. We can only go by its light. We will have to take photographs of it as we leave, and follow back by them," said Arcot.

	"I suppose that is the only way. I will have to leave it to you and trust to the fact that you are better scientists and better thinkers than I am, and that you have a very considerable desire to go on living. In the meantime, let's see the rest of this remarkable ship." Morey, Senior, turned and walked toward the farther door.

	The next room was the laboratory. Here there was a complete chemical laboratory on one side of the room, and complete physics equipment on the other. They could perform many experiments here that no man had been able to perform heretofore for lack of power, for in this ship they had more power generating facilities than in all the power stations of Earth combined!

	But there was little new, and little unusual here.

	"This next room is the physics and chemistry storeroom. Here we have a duplicate, or even six or seven duplicates of every piece of apparatus on board, and many extra tubes, spare coils, and plenty of material with which to make more. We have equipment of every kind here, and we could just about make a new ship out of what we have here! It would have to be a bit smaller, but it would work. A great deal of our materials are stored in the curvature of the ship, and can be gotten at readily if needed. The water and food are so stored and the oxygen tanks are there also. And there is plenty of nitrogen to replace any loss if necessary. But here we have most of the apparatus we are apt to need.

	"Oh, I forgot to point out in the engine room that we have the air purifier there as well as the automatic heat control. Heating is electrical, as it is easier and safer to have one large cosmic-ray power plant than many small ones for that purpose. Cosmic rays are too dangerous!

	"But here is the stairway to the upper deck."

	The upper deck was the main living quarters. There were several small rooms on each side of the corridor down the center, then at the extreme nose was the control room, and at the extreme stern, the observatory, equipped with a small but extremely powerful telectroscope, developed from those the Negrians had left on one of the deserted planets that old Sol captured in return for Neptune. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but it was easy to turn the ship about, and most of their observations would be made from the rear of the ship.

	Each of the men had a room of his own, and there was a small galley, and a library and reading room, equipped with all the books Arcot and Morey and the two others could think of as being useful. The books were clamped in place, as was everything else, lest they fly about loose when the ship accelerated. The control room, at the nose, was equipped with one giant window that included nearly a hemisphere of visible space. It was "blind" only directly behind, and there would be little to fear from behind, for there could always be someone in the rear observatory. There were cosmic-ray projectors, and molecular-ray projectors, each controlled from the control room, on the nose, and more on the stern, and a pair were set in the sides controlled from the library and the galley. They were well armed.

	The seats in the control room were, as in all interplanetary and space ships, made with broad, heavy leather straps across the front to support the pilot and assist when accelerations were changing. There was a small control board at the rear of the room, which took care of permanent adjustments, and then the control panel before the pilot. The ship certainly seemed ready to sail! They were provisioned for two years—two years without stops, and, with the possibility of stopping on other planets, they could probably exist indefinitely in the ship. "Morey," said Arcot, Senior, to his old friend, "it looks as if it was time for us to leave the Ancient Mariner to her young pilots!"

	"I guess you're right Well—I'll just say good-by—but you all know there is a lot more I could say." Morey, Senior, looked at them, and started off.

	"Good-by, Son-—good-by, men—I'll be expecting you any time within two years. We can have no warning, I suppose—for you will outrace the radio. Good-by." Arcot, Senior, joined his old friend, and they went outside. The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them, and the heavy rubber cushions sealed the entrance to the airlock. The two men stepped down and waved to the men inside the ship. Suddenly it trembled, and then it was rising gently.

-

	"THE Ancient Mariner is due for a more lonely trip than ever her namesake had," said Morey, Senior, as the shining ship rose high, and disappeared in the maze of afternoon traffic. Perhaps a few of those hurrying thousands looked at the strange ship of shining metal as it rose among them, and hurried out on its journey into the unplumbed depths of the mighty sea of space, in which float in far-separated colonies, blobs of matter we call stars. Perhaps some were curious as the first intergalactic ship left Earth, but the secret had been kept well, and no one knew what it meant.

	Soon the deep blue of the sky had given way to an intense violet and this faded to the utter black of space, as the ship drew away from the planet that was its home.

	"That lump of dust there is going to look mighty little when we get back," said Wade softly.

	"But that little lump of dust there is going to pull us across a distance that our imaginations can't conceive, and we will be happy to see that pale globe swinging in space again, when we get back—allowing, of course, that we do get back," reminded Arcot. The ship was straining forward now under the pull of its molecular motion power units, the acceleration throwing them forward at a rapidly increasing rate. Already they were nearly a half million miles from Earth, and rapidly increasing their velocity. The ship was still charging the coils, and they could not use their power yet. Indeed, it would require another three hours before they would be far enough from the sun to throw the ship into hyperspace. In the meantime, Morey was methodically checking every control, as Arcot called out the readings on the control panel. Everything was working to perfection. The machine was in perfect working order, their every calculation had been checked in practice so far. But the real test was soon to come.

	They were beyond the orbit of Saturn when they decided that they would be safe in throwing the ship over into the hyperspace.

	Morey was in the hyperspace control room, watching the instruments there. They were ready!

	"Hold on—here we go—if at all," called Arcot He reached out on the control panel before him, and touched the green switch that controlled the molecular motion machines; then the big power tubes below were off. They were drifting through space. His fingers touched a brilliant red switch—he pushed the tumbler over—there was a dull, muffled thud as a huge relay snapped shut, then suddenly a strange tingling feeling of power ran through them, space around them was suddenly black—the lights dimmed for an instant as the titanic current that flowed through the gigantic conductors set up a terrific magnetic field about it reacting with the cosmic-ray absorption plates. Suddenly the power seemed to reach a maximum and then it was gone!

	The ship was quiet. No one spoke. The meters which had flashed over to their limit had settled back and now read zero once more—all save those indicating the power stored in the giant coil. The stars that shone brilliantly in a myriad of colors about them were gone, then suddenly they saw space about glow; then there was a vast cloud of stars before them, but strange, violet stars. Some, however, were a pale green. Directly before them was one green star that glowed big and brilliant, then rapidly it faded and shrank to a tiny dot, a distant star! There was a strange tenseness about them. They seemed held in a strange, compelled silence.

	Arcot reached forward again—"Cutting off power, Morey!"—the red tumbler snapped back, Again space seemed to be charged with a vast surplus of energy that rushed in from all about, coursing through their bodies, producing a tingling feeling. Then again space was rocking in a grey cloud about them—the stars suddenly leapt out at them in blazing glory again.

	"Well, it worked once!" breathed Arcot, with a sigh of relief. "Lord, I made some false calculations, though I hope I didn't make any more! Morey—how was it? I used only one sixteenth power."

	"Don't use any more, then, Arcot!" laughed Morey. "We sure traveled! The things worked perfectly, and it certainly is lucky that we had the relays all magnetically shielded—the magnetic field down here was so strong that my pocket kit tried to start running circles around it! Those conductors carried over fifty billion amperes according to your magnetic drag meter here. The small coils were working perfectly, and you used only one sixteenth of them, as you say. They are charged again; the power went back to them all right, and we lost only five percent of the power—only about twenty thousand mega-watts."

	"Arcot—I thought you said we wouldn't be able to see the stars?" said Wade questioningly.

	"I did say that—and all my apologies for it. We can—but we aren't seeing them by light. The stars all have projections—shadows—in this space, because of their intense gravitational field, and the forces which exist on them cause shifts in this gravitational field, which cause changes in this space. These are of a frequency of perhaps one every minute or so, so when we come toward them at about twenty thousand times the speed of light, we get the effect of light of a violet type. Those were the stars in front of us, that we saw as violet points. The green ones were behind us, and that green light was tremendously reduced in frequency. It certainly can't be any less than X-rays, and may even be cosmics. Did you notice that there were no stars off to the side? We could not see them, for they were not so affected. I am beginning to wonder if we were not seeing electronic motions, oscillations, in the case of those behind us."

	"How do you know which is which?" asked Fuller skeptically.

	"Did you see the green star directly ahead of us, which dwindled rapidly?" 

	"Yes, I did."

	"Well," replied Arcot, "that was the sun. It was the only near star, the only one we would have been able to see as having a diameter. Since it was green, and I knew it was behind us, I decided that the others were also behind us. It isn't a proof, but it is a good indication."

	"You win, as usual, Arcot," admitted Fuller.

	"Well, where are we? I think that is more important!" said Wade.

	"I haven't the least idea; let's see if we can find out. I have the radio altimeter meteor detector on—we can leave the ship to itself, and let's all take a look at old Sol from a distance that no man ever reached before!"

-

	THEY started for the telectroscope room. Morey joined them, and as Arcot put the view of old Sol and his family on the telectroscope screen, and increased the magnification to its maximum, they looked eagerly at the system. The sun glowed brilliantly, and the whirling planets showed plainly.

	"Now if we wanted to take the trouble, we could calculate when the planets were in that position, and so determine the distance we have come. However, I notice that Neptune is still in place, and the planets of that other world have not come in yet, so the time is before the passing of the Black Star. That means little—I judged that from the looks of the system, as that was only about a year and a half ago—that means we are at least two light years away. But look—" Arcot looked himself for some time—pointing at the tiny dot that represented Earth, and the other that was Venus. "Look at those two planets. Earth and Venus—they are now very close together—see—almost exactly in line with the sun. That happens once every hundred years or so—and the last time that happened—we went to Venus for the first time! Since we happened to start in the general direction of Sirius, I think we must be within two light years of that star, so we might start our observations there. Let's turn the ship so the telectroscope can take in that field."

	Arcot walked, or tried to walk, forward, but as all power had been cut off, save the meteor protection, there was no weight, and their motion was a series of long dives, and since the control room and the observatory were in line, Arcot made a single dive to his destination. The walls of the rooms and the corridors had been equipped with hand grips.

	The others reached for hand grips, and Arcot swung the car gently about on its axis, till the observatory was pointing toward Sirius, the brightest star in our heavens, and from this much lesser distance it shone as a brilliant point of light that blazed wonderfully. They turned the telectroscope toward it, but there was little they could see that was not visible from Earth, or from the big observatories on the Moon or Uranus.

	"I think we may as well go nearer, and see what we can find on close range observation," suggested Morey. "Turn the ship back, and I. will take some pictures of the sun and its surrounding star field from this distance. Our only way of getting back is going to be this series of pictures, so I think we had best make it complete. For the first light century, we can take one every ten light years, after that, one each light century, till we reach a point where we see only diminishing views of the local cluster, then we can wait till we get to the edge of the Universe. That sound all right to you, Arcot?"

	"Well—you're the astronomer, I'm not," replied Arcot. "To tell you the truth, I would have to search a while to find old Sol again! I can't see just where he is. Of course, I could locate him again by means of the gyroscope settings, but I am afraid I wouldn't find him so readily visually."

	"Say—you sure are a fine one to pilot an expedition in space!" cried Wade in mock horror. "I think we ought to demote him for that! Imagine! He brings us out here some eight or nine light years—then tells us he isn't sure just where we are! Doesn't even know which of the thirty million or so stars we can see is the sun! Well, I am glad we have a cautious man like Morey along." Wade shook his head sadly. It certainly portended ill for this expedition, it seemed.

	They took a series of six plates of the sun and its family from this distance, using different magnification.

	"These plates will prove our story too, we might have gone only a little way into space, up from the plane of the solar system, and taken plates through a wide angle camera, but we must have gone at least nine years into the past to get a picture like this. This will be practically our only proof of our story—unless we bring back something very definitely of another planet," said Morey as he looked at the finished plates. The new self-developing short exposure plates, while not orthochromatic, were more desirable for this work, as they took less time on exposure.

	The ship suddenly rotated about, and they were pointed for the blazing star that was Sirius.

-

	MOREY and the others joined Arcot in the control room now and strapped themselves into the cushioned seats. It was decided that the machine was in perfect order, and certainly they needed no more observations than they could make from the control-room meters here.

	Arcot gazed out at the spot that was their immediate goal, and slowly said to Morey, "How much bigger than old Sol is that star, Morey?"

	"It all depends on how you measure size. It is 2.5 times as heavy, but four times as large as the Sun. It radiates about 25 times as much light. In other words, one hundred million tons of matter disappear each second in that star. That, of course, is Sirius A; Sirius B, its tiny companion, is the most interesting star we know of. It has only one one-hundred-and-twenty-five thousandths the volume of Sirius A, yet it weighs one-third as much—very nearly the same weight as our sun! It radiates more per square inch, than our sun, but due to its tiny size—stellarly speaking—it is very faint. That star, which, as I said, weighs as much as the sun, is about the size of Earth," replied Morey.

	"You sure have those statistics down pat!" said Fuller, laughing. "But I must say they are interesting. What is that star made of, anyway? Lux metal?"

	"Hardly! Lux metal has a density of only about 125, while this star has a density so high that one cubic inch of its matter weighs a ton!" replied Morey.

	"Whew—I would hate to drop a baseball on my toe on that world!" said Wade.

	"Oh, it wouldn't hurt you. If you could lift the darned thing, you ought to be tough enough to stand that! Remember that it would contain about nine cubic inches, and that the acceleration due to gravity there would make it weigh somewhere near 200 tons! Think you could handle it?" asked Arcot. "At any rate, here we go, and you can get out and try it."

	Again came the shock of the start; the heavens seemed to reel about them, the bright spot of Sirius was a brilliant violet point that suddenly seemed an expanding balloon as it grew before their eyes, spreading out till it filled a large angle. Larger than a full moon it was, as they rushed toward it at terrific velocity. Then again the heavens reeled, and they were still, and the control room was filled with a dazzling splendor of brilliant blue-white light, and an intense heat beat in upon them. The giant disc before them was indeed giving off far more heat than did the sun. Every square inch of this star gave off sixteen times as much power as the same area of the sun.

	"We had best be careful here, Morey, that star, at 11,000 degrees, is blue-white, and therefore gives off far more ultra-violet than the sun, and, as all radiation is more plentiful, we will get a great overdose. Feel that heat! I want to measure that—and it seems we are not going to stay here long. At our speed we will overcome the gravity of the sun and leave. We ought to calculate our distance—take some measurements that will enable us to do so. Will you?" Arcot paused, looking at the star in surprise.

	"Say—Morey, this star should be a double star—where is the companion—well—look—LOOK—That's no companion star—it's a planet! It is impossible for a planet to be in equilibrium about a double star! That star is a singleton!" said Arcot.

	"That is a planet—I can't—why, it can't be! We've made too many measurements on this star to make it possible!" said Morey in bewildered surprise.

	"I don't give a hang whether it can or not, Morey. The fact remains that it is," pointed out Wade, looking at the dimly lighted planet "Looks as if that shoots a whole flock of holes in that pretty bed-time story you were telling about the dense star!"

	"I make a motion we look more closely first," said Fuller, quite logically.

	But at first the telectroscope only served to confuse them more. It was most certainly a planet, and there seemed a strange, vague, feeling of having seen it before. Arcot mentioned this, and Wade launched into a discussion of how the left and right hemispheres of the brain get out of step at times, causing a sensation of having seen a thing before when it could not possibly have happened previously.

	Arcot looked at him for a moment, gave him a withering stare, and marched directly to the library, saying nothing. A moment later he was back with a large volume entitled, "The Astronomy of The Negrian Invasion," by D. K. Harkness. Arcot opened the volume to a full-page photograph of the third planet of the Black Star as taken from a space cruiser circling the planet. Silently he pointed to it, and to the image swimming on the screen of the telectroscope.

	"Good—why—it's impossible—we have come faster than light, and that planet was here before us!" said Wade in astonished surprise.

	"As you so brilliantly remarked a moment ago, I don't give a hang whether it can or not, it is. How, I can't say, save that it does clear up a number of things. Remember that the Negrians said that, in their past, as recorded in the records we found, they had had a force ray, which could be used to move planets in their orbits? I wonder if it couldn't be used to move an unwanted dwarf from a giant star, breaking up an age-old double star. Also, their scientists had been looking for the secret of moving faster than light. We have done it why not they? They did it, is my opinion, and made a good job of it. They moved their whole planets over here! They deserted that dead sun of theirs all right and since they could go where they wished, they went to a good star. Why bother with a second-rate sun like ours? Especially as they just received one first-class beating from the people of that sun," said Arcot

	"Perfect—explains everything!" said Morey enthusiastically.

	"Except that we saw that companion star, when we stopped back there not half an hour ago," said Fuller.

	"You are correct—not half an hour ago—two years ago. We are, of necessity, traveling through time. Remember that in all of Einstein's equations, time and the velocity of light are tied up together. We untied one—or tied it in knots—which you prefer—and the result is that we travel through time, every time we move," pointed out Arcot "We haven't slept, for instance, in some ten years. Or should I say it was ten years in the future that we slept last!"

	"I'm hungry—or ought to be—I won't eat tor ten years!" laughed Wade.

	"I sure am sorry for you, then!" laughed Morey. "If you are hungry now, what are you going to be when we reach that other nebula? It will be about three or four million light years away."

	"Oh—that's easy! I won't be yet—in fact mankind won't be for another two or three million, seven hundred thousand years!" replied Wade. "If we are traveling in time, what time are we going to get back to Earth?" asked Fuller, suddenly worried.

	"We will get back to Earth at exactly the same time we left—provided we move by space control at all times. For every second we stop, we will travel normally through time, and so spend exactly as long away from Earth, as we spend on other planets and in traveling on the molecular beam. I expect to spend some time in crossing the sea of space between the Island Universes, and that won't count on our time; all other time will. We can't land in our past, because Earth is no longer there, and we can't land in the future, because Earth isn't there yet

	"But let's investigate this world. You understand why we didn't see it when we stopped before? It wasn't there yet In fact light would show it now as being somewhere in the vicinity of the sun!" This from Wade.

	They took a number of pictures, and photographed the star from many positions, as the ship swung around it in its steady flight.

-

	THEY were so absorbed in their new discovery, that they did not notice that there were other planets here as well. It was Fuller who detected them, using a little twelve-inch relux reflector telescope, with a compound lux metal intensifier lens of two-foot diameter. There were several smaller lenses arranged as in the old style triplet and quadruplet telescopes which gave a wide angle vision, and it was this wide angle that permitted him to see the other planet.

	Morey observed it eagerly for some while, and pronounced it the sixth planet of the Black Star, and tried to watch it in its orbital movement.

	"This is the most abominable place to make planetary observations from! How can you observe a planet's motion, when the whole ship is moving? I am very skeptical of this result—but it seems to me that those planets aren't moving in the same plane of revolution!" said Morey, his brow wrinkled in puzzled wonder.

	Arcot thought a moment, then burst out laughing. "Excellent! Why should they be? This is an artificial arrangement, remember, and they are placing them for greatest convenience. By having them all in the same plane, it makes possible superior conjunctions when they are on opposite sides of the sun. By placing them at angles, if there were but two, so as to have the planes of orbital revolution at right angles, you would never have a superior conjunction and further, they can be more nearly the same distance from the sun, so making easier the acclimation of denizens of one planet on another, and their force rays will prevent trouble. I think they are wise, if they have done that!"

	The observations were continued, till all the planets had been located, and even old Neptune, where crews of working machines were very obviously at work, building up giant structures of the lux metal, and the great cities of the Negrians, were beginning to loom on the once bleak plains of the planet. Arcot noticed that it was now surrounded by a deep atmosphere, and that mighty seas of sparkling water rolled over vast areas of its huge bulk. The 84,800-mile diameter of the planet, and its mass, seventeen times that of Earth, meant that its seas were indeed wide, and since the long gone age, when it was drawn from the flaming sun, it had never been thawed, and the mighty masses of water had lain frozen on its surface. Now, at last, brought near a warm sun, a sun which poured out twenty-six times the radiation of its former parent body, it had thawed. No doubt the Negrians had hastened the process by leaving it nearer the mighty star for a time, while its mountains of ice, hundreds of degrees below zero, thawed.

	But at last they had added many pictures to their collection, and they determined to go on, for, as Arcot said, "We have plenty of proof now that we really beat light, and incidentally time, in its flight, for Earth and Venus won't receive the light-transferred news of this for eight years, and if we bring photographs of it, that ought to establish our case, and then others can take up the laborious work of classifying the planets, and getting details of their orbits, and, incidentally, start commerce! Commerce—if they are willing—across quintillions of miles of space!"

	"And," interrupted Wade, "they can make the trip to this system more quickly than the trip to Venus!"

	They turned their ship once more, and headed out into far space. They drove out from the star toward which they had been falling, and out into space where they could once more use their space-control apparatus.

	When the great, hot disc of the brightest star, which we of the solar system can see, had once more diminished to a disc smaller than our Moon appears when seen from Earth, they turned the ship till old Sol once more showed his dim point of light exactly on the cross hairs of the "aiming telescope," Arcot again threw the little red tumbler that released a flood of energy into the coils, such as they had not used before. The space about them seemed to reel, and grow dim. The stars glowed dull red ahead of them, and those that were actually ahead, were now a violet, that was so short in wave-length as to be well nigh invisible.

	Arcot watched the dull red disc of Sirius contract like a pricked balloon, and saw another star ahead of him grow to a disc off to one side—the car reeled, the relays thudded dully, the instruments flickered under a suddenly rising surge of power—then they were calm again, and Arcot had snapped over the power switch; "That," said he quietly, "is not so good."

	"Threw the gyroscopes, didn't it?" asked Morey, equally quietly.

	"It did—and I have no idea how far. All we can do is start a search, and at this distance we had best go by Sirius, it's both brighter and nearer. That is going—if we are going—to be our greatest difficulty. I can't avoid a star when it is coming at us at that rate, and I was using our next lowest power. The speed goes up with the cube of the power as we calculated."

	"What's the matter?" asked Fuller anxiously.

	"We got too near the field of gravity of a young giant star—and he threw us for a loss. We drained out three-fourths of our energy from the coils, for one thing, and into the bargain we lost our bearings. The attraction turned the gyroscopes, and threw the ship out of line, so we no longer know just where the sun is. Look at that giant will you—we must be billions of miles from that blamed star, and we can still see its diameter. Well, come on Morey, we haven't turned more than a few degrees I hope—can't tell exactly."

	Their position was anything but pleasant. They must pick out from the vast star field behind them, the one star that was their home, not knowing exactly where it was—but they had one tremendous help. Their last stop had been used to photograph the star field about the sun. No man had ever before "seen himself as others see him," or seen the solar system as others saw it. The photographs would help them tremendously.

	They found the sun at last, far off to one side; they had to rotate the ship through nearly twenty-five degrees to find it, however.

	"That being found, and photographs being taken, let's start on again. The coils are charged again, are they not?" said Morey after they had taken another group of photographs and redirected the ship.

	"They are charged, and hereafter I am going to use the least possible amount of power. It certainly is not safe to use more!" replied Arcot.

	They started for the control, room, much relieved. Arcot dove first, and Wade directly behind him. Wade decided suddenly to go into his room, and stopped himself by gripping a handhold. Morey, following close, bumped into him, and was brought to rest in his turn, and Wade was pushed into his room. But Fuller, coming last, pushed on Morey, and Morey moved forward once more with new velocity, but Fuller came to rest in the center of the corridor.

	"Hey—Morey—send me a sky hook—I'm caught!" laughed Fuller.

	"Go to sleep—it will be a comfortable bed you'll find," advised Morey, smiling up at him as he gripped his chair. Isolated as he was in the middle of the corridor, he could not push on anything and remained stranded. Wade looked out of his room just then, and remarked that Fuller certainly was weak—with no weight at all, he couldn't push himself the length of the ship.

	"Well, if certain parties, whom I will not name, wouldn't block traffic every time they get a fool idea to go into their room, I wouldn't be here. Come on, though, Morey—give me a hand—I got you off of dead center!" called Fuller.

	"Use your brains, if you have any, and see what you can do. Come on Wade—we're going," replied Morey.

-

	SINCE they were to use the space control, though, they would be subject to infinite acceleration, it would be a free fall, and Fuller would remain helplessly weightless.

	The air of the car suddenly seemed supercharged with energy, as space grew grey; then the stars were all before them. They were going forward at full speed.

	"Well, I have traffic blocked fairly well if I feel that way, so eventually you'd have to help me. However, my brains tell me," said Fuller, floundering clumsily, as he tried, weightless, to remove one of his soft rubberoid moccasins, "that action (he straightened with it in his hand) is equal, and opposite to reaction!" and he threw the mass with all possible velocity toward Morey. The reaction of the motion slowly, but surely, brought him near a handhold, and inside of ten seconds he gripped it. In the meantime, the flying slipper caught Morey in the chest with a pronounced smack as he struggled vainly to avoid it. Handicapped by the lack of friction, his arms were not powerful enough, of course, to move his mass as quickly as his legs might have done, for his inertia, or resistance to sudden motion, was as great as ever, and he did not succeed in ducking.

	"Round one! Won by Fuller!" laughed Arcot. "It appears he has brains, and knows how to use them!"

	"All right, Fuller, you win that one!" agreed Morey, laughing.

	They had stopped by the time Fuller reached the control room and set about at once making more observations.

	The time passed monotonously after they had examined a few stars. There was little difference, each was but a scene of flaming matter, for there is but one in a hundred million that has planets. There was little interest in this work; and, as Fuller remarked, he had understood that this was a trip of exploration. They were not astronomers; they were on a vacation; why all the hard work? They could neither do as good a job, nor as satisfactory a one, as could an experienced astronomer, so they decided to limit their observations to those few necessary for their return trip to Earth.

	"We have to stop now and then to make the necessary back-trail photographs. But we want to investigate for planets anyway, don't we?" said Morey.

	"Very true, but must we merely hunt at random for planets?" asked Fuller. "Can't we look, for instance, for stars of the same type as our sun, hoping that they will be more apt to have planets? I should think that such a thing as being pulled to pieces would leave its marks on the star."

	"Hmmm—that is an idea," replied Morey. "Of course as far as mass of matter lost in forming a planetary system is concerned, that is infinitesimal—the total mass of the planets will not affect the mass of the parent sun more than a few millenniums of radiation losses would. The mass of the planets of our system, as it was formed, for instance, did not total over two three-thousandths the mass of the sun. Jupiter alone was the main item, the other eight amounted to little. The outer planets, excepting the ninth, and outermost, were larger by far than the inner planets, still no one of them was even one one-thousandth the mass of the sun.

	"But naturally there might result certain internal disturbances."

	"Well, why not try it?" said Fuller. "They certainly would be as apt to have planets as any other, if our deductions are not correct, so let's pick out a star of spectral type G-0 and head for it."

	They were now well out toward the edge of our galactic nebula, some thirty thousand light years from home, and still heading outward. Since they had originally headed out along the narrow diameter of the more or less disc-shaped mass of stars that form our nebula, our Island Universe, they would reach the edge soon.

	Arcot pointed this out. "We will have less chance of finding a planetary star here near the edge of the universe," said he, "for remember that stars must pass close to each other in order for planets to be formed. Here, far toward the edge of the Island, there are fewer stars, and fewer pass. Hence the chances of planets are less."

	"One can detect the difference when looking toward the center of the universe, and looking toward the edge now. See—off there, there are rather few stars, the star field is far more crowded off to the rear. We are leaving the main concentration of stars, I have been noticing the diminishing number of stars for some time," said Morey, staring at the velvet night of space.

	The Galaxy is shaped like a gigantic disc, a mighty whirling plate, a mass of mighty suns, whose total mass was more than three hundred thousand million times as great as the mass of our own sun, and that sun is well above average in star size, for every one star that is three or four times as large as our sun, there are a hundred thousand which are smaller, and perhaps yet other thousands that man had never been able to see, on account of their very small size.

	Man is forced to judge of star size by those stars right about his own home, and the variety in dimensions is anything but great

	But here, they had come far out toward one of the flat surfaces of the titanic disc of stars, the giant of the visible Cosmos, for no other known nebula compares with it in size or mass. Behind and to their sides lay the far-stretching mass of glowing stars. Before them they saw a phenomenon that no human being of Earth had ever seen before; they saw black, velvet night of space, and only here and there was a scattered, dim-glowing star—a far-flung speck of matter that revolved in a giant orbit about the center of gravity of the Galaxy in an orbit whose radius was fifty thousand light years! Our sun, lying as it does, near the center of the mighty star field, the sky is divided by the belt of the Milky Way, the main depth of the starry Island Universe, for when we look toward the Milky Way, we are looking through the greatest radius of the disc, and we see the greatest possible number of stars, for then they stretch on for the countless quintillions of miles, through the depth of a Universe.

	And even when we look off to one side, away from the Milky Way, we see the stars, for, situated as we are at the center, they are about equally numerous on each side.

-

	IN this particular region the stars are far closer together than in the average portion of space, for the Island Universe has here a little local cluster of a few hundred thousand stars (each weighing approximately a quarter of a million times as much as Earth) grouped close together.

	Our sky is perhaps more thickly crowded than would be the sky or planets in other portions of space. But we can, with the aid of our telescopes, see other local clusters, and understand the meaning of this. Here in our little corner of space, there are stars so close together that they do not average above six light years apart!

	But now, far toward the edge, where Arcot and his friends were, the black of space that stretched so unendingly off on that one side mutely testified to the tremendous distances from one star to another.

	"Do you know," said Wade slowly, "I have been wondering about the progress along scientific lines that a race put here would make. Let us allow that there are stars here, and that these stars have planets; then we will endow these planets with life. But here, so far from the stars they might watch, how much slower their progress would be!"

	"They would certainly have to wait till some one of their scientists developed the telectroscope, wouldn't they?" said Fuller.

	"I am afraid that even that would be hopeless. The distance from star to star is of the order of 100 to 1,000 light years here, against five or six near our sun. To us, of Earth, the stars are titanic furnaces, gigantic test tubes of nature, with automatic reading devices attached, hung in the sky for us to watch. We have learned more of interest about space from the stars, than all the experiments of the physicists of Earth ever secured for us! In the stars we can watch atoms pummeled under the terrific bombardment of 28,000 degrees of heat, as S Doradus, which radiates enough heat from one square inch to run a modern space-liner—28,000 horsepower per square inch, at 28,000 degrees, and yet we can turn our telescopes to other stars, and see matter compressed to unbelievable densities, densities of 60—even 100 thousand times that of water. It was in the atoms of the sun that we first counted the 'R.P.M.' (revolutions per minute) of the electrons. They had to use telescopes on the atoms of the sun to tell those things. Earth would not disclose these secrets, and we could not get the necessary conditions there—only in the mighty stellar laboratories can we find them.

	"And creatures living out here would never see those things. Their own star they could work with—but the white dwarfs they would never know. Van Mannen's star would be invisible were we not so fortunately situated. It is a remarkably weak star but of a remarkably interesting type. These hypothetical people would be quite unable to find such stars."

	"I have heard the name, but I don't know much about that star. What is it?" asked Fuller.

	"Well, to tell the actual truth, despite my loud talk, we don't know such a tremendous lot about it," admitted Arcot "About all we do know is that its surface temperature is about 1,000 degrees higher than that of old Sol, or 7,000 degrees, yet it emits but l-6,000th the light of our sun. From these statistics, knowing the rate of radiation per square inch that can take place at that temperature, and the total amount of radiation, it is mere arithmetic to determine the total area—and hence the radius. The radius works out to be but l-110th that of our sun, so the star is, if anything, smaller than Earth, yet its density is so great that it is nearly as heavy as old Sol himself! 

	"But to continue the story: this lack of laboratories, this lack of opportunity for watching the suns that might teach them much, would delay their knowledge of atomic structure, and their knowledge of space, although they might know much of chemistry, physics, and mathematics to a certain extent, though physics of space is the greatest modern developer of Math. Morey, here, would never have developed his new auto-integral calculus without the need, and it was the space problems that made the need. They would be apt to be near, but still behind us in science. Do you realize how utterly uninteresting, as far as adventure goes, which is what we are after, they would be? They know enough to know what science is, and so are not to be mystified by our demonstrations, they would at once realize it was new, and interesting science—ask questions—but they would not be very interesting as far as adventure goes.

	"Suppose, on the other hand, we visit a race ahead of us. We won't stay there long—it is too apt to be dangerous, for think what they might do! They might decide that this ship was too threatening to them with its mobility, and they might exterminate us, and on the other hand, they might be so far advanced that we would mean nothing at all to them—just like ants, or—a better example would be a baby—a squalling, helpless, kicking baby!" Arcot laughed at the thought "That isn't a very complimentary picture—and with the wonderful advances we have made, there just isn't that much left to be able to say we are so little!" objected Fuller.

	"Fuller—I'm surprised at you! Have I never told you my objection to these scientific stories that tell of the very far future? They are impossible—for the simple reason that we are today opening our eyes on the world of science—our race has but three thousand short years behind it and three thousand million or more to come. How can any man of today, with his fresh-opened eyes of science take in the mighty pyramid of science that will have built up in those long, long years of the future? It is too gigantic for us to grasp. We must just wait—we cannot imagine the things that the ever-expanding mind of man will discover. And—I am surprised at you for saying that there can be no advances! There can be no greater energy than that of matter—yes? I doubt that. I am even now thinking of something new—an energy so vast—so transcendently tremendous—it is too great for man—the energy of all the mighty suns of all the Island Universes—of the whole cosmos at the hand of man—the energy of a billion billion billion suns! And every sun is pouring out its energy—at the rate of quintillions of horsepower every instant!

	"But it is too great for man to have—I am going to forget it, lest man be destroyed by his own might!"

-

	ARCOT had spoken slowly—with a dreamy look in his eyes as his halting speech told of his intense thought—of a dream of such awful energies as man had never before conceived. Dreamily he looked long out toward the black of velvet space, with its few, scattered, shining stars.

	"But we are here to decide which way to go," he added with a sudden briskness as he straightened his shoulders. "Every now and then I get a new idea—and I sort of dream—then is the time when I am most apt to see the solution. I think I know that solution now, but unless that need arises, I am never going to use it. It is too dangerous a toy for man."

	"Arcot I've been wondering about the advisability of looking for a planet here," said Morey. "Why look about in this universe at all? We are near the edge now, and we are due to look a much longer time than we would have to if we went to the center of the universe. Why not leave this universe here at once? Why not go to another—seek there for the worlds we want? Also, as you say, their development would be apt to be less, and we want the people to be up with us."

	"The development, per millennium, would be less," said Arcot, "but remember our old world was approximately 2,000,000,000 years old, when we came on the scene. It is now approximately 2,000,000,000 years old. In other words, our life span on Earth—and I mean the life span of mankind, is so short, that it doesn't even count—it is far within the error of observation of the age of Earth. The Earth will continue to be able to support life for another 1,000,000,000,000 years—the probable future life of the human race. And our present development, if such it may be called, is just about 1000 years of scientific life. We have, then, the chance of picking out some planet that has a race of beings within one century's development of us—or one part in 10,000,000,000, which is not a promising proposition when you consider, further, our slight chance of finding a planet at all!

	"However, under our improved system, the chances are tremendously increased, so we intend to investigate suns of the same spectral type as ours, as old Sol. I should say, young Sol, and that will automatically eliminate planets of the age I mentioned, and confine us to something within a billion or two years of the age of the Earth—or will it—for our sun was about 8,000,000,000,000 years old when the system was formed—and is now still, within the observable error, that old.

	"No, we will only say that we won't land on any stars that are tremendously older, or tremendously younger than our sun.

	"But I like your idea—and I think it is worth trying. We can leave this universe now, let us go out at a steep angle, about 45" to the Galactic plane, let us say, so that we will be able to see both the depth, the length, and the width of the Galaxy, toward some nebula in that direction—what do you say, fellows?"

	"I say," remarked Fuller, "that some of the great void without seems to have leaked into my own poor self, and that, it being some thirty thousand years before I will have my last meal this morning—whatever it is I mean—I want another." Fuller looked to Wade, the official cook of the expedition.

	"Oh! So that is what I have been wanting!" said Arcot. Then he suddenly burst out laughing. It had been ten chronometer hours since they ate, but since they had been outracing light, they were thirty thousand years in Earth's past. The strange, weightless sensation of space-traveling makes it very hard to recognize normally familiar sensations, and the sensation of hunger is one of them. Since so little work can be done, there is no great need for food, but then, ordinary hunger is not caused by lack of nourishment, but because the stomach is empty. Arcot, like most regular space navigators, had a considerable supply of some of the tasty, artificial foods which contained little or no nourishment.

	Sleep was another problem. A restless body will not permit a tired brain to sleep, and though much hard mental work is done in space, the lack of physical fatigue makes sleep difficult. The usual "day" in space was nearer forty hours, with thirty-hour waking periods, and ten-hour periods for sleep.

	"I think we might well start our trip with some sleep," said Arcot. "As soon as we get into free space, away from the crowded region of the stars, we can 'throw her into high', as they used to say in the days of gasoline automobiles, and make real 'time'—indeed—we will, for the first time in history—well we are out of history already—that is about 27,000 light years behind us—the first time in pre-history, then, 'time' will really be made at the rate of—but we don't know yet!

	"At any rate, let's eat, then; after the meal, we can let her ride into free space, until we get a suitable distance out, when we can stop for photographs. We will want to know what part of the nebula to enter when we come back!"

	Two hours later they had seen the last of the stars swing about and fall in behind them, and now they saw the mighty disc of the Galaxy for the first time, as a free observer!

	Arcot reached his hand over, and touched the red control—"I'm going to throw on half power, and stop in ten seconds." The air around them seemed suddenly snapping with an unprecedented tension—then it was gone as the coil became fully charged.

	"Lucky we shielded those relays," muttered Arcot, as the tremendous surge of current set up a magnetic field that turned knives and forks and, as Wade found to his intense disgust, stopped watches that were not magnetically shielded.

	Space was utterly black about them now. There wasn't the slightest hint of light. The ten seconds that Arcot had allowed dragged slowly, then at last came the heavy thud of the huge relays, then again the current was flowing, space was suddenly normal, and they were alone in blackness.

	Morey dove swiftly for the observatory. Before them, there was little to see, the dim glow of nebulas ten million, twenty million, a hundred million light years off, was scarcely visible to the naked eye, despite the utter clarity of space.

	Behind them, like a shining horizon, they saw the mass of the nebula they had just left. It was contracting already; it had shown a slight tilt now, and Morey made swift calculations as to their speed, by observations on fixed stars which he could recognize. He had made similar observations just before this, and as they had known the angle before, and the present angle of separation, he could calculate the distance. They had used one half power, so with twice this, they could get eight times the velocity that had been developed in this run.

	Arcot floated into the gravity-free room, and struck the wall with a little thump, bouncing back to the floor by a careful manipulation of arms and legs, and thrust his toes through a little toe-hold. In the ship they always wore soft mocassins, as this made the danger of damage or injury less, and it was easier to use the toe-holds. "What do you make?"

	"Hmm—let's see—since 45° is √2/2 and the cotan. of 80° is l/√3, then—hmmm (he worked a moment with slide rule and pencil)—Well—we sure were making time! Twenty-nine light years—that means that we can make the ten million light year trip to the nearest nebulas—and still have some choice. There are a good many within ten million light years—it will take us—(a moment's work with the slide rule)—about five days—a little less. That is, at full speed.

	"But let us go still further out into space. We will get the best glimpse of our universe from about five radii from it—that is half a million light years or so. We will need—six hours for that. I think we will be wisest to stop at three hours, and see what we can see about getting back to old Earth. We will want some photographs."

	"All right, Morey, it's up to you. I think we can go on, and I'll start the ship now. I wonder if you will want to watch the instruments? This will be first test at full power—we figured we would make 20 light years a second, as a matter of fact, we can make about 23—that is quite all right!"

	Morey had taken some photographs of the universe, but as yet they were not far enough outside, for this little trip had been more in the nature of a high speed test and had proved to be a successful test.

	Arcot settled himself at the control board once more, and stopped a moment. "All ready, Morey? I just happened to think—it might be a good idea to pick out our nebula now, and start toward it."

	"Let's wait—we can't make a very careful choice at this distance, anyway, and we are beyond the enlarging power-range of the telectroscope here. In another half million light years we will have a very much better view, remember. The distance of five hundred thousand light years will not mean much out of our way in any case, as we must go in that direction."

	"You win—here goes!" said Arcot.

	ARCOT pushed over the little red control—half way, and the air seemed snapping with the strain—a moment, and the air actually broke down in spots with the terrific electrical intensity of the charge. At thirty thousand volts per centimeter, air breaks down and sparks may pass. There were little snapping sparks in the air now, and though harmless electrically, their heat produced burns, as Wade found to his sorrow.

	"Ow—say—why didn't you tell us to bring lightning rods?" he asked indignantly, as a small spark snapped its way over his hand, giving a slight burn.

	"Oh—sorry—I forgot that, but you see, most of us know enough to keep out of the way of those things," grinned Arcot. "Seriously, though, I didn't think the electro-static curvature would be so slow in readjusting. You see what happens is, that when we build up our light-rate distortion field, other curvatures are affected, and we get some gravity, some magnetism, and some electrostatic fields. You see what happens when they don't leak their energy back into the coil, and so into the desired field. You can't feel the gravitational field, as you are already in it. But we are busy with the instruments—leave the motorman alone!"

	Morey was calling loudly for tests. The ship seemed behaving perfectly, and the check tests were to make sure that the relays were not being burned, so that they would not respond properly. Rerouting the current in the meantime, Arcot tested them one by one. All were perfect. At last they were through.

	"Say—now you two are finished, suppose you see if you can give an explanation of that!" said Fuller, in suppressed excitement.

	Far off to their left, and far to their right they saw two shining ships paralleling their course! They were shining, sleek ships, their long, longitudinal windows glowing with white light. They seemed moving at exactly the same speed, holding grimly to the course of the Ancient Mariner. Like some guard, they followed, holding perfectly to the course, despite the terrific speed they were making!

	Arcot stared in amazement, his face suddenly clouded in wonder, while Morey stared in equal wonder. Wade and Fuller, the official ray operators, slid into the ray control seats. Their long practice with the rays had made them dead shots, and they had been chosen before starting as the ray men.

	"Lord," muttered Morey as he looked at the ships, "where can they have come from?"

	Suddenly Arcot burst out laughing! "Don't—ho—hoh-ho—oh—don't shoot!" he cried, laughing so hard it was impossible to understand him without paying the closest attention. Wade and Fuller and Morey looked at him in amazement, wonderingly. "Oh—space—curved!" he managed to gasp.

	A moment Morey looked puzzled—then he was laughing as hard as Arcot. Helplessly, Wade and Fuller looked at them, and then at each other—then Wade suddenly caught the meaning of Arcot's remark. He was also incommunicado a moment later.

	"Well, when you half-witted physicists recover, please let me in on the joke," said Fuller, still mystified, looking curiously at the strange ships following close beside them. He realized that they were laughing at something about the ships, and when he noticed the exact duplications of the lines of his own ship in them, he realized that they were mirror Images, and with a startled look, asked Arcot for the explanation.

	Wiping his eyes, Arcot explained. "It wasn't really as funny as all that they are mirror images, and in this case, shooting at the mirror, will kill the original. You realize that we are now twisted far out of shape. Due to our curvature of space, what was a straight line, or a very close approach to it, is now so badly twisted into a curve, it does not even resemble a straight line. But everything is equally twisted. A carpenter's square, for instance, might be visibly twisted, but a similarly twisted 'square' would not show it. We are twisted so much ourselves, we can't detect it.

	"But light, now, is forced to go in a curve. You know they have been able to take photographs of the Galaxy before this, from outside of it, from far space. They have seen the Galaxy as it is seen from far off—very far off. They have taken pictures of it by light that left hundreds of millions of years ago, went all the way around the cosmos, and is just getting back again! What we see is an extremely smaller example of that—we are seeing ourselves—and by light that left a fraction of a second—whoa—I forgot the increased speed of light here—very shortly before—it has gone all the way around our little cosmos, and is back again. Further, if you use a cosmic or molecular ray, you may destroy the ship! It will go around, and hit us from behind!" 

	"Say—that is a nice proposition—then we will be accompanied by those ghosts all the way? This will be a real Ancient Mariner trip! There goes the spirit 'nine fathoms deep' which moves the ship—the ghosts that work the sails!" laughed Fuller.

	"But there is something else I was waiting to ask you. Back there Morey said that we would not be able to get enough magnification with the telectroscope to see the universe we were heading for, yet another half million light years, out of ten, would make a tremendous difference. Why should it?"

	"That is because of the theory of amplification in electronic tubes. The amplification of those stellar images is, of course, due to the vacuum tube amplifier. Do you remember back in the 1980's they had a telephone cable under the Atlantic? That was the first, and they had a great deal of trouble with it, for they had so much attenuation of signals over that distance, they could not get enough amplification. It would seem at first sight that they need only add more tubes for amplifiers. There is a limit, though. The whole principle of the vacuum tube depends on electronic emission, and if you get too much amplification, you can hear one electron, single electrons striking the plate of the first tube, become audible in the last, because of the terrific amplification. This held them up for some time, till the invention of permalloy allowed them to overcome the capacitance of the water around the cables.

	"The same is true of this apparatus—there is a limit to amplification. We can operate only at a fixed maximum. There is that limit, and we can get no higher amplification. To get an image of the universe we are heading for, we must use so much amplification that this effect spoils the image now, whereas in the short 500,000 light years, this limit will have been passed, and we can use the full power that is permissible, and get a very fine image."

-

	THEY found little to do now as they passed on at high speed through the vast realm of space. The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The three hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days. They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but the soundless, continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around, and Wade tried to sleep, and after lying strapped in his bunk for nearly half an hour, he finally gave up in despair.

	Arcot saw that the strain of doing nothing was not going to be good for his little crew, and decided to see what was to be done about it

	He went down to the laboratory, and looked for an inspiration. He found it.

	"Hello!—Morey—come here, will you—the rest of you, too!"

	They came to find him staring meditatively at a power pack of one of the power belts he had designed. He had taken the lux metal case off, and was looking at the neat apparatus laid out. within. This had been made by machine, already. They had been put in as a commercial article before he left Earth, the small size, and convenience was a great factor in their popularity, for they took no parking room—one merely wore them—and they were fairly fast. Of course, whereas convenient, in a city, they were useless for trips of four or five hundred miles, for while it took them a full six hours, the standard private machine would make the same trip in half an hour.

	"These are equipped for use with the altitude suits, of course, and that gives us protection against gases, but I wonder if we might not install protection against mechanical injury—with intent to damage aforethought! In other words, why not equip these suits with a small invisibility apparatus? We have it on the ship, and we can install it on this. Also—it is something to do."

	"Great idea, Arcot—If you can find room in that case!" said Wade, looking doubtfully at the neatly, but decidedly filled case.

	"Oh, we won't add anything but a few tuning devices really, and they don't take a whale of a lot of power, remember!"

	Arcot pointed out the places they could be put; also he substituted some of the old induction coils with one of his new power storage devices, and got far higher efficiency from the tubes.

	But principally, it was something to do.

	Indeed, it was so thoroughly something to do, that four hours had sped by before they realized it, and they were over 460,000 light years from the Galaxy before they noticed it! On discovering this, they decided that they might just as well wait till the full half million light years had passed. It was not long after, then, that they changed back to their control room positions from the laboratory.

	Arcot reached toward the little red switch that controlled the titanic energies of the huge coil below, and pulled it back a quarter way.

	"There go the ghosts!" he said—and indeed they quickly disappeared, seemingly leaping away from them at terrific speed, as, the curvature collapsing, the round circuit of 'space', that bit of space they had enclosed themselves in, opened out more and more, and the distance became greater. They were further away from themselves!

	One-quarter at a time, lest the sparks again fly about in the atmosphere of the ship, Arcot cut the power to zero, and they were standing once more.

	They hurriedly dove to the observation room, and looked eagerly out the window.

	Far, far behind them, floating in the marvelous black of space, the soft, utterly black space behind them, there was a shining disc, a disc of glowing points that seemed somehow, not far, but close, merely small. The area of all our Galaxy had contracted to a glowing disc, that seemed scarcely larger than a dinner plate, perhaps five feet outside their window. So perfectly clear was their view through the lux metal and the black of space, that all sense of distance was lost. It seemed more a miniature of their universe, a model—a tiny thing that floated close behind them, unwavering, shining with a faint light, a heatless illumination that made everything in the darkened observatory glow very faintly, showing bare outlines, the light of three hundred thousand million stars at a distance of 80,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. But it seemed more the light of some wonderfully constructed model, for here was no relative thing, nothing with which to compare it

	"And that is huge," said Arcot softly, looking at it, after a long time of silence. It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny, floating disc of light.

	"We must take photographs," said Morey, rising at last and floating across to where the cameras were located. He took several feet of orthochromatic pictures, on the six by four inch film, thus getting many images in a short time. Then he took a long time-exposure film and started to put it in the camera, then turned in disgust "We can't take an exposure from this darned ship. It is moving."

	"Wait—can't we? Think—we are moving about sixteen thousand a second directly away from it—and we are now over thirty quadrillion miles from it, if our calculations are right. The contraction with increased distance at that rate is negligible. The ship weighs 250,000 tons, and is held by gyroscopes, we won't shake it—go ahead," said Arcot

-

	MOREY took the plates. Then he turned to the telectroscope, which Wade had already put in service. The universe behind them glowed more brightly now, spread over the entire screen in a dotted pattern of shining points. Arcot was trying to make angular measurements. This he found impossible, for though he recognized S Doradus, and because of their tremendous radiation, the giants Betelguese and Antares, yet they were too close for measurements. The angle subtended was too small. Finally, taking the radius of the universe as his base, he calculated their distance. It came out to be almost exactly 500,000 light years, just exactly five times the diameter of the Galaxy. They studied the universe from here for a long time. At last they swung the ship about its axis, and looked ahead for a landing place.

	The nebulas ahead were still invisible to the naked eye, except as points, but the telectroscope finally revealed one that was decidedly nearer than the rest. It seemed a young island universe, for there was still a vast cloud of gas from which stars were yet to be born in the whirling center—a single titanic gas cloud that stretched out through a million billion miles of space—stars to be!

	"Shall we head for that?" asked Arcot at last as Morey finished his observations.

	"I think it would be as good as any—there are more stars there than we can hope to visit!"

	"Well, then—here we go!"

	Arcot dived for the control room, while Morey shut off the telectroscope and picked up the latest photographs, storing them in the file.

	Suddenly space was snapping about him—they were off again. Another shock of surging energy—another—the ship was leaping forward at tremendous speed—still greater—then they were rushing at top speed, and beside them ran the ghost ships of the Ancient Mariner.

	"We are off for a while now, our next stop is the Universe, and since it is quite a distance off, I think we had best stop at the end of four days, make more accurate measurements, and then stop nearer. In the meantime we must arrange shifts. I think that I will go to sleep now and take over the shift in—say, ten hours. To do that I am going to take a mild opiate I brought along in the medicine case, for just such an emergency. We stand ten-hour sleep-shifts—the rest wide awake, and working," he said, as he glided into the control room, where Arcot, Wade and Fuller were just getting ready to start for the lab.

	It was agreed, and in the meantime the three "on duty" went down to the lab to work. Just what need of a watch there was, none of them knew—but they soon found out!

	Arcot had finished his invisibility installation at the end of the ten hours, much to his disappointment. He was casting about for something else to do, while Wade and Fuller were putting the finishing touches on theirs. He had tested his, and found it worked perfectly.

	Morey came down, and when Wade had finished his, which took but another quarter hour, he took the "off duty" shift.

	Arcot had gone up to the library, and Morey was at work down below. Fuller had come up, looking for something to do, and hit on the excellent idea of fixing a meal.

	He had just about begun his preparations in the kitchen, when suddenly the Ancient Mariner gave a violent leap, and the men, not expecting any weight suddenly fell in different ways with terrific force! Fuller fell half the length of the galley, and was knocked out by the blow. Wade, under the opiate, was brought to violently by the shock, and Morey, who had been strapped in his chair, was shaken violently.

	Every one cried out simultaneously—and Arcot was on his way to the control room. The first shock was but a forerunner of the storm, for suddenly the ship was hurled violently about, the air in the room was shot through with great burning sparks, the snapping hiss of electricity was everywhere, and every pointed  metal object was throwing streamers of flame into the air! The ship rocked, heaved, and cavorted wildly, as though caught in the play of titanic forces! Scrambling wildly along the hand-holds, Arcot climbed into the control room, now above, now below, now beside him, he worked his way up, frequently getting severe burns from the flaming sparks; the relays down below were snapping in and out wildly—then suddenly the control room ahead was lighted with a strange glow—Arcot was almost there—and he continued to struggle on.

	Suddenly he cried out in amazement and sudden fear:

	"COSMIC RAYS! HIGH CONCENTRATION! Get up the screens!"

	Below he heard Morey's shout and the chair before him was suddenly leaping up at him—he grasped it-—and quickly snapped himself into the straps. A tingling warmth pervaded him—a strange heat—his hands glowed green, he heard strange sounds, smelted mingled odors, stenches, and sweetest perfumes weirdly intermingled, while all the Universe was suddenly a strangely flashing mass of color. His hands moved strangely—jerkily—he could not think, his mind was chaos—his hands, his arms, his legs refused to function. Then, with a sudden effort, he reached a small switch—pulled it—and even as he did so, he gasped suddenly, and slumped unconscious in his seat, his face glowing green, his arms, his hands strangely phosphorescent The instruments before him were strangely colored, glowing. The very walls were active and the cables seemed smoking. Then there was a whirring, and a dull click as the lever he pulled set in motion the motors that threw heavy relux screens across the windows of the pilot house, the engine room, the observatory—the very window—or should have.

	The strange lights died, and he seemed normal, breathing once more, as the ship whipped about madly, the flashing sparks still shooting out wildly.

	There was a sudden crash, and a fuse went out below —a fuse made of a silver bar two feet thick! The main power coil was cut off. In an instant the flames of the burning sparks flared up—and died. The ship cavorted, shaking mightily in titanic, cosmic forces, the forces that made the highest energy form in the universe!

	Arcot suddenly straightened—below he heard the cries of his friends—Wade was up now, and working desperately.

	He saw that nothing could be done with the power coil. It was drained, the circuit was broken. The molecular motion—he shifted it in, throwing every available power unit on, yet keeping the power down to four gravities.

	"Shut that off! Arcot—shut it off—we have to place screens!" the call from the others reached him.

	Arcot shut off the power, and made his way through the leaping ship, down to his friends, into the lab, and through to the wildly plunging power room. The powerful ship was being tossed about the plaything of inconceivable forces. They lived only because the forces did not try to turn the ship more suddenly, not because of the strength of the ship, for nothing could resist these awful forces.

-

	IN the power room Arcot saw, with dismay, that the screens had not functioned. Like a solid beam, a great stream of cosmic rays was coming in the lux metal window, streaming across the room, and playing on the all-important switchboard, while before his eyes he saw the instruments on it disintegrating! They glowed strangely, while he smelled the burning insulation of the relays, the strong odor of the heated rubberoid; the great panel of lux metal, a perfect insulator, was safe, but the wires behind it which operated the relays, were going! The cosmic rays were heating them, disintegrating them.

	Arcot felt weak. He could not think clearly. He struggled across the heaving room, to where the other three were working desperately at the screen mechanism, the motor contacts had been destroyed; they were trying to wire around it trying to get the motor to function once more—then suddenly the room was dark, except for a faint glow from the switchboard.

	"God—the power's gone!" Arcot let himself fall, when possible, toward the door, then quickly he was in the laboratory, calling to his friends to stay where they were. Then he was falling back, taking advantage of the bucking, changing motion, at last falling toward his friends, now with a cosmic ray power flashlight a light that operated at the standard voltage of 60, used everywhere on the ship, and in his other hand he held a powerpack. Quickly he stripped the wires, connected them to the stubborn motor—threw the switch, and at last the screen was in place.

	The light of the flashlight showed them a deadly truth. The switchboard had been half-disintegrated; the cosmic rays had eaten it away like some acid. The room was hot now, unbearably so, and the air was growing bad, for with failure of the power plant, the last power had gone out. The lights, the molecular motion air cooler, the ventilation fan, the air cleaner—all were off.

	In the light of that same flashlight white and clear, they saw that Arcot's face and hands were red and inflamed. Wade had been working in that ray first and his hands also were badly burned, the terrible cosmic ray burns. But Arcot had gotten the worst attack.

	"I-I'm about out on my feet I've got to go up—take the—do the best you can—Morey!" Arcot started toward his room, but fainted before he could leave the room. Wade leaped after him, and caught him before he fell in the wildly bucking ship.

	Feverishly Morey and Fuller set to work. They inspected the main power unit. It was working perfectly, but the power leads were gone at the power board.

	From the laboratory they brought auxiliary leads, and wired around all the switches, and turned the molecular power on at four gravities, after shouting a warning, and using the compass gyroscope, the only one not twisted far out of its original position. After this they maintained a fairly straight course, steering by the dangerous expedient of changing the leads. 

	They were working fast—still the bucking ship seemed always off the course, and this, naturally, was slower than the regular controls.

	"The relux screens will turn the cosmics if they are alone—but may God help us if these rays are aided by a magnetic field," said Morey in a low voice. Indeed, though the relux would throw the cosmic rays off, if unhindered. With a magnetic field, as they might well be influenced by it in this field of cosmic forces, the relux would absorb the rays, and their energy, as electricity, would become heat, and they would be lost!

	Suddenly Wade returned. "Strapped him into the bed—no time to treat him."

	Quickly he grasped the leads Morey indicated, and set-to work with them, Morey working the vertical twists, Fuller the side twists, while Wade worked on the restoration of the auxiliary power unit. In a few moments he had it pouring its energy into the great coil-bank, charging the coils, for all their energy was out. They were unable to use the space control.

	Another silver bar fuse was inserted, and Wade worked at the space controls, the relays had been undamaged, for they were in another room, with the power coils, but the power distribution room had been disintegrated by the rays—the controls were gone, and power without the controls was worse than useless!

	For half an hour they worked. While Wade was fast replacing the destroyed instruments that were absolutely essential, Morey and Fuller guided the ship, as best they could.

	At last Morey was able to leave his work, as a guiding gyroscopic apparatus was reconnected through the new leads Wade installed, and then the two men quickly had Fuller's leads released. The molecular cooling apparatus, and the air cleaner, purifier and ventilator had been started, as had the lights. Now they turned all available power from the main unit into the great battery of coils. Still it would take nearly another three-quarters of an hour before they would be ready to operate.

	The makeshift leads were not safe, and as rapidly is possible now, the men bound them in place—out of the way, where they could not mutually interfere.

	New relays were being inserted in the undamaged panel; the lux metal had not suffered; only the "electricity metals," as they may be termed, that made the instruments. As rapidly as possible these were put in service, handicapped as they were by the heavy power they were using. They had partly overcome the four gravities by using the power suits to move about in.

	Another half hour had sped by as the bucking ship forced its way through this terrific field of force.

	Suddenly they felt the terrific jolt again—then the ship was moving smoothly, and gradually it was calm! They were through!

	"I'm going to try the space control power!" called Morey. Quickly he ripped out the temporary molecular motion connections, and then threw in all the space-control power he had. The ship was suddenly supercharged with energy—it jarred suddenly—then was quiet. He allowed ten minutes to pass, then he disconnected the power and threw the ship into a halt.

	"We should be about 200 light years from there now. Come on. We can only try. I am going to let Wade and Arcot, who have burned hands, go for a little attention. You stay on the job Fuller—I don't think there will be any trouble. It was luck that we didn't meet some magnetic fields in there!"

-

	MOREY treated Wade's hands with a preparation of the Venerian medical profession, tharnilite, as Terrestrians called it, which caused the wounds to heal in less than twenty hours, if the blood was still flowing normally, as it was in this case.

	Then he looked at Arcot. Arcot had been badly burned. Morey had feared cosmic ray burns—from other sources—and had brought along a number of remedies that their brief experience had shown to be effective. He used these liberally—and finally administered a general remedy of the latest terrestrian medical science—an anesthetic that held the patient in a coma for about thirty hours, during which time the sleep was, instead of refreshing, very fatiguing, for the body's entire energies were expended in repairing the damaged tissues, and the body awoke repaired, but tired, to fall immediately into a natural sleep. Into the bargain, a strong nutrient solution was included, to give the necessary energy.

	Then he turned his attention to his own burns, and to Fuller's.

	It was a humming ship that Arcot awoke in. The sounds of work were plainly audible from below. He felt very weak, and very hungry, but he recognized the symptoms, and remembered his last surroundings.

	He went down to the galley, and quietly prepared himself a hearty meal and ate. Half an hour later he joined the others in the lower deck. They were busy reconstructing the destroyed switchboard. They had nearly finished the work now. He had been asleep for forty hours. They were installing the leads to the control room above, the installation was finished below, and all relays had been checked over. It was well for them that they had brought plenty of spare parts!

	Ten hours later Arcot was running the ship smoothly at top speed once more. Behind them the others were sleeping heavily—and they had not used any opiate this time! Arcot had two days more before they would stop to make the final observations. They had reset their course, and were off to the other universe.

	To Arcot time dragged heavily once more, for then was little to do, now that all the repairs had been made, so he decided that they would want to make a thorough inspection when the others awoke. They had not inspected the outside for possible damages. The terrific strains might have opened cracks in the external surface that would not be detectable from the inside, because the inner wall was separated from the outer envelope. Accordingly he got out their power suits, and the altitude suits, making sure that the oxygen tanks were full, and all was ready. Then he went into the library, got out some books, and set about some calculations he had in mind.

	Morey woke first, fifteen hours after going to bed. He found Arcot still at work on his calculations.

	"Say—I thought you were going to be on the lookout for more cosmic rays!" he said, swinging himself into the chair beside Arcot

	"Curious delusions, wasn't it?" asked Arcot blandly. "As a matter of fact I have been busy doing some calculating. I think our chances of meeting another such region is about one in a million million million million. Considering those chances, we will not worry. I still don't see how we ever met one, but then—well, we just had a better chance of hitting one, than of hitting two."

	Just then Fuller stuck his head in the door.

	"Oh," said he, "so you're at it already? Well, I wonder if one of you could tell me just what it was we hit? I have been so busy, I haven't had a chance to think."

	"I know what I think we hit, and I also know what I think of a designer of ships who makes screens that don't work," said Arcot caustically.

	"And I know what I think of men who tell the designers how to make the screens that don't work, and then yell about it afterward," replied Fuller, calmly, for Arcot had suggested both the screens and the method of installation.

	"Well—we'll forget that." Arcot made a deprecating gesture. "At any rate, it was really the fault of the workman in not shielding the lead wires as he did the motor. I remember telling him to put shields over those wires; all the others were shielded.

	"At any rate, what happened was easy to understand. As we sailed along through space so nicely, we came to a region in space where cosmic rays are generated. It has been known, since Millikan's discovery, that they came from outer space, from between the universes, but their origin was a mystery—and since they were heavier than the hydrogen atom, they were hard to account for.

	"I think I know their source, but I believe I will merely say that they are created here. I want to do more work on this. My ideas for that energy greater than any other in the universe has been confirmed.

	"At any rate, they are created in that space, a perfect vacuum, and the space there is distorted terrifically by the titanic forces at work. It is bent and twisted far out of the normal, even curvature, and it was that bumpy spot in space that threw us about so. When we first entered on the space control, we hit it, and the space about the ship, distorted as it was, conflicted with the region of the cosmic ray generation and the ship lost out; the curvature of space that the ship caused was just ironed out to suit the space already there, and the tremendous surges of current from the main power coils, back and forth to and from the storage coils, caused the electrical discharges that kept burning through the air. I got several little punctures myself. I noticed that Wade and Morey had some also—yes—I see you have a number, too, Fuller. The field was caused by the terrific changes of the current. The magnetic field, set up by the rushing current, caused the walls of the ship to heat up, due to the generation of electric currents in the walls.

	"Then the fuse went out. Before then the cosmic rays could reach us only when the coil was discharged. As long as we were curving space, we were safe from rays. After they blew the fuse, though, the ship was bathed in rays continuously, and although the relux walls would turn the rays, the windows passed them. We were swiftly drifting under momentum toward the exact center of the region, and the rays grew more and more intense. Their disintegration effects were very weak at first. When I entered the pilot room, I felt only warmth. After that, as the rays got to work, I felt very peculiar." Arcot described to them the strange sensations of sound, heat, cold, pain, light, odor and taste, of motion, and his inability to make his muscles obey, or his brain to work properly while exposed to the rays.

	"You see, the cosmics were penetrating my brain, and disrupting atoms in there, with the result that the nerve cells were stimulated. The rays were still weak, fortunately, and so I lived through it, and the cells were not sufficiently disintegrated to make me lose my mind, although a few things rather surprised me this morning. I found I could not think of certain words! And there were some ideas that were badly jumbled, but I am all right now, I hope! That cosmic ray is bad medicine." He paused, and looked down at his hands, which still showed spots of red.

	"Of course, the disintegration of the switchboard is obviously due to the rays, and their atomic effects," said Morey. "Unfortunately, the screen was not working. You see, those relux screens weren't so useless!"

	"I'll say they weren't But I want to ask you, Morey, why you went ahead, instead of turning and leaving the way we came?

	"We came into that region at the velocity of twenty-three light years a second; until we hit the curved space we maintained that; after that for some minutes, we continued in spots at that speed—the top speed of the space control.

	"I don't agree with Arcot that we were going toward the center; I think we had passed it, and were then going toward the outer edge, which was more intense than the center. The severe jolt we felt when we hit it coming in, made me believe that I knew that we had come a long way, and it would be better to chance going ahead, than retiring, over a way that was known to be millions of miles. It worked out you see."

	"It was lucky for us it did," said Arcot "The walls of the ship might well have been badly strained in that field of terrific force. As a matter of fact I was worried about the idea, and I have been wondering if we might not well have strained even the tremendously strong walls of the ship? Remember, that it might well have been in two 'space waves' at once. The mechanical strain of the two regions would have given a resultant velocity, or rather acceleration to the ship, but would have strained the walls with a force amounting to hundreds of thousands of tons. I laid out the suits up in front there, and I think that we might reasonably get out there and take a look at the old boat Wade, as last to—well, well—there he is. My, what an energetic fellow!" laughed Arcot, as the huge form of Wade floated in through the library door—he was yawning sleepily, and rubbing his eyes. It was evident he had not yet washed, and the ferocious, and growing beard, which was springing black from his cheeks testified to his need of a shave. The others had shaved before coming in here.

	"Wade, we are going outside, and we have to have someone in here to work the airlock, and to open it when we come the other way. Suppose you get to work on the hirsute adornment; there is an atomic hydrogen blow torch down in the lab, which you can use, if you wish, and we will step outside.

	"You have good sense—so don't be foolish enough to start away with a little acceleration, as a joke. If you do, we will be left behind, and just try and find us in the vast immensity of inter-galactic space! You would never do it and we would promptly be left there forever. I don't think you would—but I'm saying it anyway-—I prefer to be certain," said Arcot seriously. Indeed, it would not be a pleasant idea to contemplate—being left alone in the immensity of apace. Each of the suits was equipped with a small radio set by which means they could communicate with each other, and with those on the ship, but not over a distance of more than fifty miles. A mere step in space!

-

	ARCOT and Morey and Fuller went out and got the suits, and got into them, while Wade went into the control room. He had been waiting but a few moments when Arcot pushed the signal button in the airlock, and Wade at once started the pump. In a minute and a half the airlock had been exhausted to but a few millimeters of mercury, and the remaining gas was allowed to escape into space, when Wade opened the door, electrically.

	A moment later he saw Arcot float up and past him, past the control room window, and through the loudspeaker in the room he heard him call, while he saw him wave. The effect was peculiar, as the loud-speaker was behind him, the voice came from behind, although the man was in front of him.

	"O.K., Wade—they are coming."

	"Hello—you look like a balloon—or an old knight!" he laughed, as the bulging suit of the man floated by, weightless in space, falling only very, very slowly to the ship, and his present velocity, indeed, was greater than the needed velocity of escape of this tiny "planet"—or better—meteor. They were going on the molecular motion now, but as they were using no power, the men floated beside the ship, quite weightless.

	"Squire, give me the can opener! I've a flea in my night shirt!" came the deep voice of Morey, who just now drifted into sight.

	"You should talk! You're no graceful gazelle yourself!" retorted Arcot.

	"But graceful or not, I'm going to try an experiment. Light pressure is not very great, but I wonder if the cosmic ray pressure ought not to be fairly considerable. I brought along a cosmic ray pistol, and I am going to fire it toward the nebula we are aiming for—the ray will get there in another eight or nine million years—and see if there is enough of a 'kick' from a ray pistol to affect me out here in space."

	"Fire it the other way, Arcot. That isn't a fair test. Remember, the mass of the ship is not inconsiderable, and it will have some gravitational attraction. Fire it the other way and you will be overcoming gravity, and the test will be fair," said Morey.

	"Right you are—here goes!" Arcot switched on the rays at full intensity, invisible in space, however, as the men watched, he actually did change his motion. The mass of the cosmic ray quantums, as great as hydrogen atoms, shooting out at the speed of light, gave a very appreciable reaction.

	"See—it works!" he called.

	"It does—now let's see you! We are out here to inspect the ship!" called Fuller, sow floating down toward the ship, under the gentle impulse of his molecular hand power unit. The main unit was off, but the hand power unit made it possible to move easily.

	The others turned to now, and set to work, examining the shell for possible signs of strain, using their powerful flashlights; equipped with cosmic ray plates, they were more nearly searchlights, but due to the lack of gas here, the rays were absolutely invisible, save when they actually hit the relux, and at such an angle that they were bounced back right into the eye. The smooth relux, reflecting one hundred per cent of the light, did not become illuminated, for illumination is the result of scattering of light. It was necessary to look close and pass the beam of light over every square foot of the ship's surface. However, the crack would be rough, and hence would scatter light, and be even more readily visible than otherwise.

	To their great relief, after an hour and a half of searching, none of them had found any signs of a crack, and they went back into the ship, and resumed their voyage once more.

-

	AGAIN they were hurtling through space, the twin ghost ships following them closely. Hour after hour the ship went on. Now they had something else to do. They were at work calculating some work that Arcot had suggested, in connection with the velocities of motion that had been observed in the stars at the edge of the universe which they were approaching. Since these stars revolved about the mass of the entire universe, it would be possible, by considering the motion as in a pure orbit, to calculate the mass of the entire universe, averaging the values of several stars. Their results were not exact, but reliable. They found this universe to have the mass of twenty-five thousand million suns, or a good bit less than one-tenth the mass of our own universe.

	Still the hours dragged as they came gradually nearer their goal—gradually, despite their speed of 29 light years a second!

	At the end of the second day after their trouble with the cosmic ray field, they stopped for observation. They were now so near the Island Universe, that the stars spread out in a huge disc beneath them.

	"About 800,000 light years distant, I should guess," said Morey.

	"We know our speed fairly accurately, why can't we calculate the distance between two of those stars and then go on in?" asked Wade.

	"I think that is what we will do. Take the angle, will you, Morey? I'll swing the ship," said Arcot. Morey was a more accurate manipulator than Arcot, so the job was delegated to him.

	They then advanced for one hour, and knowing this distance from experience, they were able to calculate the diameter of this universe. It turned out to be of the order of 60,000 light years.

	They were now much closer. They seemed, indeed, on the edge of the giant universe, the thousands of stars flaming bright below them, stretching across their horizon more and more—a universe the eye of man had never seen before at such a distance! This universe was not yet condensed entirely to stars, and in its heart there still remained the vast gas-cloud that would eventually be stars, planets, and worlds. The vast misty cloud of light was plainly visible from here, glowing with a milky light, like some vast, frosted light bulb.

	It was impossible to conceive the size of the thing, it looked only like some model, for they were still over 260,000 light years from it.

	"I think that we should be there now in about three hours. Suppose we go at the full speed for two hours, then change to low speed?"

	"You're the astronomical boss, Morey. Shall we start?" replied Arcot

	"Let's go!"

	They swung the ship about once more—and then they were started again. As they drew near to this new universe, they began to feel more interest in the trip—more things were to happen!

	The ship was going again—full speed. They could not watch the stars ahead now, as they plunged along, the universe rushing ever nearer. The two hours dragged slowly, then they were stopped once more.

	About them they saw great suns shining. Indeed, one was so close they could see it as a disc with the naked eye—but somehow the entire sky was misty; they could not see clearly, and stars that were not close were blotted out. The room seemed to grow warm. They looked, puzzled, in an effort to find the cause.

	"Hey—your calculations were off! Here we go!" called Arcot Suddenly, the air snapped—and they were flying at low speed once more. The entire space about them, they noticed, was only lit with a dim glow. In ten minutes the dim light was gone—they were going again out in ordinary, dark space, with its star-studded blackness. The stars seemed the unusual, rather than the usual thing now.

	"What was the matter with my calculations?"

	"Oh, nothing much, Morey—only you were about thirty thousand light years off. We landed in the middle of that universe. That was a gas cloud we were in, a cloud of nebular gas, the stuff that stars are made of, and we were plowing through it at the rate of sixteen thousand miles a second. It was sheer luck that we didn't come near any stars in the process—that is, any nearer than a hundred million miles or so. If we had—well, that would have meant we would have had to recharge the coil, at least, and in the meantime, we might have hit that said star.

	"However, we got into the nebular gas, and then out again. While we were going on the molecular motion, we were plowing through that gas, and naturally we got a bit hot," said Arcot

	"It seems we did. The only thing I can't understand was why we didn't turn into a nice hot cinder," remarked Fuller.

	"Principally because that gaseous nebula comes nearer to being a perfect vacuum than we can obtain by means of our pumps," replied Arcot. "It is very dense—compared, with 'empty' space, yet it is a mighty good vacuum. That is why we lived to tell the tale, though, as a matter of fact, I don't know the melting point of lux metal, if it has any.

	"But now we are out of that, let's see if we can find a planet. We have no reason to take any photographs, we will never be able to find this particular sun again, unless we badly want to, and if we do, we will be able to do so by taking leave of our friends—or enemies, as the case may be. Then the other expeditions that are sure to follow will have their job cut out for them.

	"I am stopping, and I'll leave it to Morey to find the desired star."

-

	THE space about them was again turning wildly as the energy drained out of it. Then the stars were shining clearly before them, and about them. Arcot swung the ship about, so that the observatory pointed in their line of flight. At 16,000 miles a second, it would have taken hours to turn about without killing themselves under the pressure of the centrifugal force. Nevertheless, it was easy to spin the ship, without developing any great strain.

	Morey set to work at once with his telescope, trying to find the nearest star of spectral type. G-O, the type of our sun, as had been agreed on, and he was also anxious to have it of about the same magnitude, or brilliance. At last, after investigating several such suns, he discovered one which seemed to fulfill all his wishes. It was of the correct spectral type, and of magnitude 4.87—as closely as he could determine hastily. He was a little thoughtful as he looked at this value—there was something about it that worried him, it seemed. However, he announced his result to Arcot. The ship was turned—and they were started for the adventure they had really hoped to find!

	As they rushed through space, the distorted stars shining vividly before them, they saw the one which was their goal, a bright point on the crosshairs of the aiming telescope, slowly changing. 

	"How far is it?" asked Arcot. 

	"About ten light centuries," replied Morey, watching the star eagerly.

	They drove on in silence—Morey was watching closely as they flashed through the past time of the star. Suddenly he cried out: 

	"Look—ah—it's over—gone!" 

	"Why—it's gone!" said Arcot in surprise. "It was shining there, then suddenly it flared more brilliantly and in an instant it was gone completely!"

	"A nova! It flashed up into its sudden brilliance, as they will, and flared for perhaps a year, then it was gone forever, sunk into a slough of dimness. That star was of G-0 spectral type, and of magnitude 4.87. Now it has been, known for many years—since about 1925—that any star of the type G-0 must be brighter than magnitude 4.88 and dimmer than magnitude 8.54 to be stable. If it is not within those limits, it changes precipitously. This star was of 4.87, according to my observations. As a matter of fact, it must have been of magnitude 4.88. While we drew near, we saw it make that precipitous change. In this case, it must drop through many, many magnitudes, and change to a white dwarf. It is still shining, but now it is a white dwarf star, such as the companion star of Sirius was. I had forgotten the Negrians removed it. Remember—it was nearly the same weight as our sun—yet gave off but one four-hundredth of the light

	"That is what has happened. That star is now a white dwarf, and shines dimly. In making that precipitous change, it naturally had to shrink, as we see in the typical case, Sirius B. In doing this, the matter falling together was forced to radiate energy, which caused the sudden flare. Most of the energy of falling, however, was absorbed by the matter of the star itself, in increasing its temperature from that of a yellow star, to one that shines blue-white.

	"I want to investigate. You know that was a yellow star." Morey stopped meaningly. They were thinking of the probable fate of the beings who might have been living on the planets of such a star!

	Suddenly there loomed before them the dim bulk of the star, the disc already, and Arcot snapped the ship to the molecular motion at once. He knew they must be close indeed. They stopped, and before them they saw the angry disc of the flaming star, flaming violet before them, for it was white, and their velocity of approach made it seem violet.

	Arcot swung the ship a bit to one side, running in close to the flaming star, yet it was not exceedingly hot, for despite the high radiation per square inch, the total radiation was small, due to the rather small area.

	They swung about the star, and the time needed to slow to a stop was rather annoyingly great, for several hours were required to reduce the speed. Arcot swung the ship about the sun in a parabolic orbit for at their velocity, the star could not hold them in a planetary orbit

	"I'm swinging in close, so that I can get directly behind the star, and use its attraction as a brake. It will be several times Earth gravity, and we can add over and above that a molecular braking of four gravities.

	"Suppose you look around and see if there are any planets. We can break free and start for another star if there are not" This was from Arcot.

	Morey rose, and went to the telescope room, and swept the sky with the telectroscope. It would be hard to detect a planet when the light was so dim.

	But he found one. A dark, dimly shining globe, cold as death he knew it must be. He took angular readings on it and on the dim shining sun. A little later he took more readings. It was not accurate, but he decided with a bit of a chill, that it was practically 95 million miles out. He turned his telectroscope about and found several other planets. He realized that these, too, were not far from the arrangement of old Sol's planets. He could not see any further than five hundred million miles from the sun, for they were far too dim.

	He reported to Arcot and told him that he believed that the world at 95 million miles was their best bet. The next outer planet was too cold, even when the sun was at its normal brilliance, and the next inner planet would have been utterly blasted in the terrific heat of the Nova stage.

	They were slowing rapidly now, under a deceleration of ten gravities.

	They fell, under their own momentum, till they finally came out near the planet that Morey had suggested. Their momentum had been reduced by the gravity of the sun, and by their own deceleration, to less than four miles per second, when they reached the planet and they formed an orbit about the planet spiraling down.

	Through the clear lux metal windows of the control cabin, the men looked down on a frozen world.

	Below lay the unknown panorama of an unknown world that circled, frozen, around a dim, unknown sun, far in space. Cold and bleak, the low rolling hills below were black, bare rock, coated in spots with the white sheen of snow, though each of the men realized it must be solid air. Here and there ran strange rivers of deep blue, to form great lakes and seas of blue liquid. There were mighty mountains of deep blue crystal looming high, and in the hollows and cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionless seas of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world. It was a world that lay frozen under the rays of a dim, dead sun.

	They continued over the broad sweep of the level, crystalline plain now. The bleak rock had disappeared far behind them. This world was about ten thousand miles in diameter, and the gravity here was about a quarter more than that of Earth.

	On and on they swept, swinging over a frozen world at an elevation of but a scant thousand feet, viewing the unutterably desolate scene of a cold, frozen world.

	Suddenly, there loomed far ahead of them a bleak, dark mass of rock again. They had crossed the frozen ocean, and were coming to the land once more—a frozen land.

	Everywhere lay the deep drifts of snow, and here and there, through valleys, ran the streams of bright blue.

-

	"LOOK—!" cried Morey in sudden surprise. Far ahead and to their left loomed a strange formation of jutting, vertical columns, covered with the white burden of snow. Arcot turned a tremendously powerful searchlight on it, and it stood out brightly against the vast snowfield. It was a dead, frozen city.

	They looked at it, and the car was turned, and headed for it without a word.

	"People!" said Wade at last.

	They spoke little. It was hard to realize the enormity of the catastrophe that had brought a cold, bleak death to the population of this world—death to an intelligent world.

	Arcot watched the city ahead; finally he spoke: "I will land. I think it will be safe for all of us to leave. Get out the suits, and make sure all the tanks are charged and that the heaters are working. It will be colder here than in space. Those streams are, of course, liquid oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and probably some dissolved helium and hydrogen. There is a slight atmosphere, however, an atmosphere of hydrogen, neon, and helium, and this is chilled to about 200 degrees. We will be cooled, as we were not in space, by the chill of conduction, and convection."

	The others got the suits ready, as Arcot slowed the ship, and let it sink gently to the snowy ground below the ship. There was nearly ten feet of snow and the heavy ship sank deep into it. The ship had been chilled with the cold of space, and there was little melting about it. Now Arcot turned on the powerful searchlight, and swept it down in front of the ship. In a moment there was a hissing and the snow, for a large part, volatilized and flew away, to settle solid a moment later, falling in tiny crystals with an astonishing speed, for here was practically no air to retard their fall, as the vapor, heated by the energy from the searchlight, boiled away. But there was a good bit of water snow there also, and it melted, boiling soon as the pressure was so low that it would freeze and boil at nearly the same temperature. In a short time he had melted the way about the ship open, except for a huge mass of ice. But this would not bother them.

	Morey and the others came back in their suits. Hastily, Arcot donned his and adjusted his weight, with the molecular power-pack, to about ten pounds.

	They went down to the airlock, opened the inner door, entered, and then using the controls here, pumped the air back into the main body of the ship. A moment later they stepped out into the snow field of the frozen world. The great bank of snow loomed high above them. They readjusted their weight to two pounds and sailed up on the molecular motion power units in their hands, up and out, into the frozen world. High above them glowed the dim, blue-white disc of the tiny sun, seeming little more than a bright star. The light about them was dim and weak, but they each carried powerful lights strapped to their chests and they flew easily along ten feet above the frozen waste of the snow, field.

	At last they came to the outskirts of the dead city. The vertical walls of the buildings were free of snow and they could see the blank, staring eyes of the windows' glass, and within, the bleak, empty rooms. They swept on through the frozen streets till they came to one huge building in the center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and within the men could see that the rooms on the outside had been piled high with waste paper of all kinds. They had tried to insulate the building against loss of heat.

	"Shall we break in?" asked Arcot.

	"We may as well. There may be some records we could take back to Earth and have deciphered. In a time like this I should imagine that they would leave some records, hoping that some race might come and find them," replied Morey's voice over the radio.

	They flew down to the great bronze doors, looked at them, and decided it would be easier to break in through one of the windows and tear out the paper waste.

	A molecular ray pistol worked for fifteen minutes tearing a way through. It was slow work, and they must keep the cosmic ray pistol working at all times to supply the necessary heat for the molecular motion.

	Over everything lay that thin layer of white powder, frozen air, that testified mutely to the fact that only under the rays of the sun was there heat enough to melt it.

	At last they broke through.

	They entered on the second floor. Before them stretched a long, richly decorated hall, with great murals in colors. The life size paintings displayed a people dressed in a suit of some soft, white cloth generally, with blond hair that seemed to reach to their shoulders. They were shorter, and more heavily built than Earth people, perhaps, but there was a grace to them that denied the greater gravity of their planet.

	And it disclosed a world of warm sunlight, of green plants, of tall trees, waving perhaps in a breeze of warm air—warm air that now lay frozen on the stone floors of their buildings.

	Scene after scene they saw—then they came to a great hall. Hundreds of bodies lay here, people wrapped in heavy cloth blankets, and over the floor of this room lay little crystals of green. Wade looked at them a long time, and at the people who lay thus perfectly preserved by the utter cold. They seemed only sleeping. There were men and women and children, sleeping—sleeping under a blanket of white soft powder that crumbled, and disappeared as the energy of the lights fell on it, and that hissed under the touch of the warm suits of the Terrestrians.

-

	THERE was one little group the Terrestrians looked at, and then they turned and left this room of death. There were three in it—a young man, a fair, blonde young woman, scarcely more than a girl she seemed, smiling, her arm about the man—and between them lay a little child. They were sleeping, warm in the arms of Death, the kindly Reliever of Pain.

	Arcot turned, and rose, flying swiftly down the long corridor toward the door.

	"That was not meant for us; let's leave," he said. The others followed.

	"But let's see what records they left. It may be that they would want us to know their tragic story. They were wise in using that poisonous gas, thus relieving them of the struggle against the cold. But let us see what civilization they had reached."

	They went down, into the first floor level. 

	Here was a single, great court. There were no pillars, only a vast, smooth floor.

	"They had some architecture," said Morey. "No pillars under all the vast load of that building!"

	'And the load is even greater under this gravitational acceleration," remarked Arcot.

	In the center of the room, however, there was something. It was made of bronze, but it shone golden; it must have been new when this world froze. It had not oxidized. It was a great globe, resting on a platform of marble. The men flew over to it, and stood beside it, looking curiously at the great globe, nearly fifteen feet in diameter.

	"A globe of their world," said Fuller, looking at it with interest. "Yes, and this globe was set up here after they were certain the great cold would come. See how shiny it is. It would have oxidized quickly. I am sure that they put this here as an indicator, a guide to whoever might come. Let us see," said Arcot, looking at it curiously.

	The great globe, they found, was hollow. Arcot flew up to the top of the globe and viewed it from above. There was a carefully chiseled relief map on the smooth surface, showing seas, and continents. There was nothing at the top but a mass of brass.

	"Arcot—come here a minute," called Morey. Arcot flew down to where Morey was looking at the globe. It was the side toward the main entrance to the great building. Here, on the edge of the continent, was a small raised globe, and around the globe a circle had been drawn.

	"I think this is meant to represent this globe right here—I am almost certain that they mean that this represents this spot.

	"Now look here!" Morey pointed to a spot on the globe which must have been, on this larger world, nearly five thousand miles away, where a tower had been represented on a mountain.

	It was done in silver, rather than bronze.

	"They want us to go there; this was erected only shortly before the catastrophe, and I am sure they have relics and other things they want us to get. Little could they have guessed that the finders would be people, not merely from another star, from another world, but from a different universe, men who came ten million light years across the void, to find this little spot. Perhaps they have other maps like this in every large city.

	"But I think it is our duty to visit that cairn, that monument to a lost race, and see what they have left."

	"I quite agree," assented Arcot. "The chance of other men ever visiting this world is infinitely small."

	"Then let's leave this City of the Dead!" said Wade. It gave them a sense of depression greater than that inspired by the vast loneliness of ten million light years of empty space. One is never so lonely as when he is with the dead, and the men began to realize that the original "Ancient Mariner" had been more lonely with strange companions, than were they in the vast depths of empty space.

	They went back to the ship now, floating through the last remnants of this frozen world's atmosphere, back through the chill of the frozen gases, across the plain, and back to the cheering interior of the shining, warm ship, resting on the snow. How good it looked to them! The one spot of light, and warmth and comfort in all this vast world of frozen cold, its warm, soft light streaming out through the windows to light the snow with a soft radiance, an invitation to warmth that beckoned them strongly, as they saw behind them the bleak, cold buildings of the city of the dead.

	Wade stopped, just before entering, and filled a small tube he had carried with the snow on the surface of the frozen water. He sealed it, lest the gases, volatilizing in the ship, leak out. As chemist, he would test the substance. In the room of death back there in the city he had taken samples of the solidified gas that lay on the floor.

	Once more they were in the warmth and light of their ship. It was a contrast that made each of them appreciate more fully the gift that a hot, blazing sun is!

	Perhaps it was this that made Fuller ask: "If this happened to a star like our sun, why not to our sun?"

	"Indeed, why not?" replied Morey smiling. "It not only can, but very likely may. It is the most immediate danger that Earth stands in now. This contraction takes place when the star reaches the lower magnitude limit, 4.88, and our sun is now of magnitude 4.85. If the intensity changes, one part in thirty, we will have a sun in the same condition that this star is in."

	"What? One part in thirty, and we will freeze just as this planet has?" cried Wade and Fuller simultaneously.

	"We most certainly will. The first impulse of the human mind, after seeing this, is to say, 'Impossible, our world can never freeze like this!' which is one manifestation of that Divine Optimism that makes life worth while. If we faced life in the future, without optimistic hopes, we would all commit suicide. Perhaps it was a sort of elimination of the most sensible, that has made this an inbred feeling. All those who didn't have it, committed suicide before they passed it on to their children.

	"But it most certainly can happen. In fact, it is the thing that is most apt to end our world—within the next 150,000 million years. That is the time needed for the sun, under normal conditions, to decrease in radiation by three per cent. So it can't happen before that time.

	"And, to further relieve any doubts as to immediate failure of our source of light, I might mention that as the star changes three per cent in brilliance, it will also change its light, it will, then, change its spectral type. And the limits for the next spectral type the sun will reach, are from about 8.9 to 4.7, so our sun will be safe for another 150,000 million years—and so on. As a matter of fact the chances are that it will be good for another long stretch. Of course, accidents may happen—we may hit another star, we may become entangled with an asteroid, but that is less probable now, with space ships to deflect it." Morey certainly sounded convincing;

	"So, allowing that no accidents happen," he continued, "Earth ought to be able to support life for approximately one million million years—which is the probable future of our human race.

	"And some people have actually tried to tell what it will be like then! That stretch of time is something like three million times as long as man has been here on Earth, and a good five hundred times the age of old Terra herself. A fair age, all in all, at that about 2,000,000,000 years, and when humanity is celebrating its 1,000,000,000,000th birthday, perhaps they will be running all over the great wide universe in Arcot Space Control Cars. At any rate, it is pleasant to think that the name, at least, will be known to them, for records that are made now, will be preserved with the utmost care, and the machines will be remembered. And this machine must be used!"

	"Perhaps—but was it someone by the name of Morey, or not that remarked rather caustically about the people who try to say what people will be doing on the 1,000,000,000,000th birthday of humanity?" said Arcot.

	They had been flying over the frozen, cold world below, Arcot piloting, following the route he had drawn out from the map in the great hall of the building back there. They had a powerful searchlight playing on the ground below, focused in a cone, so it lit a great area of the snow covered ground. Mile after mile of frozen ground flew by, as they shot on at three miles a second.

-

	SUDDENLY the bleak bulk of a huge mountain loomed gigantic before them. Arcot reversed the power, and brought the car to a stop, seeking the tower, for he believed it should be here. With the powerful searchlight he swept the ground, and at last made it out a pyramid rather than a tower, and coated over with ice. It was soon being thawed out however, as the great energy of three searchlights was poured down upon it. In a few moments the glint of gold showed through the melting ice and snow. The sloping sides seemed built for strength, although gold, the metal used, was weak.

	"Perhaps," said Wade, "they have an outer wall of gold over a strong wall of iron or other metal to protect it from corrosion."

	Arcot brought the ship down beside the tower, and the men once more got into the space suits, and climbed through the airlock, out into the cold of this frozen world. They flew across the space that separated them, and then sought along the walls of the tower for some means of entrance. In several places they noticed hieroglyphics carved in great foot-high characters, they searched in vain for a door, till at last they found that the top was level. The only joint in the walls seemed to be there, yet there was no handle or visible method of opening the door.

	Arcot turned his powerful light on the surface, and searched carefully for some sign of an opening device. There was a bas-relief engraved on the panel, a hand pointed to a corner of, the door. Here Arcot saw that the metal was welded to another bit of metal of another color. He looked at it closely, saw the metal was an alloy of some kind—then suddenly he felt a vibration of some sort! The door seemed working! There was a sudden click, and the heavy panel was sinking slowly!

	"On it men—we can break out, if we can't break in!" Arcot leaped upon it and sank slowly with it. The massive walls of the great tower were nearly five feet thick, and of some tougher metal it seemed, white, and harder.

	"Pure iron!" diagnosed Wade. "That is strong, though not as strong as steel, yet it is exceedingly resistant to corrosion.

	"My mistake—this has been alloyed with silicon, which makes it harder and still more resistant to corrosion."

	Through many feet they sank. Finally they were in a great chamber that was obviously a museum of a lost race. About all the walls were arranged models, books, and diagrams.

	"We can never hope to take all this in our ship!" said Arcot, looking at the great collection. "Look-there is an old winged airplane! See—there is a steamship—there is a steam engine—that is an electric motor, surely. And that must be some kind of a battery they used. We cannot take all these things, and we want proof of our visit. I think we will be doing best if we take all the books we can, making sure we get the books of introduction that they must have prepared. See—that has only one mark above it—that group—the next has two straight bars—that one has three—and so on. I'll bet those are the first books there! Come on, let's each take a load. We will carry all we can of them and leave the models. I am going to leave a note, saying that we visited this world about five hundred years after the catastrophe. I can leave it in drawing language or pictures. We can't take these interesting models, but we can take photographs, and take route photographs when we leave. We will then be able to tell other men how to get back here, and investigations will be started, I am sure!"

	Each of the men loaded himself with all the books he could carry. They soon found that these books were not as light as they thought, for under the greater gravity of the larger world, the books felt heavy to the arms, if not to a lightened body. They could not plow their way through the heavy snow, so they had to lighten the body to zero weight, practically, and go to the machine on the impulse of one kick.

	Three loads they took, each of them, and on the fourth trip, Arcot stayed in the machine and drew his "note."

	"Let's see your masterpiece!" said Morey, as they returned to the ship with their last load of books. Arcot had just gotten back into the airlock, from the library where he had been working. He had used a piece of a very tough, high-grade paper, heavy and strong. In the cold and airless world where it was to remain, there would be no chance of early corrosion.

	Near the top of the paper Arcot had drawn a representation of their ship, and beneath it, a representation of the route they had taken from universe to universe. The present universe was represented with the cloud of gas, the main identifying feature. Beneath the dotted line that was their route, Arcot had written "600,000,000,000 u," then followed a little table, the numeral "1" followed by one straight bar, then "2" followed by two bars, end so on, up to ten. Ten was followed by ten straight bars, then, separated from it, a curved bar, used as an integral sign. "10" was represented, then, both as ten of the smaller units, and one of the larger units. Twenty was next, followed by twenty units, and two of the integral signs. Thus he had worked up to 100, and by the same system had made it clear to any reasoning creature, that we used a decimal system, and the zeros meant ten times. It would, he felt, be easy to understand.

	Next below, he had drawn this solar system, as they had found it, and the distance from the planet they were on, to the sun—very nearly 100,000,000 miles, he had indicated, and labeled "u". Thus, the finders could reason that they had come a distance of six hundred billion units, where a distance of 100,000,000 miles was taken as the unit; they had then, come from another Island Universe. Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to reach this frozen world would be able to understand this!

	"This sun is only slightly less massive than our sun, and this world is at nearly the same distance from it that Earth is from our sun. Hence the year of this planet must be very nearly equal to our own. I am indicating approximately 500 years of this planet as the time after the catastrophe that we landed, and I am indicating our removal of some of the books," pointed out Arcot, indicating several of the other drawings.

-

	THEY left this message in the tower, and then Arcot, by some means unknown to his friends, succeeded in closing the trap-door exactly as it was before they came. Ha flew back to the ship and settled in the air lock. They closed the door and let in the air from the ship once more. The warm air coming into the extremely cold room, was condensed to a liquid, and for some time merely ran down in frigid streams upon the floor, trickles of air. More kept coming in, trying vainly to equalize the pressure. Finally Arcot turned on the spotlights, as no heating arrangements had been made in this entrance way. In a short time, the energy of the lights being absorbed by the walls, the room was sufficiently warmed to allow the air pressure to equal that inside the ship.

	"Say, how did you get in?" asked Morey of Arcot, as he realized that Arcot must have warmed the room when he came in before.

	"The room had not been so thoroughly chilled then, and it was not cold enough to do this liquefaction at that time," replied his friend.

	A few minutes later, their suits off, they were busy storing the precious books in a safe place, packing them in the special specimen cases that had been brought for such a purpose.

	When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to the control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world, quietly thinking how much it must have been like Earth! It was dead now, and frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out, ice and snow coated, beneath them, as they sped along, perhaps a mile above the ground, were dimly lighted in the weak rays of the shrunken sun. 95,000,000 miles away, it glowed so weakly that this world received little more heat from it than it might have received from a coal fire a mile distant.

	So weakly it flared, that, in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium and very rare gases, its little corona flared about it plainly, and even the stars near it glowed brilliantly. Indeed, there was one constellation, a strange dragon-shaped grouping of stars, and this lit—the sun seemed to be the flaming head of the dragon!

	Gradually they rose, and then, as Arcot turned the ship definitely out into space, they saw its dim, frozen plains fall behind. It seemed that a load of oppressing loneliness parted from them, as they flew out into the vast spaces of the eternal stars, the blazing suns of all space. Even here there seemed less of the cold touch of frozen death, than back there on that frozen planet.

	"Better take some photographs, hadn't you, Morey?" said Arcot, as they were at last about three million miles from the planet.

	"All right—but let's decide now on our next stop."

	They all went back to the observatory for experimentation and observation concerning other stars.

	"I almost feel that I would prefer not to look for one of those yellow stars. This experience with the type G-0 makes me want to steer clear of them!" said Wade, looking back at the diminishing disc of the dim planet.

	"Well, if you know a better type, tell us about it!" said Arcot.

	"Which reminds me that I would greatly like to know how you opened that door and how you closed it again," said Morey, turning toward Arcot.

	"Oh—I didn't know how to open the door, I just opened it. It required only a considerable amount of light on that spot of greenish metal. It was a piece of metal which is sensitive to light and proceeded to function as had been designed. It operated the door, and let us in. Shutting it was easy, for once inside, it was easy to see the mechanism, which I examined."

	"But if the mechanism was so simple, any creature, intelligent or not, would be able to open it and the precious records they left might be destroyed by some savage," said Morey.

	"Yes? And how would the savage get there to open the door?" asked Arcot

	"Oh!" was Morey's comment. "Obviously, it would require a high order of intelligence to get there at all. Certainly the door was safe from savage attack! But in the meantime, let's take the pictures and get going."

	"About those pictures, Morey," said Arcot "We want to be able to find the star again, and if we go to some other planet directly, we will be able to find this sun only by back-trailing, but if we just run out to the edge of the Universe now, we will save later investigators a lot of trouble. It will take only a few hours."

	"I think you are right we can take the pictures, and then have a wider choice of stars. Well, let's get going."

	They went away from this star, speeding away at their half-speed, racing back through the time of this star, back till they saw the star flame once more into brilliant life.

	"Those people are coming to life now—perhaps they are building that tower—putting these books in the tower! These books are in two places at once, an observer would have to say! Visibly, they are. Now it is a world of rolling, warm oceans, where green plants—and that little group we saw back there in the room of death, are living, and growing.

	"They were wise, there was no use in fighting that cold. They did not have the weapons that could stand it off, as the Negrians had. The Negrians had the energy of matter, and we have that energy now. Never can Earth's peoples be trapped thus, for we can escape now, to other stars. It is an assurance and a certainty that this ship has brought. After I saw that world, I was glad that we had been able to contribute something. With the help of this machine, mankind is forever safe from that death."

	They stopped now, and took more photographs, that the path might be marked. They stopped every light century till they had reached a point where the sun was merely a point—a member of a constellation.

	Out to the edge of the Universe they went out toward their own Universe.

	"Arcot—" called Morey, after their last stop within the Island Universe, "let's go out say one million light years into space, at an angle to this Universe, and see what we can do about getting a photograph of both universes on the same plate."

	"Good idea—we can go out and back in one day—and we have all time before us, and this time won't count back on Earth, anyway!"

	Since they would continue to travel all this time, it would not be felt as Earth-time. Thus it "did not count" in the total time of their trip.

	They went to the control room now, to prepare for this last move. They were to travel at their top speed of twenty-nine light years per second. The hours dragged heavily, as they had when they were coming in, and Arcot alone remained on watch, while the others went to their rooms for some sleep, strapping themselves securely in the weightless bunks.

	It was hours later when Morey awoke with a sudden premonition of trouble. He looked at the chronometer on the wall of his room—he had been sleeping twelve hours! They had gone beyond the million light years. It did not matter, except that it showed Arcot must surely have fallen asleep.

	He had. He was asleep in the middle of the library—exactly the middle, floating in the room ten feet from each wall, and three feet above the table. Morey called out to him, Arcot woke with a guilty start "A fine sentry you make! Can't even keep awake when all you have to do is sit here and see we don't run into anything. We have gone more than our million light years already—and we're still going strong. Come on—snap out of it!"

	"I'm sorry—I apologize—all right—I know I should not have slept—but it was so perfectly quiet here—save for your deep toned, musical snores, that I couldn't help it!" grinned Arcot. "Get me down from here and we'll stop."

	"Get you down, nothing. You stay there, while I call the other fellows to see what is to be done to a sleeping sentry."

	Morey turned and left to wake the others.

	He had awakened Wade, and told him what had happened, and was on his way to awake Fuller, when suddenly the ship was heeling—the air snapped—the space about them was changing—they were coming out of hyperspace!

	In amazement they looked at each other—they knew that Arcot was marooned in the middle of the room—still!

	"Hold on, you brainless ones! We're turning around!" came Arcot's voice, full of suppressed mirth. Suddenly they were both plastered against the wall of the ship under four gravities of acceleration! Helpless to move, they could only crawl laboriously toward the control room, calling to Arcot to shut off the power.

-

	WHEN Morey had left him stranded in the room, Arcot had decided it was high time to reach the floor. Quickly he looked about for means of doing so. Beside him, floating in the air, was the book he had been reading—but it was out of reach. He had not noticed till now but his mocassins had come off while he slept, so the Fuller rocket method was out. It seemed hopeless. Then suddenly came the inspiration! Quickly, he slipped his shirt off, and began waving it violently in the air. Almost at once he began to drift toward the wall. He developed a speed of perhaps two inches a second—not a very rapid pace, but effective—and then put his shirt on again. In a moment he had reached the wall, and it was easy to shoot himself over to the door, out the door, and then swiftly down the corridor, and reach the control room, without being seen by Morey, who was then in Wade's room.

	Finally—just as Morey reached the doorway, Arcot decided it was time to shut the acceleration off, and whereas Morey had been laboring under a weight of eight hundred pounds, he was suddenly weightless, and all the strength of his powerful muscles was expended in hurling him against the ceiling. Wade suffered a like fate.

	The complaints finally simmered down to an earnest demand to know how in the Universe Arcot had gotten off of "Dead Center."

	"Why—that was easy—I just turned on a little power; I fell under the influence of the weight, and then it was easy to reach the control room."

	"Go on—how did you get here?"

	"Why—I just pushed myself here."

	"Yes—no doubt, but how did you get hold of anything to push?"

	"Why—I just took a handful of air and threw it away, and then I reached the wall."

	"Oh, of course, and how did you hold the air?"

	"I just took some of the air and threw it away, and reached the wall."

	Which was all that Morey could learn. Arcot had kept his system secret, it seemed.

	"At any rate, I am back in the control cabin, where I belong, and you are not in the observatory, where you belong. Now get out of my territory!" said Arcot. "I am turning the ship back. We have to move in this space in the direction we wish to go in the hyperspace. I will stop and let you do your picture taking."

	"Let's move on a bit more, Arcot, I see that we can't get both universes in the same picture, so we can go on for say another hour, and take our pictures from that point," said Morey a moment later, after an examination of the sky behind them. Fuller had come in in the meantime, and he objected. He thought they ought to take some pictures from their present position.

	"There is no particular point in that; we will have those we took coming in. and we want the wide angle pictures particularly," replied Morey, so they went on into space, shutting off the molecular power and traveling at top speed again. They planned to go a full hour more. That they didn't, was not their fault, however.

	They were all in the control room, watching the instruments, and joking. Principally the latter. It happened very suddenly, far more suddenly than the cosmic ray field difficulty had occurred.

	One instant they were sailing smoothly, weightlessly along, the next instant the ship rocked to a sudden violent force, the air was a snapping inferno of shooting sparks, and there came the dull thud of the suddenly volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously they were hurled forward with a terrific force; the straps that held them in place creaked with the strain, and the men felt a sudden faintness. Consciousness nearly left them—they had been burned in a dozen places by the leaping sparks—then it was over, and except that the ghost ships no longer followed them, the Ancient Mariner seemed much as before—save for one thing, they could now see the dim glowing universes around them.

	"Lord—we came near something. Quick—it may be a wandering star. Look behind, and to the sides—" called Arcot, himself straining his eyes forward. The dark of space seemed utterly empty about them as they coasted, weightless, through space. Quickly Arcot snapped off the lights of the control room, and in a moment his eyes became accustomed to the dim light that was coming.

	It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull, red glow, so dim it was scarcely visible, and yet it was within twenty million miles! Quickly Arcot realized that it was—a dead star!

	"Hey—quick—Morey—here—ifs directly ahead of us! It is a dead star—burned out to a cinder—and of terrific weight, I think. It must have been a giant in its day!"

	In a moment Morey was with him. They were falling straight toward it, that was obvious. Arcot quickly made some changes in the molecular power apparatus, and then read certain instruments. "Lord! Look at that!" he said in a low voice to Morey. This little gravitometer told a story that was almost unbelievable. This star was over two hundred times as massive as the sun! There is just one thing to do! We can never hope to avoid that thing. We can't pull right away, that's certain, and we don't know what we have to do. We need time! We can stay here indefinitely in an orbit. I am going to try for that, but I'm not sure that I can make it. I must fall into the sun to get speed. We can't accelerate enough alone. Tell the other fellows to come here at once. We are going to use a bit of speed. Tell them to get strapped in. We are going to use all the acceleration we can stand. There is no calculating needed; we can simply go on till we don't fall into it."

	Quickly the others came to the control room and strapped themselves in, prepared to stand the acceleration that was to come.

	Now, had they dropped from infinity into this star, they would have been able to form an orbit very readily. Indeed, they would merely have turned around and started back, which was exactly what they wanted, but they had come into it on the space power, and at so terrific a speed, that they had gotten very close to the sun before the gravitational field had broken down their own field sufficiently to stop their space-movement. Then they had lost the energy of the field, and that had slowed them down, protected them from the gravity of this star to the extent of the energy of nearly two tons of matter. The result was that, whereas under free fall they would already have had far more energy than they needed to maintain an orbit, they were now far short of orbital speed. They must, somehow, get sufficient speed to make it

-

	THEY could acquire speed far more swiftly by failing into the star, than by any efforts of their own, so they were headed now for the one edge of the star, and traveling at ever higher speed. They had been traveling at a speed of 5,000 miles a second when they entered the hyperspace; this had been their original velocity, and now they were swiftly adding to it. As they dropped towards the star, their speed mounted at an astounding rate. They were using 5.5 gravities themselves, and the star was helping out with so much more acceleration that the speed was mounting at the unheard of rate of nearly eight hundred thousand feet per second per second. They were freely falling under this tremendous acceleration, an acceleration so terrific that they would have been crushed to jelly by their own weight Even the tremendously strong lux metal would have broken down under its own weight. This weight was unbelievable, too great for imagination. An ordinary needle would have been a load too great for a normal man to lift!

	Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional speed he could get, although, as he pointed out to Morey, it was little that his 120 feet per second per second acceleration, at four terrestrial gravities, amounted to, when they were falling under 26,000 gravities! But they were also laboring under a second acceleration. Arcot was now turning the ship away from the star, so that it would move in a great parabola, which is an open curve. But he knew that their energy of motion was still far short of that hope. They could not do better than a closed ellipse now. And a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever bound to this star as a planet! Helpless, not even the titanic power of their sturdy ship could enable them to escape from the mighty star, the mass of which was two hundred times that of our own sun!

	"We will establish our orbit all right, but we are going to go mighty close to that old boy in the sweep; we are in an exceedingly eccentric orbit. I am trying to make it more circular. We are diving so close that we won't graze that surface by more than a million miles, and at our present velocity of 26,000 miles per second, that means that we will be within forty seconds of that surface!"

	The others were quiet. They merely watched Arcot and the star, as Arcot made swift movements with his controls, doing all he could to establish them in an orbit that would be safe.

	It took them nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit that they consider reasonably circular. They were rocketing over the vast surface of the star at a rate of 30,000 miles a second! And less than nine million miles from them the dull red surface of the star flamed angrily!

	Now Arcot at last shut off their power. They were in an orbit, and he knew it was safe—all too safe!

	"Well, I'm about worn out! That working under five and six gravities is too much for any man. We are safe, now all right," he said bitterly. "We are so safe, I think we will be doing mighty well if we ever break free! We are moving about 30,000 miles a second, and that dwarf sun there is not ten million miles from us! We won't get out of this in a hurry. I think we had all better go to sleep and think about it in the morning. I'm too tired to do anything but eat—I'm ravenous. Come on, Wade—do your duty. It looks at present as if that was all we would be able to do—eat and sleep—till we are starved out." Arcot had grown pessimistic.

	"Well—you may call it being safe, but I don't agree with you particularly, when we need just three hundred seconds, or five minutes, to end our careers in that miniature star there," said Fuller, looking down at their inert but titanically powerful enemy, whose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre!

	"Well, that, and flying off into space are two things we don't have to worry about. If we started toward the star, we would be falling into it, and our speed would at once increase. Result: Increased speed means increased centrifugal force, and we would bounce right out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall into that sun is appalling! We now weigh about five million pounds apiece, and the ship weighs about five billion tons. That represents the force of our gravitational weight, but, since we are in a very stable orbit, stabilized by that force, any tendency to change would be like trying to bend a spring which is that stiff. That force also represents the centrifugal force that drives us away from the sun. Now, perhaps, you can see what kind of a knock it would take to throw the Ancient Mariner into that star. The centrifugal force is calculated by Mv2/r where M is the mass of the ship, v the velocity, and r the radius of our orbit. Gravitation varies as the square of the distance. If we move in, you say the centrifugal force is increased by the change in the radius, but the gravity is increased as the second power. Halving the radius will double the centrifugal force—yes, but it also quadruples the gravitational attraction. Then why don't we fall in right away? Principally because, when we do, the centrifugal force is affected by the increase in the velocity term also, and that is a second power term. So, while gravity goes up as the second power, centrifugal force increases as the third power, the square of the velocity, and as the first power of the radius.

	"The opposite—or same reasoning, if you prefer, applies to the reverse problem, the one which so vitally concerns us. Escape. We can't do it.

	"This ship now weighs five billion tons. To escape, we have to lift this ship out from this star, lift it against gravity. We are lifting a weight of five billion tons, and in order to get really beyond the range of this blamed star's gravity, we have to get about five billion miles away. As we get farther away, we will weigh less and less, as the gravitational attraction decreases. But if we lift this ship only one mile—the result is obvious. We will need such vast amounts of energy as are beyond human conception. We have burned up two tons of matter fuel recharging the coils, and we are now using another two tons, recharging them again. We will need at least four tons to spare, and as we started out with twenty, we cannot hope to get free of this star. We simply haven't fuel enough, vast as the energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on the problem."

	They ate, and they tried to sleep on the problem, as Arcot had suggested, but it was a rather difficult proposition. They were physically tired now; they had gone through such great strains, in even this short time, that they were very tired, for under four or five times normal gravity, they felt the affects of four or five times the period under normal gravity, or better, acceleration. But sleep did come to them at last.

-

	MOREY thought he was the first to waken, when, seven hours later, he dressed, and dove lightly, noiselessly out to the library. He sat there some time, reading a book on stars. Suddenly he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation—he heard the low hum of its smoothly working director motors.

	He rose, and went back to the observatory. Arcot was busy with the telectroscope looking at different directions of the heavens. Morey waited quietly till Arcot stood up again.

	"Oh—hello, Morey—I was hoping you would show up. What are your theories on this star?"

	"I think it is one of those things we have never been able to see from Earth and have only 'discovered' by abstract reason. We see stars like Sirius A, which is obviously a young star, and others like Sirius B was, and it seems to be unutterably older. We see young red giants, like Betelguese, Antares, and that type, and then again there are the white dwarfs. We know that all those stars were created from the great nebula at about the same time. Then how can they vary so in apparent age? There are stars like S Doradus which radiates at such a rate that it cannot possibly have been doing this for the ten or fifteen millions of millions of years that the nebula has been composed of stars. It must have radiated more slowly in the past, and yet not all stars did. Why?

	"The theory suggested only one thing. It was a case of arrested development. The theory which accounted for this arrested development was very interesting, and it also accounted for the fact that we could not see any in this arrested state.

	"If the matter destroyed in a star were the matter of its atoms, it meant the simultaneous annihilation of a proton and an electron. They could show that if free electrons could, thus react with the protons of an atom, the star would be unstable, and would disappear in an instantaneous flash of light. It is only when the electron is revolving about the proton in one of the planetary orbits that the reaction can take place, that the mutual annihilation can take place. Now, if there were a star, in which nearly all the electrons had been knocked out of the atoms, where there were no atoms with planetary electrons, then in such a star, the reaction could not take place, save very slowly, when an atom happened to catch an electron. Such a star could last many millions of years and radiate little. Then one day, that reaction would take place a little faster—and it would suddenly be a star in full glory.

	"Now, this little boulder down here is probably at a temperature of about 22,000 degrees, yet it can't radiate very rapidly, it is so small, in area. At the same time, it is so dense that the surface gravity has distorted the ordinary blue-white light of a normal sun, at 12,000 degrees, to a dull red, the usual slowing up of the light quantums in fighting out against that gravity. Lord, if light can't break loose, what chance would we have!"

	"I think we are going to play God for a while here, Morey," Arcot interrupted. "If we don't, we are not only going to play dead, but be dead. I'll show you in a minute."

	"Morey, what are the heaviest stars you know of?" he asked.

	"Hmmm—Let's see," answered Morey. "In order, the largest of the red giants are Antares, with diameter 450 times that of the sun, a Herculis, about 400, a Ceti, 800, and Betelguese, about 250. Right?"

	"Right—but that's not what I asked. I asked the heaviest, not the largest."

	"I suppose so," replied Morey. "Antares is 90,000,000 times as large as the sun, and only 60 times as heavy. Well, there is Plaskett's star, the binary, and one of its components is 76 and the other 68 times as heavy as the sun, but there are the four stars of the system 27 Canis Majoris with masses of about 250 times that of the sun for each.

	"I happened to be looking up heavy stars in connection with this monster here. It certainly is unique!"

	"Ah—but it isn't," said Arcot "I looked up heavy stars myself, shortly before you did. I found that all the known stars of very great mass seemed to go in groups that way, and were, in every case, of such gigantic mass, members of a system of two or more stars, except in the case of the red giants. All main sequence stars of giant size were in groups.

	"Now, my theory is that these stars of high weight always go in pairs. If they do—we still have a chance of life. If not—well we can profit by the example of the people we left back there. Suicide is easier than dying of cold.

	"The reason we are helpless is that we have come so close to a giant sun that we can't get energy enough to pull free. We lack energy.

	"But we have energy—infinite amounts of energy-potential energy, if we can only use it We are not at the center of Antares for instance, or at the center of one of those suns in 27 Canis Majoris.

	"What we need is another big, heavy sun to fall toward. Can we find one? As luck would have it we fell into a star that is so far from the main body of the Universe, we can't very well look for help. But the size of this little pebble suggests it may not be lonely. That was what I was getting ready to look for. Come on—pitch in and help!" said Arcot, pointing to the black screen of the telectroscope.

	They started their observations, handicapped by the swift motion of the machine as it swung in its close orbit about the mighty mass that held it.

	They had turned out all lights in the observatory now. Then, at last, Arcot detected it—a faint glow—a tiny spot!

	"Look! There is another star—near—I wonder where—we can use it if it's near!"

	"Arcot—let's use the amplification of the main power board downstairs. The stars won't be in their true colors, and they will be blurred, but the increase in power alone will help. We can use those giant tubes and get a real kick behind the thing!" said Morey.

	"That may help locate the stars! Come on, we'll wire it up."

-

	WADE and Fuller joined them before they were through, and Arcot explained that they were looking for stars. They were trying to get more power now, exceeding the amplification limit getting a poor image. An image showed something was present at any rate!

	With vastly greater power, they returned to the observatory. Now, after hunting again for the star they had looked at, they saw it as a mottled, blurred green disc! They were looking at it with wonder, trying to estimate distance and size—that is, mass.

	"Morey—isn't that another star, very dim, out there behind it?" asked Wade, pointing to a tiny, dim point on the glowing screen.

	"It is—and there is another-—say Arcot—this is more than you reckoned on!"

	"It certainly is," replied Arcot "It is a whole Universe of these strange stars that never started shining! I wonder if they are apt to exist this way for countless æons, and then suddenly flame into life. Whole universes! The stars may be formed 'blind' under certain conditions, and remain that way till something disturbs them!

	"We are in a universe of stars that haven't radiated yet! But the one that we are interested in is that star that we can see as a disc. Here is my plan:

	"I believe that that star is as massive, or nearly as massive as this sun. They must be swinging about each other, about a common center of gravity, and if they don't fall together, they surely are moving—with those masses. I believe you can see what would happen if we were midway between them. In such event, we would be falling into one just as fast as we fell into the other—we would have as much weight in one direction, as the other. Result: We would be able to escape!

	"We would be able to get into that neutral space, where the two gravities mutually neutralized each other, and for the millions of miles where the gravity was most intense, the two fields would annul each other, then, when we got well out from them, the fields would both be pulling us back—but the distance would now be so great that our power would be able to pull us through!

	"That is our hope!"

	"Yes—and what a whale of a hope it is!" snorted Wade sarcastically.

	"Are you beating Joshua? He swung the sun, and made it stand still in the heavens—this is only two hundred times as big a job!"

	"And I intend to throw that star, two hundred times as big as the sun, sixty million times as heavy as Earth! And I intend to swing it into this star in such a way, that we can escape from between their twin fields! Escape between the hammer and the anvil, as millions of millions of millions of tons of matter crush into each other, falling under the weight of a gravitational acceleration that will approach fifty thousand times Earth gravity! The two gravities, each twenty-five thousand times Earth gravity, will unite—and what a terrific attraction there will be!"

	"And you intend to swing that!" asked Wade in awe, as he thought of the scene there would be, as those two giant suns, each far larger than any star we know well, crashed! "Well, I don't want to be around."

	"What I want to do is really simple. We have the molecular ray. Those stars are hot. They don't fall into each other, because they are rotating. Suppose that rotation is suddenly stopped, completely? But what can stop the rotation of those quintillions of tons of matter? Nothing—nothing, but the matter itself. The energy that would be needed to stop all that matter would be so great, that we could not even think of it—were it not for the fact that we are going to use the energy of a mighty star to supply it We are going to hitch our wagon to a star in an even more liberal sense. The molecular ray acts catalytically. We will only supply the impulse. The molecules will stop themselves. The star supplies the energy!

	"And our job will be to break away when the stars get close enough.

	"The mechanics of the job are simple—we will have to calculate when and how long to use the power, and when and how quickly to escape. Also, we will use the main power board to generate the ray and project it instead of the little ray units. The range of the ray is theoretically infinite. With luck—we ought to be free of this star in three days!"

	Work was started at once. Once more they had a chance of life in sight and they had every intention of using it! The calculating machines they had brought were certainly going to prove worth their mass in this one use! The observations were extremely difficult while the ship was rocketing about the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the mass and distance and orbital motion of that other star were very difficult. Their final results were that it revolved with this star, the two being only slightly different in mass, as Arcot had suspected, at a separation of very nearly, two billion miles. The masses of the two stars was as one to .95. Their next problem was to calculate the time of fall from that point considering that it was stopped instantaneously, which would be approximately true. Since its inertia was made up of the sum of the inertias of the molecules, and it was these molecules that were to be stopped, individually by their own energies, it was not difficult to understand.

	They had calculated that in twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes, they would be in a position that would be the most favorable to start the fall. The actual fall would take approximately six hours! The fall of two billion miles, under the titanic attraction of the two giant masses, would take but six hours! Since the stars would both fall toward each other, they would be drawn toward the falling mass, and as their orbit was completed in less than an hour, they must make sure that they were in the right position at the half way point when the fall occurred. As their orbit would be greatly perturbed as the star approached, it was necessary to calculate the perturbation and find where they would actually meet the middle point They could regulate their position but little, for whereas the maximum acceleration they could produce was five gravities, the star was pulling them with a force 5,000 times as great. They must consider themselves practically helpless, until the two gravitational fields were neutralizing.

	Arcot could have picked several points which would allow them to pull the star down sooner, since their "year" was so short but he had chosen this way to make necessary changes in the wiring of the ray controls.

	"Well," said Wade, as they finally finished the laborious computations, "I sure hope we don't make a mistake and get caught between the two! And what happens if we find that we have not stopped the star after all?"

	"We won't hit it exactly the first try, but we can juggle with the ray till we do," replied Morey.

	"And what if the rotational speed of the star is too great for its heat energy to overcome?"

	"It won't be—it is at a temperature of 40,000,000 degrees, and if you stop to figure the rate of motion of atoms at that speed, you will see that it will more than overcome the velocity of the star. Our one trouble will be that one side of the star is going to be affected more strongly than the other. It will, however, merely cause a rotation, and we can thus get a shot at all sides. At any rate, it is our only hope," was Morey's conclusion.

-

	THEY set to work at once, installing the heavy leads to the ray projectors. The ray projectors were necessarily on the extreme outside of the ship, in countersunk recesses in the walls of the ship. They were not affected by any physical influence, for they were actually electromagnetic field projectors, the projectors themselves being within the lux metal walls, but the fields united to produce the director field, outside the ship. To get at these projectors, to make the necessary readjustments, it was required that they go outside the ship. Morey and Wade were the ones to do this. Out in space, floating about the ship, under the attraction of that mighty sun, they still floated weightless, for they too were supported by centrifugal force.

	"It is a bit warm out here, Arcot despite the dullness of that star. I can actually feel the heat," reported Morey.

	"Which means," replied Arcot over the radio from his position inside the ship, "that most of this star's radiation is in the infra-red. Heat is its main product with light as a by-product"

	The work of readjusting the projectors for the greater-power was completed in an hour and a quarter, and the men returned. There still remained over twenty hours before they started their main work. Then the next ten hours would be busy ones indeed! The great storage coils had been charged to capacity, and the circuit to them was left open, controlled by the relays only. They would keep the coils charged, ready for the start

	"We are all ready, mechanically, and I think we would be wise if we were ready physically also. I suppose we aren't very tired, but we might take a little of that opiate; we are going to have a busy time when we start and if we sit in suspense, we will be very nervous. I think we had better get a little sleep, too. If we use a mild shock to wake us, we won't oversleep," suggested Wade.

	They agreed to the plan, and they prepared for their wait.

	Awakened two hours before the actual moment of action, Wade prepared breakfast, and Morey took more observations. They knew just where the star should be, and they looked for it there. Morey breathed a sigh of relief—it was exactly in place! Their mathematics they were sure of, but on such a rapidly moving machine, it was exceedingly difficult to make good observations.

	The two hours seemed to drag interminably, but as the last moments passed, and Arcot signaled for the full power of the molecular rays, they waited, breathless, for some response. Minute followed minute in breath-holding suspense—and still no result.

	"Arcot—what's wrong?" asked Wade anxiously as the minutes passed. "It has been nearly fifteen minutes!"

	"Well, be patient. We ought to see it happen in about five hours now."

	"What! Five hours? And why?" asked Wade.

	"Too great a distance," Arcot answered. "Two billion miles means that the light will take about two and a half hours getting here, and that our ray also took near two and a half. Result: We don't see it happen for five hours after we started the thing under way. There is a sort of chopped-off section of our ray going out there in space now, with nothing at its beginning and nothing at its end, but it will bit that star—and do things!

	"Don't be impatient. We made allowance for that in our calculations, you know."

	"Then how can we check the motion of that star," said Wade. "If we have to wait five hours to make sure it is doing what we want it to, and then get an impulse to correct it out there?"

	"We can't work absolutely accurately," said Arcot, "but I know we used enough energy to completely, or very nearly stop it. In either case, the suns will start falling together. We are handicapped in our work, in that we can't stop the orbital motion of this thing that has us caught. It just isn't healthy, though! That star is going to start doing things! It will be chilled to almost absolute zero, however, before we get through with it, before it gets very near. It can't do much at that temperature—except expand. Which it will do. You will see the thing suddenly expanding, as it comes near, and it will flame up to a terrific temperature. We are going to start this system blazing, and if we don't get away, we needn't worry about lack of food!"

	"Kind of playing with fire, I take it?" said Fuller smiling.

	"Oh, sort of—about 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of it, in fact," answered Arcot, nonchalantly.

	"Well, I take it that forty decillion is a pretty large number, but just how big?"

	"It is four with 34 zeros for company."

	"It sure has a lot of company!" said Fuller, laughing.

	The tension of the delay had been relieved, and they went back to the observatory to await news. There seemed to be nothing happening, however. They devoted their time to checking their position and in looking at the Universe they had just left. Finally Arcot announced that there would be things happening soon.

-

	THEY turned the telectroscope toward the tiny pinpoint of the star, scarcely visible in the depths of space. It was glowing a very dull red on their screens. Then suddenly a change seemed to come over it. Without any apparent reason, it went out all together. The telectroscope had been set rotating at such a speed that its apparent motion was zero, so now they saw it moving across the screen as it suddenly flared violet! It was larger already, and even as they watched it, it grew swiftly larger, and at a speed that they could watch! Its brilliance was mounting swiftly; it was becoming ever more and more brilliant. Already it was a blazing point of violet light, so bright that it blurred the screen. It was a disc a moment later, and still growing brighter. Already they could see its glowing with the naked eye.

	"It is happening! That star is standing still in its orbit for the time!" said Morey triumphantly, after a few minutes' work. "It is growing at a tremendously greater rate than I had anticipated, however! A star that size should radiate light at a rate that is simply unbelievable, and as it is in the condition of a white dwarf now, with a mass of 2,000 suns, and unstable, since we cooled it, we are seeing something that cannot happen in the natural universe. The Lord alone knows what that star will do before it reaches stability. Look at it! That violet light is due to two things—already it is tremendously hotter than it was, and, further, it is falling toward us, and the surface is raising at a rate that is inconceivable. I am beginning to wonder, Arcot, if we will ever be able to get within the necessary twenty million miles of its center of gravity, which is the distance we need to reach in order to escape?"

	"We won't have to—the edge alone will weigh so much we will be able to get loose. But just think—that is climbing to a temperature that no matter can reach normally! When those two suns crash—well, we would never be able to escape if the space control breaks down before we are at least two light hours away! It will be radiating its light at an unheard of rate—look at that change—Morey, I think that is going through all the stages of stellar evolution in a few days! Think of the awful reaction when those two stars unite—and nothing in God's universe could stop them now. A star of that mass, when made of normal matter, would be so big that it would fill all the space between its old orbit and this other star, and it is rapidly regaining the electrons in orbital motion, and as fast as they get there, they go up in radiation'—and more fall—Lord! It can't stand it! The whole star, the forty decillion tons of matter it makes, plus the forty more that make this other star, will be gone inside of a year! Our sun wouldn't last over a day. At the rate that our sun is radiating now, four million tons a second, it would last fifteen million million years!

	"We will have to put up the relux screens to turn the radiation when it gets too intense, and then we can only go by our instruments and calculations. We certainly didn't figure on this rate of expansion. We will have to try to escape in three and a half hours instead of six—this star is growing, as well as falling. Look—it is a disc of violet now—and ultra-violet at that, I'll bet—it is as big as the full moon—and it is still growing!"

	In awed wonder the men watched the titanic sun, a mighty hurtling mass of seething flame, grow before their eyes. It changed its color till it was shining a violet that was injurious to the eyes, and they wore glasses which cut out the ultra-violets, and left only the harmless rays. It was already the size of our sun's disc, and due to its far higher temperature, was radiating far more heat. It was only their greater distance that made it possible to stand it. The heat was indeed mounting, although the perfect reflecting of the relux turned all away that struck the sides. It could enter only at the windows. But all windows were closed, save those of the pilot room. They no longer needed the observatory. Their pale primary, the star about which they revolved, now glowed brighter. It was reflecting the light of its fast burning brother! The temperature was already 85,000 degrees on the surface, Arcot calculated, and it was mounting rapidly. They were feeling the effects of the gravity now, and their orbit was straightening out. About them already, Arcot saw that the far-reaching tongues of flame were blazing.

	"We can even live through one of those tongues of flame, thank the Lord! Lux metal doesn't melt at 40,000 degrees, as we have found, and though it will then be radiating a terrific amount of heat, if all our windows are covered with relux, and the inner wall is relux, of course we will be able to live through that; the lux metal is a perfect, or very nearly perfect, nonconductor of heat, so the relux inner wall will not be heated except in small spots, and there we can cool it with a molecular ray. The vacuum is as perfect as the vacuum of space, and we will be protected—but we can't stay in that flame!"

	The relux shields were half across the control room windows now, and they saw only a giant disc of flame that was hurtling toward them at a terrific pace, falling into its brother sun With a speed that transcended their own even, and was certain to strike it now with an energy that was colossal, an energy which was, itself, the equivalent of the destruction of millions of tons of matter. Arcot was watching the instruments.

	"We can make an escape from here in about fifteen minutes at the present rate of fall and expansion. It is rapidly accelerated, however, and that brings the time down to about five minutes. That five minutes means that the star will have covered approximately three million miles, and that will bring it near enough to release us—with a little strain, especially as the surface is coming nearer even more rapidly/'

	Arcot was gazing out now, through smoked glasses, at the mighty mass of flame, its titanic shooting flames stretching out a million and half miles from its seething surface. In a brief three hours the star had changed from a dormant star, to a roaring, struggling giant, straining at the long-held bonds of atomic separation. Now, as the atoms reformed, they were instantly blasted into radiation, but as the temperature rose, the atoms were once more driven into quanta, and the radiation could not take place; it was the swift expansion which, cooling the star, permitted this continued radiation and the rapid growth.

	Suddenly Morey cried out and pointed below them. A mighty tongue of flame was reaching out toward them—climbing, coming up at a tremendous rate—the star they were circling was expanding—growing—wakened into life by the growing attraction it felt, as the mighty star above moved nearer.

	"The sun we are circling is expanding—we are going to get caught in it! We have to try now—or never!" cried Morey.

	The close drawn slit that had been admitting what little light they had allowed, was now covered by a flashing sea of flame—-the mighty disc of the star that was falling at close to sixty thousand miles a second!

-

	SUDDENLY there came across the view an instantaneous sweep of flame—the ship was suddenly thrown end over end as it rocked under the blast of flame that welled out of the awakened and expanding star—it was racing out at close to three hundred miles a second, a flaming tongue of hydrogen and helium. At a temperature of ten thousand degrees, the lux metal coating withstood it, unharmed, but the men inside could feel the mechanical force of the blast of gas.

	Wildly, Arcot struggled to right the ship, get it into a position pointing toward the rapidly narrowing space between the two stars. They must be headed thus if they wished to get free. Only a small jagged space of black showed in the slit of the relux screens—the heaving ship was unmanageable. Now, as the flame receded, they righted the ship for an instant, and Arcot threw the space control apparatus in at full force.

	Space rocked wildly, the air around them was a sudden inferno of sparks and they were suddenly in peaceful dark—then there was a wave of sinking, staggering force; they seemed sinking in interminable night—it was dark—dark—dark—.

	Hours later Arcot regained consciousness. It was quiet in the ship. He was still seated in the control room, strapped in his seat. The relux screens were in place, and all was perfectly peaceful. As yet he had no means of telling that they were standing still, or racing through space at a speed greater than light, save by his instruments, and his first semi-conscious impulse was to look and see.

	He reached with an arm that seemed to be made of dry dust, ready to crumble, an arm that would not behave. His nerves seemed jumping wildly—at last he pulled the switch he was seeking, and the relux screens dropped down as the motors pulled them back ... They were in space, flying in hyperspace, and beside them rode the twin ghost ships.  Arcot looked about him, trying to decide what to do, but his brain was clogged. He felt tired. He wanted sleep. Scarcely able to think, except that the others, too, might be tired, he dragged them to their rooms, and strapped them in their bunks. Then he strapped himself in, and fell asleep almost at once. But this was a natural sleep.

	One by one the others woke from their strange unconsciousness and found themselves in their bunks. They were sleepy—tired. They stayed there. Arcot woke slowly to insistent shaking by Morey.

	"Hey—wake up—ARCOT!" His ears sent their message to the brain, but the brain tried to disregard it. At last he slowly opened his eyes.

	"Huh?" he said in a low, tired voice.

	"Thank the Lord! I didn't know whether you were alive or not. None of us remembered going to bed, and for that matter we didn't remember anything. We decided you had carried us there, but you sure looked dead!"

	"Uhuh?" was Arcot's unenthusiastic rejoinder.

	"Boy—you are sleepy!" laughed Wade, as he drifted around the corner of the door. "Here—give him a little cold water, Morey!"

	A brisk application of cold water restored Arcot to more nearly a waking state. He immediately clamored for the wherewithal to fill an aching void that was making its presence painfully evident within him.

	"He's all right!" laughed Wade. "He seems to have just as healthy an appetite as ever."

	They had already prepared a meal, and Arcot was promptly hustled to the galley, where explanations were started.

	He had no recollection of taking them to their bunks, but he did remember looking out the window. He had not stopped the ship, and wanted to know where they were.

	"That," replied Morey seriously, "was just what we wanted to ask you. We haven't the beginnings of an idea. We slept for two days, all told, and the result is that we are far enough from all the Island Universes, not to be able to tell one from the other. Furthermore, as we seem to have left at a tangent, we have come further from our own than from any other. We have no idea where we are. I have stopped the ship, and we are just resting on the meteor protector. I am sure I don't know what happened, but I think you may have an idea."

	"I have an idea—I'm hungry. You wait till I have eaten, and developed a theory and I'll talk with you," said Arcot, falling to on the food.

-

	AFTER eating, he went to the control room, and found that every gyroscope in the ship had been thrown all out of place by the attractions they had passed through. It was obvious what had happened, mechanically. Their attempt to escape had been successful; they had shot out from between the stars, out into space. The energy had been drained from the power-coil as they went, as had been expected, and then the power-plant, had at once started charging them again, and in two hours they had been charged, and the ship had automatically flashed on. The stars, which they had crashed together, were now millions of millions of light years behind, and they had no idea where their direction lead. They were lost in space!

	"Well, there are a lot of universes we can go to; we ought to be able to find a nice one and stay there, it we can't get home again," said Arcot, smiling.

	"Yes, only it so happens I have a hankering for home. What suggestions have you to make, and what happened to us, that we all passed out like so many, lights?"

	"I am sure I don't know; my only theory is that the gravitational field had some effect on our field that produced a sort of cross-product that affected our brains, rather deleteriously. At any rate, here we are."

	"Yes, but I am particularly interested in getting away from here, and not at all interested in staying here. How can we identify our Universe? Can we back trail, and reach that one we just left?" asked Wade.

	"Not a chance," began Morey, "we were spun all around those stars, and we were headed off in a new direction. We are now bound for some place, but we didn't come in a straight line. Furthermore, it isn't straight, for one of the gyroscopes was jammed I see, and the machine has been processing about that one ever since, and the chances are that we are now moving in a circle, a big one—but then, when we were moving at the rate we were—We can't back trail.

	"Now as to identifying our own Universe. What characteristic features has it? The first thought is constellations, but we cross that out right off. First, we are too far away. Second, we may be on the other side of the plate now, and not recognise it.

	"The second thing—and this is no doubt our only bet, is that our universe is, by far the largest in this part of space.

	"If we spent, say ten years of careful study and photographing, we might find it. We know that system will locate the Universe, but we haven't the time.

	"Well, we came out to visit planets; here's our chance—and our only chance of getting home, so far as I can see. We can go to any Universe in the near neighborhood—I mean within say fifty million light years, and ask the inhabitants of any planet we may find with a high degree of development, which is the largest Island Universe in their heavens—and keep trying till we find a people who have learned through their research. I think that is the quickest, easiest, and most satisfactory method. What say you?"

	That was the obvious choice, and was agreed on at once, by all. The next proposition was the job of selecting a Universe.

	"We can go to any one we wish, and as we are now traveling 80,000 miles per second, it would take us a long, long time to slow down, and almost as long to turn the ship around. Now, there is a nice big Universe in front of us, why not head right for it? I think it is about three days away—that is about six million light years. Any objections to going to it?" said Morey, pointing to the glowing point that was the Nebula. Out in space a star is a hard, brilliant point, a shining, dimensionless point, that shines brightly and with a faint color, and they are always seemingly "hard." That is the impression one gets, but a nebula glows with a faint mistiness; they are so far away that they never have any bright glow, such as stars have, but they are so vast, their dimensions are so great, that even in the vastness of intergalactic space, they have dimension. Even then they have a slight breadth, and appear as tiny glowing discs—discs whose edges are faint, indistinct. As they looked out through the clear lux metal windows, they saw the tiny blur of light on the soft black curtain of space.

	It was as good a course as any, and inertia commended it, so they merely redirected the ship with greater accuracy. Setting the damaged gyroscope, however, came first. There were a number of things about the ship that needed readjustment and replacement, after that terrific strain.

	"I wonder if it wouldn't be wisest to make all readjustments, and to see that everything is working perfectly before we go to any new worlds, instead of landing there first, and then finding that we have no microphone outside, or that the ray projectors aren't working. It would be inconvenient, to say the least, and the chances are always fifty-fifty, if not nearer ninety-nine-one that the visited peoples will not welcome us with open arms, but with open cannon muzzles. I am certain that the outside microphone is gone, and that the ray projectors are in bad shape. Also, the outside loud-speaker unit is gone. Since we used relux connectors, the leads won't be fused off, at any rate.

	"I can think of a number of things that might well be done. I think we had best get into our suits and get out and fix them now. We could do it on the planet—and more readily—but there might not be friends to help us," said Arcot.

	The work inside was left to Arcot and Fuller, while Morey and Wade took a number of tools of various sorts, and all the spare parts they expected to need down to the airlock, and then returned, donned their suits, and stepped out into space, from the airlock.

	They found even less damage than they had expected. True, the loud-speaker, the microphone, and all other instruments made of ordinary matter had been utterly removed. They did not even have to clean out the spaces where they had been recessed into the wall—the metal of the wall had been raised to a temperature of approximately 10,000 degrees, and the metals had all boiled away, leaving it quite clean. There was no coating on the walls of the car, as might have been expected, for while at that terrific temperature, no matter could condense on it. It was like a piece of red hot iron—water will not condense on it, and if it be held in a stream of water, as long as it is hot, no water condenses, and when pulled out, still hot, it remains clean. And since even tungsten boils away at 7,000 degrees, and all other substances known boiled more easily, there was no fear of trouble.

	The ray projectors, which had been readjusted for the greater power, when used to move the sun into its new orbit, were adjusted for the normal power, while the cosmic ray apparatus was fixed. The lead supply had all been boiled away.

	The name of the ship had been put on in raised letters, painted with a colloid suspension of gold in a special liquid which, evaporating away, left the gold in the solid yellow state on the metal so plated. Since lux metal was a non-conductor, and absolutely inactive chemically, it was impossible to plate it effectively in any other way. However, this had been thoroughly removed with the rest of the matter, and they were trying to decide how one painted a thing at absolute zero. Anything they put on would instantly freeze, when Arcot, hearing their problem, via the radio, suggested that they use a red paint, one of the evaporating solute type, and preheat the metal to be painted. The problem was solved!

-

	AFTER nearly four hours' work, everything had been checked, from relays and switch points, to the instruments and the gyroscopes. Stock had been taken, furthermore, and it was decided that if they got into very much more trouble, they would have to stop using some of the machinery, and break it up for spare parts. It was certainly lucky they had come away with plenty of spare parts! They had remaining, of their original store of twenty tons of lead, only ten tons. This they could easily replenish at whatever planet they might stop on. They could also get a fresh supply of water and refill their oxygen tanks and nitrogen tanks there.

	The ship was in as perfect condition as it ever was for now every bearing had been put in condition and the generators and gyroscopes were running smoothly.

	They threw the ship into full speed. Morey engaged Wade in a fierce battle of chess, with Fuller as an interested spectator. Arcot, too, was watching, but he said nothing.

	"Now why did I make that move?" said Morey suddenly. "I intended moving my queen over there to check your king on the red diagonal."

	"Yes," replied Wade, "that was what I wanted you to do," he added gloomily. "I had a sure checkmate in three moves."

	Arcot smiled, bat said nothing. They continued the play for several moves, then it was Wade that remarked that something seemed to be influencing his playing. He had intended trading queens. He didn't, but suddenly he discovered that he was in a better position. That was all.

	"That was a good move for you," said Morey. "I was due to clean up on the queen trade, and you surprised me by making that move, because that is not your usual type of play. You usually go in for trades. It beats me."

	It did. In ten moves, ten moves of perfect playing to which of every attack Morey launched with the white, red saw the weak point, and the attack crumbled disastrously; white was forced to resign, his knight in a hopeless position.

	"You know, Morey, I seemed to know exactly why you made every move, and saw every possibility of it."

	"Yes, so I noticed!" said Morey with a grin.

	"Come on, Morey, let's try it," said Fuller, sliding toward the chess table. The chess game was possible by using a standard lightweight set, each piece of which had a small magnet in it, and the board was of iron.

	Again Morey went down to disastrous defeat. Yet ordinarily he was very equally matched with Fuller. It almost seemed as if Fuller could read his every move.

	"I certainly am all off form today," he said, rising from the table. "Come on Arcot—let's see you try Wade."

	Arcot complied, and although he had never played chess as extensively as the others, he proceeded to clean Wade out, lock, stock and barrel.

	"How, what's come over you?" asked Morey in astonishment, as he saw a very complicated formation working out, a formation he knew was far better than Arcot's usual game, and one which he himself had just conceived, and felt very, proud of.

	Arcot looked at him and smiled. "That's the answer, Morey!" he said.

	"What—what's the answer to what?"

	"Yes—I meant it—don't be so surprised—you have seen it done before. I have. No, not under him, but under a more experienced teacher. You see, this will be very handy in our little explorations." Morey's face showed more and more astonishment as Arcot's strange monologue continued. He hinted more and more broadly. He turned to Wade, who was looking at him and at Morey in wide-eyed wonder.

	"You did!" said Wade in a surprised voice. "When?" A pause followed, in which Arcot stared directly at Wade with an intensity that began to tell Fuller what was happening.

	"Well, if you have learned the stunt so thoroughly, try it out. Let's see you project your thoughts. I can believe you can read them—no wonder we couldn't, win at chess!"

	Arcot burst out laughing. "I have been projecting my thoughts to you—ask Fuller here if I said anything."

	"I'll say, he didn't!" replied Fuller, smiling at the surprise on Wade's face. "He said so little, I am quite in the dark as to how, when, and where he learned the secret, though I can easily guess that he has picked up telepathy as one of his accomplishments. We certainly had a fine chance to play chess, with him around here!"

	"I spent three months on Venus a while back, studying with one of their foremost telepathists, and along with some other Terrestrians, learned how to do it. The whole secret is that we have the power, each one of us, and all animals of the most moderate brain power have it. In the animals, however, it is better developed, for they need it, while man found that language, aside from communicating at a greater distance, would give his thoughts more concreteness, and hence permitted a freer and more clearly conceived type of thinking. The result was that his telepathy fell into disuse, and idled, and like all disused things, atrophied. It gives one terrific headaches for the first three days or so, and it's bad enough for weeks after, but you get used to it in time. I can use it for about three hours at a stretch without killing myself mentally. I will have to stop soon. I was rather mussing up those chess games of yours by reading Morey's mind, and projecting the thoughts into Wade's thinking mechanism. I can make you 'hear,' or you can conceive the idea as though it were your own, depending on my method of projection.

	"I am going to try to show you how to read, which is the easier of the two, and then I will try to teach you how to project your thoughts. It will be invaluable when we visit another planet. No language is needed." He turned to the others, and told them carefully the principles on which the Venerian system of telepathy was based. The system that had so surprised them on the occasion of their first visit to that planet, was not so extremely complicated at that, they found, and within an hour and a half, they could read the ideas that the others were picturing. It was impossible, as yet, to grasp complicated ideas, unless Arcot projected them a bit, but such picture-ideas as book or knight were easy to receive. They practiced steadily for about an hour, when Arcot warned them that if they didn't stop, they would develop headaches, which would make them need some kind of an opiate. They soon decided that he was right, and stopped. However, they read some of the books Arcot had brought along on the ship, and tried to make up for lost time. 

	"Why didn't you start showing us sooner?" asked Morey, reproachfully.

	"Why, I wanted to have some mental privacy. Also, I wanted to have some time to get acquainted with things on the ship—and also, I just didn't feel like it. It's a whale of a lot of work to do that stunt, and I was doubtful of my ability as a teacher. I'm going to sleep awhile now."

	The time passed rather more rapidly now, as they spent a considerable part of it reading books on telepathy, or practicing it. By the end of the second day of their trip, Morey and Fuller, who had a peculiarly adaptable mind, were able to converse readily and rapidly, Fuller doing the projecting, Morey the receiving. However, it was necessary to develop some sort of system, for as yet they could transmit their ideas only in pictures. Wade had divided his time about equally between projecting and reading, with the result that he could do neither well.

	On the morning of the fourth day after leaving the field of the giant star, they entered the Universe for which they were heading. At least it was about eighty-five hours later, and they had all risen very recently from a long refreshing nap.

	They had stopped at a distance of about half a million light years, and decided that a large local cluster of very brilliant suns promised best results, as the stars were closer together there, and further, there seemed to be many of the yellow type they wanted. The closer stars, of course, gave reason to hope that passings, which might produce planets, had taken place. The nearer they were together, the more apt to pass within a few millions of miles.

	They had penetrated into the Universe as far as was safe, using the half speed; then at lower speeds, they had worked toward the local cluster. "Well," said Arcot, piloting the ship. "We are where we wanted to be, now what do we do. Morey, your job is to pick the nearest G-0 star. Come on—we await your royal command to move!"

	"Well," said Morey, returning from the control room a few minutes later, "all stars of type G-0 are approximately the same size, that is in mass; they must be within a few per cent, of the same mass, or they will be outside the limits of the 3.54 to 4.88 magnitudes. At any rate, I see one there that is of magnitude 8.7 or so, which makes it a very brilliant type G-0 star, and I think that will give us as good a chance as any. What say we go?"

	"Suits us—where is it?"

	"I will have to direct the ship; I'll let you pilot it. I know I can work the instruments, and so can the others here, and we can work the ray projectors. But I never succeed in hitting anything with the rays, and you never hit anything with the car, so we'll let you take it." Morey and Arcot were the better pilots, although each of the men could maneuver the ship very well. Since Wade and Fuller shone as ray operators, this, position was given to them.

-

	MOREY swung the ship about now, pointing the axis of the ship in the same direction as its line of flight. The observatory had been leading, but now the ship was reversed till it was in normal position; then, they started once more, decreasing their terrific speed somewhat. When they were perfectly directed, and the distance calculated, Arcot threw the ship into one-quarter power, and they shot forward. An hour later they stopped. Already the disc of the sun was large before them, and they would have considerable difficulty slowing down to orbital speed. The speed was so high that the attraction of the sun did not seem to swerve them greatly as they rushed nearer. Morey was busy with the telectroscope, although greatly hampered by the fact that it was a feat of strength to hold one's arm out at right angles to the body for ten seconds under the heavy acceleration Arcot was using.

	"This system works!" called Morey suddenly. "We have picked another winner! I can make out a planet, I am sure, a fairly large one, too. It is smaller than Earth, I think, but I can't tell. Circle the sun, in an orbit, and we can come back to it."

	Arcot was already trying vainly to decrease their velocity to a figure that would permit the attraction of the sun to hold them in its grip and allow them to land on a planet.

	"As I figure it, we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 days to come to rest, using all the negative acceleration that will be safe. At five gravities, to reduce our present velocity of 25,000 miles per second to zero, will require, approximately 2,400 hours, 100 days. I think the only way we can do it, is to make that sun pull us to rest."

	"We will have to use the space control. If we move close to the sun, by the space control, all the energy of fall will be used in overcoming the space control coil field, and thus prevent our falling. When we start to move away again, we will be climbing against that gravity, and we will have a gravity many times greater to aid us in stopping. It will, nevertheless, take us about three days to stop. I am going to start the first cycle now. We won't get anywhere using only our own power. That sun back there was too blamed generous with his energy of fall!" said Arcot, smiling.

	They started the cycles, and as Arcot predicted, they took a full three days of constant slowing to accomplish their purpose, and burned up nearly three tons of matter. They were constantly oppressed by a load of five gravities, save the short intervals when they were moving in the space control field, and the intervals when they stopped to eat. Even in sleeping, they were forced to stand the load. The massive sun was their principal and most effective brake. At no time did they go more than a few dozen million miles from the sun, for the more intense the gravity, the better effect they got.

	Morey divided his time between piloting the car while Arcot rested, observing and sleeping. By the end of the third day, he had made very creditable progress with his map of this solar system.

	He had located only six planets, but he was certain that there were others. For his purposes he had assumed circular orbits, and calculated their approximate speed of motion from the distance from the sun, and the mass of the sun, as determined by direct weighings aboard their ship. Taken at various points in their fall, it was easy to calculate from the older Newton formula the mass of the sun. He soon had a fair map of the system constructed mathematically. This he tested experimentally and found true to a very close approximation.

	The planets, from the order of their masses, rather indicated a more extensive system than those of old Sol.

	The innermost planet was slightly larger than Mercury, being 4200 miles in diameter, and revolving at approximately 40,000,000 miles from the primary. The next, which Morey had named after the planet of the solar system, using the Greek name for the corresponding divinity, Aphrodite, was approximately 8000 miles in diameter. It revolved at a distance of 75,000,000 miles, and, like its solar counterpart, was cloud wrapped most of the time.

	The next, Terra, as Morey had called it, was indeed much like the Earth. At a distance of 124,000,000 miles from its sun, it must have received almost the same amount of heat that Earth does, for this sun was considerably brighter. It was 8200 miles in diameter, a shining sphere, and because of its relations with the rest of this system, Morey had observed it more carefully, which was the main reason for his knowing the distance from the sun a bit more accurately. At first it had been only this interest, but since it apparently had a clear atmosphere, he soon found that he had every reason to be interested. It must be inhabited. He felt certain of this, but his photographs were consistently poor, and he had no very good evidence, as they had not come within fifty million miles of the planet as yet. Arcot was swinging the ship about, however, and as the speed finally dropped to a more manageable rate, they headed for it.

	The other planets had proven of little interest In our system, Mars had, like the planet that once formed the mass from which the asteroids are derived, been broken up, as, like the mythological Icarus, it flew too close to the sun. Originally larger than Earth, it was smaller through all the time of Man.

	So this next outer planet had been broken up, and there were now two bands of asteroids, one just beyond Terra, and another just beyond the fourth major planet, a giant 60,000 miles in diameter, named in honor of the corresponding solar planet, Zeus.

-

	OTHER planets had not been found. But the inner two, Aphrodite and Terra, were of far more interest, in any case.

	"Well, I think we picked the right angle to come to this system," said Arcot, looking at Morey's photographs of the wide bands of asteroids. They had come at an angle perpendicular to the planetary plane, with the result that, instead of having to pass through the planetary asteroids, they had been millions of miles from them at all times.

	"We did, but why not land?" asked Morey, pointing to the speedometer, which now read well below 1000.

	They started now, toward the planet Terra, and to facilitate moving, they used a touch of space power, reaching the planet in less than three hours.

	The globe beneath them now was lit brightly, for they had approached from the daylight side. There were wide, green plains, and gently rolling mountains beneath them, and in a great cleft in one of the mountain ranges was a shimmering spot of clearest blue.

	The air of the planet was rushing about them now, as they dropped slowly down, and the roar in the loud speaker was growing to a mighty cataract of sound. Morey turned down the volume.

	The sparkling little lake passed beneath them as they shot on, still at a height of seventy-five miles. They could see the horizons about them now, as though they looked down on some giant inverted bowl, the edge resting on a vast, smooth table of the deepest violet, a violet that was constantly changing to a bluer and bluer shade. Suddenly they experienced that strange optical illusion of the "flopping" of the scene. It turned beneath them. Mysteriously they were gazing down into the bowl, instead of on its inverted surface, and what had been the outside was now the inside.

	They had passed the mountain range by this time, and the vast plain was spread out before them. Here and there, in the far distance, they could make out slight darkenings. The darkened spots were doubtless geological strata.

	Arcot swung the ship about, and they saw the vast horizon swinging about them, as their sense of "down" changed with the changing acceleration of the turn. They felt nearly weightless, revolving about the world at a speed of five miles per second, or very nearly orbital speed.

	Arcot was heading back toward the mountains they had passed over. The green of the foothills was already rising to meet them. They had nearly come to rest in the lateral sense, moving at little more than five hundred miles an hour, and falling at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour. Still, at the present rate they would require three hours to reach the green surface that seemed so pleasant.

	"I am heading for that lake. It seems absolutely deserted, and there are several things I want. I haven't had any decent exercise, save lifting my own heavy body around, for the last two weeks. I want some swimming, and I also intend to distill some water for drinking. I know it will be flat, but a pinch of salt, a little calcium salt and a few other flavorings, and it will be all right. Then we can fill the water tanks for emergencies. We can also fill the oxygen tanks from the water by electrolysis. If the air contains enough nitrogen to make it worth while, we can freeze some of that out, and store it in the air-tanks of the ship, using the molecular cooler, of course. In fact, we might have one of those good old-fashioned 'picnics' and throw a sun bath into it. I have been wanting a real sun bath for some time. Those blamed ultra-violet generators are all very well—but they aren't as satisfying!"

	No one seemed to have the least objection! They had slowed the ship to a halt as she hung high over the little, gleaming lake. Now Arcot dropped the shining hull a sheer fifty miles, at a speed of about 500 miles an hour. Wade, as chemist of the expedition, was delegated to test the atmosphere.

	In the meantime, the others collected the apparatus they intended to take with them. A long hose was coiled up and connected to the water distilling apparatus, the pump there being capable of pulling the water of the lake in directly. The air apparatus would merely suck air through a tube.

	By the time they had returned with the last load of the apparatus they intended using, everything from thermometers to pans and ray pistols, both cosmic and molecular, Wade returned with his report.

	"The air pressure is 20.3 pounds per square inch. Temperature is about 95, due to thicker air envelope holding heat better, probably. The composition is: oxygen 18 per cent, nitrogen 75 per cent, carbon dioxide 0.4 per cent, the rest is utterly inactive. I can't touch it with titanium, so it isn't nitrogen. Sodium won't affect it, so it isn't oxygen. Flourine won't do anything, so if s not metallic in nature. I suspect that it is an inert gas. It certainly isn't poisonous, if it's so inert! There is a large amount of water vapor, but due to the higher pressure, there is less than I would expect on Earth at the same temperature. I put a canary into the air, as usual, and found the bird liked it, so I suspect it is quite safe—except for possible germs. Of course, my pressure reading of 20.8 pounds per square inch is extrapolated from the height of that atmosphere and the density of the air so far.

	Here, at a height of 25 miles, the air is naturally germ free.

	"I am depending on the fact that in general the chances of organisms developing along exactly the same line are very slim. We may find the inhabitants of the same shape as men of another world. I expect that the men of other worlds are using the wheel. It is a good piece of mechanism. The human body is well constructed mechanically. The head is in a place where it will be able to see over a wide area—and be so much the safer. The hand is very useful, and can be improved on but little. True, the Venerians have a second thumb on each hand, but the principle is still the same. The backbone is such a fine piece of mechanism—it is certain to develop on any world.

	"On Venus, although the men were almost exactly like us outwardly, they were so widely different chemically, that we are probably quite immune to their diseases. We need no immunity—we can't expect germs that attack our bodies to attack a snake; the chemical difference is too great. Similarly we can't expect a germ which attacks a Venerian to attack any Earthly creature. I am sure the same holds true here.

	"However, I am sure that a Terranian lion or tiger would find us quite as edible as would an Earthly lion. Hence the weapons. Also—we might not be welcome."

	They sank the machine swiftly, till they were hovering a bare 100 feet above the little mountain lake. There was a little stream winding its tortuous way down the mountainside, feeding it, while another led the clear overflow away.

	"I don't think there is anything of any great size in that lake," said Arcot slowly and thoughtfully. "Still, a small fish might be deadly—let's play safe and remove all forms of life, bacterial and otherwise. A little touch of the ray, greatly diffused, will do that.

	"Wade, you do it; I'll hold the ship directly over the center of the lake."

	The molecular ray, since it directed the molecules of matter, would prevent chemical action from taking place when very greatly diffused, for then it made the molecules go all the same direction, only to such an extent, that the delicate balance of chemical reactions that is life, is upset. It is too delicate a thing to stand any power that will alter the rate of reaction. All things are killed instantly.

	As the light haze of the ionized air below them glowed out in a huge cone, the water of the lake heaved slightly and seemed to move to its depths, but there was no great movement of the waters; they lost only a fraction of their weight. But all living things in that water died instantly.

-

	ARCOT turned the ship, and the shining hull glided softly over to one side of the lake where a little sandy beach invited them. There seemed no indication of man about.

	Each of them took a load of the supplies they had brought, and carried them out under the shade of an immense pine-like tree, a gigantic column of wood, that stretched far into the sky to lose its green leaves in a waving sea of foliage. The mottled sunlight of the bright star above them made them feel very much at home. Its color, its intensity, its warmth, all were exactly as of Earth.

	Each was wearing his power-suit now, to aid in carrying the things they had brought, for on this more massive world the gravity alone was different. The air pressure was so little greater that they scarcely noticed it. Even the interior of their ship had been adjusted to this pressure. They had every intention of staying here for a while. It was pleasant to lie in the warm sun once more; it was hard to remember that they were countless trillions of long miles from their own home planet. It was hard to realize that that warm, blazing sun was not their old, hot sun.

	Arcot was carrying a load of food in a box. He had neutralized his weight till, load and all, he weighed about 100 pounds. This was necessary, in order to permit him to drag the hose behind him. He was leading this down to the water. He pulled his hose as far as the beach, then deposited the box, and set to work in earnest, tugging the hose into place. He tried to float it out over the water, but finally had to be content with getting it but a few feet from the shore.

	Morey almost had an accident. He had been carrying a load of about thirty pounds of assorted things to use. He had a number of pneumatic pillows, a heavy iron pot for boiling the water, and a number of other things.

	He reached his destination, having floated the hundred feet or so from the ship, pulling himself along with the molecular motion power unit. He forgot, momentarily, and released his load, which dropped down, while he, equally promptly "dropped." He had a buoyancy of 800 pounds, perhaps, and a weight of 250 pounds. Further, in dropping his load, the sudden release had caused the power unit to yank him up straight, and somehow the controlling dial of the power-pack had been torn loose. Result: Morey was in the air, and showing a fair rate of progress toward his late abode, space, and had no available means of stopping it. His hand power unit was far too weak to overcome the pull of the power-pack, and he was rising faster and faster! He realized that his friends could easily catch him—and laughingly he called down.

	"Arcot—help—I'm being captured by my power suit! To the rescue!"

	Arcot looked up quickly at Morey's call and realized immediately that Morey's power control must have come off.

	"Good-bye. I have been trying to think of a good method to lose you before we had to meet some people. I didn't want them to meet such a weak-minded specimen of humanity. Tell me if you get cold before you fall into the sun!" Whereupon Arcot turned back to his work.

	He realized also that there were twenty-five miles of breathable air above, and long before Morey rose that far, he could catch him in the Ancient Mariner, if necessary.

	As a matter of fact he let him go to a considerable height before he reduced his weight to something less than zero, using a lift of about 100 pounds. Quickly he gathered speed that shot him up toward Wade very swiftly, and a moment later he had caught up with him and passed him. Then he shut off his power, coming to a halt, with a weight of about 200 pounds. Swiftly now Morey rose to him, and again Arcot turned on some power, till Morey was just drifting toward him slowly, although he was rising at a speed of nearly fifty miles an hour. Arcot grasped Morey's leg and turned his power down till he had a weight of fifty pounds. Soon they were both falling again, and when their fall had amounted to a rate of approximately twenty miles an hour, Arcot made their combined weights zero, and merely continued down by their momentum. Just short of the ground he leapt free of Morey, and Morey, carried on by mere momentum, soon followed. Arcot at once jumped in and held him down. 

	"Now, now—calm yourself. Don't go up in the air like that over the least little thing!" said Wade solicitously.

	"I won't, if you'll get busy and take this darned thing off, or fasten some lead on my feet," replied Morey, starting to unstrap the mechanism.

	"You had better held your horse there," said Arcot, "for if you take that off now, we sure will need the Ancient Mariner to catch up with it. It will produce an acceleration that no man could ever stand—somewhere around the order of 5000 gravities—if the tubes will stand it. And as that one is equipped with the invisibility apparatus, as the regular ones are not you will be out one good invisibility suit. Now, if you can restrain your impatience, I will get a new control dial and shut that off. Hey, Wade, get the boy a rock to hold fast to. Better tie it around his neck so he won't forget it and fly off into space again. It's a heck of a nuisance locating so small an object in space, and I promised his father to bring back his body, if there was anything left of it," remarked Arcot nonchalantly, releasing Morey, as Wade handed him a large stone. A few minutes later he returned with the adjustment dial, and affixed it to Morey's apparatus. In a moment the strain was released, and Morey parted with the rock, evincing every manifestation of joy.

	"The dumbness of some people's grandchildren!" remarked Wade in deep surprise. "And here I always credited him with sense. He pulls his apparatus apart, then starts up into space. I can think of easier ways to commit suicide!" He shook his head dubiously and turned back to his work of frying some very deliciously odorous bacon. Over another small heater a coffee pot was sending out odors of equally enticing quality.

	"Forget it, Wade—and get that food ready," suggested Fuller, sagely, from his position in the bright warm sunshine. He was already in short trunks, lying with his back exposed to the sunshine. The curve of the muscles showed his complete relaxation. He was enjoying life. Arcot was gone—putting on his trunks also.

	"Hmm—wise advice from one who doesn't work. Come on and help!"

	"I'll help you now, if you will help me with the dishes," said Fuller, without the slightest sign of movement in his direction.

	"Fuller, I think, has the right idea. I'm going to emulate his excellent example!" said Mossy, looking at Fuller's perfect comfort with a judicious eye.

	"Which makes three in favor—and the fourth on his way," said Arcot as he came out of the ship and sank down on the soft sand of the beach.

-

	THE lunch was a great success, and all thanks were voted to Wade. While he was getting ready for his sun bath, the others carried the now unnecessary apparatus back to the ship.

	One of them, however, was to stand guard, while the others were in swimming. Standing guard consisted of lying on his back, on the soft sand, and staring at the delightful contrast of lush green foliage and deep blue sky. They waited a time after lunch before swimming, lest cramps attack them. Then, for nearly an hour, they enjoyed themselves in the rather warm water.

	"Ah, I feel better," said Arcot after they had finished the swim. They were basking in the sun, side by side.

	"Say, they must have a long day here," said Wade. "That sun has not moved more than five degrees in the two hours we have been here."

	"As a matter of tact," replied Morey, not bothering to look at the height of the star, "it should have moved exactly nine degrees. The day is twenty hours, and twenty hours of night follow. If they didn't have such a deep atmosphere, it would get kind of chilly here by dawn. But why talk about that, I want to rest."

	"Well, we want to see you and Wade settle the long standing dispute as to wrestling ability," said Arcot. Both men were powerful wrestlers, although Morey was at a slight disadvantage in weight, for although he was two inches taller than Wade, he was not as heavily built. The long, smooth muscles under his skin testified to his speed, however, as well as to the fact that he was not lacking in strength.

	They had tried many times, and the score was practically even, for Morey's smooth, muscular speed overcame his handicap in weight, and in sheer power, for Wade's arms and shoulders were bulky with the heavy, bulging type of muscles, and his deep chest gave him the endurance to maintain his powerful chemical engines in action for long periods. Neither lacked in skill. Arcot was hoping for an exhibition. "He won't wrestle. He knows that the only reason he threw me last time was because of that new trick he learned from the Chinese valet he hired. I think that fellow must have been thrown out of China for robbing churches. He looks hard-boiled enough," said Wade, rolling over, and smiling up at the deep blue sky.

	"I was just about to say that it's too blamed hot, and if you want to see some wrestling, wait till night, and I can guarantee a real exhibition." He did not know, himself, how true his words were to be!

	"But just for that remark, I'm going to slap you down in that pond there!"

	They rose and faced each other. Arcot and Fuller retired to the safety of the turf, leaving the soft, sandy beach to the contestants.

	Suddenly Morey dived for a hold, halted himself suddenly, and then, as Wade swerved to avoid the rush, he was off balance an instant and Morey crashed into him. They were down, with Morey on top. Only for an instant, however. In a moment the battle was a flashing conglomerate of heterogeneous and mismated arms and legs.

	For nearly a minute the flashing arms and legs worked violently, then Wade had a hold that quieted them, and slowed them to a steady strain. For perhaps ten seconds the men were struggling, panting in this new position, Morey under Wade's arms, but far from down.

	"Uh—you weigh fifty pounds more here, you horse!" he growled. The larger planet made the men heavier.

	"ACTION! WE WANT ACTION!" called Arcot, laughing.

	"Well, come on out and try it yourself," retorted Wade, puffing heavily.

	The action was resumed more violently. Suddenly there was an instant of swift movement, in which none but the actual combatants knew what happened, and then the twisted and intermingled forms separated, and Wade was almost down! Morey had a half nelson and crotch hold, and was lying heavily on his chest. On this world heavily meant more than heavily on Earth! Wade was straining to keep his shoulder off the ground, while Morey waited patiently, knowing that eventually muscle must tire, while gravity, which was working for him, was tireless. Morey was on the shoreward side of Wade, and the shore was scarcely two feet from them as they lay parallel to it. Wade was parallel to the shore. Morey, at right angles to Wade, was at right angles to the shore. Suddenly Wade heaved quickly and his arm was under Morey's body. He gave a sudden terrific pull—his powerful muscles knotted under the skin of his chest, and suddenly Morey was lifted above him and sent splashing into the lake! Now, Morey weighed 250 pounds or so on this world, and lifting him practically at arms' length, as Wade had done, was no mean feat. Further, as his ardor had been sufficiently cooled in the lake, he decided that he would concede the match to Wade. It was too hot to wrestle, anyway. If Arcot and Fuller doubted it, they were perfectly willing to referee a match between them! Arcot and Fuller professed a desire to swim instead.

	They left the lake now, and gathering up their things, returned to the ship. They dried themselves by brisk rubbing, and after the swim and the sunbath and the rubbing, as Arcot said, they felt more rested than they had before they took their exercise. They had not been tired; they were merely restless before, and the physical exercise had made them far more comfortable.

-

	THEY gathered again in the control room. Arcot had drawn in the hose, the water tanks were filled, the air, nitrogen, and oxygen tanks were equally full. They closed the airlock and were ready to start again. They rose into the air, and hung high above the mountain and the little sparkling lake that had furnished them the most, in fact the only, enjoyable adventure of the trip.

	"That certainly is a nice place for a picnic," said Arcot. "We want to remember this place, and come again some time. It is probably not more than ten million light years from home."

	"Yes, it is handy. But suppose we find out how to get home first. I think Morey said this place was inhabited. Let's go and see," suggested Wade.

	"Excellent idea. I quite agree. Which way do we go, Morey?" asked Arcot.

	"This lake must have an outlet into the sea. I noticed vast areas of water, so let's see if we can't follow it down to the sea. Most rivers of any size have a port on their deltas, or mouths, and a port in the old days meant a city. Also they are apt to mean a water supply when the fluid is as clear and clean as this lake."

	"I thought of that but decided it was not a water supply, because we are at least two hundred miles from the nearest city. From our height we would have spotted any nearer city."

	"Well, if you don't like my suggestions, make some of your own," grinned Morey.

	"Oh, we'll follow the river, of course," replied Arcot. And so saying, he swung the shining ship about and headed smoothly down along the line of the little stream that had its beginning at the lake. Mile after mile of the wide plain rolled by beneath them, and far ahead there loomed a range of rolling hills, the green banks of their sides showing dark in the clear blue of the sky. Below them were vast stretches of deserted plain.

	"I wonder if this place is inhabited? This land is not cultivated at all," said Arcot

	"No, it is not cultivated now, but take this glass, and look off there—see where that little rolling hillock is in the land to the west—or right I suppose I had best say, till I know which is the north, and which the south pole," suggested Morey.

	Arcot looked long and quietly. At last he lowered the glass, and handed it to Wade, who sat next to him.

	"That looks for all the world like the ruins of a city, but not such ruins as storms make, but ruins such as explosives make. I would say that there had been a war and the people who once lived here had been driven off," said Arcot.

	"So would I," rejoined Morey. "I wonder if we can't find the conquerors?"

	"Unless it was mutual annihilation!"

	They rose a bit higher, and increased the speed to 1000 miles an hour. The roar of the air in the microphone outside made it necessary to shut this off entirely now. On and on they flew, high above the gently rolling plain, mile after mile, and the little brooklet grew to be a great river, and the river kept growing more and more, until, as they came to the range of hills ahead of them, they wondered how it was to thread its way through that mighty natural barrier. As they drew nearer, however, they found that the range of hills was made up more of many short ranges of hills than of one long range. There were many passes through the mountains.

	They started through the one that the river followed. They found a great natural basin in the pass, which widened out to a wide, level bowl, and here, in almost the exact center, they saw a looming mass of buildings—a great city!

	"Look!" cried Morey in excitement. "I told you it was inhabited!"

	"Yes, but if you shout in my ear like that again, you will have to write things out for me hereafter!" objected Arcot, just as excited as Morey, nevertheless.

	The great mass of the city was shaped like a titanic cone, that stood a full half mile high, and was fully a mile and a half in radius. But the remarkable thing about it was the perfect uniformity with which the buildings and every structure seemed to conform to this plan. It seemed as though an invisible, but very tangible line had been drawn in the air. "Here shall there be buildings. Beyond this line no structure shall extend, nor any vehicle go!" seemed to be its message. Indeed, the air directly above the city was practically packed with slim, long ships—ships almost too long to be graceful—long, needle-like ships of every size, from tiny private ships of scarcely fifteen feet length to giant freighters of six hundred feet and longer. All conformed to the rule perfectly!

	Only about the very base of the city there seemed to be a slight deviation. Where the cone should have touched the ground, there was a series of low, half buried buildings, which seemed to have been made of heavy, dark metal, and all about them the ground appeared scarred and churned. It appeared that all along the base line of the cone the ground was in this condition. It seemed as though the city had been attacked by a rain of some destructive explosive, and the cone was its invulnerable sheet of protection. The little squat buildings were the producers of this defensive weapon.

	"They certainly have some kind of a screen of rays over that city. Just look at the perfect cone effect and the low buildings that are undoubtedly the projectors," said Morey.

	Arcot had brought the ship to a halt, as he came through the pass in the mountain. The shining hull was in the cleft of the gorge, and was, no doubt, quite hard to see from the city.

-

	SUDDENLY a vagrant ray of the brilliant sun reached down through a cleft in the rock and touched the shining hull with a finger of gold. Instantly the ship shone like the polished mirror of a heliograph.

	Almost instantly a low sound came from the far distant city. It was a low pulsing drone that came through the microphone in a weird cadence, a low beating drone, like some wild music Louder and stronger it grew, rising in pitch slowly, then suddenly it ended in a sudden burst of rising sound, a terrific whoop of alarm.

	As if by magic, every ship in the air shot down and out of the air, dropping suddenly out of sight.

	"It seems that they have spotted us," said Arcot, in a voice he tried hard to make nonchalant.

	A fleet of great long ships was suddenly rising from the neighborhood of the central building, the tallest of the group. They went in a compact, wedge formation and shot swiftly down along the wall of the invisible cone, till they were directly over the low building nearest Arcot and his friends. There was a sudden shimmer in the air. In an instant the ships were through and heading toward the Ancient Mariner at a tremendous rate. They had shot forward at an acceleration that had surprised Arcot. They were certainly swift ships! In perfect formation they darted toward the lone, shining ship of far-off Earth.

	"Now how shall we signal them?" asked Morey, also trying to be nonchalant, and failing as badly as had Arcot.

	"Don't try the light beam method"—the last time they tried to signal with a beam of light was when they signaled the Negrians and started the terrible war of the Black Star.

	"Let's just hang here peaceably and see what they do."

	Motionless, the little ship hung before the advancing attack of the great battle fleet. The shining hull was a thing of beauty in the golden sunlight as it waited the advancing ships. They slowed as they approached and spread out in a great fan-shaped crescent as they drew near.

	Suddenly the Ancient Mariner gave a tremendous leap and was hurtling toward them at a terrific speed, and under an acceleration that was so great that Arcot was nearly hurled into unconsciousness. He would have been, but for the terrific mass of his ship. To produce that acceleration in so great a mass, a tremendous force was needed, a force that made even the fleet over there reel under its blow. But sudden as it was, Arcot had pushed the power into reverse, and had used as great a force to counteract it The whole mighty fabric of the ship creaked as the titanic load came upon it. They were using a force of a million tons! The mighty lux metal beams stood the stress, however, and the ship came to a halt then was swiftly backing away from the ships over there.

	Suddenly Arcot was aware that his companions were "out" all, that is, except Morey.

	"We can give them all they want!" said Arcot grimly.

	"Let's not—we may be able to make friends with them, but not if we kill them off," remonstrated Morey.

	"Right!" replied Arcot "but we are going to give them a little demonstration of power!"

	The Ancient Mariner leapt suddenly upward with a speed that defied the eyes of the men at the rays of the enemy ships. Then, as they turned to follow the sudden motion of the ship—it was not there! It had simply vanished!

	"Oh!" said Morey, as he realized what had happened. They were invisible! Arcot had found a use for his apparatus!

	Arcot, released from the force of the strange rays, had at once shut off his power, but now he turned it on again, and raced swiftly far off to one side, behind the ships, and, still invisible, hovered over the great cliff that made the edge of the cleft that was the river bed.

	He snapped the car suddenly into full visibility. Wade and Fuller were fully restored now. It had been but a slight, temporary shock from which they had to recover.

	"Wade—Fuller—take the molecular ray, Wade, and tear down that cliff; throw it down into the valley. Fuller, turn on the cosmic ray with all the power you can get and burn that refuse he tears down into a heap of molten lava! I want to show them what I can do.

	"After you get that cliff down, throw the molten lava high into the air!"

	Suddenly, from the ship, a long pencil of faintly violet rays, ionized air it was, reached and touched the cliff. In an instant it had torn down a vast mass of the solid rock, which came raining down in huge masses into the valley, with a roaring thunder and an impetuosity that threw the dirt of the valley into the air like splashed mud. Then the ray died out—and two brilliant rays, rays of blinding brilliance, reached out. The rock was suddenly smoking—steaming, then it was dully red, then quickly brighter, and in a few moments it was flaming brilliant red. It was next a pool of white-hot lava, flowing, running under the influence of the brilliant rays, like ice under an ordinary heat-ray, a flowing liquid, limpid as water.

	Again the pale beam joined the brilliant rays and in an instant the great mass of flaming, incandescent rock was flying like a glowing meteor, up into the air. It shot up with terrific speed, broke in the air, and came down as a rain of burning, incandescent matter.

-

	AGAIN the pale beams reached out, two of them now, as the bright rays died out, and they reached down to the level ground. As they touched it, the solid soil spouted into the air, like some vast fountain, to fall back in powder.

	The rays that had swung a sun into destruction were at work! What chance had man, or the works of man against such? What mattered a tiny planet when those rays could hurl one mighty sun into another, to blaze up in an awful conflagration that lit space for a million light years about with a mighty blare of light!

	As if by a giant plow the valley was torn and rent in great streaks by the pale rays of the molecular force. Wade tore loose a giant boulder, and like a boy tossing a stone into the air and catching it, Fuller hurled the mighty boulder a mile into the air, to allow it to come rushing down, only to send it rocketing far into the heavens. Again he tossed it, then drove it far into the atmosphere—so far it came down with a terrific crash, minutes later, to bury itself deep in the soil, the great boulder splintering to fragments.

	Suddenly the Ancient Mariner was thrown violently about again. Again rays had gripped it and were drawing it with terrific acceleration. Now, however, the ship was racing toward the city, caught by the beam of one of the low-built, sturdy buildings that housed the main ray projectors. They were racing toward it at tremendous speed, weighed down by the acceleration. Arcot again threw on the mighty power of the units that drove the ship against the power of the beam.

	"Wade—use the ray-—Fuller—don't use the cosmics—tell you why later!"

	The ship was stationary now, quivering under the titanic forces that struggled for it, while the racing ships drove toward them, trying to come to the aid of the men in the tower, amazed at the titanic power this ship displayed.

	The pale beam of the molecular beam reached out its ghostly finger—touched the heavy walled ray projector building, and suddenly there was a flash of discharging energy, and the tower was hurled high into the air. A gaping hole in the ground that testified to its removal was all that remained. Instantly, with the collapse of the power that bound them, they shot far into the rear, while Arcot snapped off the power. Then they were invisible again.

	They hung motionless, soundless in the air, waiting developments. The battle fleet was cruising about the city, darting here and there. In close formation they blocked the opening in the wall of rays that the removal of the ray power had caused. The rest of the fleet, save a group of three that went to investigate the wreck of the heavy building where it had fallen, a mile away, were circling the city now, darting about, searching frantically for the invisible enemy, fully aware of the danger of collision, not fearing it consciously, but the unnerving tension of expecting it every second, made them erratic and nervous to the nth degree.

	"Well, they don't seem to want to play with us," said Arcot, smiling, now that he knew they were safe.

	"They don't, don't they? They might at least have been willing to see what we wanted. I want to investigate some other cities. Come on." Morey was angry.

	He had thoroughly enjoyed the rest at the side of the little mountain lake, and he was disappointed that they had been driven away—or better, not received. Had they wanted to, he knew, they could readily have torn the entire city out by the roots!

	"I think we ought to smash them thoroughly. They certainly are inhospitable people!" said Wade.

	"And I, for one, would like to know why it was you didn't want to use the cosmics, and what that attractive ray was," said Fuller curiously.

	"The ray is easily understood, after you took at the wreck it made of some of these instruments. It was projected magnetism. I can see how it might be done, if you worked on it long enough. The ray simply attracted everything in its path that was magnetic. As you know, lux metal is magnetic. The result was that the ship was strongly attracted, and we felt the results. Most of our apparatus luckily was insulated against magnetism because of the effects of the tremendous currents that flow through the coil leads. The little that was not, was not sufficiently important to worry about at the time. Wade will find his apparatus out in the galley, rather thrown about, however.

	"The only thing that was actually effected was the absorption of cosmic rays by our molecular motion power units, for they are designed to use the cosmic rays as a source of heat, and when the magnetic field strikes relux metal, instead of absorbing the rays directly as heat, you remember the cosmic rays are converted directly into electricity. It made very little difference, however, for the electricity was promptly converted into heat by the eddy currents in the conducting relux.

	"However, the relux would have made a bad mirror under those circumstances and your ray would have merely melted the projector, then a hole in our own ship, if you tried to use it, when in the magnetic field. Of course, the molecular ray was unaffected by that force—as witness that little fort they had there. I didn't like to have to do that, but I don't care to remain on this world permanently, alive or dead, and we might have been permanently disabled in a few minutes, with that fleet coming after us." 

	"But what's next?" the others asked in one voice. 

	"Well, this world is bigger than ours. Even if they are afraid to go out of their cities to run farms, they must have other cities. The thing that puzzles me, though, is how they do it—I don't see how they can possibly raise enough food for a city in the area they have available," said Morey.

	" 'People couldn't possibly live in hydrogen, instead of oxygen!' they all said when I made my little announcement at the meeting on the Black Star situation. The only trouble was, they did. That suggestion of yours meets the same fate, Morey," grinned Arcot.

	"All right—you win—but let's see if we can't find the other nations on this world more friendly."

	"I am now well north of the equator. I am going up where the air is thin, and will put on some speed and go well south, into the south temperate zone, and see if I can't find some people there in the dawn region of the world at present, who are more peaceably inclined.''

	The ship became visible suddenly. Instantly all the ships of the enemy in their near neighborhood turned at a speed that made their efforts futile, and darted toward it at top speed, but the shining Ancient Mariner darted into the deep blue vault of the sky, and a moment later was lost to their view. These men must have felt relieved—at least temporarily!

	"Well, they had courage," said Arcot, looking at the city as it sank out of sight "It does not take one-quarter as much courage to fight a known enemy, no matter how deadly, as it does to fight an unknown enemy force—something that can disappear and reappear mysteriously, that can tear down mountains and throws their great forts into the air like play toys. No, they had courage, but I wish they weren't quite so anxious to display it!"

-

	THEY were high above the ground now, and they were accelerating with a force of one gravity. In a moment Arcot cut it down till the air resistance was just being overcome, and at the height they were now-flying, it was very little. The sky was black above them, and the stars were showing about the blazing star that was the sun. They were unfamiliar stars, the stars of another universe.

	In a very short time the ship was dropping rapidly downward again, the horizontal power off, the air rapidly slowing them. They were drifting high over the south temperate zone now, speeding on, as the rolling terrain spread out beneath them. Far ahead they distinguished the bright metallic glint of a great expanse of water. They sped on, and in a moment they were sailing out across it at high speed. It swept behind them, hundreds of miles on each side, and as far as the eye could see, there was only the smooth water, extending to a tremendous distance. "They don't lack for water, do they?" said Wade. "No, I assumed that from the fact that all the land we have passed over has been green and fertile. There seem to be a great many streams, too, and see that great mass of clouds there? That represents tons of water no doubt that will probably be precipitated on the land somewhere. "Look—there is the other shore!" Far ahead, a low mass of solid land was obtruding above the blue of the horizon.

	It was not a continent they were approaching, however, but a great island, that stretched for hundreds of miles to their north and south. They were approaching from the west.

-

	THEY sailed over it at a height of thirty miles. They sank now, as the mountainous terrain became so rough, that from their elevation it would be impossible to detect a city. On and on they flew, slower now, lest they miss the object of their search. They expected to find the city hidden among the rocky mountains.

	The green defiles of the great mountain certainly made the city hard to spot and further, Arcot realized that no great number of ships would be able to attack the ray stations if they could not get in from the sides, but only from the top, and, piled one on the other, as they must be for aerial attack, the efficacy of bombs dropped, was greatly reduced. Unable to attack from the sides, they would be at a great disadvantage. These cities were surely located with an eye for war! What conflict was this that had lasted so long that cities were designed for perpetual wartime conditions? Had they never had peace?

	"Look—there's another city!" called Fuller. Below them, there was another of the cone cities. It also was located in a little natural bowl. Three mountain ranges seemed to meet and fall off here, and in the narrow pass left, a broad river flowed down to the sea. But still, it was impossible to get more than a few ships beside the city. The Ancient Mariner was high above the city now, and its shining hull, against the brilliance of the sky, made it quite as invisible as any apparatus might have. But they were sinking now, and as they came lower, it became apparent that they were not over the city, but were a mile west of the main building that made the cone.

	At last they had come quite low. There were no ships in the air now, and no people in sight

	Suddenly Arcot heard a low hum, and, looking about him in surprise, saw a long, dim shape darting up toward the ship at terrific speed. It was painted a dark mottled green, and against the background of the ground, was well nigh invisible.

	"Wade I—catch that on the ray!" said Arcot sharply, darting swiftly to one side. Instantly the swift torpedo, for as such Arcot had classified it, turned, and was coming toward them still. A pale beam reached out and the little torpedo was suddenly dashing toward the ground with terrific speed, miles a second. Long before the power that drove it could stop it it had crashed violently to the ground. There was a terrific flash of flame, and a dull concussion, and a great hole gaped in the ground.

	"They sure know their chemistry!" remarked Wade, looking down at the great hole the explosion had torn in the ground. "That was no mild dynamite or nitroglycerine. I would like to know what they use!"

	"Personally, I think that's a rather more or less, principally the latter, gentle hint to move on. What do you say?" Arcot was becoming decidedly angry at the way they were being received. He had wanted to meet these people. Of course, the other planet might be inhabited—but then again it might not be!

	"I wonder—Arcot. Obviously they were warned against our attack—probably by that other city. Now we have come nearly half around this world, certainly we couldn't have gone much further away, and still be on the planet. This city is, then, in league with our original attackers. Since this league goes half around the world, and they evidently expected us to do the same, why not go further? If we find that city also armed and ready, it will be fair to assume, just on the basis of the geographical separation, that all this world is in one league," said Morey.

	"Hmm—an interplanetary war. That would certainly prove that one of the other planets is inhabited. Next question: Which one?"

	"The most probable one would be that which we called Aphrodite," replied Morey.

	Arcot had driven the ship so far into the sky that they were effectively invisible. They were holding a brief consultation of war. What next?

	"If that is so, and I think we have good reason to believe it is, for people on this planet would certainly end a war after over a century or so of warfare, I think we might just as well leave this planet and see if their neighbors are less aggressive."

	"I agree, Arcot and I certainly hold no deep love for these men. They certainly are hard to get along with," said Morey sourly.

	"Well, so be it. Here we go!" And with that, Arcot shot the car straight up, and at the same time rotated it, till it was pointing its bow straight away from the planet. As they drew away, Arcot increased the acceleration, till, as they left the air, he turned the acceleration to a full four gravities.

	At the same time he redirected the motion of the ship till he felt confident he had overcome the orbital motion of the planet they had just left, and any velocity they now had would be accelerated by the gravity of the brilliant sun.

	The other planet was nearly a quadrant of its orbit away from the planet they had just left and as Aphrodite was a full 50,000,000 miles away from Terra in any case, it made a long trip.

	"I am going to shorten things up and throw us into space control. We lose a lot of energy that way, but what of it? Lead is cheap, and before we're through, we will have plenty, or I'll know the reason why," said Arcot. Arcot was becoming angry. He had hoped to make a peaceable, friendly landing on that inviting planet, so much like his own home planet, and the rebuffs he had received annoyed him. He decided that if there was no other way, he would capture one of their ships, speak with the men personally, and then send them back to carry his message.

-

	THERE was the familiar tension in the air as the space field built up and they were hurled suddenly forward, the star-like dot of the planet suddenly expanding as they rushed forward at a speed far greater than that of light. In a moment it had grown to a disc, and Arcot had stopped the space control. Again they were moving forward on molecular power. There was no need to accelerate, as they drew near the planet, for they were already so near that they would soon have to begin their deceleration. In ten minutes they were beginning to feel the outermost wisps of the cloud-filled air. Here the heat of the blazing sun was exceedingly Intense, and the clouds were no doubt a very welcome condition. This planet was, no doubt, a very hot place, far warmer than the Earthmen would find comfortable. They would have been far better suited to remain on that other planet, but they very evidently weren't wanted!

	They were slowing now, and dropping down, through the atmosphere of the planet. Here they had very nearly their Earth weight, for this planet was very nearly the same size, and apparently had the same density as that of the Earth.

	They sank for miles as the ship slowed to the retarding influence of both air and molecular power. At last they had sunk fully fifty miles to the highest of the upreaching mists, a thin wisp of cloud. After that they passed through mile after mile of the cloud-layer, while the air grew more and more tepid.

	Suddenly, the thick, all-enveloping mists that had held them were gone. They were flying smoothly along under leaden skies, perpetual dim, dark clouds. Despite the bright sunshine, the clouds made the day a dim, gray thing, and they reflected such an enormous percentage of the light that struck them, that the climate was not exceedingly hot, they learned, when they sank another fifty miles toward the soil below.

	The ground was dark, under its somber mantle of clouds, and the hills, with the rivers crawling their tortuous way across the wide plains, seemed strange details modeled in a great mass of greenish-gray putty. It was a discouraging world.

	"I'm glad we didn't wait for our picnic here. It sure looks like rain!" remarked Wade.

	At last they hung motionless at ten miles. Wade set to work once more with his chemical analysis. In fifteen minutes his report was ready.

	"They have a fine atmosphere. They have fifteen per cent oxygen at the surface, and seventeen pounds pressure. Temperature here about 40, but due to the cloud bank, I can't extrapolate for ground temperature. I can't tell how much heat that holds. The remaining percentage of the air is practically all nitrogen, with the usual trace of CO2 and plenty of water vapor. Sweating won't help an animal to cool his body much here! The air is saturated almost, and the cooling by evaporation would be useless. It wouldn't cool. A canary seems to have to breathe a bit fast, but it isn't bothered by it. I imagine that the air has a better percentage of oxygen down below; it is so on Earth."

	"Wade, why is oxygen so plentiful on all these planets? It was plentiful on Earth, Venus, Mars, on the frozen planet we found, and on Terra and now on Aphrodite here. What is the reason?" asked Fuller.

	"I don't know—that's atomic structure, and as such, goes to Morey or Arcot," replied Wade, looking questioningly at Arcot

	"I can't say for certain—but I believe it is due to the very stable arrangement of the protons and electrons in the nucleus. Oxygen is just four times as heavy as helium, and probably it is due to the very stable configuration of the protons. I can't say why, or how this is more stable, however."

	They were sinking rapidly now, and at the same time rocketing smoothly along the ground toward the sea that, Arcot believed, he had seen in the far distance. Swiftly the ground fled behind them, and the low plain, sloping toward the sea, at last revealed it behind a low roll in the land, a vast, level surface of cold, gray water, of a changeless, leaden hue.

	"My, what a pleasant world!" said Fuller sarcastically. It certainly was not an inspiring scene. The leaden skies, the heavy clouds, the dark land, and the leaden green of the sea, always shaded in perpetual half-light, lest the burning sun heat them beyond endurance—it was a gloomy world!

-

	THEY turned and followed the coast. Still no sign of inhabitants was visible. Mile after mile passed beneath them as the shining ship followed up the coast, a ragged level shore, small indentations and baylets seemed to run into a shallow level sea. This world had no moon, and it was tideless, save for slight solar tides.

	Finally, far ahead of them, loomed a mountain range, back from the coast and Arcot headed in toward it

	"I expect" he explained, "that these people, if, as we suspect they are at war with our very inimical friends of that other planet will also have cities placed in the mountains."

	They had such cities. They had penetrated less than a hundred miles along the twisted ranges of the mountains before they saw, far ahead, a great cone-shaped city. These cities were taller, larger, and in them the cone ran up further from the actual city buildings, leaving the airships more room.

	Arcot stopped and watched the city for a long time, looking through his telescope. In all respects it seemed like that other one. The same type of needle-like ships, the same type of cone ray projectors nestled at the base of the city's invisible protection.

	Then they moved nearer. The ship drew slowly down, till they were scarcely a mile from the surface. Suddenly, without any warning signal, apparently, the air traffic they had seen was suddenly in wild movement, and then it was gone. Every ship seemed to have ducked into some unseen place of refuge. In a moment a fleet of battleships was winging its way toward the invisible barrier. Then it was out, and in a great semi-cylinder, a quarter of a mile high, and a quarter of a mile in radius, they advanced, with the Ancient Mariner as their objective. Arcot remained motionless. He knew their only weapon was magnetic rays, for had they had a more deadly weapon, the war would have been over already, and he knew that he could combat that ray easily and safely.

	Slowly the Aphroditian ships advanced, and at last halted a quarter-mile from the Earthmen. A single ship detached itself from the mass, a single, large needle-shaped machine.

	"Morey—the controls—I can use the telepathy best—I am going to parley with them, for they don't seem to want a battle on the first occasion. Come on."

	Quickly Arcot jumped to his feet and ran the length of the corridor, to his room, and slipped on the power suit. A moment later he was in the airlock, and then, as the outer door opened, he launched himself into space. He quickly adjusted his weight, and an instant later he was flying swiftly toward the ship that had come forward, alone. But armed as he was with his molecular ray pistol and cosmic ray pistol, he was probably more than a match for anything the fleet had displayed on that other world!

	He went directly toward the broad expanse of glass that marked the pilot house and looked in curiously. He was a man much like Arcot, quite tall, apparently, but a man of tremendous girth, with a huge chest, and great powerful arms. His hands, like the venerians, had two thumbs. With equal curiosity he stared at Arcot, floating in the air without apparent means of support. Arcot hung there a moment, then he motioned that he wished to enter. The giant Aphroditian motioned him around to the side of the ship. Half way down the length Arcot saw a door suddenly open, and he flew swiftly forward and entered. There was a corridor running along the side of the ship, just within the wall. There was one man here, a giant as tall as Wade, but with tremendously massive shoulders, and giant chest, his thighs rounded under a close-fitting gray uniform, seemed bulging with smooth muscle. He was considerably larger than the man he had seen in the pilot room, and the other one had been a very pale yellow, while this man was burned to a more healthy appearing shade of tan. His features were regular and pleasing; his hair was black and straight; his wide forehead denoted a high degree of intelligence, and his clear black eyes, under heavy black eyebrows, seemed curious, but friendly.

	His nose was rather thin, and yet not sharp, and his small mouth was curved now in a smile of welcome. His chin was firm and sharp, distinct from his face and neck. The chin is one of the principal differences between man and the higher animals. No other animal has a true chin.

	The other man was looking Arcot over as Arcot inspected him. Arcot smiled at him, as their eyes met. "Torlos," he said, pointing to his great chest "Arcot," replied the Earth man, pointing to himself, then, to the stranger, "Torlos."

	The stranger shook his head from left to right, smiling in approval. "Ahcut," he said, pointing to the Terrestrian, and again to himself, repeating the left to right motion of his head, "Torlos."

	Again he looked at Arcot. He pointed to the comparatively thin arms of the Terrestrian, and to his own and smiled; then he pointed to Arcot's head and to the mechanism be wore on his back, then to his own head, and indicated walking with great effort. He turned again to Arcot smiling, and pointed again to the mechanism, and Arcot's head, nodding his head in approval. Arcot laughed. He saw Arcot was comparatively weak, but he had no need of muscle, for he made his head and his machines work for him. He decided that the head was better!

	Arcot reached out and touched the man's face, and turned him so that their eyes met. Then he concentrated on the idea of friendship. The black eyes that he was staring into suddenly widened in surprise, than with joy, he tried to concentrate on one thought. It was very difficult to interpret the thoughts of this other man, his thoughts were so different all his concepts were in different form. But at last Arcot interpreted the idea as one of location, but the thing that had made it so hard to vision, was that it was location in the interrogative. Now how was one to imagine that?

-

	AT last Arcot realized what it was he asked, and took over toward the door, where the thin grey light of this dull world filtered in through the open doorway. From his pocket he drew a pad of paper and a pencil. Rapidly he sketched the Island Universe, with a countless number of dots for stars, and then swept his hand all about him. He pointed to the planet and on a second sheet he indicated that the planet described an orbit about their sun. Then he indicated the sun in its approximate relation to the rest of the Universes, as a dot. The man looked in surprise and shook his head from right to left, interestedly. Arcot sketched a second Island Universe, then drew a thin dotted line from one to the other, and pointed to the ship that had brought them. In incredulous wonder the man looked at him. Again ho pointed to the great muscles of his arms, and then to Arcot's brain, and indicated his preference. Arcot smiled, and then indicated the city. Could they go there?

	Torlos turned and glanced toward the end of the corridor. There was no one in sight. He shouted an order in his deep, pleasant voice, and instantly another giant man came striding down the corridor with a lithe softness that indicated tremendous muscular power, excellently controlled. He saluted by placing his left hand over the right side of his chest. Torlos replied, and Arcot noted this for future reference.

	Torlos spoke to him a moment. Then he disappeared. A minute later he returned and said something to Torlos. Torlos turned to Arcot and wagged his head once more, and indicated that he should return to his ship and follow them.

	He looked curiously at Arcot as he prepared to start, then reached out one hand and grasped Arcot's power suit harness, and with one hand, at arm's length, lifted him easily from the floor without visible effort. He gently returned him to the floor, while Arcot looked in amazement at him. Torlos smiled, and pointed again at the small arm and the large.

	Arcot suddenly turned his eyes once more into the black eyes of Torlos and stared fixedly. "Torlos, will you come with us on our ship?" 

	"I am commander of this ship, and I cannot go without permission of my chief. I will ask my chief," he telegraphed mentally.

	Again he turned and left Arcot for a moment. Inside of a minute and a half he had returned, carrying a small handbag, to which a disc-shaped piece of metal was wired. This was strapped to his chest.

	"I can go. This keeps me in communication with the ship."

	"Radio," thought Arcot negligently, as he turned toward the door. To him it was a thing centuries old, but Torlos looked in surprise as he grasped this full thought. It was a wonderful thing to their world!

	Arcot went to the doorway. He adjusted his weight to zero and floated lightly into the air. He rose about six feet above the landing, and then indicated to Torlos that he was to grasp his feet, one in each hand. A moment later Torlos had closed a grip of steel about Arcot's ankles and let himself off the platform. At once they dropped, for Arcot was not adjusted to this load. They fell very quickly, of course, and Arcot cried out, as Torlos, in his surprise at not floating, involuntarily gripped Arcot more tightly. Quickly Arcot turned on more power, and gasped in surprise as he felt the weight mount swiftly. He had estimated the man's weight at 270 or so. It was easily three hundred and fifty pounds! Soon, however, he had the weight adjusted, and they floated easily up, and toward the Ancient Mariner. In a moment more Arcot had floated through the doors of the ship, and once inside, Torlos released his hold, with the result that Arcot "fell" to the roof with a weight of 350 pounds and received a correspondingly severe jolt. A moment later he was again on the floor, rubbing his back. He shook his head and frowned, then smiled and pretended to limp.

	"Don't let go so suddenly," he admonished telepathetically.

	"I did not know. I am sorry," was the telepathic reply from Torlos.

	"Who is your friend?" asked Wade, suddenly entering. "He sure looks like a husky customer."

	"He is—and he must be weighted with lead. Lord! I thought he would pull my legs off. Look at those arms!'

	"I don't want to get hint mad at me; he would make a mean opponent." Wade smiled genially as he advanced and felt of the giant arm.

	"What's his name?" asked Wade at last.

	"Torlos," replied Arcot, just as Fuller appeared on the scene.

	Torlos had been looking about the room, and now he had found what he wanted, it seemed, for he brought back a heavy crowbar that they had used when they had their little swim and picnic on the other planet.

	He looked at it rather skeptically, and taking it in his hands, flexed it in a bit as he might flex a rapier to test its material. Then, rather displeased, it seemed, be held it out far in front of him, and tied the inch thick metal bar into a neat knot! Then he untied it, and straightened the bar as best he could, and handed it back to Arcot, smiling.

	Arcot and his friends were staring in utter astonishment at the terrific strength the man displayed. He was smiling now as they turned to him again.

	"If he can do that with his arms, at arms' length, what would his legs do, when he was really working?" asked Wade thoughtfully.

	"Why don't you try and see?" asked Fuller sweetly.

	"I can think of easier, but no quicker ways of committing suicide," replied Wade.

	Arcot laughed and, looking at Torlos, translated, in main, the last remarks of his friends, Torlos joined them in the laugh,

	"All my people are strong. I can not understand why you are not. That, I see, was a tool. We could not use it so, it is too weak."

	As Arcot translated, Wade laughed and said, "They probably use old I beams to tie packages up with!"

	"We are supposed to follow these men into their city, to have some kind of an audience with their ruler, according to Torlos," interrupted Arcot, after a moment's consultation with Torlos. "Let's start now. The rest of the fleet must be waiting."

-

	ARCOT led Torlos through the engine room, and was going toward the main coil room, when Torlos stopped him, and, in surprise, asked him, telepathically, if this were all the apparatus. On being told that this, and the coils in the next room constituted the entire apparatus, he said, or thought, "It is smaller than the power equipment of a small private machine. How could you make so great a distance?"

	Arcot drew his molecular ray pistol and showed it to Torlos. "This, alone," thought he, "is powerful enough to destroy all your battle fleet, and without any danger on our part. And, despite your strength, you are helpless against me, for look!" Arcot touched a little switch on his power suit, and—he was not there! In vast amazement, Torlos cried out and searched for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly he cried out, and reached up for something had touched him on the head. Again he was reaching for something that brushed his arm—but it was hopeless! Then suddenly, to his immense astonishment, Arcot was standing, or better, floating in the air just before him. Arcot landed, laughing. "What avails strength against air, Torlos?" 

	"For safety's sake, I wish to be your friend!" thought Torlos, in reply, smiling at him as he thought it.

	They went on through the coil room, where power lay harnessed even now, which, released, would rock the planet in its orbit, or, if otherwise released, could throw the planet into the blazing sun. But it was small and Torlos wondered at the smallness, not at the unknown might!

	They passed quickly up to the control room now, and into the front of the ship.

	"Come on—these men are signaling for action," called Morey, from the controls.

	They started now, and the other ships followed at once, soon leading the way.

	"I wonder if it might not be a good idea to display our hand, and show them what is in store, if they try any unpleasantness?" asked Wade, looking at the great buildings they were gliding toward.

	"I don't know—but I think not. It is more effective as a surprise, and in any case, it is probable that they are friendly, but cautious. Our strange appearance may have convinced them, for evidently we are not like the people of that other world, for Torlos was surprised. At any rate, I wish to communicate with Torlos, so keep quiet, please," said Arcot, turning to Torlos.

	"Where are we going?" thought he, staring fixedly towards the stranger.

	"This is the capital of this world, Sator, and here is the commander-of-all-military-and-civil-forces. It is he you will see. He has been summoned," replied Torlos.

	"There is another planet in this system, like this one, inhabited. We visited this other world first, and they repulsed us; we tried to be friendly, but they attacked us at once. Their ship came out and tried to drive us off. With our rays we tore down the mountains that surrounded their city, and still they attacked us, and in order that we be not damaged, we were forced to destroy one of their city-protecting-ray buildings." This last thought was hard to transmit, although the idea of tearing down a mountain, and the picture of its flaming, crumbled fragments was very clear.

	In sudden anxiety and concern, Torlos stared into Arcot's eyes. And in that look Arcot read what even mental telepathy had hidden heretofore.

	"Did you destroy the city?" asked Torlos anxiously, but it was not the question of an enemy hoping for the destruction of his enemies' city; it was the idea of a city, the mental picture of a city, but with it Arcot caught the idea of home! He attributed this, naturally, to the idea that "city" was, on this world, "home," for they seemed never to leave the cities. Still, why this feeling of worry?

	"No, we did not wish to injure them. We destroyed the ray building only in self defense."

	"I understand." There was, despite obvious mental efforts, an idea of relief in this!

	"Are you at war with that world?" asked Arcot.

	"For many generations we have been at war—the two worlds struggling for supremacy. At one time this world alone seemed populated, but at last the people of Nansal came out of the forest homes they had built, and with a rejuvenated science they built the cities you saw. I will tell you more later.

	"Now we are approaching the leader of all the forces of Sator. He is all powerful here. His word must be absolutely obeyed. It is wise that you do not unnecessarily offend him. I see from what your mind tells me that you have great power, but there are many many ships in Sator, more than Nansal can boast. 

	"Our commander, Horlan, is a military commander, but as every man is necessarily a soldier, he is a true ruler."

	Arcot addressed his friends.

	"Morey, we are going to visit the ruler of this world. He is an absolute ruler, by virtue of ruling the army, which runs everything here. Now when we go to see him, I think you had best go along. Wade and Fuller can stay here as a rear guard. It will be a little safer. I don't think it is at all dangerous, but after being blown off of one world I like to be safe. Also, the people of this world sure could use this machine to clean out that other world.

	"Wade, suppose you take over the controls while Morey is putting on his power suit. I am going to take a radio, of course. Also make sure that you have your ray pistols along, and that the invisibility apparatus is working. You know it might be handy after all!" said Arcot.

	They had followed the great fleet of Satorian ships, and now, at last, they had come to the magnetic barrier. As they reached it, it was suddenly lowered and gone. The fleet passed through, and the Ancient Mariner followed.

-

	THEY were in the city. Below them the great buildings were piled high in the gray light of this gray world, its massiveness seemed only to accentuate the depressing light.

	On the broad roofs below them, they saw that there were hundreds of strange people coming out to watch them as they came across the city. It was the first friendly stranger ship they had ever seen, Torlos said. All the planets had been explored, and he could not understand how they could cross such vast spaces. How could they go so fast? He evidently had some conception of the speed-of-light limit. Arcot replied that he would explain when they had more time.

	The buildings were sloping up now. Higher and higher they rose as they entered the cone city. The fleet going ahead of them was slowing now, as the mass of the great central building loomed grey before them. Then they were motionless, hanging suspended in the still air. Then they were dropping vertically into a great courtyard that surrounded the building. They dropped down and down, till at last they landed lightly on the broad, soft turf-covered court, and the men came out of them, rapidly forming into ordered squads and marching swiftly away. The men from Torlos' ship came out, and formed, then marched directly to where the Ancient Mariner had landed, close to the great arched door of the mighty tower, where Torlos had indicated they should land. In a moment they had formed into two neat rows, one on each side of the airlock.

	"Come on Morey, we are wanted. And keep the radio going at full amplification. The building may cut out the waves. I'll try to keep you posted on what is going on. Wade, but we will be busy, probably, answering questions telepathically," said Arcot, as they followed Torlos down the corridor.

	They were quickly out in the dim light of the grey sky and walking across the courtyard, between the ranks of soldiers from Torlos' ship. They walked directly to the great door, a heavy gate of solid bronze, on great bronze hinges, but obviously designed only for show. Still, it would have been effective against attack.

	The building seemed to be made of a dense, grey stone, much like granite, but depressing in its perfectly unrelieved front. There were no bright spots of color as on all earthly buildings and Venerian structures. Even the lines were grimly utilitarian. There seemed to be no decoration.

	Through the great bronze door they walked and across a small vestibule. Then they were in a mighty concourse, a giant room that went completely through the structure, and great granite pillars rose to support the mighty building above. Square cut, they lent but little grace to the mighty room, but the floor was made of a dense, hard, green stone, as Arcot discovered when he examined it, much to the surprise of the soldiery behind. The walls of the room were of the same light green stone, almost the color of natural foliage.

	On one wall there was a giant tablet, a great plaque fifteen feet high, made of a deep violet stone, almost black, and inlaid on it was a series of characters in the language of this world. Like ordinary terrestrial characters, they ran from one side to the other. Their order of reading was, of course, quite indeterminate. The letters themselves were inlaid in some red metal, a rather deep colored metal, and one quite unknown to Arcot and Morey.

	Arcot turned to Torlos, and looking at him fixedly, asked, "What is that tablet?"

	"That is the tablet on which is inscribed the name of each of our mighty leaders since the Great War began. Ever since the war with the other planet, Nansal, the names of our leaders have been inscribed in the rarest metal on that tablet."

	The "rarest metal" was definite to Torlos, and Arcot decided to question him further when time permitted, as to the meaning of it

-

	BUT now, as they swung swiftly across the great hall, they reached what was evidently an elevator. A folding door, made in sections, was folded back as they came, and now as they entered, Arcot, Morey, Torlos, and the second in command of the ship Torlos had been on, the operator pushed a small button, and with the hiss of air, the door shut. A moment later Arcot and Morey staggered under a sudden terrific load, their knees bent and they nearly fell as the car shot upwards under an acceleration of at least three gravities! It continued just long enough for the three Earthmen to get accustomed to it then it was snapped off, and suddenly they went flying up to the ceiling of the car, as it continued upwards under its own momentum. It stopped slowly under the influence of the planet's gravity, and they stopped exactly opposite the doorway of a higher floor.

	"Whew—some elevator!" exclaimed Morey as he stepped out his knees rather bending, as he tried to readjust himself. "That certainly is a violent way of getting upstairs. That wasn't designed by a lazy man, or a cripple! I prefer to walk! Now what I really want to know is how on—Sator—the old people get upstairs? Or do they die young? Boy, I feel weak after that. That is even worse than the ship under full power!

	"I was a bit disconcerted by that, and I am even more disconcerted by another thing. I noticed that none of the Satorians seemed bothered by the extremes of acceleration. They actually jumped a little off the floor when we started and did not seem to experience much difficulty when we stopped. Of course, they held on to the straps there, which we did not, but they did not seem as heavily oppressed by the original acceleration.

	"That, and one other thing, have made me draw a rather surprising conclusion. It also fits into the curious thought-picture Torlos had for one thing." He paused, and turned to Torlos, and looked at him fixedly once more.

	"You once gave me the thought idea 'Bone-material' what is that?" Torlos looked at him in surprise, and then pointed mutely to a heavy belt he wore, made of links of iron wire, woven closely together, like the old chain mail, but finer and more flexible.

	"I was right, Morey! These men have iron bones! Their bones are made of the pure metal! Just think of the advantages! They have bones that are far more powerful than ours, weight for weight. Just think, we can not make our buildings very tall if we use stone alone. In the modern buildings, of course, we have nothing but steel skeleton, with the building and all it contains just draped about it! They have the same! It is a steel, or iron skeleton, with their flesh draped about it! How poor a thing is stone to make a skeleton of! It is more resistant to corrosion, but skin corrodes so easily, why worry about the bones? Iron never rusts in an alkaline solution, and the body is always alkaline. And certainly if the body can deposit the molecules of calcium phosphate into the crystalline structure of the bones, and leave the channels for blood vessels, and the nerves can make stone grow, why not iron? A stone can grow—and if that is conceivable, certainly we can appreciate that a structure of iron can grow! The whole process is merely accretion, and growth of crystals and iron is as crystalline as stone. And certainly easier to use, for just think how vastly stronger it is!

	"Do you remember that he tied that crowbar into a knot, then untied it? You didn't see it, but I swear he did that as easily as I would tie a knot in a piece of 00 gauge wire! Then he untied it and straightened it. Now, it would be impossible for a man with stone bones to do that. He couldn't, for his bones, which would not be any heavier than the crowbar, would break under a lesser strain. The crowbar is stronger than any man's bones. I could scarcely believe it as I watched, but I can see that with the heavier bones of iron, and the fact that they are cylindrical, which makes them stronger per pound than ordinary straight bones would be—I mean solid bones—I can see how he could do that now!" Arcot was talking rapidly, as he walked along with Morey, down a long corridor of white. But Arcot was too interested to notice.

	"The second fact that confirms my theory was that elevator. Of course it is obvious how it is operated. That elevator is merely a little piece of iron in the path of a magnetic beam, and it is pulled up with a terrific acceleration. Now, if these men have iron bones, they will, in a fair degree, be similarly influenced, and they will not feel the acceleration so greatly."

	"Say—that would be some skeleton!" interrupted Morey. "But I was wondering about the chemistry of it. Remember, that stone is a compound, while iron is an element. Can the living cells handle this as readily as they handle the compound?"

	"I think so, Morey," said Arcot "Remember that we know many forms of bacteria on Earth that can release hydrogen from water, using the energy of sugars, ferments they are, and burning sugar, releasing part of the energy as the chemical energy of hydrogen element, and the rest, of course, as heat. If bacteria can do that why not have living cells that can release iron? Certainly it is possible!"

	"Well, there will be difficulties, Arcot. There should be people here then, who, through accident have received bent arms. These arms wouldn't break!"

	"No, and it is seldom that we get broken bones, except when the bone is subject to an actual twisting force, and any twisting force that is great enough to break or bend these bones would destroy the flesh. Ordinarily, the damage is more apt to be a dislocation. But I admit these men could have bent bones. But then," Arcot smiled, "I have seen men who certainly seemed to have leg bones bent into a parenthesis!"

	"And with these famous magnetic bones of yours, I think it would be dangerous to have the magnetic apparatus around, let alone to use it in elevators. If they get magnetized, they won't be able to move! What a revenge! Wrap a coil of wire around your enemy's leg and turn it into a magnet—he can't keep his legs apart to walk!" laughed Morey.

	"Say, a fine physicist you turned out to be! Did you ever see a piece of pure iron that was magnetized without having a coil of wire around it? Iron can be magnetized only by the electro-magnetic effects of a current. As soon as the current is broken, the magnetism collapses! Naturally, as soon as they get out of the elevator their bones become demagnetized, and they proceed as usual. There are dangers, of course, but then, we use electricity, which is deadly to us, and the molecular rays are deadly, and the cosmic rays are certainly dangerous."

	"We seem to be here," interrupted Morey, "so let's wait, and continue this discussion later."

-

	THEIR party had stopped just outside a large door, carved elaborately. There were four guards, armed with a sort of pistol, which, as the Earth men found later, were pneumatic pistols, storing their air in a small tank in the handle, under terrific pressure, for, at room temperature, air cannot liquefy under any pressure. It will stand any pressure that can be brought upon it without liquefaction. These weapons were able to project a small metal slug, cylindrical with a conical point, and hurled through a rifled barrel, a distance of little short of a mile, a very effective weapon, except that they would fire but four times and that slowly.

	As Arcot and Morey approached, Torlos stepped forward, and spoke briefly with the guard. The man saluted and they opened the door. They walked in and entered a large room, where many men were seated about a large crescent-shaped table, in whose middle, at the center of the crescent curve there sat a single man in a uniform of grey, as usual, but so bedecked with medals of a red metal, and insignia, with ribbons and decorations, that his uniform was scarcely visible.

	The entire assemblage rose and the leader, as Arcot at once assumed him to be, rose also.

	Arcot snapped to the attention of the interplanetary guards and saluted, while Morey did the same.

	"We greet you, in the name of our planet. We come in peace, may we remain so, and so depart at a later time," said Arcot, realizing that he would not be understood.

	In his own language the leader replied, putting his hands to his hips with a definite motion, and at the same time shaking his head from side to side. Some sort of a higher salute, Arcot decided. He watched the man while he spoke. He was a taller man than Torlos, but less heavily built as were all these others here. It seemed that Torlos was unusually powerful, even for this world.

	When he had finished speaking, Arcot smiled, and shrugged his shoulders, then turned quickly toward Torlos and motioned him toward him. Again he projected his thoughts to him.

	"Tell your leader, Torlos, that we come from a planet far away across the vast depths of space, and we come in peace, we wish to stay a short time in peace, and we will leave in peace, but before we leave we will give certain gifts that will well repay him for any trouble we may cause him. I will communicate through you, for we have learned to communicate easily. 

	"Tell him of our weapons, that which can tear down mountains, and can fuse them into running lava—these weapons will we give him when we leave. His scientists can readily copy them and make them in quantities. Also, the weapon is at once our weapon and our power, for with it he can make ships such as ours—ships that can travel far faster than any ship you have. Yours are driven by magnetism, while ours are driven by another power, the power of the molecules, With these rays can we turn this very planet from its orbit and hurl it into the sun, or so we could do with Nansal. If this is done, your war will be at an end.

	"In return we ask only peace while we stay, and some wire made of the element lead, which is our fuel, and directions from your astronomers as to how we may reach home. We have come far and we have lost the way to return. This, and fuel, lead wires, we ask."

	Torlos turned, and for several minutes he spoke to his leader in a deep, powerful voice. Meanwhile, Morey was trying to get in communication with the ship. The walls, however, seemed of metal, and no radio waves would penetrate.

	"I can't get through to the ship, and they can't reach us, Arcot," said Morey, disappointed.

	"I rather feared we might not be able to do so, but that is all right. Our proposition is too good. They won't turn it down?"

	Torlos was turning to Arcot now, for the Emperor had replied.

	"The Commanding One asks that you prove the possibilities of your weapons. His scientists tell him that it is impossible to make the trip that you claim to have made." Arcot laughed when he received this message, and turned a bit to Morey. "They say that the scientists here declare the trip we made was impossible. I would certainly have agreed with them myself a year ago. How do they want me to prove it?" He turned to Torlos, and concentrated.

	"What your scientists say is true, to an extent. They have learned that no body can go faster than the speed of light. Is that not so?" Torlos repeated, this question. "Yes, such they say is the fact, and to have made this trip, you must, of necessity be not less than 20,000,000 years old!"

	"But they are wrong! Do they know all the secrets of nature? Are there not some things that they may yet learn? Say this: the speed of light is a thing that is fixed by the nature of space. This is truth, is it not?"

	"They agree, they know not all the secrets of space, and of the Universe, but what you say is true. Light is due to the nature of space," replied Torlos, after a consultation with his scientists, the men who set about the great table. In the meantime, Arcot had translated to Morey.

	"How fast does sound travel?" asked Arcot.

	"They ask in what medium do you mean?"

	"How fast does light travel? In air? In glass? Is then, the speed of light unalterable? Suppose that I can alter the speed of light, make it greater, can I not then go faster than light in normal space?"

	"They say this is true, but space is unalterable, for it is empty," interrupted Torlos again.

	"Ask them, then, if they know of the curvature of space?" Arcot became worried for fear his explanation would be unintelligible, for unless they knew his terms, he could not explain, and it would take a long time to teach them. At any rate they knew of the Island Universes—that they were very far away.

	"They say that I have misunderstood you, space is not curved; it is emptiness. How could emptiness be curved?" Arcot turned to Morey and shrugged his shoulders.

	"I give up, Morey—it's a bad case. They say space is emptiness, and emptiness can't be curved. I can't go any further.

	"They cannot understand what I would tell them. We have learned secrets of space that they do not know. I am surprised that they have not solved these problems and learned of the curvature of space. How do they know then of the speed of light, and its limiting effect on motion?

	"They say that you do not know more than they have learned, for surely they know that the speed of light is the limit, and in emptiness it is greatest, and that they learned of this law by experiment with space ships at very high speeds, and by experiments with the smallest particles of electricity,"

	The scientists were looking at Arcot now in protest; they felt he was trying to foist something on them.

	"Where, then, do creatures such as I live. They have explored this system? There are no such people? Then I must have come from some other star? How? If they will not accept my explanation, what have they to offer? Also, can they say I know no more? Watch, ask them to do this!"

	Arcot waited till the message had been translated, then he rose gently into the air, and hung suspended. He used his power unit to move slowly about, then darted high into the great room. Then gently he dropped to the ground. "Why not show them the invisibility?" asked Morey. "Don't—keep it for a surprise—they are beginning to get ugly. We need the information they can give us, so let's be at least as persistent as possible, but save the invisibility for the last. It may be necessary."

-

	ARCOT drew his molecular ray pistol now and asked, through Torlos, for a chair. This was brought, and Arcot lifted it high into the air on his molecular beam; then Morey drew his cosmic ray beam and turned it on the metal chair. In an instant it was glowing white hot, and had melted. An instant after it was a fiery drop of metal in the air. Morey shut off his ray, and Arcot held it there till it had cooled. Then he let it down to the floor. That the scientists were greatly impressed was obvious, but the Emperor was now talking eagerly with the men about him. For many minutes they talked together, and said nothing to Arcot or Morey. Torlos stood awaiting their message. Arcot tried to communicate with his ship, but could not.

	At last they turned and spoke a long message to Torlos. Then the Emperor called out. Some of the guards moved inside the door. Two more followed, and another pair, as Torlos thought his message to Arcot.

	"Show no emotion!" he warned as his beginning. Arcot was surprised at this message, but obeyed its command.

	"I have been listening to them as they spoke. The Commanding One wants your weapons. Whatever the scientists may say about the possibility of your trip, those weapons are deadly. He wants them.

	"I am not of this world, but of Nansal, sent here many years ago as a spy. I have served in the Satorian fleets for many years, and I have gained their trust. I am telling you the truth, now, friend, as you will soon see.

	"These people are going to follow their usual line of action, and take the most direct way toward their end. They are going to attack you, believing that you, despite your weapons, will go down before superior numbers. See, the guards are coining already!

	"I must go with you now, for otherwise I will be detected, and I want to return to my world. These people are so treacherous that our people can no longer trust anyone, or anything they cannot know about. That was why they attacked you.

	"These men are about to attack. They are awaiting the answer to the question of how many men there are on your ship and certain other things. I said I didn't see them all.

	"Can you signal your ship? Tell them to come and break down that wall. It opens into the city. From there we can leave. But it must be quickly done, before their ships get here."

	"We cannot call the ship," replied Arcot, his face calm, his heart beating violently. "They are shielded by these metal walls. We can open that wall, however. Wait, I will speak with my friend."

	"No expressions, Morey, they are planning to jump on us. We can't reach Wade and Fuller till we open that wall. There is going to be action here right swiftly, so you open that wall, and I'll pass my cosmic pistol to Torlos. We can go into invisibility, and my apparatus is powerful enough to carry us both, as well as lift us both. We can act quickly, and escape before they know where we are. Get ready for some action of some sort." He turned to Torlos.

	"He is ready. Your Emperor is getting nervous. We are ready soon. I will rise into the air above your head, and you will take my legs, and we can float. I will make us invisible. You will use the ray pistol that heats. Do not use it while we are invisible, as it will make us visible again." (Arcot meant that the light produced, would, like a flashlight at night, make the user visible.) "Remember it is deadly. Kill no more than necessary."

	He stopped, and Torlos turned to his king.

	But it was too late. Already the order had been given, and the guards were leaping toward them. Quick as a flash, Arcot passed Torlos the ray pistol, but already the first of the guards was on him. Too late to use the pistol! Torlos seized the man by one leg and an arm, and tensing his huge muscles, hurled him the thirty feet against the Commander. He hurled him with such terrific force that both were killed instantly by the impact! He turned and gripped another, long before his first victim had landed. Indeed, he was far stronger than these men! This man he grasped in one hand and hurled him toward the advancing guards, for already one had gotten by him and reached Arcot! Arcot, strong as Earth men go, dealt the fellow a terrific blow on the jaw that nearly shattered the bones of his own hand. The man's head jerked back and he fell unconscious, for the iron bones still did not protect the delicate brain from shock. They transmitted it even better. Morey was also in action and he, too, realized the futility of trying to overcome these men by mere wrestling, and their muscles made them immune to any blows that the Terrestrian men could deal, save on the point of the jaw, so he struck another as Arcot had struck the first. They were too busy now to be able to escape. But now Torlos had gripped a man more securely, and as from a great catapult, he hurled him thirty feet away. The man landed with a thud and lay motionless for a moment. Then he was up and leaping back. They could not use their pistols now. Their own men protected the strangers.

	Torlos was in action again. He drove his hands like pistons now, and he had seen the success of the comparatively weak Terrestrians, and imitated their blows with deadly results, for every man he struck went down forever. Nature had given them mighty muscles, and mighty bones, but the brain was still delicate and it was killed, where the tough body could withstand the blow. But they could never win free. Already the alarm was spreading. Suddenly he grasped two men under his arms and crushed them heavily together. The brains were numbed by the shock, although the iron arch of the skull was unaffected. Then, one by one, using them as ammunition, he hurled them across the room, smashing back the men who struggled to attack. His monstrous ammunition he hurled with the speed and tirelessness of some giant engine of war, and as he hurled the two he stooped and gathered the forms of the others he had put out of action, and they followed the others.

	At last he was free for an instant, and just as one man gave a tremendous leap and sprang nearly twenty feet, and landed full on him, he drew the pistol Arcot had given him. With one giant arm he caught the man and flung him away, ere he had a chance to reach the floor. And now, with a swift motion, he turned the pistol, and as Arcot taught him telepathically, loosed its energy. In a moment every man in the room was dead, save Arcot, Morey and the giant Torlos,

-

	BOTH Arcot and Morey had nearly broken their hands, but they were still alive. They had had no chance to use their weapons. That they had been able to defend themselves in man-to-man combat was indeed a tribute to the development of these men! Luckily, they found these men knew nothing of boxing.

	They were free now, temporarily. Arcot drew his molecular pistol, and a moment later the entire wall was flying inward, to fall a mass of masonry and twisted steel, on the floor of the room. He at once called the ship.

	"Wade—couldn't communicate—metal walls—they attacked us—treacherous. Torlos warned us. We have torn out the wall; come quickly, and we will pile in. Step on it; they are coming—Morey—ray that wall down over the door so they can't get through—they will attack you soon; get moving. We will bring Torlos. Don't come into the building—just hang outside. We will board in an instant."

	He stopped and turned. Suddenly the room rocked under an explosion, and the debris Morey's ray had thrown over the doorway was blown away. A score of men leaped through the gap before it had settled. The dust was still in the air. Instantly Torlos turned his ray on them, they fell dead.

	"In the air, quick!" called Arcot. He turned on his machine and Torlos gripped his leg as he rose. Another group of men leaped over the debris, and Morey's ray flung them back at a far higher velocity. They were silent, but he heard heavy crashes and groans, as they shot back on those behind. Then they were in the air, and Arcot snapped on the "invisibility." He disappeared, just as Morey did. At the same moment, more of the courageous, but foolhardy, Satorians leaped through the opening and looked bewildered as they saw no one moving. Arcot and Morey and Torlos were invisible in the air above them. They looked wildly about, but there was no one. Just then the shining bulk of the Ancient Mariner came into view. They draw back behind the wall and sought shelter. One of the men began shooting his little gun at it. The foot thick walls of lux might as well have been struck by some buzzing mosquito!

	"We're coming—invisible—don't use the rays till we are aboard. Open the airlock," said Arcot into the radio. In a moment they had come over to the ship, and were in. The heavy door closed behind them and they settled to the floor. In an instant they were visible again; then Arcot and Torlos sank to the ground and Torlos lowered Arcot to the floor. He stripped off his power suit, calling to Torlos to follow. Already Morey was out of his suit and in the power room. In an instant Arcot was dashing up the stairs and into the control room.

	"I'll take controls—Morey; rear molecular; take Torlos with you. Wade, forward molecular; Fuller, bow cosmics."

	In a moment they were at their posts. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion and the titanic mass of the ship, a quarter of a million tons, was rocked by the explosion of a bomb of some sort one of the men in the building had thrown. It seemed Morey had already shown Torlos how to use his cosmic ray, for an instant later the stabbing beam reached out, and the great tower, from the floor to the roof, suddenly leaned over and slumped as the entire side of the building was converted into a mass of glowing stone and molten steel. Then it crashed heavily to the ground, a half mile below.

	But already there were two score of the great battle ships rising for battle.

	Arcot snapped the ship into invisibility. The battleships suddenly halted in their wild rush, and looked, amazed, for their opponent.

	"I think we had better be moving. We will have a sweet job breaking through that magnetic wall, but we have to do it. Oh, by the way, we can't let a magnetic ray touch us now, for it would kill Torlos. That is one disadvantage of iron bones. Sorry—I'll explain to you fellows later. We're busy!"

	Torlos made a mistake. He turned a cosmic ray down and picked off a battleship. It fell, a blazing wreck, but the ray did two things. First, it revealed their presence by its shining column of ionized air, and second, it touched a great building behind the battleship. It fused most of that building, and did a thorough job of destruction on the one behind that. But it also established a conducting path between the invisible ship and the mass of the planet. Now, the apparatus was not designed to make a planet invisible, but it did make a noble effort, and blew out one of the tubes. The ship was at once busy and visible. The battleships of the Satorians saw to it that it remained busy—so busy that it was forced to remain visible. They had only one bank of invisibility tubes.

	Arcot was diving the ship, twisting, shooting up, and always the rays of pale light were reaching out from the Ancient Mariner to touch the battleships. Where they touched, those ships went down in wreckage and fell on the city. They were certainly showing a good account of themselves, to say the least!

	And always Arcot was working his way toward the magnetic wall and the base of the city. There were no people on the roofs of the city now!

	Suddenly, giant pneumatic guns from below joined the battle. They hurled huge explosive shells. They exploded in the air, so the fragments even did not fall on the city. They did, however, accidentally hit one or two of their own ships. The Ancient Mariner was hit twice. Each time the ship was staggered by the mechanical force of the explosion, but the foot-thick armor of lux metal laughed at it.

	The magnetic rays twice touched them, and each time Torlos was thrown violently to the floor, but the ship was in their influence for so short a time that he was not injured. Torlos more than made up for his hurts with the ray he used. And Morey was no mean ray-man, it seemed, judging from the work he was doing.

	Three ships attempted to commit suicide in their efforts to kill the Terrestrians. They were semi-successful. They committed suicide. In trying to crash into the Terrestrians, they were merely caught on the beam and thrown away. Morey actually developed a very successful use for them. He succeeded in using them as bullets, throwing them about on the molecular ray till they became too cold to move.

	Then suddenly the magnetic wall was before them and they were near the base. Before them there was one of the low power-houses. A molecular beam reached down and the black metal dome sailed high into the sky. The magnetic wall was broken. An instant later the Ancient Mariner had shot through.

-

	IN a moment they would be away. Torlos realized this, and having seen how to operate the molecular ray projector, he reached over and took the controls from Morey, pushing the Terrestrian aside.

	He did not realize the power of that ray. He had never seen Morey use it at full power, and he did not know that these projectors had thrown a sun into a blazing furnace. He only knew that it was destructive. They were several miles away from the city when he turned the projector on it, full power. He had used the ray directed up. To his amazement, he saw the entire city suddenly leap into the air and flash out into space, a howling meteor that flashed dark and small as it shot through the clouds. Behind was a deep hole in the planet's surface, a mighty chasm, its walls, miles deep, lined with dark granite. He looked behind him, amazed, and horrified.

	"Lord! Torlos used the full power of the ray!" called Morey in awed tones. It is quite a different thing, this pulling a sun into another and seeing the titanic masses burst into cosmic flame; it is impersonal, but when an entire city flies off into space, a wild planetoid, that is different!

	Arcot turned back, slowly now, and they sailed over the spot where the city had been. They saw a dozen or so battleships racing from them, ships that had been outside the city when it happened, racing to spread the news of disaster. Arcot maneuvered the ship over the mighty pit, and sank slowly down, great searchlights lighting the dark chasm. Far, far down he could see the solid rock stretching away.

	Then he rose and sailed quickly up and out, above the cloud layer, into the bright light of the great yellow sun, out from the grey world, and into the world of light, and a sea of grey misty clouds.

	"Morey, take the controls, and head out into space. We have to take Torlos home, and there is a lot I want to ask him. I will speak—or think, with him. I want to ask him why he did that last stunt. Wade, you put a new tube into the invisibility, will you? We had better go on the molecular motion until I have found out what I want."

	Arcot left the cabin and retired to the library with Torlos. Wade and Fuller followed.

	"I'll explain to you just what happened back there—it was plenty!" Arcot smiled, and looked ruefully at his bruised hand. He had stopped on the way back, and fixed it as well as possible. Arcot told as rapidly as possible what had happened in the Audience Room.

	"Hmm—they were a nice bunch of people to deal with, weren't they? Well, they tried to get the whole cake and lost everything. We were going to give them plenty, at any rate. But what sort of a war is this that Torlos' people are carrying on?" asked Wade.

	"That's the question which I intend to settle. We haven't had a very good opportunity to listen to him yet, you know. About the time we learned he was a spy, a little private war broke out, and we were rather occupied," replied Arcot. Now he turned to Torlos. It was obvious that the idea of destroying a city, as Torlos had done, was very distasteful to him.

	"Torlos, why did you force Morey to leave the ray and then destroy the city? You certainly had no reason to kill all the non-combatant men and women and children in that city? And why, after I had told you that you must not use the rays when we were invisible, did you use your ray on that battleship? You made our invisibility break down and destroyed a tube. Why did you do this?"

	"I am sorry, man of Earth," replied Torlos. "I can only say that, for I did not fully understand the effect that the rays would have. I would not have done so but for one reason. In the first case, I did not know for how long a time we might remain invisible; the thing has been accomplished momentarily on our world, before this, for a mere fraction of a minute, and I feared we might become visible soon, and I knew that we must become visible to use the rays in getting through the magnetic wall, and that ship worried me. That was one of their newest battleships, and they are equipped with an invention they stole from us, as they have stolen every other important invention. They have men in every laboratory and they are always stealing the things we work out, and removing the men who invent it. It is unfortunate that the two races are so similar, "What the invention is I do not know, only I have heard that it is utterly deadly. That ship was equipped with it, and I wanted to make sure we were not attacked by it. I knew that you could withstand any efforts of the magnetic ships if you lived through the magnetic ray of a power station, and I wanted to make sure you got back to my world.

	"That was why I turned the ray on that ship from invisibility. They have only one or two completed as yet, but by the time we reach my world, they will have completed many of them, for their factories are in production, and it will take two weeks for us to make the long journey now.

	"But I forgot—how long will it take you?" he asked, suddenly remembering the speed of this car.

	"As long, or as short a time as we wish. Finish your story. We will land on your planet inside of fifteen minutes."

	Torlos gasped.

	"I did not mean to destroy that city," he continued. "I meant only to tear out the factory that made those battleships. I wanted only to destroy those machines. I had no conception of the power of that ray. I was as horrified to see that city disappear as you were. I wanted only to protect my people.

	"But," Torlos smiled bitterly, "I cannot say that I had no provocation for destroying that city and all its people. However, I had no intention of doing it, Earth-man." Arcot knew he was sincere. There could be no deception when communicating in this way! How he wished he had used this method of direct communication with the Emperor. The trouble would have been stopped quickly.

	"You had no conception of its power, Torlos. Yon still do not have any idea of the real magnitude of its power. With the rays of this ship we tore from its orbit a sun 200 times as large as the sun that lights this system, and flung it, blazing, into another giant of space, 260 times as massive as this sun. What you did to that city, we could do to that planet. Do not tamper with things you do not understand, Torlos. There are forces on this ship that would make the energies of your great battleships seem weak and futile. A billion times faster than light we can race through the ether. We can tear apart the atoms of matter, and leave, instead, only separate protons and electrons. We can rip apart the greatest of planets. We can turn the hurtling stars, and send them where we want them. We can curve space as we please, we can put out the fires of a sun, if we wish. What you looked at in surprise, as small, and seemingly weak as we ourselves, contains in its instruments the forces that will loose the vastest of nature's energies and will swing stars, planets, suns, or atoms about as it chooses! Torlos, respect the powers of this ship, and do not release its energies, unknowing. They are too great." Arcot paused. Torlos was gazing in awe at the man who had just told him of the powers of this seemingly tiny ship. He had seen the engines, small, apparently futile things beside the solid might of the giant engines of his ships—but he had seen great explosive charges that would split any ship he knew open from end to end, bounce harmlessly from the smooth walls of this ship. He had seen it destroy the fleet of the magnetic ships that had formed an impregnable guard about the city of Sator, the capital of Sator.

-

	THEN he himself had touched a button—and the giant city had flown off into the air, leaving behind it only a screaming tornado and a vast chasm in the blasted planet. He could not appreciate the full significance of the velocity Arcot had told him of. He only knew that he had made a bad mistake in underrating the powers of this ship!

	Arcot translated the things Torlos had explained to his friends and told Morey about it, going up to the control room. They were now several million miles from the planet, and now were merely coasting, weightless, toward their destination.

	"I rather thought Torlos had some reason for what he did. He had picked out one particular battleship with his ray projector and kept following it, not using his ray, just keeping it covered," ventured Morey.

	"How did you know? You couldn't watch him when he was invisible, could you?" asked Arcot in surprise,

	"Pssst—I kept my hand on his ray director, so I knew what he was doing. I would have stopped him from using that ray, but he had followed it for so long without using it, I didn't expect him to discharge it. It was a big surprise to me when he finally did use the ray.

	"But while I was alone here I kept thinking about that man's strength. It still surprises me. Your explanation of iron bones makes it more comprehensible. But still—did you notice how he threw one man a full twenty-five feet—and with one hand. That was the only time I saw him give any indication of strain. All the rest of the time he was merely smiling, a smile that made me like him even more! Lord! The way he tossed those men around! It seemed that only a machine could have done that! But then, he comes nearer to being a machine than anything else I ever saw! The strength of the man! He is far stronger than the men of this world we just left, that is certain. Of course, having been born and raised on a heavier planet, would account for part of it but not so much! And he seemed tireless. He threw those men one after the other like ammunition from an old machine gun! He threw the first as violently as the last. Apparently his muscles felt no fatigue!

	"I have developed a little theory to account for all that and several other facts I noticed. When I got through there I was dripping sweat. That hot moist air was almost too much for me. Our friend? Cool as ever—if not more so. I noticed that he was not breathing heavily any more! During the fight I noticed, in the few seconds I could spare, that his abdomen was evidently the muscle with which he breathed, like a man. Although man has a flexible chest he never uses it save under the most violent exercise. Ordinarily he breaths with his abdomen. Only a woman uses her chest. Torlos was breathing heavily, deeply and swiftly, not shallow like an ordinary panting breath of a runner, but deep and full, yet faster than I can breathe! I could hear his breath, despite his swift movements and the noise of the battle. After it was all over he was not breathing any more heavily than now! He started breathing heavily before the fight and ceased when, the fight was over.

	"Now, a man can fight very swiftly, and with tremendous vigor for ten seconds, putting forth his greatest efforts, and breathe only once or twice. For two minutes, at least, he breathes only slightly more heavily than normal, or is forced to, although he reasons that he should breathe heavily and does. But after the battle, he cannot stop breathing heavily. Of course, as he starts, he is running on stronger energy. The blood is full of dissolved sugars, which furnish the reducing agent, and some high oxides that are the oxidizing agents. He really gets into 'oxygen debt' when he uses these oxides to work his body, for the short time that the body is 'shifting into high', and then the blood stream supplies the necessary oxygen. But, after the work, the blood must supply more oxygen to build up these oxides once more. Therefore we must breathe heavily after working. But Torlos didn't. Why? He did not get fatigued. He was able to work steadily.  "It seems obvious to me that no chemical engine, the size of Torlos could do that much work, without getting rid of the tremendous volume of carbon dioxide by means of some special mechanism. The oxygen couldn't be supplied; the amounts of water created would dilute the blood. The wastes would accumulate, unless that engine had been very specially designed to be used at that rate for long periods of time.

	"The human heart is such an engine. There is a muscle that has been designed to do a great deal of work continuously. Fatigue, of course, is nothing but chemical wastes accumulating. It is a chemical. To get rid of this fatigue and the consequent tiredness, and make the heart able to work continuously, the Lord has provided it with an apparatus that will remove these poisons so swiftly it never gets tired. A fast runner is one who has accustomed his legs and muscles to building up a very special mechanism that will remove the poisons more swiftly than is natural for the human body. The result is that he can work thus as a higher rate than can an untrained man.

	"My point is that no man could have done that work, and still breathe lightly. Nor could he have done that work without becoming fatigued. As you pointed out, he did not get tired, and, as I have tried to show, if he were a chemical engine, that is, as we are, he would have had to practice for this battle, would have had to do that much work for many, many months!

	"The conclusion is obvious. The man is not a chemical engine. Very well, what is he?

	"I'll admit that I got some of the information for this theory from his brain, but most of it was derived from my own deduction. 

	"You know what the Brownian motion is, do you not? Well, you sure are a fine partner for met It is the thing that really did most for the molecular theory of heat! If very small particles are suspended in a liquid, a gas, a solution, the particles, when viewed under an exceedingly powerful microscope, will be seen to jump about violently, as though they were alive, moving first in one way, then in the other, then in a new direction, jumping about with great speed. A biologist named Brown first discovered this, hence the name. Also, I am surprised at you—don't know that Einstein, the great mathematical investigator of space, won his first Nobel Prize for his explanation of that phenomenon.

-

	"HIS explanation of the thing was mathematical, of course. I wish you'd get courage and dig it out—I never tried following it. Here's the idea, though. Suppose we lower a plate, say one inch square, into a tank of oxygen. The laws of probability, which apply perfectly when there are so nearly an infinite number of chances, say that if 10555 molecules hit it on one side in one second, then 10555 + or - a few billion, will hit it on the other side. The result is zero, and it stays where it is. Suppose it is only one billionth as large. Now the thing is so small that there isn't room for more than a few hundred molecules to hit it at any time.

	Now, if we threw a set of dice 10555 times, we would get just as many deuces as elevens or sevens. But if we throw the dice only 100 times, this isn't so apt to be true.

	"Make the plate still smaller—the number of throws still less. Suppose the plate is only 1/100,000,000,000 as large as originally. Then we will have only a few molecules striking it at any one time; we throw our dice only a few times. Now if we throw our dice a few times, the chances of the sides turning up even numbers of times are slight. In the molecular analogue, if we allow only a few chances—a few molecules, there is a fair probability that more will hit one side than the other. Result? The little plate—the tiny particle, will move in the direction it is being driven by most molecules, until more hit in front than hit behind. Then it will go the other way.

	"It is doing, on a small scale, what we have made a large and expensive machine to do. It utilizes heat energy to drive itself, for the molecules are moving because of heat energy.

	"Heat is the sum of all energy. All energy tends toward heat and there is heat everywhere in the universe. Now, as we know, there is not food everywhere in the universe. If a creature could use that low grade heat energy, that most omnipresent of energies, what a hardy species it would be!

	"Now the particles that are needed for the Brownian movement are of the order of size of a living, single cell. The energy is available to a living cell."

	"Oh!" said Morey, amazed. "You mean that Torlos uses heat?"

	"Exactly—and he lives on heat. His fuel is heat. I have noticed that he seemed almost cold-blooded. He is! His body is at the temperature of the room at all times. He is, then, reptilian in a sense, but he is vastly different from any reptile that Earth ever knew. He eats food, but that food is needed only for replacement of dead cells and for the small amounts of fuel needed to run his brain. His brain alone needs fuel. That is the only thing open to chemical fatigue, and it has been shown time and again that the brain can work indefinitely, if the body would only stop getting tired! The twenty hours of day would be very hard for us, but there is no trouble for them. They probably sleep once every two days. They have no wastes to get rid of, save the slight wasting of the dying cells, the brain energy wastes, and the little work of replacing the worn cells. The heart, the muscles of lung and arms and leg—they are all using the energy of the air that abounds about them. He breathes—certainly—he breathes to take in heat as he uses it. And just one heat unit in the English system is equal to 778 work units! No wonder he can do the things he does! Lord! He is not as close to the snake as he is to the machine! It, too, takes its temperature from that of its surroundings. A man, a brain, directs it, and it works for him, using some other source of energy. A brain directs his body, and the body does the work, using the heat of air to work. What an admirable system! No wonder he can do the things we saw! Why, he could have continued that fight for forty hours or so without a sign of fatigue! Fatigue is as unknown to him as cold weather. He sleeps only to allow for replacement of worn parts. The world he lives in is warm, it is upright on its axis, and there are no seasons. He cannot live in the Arctic, of course, but he is obviously the ideal form of life for the tropics."

	As Arcot later found, he was mistaken in only one point. His diagnosis had been perfect up to this last point, but here he was wrong, but he had little reason to expect that! These men, on necessity, could develop an organ which ordinarily was of small size, a peculiar mass of cells in the lower abdomen which could absorb food from the bloodstream and convert it into carbon dioxide, water and heat. Then the men could live very comfortably in the Arctic zones. As Arcot put it, they carried their own heaters. Then, however, their vast strength was limited, they were forced to eat greater amounts of food, and they were subject to fatigue.

	"I can see now how they can have such tremendously powerful muscles. At first it was only the bones that bothered me. Then when I began considering them as pure chemical engines, I saw rather difficult points. That makes it obvious. No wonder he could throw the soldiers about like that! What wrestlers those men would make! A ringside seat would be highly undesirable! Imagine those huge muscles straining—Lord!"

	"Well, in the meantime, I am going back to confirm my suspicions," said Arcot, diving back to the library.

	Wade and Fuller were engaged in trying to read Torlos's thoughts and to communicate with him. As Fuller had specialized on Transmission of Ideas, he had been able to make Torlos acknowledge acceptance of an idea; but neither was able to completely grasp Torlos's ideas.

	"Say, Arcot, I thought telepathy was a universal language. This man doesn't get our ideas at all! And we can't make out some of his. He seems to be thinking 'nourishment,' or 'food,' and I found out he meant 'hot'!" laughed Fuller.

	Torlos smiled, and turning to Arcot, with whom he had learned to communicate readily, he said, or thought, "These men have not your learning. They cannot un-understand my least thought!"

	"We are not made as you are, and all your thought ideas are different. When you meant that quality which causes pain on being touched," Arcot thought of a flame, "they understood you to mean food. I have but just decided that even our muscles are different from those of your people. Do you not breathe that you may be able to move, and use the heat of the air?" asked Arcot.

	"Of course! Don't you?. How is it that you are so warm, even in this bitterly cold room?" asked Torlos in sudden surprise, as he felt Arcot's warm hand.

	"We are made on a different plan. Our muscles burn foods and the energy is converted into motion."

	"Why, that is almost impossible!" thought Torlos in amazement. "We have never been able to get better than 30 per cent, of the energy out of any such machine that we put into it! And even then the machine was such a great, clumsy, clanking affair, that we were forced to throw it away at once. How can you use such a curious form of energy?"

	"How indeed? We do not know ourselves. We know it is an exceedingly inefficient system, but we have been so built. That is one reason why you are so vastly stronger, and your iron bones give another reason. Ours, as I have explained, are of stone."

	"Stone, and a soft, porous stone at that! Indeed your brains must have been active to overcome such terrific handicaps, when all was a struggle for existence."

	"It was not so bad as that, Torlos, for there are no such creatures as you on our Earth. All creatures have the 60-70 per cent, inefficient muscles that we have, and the same soft bones.
"But man is the one creature that has no outstanding weapon of offense or defense save his brain. He is slow. Almost any creature can outrun him. He is weak. Creatures half his weight are more powerful. He has not great teeth with which to protect himself; his claws are meager burlesques of weapons. His eyes are probably the poorest in the animal world; his ears are useless as warnings; his nose never knows when danger is near. He certainly seems a hopeless misfit. Even his hide is poor protection against cold or heat or danger. He has no armor, such as the armadillo wears, or the tortoise.

	"Yet man is found over all the Earth—and now, man will be found over all the vastness of space. With his machines, he can outrun, outfly, outswim and outdive any creature that lives or has lived. With them he is stronger, taller, faster and more deadly than any creature that ever lived. With his machines he could hurl to defeat the mightiest creature that lives. He can destroy at a distance; he can lie back in perfect safety and destroy his enemy by merely pushing a button, he can go in a machine, directly to his enemy, and examine it, hold it captive, and make it obey his will. He can see farther with his telescopes, and smaller with his microscopes, than could any other creature. He can see around corners and through walls with his television, and he can hear sounds a hundred million miles away, or a billion miles away with his radio. He can lift any load that he wishes, and now, as we know, he can move the very stars in their courses. He even changes the forms of the animals he deals with. In all the universe there seems but one thing he cannot manage."

	"What is that?" asked Torlos curiously, marveling at the mighty record of triumph over obstacles that must have been almost insurmountable.

	"Himself," replied Arcot, smiling. "He can manage the animals, the matter of Earth or any planet, or the sun. He cannot control the atom. He bends electricity to his wishes; heat and light X-rays, cosmic rays, radio, molecular rays, sound, gravity, all yield to his desires and the forces of his machines. Yet he cannot always control himself. We have had wars and I fear that we will have wars in the future—wars in which whole worlds will be annihilated!

	"It is true, men of our world can do much, but much that you control, we know nothing about, I can only learn of their nature from you. We cannot control ourselves. Even now we are at war." 

	"What's the communication about?" broke in Wade. 

	"Philosophy. You wouldn't be interested," grinned Arcot "but we are going to start finding out about the present unpleasantness.

	"Torlos, we want to know how this war started. Has it been continuing long?"

	"This war has been continuing for many hundreds of years. It is history that will be of interest to any world. It is a history of persecution and rebellion.

	"Hundreds of years ago there were two races of men in the system of our sun. One race lived on Nansal, and it was farther advanced than that race of Sator, which alone of the planets was left habitable. The men of Nansal were almost exactly like those of Sator. Those men of Sator, however, were treacherous, lying, deceitful. They were somewhat smaller than our men and they were lighter in color, for their world is always sunless. It is always a dull gray, as you saw it. Our world is usually lit by the sun and its warm rays tan our skins to a darker color. Our children have always been brought up in a strict training of truth and according to an ideal we know as 'norus'," and Torlos pronounced this word, "which is the embodiment of our ideas of those things which are right. It was a thing developed long ago, almost before history was begun, when there was a certain king by the name of Norus, who gathered about him a group of men who tried to develop and spread his ideals.

	"The men of Sator have been brought up on a different system. It is a system of cunning. In their idea, cunning is right. The man who can plan most cunningly is the man who deserves to live. There are restrictions; they have loyalty. It may seem incongruous that these can exist together, but they do. And they are peculiarly loyal to their country—their world.

-

	BUT the first planetary exploration was carried on by the Satorians. Their researches had led them to the secret of the magnetic projector. They had many things that we did not have, but there were many things we had that they lacked. Our discoveries were, in a large part, commercial, and tended toward making our lives more comfortable. Maybe we were growing weak. I do not know. The Satorians had developed many things with which they could fight, as well as commercial discoveries. They had but just made their world one nation, when at last, with the development of the magnetic ship, all men went down before the nation which had developed it. Then they came to our planet.

	"They traded peacefully with us for many years, while their spies tested out our institutions and learned our secrets, the few that we did not gladly give them. These few were trade secrets in the main, only certain ones would have been of importance to the Satorians.

	"The Satorians, in return, gave no secrets of their processes. They refused to disclose the secret of the magnetic beam and the magnetic ship.

	"Finally there were a few of the courageous Nansalians, who realized that this might mean danger to them. There were three men, students in one of the great scientific schools, and these men realized that this situation should have been studied. There was no law prohibiting the men of Nansal from coming to Sator, but it seemed that Nature had raised a more impenetrable barrier. All Nansalians who went to Sator died of a mysterious disease. A method was found by which it was possible to fumigate a man so that he would no longer spread it, and this was used on all Satorians entering Nansal, but an entire world cannot be thus treated. Nansalians could not go to Sator.

	"These men had an idea. They studied carefully the ways and speech of the Satorians. They learned to imitate the slang, the idioms of three of the men they intended to replace. Three navigators of the space between the planets, they were. Finally they decided they were perfect. They had bleached their faces. They had chosen exceptionally large men for their doubles. Then they acted. On one trip three of the men that went back were Nansalians.

	"It took them six years to get back. They had to wait till they were again detailed for a trip, but in the time that had passed they proved two things. The first was that the 'disease' that was so deadly to all Nansalians, was probably a poison unknown to Nansal. Or perhaps the germs didn't penetrate the disguise. At any rate, they lived, and they brought the secret of the magnetic ship back with them. They had passed the tests of the men of Sator for six years. At last they had returned.

	"But that was not all they brought. It was common knowledge on Sator that their leaders would soon lead them across space, to settle on the land of sunlight and clear air, cloudless skies, where they could see the stars of space every night. They were waiting only till they had built up a larger fleet, and until they had learned all they could from the Nansalians. Also, they wanted more of their supply of the most precious of metals.

	They attacked three years after the men had returned, and in the meantime, Nansal had secretly succeeded in building up a fleet of the magnetic ships, but it went down quickly before the vastly greater fleet of the Satorians. Their magnetic rays were deadly; they killed every one they struck, for they attracted every man, and then, when they passed, he was allowed to drop, perhaps hundreds of feet. Their buildings, despite their steel and iron frames, went down, crushing hundreds of others. They practically depopulated the world of Nansal, as the three men who had gone to Sator had said they would. They had made the correct steps, they had made great caverns in the hills habitable, and there they had built laboratories, factories, and had established a little city far under the ground, where the Satorians would never find them.

	"But many people did not reach these caverns, and they were destroyed.

	"Enough men had reached it, however, and most of these were the best, the strongest, the healthiest, the most intelligent that Nansal had. They lived here for over a century, while Nansal was overrun by the conquerors and the cities they had built were rebuilt by the Satorians. This was before the day of the magnetic shield. That is quite a different thing from the rays and the propelling device. On these beams the ships went from planet to planet easily, you know. They do not vary with the distance, but are as strong at one end as the other. They are perfect beams. One merely points them at the planet, and turns on their power. When the beam reaches the planet, the attraction for the iron core of the planet makes the ship move forward. Soon they have sufficient speed and coast on, as we are now doing.

	"But the ray that built up the shield was new. That was developed in that century, by one of the men who had originally gone to Sator. With it as a protection, he built a city in the mountains. For many weeks it was not discovered. Then at last a Satorian scout found it, for ours is a big world and he reported it. Soon a battle fleet appeared. But the city spot was already impregnable. The great domed power stations were already in operation, and they were anchored too firmly to be drawn out of the ground. The ships could not destroy them, nor could they enter the city with the ships, for the sudden weight of the men was at once fatal. They could not enter, nor could their rays, for the magnetic shield acted on them also, and bent them down so they were unable to penetrate the city.

	"The first city was a great munitions plant. They built factories there, and laughed, while around them the armies of the Satorians raged impotent. Explosives the Satorians tried, but the domed construction made them impossible to destroy in this way. Men could not enter on foot. And the men from within the cities had developed a means of causing sparks in any conductor that appeared in the magnetic wall. The result was, that no explosive could get through without being exploded, unless it were in a non-conducting container. It took the Satorians a long time to find that out." Torlos chuckled as he thought of those men raging impotent about the city.

	"In the meantime the Nansalians made their fleet. It was a great fleet of ships, and the Satorians were also at work. But the Nansalians had a new thing; they had developed a way of projecting the magnetic wall. This they used and could cut the support from under their enemies. The rays were thrown to one side, and the ships, which were no longer supported, crashed. The city stations projected this magnetic wall, while the men outside fought with the rays.

	"Also, we had means of making the ships very rapidly. The Satorians had decided that we had been wiped out." Torlos laughed again.

	"It took us nearly thirty years to convince them that not only were we far from being wiped out but that they were in imminent danger of it themselves. Their cities had never developed the protective ray. Their people fled back to Sator. The cities we wiped out and in the meantime they had learned the secret of our magnetic wall. Their cities were now protected.

	There were three left on Nansal. It was a static condition. We could not wipe them out; they could not attack us. We had six cities then. And we were rapidly expanding.

	"Their fleet was so concentrated now that we, with our magnetic beams, could not attack. At first we had been able to creep up by night, and wipe out a large portion of the cities, but now they had means of detecting the action of our rays, and we could not steal up on them. Neither could they attack us thus, however. But their fleet had the advantage now, and they were constantly attacking, and our fleet was wearing thin.

	"We developed the next surprise. We set down a barrage of a gas that drowned them in their mountain valley. They were practically destroyed in those two cities.

	"They tried to reciprocate, but we had expected that, and all buildings had been made air-tight, and the air was passed in through giant purifiers. They, too, were protected on the next attack. But we seemed winning. Then they built three more cities. We became desperate. The war was concentrated on our world. They had developed shells that would penetrate our cities and burst. But we had done the same, of course. It was so deadly, that, like many other things, neither side continued it. We merely decided not to do that particular thing."

-

	ARCOT had been translating. Wade exclaimed in surprise, laughing at the idea of two forces, each trying to kill off the other, agreeing thus to be careful!

	"That is not so surprising!" said Arcot. "How about the scrap they had in 1918—it started in 1914, didn't it? Did you know that they did not drop gas bombs from airplanes? Why? They were both afraid of it. They knew that if they did it, so would the other fellow, so they didn't! And how about killing the general? There are plenty of men willing to commit suicide for their country. How easy to send a man within rifle shot of the general! They have spies in plenty, why not have one kill the general and cripple the forces? Why, that's no fun—because then the other general, who is directing the opposing force will merely have to make out his will. He is next on the list. You can win a game of chess by killing the other fellow, but that's no game, his friends would kill you—and so on! And remember, they talked about that famous non-existent ideal 'Civilized Warfare'! Legalized Murder too—and they had a lot of need for it. Some of those criminals should have been shot. They might get a few innocent persons—but the great good would certainly more than make up for it—and—'Civilized Warfare'!"

	"You win Arcot—you're right, and I'm wrong, as usual," said Wade grinning.

	"Just what do you mean by that?" asked Arcot, looking at Wade skeptically.

	"Oh," replied he, with a nonchalant gesture, "take it as you will."

	"Well to get back—" said Arcot, turning to Torlos.

	"But the conditions were necessarily remedied. The ships had been made by workmen heretofore, and now a Nansalian engineer developed a system of machines, which did half the work. In a month we had so many ships that we proceeded to attack, and so successfully, that we wiped out the Satorian fleet, and we stood guard over the planet—no more reinforcements from Sator!

	"We destroyed one city then, by such a great concentration of our rays on it that their magnetic wall was broken. They knew they could not get more reserves from their world, and our ships were coming out in even greater numbers.

	"Then," continued Torlos, his mind filled with thoughts of their treachery and hate for their methods, they did a thing which we had not even thought of. We did not know their methods then.

	"They sued for peace. We were willing, and a delegation came in a ship that was painted red—our signal of peace. Their ship was escorted into our city and our officials treated with them. Their crews—they, mingled with the people.

	"I do not know how they did it, but when they left that night, they had discovered the secret of our great force. They carried that secret to their cities, and had the machines in operation in a week. They treated for peace—they argued; they debated-—they delayed us, while they built up a fleet. Then they told us frankly that they would not treat with us. They left. The next day war broke out again and they had a greater fleet than ours. They beat us back to our cities. We took our ships in; we did not fight; we needed the ships for later use.

	"It was nearly a century later that we were again able to make a great attack. The years between were years when each fleet was so nearly equal in power that neither dared attack actively.

	"That was when we developed the system we now use for storing power, all power before this time had been generated on the ships; now we were able to store it. We had never before had a satisfactory method of doing this. This method was simple. We wind a coil of wire about a bone-metal (iron) ring, and the coil is of a soft, heavy metal, silvery, and easy to melt. But, when in very great cold, it becomes a very good conductor of electricity. It carries the current perfectly, and the electricity is stored in it, the current circulating about the ring. The current may now be tapped when needed."

	"Wade—they store power in an induction coil cooled in liquid helium, wound with lead wire! A torus-shaped coil, so all the lines of force are used!" Arcot cried in surprise.

	Torlos continued his story.

	"With this, our ships were far lighter, smaller, swifter. We could carry bigger magnets. Need I say that we soon had the Satorians again at our mercy? They could not fight the faster ships, and went down to defeat.

	"Again they treated for peace. We knew better this time, and we kept on with our fleet developing it, working on it. Their ambassadors stayed and parleyed and argued as before. We had our world to ourselves at last The Satorians had been driven off. That was the consideration on which we would let them treat for peace, and they had been isolated again.

	"The crew was kept in their ship now, and the ambassadors were kept with care—carefully treated as their rank deserved—given a 'Guard of Honor'.

	"They all died ten days after they arrived. They had killed themselves. We could not guess why it was. We reported it to their government at once and prepared for an immediate renewal of hostility, expecting their disbelief.

	"We became even more worried when they merely acknowledged the notice—with respects, and said they would send another commission.

	"Twelve days after the ambassadors arrived, a disease broke out and spread like wildfire, or I should say, had spread like wildfire. For twelve days it gave no sign. Then the flesh rotted away. No wonder the 'Ambassadors' had committed suicide!" Torlos paused again.

	"Millions of our people died. That was in the time of my father. He died. I had been attacked by the disease. They discovered a cure, and the people no longer died. We found that no cure was known on Sator. As soon as the infection was noticed the victims were at once killed, and the bodies burned.

	"The men had all inoculated themselves with the disease, and spread it among us, at the sacrifice of their own lives. The people of Sator never lacked courage, nor loyalty, as I have said. The trouble was merely that their ideals of honor did not coincide with ours. They believed honor lay in the greatest cleverness.

	"It was clever. It was only by accident that we learned the cure. A doctor was trying to inoculate a——"But that is not what you want. "By a miracle we recovered. Our fleet was undermanned. And, as we had expected, news came slowly then for we did not have radio. Their fleet started a month and a half after their ambassadors. They arrived to find us ready. They were quite unprepared for battle! They had brought colonists! It was no Accident that these men had that disease!

	"We destroyed the lighting element of the fleet, but permitted the non-combatants to return.

	"Since then we have been again in a state of armed waiting. Neither has developed any weapon which warrants an attack, each is so spy-infested that no move can pass undiscovered. A number of my countrymen were killed in that battle. There were ten other men of the service in the fleet.

	"But can you wonder that my people were suspicious when, you appeared. Can you wonder that they drove you away. They were afraid of the men of that other world, Sator. You can understand how they felt when they saw your weapons, and that they were afraid for their civilization.

	"But, on the other hand, why should the men of Sator fear? They knew that our code of honor will not permit us to make any such treacherous attacks. It is no great wonder our people drove you away, while these men were willing to speak with you. Could you blame
my people?''

	Thus Arcot translated the message. It was obvious that they had been only wise in doing as they had done. They could not expect visitors from another Universe!

	Arcot went up to Morey now, and explained to him the course of the history of this world they were to revisit, and why it was that the men had driven them away when they had come to their cities.

	"They were certainly reasonable in driving us from their cities. Experience had taught them that was the safest way.

-

	"BUT experience has taught me that, unlike Torlos, I have to eat. I wonder if it might not be a good idea to take a bit of a nap also; we have been going rather at a good pace. After breakfast we can enter Torlos' planet refreshed. I don't know but what Torlos might wish to sleep also."

	"Good idea, I think," said Morey. "I'll ask Wade if he won't stand guard while we sleep. If Torlos wants to speak to some one, he can communicate with Wade about it as well as with any one else. I am due for some sleep myself. The acceleration of almost exactly normal gravity is tiring, now.

	"Oh, by the way. I found out one reason why Torlos was able to throw our friends around that way. He is trained for the secret service, and part of that training is a very strict course in physical development. He is unusually powerful, even for his world.

	"But I'll ask Wade to relieve you at once."

	Arcot shot down the corridor under the impulse of a gentle push, and turned into the library.

	"I'm getting the trick in this thought communication, now, Arcot," said Wade enthusiastically. "I heard what you and Morey were talking about, and I'd be glad of the opportunity, I am not tired. I didn't engage in the little playfulness that you and Morey did. I asked Torlos if he wished to sleep, and it seems that they do it regularly one day in every ten. And when they sleep, they sleep very soundly. It is more of a coma than a sleep with them. They can train themselves to sleep on any day they wish, but it is customary to sleep once in ten, so that commerce will not be interrupted by the men sleeping on the wrong days. If you want to do business with Mr. John Doe, and he happens to be asleep, and destined to stay that way for the next forty hours, which is their day, it is just too bad, you have to wait. So they all sleep the same day. It would be bad for one of those fellows if he went to sleep in a class, or lecture! They'd have to call in the ambulance or something to carry him home," said Wade, smiling, as he remembered the remark one of his friends at college had made, unconscious of any humor. "I've got to go to more lectures. I've been losing a lot of sleep." He had meant the thoughts as disconnected ideas, but knowing his habits, his classmates had realized that they were not as disconnected as he meant them to be. That man now boasted an income of over a million a year.

	"Oh, no," replied Arcot, "one of his friends would just tuck him under one arm and carry him home, or on to his next class, Remember, they only weigh about 400 pounds on their world, and that is no more to them than fifty is to us."

	"That's true! Well, I'd hate to have him wrap his arm around me. He might get excited and squeeze, and—!" said Wade, looking at the huge muscles of Torlos' arms.

	Arcot, Morey and Fuller went to their rooms and tried to get some sleep. Morey and Arcot were tired, but Fuller rose after two hours and went down to join Wade.

	"Hello—I thought you had joined the Snoring Chorus long ago!" greeted Wade.

	"I tried to, but they made so much noise, I couldn't get in tune," grinned Fuller. "What have you been doing?"

	"I have been trying to talk with Torlos—and had fair success. He was amazed at the power of our ship when I showed it to him. Did you notice the sun?"

	"Oh—we have moved a bit!" said Wade. They had indeed. They were now so far from the sun that it was a tiny disc of cold light before them.

	"I moved the ship a bit and showed Torlos what real speed was; then I started back toward his world and I'm waiting for Arcot now," said Fuller.

	Arcot and Morey woke about three hours later, and the trip was resumed. They took their meal, much to Torlos' surprise/

	 "I can understand that you need far more food than we do, but still, when you tell me that you ate only a few hours ago, it seems a tremendous amount of food. How can you grow food enough in your cities?" This from Torlos.

	"That's why you don't have any rural districts. We have farms on our world, outside the cities. Food is grown out on the plains, where there is room. We find difficulty, but our machines make the task lighter. We could never have developed the cone city type of civilization that you have, however, for we need huge quantities of food."

	Arcot thus translated to his friends the secret of the lack of rural districts on Nansal, and continued:

	"You know, I really must admit that Torlos' people are a higher type of creation than we. Man is a parasite; all animals of Earth are parasites of the plant world. We are helpless to produce our own foods. We have to live on the products of plants. We can never gather energy tor ourselves; we are as truly parasites as are fungi, or the germs of disease. We are to the plant, a malignant growth—a sort of cancer!

	"These men are less so. They, at least, generate or extract their own muscular energy. They turn to the plant for their matter, the matter that makes up their bodies, but they get their energy from the air, from the sun directly. They combine the characteristics of the plant, of the reptile, of man, and of many other creatures we know. They are cold-blooded; they get their energy directly from the sun, like plants; they eat food like mammals—"

	"It beats me. I don't know what you would call them!"

	After the meal, they went to the control room, and to Torlos' immense joy, they were at last started for his own planet.

	"We are going now, Torlos," said Arcot "Come to the control room and watch." They went to the control room, where Torlos was fastened in one of the chairs. Then Arcot pointed out his planet the little dot in the vast distance, for they were over a billion miles from it now.

	"Watch it, as we go. Keep your eyes on it, for there will be many other stars showing soon. Watch it grow as we draw near."

	Arcot pushed the little red switch to the first notch. The air about them was tense with the snapping of the field of electricity, and every sharp point was surrounded with a faint haze, a corona. Then space had readjusted itself. They were fleeing along now, the stars seemed moving ever so slowly, but there were some that seemed now to race across the skies; these were the planets within a few billion miles; at this velocity they seemed to move swiftly. The sun was welling up to meet them, expanding its bulk with awesome speed; then the point that was Nansal had grown to a disc, and then it was swiftly leaping toward them; it was nearing, expanding, growing, at a rate that made Torlos clutch his chair—there was a sudden crashing, splintering sound, and Arcot had jerked open the circuit half in alarm. They were almost motionless again as the stars reeled about them.

-

	TORLOS had been nervous. Like any man so affected, for his nervous system was, after all, like ours, he had tightened his terrific ally, his powerful muscles. The chair was made of wood. His fingers had sunk into the wood and crushed the wood as if it had been crushed in a vice!

	"I'd hate to have him take hold of my arm and try to hold it tight!" said Wade eying the splintered chair with a judicious air.

	"I'm very sorry—I did not intend to do that; I forgot myself when I saw that planet rushing at me so fast. I am sorry, indeed," thought Torlos humbly, his chagrin apparent in his face. Arcot read this thought and then laughed.

	"It is nothing, Torlos—we are merely astonished at the terrific strength of your hand. Wade was not worried; he was joking!" Torlos seemed much relieved, but he looked at the splintered wood and then his hand.

	"It is best that I keep my too-strong hands from your instruments!" he communicated.

	"Indeed, it is!" rejoined Arcot "We would be stranded if you destroyed some of them!" laughed Arcot.

	But Arcot was busy now. They had come within a hundred thousand miles of Nansal, which was, really, nearer than Arcot had intended to come, for, although they were passing it tangentially, actually that distance represented a tiny fraction of a second's motion! Had they deviated, they would have crashed into the planet and their coils would have been destroyed instantly. They were moving slowly, in normal space, only four miles a second, so they were falling swiftly toward the planet Arcot turned the ship so that its original velocity was directed toward the planet. They dropped nearly three-quarters of the distance before their speed was over orbital velocity. Then Arcot began to decelerate. They reached a point 600 miles from the planet very quickly then, and Arcot slowed the ship till it dropped into the atmosphere. In a moment the air resistance had checked its motion greatly, for they had been going nearly fifteen miles a second and the outer shell became white hot in an instant. Arcot closed the relux shutters till he was no longer bothered by the heat radiated inward. He knew the temperature of 8,000 degrees would be quite harmless as far as the outer wall went and it saved power. He was making the air absorb his energy of motion, instead of using more power to overcome their speed.

	Soon, however, they were drifting again over the broad plains of the planet Torlos told Arcot that by far the larger percentage of the planet's surface was land, yet they had vast quantities of water, for their seas were exceedingly deep. Some ranged over thirty miles deep for hundreds of square miles. The pressure at this depth is terrific, and the density of the water increased a little under the pressure, for water, though practically incompressible, still has a slight compressibility, as has any matter, in any state, liquid, solid or gaseous. Earth's crust is practically perfectly smooth, the variations amounting to less than the variations in the surface of an orange. This planet was a bit less smooth. It also had gigantic mountains, some towering ten miles into the air, nearly twice the height of Earth's greatest elevation, Mt. Everest at approximately 20,000 feet This distribution of land and water was no doubt responsible for the fact that they had in each case landed on the planet over some land, without consciously guiding the ship to land. 

	Torlos, with shining eyes, was directing their progress toward his home city, and the capital of the world-nation. Over the great plain the Ancient Mariner sped, the air rushing around its streamlined hulk, and they slipped smoothly on.

	"Is there no traffic between the cities here, Torlos? We have met no ships."

	"There is a continuous traffic but we are far off its line. The commerce must be densely populated with warships as well, and both warships and peaceful craft are made to look as much alike as possible. Then the enemy cannot know when the ships of war are present and when they are not, and the attacks are more easily beaten off. They are forced to live on our commerce while here. Before we invented the magnetic energy storage apparatus, they were forced to get fuel from our ships in order to make the return journey, for they could not carry fuel for the round trip. But now it is found that the coils weigh only a little more when full than when discharged, and we can carry energy for the entire trip.

	"Our city now should be behind that next range of mountains."

	They were flying at a height of twenty miles and the range Torlos indicated was low mountains far off in the blue distance; they were almost below the horizon. But as they were going at nearly ten thousand miles an hour, they would soon be there. The mountains seemed slowly changing; they seemed to crawl about on one another like living things, as we watched them, except that they grew larger and changed from the strange blue to a blue green, then to a green. Soon the ship was rocketing smoothly over them. Ahead and below, in the rocky gorge of the mountains, lay a great cone city, the largest they had seen yet. In fact it was of two cones. Like the "circus" tents of two centuries ago they rose, and there was a ridge in the center.

	" AH—home! See—that twin cone idea is new. It was not thus when I left long ago. It is growing, growing, and that new section, see, they have bright colors in the buildings. All the buildings are colored, and already they are digging foundations far out to the left for a third cone. All the city will be extended. Ah, but they won't have to, if you will give us the secret of the rays you use!

	"But Arcot, you must hide in the hills now; go closer to the city, and deposit me in the hills. There I must walk to the city on foot. Long ago it was agreed that if I ever returned, I would return on foot, and I would wear certain insignia. Their ships will come down—I win soon be home and telling the Supreme Three that I have salvation and peace for them!"

	"We'll take you close to the city, invisible, then you can drop, say ten feet from the ship to the ground, and continue from there. That will be all right, won't it?" asked Arcot

	Torlos agreed that it would, so Arcot made the ship invisible, and they dove down toward the city, stopping just a few hundred feet from the base of the magnetic wall, near one of the great magnetic beam stations. Torlos dropped from the door of the airlock, after agreeing to meet the Terrestrians in a one-man flyer by coming out into the hills slowly, at a low altitude. Arcot was to become visible and follow the little machine into the city.

	"You need fear no treachery from my people," communicated Torlos, sincerely, then; smiling, "if you need fear treachery at the hands of any people! You have certainly proven your ability to defend yourselves! Certainly my people, had they such treacherous intents, would have been convinced by that escape from the Satorians! For they have already heard all about it, no doubt—all save the actual destruction of the city. And by this time they may have learned that the city is missing, and that there is only a vast chasm to show for it. Certainly they should have been able to guess at the reason."

	He paused a moment, and then asked: "Is there any message you wish me to give to my Supreme Council of Three?"

	"Repeat to them the offer we made to the Emperor of Sator. We will give to them the molecular ray, the ray which tore that city out of the ground, and as your people of this world have seen, also tore the mountain down; we will give them the cosmic ray, which will destroy anything, blasting the very atoms of which it is made, except the material of which this ship is made. And we will give to your people the secret of this material too. And we will give them the secret of the most terrific energy known to mankind—the energy of matter itself. With these, Sator will soon be peaceful.

	"In return we ask things that, while costing you nothing, are invaluable to us. We have lost our way. In the vastness of space we can no longer find the way to our own Universe. Ours is the largest in this part of the Cosmos; it contains approximately 300,000 million suns, nearly 160 times as many as any other Island of Space in this part of the Cosmos.

	"Also, we need more fuel; our fuel is lead wire. We need thin wires of that metal of which you make your power storage coils. That we use for fuel.

	"And we would like books of your people, and photographs, which will prove our visit, that they may know, on our world, that we have in truth been out in space. 

	"That, and peace is all we ask. 

	"But, Torlos, we should like the secret of your power storage coils. If you do not wish to disclose this secret to us, don't do it. We will have no real need of them; we have a better one; we are merely interested."

	"Torlos," added Arcot, suddenly remembering something he had forgotten to ask, further delaying the parting, for they must remain visible that Arcot and Torlos could communicate, "did your people try using very heavy currents in the magnetic energy machines?"

	"The things you ask, I am sure my Council will gladly agree to and the secret of the magnetic coil we will gladly give you, I am certain.

	"During the early experimenting they attempted to use very fine wire and heavy current, for the wire had no resistance, and it seemed thus, that they could get more power in less space, but there was a difficulty. In every case, a new, unknown, and still inexplicable phenomenon came in. The wires remained cold for but a short time, and in that time, the substance all about the machine glowed strangely and grew hot. Men near it were killed instantly. The air about it glowed with tremendous brilliance—why—just like the air in the path of the rays of death you use—the rays of heat—the rays—they must be the same! The rays that came from this machine were able to change matter, as these rays of yours are!" Torlos communicated sudden surprise. .

	The "exclamation" was, of course, telepathic.

	"They are the same, Torlos. But you could never have used them, for you must have this metal here, relux, that you may direct the rays," explained Arcot

-

	THEY went to the city, and Torlos dropped off. The ship jerked up as the load of his weight was removed; then they were rising and Torlos was suddenly visible on the plain, leaping forward in great leaps of twenty feet, graceful, easy leaps, that told of tremendous power. He ran on lightly. Suddenly a magnetic ship was darting down from the city toward him. It curved down, and as it drew near, he made certain signals; then he stood still, with his hands behind him.

	Two men dropped thirty feet from the ship to him and questioned him. Then they motioned to the ship; it dropped to ten feet and the men sprang lightly up to its door and entered it. The door snapped shut and the ship shot up and toward the city. A moment it hesitated at the magnetic wall, then it was in and out of sight, lost in the busy traffic of the streets.

	"Well, we will now go back in the hills and wait," said Arcot

	Back in the hills they lay on the ground, visible now, keeping a close watch of the sky, yet sitting easily in the deeply cushioned seats, talking, and discussing more in detail this race of strange people, who seemed to combine the properties of plant and animal, coldblooded, yet with an organ for maintaining warmth; with mobility that defied the plant, and carnivorous as well as herbiverous traits; incapable of living directly on the soil, yet absorbing unfixed energy from the air! Their iron bones, and great intelligence—a strange combination to Terrestrians.

	"I wonder if their bones are put together quite as ours are?" said Horsy.

	"I'm sure I don't know!" replied Arcot "I was thinking of asking for a skeleton as part of the relics we take back with us."

-

	"LOOK—there's Torlos!" called Wade, pointing to a tiny ship, which was rapidly approaching the hills and circling slower as it drew near.

	They rose and sailed out over the hills. In a moment Torlos had spotted them, and came toward their ship. He motioned them to the ground. They landed. Torlos came toward the ship, and aboard. He was smiling broadly.

	"I had some difficulty convincing them my story was true! When I told them that you could go faster than light they strongly objected. But they had to admit that you had certainly been able to tear down the mountain very effectively, and they had reports of the total destruction of the city of Sator. It seems you first visited Thanso when you came here. The people there were panic-stricken when they saw you utterly destroy a mountain, then tear that magnetic ray station up! It had never been done by any one ship.

	"But the fact that several guards had seen me materialize from thin air, and my explanation, plus the fact that they knew you could make yourself invisible, at last made them believe. They want to talk to you, and they say they will gladly grant your requests—on one condition. .You must promise to keep yourself away from any of our people, for they are afraid of disease. Germs that do not bother you, may be deadly to us, and they are very much afraid of you. I will lead the way back to the city in the little ship."

	"We will keep apart from your people if the council wishes, but there is no real danger. We are too vastly different. Are your animals all susceptible to the diseases you have? We are so vastly different from you, that it will be impossible for you to get our diseases, or for us to contract yours. However, we will do as your council asks," Arcot informed him.

	Torlos slipped out again to his little ship and went at once toward the city.

	Arcot brought the Ancient Mariner along behind, easily, keeping about three hundred feet to the rear.

	They went smoothly on. In a moment they had reached the great magnetic wall of the city and glided through. On the roofs of the buildings men were collected, watching the shining, polished hull of the strange ship as it glided across the roofs of their city. They climbed swiftly up, until they had reached at last the great central building, and settled slowly to the floor of the great courtyard.

	About them, in regular rows, the great hulls of the Nansal battleships were arranged. Torlos settled in a little space, the one space where there seemed room for the Ancient Mariner. Then almost at once he rose and sailed off, landing on top of a nearby battleship. A moment later Arcot had landed the Ancient Mariner, and the power was shut off.

	"I think that Wade is the man to go with me this time, Morey, as he has learned the 'language' and can converse with them. We will each, carry a molecular ray pistol and a cosmic ray pistol, wear the power suits, and carry a radio. This time I don't believe they will start any actions we don't like. But I am no longer so confident, and I am not going to take any useless chances. This time I am going to make arrangements. If I die here, there is going to be a very costly funeral. And further, these men are going to pay the costs! I will call you at least once every two minutes. If three minutes goes by without a message from me, call me, as a warning. Allow one minute more. Then, if nothing happens, why start things because you will be able to use a free hand without injuring me. Start on this building. I am going to tell Torlos about this. If the building is shielding the radio, I will be listening for you and will return on my steps until you can hear me. Right? Then come on, Wade!" Arcot, fully equipped, strode down the corridor and to the air lock. Torlos had appeared now, and with him a single man, a high officer of the patrol explained Torlos, for he, Torlos, was without official rank. His was a secret service and he therefore had no official status. An officer was assigned to accompany him.

	Torlos seemed to be relaxing now in the warm, yellow sunlight of his own world. It had been years since he had seen the warm sun, save from the windows of a space-flyer. Now he could walk around in the warm air of the world of his birth.

	"You, of Earth, imagine spending your years on a sunless cloudy world such as Venus. To the Venerians it is a beautiful world, a world of soft, silvery radiance, while Earth is a world of glaring, blinding light, a world of burning light, that turns the skin raw with its heat. But to us, it is a beautiful world!" This was Torlos' communication.

	Arcot explained to Torlos the precautions they had taken against trouble here. Torlos smiled.

	"You have learned greater caution. I cannot blame you. We certainly seem little different from the men of Sator; we can only stand on trial. But I know you will be safe. I wonder if it would not be wise to shut off your set as we enter the elevator. Might not the magnetic force affect it?" Arcot had thought of that and had fully intended shutting off his apparatus.

	They were walking now across the great court, covered with a soft springy turf of green. The hot sun shining down on them, the brilliant colors of the new buildings of this part of the city, the towering walls of the magnificent building they were approaching, and behind them the shining shell of the Ancient Mariner, set amongst the dark, needle-shaped Nansalian ships, all combined to make a picture that would remain in their minds for long. Here no guards were watching them. They were being conducted to the meeting of the Council of Three.

	THEY entered the main entrance of the great government building and stepped into the great hall on the ground floor. It was like the nave of some ancient cathedral, when the Church of Earth was corrupt with political power, ruling the people by the power of politics, and forgetting that they were men of God. But they had produced beautiful things then, and this hall was like them.

	Great pillars of the green stone rose in graceful, fluted columns, gracefully curving out, like the branches of some tree, to meet in arches that rose high in pleasing curves, meeting at a point midway between four pillars, while the walls were made of the dark green stone as a background. On them had been traced designs in colored tile or stone. The hall was indeed a thing of colored beauty and the color gave it life, as the yellow sunlight gave life to the trees of the mountains. The graceful arches alone were not enough, but this touch of color gave an added beauty. They crossed the great hall and came at last to the elevator shaft, its door made of narrow strips of metal, so bound together that the whole made a flexible but strong sheet. It was, in principle, like the cover of one of the antique roll-top desks. Now, some things are old and beautiful and some things are just old. The roll-top desk was old, but these men had made their elevator doors very attractive by adding the effect of color. In no way did they detract from the dignified grace of the great hall.

	Torlos communicated with Arcot as they entered, "We will ascend more gradually this time, Arcot so the acceleration won't be so trying to you. I will go up by short stretches."

-

	WADE had been talking to Morey, explaining that they would be silent for a moment. Now they entered the elevator, and by gentle steps, each step representing an added magnetic impulse, they rose to the sixty-third floor of the giant building.

	As soon as they stepped out of the elevator, Wade attempted to call Morey. To his relief he contacted.

	The officer was leading them down a green stone corridor, sufficiently decorated to relieve all feeling of monotony.

	They came to a simple door, like many of the others, and entered the room beyond. A table was here, in triangular form, and in the center of each side sat one man on a slightly raised chair, while on each side of him sat a number of other men.

	Torlos stopped at the door and saluted. Then he spoke in rapid, liquid syllables to the men sitting at the table, halting once or twice, and showing evident embarrassment as he did so. He paused, and one of the three men in command replied rapidly, in a pleasant voice, that had none of the harsh command that Arcot had instantly sensed in the voice of the Satorian Emperor. Arcot liked the voice and the man. He was, judged by Terrestrial standards, past middle age, whatever that might be here on Nansal, and his crisp black hair was bleaching slightly. His face was showing the signs that worry must always leave, but although the face was strong with authority, there was a gentleness that comes with a feeling of kindly power.

	Torlos was turning to Arcot as he rapidly radioed to Morey the scene before them, the great table of a dense, black wood, the men about it, some in the blue uniform of officials of this nation, and some in the loose, soft garments of the civilian, their colored fabrics, individually in good taste, and harmonious, were frequently badly out of harmony with the costume of their neighbor, a difficulty accompanying this colored clothing.

	"The Supreme Council asks that you be seated at the table, in the places left for you." Torlos paused, then quickly added to his thoughts, for Arcot, "I have told them of your precautions, and they have said, 'A wise man, having been received treacherously once, will not again be trapped', and they approve of your policy of caution."

	"Those men who sit at the raised portion of the table are the Supreme Three, these others are their advisors, knowing the details of Science, of Business, and of War. No one man can know all branches of human endeavor, and this is but a meeting place of those who know best the individual lines, with the Supreme Three, elected by these others, on the death of a member, act as coordinators. The man of Science is to your left. He directly before you is the man of Business and Manufacturing, and he to the right is the Leader of Men and our Commander in Battle. 

	"Is it not to the man of Science yon speak first?" 

	"I must first tell the Scientist what it is I have, then I will tell the Warrior how he may use it, and they may tell the man of Business what it is they need.

	"But you are my connecting link. I must at all times be facing you. We cannot sit at the table and yet face all, as I wish. Cannot chairs be brought for us here?

	While Torlos was speaking to his Supreme Council, Arcot related rapidly to Morey what had been said, thus telling Wade as well.

	Before he was finished, the chairs had been brought by two men who entered, after one of the Three had spoken into a telephone. These men wore holsters for the pneumatic pistols, but they were conspicuously empty. Arcot was both pleased and embarrassed to notice this. What should he do, who carried two deadly pistols? He followed the least conspicuous course, and left them as they were.

	The audience had begun. As quickly as possible he explained to the council what it was he wanted.

	"We have come from a vast distance across space. We have come from another Island Universe. Let your astronomer tell you of the distance that represents." Arcot paused, while Torlos translated, and a moment later one of the Scientists, a tall, powerfully built man, even for these men of giant strength, rose, and spoke to the others. When he was seated, a second rose and spoke also, with an expression of puzzled wonder.

	"He says," translated Torlos, "that his science has taught him that a speed such as you say you must have made is impossible, but the fact that you are here proves his science wrong. And he reasoned that your kind live on no planet of this system, hence you must come from another star, and as this is as impossible as coming from another Universe, according to his science, he is convinced of the fallacy."

-

	ARCOT laughed, the sound reasoning of the man was creditable; he did not label it "Impossible"; he realized that their very presence was proof. Arcot relayed the message to Morey, then replied to Torlos, that his men were indeed intelligent in being willing to accept a new fact, a thing that his own people would not be so ready to do. Then rapidly he tried to explain the facts of his trip. It was impossible. Torlos, a warrior, not a scientist, could not comprehend the ideas; they were far ahead of anything his own people had conceived; he could not translate them.

	"The Physicist suggests that it may be easier to think directly to him, the thoughts being more familiar to him, perhaps, than to me," Torlos smiled. "They most certainly are."

	Arcot strode over to the Physicist, and looking into his eyes, concentrated deeply—to his surprise and relief the man was a perfect receiver. He had a natural gift for receiving thought. Quickly Arcot outlined the system that had made the trip possible.

	The Physicist smiled when he was finished, and vainly tried to reply. The men who receive most readily seldom transmit easily. Torlos aided him.

	"He says that the science of your people is a million years ahead of us. He says that the conceptions are totally foreign to his mind, and that he can but now grasp the magnitude and possibilities of the idea—bent emptiness he calls it—that you have given him. He says he can fully appreciate the possibility that yon have shown him. He has given your message to the Three, and they are now anxious to hear of the weapons you have."

	Arcot drew first the molecular pistol, and looking to Torlos, explained that it would be easier to give the ideas to the Physicist. He turned to him now, and holding up the pistol, explained the general theory of the ray. The idea of molecular energy was old to this man, for he had been making use of it all his life, and it was well known that the muscles used the heat of air to take advantage of its energy and do their work. This ray he could understand, but not until Arcot projected into his mind the powerful mental impressions of the mighty blazing suns that had swirled about them in space, when their ray had thrown one mighty sun hurtling into the other, and he had shown him mental images of that mountain tumbling, crushed, into the ravine, and of the city flying off into space as Torlos directed his ray upon it.

	Awed, the man translated the ideas to his fellows, while Arcot drew the cosmic ray pistol and reported to Morey the results of their conference.

	"This pistol," continued Arcot, "uses a ray that exists naturally in space, one I think you have never detected, but have accidentally produced. You have all the essentials of the ray in your magnetic energy storage machines, save that you have no means of directing and controlling it.

	"You know the nature of light? Of ultra-light? and of X-rays—then of the elements that break up spontaneously, an element that is very heavy and has a valence of two; an element that, very active chemically, will decompose water spontaneously, forming hydrogen and the hydroxides? That element gives off a certain ray, and its atom breaks. You know that?"

	Torlos had to answer—they did, it was rare, but there were others rarer. It was very hard to separate, because it was contaminated so by a large amount of another element, which was lighter, and chemically exactly like it, save for reactions with a green gas, and a heavy brown liquid, and a very dark blackish, gray solid. Arcot smiled at the description of chlorine, bromine and iodine.

	He meant, of course, that the solubilities of the corresponding radium salts differed sufficiently to permit a separation.

	"That element," continued Arcot, "gives off certain very short waves. These rays are far shorter, and are given off when the atom is utterly annihilated. These rays are so energetic that they will blast the atom, and make any atom save that of helium, or other very stable atoms and hydrogen, break up, and, like radium, give off rays, at the same time becoming tremendously hot. I will show you a very dangerous experiment. I will show you the powers of these rays.

	Arcot asked that a lump of any sort be brought in; any mass of matter. A large mass of iron, a broken casting, was produced in a few minutes, and Arcot suspended it on a molecular ray, while Wade melted it with the cosmic ray. Cooling it again with the molecular ray, Wade lowered it to the floor, a perfect sphere, encrusted with ice and snow. It was very cold, yet a moment ago it had glowed brilliantly and its surface had flamed as it burned in the oxygen of the air, while 

* * * missing pages from pulp – approximate text filled in from Ace Books version * * *

Arcot continued for the better part of an hour to explain to the Council exactly what he had, how they could be used, and what materials and processes were needed to make them.

When he was finished, the Supreme Three conferred for several minutes. Then the Scientist asked, through Torlos:

"How can we repay you for these things you have given us?"

"First, we need lead to fuel our ship." Arcot gave them the exact specifications of the lead wire they needed.

He received his answer from the man of Business and Manufacturing. "We can give you that easily, for lead is cheap. Indeed, it seems hardly enough to repay you."

"The second thing we need," Arcot continued, "is information. We became lost in space and are unable to find our way home. I would like to explain the case to the Astronomer."

The Astronomer proved to be a man of powerful intelligence as well as powerful physique, and was a better transmitter than receiver. It took every bit of Arcot's powerful mind to project his thoughts to the man.

He explained the dilemma that he and his friends were in, and told him how he could recognize the Galaxy on his plates. The Astronomer said he thought he knew of such a nebula, but he would like to compare his own photographs with Arcot's to make sure.

"In return," Arcot told him, "we will give you another weapon—a weapon, this time, to defeat the astronomer's greatest enemy, distance. It is an electrical telescope which will permit you to see life on every planet of this system. With it, you can see a man at a distance ten times as great as the distance from Nansal to your sun!"

Eagerly, the Astronomer questioned Arcot concerning the telectroscope, but others were clamoring for Arcot's attention.

The Biologist was foremost among the contenders; he seemed worried about the possibility of the alien Earthmen carrying pathogenic bacteria.

"Torlos has told us that you have an entirely different internal organization. What is it that is different? I can't believe that he has correctly understood you."

Arcot explained the differences as carefully as possible. By the time he was finished, the Biologist felt sure that any such creature was sufficiently far removed from them to be harmless biologically, but he wanted to study the Man of Earth further.

Arcot had brought along a collection of medical books as a possible aid in case of accident. He offered to give these to Nansal in exchange for a collection of Nansalian medical texts. The English would have to be worked out with the aid of a dictionary and a primary working aid which Arcot would supply. Arcot also asked for a skeleton to take with him, and the Biologist readily agreed.

"We'd like to give you one in return," Arcot grinned, "But we only brought four along, and, unfortunately, we are using them at the moment."

The Biologist smiled back and assured him that they would not think of taking a piece of apparatus so vitally necessary to the Earthmen.

The Military Leader was the man who demanded attention next. Arcot had a long conference with him, and they decided that the best way for the Military Leader to learn the war potential of the Ancient Mariner was to personally see a demonstration of its powers.

The Council decided that the Three would go on the trip. The Military Commander picked two of his aides to go, and the Scientist picked the Astronomer and the Physicist. The head of Business and Manufacturing declined to bring any of his advisors.
"We would learn nothing," he told Arcot, "and would only be in the way. I, myself, am going only because I am one of the Three."

"Very well," said Arcot. "Let's get started."

-

The party descended to the ground floor and walked out to the ship. They filed into the airlock, and in the power room they looked in amazement at the tiny machines that ran the ship. The long black cylinder of the main power unit for the molecular drive looked weak and futile compared to the bulky machines that ran their own ships. The power storage coils, with their fields of intense, dead blackness, interested the Physicist immensely.

The ship was a constant source of wonder to them all. They investigated the laboratory and then went up to the second floor. Morey and Fuller greeted them at the door, and each of the four Earthmen took a group around the ship, explaining as they went.

The library was a point of great interest, exceeded only by the control room. Arcot found some difficulty in taking care of all his visitors; there were only four chairs in the control room. The Three could sit down, but Arcot needed the fourth chair to pilot the ship. The rest of the party had to hold on as best they could, which was not too difficult for men of such physical strength; they were accustomed to high accelerations in their elevators.

Morey, Wade, and Fuller strapped themselves into the seats at the ray projectors at the sides and stern.

Arcot wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ship's armament first, and then the maneuverability. He picked a barren hillside for the first demonstration. 
* * * resume pulp version * * *

	It was a huge cliff, towering fully a thousand feet above, almost vertically.
	Then the pale beam reached toward it.

	The huge cliff was spread out over five square miles of territory. It was thrown ten miles into the air, the air whining, roaring and whistling about it as it went up, and then it was coming down, red hot now, and it struck the snow-covered mountain top, shivered into a million fragments with a terrific roar, and the rocks rolled down the mountain side, their path traced by a line of steam clouds.

	Then Arcot trained the cosmic ray on the mountain peak. In an instant the snow was gone. He had drawn the relux shutters over the windows to keep out the unwanted rays, then the cosmic rays were turned on in their full power. In less than a minute the whole mountain peak was a pool of molten rock.

	Now something else was happening. Flames were shooting up from the mass; blue flames they were that shot higher and higher, and were almost invisible in the radiance of the incandescent rock. And other things were happening. The air all about the mountain peak was blue, and glowing brilliantly, while crackling sparks developed. Then slowly great streamers of electric fire wound down from the mountain top, striking rocks, and shivering them open as they expanded suddenly with the heat. The blue flames were reaching higher, and the heat, coming from the rock, was so great that they could feel its searing radiation. Then Arcot shut off the cosmic ray, and turned on the molecular ray.

	The molecules of the molten rock were traveling at prodigious velocities; the heat was terrific. Arcot could see that the rock was boiling quite freely. The molecular ray hit it, and with the roar of a meteor it was plunging at five miles a second out into space and gaining speed swiftly! Then it was out of the atmosphere, and rushing, cold now, through space, at still higher speeds.

	Arcot followed it at his leisure, in the ship. It was going too slowly. He heated it further with the cosmic ray and drove it on with a molecular ray. Then he had it in an orbit about the planet, as they reached free space!

	"Tharlano," he said, or rather thought, to the Astronomer, "your planet has a new satellite!"

	"So I perceive!" replied Tharlano. "Can we now use the wonderful instrument of which you told me?"

	Arcot established the ship in an orbit twenty thousand miles from the planet and then led them back to the observatory. Below them the planet was turning slowly, and the vast panorama of the sunlit world was a wonderful sight. Torlos, however, protested that he preferred to be there. He had looked at it for many years, and much preferred being there!

	Through the weightless car they went to the observatory, where Morey had already trained the telectroscope on the planet below, and the amplification showed only the rushing ground and a blurred picture of the land below rushing past them, they were so close.

	Instead, he trained it on the planet they had left for good, Sator. It filled all the screen as they increased the power; then it was only a section; then they were looking at the billowing clouds. It was a poor subject.

	The Astronomer was content to sweep the sky with this wonderful instrument. It was such a thing as he had longed for!

	But the Military Leader of the Three pointed out that the Satorians still had a weapon that was reported deadly, and they were in imminent danger of being wiped out by their own stolen science, and that Arcot's inventions should be applied at once. So they returned to the planet and to the council room. All the way to Nansal they spent the time discussing the problem in the Ancient Mariner's library. Arcot and Morey were both here, while Fuller piloted the ship. Torlos was needed in the conference.

	It was finally agreed that the necessary plans and blueprints were to be given to the Nansalians who could start production at once. The greatest problem was in the supply of relux and lux, for these were necessary and their vast energy-content made them possible only with the aid of material energy, so the Ancient Mariner supplied the necessary start, and the necessary starting materials.

	They began to carry out the plans for making the equipment as soon as the ship landed. They at once called the manufacturers together and the plans were distributed, for the Ancient Mariner carried a supply of all the necessary plans, in case of need. They were very useful now.

	The days that followed were exceedingly busy days for the Terrestrians.

	The Nansalians were wildly fearful of the consequences of the weapon that the Satorians had to attack them with. The results of their investigations through their agents had, so far, ended only in death to their men. They knew only what the Satorians wished them to know, that the instrument was new and deadly.

	The Satorians, on the other hand, were not in the dark as to the progress of the Nansalians.

	Arcot and Morey found this out

	Arcot had, of course, been tremendously interested in finding their home Universe, and, realizing that the Nansalians were vastly interested in erecting a barrier of molecular ships, and a series of molecular ray projectors, Arcot had first turned his attention and the attention of his friends to helping them. Fuller had proven invaluable, for his knowledge of designing had permitted him to smooth their ways greatly. They had no such machinery as was required for the manufacture of the tubes needed. The tubes such as Arcot's machinery required, had never existed on Nansal, and Fuller had to design the machines to make them, then to interpret the designs for the artisans, then to supervise their execution.

	But it was done.

	The men of Nansal were exceedingly grateful to these Terrestrians, and equally realizing that the question of their directions for returning home must be uppermost in the minds of their visitors, Tharlano had begun a systematic search of the known nebulas. He already knew which was the largest, but he wanted to make certain. He had invited Arcot and Morey to join him in the observations. His observatory was located on the barren peak of an exceedingly high mountain, more than seven miles high, and built on the solid rock, high in the clear air, so far from disturbing influences that he could get what approximated to spatial conditions, and while he could not use as great a magnification, for the air still made his pictures, or images, indistinct, still for observation of stars, the fixed and low power telescope was far preferable to the unstable high magnification telescope of a space ship. Also, the telescope here was able to use a gigantic mirror, and hold it more fully vibrationless than could any space-flyer. The mere movement of a man was sufficient to deflect the angle of a space-flyer, but millions of tons moving about the planet would not affect the angle of the observatory instrument noticeably.

-

	THE observatory was accessible only from a space ship, or air machine. The great observatory was entirely enclosed, against the biting cold, and the lack of air. Also, a constant temperature was necessary, lest expansions and contractions due to differences in temperature, throw the mirror out of true.

	Arcot and Morey had gone on this trip, leaving Wade and Fuller in the consulting office of the Three. The Nansalian ability to go for long periods without sleep had made it difficult for the Terrestrians, and the vast quantities of food the Terrestrians consumed was a never-ending source of wonder to the Nansalians. This trip had been taken more in the spirit of recreation now, for, to Arcot's great relief, Tharlano had pointed out to him, with the aid of the telectroscope, the nebula that was our Galaxy. From this place they saw it almost edge on, and so it would indeed have been impossible for them to recognize it. It looked small, yet Tharlano had found, by measurement of stellar velocities of its edge suns, that it was by far the largest, its mass being approximately 280,000 million times the mass of their own sun. The Universe they were in puzzled Arcot. He tried to conjecture which one of the many visible from Earth it must be, and from a careful perusal of the star charts, decided it was N. G. C. 4594, which contains approximately two thousand million stars, hence our Universe, 200,000 million times as heavy as our sun, was approximately 150 times as massive as this Universe.  

	They landed the Ancient Mariner on the landing platform, blasted from the rock, which was the precarious ledge on which all ships landing must rest.

	Torlos had accompanied them, but his giant frame would not fit into a standard altitude suit such as the Terrestrians had brought, although he was supplied with a power suit of Terrestrial origin, he had been forced to use one of the rubber and cloth suits of Nansal.

	They flew across to the observatory, where Tharlano awaited them, and were at once admitted into the air lock. Next they were in the observatory; its warmed room made observation far more comfortable, and to these people who lived on heat, far safer and easier.

	The floor was of smoothed-off solid rock, and in this the great clock which drove and timed the telescope, was set. The dome, made much like an old gas tank, was sealed with mercury, which had to be heated at times to prevent freezing in the cold, and could be completely rotated. The entire dome turned with the telescope. The telescope itself being a reflector, had been constructed with an airtight tube, and the lenses of the optical system were used to seal the little observation tube or eyepiece.

	Arcot and Morey were vastly interested in the huge machine, which was, of course, equipped with its magnetic shield, which made it necessary to wait till they were sure no enemy ships were near, before turning off the shield, for the magnetic field affected the light.

	The mirror was made of fused silicon dioxide, or quartz, and silvered, as our mirrors, by chemically depositing metallic silver from a solution of a complex tartrate, reducing by means of a mild reducing agent, such as sugar.

	The mirror was approximately twenty feet, or 240 inches in diameter, and the powerful lenses were able to make a space ship visible as it left Sator, although the tactical uses of the telescope were practically nil, for merely painting the ships black made them quite invisible.

	There were half a dozen assistants with Tharlano at the observatory at all times, one busy with the great files of plates that were kept on hand. Every plate made was preserved in triplicate, lest they be destroyed in a raid. The original was kept here, and the other copies were kept at two of the largest cities. It was from these files of plates that Tharlano had gathered the data necessary to show Arcot which universe was his.

	Tharlano was proudly explaining the telescope to Arcot, realizing that the wonderful telectroscope was far better, yet this was indeed a triumph of mechanical perfection. Arcot and Morey were both intensely absorbed in the discussion, while Torlos, less interested, was examining the observatory.

	Suddenly he cried out in warning, at the same time leaping wildly, and covering fully thirty feet, gathered Arcot and Morey to him in his great arms. There was a low, but distinct noise of a pneumatic pistol and the thud of a bullet, and Arcot and Morey each felt Torlos jerk.

	Quick as a flash, however, Torlos had whirled them behind the great tube of the telescope, and leaping over it and across the room, he had quickly disappeared in the supply room. Suddenly, there was the noise of a scuffle; again the noise of the pneumatic pistol, and the sudden tinkle of broken glass. Then suddenly the figure of a man described a wild arc as it flew out through the air, and landed with a heavy crash on the floor. Instantly Torlos was leaping after him, and while a trickle of blood ran down from his left shoulder, he gripped the man in his giant arms, pinning his arms to his side. The struggle was brief. Torlos simply squeezed the man's chest with his arms; they could see it bend! then in a moment the man was unconscious.

	Torlos had stripped from him a leather strap that formed part of his harness, and bound his legs with it, wrapping it many times around the ankles, and was picking him up when Tharlano arrived. Immediately behind him came Arcot and Morey. Torlos was smiling broadly.

	"One Satorian spy that won't report. I could have finished him when I got my hold on him, but I wanted to take him to the Board for questioning. I just dented his chest a bit."

	"Well, we owe our lives to you again, Torlos. It is becoming habitual with you it seems," said Arcot, gravely. "But this time you certainly risked your life; that bullet might well have penetrated your heart, instead of striking a rib, as it seems to have done."

	"What is a rib?" asked Torlos, curiously,

	Arcot looked in amazement, then quickly ran exploratory fingers over Torlos' great chest. It was smooth and solid. Certainly he had no ribs. Arcot told Torlos to feel his chest, and when he saw the look of amazement in his eyes, he took a deep breath, expanding, and separating the ribs.

	"Morey—-these men have no ribs! Their chest is as solid and smooth as the skull; it is a bell of metal! No wonder they are hard to kill. Torlos was taking far less chance than would an Earth man. These men are equipped by nature with a solid steel vest, front and back, and very effectively bullet-proof. No wonder they don't use rifles! The hands of a man like this are deadly, and there is no vital organ that you can reach without shooting through a layer of metal; they can't be killed instantly, and just let them live thirty seconds, and they will have revenge. They will certainly live that long! Their vital organs are all shielded in metal; they are certainly a deadly enemy!" said Arcot in surprise. 

	"What—no chests! How do they breathe?" 

	Arcot laughed, and replied with a question. "How do you? Don't strain your chest to a deep breath, just breathe naturally—you don't use your chest, you see, but the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles. A man normally breathes that way, although a woman does use the ribs. So why should these men have ribs? We have them and don't use them; these men have not only better protection, as we have seen, but greater strength, for the arch and the sphere are the strongest types of construction."

	"But the question in hand is, who is this man?"

	Torlos answered to the best of his ability, that he was undoubtedly a Satorian spy, sent to murder Arcot and Morey. He had glimpsed the muzzle of his pistol as he was about to direct it, and had at once intercepted his shot, with the observed and pleasant results. The damage done by the bullet was, he said, about equal to scratching the paint off some machine—merely bothersome. It was evidently very nice to have a bullet-proof chest!

	ARCOT and Morey decided that they had best return at once to see that Wade and Fuller were still safe, and the Satorian was hastily bundled into the ship, tied further with a lux metal cord, thick as a string, with two loops. Torlos looked skeptically at it. "He will break that when he wakes, without knowing." He looked again at the thin, transparent thread. "You forget the strength of Nansalian and Satorian men."

	Arcot smiled, and wrapped the cord once about Torlos's wrists. Torlos smiled and pulled. That's all he did. His huge muscles bulged and writhed in great ridges along his arms. He strained, but the thin cord was undamaged. He stopped, panting. In an instant he was breathing normally. "That cord is something different," he smiled, "and I will make no more comments on the things I see you do." Lux metal was not easily to be broken, as Torlos now realized.

	They returned to the capital at once now, going at a rather high rate of speed, for Torlos was anxious, and felt that there might be some significance in this attempt to remove Arcot and Morey. Wade and Fuller had been warned by radio, and had immediately retired to the council room of the Three. The members of the Investigation Board joined them for questioning the prisoner.

	When Arcot and Morey arrived, Torlos carrying the man in, helplessly bound, and exceedingly violent, struggling with his shackles. He had broken the heavy belt almost as soon as he came to, and Torlos had been required to hold him, but the thin, almost invisible lux cord had held him securely. Arcot applied another to his legs. Now he was secure.

	The Nansalians questioned him without result, for he merely said nothing—that is nothing helpful. Eventually they were forced to give up in disgust. They were further worried, as they had been receiving, via radio, signals from Sator in code that they knew must be signals to spies.

	"May I try my luck?" asked Arcot. "I will try the mental telepathy. If I can get his attention with my eyes, I believe I am powerful enough to force him to remain looking at me." Gladly the Nansalians assented.

	Arcot came over as though to inspect the prisoner. For an instant the man was looking defiantly into Arcot's eyes—then suddenly an expression of amazement and fear crept over the man's face as his eyes remained helplessly fixed on Arcot's blazing eyes. Arcot's practice in telepathy had made him exceedingly powerful now, and the man was as helplessly bound mentally, as the lux metal bound his arms and legs.

	For a quarter of an hour Arcot stood glaring into the man's eyes. Then he turned, shook his head, and sat down, tired.

	"Some job, Morey! I am so tired you will have to tell them what I have found out I can't communicate with them. I have a terrific headache already. He was fighting me all the way, and toward the end his brain became so confused and muddled that I couldn't learn anything; he was nearly crazy, I think.

	"But Torlos was right. They were trying to get rid of both of us, and Wade and Fuller, too, for we are the only four who can operate the ship, and that ship is the only defense against them.

	"This man did not know what the new weapon is; it seems they are telling practically no one, not even their own men. But that an attack is planned, and soon, is evident. He didn't know when. We can only lie in readiness, and do everything to help these men with their work. Tell them what I have found out, will you?"

	"Arcot" said Wade, "they had a lot of workmen bring about twenty tons of lead wire on board this evening, and the distilled water tanks are full. Oxygen is plentiful, they even gave us supplies of food, such foods as we can eat, and a lot of spare parts for the ships. We are fully stocked for a long trip! We can leave any time. The Three said that it was their first consideration that we should be able to return to our homes.

	"I made up one projector, to which they can supply power from their regular power station. We didn't have enough time to make any more, but this one will be able to give the Satorians a hot time, if they come near it. As it works nicely through the magnetic wall, they have mounted it on the roof of the central building."

	Morey had been telling the Three what Arcot had learned from their Satorian prisoner, who was now unconscious. The message had made a great impression on the Nansalian council—that was evident.

	"I think we had best go back to the Ancient Mariner and get some sleep; then we will be more nearly ready for whatever may happen. We can ask Torlos to stand guard, and call us in case of attack," suggested Arcot.

	"Excellent! I feel as if I needed some sleep. These sleepless men make me feel as though I were lazy. They work for forty or fifty hours and think nothing of it. Then they sleep for five hours and they are ready for another long stretch. They certainly are some workmen!" said Fuller, yawning and stretching.

	Arcot asked Torlos if he would stand guard on the ship, while they got some much needed sleep. Torlos consented readily, with the permission of the Supreme Council.

	The Terrestrians returned to the ship under heavy guard, and each was carrying a ray pistol now.

	Gladly they threw themselves down on the bunks, taking off only the more uncomfortable articles of clothing, for they expected an attack almost momentarily.

	It was seven hours after they had gone to sleep that it came. Through the ship came the low hum that quickly rose to a dull, booming call of danger—the warning. Torlos was calling them, but already they had heard the sound as it was retransmitted to them from the loud speaker. They were dressing quickly.

-

	THE Nansalian fleet was already outside, and hard at it. The fight was on! But Arcot saw even now that the fight was one-sided in the extreme. Ship after ship of Nansal seemed to burst into sudden, inexplicable flame, and fall blazing against another of their own ships. It seemed as if some irresistible attraction was drawing one ship to the next while the Satorian ships flew far off to one side, doing nothing, it seemed, but dancing about to avoid the rays of the Nansalian ships.

	"Torlos—go out—we can work better when you are not here—you are exposed to danger of magnetic rays, which we need not fear. It will be safer, and gives us a freer hand. I don't like to make you miss this, but it's for your world!" said Arcot as he ran into the control room, where Torlos was watching anxiously, buckling his ray pistol belt about him, as he ran over, and dropped into the control seat. Torlos showed his disappointment. He wanted to be in this battle, but he realized that what Arcot said was true. These strange men with their weak, stone bones, were completely immune to the effects of the most powerful magnetic ray. Quickly he was replying, then he turned, and ran down the hall, and to the airlock, and was out

	"I'll go—may you have good luck, and wipe them out for me—I suffered with them for many years—now it is time I got a lick at them, so give them mine!"

	Outside now, Torlos was waving to him. It was sunset, and the sky was red with the blood colored light of the great day-star. Then Torlos turned, and ran quickly into the great central building and was out of sight

	Wade and Fuller were already at their ray positions, and Morey called from his in the rear that he was ready. It had required less than one minute to get into action, but in that minute the forces of Nansal were surely defeated! The ships seemed suddenly to leap up in violent glowing light then to fall swiftly toward nearby ships, and strike them with terrific force, fusing them, and crushing them, while about them flamed a great flare of light a gigantic electric discharge.

	The magnetic rays seemed helpless, and though many ships of Sator went down, more ships of the Nansalians were going, and every ship increased the odds. Whenever a Satorian ship struck, there was a great roaring column of fire, and a crashing boom of some titanic arc. Then there was a spot of fused metal.

	"They've got something!" said Arcot as he drove the Ancient Mariner up and into the battle. The molecular ray on the roof of the Central Building was useless, for their own ships were so inextricably mingled with the Satorian, that it was impossible to use it

	Arcot was at the magnetic wall now. "Hold on!" he called, and they had struck it. The ship reeled, and sank suddenly planetward. Then it was standing almost motionless, but was through the beam.

	The rooms were suddenly hot, oppressively hot and the molecular cooler was struggling to lower it "Made it!" yelled Arcot triumphantly. "The eddy currents induced in the relux wall generated a lot of heat, though!"

	They were out of the city now, and speeding toward the battle. Following the prearranged system, all the Nansalian ships retired and left Arcot with a free hand. He needed no help!

	Suddenly from the bow, a molecular ray broke out. A Satorian ship was suddenly leaping sidewards, straight for its neighbor—there was a terrific crash and the two ships fell, a molten mass of metal, while all about in the air were flying stars of burning metal. Another ray reached out, and another ship was diving. Then Wade and Fuller got together—Wade turned his molecular ray on one ship, and Fuller used the cosmic ray. Like some titanic broom they swept it about at dozens of miles a second, leaping, twisting, shooting from ship to ship, and like a snowball, it grew with each crash, till a dozen ships had fallen into it—it was a new broom, and it swept clean!

	Then a magnetic beam caught the leaping ship. Arcot had kept the Ancient Mariner leaping in a way that belied its name. The magnetic beams had been outdistanced. But suddenly the ship was caught. With a shock it slowed down at a terrific rate, then Arcot turned on more power, and magnetic beam or not he merely dragged the other ship along with him! In a second the other ship had been torn loose, and the Ancient Mariner was again sweeping about, but the mighty blazing mass of metal that had been Wade's broom, was gone, and was a glowing mass of metal on the ground.

	"We haven't seen that new weapon yet," called Morey.

	"Can't find us!" replied Arcot, for the blazing red sun lighting the ship, made it seem like a ball of fire when still, and in motion it was a mere flash of red, a streak of red light.

	Ship after ship of the Satorians was going down before the three beams of the Terrestrial ship, and the great fleet was being disintegrated like a cake of solid CO2 in a furnace, disappearing!

	Suddenly Wade cried out in surprise—ahead of them, a Satorian ship was driving at them with obvious intent to attack; if his magnetic beam caught them, and drew him to them, there would surely be a head-on collision.

	A molecular beam caught him. Another blazing wreck lay on the ground below.

	The ship was going once more, free of its enemies, for the reason that none could catch it. Time after time the ship would suddenly swing with the force of an invisible magnetic ray.

	"All rays off!" called Arcot. In an instant they were off, and the next second the Ancient Mariner had vanished.

	"A moment's rest. Feel as though I need it. They will be looking for us for a while," said Arcot, as he drove the now invisible ship up two miles above the battle. Below the Satorians were searching wildly for the ship. They knew it must be near, and feared to see it materialize directly before them with its deadly rays. For one minute Arcot hung here, while the ships below twisted and turned, wildly seeking him. Then they formed again and started for the city.

	"Our turn now!" called Arcot. The ship dropped like a plummet, and the ray operators prepared to sweep the front with their beams.

	SUDDENLY the Ancient Mariner was visible again. Simultaneously three rays leapt down and bathed the front in their pale radiance. Fuller was using a molecular ray now. The front vanished, and the line broke, attacking the ship that hung above them now. Suddenly, four magnetic beams found Arcot simultaneously. He could not pull away from all four, and it was impossible to tell what ships were sending them.

	All at once the men felt a violent electrical shock, and the air about them was filled with the blue haze of the electric weapon they had seen!

	Simultaneously, the magnetic beams left them, and they saw, behind them, and coming swiftly on, a single, Satorian ship, surrounded with that same, bluish halo of light,

	"Suicide ship! Get away, Arcot!" called Morey.

	But Arcot had already thrown every possible unit of acceleration into the attempt—there was a limit to what he could use, for they could not endure above a certain limit. The Nansalian ship was accelerating also. A molecular beam reached out and touched it. It reeled, and stopped—they were escaping. Then it was frost-covered, a ship of the dead, but still coming! Morey could not get more force from it now, for the molecules were already still. Arcot turned and went off to the right—but like a pursuing Nemesis, the strange ship came after them, in the shortest, most direct route!

	"Still coming!" called Morey in alarm.

	"He will reach us, too—it's hopeless now!" called Arcot. He put on more power, but the drag of the pursuing ship was evident now. They were rapidly nearing it, and with an ever-increasing acceleration, though they scarcely felt it. In horror Morey saw the ship rushing at them ever faster and faster—accelerating with amazing speed.

	Suddenly the two envelopes of blue light had touched—they coalesced—then Morey turned away as a great blinding arc seemed to leap from the Ancient Mariner,

* * * missing pages from pulp – approximate text filled in from Ace Books version * * *

	The men ducked automatically, and were hurled against their seat-straps with tremendous force. There was a rending, crashing roar, a sea of flame-and darkness.

They could only have been unconscious a few seconds, for when the fog went away, they could see the glowing mass of the enemy ship still falling far beneath them. The lux wall where it had hit was still glowing red.

“Morey!” Arcot called. “You all right? Wade? Fuller?"

“Okay!” Morey answered.

So were Wade and Fuller.

“It was the lux hull that saved us,” Arcot said. “It wouldn't break, and the temperature of the arc didn't bother it. And since it wouldn't carry a current, we didn't get the full electrical effect.

“I'm going to convince those birds that this ship is made of something they can't touch! Well give them a real show!"

He dived downward, back into the battle.

It was a show, all right! It was impossible to fight the Earth ship. The enemy had to concentrate four magnetic rays on it to use their electric weapon, and they could only do that by sheer luck!

And even that was of little use, for they simply lost one of their own ships without harming the Ancient Mariner in the least.

Ship after ship crumpled in on itself like crushed tinfoil or hurled itself violently to the ground as the molecular beams touched them. The Satorian fleet was a fleet no longer; it was a small collection of disorganized ships whose commanders had only one thought-to flee!

The few ships that were left spearheaded out into space, using every bit of acceleration that the tough bodies of the Satorians could stand. With a good head start, they were rapidly escaping.

“We can't equal that acceleration,” said Wade. “We'll lose them!"

“Nope!” Arcot said grimly. “I want a couple of those ships, and I'm going to get them!"

At four gravities of acceleration, the Ancient Mariner drove after the fleeing ships of Sator, but the enemy ships soon dropped rapidly from sight.

Twenty five thousand miles out in space, Arcot cut the acceleration. “We'll catch them now, I think,” he said softly. He pushed the little red switch for an instant, then opened it. A moment before, the planet Nansal had been a huge disc behind them. Now it-was a tiny thing, a full million miles away.

It took the Satorian fleet over an hour to reach them. They appeared as dim lights in the telectroscope. They rapidly became larger. Arcot had extinguished the lights, and since they were on the sunward side of the approaching ships, the Ancient Mariner was effectively invisible.

“They're going to pass us at a pretty good clip,” Morey said quietly. “They've been accelerating all this time."

Arcot nodded in agreement. “We'll have to hit them as they come toward us. We'd never get one in passing."

As the ships grew rapidly in the plate, Arcot gave the order to fire!

The molecular rays slashed out toward the onrushing ships, picking them off as fast as the beams could be directed. The rays were invisible in space, so they managed to get several before the Satorians realized what was happening.

Then, in panic, they scattered all over space, fleeing madly from the impossible ship that was firing on them. They knew they had left it behind, yet here it was, waiting for them!
“Let them go,” Arcot said. “We've got our specimens, and the rest can carry the word back to Sator that the war is over for them."

It was several hours later that the Ancient Mariner approached Nansal again, bringing with it two Satorian ships. By careful use of the heat beam and the molecular beam, the Earthmen had managed to jockey the two battle cruisers back to Nansal.

It was nighttime when they landed. The whole area a-round the city was illuminated by giant searchlights. Men were working recovering the bodies of the dead, aiding those who had survived, and examining the wreckage.

Arcot settled the two Satorian ships to the ground, and landed the Ancient Mariner.
Tories sprinted over the ground toward them as he saw the great silver ship land. He had been helping in the examination of the wrecked enemy ships.

“Have they attacked anywhere else on the planet?” Arcot asked as he opened the airlock.
Torlos nodded. “They hit five other cities, but they didn't use as big a fleet as they did here. The plan of battle seems to have been for the ships with the new weapons to hit here first and then hit each of the other cities in turn. They didn't have enough to make a full-scale attack; evidently, your presence here made them desperate.

“At any rate, the other cities were able to beat off the magnetic beam ships with the projectors of molecular beams."

“Good,” Arcot thought. “Then the Nansal-Sator war is practically over!"

* * * resume pulp version * * *

Nansalian and Satorian ship loomed about them, where tremendous energy was stored. The coils looked strangely like a series of giant doughnuts strung on huge hoops, for while the magnetic flux was almost completely within the turns of the wire, in progressing in a spiral about the toroidal form, the effect was as of one single turn in a plane at right angles, so every line of force had been taken into consideration, and the individual coils were part of a greater torus. The giant magnetic projectors, arranged about the room, dwarfed the men as they walked between them. Here and there a silent figure lay on the floor, killed painlessly and instantly by the deadly molecular ray.

-

	ANXIOUSLY Arcot threaded his way between the gigantic machines, knowing that vast magnetic fields were here, yet, because they were bound, they were harmless. He walked to where he knew the weapon they were seeking was located. He saw two huge, cubes of silver, or maybe they were but cubical boxes of silver, and about them was wrapped layer on layer of wire, in a curious manner, which, no doubt, was the true secret of the apparatus. Arcot examined it minutely, while Morey joined him. Torlos was, in the meantime, entering the captain's quarters, and removing a number of valuable papers. He knew well that there would be no plans of ships or weapons here, but he knew that the ship had left the planet under sealed orders, and he hoped to find them.

	"I think I know how—" Arcot began—then suddenly he was interrupted. The whole ship suddenly leaped violently; the machine rolled, and there was a sudden flash of light. A tremendous low rolling roar came through the open window of the ship, and a wave of heat seemed to come upon them. The great window, through which the heavy silver bar projectors were thrust, suddenly glowed red and slumped. Arcot, nearest it, dove suddenly across the room to escape an inrush of searing gas.

	"Lord—the fools! They did something over there!" Even as Arcot said it, there was a second explosion. Then a tremendous hissing and Arcot suddenly felt the great metal ship leap into the air and roll over and over. Like peas in a pod they were thrown about the engine room, wildly clutching for a hold. Their weightless condition did not relieve them of mass, and it was some time before the ship came to rest, a veritable flaming Hades. They dove quickly for the corridor and they were racing out, calling Torlos. He did not answer!

	"Out, fellows—I'll get him—one's better than three—there's going to be another explosion here, too! Tell everyone near here to beat it—magnetic field!"

	Arcot was searching for the commander's cabin. At last he found it, next to the little radio room. Torlos was lying on the wall of the ship, limp, and obviously unconscious, if not dead. Arcot bent over him—but didn't know just where his heart should be. Quickly he bent, and, struggling under his load of nearly four hundred pounds, threw the limp body to his shoulder. Thereafter, it was easy. If you believe it easy to lift a limp, unconscious man to your shoulder, one who weighs four hundred pounds, try it some time.

	With the aid of the molecular power suit, he ran lightly along the hall. It was easier to run than it might have been with a weight of about seventy pounds. Then he leaped through the window. He had been too hurried to look before leaping, and was settling already, when he saw to his astonishment that the entire outer wall of the ship was red hot and the ground beneath was dully red. The air was hot as a furnace. He did not breathe this burning air, but quickly, before he had sunk to the burning ground, turned on nearly all the power of his little unit. The powerful machine strained at the straps, and the creak of the bands seemed to indicate a prompt parting, but they held, and the two forms soared swiftly up and away from the burning ship. Arcot turned a cosmic ray upwards, and held it there, like a beacon, while he rose rapidly to nearly a mile.

	A moment after he had stopped rising, the dimly glistening bulk of the Ancient Mariner loomed up out of the night, and Arcot shut off his ray. A moment later he was in the airlock, and had lowered Torlos to the floor. Suddenly the ship rocked violently; there was a terrific explosion from below. Simultaneously there came a flash of light that was more nearly a blast. An instant later, perhaps half a second, there was a low humming roar, and the ship was suddenly sinking with astonishing speed! Fuller, at the controls, turned in more power, and the ship started up. A moment later it was all over. The outer door of the lock snapped into place, the inner opened, and Arcot and Wade bore Torlos into his bedroom. They were at a loss as to the exact measures to follow.

	"Cold water or hot, when dealing with a molecular motion man?" asked Wade, puzzled.

	"Neither, rub him and bring a bottle of amyl acetate, and a bit of butyl cyanide. If the one pleasant odor doesn't affect him, try the other. If he doesn't stir then, it's a bad case. In the meantime, I'll rub his arms," suggested Arcot Wade leaped down to the chemistry lab and returned a moment later with two small tubes. But Torlos was sitting on the edge of the low bunk, rubbing his head, and shaking it every now and again. Wade heaved a sigh of relief.

	"We thought you were gone for a while!" he said in English.

	Torlos had been picking up a few words, and understood him.

	"Sao deed Yi!" he replied smiling.

	Arcot communicated telepathically with him now. "We will leave you. You need to rest a while. I cannot give you any medicine, but we will go at once to the city!"

	Arcot and Wade left Torlos lying down. "Hello—we were mighty glad to see your signal there just now, Arcot!" called Fuller as Arcot entered the control. "Just look down there," he added, in a lower tone. The ship had dropped many feet now. They were but a short distance over the spot where Arcot had landed the two ships. The ground about there was glowing dully, and what was left of them was glowing brightly. But there were, outlined clearly against the red-hot rocks, figures that Arcot could recognize as having been human. They were grouped closely about the ships.

	"Some of the disadvantages of iron bones," he said softly.

	He realized that the ships had been in some way started by the release of the energy stored in that electrical weapon of the Satorians. This had blown up the first ship, heating, and hence volatilizing the liquid helium which was cooling the lead coils. The pressure increased and the temperature changed a little, but so long as there was liquid helium no great change could occur, save as the mounting pressure raised the boiling point. Then it had reached a point where, no matter how great the pressure, the helium was a gas and it had exploded. The coils of wire were no longer cooled. They melted instantly, and the magnetic field, with the vast amounts of energy in it was loosed, its energy forming an electric current in every conductor near it, and more dangerous, still, the straying lines of force now caught the iron bones of the unfortunate men near the red-hot ship. They had been suddenly yanked toward the destroyed and glowing ship, and—

-

	THE heat had penetrated through the second ship, volatilizing the helium there, with a similar effect. The results had been complete destruction. The ship had rolled about while they were in it, rolling nearer the blazing ruin that had been the Satorian ship. The vacuum jacket had saved it for some minutes, but the metal softened in the heat; then it had burst, and the end had come quickly. Torlos had been badly hurt by the acceleration produced by the magnetic field, despite the shielding effect of the steel walls. The walls had absorbed much of the magnetic force, but not all.

	"I can see what happened after the ships were landed—but I'd like to know how their weapons worked. They were even able to stop this ship," said Wade. "I have an idea—but I want your explanation, Arcot."

	"Well, they have something that interests me scientifically, though it is not particularly useful now. They have found a way to cut off the electrical field produced by two charges, or perhaps to direct it. They have, at any rate, succeeded in separating the atoms from some of their electrons. They merely had two charges separated. The energy required was tremendous, but they had it done on their world where they could get the energy, and then just carried it along. It was electrostatic attraction. You can see what would happen if a ship were charged negatively, and the ship next were positively charged! Have you any idea of the magnitude of those electro-static tones! One coulomb is one ampere for one second, of course. Now if one coulomb of negative charge be put on a body, placed at a distance of 300 feet from another body, with one coulomb of positive electricity, the force of attraction, varying according to EE'/d2 will be ninety billion dynes. Let us use more practical figures. Say we use the very obtainable figure of 100 coulombs on each. Then the attraction is practically one quintillion dynes. Do you know the charge on one gram molecular weight of iron ions? It is about 285,000 coulombs, and that is about two ounces of iron! You can see what a whale of an attraction that means!

	"They located one of the charges on one ship, the other on the other ship, then the attraction of the ships pulled them closer. In a short time they had come nearer—and the attraction increased. In a while it was beyond control, and then the charges leaped across, and the giant arc was formed, for those charges represented energy all right. You don't get a pull like that without having work. The energy was enough to fuse the metal, no doubt, but the ships were already falling toward each other—they met—and the result is obvious. There they lie now. They were wrecked by less than a tenth of an ounce of ions, projected by some method, and lodged on the ships. The attraction was irresistible, as we saw. Why, if we were to put two ounces of iron atoms, or ions at the north pole, and an equivalent amount of chlorine ions at the south pole, the attraction, even across that distance, would be 860 tons! 

	"So it was ions that destroyed those ships, I am sure." 

	"The whole secret of the weapon was, of course, in the method they used for keeping the charges from acting on each other in the Satorian ships. They had some trick field that did it. I am sure I don't know how it was."

	Arcot stopped. "Well—shall we go? We have done enough here for a while, I think," He paused, and looked at the still glowing wreckage on the ground.

	"We did more damage with those two ships than the Satorians did with their entire fleet," said Arcot bitterly.

	They turned and went hurriedly to the city. The magnetic wall was lowered and they entered, making their way directly to the central courtyard. They at once called a Nansalian physician to care for Torlos. He would be well in ten hours, the physician assured them.

	But Arcot was almost surprised to see that the Nansalians still thought him their greatest friend—after all the damage those ships had done! They had lost many men and many scientists. But the Nansalians were reasonable. Arcot and his party had examined their ship without any trouble; it must have been the fault of the Nansalian scientists that the ship exploded. And these Terrestrians had saved the entire city, for Torlos had rescued the orders. They were very brief; and very definite. They were to attack the cities in succession—naming the largest and most vital cities of their world—and destroy them. With the fleet wiped out, a break could be made in the magnetic wall, and they would enter—pouring down their explosives and their magnetic rays, and the electric weapon would have come into action.

	The Terrestrians were anxious to leave, but the Nansalians did everything in their power to urge them to stay.

	In the Council of the Three, Arcot was officially invited to remain with them. The fleet of molecular motion ships was nearing completion—indeed, the first of the ships was to be ready the next day—but they wanted Arcot and Morey and Fuller and Wade to remain.

	"We have a large world here, and at last we can call it ours, thanks to you. We offer to you, in the name of the people, the choice of any spot of this world. And—we give you this!" The spokesman, or thoughts-man, of the Three came forward. He had a disc-shaped plaque, perhaps three Inches in diameter, made of a deep ruby red metal. In the exact center of this was a green stone, which seemed to shine of its own accord, with a clear, pale green light; it was transparent and highly refractive. About it, as at the three points of a triangle, were three similar but much smaller green stones, There were lines engraved on the metal and the three stones were three corners of a regular tetrahedron, and the green stone, perhaps the size of a pea, was the apex, or fourth corner. There were characters engraved at each point of the tetrahedron, in the language of Nansal. And around the edge were other characters, for the disc was perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. Arcot looked at it in amazement, and turned it in his hand. On the back was a miniature map of their solar system. The center was a pale yellow stone, cut and faceted in a thousand faces, and each seemed to have a separate life. Around this were the orbits of planets, and each was marked by a little or large stone, one red, one yellow, and one white—till all of the eleven planets had been represented. Here, too, were characters.

	The Thoughtsman was holding in the palm of his hand another such disc, slightly smaller, and on it there were three green stones. One of these was a bit larger than the others, but none were as large as the apex stone on Arcot's plaque.

	"This is my badge of office as Scientist of the Three. The stone marked Science is here larger."

	"This plaque," he pointed to the disc in Arcot's hand, "is new. Henceforth, it shall be the Three, and you, or your successor, shall be the Coordinator. Your vote shall outweigh all but a unanimous vote of the Three. To you our world is answerable, for this day you have saved us.

	"And when you return, as you have promised, you shall be the Coordinator of this system!"

-

	ARCOT stood silent for a moment; this was a thing he had never thought of. He was a scientist, and knew that his ability was limited to that field. At last he smiled, and replied: "It is a great honor, and it is a great work. I cannot spend my time here always; I must return to my planet. I cannot be fairly in contact with you. I will make my first move in office now, and I suggest that this signify not the Coordinator, and first power of your country, but your First Friend, and Counselor in all things in which I can serve you. The Tetrahedron you have chosen, so let it be. The apex is out of the plane of the other points, and I am out of this universe, but there is a relationship between the points and the apex, and this relationship and these lines will exist forever.

	"We have been too busy to think of anything else as yet, but our worlds are large, and your worlds are large. Commerce can develop across the ten million light years of space as readily as it now exists across the little space of our own system. It is a journey of but five days! And later machines will make it less. Commerce will come, and with it will come close communication. I will accept this on the understanding that I am but your friend and advisor. Too great power in the hands of one man is bad. There might be an unscrupulous successor, even if you trust me wholly.

	"And I must return to my world.

	"I had intended going today. Your first ship will be ready tomorrow, and when it leaves the ways I will leave your planet, for I want to return to my world. I will return to this world, though. We are ten million light years apart, but the universe is not to be measured in space any longer, but in time. We are five days apart I am nearer to you at all times, than is Sator! I will come, and others of my race, if you wish it. But if you wish that they shall not come—they will not. I alone have the photographs of the route, and these I can lose."

	For a moment the Three spoke together. Then again the Scientist was thinking to him.

	"Perhaps you are right. It is obvious that your people know more than we. They have the molecular powers, and they do not have wars; they do not destroy each other. They must be a good race, and we have seen excellent examples in you. We ask that you come again, for we can realize your desire to return to your home. We will remember that you are not ten million light years, but five days, from our planet"

	Then plans were laid as to the things that the ships of commerce should bring. It seemed strange to be laying plans for such a trip!

	But the conference was ended, and Arcot and his friends returned to their ship. Torlos was awaiting him. Already it had been announced on the radiocast that Arcot had been given the new position, and his reply was broadcast.

	"About—haow saon you laive?" asked Torlos in his English.

	"Why—tomorrow."

	Torlos reverted to telepathy. "Arcot, I have seen my world; I have been living here. For two days it was Heaven, but Arcot, for ten long years I pictured it perfect; it is not. I have built too high an ideal, Arcot, and I want to go far away and build a new conception of my world, that I may be happy when I return. Arcot can a man of Nansal visit Earth?" Anxiously, hopefully, and hesitatingly he asked. "I can come back when you return, perhaps, or I can come with one of the commercial ships. And I think I can earn my living on your world!" He half smiled, but he was too earnest to make a perfect success, as he flexed his giant muscles. "And I would perhaps prove that what you said was true!" he added.

	Arcot was amazed. It was an idea he would very much have desired to see fulfilled, for the idea of metal-boned men, of tremendous strength, and strange molecular motion muscles—that would inspire no friendship, no feeling of kinship, but the man himself, a pleasant kindly, sincere man, an intelligent giant, he would be a far greater argument for the world of Nansal than the most vivid orator would be!

	Arcot called the rest of the men at once, and explained Torlos's plea. The vote was unanimous—let him come!

	Arcot alone proposed one difficulty. Torlos had become somewhat accustomed to Terrestrial foods, but would the long sojourn be good for him. And who could take care of him if it were not? There were no men on Earth who could treat him.

	"But," objected Torlos, with a smile, for he felt his case was won, "we will be no further from home than we were when you picked me up on Sator—no further in time!"

	"Oh—my own arguments!" grinned Arcot "Well, if you're willing to take the chance—come along!"

	The first of the molecular motion ships was ready shortly after sunrise the next day, approximately twenty-eight hours after Arcot had announced his intention of leaving when it was completed. The Ancient Mariner and many other ships were there. Arcot was aboard the new ship. He was to raise it into space. There the Nansalian operators would take it over, for they were going on the very excellent principle that if they were far enough from everything, they couldn't wreck the ship, and the meteor guard would prevent them from hitting anything dangerous out in space.

	For three hours Arcot trained one pilot. He trained him by having him land again and again on a small planet after he had learned the "feel" of the controls in open space. Then he was ready, for this one could train others. He had done his work.

	Arcot and his friends returned to Nansal now. They were to sleep once more here. Then—home!

	The sun was shining in warm light through the windows of their rooms when they woke. They could hear Torlos below. He was struggling with the English language Arcot had taught him to read. They heard him get up and move about

	"Torlos—we'll be going soon—are you all ready?" asked Arcot dressing.

	"Pearfactly, Ahcut. Tse soonah tse better."

	It was not long. The Three were there, and the Council of the Three, in the courtyard, and near them rested the graceful hull of the Nansalian molecular motion ship. It, too, was made of lux and relux, and only in its smaller size did it differ from the Ancient Mariner.

	Arcot had given them the secret of the space apparatus, but this was as yet beyond their mathematics. They had been unable to follow its development and had wisely refrained from merely aping the machine Arcot had made. They would make it theirs before they completed it

-

	FIVE hours saw them out of the galaxy. Twelve hours more and they were heading for home at full speed, well out in space.

	The universe was looming large when they next stopped for observation. Old Tharlano had guided them correctly. They were home!

The End

Invaders from the Infinite
Arcot, Morey and Wade 03
Amazing Stories Quarterly – Spring-Summer 1932

ONCE more our famous trio of scientists, Arcot, Wade and Morey, are off in interplanetary space—this time with improvements for such travel even beyond their previous hopes. And it is while they are within their own universe that a warning and a plea for help against inimical enemies comes to them from inhabitants of far-away strange worlds. There is plenty of science, adventure, thrill and excitement in this last novel-length interplanetary story by one of our masters of scientific fiction. It is provocative of thought and is thoroughly entertaining.

-

CHAPTER I - Invaders

	RUSS EVANS, Pilot 3497, Rocket Squad Patrol 34, unsnapped the belt that had held him to his seat in the weightless ship, and with a slight push floated up into the air of the room. He stretched himself, and yawned broadly.

	"Red, how soon do we eat?" he called.

	"Shut up, you'll wake the other fellows, you nut. It's hard enough getting to sleep without being waked up," replied a low voice from the rear of the little, swift patrol ship. "See anything?"

	"Yes, several million stars," replied Evans in a lower voice, rather disgustedly. "And," his tone becoming suddenly severe, "Assistant Murphy, remember your manners when talking to your superior officer. I've a mind to report you."

	A flaming head of hair topping a grinning face poked around the edge of the door. "Lower your wavelength, lower your wavelength! You may think you're a sun, but you're just a planetoid. But what I'd like to know, Chief Pilot, Russ Evans, is why they locate a ship in a forlorn, out of the way place like this. Three-quarters of a billion miles out of the planetary plane. No ships ever come out here, no pirates, not a chance to help a wrecked ship. All we can do is sit here and watch the other fellows do the work."

	"Which is exactly why we're here. Watch—and tell the other ships where to go, and when. Is that chow ready?" asked Russ looking at a small clock giving New York time.

	"Uh—think she'll be on time? Come on an' eat."

	Evans took one more look at the telectroscope screen, then snapped it off. A tiny, molecular motion, towing unit in his hand, he pointed toward the door to the combined galley and lunch room, and glided in the wake of Murphy.

	"How much fuel left?" he asked, as he glided into the dizzily spinning room. A cylindrical room, spinning at high speed, causing an artificial "weight" for the foods and materials in it, made eating of food a less difficult task. Expertly, he maneuvered himself to the guide rail near the center of the room, and caught the spiral. Braking himself into motion, he soon glided down its length, and landed on his feet. He bent and flexed his muscles, waiting for the now-busied assistant to get to the floor and reply.

	"They gave us two pounds extra. Lord only knows why. Must expect us to clean up on some fleet. That makes four pound rolls left, untouched, and two thirds of the original pound. We've been here fifteen days, and have six more to go. The main driving power rolls have about the same amount left, and three pound rolls in each reserve bin," replied Red, holding a curiously moving coffee pot that strove to adjust itself to rapidly changing air velocities as it neared the center of the room.

	"Sounds like a fleet's power stock. Martian lead or the terrestrial isotope?" asked Evans, tasting warily a peculiar dish before him. "Say, this is energy food. I thought we didn't get any more till Saturday." The change from the energy-less, flavored pastes that made up the principal bulk of a space-pilot's diet, to prevent over-eating, when no energy was used in walking in the weightless ship, was indeed a welcome change.

	"Uh-hu. I got hungry. Any objections?" grinned the Irishman.

	"None!" replied Evans fervently, pitching in with a will.

-

	SEATED at the controls once more, he snapped the little switch that caused the screen to glow with flashing, swirling colors as the telectroscope apparatus came to life. A thousand tiny points of flame appeared scattered on a black field with a suddenness that made them seem to snap suddenly into being. Points, tiny dimensionless points of light, save one, a tiny disc of blue-white flame, old Sol from a distance of close to one billion miles, and under slight reverse magnification. The skillful hands at the controls were turning adjustments now, and that disc of flame seemed to leap toward him with a hundred light-speeds, growing to a disc as large as a dime in an instant, while the myriad points of the stars seemed to scatter like frightened chickens, fleeing from the growing sun, out of the screen. Other points, heretofore invisible, appeared, grew, and rushed away.

	The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller reddish-green disc came into view—a planet, its atmosphere coloring the light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a world, a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification increased, boundlessly it seemed.

	Finally, New York spread across the screen; New York seen from the air, with a strange lack of perspective. The buildings did not seem all to slant toward some point, but to stand vertical, for, from a distance of a billion miles, the vision lines were practically parallel. Titanic shafts of glowing color in the early summer sun appeared; the hot rays from the sun, now only 82,500,000 miles away, shimmering on the colored metal walls.

	The new Airlines Building, a mile and a half high, supported at various points by actual space-ship driving units, was a riot of shifting, rainbow hues. A new trick in construction had been used here, and Evans smiled at it. Arcot, inventor of the ship that carried him, had suggested it to Fuller, designer of that ship, and of that building. The colored beryllium metal of the wall had been ruled with 20,000 lines to the inch, mere scratches, but nevertheless a diffraction grating. The result was amazingly beautiful. The sunlight, split up to its rainbow colors, was reflected in millions of shifting tints.

	In the air, supported by tiny packs strapped to their backs, thousands of people were moving, floating where they wished, in any direction, at any elevation. There were none of the helicopters of even five years ago, now. A molecular power suit was far more convenient, cost nothing to operate, and but $50 to buy. Perfectly safe, requiring no skill, every one owned them. To the watcher in space, they were mere moving, snaky lines of barely distinguishable dots that shivered and seemed to writhe in the refractions of the air. Passing over them, seeming to pass almost through them in this strange perspectiveless view from infinite altitude, were the shadowy forms of giant space liners, titanic streamlined hulls. They were streamlined for no good reason, save that they looked faster and more graceful than the more efficient spherical freighters, just as passenger liners of two centuries earlier, with their steam engines, had carried four funnels and used two. Four made it appear more powerful. A space liner spent so minute a portion of its journey in the atmosphere that it was really inefficient to streamline them.

	"Won't be long!" muttered Russ, grinning cheerily at the familiar, sunlight city. His eyes darted to the chronometer beside him. The view seemed to be taken from a ship that was suddenly scudding across the heavens like a frightened thing, as it ran across from Manhattan Island, followed the Hudson for a short way, then cut across into New Jersey, swinging over the great woodland area of Kittatiny Park, resting finally on the New Jersey suburb of New York nestled in the Kittatinies, Blairtown. Low apartment buildings, ten or twelve stories high, nestled in the waving green of trees in the old roadways. When ground traffic ceased, the streets had been torn up, and parkways substituted.

	Quickly the view singled out a single apartment, and the great smooth roof was enlarged on the screen to the absolute maximum clarity, till further magnification simply resulted in worse stratospheric distortion. On the broad roof were white strips of some material, making a huge V followed by two I's. Russ watched, his hand on the control steadying the view under the Earth's complicated orbital motion, and rotation, further corrections for the ship's orbital motion making the job one requiring great skill. The view held the center with amazing clarity. Something seemed to be happening to the last of the I's. It crumpled suddenly, rolled in on itself and disappeared.

	"She's there, and on time," grinned Russ happily.

	He tried more magnification. Could he—.

	He was tired, terribly, suddenly tired. He took his hands from the viewplate controls, relaxed, and dropped off to sleep.

	"What made me so tired—wonder—GOD!" He straightened with a jerk, and his hands flew to the controls. "Red!" he shouted. The view on the machine suddenly retreated, flew back with a velocity inconceivable. Earth dropped away from the ship with an apparent velocity a thousand times that of light; it was a tiny ball, a pinpoint, gone, the sun—a minute disc—gone—then the apparatus was flashing views into focus from the other side of the ship. The assistant did not reply. Evans' hands were growing ineffably heavy, his whole body yearned for sleep. Slowly, clumsily he pawed for a little stud. Somehow his hand found it, and the ship reeled suddenly, little jerks, as the code message was flung out in a beam of such tremendous power that the sheer radiation pressure made it noticeable. Earth would be notified. The system would be warned. But light, slow crawling thing, would take hours to cross the gulf of space, and radio travels no faster.

	Half conscious, fighting for his faculties with all his will, the pilot turned to the screen. A ship! A strange, glistening thing streamlined to the nth degree, every spare corner rounded till the resistance was at the irreducible minimum. But, in the great pilot-port of the stranger, the patrol pilot saw faces, and gasped in surprise as he saw them! Terrible faces, blotched, contorted. Patches of white skin, patches of brown, patches of black, blotched and twisted across the faces. Long, lean faces, great wide flat foreheads above, skulls strangely squared, more box-like than man's rounded skull. The ears were large, pointed tips at the top. Their hair was a silky mane that extended low over the forehead, and ran back, spreading above the ears, and down the neck.

	Then, as that emotion of surprise and astonishment weakened his will for the moment, oblivion came, with what seemed a fleeting instant of memories. His life seemed to flash before his mind in serried rank, a file of events, his childhood, his life, his marriage, his wife, an image of smiling comfort, then the years, images of great and near great men, his knowledge of history, pictures of the great war of 2074, pictures of the attackers of the Black Star—then calm oblivion, quiet blankness.

	The long, silent ship that had hovered near him turned, and pointed toward the pinhead of matter that glowed brilliantly in the flaming jewel box of the heavens. It was gone in an instant, rushing toward Sun and Earth at a speed that outraced the flying radio message, leaving the ship of the Guard Patrol behind, and leaving the Pilot as he leaves our story.

-

CHAPTER II - Canine People

	"AND that," said Arcot between puffs, "will certainly be a great boon to the Rocket Patrol, you must admit. They don't like dueling with these space-pirates using the molecular rays, and since molecular rays have such a tremendous commercial value, we can't prohibit the sale of ray apparatus. Now, if you will come into the 'workshop', Fuller, I'll give a demonstration with friend Morey's help."

	The four friends rose, Morey, Wade and Fuller following Arcot into his laboratory on the thirty-seventh floor of the Arcot Research Building. As they went, Arcot explained to Fuller the results and principles of the latest product of the ingenuity of the "Triumvirate," as Arcot, Morey and Wade had come to be called in the news dispatches.

	"As you know, the molecular rays are rays of a frequency between the shortest radio and the longest, so called heat ray or infra-reds. Their range is narrow, and they must be used and mixed correctly to have the desired effect; making all the molecules of any piece of matter they are turned upon move in the desired direction. Since they supply no new energy, but make the body they are turned upon supply its own, or better, use the energy of its own random molecular motion of heat, it was practically impossible to stop it. The energy necessary for molecular rays to take effect is so small that the usual type of filter lets enough of it pass, and the attacked ship was no better off than before; the rays simply drove the front end into the rear, or vice versa, or tore it to pieces as the pirates desired. The Rocket Patrol could kill off the pirates, but they lost so many men in the process, it was a Pyrrhic victory.

	"For some time Morey and I have been working on something to stop the rays. Obviously it can't be by means of any of the usual metallic energy absorption screens.

	"We finally found a combination of rays, better frequencies, that did what we wanted. I have such an apparatus here. What we want you to do, of course, is the usual job of re-arranging the stuff so that the apparatus can be made from dies, and put into quantity production. As the Official Designer for the A.A.L. you ought to do that easily." Arcot grinned as Fuller looked in amazement at the apparatus Arcot had picked up from the bench in the "workshop."

	"Don't get worried," laughed Morey, "that's got a lifting unit combined—just a plain ordinary molecular lift such as you see by the hundreds out there." Morey pointed through the great window where thousands of those lift units were carrying men, women and children through the air, lifting them hundreds, thousands of feet above the streets and through the doors of buildings.

	"Here's an ordinary molecular pistol; you've used them before. Try this one if you want to, and then use it when I say ready. I'm going to put the suit on, and rise about five feet off the floor. You can turn the pistol on me, and see what impression it makes on the suit."

	Fuller took the molecular ray pistol, while Wade helped Arcot into the suit. He looked at the pistol dubiously, pointed it at a heavy casting of iron resting in one corner of the room, and turned the ray at low concentration, then pressed the trigger-button. The casting gave out a low, scrunching grind, and slid toward him with a lurch. Instantly he shut off the power. "This isn't any ordinary pistol. It's got seven or eight times the ordinary power!" he exclaimed.

	"Oh yes, I forgot," Morey turned to him, and took it from him. "Instead of the fuel battery that the early pistols used, this has a space-distortion power coil. This pistol has as much power as the usual A-39 power unit for commercial work. Arcot used that pistol to show you the power of the suit."

	By the time Morey had explained the change to Fuller, Arcot had the suit on, and was floating five or six feet in the air, like a grotesque captive balloon. "Ready, Fuller?''

	"I guess so, but I certainly hope that suit is all it is claimed to be. If it isn't—well I'd rather not commit murder. All the people in the system would be howling for my corpse if I murdered the man who gave them unlimited energy and unlimited mobility!"

	"It'll work," said Arcot, a slow smile on his face. "I'll bet my neck on that!" Suddenly he was surrounded by the faintest of auras, a strange, wavering blue light, like the hazy corona about a 400,000-volt power line. "Now try it."

	Fuller pointed the pistol at the floating man and pushed the trigger. The brilliant blue beam of the molecular ray, and the low hum of the air, rushing in the path of the director beam, stabbed out toward Arcot. The faint aura about him was suddenly intensified a million times till he floated in a ball of blue-white fire. Scarcely visible, the air about him blazed with bluish incandescence of ionization.

	"Increase the power," suggested Morey. Fuller turned on more power. The blue halo was shot through with tiny violet sparks, the sharp odor of ozone in the air was stifling; the heat of wasted energy was making the room hotter. The power increased further, and the tiny sparks were waving streamers, that laced across the surface of the blue fire. Little jets of electric flame reached out along the beam of the ray now. Finally, as full power of the molecular ray was reached, the entire halo was buried under a mass of writhing sparks that seemed to leap up into the air above the man's head, wavering up to extinction. The room was unbearably hot, despite the molecular ray coolers absorbing the heat of the air, and blowing cooled air into the room.

	Fuller snapped off the ray, and put the pistol on the table beside him. The halo died, and went out a moment later, and Arcot settled to the floor.

	"This particular suit will stand up against anything the ordinary commercial sets will give. The system now: remember that the rays are short electrical waves. The easiest way to stop them is to interpose a wave of opposite phase, and cause interference. Fine, but try to get in tune with an unknown wave when it is moving in relation to your center of control. It is impossible to do it before you yourself have been rayed out of existence. We must use some system that will automatically, instantly be out of phase.

	"The Hall effect would naturally tend to make the frequency of a wave through a resisting medium change, and lengthen. If we can send out a spherical wave front, and have it lengthen rapidly as it proceeds, we will have a wave-front that is, at all points, different. Any entering wave would, sooner or later, meet a wave that was half a phase out, no matter what the motion was, nor what the frequency, as long as it lies within the comparatively narrow molecular wave band. What this apparatus, or ray screen, consists of, is a machine generating a spherical wave front of the nature of a molecular wave, but of just too great a frequency to do anything. A second part generates a condition in space, which opposes that wave. After traveling a certain distance, the wave has lengthened to molecular wave type, but is now beyond the machine which generated it, and no longer affects it, or damages it. However, as it proceeds, it continues to lengthen, till eventually it reaches the length of infra-light, when the air quickly absorbs it, as it reaches one of the absorption bands for air molecules. But, in the meantime, it has run the entire gamut of molecular waves, and any molecular wave must find its half-wave complement somewhere in that wedge of waves. It does, and is at once choked off, its energy fighting the energy of the ray screen, of course. In the air, however, the screen is greatly helped by the fact that before the half-wave frequency is met in the ray-wedge, the molecular ray meets a wave that makes it ionize the air, and most of the molecular ray is buried in ions, leaving the ray screen little work to do.

	"Now your job is to design the apparatus in a form that machines can make automatically. We tried doing it ourselves for the fun of it, but we couldn't see how we could make a machine that didn't need at least two humans to supervise."

	"Well," grinned Fuller, "you have it all over me as scientists, but as economic workers—two human supervisors to make one product!"

	"All right—we agree. But no, let's see you—Lord! What was that?" Morey started for the door on the run. The building was still trembling from the shock of a heavy blow, a blow that seemed much as though a machine had been wrecked on the armoured roof, and a big machine at that. Arcot, a flying suit already on, was up in the air, and darting past Morey in an instant, streaking for the vertical shaft that would let him out to the roof. The molecular ray pistol was already in his hand, ready to pull any beams off unfortunate victims pinned under them.

-

	IN a moment he had flashed up through the seven stories, and out to the roof. A gigantic silvery machine rested there, a huge, tapering machine, streamlined to perfection, its rounded fluted hull dazzlingly beautiful in the sunlight. A door opened, and three tall, lean men stepped from it. Already a crowd of people were collecting about the ship, flying up from below. The three men blinked in the bright sunlight, gazing in amazement at the men floating in the air, calling to each other. Air patrolmen floated up in a minute, and seeing Arcot, held the crowd back.

	The strange ship proclaimed in an instant that this was no ship of the system, and the strange men told the same story. They were tall, eight feet or more in height. Great, round, soft brown eyes looked in bewildered curiosity at the towering multicolored buildings, at the people floating in the air, at the green trees and the blue sky, the yellowish sun.

	Arcot looked at them, at their strangely blotched and mottled head and face, their arms and hands. Their feet were very long and narrow, their legs long and thin. Their faces were kindly, but bewildered now, the mottled skin, brown and white and black, seemed not to make them ugly. It was not a disfigurement; it seemed oddly familiar and natural; the pointed ears, too, seemed familiar in some reminiscent way.

	Suddenly Morey was beside Arcot, and a moment later Fuller and Wade joined him, their flying suits on at last.

	"Lord, Arcot—queer specimens, yet they seem familiar!" said Morey in an undertone.

	"Oh—no wonder! They are. Their race is that of man's first and best friend, the dog! These are canine people! See the typical brown eyes? The typical teeth, their feet now flat on the ground, still show the traces of the dog's toe-step. Their nails, not flat like human ones, but rounded? The mottled skin, the ears—look, one is advancing." Arcot spoke hurriedly.

	One of the strangers walked laboriously forward. A lighter world than Earth was evidently his home. His great brown eyes fixed themselves on Arcot's. Arcot watched them. They seemed to expand, grow larger; they seemed to fill all the sky. Arcot was curious; why was this, and why was this feeling of content.

	Suddenly realization came. Hypnotism! He concentrated his mind trained by Venerian masters, and the eyes suddenly contracted to the normal eyes of the stranger, shrank even more, the man reeled back, as Arcot's telepathic command to sleep came, stronger than his own will. The stranger's friends caught him, shook him, but he slept. One of the others looked at Arcot, his eyes seemed hurt, desperately pleading.

	Arcot strode forward, and quickly brought the man out of the trance. He shook his head, smiled at Arcot, then, with desperate difficulty, he enunciated some words in English, terribly distorted.

	"Ahy wizz tahk. Vokle kohds ron. Tahk by breen."*(*"I wish (to) talk. Vocal cords wrong. Talk by brain.")

	Puzzled, Arcot repeated the words to himself, turning to Morey for assistance in deciphering the meaning. Wade finally got it, and explained what they meant. Instantly Arcot turned to the speaker, and without hypnotism, communicated by the Venerian method, telepathically.

	"Good enough. When you attempted to hypnotize me, I didn't know what you wanted, and knowing nothing of your mission, I naturally determined to overcome you. It is not necessary to hypnotize one to carry on communication by the method of the second world of this system. What brings you to our system? From what system do you come? What do you wish to say?"

	The other, not having learned the Venerian system, had great difficulty in communicating his thoughts, but Arcot learned that they had machines which would make it easier, and the Terrestrian invited them into his laboratory, for the crowd was steadily growing.

	The three returned to their ship for a moment, coming out with several peculiar headsets. Almost at once the ship started to rise, going up more and more swiftly, as the people cleared a way for it.

	Then, in the tiniest fraction of a second, the ship was gone; it shrank to a point, and was invisible in the blue vault of the sky.

	"Apparently they intend to stay a while," said Wade. "They are trusting souls, for their line of retreat is cut off. We naturally have no intention of harming them, but they can't know that."

	"I'm not so sure," said Arcot. He turned to the apparent leader of the three men of another world, and explained briefly that there were several stories to descend, and stairs were harder than a flying unit. "Wrap your arms about my legs, when I rise above you, and hold on till your feet are on the floor again," he concluded.

	The stranger walked a little closer to the edge of the rising shaft, and looked down. White bulbs illuminated its walls down its length to the ground. The man talked rapidly to his friends, looking with evident distaste at the shaft, and the tiny pack on Arcot's back. Finally, shaking his shoulders a little, and smiling, he evinced his willingness. Arcot rose, the man grasped his legs, and then both rose. Over the shaft, and down to his laboratory was the work of a moment. Morey and Wade followed immediately with the other two, Fuller coming down just behind them. In common with most people unfamiliar with the operation of the molecular lift-suits who are thus given a lift, the three dropped when they came within a foot or so of the floor, with the natural result that the terrestrians, who had carried them, had about two hundred and fifty pounds excess lift, and fell heavily to the ceiling. However, as Arcot had expected it, he had warned the others, and no heads were bumped. An inverted fall can be a mean thing. The head and neck practically always get the full force of the blow, which may be several times heavier than a fall under gravity, for the acceleration produced by a molecular lift is easily greater than g.

-

	ARCOT lead them into his "consultation room," where a number of comfortable chairs were arranged, facing each other. He seated them together, and his own friends facing them. He left the room, explaining that he was going to call his father.

	In less than three minutes both were back, Arcot junior having already explained as much as he knew of his guests.

	"Friends of another world," began Arcot, Jr., when they were finally seated, "we do not know your errand here, but you evidently have good reason for coming to this place. It is unlikely that your landing was the result of sheer chance. What brought you? How came you to this point?"

	"It is difficult for me to reply. First we must be en rapport. Our system is not simple as yours, but more effective, for yours depends on thought ideas, not altogether universal. Place these on your heads, for only a moment. I must induce temporary hypnotic coma. Let one try first if you desire." The leader of the visitors held out one of the several headsets they had brought, caplike things, made of laminated metal apparently.

	Arcot took it, and was ready to slip it on, when his father stopped him. "They may mean well, and yet it may turn out that what is their meat is our poison. That may ruin your mind. Don't."

	Arcot hesitated, then with a grin slipped it on. "I think they are friends, and I think they know what they are talking about."

	"Relax," came a voice in Arcot's head, a low, droning voice, a voice of command. "Sleep," it added. Arcot felt himself floating down an infinite shaft, on some super flying suit that did not pull at him with its straps, just floating down lightly, down and down and down. Suddenly he reached the bottom, and found to his surprise that it led directly into the room again! He was back. "You are awake. Speak!" came the voice.

	Arcot shook himself, and looked about. A new voice spoke now, not the tonelessly melodious voice, but the voice of an individual, yet a mental voice. It was perfectly clear, and perfectly comprehensible. "We have traveled far to find you, and now we have business of the utmost import. Ask these others to let us treat them, for we must do what we can in the least possible time. I will explain when all can understand. I am Zezdon Fentes, First Student of Thought. He who sits on my right is Zezdon Afthen, and he beyond him, is Zezdon Inthel, of Physics and of Chemistry, respectively."

	And now Arcot spoke to his friends. "These men have something of the greatest importance to tell us, it seems. They want us all to hear, and they are in a hurry. The treatment isn't at all annoying. Try it. The man on the extreme right, as we face them, is Zezdon Fentes of Thought, Zezdon apparently meaning something like professor, or 'First Student of'. Those next him are Zezdon Afthen of Physics and Zezdon Inthel of Chemistry."

	Zezdon Afthen offered them the headsets, and in a moment everyone present was wearing one. The process of putting them en rapport took very little time, and shortly all were able to communicate with ease.

	"Friends of Earth, we must tell our strange story quickly for the benefit of your world as well as of ours, and others, too. We bring news of a menace of cosmic proportions of an enemy that we cannot so much as annoy. We are helpless to combat them.

	"Our world lies far out across the galaxy. It is the planet of a sun somewhat larger than yours, but our scientists have for many years observed your sun with great interest, longing always to reach it and investigate it—for we are your twin! Our race lives on a world that owes its existence to your sun, as your planet owes its being to our sun! Our two suns passed each other at close range in the ages long, long passed, and they drew—but I see that you know the story of the formation of planets from suns. At any rate, our worlds are twins. The outer worlds of our system show chemical substances not found on the inner worlds, for the planetary filament was mixed, the substance of the two suns joining and forming the great filament. Always your sun has been of interest to us, and to the Ancient Masters before us. The Ancient Masters learned the secret of space travel, but never could they make a machine capable of traversing the 250,000 light years that separate the worlds once so close—many times in the ages past so close. In another hundred million years perhaps—then we will be next door neighbors. But even with incalculable velocity of the great swift thing that bore us, three long months have we traveled toward your distant worlds, hoping against hope that we would find the aid we needed, hoping that at last the Invaders might meet their masters.

	"We landed on this roof, Arcot, because we examined mentally the knowledge of a pilot of one of your patrol ships. His mind told us that here we would find the three greatest students of Science of this Solar System. So it was here we came for help," explained Zezdon Afthen in reply to Arcot's previous question.

	"Our race has arisen," he continued, "as you have so surely determined, from the race you call canines. It was artificially produced by the Ancient Masters when their hour of need had come. We have lost the great science of the Ancient Ones. But we have developed a different science, a science of the mind."

	"Dogs are far more psychic than are men. They would naturally tend to develop such a civilization," said Arcot senior judiciously.

-

CHAPTER III - A Quarter of a Million Light Years

	"OUR civilization," continued Zezdon Afthen, "is built largely on the knowledge of the mind. We cannot have criminals, as your world unfortunately has, for the man who plots evil, is surely found out by his thoughts. We cannot have lying politicians and unjust rulers. Our government must be just and honest, and there can be no wars.

	"It is a peaceful civilization. The Ancient Masters feared and hated War with a mighty aversion. But they did not make our race cowards, merely peaceful intelligence. Now we must fight for our homes, and my race will fight mightily. But we need weapons.

	"But my story has little to do with our race. I will tell the story of our civilization and of the Ancient Ones later when the time is more auspicious.

	"Four months ago, our mental vibration instruments detected powerful emanations from space. That could only mean that a new, highly intelligent race had suddenly appeared within a billion miles of our world. The directional activity-locating devices quickly spotted it as emanating from the third, and largest planet of our system. Zezdon Fentes, with my aid, set up some special apparatus, and invented the greatest wonder our world has known. He has discovered a way of so heterodyning a thought vibration of the order of the—. But you do not know all of thought. Never mind that. But he invented a machine that makes thought visible.

	"With it we could see not only what the enemy looked upon, but what he saw in that curious thing, the eye of the mind, the vision of the past and the future. It was an immense labor, possible only because the men stayed on that world for a long time. But finally it was finished. We had a machine which would pick up strong thoughts and make them visible. You who know so little of thought and so much of the forces of space cannot appreciate what it was. But it was a wonder to us. We had thought-amplification devices, and we could pick up those distant thoughts. We could have made them visible, those thought of those men, if only we could get them separated.

	"It was done finally, when all but one man slept. That one we were enabled to tune sharply to. After that we could reach him at any time. He was the commander. We saw him operate the ship, we saw the ship, saw it glide over the barren, rocky surface of that world. We saw other men come in and go out. They were strange men. Short, squat, bulky men. Their arms were short and stocky. But their strength was enormous, unbelievable, We saw them bend solid bars of steel as thick as my arm, with perfect ease!"

	"Their brains were tremendously active, but they were evil, selfishly evil. Nothing that did not benefit them counted. At one time our instruments went dead, and we feared that the commander had detected us, but we saw what happened a little later. The second in command had killed him, blasting a little hole, the diameter of a pencil of your world, through his head. A ray—some shining bright ray that I cannot understand.

	"We saw them examine the world, working their way across it, wearing heavy suits, yet, for all the terrific gravity of that world, bouncing about like rubber balls, leaping and jumping where they wanted. Their legs would drive out like pistons, and they soared up and through the air.

	"They were tired while they made those examinations, and slept heavily at night. There was little thought, save of the morrow.

	"Then one night there was a conference. We saw then what they intended. Before we had tried desperately to signal them. Now we were glad that we had failed.

	"We saw their ship rise (in the thoughts of the second in command) and sail out into space, and rush toward our world. The world grew larger, but it was only dimly, imperfectly sketched in, for they did not know our world well. Their telescopes did not have great power as your electric telescopes have.

	"We saw them investigate the planet, but there were no people. Then there were people on it, and they destroyed the people with either a ray which was as follows: 'the ray which makes all parts move as one', or another which was: 'the ray which is light of very great brightness or speed of rotation'. We could not understand and could not interpret. Thoughts beyond our knowledge have, of course, no meaning, even when our mental amplifiers get them, and bring them to us."

	"The Molecular ray and the Cosmic Ray!" gasped Morey in surprise. "They will be an enemy."

	"You know it! It is familiar to you! You have it? You can fight it?" asked Zezdon Afthen excitedly.

	"We know it, and can fight it, if that is all they have."

	"They have more—much more I fear," replied Zezdon Afthen hopelessly. "At any rate, we saw what they intended. If our world was inhabited, they would destroy every one on it, and then, from somewhere across the void, other men of their race were to float in on their great ships, and settle on that largest of our worlds.

	"We had to stop them, so we did what we could. We had powerful machines, which would amplify and broadcast our thoughts. That seemed the only way we could get them in our power. Certainly, as they came near our world, they would see our cities and become careful, perhaps not land at any point. So we broadcast our thought-waves, and implanted in the mind of their leader that it would be wise to land, even if the world were inhabited, and learn the extent of the civilization, and the weapons to be met. Also, as the ship drew nearer, we made him decide on a certain spot we had prepared for him.

	"He never guessed that the thoughts were not his own. Only the ideas came to him, seeming to spring from his own mind. Thought is a mysterious thing, and only the greatest experts can determine successfully whether their thoughts are their own, or ideas supplied by others. He never guessed it.

-

	"HE landed—and we used our one weapon. It was a thing left to one group of rulers when the Ancient Masters left us to care for ourselves. What it was, we never knew; we had never used it in the fifteen thousand years since the Great Masters had passed—never had to. But now it was brought out, and concealed behind great churned piles of rock in a deep cañon, where the ship of the enemy would land soon. When it landed, we turned the strange beam of the machine on it, and the apparatus rotated it swiftly, and a cone of the beam's ray was formed as the beam was swung through a small circle in the vertical plane. The machine leaped backwards, and though it was so massive that a tremendous amount of labor had been required to bring it there, the push of the pencil of force we sent out hurled it back against a rocky cliff behind it as though it were some child's toy. It continued to operate for perhaps a second, perhaps two. In that time two great holes had been cut in the enemy ship, holes fifteen feet across, that ran completely through the hull, as though a die had cut through the metal of the ship, cutting out a disc of metal.

	"There was a terrific concussion, and a roar as the air blasted out of the ship. The huge discs of metal were hurled across the canon by the escaping air, and struck the wall with terrific force, splintering the solid rock to sand, yet not so much as scratching those glass-like discs.

	"Relux-coated lux I should say, eh Arcot?" muttered Morey.

	"Probably. Go on Zezdon Afthen."

	"You know of that, too?" Zezdon asked, eagerly glad of their knowledge.

	"To continue; the material we did not know, but it did not take us long to discover that the enemy were dead. Their terrible, bloated corpses lay everywhere in the ship. Most of the men we were able to recognize, having seen them in the mentovisor. But the colors were distorted, and their forms were peculiar. Indeed, the whole ship seemed strange. There was a weird unreality about it, an impression I could not understand. The only time that things ever did seem normal about that strange thing, when the angles of it seemed what they were, when the machines did not seem out of proportion, out of shape, twisted, was when on a trial trip we ventured very close to our sun."

	Arcot whistled softly and looked at Morey. Morey nodded. "Probably right. Don't interrupt."

	"That you thought something, I understood, but the thoughts themselves were hopelessly unintelligible to me. You know the explanation?" asked Zezdon Afthen eagerly.

	"We think so. The ship, which you captured, was evidently made on a world of huge size. Those men, their stocky, block legs and arms, their entire build and their desire for the largest of your planets, would indicate that. Their own world was probably even larger—they were forced to wear pressure suits even on that large world, and could jump all over, you said. On so huge a sphere as their native world seems to be, the gravity would be so intense as to distort space. Geometry, such as yours seems to be, and such as ours was, could never be developed, for you assume the existence of a straight line, and of an absolute plane surface. These things cannot exist in space, but on small worlds, far from the central sun's mass, the conditions approach that without sufficient discrepancy to make the error obvious. On so huge a globe as their world, perhaps as large as our sun, the space is so curved that it is at once obvious that no straight line exists, and that no plane exists. Their geometry would never be like ours, nor like yours. When you went close to your sun, the attraction was sufficient to curve space into a semblance of the natural conditions on their home planet, then your senses and the ship met a compromise condition which made it seem more or less normal, not so obviously strange to you.

	"But continue," Arcot looked at Afthen interestedly.

	"There were none left in their ship now, and we had been careful in locating the first hole, that it should not damage the propulsive machinery. The second hole was accidental, due to the shift of the machine. The machine itself was wrecked now, for it had been crushed by its own reaction. We forgot that any pencil of force powerful enough to do what we wanted, would tear the machine from its moorings unless fastened with great steel bolts into the solid rock.

	"The second hole had been far to the rear, and had, by ill-luck, cut out a portion of the driving apparatus. It was, to us, irreplaceable. We could not repair that, though we did succeed at last in lifting the great discs into place. We attempted to cut them, and put them back in sections. Our finest saws and machines did not nick them. Their weight was unbelievable, and yet we finally, with terrible labor in that forsaken place, far from machine shops, succeeded in lifting the things into the wall of the ship. The actual missing material did not represent more than a tiny cut, perhaps as wide as one of your credit-discs. You could slip a thin piece of metal in between them, but not so much as your finger.

	"Those slots we welded tight with our best steel, letting a flap hang over on each side of the cut, and as the hot metal cooled, it was drawn against the shining walls with terrific force. A softer metal with a higher melting point had been put in first, and this yielded under the pressure, and flowed into the slight holes like a grommat. The joints were perfectly airtight.

	"The machines proper were repaired to the greatest possible extent. It was a heart-breaking task, for we must only guess at what machines should be connected together. Much damage had been done by the rushing air as it left, for it filled the machines, too, and they were not designed to resist the terrific air pressure that was on them when the pressure in the ship escaped. Many of the machines had been burst open, and these we could repair when we had the necessary elements and knew their construction from the remnants, or could find unbroken duplicates in the stock rooms.

	"Once we connected the wrong things. This will show you what we dealt with. They were the wrong poles—two generators, connected together in the wrong way. There was a terrific crash when the switch was thrown, and huge sheets of electric flame lept from one of them. Two men were killed, incinerated in an instant, even the odors one might expect were killed in that flash of heat. Everything save the shining metal and clear glass within ten feet of it was instantly wiped out. And there was a fuse link that gave. The generator was ruined. One was left, and several small auxiliary generators.

	"Eventually, the Lord of Space alone knows how, we did the job. We made the machine work. And we are here."

	Zezdon Afthen paused; he looked tired now.

	"I will continue," said Zezdon Fentes. "We have come to warn you, and to ask aid. You can see that we need aid. But now the warning to you. Your system also has a large planet, slightly smaller than the largest of our system, but yet attractive. There are approximately 50,000 planetary systems in this universe, according to the records of the Invaders. Their world is not of this system. It is the World Thett, sun Antseck, Universe Venone. Where that is, or even what it means, we do not know. Perhaps you understand.

	"But they investigated your world, and its address, according to their records, was World 3769-8482730-3. This, I believe, means, Universe 3769, sun 8482730, world 3. They have been investigating this system now for nearly three centuries. It was close to 200 years ago that they visited your world—two hundred years of your time."

	"This is 2129—which makes it about the year 1929-30 that they floated around here investigating. Why haven't they done anything?" Arcot asked him.

	"They waited for an auspicious time. They are waiting for some weapon. They are afraid now, for recently they visited your world, and were utterly amazed to find the unbelievable progress your people have made. They intend to make an immediate attack on all worlds known to be intelligently populated. They had made the mistake of letting one race learn too much, they cannot afford to let it happen again.

	"There are only twenty-one inhabited worlds known, and their thousands of scouts have already investigated nearly all the central mass of this universe, and much of the outer rings. They have established a base in this universe. Where I do not know. That, alone, was never mentioned in the records. But of all peoples, they feared only your world.

	"There is one race in the universe far older than yours, but they are a sleeping people. Long ago their culture decayed. Still, now they are not far from you, and perhaps it would be worth the few days needed to learn more about them. We have their location and can take you there. Their world circles a dead star—"

	"Not any more," laughed Morey grimly. "That's another surprise for our friends, the enemy. They had a little jog, and they certainly are wide awake now. They are headed for big things, and they are going to do a lot."

-

	"BUT how do you know these things? You have ships that can go from planet to planet, I know, but the records of the enemy said you could not leave the system of your sun. They alone knew that secret."

	"Another surprise for them. We can—and we can move faster than your ship, if not faster than they. The people of the dead star have moved to a very live star—Sirius, the brightest in our heavens. And they are as much alive now as their new sun. They can move faster than light, also. I don't know how, yet. We had a little misunderstanding a while back, when their star passed close to ours. They came off second best, and we haven't spoken to them since. But I think we can make valuable allies there.

	"But continue," for all Morey's jocular manner, he realized the terrible import of this announcement. A race which had been able to cross the vast gulf of inter-galactic space in the days when Terrestrians were still developing the airplane—it had just been invented then, back in 1930, and already they had mapped Jupiter, and planned their colonies! When the submarine was still an important instrument of war! What developments had come? They had molecular rays, cosmic rays, the energy of matter, then—what else had they now? Lux and Relux, the two artificial metals, made of solidified light, far stronger than anything of molecular structure in nature, absolutely infusible, totally inert chemically, one a perfect conductor of light and of all radiation in space, the other, from its very name, indicated a perfect reflector of all radiations—save molecular rays. Made into the condition of reflection by the action of special frequencies in its formation from light, molecular frequencies were, unfortunately, able to convert it into perfectly transparent lux metal, when the protective value was gone.

	They had that. All Earth had, perhaps.

	"There was one other race of some importance, the others were semi-civilized. They rated us in a position between these races and the high races—yours, those of the dead star, and those of world 3769-37:478:326:-894-6. Our science had been investigated during the time of—an ancient ruler. You had best merely know it as two hundred or so years ago.

	"This other race was at a great distance from us, greater than yours, and apparently not feared as greatly as yours. They cannot cross to other worlds, save in small ships driven solely by fire, which the Thessians have called a 'hopelessly inefficient and laughably awkward thing to ride in'."

	"Rockets," grinned Morey. "Our first ship was part rocket."

	Zezdon Fentes smiled. "But that is all. We have brought you warning, and our plea. Can you help us?" His thoughts were anxious for his people, as they came clearly to the men seated before him.

	"We cannot answer that. The Interplanetary Council must act. But I am afraid that it will be all we can do to protect our own world if this enemy attacks soon, and I fear they will. Since they have a base in this universe, it is impossible to believe that all ships did not report back to the home world at stated intervals. That one is missing will soon be discovered, and it will be sought. War will start at once. Three months it took you to reach us—they should come soon. Three months those men who left will be on their way back to the home world from which they came—from your world. What do you call your planet, friend?"

	"Ortol is our home," replied Zezdon Inthel.

	"At any rate, I can only assure you that your world will be given weapons that will permit your people to defend themselves as well as our own people can defend themselves, and I will get you to your home within twenty-four hours. Your ship—is it in the system?"

	"It waits on the second satellite of the fourth planet," replied Zezdon Afthen.

	"Signal them, and request them to land where a beacon of intense light, alternating red and blue, reaches up from—this point on the map." Arcot pointed out the spot in Vermont where their private lake and laboratory were. Here the larger scale experiments were carried out. Here the first molecular motion ship of earth had been built. Here the Solarite, first of the interplanetary ships had been launched. Here the Ancient Mariner, the first intergalactic ship of Earth—of this universe—had been built.

	"We will leave you now. No, come with us," Arcot turned to the others, and in rapid-fire English, he explained his plans.

	"We need the help of these people as much as they need ours. Dad, you can better speak to the authorities. I think Zezdon Afthen—no better Zezdon Fentes—will stay here and help you. The others will go with us to their world. There we shall have plenty of work to do, but on the way we are going to stop at Mars and pick up that very valuable ship of theirs and make a very careful examination for possible new weapons, their system of speed-drive, and their regular space-drive, if it is not the same. I'm willing to make a bet right now, that I can guess both. Their regular drive is a molecular drive with lead disintegration apparatus for the energy; cosmic ray absorbers for the heating, and a drive much like ours. Their speed drive is a time distortion apparatus, I'll wager. It would be very natural for men on so huge a world to become acquainted early with the intricacies of dimensional space. Time distinction offers an easy solution of speed. All speed is relative—relative to other bodies, but also to time-speed. But we'll see.

	"I'm going to hustle some workmen to installing the biggest spare power board I can get into the storerooms of the Ancient Mariner, and pack in a ray-screen. It will be useful. Let's move."

	"Our ship," said Zezdon Afthen," will land in three of your hours."

-

CHAPTER IV - The First Move

	THE Ortolians were standing in silent awe on a low, green-clad hill. Below them stretched the green flank of the little rise, and beyond lay ridge after ridge of the broad, smooth carpet of the beautiful Vermont hills. Little narrow valleys ran between mountains that extended back in serried ranks, while over their haze-blued masses a great ball of red fire sank behind the green curtain of the mountains. Little white clouds, stained with delicate rose, floated in a sky that was deep azure.

	"Man of Earth," said Zezdon Afthen turning at last to Wade, who stood behind him. "It took us three months of constant flight at a speed unthinkable, through space dotted with the titanic gems of the Outer Dark, stars gleaming in red, and blue and orange, some titanic lighthouses of our course, others dim pinpoints of glowing color. It was a scene of unspeakable grandeur, but it was so awesomely mighty in its scope, one was afraid, and his soul shriveled within him as he looked at those inconceivable masses floating forever alone in the silence of the inconceivable nothingness of eternal cold and eternal darkness. One was awed, suppressed by their sheer magnitude. A magnificent spectacle truly, but one no man could love.

	"Now we are at rest on a tiny pinpoint of dust in a tiny bit of a tiny corner of an isolated universe, and the magnitude and stillness is gone. Only the chirpings of those strange birds as they seek rest in darkness, the soft gurgling of the little stream below, and the rustle of countless leaves, break the silence with a satisfying existence, while the loneliness of that great star, your sun, is lost in its tintings of soft color, the fleeciness of the clouds, and the seeming companionship of green hills.

	"The beauty of boundless space is awe-inspiring in its magnitude. The beauty of Earth is something man can love.

	"Man of Earth, you have a home that you may well fight for with all the strength of your arms, all the forces of your brain, and all the energies of Space that you can call forth to aid you. It is a wondrous world." Silently he stood in the gathering dusk, as first Venus winked into being, then one by one the stars came into existence in the deepening color of the sky.

	"Space is awesomely wonderful; this is—lovable." He gazed long at the heavens of this world so strange, so beautiful to him, looking at the unfamiliar heavens, as star after star flashed into the constellations so familiar to terrestrians and to those Venerians who had been above the clouds of Venus' eternal shroud.

	"But somewhere off there in space are other races, and far beyond the power of our eyes to see is the star that is the sun of my world, and around it circles that little globe that is home to me. What is happening there now? Does it still exist? Are there people still living on it? Oh, Man of Earth, let us reach that world quickly, you cannot guess the pangs that attack me, for if it be destroyed think—forever I am without home—without friends I knew. However kind your people may be to me, I would be forever lonely.

	"I will not think of that—only it is time your ship was ready, is it not?"

	"I think we had better return," replied Wade softly, his English words rousing thoughts in his mind intelligible to the Ortolians.

	The three rose in the air on the molecular suits and drove quickly down toward the blue gem of the lake to the east, nestled among still other green hills. Lights were showing in the great shop, where the Ancient Mariner was being fitted with the ray-shields, and all possible weapons. Men streaming through her were hastily stocking her with vast quantities of foods, stocks of fuel, all the spare parts they could cram into her stock rooms.

	When the men arrived from the hilltop, the work was practically done, and Wade stepped up to Morey, busily checking off a list of required items.

	"Everything you ordered came through?" he asked.

	"Yes—thanks to Dad, and to the 'pull' of a two-billion dollar private fortune. Who says credit-units don't have their value? This expedition never would have gotten through, if it hadn't been for that. We succeeded in ditching two big orders in the process. Ganymede Mining lost some time—and they are already howling. So is Martian Lead—which is very sad.

	"But we have the main space distortion power bank, and the new auxiliary coils full. Ten tons of lead aboard for fuel. Installed the ray screens, and have arranged so that the power tube banks that push them can be switched by relays from the control room almost instantly to ray power tubes. They all operate molecular rays as powerful as any known tube can handle. That's one thing we are afraid of. If the enemy have a system of tubes that is able to handle more power than our last tube—we're sunk. These brilliant people that suggest using more tubes to a ray-power bank forget the last tube has to handle the entire output of all the others, and modulate it correctly. If the enemy has a better tube—it will be too bad for us." Morey was frankly worried.

	"My end is all set, Morey. How soon will you be ready?" Arcot asked.

	" 'Bout ten-fifteen minutes, I guess, Arcot." Morey lit an imported Venerian cigarette and watched as the last of the stuff was carried aboard, checking his list as load after load was carried in by molecular handler machines.

	At last they were ready, some five minutes before Morey had assigned as the time for departure. The Ancient Mariner, originally built for intergalactic exploration, was kept in working condition, and used frequently, for whenever Arcot or Morey wanted to go to one of the other planets, they had used this large ship, for it could exceed the speed of light, and in it the trip to Venus, or even the plutium or element 103 mines of Pluto were but a few minutes from Vermont. New apparatus had been incorporated in it, as their research had led to improvements, and it was constantly in condition, ready for a trip. Many exploration trips to the nearer stars had already been made.

-

	ZEZDON AFTHEN was intensely interested in learning the mechanism of the ship, but Arcot had asked him to wait for the explanation till they had left Earth and were under way. There was so much to do in the meantime.

	The ship was backed out from the hangar now, and rested on the great smooth landing field, its tremendous quarter million ton mass of lux and relux sinking a great, smooth depression in the turf of the field. They were waiting now for the arrival of the Ortolian, or better, Thessian ship. Zezdon Afthen assured them it would be there in a few minutes.

	The field was brightly lit now, and the great beacon was stabbing its brilliant rays of red and blue far into the clear night sky, the rays almost invisible, for the air was unusually clear now.

	High in the sky, came the whining whistle of an approaching ship, coming at terrific velocity. It came nearer the field, darting toward the ground at an unheard of speed, flashing down at a speed of well over three thousand miles an hour, and, only in the last fifty feet slowed with a sickening deceleration. Even so it landed with a crash of fully two hundred miles of speed. Arcot gasped at the terrible landing the pilot had made, fully expecting to see the great hull dent somewhat, even though made of solid relux. And certainly the jar would kill every man on board. Yet the hull did not seem harmed by the crash, and even the ground under the ship was but slightly disturbed, though, at a distance of some thirty feet, the entire block of soil was crushed, and cracked by the terrific impact of hundreds of thousands of tons striking with terrific energy.

	"Lord, it's a wonder they didn't kill themselves. I never saw such a rotten landing," exclaimed Morey with disgust, himself one of the best pilots of Earth.

	"Don't be too sure. I think they landed gently, and at very low speed. Notice how little the soil directly under them was dented?" replied Arcot, walking forward. "They have time control, as I suspected. Ask them. They drifted in gently. Their time rate was speeded up tremendously, so that what was hundreds of miles per hour to us was feet per minute to them. But come on, get the handlers to bring that junk up to the door—they are coming out." One of the tall, kindly-faced canine people was standing in the doorway now, the white light streaming out around him into the night, casting a grotesque shadow on the landing field, for all the flood lights bathing it.

	Zezdon Afthen came up, and spoke quickly to the man evidently in command of the ship. The entire party went into the ship, and the "junk" Arcot had referred to, the cream of their laboratory instruments, was brought in by men operating handlers, little molecular motion ships, with powerful clamps and chains and magnets to lift almost any load short of a space ship. One of these machines could easily lift a load of a thousand tons, and float it where it was wanted. Yet they measured but five by two by three feet, and were controlled by men walking or flying beside them, holding the long flexible control cable.

	For three long hours Arcot and Morey and Wade worked at the apparatus in the ship, measuring, calculating, observing, following electrical and magnetic and sheer force hook-ups of staggering complexity, hidden behind great switchboards that had to be cut open many times to reach the apparatus behind. They were not trying to find the exact method of construction, interested only in the principles involved, so that, with the data they collected here, they could perform calculations of their own, and duplicate or better the results of the enemy with apparatus designed by them. Thus they would be far more thoroughly familiar with the machinery when done.

	Little attention was paid to the actual driving plant, for the Terrestrians quickly learned that it was purely molecular drive with the same type of lead-fuel burner they used in their own ship. The tubes of the power bank were, however, a puzzle to them. They were made of relux, so that it was impossible to see the interior of the tube. To open one was to destroy it, but calculations made from readings of their instruments, showed that they were more efficient, and could readily carry nearly half again the load that the best terrestrian tubes could sustain. This meant the enemy could send heavier rays and heavier ray screens.

	But finally they returned to the Ancient Mariner, and as the Ortolian ship whined its way out to space, the Ancient Mariner started, rising faster and faster through the atmosphere till it was in the night of space. Then the molecular power was shut off, as the ship was pointed toward the far distant star of Ortol at Zezdon Afthen's instructions, or better, toward the landmark that would guide them. The ship suddenly seemed to writhe, space was black and starless about them, then sparkling weirdly distorted stars, all before them. They were moving, flashing by already. Almost before the Ortolians fully realized what was happening, a dozen stars had swung past the ship, driving on now at better than five light years in every second. At this speed, approximately fourteen hours would be needed to reach Ortol. The time could be spent in discussion, explanation, and calculation on the results they had obtained in investigating the Ortol ship.

	"Now, Arcot, perhaps you will explain to me the secret of this ship," said Zezdon Afthen at last, turning from the great lux pilot's window, to Arcot seated in the pilot's chair. "But I know beforehand that only the broadest principles will be intelligible to me, for I could not understand that ship we captured, after almost four months of study. Yet it crept through space at the veriest snail's pace compared with this ship. Certainly no ship could outdistance this in a race!" he smiled.

	"As a matter of fact—watch!" Arcot pushed a little metal button along a slide to the extreme end. Again the ship seemed to writhe. Space was no longer black, but faintly gray, and beside them, on either side, floated two exact replicas of their ship! In amazement Zezdon Afthen stared. But in another moment, both were gone, and space was black, yet in but a few moments a grayness was showing, and light was appearing from all about, growing gradually in intensity. For perhaps three seconds Arcot continued thus, then he pulled the metal button down the slide, and flicked over another that he had pulled to cause the second change. The stars were again before them, their colors changed beyond all recognition at that speed. But the orientation of the stars behind them had been familiar. Now an entirely different set of constellations showed.

	"I merely opened the ship out to her maximum speed for a moment. I was able to see any large star 2000 light years in our path, and there were none. Small stars do not bother us as I will explain. When I put on full power of the main power coils, I drove the ship up to a speed of 30 light years a second. When I turned in the full power of the auxiliary coils as well I doubled the power, and the speed was multiplied by eight. The result was that in the four seconds of racing, we made approximately 1000 light years!"

	Zezdon Afthen gasped. "Two hundred and forty light years per second!" he paused in bewilderment. "Suppose we had struck a small sun, a dark star, even a meteor at that speed? We would have been—The Great Will alone knows what would have been the result!"

	"No, I know the result," smiled Arcot, "otherwise I wouldn't have done it. The chances are excellent that we plowed through more than one meteor, more than one dark star, and more than one small sun.

	"But this is the secret: the ship attains the speed only by going out of space. Nothing in space can attain the speed of light, save radiation! Nothing in normal space. But, we alter space, make space along patterns we choose, and so distort it that the natural speed of radiation is enormously greater. In fact, we so change space that nothing can go slower than a speed we fix.

	"Morey—show Afthen the coils, and explain it all to him. I've got to stay here."

-

	AT Arcot's suggestion, Morey rose, and diving through the weightless ship, went down to the power room, and back to the coil room, Zezdon Afthen following. Here, giant pots five feet high were stocked in close packed rows. The "pots" contained specially designed coils storing tremendous energy, the energy of four tons of disintegrated lead, in the only form that energy may be stored, as a strain, or distortion in space. These charged coils distorted only the space within themselves, making a closed field entirely within themselves. But in the exact gravitational center of the quarter of a million ton ship was a single high coil of different design that distorted space around it, as well as the space within it. This, as Morey explained, was the control that altered the constants of space to suit. The coils were charged, and the energy stored. Their energy could be pumped (by the use of other energy) into the big coil, and then, when the ship slowed to normal space, could be pumped back to them. The pumping energy, as well as any further energy needed for recharging the coils could be supplied by three huge power generators.

	"These energy-producers," explained Morey, hesitating to call an apparatus designed to convert the energy of lead, or matter, into electrical energy an "energy-producer,"

	"work on a principle known for hundreds of years on Earth, but not applied till Arcot thought up this thing. Lead, when reduced to a temperature approaching absolute zero as closely as, for instance, liquid helium, has no electrical resistance. In other words, no matter how great a current is sent through it, there is no resistance, and since r is zero in formula for the heat produced in a resisting wire, I2r, no heat is produced to raise the temperature. What we do is to send a powerful current through a lead wire. The wire has a current density so huge that the atoms are destroyed, and the protons and electrons coalesce into pure radiant energy. Since the mass, of a proton and an electron is very nearly the mass of a cosmic ray proton, cosmic rays are given off. Relux, under the influence of a magnetic field, converts cosmic rays directly into electrical potential in a way as yet scarcely explained, apparently—well, lux metal is transparent, and like all transparent substances does not conduct electricity by metallic conduction. But relux is not transparent; it is reflective, and for some unknown reason, transmits electricity. However, not being an electric substance, but made of light photons bound by their own weight, or mass-attraction, it can scarcely transmit electrons. Apparently it transmits the spatial strain that is an electric current. Remember that electricity travels at 186,000 miles per second, yet electrons cannot travel anywhere near that speed, and, as a matter of fact, travel slowly. In fact, under ordinary conditions, the drift speed of electrons carrying current in an electric wire is of the order of—about the length of my arm per second. Of course, in the lead wire in the generators, due to the enormous current density, the drift speed is enormous, which causes the destruction of matter.

	"Yet with so low a speed of electrons, electricity moves at the speed of radiation along the wire! The answer is that some spatial force moves along the wire. Relux will conduct that spatial strain also, and without resistance. Furthermore, the combination of cosmics and magnetic field produces that force in relux. Thus we can convert lead directly to cosmics, and cosmics directly to electricity. Electricity we can convert to the spatial strain in the power coils, and thus the ship is driven." Morey pointed out the huge molecular power cylinder overhead, where the main power drive was located in the inertial center of the ship, or as near as the great space coil would permit. Explaining to him how the directed molecules confined in the tank, helium in this case, supplied the power when heated, he pointed out the matter-destroying apparatus at the end of the cylinder where cosmics were thrown on the relux plate which alone could stand their destructive power, and converted by it into pure heat, which the helium molecules absorbed, and used to drive the ship.

	The smaller power units for vertical lift, and for steering, were in the side walls, hidden under heavy walls of relux.

	"The projectors for throwing molecular and cosmic rays are on the outside of course. Both of these projectors are protected, both against cosmic rays and molecular rays. The walls of the ship are made of an outer wall of heavy lux metal, a vacuum between, and an inner wall of heavy relux. The lux is stronger than relux, and is therefore used for an outer shell. The inner shell of relux will reflect any dangerous cosmics, and serve to hold the heat in the ship, since a perfect reflector is a perfect non-radiator. The vacuum wall is to protect the occupants of the ship against any undue heat. If we should get within the atmosphere of a sun, it would be disastrous if the physical conduction of heat were permitted, for though the relux will turn out any radiated heat, it is a conductor of heat, and we would roast almost instantly. These artificial metals are both absolutely infusible and non-volatile. The ship has actually been in the limb of a star, and a star tremendously hotter than your sun or mine. We have made several trips to the sun, actually descending into the great sunspots for investigation. Once one started to close in over us, and we had to escape into artificial space.

	"Now you see why it is we need not fear a collision with a small sun, meteor or such like. Since we are in our own, artificial space, we are alone, and there is nothing in space to run into. But, if we enter a huge sun, the terrific gravitational field of the mass of matter would be enough to pull the energy of our coil away from us. That actually happened the time we made our first inter-galactic exploration. But it is almost impossible to fall into a large star—they are too brilliant in general, and only in very, very, very rare cases are invisible. It was one of those impossibly rare cases we struck. We never did succeed in convincing astronomers we did. It will be some 50,000,000 years before the visual proof reaches Earth. By that time we won't be worrying about it," grinned Morey.

	"And every second we speak here, we move five light years further? Nearly 30,000,000,000,000 miles each single second?" Zezdon Afthen was looking out through the small lux window to the strange space about them.

	"That's about right I think," replied Morey.

	"But how did the ship we captured operate?" asked Zezdon Fentes, who had come in shortly after Morey had begun his explanations.

	"It was a very ingenious system, very closely related to ours, really.

	"We distort space and change the velocity characteristics; in other words, we distort the rate of motion through distance characteristics of normal space. The Thessian ships work on the principle of distorting the rate of progress through time instead of through space.

	"Velocity is really 'units of travel through space per unit of travel through time'. Now if we make the time unit twice as great, and the units traveled through space are not changed, the velocity is twice as great. That is, if we are moving five light-years per second, make the second twice as long and we are moving ten light years per double-second. Make it ten thousand times as long, and Ave are traveling fifty thousand light years per ten-thousand-seconds. This is the principle—but there is a drawback. We might increase the velocity by slowing time passage, that is, if it takes me a year for one heart-beat, two years to raise my arm thus, and six months to turn my head, if all my body processes are slowed down in this way, I will be able to live a tremendous length of time, and though it takes me two hundred years to go from one star to another, so low is my time rate that the two hundred years will seem but a few minutes. I can then make a trip to a distant star—one five light years distant let us say, in three minutes to me. I then will say, looking at my chronometer (which has been similarly slowed) 'I have gone five light years in three minutes, or five thirds light years per minute. I have exceeded the speed of light'.

	"But people back on Earth would say, he has taken two hundred years to go five light years, therefore he has gone at a speed one fortieth of that of light, which would be true—for their time rate.

	"But suppose I can also speed up time. That is, I can live a year in a minute or two. Then everyone else will be exceedingly slow. The ideal thing would be to combine these two effects, arranging that space about your ship will have a very rapid time rate, ten thousand times that of normal space. Then the speed of radiation through that space will be 1,860,000,000 miles per second, and a speed of 1,000,000,000 miles per second would be possible, but still you, too, will be affected, so that though the people back home will say you are going far faster than light, you will say 'No, I am going only 100,000 miles per second'.

-

	"BUT now imagine that your ship and surrounding space for one mile is at a time rate 10,000 times normal, and you, in a space of one hundred feet within your ship, are affected by a time rate 1/10,000 that, or normal, due to a second, reversing field. The two fields will not fight, or be mutually antagonistic; they will merely compound their effects. Result: you will agree that you are exceeding the speed of light!

	"Do you understand? That is the principle on which your ship operated. There were two time-fields, overlapping time-fields. Remember the terrible speed with which your ship landed, and yet there was no appreciable jar according to the men? The answer of course was, that their time rate had been speeded enough, due to the fact that one field had been completely shut off, the other had not.

	"That is the principle. The system is so complex, naturally, that we have not yet learned the actual method of working the process. We must do a great deal of mathematical and physical research.

	"Wish we had it done—we could use it now," mused the Terrestrian.

	"We have some other weapons, none as important, of course, as the molecular ray and the cosmic ray. Or none that have been. But, if the enemy have ray shields, as I am sure they must have, then perhaps these others also will be important. There are molecular motion guns, metal tubes, with molecular director apparatus at one end. A metal shell is pulling the power turned on, and the shell leaps out at a speed of about ten miles per second—since it has been superheated—and is very accurately aimed, as there is no terrific shock of recoil to be taken up by the gun.

	"But a more effective weapon, if these men are as I expect them to be, will be a peculiarly effective magnetic field concentrator device, which will project a magnetic field as a beam for a mile or more. How useful it will be—I don't know. See, that tremendously heavy mounting up there is one of the three beam projectors aboard. They are connected with the power coils which permits us to build an enormous field in an exceedingly short time. An attractive force of as high as fifty thousand g*(*The letter g indicates the acceleration of gravitation of the earth. It is expressed in feet per second or other dimensions, such as centimeters per second.) can be created on a piece of soft iron.

	"But—we don't know what the enemy will turn against us?"

-

CHAPTER V - Ortol

	SHORTLY after Morey's explanation of the ship was completed, Wade took Arcot's place at the controls, while Morey and Arcot slept. The day of Ortol was close to fifty hours, so that many hours more would pass before the Ortolians would be tired.

	When Arcot rose after four hours intensified sleep under the new drug, morcon, and Morey a few moments later, they retired to the calculating room to do some of the needed mathematics on the time-field investigation.

	Their work continued here, while the Ortolians prepared a meal and brought it to them, and to Wade. When at last Ortol, and the sun of Ortol was growing before them, Arcot took over controls from Wade once more. Slowing their speed to less than fifty times that of light, they drove on. The attraction of the giant sun was draining the energy from the coils so rapidly now, that at last Arcot was forced to get into normal space, while the planet was still close to a million miles from them. Morey was showing the Ortolians the operation of the telectroscope and had it trained now on the rapidly approaching planet. It was difficult to keep it trained on the planet in question as the ship moved and turned slightly under the complex attraction of planets and sun. But the planet was easily enlarged to a point where the features of continents were visible. Minutes sped as they neared, and finally, wholly within the gravitational field of Ortol, the ship steadied. The magnification was increased till cities were no longer blurs, but truly cities.

	Suddenly, as city after city was brought under the action of the machine, the Ortolians recognizing them with glad exclamations, one swept into view—and as they watched, it leapt into the air, a vast column of dust, then, twisting, whirling, it fell back in utter, chaotic ruin.

	"Thestis—my wives—my children—" Zezdon Fentes staggered back from the screen in horror.

	"Arcot—drive down—increase your speed—the Thessians are there already and have destroyed one city," called Morey sharply. "Hang on Afthen." Then men grasped handholds, while they secured themselves with heavy belts, as the deep toned hum of the warning echoed through the ship. A moment later they staggered under an acceleration of four gravities. Space was dark for the barest instant of time, and then there was the terrible, screaming hum of atmosphere split as the ship rocketed through the air of the planet at nearly fifteen hundred miles per second. The outer wall was blazing in incandescence in a moment, and the heavy relux screens seemed to leap into place over the windows as the blasting heat, radiated from the incandescent walls, flooded in. The telectroscope was sadly handicapped now, for the walls protecting the view-elements were white hot. Arcot was controlling the ship by his view plates. The space distortion had thrown them to the planet, nearly a million miles, in so brief a time that the ship had but started to slow under the reserve acceleration, and now the millions of tons pressure of the air on the nose of the ship would have brought it to a stop in an instant, had it not been that the molecular drive was on at full power, driving the ship against the air resistance, and still losing. The ship slowed swiftly, but was shrieking toward the destroyed city at terrific speed.

	Zezdon Fentes sat in his chair, his chaotic thoughts thrown into the surrounding space hindering the others. Zezdon Afthen reached over and removed the headset from him.

	"Hesthis—to the—right and ahead. That would be their next attack," said the Ortolian. Arcot, catching the thought, altered the ship's course, and they shot toward the distant city of Hesthis. They were slowing perceptibly, and yet, though the city was half around the world, they reached it in half a minute. Now Arcot's wizardry at the controls came into play, for by altering his space field constants, he succeeded in reaching a condition that slowed the ship almost instantly to a speed of but a mile a second, yet without apparent deceleration.

	High in the white Ortolian sky was a shining point bearing down on the now-visible city. Arcot slanted toward it, and the approaching ship grew like an expanding rubber balloon.

	A ray of intense, blindingly brilliant light flashed out, and a gout of light appeared in the center of the city. A huge flame, bright blue, shot heavenward in roaring heat.

	"Cosmic—turn the atoms of the soil into hydrogen, and it's burning," snapped Morey in response to Afthen's question.

	Arcot was in action. In an infinitesimal time he had slowed the ship to a speed of a few hundred miles per hour when it was possible to turn in a reasonable circle. The Thessian ship had spotted them, though Arcot had tried the invisibility apparatus, without much hope, confessedly. Seeing that a strange ship had arrived was enough for the Thessians, and they turned, and drove at Arcot instantly. The Thessian ship was built for a heavy world, and for heavy accelerations in consequence, and, as they had found from the captured ship, it was infinitely stronger than the Ancient Mariner. Now the Thessians were driving at Arcot with an acceleration and speed that convinced him dodging was useless. Suddenly space was black around them, the sunlit world was gone.

	"Wonder what they thought of that!" grinned Arcot, Wade smiled grimly.

	"It's not what they thought, but what they'll do, that counts. That, and what we'll do,"

	Arcot came back to normal space, just in time to see the Thessian ship spin in a quick turn, under an acceleration that would have crushed a human to a pulp. Again the pilot dived at the Terrestrian ship. Again it vanished. Twice more he tried these fruitless tactics, seeing the ship loom before him—bracing for the crash—then it was gone instantaneously, and though he sailed through the spot he knew it to have occupied, it was not there. Yet an instant later, as he turned, it was floating, unharmed, exactly where his ship had passed!

	Rushing was useless. He stood, and prepared to give battle. A molecular ray reached out—and disappeared in flaring ions on a shield utterly impenetrable in the ionizing atmosphere.

	Arcot meanwhile watched the instrument of his shield. The Thessian shield would have been impenetrable, but his shield, fed by less efficient tubes, was not, and he knew it. Already the terrific energy of the Thessian ray was noticeably heating the copper plates of the tube. The seal would break soon,

	Another ray reached out, a ray of flaring light, Arcot, watching through the "eyes" of his telectroscope viewplates, saw it for but an instant, then the "eyes" were blasted, and the screen went blank.

	"Trying cosmics. He won't do anything with that, but burn out eyes," muttered the Terrestrian. He pushed a small button when his instruments fold him the cosmics were off. Another scanner came into action, and the viewplate was alive again.

	Arcot shot out a cosmic ray himself, and swept the Thessian with it thoroughly. For the instant he needed the enemy ship was blinded. Immediately the Ancient Mariner dove, and the automatic ray-finders could no longer hold the rays on his ship. As soon as he was out of the deadly molecular ray he shut off his screen, and turned on all his molecular rays. The Thessian ship, their own ray on, had been unable to put up their screen, as Arcot was unable to use his ray with the enemy's ray forcing him to cover with a shield,

-

	ALMOST at once the relux covering of the Thessian ship shone with characteristic iridescence as it changed swiftly to lux metal. The molecular ray blinked out, and a ray screen flashed out instead. The Thessians were covering up. Their own rays were useless now. Though Arcot could not hope to destroy their ray shield, they could no longer attack his, for their rays were useless, and already they had lost so much of the protective relux, that they would not be so foolhardy as to risk a second attack of the ray. Arcot kept one ray on them at low power, Their screen was flaming in ions, for "low" power meant power of the order of 10,000 kilo-watts.

	Arcot continued to bathe the ship in cosmics, keeping their "eyes" closed. As long as he could hold his barrage on them, they would not damage him.

	"You've got him tied—what are you going to do with him?" asked Morey, suddenly coming in. "Sort'a got the bear by the tail." Arcot didn't answer. He was busy with switches. 

	Finally he answered: "Morey—get into the power room, strap onto the board. Throw all the power-coil banks into the magnets. I may burn them out, but I have hopes—." Arcot already had the generators going full power, charging the power coils.

	Morey dived. Almost simultaneously the Thessians succeeded in the manoeuver they had been attempting for some time. There were a dozen cosmic rays flaring wildly from the ship, searching blindly over the sky and ground, hoping to blindly stumble on the enemy ship, while their own ship dived and twisted blindly. Arcot was busily dodging the sweeping rays, but finally one hit his viewplates, and his own ship was blind. Instantly he threw the ray screen out, cutting off his own molecular ray. His own cosmics he set rotating in cones that covered the three dimensions—save below, where the city lay. Immediately the Thessian had retreated to this one segment where Arcot did not dare throw his own rays. The Thessian cosmics continued to make his relux screens necessary, and his ship remained blind.

	His ray screen was showing signs of weakening. The Thessians got a third ray into position for operation, and opened up. Almost at once the tubes heated terrifically. In an instant they would give way. Arcot threw his ship into space, and let the tubes cool under the water jacket. Morey reported the coils ready as soon as he came out of space.

	The cosmics, in all probability, would not be bathing the ship when he came back to normal space, for it is utterly impossible for anyone or any machine to locate an invisible machine from a swiftly moving ship when it is flying in air, with no possible-landmarks near. Further, their ship moved somewhat, due to its centrifugal force about the planet, since it was now cut off from the planetary gravity.

	Arcot cut in the new set of eyes, put up his molecular ray screen again, with the cooling solution once more at -37° C. flowing over the tubes. Then he cut the energy back to the coils.

	Half a mile below the enemy ship was vainly scurrying around an empty sky. Wade laughed at the strange resemblance to a puppy chasing its tail. The Ancient Mariner was utterly lost to them.

	"Well, here goes the last trick," said Arcot grimly. "If this doesn't work, they'll probably win, for their tubes are better than ours, and their cosmics are just as good, and they can maneuver faster. By win I mean force us to let them attack Ortol. They can't really attack us, artificial space is a perfect defense."

	Arcot's molecular ray apprized the Thessians of his presence once more. Their screen flared up once more. Arcot was driving straight toward their ship as they turned. He snapped the relux screens in front of his eyes an instant before the enemy cosmics reached his ship. Immediately the heavy thud of four heavy relays rang through the ship. The quarter of a million ton ship leaped forward under a terrific acceleration, and then, as the four relays cut out again, the acceleration was gone. The screen regained life as Arcot opened the shutters. Before them, still directly in their path, was the huge Thessian ship. But now its screen was down, the relux iridescent in decomposition. It was falling, helplessly falling to the rocky plateau seven miles below. Its cosmic rays reached out even yet—and again the Ancient Mariner staggered under the terrific pull of some acceleration. The Thessian ship lurched upward, and the cosmic ray seemed to explode, a terrific concussion came, and the entire neighborhood of that projector disappeared in a flash of radiation.

	Arcot drove the Ancient Mariner down beneath the Thessian ship in its long fall, and with a powerful molecular beam ripped a mighty chasm in the deserted plateau. The Thessian ship fell into a quarter mile rift in the solid rock, smashing its way through falling debris. A moment later it was buried beneath a quarter mile of broken rock as Arcot swept a molecular beam about with the grace of a mine foreman filling breaks.

	An instant later and a cosmic ray followed the molecular in dazzling brilliance. A terrific gout of light appeared in the barren rocks. It flared white, and great blue flames of burning hydrogen reached up, thick, black vapor rolled up to condense in dust of rock in the air. In ten minutes the plateau was a white hot cauldron of molten rocks, glowing now against a darkening sky. Night was falling.

	"That ship," said Arcot with an air of finality, "will never rise again."

-

CHAPTER VI - The Second Move

	WELL the Terrestrians knew, that that ship would never rise again, but after it another would come, and then more—and more. "What happened to him though, Arcot. I haven't yet figured it out. He went down in a heap, and he didn't have any power. Of course, if he had his power he could have pulled out again. He could just melt that rock again, and rise out of it. Go take a bath in the sun, and burn all the excess rock off, and he would be all set. The sun wouldn't bother that lux metal any, nor would the molten rock. But his rays all went dead. How come? Even his power—and why the explosion?" asked Wade, bewildered.

	"The magnetic beam is the answer. Think—in our boat we have everything magnetically shielded, because of the enormous magnetic flux set up by the current flowing from the storage coils to the main coil, so the magnetic rays of our iron-boned friends of Nansal and Sator didn't in the least hinder us. But—with so many wires heavily charged with current, what would have happened if they had not been shielded?

	"If a current cuts across a magnetic field a side thrust is developed. What do you suppose happened when the terrific magnetic field of the beam and the currents in the wires of their power-board were mutually opposed?" asked Arcot.

	"Lord, it must have ripped away everything in the ship. It'd tear loose even the lighting wires!" gasped Wade in amazement.

	"But if all the power of the ship was destroyed in this way, how was it that one of their rays was operating as they fell?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"Each cosmic ray is a power plant in itself," explained Arcot, "and so it was able to function. I do not know the cause of the explosion, though it might well have been that they had light-bombs such as the Kaxorians of Venus have," he added, thoughtfully.

	They landed, at Zezdon's advice, in the city that their arrival had been able to save. This was Ortol's largest city, and their industrial capital. Here, too, was the University at which Afthen taught. Hesthis was the Chicago of Ortol, their largest city, and most important industrial city. Chicago's position had been won by its central location with air, land and water facilities at hand. It was in the center of the richest continent of Earth.

	Hesthis was located on a huge river which gave the city access to land, river and ocean. Flying was still a rudimentary art on Ortol. Their machines were but half a century old in their development, and capable of little more than six hundred miles per hour at best, and their cruising speed was held down to approximately three hundred miles. Therefore, the air was not as yet important.

	They landed here, and Arcot, Morey and Wade, with the aid of Zezdon Afthen and Zezdon Fentes worked steadily for two of their days of fifty hours each, teaching men how to make and use the molecular ships, and the rays and screens, the cosmics, and relux. But Arcot promised that when he returned he would have some weapon that would bring them certain and easy salvation. He said "when," but his thought came near to being "if." In the meantime other terrestrians would follow him.

	They left the morning of their third day on the planet. A huge crowd had come to cheer them on their way as they left, but it was the "silent cheer" of Ortol, a telepathic well-wishing.

	"Now," said Arcot as their ship left the planet behind, "we will have to make the next move. It certainly looks as though that next move would be to the still-unknown race that lives on world 3769-37,478,326,894-6. Evidently we will have to have some weapon they haven't, and I think that I know what it will be. Thanks to our trip out to the Islands of Space."

	"Shall we go?"

	"I think it would be wise," agreed Morey.

	"And I," said Wade. The Ortolians agreed, and so, with the aid of the photographic copies of the Thessian charts that Arcot had made, they started for world 3769-37,478,326,894-6.

	"It will take approximately twenty-two hours, and as we have been putting off our sleep with drugs, I think that we had better catch up. Wade, I wish you'd take the ship again, while Morey and I do a little concentrated sleeping. We have by no means finished that calculation, and I'd very much like to. We'll relieve you in five hours."

	Wade took the ship, and following the course Arcot laid out, they sped through the void at the greatest safe speed. Wade had only to watch the view-screen carefully, and if a star showed as growing rapidly, it was proof that they were near, and nearing rapidly. If large, a touch of a switch, and they dodged to one side, if small, they were suddenly plunged into an instant of unbelievable radiation as they swept through it, in a different space, yet linked to it by radiation, not light, that were permitted in.

	"How is it," he asked of Zezdon Afthen who had elected to stay with him, "that Zezdon Fentes so quickly forgot his loss?" The promptness with which Zezdon Fentes had put behind him the loss of his family had been rather a disappointment to the terrestrian. The canines are an affectionate and faithful race, and that one could be so apparently forgetful rather piqued Wade, as it did the other terrestrians.

	"That, my friend, is a thing that has evidently rather bothered you of Earth. Affection we have, you know; it as a characteristic of our race—affection and loyalty.

	"But you know of lower members of our race, dogs, who have lain starving on their masters' graves. Affection—uselessly and senselessly applied. Is it not equally useless and senseless to mourn for the dead wife or the dead children when we reach a higher stage? To forget them—that would be insulting to their memory. But to mourn them with useless, senseless loss of health and balance is also insulting, not only to their memory, but to the race.

	"No, we have a better way. Fentes, my very good friend, has not forgotten, nor have you forgotten the death of your mother, whom you loved. But you no longer mourn her death with a fear and horror of that natural thing, the Eternal Sleep. Time has softened the pain.

	"If we can do the same in five minutes instead of five years, is it not better? That is why Fentes has forgotten."

	"Then you have aged his memory of that event?" asked Wade in surprise.

	"That is one way of stating it," replied Zezdon Afthen seriously.

	"But you spoke of his wives. Your customs are polygamous?"

	"It was a custom given us by the Ancient Masters. Always we attempt to improve our race. On our world we have neither prison nor police force. We have no criminals. We waste no foolish sympathy and we divert no productive energy to caring for the defects nature puts among us—the mistakes Nature inflicts on us.

	"If we have a criminal, a murderer, one who becomes insane, it shows an inherent weakness. Certainly we want none such in our world. He is removed, painlessly, and the minds of all who knew him, or loved him, are aged, as you put it. His children, if he has any, may not propagate. His parents, if they are still young may not propagate further. It probably seems cruel to you, to whom the right to reproduce is inviolate—but you were evolved in a haphazard accidental manner by Nature. We were a scientifically evolved race, such an imposed breeding of our own stock seems but natural and right to us.

	"Similarly, at the high end, the best of our men are permitted two or more wives, the wives being selected as most suited to them, in every way physically and mentally their equals. It improves our race. With astounding rapidity we are advancing. We have bred solely for psychic powers I fear, and the result has been a rather poor showing for our race in mechanical and physical scientific lines. But we are correcting our mistake.

	"So Zezdon Fentes, as the first Student of Thought, had five wives. He had seventeen children I believe. It was a great loss to him, and to our world, for all of the women were very brilliant students of Physics. It is not the last of these losses, nor the only one, I fear."

	"I am afraid I will have to agree with you," said Wade sorrowfully.

-

	"BUT tell me," he asked curiously, "if such a system of artificial marriages is satisfactory. Are not the parties to such an agreement frequently mutually distasteful?"

	"Oh, that problem was easily solved. For instance, my first wife was but seventeen—twenty-one of your years old—when I married her, and she was very much in love with a young man of Art. He was a genuine genius, and has since been given three wives, yet my wife, with her ability in the natural sciences, was certainly far more valuable to our race if mated with some one of similar taste and temperament. Therefore her love for the artist was blanked, and aged, then a feeling of the obvious unfitness of the thing was impressed upon her mind. Then, both her mind and mine were made to conform for domestic happiness, without our knowing for whom we were being fitted. Doubtless the 'chance' meeting that brought us together first was arranged." He smiled whimsically.

	"A most wonderful woman she is, and she has always been my ideal. At that," he smiled, "it may be that it was at that impressioning that her picture was given to my hand. I do not know. And why worry, we seek only happiness in this world, and if happiness is found with her, as it is, why worry if it is at the will of another? If another has made me love her—what matter? I love her as truly as any man of your world may love the woman of his choice. The love may have been induced—but it is love we seek, not its reason.

	"But with the other wives, it is always a great problem. Out of fairness, the love for the first wife is always made the deepest, yet for each there is a great and sincere love. It is a thing natural to our inheritance and I know my wives never have the jealous quarrels I see your mind pictures," he finished with a smile.

	"It isn't safe thinking things around you," laughed Wade. "Just the same, all of this has made me even more interested in the 'Ancient Masters' to whom you so frequently refer. Who were they?"

	"The Ancient Ones," began Zezdon Afthen slowly, "were men such as you are. They, too, descended from a primeval arboreal omnivorous mammalian, an animal very closely related to your race. Evidently the tendency of evolution on any planet is approximately the same with given conditions.

	"The race existed as a distinct branch of what you call the primate family for approximately 1,500,000 of your years before any noticeable culture was developed. Then it existed for a total of 1,525,000 years before extinction. With culture and learning they developed such marvelous means of killing themselves that in twenty-five thousand years they succeeded perfectly," he said ironically. Ten thousand years of barbaric culture—I need not relate it to you, five thousand years of the medieval culture, then five thousand years of true culture, true civilization. They developed science, they learned to harness nature.

	"They learned to fly through space very shortly after, and nearly populated three worlds; two were fully populated, one was still under colonization when the great war broke out. It started over a silly thing. So wise as the Ancient Ones were—it seems impossible. It actually started because one man's hand slipped—one minor official of a large transportation company. One transport going from Ortol to Selto was nearing another coming from the colony on Thenton. The colony was a settlement of Selto. The Ortolian ship was drawing past the slightly slower moving Thentian ship. Then—a meteor appeared. The Ortolian pilot saw it, turned to avoid it. The Thentian pilot was but recently inaugurated as a licensed pilot. He was nervous in juxtaposition to the swiftly moving mass of the other ship, and at the sudden movement he pushed the wrong control—and some few escaped in the life tanks. Guard ships picked them up.

	"An interplanetary situation developed. Selto blamed Ortol for the destruction of their ship and the loss of many lives. Ortol, willing to admit that no one was to blame at first, now decried the Thentian pilot.

	"So it started. An interplanetary war is not a long drawn out struggle. The science of any people so far advanced as to have interplanetary lines is too far developed to permit any long duration of war. Selto declared war, and made the first move. They attacked, and destroyed the largest city of Ortol of that time. Ortolian ships drove them off, and in turn attacked Selto's largest city. Twenty million intelligences, twenty million lives, each with its aims, its hopes, its loves and its strivings—gone in four days.

	"The war continued to get more and more hateful, till it became evident that neither side would be pacified till the other was totally subjugated. So each laid his plans, and laid them to wipe out the entire world of the other.

	"Selto sent a ship, a tiny scout plane, and it headed toward one of the great camps where the last of Ortolians were staying. Ortolian ships attacked it, and the pilot, diving to escape their attack, crashed blindly into a mountainside. A soft explosion blew the ship to pieces and scattered it broadside. I say soft, because it was not a sharp, true explosion, but more the sudden release of pressure, such as an exploding tank would give. But Ortol had succeeded in destroying the ship, whatever its foolhardy mission, and in the meantime their own scientists were busy. They had constructed a ray machine, a huge projector, powerful enough to send its beam to the distant planet, Selto, then less than 72,000,000 of your miles away. It was a ray of light that made things not happen," explained Zezdon Afthen, his confused thoughts clearly indicating his own uncertainty.

	" 'A ray of light that made things not happen'," repeated Wade curiously. "A ray, which prevented things, which caused processes to stop—The Negrian Death Ray!" he exclaimed as he suddenly recognized, in this crude and garbled description of its powers, the Negrian ray of anti-catalysis, a ray which tended to stop the processes of life's chemistry and bring instant, painless death.

	"Ah, you know it, too?" asked the Ortolian eagerly. "Then you will understand what happened. The ray was turned first on Selto, and as the whirling planet spun under it, every square foot of it was wiped clean of every living thing, from gigantic Welsthan to microscopic Ascoptel, and every man, woman and child was killed, painlessly, but instantly.

	"Then Thenten spun under it, and all were killed, but many who had fled the planets were still safe—many?—a few thousand.

-

	"THE day that Thenten spun under that ray, men of Ortol began to complain of disease—men by the thousands, hundreds of thousands. Every man, every woman, every child was afflicted in some way. The diseases did not seem all the same. Some seemingly died of a disease of the lungs, some went insane, some were paralyzed, and lay helplessly inactive. But most of them were afflicted by a terrible, loathsome disease, and they died like flies, for it was exceedingly virulent, and the normal serums were helpless. So swift was its work, no new serums could be made in time.

	"Communication was established with the few Seltonians, and now all realized the terrible thing they had done. The Seltonians expressed their willingness to aid in any way they could, and told the Ortolians how to make the serums. But before any quantity was made, nearly all the population, all but a slender remnant had died, either of starvation through paralysis, none being left to care for them, or from the disease itself, while thousands who had gone mad were painlessly killed.

	"The Seltonians came to Ortol, and the remaining Ortolians, with their aid, tried to rebuild the civilization. But what a sorry thing! The cities were gigantic, stinking, plague-ridden morgues. And the plague broke among those few remaining people. The Ortolians had done everything in their power with the serums—but too late. The Seltonians had been protected with it on landing—but even that was not enough. Again the wild fires of that loathsome disease broke out.

	"Since first those men had developed from their hairy forbears, they had found their eternal friends were the dogs, and to them they turned in their last extremity, breeding them for intelligence, hairlessness, and resemblance to themselves. The Deathless ones alone remained after three generations of my people, but with the aid of certain rays, the rays capable of penetrating lead for a short distance, and most other substances for considerable distances." X-rays, thought Wade. "Great changes had been wrought. Already they had developed startling intelligence, and were able to understand the scheme of their Masters. Their feet and hands were being modified rapidly, and their vocal apparatus was changing. Their jaws shortened, their chins developed, the nose retreated.

	"Generation after generation the process went on, While the Deathless Ancient Ones worked with their helpers, for soon my race was a real helping organization.

	"But it was done. The successful arousing of true love-emotion followed, and the unhappy days were gone. Quickly development followed. In five thousand years the new race had outstripped the Ancient Masters, and they passed, voluntarily, willingly joining in oblivion the millions who had died before.

	"Can you appreciate their loneliness, Earth Man? Can you picture the thousands of long, bleak years with their race dead, knowing that for all eternity they could never live again? That only through our race could they leave their mark? Five thousand long years of work, solitary hopeless work, longing always to join those who had long since gone, the friends, the relations, wives, mothers, sweethearts, whose memory alone was with them for those long, long, blank years? When their hearts eternally cried, 'No hope. There is no hope. Hope is dead. Let us die too. Let us join those who have perished in eternal, restful oblivion. Why this mad, long straining, when there can be only death. Why live? Join the multitude of your own in Death's gentle arms'. But at last they died, and were at peace.

	"Since then our own race has risen, it has been but a short thousand years, a thousand years of work, and hope, and continuous improvement for us, continual accomplishment on which we can look, and a living hope to which we could look with raised heads, and smiling faces.

	"Then our hope died, as this menace came. Do you see what you and your world was meant to us, Man of Earth?" Zezdon Afthen raised his dark eyes to the terrestrian with a look in their depths that made Wade involuntarily resolve that Thet and all Thessians should be promptly consigned to that limbo of forgotten things where they belonged.

-

CHAPTER VII - World 3769-37,478,326,894-6, Talso

	WADE sat staring moodily at the screen for some time, while Zezdon Afthen, sunk in his own reveries, continued in thought. Suddenly Wade looked again toward Afthen, and asked, "But you have not told me how your mental machines operate; what is the secret?"

	"It is not a secret to Earth, save in that they have not learned to use that knowledge. I see that your world learned many, many years ago—I cannot read the date in your mind—but they learned that all living things are radioactive.

	"Oh—they learned that about 1930, didn't they!" exclaimed Wade, "And we never thought to investigate it, I guess."

	"We did," continued Zezdon Afthen, "when it was discovered, and we learned a great deal from it. The radioactivity seemed to have some marked connection with the life processes.

	"Study showed that it was intimately connected with the more typically nervous organisms. It seemed to be connected with the nervous impulse in some way. It was particularly evident in the higher animals, and with suitable instruments we began to find means of measuring rapid fluctuations, even getting oscillograph readings, showing the frequency. That gave us a lead, and from that basis, knowing the approximate frequency of mental impulses, we were able to design apparatus which could tune to such frequencies. Remember, the radioactive rays were merely the carrier waves, or, still better, the mere signals. The tube glows brighter when more power passes through it, though the light given off has no necessity of being, is of no use. So the radioactivity seemed but an accidental accompaniment of the real wave impulses. It may be that our own bodies had solved the secret of atomic energy, while we could not. Knowing what to tune for, we succeeded, in this apparatus we are wearing, to both catch and intensify it. 

	"Our race was too highly psychic, and too little mechanically furious. We learned too little of the world about, and too much of our own processes. We are a peaceful race, for, while you and the Ancient Masters learned the rule of existence in a world of strife, where only the fittest, the best fighters survived, we learned life in a carefully tended world, where the Ancient Masters taught us to live, where the one whose social instincts were best developed, where he who would most help the others, and the race, was permitted to live. Is it not natural that our race will not fight among themselves? The natural instincts that the dog of old had, has been weeded out. We are careful to suppress tendencies toward criminality and struggle. The criminal and the maniac, or those who are permanently incurable as determined by careful examination, are 'removed' as the Leaders put it. Lethal gas." It was evident that Afthen did not greatly like this custom—but realized it was best.

	"At any rate, we know so pitiably little of natural science. We were hopelessly helpless against an attacking science."

	"I promise you, Afthen, that if Earth survives, Ortol shall survive, for we have given you all the weapons we know of, and we will give your people all the weapons we shall learn of." Morey spoke from the doorway. Arcot was directly behind him.

	They talked for a short while, then Wade retired for some needed sleep, while Morey and Arcot started further work on the time fields.

	Hour after hour the ship sped on through the dark of space, weirdly distorted, glowing spots of light before them, wheeling suns that moved and flashed as their awesome speed whirled them on.

	They had to move slower soon, as the changing stars showed them near the space-marks of certain locating suns. Finally, as they hung motionless, barely moving, motionless to the quintillions of miles-distant suns, though still moving close to fifteen thousand miles per second, they saw the sun they knew was sun 3769-37,478,326,894. It is now but a tiny spot of light in a tiny, distant constellation, but a ten-minute journey at the space speed brought them within the field of the gigantic star, twice as large as our sun, two and a half times as massive and twenty-six times as brilliant.

	Thirteen major planets they counted as they searched the system with their powerful telectroscope, the outermost more than ten billion miles from the parent sun, while planet six, the one indicated by the world number, was at a distance of five hundred million miles, nearly as far from the sun as Jupiter is from ours, yet the giant sun, giving more than twenty-five times as much heat and light in the blue-white range, heated the planet to approximately the same temperature Earth enjoys. Spectroscopy showed that the atmosphere was well supplied with oxygen, and so the inhabitants were evidently oxygen-breathing men, unlike those of the Negrian people who lived in an atmosphere of hydrogen.

	Arcot threw the ship toward the planet, and as it loomed swiftly larger, he shut off the space-control, and set the coils for full charge, while the ship entered the planet's atmosphere in a screaming dive, still at a speed of better than a hundred miles a second. But this speed was quickly damped as the ship shot high over broad oceans to the dull green of land ahead in the daylit zone. Observations made from various distances by means of the space-control, thus going back in time, showed that the planet had a day of approximately forty hours, the diameter was nearly nine thousand miles, which would probably mean an inconveniently high gravity for the terrestrians and a distressingly high gravity for the Ortolians, used to their world even smaller than Earth, with scarcely 80 per cent, of Earth's gravity.

	At the speed they were now traveling, however, the centrifugal force was more than enough to support them, and they could not judge. Wade made some volumetric analysis of the atmosphere, and with the aid of a mouse, pronounced it "QA.R." (quite all right) for human beings. It had not killed the mouse, so probably humans would find it quite all right.

	"We'll land at the first city that comes into view, and Afthen, you will be delegated as the spokesman, for you have a very considerable ability with the mental communication, and have a better understanding of the physics we need to explain than has Zezdon Fentes," suggested Arcot. They were now over land, a rocky coast that shot behind them as great jagged mountains, tipped with snow, rose beneath. The ship was traveling at a bare mile a second now, and the gravity of the planet was noticeable.

	 Suddenly, as a deep, long valley was under them, a shining apparition appeared from behind one of the neighboring hills, and drove down at them with an unearthly acceleration. Arcot moved just enough to dodge the blow, and turned to meet the ship. Instantly, now that he had a good view of it, he was certain it was a Thessian ship. Waiting no longer to determine that it was not a ship of this world, he shot a molecular beam at it. The beam exploded into a coruscating panoply of pyrotechnics on the Thessian shield. The Thessian replied with all his cosmics, and all other beams he had available, including a straight low-frequency heat-beam, an induction-beam, an intensely brilliant light-beam, and several molecular cannon with shells loaded with an explosive that was very evidently condensed light. This was no exploration ship, but a full-fledged battle-ship.

	The Ancient Mariner was blinded instantly, though Arcot had the relux screens up. None of the occupants were hurt, but the combined pressure of the various beams hurled the ship to one side for all its tremendous mass. The induction beam alone was dangerous. It passed through the outer lux-metal wall unhindered, and the perfectly conducting relux wall absorbed it, and turned it into power. At once, all the metal objects in the ship began to heat up with terrific rapidity. Since there were no metallic conductors on the ship, no damage was done, save to the pans and tableware that happened to be in contact with relux walls.

	Arcot immediately hid behind his perfect shield— the space-distortion.

	"That's no mild dose, I must say," he said in a tense voice, working rapidly to restore the destroyed "eyes."

	"He's a real-for-sure battleship. Notice how that pilot dived, a lot more vigorously than the fellow on Ortol did. Better get down in the power room, Morey."

-

	IN a few moments the ship was ready again. Opening the shield somewhat, Arcot was able to determine that no rays were being played on it, for no energy fields were disclosed as distorting the opened field, other than the field of the sun and planet.

	Arcot opened it. The battleship was searching vainly and wildly about the mountains, and was now some miles distant. His last view of Arcot's ship had been a suddenly contracting ship, one that vanished in infinite distance, the infinite distance of another space, though he did not know it.	'

	Arcot turned three powerful cosmics on the Thessian ship, and drove down toward it, accompanying the cosmics with molecular rays. The Thessian shield stopped the moleculars, but the cosmics had already destroyed the eyes of the ship. But by some system of magnetic or electrostatic locating devices, the enemy guns and rays replied, and so successfully that Arcot was again blinded.

	He had again been driving in a line straight toward the enemy, and now he threw in the entire power of his huge magnetic field-rays. The enemy cosmics snapped off. The induction ray disappeared, the heat, light and cannons stopped.

	"Worked again," grinned Arcot. A new set of eyes was inserted automatically, and the screen again lighted. The Thessian ship was spinning end over end toward the ground. It landed with a tremendous crash. Simultaneously from the rear of the Ancient Mariner came a terrific crash, an explosion that drove the terrestrian ship forward, as though a giant hand had pushed it from behind.

	The Ancient Mariner spun like a top, facing the direction of the explosion, though still traveling in the direction it had been pursuing, but backward now. Behind them the air was a gigantic pool of ionization. Tremendous fragments of what obviously had been a ship were drifting down, turning end over end. And those fragments of the wall showed them to be fully four feet of solid relux.

	"Enemy got up behind somehow while the eyes were out, and was ready to raise merry hell. Somebody blew them up beautifully. Look at the ground down there—it's red hot. That's from the radiated heat of our recent encounter. Cosmics reflected, heat rays reflected, light bombs turned off, heat escaping from ions—nice little workout—and it didn't seriously bother our defenses of two-inch relux. Now tell me: what will blow up four-foot relux?" asked Arcot looking at the fragments. "It seems to me those fellows don't need any help from us; they may decline it with thanks. They wrecked that boat so quickly, we didn't even see it go."

	"But they may be willing to help us, Man of Earth," replied Afthen," and we certainly need such help."

	"I didn't expect to come out alive from that battleship there. It was luck. If they knew what we had, they could insulate against it in an hour," added Arcot.

	"Let's finish those fellows over there—look!" From the wreck of the ship they had downed, a stream of men in glistening relux suits were filing. Any men comparable to humans would have been killed by the fall, but not Thessians. They carried peculiar machines, and as they drove out of the ship in a dive that looked as though they had been shot from a cannon, they turned and landed on the ground and proceeded to jump back, leaping at a sped that was bewildering, seemingly impossible in any living creature. Yet they did it.

	Another group of men came out with more machines. They busied themselves quickly, setting them up. It took less than thirty seconds, and they had a large relux disc laid under the entire group and the machines. Arcot turned a molecular ray down. The rock and soil shot up all about them, even the ship shot up, to fall back into the great pit its ray had formed. But the ionization told of the ray shield over the little group of men. A cosmic reached down, while the men still frantically worked at their stubby projectors. The relux disc now showed its purpose. In an instant the soil about them was white hot, bubbling molten lava, huge blue hydrogen flames springing high from it. It was liquid, boiling furiously. But the deep relux disc simply floated on it. The enemy ship began sinking, and in a moment had fallen almost completely beneath the white hot rock.

	A fountain of the melted lava sprung up, and under Arcot's skillful direction, fell in a cloud of molten rock on the men working. The suits protected, and the white hot stuff simply rolled off. But it was sinking their boat. Arcot continued hopefully.

	A blazing cosmic reached out, and snapped out the eyes of the ship as they finished their work on one machine. Meanwhile a signaling machine was frantically calling for help and sending out information of their plight and position, and, most deadly to the terrestrians, the attack that had grounded them.

	Then all was instantly wiped out in a single terrific jolt of the magnetic beam. The machines jumped a little, despite their weight, and the ray shield apparatus slumped suddenly in blazing white heat, the interior mechanism fused. But the men were still active, and rapidly spreading from the spot, each protected by a ray shield pack.

	A brilliant stab of molecular ray shot at each from either of two of the Ancient Mariner's projectors as Morey aided Arcot. Their little packs flared brilliantly for an instant under the thousands of horsepower of energy lashing at the screen, then flashed away, and the opalescent relux yielded a moment later, and the figure went twisting, hurtling away. Meanwhile Wade was busy with the magnetic apparatus, destroying shield after shield, which either Arcot or Morey picked off. The fall from even so much as half a mile seemed not sufficient to seriously bother these super-men, for an instant later they would be up tearing away in great leaps on their own power as their molecular suits, blown out by the magnetic field, failed them.

	It was but a matter of minutes before the last had been chased down either by the rays or the ship. Then, circling back, Arcot slowly settled beside the enemy ship, that one still in fair repair, the shattered fragments of the one which simply disappeared in a burst of heat could not be called a ship.

	"Wait," called Arcot sharply as Morey started for the door. "Don't go out yet. The friends who wrecked that little sweetheart who crept up behind will probably show up. Wait and see what happens." Hardly had he spoken, when a strange apparition rose from behind a rock scarcely a quarter of a mile away. Immediately Arcot intensified the vision screen covering him. He seemed to leap near. There was one man, and he held what was obviously a sword by the blade, above his head, waving it from side to side.

	"There they are—whatever they are. Intelligent all right—what more universally obvious peace sign than a primitive weapon such as a knife held in reverse position? You go, Morey, or I will, with Zezdon Afthen. Try holding a carving knife by the blade. We don't carry swords."

	Morey grinned as he got into his power suit, on Wade's O.K. of the atmosphere. "They may mistake me for the cook out looking for dinner," he pointed out with a long face, "and I wouldn't risk my dignity that way. I'll take the base-ball bat and hold it wrong way round instead."

	Nevertheless, as he stepped from the ship, with Afthen close behind, he held the long knife by the blade, and Afthen, very awkwardly operating his still rather unfamiliar power suit, followed with the reversed bat. "It seems that you have picked a weapon still more primitive than the knife, but, unfortunately, a club works very well either way round," remarked Afthen smilingly.

	Into the intensely blue sun-light the men stepped. Their skin and clothing took on a peculiar tint under the strange sunlight. The effect was far less pronounced than that of the mercury ion, or mercury vapor lamp, but noticeably distorted colors.

	The single stranger was joined by a second, also holding a reversed weapon, and together they threw them down. Morey and Zezdon Afthen followed suit. The two parties advanced toward each other. Morey could tell from Zezdon Afthen's thoughts that this occasion was decidedly impressive to him, for it was the second time in the history of their world that one of their men had landed on the planet of another system.

	The strangers advanced with a swift, light step, jumping from rock to rock, while Morey and Afthen flew part way toward them. The men of this world were totally unlike any intelligent race Morey had conceived of. Their head and brain case was so small as to be almost animalish. The nose was small and well formed, the ears more or less cupshaped with a remarkable and, to terrestrians, almost comical power of motion. Their eyes were large, dark brown spots in tiny faces, seemingly huge, but probably no larger than a Terrestrian's or those of an Ortolian, though in the tiny head they were necessarily closely placed, protected by heavy boney ridges that actually projected from the skull to enclose them. Tiny, childlike chins completed the head, running down to a thin, apparently scrawny neck, though no doubt quite large enough in relation to the head.

	They were short, scarcely five feet, yet evidently of tremendous strength for their short, heavy arms, the muscle bulging plainly under the tight rubber-like composition garments, and the short legs whose stocky girth proclaimed equal strength were members of a body in keeping with them. The deep, broad chest, wide, square shoulders, heavy broad hips, combined with the tiny head seemed to indicate a perfect incarnation of brainless, brute strength.

	"Strangers from another planet, enemies of our enemies, you must be our friends. What brings you here at this time of troubles?" The thoughts came clearly and forcefully from the stocky individual before them, belying his apparent lack of mental organization.

	"We seek to aid, and to find aid. The enemy that attacks you, attacks us. We are not of the same planet, nor is he who stands beside me of my planet. The menace that you face, attacks not alone your world, nor your system, but all this star cluster," replied Zezdon Afthen steadily.

	The stranger stood, thoughtful, a moment. At last he shook his head with an evident expression of hopelessness in the diminutive features. "The menace is even greater than we feared. We cannot help you. It was just fortune that permitted us to have our weapon in workable condition at the time your ship was attacked. It will be a day before the machine will again be capable of successful operation. When in condition for use, it is invincible, but—one blow in thirty hours—(Hours was the natural interpretation for Morey, as the thought was "twenty of the time units into twenty-four of which a day is divided," and their day was forty hours) so you can see we are not of great aid," he shrugged.

	How hopeless was their position! An enemy with evident resources of tremendous power, deadly, unknown rays that wiped out entire cities with a single brief sweep—and no defense save this single weapon, good but once a day! Morey could read the utter despair of the man.

	"What is the difficulty?" asked Morey eagerly.

	"Power," exploded the man. "Power, lack of power. The utter necessity of war-power, electric power—there is practically none. Our cities are going without power, factories are shut down, while every electric generator on the planet is pouring its output into the accumulators that work these damnable, hopeless things. Inyincible with power—helpless without."

	"Ah!" Morey's face shone with delight—invincible weapon—with power. And the Ancient Mariner could generate unthinkable power. Perhaps enough.

	"What power source do you use—how do you generate your power?" The fact of mental telepathy was now a thing so familiar to Morey that he scarcely realized he was not speaking aloud.

	"Combining oxidizing agent with reducing agent releases heat. Heat used to boil the liquid metal (mercury, of course, thought Morey), and the vapor runs turbines. Condensers boil hydrogen oxide, this used to drive other turbines, and ..."

	"We can give you power. What wattage have you available?" Only Morey's thoughts had to translate "watts" to "How many man-weights can you lift through your height per time interval, equal to this." He gave the man some impression of a second, by counting. The man figured rapidly. His answer indicated that approximately a total of two billion kilowatts were available.

	"Then the weapon is invincible hereafter, if what you say is true, provided your apparatus is good for a thousand times that load in so far as transportation of power goes. Our ship alone can easily generate ten thousand times that power.

	"Come, get in the ship, accompany us to your largest city, or the capital."

	The men turned, and retreated to their position behind the rocks, while Morey and Zezdon Afthen waited for them. Soon they returned, and entered the ship.

	"Our world," explained the leader rapidly, "is a single unified colony. The capital is 'Shesto', our world we call 'Talso'." His directions were explicit, and Arcot started for Shesto, on Talso.

-

CHAPTER VIII - Undefeatable or Uncontrollable?

	FIFTEEN minutes after they started, they came to Shesto. They were forced to land, and explain, for their relux ship was decidedly not the popular Talsonian idea of a life-saver. Three cities had been destroyed in the day and half the Thessian forces had been here. The people had scattered to the country for the most part, where less concentration made Talso less vulnerable.

	Shesto was defended by two of the machines, whatever they were, and each machine had been equipped with two fully charged accumulators. Their four possible shots were hoped to be sufficient protection, and, so far, had been. The city had been attacked twice, according to Tho Stan Drel, the Talsonian who had conducted them hither. Once by a single ship which had been instantly destroyed, and once by a fleet of six ships. The interval had permitted time to recharge, in part, the discharged accumulator, and the fleet had been badly treated. Of the six ships, four had been brought down in rapid succession, for it was decided to throw all on one chance of making the Thessians retreat in fear. It had worked, and the remaining two ships had fled.

	That was on the previous evening. When the first city had been wiped out, with a loss of life well in the hundreds of thousands, the other cities had, to the limit of their abilities set up the protective apparatus. Two cities were destroyed since. Apparently the Thessians were holding off for the present.

	They landed at Shesto, after Tho Stan Drel had succeeded in getting in touch with military authorities and secured guarantee of safe passage into the city.

	"In a way," said Morey seriously as the Talsonian returned, "it was distinctly fortunate that we were attacked almost at once. Their instantaneous system of destruction would have worked for the one shot needed to send the Ancient Mariner to eternal blazes." He laughed, but it was a slightly nervous laugh as he thought of the consequences of going directly to some city with their ship, obviously a space ship, and obviously of design similar to that of the Thessian ships.

	The Terrestrial ship landed in a great grassy court, and out of respect for the parklike smoothness of the turf, Arcot left the ship on its power units, suspended a bit above the surface. Then he, Morey and the Talsonian left the ship. Zezdon Afthen was left with the ship and with Wade in charge, for if some difficulties were encountered, Wade would be able to help them With the ship, and Zezdon Afthen with the tremendous power of his thought locating apparatus, was busy seeking out the Thessian stronghold, as yet undetermined. He was using the thought of the "magnetic beam" as a clue in searching for them, for only their own party and the Thessians could know of it on this world. The sending apparatus which the survivors of the wrecked ship had set up had, without doubt, sent that important news to the base.

	A party of men of Talso, their tiny heads and powerful, heavy bodies clothed in uniforms, met the Terrestrians outside the ship.

	"Welcome, Men of another world, and to you go our thanks for the destruction of one of our enemies." The clear thoughts of the spokesman evinced his ability to concentrate.

	"And to your world must go our thanks for the saving of our lives, and more important, our ship. For the ship represents a thing of enormous value to our world. And, we think, to this entire star-system," replied Arcot.

	"We, as the military authorities, have met you, but unlike the military authorities of years past, we are ready to recognize that this is not a war of men, but a war of knowledge of Nature and her works. We have learned only the handling of men, those who have learned the handling of Nature must speak with you, that you may be understood.

	"I see—understand—your—thoughts that you wish to learn more of this weapon we use. You understand that it is undefeatable? It is a question among us as to whether it is undefeatable, uncontrollable or just un-understandable. We have had fair success with it. It is not a weapon, was not developed as such; it was an experiment in the line of electric-waves. How it works, What it is, what happens—we do not know.

	"But men who can create so marvelous a ship as this of yours, capable of destroying a ship of the Thessians ("enemy from other worlds" were his thoughts) with their own weapons must certainly be able to understand any machine we may make—and you have power?" he finished eagerly.

	"Practically infinite power. I will throw into any power line you suggest, all the direct current you wish, but right in that fact, that it is direct current, not alternating, is no doubt the greatest trouble, for I doubt if you have rotary converters capable of handling any tremendous power, and interrupters would not be able to handle any great power—unless made of relux, and we can't make any relux for you. No apparatus." Arcot's thoughts were pure reflection, but the Talsonian brightened at once.

	"I feared it might be alternating—but we can handle direct current. All our transmission is done at high voltage direct current. What potential do you generate? Will we have to install changers?"

	"We generate D.C. at any voltage up to fifty million, any power up to —— that is needed to lift ten trillion men through their own height in this time." The time was a second, and the power represented approximately twenty trillion horsepower.

	The Talsonian's face went blank with amazement as he looked at the ship. "In that tiny thing you generate such power?" he asked in amazement.

	"In that tiny ship we generate more than one thousand times that power directly as electric current when we wish, and in all, can generate more than one million times that power, or 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 horsepower," smiled Arcot.

	"Our power troubles are over," declared the military man emphatically.

	"Our troubles are not over," replied a civilian who had joined the party, with equal emphasis. "As a matter of fact, they are worse than ever. More tantalizing. What he says means that we have a tremendous power source, but it is in one spot. How are you going to transmit the power? We can't possibly move any power anywhere near that amount. We couldn't touch it to our lines without having them all go up in one instantaneous blaze of glory. Every changer in the system would blow up, before the circuit relays could move. Even the accumulators would break down under the first jolt of anything like that.

	"We cannot drain such a lake of power through our tiny power pipes of silver ware," said the Talsonian excitedly, and yet obviously partly in awe of the power Arcot had mentioned.

	"This man is Stel Felso Theu, the greatest of our scientists, the man who has invented this weapon which alone seems to offer us hope. And I am afraid he is right. See, there is the University. For the power requirements of their laboratories, a heavy power line has been installed, and it was hoped that you could carry leads into it." His face showed evident despair greater than ever.

	"We can always feed some power into the lines. Let us see just what hope there is. I think that it would be wiser to investigate the power lines at once," suggested Morey.

-

	TEN minutes later, the military staff having retired, and but a single officer now accompanying them, other than Tho Stan Drel, the Terrestrial scientist, and the Talsonian scientist were inspecting the power installation.

	They had entered a large stone building, into which and from which led numerous very heavy silver wires. Evidently silver replaced copper on this world. The insulators were evidently silicate glass. Their height suggested a voltage of well over one hundred thousand, and such heavy cables suggested a very heavy amperage, so that a tremendous load was expected.

	"No," answered Stel Felso Theu, in reply to Arcot's question, "we do not expect to use any such terrific power, but at times we find a very heavy amperage needed in an experiment, and at times a heavy amperage is not wanted, but great voltage is, so we use these heavy wires, and the high insulation. It will permit a tremendous power, but we have never had use for it, of course."

	Entering the building, the Terrestrians stopped in amazement. Completely filling the building were a series of gigantic glass tubes, their walls fully three inches thick, and even so, braced with metal supports that looked suspiciously like heavy platinum rods. Inside the tubes were tremendous elements such as the tiny tubes of their machine carried. Great cables led into them, and now their heating coils were glowing a somberly deep red. Little coronas surrounded the leads from the tubes at one end of the room.

	Along the walls were the switchboards, dozens of them, all sizes, all types of instruments, strange to the eyes of the Terrestrians, and in practically all the light-beam indicator system was used, no metallic pointers, but tiny mirrors directing a very fine line of brilliant light acted as a needle. The system thus had practically no inertia.

	"Are these the changers?" asked Arcot gazing at the gigantic tubes.

	"They are, each tube will handle up to a hundred thousand times the potential of zinc-copper in the acid of the yellow powder," said Stel Felso Theu. One hundred thousand times the potential of a copper-zinc cell in copper sulphate solution would be of the order of 110,000 volts. This was a thing as universal as the elements themselves. In any world this was true, though their system of correlating work-units by man-weights through man-heights was not a very accurate comparison, for though the Thessians, for instance, were not over three feet high, at most, and probably shorter than that, for it was exceedingly difficult to judge their height from a distance, their world was evidently very large, and subject to a great gravitational attraction. To such men, the man system would mean little. Further, Arcot had learned from the Ortolians, who had performed some autopsies on their corpses, that their bones were not of stone, as ours are, but of practically pure iron, as are the "bones" of a skyscraper. Certainly the apparent weight of a man would be misjudged by a terrestrian, and probably the weight of these men had been misjudged—but the zinc-copper sulphuric-acid couple was free from such error.

	Arcot inspected the tubes with intense interest. If these people had developed real power tubes such as these, perhaps they could make for him real power tubes for molecular motion units. With the screens and rays driven by such tubes—	

	But he quickly realized that that could not be. The sheer capacity of the elements of these tubes would preclude the production of the necessary high frequencies.

	That tubes could be made to act as direct current voltage transformers, much as the magnetic induction transformers for changing the voltage from alternating current circuits, had been known for centuries on Earth, but before the tubes had been developed, alternating current had been so developed as to make the transfer to the more manageable direct current useless, and economically unwise. They had never used the system of Talso on Earth.

	"But I fear, Stel Felso Theu, that these tubes will carry power only one way; that is, it would be impossible for power to be pumped from here into the power house, though the process can be reversed," pointed out Arcot anxiously. "Radio tubes work only one way, which is why they can act as rectifiers. The same was true of these tubes. They could carry power one way only.

	"True, of tubes in general," replied the Talsonian, "and I see by that that you know the entire theory of our tubes, which is rather abstruse."

	"We use them on the ship, in special form," interrupted Arcot.

	"Then I will only say that the college here has a very complete electric power plant of its own, and on special occasions, such as this, the power generated here is frequently needed by the city, and so we arranged the tubes with switches which could reverse the flow. At present they are operating to pour power into the city.

	"If your ship can generate such tremendous power, I suspect that it would be wiser to eliminate the tubes from the circuit, for they put certain restrictions on the line. Remember the line is designed for operation at either high voltage or amperage. The main power plant in the city has tube banks capable of handling anything the line would. I suggest that your voltage be set at the maximum that the line will carry without break-down, and the amperage can be made as high as possible without heat loss."

	"Good enough—with this exception. Because of our super-abundance and cheapness of power, there is no need to avoid heat loss. We can run the line dull red. Silver won't oxidize, and the lines are not insulated save by glass, and if the heating is slow, as it inevitably will be, the glass will not crack. The line to the city power will stand what pressure?"

	"It is good for the maximum of these tubes, or 100,000 copper-zinc units," replied the Talsonian.

	"Then get into communication with the city plant and tell them to prepare for—", Arcot studied the lines carefully, making due allowance for the superior conductance of silver, and allowing for heating, "100,000 such units of pressure, and—", another pause as Arcot translated amperes to copper plating units, "a current capable of plating about fifty times this mass of copper out in one second." Arcot handed him a small bar of lux metal he had brought with him. The Talsonian immediately dropped it as its enormous density surprised him with too little muscular effort in his arm. He glanced at it in amazement as he picked it up with some difficulty and weighed it in his hand, again doing mental arithmetic.

	"That represents about seven hundred million horsepower," gasped the Talsonian. "Can you give us so much? Why, nothing on Talso could possibly stand that power!"

	"Well, tell them to get ready for every work-unit they can carry, I'll get the generator." Arcot turned, and flew on his power suit to the ship while the Talsonians stared after him in amazement.

	"A little pack on his back contains the same type of driving unit the ship uses, and is capable of lifting about a ton under full load—about over eight times his weight," explained Morey in answer to their surprised glances.

-

	ARCOT disappeared in the ship. In a few moments he was back, a molecular pistol in one hand, and suspended in front of him on nothing but a ray of ionized air, to all appearances, a cylindrical apparatus, with a small cubical base. From the base protruded a tremendously heavy relux clamp, and another from the end of the cylinder on top. Both were set in cups of lux metal insulators.

	The cylinder was about four feet long, and the cubical box about eighteen inches on a side.

	"What is that, and what supports it?" asked the Talsonian scientists in surprise.

	"The thing is supported by a ray which directs the molecules of a small bar in the top clamp, driving it up," explained Morey, answering his last question first, "and that is the generator."

	"That! Why it is hardly as big as a man!" exclaimed the Talsonian in disappointment.

	"Nevertheless, it can generate something in the neighborhood of a billion horsepower. But you couldn't get the power away if you did generate it." He turned toward Arcot, and called to him.

	"Arcot—set it down and let her rip on about half a million horsepower for a second or so. Air arc. Won't hurt it—she's made of lux and relux."

	Arcot grinned, and set it on the ground. "Make an awful hole in the ground."

	"Oh—go ahead. It will satisfy this fellow, I think," replied Morey.

	Arcot pulled a very thin lux metal cord from his pocket, and attached one end of a long loop to one tiny switch, and the other to a second. Then he adjusted three small dials. The wire in hand, he retreated to a distance of nearly two hundred feet, while Morey warned the Talsonians back. Arcot pulled one end of his cord.

	Instantly a terrific crashing roar nearly deafened the men, a solid sheet of blinding flame enveloped the little machine, and a mighty tongue of blue flame reached in a flaming cone into the air for nearly fifty feet. The flame was a bit lop-sided, since the one contact was on one side of the base. The terrific screeching roar continued for a moment, then the heat was so intense that Arcot could stand no more, and pulled the cord. The flame died instantly, though a slight ionization clung for a moment. The little machine was scarcely visible, its blue was so intense that the eyes were endangered. In a moment it had cooled to white, and was cooling slowly through orange—red deep—red—

	The grass for thirty feet about was gone, the soil for ten feet about was molten, boiling. The machine itself was in a little crater, half sunk in boiling rock.

	The Talsonians stared in amazement. Then a sort of sigh escaped them and they started forward. Arcot raised his molecular pistol, and a blue green ray reached out, and the rock suddenly was black. It settled swiftly down, and a slight depression was the only evidence of the terrific action.

	Arcot walked over the now cool rock, cooled by the action of the molecular ray. In driving the molecules downward, the work was done by the heat of these molecules. The machine was evidently frozen in the solid lava.

	"Brilliant idea, Morey," said Arcot disgustedly. "Now we have a nice job breaking it loose.

	Morey stuck the lux metal bar in the top clamp, walked off some distance, and snapped on the power for an instant. The rock immediately about the machine was molten again. A touch of the molecular pistol to the lux metal bar, and the machine jumped free of the molten rock.

	"I'll hold it—clean it with cosmics."

	"Use your head—that's relux, it'll simply throw cosmics all over the place. Turn it on," replied Arcot cheerily.

	Indeed, the reflected cosmics would have been dangerous to plant life in the neighborhood, though the men could easily have retreated into a position where they wouldn't be hit by them. But Morey did turn it on, and left it on longer this time. The noise was terrific, the air was a ball of fire for thirty feet around it, but the infusible, indestructible relux and lux were not disturbed, and the molecular ray functioned nicely, holding it where it was. In a very short time Morey felt quite sure that it was clean, for no rock could stay in that inferno without volatilizing instantly. He shut off the power. The machine was perfectly clean, and extremely hot.

	"And your ship is made of that stuff!" exclaimed the Talsonian scientist. "What will destroy it?"

	"Your weapon will, apparently. Also the molecular ray we used will change the reflective material into the clear material. We had to be careful not to have the ray touch the machine.

	"But do you believe that we have power enough?" asked Morey with a smile.

	"No—it's entirely too much. Can you tone that condensed lightning bolt down to a workable level?"

-

CHAPTER IX - The Irresistible and the Immovable

	THE generator Arcot had brought was one of the two spare generators used for laboratory work. He took it now into the sub-station, and directed the Talsonian students and the scientist in the task of connecting it into the lines; though they knew where it belonged, he knew how it belonged.

	It was nearly a quarter of an hour before the power company was prepared to receive the enormous flow of power Arcot promised. Then the Terrestrian turned on the power, and gradually increased it until the power authorities were afraid of breakdowns. The leads to the generator were glowing a very dull red, and the long leads to the main power plant were decidedly warm. But the city plant itself was the limiting factor, for there was a limit to what power they could carry. The accumulators were charged in the city, and the power was being shipped to other cities whose accumulators were not completely charged.

	But, after giving simple operating instructions to the students, Arcot and Morey went with Stel Felso Theu to his laboratory.

	"Here," he explained, "is the original apparatus. All these other machines you see are but replicas of this. How it works, why it works, even what it does, I am not sure of. Perhaps you will understand it. The thing is fully charged now, for it is, in part, one of the defenses of the city. Examine it now, and then I will show its power."

	Interestedly Morey and Arcot looked at a large glass tube surrounded with a battery of terrifically powerful electro-magnets, and several huge condenser-plates. Evidently both electro-static and electro-magnetic fields were used here. Arcot looked it over in silence, following the great silver leads with silent interest. Finally he straightened, and returned to the Talsonian. In a moment Morey joined them.

	"I will now start the apparatus." The Talsonian threw a switch, and an intense ionization appeared within the tube, then a minute spot of light was visible within the sphere of light. "The minute spot of radiance is the real secret of the weapon. The ball of fire about is merely wasted energy.

	"Now I will bring it out of the tube." There were three dials on the control panel from which he worked, and now he adjusted one of these. The ball of fire moved steadily toward the glass wall of the tube, and with a crash the glass exploded inward. It had been highly evacuated. Instantly the tiny ball of fire about the point of light expanded to a large globe.

	"It is now in the outer air. We make the—thing, in an evacuated glass tube, and can only release it by destroying the tube, but as they are cheap, it is not an expensive procedure. The ball will last in its present condition for approximately three hours. Feel the exceedingly intense heat? It is radiating away its vast energy.

	"Now here is the point of greatest interest." Again the Talsonian fell to work on his dials, watching the ball of fire, and the almost invisible intensely bright spot of light in its center. It seemed far more brilliant in the air now. It moved, and headed toward a great slab of solid steel off to one side of the laboratory. It shifted about until it was directly over the center of the great slab. The slab rested on a scale of some sort, and as the ball of fire touched it, the scale showed a sudden increase in load. The ball sank into the slab of steel, and the scale showed a steady, enormous load. Evidently the little ball was pressing its way through as though it were a solid body. In a moment it was through the steel slab, and out on the other side.

	"It will pass through any body with equal ease. It seems to answer only these controls, and these it answers perfectly, and without difficulty.

	"One other thing we can do with it. I can increase its rate of energy discharge. I will do so."

	The Talsonian turned a fourth dial, well off to one side, and the brilliance of the spot increased enormously. The heat was unbearable. Almost at once he shut it off.

	"That is the principle we use in making it a weapon. Watch the actual operation."

	The ball of fire shot toward an open window, out the window, and vanished in flying trail of ions far in the sky above. The Talsonian stopped the rotation of the dials. "It is motionless now, but scarcely visible. I will now release all the energy." He twirled the fourth dial, and instantly there was a flash of light, and a moment later a terrific concussion.

	"It is gone." He left the controls, and went over to his apparatus. He set a heavy silver bladed switch, and placed a new tube in the apparatus. A second switch arced a bit as he drove it home. "Your generator is recharging the accumulators."

	The accumulators were exactly that; they were a huge series of condensers. They were being charged now in readiness for another "shot." Arcot and Morey returned to the machine and examined it carefully now, and very curiously. Stel Felso Theu took the back-plate of the control cabinet off, and the Terrestrians looked at the control with interest.

	"Got it, Morey?" asked Arcot after a time.

	"Think so. Want to try making it up? We can do so out of spare junk about the ship, I think. We won't need the tube if what I believe of it is true."

	"Q.A.R.—We'll do it. Come on." Arcot turned to the Talsonian. "We wish you to accompany us to the ship. We have apparatus there which we wish to set up."

	Back to the ship they went, and into the mathematics room. There Arcot, Morey and Wade worked rapidly on the machines, setting up equations and functions. The Ortolians showed the Talsonian the ship to the best of their abilities, and explained fully the nature of their attackers, and the mission that had brought the Terrestrians to their planet. 

	It was about three-quarters of an hour later when Arcot and his friends called the others to the laboratory. They had a maze of apparatus on the power bench, and the shining relux conductors ran all over the ship apparently. One huge bar ran into the power room itself, and plugged into the huge power-coil power supply.

	They were still working at it, but looked up as the Others entered. "Guess it will work," said Arcot with a grin.

	There were four dials, and three huge switches. Arcot set all four dials, and threw one of the switches. Then he started slowly turning the fourth dial. In the center of the room a dim, shining mist of a foot diameter began to appear. It condensed, solidified without shrinking. In less than a minute it was a solid ball of matter a foot in diameter. It was strange, utterly strange. It seemed black, but was a perfectly reflective surface—and luminous!

	"Then—then you had already known of this thing? You had it on your own world? Then why did you not tell me when I tried to show it," said the Talsonian.

	Arcot was sending the globe, now perfectly non-luminous, about the room. It flattened out suddenly, and was a disc. He tossed a small weight on it, and it remained fixed, but began to radiate slightly. Arcot readjusted his dials, and it ceased radiating, held perfectly motionless. The sphere returned, and the weight dropped with a metallic clang to the floor. Arcot maneuvered it about for a moment more. Then he placed his friends behind a screen of relux, and increased the radiation of the globe tremendously. The heat became intense, and he stopped the radiation.

	"No, Stel Felso Theu, we do not have this on our world, but it is a marvelous thing. May I use it in our defense?" asked Arcot.

	"You do not have it! You do not have it, yet you look at my apparatus for fifteen minutes, and then work for an hour—and you have apparatus far more effective than ours, which required years of development!" exclaimed the Talsonian.

	"Ah, but it was not wholly new to me. This ship is driven by curving space into peculiar coordinates.

	"Even so, we didn't do such a hot job, did we, Morey?"

	"No, we should have—"

	"What—it was not a good job? And you succeeded in creating it in air—in making it stop radiating, in making a ball a foot in diameter, made it change to a disc, made it carry a load—what do you want?" interrupted the Talsonian explosively.

	"We want the full possibilities, the only things that can save us in this war. You do not know the full possibilities? Then learn the cosmic force you played with, was let loose on your enemies. No wonder their mighty ships were wrecked under its awful powers!" Morey spoke swiftly, excitedly.

	"What you learned how to do was the reverse of the process we learned. How you did it is a wonder—but you did. Very well—matter is energy—does your physics know that?" asked Arcot.

	"It does; matter contains vast energy. Energy has mass, just as matter has," replied the Talsonian.

	"Matter has mass, and energy because of that! Mass is energy. Mass is the measure of energy; it is energy.

	Energy in any known form is a field of force in space. Matter—the gravitational field in space represents its energy—but it is its energy. Light—light has a mass, and that mass a gravitational field. Magnetism—is a field itself. Electrostatic energy—a field between charged bodies. The electric current—besides the mass field of the electron is the electrostatic field, though it is hard to distinguish one from the other, and when the electron moves, there is a magnetic field.

	"So matter is ordinarily a combination of magnetic, electrostatic and gravitational fields. Your apparatus combined the three, and put them together. The result was—matter!

	"You created matter. We can destroy it, but we cannot create it.

	"What we ordinarily call matter, the substance, is just a marker, a sign that there are those energy-fields. Each bit is surrounded by a gravitational field. The bit is just the marker of that gravitational field."

	"But that seems to be wrong. This artificial matter of yours seems also a sort of knot, for you make all three fields, combine them, and have the real matter, but the little spot that we call matter is not, very apparently, like normal matter. Normal matter also has a draw-string effect. It holds the fields that make it. The artificial matter is surrounded by the right fields, but it is evidently not able to hold the fields, as normal matter does. That was why your matter continually disintegrated to ordinary energy. The energy was not bound properly.

	"That I haven't worked out—that is one of the things that has made my experiment unsuccessful. I was able to hold the energy by very nearly forcing more in.

	"But the reason why it would blow up so was obvious. It did not take much to destroy the slight hold that the artificial matter had on its fields, and then it instantly proceeded to release all its energy at once. And as you poured millions of horsepower into it all day to fill it, it naturally raised merry hell when it let loose."

	Arcot was speaking eagerly, excitedly.

	"But here is the great fact, the important thing: It is artificially created in a given place. It is subject absolutely to the forces that make it. It is made, and exists at the point determined by these three coordinate dials. It is not natural, and can exist only where it is made. The thing is hard to explain. Its principle is that the stuff exists where it is made, and nowhere else—obvious, but important. It cannot exist save at the point designated. Then, if that point moves along a line, to continue existence, the artificial matter must follow that moving point and be always at that point. Suppose now that a slab of steel is on that line. The point moves to it—through it. To exist, that artificial matter MUST follow it through the steel—and if not, it is destroyed. Then the steel is attempting to destroy the artificial matter. If the matter has sufficient energy, it will force the steel out of the way, and penetrate. The same is true of any other matter, lux metal or relux—it will penetrate. To continue in existence it must. And it has great energy, and will expend every erg of that energy of existence to continue existence.

	"It is, as long as its energy holds out, absolutely irresistible!

	"But similarly, if it is at a given point, it must stay there, and will expend every erg staying there. It is then immovable! It is either irresistible in motion, or immovable in static condition. It is the irresistible and the immovable!

	"What happens if the irresistible meets the immovable?" Arcot finished with a smile? "It can only fight with its energy of existence, and the more' energetic prevails."

-
	
CHAPTER X - Improvements and Calculations

	THE Talsonian looked at Arcot for a long time in silence. Finally: "And you come to us for aid! One can, by merely looking at an apparatus we have spent years designing, make it infinitely more effective, infinitely more manageable—seemingly without apparatus—yet you come to us!"

	"We had the apparatus all right," explained Morey. "We keep all apparatus in a form that permits us to take it apart and put it together in different ways. When we had this problem, we merely constructed the apparatus from parts, for nearly all parts are, in the essentials, similar. It is the hook-up, not the apparatus. It is inductance and capacity and magnetics that count, not inductances, condensers, and magnets. Then, too, we had the advantage of having worked with space-force fields many, many times before."

	"It is still incredible. But you have done it. It is certainly successful!" replied the Talsonian scientist with conviction.

	"Far from it—we have not realized a thousandth part of the tremendous possibilities of this invention. We cannot, till we know more about it. We must work and calculate and then invent. Experiments can err, but mathematics, faithfully performed, cannot, and they will inevitably give the correct answer the first time.

	"Think of the possibilities as a shield—naturally if we can make the matter we should be able to control its properties in any way we like. We should be able to make it opaque, transparent, red, green, blue, violet—any color. We should be able to make it transparent to ultra-violet and opaque to cosmics. Cosmics would tend to destroy the artificial matter, but the matter would in turn expend its energy in maintaining its existence. Then—attach to this the idea I have already mentioned." Arcot was speaking more to Morey now. "Do you remember, when we were caught in that cosmic ray field in space when we first left this universe, that I said that I had an idea for energy so vast that it would be impossible to describe its awful power? I mentioned that I would attempt to liberate it if ever there was need? The need exists. I am going to seek that secret—and if I find it, nothing in all this space will ever resist it—I think." He added: "Don't want to be too sure." Which was wise.

	Stel Felso Theu was looking out through the window at a group of men excitedly beckoning. He called the attention of the others to them, and himself went out. Arcot and Wade joined him in a moment.

	"They tell me that Fellsheh, well to the poleward of here, is being attacked. In fact, though they have used four of their eight shots, they are still being attacked," explained the Talsonian gravely.

	"Well, get in," snapped Arcot as he ran heavily back to the ship. Stel Felso hastily followed, and the Ancient Mariner shot into the air, above the city, and darted away, poleward, to the Talsonian's directions. The ground fled behind them at a speed that made the scientist grip the hand-rail with a tenseness that showed his nervousness.

	It seemed hours, however, before the battle-front came into view. As they approached, a tremendous concussion, and a great gout of light in the sky informed them of the early demise of several Thessians. But a real fleet was clustered about the city. Arcot approached low, and was able to get quite close before detection. His ray screen was up, and Morey had charged the artificial matter apparatus, small as it was, for operation. He created a ball of substance outside the Ancient Mariner, and thrust it toward the nearest Thessian, just as a molecular hit the Ancient Mariner's ray screen.

	The artificial matter instantly exploded with terrific violence, slightly denting the tremendously strong lux metal walls. The pressure of the light was so great that the inner relux walls were dented inward. The ground below was suddenly, instantaneously fused.

	"Lord—they won't pass a ray screen, obviously," he muttered, picking himself up from where he had fallen as the ship leaped violently.

	"Hey—easy there. You blinked off the ray screen, and our relux is seriously weakened," called Arcot, a note of worry in his voice.

	"No artificial matter with the ray screen up. I'll use the magnet," called Morey.

	He quickly shut off the apparatus, and went to the huge magnet control. The power room was crowded, and now that the battle was raging in truth, with three ships attacking simultaneously, even the enormous power capacity of the ship's generators was not sufficient, and the storage coils had been thrown into the operation. Morey looked at the instruments a moment. They were all up to capacity, save the ammeter from the coils. That wasn't registering yet. Suddenly it flicked, and the other instruments dropped to zero. They were in artificial space.

	"Come here, will you, Morey," called Arcot. In a moment Morey joined his much worried friend.

	"That artificial matter control won't work through ray screens. The Thessians never had to protect against moleculars here, and didn't have them up—hence the destruction wrought. We can't take our screen down, and we can't use our most deadly weapon with it up. If we had a big outfit, we might throw a screen around the whole ship, and sail right in. But we haven't."

	"Well, it was getting too hot for us. We can't stand ten seconds against that fleet, save with our wall up, and neither of us can hurt the other this way. I'm going to find their base, and make them yell for help." Arcot snapped a tiny switch one notch further for the barest instant, then snapped it back. They were close to a hundred thousand miles from the planet as he opened the screen. Instantly he set to work, but straightened with a laugh, and threw the ship several million miles from the planet. "Quicker," he explained, "to simply follow those ships back home—go back in time."

	With the telectroscope, he took views at various distances, thus quickly tracing them back to their base at the pole of the planet. Instantly Arcot shot down, reaching the pole in less than a second, by careful maneuvering of the space device.

	A gigantic dome of polished relux rose from rocky, icy plains. The thing was nearly half a mile high, a mighty rounded roof that covered an area almost three-quarters of a mile in diameter. Titanic—that was the only word that described it. About it there was the peculiar shimmer of a molecular ray screen. They could not see within the enclosure, for the relux turned back all light, yet they knew that within were the Thessian garrison.

	Morey looked a minute, then grinned. He darted to the power room and again set his apparatus into operation. He created a ball of matter outside the ship, the ray screen now down, and hurled it instantly at the fort. It exploded with a terrific concussion as it hit the wall of the ray screen. Almost instantly a second one followed, weighing nearly half a pound. The concussion was terrifically violent, the ground about was fused, and the ray screen was opened for a moment. Arcot threw all his moleculars on the screen, as Morey sent bomb after bomb at it. The coils supplied the energy, and the violent concussions rocked the un-f used ground, cracked the ice about, and the rock beneath. Each energy release disrupted the ray-screen for a moment, and the concentrated fury of the molecular beams poured through the opened screen, and struck the relux behind. It glowed opalescent now in a spot twenty feet across. But the relux was thick—tremendously thick, and it lasted. Thirty bombs Morey hurled, while cosmics from the fort played on the relux protection of the Ancient Mariner. Their eyes were destroyed, but they were motionless, and they held their position without difficulty, pouring their bombs and rays at the fort.

	Arcot threw the ship into space, moved, and reappeared suddenly nearly three hundred yards further on. A snap of the eyes, and he saw that the fleet was approaching now. He went again into space, and retreated. Discretion was the better part of valor. But his plan had worked.

-

	HE waited half an hour, and returned. From a distance the telectroscope told him that one lone ship was patrolling outside the fort. He moved toward it, creeping up behind the icy mountains. The ship seemed to loom suddenly before him, and his magnetic beam reached out. The ship lurched and fell. The magnetic beam reached out toward the fort, from which a molecular ray had reached already, tearing up the icy waste which had concealed him. The ray-screen stopped it, while again Morey turned the magnetic beam on—this time against the fort. The ray remained on! Arcot retreated hastily.

	"They found the secret, all right. No use, Morey, come on up," called the pilot. "They evidently put magnetic shielding around the apparatus. That means the magnetic beam is no good to us any more. They will certainly warn every other base, and have them install similar protection."

	"Why didn't you try the magnetic ray on the occasion of our first attack?" asked Zezdon Afthen curiously.

	"If it worked, I didn't want it to, and I suspected it wouldn't. If it had worked, their sending apparatus would have been destroyed, and no message could have been sent to call their dogs off of Fellsheh and our plan would have been unsuccessful. By forcing them to recall their fleet I got results I couldn't get by attacking the fleet.

	"I think there is little more I can do here, Stel Felso Theu. I will take you to Shesto, and there make final arrangements till my return—if ever, with apparatus capable of overthrowing your enemies. If you wish to accompany me—you may." He glanced around at the others of his party. "And our next move will be to return to Earth with what we have. Then we will investigate the Sirian planets, and learn anything they may have of interest, thence—to the real outer space, the utter void of inter-galactic space, and an attempt to learn the secret of that enormous power," finished Arcot.

	"Terrestrian, why do you need greater power than the enormous powers you have shown me?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	For answer, Arcot lead him to the laboratory, and there picked up two small electro-magnets, connecting them to the power lines, one drawing five amperes and the other ten. He arranged them so that the north poles of each were adjacent. A powerful repulsive action was set up.

	"Stel Felso Theu, take these, and push them together slowly," he suggested, handing him the magnets. The Talsonian took them curiously, and pushed them slowly toward each other. The repulsive force between them grew steadily as they approached, greater—greater—then it stopped increasing, and began to decline very rapidly, till at last it was practically zero. Then, for the last half inch, there was a pull between them.

	He looked curiously at Arcot.

	"At first they repel, then as they come nearer, the repulsion grows, but as they come still nearer the stronger tends to reverse the polarity of the weaker, and they struggle, the weaker struggling to maintain its identity. They come nearer, and the forces are slowly struggling in a death battle, the weaker steadily losing to the greater. They come nearer, and the weaker completely loses its polarity in the greater field of the stronger, and now, just a piece of steel, it is attracted, its identity lost.

	"The force with the lesser power has been overcome, its identity lost, finally completely destroyed by the greater power. It is power that conquers. They each fought with the same weapons, but the greater power inevitably won. If we can get vast power—we need no great weapons."

	They returned to Shesto, and there Arcot arranged that the only generator they could spare, the one already in their possession, might be used till other Terrestrian ships of the Ancient Mariner type, designed for their use in commerce with Nansal and Sator in that other Island Universe Arcot and his friends had visited, could bring more.

	Then they left for Earth. Hour after hour they fled through the utter void, till at last old Sol was growing swiftly ahead of them, and finally Earth itself was large on the screens. Stel Felso Theu looked on with vast interest as the strange planet loomed larger and still larger on the distorted view-screen. Finally they changed to a straight molecular drive, and dropped to the Vermont field from which they had taken off.

	During the long voyage, Morey and Arcot had both spent much of their time working on the time-distortion field, till at last it was finished, and plans were drawn up for installation of an apparatus which would give them a tremendous control over time, either speeding or slowing their time rate enormously. At last, this finished, they had worked on the artificial matter theory, and developed considerable of the theory, at least to the point where they could control the shape of the matter perfectly, though as yet they could not control the exact nature. The possibility of such control was, however, definitely proven by the results the machines had given them. Arcot had been more immediately interested in the control of form. He could control the nature as to opacity or transparency to all vibrations that normal matter is opaque or transparent to. Light would pass, or not as he chose, but cosmics he could not stop nor would radio or moleculars be stopped by any present shield he could make.

	The relux making the inner lining of the Ancient Mariner was distinctly weakened, and this they could not repair; neither were they able to have an inner coat put on. However, Arcot hoped that the power room and the pilot room might have an outer sheath of relux applied in time. Their time on Earth would be short, less than a day, but perhaps—

	They had signaled, as soon as they slowed outside the atmosphere, for a landing, and when they settled to the field, Arcot senior and a number of very important scientists had already arrived. More were coming as Arcot met his father on the field.

	Arcot senior greeted his son very warmly, but he was worried, tremendously worried, as his son soon saw.

-

	"WHAT'S happened, Dad, won't they believe your statements?"

	"They doubted when I went to Luna for a session with the Interplanetary Council, but before they could say much, they had plenty of proof of my statements," he answered with a wry smile. "News came that a fleet of Planetary Guard ships had been wiped out instantaneously by a fleet of ships from outer space. They were huge things—nearly half a mile in length. The Guard ships went up to them—fifty of them—and tried to signal for a conference. The white ship was instantly wiped out—we don't know how. They didn't have ray screens, but that wasn't it. Whatever it was—slightly luminous ray in space—it simply released the energy of the lux metal and relux of the ship. Being composed of light energy simply bound by photonic attraction, it let go with terrible energy. We can do it slowly in a special apparatus. They can do it almost instantly from a distance. Only one ship had the ray apparatus. The other Guards at once let loose with all their moleculars and cosmics. The enemy screen shunted off the moleculars, the cosmics blinded the big ray-ship, but the others sent moleculars and wiped out the Guard almost instantly.

	"Of course, I could explain the screen, which was new, but not the detonation ray. I am inclined to believe from other casualties that the destruction, though reported as an instantaneous explosion, was not that. Other ships have been destroyed, and they seemed to catch fire, and burn, but with terrific speed, more like gun powder than coal. It seems to start a spreading decomposition, the ship lasts perhaps ten minutes. If it went instantly, the shock of such a tremendous energy release would disrupt the planet.

	"At any rate, the great fleet separated, twelve went to the North Pole of Earth, twelve to the south', and similarly twelve to each pole of Venus. Then one of them turned, and went back to wherever it had come from, to report. Just turned and vanished. Similarly-one from Venus turned and vanished. That leaves twelve at each of the four poles, for, as I said, there were an even fifty.

	"They all followed the same tactics on landing, so I'll simply tell what happened in Arctica. In the North they had to pick one of the islands a bit to the south of the pole. They melted about a hundred square miles of ice to find one.

	"The ships arranged themselves in a circle around the place, and literally hundreds of men poured out of each, and fell to work with machines. In an inconceivably short time, their motions were exceedingly rapid, they had set up a number of machines, the parts coming from the ships. These machines at once set to work, and they built up a relux wall. A tiny ship watched from direct vision range, but the main observation was done from telectroscope machines at great distance. That wall, according to both parties, was at least six feet thick! The machines that made the relux, placed it. The floor was lined with thick relux as well as the roof, which is simply a continuation of the wall in a perfect dome. They had so many machines working on it, that within twenty-four hours they had it finished, while huge masses of water had been drawn in to supply the machines.

	"We attacked twice, once in practically our entire force, with some ray-shield machines. The result was, as I had predicted, disastrous. The second attack was made with ray shielded machines only, and little damage was done to either side, though the enemy were somewhat impeded by masses of ice hurled into their position by cosmics. All the workers wore relux suits, and the separate ships resting threw out a ray shield. The combined screens protected the workers. Their relux disintegration ray was conspicuous by its absence.

	"Yesterday—seems a lot longer than that, son—they started it again. They'd been unloading it from the ship evidently. We had had ray-shielded machines out, but they simply melted. They went down, and Earth retreated. They're in their fortress now. We don't know how to fight them. Now, for God's sake, tell us you have learned of some weapon, son!" The older man's face was lined and deadly serious as he pleaded for some encouraging word. His iron gray head showed his fatigue due to hours of concentration on his work.

	"Some," replied Arcot junior briefly. He glanced around. Other men had arrived, men he knew, whom he met in his work, or at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But there were Venerians here, too, in their protective suits, insulated against the cold of Earth, deadly to them, and against its dissecting-room atmosphere.

	"First, though, gentlemen, allow me to introduce Stel Felso Theu of the planet Talso, one of our allies in this struggle, and Zezdon Afthen and Fentes of Ortol, which, as you already know, is one of our other allies.

	"As to progress, I can say only that it is in a more or less rudimentary stage. We have the basis for great progress, a weapon of inestimable value—but it is only the basis. It must be worked out. I am leaving with you today the completed calculations and equations of the time field, the system used by the Thessian invaders in propelling their ships at a speed greater than that of light. Also, the uncompleted calculations in regard to another matter, a weapon which our ally, Talso, has given us, in exchange for the aid we gave in allowing them the use of one of our generators. Unfortunately the ship could not spare more than the single generator. I strongly advise rushing a number of generators to Talso in intergalactic freighters. They badly need power—power of respectable dimensions.

	"I have stopped on Earth only temporarily, and I want to leave as soon as possible. I intend, however, to attempt an attack on the Arctic base of the Thessians, in strong hopes that they have not armored against one weapon that the Ancient Mariner carries—though I sadly fear that old Earth herself has played us false here. I hope to use the magnetic beam, but Earth's polar magnetism may have forced them to armor, and they may have sufficiently heavy material to block the effects. As yet, no ship can have reached them from Talso, where they have already set up a base, for I believe our system is more rapid than theirs."

	In this belief Arcot was wrong. His maximum speed was greater, due to the peculiar practical considerations. A time control permitted full speed across space, since they at all times had perfect vision. The distortion of light due to speed was automatically rectified by their time fields; therefore they did not have to run at less than one-fifth full speed, whereas Arcot was forced to run at less than one-fifth full speed. A ship had already arrived, and the Thessians were working on complete magnetic protection.

-

	MOREY distributed the papers which had been made out upon the time field, and the incomplete calculations on the artificial matter, while Arcot already had a ground crew servicing the ship. He gave designs to machinists on hand to make certain control panels for the large artificial matter machine. The Ancient Mariner's store rooms were crowded with machinery, many very valuable cubic feet of storage space being sacrificed. The new "Mariner Type" machines being constructed had required the peculiar energy storage coils used in storing power for the space distortion apparatus, and many were on hand. Practically a third bank was installed, and charged at the maximum rate of the ship's huge generators while Morey, Arcot and Wade got some badly needed sleep.

	At least the danger of human interference with their plans was negligible. No human could hope for gain through an overt action, only some fanatic that felt "Called of God" to see that the Earth was "punished for its sins" could be expected to interfere—and did. One genius threw a tremendously powerful chemical explosive bomb under one side of the Ancient Mariner. It made a large pit in the landing field, killed one man and injured three others. The Ancient Mariner was slightly shifted as the ground gave way to the explosive. It takes more than chemical explosives to injure six inches of lux metal.

	Nevertheless, in six hours, Arcot had announced himself ready, and a squadron of Planetary Guard ships were ready to accompany the re-fitted Ancient Mariner.

	They approached the pole cautiously, and were rewarded by the hiss and roar of ice melting into water, which burst into steam under a cosmic ray. A molecular followed. They were coming from an outpost of the camp, a tiny dome under a great mass of ice. But the dome was of relux. A molecular reached down from a Guard ship—and the Guard ship crumbled suddenly as dozens of moleculars from other points hit it.

	"They know how to fight this kind of a war. That's their biggest advantage," muttered Arcot. Wade merely swore.

	"Ray screens, no moleculars," snapped Arcot into the transmitter. He was not their leader, but they saw his wisdom, and the squadron commander repeated the advice as an order. In the meantime, another ship had fallen. The dome had its screen up, allowing the multitudes of hidden stations outside to fight for it. They were bathed in cosmics, that melted their icy cover, and dozens of the miniature forts came into view.

	"Hmm—something to remember—when terrestrians have to retire to forts. They will, too, before this war is over. That way the main fort doesn't have to lower its ray screen to fight," commented Arcot. He was watching intensely as a tiny ship swung away from one of the larger machines, and a tremendously powerful molecular started biting at the fort's ray screen. The ship seemed nothing but a flying ray projector, which was what it was.

	As they had hoped, the deadly new ray stabbed out from somewhere on the side of the fort. It was not within the fort.

	"Which means," pointed out Morey, "that they can't make stuff to stand that. Probably the projector would be vulnerable."

	But a barrage of cosmics, which immediately followed back the brilliant beam of ionization, had no apparent effect. The little radio-controlled molecular beam projector lay on the rock under the melted ice, blazing incandescent with the rapidly released energy of the relux.

	"Now to try the real test we came here for," Morey clambered back to the power room, and turned on the controls of the magnetic beam. The ship was aligned, and then he threw the last switch. The great mass of the machine jerked violently, and plunged forward as the beam attracted the magnetic core of the Earth.

	Morey could not see it, but almost instantly the shimmer of the molecular screen on the fort died out. The deadly ray sprang out from the Thessian projector—and went dead. A cosmic ray started—and went dead. Frantically the Thessians tried weapon after weapon, and found them dead almost as soon as they were turned on—which was the natural result in the terrific magnetic field.

	And these men had iron bones, their very bones were attracted by the beam; they plunged upward toward the ship as the beam touched them, but, accustomed to the enormous gravitational accelerations of an enormous world, most of them were not killed.

	The molecular screen of the fort down, several of the Guard ships made the mistake of using their own molecular rays, which exposed them to the attacks of the little outskirt forts, as their screens were lowered. Arcot turned the ship now, and the magnetic beam played on one after another of the miniature forts, with dire results. One after another went dead, and leaping figures scurried from them, their packs alone protecting them. But there were too many. And while one existed, no ship could lower its screen to attack the fort.

	"Ah—" exclaimed Arcot. He picked up the transmitter and spoke again to the Squadron Commander. "Squadron Commander Tharnton, what relux thickness does your ship carry."

	"Inch and a quarter," replied the surprised voice of the commander instantly.

	"Any of the other ships carry heavier?"

	"Yes, special solar investigator carries five inches. One alone. What shall we do?"

	"Tell him to lower his screen, and let loose at once on all operating forts. His relux will stand for the time needed to shut them down for their own screens, unless some genius decides to fight it out. As soon as the other ships can lower their screens, tell them to do so, and tell them to join in. I'll be able to help then. My relux has been burned, and I'm afraid to lower the screen. It's mighty thin already."

	The Squadron Commander was smiling joyously as he relayed the advice as a command.

	Almost at once a single ship, blunt, an almost perfect cylinder, lowered its screen. In an instant the opalescence of the transformation showed on it, but its dozen ray projectors were at work. Fort after fort glowed opalescent, then flashed into protective ionization of screening. Quickly other ships lowered their screens, and joined in. In a moment more, the forts had been forced to raise their screens for protection. Still, many of the ships were fighting blind, their "eyes" gone under cosmics.

	Now at last a barrage of moleculars struck the six-foot relux of the fort. Arcot grinned. "They won't get far in that." Wade took over the ship, and Arcot retired to the new artificial matter room, and started the screen there. A chance cosmic wiped out the eyes. Another set flashed into action—and revealed the fort protected by the merged fields of the Thessian ships within. The ship rocked under another jolt of the magnetic beam, and in several places the screen fell.

	A disc of artificial mater ten feet across suddenly appeared beside the Ancient Mariner. It advanced with terrific speed, struck the great dome of the fort, and the dome caved, bent in, bent still more—but would not puncture. The disc retreated, became a sharp cone, and drove in again. This time the point smashed through the relux, and made a small hole. The cone seemed to change gradually, melting into a cylinder of twenty foot diameter, and the hole simply expanded. It continued to expand as the cylinder became a huge disc, a hundred feet across, set in the wall. The juncture of the wall and disc was a blazing inferno of released energy as the disc expanded.

	Suddenly it simply dissolved. There was a terrific roar, and a mighty column of white rushed out of the gaping hole. Figures of Thessians caught by the terrific current came rocketing out. The inside was at last visible. The terrific pressure was hurling the outside line of ships about like thistledown. The Ancient Mariner reeled back under the tremendous blast of expanding gas. The snow that fell to the boiling water below was not water, in toto, but some was carbon dioxide—and some oxygen chilled in the expansion of the gas. It was snowing within the dome. The falling forms of Thessians were robbed of the life-giving air pressure to which they were accustomed. But all this was visible for but an instant.

	Then a small, thin sheet of the artificial matter formed beside the fort, and advanced on the dome. Like a knife cutting open an orange, it simply went around the dome's edge, cutting through it. Half way around—three quarters—and the great dome lifted like the lid of a teapot under the enormous gas pressure remaining—then dropped under its own weight.

	The artificial matter was again a huge disc. It settled over the exact center of the dome—and went down. The dome caved in. It was crushed under a load utterly inestimable. Then the great disc, like some monstrous tamper, tamped the entire works of the Thessians into the bed-rock of the island. Every ship, every miniature fort, every man was caught under it—and annihilated.

	The disc dissolved. A terrific barrage of cosmics played over the island, and the rock melted, flowed over the ruins, and left only the spumes of steam from the Arctic ice, rising from a red-hot mass of rock, containing a boiling pool.

	The Battle of the Arctic was done. Arcot turned the machine south.

-

CHAPTER XI - "Write Off the Magnet"

	"SON," said Dr. Arcot senior's voice over the radio communicator, "that was a marvelous demonstration of energy controlled for destructive purposes. Thett has lost one base in this system.

	"But," his voice continued seriously, "it still has three others and—while you were fighting there to the North, the South, too, witnessed a battle. Capetown was wiped out. They did not use the merciful death ray, nor the molecular. They are a vindictive people. They burned the entire city with low concentration cosmics, while guard ships watched helplessly."

	Morey's comments were brief, relating principally to the future consignment of the Thessian race. Arcot turned to his transmitter and called the Squadron Commander.

	"You heard? Capetown wiped out. Let's see what we can do with the South Polar base."

	"Squadron Commander Tharnton speaking: Squadron 73-B of Planetary Guard will follow orders from Dr. Arcot directly. Heading south to Antarctica at maximum speed," droned the communicator, but under the official tone of command was a note of suppressed rage and determination. "And the Squadron Commander wishes Dr. Arcot every success in wiping out Antarctica as thoroughly and completely as he destroyed the Arctic base—and may all Thessians be eternally damned. My wife lived in Capetown."

	The flight of ships headed south at a speed that heated them white in the air, thin as it was at the hundred mile altitude, yet going higher would have taken unnecessary time, and the white heat meant no discomfort. They reached Antarctic in about ten minutes. The Thessian ships were just entering through great locks in the walls of the dome. At the first sight of the terrestrial ships they turned, and shot toward the guard-ships. Their screens were down, for, armored as they were with very heavy relux, they expected to be able to overcome the terrestrial thin relux before theirs was seriously impaired.

	"Ships will put up screens," Arcot spoke sharply—a new plan had occurred to him. The moleculars of the Thessians struck glowing screens, and no damage was done. "Ships, in order of number, will lower screen for thirty seconds, and concentrate all moleculars on one ship—the leader. Solar investigator will not join in action."

	The flagship of the squadron lowered its screen, and a tremendous bombardment of rays struck the leading ship practically in one point. The relux glowed, and the opalescence shifted with bewildering, confusing colors. Then the terrestrial ship's screen was up, before the Thessians could concentrate on the one unprotected ship. Immediately another Terrestrial ship opened its screen and bombarded the same ship. Two others followed—and then it was forced to use its screen.

	But suddenly a terrestrial ship crashed. Its straining screen had been overworked—and it failed.

	Arcot's magnetic beam went into action. A huge Thessian battleship staggered, and fell, its screen down. It crashed heavily on the icy, tumbled hillside. A door opened and long lines of men filed from it, quickly setting up apparatus on the ice. The Dome fort was not as yet actively fighting, save with cosmics which did little damage, but did annoy. It was easy to keep behind some Thessian ship, and so be out of range of the blinding rays.

	Morey, with Arcot's aid, was systematically wrecking the propulsive engines of the Thessian ships. But a few were left in the air when they changed their tactics, and charged down on the terrestrial ships. Three guard ships were changed to masses of bent, distorted relux under the ship bombardment. It was almost impossible to dodge the terrific charges, for the vastly greater accelerations which the Thessians used, made it like the strike of a snake.

	A Thessian ship loomed suddenly huge beside the Ancient Mariner. Arcot touched the switch—and they were alone in space. Alone—save for a great chunk of relux which drifted swiftly against the lux walls, only to bounce off. Arcot looked at it in puzzled wonder. It was the cap of a Thessian ship, the very tip of the nose. It was one solid piece of relux easily ten feet thick.

	"Designed for ramming, I see. But even it gave way when we went into space—and that bow was too near. Too bad we can't use that system, but we can't get near the Dome, because of the new ray, and the ships won't stand still long enough for us."

	Ten seconds later Arcot reappeared. All the Thessian ships were on the ground! A blazing mass of incandescence explained these tactics. Another ship was suddenly afire under the deadly ray.

	"Down—beside a Thessian" commanded Arcot sharply. He himself retreated again into space.

	"Tactics—while their friends were in the air. They couldn't use it of course. Now what!"

	Arcot reappeared, aligned the ship almost instantly, and Morey threw on the magnet. The deadly ray did not go out—it flickered, dimmed, but was apparently as deadly as ever.

	"Shielded—write off the magnet, Morey. That is one asset we lose."

	Arcot, protected in space, was thinking swiftly. Moleculars—useless. They had to keep their own screens up. Cosmics—against relux! Hopeless. Artificial matter—bound in by their own molecular screen! And the magnet had failed them against the protected mechanism of the dome. The ships were not as yet protected, but the dome was.

	"Guess the only place we'd be safe is under the ground—way under!" commented Wade drily.

	"Under the ground—Wade, you're a genius!" Arcot gave a shout of joy, and told Wade to take over the ship. He called Morey into session, while Wade looked in blank wonderment. He had apparently been very brilliant, but just how he didn't as yet see.

	"Take the ship back into normal space, head for the hill over behind the Dome, and drop behind it. It's solid rock, and even their rays will take a moment or so to move it. As soon as you get there, drop to the ground, and turn off the screen. No—here, I'll do it. You just take it there, land on the ground, and shut off the screen. I promise the rest!" Arcot dived for the artificial matter room.

-

	THE ship was suddenly in normal space; its screen up. The dog-fight had been ended. The terrestrial ships had been completely defeated. The Ancient Mariner's appearance was a signal for all the moleculars in sight. Ten huge ships, half a dozen small forts, and the now unshielded Dome, joined in. Their screen tubes heated up violently in the brief moment it took to dive behind the hill, a tube fused, and blew out. Automatic devices shunted it, another tube took the load—and heated. But their screen was full of holes before they were safe for the moment behind the hill.

	Instantly Wade dropped the defective screen. Almost as quickly as the screen vanished, a cylinder of artificial matter surrounded the entire ship. The cylinder was tipped by a perfect cone of the same base diameter. The entire system settled into the solid rock, making it flow like mud under the enormous pressure of artificial matter. The heat generated by the escaping energy aided somewhat, as they sank in a moment a quarter of a mile into solid rock. The rock above cracked and filled in behind them. The ship was suddenly pushed by the base of the cylinder behind them, and they drove on through the rock, the cone parting the hard granite ahead. They went perhaps half a mile, then stopped. In the light of the ship's windows, they could see the faint mistiness of the inconceivable hard, artificial matter, and beyond the slick, polished surface of the rock it was pushing aside. The cone shape was still there.

	There was a terrific roar behind them, the rock above cracked, shifted and moved about.

	"Raying the spot, where we went down," Arcot grinned happily.

	A reddish glow came from behind. "Cosmic now." The reddish color grew swiftly, became orange, and the rock slumped into white lava.

	The cone and cylinder merged, shifted together, and became a sphere. The sphere elongated upward, and the Ancient Mariner turned in it, till it, too, pointed upward. The sphere became an ellipsoid.

	Suddenly the ship was moving, accelerating terrifically. It plowed through the solid rock, and up—into a burst of light. They were inside the dome. A great rent in the floor behind them told the secret of their presence. Great ships were berthed about the floor. Huge machines bulked here and there—barracks for the men—everything.

	The ellipsoid shrank to a sphere, the sphere grew a protuberance which separated and became a single barlike cylinder. The bar shot toward a huge machine on one side, passed through it, turned, and reversed. The machine released a flood of cosmic rays. They hit the dome wall, were reflected and re-reflected, a burning, awful flood of cosmic rays. Many of the structures were made of natural elements, and these added to the horror by sending out great tongues of flame, floods of radiation of their own, of burning hydrogen.

	The bar turned, and drove through the great dome wall. A little hole—but it whirled rapidly around, sliced the top off neatly and quickly. Again, like a gigantic teapot lid, the whole great structure lifted, settled, lifted, settled, and stayed there. Men, scrambling wildly toward ships, suddenly stopped, seemed to blur and their features ran together horribly. They fell—and were dead in an instant as the air disappeared. In another instant they were solid blocks of ice, for the temperature was below the freezing point of carbon dioxide.

	The giant tamper set to work. The Thessian ships went first. Their cold tubes were rapidly becoming effective as occasional weak moleculars testified. But they were all crumpled, battered wrecks in a few seconds of work of the terrible disc.

	The dome was destroyed. Arcot tried something else. He put on his control machine the equation of a hyperboloid of two branches, and changed the constants gradually till the two branches came close. Then he forced them against each other. Instantly they fought, fought terribly for existence. A tremendous blast of light and heat exploded into being. Two tons of lead had been used to charge the coils that fed them. The energy of two tons of lead attempted to maintain those two branches. It was not, fortunately, explosive, and it took place over a relux floor. Most of the energy  escaped into space. The vast flood of light was visible on Venus, despite the clouds.

	But it fused most of Antarctica. It destroyed the last traces of the camp in Antarctica.

	"Well—the Squadron was wiped out I see." Arcot's voice was flat as he spoke. The Squadron—twenty ships—four hundred men.

	"Yes—but so is the Arctic camp, and the Antarctic camp, as well," replied Wade. He knew Arcot, and at present Arcot was about ready to start off on a single handed punitive expedition. That had happened once. Arcot had seen three husky interplanetary dock-hands hold up a little old lady, and take from her some two hundred dollars. "My funeral money" she had called ft. Arcot caught the dock-hands, and when the police arrived they were all taken to the station. The dock-hands were there for treatment; Arcot was held on a charge of assault and battery.

	"What next, Arcot. Shall we go out to intergalactic space at once?" asked Morey, coming up from the power room.

	Arcot steadied himself, and grinned at his friends. "You win, I guess I was about to lose my temper. I was about to start for Venus and finish the job.

	"No, we'll go back to Vermont, and have the time-field stuff I ordered installed, then go to Sirius, and see what they have. They moved their planets from the gravitational field of Negra, their dead, black star, to the field of Sirius—and I'd like to know how they did it. Then—Intergalactia." He started the ship toward Vermont, while Morey got into communication with the field, and gave them a brief report.

	"We knew what had happened," replied the Commander in charge at the field, "for there were ships out in space watching on the telectroscope. Relayed to us. But we didn't know how it had been done. So you drilled through about a mile of solid rock. We need that machine. Don't wreck it on the way up here!"

-

CHAPTER XII - Sirius

	THEY didn't wreck it on the way up. They landed about half an hour later, and Arcot simply went into the cottage, and slept—with the aid of a light soporific. Morey and Wade finished the job of directing the disposition of the machines, while Dr. Arcot senior really finished the job. The machines would be installed in less than ten hours, for the complete plans Arcot and Morey had made, with the modern machines for translating plans to metal and lux had made the actual construction quick, while the large crew of men employed required but little time.

	When Arcot and his friends awoke, the machine was ready. They swam in the near-by lake a bit, ate, and made final preparations for departure.

	"Well, Dad, you have the plans for all the machines we have. I expect to be back in two weeks. In the meantime you might set up a number of ships with very heavy relux walls, walls that will stand rays for a while, and equip them with the rudimentary artificial matter machines you have, and go ahead with the work on the calculations. Thett will land other machines here—or on the moon. Probably they will attempt to ray the whole Earth. They won't have concentration of ray enough to move the planet, or to seriously chill it. But life is a different matter—it's sensitive. It is quite apt to let go even under a very mild ray. I think that a few exceedingly powerful ray screen stations might be set up, and the Heavyside Layer used to transmit the vibrations entirely around the Earth. You can see the idea easily enough. If you think it worth while—or better, if you can convince the thickheaded politicians of the Interplanetary Defense Commission that it is—.

	"Beyond that, I'll see you in about two weeks," Arcot turned, and entered the ship.

	"The question is," he added a bit later, as the ship left Earth beneath, "Will I?"

	"At least you saw him then. I wish Dad had been able to get up. The Commission kept him too busy, and you kept me too busy," remarked Morey, half ruefully, half caustically.

	"I have no power to read the future with accuracy, Terrestrians," interrupted Zezdon Afthen, who alone of the Ortolians had joined them at Vermont," but I can read it to this extent: who has not his mind on the business in hand, does not long have himself upon it." 

	"True enough, Afthen.

	"I'll line up for Sirius and let go." Arcot turned the ship now, for Earth was well behind, and lined it on Sirius, bright in the utter black of space. He pushed his control to "1/2" and the space closed in about them. Arcot held it there while the chronometer moved through six and a half seconds. Sirius was at a distance almost planetary in its magnitude from them. Controlling directly now, he brought the ship closer, till a planet loomed large before them—a large world, its rocky continents, its rolling oceans and jagged valleys white under the enormous energy-flood from the gigantic star of Sirius, twenty-six times more brilliant than our own sun.

	"That world is a world of young rivers. No river there has grown to a series of meanders, no river there has even flattened its valley! There are hundreds of gigantic waterfalls!" exclaimed Sel Felso Theu in surprise. "And yet there are rivers; there is rainfall! Certainly the planet can not be old with such a geological formation.

	"It's old!" laughed Wade, "old as Earth. It is the planet Neptune, captured from our solar system by the Black Star as it passed a few years ago. The Negrians, as we called them, migrated here, and brought their old worlds to the new sun, and brought the new planet along. It had always been far from the sun, so far that water was continually locked up as ice, and the only rivers the planet knew were of liquid helium flowing to lakes of liquid helium, under an occasional snowstorm of hydrogen, or perhaps a little rain of the liquid hydrogen when the weather was unusually warm. It was cold out there. So cold that water never melted. The rivers of helium carved their way through mountains of ice and packed mountains of oxygen and nitrogen.

	"When the planet came here, the Sirians, or the old Negrians, moved it very near to the sun, and set it spinning very rapidly. The enormous flood of heat melted even the vast ice fields, probably in a few months, warmed the great mass of the planet throughout. Then they moved it back from the fire where they had thoroughly toasted it, let it cool to a comfortable temperature, and finally placed it at this distance, as being the one most satisfactory for their purposes." Wade pointed to the city, which had suddenly leapt into view on the screen, as the ship, sinking close to the planet, swept over a mountain range. "There they are now—living on the new world.

	"But Arcot, hadn't you better take it easy? They might take us for enemies—which wouldn't be so good."

	"I suppose it would be wise to go slowly. I had planned, as a matter of fact, on looking up a Thessian ship, taking a chance on a fight, and proving our friendship," replied Arcot.

	"My friend, would it not be wiser, and easier, to simply tell them we are friends?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"Oh—certainly! I forgot that we could communicate with them mentally from a distance. You had best tend to it Zezdon Afthen."

	"But," objected Morey, "I suspect that they won't be so sure we are friends when we come with a relux ship, equipped with cosmic projectors, rays, screens, and molecular rays, and they probably already suspect us of wishing to attack them—they probably already suspect that Earth has attacked them. They attacked us—we attacked them. Right? Then how convince them we are friends? Go attack a Thessian?"

	Morey saw Arcot's logic—then suddenly burst into laughter. "Absolutely—attack a Thessian. But since we don't see any around now, we'll have to make one!"

-

	MOREY was completely mystified, and gave Arcot! a doubtful, sarcastic look. "Sounds like a good idea, only I wonder if this constant terrific mental strain—"

	"Come along and find out!" Arcot threw the ship into artificial space for safety, holding it motionless. The planet, invisible to them, retreated from their; motionless ship.

	In the artificial matter control room, Arcot set to work, and developed a very considerable string of forms on his board, the equations of their formations requiring all the available formation controls. By the time he sat down to work, Morey just looked on; by the time he had set up the first, Morey aided him, and thereafter Wade was busy explaining to the Talsonian what Arcot intended.

	"Now," said Arcot at last, "you stay here, Morey, and when I give the signal, create the thing back of the nearest range of hills, raise it, and send it toward us. Unfortunately we can't—oh yes we can." Some more work was done, a great deal more work, and it was fully half an hour before the new adjustments had been made. Then Arcot declared himself ready.

	At once they returned to normal space, and darted down toward the now distant planet. They landed again near another city, one which was situated close to a range of mountains ideally suited to their purposes. They settled, while Zezdon Afthen sent out the message of friendship. He finally succeeded in getting some reaction, a sensation of skepticism, of distrust—but of interest. They needed friends, and only hoped that these were friends. Arcot pushed a little signal button, and Morey began his share of the play. From behind a low hill a slim, pointed form emerged, a beautifully streamlined ship, the lines obviously those of a Thessian, the windows streaming light, while the visible ionization about the hull proclaimed its molecular ray screen. Instantly Zezdon Afthen, who had carefully refrained from learning the full nature of their plans, felt the intense emotion of the discovery, called out to the others, while his thoughts were flashed to the Sirians below.

	From the attacking ship, a body shot with tremendous speed, it flashed by, barely missing the Ancient Mariner, and buried itself in the hillside beyond. With a terrific explosion it burst, throwing the soil about in a tremendous crater. The Ancient Mariner spun about, turned toward the other ship, and let loose a tremendous bombardment of molecular and cosmic rays. A great flame of ionized air was the only result. A new ray reached out from the other ship, a fan-like spreading ray. It struck the Ancient Mariner, and did not harm it, though the hillside behind was suddenly withered and blackened, then smoking as the temperature rose.

	Another projectile was launched from the attacking ship, and exploded terrifically but a few hundred feet from the Ancient Mariner. The terrestrial ship rocked and swayed, and even the distant attacker rocked under the explosion.

	A projectile, glowing white, leaped from the earth-ship. It darted toward the enemy ship, seemed to barely touch it, then burst into terrific flames that spread, eating the whole ship, spreading glowing flame. In an instant the blazing ship slumped, started to fall, then seemingly evaporated, and before it touched the ground, was completely gone.

	The relief in Zezdon Afthen's mind was genuine, and it was easily obvious to the Sirians that the winning ship was friendly, for, with all its frightful armament, it had downed a ship obviously of Thett, though not exactly like the others, it had the all too familiar lines.

	"They welcome us now," said Zezdon Afthen's mental message to his companions.

	"Tell them we'll be there—with bells on or thoughts to that effect," grinned Arcot. Morey had appeared in the doorway, smiling broadly.

	"How was the show?" he asked.

	"Terrible—Why didn't you let it fall, and break open?"

	"What would happen to the wreckage as we moved?" he asked sarcastically. "I thought it was a darned good demonstration."

	"It was convincing," laughed Arcot. "They want us now!"

	The great ship circled down, landing gently just outside of the city. Almost at once one of the slim, long Sirian ships shot up from a courtyard of the city, racing out and toward the Ancient Mariner. Scarcely a moment later half a hundred other ships from all over the city were on the way. Sirians seemed quite humanly curious.

	"We'll have to be careful here. We have to use altitude suits, as the Negrians breathe an atmosphere of hydrogen instead of oxygen," explained Arcot rapidly to the Ortolian and the Talsonian who were to accompany him. "We will all want to go, and so, although this suit will be decidedly uncomfortable for you and Zezdon Afthen and Stel Felso Theu, I think it wise that you all wear it. It will be much more convincing to the Sirians if we show that people of no less than three worlds are already interested in this alliance."

	Stel Felso Theu, who had been looking at the headpiece, gigantic for his diminutive head, and the rest too small really for his heavy form, shrugged, and worked his way into the flopping, uncomfortable affair.

	"Why any race," he commented good naturedly, "should develop their brains in such a poor, exposed place as the head, instead of the obviously more reasonable, better protected, better supported, and better nourished place like the hips, I don't know. You have told me, Wade, that many animals of your world did, in pre-human times, carry their brains in the more obvious place. Why did they move them to so poor a place as the head? The blood vessels must go through the easily accessible neck, the neck has to be straightened, the nerves all lead to a place distant from every part of the body, instead of centralizing near the center—and now look, I must needs rattle my eye-case (his thought-form for head) about in this great casket." His little face smiled cheerily, however, as he set the thin, strong, lux-metal helmet on his tremendous shoulders, and bolted it down.

	"And such diminutive creatures—how can I be expected to wear so small a rag as this?" asked the huge Ortolian, pulling to stretch the elastic fabric about his great frame.

	"The easiest way to get out of that, Zezdon Afthen, is to make one of your own," said Morey cheerfully bolting the headpiece on his shoulders. "Good luck!"

	"Good luck!" added Wade softly as the three filed into the airlock of the ship. "For luck it must be."

	A considerable number of Sirian ships had landed about them, and the tall, slim men of the 100,000,000-year-old race were watching them with their great brown eyes from a slight distance, for a cordon of men with evident authority were holding them back. Their flesh, once so exceedingly pale, lighted as their planets had been only by the stars, developed only to the slight immunity from destructive photo-active rays that such an existence needed, had darkened now, under the terrifically active rays of Sirius to a deep tan; they seemed a healthy, sturdy race now.

	"Who are you, friends?" asked a single man who stood within the cordon. He was tall, his strongly built frame, great high brow and broad head designating him a leader at a glance.

	Despite the vast change the light of Sirius had wrought, Arcot recognized in him the original of photographs he had seen from the planet old Sol had captured as Negra had swept past. So it was he who answered the thought-question. Though to the Sirian they had been words in his own tongue, to the terrestrian the thought-forms represented by his words had been clear English thought-forms.

	"I am of the third planet of the green-blue sun your people sought as a home a few years back in time, Taj Lamor. Because you did not understand us, and because we did not understand you, we fought. We found the records of your old, old race on the planet our sun captured, and we know now what you most wanted. Had we been able to communicate with you then, as we can now, our people would never have fought.

	"At last you have reached that sun you so needed, thanks, no doubt, to the genius that was with you.

	"But now, in your new-found peace comes a new enemy, one who wants this sun, as you wanted ours, and wants not only yours, but every sun in this galaxy. Perhaps your people do not know all the plans these invaders have, but thanks to our allies, we have learned them, and we have learned of weapons with which we may fight them better than they can fight us.

	"You have tried your ray of death, the anti-catalyst? And it but sputters harmlessly on their screens? You have been swept by their terrible rays that fuse mountains, then hurl them into space? Our world and the world of each of these men is similarly menaced. It is not a menace to you, but a menace to this galaxy, and all who live on its planets.

	"See, here is Zezdon Afthen, a student of the laws of Nature from Ortol, planet of the star, Thil, far on the other side of the galaxy, and here is Stel Felso Theu, of the planet, Talso, of the Sun Renl. Their worlds, as well as yours and mine have been attacked by this menace from a distant galaxy, from Thett, of the sun Ansteck, of the galaxy Venone.

	"Now we must form an alliance of far wider scope than ever has existed before.

	"You have already discovered that this is a war of science. To you we have come, for your race is older by far than any race of our alliance. Your science has advanced far higher than any division of our present science. What weapons have you discovered among those ancient documents, Taj Lamor? We have one weapon that you no doubt need, perhaps. We have a screen, which will stop the rays of the molecule director apparatus. What have you to offer us?"

	"We need your help, man of the blue-green star, we need it badly," was the reply. "We have been able to keep them from landing on our planets, but it has cost us much. They have landed on a planet we brought with us when we left the black star, but it is not inhabited. From this as a base they have made innumerable attacks on us. We tried throwing the planet into Sirius. They merely left the planet hurriedly as it fell toward the star, and broke free from our attractive ray."

	"The attractive ray! Then you have uncovered that secret?" asked Arcot eagerly.

	For long the men conferred, moving soon to the Ancient Mariner. Taj Lamor had some of his men bring a small attractive ray projector to the ship, and the "small" apparatus turned out to be nearly a thousand tons in weight, and some twenty feet long, ten feet wide and approximately twelve feet high. It was impossible to load the huge machine into the Ancient Mariner, so an examination was conducted on the spot, with instruments whose reading was intelligible to the Terrestrians operating it. Its principal fault lay in the fact that, despite the enormous energy of matter given out, the machine still gobbled up such titanic amounts of energy before the attraction could be established, that a very large machine was needed. In swinging the planets, the ray was established, and so long as maintained, used no more power than was actually expended in moving the planet or other body. The power used while the ray was in action corresponded to the work done, but a tremendous power was needed to establish it, and this power could never be recovered.

	Further, no reaction was produced in the machine, no matter what body it was turned upon. In swinging a planet then, a space ship could be used as the base, for the reaction was not exerted on the machine.

	From such meager clues, and the instruments, plus tests on the energy storage coils, Arcot got the hints that lead him to the solution of the problem, for the documents, from which Taj Lamor had gotten his information, had been disastrously wiped out, when one of their cities fell, and Taj Lamor had but copied the machines of his ancestors.

-

	THE immense value of these machines was evident, for they would permit Arcot to do many things that would have been impossible without them. The explanation as he gave it to Stel Felso Theu, foretold the uses to which it might be put.

	"As a weapon," he pointed out, "its most serious fault is that it takes a considerable time to pump in the power needed. It has here, practically the same fault which the artificial matter had on your world."

	"As I see it, the ray is actually directed gravitational field. Undirected, the mass attraction of sextillions of tons of matter is needed to produce an attractive force of one Earth-gravity at a distance of four thousand miles from its center of mass. "But if a spotlight-like ray is used instead—?"

	"See; the mass of one proton is about 1.7 X 10-24 grams, its radius is approximately 2 X 10-16 centimeters. That makes the surface gravity of that minute speck comparable in magnitude to that of earth—three centimeters per second per second. Earth's is about nine hundred only.

	"But here is the advantage. You could add a second and a third and a fourth proton, and add the surface gravity of each to that. So if you put in the sending end of such a beam a gram molecular weight of hydrogen, two grams of gas, with its 12 x 1023 protons, you would have a combined gravity 4 x 1021 times earth's gravity! A pound mass in that beam would weigh two quadrillion tons.

	"But actually their machine does not do just that. It consists of three parts really, three generating devices.

	"The first consists of a gravitational field projector. They create the gravitational field of a few milligrams of matter, without the matter. The more concentrated this field, the more powerful their final beam will be. This is created as a field in space, remember, an integral, interwoven part in the titanic fabric of space, which is really but the interacting gravitational fields of all the matter in the Universe.

	"Next they create a gravitational force-mirror. This requires enormous energy, as it is a peculiar space condition which requires the establishment of an inverted space curvature. This varies in size with the beam, and here is where the enormous amounts of energy are poured.

	"The third, and final step, consists of the arrangement of these force-mirrors, by the action of a third set of devices. Then the gravitational field is built up by the machine, the minute attraction of this field is all directed in one path by the force mirrors, and because the exact surface attraction of that field is projected, the attractive power may be enormous, as I suggested in the case of protons.

	"Now here is one thing that makes it more interesting, and more useful. It seems to defy the laws of mechanics. It acts, but there is no apparent reaction! A small ship can swing a world! Remember, the field that generates the attraction is an integral, interwoven part of the mesh of Space. It is created by something outside of itself. Like the artificial matter, it exists there, and there alone. There is reaction on that attractive field, but it is created in Space at that given point, and the reaction is taken by all Space. No wonder it won't move.

	"The work considerations are fairly obvious. The field is built up. That takes energy. The beam is focused on a body, the body falls nearer, and immediately absorbs the energy in acquiring a velocity. The machine replenishes the energy, because it is set to maintain a certain energy-level in the field. Therefore the machine must do the work of moving the ship, just as though it were a driving apparatus. After the beam has done what is wanted, it may be shut off, and the energy in the field is now available for any work needed. It may be drained back into power coils such as ours for instance, or one might just spend that last iota of power on the job.

	"As a driving device it is delightful. No reaction, save on all Space. Therefore a device in the nose of the ship might be set to pull the entire ship along, and still not have any acceleration detectable to the occupants.

	"I think we'll use that on our big ship," he finished, his eyes far away on some future idea.

	"Gravity, too, varies by the inverse square, quartering the force at twice the range. But if the gravitational attraction of one unit be completely projected on a straight line, so that we get, say the surface attraction of a proton—! Who knows its value? A proton's mass is close to 1.7 X 10-24 grams. Its radius is approximately 2 X 10-16. That makes the surface gravity—Good Lord! It's close to the same order of magnitude of that of the Earth! It is, I think, about three cms per second per second. Earth is nine hundred. You'd have only one three-hundredth of your normal weight—if you could stand on one—but think of the infinitely minute size, and the tremendous numbers of such tiny masses obtainable. Then, if one unit has one three-hundredth, three hundred, rolled into one, would have Earth's surface gravity. Right? If we could put something up against that surface.

	"But if a single mole, or gram-molecular-weight of a substance has 6 x 1023 molecules, or, in hydrogen, 12 X 1023 protons per two grams of gas, we would have 4 X 1021 times Earth's surface gravity if we could thus get the surface of each of those protons!*(*4 x 1021= 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times Earth's gravity. One pound weight on earth would be two quadrillion tons in this ray!)

	"Natural gravity of natural matter is, luckily, not selective. It goes in all directions. But this artificial gravity is controlled so that it does not spread, and the result is that the mass-attraction of a mass of matter does not fall off as the inverse square of the distance, but like the ray from the parallel beam spotlight, continues undiminished. Thus the gravitational conditions existing at the surface of a proton exist, in a straight line, undiminished. Anywhere along the path of the ray, the conditions are those of the protons surface.

	"Actually, they create an exceedingly intense, exceedingly small gravitational field, and direct it in a straight line. The building up of this field is what takes time.

	"But say, Morey," Arcot said suddenly turning to his friend, I wonder if there isn't a decided limit in the form of space-curving effects? Wouldn't space curve so badly as to close in the ray?"

	"Certainly!" laughed his friend, "But what's the value of the force-field that does that?"

	"Hmmm—so darned high you couldn't make anything stand up in it."

	"Precisely.

	"That ray has two excellent possibilities as a weapon. It can be used in a slightly diffused form, as they use it, to move bodies, or, if it can be concentrated indefinitely, it would simply draw everything together in so tiny a particle—it would simply bore a neat, round hole through anything."

	"Including the apparatus that generated it," added Wade.

	"Then it can't be intensified indefinitely, because the apparatus that does the work would be destroyed by the space strains around that field. Remember, to make it directional, they have to change those space strains, and send them off at an angle." Arcot was thinking aloud.

	All the men were silent for some time, and Zezdon Afthen, who had a question which was troubling him, looked anxiously at his friends. Finally he broke into their thoughts which had been too cryptically abbreviated for him to follow, like the work of a professor solving some problem, his steps taken so swiftly and so abbreviated that their following was impossible to his students.

	"But how is it that the machine is not moved when exerting such force on some other body?" he asked at last.

	"Oh, the ray concentrates the gravitational force, and projects it. The actual strain is in space. It is space that takes the strain, but in normal cases, unless the masses are very large, no considerable acceleration is produced over any great distance. That law operates in the case of the pulled body; it pulls the gravitational field as a normal field, the inverse-square law applying.

	"But on the other hand, the gravity-beam pulls with a constant force.

	"It might be likened to the light-pressure effects of a spotlight and a star. The spotlight would push the sun with a force that was constant, no matter what the distance, while the light pressure of the sun would vary as the inverse square of the distance.

	"But remember, it is not a body that pulls another body, but a gravitational field that pulls another. The field is in space. A normal field is necessarily attached to the matter that it represents, or that represents it as you prefer, but this artificial field has no connection in the form of matter. It is a product of a machine, and exists only as a strain in space. To move it you must move all space, since it, like artificial matter, exists only where it is created in space.

	"Do you see now why the law of action and reaction is apparently flouted? Actually the reaction is taken up by space."

	Arcot rose, and stretched. Morey and Wade had been looking at him, and now they asked when he intended leaving for the intergalactic spaces.

	"Now, I think. We have a lot of work to do. At present we have the mathematics of the artificial matter to carry on, and the math of the artificial gravity to develop. We gave the Sirians all we had on artificial matter and on moleculars.

	"They gave us all they had,which wasn't much beyond the artificial gravity, and a lot of work. At any rate, let's go!"

	Once more the Ancient Mariner was to do her warlike work against the Glossians.

CHAPTER XIII - Attacked

	THE Ancient Mariner stirred, and rose lightly from its place beside the city. Up, up, up it climbed, in horizontal position. A number of small Sirian ships kept it company as it started out into space.

	Suddenly they seemed to stop, and at a common signal they dropped frantically toward the ground below, and toward the city. The city was suddenly showing a liveliness and activity that had not been displayed before. Arcot became suspicious, and snapped on the loud-speaker, giving sound access to the ship. Instantly the whine of a siren-like apparatus became evident. Arcot "jumped" the ship several miles in a dive upwards under high acceleration. Then he looked about. Visible over the horizon now, and coming at terrific speed, were a fleet of seven Thessian ships.

	They must do their best to protect that city. Arcot turned the ship and called his decision to Morey. As he did so, one of the Thessian ships suddenly swerved violently, and plunged downward. The attractive ray was in action. It struck the rocks of Neptune, and plunged in. Half buried, it stopped. Stopped—and backed out! The tremendously strong relux and lux had withstood the blow, and these strange, inhumanly powerful men had not been injured! Of course the sharp turn had not bothered them, had not been felt, inasmuch as everything on the ship was affected equally, which caused the turn.

	But the ships were coming still. More slowly—but steadily.

	"They suffered thirty-three casualties in the crash, due to falling objects," thought Afthen to his friends.

	"Which explains their caution," replied Arcot.

	Two of the ships darted toward him simultaneously, flashing out molecular rays. The rays glanced off of Arcot's screen already in place, but the tubes were showing almost at once that this could not be sustained. It was evident that the swiftly approaching ships would soon break down the shields. Arcot turned the ship and drove to one side as a cosmic reached out. His eyes went dead.

	He cut into artificial space, waited ten seconds, then cut back. The Thessians were searching for him. Suddenly he gasped. The scene before him changed. It seemed a different world. The light was very dim, so dim he could scarcely see the images on the view plate. They were red, so exceeding deep a red that they were very near to black. Even Sirius, the flaming blue-white star was red, as deep a red as the objects about. The darting Thessian ships were moving quite slowly now, moving at a speed that was easy to follow. Their cosmics, before ionizing the air brilliantly red, were now dark. The instruments showed that the screen was no longer encountering serious loading, and, further, the load was coming in at a frequency harmlessly far down the radio-spectrum!

	Arcot stared in wide-eyed amazement. What could the Thessians have done that caused this change? He reached up and increased the amplification on the eyes to a point that made even the dim illumination sufficient. Wade was staring in amazement, too.

	"Lord! What an idea!" suddenly exclaimed Arcot. "Morey," he called exultantly, "The fools haven't thought of it. Increase it gradually. The trouble now is we get too high in the blue but we have amplification that should let us use the X-ray, and Sirius should be more generous!"

	Wade was staring at Arcot in equally great amazement. "What's the secret?" he asked.

	"Think, Wade, think!" replied Arcot joyously, and went to work. He moved the Ancient Mariner up to the nearest Thessian ship, and as he did so the scene changed again. It became even gloomier, but what faint light there was changed now, and there was a curious violet shading to it. The sun had a strange red-blue cast. Arcot increased the amplification of the kino-view lamps. The scene shifted once more, and now it was lighted with a ghastly blue tint. The Thessian ships were motionless, blue-glinting ghost ships. They hung silently, motionless where they were.

	The Ancient Mariner was very close now. Arcot turned a molecular ray toward the ship, and the air immediately about the ship blazed in the characteristic reddish ionization of the Sirian atmosphere. But, ten feet from the ship, the ionization disappeared. The ray seemed stopped. But the Thessian ship became suddenly luminous in a large spot, with the characteristic shifting colors of disintegrating relux. In a short time, a time far shorter than was ordinarily required to disintegrate a thickness of more than two inches, the six-foot wall was changed, and lux remained. Arcot shifted to a cosmic, and the terrible rays poured in through the gap. A man standing motionless in the room to one side of the gap suddenly exploded, and was gone in the roaring flame of cosmics. In an instant the entire inside of the ship was a blazing inferno of cosmic rays, reflected, re-reflected and again re-re-reflected about the relux walls, drenching every atom of matter within under the destructive rays.

	The ship was blazing, the atomic fires of disintegrating atoms spreading in the very air. It was unthinkable that anything could live in that section of the ship. But other sections—.

	Arcot's molecular rays were going. There was a peculiar flash for a moment as the rays tore at the relux of the ship, stripping it to lux metal. The rays entered in a moment, and an instant later the cosmics were drenching that section of the ship also.

-

	ARCOT had been paying very little attention to the other Thessian ships, blue ghosts in the air, motionless things. Suddenly he started, and drove his ship aside. One of the motionless ghosts had come to life!

	"Morey—they've got it—artificial matter," called Arcot sharply. A wall of artificial matter, a disc that was precisely flat loomed before the Thessian ship. It struck it with terrific force. The ship crumpled and bent in on itself like a food can under a sledge hammer. The artificial matter disc became a cylinder, whose base was the disc. It formed another end, and the Thessian ship was closed in. The cylinder closed, shrank, till it was a very small thing. Then it released a small cylinder of something that floated gently, very gently, downward.

	"Try that on the other ships. Their screens won't stop the stuff now!" called Arcot.

	Morey tried it. But that was all. The artificial matter seemed to move through the ships without affecting them.

	"Wrong idea, Arcot. They won't touch us, we can't touch them, much less artificial matter. It gets there at the wrong time."

	"The rays work," replied Arcot.

	"Because they shift when they reach the border."

	"What's the secret, Arcot? I give up!" said Wade desperately.

	"Time, man, time! We are in an advanced time plane, living faster than they, our atoms of fuel are destroyed faster, our second is shorter. In one second of our earthly time our generators do the same amount of work as usual, but they do many, many times more work in one second of the time we were in! We are under the advanced time field."

	Quickly now Wade could see it all. The red light—normal light seen through eyes enormously speeded in all perceptions, the change, the dimness—dim because less energy reached them per second of their time. Then came this blue light, as they reached the X-ray spectrum of Sirius, and saw X-rays as normal light—shielded, tremendously shielded by the atmosphere, but the enormous amplification of the eyes made up for it.

	The ship that had been rayed had no doubt seen only a flash of molecular rays, a terrific flood of cosmics coming at a rate that bespoke a generator of unheard of proportions, apparently. The relux, flooded with an enormous energy of molecular ray frequency, broke down swiftly. Morey had re-tuned the rays for the time-rate to make them effective, but the artificial matter operated on a different time-rate plane. It was matter, not light.

	Arcot found that only the rays were effective, and these were exceedingly hard to control, for the effective of the time-field and gravitational field of the planet twisted them badly. The artificial matter would be effective if an enemy ship attempted to attack on their time-plane, but not otherwise.

	Despite the difficulties, three more ships were rayed down before the remaining Thessians seemed to attain the idea simultaneously, and started for Arcot in his own time field. Already at close to the maximum speed safe near the planet, Arcot was forced to fight them in on their time frame now. Artificial matter got one ship as it entered the new frame, and the remaining ship was in his time frame. His molecular equipment seemed of the best, and he was bent on putting it all into operation at once, as well as ramming the terrestrial ship. Arcot's tubes heated swiftly, and though he tried the magnet, it failed. His own screen prevented the use of the artificial matter now, while the weakening screen was fatal. The Thessian ship seemed leaping at him. Suddenly, his speed increased inconceivably. Simultaneously, Arcot's hand, already started toward the space-control switch, reached it, and pushed it to the point that threw the ship into artificial space. The last glimmer of light died suddenly, as the Thessian ship's bow loomed huge beside the Ancient Mariner.

	There was a terrific shock that hurled the ship violently to one side, threw the men about inside the ship, and a crash of pans, metal plates, loose articles of all sorts, supposedly tied down, rang through the ship.

	Simultaneously the lights blinked out, the air whished from the room, and the expansion cooled the remaining atmosphere uncomfortably before a special locking gate closed the door of every room, as the air pressure fell below normal in it.

	Light returned as the automatic emergency incandescent lights in the room, fed from an energy storage coil, flashed on abruptly. The men were white-faced, tense in their positions. Swiftly Morey was looking over the indicators on his remote-reading panel, while Arcot stared at the few dials before the actual control board.

	"Power room flooded with cosmics. Gone," snapped Morey. Arcot had opened the power switch. "From the generator. The power coils are still functioning, we're in artificial space. There's an air pressure outside the ship!" he cried out in surprise. "High oxygen, very little nitrogen, breathable apparently, provided there are no poisons. Temperature ten below zero C.

	"Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short-circuited them." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking. They could scarcely hold themselves still, as their muscles jumped and quivered so.

	"Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen, his thoughts strangely distorted; shaky one might say. "It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work."

	"Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too. "When the ship was struck, curiously, I was calm enough, and didn't even think about what might happen to us; my only thoughts were what was happening to my pet ship. Morey, get some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste a little air on some smokes."

	Morey rose and went to the door that lead through the main passage to the galley. "Heck of a job—no weight at all," he muttered. "There is air in the passage, anyway." He opened the door, and the air rushed from the control room to the passage till the pressure was equalized. The door to the power room was shut, but it was bulged, despite its two-inch lux metal, and through its clear material he could see the wreckage of the power room. "Arcot," he called, "Come here and look at the power room. Quintillions of miles from home, and probably infinitely distant, for we can't shut off this field now." Arcot was with him in a moment. The tremendous mass of the nose of the Thessian ship had caught them full amidship, and the powerful ram had driven through the room. It had, by a miracle, missed the molecular tubes, so that they had continued to function until Arcot shut them off. Their lux walls had not been touched, and only a sledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, let alone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator was split wide open. Through a great rent in its side the cosmics had poured out into the room, and though all vital machinery had been shielded in relux, some of the lesser apparatus around the room had been burned. But the mechanical damage was the main item. The prow of the ship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was a wreck. Half of the tremendous leads were cut, and the huge power leads that carried the power to and from the auxiliary storage coils were cut. The main coil was charged, and would stay charged till they drained it.

	"And," pointed out Morey," we can't handle a job like that. It will take a tremendous amount of machinery back on a planet to work that stuff, and we couldn't bend that bar, let alone fix it. We'd have to put both ends together, then run new relux into a mold, and let it knit under the K-4Z field. We can't make a K-4Z field without apparatus, and we haven't the apparatus, nor the wherewithal to make the darned stuff."

	"Get the coffee, will you please, Morey? I have an idea that's bound to work," said Arcot looking fixedly at the machinery.

	Morey turned and went to the galley. In a few minutes he reported that the electric stove was useless, but that he was trying to work it on his pocket cosmic ray projector. He took out the power storage coil, and with some difficulty made a contact between the metal wires of the stove and the relux leads of the storage coil. The more than a million watt-hours stored in the tiny coil, no larger than his fist, solved the problem. In a short time the coffee, which had simply spread itself about the walls of the closed pot, was hot. The pressure was mounting rapidly, and Morey turned off the current. A small petcock opened in the side, and the coffee spouted out in a stream under the pressure of the water. It promptly rebounded from the bottom of the cup, and shot all around the room. Morey cursed and dropped the cup. It shot away under the impetus of the stream of coffee. Morey shut off the coffee, and cursed some more, nervously. Wade appeared, and took in the scene at a glance.

	FIVE minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small rubber balloons with coffee in them.

	They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about, the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsonian satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which Zezdon Afthen introduced.

	"Ah—Arcot, I never knew what a smoke was for, till now," said Wade gratefully as he puffed out a blue-grey streamer of the fine, fragrant Venerian-grown tobacco smoke.

	"Well, we have a lot more to do. The air-apparatus stopped working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while the air in the storage tanks is used up. Did you notice our friends, the enemy?" Through the great pilot's window the bulk of the Thessian ship's bow could be seen. It was cut across with an exactitude of mathematical certainty. The surfaces were so absolutely true that they shone with definite, sharp images.

	"Easy to guess what happened," Morey grinned. "They may have wrecked us, but we sure wrecked them. They got half in and half out of our space field. Result—the half that was in, stayed in. The half that was out stayed out. The two halves were instantaneously a billion miles apart, and that beautifully exact surface represents the point our space cut across. They apparently passed out with a bang, the air left them—er—not flat exactly, from what I have seen elsewhere. I suspect that they can't use their space suits in the ship when in battle because they are so heavy and clumsy that delicate, quick work can't be done in them. In an actual battleship I suspect they carry only the necessary working crew. That accounts for the air pressure outside. But it certainly must be tremendous to fill the space of this artificial space of ours so full!

	"That being decided, the next question is how to fix this poor old wreck?" Morey grinned a bit, "Better, how to get out of here, and down to old Neptune?"

	"Fix it!" replied Arcot. "Come on; you get in your space suit, take the portable telectroscope and set it up in space, motionless, in such a position that it views both our ship, and the nose of the Thessian machine, will you Wade? Tune it to—seven-seven-three." Morey rose with Arcot, and followed him, somewhat mystified, down the passage. At the air-lock Wade put on his space suit, and the Ortolian helped him with it. In a moment the other three men appeared bearing the machine. It was naturally practically weightless, though it would fall slowly if left to itself, for the mass of the Ancient Mariner and the front end of the Thessian ship made a considerable attractive field. But it was clumsy, and needed guiding here in the ship.

	Wade took it into the air-lock, and a moment later into space with him. His hand molecular-driving unit pulling him, he towed the machine into place, and with some difficulty got it practically motionless with respect to the two bodies, which were now lying against each other.

	"Turn it a bit, Wade, so that the Ancient Mariner is just in its range," came Arcot's thoughts. Wade did so. "Come on back and watch the fun."

	Wade returned. Arcot and the others were busy placing a heavy emergency lead from the storeroom in the place of one of the broken leads. In five minutes they had it fixed where they wanted it.

	"But," objected Wade, "that's just a laboratory lead. How come?" The Talsonian looked at it thoughtfully a moment, then suddenly his face brightened.

	"I think," he commented thoughtfully, "that Arcot has a very, very strong hand."

	"He has—now," grinned Morey. "Just watch dumbbell."

	Into the control room went Arcot, and started the power-room teleview plate. Connected into the system of viewplates, the scene was visible now on all the plates in the ship. Well off to one side of the room, prepared for such emergencies, and equipped with individual power storage coils that would run it for several days, the viewplate functioned smoothly.

	"Now, we are ready," said Arcot. The Talsonian proved he understood Arcot's intentions by preceding him to the laboratory.

	Arcot had two viewplates operating here. One was covering the scene as shown by the machine outside, and the other showed the power, room.

	"Oh," muttered Wade sheepishly. Arcot stepped over to the artificial-matter machine, and worked swiftly on it. In a moment the power from the storage coils of the ship was flowing through the new cable, and into the machine. A huge ring appeared about the nose of the Thessian ship, fitting snugly over it. A terrific wrench—and it was free of the Ancient Mariner. The ring contracted, but through the relux, and formed a chunk of the stuff free of the broken nose of the ship.

	It was carried over to the wall of the Ancient Mariner, a smaller piece snipped off as before, and carried inside. A piece of perhaps half a ton mass. "I hope they use good stuff," grinned Arcot. The piece was deposited on the floor of the ship, and a disc formed of artificial matter plugged the hole in its side. Another took a piece of the relux from the broken Thessian ship, and pushed it into the hole on the ship. Suddenly the meters of the artificial-matter machine ran up enormously. The space about the scene of operation was a crackling inferno of energy breaking down into heat and light. Arcot dematerialized his tremendous tools, and the wall of the Ancient Mariner was neatly patched with relux, smoothed over as perfectly as before. A second time, using some of the relux he had brought within the ship, and the inner wall was rebuilt. The job was absolutely perfect, save that now, where there had been lux, there was an outer wall of relux.

	The main generator was crumpled up, and torn out. The auxiliary generators would have to carry the load. The great cables were swiftly repaired in the same manner, a perfect cylinder forming about them, and a piece of relux from the store Arcot had sliced from the enemy ship, welding them perfectly under enormous pressure, pressure that made them flow perfectly into one another as heat alone could not.

	In less than half an hour the ship was patched up, the power room generally repaired, save for a few minor things that had to be replaced from the stores. The main generator was gone, but that was not an essential. The door was straightened and the job done.

	In an hour they were ready to proceed.

-

CHAPTER XIV - Intergalactic Space

	"WELL, Sirius has retreated a bit," observed Arcot. The star was indeed several trillions of miles away. Evidently they had not been motionless as they had thought, but the interference of the Thessian ship had thrown their machine off.

	This was not the true explanation, as they later learned to their sorrow, but it was the one that occurred to their minds as the most natural. Their apparatus, designed for rapid travel, had hurled them through space. That seemed natural. But the true explanation—how could they have guessed it?

	"Shall we go back, or go on?" asked Morey. "The ship works. Why return?" asked Wade. "I vote we go on."

	"And so say I," added Arcot.

	"If they who know most of the ship vote for a continuance of the journey, then assuredly we who know so little can only abide by their judgment. Let us continue," said Zezdon Afthen gravely.

	"She behaves QAR, Arcot?" asked Morey.

	"Perfectly."

	"Then let's go on. We have no reason to return to Sirius."

	Space was suddenly black about them. Sirius was gone, all the jewels of the heavens were gone in the black of swift flight. Ten seconds later Arcot lowered the space-control. Black behind them the night of space was pricked by points of light, the infinite multitude of the stars. Before them lay—nothing. The utter emptiness of space between the galaxies.

	"Thlek Styrs! What happened?" asked Morey in amazement, his pet Venerian phrase rolling out in his astonishment.

	"Tried an experiment, and it was overly successful," replied Arcot, a worried look on his face. "I tried combining the Thessian high speed time distortion with our high speed space distortion—both on low power. 'There ain't no sich animals.' as the old agriculturist remarked of the giraffe. God knows what speed we hit, but it was plenty. We must be ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy."

	"That's a fine way to start the trip. You have the old star maps to get back by, however, have you not?" asked Wade.

	"Yes, the maps we made on our first trip out this way are in the cabinet. Look 'em up, will you, and see how far we have to go out before we reach the cosmic fields?"

	Arcot was busy with his instruments, making a more accurate determination of their distance from the "edge" of the galaxy. He adopted the figure of twelve thousand five hundred light years as the probable best result. Wade was back in a moment with the information that the fields lay about sixteen thousand light years out. Arcot went on, at a rate that would reach the fields in two hours. In the meantime the Terrestrians took a nap, while the tireless Talsonian watched the ship.

	At the end of an hour and fifty minutes Arcot was violently awakened by striking the side of his room. The relux window screens were up, and he could not see out, but he knew what was happening. He drove for the controls, reached them without being thrown against the wall but four times, and shut off the space control. The ship continued to lurch, but not as badly. On the time control, which he applied for an instant, the ship lurched even more violently. The molecular control backed them out in less than an hour, to a point where the pitching was slight. In the meantime both the Ortolian and the Talsonians were made most desperately sick by the motion. Then Morey, Arcot and Wade set to work with the Talsonian scientist on their instruments. For several hours they worked steadily. They retreated further, and took more readings. Then, throwing the combined time and space control on full power for an instant, they drove forward. They were again moving smoothly, after a single violent jerk, but the galaxy was so far behind, it was a point.

	"It works—but it works too well. We'll have to go back—by careful maneuvering," said Arcot drily. "The double drive was not a thing to use for going home evenings. Unless your home was somewhere in the next galaxy."

	"It seems, Arcot, that we could reach Andromeda M-31 at 1,000,000 light years more quickly than we could reach England at 3000 miles," laughed Wade.

	"Laugh now—but tell me how to get back there in less than an hour," commented Arcot looking at the rear viewplate.

-

	NEVERTHELESS he swung the ship about, reversed the actual motion, and started it back on the molecular drive, and threw it into the space-drive, with a touch of the time-drive. A minute later he took the two off. They were 50,000 light years from the galaxy. Proceeding slowly now, he soon ran into the invisible cosmic field at 43,000 light years.

	Here, several hours more were spent in measurements, till at last Arcot announced himself satisfied.

	"Good enough—back we go." Again in the control room, he threw on the drive, and shot through the twenty-seven thousand light years of cosmic ray fields, and then more leisurely returned to the galaxy. The star maps were strangely off. They could follow them, but only with difficulty as the general configuration of the constellations that were their guides were visibly altered to the naked eye.

	"Morey," said Arcot softly, looking at the constellation at which they were then aiming, and at the map before him, "there is something very, very rotten. I won't say it's in the State of Denmark; that doesn't exist any more, and, anyhow, it's too far off. But the Universe either 'ain't what it used to be' or we have traveled in more than space."

	"I know it, and I agree with you. Obviously, from the degree of alteration of the constellations, we are off by about 100,000 years. Question: which way, early or late? Question: how come? Question: what are we going to do about it?"

	"Answer one: we can determine by determining the direction of relative motion of those stars, but not necessarily their magnitudes. Or, we can return to Earth and determine there.

	"Answer two: remembering what we observed in re Sirius, I suspect that the interference of that Thessian ship, with its time-field opposing our space-field did things to our time-frame. We were probably thrown off then.

	"As to the third question, we have to determine number one first. Then we can plan our actions."

	With Wade's help, and by coming to rest near several of the stars, then observing their actual motions, they were actually able to determine their time-status. The estimate they made finally was of the order of eighty thousand years in the past! The Thessian ship had thrown them eighty thousand years out of their time.

	"This isn't all to the bad," said Morey with a sigh," We at least have all the time we could possibly use to determine the things we want for this fight. We might even do a lot of exploring for the archeologists of Earth and Venus and Ortol and Talso. As to getting back—that's a question."

	"Which is," added Arcot, "easy to answer now, thank the good Lord. All we have to do is wait for our time to catch up with us. If we just wait eighty thousand years, eight hundred centuries, we will be in our own time."

	"Oh, I think waiting so long would be boring," said Wade sarcastically. "What do you suggest we do in the intervening eighty millenniums? Play cards?"

	"Oh, cards or chess. Something like that," grinned Arcot. "Play cards, calculate our fields—and turn on the time rate control."

	"Oh—I take it back. You win! Take all! I forgot all about that," Wade smiled at his friend. "That will save a little waiting, won't it."

	"The exploring of our worlds would without doubt be of infinite benefit to science, but I wonder if it would not be of more direct benefit if we were to get back to our own time, alive and well. Accidents always happen, and for all our weapons, we might easily meet some animal which would put an abrupt and tragic finish to our explorations. Is it not so?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	"I knew nothing of the animals of your world, and little at the actual time, of the life of my world, but in the past, before History was invented, there were animals on my world which would probably have required more killing than one could readily give them," added Zezdon Fentes.

	"Your point is good, Stel Felso Theu. I agree with you. We will do no more exploring than is necessary, or safe."

	"We might just as well travel slowly on the time retarder, and work on the way, save that in that case someone has to keep an eye on the screens. I think the thing to do is to go back to Earth, or better, the solar system, and follow the sun in its path."

	"Follow the sun in its lonely, awesome journey through the eighty thousand years that we have been hurled through time, follow it through a single, instantaneous flash of its eon-long journey through infinite time and infinite space," added Morey softly. "Through the utter desolation of absolute cold that forever saps its energy."

	They returned, and the desolation that the sun in its journey passes through is nothing to the utter, oppressive desolation of empty space between the stars, for it has its family of planets—and it has no conscious thought.

	The Sun was far from the point that it had occupied when the travelers had left it, billions on billions of miles, for every hour sees it close to forty thousand miles further on its journey around the gravitational center of our galactic universe, and in the eighty millenniums that they must wait, it would go far.

	They did not go to the planets now, for, as Arcot said in reply to Stel Felso Theu's suggestion that they determine more accurately their position in time, life had not yet developed to an extent that would enable them to determine the year according to our calendar.

	So for thirty thousand years they hung motionless as the sun moved on, and the little spots of light, that were worlds, hurled about it in a mad race. Even Pluto, in its three-hundred-year-long track seemed madly gyrating beneath them; Mercury was a line of light, as it swirled about the swiftly moving sun.

	But that thirty thousand years was thirty days to the men of the ship. Their time rate immensely retarded, they worked on their calculations. At the end of that month Arcot had, with the help of Morey and Wade, worked out the last of the formulas of artificial matter, and the machines had turned out the last graphical function of the last branch of research that they could discover. It was a time of labor for them, and they worked almost constantly, stopping occasionally for a game of some sort to relax the nervous tension.

-

	AT the end of that month they decided that they would go to Earth, not hoping to find life, but hoping to find relaxation.

	They speeded their time rate now, and flashed toward Earth at enormous speed that brought them within the atmosphere in minutes. They had landed in the valley of the Nile. Arcot had suggested this as a means of determining the advancement of life of man. Man had evidently established some of his earliest civilizations in this valley where water and sun for his food plants were assured.

	"Look—there are men here!" exclaimed Wade. Indeed, below them were villages, of crude huts made of timber and stone and mud. Rubblework walls, for they needed little shelter here, and the people were but savages, at this time, fifty thousand years before our histories.

	"Shall we land?" asked Arcot, his voice a bit unsteady, with suppressed excitement.

	"Of course!" replied Morey, without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in the air above them, a great, shining thing, a thing for which there were no words in their language and no thoughts in their minds. A thing unheard of.

	"Does every one agree that we land?" asked Arcot.

	There were no dissenting voices, and the ship sank gently toward a road below and to the left. A little knot of watchers broke, and they fled in terror as the great machine approached, crying out to their friends, casting affrighted glances at the huge, shining monster behind them.

	Without a jar the mighty weight of the ship touched the soil of its native planet, touched it fifty millenniums before it was made, five hundred centuries before it left!

	"There is one thing puzzles me—I can't see how we can come back. Don't you see, Morey, we have disturbed the lives of those people, we have affected history. Either this was ordained—it must be that, in our right time the effect of this call was ordained, had already been felt. This must be written into the history that exists.

	"This call seems to banish the idea of free thought. Think, if we were not intended, forced, to come here, we would have changed history, yet history is that which is already done!

	"Had I never been born, had—but I was already—I existed fifty-eighty thousand years before I was born!" exclaimed Arcot.

	"Let's go out and think about that later. We'll go to a psychopathic hospital, if we don't stop thinking about problems of space and time for a little while. We need some kind of relaxation."

	"I suggest that we take our weapons with us. These men may have weapons of chemical nature, such as poisons injected into the flesh on small sticks hurled either by a spring device or by pneumatic pressure of the lungs," said Stel Felso Theu as he rose from his seat, unstrapping himself.

	"Arrows and blow-guns we call 'em. But it's a good idea, Stel Felso, and I think we will," replied Arcot. "Let's not all go out at once, and the first group to go out goes out on foot, so they won't be scared off by our flying around."

	Arcot, Wade, Zezdon, Afthen, and Stel Felso Theu went out. The natives had retreated to a respectful distance, and were now standing about, looking on, chattering to themselves. They were edging nearer.

	"Growing bold," grinned Wade.

	"It is the characteristic of intelligent races manifesting itself—curiosity," pointed out Stel Felso Theu.

	"Are these the type of men still living in this valley, or who will be living there in fifty thousand years?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"I'd say they weren't Egyptians as we know them, but typical Neolithic men. See, their clothing consists of rough hides, stinking hides I might say. How do they stand it? Yet they are intelligent looking. It seems they have brains fully as large as some of the men I see on the streets of New York. I wonder if they have the ability to learn as much as the average man of—say about 1950? That was just shortly before men began to grow tall.

	"You know, Zezdon Afthen, I am not unusually tall, nor is Morey unusually tall for our race, yet we are both well over six feet. Morey is nearly six and one-half feet tall. In 1950, less than two hundred years ago, a man of that height would have loomed over the crowd enormously. A man of six feet even, would have stood out in the crowd. A man of six feet then would have been able to look over the heads of most of the people in a crowd about him, for the average height of the men of New York City was of the order of five feet six. Now Morey with his six-six is not outstanding. And remember that a large man has a large head, of necessity." Arcot was warming up on one of his pet topics, but the Neolithic men were also warming up. There was an orator among them, and his grunts, growls, snorts and gestures were evidently affecting them. They had sent the women back (by the simple and direct process of sweeping them up in one arm and heaving them in the general direction of home). The men were brandishing polished stone knives and axes, various instruments of war and peace. One favorite seemed to be a large club.

	"Let's forestall trouble," suggested Arcot. He drew his cosmic ray pistol, and turned it on the ground directly in front of them, and about half way between them and the Neoliths. A streak of the soil about two feet wide flashed into intense radiation under the impact of millions on millions of horsepower of radiant energy. Further, it was fused to a depth of twenty feet or more, and intensely hot still deeper. The Neoliths took a single look at it, then turned, and raced for home.

	"Didn't like our looks. Let's go back."

	They wandered about the world, investigating various peoples, and proved to their own satisfaction that there was no Atlantis, not at this time at any rate. But they were interested in seeing that the polar caps extended much further toward the equator; they had not retreated at that time to the extent that they had by the opening of history.

	They secured some fresh game, an innovation in their larder, and a welcome one. Then the entire ship was swept out with fresh, clean air, their water tanks were filled with water from the cold streams of the melting glaciers. The air apparatus was given a new stock to work over. The principle of this apparatus was the principle of nature's apparatus on Earth. The carbon dioxide was absorbed in water as the air was forced through under great pressure. Collected thus, it was also an effective system for washing the air free of dust and impurities.

	The carbon dioxide was now collected and electrolyzed in a solution prepared for this purpose. The oxygen was freed, the carbon collected. Some water must be electrolyzed also, but the greater part of the oxygen replacement came from the oxygen tanks, where the gas was stored under such enormous pressure that it was denser than aluminum. Aluminum tended to float in the air!

	Their supplies in a large measure restored, thousands of aerial photographic maps made, they returned once more to space to wait.

	Their time was taken up for the most part by actual work on the enormous mass of calculation necessary. It is inconceivable to the layman what tremendous labor is involved in the development of a single new theory, and a concrete illustration of it was the long time, with tremendously advanced calculating machines, that was required in their present work.

-

	THEY had worked out the problem of the time-field, but there they had been aided by the actual apparatus, and the possibilities of making direct tests on machines already set up. The problem of artificial matter, at length fully solved, was a different matter. This had required within a few days of a month (by their clocks; close to thirty thousand years of Earth's time), for they had really been forced to develop it all from the beginning. In the small improvements Arcot had instituted in Stel Felso Theu's device, he had really merely followed the particular branch that Stel Felso Theu had stumbled upon. Hence it was impossible to determine with any great variety, the type of matter created. Now, however, Arcot could make any known kind of matter, and many unknown kinds.

	But now came the greatest problem of all. They were ready to start work on the data they had collected in space.

	"What," asked Zezdon Afthen, as he watched the three terrestrians begin their work, "is the nature of the thing you are attempting to harness?"

	"In a word, energy," replied Arcot, pausing.

	"We are attempting to harness energy in its primeval form, in the form of a space-field. Remember, mass is a measure of energy. Two centuries ago a scientist of our world proposed the idea that energy could be measured by mass, and proceeded to prove that the relationship was the now firmly entrenched formula E = MC2. Energy of any mass equals the product of that mass times the velocity of light squared, all units in the same measurement system. That applies whether we use the terrestrial system of centimeter-gram-second, your system of steh-rensl-kwuns or Stel Felso's system of thels-meles-gerds. It is true, and the reason is that all energy is represented, or better is a field in space. All energy has mass, all energy has a field in space. If it be the energy of matter, it is represented by the gravitational field; if it be chemical energy—the reacting substances do weigh a minute amount more before than after the reaction in the case of an exothermic reaction.

	"The sun is giving off energy. It is giving off mass, then, in the form of light photons. The field of the sun's gravity must be constantly decreasing as its mass decreases. It is a collapsing field. It is true, the sun's gravitational field does decrease, by a minute amount, despite the fact that our sun loses a thousand million tons of matter every four minutes. The percentage change is minute, but the energy released is—immeasurable.

	"But, I am going to invent a new power unit, Afthen. I will call it the 'sol', the power of a sun. One sol is the rating of our sun. And I will measure the energy I use in terms of sunpowers, not horsepower. That may tell you of its magnitude!

	"You know what a transformer is, do you not? It is a device in which one coil, the primary, builds up a magnetic field, while a second coil, the secondary, taps that changing space-field, or commonly, magnetic field, and takes that energy that it needs for itself. When the primary now lets the field fall, or collapse, the secondary again taps the field. The energy which the primary stored in space as a space-field, was tapped by the secondary, and energy which would have been available for the primary, was taken by the secondary.

	"Yet remember that no matter how great the energy field of the primary coil, so long as it is not changing, the secondary coil cannot tap it, a collapsing field, or of course a rising field, is needed.

	"Now a gravitational field represents energy, surely you will not question that. A collapsing gravitational field means a withdrawal of stored energy. The sun's field is collapsing, and the stored energy appears as light.

	"A sun, or star, is not merely a lump of matter, a mere collection of atoms that stays helpless there, a piece of hot clay. A sun is a machine, a titanic, marvelously ingenious machine, a transformer on a scale inconceivable, a thing of forces, immense forces balanced and counterbalanced to the minutest detail. It is a transformer so huge that driblets and chips that may break from it form worlds, a transformer so huge that floods of energy may pass through it at such a rate that space itself is strained in the bearing of its power-loads. A star is a huge induction coil, in which energy is stored, an amount of energy which one may put down in cold figures, and still have no meaning. It is a very nearly perfect storage coil, but like most storage apparatus it leaks, just a trifle, a fraction of a percentage so small that in two billion years that our planets have existed, no appreciable change in that energy has taken place. Wouldn't you say it was a perfect storage machine? The sun is like a huge transformer in many ways. You know the bigger they are, the more efficient they are. Some of the biggest ones run better than 99%, and still waste 10,000 kilowatt time units.

	"But the point of all this is that the sun represents an energy field in space, and further, a collapsing energy field in space. Now, from our experience with other collapsing fields, it would seem reasonable that some sort of collector could be devised that would tap this energy field just as the sun itself does, but it would be a secondary coil! That is, we could hook our wagon to a star—literally and directly! Make a star supply the power, and better than that too, for here is the stupendous thing, every star in the universe is doing exactly the same thing! Every star represents a collapsing energy-field, so the entire galaxy represents a collapsing energy field! Five hundred thousand million stars, five hundred thousand million power plants, every one of them destroying, on the average, one thousand million tons of matter each four minutes, two hundred and fifty million tons a minute. That's a grand total of one hundred and twenty-five thousand thousand million million tons of matter a minute.*( *125,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.)

	"I could carry that on into horsepower, but even if I did, it would just be a huge power. You probably appreciate what that means though. Infinite power, the power of all the universe, no power can be greater, for any other power source must be the destruction of matter, and our hypothetical secondary would take a levy on that as well as any other matter!

	"But remember, the galaxy is losing weight by throwing its light into intergalactic space. That means that the mass of energy in the intergalactic space must be increasing. Then we have the galaxies losing weight, and the space between gaining. At some point there must be a neutral region where it neither gains nor loses. There the opposing fields, one positive, one negative, must clash. They do—and those are the cosmic ray fields.

	"Now we have clews here, the rays, the structure of suns, and so forth. Several ships have gone into the sun, and penetrated to a depth of close to a hundred thousand miles, where the pressure became so enormous that even shells of solid lux would not stand it, though it was close to fifty feet thick.

	"That's the data. Problem—design a secondary coil," concluded Arcot.

	"And when you get this power? There is on my world a story of an old sage whose favorite pupil was enthusiastically seeking the liquid in which all things dissolve. The sage asked what the youth intended to use as a container," said Zezdon Afthen.

	"Ummm—we have the same story, only it's an agriculturist and his son," grinned Morey. "We plan to keep it in the one thing that could hold it, the thing that always did hold it—space itself. As you suggest, no conceivable conductors could transmit such power. We don't intend to transmit it; we intend to use it directly, we will not make a material secondary coil; our secondary coil will be only a condition in space causing energy to become available. We will use the energy—but that is first to be determined by the machines. However, we hope to use the energy to form artificial matter."

	"I understand. You will not make the 'coil' but the machine which causes the 'coil' to be made in space. That seems more conceivable." Zezdon Afthen nodded, satisfied.

	"But," he continued, "while you men of Earth work on this problem, what is there for us? We have no problems, save the problem of the fate of our world, still fifty thousand years of your time in the future. It is terrible to wait, wait, wait and think of what may be happening in that other time. Is there nothing we can do to help? I know our hopeless ignorance of your science. Stel Felso Theu can scarcely understand the thoughts you use, and I can scarcely understand his explanations! I cannot help you there, with your calculations, but is there nothing I can do?"

	"There is, Ortolian, decidedly. We badly need your help, and as Stel Felso Theu cannot aid us here as much as he can by working with you, I will ask him to do so. I want your knowledge of psycho-mechanical devices to help us. Will you make a machine controlled by mental impulses? I want to see such a system and know how it is done that I may control machines by such a system."

	"Gladly. It will take time, for I am not the expert worker that you are, and I must make many pieces of apparatus, but I will do what I can," exclaimed Zezdon Afthen eagerly.

	So, while Arcot and his group continued their work of determining the constants of the space-energy field, the others were working on the mental control apparatus.

-

CHAPTER XV - All-Powerful Gods

	AGAIN there was a period of intense labor, while the r\ ship drifted through time, following Earth in its mad careening about the sun, and the sun as it rushed headlong through space. With the aid of their time machine they had acquired the viewpoint of the eternal stars, every motion seemed a headlong plunge; the planets darting about were gnats moving about the mighty flame of the great energy-machine that was the sun.

	But their work went on, and at the end of the thirty-day period, they had reached no definite position in their calculations, and the Talsonian reported, as a medium between the two parties of scientists, that the work of the Ortolian had not reached a level that would make a scientific understanding of the things possible.

	As the ship needed no replenishing, they determined to finish their present work before landing, and it was nearly forty thousand years after their first arrival that they again landed on Earth.

	It was changed now; the ice caps had retreated visibly, the Nile delta was far longer, far more prominent, and cities showed on the Earth here and there. China was a populous country, the culture well developed, their temples and many governmental institutions established. But the contacts with Ancient China were difficult, for the natives showed already that strong aversion to strangers, fleeing, or attacking at sight.

	"I am afraid we had best investigate the less advanced European races," said Arcot at length.

	.Greece they decided would be the next stop, and to

	Greece they went, landing on a mountain side. Below was a village, a small thing of huts and hovels, far different from the villages of China, already a civilized nation. But the villagers were not so vastly different. They attacked, swarming up the hillside furiously, shouting and shrieking warnings of their terrible prowess to these men who came from the "shining house," ordering them to flee from them and turn over their possessions to them.

	"All human nature is pretty much alike, I fear. What'll we do?" asked Morey. He and Arcot had come out alone this time.

	"Take one of these fellows back with us, and question him. We had best get a more or less definite idea of what time-age we are in, hadn't we? We don't want to overshoot by a few centuries, you know!"

	The villagers were swarming up the side of the hill, armed with weapons of bronze and wood. The bronze implements of murder were rare, and evidently costly, for those that had them were obviously leaders, and better dressed than the others.

	"Hang it all, I have only a molecular pistol. Can't use that, it would be a plain massacre. What I want to do is to use a cosmic," exclaimed Arcot.

	But suddenly several others, who had come up from one side, appeared from behind a rock. The scientists were wearing their power suits, and had them on at low power, leaving a weight of about fifty pounds. Morey, with his normal weight well over two hundred, jumped far to one side of a clumsy rush of a peasant, leaped back, and caught him from behind. Lifting the smaller man above his head, he hurled him at two others following. The three went down in a heap.

	"Little fellows," grunted Arcot landing a beautiful uppercut.

	Most of the men were about five feet tall, and rather lightly built. The "Greek God" had not yet materialized among them. They were probably poorly fed, and heavily worked. Only the leaders appeared to be in good physical condition, and the men could not develop to large stature. Arcot and Morey were giants among them, and with their greater skill, tremendous jumping ability, and far greater strength, easily overcame the few who had come by the side. One of the leaders was picked up, and trussed quickly in a rope a fellow had carried.

	"Look out," called Wade from above. Suddenly he was standing beside them, having flown down on the power suit. "Caught your thoughts—rather Zezdon Afthen did." He handed Arcot a cosmic ray pistol. The rest of the Greeks were near now, crying in amazement, and running more slowly. They didn't seem so anxious to attack. Arcot turned the ray pistol to one side—

-

	"WAIT!" called Morey. A face peered from around the rock toward which Arcot had aimed his pistol. It was that of a girl, about fifteen years old in appearance, but hard work had probably aged her face. Morey bent over, heaved on a small boulder, about two hundred pounds of rock, and rolled it free of the depression it rested in, then caught it on a molecular ray, and hurled it up. Arcot turned his cosmic ray on it for an instant, and it was white hot. Then the molecular ray threw it over toward the great rock, and crushed it against it. Three children shrieked and ran out from the rock, scurrying down the hillside.

	The soldiers had stopped. They looked at Morey. Then they looked at the great rock, three hundred yards from him. They looked at the rock fragments.

	"They think you threw it," grinned Arcot.

	"What else—they saw me pick it up, saw me roll it, and it flew. What else could they think?"

	Arcot's cosmic ray hissed out, and the rocks sputtered and cracked, then glowed white. There was a dull explosion, and chips of rock flew up. A little water, imprisoned, had been turned into steam. In a moment the whistle and crackle of combined cosmic and molecular rays stabbing out from Arcot's hands, had built a barrier of fused rock.

	Leisurely Arcot and Morey carried their now revived prisoner back to the ship, while Wade flew ahead to open the locks.

	Half an hour later the prisoner was discharged, much to his surprise, and the ship rose. They had been able to learn nothing from him. Even the Greek Gods, Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, all the later Greek gods, were unknown, or so greatly changed that Arcot could not recognize them.

	"Well," he said at length," it seems all we know is that they came before any historical Greeks we know of. That puts them back quite a bit, but I don't know how far. Shall we go see the Egyptians?"

	They tried Egypt, a few moments across the Mediterranean, landing close to the mouth of the Nile. The people of a village near by immediately set out after them. Better prepared this time, Arcot flew out to meet them with Zezdon Afthen and Stel Felso Theu. Surely, he felt, the sight of the strange men would be no more terrifying than was the ship or the men flying. And that did not seem to deter their attack. Apparently the proverb that "Discretion is the better part of valor," had not been invented.

	Arcot landed near the head of the column, and cut off two or three men from the rest with the aid of his ray pistol. Zezdon Afthen quickly searched his mind, and with Arcot's aid they determined he did not know any of the Gods that Arcot suggested. Gods are long lived, for their memory is passed from father to son, and if the Gods had not yet been invented as we know them, surely it was long before our time.

	Finally they had to return to the ship, disappointed. They had had the slight satisfaction of finding that the Sun God was Ralz, the later Egyptian Ra might well have been an evolved form of that name.

	They restocked the ship, fresh game and fruits again appearing on the menu, then once again they launched forth into space to wait for their own time.

	"It seems to me that some effect must have been produced by our visit," said Arcot shaking his head solemnly. The subject of time-traveling, one of the ideas frequently and poorly portrayed in theaters, was one of Arcot's phobias. He did not believe in the possibility of time-traveling, and was a bit annoyed to find himself a subject to the thing he had denied. His strongest argument against time-traveling had been the "Go back and kill your grandfather as a boy" idea. In other words, the time traveler must leave an imprint on history. That past-traveling was not physically impossible, he acknowledged, but that it had happened, he denied. If it had happened, he maintained, there would have been some record, any scientist capable of doing so, would certainly have traveled extensively enough to leave his records, and probably have shared his knowledge with the past.

	"We did, Arcot," replied Morey softly. "We left an impress in history, an impress that still is, and an impress that we know, that has affected countless thousands.

	"Meet the Egyptian Gods with their heads strange to Terrestrians, the Gods who fly through the air without Wings, come from a shining house that flies, whose look, whose pointed finger melts the desert sands, and the moist soil!" he continued softly, nodding toward the Ortolian and the Talsonian.

	"Their 'impossible' Gods existed, and visited them.

	Indubitably some genius saw that here was a chance for fame and fortune and sold "charms" against the "Gods." Result: we are carrying with us some of the oldest deities. Again, we did leave our imprint in history."

	"And," cried Wade excitedly, "meet the great Hercules, who threw men about. I always knew that Morey was a brainless brute, but I never realized the marvelous divining powers of those Greeks so perfectly as now, the Incarnation of Dumb Power!" Dramatically Wade pointed to Morey, unable even now to refrain from some unnecessary comments.

	"All right, Mercury, the messenger of the Gods speaks. The little flaps on Wade's flying shoes must indeed have looked like the winged shoes of legend. Wade was Mercury, too brainless for anything but carrying the words of wisdom uttered by others.

	"And Arcot," continued Morey, releasing Wade from his condescending stare, "is Jove, hurling the rock-fusing, destroying thunderbolts. Certainly nothing the Greeks knew, except the thunderbolt, could approach the power of a Cosmic."

	"The Gods that my friends have been talking of," explained Arcot to the curious Ortolians, "are legendary deities of Earth. I can see now that we did leave an imprint on history in the only way we could—as Gods, for surely no other explanation could have occurred to those men."

	The days passed swiftly in the ship, as their work approached completion. Finally, when the last of the equation of Time, artificial matter, and the most awful of their weapons, the unlimited Cosmic Power, had been calculated, they fell to the last stage of the work. The actual appliances were designed. Then the completed apparatus that the Ortolian and the Talsonian had been working on, was carefully investigated by the terrestrial physicists, and its mechanism studied. Arcot had great plans for this, and now it was incorporated in their control apparatus.

	The one remaining trouble was time. Already their progress had brought them well up to the nineteenth century, but, as Morey sadly remarked, they couldn't tell what date, for they were sadly lacking in history. Had they known the real date, for instance, of the famous battle of Bull Run, they could have watched it in the telectroscope, and so determined their time. As it was, they knew only that it was one of the period of the first half of the decade of 1860.

	"As historians, we're a bunch of first-class kitchen mechanics. Looks like we're due for another landing to locate the exact date," agreed Arcot.

	"Why land now? Let's wait until we are nearer the time to which we belong, so we won't have to watch so carefully and so long," suggested Wade.

-

	THEY argued this question for about seventy years, as a matter of fact, and finally determined to land. It was already 1930 plus. They shut off the time apparatus, and switched to the double time-field. Then they shot toward Earth. They determined on New York, and had the excellent luck of landing on a day that was abominably cloudy. They couldn't see anything with the telectroscope that would date them. Finally they moved to Boston. However, in the meantime, night had fallen.

	"Let's land. What's the use of trying to avoid it. Anyhow, I'd like to mingle with those old people with their quaint dress, their old gasoline engines weighing tones, uncolored metals and all. Whatsay?

	"I'm afraid our Ortolian and Talsonian friends will have to stay aboard, but we can mingle unnoticed if we wear ordinary flying clothes, minus our power suits and tail flaps," suggested Arcot.

	"I thought you did a marvelously bum job of managing this trip. So that's why!" laughed Morey. "Go to it, Arcot."

	Realizing that delay was not time-consuming in their peculiar condition, the allies agreed to wait, while the Terrestrians visited their world of two centuries ago.

	The great ship was landed on an island in the harbor, its lights out, after darkness had fallen. Then the Terrestrians took off in flying suits, and power suits, and landed, at Arcot's suggestion, in Cambridge, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "For," as Arcot pointed out, "it's as good a place as any to learn the date, and one of the best places to land without being a center of attraction. College students in flying rig—why not? And we can, perhaps, see some of their old machines in operation instead of in a museum."

	They landed in a vacant field just across the avenue from the group of buildings that represented the little old school. The Charles was still uncovered, the black waters of the basin sparkling under the lights of the bridges and the town. Such a little, dingy town, its narrow, dark streets brought home to them the almost universal squalor of the twentieth century. There was no moon, and no one about the field as they landed on a spring night.

	"Boston! Lord, what a town! It's a village! Did you see the narrow, crowded streets, the dark, dingy brick buildings piled up on each other so close you couldn't get a toothpick between 'em? And people considered houses in those dingy, lightless alleys high class residences!" Arcot exclaimed.

	"All of which may be true, Arcot, but don't light out so till you consider that in these times antiques were valuable, because they were old. To many people the three rules for value did not yet appear necessary; it must be unique, it must be old and it must be beautiful. They seemed contented with merely the one, and certainly they look old," replied Morey. "Also, they probably are comfortable enough inside, and artificial lighting was fairly well perfected. They had the incandescent filament bulbs and the ionized gas bulbs were just coming in, or had come in; I don't know which, yet."

	"Well, let's find out," Arcot took off his power suit as he spoke, and, dressed in his close-fitting, brown rubberoid flying suit, he seemed only an aviator. They walked over toward of group of three-story buildings, passing through a wire net fence by a small gate, and left the suits in the dark alleyway between the fence and the buildings.

	"Wonder what they'd be worth to a man of this time if he found 'em?" grinned Morey as he left his beside Arcot's.

	"Can't imagine. Immensely valuable, but no one will find them."

	"What makes you so sure, Arcot?" asked Wade dubiously.

	"They'd sure make an impression on history if found, and there is no such impression." Arcot turned, and walking along the side of one building, followed its wall to Massachusetts Avenue. Bluish arc lights at intervals lighted the street dimly. Arcot smiled inwardly. Automobiles passing "swiftly" along the street, steel car rails and a trolley car attracted their attention as it rattled and clanged its noisy way along.

	Little groups of people, mostly young men, were passing them on the sidewalk as they walked along. They attracted a few curious glances, but no one spoke to them. The peculiar cut of the clothes, the heavy leather shoes, the clump of hard heels and soles on the sidewalk of concrete, interested the men of an age where all shoes were soft, and the walks were as soft and yielding as the turf Nature meant man to walk upon.

	A group of girls passed. Their dresses were very little more than knee length. "Knowing the rate of change of feminine fashions, we could tell very closely the year from that dress if we only were fashion experts. I must say, though, that the girls of 2130 aren't any better looking than the girls of 1930 if these are fair samples." Morey smiled approvingly.

	"Probably aren't. Remember that we are Nordics, and Nordic types will be more beautiful to us. Near a college we are apt to find Nordic types, and not a fair cross-section of the race." Arcot replied in a low voice. "But we came here to find a date. I see a newspaper store up the way. Shall we go up?"

	"What'll we pay with?" asked Morey.

	But the problem was solved for them by Chance. An explosive exclamation and then someone fell against Arcot violently.

	"Oof—Sorry. Turned my ankle, I guess." The living antique was nursing his ankle as he sat on the sidewalk.

	Arcot bent over unthinking now, and helped him to his feet. His hands ran lightly over the stranger's ankle. It was already swelling a bit.

	"Say, do me a favor, will you? I have my car here, and if you will run me up to my place, I'll appreciate it. I can't drive the thing now, and I can't leave it here or I'll have a three-way unfixable ticket by the time I send for it. Have a car?"

	Arcot looked up, nonplussed.

	The stranger stared at him in the light of the street lamp for a moment. His expression changed to one of curiosity and surprise as he looked. Arcot's strong forehead, his black, keen eyes, seemed to draw the man's gaze as a magnet draws iron. He shook himself suddenly and gasped in surprise.

	"Who—who are you?"

	Arcot smiled. "Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you so, and I'm afraid we can't do that for you. Can't you get one of your friends? We have to wait here a while."

	"And will you tell us the date?" asked Morey, more to the point.

	"Uh—why it's May 25th. Where do you come from?"

	"What year?" demanded Arcot.

	The man sat up, and stopped rubbing his ankle. He glanced keenly at Arcot, looked carefully at the black eyes in the half-light, and replied, "1932."

	"Thanks. Sorry I can't help you—perhaps this will help explain." Arcot tossed a metal disc that rang sharply, then rolled flashing in the light. He turned, and hurried away, his friends behind him.

	"The correct date," called the man on the running board of his car now, "is May 25, 1930." Arcot paused and looked back, but the other had his car started and drove away.

	"Why on Earth did he do that?" asked Wade in surprise.

	"To test us in the beginning, and to set us right in the end, probably. He thought we were kidding, and gave a false date to see if we'd comment on it."

	They left then, and returned to the ship, starting once more for the last two hundred years of their journey.

-

CHAPTER XVI - Home Again

	IN space once more, Arcot again started their journey through time, keeping careful count of the years as Earth swung about in its orbit like a mad planet. Finally Arcot felt they were getting very near their own time. Indeed, he felt that they must already exist on Earth now. "One thing that puzzles me, is what would happen if we were to go down now, and see ourselves," he suggested.

	"Either we can't or we don't want to do it," pointed out Morey, "because we didn't."

	"I wonder which it is?" asked Arcot softly. Suddenly he sat up, and pointed to something on the screen of the telectroscope, at the same time slowing the time-field to a minimum.

	"Hey—look! It's we!" Arcot exploded. "We know what time we're in now—there goes the old Solarite! That makes the second time we've watched ourselves! I'm going to find out why we can't go back and see ourselves now, or then, or whenever it was, is, or will be."

	Arcot reached for the time switch, and looked at the others. They did not object, and he pulled it open. The time field collapsed, the ship seemed to reel, and the Earth suddenly flashed before them in an arc, swiftly accelerated, and became a blazing line. Suddenly it seemed to slow down, and stood motionless before them.

	"Whew. That answers whether it was, couldn't or didn't want to, I guess. We couldn't," said Wade emphatically. "I feel as though every atom of me had been under a heavy load of some sort. How about you, Stel Felso Theu?"

	"I was not so affected; with me it seems as though each atom had been pulled very hard. It is an indescribable sensation. I cannot know how I know that I feel thus. It is surely like nothing else."

	"I think the answer is that nothing can exist two times at the same time-rate. As long as we were in a different time-rate we could exist at two times. When we tried to exist simultaneously, we could not, and we were forced to slip through time to a time wherein we either did not exist or wherein we had not yet been. Since we were nearer the time when we last existed in normal time, than we were to the time of our birth, we went to the time we left. I suspect that we will find we have just left Earth. Shall we investigate?"

	"Absolutely, Arcot, and here's hoping we didn't overshoot the mark by much." As Morey intimated, had they gone much beyond the time they left Earth, they might find conditions very serious, indeed. But now they went at once toward Earth on the time control. As they neared, they looked anxiously for signs of the invasion. Arcot spotted the only evident signs, however, two large spheres, tiny points in appearance on the telectroscope screen, were circling Earth, one at about 1,000 miles, moving from east to west, the other at about 1,200 miles, moving from north to south.

	"It seems the enemy have retreated to space to do their fighting. I wonder how long we were away."

	As they swept down at a speed greater than light, they were invisible till Arcot slowed down near the atmosphere. Instantly half a dozen fast ships darted toward them, but the ship was very evidently unlike the Thessian ships, and no attack was made. First the occupants would have an opportunity to prove their friendliness.

	"Terrestrians Arcot, Morey and Wade reporting back from exploration in space, with two friends. All have been on Earth with us previously," said Arcot into the radio vision apparatus.

	"Very well, Dr. Arcot. You are going to New York or Vermont?" asked the Patrol commander.

	"Vermont."

	"Yes, Sir. I'll see that you aren't stopped again."

	And, thanks to the message thus sent ahead, they were not, and in less than half an hour they landed once more in Vermont, on the field from which they had started.

	The group of scientists who had been here on their last call had gone, which seemed natural enough to them, who had been working for three months in the interval of their trip, but to Dr. Arcot senior, as he saw them, it was a misfortune.

	"Now I never will get straight all you'll have ready, and I didn't expect you back till next week. The men have all gone back to their laboratories, since that permits of better work on the part of each, but we can call them here in half an hour. I'm sure they'll want to come. What did you learn, Son, or haven't you done any calculating on your data as yet?"

	"We learned plenty, and I feel quite sure that a hint of what we have would bring all those learning-hounds around us pretty quickly, Dad," laughed Arcot junior, "and believe it or not, we've been calculating on this stuff for three months since we left yesterday!"

	"What!"

	"Yes, it's true! We were on our time field, and turned on the space control—and a Thessian ship picked that moment to run into us. We cut the ship in half as neatly as you please, but it threw us eighty thousand years into the past. We have been coasting through time on retarded rate while Earth caught up with itself, so to speak. In the meantime—three months in a day!

	"But don't call those men. Let them come to the appointment, while we do some work, and we have plenty of work to do, I assure you. We have a list of things to order from the standard supply houses, and I think you better get them for us, Dad." Arcot's manner became serious now. "We haven't gotten our Government Expense Research Cards yet, and you have. Order the stuff, and get it out here, while we get ready for it. Honestly, I believe that a few ships such as this apparatus will permit, will be enough in themselves to do the job. It really is a pity that the other men didn't have the opportunity we had for crowding much work into little time!

	"But then, I wouldn't want to take that road to concentration again myself!

	"Have the enemy amused you in my absence? Coma on, let's sit down in the house instead of standing here in the sun."

	They started toward the house, as Arcot senior explained what had happened in the short time they had been away.

	"There is a friend of yours here, whom you haven't seen in some time, Son. He came with some allies."

	As they entered the house, they could hear the boards creak under some heavy weight that moved across the» floor, soundlessly and light of motion in itself. A shadow fell across the hall floor, and in the doorway a tremendously powerfully-built figure stood.

	He seemed to overflow the doorway, nearly six and a half feet tall, and fully as wide as the door. His rugged, bronzed face was smiling pleasantly, and his deep-set eyes seemed to flash; a living force flowed from them.

	"Torlos! By the Nine Planets! Torlos of Nansal! Say, I didn't expect you here, and I will not put my hand in that meat-grinder of yours," grinned Arcot happily, as Torlos stretched forth a friendly, but quite too powerful hand.

-

	TORLOS of Nansal, that planet Arcot had discovered on his first voyage across space, far in another Island of Space, another Island Universe, was not constructed as are human beings of Earth, nor of Venus, Talso, or Ortol, but most nearly resembled, save in size, the Thessians. Their framework, instead of being stone, as is ours, was iron, their bones were pure metallic iron, far stronger than bone. On these far stronger bones were great muscles of an entirely different sort, a muscle that used heat of the body as its fuel, a muscle that was utterly tireless, and unbelievably powerful. Not a chemical engine, but a molecular motion engine, it had no chemical fatigue-products that would tire it, and heeded only the constant heat supply the body sucked from the air to work indefinitely. Unlimited by waste-carrying considerations, the strength was enormous. Torlos' first demonstration of that strength to the Terrestrians when they had met him was tying a crowbar, held at arm's length, in a simple knot. Arcot had reasons for not shaking hands with this friendly giant with his two thumbs on each hand.

	It was one of the commercial space freighters plying between Nansal, Sator, Earth and Venus that had brought the news of this war to him, Torlos explained, and he, as the new Trade Coordinator and Fourth of the Four who now ruled Nansal, had suggested that they go to the aid of the man who had so aided them in their great war with Sator. It was Arcot's gift of the secret of the molecular ray and the molecular ship that had enabled them to overcome their enemy of centuries, and force upon them an unwelcome peace.

	Now, with a fleet of fifty interstellar, or better, intergalactic battleships, Nansal was coming to Earth's aid.

	The battleships were now on patrol with all of Earth's and Venus's fleet. But the Nansalian ships were all equipped with the enormously rapid space distortion system of travel, of course, and were a shock troop in the patrol. The Terrestrian and Venerian patrols were not so equipped in full.

	"And Arcot, from what I have learned from your father, it seems that I can be of real assistance," finished Torlos. Torlos had used the direct thought transference by the Venerian method that Arcot had originally taught him, and therefore Arcot alone had received his thoughts directly, but since Arcot wore the Ortolian thought apparatus, he had re-transmitted it to the others.

	"All our ships," explained Torlos, "are equipped with the newest and most powerful magnetic beam apparatus. They have an amazing amount of power. I believe that no shielding short of a planetary core is sufficient to protect against the concentrated beams of ten or more of these ships."

	"I wouldn't have either, Torlos, had I not read the mind of one of the Thessians. They don't shield, they neutralize. By some system of space distortion they use, they distort half of the magnetism and turn it around the other way. In other words, half of it becomes north, and the other half remains south. Result—nil! Any conceivable force, they can thus neutralize.

	"I'm a lot sorrier than you are, Torlos, but I don't think the magnetism stunt works any more. But, dear old—er—er—er—let's see, Morey's Hercules, isn't he—well then, Samson, you are pronto invited on a trip we have in mind. To Eros it is. That's one of the minor planets of our system. We're going to do things to it. Watch and see!

	"But now, I think, I should know what the enemy has done. I see they built some new forts."

	"Yes," replied Arcot senior, "they did. They decided that the system you used on the forts of North and South poles was too effective. They moved to space, and cut off slices of Luna, pulled it over on their molecular rays, and used some of the most magnificent apparatus you ever dreamed of. I have just started working on the mathematics of it.

	"They didn't come near it, but by means of rays, they released the energy of the matter very completely, apparently, and as fast as the energy came loose, a field of some sort caught it, and bound it. That was probably a very slightly modified Field B-27-e56, the kind we use in making lux and such materials. But it took them less than twelve hours to convert all that matter into relux, and then work it around where they wanted it. They moved in a short while ago.

	"We sent out a fleet to do some investigating, but they attacked, and stopped work in the meantime. Whatever the ray is that can destroy matter at a distance, they are afraid that we could find its secret too easily, and block it, for they don't think it is a weapon, and it is evidently slow in action."

	"Then it isn't what I thought it was," muttered Arcot junior.

	"What did you think it was?" asked his father.

	"Er—tell you later. Go on with the account."

	"I wish," said Arcot senior, turning to Zezdon Afthen with a smile, "that you'd make these headsets transmit all thoughts."

	"Well, to continue. We have not been idle. Following your suggestion, we built up a large ray screen apparatus, in fact, several of them, and carried them in ships to different parts of the world. Also some of the planets, lest they start dropping worlds on us. They are already in operation, sending their defensive waves against the Heaviside layer. Radio is poor, over any distance, and we can't call Venus from inside the layer now. However, we tested the protection, and it works—far more efficiently than we calculated, due to the amazing conductivity of the layer.

	"If they intend to attack in that way, I suspect that it will be soon, for they are ready now, as we discovered. An attack on their fort was met with a ray screen from the fort.

	"They fight with a wild viciousness now. They won't let a ship get near them. They destroy everything on sight. They seem tremendously afraid of that apparatus of yours. Too bad we had no more."

	"We will have—if you will let me get to work. I see it is after sundown now, and I'm hungry. Do we eat?"

	"We certainly do—all but Torlos. He ate yesterday, he says, and won't need anything till the day after tomorrow."

	They ate, and while they were having coffee, it grew absolutely dark outside. In the clear air the stars winked out, and one could see the visibly moving bulk of the Thessian ship now, a point of light, still illuminated by the sun. They were sitting on the porch, looking at it, when its light suddenly winked out.

	"Hmmm—in Earth's shadow," commented Wade.

	"Well, long may it—Good Lord! Look!" cried Morey.

-

	SOMEONE had spilled iridescent paint all over Earth, and it was running in dripping streams more and more from the point of contact, and the shining, iridescent stuff was spreading over the sky above, blotting out stars, and making the images of those near the edges quiver in the air. And the point of origin of the stream seemed to be directly below where they had last seen the Thessian ship.

	"It's nothing but the molecular rays meeting the molecular screen. The patrol will get out after the ship in a moment, and attack it. Then the Thessians will have to use their screen, and shut down the huge ray they are throwing on Earth. Venus and the sun are protected, too, I understand. Is Mars?" asked Wade. 

	"Your sun is protected?" asked Stel Felso Theu. 

	"Yes, by ships on its surface, made entirely of relux, the heat doesn't bother them, and the rays of the Thessians can't reach the sun. Remember, nothing is too big for them to swing with molecular rays. We have swung suns a lot bigger than that sun of ours, you know, and they might well split it in two for our discomfort, or heave a few quintillion tons of it out at the Earth with molecular rays, so we just simply put up a ray plant on the sun. Our engineers are doing the same for yours, too, you know.

	"But I don't know about our other planets, Dad?"

	"There are ray screens on all the inferior planets, lest one of them be thrown into the sun and cause great explosions, explosions microscopic to the sun and cataclysmic to man," replied the older man.

	"But let's let the rays play, and we will work," suggested Arcot junior.

	They went to the ship, and entered it. Arcot senior did not follow, but the others waited, while the ship left Earth once more, and floated in space. Then they lay down and slept. After a full eight hours of sleep all around, the terrestrians were ready for sixteen hours of wakefulness, the Ortolians for nearly fifty hours, the Talsonian could work for some thirty hours, and Torlos would work till the others were all asleep.

	They returned at once to Earth, but Earth was still almost exactly as they had left it. In fact, Arcot senior had not yet reached the house! For they had gone on the time speed, and though they had had plenty of sleep, and were ready to work, they had lost no terrestrial time.

	They at once assembled considerable apparatus that was in sight about the ship, and in the shop and laboratory, anchored the ship firmly with a magnetic beam to the Earth's steel core, and once more speeded time. The ship lurched, and was suddenly jerking and grinding its way downward!

	Arcot leaped for the controls, sailed across the room under the infinitesimal gravity of this tremendously advanced time rate, and opened the magnetic beam switch.

	"Sorry—nothing serious. I forgot, and used an acceleration of one gravity on that magnetic beam, which meant 32 feet per second acceleration for this ship under normal time. We were forced through solid rock under a tremendous pressure when we speeded our time, and the time-pull of that beam. The second was disturbed by the second power, and we naturally sank right through the rock."

	Arcot lifted the ship back to the surface, still on advanced time.

	Then he anchored it once more, this time judging by the external effects.

	The effects of their tremendous time-speed were apparent now. It was very dark outside, and what could be seen, was absolutely motionless. The lights were on inside the ship, and they wasted little time looking about, but set to work on the apparatus in the laboratory.

	They worked steadily, sleeping when necessary, and the giant strength of Torlos was frequently as great an asset as his indefatigable work. He was learning rapidly, and was able to do a great deal of the work without direction. He was not a scientist, and the thing was new to him, but his position as one of the best of the secret intelligence force of Nansal had proven his brains, and he did his share.

	The others, scientists all, found the operations difficult, for it had been allotted to each according to his utmost capabilities.

	It was still nearly a week of their time before the apparatus was completed to the extent possible. In the meantime, Arcot had seen the folly of maintaining the high time-rate, and three days of terrestrial time had passed. They stopped, and now took into the ship what apparatus had been ordered. Now there was no need for waiting on external things, and they completed the remainder of the work under the full time-field, less than a minute of normal time passing.

	Finally the unassembled, but completed apparatus, was carried to the laboratory of the cottage, and word was sent to all the men of Earth that Arcot was going to give a demonstration of the apparatus he hoped would save them. The scientists from all over Earth and Venus were interested, and those of Earth came, for there was no time for the men of Venus to arrive to inspect the results.

-

CHAPTER XVII - Power of Mind

	IT was night. The stars visible through the laboratory windows winked violently in the disturbed air of the Heaviside layer, for the molecular ray screen was still up.

	The laboratory was dimly lighted now, all save the front of the room. There, a mass of compact boxes were piled one on another, and interconnected in various and indeterminate ways. And one table lay in a brilliant path of illumination. Behind it stood Arcot junior. He was talking to the dim white group of faces beyond the table, the scientists of Earth assembled.

	"I have explained our power. It is the power of all the universe—Cosmic Power—which is necessarily vaster than all others combined.

	"I cannot explain the control in the time I have at my disposal, but the mathematics of it, worked out in two months of constant effort, you can follow from the printed work which will appear soon.

	"The second thing, which some of you have seen before, has already been partly explained. It is, in brief, artificially created matter. The two important things to remember about it are that it is, that it does exist, and that it exists only where it is determined to exist by the control there, and nowhere else.

	"These are all coordinated under the new mental relay control. Some of you will doubt this last, but think of it under this light. Will, thought, concentration—they are efforts, they require energy. Then they can exert energy! That is the key to the whole thing.

	"But now for the demonstration."

	Arcot looked toward Morey, who stood off to one side. There was a heavy thud as Morey pushed a small button. The relay had closed. Arcot's mind was now connected with the controls.

	A globe of cloudiness appeared. It increased in density, and was a solid, opalescent sphere.

	"There is a sphere, a foot in diameter, ten feet from me," droned Arcot. The sphere was there. "It is moving to the left." The sphere moved to the left at Arcot's thought. "It is rising." The sphere rose. "It is changing to a disc two feet across." The sphere seemed to flow, and was a disc two feet across as Arcot's toneless voice of concentration continued.

	"It is changing into a hand, like a human hand." The disc changed into a human hand, the fingers slightly bent, the soft, white fingers of a woman with the pink of the flesh and the wrinkles at the knuckles visible. The wrist seemed to fade gradually into nothingness, the end of the hand was as indeterminate as are things in a dream, but the hand was definite.

	"The hand is reaching for the bar of lux metal on the floor." The soft, little hand moved, and reached down and grasped the half ton bar of lux metal, wrapped dainty fingers about it and lifted it smoothly and effortlessly to the table, and laid it there.

	A mistiness suddenly solidified to another hand. The second hand joined the first, and fell to work on the bar. It was pinched, and the tremendously strong metal yielded like putty, while a slight flashing of energy told that there was a slight inefficiency.

	The hands grasped either end of the bar, and pulled. The bar stretched finally under an enormous load. One hand let go, and the thud of the highly elastic lux metal bar's return to its original shape echoed through the soundless room. These men of the twenty-second century knew what relux and lux metals were, and knew their enormous strength. Yet it was putty under these hands. The hands that looked like a woman's!

	The bar was again placed, on the table, and the hands disappeared. There was a thud, and the relay had opened.

	"I can't demonstrate the power I have. It is impossible. As impossible as demonstrating the destructive power of molecular rays here. The power is so enormous that nothing short of a sun could serve as a demonstration-hall. It is utterly beyond comprehension under any conditions. I have demonstrated artificial matter, and control by mental action.

	"I'm now going to show you some other things we have learned. Remember, I can control perfectly the properties of artificial matter, by determining the structure it shall have.

	"Watch."

	Morey closed the relay. Arcot again set to work. A heavy ingot of iron was raised by a clamp that fastened itself upon it, coming from nowhere. The iron moved, and settled over the table. As it approached, a mistiness that formed became a crucible. The crucible showed the grey of pure iron, but it was artificial matter. The iron settled in the crucible, and a strange process of flowing began. The crucible became a ball, and colors flowed across its surface, till finally it was glowing richly silvery. The ball opened, and a great lump of silvery stuff was within it. It settled to the floor, and the ball disappeared, but the silvery metal did not.

	"Platinum," said Morey softly. A gasp came from the audience. "Only platinum could exist there, and the matter had to rearrange itself as platinum." He could rearrange it in any form he chose, either absorbing or supplying energy of existence and energy of formation.

-

	THE mistiness again appeared in the air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized the signal. "He will now make the artificial matter into all the elements, and many non-existent elements, unstable, atomic figures." There followed a long series of changes, stopping finally at one weird thing. It was a new type, an atom whose configuration was unstable, but it had weirdly impossible-seeming properties. Morey described the strange stuff.

	"This is one of the impossible atomic configurations, unstable, tends to collapse. We found it stable finally in a special space we succeeded in developing for it, and we have a sample. It is neither solid, liquid, nor gas! We made some by transmutation of natural matter and were able to see its properties. What is it?

	"Its normal state is something new, and I can only call it solgas. It has fixed form but not fixed volume. Like a solid, its form is more or less fixed. If it is made in a cube, it remains a cube, if made a sphere it remains so. But its volume is changeable. It will expand indefinitely if not stopped. Yet, by confining it between two planes, it will stop expanding the moment any two surfaces come in contact with the planes, its shape exactly as before! It melts to a normal liquid, and when chilled, turns first to a gas, and finally, at absolute zero, to a normal solid."

	The material shifted again, and again. Finally the last of the natural elements was left behind, all 104 elements known to man were shown, and many others.

	"We will skip now. This is element of atomic weight 7000."

	It was a lump of blackness, a lump of soft, oozy blackness. One could tell from the way that Arcot's mind handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly cold.

	"It is very soft, for its atom is so large that it is soft in the molecular state. It is tremendously photoelectric, losing electrons very readily, and since its atom has so enormous a volume, its electrons are very far from the nucleus in the outer rings, and they absorb rays of very great length; even radio and some shorter audio waves seem to affect it. That accounts for its blackness, and the softness as Arcot has truly depicted it. Also, since it absorbs heat waves and changes them to electrical charges, it tends to become cold, as the frost Arcot has shown indicates. Remember, that that is infinitely hard as you see it, for it is artificial matter, but Arcot has seen natural matter forced into this exceedingly explosive atomic figuration.

	"It is so heavily charged in the nucleus that its X-ray spectrum is well toward the gamma! The inner electrons can scarcely vibrate."

	Again the substance changed—and was gone.

	"Too far—atom of weight 20,000 becomes invisible and non-existent as space closes in about it—perhaps the origin of our space. Atoms of this weight, if breaking up, would form two or more atoms that would exist in our space, then these would be unstable, and break down further into normal atoms. We don't know."

	"And one more substance," continued Morey as he opened the relay once more. Arcot sat down and rested his head in his hands. He was not accustomed to this strain, and though his mind was one of the most powerful on Earth, it was very hard for him.

	"We have a substance of commercial and practical use now. Cosmium. Arcot will show one method of making it."

	Arcot resumed his work, seated now. A formation reached out, and grasped the lump of platinum still on the floor. Other bars of iron were brought over from the stack of material laid ready, and piled on a broad sheet that had formed in the air, tons of it, tens of tons. Finally he stopped. There was enough. The sheet wrapped itself into a sphere, and contracted, slowly, steadily. It was rampant with energy, energy flowed from it, and the air about was glowing with ionization. There was a feeling of awful power that seeped into the minds of the watchers, and held them spellbound before the glowing, opalescent sphere. The tons of matter were compressed now to a tiny ball! Suddenly the energy flared out violently, a terrific burst of energy, ionizing the air in the entire room, and shooting it with tiny, burning sparks. Then it was over. The ball split, and became two planes. Between them was a small ball of a glistening solid. The planes moved slowly together, and the ball flattened, and flowed. It was a sheet.

	A clamp of artificial matter took it, and held the paper-thin sheet, many feet square, in the air. It seemed it must bend under its own enormous weight of tons, but thin as it was it did not.

	"Cosmium," said Morey softly.

	Arcot crumpled it, and pressed it once more between artificial matter tools. It was a plate, thick as heavy cardboard, and two feet on a side. He set it in a holder of artificial matter, a sort of frame, and caused the controls to lock.

	Taking off the headpiece he had worn, he explained, "As Morey said, Cosmium. Briefly, density, 5007.89. Tensile strength, about two hundred thousand times that of good steel!" The audience gasped. That seems little to men who do not realize what it meant. An inch of this stuff would be harder to penetrate than three miles of steel!

	"Our new ship," continued Arcot, "will carry six-inch armor." Six inches would be the equivalent of eighteen miles of solid steel, with the enormous improvement that it will be concentrated, and so will have far greater resistance than any amount of steel. Its tensile strength would be the equivalent of an eighteen-mile wall of steel.

	"But its most important properties are that it reflects everything we know of. Cosmics, light, and even moleculars! It is made of cosmic ray photons, as lux is made of light photons, but the inexpressibly tighter bond makes the strength enormous. It cannot be handled by any means save by artificial matter tools.

	"And now I am going to give a demonstration of the theatrical possibilities of this new agent. Hardly scientific—but amusing."

	But it wasn't exactly amusing.

	Arcot again donned the headpiece, but almost at once took it off. "Sorry—our amusement must wait. I want first to show the strength of that plate."

	He put on the headpiece, and the artificial matter formed around another lux metal bar, four inches in diameter, and picking it up, moved it toward the plate of cosmium. The bar touched it, then it was forced against it. More and more pressure was applied, and—the four-inch lux metal bar slowly, steadily crumpled! Its enormous strength was nothing on that plate!

	"It would have resisted the old twenty-inch artillery in the same way. You know their formula—twenty inches of armor at twenty-thousand yards. Twenty inches of steel—and they wouldn't have scratched this surface. Remember, diamonds won't scratch lux or relux, and the latter cut diamonds like so much mild steel, yet they won't faze this.

	"But now our theatricals," smiled Arcot, removing the headpiece once more. "I think," he continued, "that a manifestation of the super-natural will be most interesting. Remember that all you see is real, and all effects are produced by artificial matter generated by the cosmic energy, as I have explained, and are controlled by my mind."

-

	ARCOT had chosen to give this demonstration with definite reason. Apparently a bit of scientific playfulness, yet he knew that nothing is so impressive, nor so lastingly remembered as a theatrical demonstration of science. The greatest scientist likes to play with his science. Steinmetz, the great mathematical scientist of alternating current phenomena, a man who could solve problems in triple integration in his head that most men of his laboratory could not do at all, was frequently amusing himself by such pranks as electrifying a chair. A tremendous explosion is far more impressive, than the mightiest of generators, yet has far less actual power. Dynamite is not more powerful, pound for pound, than coal, yet we naturally think of dynamite as far more powerful—because it is impressive. It is a question of rate, not of quantity only.

	But Arcot's experiment now—it was on a level of its own!

	He resumed his headpiece. From behind the table, apparently crawling up the leg came a thing! It was a hand. A horrible, disjointed hand. It was withered and incarmined with blood, for it was severed from its wrist, and as it hunched itself along, moving by a ghastly twitching of fingers and thumb, it left a trail of red behind it. The papers to be distributed rustled as it passed, scurrying suddenly across the table, down the leg, and racing toward the light switch! By some process of writhing jerks it reached it, and then the room was plunged into half-light  as the lights winked out. Light filtering over the transom of the door from the hall alone illuminated the hall, but the hand glowed! It glowed, and scurried away with an awful rustling that seemed a strange cackle of laughter, scuttling into some unseen hole in the wall. The quiet of the hall was the quiet of tenseness.

	From the wall, coming through it, came a mistiness that solidified as it flowed across. It was far to the right, a bent stooped figure, a figure half glimpsed, but fully known, for it carried in its bony, glowing hand a great, nicked scythe. Its rattling tread echoed hollowly on the floor. Stooping walk, shuffling gait, the great metal scythe scraping on the floor, half seen as the grey, luminous cloak blew open in some unfelt breeze of its ephemeral world, revealing bone; dry, grey bone. Only the scythe seemed to know Life, and it was red with that Life. Slow running, sticky life-stuff.

	Death paused, and raised his awful head. The hood fell back from the cavernous eyesockets, and they flamed with a greenish radiance that made every strained face in the room assume the same deathly pallor.

	"The Scythe, the Scythe of Death," grated the rusty Voice. "The Scythe is slow, too slow. I bring new things," it cackled in its cracked voice, "new things of my tools. See!" The clutching bones dropped the rattling Scythe, and the handle broke as it fell, and rotted before their eyes. "Heh, heh," the Thing cackled as it watched. "Heh—-what Death touches, rots as he leaves it." The grinning, blackened skull grinned wider, in an awful, leering cavity, rotting, twisted teeth showed. But from under his flapping robe, the skeletal hands drew something—ray pistols!

	"These—these are swifter!" The Thing turned, and with a single leering glance behind, flowed once more through the wall.

	A gasp, a stifled, groaning gasp ran through the hall, a half sob.

	But far, far away they could hear something clanking, dragging its slow way" along. Spellbound they turned to the farthest corner—and looked down the long, long road that twined off in distance. A lone, luminous figure plodded slowly along it, his half human shamble bringing him rapidly nearer.

	Larger and larger he loomed, clearer and clearer became the figure, and his burden. Broken, twisted steel, or metal of some sort, twisted and blackened.

	"It's over—it's over—and my toys are here. I win, I always win. For I am the spawn of Mars of War, and of Hate, the sister of War, and my toys are the things they leave behind." It gesticulated, waving the twisted stuff and now through the haze, they could see them—buildings. The framework of buildings and twisted liners, broken weapons.

	It loomed nearer, the cavernous, glowing eyes under low, shaggy brown, became clear, the awful brutal hate, the lust of Death, the rotting flesh of Disease—all seemed stamped on the Horror that approached.

	"Ah!" It had seen them! "Ahhh!" It dropped the buildings, the broken things, and shuffled into a run, toward them! Its face changed, the lips drew back from broken, stained teeth, the curling, cruel lips, and the rotting flesh of the face wrinkled into a grin of lust and hatred. The shaggy mop of its hair seemed to writhe and twist, the long, thin fingers grasped spasmodically as it neared. The torn, broken finger-nails

	Were visible—nearer—nearer—nearer	

	"Oh, God—stop it!" A voice shrieked out of the dark as someone leaped suddenly to his feet.

	Simultaneously with the cry the Thing puffed into nothingness of energy from which it had sprung, and a great ball of clear, white glowing light came into being in the center of the  room, flooding it with a light that dazzled the eyes, but calmed broken nerves.

-

CHAPTER XVIII - Earth's Defenses

	"I AM sorry, Arcot. I did not know, for I see I might have helped, but to me, with my ideas of horror, it was as you said, amusement," said Torlos. They were sitting now in Arcot's study at the cottage; Arcot, his father, Morey, Wade, Torlos, the three Ortolians and the Talsonian.

	"I know, Torlos. You see, where I made my mistake, as I have said, was in forgetting that in doing as I did, picturing horror, like a snowball rolling, it would grow greater. The idea of horror started, my mind pictured one, and it inspired greater horror, which in turn reacted on my all too reactive apparatus. As you said, the things changed as you watched, molding themselves constantly as my mind changed them, under its own initiative and the concentrated thoughts of all those others. It was a very foolish thing to do, for that last Thing—well, remember it was, it existed, and the idea of hate and lust it portrayed was caused by my mind, but my mind could picture what it would do, if such were its emotions, and it would do them because my mind pictured them! And nothing could resist it!"

	Arcot's face was white once more as he thought of the danger he had run, of the terrible consequences possible of that 'amusement'.

	"The Ortolians, as you know, were quite as terrified as we. Though every race and every people has its own ideas of horror, and the Ortolians felt no original fear, still the strong emotions of all those powerful minds acted so powerfully on their sensitive minds that they could not think. You others—It was my fault," finished Arcot.

	"It was, Son. But I think that is no reason to waste moments so valuable as these. You say you are ready now to do the work you have to do, to make that ship you speak of. Also you neglected to tell us what the second method of making cosmium is. Why not tell me now, and start on the ship?" asked his father.

	"Oh—the second method is easy enough," answered Arcot, rising to his father's bait of a scientific discussion, forgetting his depression, "since all we have to do is to release the energy of space as cosmic rays, and condense them. The experiment was not safe to try in there, so I neglected to explain it.

	"I think we had best start on the ship. I'll go get some sleep now, and then we can go."

	Arcot led the way to the ship, while Torlos, Morey and Wade and Stel Felso Theu accompanied him. The Ortolians were to work on Earth, aiding in the detection of attacks by means of their mental investigation of the enemy.

	"Well—good-bye, Dad. Don't know when I'll be back. Maybe tomorrow, maybe twenty-five thousand years from now, or twenty-five thousand years ago. But we'll get back somehow. And we'll clean out the Thessians!"

	He entered the ship, and rose into space.

	"Where are you going, Arcot?" asked Morey.

	"Eros," replied Arcot laconically.

	"Not if my mind is working right," cried Wade suddenly. All the others were tense, listening for inaudible sounds.

	"I quite agree," replied Arcot. The ship turned about, and dived toward New York, a hundred thousand miles behind now, at a speed many times that of light as Arcot snapped into time. Across the void, Zezdon Fentes' call had come—New York was to be attacked by the Thessians, New York and Chicago next. New York because the orbits of their two forts were converging over that city in a few minutes!

	They were in the atmosphere, screaming through it as their relux glowed instantaneously in the Heaviside layer, then was through before damage could be done. The screen was up.

	Scarcely a minute after they passed, the entire heavens blazed into light, the roar of tremendous thunders crashing above them, great lightning bolts rent the upper air for miles as enormous energies clashed.

	"Ah—they are sending everything they have against that screen, and it's hot. We have ten of our biggest tube stations working on it, and more coming in, to our total of thirty, but they have two forts, and Lord only knows how many ships.

	"I think me I'm going to cause them some worrying."

	Arcot turned the ship, and drove up again, now at a speed very low to them but as they had the time-field up, very great. They passed the screen, and a tremendous bolt struck the ship. Everything in it was shielded, but the static was still great enough to cause them some trouble as the time-field and electric field fought. But the time-field, because of its very nature, could work faster, and they won through undamaged, though the enormous current seemed flowing for many minutes as they drifted slowly past it. Slowly—at fifty miles a second.

	Out in space, free of the atmosphere, Arcot shot out to the point where the Thessians were congregating. The shining dots of their ships and the discs of the forts were visible from Earth save for the air's distortion.

	They seemed a miniature Milky Way, their deadly beams concentrated on Earth. No cosmics were being used, for the energy required to damage the entire planet was so great they could not prepare them in time. To melt all of New York they knew would do damage, but not the damage their moleculars could do if they could break through the screen.

	But the Earth-stations had the advantage now, for the entire atmosphere of air, countless billions of tons, was helping to absorb the power load of the Thessian rays.

	Then the Thessians discovered that the terrestrial fleet was in action. A ship glowed with the ray, the opalescence of relux under moleculars visible on its walls. It simply searched for its opponent while its relux slowly yielded. It found it in time, and the terrestrial ship put up its screen.

-

	THE terrestrial fleet set to work, everything they had flying at the Thessian giants, but the Thessians had heavier ships, and heavier tubes. More power as Arcot had said, was winning for them. Inevitably, when the Sun's interference somewhat weakened the ray shield	

	About that time Arcot arrived. The nearest fort dived toward the further with an acceleration that smashed it against no less than ten of its own ships before they could so much as move.

	When the way was clear to the other fort—and that fort had moved, the berserk fort started off on a new tack—and garnered six more wrecks on its side.

	Then Thett's emissaries located Arcot. The screen was up, and the Negrian attractive apparatus which Arcot had used was working through it. The screen flashed here and there and collapsed under the full barrage of half the Thessian fleet, as Arcot had suspected it would. But the same force that made it collapse operated a relay that turned on the space control, and Thett's molecular ray energy streamed off to outer space.

	"We worried them, but dug our hole and dragged it in after us, as usual, but damn it, we can't hurt them!" said Arcot disgustedly. "All we can do is tease them, then go hide where it's perfectly safe, in artificial—" Arcot stopped in amazement  The ship had been held under such space control that space was shut in about them, and they were motionless. The dials had reached a steady point, the current flow had become zero, and they had hung there with only the very slow drain of the Sun's gravitational field and that of the planet's field pulling on the ship. Suddenly the current had leaped, and the dials giving the charge in the various coil banks had moved them down toward zero.

	"Hey—they've got a wedge in here and are breaking out our hole. Turn on all the generators, Morey." Arcot was all action now. Somehow, inconceivable though it was, the Thessians had spotted them, and got some means of attacking them, despite their invulnerable position in another space!

	The generators were on, pouring enormous power into the coils, and the dials surged, stopped, and climbed ever so slowly. They should have jumped back under that charge, ordinarily dangerously heavy. For perhaps thirty seconds they climbed, then they started down at full speed!

	Arcot's hand darted to the time field, and switched it on full. The dial jerked, swung, then swung back, and started falling in unison with the dials, stopped, and climbed. All climbed swiftly, gaining ever more rapidly. With what seemed a jerk, the time dial flew over, and back, as Arcot opened the switch. They were free, and the dial on the space control coils was climbing normally now.

	"By the Nine Planets, did they drink out our energy! The energy of six tons of lead just like that! The lead was running into those disintegrators so fast, the coils it ran off of got a hot box!" called Morey, pouring a generous dose of lubricant on the supply coil bearings. The lead was fed to the main generators from wires wound on wheels, and one of these bearings had overheated.

	"How'd they do it?" asked Wade.

	Torlos kept silent, and helped Morey replace the coils of lead wire with others from stock.

	"Same way we tickled them," replied Arcot, carefully studying the control instruments, "with the gravity ray! We knew all along that gravitational fields drank out the energy—they simply pulled it out faster than we could pump it in, and used four different rays on us doing it. Which speaks well for a little ship! But they burned off the relux on one room here, and it's a wreck. The molecs hit everything in it. Looks like something bad," called Arcot. The room was Morey's, but he'd find that out himself. "In the meantime, see if you can tell where we are. I got loose from their rays by going on both the high speed time-fields and the space control at full, with all generators going full blast. Man, they had a stranglehold on us that time! But wait till we get that new ship turned out!

	"When we pulled free, the time-fields and the space control pulled for an instant. I don't recognize the stars."

	And considering that Arcot had visited all the nearer stars, all those that had been known, and many that had not; had gone to several of the red giants and dwarf blue-white suns for experiments, that meant they were many, many light years from old Sol.

	"We started off in the general direction of Talso," said Wade hopefully.

	"Maybe the photographs of the constellations en route to Talso will locate us," added Morey.

	But a careful examination showed no great similarity. None of the constellations were recognizable.

	"From the fact that there are fewer stars ahead of us than behind us, I take it that we are very near this edge of our Island. What do you think?" asked Arcot after a moment.

	"Is it impossible to return, by merely following backwards the line of the ship's present progress?" asked Torlos.

	"Not at all—but the chances are all against us. The ship may have come in a perfectly straight line, but it certainly came at a terrific pace, and went hundreds of thousands of light years apparently. The rate we were traveling then is an absolutely unheard-of speed. And if we diverged from the straight path by a hundredth of a degree, that would mean we would miss Sol by thousands of light years! And any star might have thrown, us out that much," replied Arcot. "Of course we can get back—but it may take a month if we have to search. We could, sooner or later, find some variable stars that have a period corresponding exactly with the period of variables known on Earth, and pick out Mira, the red giant, the second largest sun known, for it is a giant red variable, which is not a common type. With them we could work out a position."

	"Which would be all wrong," interjected Morey smoothly, "Inasmuch as we have gone hundreds of thousands of light years—figure out the effect on the star-positions in a hundred thousand years!"

	"And with that correction made, dumbell, run along home," answered Arcot, quite as smoothly.

	"It seems to me that that constellation there, some-what resembling a man's face in profile, but slightly askew, is the reverse of a constellation of the skies of Talso in winter," interrupted Stel Felso Theu. "From our world the constellation is larger, and the profile is quite a bit changed, as well as the angle, but the star drift and our angle of observation may have caused the change."

	"Ahh—That means something, Stel Felso Theu, and we can save a lot of work. Instead of calculating, let's run over to it and look. Your sun may be recognizable."

	It was clearly recognizable when they reached that constellation and then, under all possible speed with the time apparatus, they headed for home. Still it was slow, so Arcot tried once more with the space apparatus as well. With the time apparatus throwing them into a different time-rate, and the space apparatus giving them other space-characteristics, they were safe as to collisions with stars, as they had been on the outward inadvertent trip. They reached Earth after less than half an hour.

-

	THEY did not land, but with the telectroscope they could see what was happening. The terrific bombardment of rays was continuing, and the fleets were locked now in a struggle, the combined fleets of Earth and Venus and of Nansal, far across the void. Many of the terrestrian, or better, Solarian ships, were equipped with space distortion apparatus, now, and had some measure of safety in that the attractive rays of the Thessians could not be so concentrated on them. In numbers was safety, Arcot had been endangered because he was practically alone at the time they attacked.

	But it was obvious that the Solarian fleet was losing. They could not compete with the heavier ships, and now the frequent flaming bursts of light that told of a ship caught in the new deadly ray showed another danger.

	"I think Earth is lost if you cannot aid it soon, Arcot, for other Thessian ships are coming," said Stel Felso Theu softly.

	From out of the plane of the planetary orbits they were coming, across space from some other world, a fleet of dozens of them. They were visible as one after another leapt into normal time-rates.

	"Why don't they fight in advanced time?" asked Morey, half aloud.

	"Because the genius that designed that apparatus didn't think of it. Remember, Morey, those ships have their time apparatus connected with their power apparatus so that the power has to feed the time continuously. They have no coils like ours. When they advance their time, they're weakened every other way.

	"We need that new ship. Are we going to make it?" demanded Arcot.

	"Take weeks at best. What chance?" asked Morey.

	"Plenty; watch." As he spoke, Arcot pulled open the time controls, and spun the ship about. They headed off toward a tiny point of light far beyond. It rushed toward them, grew with the swiftness of an exploding bomb, and was suddenly a great, rough fragment of a planet hanging before them, miles in extent.

	"Eros," explained Wade laconically to Torlos. "Part of an ancient planet that was destroyed before the time of man, or life on Earth. The planet got too near the sun when its orbit was irregular, and old Sol pulled it to pieces. This is one of the pieces. The other asteroids are the rest. All planetary surfaces are made up of great blocks, they aren't continuous, you know. Like blocks of concrete in a building, they can slide a bit on each other, but friction holds them till they slip with a jar and we have earthquakes. This is one of the planetary blocks. We see Eros from Earth intermittently, for when this thing turns broadside it reflects a lot of light; edge on it does not reflect so much."

	It was a desolate bit of rock. Bare, airless, waterless rock, of enormous extent. It was contorted and twisted, but there were no great cracks in it, for it was a single planetary block.

	Arcot dropped the ship to the barren surface, and anchored it with an attractive ray at low concentration. There was no gravity of consequence on this bit of rock.

	"Come on, get to work. Space suits, and rush all the apparatus out," snapped Arcot. He was on his feet, the power of the ship in neutral now. Only the at-tractor was on. In the shortest possible time they got into their suits, and under Arcot's direction set up the apparatus on the rocky soil as fast as it was brought out. In all, less than fifteen minutes were needed, yet Arcot was hurrying them more and more. Torlos' tremendous strength helped, even on this gravitationless world, for he could accelerate more quickly with his burdens.

	At last it was set up for operation. The artificial matter apparatus was operated by cosmic power, and controlled by mental operation, or by mathematical formula as they pleased.

	Immediately Arcot set to work. A giant hollow cylinder drilled a great hole completely through the thin, curved surface of the ancient planetary block, through twelve miles of solid rock—a cylinder of artificial matter created on a scale possible only to cosmic power. The cylinder, half a mile across contained a huge plug of matter. Then the artificial matter contracted swiftly, compressing the matter, and simultaneously treating it with the tremendous fields that changed its energy form. In seconds it was a tremendous mass of cosmium.

	A second smaller cylinder bored a plug from the rock, and worked on it. A huge mass of relux resulted. Now other artificial matter tools set to work at Arcot's bidding, and cut pieces from his huge masses of raw materials, and literally, quick as thought, built a great framework of them, anchored in the solid rock of the planetoid.

	Then a tremendous plane of matter formed, and neatly bisected the planetoid, two great flat pieces of rock were left where one had been—miles across, miles thick—planetary chips.

	On the great framework that had been constructed, four tall shafts of cosmium appeared, and each was a hollow tube, up the center of which ran a huge cable of relux. At the peak of each mile-high shaft was a great globe. Now in the framework below things were materializing as Arcot's flying thoughts arranged them—great tubes of cosmium with relux elements—huge coils of relux conductors, insulated with microscopic but impenetrable layers of cosmium.

	Still, for all his swiftness of mind and accuracy of thought, he had to correct only two mistakes in all his work. It was nearly an hour before the thing was finished. Then, two hundred feet long, a hundred wide, and fifty in height, the great mechanism was completed, the tall columns rising from four corners of the greater framework that supported it.

	Then, into it, Arcot turned the powers of the cosmos. The stars in the airless space wavered and danced as though seen through a thick atmosphere. Tingling power ran through them as it flowed into the tremendous coils. For thirty seconds—then the heavens were as before.

	At last Arcot spoke. Through the radio communicators, and through the thought-channels, his ideas came as he took off the headpiece. "It's done now, and we can rest." There was a tremendous crash from within the apparatus. The heavens reeled before them, and shifted, then were still, but the stars were changed. The sun shone weirdly, and the stars were altered.

	"That is a time shifting apparatus on a slightly larger scale," replied Arcot to Torlos' question, "and is designed to give us a chance to work. Come on, let's sleep. A week here should be a few minutes of Earth-time."

	"You sleep, Arcot. I'll prepare the materials for you," suggested Morey. So Arcot and Wade went to sleep, while Morey and the Talsonian and Torlos worked. First Morey bound the Ancient Mariner to the frame of the time apparatus, safely away from the four luminous balls, broadcasters of the time field. Then he shut off the attractive ray, and bound himself in the operator's seat of the apparatus of the artificial matter machine.

	A plane of artificial matter formed, and a stretch of rock rose under its lift as it clove the rock apart. A great cleared, level space resulted. Other artificial matter enclosed the rock, and the fragments cut free were treated under tremendous pressure. In a few moments a second enormous mass of cosmium was formed.

	For three hours Morey worked steadily, building a tremendous reserve of materials. Lux metal he did not make, but relux, the infusible, perfect conductor, and cosmium in tremendous masses, he did make.

	And he made some great blocks of oxygen from the rock, transmuting the atoms, and stored it frozen on the plane, with liquid hydrogen in huge tanks, and some metals that would be needed. Then he slept while they waited for Arcot.

	Eight hours after he had lain down, Arcot was up, and ate his breakfast. He set to work at once with the machine. It didn't suit him, it seemed, and first he made a new tool, a small ship that could move about, propelled by a piece of artificial matter, and the entire ship was a tremendously greater artificial matter machine, with a greater power than before!

	His thoughts, far faster than hands could move, built up the gigantic hull of the new ship, and put in the rooms and the brace members in less than twelve hours. A titanic shell of eight-inch cosmium, a space, with braces of the same non-conductor of heat, cosmium, and a two inch inner hull. A tiny space in the gigantic hull, a space less than one thousand cubic feet in dimension was the control and living quarters.

	It was held now on great cosmium springs, but Arcot was not by any means through. One man must do all the work, for one brain must design it, and though he received the constant advice and help of Morey and the others, it was his brain that pictured the thing that was built.

	At last the hull was completed. A single, glistening tube, of enormous bulk, a mile in length, a thousand feet in diameter. Yet nearly all of that great bulk would be used immediately. Some room would be left for additional apparatus they might care to install. Spare parts they did not have to carry—they could make their own from the energy abounding in space.

	The enormous, shining hull was a thing of beauty through stark grandeur now, but obviously incomplete. The ray projectors were not mounted, but they were to be ray projectors of a type never before possible. Space is the transmitter of all rays, and it is in space that those energy forms exist. Arcot had merely to transfer the enormously high energy level of the space-curvature to any form of energy he wanted, and now, with the complete statistics on it, he was able to do that directly. No tubes, no generators, only fields that changed the energy already there—the immeasurable energy available!

	The next period of work he started the space distortion apparatus. That must go at the exact center of the ship. One tremendous coil, big enough for the Ancient Mariner to lie in easily! Minutes, and flying thoughts had made it:—then came thousands of the individual coils, by thinking of one, and picturing it many times! In ranks, rows, and columns they were piled into a great block, for power must be stored for use of this tremendous machine, while in the artificial space when its normal power was not available, and that power source must be tremendous.

	Then the time apparatus, and after that the driving apparatus. Not the molecular drive now, but an attraction drive, an attraction ray focused on their own ship, with projectors scattered about the ship that it might move effortlessly in every direction. And provision was made for a force-drive by means of artificial matter, planes of it pushing the ship where it was wanted. But with the attraction-drive they would be able to land safely, without fear of being crushed by their own weight on Thett, for all its enormous gravity.

	The control was now suspended finally, with a series of attraction drives about it, locking it immovably in place, while smaller attraction devices stimulated gravity for the occupants.

	Then finally the main apparatus—the power plant—was installed. The enormous coils which handled, or better, caused space to handle as they directed, powers so great that whole suns could be blasted instantaneously, were put in place, and the field generators that would make and direct their rays, their ray screen if need be, and handle their artificial matter. Everything was installed, and all but a rather small space was occupied.

	It had been six weeks of continuous work for them, for the mind of each was aiding in this work, indirectly or directly, and it neared completion now.

	"But, we need one more thing, Arcot. That could never land on any planet smaller than Jupiter. What is its mass?" suggested Morey.

	"Don't know, I'm sure, but it is of the order of a billion tons. I know you are right. What are we going to do?"

	"Put on a tender."

	"Why not the Ancient Mariner?" asked Wade.

	"It isn't fitting. It was designed for individual use anyway," replied Morey. "I suggest something more like this on a small scale. We won't have much work on that, merely think of every detail of the big ship on a small scale, with the exception of the control cube furnishings. Instead of the numerous decks, swimming pool and so forth, have a large, single room."

	"Good enough," replied Arcot.

	As if by magic, a machine appeared, a "small" machine of two-hundred-foot length, modified slightly in some parts, its bottom flattened, and equipped with an attractor anchor. Then they were ready.

	"We will leave the Mariner here, and get it later. This apparatus won't be needed any longer, and we don't want the enemy to get it. Our trial trip will be a fight!" called Arcot as he leaped from his seat. The mass of the giant ship pulled him, and he fell slowly toward it.

	Into its open port he flew, the others behind him, their suits still on. The door shut behind them as Arcot, at the controls, closed it. As yet they had not released the air supplies. It was airless.

	Now the hiss or air, and the quickening of heat crept through it. The water in the tanks thawed as the heat came, soaking through from the great heaters. In minutes the air and heat were normal throughout the great bulk. There was air in the power compartments, though no one was expected to go there, for the control room alone need be occupied; vision-screens here viewed every part of the ship, and all about it.

	The eyes of the new ship were set in recesses of the tremendously strong cosmium wall, and over them, protecting them, was an infinitely thin, but infinitely strong wall of artificial matter, permanently maintained. It was opaque to all forms of radiation known from the longest Hertzian to the shortest cosmics, save for the very narrow band of visible light. Whether this protection would stop the Thessian beam that was so deadly to lux and relux was not, of course, known. But Arcot hoped it would, and, if that beam was radiant energy, or material particles, it would.

	"We'll destroy our station here now, and leave the Ancient Mariner where it is. Of course we are a long way out of the orbit this planetoid followed, due to the effect of the time apparatus, but we can note where it is, and we'll be able to find it when we want it," said Arcot, seated at the great control board now. There were no buttons now, or visible controls; all was mental.

	A tiny sphere of artificial matter formed, and shot toward the control board of the time machine outside. It depressed the main switch, and space about them shifted, twisted, and returned to normal. The time apparatus was off for the first time in six weeks.

	"Can't fuse that, and we can't crush it. It's made of cosmium, and trying to crush it against the rock would just drive it into it. We'll see what we can do though," muttered Arcot. A plane of artificial matter formed just beneath it, and sheared it from its bed on the planetoid, cutting through the heavy cosmium anchors. The framework lifted, and the apparatus with it. A series of planes, a gigantic honeycomb formed, and the apparatus was cut across again and again, till only small fragments were left of it. Then these were rolled into a ball, and crushed by a sphere of artificial matter beyond all repair. The enemy would never learn their secret.

	A huge cylinder of artificial matter cut a great gouge from the plane that was left where the apparatus had been, and a clamp of the same material picked up the Ancient Mariner, deposited it there, then covered it with rubble and broken rock. A cosmic flashed on the rock for an instant, and it was glowing, incandescent lava. The Ancient Mariner was buried under a hundred feet of rapidly solidifying rock, but rock which could be fused away from its infusible walls when the time came.

	"We're ready to go now—get to work with the radio, Morey, when we get to Earth."

	The gravity seemed normal here as they walked about, no accelerations affected them as the ship darted forward, for all its inconceivably great mass, like an arrow, then flashed forward under time control. The sun was far distant now, for six weeks they had been traveling with the section of Eros under time control. But with their tremendous time control plant, and the space control, they reached the solar system in very little time.

	It seemed impossible to them that that battle could still be waging, but it was. The ships of Earth and Venus, battling now as a last, hopeless stand, over Chicago, were attempting to stop the press of a great Thessian fleet. Thin, long Negrian, or Sirian ships had joined them in the hour of Earth time that the men had been working. Still, despite the reinforcements, they were falling back.

-

CHAPTER XIX - The Battle of Earth

	IT had been an anxious hour for the forces of the Solar System. General Hetsar Sthel, of Kaxor, Venus, in charge of the defense, with the advice and aid of the General Staff, had thrown in all his forces. The great ray stations of the cities would be a last defense after the ships entered the air, but they would be mere retaliation, for once Thett got inside Earth's atmosphere, inside the great Heaviside layer ray-screen, her rays would be loosed on all the cities. The few stations that would operate had ray screens—but not the billions of the cities. It would be retaliation, not defense.

	The struggle was to keep the Thessians from the air, and it was a hopeless struggle. For some time, because Earth's forces had, by sheer sacrifice, held the Thessians off, they were able to gain when the aid from Venus came. A ship was dispatched at once to Sirius for aid, had returned to report aid on the way, for Sirius had been relieved of attack when Thett sent all ships to this planet for the great attack.

	The forces of Earth and Venus were small ships, in general, and carried only small ray screens. They failed instantly before the tremendous projectors of the Thessian battleships, so for a long time the Solarians had not used their screens, but going on the daylight side of the Thessians, where their ships were black in black space, and the Thessian ships bright spots, they had used no screens, and bombarded the great ships with molecular rays. Slowly their relux was eaten away by the smaller Solarian ships, while Solarian after Solarian was found, spotted with the molecular ray and destroyed, or blazed into a torch, revealing its hull, as the destructive ray touched the ship.

	But many Thessian ships went to destruction in this. And many, poorly armored against magnetism, went suddenly dead as the concentrated force of several Nansalian battleships hit them.

	The Nansalian ships were larger, and carried heavier screens now. They easily fought it out with one or two rays from Thessian ships, probing with deadly magnetic rays, sometimes finding some machine, sometimes a man who was not under the magnetic screen. A man unprotected meant the failure of some machine temporarily, and they had a chance to break through the armor.

	But the greater size of the Nansalian ships made them constant targets. The Thessian ships joined in attacking them, as well as the few true battleships Earth possessed.

	One new one had just been completed, designed under Arcot's advice. It carried a double ray screen, six foot relux, and the space- and time-distortion apparatus. Time after time it escaped into space by the use of the space-distortion as some Thessian charged down. And ship after ship they destroyed by lowering their heavy screens, and pouring all their power of six prow projectors against a Thessian ship. But eventually one of the giant forts crept too near—and it disappeared in a blaze of incandescence.

	They were in the last fine stages of Earth's atmosphere when the general staff received notice that a radio message of tremendous power had penetrated the ray screen, with advice for them. It was signed "Arcot."

	"Bringing new weapon. Draw all ships within the atmosphere when I start action, and drive Thessians back into space. Retire as soon as a distance of ten thousand miles is reached. I will then handle the fleet," was the message.

	"Gentlemen: We are losing. The move suggested would be eminently poor tactics unless we are sure of being able to drive them. If we don't, we are lost in any event. I trust Arcot. How vote you?" asked General Hetsar Sthel.

	The message was relayed to the ships. Scarcely a moment after the message had been relayed, a tremendous battleship appeared in space, just beyond the battle. It shot forward, and planted itself directly in the midst of the battle, brushing aside two huge Thessians in its progress. The Thessian ships bounced off its sides, and reeled away. It lay waiting, making no move. All the Thessian ships above poured the full concentration of their moleculars into its tremendous bulk. A diffused glow of opalescence ran over every ship—save the giant. The moleculars were being reflected from its sides, and their diffused energy attacked the very ships that were sending them!

	A fort moved up, and the deadly beam of destruction reached out, luminous even in space.

	"Now," muttered Morey," we shall see what cosmium will stand."

	Suddenly the screens went blank, all save those inside the ship, the eyes outside had been destroyed by the ray.

	"Which means it is nothing in the spectrum, or that artificial matter would stop it," commented Wade.

	A huge spot on the side of the ship had become incandescent. A vapor, a strange puff of smokiness exploded from it, and disappeared instantly. Another came and faster and faster they followed each other. The cosmium was disintegrating under the ray, but very slowly, breaking first into gaseous cosmic rays, then free, and spreading.

	"We will now fight," muttered Morey happily as he saw Arcot shift in his seat.

	Arcot picked the moleculars. They reached out, touched the heavy relux of the fort, and it exploded into opalescence that was hazily white, the colors shifted so quickly. A screen sprang into being, and the ray was chopped off. The screen was a mass of darting flames as energies of stupendous magnitude clashed.

-

	ARCOT used a bit more of his inconceivable power. The ray struck the screen, and it flashed once—then died into blackness. The fort suddenly crumpled in like a dented can, and rolled clumsily away. The other fort was near now, and started an attack of its own. Arcot chose the artificial matter this time. He was not watching the many attacking ships.

	The great ship careened suddenly, fell over heavily to one side. "Foolish of me," said Arcot. "They tried crashing us. See—there, with the new eyes in you can see him."

	A mass of crumpled, broken relux and lux, surrounded by a haze of gas lying against a slight scratch on the great side told the story. Eight inches of cosmium does not give way.

	Yet another ship tried it. But it stopped several feet away from the real wall of the ship. It struck a wall even more unyielding—artificial matter. Arcot had surrounded the ship with a sheet of artificial matter.

	But now Arcot was using this major weapon—artificial matter. Ship after ship, whether fleeing or attacking, was surrounded suddenly by a great sphere of it, a sudden terrific blaze of energy as the sphere struck the ray shield, the control forces now backed by the energy of all the millions of stars of space shattered it in an instant. Then came the inexorable crush of the artificial matter, and a ball of matter alone remained.

	But the pressing disc of the battle-front which had been lowering on Chicago, greatest of Earth's metropolises, was lifted. This disc-front was staggering back now as Arcot's mighty ship weakened its strength, and destroyed its morale, under the steady drive of the now hopeful Solarians.

	The other gigantic fort moved up now, with twenty of the largest battleships. The fort turned loose its destructive ray—and Arcot tried his new "magnet." It was not a true magnet, but a transformed space field, a field created by the energy of all the universe.

	The fort was gigantic. Even Arcot's mighty ship was a small thing beside it, but suddenly it seemed warped and twisted as space curved visibly in a magnetic field of such terrific intensity as to be immeasurable. Earth, out of the direct range of the great beam, trembled under its pull, and earthquakes, like monstrous tides, were stirred up in it. The giant ship lurched terrifically under its pull—and Arcot turned on one other weapon. It was an apparatus designed for inducing enormous currents in any apparatus made of relux. Simply a diffused cosmic ray, for relux, under a cosmic ray, and in a magnetic field is a conductor, and also a generator.

	It was inevitable. The fort was made of relux. Currents were suddenly generated in it, and those currents heated it almost instantly to incandescence—then it shook terrifically as those currents reacted on the magnetic field, the resistance stopped them, the magnetic field drove them—and the relux took the strain. The great wall was pulverized, shattered to dust, and the dust scattered by suddenly expanding air.

	There was double reason in using one weapon after another in this way. For one thing Arcot learned their manipulation, and their effectiveness. For another, the display of innumerable and terribly efficacious weapons did not help the morale of the already retreating Thessian fleet.

	Moleculars had been beating harmlessly against the cosmium walls of the ship, and cosmics had bathed it. The eyes did not fail, but each little socket became a point of light as artificial matter and cosmic ray energy battled, with the inevitable result when the energy of matter fought the energy of the Universe. No effect was produced on the ship.

	But now Arcot threw out a molecular ray screen, generated directly in space, no apparatus of tubes handled this, and no apparatus of tubes could bother it. But the Thessian battleships poured their futile energy into blazing interference on it.

	And his last new weapon, the Sirian attractive ray, he tried now. Two battleships were caught by two beams. The ships leapt forward at an acceleration that yanked them to a speed of thousands of miles per second in mere miles of distance. Then they were released. They turned their maximum acceleration to deflect themselves from the inevitable collision—but at that speed no bearable force could turn them half a diameter in the distance they had of safety. They crashed and relux against relux, the crash was an enormous explosion of energy.

	Arcot's armory was tested and found not wanting.

	Suddenly every Thessian ship in sight, ceased to exist. They disappeared. Instantly Arcot threw on all time power, and darted toward Venus. The Thessians were already nearing the planet, and no possible rays could overtake them. An instantaneous touch of the space control, and the mighty ship was within hundreds of miles of the atmosphere.

	Space twisted about them, reeled, and was firm. The Thessian fleet was before them in a moment, visible now as they slowed to normal speed. Startled they were no doubt to find the ship they had fled from waiting before them. But they charged on for a space. Then, as though by some magic, they stopped and exploded in gouts of light.

	When space had twisted, seconds before, it was because Arcot had drawn on the enormous power of space to an extent that had been appreciable even to it—ten sols. That was forty million tons of matter a second, and for a hundredth part of a second it had flowed. Before them, in a vast plane, had been created an infinitesimally thin film of artificial matter, four hundred thousand tons of it, and into this invisible, infinitely hard barrier, the Thessian fleet had rammed. And it was gone.

	"I think," said Arcot softly, as he took off his headpiece, "that the beginning of the end is in sight."

	"And I," said Morey, "think it is now out of sight. Half a dozen ships stopped. And they are gone now, to warn the others."

	"What warning? What can they tell? Only that their ships were destroyed by something they couldn't see," smiled Arcot. "I'm going home."

-

CHAPTER XX - Destruction

	THEY could not land on Earth. Not with their huge machine, but they brought it down to Chicago, and hung out over the lake, while Arcot went in the tender, and picked up a number of delegates. Arcot Senior was there, and Morey Senior too, General Hetsar Sthel, and the General Staff came en masse, with a number of important scientists, who were near enough to get there in time.

	"I cannot explain all this apparatus to you. But I want you to understand that this ship represents not an hour's labor, but six weeks work, constant work, with the most titanic powers the Universe has ever yielded to man.

	"I will show you the machine, and you will get an impression of it only. I cannot stay long, for I must go to those other worlds with what aid I can give. But we are in the tender room now. This room," said Arcot pointing about at the great cosmium, arched ceiling, "is designed solely to hold this ship, which will be anchored in place when we leave it. It alone weighs in the order of a quarter of a million tons, and could make the intergalactic journey itself.

	"This is the main driving engine. It is better to say, it controls the driving power." He pointed as he spoke, to an apparatus the height of a man, and its humped bulk was approximately ten feet long.

	The General looked at it skeptically. "Do you mean that that apparatus alone drives this enormous thing?" he asked.

	"It causes it to be driven," smiled Arcot, "because it causes space to form the field which actually drives."

	The room they had entered was fully one hundred feet high, and two hundred long, by one hundred and seventy-five wide. The driving apparatus occupied one corner. Down both walls, in great stacks, held in cosmium insulating pots, were rows on rows of enormous coils, twenty feet in diameter, the two toruses, or doughnut shaped coils at right angles to each other, the space in their intersection was the absolute black of that other space they contained.

	"These are the space distortion power coils. This is one of the three banks, any one of which is sufficient to carry us. Due to the necessary limitations of the relux conductors, it takes us five minutes to charge any one bank. That machine beside the normal space drive supplies the power." Again it was absurdly small.

	But there was one thing that bulked enormous in the center of the room, filling all the space between the walls of coils. It was a single cylindrical coil.

	"That," explained Arcot pointing toward it, "is the main space distortion coil. There are two, that or the other one may be used. Both are never used at once. Either one will give us a velocity of thirty-five light years a second, per se."

	Flying across the room on the molecular suits that each had worn, they entered a titanic chaos of machines. Machines so huge that entire towns, it seemed, could have been built on their enormous backs.

	"Son, what are those machines?" asked Arcot Senior in amazement.

	"The central one, the largest of all, is the artificial matter feed apparatus. The one to the left is the projector feed. It will feed the projectors with any type of feed-field I want, and produce any type of ray that exists in space. I do not know its power, nor do I know the power of the artificial matter feed. Each can handle the power of more than one billion sols, however."

	"And what," asked Arcot Senior softly, "would that do?"

	"It would be sufficient to create a new universe, or completely wreck an old one," replied Morey Junior, who had appeared.

	"The other converter, to the right, and those other two, fore and aft of the master feed, are other projector feeders. We can throw four different types of ray at once, if we want, and each ray will be backed with the power of one billion suns!

	"The smaller machines about are for different purposes. That down there is the control, where the mental impulses are converted to mechanical and electrical action. That is the magnetic ray. I'm sorry I touched Earth with it. I understand it caused considerable damage."

	"That! That threw the ray that rocked old Earth?" asked one of the General Staff, looking in horror at the machine, which was no bigger than a private molecular ship, and yet was capable of rocking a planet to the core.

	"That did it. It's made of pure cosmium, and anchored with artificial matter plates. The other machines around here have the job of maintaining in place the various permanent artificial matter structures. The lights—those globes of white fire apparently floating in the air, are structures of artificial matter. They are under my mental control even now. See."

	Arcot stared upwards, and the lights, which had been shining steadily with a glow rather than a glare, suddenly brightened, until they were white furnaces of light. The gigantic room was quickly warming, and in moments the radiated energy had made it uncomfortable. But the lights dimmed, and in a few seconds the molecular cooling had absorbed the energy.

	"IF any enemy should force an entrance to this room I could turn the power into those lights till this power room was a white hot inferno, in which every element would be a gas, except only the cosmium and relux of which it is constructed, which could exist in solid form. The same is true of every part of the ship, and every part of the ship is guarded by those eyes you see up there. They watch every room, and relay the views to the screens in the ships control room—but also, when I have accustomed myself to it, I can have those scenes projected directly upon my mind, so that I am continually conscious of every part of the ship, as I am conscious of every part of my body. By merely desiring it, any one screen's impression may be intensified, and observed minutely, as the impression of any nerve of the body can, by willing, be made more clear, more definite.

	"But as yet I can only use the standard controls. I need practice.

	"But gentlemen I have to repair the cosmium of the ship. It was pitted a bit in some spots by their rays, and I want to repair it. Let us go to the control room."

	"Dr. Arcot. There is one question I should like to ask. Do you think the enormous powers of those generators is necessary?" asked General Hetsar Sthel.

	"I sincerely hope not, General Sthel, but as a matter of fact they are not generators. They do not generate power; they merely turn it; convert it. They are no more generators than is a transformer for electrical power. Save if an electrical transformer were on the same scale to the power handled as these machines are, you would be unable to see it with the average microscope!"

	The General looked again at the apparatus which had rocked the terrestrial planet, when a stray edge of the beam it threw had touched it, and then at the gigantic central machine, and the four slightly smaller projector feeders. He shook his head, and turned away.

	In the control room, Arcot at once seated himself, and the ship darted up, Chicago with its multitude of colors, flashing now in the early morning sun dropping behind. In a few seconds the scream of the air had died out, the space was black around them.

	Out in front of the ship a transparent sphere formed. Within it a pair of planes formed, and moved slowly toward each other. They touched, and a terrific burst of energy evidently escaped, for the meters on the control board suddenly jiggled slightly, and the one which read in millisols of power used registered in the neighborhood of five. Five thousandths of a sun power. The meter hung steady, and the planes within the sphere of transparency seemed to waiver, and move about like pieces of cloth, while they glowed with a strange violet glare. For perhaps ten seconds this continued, then Arcot stopped it The planes vanished; the sphere closed in inexorably, and suddenly, as if by magic, the empty space within the sphere was filled with solid, reflecting mass.

	"Cosmium," explained Morey sotto voce, "He pushed two artificial matter planes together, and they radiated in the cosmic principally, and the sphere-shield he used was a perfect reflector of cosmics, though transparent to light. When the cosmic energy had accumulated sufficiently, he closed in the sphere against its enormous pressure, and then subjected the whole to the correct field—and the cosmics crystallized info cosmium."

	So swiftly that they were almost invisible, a number of artificial matter tools were at work. The cosmium was rapidly pinched off, and smoothed against the pitted wall of the ship, till it was smooth once more, and as brightly shiny as before.

	"We are ready now. I have just received a message from Zezdon Fentes that he has an important communication to make, so I will go down to New York instead of to Chicago, if you gentlemen do not mind. Morey will take you to Chicago in the tender, and I can find Zezdon Fentes."

	Zezdon Fentes' message was brief. He had discovered from the minds of several who had been killed by the magnetic field Arcot had used, and not destroyed, that they had a base in this universe. Thett's base was somewhere near the center of the galaxy, on a system of unusually large planets, circling a rather small star. But what star their minds had not revealed.

	"It's up to us then to locate said star," said Arcot, after listening to Zezdon Fentes' account: "I think the easiest way will be to follow them home. We can go to your world, Zezdon Fentes, and see what they are doing there, and drive them off. Then to yours, Stel Felso. I place your world second as it is far better able to defend itself than is Ortol. It is agreeable?"

	It was, and the ship, which had been hanging in the atmosphere over New York, where Zezdon Afthen Fentes and Inthel had come to it in a taxi-ship, signaled for the crowd to clear away above. The enormous bulk of the shining machine, the savior of Earth, had attracted a very great amount of attention, naturally, and thousands on thousands of hardy souls had braved the cold of the fifteen mile height with altitude suits or in small ships to climb up. Now they cleared away, and as the ship slowly rose, the tremendous concentrated mental well-wishing of the thousands reached the men within the ship. "That," observed Morley, "is one thing cosmium won't stop. In some ways I wish it would—because the mental power that could be wielded by any great number of those highly advanced Thessians, if they know its possibilities, is not a thing to neglect."

	"I can answer that, Terrestrian," thought Zezdon Afthen. "Our instruments show great mental powers, and great ability to concentrate the will in mental processes, but they indicate a very slight development of these abilities. Our race, despite the fact that our mental powers are much less than those of such men as Arcot and yourself, have done, and can do many things your greater minds cannot, for we have learned the direction of the will. We need not fear the will of the Thessians. I feel confident of that!"

	The ship was in space now, and as Arcot directed it toward Ortol, far far across the Island, he threw on, for the moment, the combined power of space distortion and time fields. Instantly the sun vanished, and when, less than a second later, he cut off the space field, and left only the time, the constellations were instantly recognizable. They were within a dozen light years of Ortol.

	"Morey, may I ask what you call this machine?" asked Torlos.

	"You may, but I can't answer," laughed Morey. "We were so anxious to get it going that we didn't name it. Any suggestions?"

	For a moment none of them made any suggestions, then slowly came Arcot's thoughts, clear and sharp, the thoughts of carefully weighed decision.

	"The swiftest thing that ever was thought! The most irresistible thing, thought, for nothing can stop its progress. The most destructive thing, thought. Thought, the greatest constructor, the greatest destroyer, the product of mind, and producer of powers, the greatest of powers. Thought is controlled by the mind. Let us call it Thought!"

	"Excellent, Arcot, excellent. The Thought, the controller of the powers of the cosmos!" cried Morey.

	"But the Thought has not been christened, save in battle, and then it had no name. Let us emblazen its name on it now," suggested Wade.

-

	STOPPING their motion through space, but maintaining a time field that permitted them to work without consuming previous time, Arcot formed some more cosmium, but now he subjected it to a special type of converter field, and into the cosmium, he forced some light photons, half bound, half free. The fixture he formed into the letters, and welded forever on the gigantic prow of the ship, and on its huge sides. Thought, it stood in letters ten feet high, made of clear transparent cosmium, and the golden light photons, imprisoned in it, the slowly disintegrating lux metal, would cause those letters to shine for countless æons with the steady golden light they now had.

	The Thought continued on now, and as they slowed their progress for Ortol, they saw that messengers of Thett had barely arrived. The fort here too had been razed to the ground, and now they were concentrating over the largest city of Ortol. Their rays were beating down on the great ray screen that terrestrial engineers had set up, protecting the city, as Earth had been protected. But the fleet that stood guard was small, and was rapidly being destroyed. A fort broke free, and plunged at last for the ray screen. Its relux walls glowed a thousand colors as the tremendous energy of the ray-screen struck them—but it was through!

	A molecular ray reached down for the city—and stopped half way in a tremendous coruscating burst of light and energy. Yet there was none of the sheen of the ray screen. Merely light.

	The fort was still driving downward. Then suddenly it stopped, and the side dented in like the side of a can some one has stepped on, and it came to sudden rest against an invisible, impenetrable barrier. A molecular reached down from somewhere in space, hit the ray screen of Ortol, which the Thessians had attacked for hours, and the screen flashed into sudden brilliance, and disappeared. The ray struck the Thessian fort, and the fort burst into tremendous opalescence, while the invisible barrier the ray had struck was suddenly a great sheet of flaming light. In less than half a second the opalescence was gone, the fort shuddered, and shrieked out of the planet's atmosphere, a mass of lux now, and susceptible to the moleculars. And everything that lived within that fort had died instantly and painlessly.

	The fleet which had been preparing to follow the leading fort was suddenly stopped; it halted indecisively.

	Then the Thought became visible as its great golden letters showed suddenly, streaking up from distant space. Every ship turned cosmics and moleculars on it. The cosmics rebounded from the cosmium walls, and from the artificial matter that protected the eyes. The moleculars did not affect either, but the invisible protective sheet that the Thought was maintaining in the Ortolian atmosphere became misty as it fought the slight molecular rebounds.

	The Thought went into action. The fort which remained was the point of attack. The fort had turned its destructive ray on the cosmium ship with the result that, as before, the cosmium slowly disintegrated into puffs of cosmic rays. The vapor seemed to boil out, puff suddenly, then was gone. Arcot put up a wall of artificial matter to test the effect. The ray went right through the matter, without so much as affecting it. He tried a sheet of pure energy, an electro-magnetic energy stream of tremendous power. The ray bent sharply to one side. But in a moment the Thessians had realigned it.

	"It's a photonic stream, but of some type that doesn't affect ordinary matter, but only artificial matter, such as lux, relux, or cosmium. As I can't make those with artificial matter apparatus, except to make real material, I can't get it to fight. If the artificial matter would only fight it, I'd be all right." The thought running through Arcot's mind reached the others.

	A tremendous burst of light energy to the rear announced the fact that a Thessian had crashed against the artificial matter wall that surrounded the ship. Arcot was throwing the Thessian destructive beam from side to side now, and twice succeeded in misdirecting it so that it hit the enemy machines.

	The Thought sent out its terrific beam of magnetic energy. The ray was suddenly killed, and the fort cruised helplessly on. Its driving apparatus was dead. The diffused cosmics reached out, and as the magnetic field, the relux and the cosmics interacted, the great fort was suddenly blue-white—then instantly a dust that scattered before an enormous blast of air.

	From the Thought a great shell of artificial matter went, a visible, misty wall, that curled forward, and wrapped itself around the Thessian ships with a motion of tremendous speed, yet deceptive, for it seemed to billow and flow.

	A Thessian warship decided to brush it away—and plowed into inconceivable strength. The ship crumpled to a mass of broken relux.

	The greater part of the Thessian fleet had already fled, but there remained half a hundred great battleships. And now, within half a million miles of the planet, there began a battle so weird that astronomers who watched could not believe it.

	From behind the Thought, where it hung motionless beyond the misty wall, a Thing came.

-

	THE Thessian ships had realized now that the misty sphere that walled them in was impenetrable, and their rays were off, for none they now had would penetrate it. The forts were gone.

	But the Thing that came behind the Thought was a ship, a little ship of the same misty white, and it flowed into, and through the wall, and was within their prison. The Thessian ships turned their rays toward it, and waited. What was this thing?

	The ovaloid ship which drifted so slowly toward them suddenly seemed to jerk, and from it reached pseudo-pods! An amoeba on a titanic scale! It writhed its way purposefully toward the nearest ship, and while that ship waited, a pseudopod reached out, and suddenly drove through the four foot relux armor! A second pseudopod followed with lightning rapidity, and in an instant the ship had been split from end to end!

	Now a hundred rays were leaping toward the thing, and the rays burst into fire and gouts of light, blackened, burned pseudopods seemed to fall from the thing and hastily it retreated from the enclosure, flowing once more through the wall that stopped their rays.

	But another Thing came. It was enormous, a mile long, a great, shining scaly thing, a dragon, and on its mighty neck was mounted an enormous, distorted head, with great flat nose and huge flapping nostrils. It was a Thessian head! The mouth, fifty feet across, wrinkled into an horrific grin, and broken, stained teeth of iron showed in the mouth. Great talons upraised, it rent the misty wall that bound them, and writhed its awful length in. The swish of its scales seemed to come to the watchers, as it chased after a great battleship whose pilot fled in terror. Faster than the mighty space ship the awful Thing caught it in mighty talons that ripped through solid relux. Scratching, fluttering enormous, blood-red wings, the silvery claws tore away great masses of relux, sending them flying into space.

	Again rays struck at it. Cosmic and moleculars with blinding pencils of light. For now in the close space of the Wall was an atmosphere, the air of two great warships, and though the space was great, the air in the ships was dense.

	The rays struck its awful face. The face burst into light, and smoke, black, greasy smoke streamed up, as the thing writhed and twisted horribly, awful screams rang out. Then it was free, and half the face was burned away, and a grinning, bleeding, half-cooked face writhed and screamed in anger at them. It darted at the nearest ship, and ripped out that ray that burned it—and quivered into death. It quivered, then quickly faded into mist, a haze, and was gone!

	A last awful thing—a thing they had not noticed as all eyes watched that Thing—was standing by the rent in the Sphere now, the gigantic Thessian, with leering, bestial jaws, enormous, squat limbs, the webbed fingers and toes, and the heavy torso of his race, grinning at them. In one hand was a thing—and his jaws munched. Thett's men stared in horror as they recognized that thing in his hand—a Thessian body! He grinned happily and reached for a battleship—a ray burned him. He howled, and leaped into their midst.

	Then the Thessians went mad. All fought, and they fought each other, rays, of all sorts, their moleculars and their cosmics, while in their midst the Giant howled his glee, and laughed and laughed—

	Eventually it was over, and the last limping Thessian ship drove itself crazily against the wreck of its last enemy. And only wreckage was left.

	"Lord, Arcot! Why in the Universe did you do that—and how did you conceive those horrors?" asked Morey, more than a little amazed at the tactics Arcot had displayed.

	Arcot shook himself, and disconnected his controls. "Why—why I don't know. I don't know what made me do that I'm sure. I never imagined anything like that dragon thing—how did—"

	His keen eyes fixed themselves suddenly on Zezdon Fentes, and their tremendous hypnotic power beat down the resistance of the Ortolian's trained mind. Arcot's mind opened for the others the thoughts of Zezdon Fentes.

	He had acted as a medium between the minds of the Thessians, and Arcot. Taking the horror-ideas of the Thessians, he had imprinted them on Arcot's mind while Arcot was at work with the controls. In Arcot's mind, they had acted exactly as had the ideas that night on Earth, only here the demonstration had been carried to the limit, and the horror ideas were compounded to the utmost. The Thessians, highly developed minds though they were, were not resistant and they had broken. The Allies, with their different horror-ideas, had been but slightly affected.

	"We will leave you on Ortol, Zezdon Fentes. We know you have done much, and perhaps your own mind has given a bit. We hope you recover. I think you agree with me, Zezdon Afthen and Inthel?" thought Arcot.

	"We do, heartily, and are heartily sorry that one of our race has acted in this way. Let us proceed to Talso, as soon as possible. You might send Fentes down in a shell of artificial matter," suggested Zezdon Afthen.

	"Which," said Arcot, after this had been done, and they were on their way to Talso, "shows the danger of a mad Thought!"

-

CHAPTER XXI - The Power of the Thought

	BUT it seemed, or must have seemed to any infinite being capable of watching it as it moved now, that the Thought was a mad thought. With the time control opened to the limit, and a touch of the space control, it fled across the Universe at a velocity such as no other thing was capable of.

	Stars wheeled, and fled behind it as mountains wheel, and flee behind a racing space ship as it enters a world's atmosphere. Stars, light years apart, or hundreds of light years apart, flashed to discs, wheeled, winked, and changed color under the action of the space control, winked from green to violet discs, and fled back to insignificance with a speed that seemed phantasmal.

	One star—it flashed to a disc, loomed enormous—overpowering—then suddenly they were flashing through it! The enormous coils fed their current into the space-coils and the time field, and the ship seemed to twist and writhe in distorted space as the gravitational field of a giant star, and a giant ship's space field fought for a fraction of time so short as to be utterly below measurement. Then the ship was gone—and behind it a star, the center of which had suddenly been hurled into another space forever, as the counteracting, gravitational field of the outer layers was removed for a moment, and only its own enormous density affected space, writhed and collapsed upon itself, to explode into a mighty sea of flames. Planets it formed, we know, by a process such as can happen when only this man-made accident happens.

	But the ship fled on, its great coils partly discharged, but still far more charged than need be.

	It was minutes to Talso where it had been hours with the Ancient Mariner, but now they traveled with the speed of the Thought!

	Talso too was the scene of a battle, and more of a battle than Ortol had been, for here where more powerful defensive forces had been active, the Thessians had been more vengeful. All their remaining ships seemed concentrated here. And the great molecular screen that terrestrian engineers had flung up here had already fallen. Great holes had opened in it, as two great forts, and a thousand ships, some mighty battleships of the intergalactic spaces, some little scout cruisers, had turned their rays on the struggling defensive machines. It had held for hours, thanks to the tremendous tubes that Talso had had in their power-distribution stations, but in the end had fallen, but not before many of their largest cities had been similarly defended, and the people of the others had scattered broadcast.

	True, wherever they might be, a diffused molecular would find them and destroy all life save under the few screens, but if the Thessians once diffused their rays, without entering the atmosphere, the broken screen would once more be able to hold.

	No fleet had kept the Thessian forces out of this atmosphere, but dozens of more adequately powered artificial matter bomb stations had taught Thett respect for Talso. But Talso's own ray screen had stopped their bombs. They could only send their bombs as high as the screen. They did not have Arcot's tremendous control power to maintain the matter without difficulty even beyond a screen.

	At last the screen had fallen, and the Thessian ships, a hole once made, were able to move, and kept that hole always under them, though if it once were closed, they would again have the struggle to open it.

	Exploding matter bombs had twice caused such spatial strains and ionized conditions as to come near closing it, but finally the Thessian fleet had arranged a ring of ships about the hole, and opened a cylinder of rays that reached down to the planet.

	Like some gigantic plow the rays tore up mountains, oceans, glaciers and land. Tremendous chasms opened in straight lines as it plowed along. Unprotected cities flashed into fountains of rock and soil and steel that leaped upwards as the rays touched, and were gone. Protected cities, their screens blazing briefly under the enormous ray concentration as the ships moved on, unheeding, stood safe on islands of safety amidst the destruction. Here in the lower air, where ions would be so plentiful, Thett did not try to break down the screens, for the air would aid the defenders.

	Finally, as Thett's forces had planned, they came to one of the ionized layer ray-screen stations that was still projecting its cone of protective screening to the layer above. Every available ray was turned on that station, and, designed as it was for protecting part of a world, the station was itself protected, but slowly, slowly as its already heated tubes weakened their electronic emission, the disc of ions retreated more and more toward the station as, like some splashing stream, the Thessian rays played upon it forcing it back. A rapidly accelerating retreat, faster and faster, as the disc changed from the dull red of normal defense to the higher and bluer quanta of failing, less complete defense, the disc of interference retreated.

	Then, with a flash of light, and a roar as the soil below spouted up, the station was gone. It had failed.

	Instantly the ring of ships expanded as the great screen was weakened by the withdrawal of this support. Wider was the path of destruction now as the forces moved on.

	But high, high in the sky, far out of sight of the naked eye, was a tiny spot that was in reality a giant ship. It was flashing forward, and in moments it was visible. Then, as another deserted city vanished, it was above the Thessian fleet.

	Their rays were directed downward through a hole that was even larger. A second station had gone with that city. But, as by magic, the hole closed up, and chopped their rays off with a decisiveness that startled them. The interference was so sharp now that not even the dullest of reds showed where their beams touched. The close interference was giving off only radio! In amazement they looked for this new station of such enormous power that their combined rays did not noticeably affect it. A world had been fighting their rays unsuccessfully. What single station could do this, if the many stations of the world could not? There was but one they knew of, and they turned now to search for the ship they knew must be there.

	"No horrors this time; just clean, burning energy," muttered Arcot.

	It was clean, and it was burning. In an instant one of the forts was a mass of opalescence that shifted so swiftly it was purest white, then rocketed away, lifeless, and no longer relux.

	The other fort had its screen up, though its power, designed to withstand the attack of a fleet of enormous intergalactic, matter-driven, fighting ships lasted but an instant under the driving power of half a million million suns, concentrated in one enormous ray of energy. The sheer energy of the ray itself, molecular ray though it was, heated the material it struck to blinding incandescence even as it hurled it at a velocity close to that of light into outer space. With little sparkling flashes battleships of the void after giant cruisers flashed into lux, and vanished under the ray.

	A tremendous combined ray of magnetism and cosmic ray energy replaced the molecular, and the ships exploded into a dust as fine as the primeval gas from which came all matter.

	Sweeping energy, so enormous that the defenses of the ships did not even operate against it, shattered ship after ship, till the few that remained turned, and, faster than the pursuing energies could race through space, faster than light, headed for their base.

	"That was fair fight; energy against energy," said Arcot delightedly, for his new toy, which made playthings of suns and fed on the cosmic energy of a universe, was behaving nicely, "and as I said Stel Felso Theu, at the beginning of this war the greater Power wins, always. And in our Island here, I have five hundred thousand million separate power plants, each generating at the rate of decillions of ergs a second, backing this ship.

	"Your world will be safe now, and we will head for our last embattled ally, Sirius." The titanic ship turned, and disappeared from the view of the madly rejoicing billions of Talso below, as it sped, far faster than light, across a universe to relieve another sorely tried civilization.

	Knowing their cause was lost, hopeless in the knowledge that nothing known to them could battle that enormous force concentrated in one ship, the Thought, the Thessians had but one aim now, to do all the damage in their power before leaving.

	Already their tremendous, unarmed and unarmored transports were departing with their hundreds of thousands from that base system for the far-off Island of Space from which they had come. Their battlefleets were engaged in destroying all the cities of the allies, and those other helpless races of our system that they could. Those other inhabited worlds, many of which were completely wiped out because Arcot had no knowledge of them, were relieved only when the general call for retreat to protect the mother planet was sent out.

-

	BUT Sirius was looming enormous before them. And its planets, heavily defended now by the combined Sirian terrestrial and Venerian fleets and great ray screens as well as a few matter-bomb stations were suffering losses none the less. For the old Sixth of Negra, the Third here, had fallen. Slipping in on the night side of the planet, all power off, and so sending forth no warning impulses till it actually fell through the ray screen, a small fleet of scouts had entered. Falling still under simple gravity, they had been missed by the rays till they had fallen to so small a distance, that no humans or men of our allied systems could have stopped, but only their enormous iron boned strength permitted them to resist the acceleration they used to avert collision with the planet. Then scattering swiftly, they had blasted the great protective screen stations by attacking on the sides, where the ray screen projectors were not mounted. Designed to protect above, they had no side armor. And the Sixth was opened to attack.

	Two and one-half billion people lost their lives painlessly and instantaneously as tremendous diffused moleculars played on the revolving planet.

	Arcot arrived soon after this catastrophe. The Thessians left almost immediately, after the loss of three hundred or more ships. One hundred and fifty wrecks were found. The rest were so blasted by the forces which attacked them, that no traces could be found, and no count made.

	But as those ships fled back to their base, Arcot, with the wonderfully delicate mental control of his ship was able to watch them, and follow them, for, invisible under normal conditions, by twisting space in the same manner that they did he was able to see them flee, and follow.

	Light year after light year they raced toward the distant base. They reached it in two hours, and Arcot saw them from a distance sink to the various worlds. There were twelve gigantic worlds, each far larger than Jupiter of Sol, and larger than Stwall of Talso's sun, Renl.

	"I think," said Arcot as he stopped the ship at a third of a light year, "that we had best destroy those planets. We may kill many men, and innocent non-combatants, but they have killed many of our races, and it is necessary. There are, no doubt, other worlds of this Universe here that we do not know of that have felt the vengeance of Thett, and if we can cause such trouble to them by destroying these worlds, and putting the fear of our attacking their mother world into them, they will call off those other fleets. I could have been invisible to Theft's ships as we followed them here, and for the greater part of the way I was, for I was sufficiently out of their time-rate, so that they were visible only by the short ultra-violet, which would have put us in their infra-red, and no photoelectric cell will work on quanta of such low energy. When at last I was sure of the sun for which they were heading, I let them see us, and they know we are aware of their base, and that we can follow them.

	"I will destroy one of these worlds, and follow a fleet as it starts for their home nebula. Gradually, as they run, I will fade into invisibility, and they will not know that I have dropped back here to complete the work, but will think I am still following. Probably they will run to some other nebula in an effort to throw me off, but they will most certainly send back a ship to call the fleets here to the defense of Thett.

	"I think that is the best plan. Do you agree?"

	"Arcot," asked Morey slowly, "if this race attempts to settle another Universe, what would that indicate of their own?"

	"Hmmm—that it was either entirely populated by their own race or that another race held the parts they did not, and that the other race was stronger," replied Arcot. "The thought idea in their minds has always been a single world, single solar system as their home, however."

	"And single solar systems cannot originate in this Space," replied Morey, referring to the fact that in the primeval gas from which all matter in this Universe and all others came, no condensation of mass less than thousands of millions of times that of a sun could form and continue.

	"We can only investigate—and hope that they do not inhabit the whole system, for I am determined that, unpleasant as the idea may be, there is one race that we cannot afford to have visiting us, and it is going to be permanently restrained in one way or another. I will first have a conference with their leaders and if they will not be peaceful—the Thought can destroy or make a Universe! But I think that a second race holds part of that Universe, for several times we have read in their minds the thought of the 'Mighty War-less Ones of Venone'."

	"And how do you plan to destroy so large a planet as these are?" asked Morey, indicating the telectroscope screen.

	"Watch and see!" said Arcot.

	They shot suddenly toward the distant sun, and as it expanded, planets came into view. Moving ever slower on the time control, Arcot drove the ship toward a gigantic planet at a distance of approximately 300,000,000 miles from its primary, the sun of this system.

	Arcot fell into step with the planet as it moved about in its orbit, and watched the speed indicator carefully.

	"What's the orbital speed, Morey?" asked Arcot.

	"About twelve and a half miles per second," replied the somewhat mystified Morey.

	"Excellent, my dear Watson," replied Arcot. "And now does my dear friend know the average molecular velocity of ordinary air?"

	"Why, about one-third of a mile a second, average."

	"And if that planet as a whole should stop moving, and the individual molecules be given the entire energy, what would their average velocity be? And what temperature would that represent?" asked Arcot.

	"Good—Why, they would have to have the same kinetic energy as individuals as they now have as a whole, and that would be an average molecular velocity in random motion of 12.5 miles a second—giving about—about—about—twelve thousand degrees centigrade!" exclaimed Morey in surprise. "That would put it in the far blue-white region!"

	"Perfect. Now watch." Arcot donned the headpiece he had removed, and once more took charge. He was very far from the planet, as distances go, and they could not see his ship. But he wanted to be seen. So he moved closer, and hung off to the sunward side of the planet, then moved to the night side, but stayed in the light. In seconds, a battlefleet was out attempting to destroy him.

	Surrounding the ship with a wall of artificial matter, lest they annoy him, he set to work.

	Directly in the orbit of the planet, a faint mistiness appeared, and rapidly solidified to a titanic cup, directly in the path of the planet.

	Arcot was pouring energy into the making of that matter at such a rate that space was twisted now about them. The meter before them, which had not registered previously, was registering now, and had moved over to three. Three sols—and was still climbing. It stopped when ten were reached. Ten times the energy of our sun was pouring into that condensation, and it solidified quickly.

	The Thessians had seen the danger now. It was less than ten minutes away from their planet, and now great numbers of ships of all sorts started up from the planet, swarming out like rats from a sinking vessel.

	Majestically the great world moved on in its orbit toward the thin, thin wall of infinite strength and infinite toughness. Already Thessian battleships were tearing at that wall with rays of all types, and the wall sputtered back little gouts of light, and remained. The meters on the Thought were no longer registering. The wall was built, and now Arcot had all the giant power of the ship holding it there. Any attempt to move it or destroy it, and all the energy of the Universe would rush to its defense!

	The atmosphere of the planet reached the wall. Instantly, as the pressure of that enormous mass of air touched it, the wall fought, and burst into a blaze of energy. It was fighting now, and the meter that measured sun-powers ran steadily, swiftly up the scale. But the men were not watching the meter; they were watching the awesome sight of Man stopping a world in its course! Turning a world from its path!

	But the meter climbed suddenly, and the world was suddenly a tremendous blaze of light. The solid rock had struck the giant cup, 110,000 miles in diameter. It was silent, as a world pitted its enormous kinetic energy against the combined forces of a universe. Soundless—and as hopeless. Its strength was nothing, its energy pitted unnoticed against the energy of five hundred thousand million suns—as vain as those futile attempts of the Thessian battleships on the invulnerable walls of the Thought.

	What use is there to attempt description of that scene as 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of rock and metal and matter crashed against a wall of energy, immovable and inconceivable. The planet crumpled, and split wide. A thousand pieces, and suddenly there was a further mistiness about it, and the whole enormous mass, seeming but a toy, as it was from this distance in space, and as it was in this ship, was enclosed in that same, immovable, unalterable wall of energy.

	The ship was as quiet and noiseless, as without indication of strain as when it hummed its way through empty space. But the planet crumpled and twirled, and great seas of energy flashed about it.

	The world, seeming tiny, was dashed helpless against a wall that stopped it, but the wall flared into equal and opposite energy, so that matter was raised not to the twelve thousand Morey had estimated, but nearer twenty-four thousand degrees. It was over in less than half an hour, and a broken, misshapen mass of blue incandescence floated in space. It would fall now, toward the sun, and it would, because it was motionless and the sun moved, take an eccentric orbit about that sun. Eventually, perhaps, it would wipe out the four inferior planets, or perhaps it would be broken as it came within the Roches limit of that sun. But the planet was now a miniature sun, and not so very small, at that.

	And from every planet of the system was pouring an assorted stream of ships, great and small, and they all set panic-stricken across the void in the same direction. They had seen the power of the Thought, and did not contest any longer its right to this system.

-

CHAPTER XXII - Thett

	THROUGH the utter void of intergalactic space sped a tiny shell, a wee mite of a ship. Scarcely twenty feet long, it was one single power plant. The man who sat alone in it, as it tore through the void at the maximum speed that even its tiny mass was capable of, when every last twist possible had been given to the distorted time fields, watched a far, far galaxy ahead that seemed unchanging.

	Hours, days sped by, and he did not move from his position in the ship. But the ship had crossed the great gulf, and was speeding through the galaxy now. He was near the end. At a reckless speed, he sat motionless before the controls, save for slight movements of supple fingers that directed the ship at a mad pace about some gigantic sun and its family of planets. Suns flashed, grew to discs, and were left behind in the briefest instant.

	The ship slowed, the terrific pace it had been holding fell, and dull whine of overworked generators fell to a contented hum. A star was looming, expanding before it. The great sun glowed the characteristic red of a giant as the ship slowed to less than a light-speed, and turned toward a gigantic planet that circled the red sun. The planet was very close to 500,000 miles in diameter, and it revolved at a distance of four and one-half billions of miles from the surface of its sun, which made the distance to the center of the titanic primary four billion, eight hundred million miles, in round figures, for the sun's diameter was close to six hundred and fifty million miles! Greater even than Antares, whose diameter is close to four hundred million miles, was this star of another universe, and even from the billions of miles of distance that its planet revolved, the disc was enormous, a titanic disc of dull red flame. But so low was its surface temperature, that even that enormous disc did not overheat the giant planet.

	The planet's atmosphere stretched out tens of thousands of miles into space, and under the enormous gravitational acceleration of the tremendous mass of that planet, it was near the surface a blanket dense as water. There was no temperature change upon it, though its night was one hundred hours long, and its day the same. The centrifugal force of the rapid rotation of this enormous body had flattened it when still liquid till it seemed now more of the shape of a pumpkin than of an orange. It was really a double planet, for its satellite was a world of one hundred thousand miles diameter, yet smaller in comparison to its giant primary than is Luna in comparison to Earth. It revolved at a distance of five million miles from its primary's center, and it, too, was swarming with its people.

	But the racing ship sped directly toward the great planet, and shrieked its way down through the atmosphere, till its outer shell was radiating far in the violet.

	Straight it flew to where a gigantic city sprawled in heaped, somber masonry, but in some order yet, for on closer inspection the appearance of interlaced circles came over the edge of the giant cities. Ray screens were circular and the city was protected by dozens of stations.

	The scout was going well under the speed of light now, and a message, imperative and commanding, sped ahead of him. Half a dozen patrol boats flashed up, and fell in beside him, and with him raced to a gigantic building that reared its somber head from the center of the city.

	Under a white sky they proceeded to it, and landed on its roof. From the little machine the single man came out. Using the webbed hands and feet that had led the Allied scientists to think them an aquatic race, he swam upward, and through the water-dense atmosphere of the planet toward the door.

	Trees overtopped the building, for it had but four stories, above ground, though it was the tallest in the city. The trees, like seaweed, floated most of their enormous weight in the dense air, but the buildings under the gravitational acceleration, which was more than one hundred times Earth's gravity, could not be built very high ere they crumple under their own weight. Though one of these men weighed approximately two hundred pounds on Earth, for all their short stature, on this planet their weight was more than ten tons! Only the enormously dense atmosphere permitted them to move.

	And such an atmosphere! At a temperature of almost exactly 360 degrees centigrade, there was no liquid water on the planet, naturally. At that temperature water cannot be a liquid, no matter what the pressure, and it was a gas. In their own bodies there was liquid water, but only because they lived on heat, their muscles absorbed their energy for work from the heat of the air. They carried in their own muscles refrigeration, and, with that aid, were able to keep liquid water for their life processes. With death, the water evaporated. Almost the entire atmosphere was made up of oxygen, with but a trace of nitrogen, and some amount of carbon dioxide.

	Here their enormous strength was not needed, as Arcot had supposed, to move their own bodies, but to enable them to perform the ordinary tasks of life. The mere act of lifting a thing weighing perhaps ten pounds on Earth, here required a lifting force of more than half a ton! No wonder enormous strength had been developed! Such things as a man might carry with him, perhaps a ray pistol, would weigh half a ton; his money would weigh near to a hundred pounds!

	But—there were no guns on this world. A man could throw a stone perhaps a short distance, but when a gravitational acceleration of more than half a mile per second acted on it, and it was hurled through an atmosphere dense as water—what chance was there for a long range?

	But these little men of enormous strength did not know other schemes of existence, save in the abstract, and as things of comical peculiarity. To them life on a planet like Earth was as life to a terrestrian on a planetoid such as Ceres, Juno or Eros would have seemed. Even on Thettsost, the satellite planet of Thett, life was strange, and they used lux roofs over their cities, though their weight there was four tons!

	As the scout swam through the dense atmosphere of his world toward the entrance way to the building, guards stopped him, and examined his credentials. Then he was led through long halls, and down a shaft ten stories below the planet's surface, to where a great table occupied a part of a low ceiled, wide room. This room was shielded, interference screens of all known kinds lined the hollow walls, no rays could reach through it to the men within. The guard changed, and new men examined the scout's credentials, and he was led still deeper into the bowels of the planet. Once more the guard changed, and he entered a room guarded not by single shields but by triple, and walled with six foot relux, and ceiled with the same strong material. But here, under the enormous gravity, even its great strength required aid in the form of pillars.

-

	A GIANT of his race sat before a low table. The table ran half the length of the room, and beside it sat four other men. But there were places for more than two dozen.

	"A scout from the colony? What news?" demanded the leader. His voice was a growl, deep and throaty.

	"Oh mighty Sthanto (chief slayer of men), I bring news of resistance. We waited too long, in our explorations, and those men of World 3769-8482730-3 have learned too much. We were wrong. They had found the secret of exceeding the speed of light, and can travel through space fully as rapidly as we can, and now, since by some means we cannot fathom, they have learned to combine both our own system and theirs, they have one enormous engine of destruction that travels across their huge universe in less time than it takes us to travel across a planetary system," said the scout, speaking rapidly.

	"Our cause is lost, which is by far the least of our troubles. Thett is in danger. We cannot hope to combat that ship. It is, in length, approximately three and one-quarter talt, in diameter one-half talt. It is made of a material which seems to be relux. It turns cosmics and light and lower frequencies, as does relux, but more, it does not yield either to the double ray nor to the molecular ray. The twin ray merely causes it to boil away slowly, and that boiling releases its energy slowly, and from examinations of that energy release we learn it is crystallized cosmic rays, a thing we have long known to be capable of formation, but under conditions unattainable."

	"Thalt—what means have we. Can we not better them?" demanded Sthanto of his chief scientist.

	"Great Sthanto, we know that such a substance can be made when pressure can be brought to bear on cosmic rays under the influence of field 24-7649-321, but that field cannot be produced, and could not be produced, only crystallized cosmic rays could exist within it, thus no pressure could be brought to bear upon the rays to crystallize them in the first place. We cannot produce that field because no sufficient concentration of energy is available. Energy cannot be released rapidly enough to replace the losses when the field is developing. The fact that they have that material indicates their possession of an unguessed and terrific energy source. I would have said that there was no energy greater than the energy of matter," replied Thalt smoothly. "But may I add that we know the properties of this material and that the triple ray which has at last been perfected, and can be produced providing your order for all energy sources is given, will release its energy at a speed comparable to the rate of energy release of relux in a twin ray, but that the release takes place only in the path of the ray."

	"What more, Scout?" asked Sthanto smoothly.

	"The ship first appeared in connection with our general attack on world 3769-8482730-3. The attack was near success, their screens were already failing. They have devised a new and very effective screening. They screen the entire world by using the ionized layer as a conductor. It was exceedingly difficult to break, and since their sun had been similarly screened, we could not throw masses of that matter upon them.

	"In another sthan of time, we would have destroyed their world. Then the ship appeared. It has molecular rays, magnetic beams and cosmic rays, and a fourth weapon we know nothing of. It has molecular screens, we suspect, but has not had occasion to use them.

	"Our heaviest molecular screens flash under their molecular rays. Ordinary screens do not even flash as they break. All screens fall instantly without momentary defense. The total thick relux of the forts glows pure white, the opalescence of disintegration proceeds so rapidly. The ray power is incalculable.

	"Their magnetic beams are used in conjunction with cosmics. The action of the two causes the relux to induce current, and due to reaction of currents on the magnetic field—"

	"And the resistance due to the relux, the relux is first heated to incandescence and then the ship opens out as the air pressure bends the magnetically softened relux?" finished Thalt.

	"No, the effect is even more terrific. It explodes into powder," replied the scout.

	"And what happens to worlds that the magnetic ray touches?" inquired the scientist.

	"A corner of it touched the world we fought over, and the world shook," replied the colonist.

	"And the last weapon?" asked Sthanto, his voice soft now.

	"It seems a ghost. It is a mistiness that comes into existence like a cloud, and what it touches is crushed, what it rams is shattered. It surrounds the great ship, and machines crashing into it at a speed of more than six times that of light are completely destroyed, without in the slightest injuring the shield.

	"Then—what caused my departure from the colony—it showed once more its unutterable power. The mistiness formed in the past of our colonial world, number 3769-1-5, and the planet swept against that wall of mistiness, and was shattered, and turned in less than five sthan to a ball of blue-white fire. The wall stopped the planet in its motion. We could not fight that machine, and we left the worlds. The others are coming," finished the scout.

	The ruler turned his slightly smiling face to the commander of his armies, who sat beside him.

	"Give orders," he said softly, almost gently, "that a triple ray station be set up under the directions of Thalt, and further notice that all power be made instantly available to it. Add that the colonists are returning defeated, and bringing danger at their heels. The triple ray will destroy each ship as it enters the system." His hand under the table pushed an invisible protuberance, and from the perfectly conducting relux floor to the equally perfectly conducting ceiling, and between four pillars grouped around the spot where the scout stood, terrific arcs suddenly came into being. They lasted, for the thousandth part of a second, and  when they suddenly died away, as swiftly as they had come, there was not even ash where the scout had been.

	"Have you any suggestions, Thalt?" he asked of the scientist, his voice as soft as before.

	"I quite agree with your conduct so far, but the future conduct you had planned is quite unsatisfactory," replied the scientist. The ruler sat motionless in his great seat, staring fixedly at the scientist. "I think it is time I take your place, therefore." The place where the ruler had been was suddenly seen as through a dark cloud, then the cloud was gone, and with it the king, only his relux chair, and the bits of lux or relux that had been about his garments remained.

	"He was a fool," said the scientist softly, as he rose, "to plan on removing his scientist. Are there any who object to my succession?"

	"No one objects," said Faslar, the ex-king's Prime Minister and counseller.

	"Then I think, Phantal, Commander of planetary forces, that you had best see Ranstud, my assistant, and follow out the plan outlined by my predecessor. And you, Tastal, Commander of Fleets, had best bring your fleets near the planets for protection. Go."

	"May I suggest, mighty Thalt," said Faslar after the others had left, "that my knowledge will be exceedingly useful to you. You have two commanders, neither of whom loves you, and neither of whom is highly capable. The family of Thadstil would be glad to learn who removed that honored gentleman, and the family of Datstir would gladly support him who brought the remover of their head to them.

	"This would remove two unwelcome menaces, and open places for such as Ranstud and your son Warrtil.

	"And," he said hastily as he saw a slight shift in Thalt's eyes, "I might say further that the bereaved ones of Parthel would find great interest in certain of my papers, which are only protected by my personal, constant watchfulness."

	"Ah, so? And what of Kelston Fain, Faslar?" smiled the new Sthanta.

	Thalt's hand relaxed, and they started a conversation and discussion on means of defense.

-

CHAPTER XXIII - Dreams

	ARCOT, carrying out his plan, had followed the escaping colonists as they headed across the universe, following them out, and into intergalactic space, invisible to them now, but watching carefully their line of flight. Their slower ships took hours to get beyond the confines of the Island, then, with all their power on at full, they raced for Thett, far off across the void.

	For several hours more Arcot followed them, lining their flight carefully, without letting them know he was following. Then, assured that he had located their home universe, he let his ship slowly sink into their visible range. Instantly the change was apparent. The great fleet of ships was suddenly wildly changing its order, as battleships fell to the rear, and passenger transports moved up. Then their line of march altered slightly, and they were headed for quite another Island.

	Arcot shot one cone of moleculars at the battleships, and watched half a dozen flash into opalescence; then he disappeared from their sight as he turned on his full time power. Quickly he swung the Thought about, and headed back for our Island. He gave a touch of the space power as well, and minutes later, when he shut it off, he was once more far within the Island.

	In ten minutes he was again following the planets of that base system the Thessians had chosen. One after another he blasted those planets into great balls of molten rock and metal, using enormous cosmic rays, thus altering their orbits very little, though the sheer mass of the cosmic rays was sufficient to drive the planets somewhat toward the sun.

	Arcot did not want to go at once to Thett. He wanted to be sure that all Thett's forces had congregated there. Then he at last would destroy them. One ship, perhaps, would be enough to bring more trouble upon them, though he felt that it would not be of great import, since it was evidently a question of time before that one ship-full would be able to be a menace to Earth once more, and in the years that must intervene—. Earth herself would be too powerful; her commerce already extending to the Universe of Nansal and Sator, to hundreds of colony worlds and allied worlds of this Island, and as expansion became desirable, there were countless other vast Universes that must of necessity be habitable in some parts. Or, if they did not desire to leave this universe, the latest determinations by actual star-drift measurement from space ships had shown that this Island alone, largest of all known, contained five hundred thousand million suns, half again as many as their previous estimates, made from Earth, had shown.

	With Thought type ships, it would be simple now to make planets when wanted, to carve from suns masses of matter of whatever type and whatever size they desired. Cooling would be simple. A giant molecular ray would quickly cool the new-made world, and working on it with the infinite tools of artificial matter and cosmic energy, the world could be placed wherever man wanted it, carved as he saw fit, the atmosphere and temperature he could determine, and the land distribution would not be a thing of chance, but of his determining. The suns—he could pick his suns, and about them place the planets he wanted. No great cataclysm would occur on that sun, when the planets he made were carved from it, for the loss of a thousandth part of its mass, the outermost layers of its mighty bulk would not practically alter it.

	Enthusiastically as he sat in the great ship he thought of that future that lay before man.

	He pictured the tearing of some mighty mass of matter from just such a sun as this one, the formation, the cooling of the planet, the establishment of its orbit. In his mind's eye he seemed to see that very process now, and see before him the great barren world ready for population.

	Then upon it he saw trees springing into green life, cities with their multitudinous flashing buildings rising up, their ships filling the air.

	"Arcot, that is the most wonderful constructive demonstration of the enormous power of this machine I have seen, but may I ask the reason for it?" broke in Morey's voice.

	Arcot started. He suddenly realized that he had neglected to remove the control headset! His dream existed! He started now in wonder as he looked upon the world his idle dream had created! A World as large as Earth, spinning in its orbit, a new created thing, green with life, and flashing with cities—of artificial matter. They faded now as he looked, the thought that they were not there suddenly entering his mind, but the great world remained, barren rock and rolling waters!

	"Good Lord, Morey!" exclaimed Arcot, not neglecting to remove the headset now, "I was merely thinking of the things man could do in the future—and the dream came true. I thought of the making of that world—and it was made. I thought of its peopling, and it was peopled!" Arcot shuddered a little now as he realized the awful power that lay in the mere dream of him who sat before the controls of the Thought.

	"Arcot," said Morey gravely, "it is true, for your dream has come true, as it necessarily must when you dream with that power under your control." He smiled now, a little thin smile, and added, "But don't dream that I have ceased to exist, please.

	"It is a magnificent future man has—can we but destroy the men who have so besieged our worlds, Some of your thoughts were clear enough for me to catch, but many were insufficiently powerful for me to catch. Only the sensitive apparatus of the ship caught them, and put them into effect. Your slightest wish is now law, a mighty natural law that all the Universe upholds with its combined might. You must be careful in those wishes.

	"That was a dream, a constructive dream, as are all dreams of the true scientist, and now, and forever more, man's dreams will be realized in full, for he can make them come true by the mere act of dreaming. Most of mankind dream of things that are great and good for the race."

-

	TO their amazement, Wade suddenly burst out laughing uproariously. "Whoa—that reminds me of an old poem, written by an Englishman of about the beginning of the scientific era—about 1900. His name was Kipling, and he was writing about the monkeys. He said that their ideas were of the order of

-
 'Something great, and noble and new. 
Done, by merely wishing it true.' 
-

	In honor of that bit of verse I think we should by all means change the name of this ship at once to the Banderlog, the name of that poem. Our first intergalactic ship was named after a poem, what more appropriate than that for this ship?" laughed Wade. "But," he added more seriously, "it is the dream of the 'Banderlog,' something great and noble and new, done by merely wishing it true. And that accomplishment in itself is indeed something great and noble and new."

	They had spoken in English, and the words had more or less replaced the thought-pictures, with the result that the Ortolians and the Talsonian had been unable to follow them, but Torlos, who spoke English quite well, and understood perfectly, had followed them, and now he spoke.

	"There is humor in what Wade says, in speaking of your old poet, and there is greatness in what Arcot has done in making that world. It was indeed a 'constructive dream.'

	"But before man can dream further of constructive good, he must first dream of destructive good; we have enemies who must be destroyed. They have captured several of my men, Arcot, and if I know their minds at all, they will certainly wish to avenge themselves on my world as well, and we have no great Thought to defend us. Nor have the dozens of other inhabited globes of these systems. Let us first destroy our enemies, and relieve these worlds."

	"We are doing so, Torlos," said Arcot. "We will destroy them, but now we are doing our best to relieve those other worlds. We must give the Invaders time to return in their slower ships to their own planet. Then we can attack, and destroy all at once.

	"But now I think it would be wise for me to practice what I have not yet had an opportunity to use—the full possibilities of mental control." Arcot meant by this the mental impression view of the entire field, vision in all directions simultaneously and simultaneous knowledge of all operations of the ship. It was a thing he must indeed become accustomed to, for such a thing was completely foreign to human experience.

	So for days they circled through the universe, Arcot or Morey or Wade taking control, with full mental impression-viewing. The sensation was utterly indescribable, as their minds were simultaneously and equally completely cognizant of the entire space about them. Human eyes cannot take in a field of view of more than a very few degrees. Of that, but a very small part is seen in detail. It is a common experience that it is impossible to look at both eyes of a person simultaneously.

	It is not due to any inability on the part of the brain, but due to the eyes. No man in all history ever used even half of the thinking part of his brain. The feeling and sensation section of the brain is very incompletely used, and the great mass of the brain which is designed for thinking is never so much as half used. But a small fraction of one hemisphere is used. With the apparatus Arcot was now using, these men received images of all space with the same clarity of detail, with which the eyes received one small portion of space. They, too, understood everything within it with equal ease, the images were perceived and comprehended by the brain with the same ease as the brain comprehends the images produced by the eyes. The great need of practice was in learning automatically the position of any object. We know in what direction our eyes are focused, but when the entire field of space is pictured, it is difficult to determine where an object pictured lies. With relation to other objects, yes. With relation to the viewer—no.

	Further, they discovered an enormous obstacle in that the eye never gives us a true picture of a thing, and the brain has learned through experience to make the necessary corrections. As an optical instrument, the eye is exceedingly poor. The wonderfully efficient brain has, however, learned to make the necessary corrections. To get some picture of the eye's inaccuracies, remember that the eyeball is round. A lens throws an image on the rounded screen of the retina. Look at the reflection of a window as seen in a globe, a gold-fish bowl is perhaps the most familiar object of that nature. What shape do the straight lines of the window's edges take? Then imagine the shape the eye actually shows for that same window, or the door.

	We think it perfectly natural that we can walk straight to the door, and through it without touching the wall. But imagine again the shape in which the eye pictures that door! Is it any wonder a baby, learning to make those corrections we find so automatic, has difficulty in steering a course through a room that its eyes are portraying as some futuristic artist might portray it, save that all lines, invariably, are curves? 

	Now Arcot and his friends, whose brains had always been forced to correct vision-images, tended to correct the images now received, though these were correct images. In time a different sight-center developed in their brains, that did not tend to correct, but for a while the men were afflicted with terrific headaches, and were continually stumbling into things when not using the apparatus as their brains neglected to correct for eye-distortion.

	But in the end their brains had developed the two abilities, and the full vision and full comprehension of everything that happened around the ship and within it was theirs. Then Arcot announced he was ready to go.

	They had been almost two weeks learning this, and now, just before starting off for their attack on Thett, they stopped once more on Earth to gather food supplies. There was now no necessity for gathering energy supplies. Anywhere they would find those, anywhere save in the cosmic ray regions. Through such regions they did not intend to go, but there they could, if necessity demanded, use the stored energy in their huge coils, the equivalent of more than two thousand tons of lead.

	But foods they did need. Water, oxygen or any elemental need they could take care of by transmutation of any electricity base matter they found.

	Their stay was brief, and already Earth and its allies were falling back into the ways of peace and commerce. The passenger and freight traffic to Venus were almost up to normal, and already companies had been organized to trade with Ortol, Sirius and Talso. Exploration ships were starting out to those other planetary systems, which had been marked on the Thessian charts.

	And somewhere out in the void a lone ship was racing across the infinite void back to Ortol, far faster than light, but slow for such a trip. It would be nearly two and a half months before they would know that their world had been protected by that distant race whose aid they had sought when they came to Earth, That captured Thessian ship of Ortol had not yet reached home, nor would it for long land there.

	But soon Arcot's supplies were filled, and they were ready to travel to that distant Universe they had determined to be the home of Thett's forces. It was far more distant than Thansal, as the Island of Space which contained Nansal, Torlos' home, had been named, for it was nearly one hundred and fifty million light years across the void!

-

CHAPTER XXIV - Venone

	UP from Earth, out of its clear blue sky, and into the glare and dark of space and near a sun the ship soared. They had been holding it motionless over New York, and now as it rose, hundreds of tiny craft, and a few large excursion ships followed it until it was out of Earth's atmosphere. Then—it was gone. Gone across space, racing toward that far Universe at a speed no other thing could equal. In minutes the great disc of the Universe had taken form behind them, as they took their route photographs to find their way back to Earth after the battle, if still they could come.

	Then into the stillness of the Intergalactic spaces.

	"This will be our first opportunity to test the full speed of this ship. We have never tried its velocity, and we should measure it now. Take a sight on the diameter of the Island, as seen from here, Morey. Then we will travel ten seconds, and look again."

	Half a million miles from the center of the Island now, the great disc spread out over the vast space behind them, apparently the size of a dinner plate at about 30 inches distance, it was more than two hundred and fifty thousand light years across. Checking carefully, Morey read their distance as just shy of five hundred thousand light years.

	"Hold on—here we go," called Arcot. Space was suddenly black, and beside them ran the twin ghost ships that follow always when space is closed to the smallest compass, for light leaving, goes around a space whose radius is measured in miles, instead of light centuries and returns. There was no sound, no slightest vibration, only Torlos' iron bones felt a slight shock as the inconceivable currents flowed into the gigantic space distortion coil from the storage fields, their shielded magnetic flux leaking by in some slight degree.

	For ten seconds that seemed minutes Arcot held the ship on the course under the maximum combined powers of space distortion and time field distortion. Then he released both simultaneously.

	The velvet black of space was about them as before, but now the disc of the Nebula was tiny behind them!, So tiny was it, that these men. who knew its magnitude, gasped in sudden wonder. None of them had been able to conceive of such a velocity as this ship had shown! In ten seconds, Morey announced a moment later, they had traveled one million, one hundred thousand light years! Their velocity was six hundred and sixty quadrillion miles per second!

	"Then it will take us only a little over one thousand seconds to travel the hundred and fifty million light years, at 110,000 light years per second—that's about the radius of our galaxy isn't it!" exclaimed Wade.

	"And your Galaxy, Earth man, is the largest there is," pointed out Torlos.

	They started on now, and one thousand and ten seconds, or a little more than eighteen minutes later, they stopped again. So far behind them now as to be almost lost in the far scattered universes, lay their own Island, and carefully they photographed and marked it. Then they photographed the Universe that now lay less than twenty million light years ahead. Still, it was further, even after crossing this enormous gulf, than are many of those nebulae we see from Earth, many of which lie within that distance. They must proceed cautiously now, for they did not know the exact distance to the Nebula. Carefully, running forward in jumps of five million light years, forty-five second drives, they worked nearer.

	Then finally they entered the Island, and drove toward the denser center.

	"Good Lord, Arcot, look at those suns!" exclaimed Morey in amazement. For the first time they were seeing the suns of this system at a range that permitted observation, and Arcot had stopped to observe. The first one they had chosen had been a blue-white giant of enormous mass, nearly one hundred and fifty times as heavy as our own sun, and all the enormous surface was radiating power into space at a rate of nearly thirty thousand horsepower per square inch! No planets circled it, however, in its journey through space.

	"I've been noticing the number of red giants here. Look around. They are literally thick around us. Every one of these stars seems to be a giant. I can understand it though. Remember, our Island is the largest there is. When it condensed from the primeval chaotic gas that filled all space, its mass was greatest, and hence it contracted upon itself far more than the others and its density became greater. It is not enormously larger in bulk than many other Islands, but it is tremendously greater in mass. Its density is higher. Remember, gravitational instability does not begin to act until density, temperature of the gas, and mass of the condensation are such that the outermost layers of the condensation can be bound by the gravitational attraction of the whole. And, the bigger it is, the faster it grows once it gets started. Remember, our Island is rather further than the other islands from their nearest neighbors. The average distance to neighbor Islands is greater. If they came too near during that time when each was a single enormous mass of gas, ours, with its inconceivable gravitational pull, would tear them to pieces, by Roche's law, and probably gobble them up.

	"But when suns formed in our dense, heavy galactic mass, the density of the gas permitted small masses to remain stable, to form, in other words. The masses were, of course, suns, and the suns of our system are generally of a size a bit smaller than our own star.

	"But in this system, which, as we observe, is an unusually small galaxy, indeed of a size barely above the lower limit possible for a galaxy (for no galaxy can be less than about five hundred million sun-masses) the density of the gas as it fell together under its own gravitational attraction, must have been far less than in ours. The result was the formation of suns not of masses of the order of our sun, but of an order far higher.

	"Now we have large suns here, and would expect large planets. If we find the run of sun-masses such as two hundred and even four hundred times our sun's mass, I shall not be surprised, and a sun four hundred times ours would easily throw off a planet four hundred times as massive as Jupiter! No wonder those fellows liked heavy worlds!"

-

	WHAT Arcot had said was correct, but he forgot a second fact, that when such enormous suns did pass to make planets, the inconceivably great pulls on them due to tidal action, far greater than our type of sun would produce, would tend to tear off masses for longer periods, as their passing would be slower, their gravitational arms longer, and might strip the entire photosphere from a sun. This tended to make few, but proportionately larger planets.

	Thett, for example, was one of four planets which revolved around the sun Antseck. Their combined mass was nearly one one-hundredth that of their primary. The entire photosphere of Antseck had been swept off in their making, and gathered in these four great masses with their satellites.

	But soon the Thought moved on, on to other suns. They must find one that was inhabited.

	They stopped at last near a great orange giant, and examined it. It had indeed planets, and as Arcot watched, he saw in the Telectroscope a line of gigantic freighters rise from the world, and whisk off to nothingness as they exceeded the speed of light! Instantly he started the Thought searching in time fields for the freighters. Soon he found them, and followed them as they raced across the void. He knew he was visible to them, and as he suspected, they soon stopped, slowing down and signaling to him.

	"Morey—take the Thought. I'm going to visit them in the Banderlog as I think we shall name the tender," called Arcot, stripping off the headset, and leaving the control seat. The other fleet of ships was now less than a hundred thousand miles away, clearly visible in the telectroscope. They were still signaling, and Arcot had set an automatic signaling device flashing an enormously powerful searchlight toward them in a succession of dots and dashes, an obvious signal, though also, obviously unintelligible to those others.

	"Is it safe, Arcot?" asked Torlos anxiously. To approach those enormous ships in the relatively tiny Banderlog, seemed unwise.

	"Far safer than they'll believe. Remember, only the Thought could stand up against such weapons as even the Banderlog carries, run as they are by cosmic energy," replied Arcot, diving down toward the little tender.

	In a moment it was out through the lock, and sped away from them like a bullet, reaching the distant stranger fleet in less than ten seconds.

	"They are communicating by thought!" announced Zezdon Afthen presently. "But I cannot understand them, for the impulses are too weak to be intelligently received."

	For nearly an hour the Banderlog hung beside the fleet, then it turned about, and raced once more to the Thought. Inside the lock, and a moment later Arcot appeared again on the threshold of the door. He looked immensely relieved.

	"Well, I have some good news," he said and smiled, sitting down. "Follow that bunch, Morey, and I'll tell you about it. Set it and she'll hold nicely. We have a long way to go, and those are slow freighters, accompanied by one Cruiser.

	"Those men," he began, "are men of Venone. You remember Thett's records said something of the Mighty Warless Ones of Venone? Those are they. They inhabit most of this universe, leaving the Thessians but four planets of a minor sun, way off in one corner. It seems the Thessians are their undesirable exiles, those who have, from generation to generation, been either forced to go there, or who wanted to go there.

	"They did not like the easier and more effective method of disposing of undesirables, the instantaneous death chamber they now use. Thett was their prison world. No one ever returned, and his family could go with him if they desired, but if they did not, they were carefully watched for outcroppings of undesirable traits—murder, crime of any sort, any habitual tendency to injustice.

	"About six hundred years ago of our time, Thett revolted. There were scientists there, and their scientists had discovered a thing that they had been seeking for generations—the Twin-ray. I don't know what it is, and the Venonians don't either. It is the ray that destroys relux and lux, however, and can be carried only on a machine the size of their forts, due to some limitation. Just what those limitations are the Venonians don't know. Other than that ray they had no new weapons.

	"But it was enough. Their guard ships which had circled the worlds of the prison system, Antseck, were suddenly destroyed, so suddenly that Venone received no word of it till a consignment ship, bringing prisoners, discovered their absence. The consignment ship returned without landing. Thett was now independent. But they were bound to their system, for although they had the molecular ships, they had never been permitted to have time apparatus, nor to see it, nor was any one who knew its principles ever consigned there. The result was that they were as isolated as ever.

	"This was for two centuries. Two centuries later it was worked out by one of their scientists, and the Warless Ones had a War of defense. Their small fleet of cruisers, designed for rescue work and for clearing space lanes of wrecks and asteroids, was destroyed instantly, their world was protected only by the ray screen, which the Thessians did not have, and by the fact that they could build more cruisers. In less than a year Thett was defeated, and beaten back to her world, though Venone could not overcome Thett, now, for around their planets they had so many forts projecting the deadly rays, that no ship could approach.

	"Then Thett learned how to make the screen, and came again. Venone had planetoid stations, that projected molecular rays of an intensity I wonder at, with their system of projecting. It seems these people have force-power feeds that operate through space, by which an entire solar system can tie in for power, and they fed these stations in that way. Lord only knows what tubes they had, but the Thessians couldn't get the power to fight.

	"They've been let alone since then, they did not know why. I told them what their dear friends had been doing in that time, and the Venonians were immensely surprised, and very evidently sorry. They begged my pardon for letting loose such a menace, quite sincerely feeling that it was their fault. They offered any help they could give, and I told them that a chart of this system would be of the greatest use. They are going now to Venone, and we are to go with them, and see what they have to offer. Also, they want a demonstration of this 'remarkable ship that can defeat whole fleets of Thessians, and destroy or make planets at will'," concluded Arcot.

	"I do not in the least blame them for wanting to see this ship in operation, Arcot, but they are, very evidently, a much older race than yours," said Torlos, his thoughts coming clear and sharp, as those of a man who has thought over what he says carefully. "Are you not running danger that their minds may be more powerful than yours, that this story they have told you is but a ruse to get this ship on their world where thousands, millions can concentrate their will against you and capture the ship by mind where they cannot capture it by force?"

	"That," agreed Arcot, "is where 'the rub' comes in as an ancient poet of Earth put it. I don't know, and I did not have a chance to see. Wherefore I am about to do some work. Let me have the controls, Morey, will you?"

	Arcot took the ship, and locked the drive for the present speed and position in relation to the Venonian freighters, and proceeded to work.

	The ship was traveling solely on the time device, and so the energy of space was available, as it was not when using the space drive, since then only their own energy could be tapped, and then only if a fluctuation could be caused. But now Arcot had the energy of more than a million giant suns, each radiating far faster than four hundred suns such as ours would do, for a giant sun generates at a far higher rate per ton than a main-sequence sun. Doubling the mass does not double the energy generation rate of a sun, but increases it far more than twice. Sirius, only two and a half times as massive as Sol, generates twenty-six times as much energy. Here, despite the smaller Universe, supplying his power-generation stations, Arcot had fully as great an energy supply as in his own giant Island.

-

	SO now he made a new ship. It was made entirely, perforce, of cosmium, lux and relux, for those were the only forms of matter he could create in space permanently from energy. It was equipped with gravity drive, and time distortion speed apparatus, and his far better trained mind finished this smaller ship with his titanic tools in less than the two days that it took them to reach Venone. In the meantime, the Venonian cruiser had drawn close, and watched in amazement as the ship was fashioned from the energy of space, became a thing of glistening matter, materializing from the absolute void of space, and forming under titanic tools such as the commander could not visualize.

	Now this move was partly the reason for this construction, for while the Venonian was busy, absorbed in watching the miraculous construction, his mind was not shielded, and it was open for observation of two such wonderfully trained minds as those of Zezdon Afthen and Zezdon Inthel. With their instruments, and wonderfully developed mind-science, aided at times by Morey's less skillful, but more powerful mind of his. older race, and powerful too, both because of Ion? concentration and training, and because of his individual inheritance, they examined the minds of many of the officers of the ship without their awareness.

	As a final test Arcot, having finished the ship, suggested that the Venonian officer and one of the men of his ship have a trial of mental powers.

	Zezdon Afthen tried first, and between the two ships, racing along side by side at a speed unthinkable, the two men struggled with those forces of will, the full secrets of which none yet has learned, more than those men of the twentieth century learned the full truth of electricity, with which they did their amazingly great works considering their almost primitive tools. How could those mental forces cross that void through walls of cosmium and relux, and remain unchanged? How could they travel faster than light, as they must, to reach their destination? 

	We do not know, nor did they who used them then know. Though Zezdon Afthen struggled, his mind was not equal to that of the Venonian, and quickly he was in the passive state. Each was gazing at the image of the other as seen in the vision screens, and the Venonian saw that he had succeeded, and released the Ortolian.

	Quickly Zezdon Afthen told Arcot what he had learned.

	These men were old, and their minds strong, but they, like Terrestrians, had never trained the forces of will to work for them, but had relied on the forces of Nature. They could not, as could Ortolians, concentrate the combined will of many with effect. But Zezdon Afthen had been unable to overcome his opponent, and hence had not learned the full truths he had hoped for.

	Arcot had put the machine on manual control during this trial, as the mental forces interfered with its control, and now he turned all over to Morey.

	"This seems a tremendous amount of effort to take over this one point," he said and smiled, "but it is an enormously important point, for we can be sure that the results we find for Venonians will also be true for Thessians in a large degree. If not, one people or the other would have ended this conflict long ago."

	And he tried it! Sitting in the chair before the visiplate, he looked at the image of the short, powerful man in the other ship, and threw all the power of his mind into the effort. But, like some solid wall, he could feel the mental force of the iron-boned Venonian. The eyes before him on the screen seemed enlarging, growing to fill all his sight.

	With an effort he forced back that feeling the Venonian had caused, and concentrating his force on the one idea of blackness, he brought into use those countless billions of newly developed cells that his machine had stimulated in teaching him to see in all directions at once.

	Eyes seemed to intrude on that black, starry vault he pictured, as the Venonian attempted to force back the picture that their rapport was causing in his mind as well as in Arcot's. But gradually the light and images on the smooth blackness faded, and then the greyness faded, and the vault was black all about. But it faded to black last directly before him, and Arcot realized that in that section alone had the Venonian's brain been able to meet and resist the foreign sight-impression.

	One impression Arcot had succeeded in forcing upon his opponent, an impression of black, starry sky. Now he wiped out the stars, and sheer blackness of inter-galactic space alone appeared. And again, the stars directly ahead lasted longest, faded last.

	Next all about was blankness—and Arcot forced upon the Venonian's brain the conviction that it was sleeping, and the blankness was the blankness of unconsciousness.

	Slowly the almost physical force that had been fighting him faded, and Arcot realized that his opponent was "convinced," defeated.

	Arcot let the impressions he had so forced upon his own brain relax now, and before him, on the view screen, he saw the face of the Venonian, and the eyes were closed. He glanced about the room, a tired smile on his face—then stared. The Nansalian was sleeping too, the sleep of the Venonian! No wonder there had been such a multiplicity of eyes—Torlos, by some mischance, had been caught in his rapport as well as the Venonian, and had, necessarily, fought with him!

	While the Venonian slept now, Zezdon Afthen and Inthel worked rapidly, and soon declared that a trip to Venone would be safe, that all Arcot had learned was indeed true.

	The easiest way now to wake the two, was to wake Torlos, and in a moment it was done. Torlos stared uncomprehendingly a moment, then grinned sheepishly, and waved to Arcot.

	"I am sorry—I was too interested, and made the mistake of following your thoughts too long. Then when I struggled to free my mind, I was caught in such forces as I had not dreamed of. I think it was the awakening of the Venonian that brought me back!"

	"Terrestrian," came suddenly the thought from the Venonian ship, "that is not the first time I have tried that pastime in my monotonous vigils in space, and always have we forced upon our opponent the vision of some object of common, daily experience. But you overcame me by imagination, by picturing a thing I have never before pictured—the heavens as seen in all directions simultaneously! And I know, too, that you fought not one, but two! You say your race is young. If a young race can develop such brains as yours, it is best we of Venone cement our friendship now!"

	Though Arcot realized that he did not deserve the full of this praise, in that it had not been imagination, but actual experience that had permitted him to visualize the heavens, as seen simultaneously in all directions as no living creature could see them, he stored away in his mind for future use the fact that such an impression, such a vision was one that no living creature who had not thus seen them could capably fight, for while he fought with mental experience, the opponent would have to use imagination.

	The sun of Venone was close, now, and Arcot prepared to use as he intended the little space machine he had made. Morey took it, and went away from the Thought flying on its time field. The ship had been stocked with lead fuel for its matter-burning generators from the supply that had been brought on the Thought for emergencies, and the air had come from the Thought's great tanks. Morey was going to Venone ahead of the Thought to scout—"to see if they could safely approach so huge a planet," as Arcot explained.

-

	HOURS later Morey returned with a favorable report. He had seen many of the important men of Venone, and conversed with them mentally from the safety of his ship, where the specially installed gravity apparatus had protected him and the ship against the enormous gravity of this gigantic world. He did not describe Venone; he wanted them to see it as he had first seen it.

	So the little ship, which had served its purpose now, was destroyed, nearly a light year from Venone, and left a crushed wreck when two plates of artificial matter had closed upon it, destroying the apparatus, lest some unwelcome finder use it. There was little about it, the gravity apparatus alone perhaps, that might have been of use to Thett, and Thett already had the ray—so why take needless risk?

	Then once more they were racing toward Venone. Soon the giant star of which it was a planet loomed enormous. Then, at Morey's direction, they swung, and before them loomed a planet. Large as Thett, near a half million miles in diameter, its mass was very closely equal to that of our sun. Yet it was but the burnt-out sweepings of the outermost photospheric layers of this giant sun, and the radioactive atoms that make a sun active were not here, it was a cold planet. But its density was far, far higher than that of our sun, for our sun is but slightly denser than ordinary sea water. This world was dense as copper, for with the deeper sweepings of the tidal strains that had formed it, more of the heavier atoms had gone into its making, and its core was denser than that of Earth; nearly eleven was its density.

	About it swept two gigantic satellite worlds, each larger than Jupiter, but satellites of a satellite here! And Venone itself was inhabited by countless millions, yet their low, green-tile and metal cities were invisible in the aspect of rolling lands with tiny hillocks, dwarfed by gigantic bulbous trees that floated their enormous weight in the water-dense atmosphere.

	Here, too, there were no seas, for the temperature was above the critical temperature of water, and only in the self-cooling bodies of these men and in the trees which similarly cooled themselves, could there be liquid.

	The sun of this world was another of the giant red stars, close to three hundred and fifty times the mass of our sun. It was circled by but three giant planets. Its enormous disc was almost invisible from the surface of the world as the Thought sank slowly through fifteen thousand miles of air, due to the screening effect on light passing through so much air. Earth could have rested on this planet and not extended beyond its atmosphere! Had Earth been situated at this planet's center, the Moon could have revolved about it, and would not have been beyond the planet's surface!

	In silent wonder the terrestrians watched the titanic world as they sank, and their friends looked on amazed, comprehending even less of the significance of what they saw. Already within the titanic gravitational field, they could see that indescribable effects were being produced on them, and on the ship. Arcot alone could know the enormous gravitation, and his accelerometer told him now that he was subject to a gravitational acceleration of three thousand four hundred and eighty-seven feet per second per second, or almost exactly one hundred and nine times Earth's pull.

	"The Thought weighs one billion, two hundred and six million, five hundred thousand tons, with tender, on Earth. Here it weighs approximately one hundred and twenty-one billion tons," said Arcot softly.

	"Can you set it down? It may crush under this load if the gravity drive isn't supporting it?" asked Torlos anxiously.

	"Eight inches cosmium, and everything else supported by cosmium. I made this thing to stand any conceivable strain. Watch—if the planet's surface will take the load," replied Arcot.

	They were still sinking, and now a number of small, marvelously streamlined ships were clustered around the slowly settling giant. In a few moments more people, hundreds, thousands of men were flying through the air up to the ship.

	"There are your 'aquatic' people, Arcot," said Morey.

	"I can see them a lot better with this than you can with your eyes," replied Arcot, smiling, "but I notice something else. Their skins, those of the Thessians, I mean, were reddish, you remember, and they possessed an utterly amazing lack of digestive organs, and peculiar organs they had. Remember what tiny organs they had? Now look at the amount of clothing these people wear, male and female both. Practically nothing. Aside from the fact that clothes weigh something here, mine weigh half a ton or so probably, there is reason in that. See it?"

	"Lord—they can't be photo-synthetic animals!" exclaimed Morey, staring now at the people. Though he had been here for a short period before, Arcot had divined something he had not imagined. These men were photo-synthetic, or plant-like people. In a world bathed by the radiation of an enormous star, using the energy of heat for muscular power, they needed an exceedingly small amount of energy in chemical form to replace nervous energy, and to replace the body parts. Torlos, a man using the heat energy of the air, as did these people, ate very little at long intervals. These people need eat even less, for what they might eat was used only for building body materials, for the actual building bricks. Even so, like the plant, they obtained most of their materials from the air in the form of carbon dioxide and oxygen and water vapor. Their chemical action was even more perfectly balanced than that of the plant, for they could live indefinitely in a perfectly airtight vessel, needing neither external carbon dioxide supply nor external oxygen supply, though the plant consumes more carbon dioxide than it gives off.

	Since their sun radiated in the red region principally, green would be the color of an object most absorptive to red light, and least absorptive to others, as were their plants, for the plants used the plentiful red light. But the men used high-energy quanta of the blue-green, and so had the complementary color in their skins. Though not as plentiful as the red, still its higher energy made it more available, and more desirable for them.

	A cruiser had appeared, and was very evidently intent on leading them somewhere, and Arcot followed it as it streaked through the dense air. "No wonder they stream-line," he muttered as he saw the enormous force it took to drive the gigantic ship through this air. The air pressure outside their ship now was so great, that the sheer crushing effect of the air pressure alone was enormous. The pressure was well over nine tons to the square inch, on all the surface of that enormous ship!

-

	THEY landed approximately fifty miles from a large city which was the capital. The land seemed absolutely level, and the horizon faded off in distance in an atmosphere absolutely clear. There was no dust in the air at their height of nearly three hundred feet, for dust was too heavy on this world. There were no clouds, no haze could be, for there was water only perfect, and perfectly transparent. The mountains of this enormous world were not large, could not be large, for their sheer weight would tear them down, but what mountains there were jagged, tortured rock, exceedingly sharp in outline.

	"No rain—no temperature change to break them down," said Wade looking at them. "The zone of fracture can't be deep here."

	"What, Wade, is the zone of fracture?" asked Torlos.

	"Rock has weight. Any substance, no matter how brittle, will flow if sufficient pressure is brought to bear from all sides. A thing which can flow will not break or fracture. You can't imagine breaking water, water, not ice. Imagine the pressure to which the rock three hundred feet down is subject to. There is the enormous mass of atmosphere, the tremendous mass of rock above, and all forced down by this gravitation. By the time you get down half a mile, the rock is under such an inconceivably great pressure that it will flow like mud. The rock there cannot break; it merely flows under pressure. That is the zone of flowage. Above, the rock can break, instead of flowing. That is the zone of fracture. On Earth the zone of fracture is ten miles deep. Here it must be of the order of only five hundred feet! And the planetary blocks that make a planet's surface float on the zone of flowage, they determine the zone of fracture."

	The gigantic ship had been sinking, and now, suddenly, it gave a very unexpected demonstration of Wade's words. It had landed, and Arcot shut off the power. There was a roaring, and the giant ship trembled, rocked, and rolled along a bit. Instantly Arcot drove it into the air.

	"Whoa—can't do it. The ship will stand it, and won't bend under the load—but the planet won't. We caused a Venone-quake. One of those planetary blocks Wade was talking about slipped under the added strain."

	Quickly Wade explained that all the planetary blocks were floating, truly floating, and in equilibrium just as a boat must be. The added load had been sufficiently great, so that, with an already extant overload on this particular planetary block, this "boat" had sunk a bit further into the flowage zone, till it was once more at rest and balanced. Some overloading may take place, till a force great enough to overcome the friction between the planetary blocks arises. Then the slippage is sharp, and not smooth, and we have quakes.

	"They wish us to come out that they may see us, strangers and friends from another Island," interrupted Zezdon Afthen.

	"Tell them they'd have to scrape us up off the ground, if we attempted it. We come from a world where we weigh about as much as a pebble here," said Wade, grinning at the thought of terrestrians trying to walk on this world.

	"Don't—tell them we'll be right out," said Arcot sharply. "All of us."

	Morey and the others all stared at Arcot in amazement. It was utterly impossible!

	But Zezdon Afthen did as Arcot had asked. Almost immediately, another Morey stepped out of the airlock, wearing what was obviously a pressure suit. Behind him came another Wade, Torlos, Stel Felso Theu, and indeed all the members of their party save Arcot himself! The Galactians stared in wonder—then comprehended and laughed together. Arcot had sent out artificial matter images of them all!

	Their images stepped out, and the Venonian crowd which had collected, stared in wonder at the giants, looming twice their height above them.

	"You see not us, but images of us. We cannot withstand your gravity nor your air pressure, save in the protection of our ship. But these images are true images of us."

	For some time then they communicated, and finally Arcot agreed to give a demonstration of their power. At the suggestion of the cruiser commander who had seen the construction of a space ship from the emptiness of space, Arcot rapidly constructed a small, very simple, molecular drive machine of pure cosmium, making it entirely from energy. It required but minutes, and the Venonians stared in wonder as Arcot's unbelievable tools created the machine before their eyes. The completed ship Arcot gave to an official of the city who had appeared. The Venonian looked at the thing skeptically, and half expecting it to vanish like the tools that made it, gingerly entered the port. Powered as it was by lead burning cosmic ray generators, the lead alone having been made by transmutation of natural matter, it was powerful, and speedy. The official entered it, and finding it still existing, tried it out. Much to his amazement it flew, and operated perfectly.

	Nearly ten hours Arcot and his friends stayed at Venone, and before they left, the Venonians, for all their vast differences of structure, had proven themselves true, kindly honest men, and a race that our Alliance has since found every reason to respect and honor. Our commerce with them, though carried on under difficulties, is none the less a bond of genuine friendship.

-

CHAPTER XXV - Thett Prepares

	STREAKING through the void toward Thett was again a tiny scout ship. It carried but a single man, and with all the power of the machine he was darting toward distant Thett, at a speed insanely reckless, but he knew that he must maintain such a speed if his mission were to be successful.

	Again a tiny ship entered Thett's far-flung atmosphere, and slowed to less than a light speed, and sent its signal call ahead. In moments the patrol ship, less than three hundred miles away, had reached it, and together they streaked through the dense air in a screaming dive toward Shatnsoma, the capital city. It was directly beneath, and it was not long before they had reached the great palace grounds, and settled on the upper roof. Then the scout leaped out of his tiny craft, and dove for the door. Flashing his credentials, he dove down, and into the first shielded room. Here precious seconds were wasted while a check was made of the credentials the man carried, then he was sent through to the Council Room. And he, too, stood on that exact spot where the other scout, but a few weeks before, had stood—and vanished. Waiting, it seemed, were four councilors and the new Sthanto, Thalt. 

	"What news, Scout?" asked the Sthanto. 

	"They have arrived in the Universe of Venone, and gone to the planet Venone. They were on the planet when I left. None of our scouts was able to approach the place, as there were innumerable Venonian watchers who would have recognized our deeper skin-color, and destroyed us. Two scouts were rayed, though the Galactians did not see this. Finally we captured two Venonians who had seen it, and attempted to force the information we needed from them. A young man and his chosen mate.

	"The man would tell nothing, and we were hurried. So we turned to the girl. These accursed Venonians are courageous for all their pacifism. We were hurried, and yet it was long before we forced her to tell what we needed to know so vitally. She had been one of the notetakers for the Venonian government. We got most of their conversation, but she died of shortest-ray (cosmics) burns before she finished. We had been forced to use them too much.

	"The Galactians know nothing of the twin-ray beyond its action, and that it is an electro-magnetic phenomenon, though they have been able to distort it by using a sheet of pure energy, a space strain acting on it naturally, as you, Oh Sthanto, wise one of science, can understand. But their walls are impregnable to it, and their power is so enormous that they have claimed that their strange power of creating matter from the pure energy of space, as we saw from a distance, would enable them to easily defeat it, were it not that the twin-ray passes through matter without harming it. Any ray which will destroy matter of the natural electrical types, will be stopped.

	"The girl was damnably clever, for she gave us only the things we already knew, and but few new facts; knowing that she would inevitably die soon, she talked—but it was empty talk. The one thing of import we have learned is that they burn no fuel, use no fuel of any sort, but in some inconceivable manner get their energy from the radiations of the suns of space. This could not be great—but we know she told the truth, and we know their power is great. She told the truth, for we could determine when she lied, by mental action, of course.

	"But more we could not learn. The man died without telling anything, merely cursing. He knew nothing anyway, as we already had determined," concluded the scout.

	Silently the Sthanto sat in thought for some moments. Then he raised his head, and looked at the scout once more.

	"You have done well. You secured some information of import, which was more than we had dared hope for. But you managed things poorly. The woman should not have died so soon. We can only guess.

	"The radiations of the suns of space—hmmm—." Sthanto Thalt's brow wrinkled in thought. "The radiation of the suns of space. Were his power derived from the sun near which he is operating, he would not have said suns. It was more than one?"

	"It was, oh Sthanto," replied the scout positively.

	"His power is unreasonable. I doubt that he gave the true explanation. It may well have been that he did not trust the Venonians. I would not, for all their warless ways. But surely the suns of space give very little power at any given point picked at random. Else space would not be cold.

	"But go, Scout, and you will be assigned a position in the fleet. The Colonial fleet, the remains of it, have arrived, and the colonists been removed. They failed. We will use their ships. You will be assigned. " The scout left, and was indeed assigned to a ship of the colonists. The incoming colonial transports had been met at the outposts of the system, and rayed out of existence at once—failures, and bringing danger at their heels. Besides—there was no room for them on Thett without Thessians being crowded uncomfortably.

	As their battleships arrived they were conducted to one of the satellites, and each man was "fumigated," lest he bring diseases to the mother planet. Men entered, men apparently emerged. But they were different men.

	"It seems," said the Sthanto softly, after the scout had left, "that we will have little difficulty, for they are, we know, vulnerable to the triple ray. And if we can but once destroy their driving units they will be helpless on our world. I doubt that wild tale of their using no fuel. Even if that be true they will be helpless with their power apparatus destroyed, and—if we miss the first time, we can seek it out, or drive them off!

	"All of which is dependent on the fact that they attack at a point where we have a triple ray station to meet them. There are but three of these, actually, but I have had dummy stations, apparently identical with our other real stations, set up in many places.

	"This gibberish we hear of creating matter—it is impossible, and surely unsuitable as a weapon. Their misty wall—that may be a force plane, but I know of no such possibility. The artificial substance though—why should any one make it? It but consumes energy, and once made is no more dangerous than ordinary matter, save that there is the possibility of creating it in dangerous positions. But it consumes too great an amount of energy. Force-planes—mere force planes—plus a wonderfully developed power of suggestion. They do most of their damage by mental impression. Remember, we have heard already of the mental suggestions of horrible things that drove one fleet of the weak-minded colonists mad.

	"And that, I think, we will use to protect ourselves. If we can, with the apparatus which you, my son, have developed, cause them to believe that all the other forts are equally dangerous, and that this one on Thett is the best point of attack—It will be easy. Can you do it?"

	"I can, Oh Sthanto, if but a sufficient number of powerful minds, may be brought to aid me," replied the youngest of the four councilmen.

	"And you, Ranstud, are the stations ready?" asked the ruler.

	"Oh, Sthanto, they are. The three stations, each with its own exceedingly powerful generators has been tied in with the great power network of the Four Planets, and the Four Satellites. We can pour into the projectors of any one station a power equivalent to more than three stinuses*(*The stinus was equal to the power of three and one-eigth (approximately) tons of matter disintegrated in one second.)," replied the ex-assistant. "Further, we have the most efficient apparatus yet designed. Better than eighty-three per cent of the input appears in the form of the third-ray energy. It can be started in less than ten seconds."

	"It should be instantaneous, like the shortest-ray," grumbled the Sthanto. Himself acquainted with the ray, he knew perfectly well it was impossible to them, for no conceivable power could create the necessary conditions in less than five seconds.

	"Very well. And the force-power feeds are aligned and tuned? The forts are anchored with the new attractive ray of the colonists, and shielded by the magnetic inverter from without? What ray screens? What thickness of relux? They are supplied with an artificial atmosphere, and cooled, protected against heating, and capable of floating when the rock melts?"

	"All, Mighty Sthanto. They have triple molecular ray screens with a tube we are sure is better than any tube hitherto produced, and better than any tube the enemy can use to produce his ray. We have at last succeeded in putting electricity matter in relux in its formation, and have a tube which operates perfectly up to a temperature of over one million degrees, but has not been tested completely to higher temperatures."

	Since their thermometer called absolute zero, zero, and the critical temperature of water one hundred, a range of close to 650 degrees on the centigrade scale, their degrees were better than six times as great as ours. The tube would, then, operate at a temperature well into the X-ray temperatures. The radiation at this temperature would cool any conceivable object, except for the fact that relux was a nearly perfect reflector, and hence a nearly perfect non-radiator. By roughening it, however, they made it radiate and cool itself.

	"What about the effect of the field in disintegrating the relux?" snapped the Sthanto.

	"The frequency generated is above that wanted in the actual molecular rays or in the screen, and sufficiently high for the danger region to be passed. A screen-field slows the frequency to the desired quantum-energy," replied the Councilor of Science.

	"The forts are anchored with attraction beams, and are so stabilized that they will remain in the position chosen under any conceivable force. The magnetic screen is not such as the colonists used, for that proved valueless, but was developed by following out your work on Fields-5783-ZA-21 through 84. The new field does not fight the magnetic field but by-passes it. It is a super-permeable space condition, and leads the magnetic field around, as iron will lead it around a piece of copper. To care for stray flux, there is an inner magnetic reverser.

	"The relux is fifty feet thick, and under even such a molecular beam as we now possess, it would withstand the attack itself for two hours, disintegration being retarded by our ability to maintain through it the constructive field.

	"I fully believe that we have an armor and an armory far superior to our opponent, provided only he does not operate on the radiation of the suns of space in some way. Our sun alone destroys matter at an unthinkable rate. If he can collect its energy—but then, why think of such things? It would be utterly and absolutely impossible to collect energy so distributed, and certainly beyond reason to imagine that such a power could be handled even were it collected," declared Ranstud stoutly, overlooking the fact that the sun itself was collected, and did handle that energy without difficulty. But—men believe what they wish to believe. And though they had no reason to fear a ship which would be vulnerable to their new weapon, they did not like to admit that any other race could surpass them in knowledge.

-

CHAPTER XXVI - With Galaxies in the Balance

	THE Thought rose from Venone after long hours, and at Arcot's suggestion, they assumed an orbit about the world, at a distance of two million miles, and all on board slept, save Torlos, the tireless molecular motion machine of flesh and iron. He acted as guard, and as he had slept but four days before, he explained there was really no reason for him to sleep as yet.

	But the terrestrians would feel the greatest strain of the coming encounter, especially Arcot and Morey, for Morey was to help by repairing any damage done, by working from the control board of the Banderlog. The little tender had sufficient power to take care of any damages that Thett might inflict, they felt sure.

	For they had not learned of the triple ray.

	It was hours later that, rested and refreshed, they started for Thett. Following the great space-chart that they had been given by the Venonians, a series of blocks of clear lux metal, with tiny points of slowly disintegrating lux, such as had been used to illuminate the letters of the Thought's name representing suns, the colors and relative intensity being shown. Then there was a more manageable guide in the form of photographs, marked for route by constellations formations as well, which would be their actual guide.

	At the maximum speed of the time apparatus, for thus they could better follow the constellations, the Thought plunged along in the wake of the tiny scout ship that had already landed on Thett. And, hours later, they saw the giant red sun of Antseck, the star of Thett and its system.

	"We're about there," said Arcot, a peculiar tenseness showing in his thoughts. "Shall we barge right in, or wait and investigate?"

	"Let's try to confer with them," said Morey slowly. "There is no real hope—but we will be better for it."

	"And I," said Torlos anxiously, "think it is foolish. I am more used to war than you, for countless years my people had to fight continuously, and with an enemy of the same character as these Thessians. Unless I am far wrong, they will immediately ask you to whatever place they have best defended, and then turn on your ship everything they can bring to bear. They may do no damage—I think they will not, but—we did hear of a weapon they had been seeking which was even more deadly than the twin-ray. They might have it."

	"I think you are right, Torlos, they will, if they are of the character you suppose and I suspect, invite us to their best defended point, which is the exact point we will want to attack, for with the energy-releasing system they have, I doubt if any fortification will be dependent on any other, so that weakening and destroying weaker points will still leave the strong point untouched. We will have to risk greater weapons than we know of. We will try conference. Zezdon Afthen, you can project thought further than we can. We will go to Thett itself, and you will try to confer with them. I will use manual control."

	The ship was suddenly but a few millions of miles from Thett as Arcot threw on the space control for a moment. Then in moments more, the time control brought them to the outer limits of Thett's tremendous atmosphere. The moment they became visible, having slowed to normal time, a score of ships had darted toward them, and other scores were coming swiftly nearer.

	Zezdon Afthen tried to communicate—and suddenly fell unconscious. Morey removed the headset he had been using, and brought him out of the trance he had been forced into by the Thessian's reply.

	"They have no intention of peace, and will not treat with us," he reported shakily. "They say that all their worlds are now defended by the triple-ray!"

	"They have that new weapon," said Arcot seriously, as two huge Thessian battleships exploded into terrific flashing energy on the impenetrable wall of artificial matter that surrounded the ship. They had dived on it at more than fifty times the speed of light. The soil beneath was a pool of lava for a hundred miles around, and for many more miles glowed red, for already a perfect shower of fire was lacing over the great artificial matter wall. Thett was pouring cosmics at the ship, and the ship fought back with equal energy, while Arcot talked.

	"We'll have to chance it. Where is their main fort here?"

	"From the direction, I should say it was to the left and ahead of our position," replied Zezdon Afthen.

	The ship moved ahead, while about it the tremendous Thessian battle-fleet buzzed like flies, thousands of ships now, and more coming with each second.

	In a few moments the titanic ship had crossed a great plain, and came to a region of bare, rocky hills several hundred feet high. Set in those hills, surrounded by them, was a huge sphere, resting on the ground. As though by magic the Thessian fleet cleared away from the Thought. The last one had not left, when Arcot shot a terrific cosmic ray toward that sphere. It was relux, and he knew it, but he knew what would happen when that cosmic ray hit it. The solometer flickered and steadied at three as that inconceivable ray flashed out.

	Instantly there was a terrific explosion. The soil exploded into hydrogen atoms, and expanded under heat that lashed it to more than a million degrees in the tiniest fraction of a second. The terrific recoil of the ray-pressure was taken by all space, for it was generated in space itself, but the direct pressure struck the planet, and that titanic planet reeled! A tremendous fissure opened, and the section that had been struck by the ray smashed its way suddenly far into the planet, and a geyser of fluid rock rolled over it, twenty miles deep in that world. The relux sphere had been struck by the ray, and had turned it, with the result that it was pushed doubly hard. The enormously thick relux strained and dented, then shot down as a whole, into the incandescent rock.

	For miles the vaporized rock was boiling off. Then the fort sent out a cosmic, and that cosmic blasted the rock that had flowed over it as Arcot's titanic ray snapped out. In moments the fort was at the surface again—and a molecular hit it. The molecular did not have the energy the cosmic had carried, but it was a single concentrated beam of destruction ten feet across. It struck the fort—and the fort recoiled under its energy. The marvelous new tubes that ran its ray screen flashed instantly to a temperature inconceivable, and, so long as the elements embedded in the infusible relux remained the metals they were, those tubes could not fail. But they were being lashed by the energy of half a sun. The tubes failed. The elements heated to that enormous temperature when elements cannot exist—and broke to other elements that did not resist. The relux flashed into blinding iridescence—"

-

	AND from the fort came a beam of pure silvery light. It struck the Thought just behind the bow, for the operator was aiming for the point where he knew the control room and pilot must be. But Arcot had designed the ship for mental control, which the enemy operator could not guess. The beam was a flat beam, perhaps an inch thick, but it fanned out to fifty feet width. And where it touched the Thought, there was a terrific explosion, and inconceivably violent energy lashed out as the cosmium instantaneously liberated its energy. A hundred feet of the nose was torn off the ship, and the enormously dense air of Thett rushed in. But that beam had cut through the very edge of one of the ray projectors, or better, one of the ray feed apparatus. And the ray feed released the energy of space as it was designed to release it, and it released it without control; it released all the energy it could suck in from space about it, as one single beam of cosmic energy, somewhat lower than the regular cosmics, and it flashed out in a beam as solid as matter. There was air about the ship, and the air instantly exploded into atoms of a different sort, threw off their electrons, and were raised to the temperature at which no atom can exist, and became protons and electrons. But so rapidly was that coil sucking energy from space, that space tended to close in about it, and in enormous spurts the energy flooded out. It was directed almost straight up, and but one ship was caught in its beam. It was made of relux, but the relux was powdered under the inconceivable blow that countless quintillions of cosmic ray photons struck it. That ray was in fact, a solid mass of cosmium moving with the velocity of light. And it was headed for that satellite of Thett, which it would reach in a few hours time.

	The Thought, due to the spatial strains of the wounded coil, was constantly rushing away to an almost infinite distance, as the ship approached that other space toward which the coil tended with its load, and rushing back, as the coil, reaching a spatial condition which supplied no energy, fell back. In a hundredth of a second it had reached equilibrium, and they were in a weirdly, terribly distorted space. But the triple-ray of the Thessians seemed to sheer off, and miss, no matter how it was directed. And it was painfully weak, for the coil sucked up the energy of whatsoever matter disintegrated in the neighborhood.

	Then suddenly the performance was over. And they plunged into artificial space that was black, and clean, and not a thing of wavering, struggling energies. Morey, from his control in the Banderlog, had succeeded in getting sufficient energy, by using his space distortion coils, to destroy the great projector mechanism. Instantly Arcot, now able to create the artificial space without the destruction of the coils by the struggling ray-feed coil, had thrown them to comparative safety. Space writhed before they could so much as turn from the instruments. The Thessians had located their artificial space, and reached it with an attraction ray. They already had been withstanding the drain of the enormous fields of the giant planet and the giant sun, the attractive ray was an added strain. Arcot looked at his instruments, and with a grim smile set a single dial. The space about them became black again.

	"Pulling our energy—merely let 'em pull. They're pulling on an ocean, not a lake this time. I don't think they'll drain those coils very quickly." He looked at his instruments. "Good for two and a half hours at this rate.

	"Morey, you sure did your job then. I was helpless. The controls wouldn't answer, of course, with that titanic thing flopping its wings, so to speak. What are we going to do?"

	Morey stood in the doorway, and from his pocket drew a cigarette, handed it to Arcot, another to each of the others who smoked, and lit them, and his own. "Smoke," he said, and puffed. "Smoke and think. From our last experience with a minor tragedy, it helps."

	"But—but this is no minor tragedy, they have burst open the wall of this invulnerable ship, destroyed one of those enormous coils, and can do it again," exclaimed Zezdon Afthen, exceedingly nervous, so nervous that the normal courage of the man was gone. His too-psychic breeding was against him as a warrior.

	"Afthen," replied Stel Felso Theu calmly, "when our friends have smoked, and thought, the Thought will be repaired perfectly, and it will be made invulnerable to that weapon."

	"I hope so, Stel Felso Theu," smiled Arcot. He was feeling better already. "But do you know what that weapon is, Morey?"

	"Got some readings on it with the Banderlog's instruments, and I think I do. Twin-ray is right," replied Morey.

	"Hmhm—so I think. It's a super-photon. What they do is to use a field somewhat similar to the field we use in making cosmium, except that in theirs, instead of the photons lying side by side, they slide into one another, compounding. They evidently get three photons to go into one. Now, as we know, that size photon doesn't exist for the excellent reason that it can't in this space. Space closes in about it. Therefore they have a projected field to accompany it that tends to open out space—and they are using that, not the attractive ray, on us now. The result is that for a distance not too great, the triple-ray exists in normal space—then goes into another. Now the question is how can we stop it? I have an idea—have you any?"

	"Yes, but my idea can't exist in this space either," grinned Morey.

	"I think it can. If it's what I think, remember it will have a terrific electric field."

	"It's what you think, then. Come on," Arcot and Morey went to the calculating room, while Wade took over the ship. But one of the ray-feeds had been destroyed, and they had three more in action, as well as their most important weapon, artificial matter. Wade threw on the time field, and started the emergency lead burner working to recharge the coils that the Thessians were constantly draining. Being in their own peculiar space, they could not draw energy from the stars, and Arcot didn't want to return to normal space to discharge them, unless necessary.

	"How's the air pressure in the rest of the ship?" asked Wade.

	"Triple normal," replied Morey. "The Thessian atmosphere leaked in and sent it up terrifically, but when we went into our own space, at the half-way point, a lot leaked out. But the ship is full of water now. It was a bit difficult coming up from the Banderlog, and I didn't want to breathe the air I wasn't sure of. But let's work."

-

	THEY worked. For eight hours of the time they were now in they continued to work. The supply of lead metal gave out before the end of the fourth hour, and the coils were nearing the end of their resistance now. It would soon be necessary for Arcot to return to normal space. So they stopped, their calculations very nearly complete. Throwing all the remaining energy into the coils, they a little more than held the space about them, and moved away from Thett at a speed of about twice that of light. For an hour more Arcot worked, while the ship plowed on. Then they were ready.

	As Arcot took over the controls, space reeled once more, and they were alone, far from Thett. The suns of this space were flashing and glowing about them now, and the unlimited energy of a universe was at Arcot's command. But all the remaining atmosphere in the ship had either gone instantaneously in the vacuum, or solidified as the chill of expansion froze it.

	To the amazement of the extra-terrestrians, Arcot's first move was to create a titanic plane of artificial matter, and neatly bisect the Thought at the middle! He had thrown all the controls thus interrupted into neutral, and in the little more than half of the ship which contained the control cabin, was also the artificial matter control. It was busy now. With bewildering speed, with the speed of thought trained to construct, enormous masses of cosmium were appearing beside them in space as Arcot created them from pure energy. Cosmium, relux and some clear cosmium-like lux metal. Ordinary cosmium was reflective, and he wanted something with cosmium's strength, and the clearness of lux.

	In seconds, under Arcot's flying thought manipulation, a great tube had been welded to the original hull, and the already gigantic ship lengthened by more than five hundred feet! Immediately great artificial matter tools gripped the broken nose-section, clamped it into place, and welded it with cosmium flowing under the inconceivable pressure till it was again a single great hull—but five hundred feet longer.

	Then the Thessian fleet found them. The coils were charged now, and they could have escaped, but Arcot had to work. The Thessians were attacking with moleculars, cosmics, and a great twin-ray. Arcot could not use his magnet now, for it had been among those things severed from the control. He had two ray feeds, and the artificial matter. There were nearly three thousand ships attacking him now with a barrage of energy that was inconceivably great, but the cosmium walls merely turned it aside. It took Arcot less than ten seconds to wipe out that fleet of ships! He created a wall of artificial matter at twenty feet from the ship—and another at twenty thousand miles. It was thin, yet it was utterly impenetrable. He swept the two walls together, and forced them against each other until his instruments told him only free energy remained between them. Then he released the outer wall, and a terrific flood of energy swept out.

	"I don't think we'll be attacked again," said Morey softly. They would not. Thett had only one other fleet, and had no intention of losing the powers of their generators at this time when they so badly needed them. The strange ship had retired for repairs—very well, they could attack again—and maybe—

	Arcot was busy. In the great empty space that had been left, he installed a second collector coil as gigantic as the main artificial matter generator. Then he repaired the broken ray feed, and it, and the companion coil which, with it, had been in the severed nose section, were now in the same relative position to the new collector coil that they had had with relation to the artificial matter coil. Next Arcot built two more ray feeds. Now in the gigantic central power room there loomed two tremendous power collectors, and six smaller ray feed collectors.

	His next work was to reconnect the severed connectors and controls. Then he began work on the really new apparatus. Nothing he had constructed so far was more than a duplicate of existing apparatus, and he had been able to do it almost instantly, from memory. Now he must vision something new to his experience, and something that was forced to exist in part in this space, and partly in another. He tried four times before the apparatus had been completed correctly, and the work occupied ten hours. But at last it was done. The Thought was ready now for the battle.

	"Got it right at last?" asked Wade. "I hope so."

	"It's right—tried it a little. I don't think you noticed it. I'm going down now to give them a nice little dose," said Arcot grimly. His ship was repaired—but they had caused him plenty of trouble.

	"How long have we been out here, their time?" asked Wade.

	"About an hour and a half." The Thought had been on the time field at all times save when the Thessian fleet attacked.

	"I think, Earthman, that you are tired, and should rest, lest you make a tired thought and do great harm," suggested Zezdon Afthen.

	"I want to finish it," replied Arcot, unnecessarily sharply. For he was tired.

	In seconds the Thought was once more over that fortified station in the mountains—and the Triple-ray reached out—and suddenly, about the ship, was a wall of absolute, utter blackness. The Triple-ray touched it, and exploded into coruscating, blinding energy. It could not penetrate it. More energy lashed at the wall of blackness as the operators within the sphere-fort turned in the energy of all the generators under their control. The ground about the fort was a great lake of dazzling lava as far as the eye could see, for the Triple-ray was releasing its energy, and the wall of black was releasing an equal, and opposing energy!

	"Stopped!" cried Arcot happily. "Now here is where we give them something to think about. The magnet and the cosmics!"

	He turned the two enormous forces simultaneously on the point where he knew the fort was, though it was invisible behind the wall of black that protected him. From his side, the energy of the spot where all the system of Thett was throwing its forces, was invisible.

	Then he released them. Instantly there was a terrific gout of light on that wall of blackness. The ship trembled, and space turned grey about them. The black wall dissolved into greyness in one spot, as a flood of energy beyond comprehension exploded from it. The enormously strong cosmium wall dented as the pressure of the escaping radiation struck it, and turned X-ray hot under the minute percentage it absorbed. The Triple-ray bent away, and faded to black as the cosmic force playing about it, actually twisted space beyond all power of its mechanism to overcome. Then, in the tiniest fraction of a second it was over, and again there was blackness and only the brilliant, blinding blue of the cosmium wall testified to its enormous temperature, cooling now far more slowly through green to red.

-

	"LORD—you're right Zezdon Afthen. I'm going to sleep," called Arcot. And the ship was suddenly far, far away from Thett. Morey took it over, and Arcot slept. First Morey straightened the uninjured wall and ironed out the dents.

	"What, Morey, is the wall of Blackness?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	"It's solid matter. A thing that you never saw before. That wall of matter is made of a double layer of protons lying one against the other. It absorbs absolutely every and all radiation, and because it is solid matter, not tiny sprinklings of matter in empty space, as is the matter of even the densest star, it stops the triple-ray. It is not 'neutronium,' because cosmic rays are where neutronium would be if it existed. If a proton and an electron coalesces, we get, not neutronium, but cosmic rays. That matter is nothing but protons; there are no electrons there, and the positive electrical field is inconceivably great, but it is artificial matter, and that electrical field exerts its strain not in pulling and electrifying other bodies, but in holding space open, in keeping it from closing in about that concentrated matter, just as it does about a single proton, except that here the entire field energy is so absorbed.

	"Arcot was tired, and forgot. He turned his magnet and his cosmics against it. The cosmics fought the solid matter with the same energy that created it, and with an energy that had resources as great. The magnet curved space about it, and about us. The result was the terrific energy release you saw, and the hole in the wall. All Thett couldn't make any impression on it. One of the rays blasted a hole in it," said Morey with a laugh. For he, too, loved this mighty thing, the almost living ideas of his friend's brain.

	"But it is as bad as the space defense. It works both ways. We can't send through it, but neither can they. Any thing we use that attacks them, attacks it, and so destroys it—and it fights."

	"We're worse off than ever!" said Morey gloomily.

	"My friend, you, too, are tired. Sleep, sleep soundly, sleep till I call—sleep!" And Morey slept under Zezdon Afthen's will, till Torlos carried him gently to his room. Then Afthen let the sleep relax to a natural one. Wade decided he might as well follow under his own power, for now he knew he was tired, and could not overcome Zezdon Afthen, who was not.

	On Thett, the fort was undestroyed, and now floating on its power units in a sea of blazing lava. Within men were working quickly to install a second set of the new tubes in the molecular motion ray screen, and other men were transmitting the orders of the Sthanto who had come here as the place of actually greatest safety.

	"Order all battleships to the nearest power-feed station, and command that all power available be transmitted to the station attacked. I believe it will be this one. There is no limit on the power transmission lines, and we need all possible power," he commanded his son, now in charge of all land and spatial forces.

	"And Ranstud, what happened to that molecular ray screen?"

	"I do not know. I cannot understand such power, for the tubes, it has been proved, heated to a temperature of over three thousand six hundred million degrees, before they ceased operating. This happened in less than one-one hundredth of a dnoces (second). The power that could do that is inconceivably great. For there are more than fifty times the area of my hand which can radiate away the heat."

	What Ranstud referred to was the fact that ah area of one square inch at that temperature, the temperature that will break atoms, rearrange their nuclei, can radiate away energy at the rate of 65 X 1026 horsepower. And since there were approximately two hundred square inches radiating, that meant power was flowing in at more than 13 x 1026 horsepower!*(*13 x 1026 = 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 horsepower.)

	"Of course, over and above that terrific power of radiation loss, he was fighting our own not inconsiderable energy. And so those tubes lasted only long enough to flash once. It is really useless to attempt to fight that ray.

	"Then the effect we witnessed when his cosmic hit us—I could not have conceived of such power. I am sure that we seriously damaged the ship when they were forced to retire. That ray that left it was pointed in the direction of our satellite, and I am worried as to its fate. We cannot know till the light which has been generated by that beam reaches our observatories. The power from their stations is still flowing in, of course, as from the other stations, but it is power that left some time ago.

	"But what most worries me is his wall of darkness," said Ranstud seriously.

	"But he was forced to retire for all his wall of darkness, as you saw.

	"He can maintain it but a short time, and it was full of holes when he fled."

	"Old Sthanto is much too confident, I believe," said an assistant working at one of the great boards in the enemy's fort, to one of his friends. "And I think he has lost his science-knowledge. Any power-man could tell what happened. They tried to use their own big rays against us, and their screen stopped them from going out, just as it stopped ours on the way in. Ours had been working at it for seconds, and hadn't bothered them. Then for a bare instant their ray touched it—and they retired. That shield of blackness is absolutely new."

	"They have many men on that ship of theirs," replied his friend, helping to lift the three hundred ton load of a vacuum tube into place, "for it is evident that they built new apparatus, and it is evident their ship was increased in size to contain it. Also the nose was repaired. They probably worked under a time field, for they accomplished an impossible amount of work in the period they were gone."

	Ranstud had come up behind them, and overheard the latter part of this conversation. "And what," he asked suddenly, "did your meters tell you when our ray opened his ship?"

	"Councilor of Science-wisdom, they told us that our power diminished, and our generators gave off but little power when his rays gave much, and they told us that when his power was exceedingly little, we still had much."

	"Have you heard the myth of the source of his power, in the story that he gets it from all the stars of the Island?"

	"We have, Great Councilor. And I for one believe it, for he sucked the power from our generators, so might he suck the power from the inconceivably greater generators of the Suns. I believe that we should treat with them, for if they be like the peace-loving fools of Venone, we might win a respite in which to learn their secret."

	Ranstud walked away slowly. He agreed, in his heart, but he loved life too well to tell the Sthanto what to do, and he had no intention of sacrificing himself for the possible good of the race.

	So they prepared for another attack of the Thought, and waited.

-

CHAPTER XXVII - Man, Creator and Destroyer

	"WHAT we must find," said Arcot, between contented puffs, for he had slept well, and his breakfast had been good, "is some weapon which will attack them, but won't attack us. The question is, what is it? And I think, I think—I know." His eyes were dreamy, his thoughts so cryptically abbreviated that not even Morey could follow them.

	"Fine—what is it?" asked Morey after vainly striving to deduce some sense from the formulas that were chasing through Arcot's thoughts. Here and there he recognized them: Einstein's energy formula, Planck's quantum formulas, Nitsu Thansi's electron interference formulas, Stebkowfski's proton interference, Williamson's electric field, and his own formulas appeared, and others so abbreviated he could not recognize them.

	"Do you remember what Dad said about the way the Thessians made the giant forts out in space—hauled matter from the moon and transformed it to lux and relux. 'Member I said then I thought it might be a ray—but found it wasn't what I thought? I want to use the ray I was thinking of. The only question in my mind is—what is going to happen to us when I use it?"

	"What's the ray?"

	"Why is it, Morey, that an electron falls through the different quantum energy levels, falls successively lower and lower till it reaches its 'lowest energy level,' and can radiate no more. Why can't it fill another step, and reach the proton? Why has it no more quanta to release? We know that electrons tend to fall always to lower energy level orbits. Why do they stop?"

	"And," said Morey, his own eyes dreamily bright now, "What would happen if it did? If it fell all the way?"

	"I cannot follow your thoughts, Earthmen, beyond a glimpse of an explosion. And it seems that is Thett that is exploding, and that Thett is exploding itself. Can you explain?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	"Perhaps you know that electrons in their planetary orbits, so called, tend to fall always to orbits of lower energy, till they reach the lowest energy orbit, and remain fixed till more energy comes and is absorbed, driving them out again. Now we want to know why they don't fall lower, fall all the way? As a matter of fact, thanks to some work I did last year with disintegrating lead, we do know. And thanks to the absolute stability of artificial matter, we can handle such a condition.

	"The thing we are interested in is this: Artificial matter has no tendency to radiate, its electrons have no tendency to fall into the proton, for the matter is created, and remains as it was created. But natural matter does have a tendency to let the electron fall into the proton. A force, the 'lowest energy wall', over which no electron can jump, caused by the enormous space
distortion of the proton's mass and electrical attraction, prevents it. What we want to do is to remove that force, iron it out. Requires inconceivable power to do so in a mass the size of Thett—but then—!

	"And here's what will happen: Our wall of protonic material won't be affected by it in the least, because it has no tendency to collapse, as has normal matter, but Thett, beyond the wall, has that tendency, and the ray will release the energy of every planetary electron on Thett, and every planetary electron will take with it the energy of one proton. And it will take about one one-hundred-millionth of a second. Thett will disappear in one instantaneous flash of radiation, radiation in the high cosmics!

	"Here's the trouble: Thett represents a mass as great as our sun. And our sun can throw off energy at the present rate of one sol for a period of some ten million million years, three and a half million tons of matter a second for ten million years. If all of that went up in one one-hundred-millionth of a second, how many sols?" asked Morey.

	"Too many, is all I can say. Even this ship couldn't maintain its walls of energy against that!" declared Stel Felso Theu, awed by the thought.

	"But that same power would be backing this ship, and helping it to support its wall. We would operate from—half a million miles."

	"We will. If we are destroyed—so is Thett, and all the worlds of Thett. Let that flood of energy get loose, and everything within a dozen light years will be destroyed. We will have to warn the Venonians, that their people on nearby worlds may escape in the time before the energy reaches them," said Arcot slowly.

	The Thought started toward one of the nearer suns, and as it went, Arcot and Morey were busy with the calculators, and they finished their work, and started back from that world, having given their message of warning, with the artificial matter constructors. When they reached Thett, less than a quarter of an hour of Thessian time had passed. But, before they reached Thett, Arcot's viewplates were blinded for an instant as a terrific flood of energy struck the artificial matter protectors, and caused them to flame into defense. Theft's satellite was sending its message of instantaneous destruction. That terrific cosmic ray had reached it, touched it, and left it a shattered, glowing ball of hydrogen. Every other atom on the planet had been destroyed by the cosmic rays.

	"There won't be even that left when we get through with Thett!" said Arcot grimly. The apparatus was finished, and once more they were over the now fiery-red lava sea that had been mountains. The fort was still in action. Arcot had cut a sheet of sheer energy now, and as the triple-ray struck it, he knew what would happen. It did. The triple-ray shunted off at an angle of forty-five degrees in the energy field, and spread instantly to a diffused beam of blankness. Arcot's molecular reached out. The lava was instantly black, and mountains of ice were forming over the struggling defenses of the fort. The molecular screen was working.

	"I'd like to know how they make tubes that'll stand that, Morey," said Arcot, pointing to an instrument that read .01 millisols. "They have tubes now, that would have wiped us out in minutes, seconds, before this."

	The triple-ray snapped off. They were realigning it to hit the ship now, correcting for the shield. Arcot threw out his protonic shield, and retreated to half a million miles, as he had said.

	"Here goes." But before even his thoughts could send Thett to radiation, the entire side of the planet blazed suddenly incandescent. Thett was learning what had happened when their ray had wounded the Thought.

	And then, in the barest instant of time, there was no Thett. There was an instant of intolerable radiation, then momentary blackness, and then the stars were shining where Thett had been. Thett was utterly gone.

	But Arcot did not see this. About him there was a tremendous roar, titanic generator-converters that had not so much as hummed under the impact of Thett's greatest weapons, whined and shuddered now. The two enormous generators, the blackness of the protonic shield, and the great artificial matter generator, throwing an inner shield impervious to the cosmics Thett gave off as it vanished, both were whining. And the six smaller machines, which Arcot had succeeded in interconnecting with the protonic generator, were whining too. Space was weirdly distorted, glowing grey about them, the great generators struggling to maintain the various walls of protecting power against the surge of energy as Thett, a world of matter, disintegrated.

	But the very energy that fought to destroy those walls was absorbed in defending it, and by that much the attacking energy was lessened. Still, it seemed hours, days that the battle of forces continued.

	Then it was over, and the skies were clear once more as Arcot lowered the protonic screen silently. The white sky of Thett was gone, and only the black starriness of space remained.

	"It's gone!" gasped Torlos. He had been expecting it—still, the disappearance of a world	

	"We will have to do no more. No ships had time to escape, and the risk we run is too great," said Morey slowly. "The escaping energy from that world will destroy the others of this system as completely, and it will probably cause the sun itself to blow up—perhaps to form new planets, and so the process repeats itself. But Venone knows better now, and their criminals will not populate more worlds.

	"And we can go—home. To our little dust specks."

	"But they're wonderfully welcome dust specks, and utterly important to us, Earthman," reminded Zezdon Afthen.

	"Let us go then," said Arcot.

-

	IT was dusk, and the rose tints of the recently-set sun still hung on the clouds that floated like white bits of cotton in the darkening blue of the sky. The dark waters of the little lake, and the shadowy tree-clad hills seemed very beautiful. And there was a little group of buildings down there, and a broad cleared field. On the field rested a shining, slim shape, seventy-five feet long, ten feet in diameter.

	But all, the lake, the mountains even, were dwarfed by the silent, glistening ruby of a gigantic machine that settled very, very slowly, and very, very gently downward. It touched the rippled surface of the lake with scarcely a splash, then hung, a quarter submerged in that lake.

	Lights were showing in the few windows the huge bulk had, and lights showed now in the buildings on the shore. Through an open door light was streaming, casting silhouettes of two men. And now a tiny door opened in the enormous bulk that occupied the lake, and from it came five figures, that floated up, and away, and toward the cottage.

	"Hello, Son. You have been gone long," said Arcot, senior, gravely, as his son landed lightly before him.

	"I thought so. Earth has moved in her orbit. More than six months?"

	His father smiled a bit wryly. "Yes. Two years and three months. You got caught in another time field and thrown the other way this time?"

	"Time and force. Do you know the story yet?"

	"Part of it—Venone sent a ship to us within a month of the time you left, and said that all Thett's system had disappeared save for one tremendous gas cloud—mostly hydrogen. Their ships were met by such a blast of cosmic rays as they came toward Thett that the radiation pressure made it almost impossible to advance. There were two distinct waves. One was rather slighter, and was more in the gamma range, so they suspected that two bodies had been directly destroyed, one small one, and one large one were reduced completely to cosmics. Your warning to Sentfenm was taken seriously, and they have vacated all planets near. It was the force field created when you destroyed Thett that threw you forward? Where are the others?"

	"Zezdon Afthen and Zezdon Inthel we took home, and dropped in their power suits, without landing. Stel Felso Theu as well. We will visit them later." 

	"Have you eaten? Then let us eat, and after supper we'll tell you what little there is to tell."

	"But Arcot," said Morey slowly, "I understand that Dad will be here soon, so let us wait. And I have something of which I have not spoken to you as yet. Worked it out and made it on the back trip. Installed in the Thought with the Banderlog's controls. It is—well, will you look? —Fuller! Come see the new toy you designers are going to have to work on!"

	They had all been depressed by the thought of their long absence, by the scenes of destruction they had witnessed so recently. They were beginning to feel better.

	"Watch," Morey's thoughts concentrated. The Thought outside had been left on locked controls, but the apparatus Morey had installed responded to his thoughts from this distance.

	Before them in the room appeared a cube that was obviously copper. It stayed there but a moment, gleaming brightly, then there was a snapping of energies about them—and it dropped to the floor, a fifty-pound lump of copper. It dropped to the floor but—it rang with the impact! Artificial matter is always soundless, for its atoms are fixed, and cannot vibrate in sound. Only natural matter can make sound.

	"It was not created from the air," said Morey simply.

	"And now," said Arcot, looking at it, "Man can do what never before was possible. From the nothingness of Space he can make anything.

	"Man alone in this space is Creator and Destroyer.

	"It is a high place.

	"May he henceforth live up to it."

	And he looked out toward the mighty star-lit hull that had destroyed a solar system—and could create another.

The End

The Derelicts of Ganymede
Wonder Stories – January 1932

Although interplanetary exploration will produce situations in which the heroic, tragic, and dramatic in man will be brought out, it will also probably produce much that is quite humorous and whimsical.

Certainly the spectacle of men, used to the comforts of earth, being forced to adapt themselves to the conditions of some strange planet, may appear to some people as being tragic and to others as being humorous.

There is no doubt, however, that if man leaves the earth, travels to another world under which totally different conditions prevail, he may have to change his entire mode of conduct and his outlook. Qualities on earth that would make a man successful might entirely unfit him for the pioneering life on a new world; and the man unsuccessful on earth, may become a great leader on the new planet.

Mr. Campbell uses this idea in his story with great effectiveness. He has given us a very human picture of the "derelicts" that will not soon be forgotten.

-

Chapter I

	Duke Stetson deposited his bag and pushed his First Officer's cap to one side meditatively. He looked up at the blue sky. Then he glanced off toward thin, multicolored towers that formed the skyline of New York City in 2132. Tiny lines of crawling airplanes wound through them. Behind, and beyond lay the residential districts.

	"Vacation, huh?" Duke grinned. "And now what?" He looked at the little blue slip in his hand. For the next six months he could wander anywhere he pleased on Earth's surface, following the Terrestrial Transport Lines free of charge. That and the six months' vacation were the due rewards of five years of steady work on the Terraluna Lines, owned by Lunar Beryllium. Behind him now loomed the shining, scarred hull of the giant freighter from which he had landed an hour ago.

	"Well, Horace Greeley advised going west, so I think I'll try it. I need a little genuine ultra-violet." Duke stepped down through the customs and waved to a taxiplane.

	"Terrestrial Transport," he called. In six hours he was in Los Angeles, and twenty minutes later found him registering at the Hotel Pacific in Santa Monica.

	Then he started to enjoy life, light and liberty. It was quite a peculiar sensation to the man who had spent so many hours weightless in the eternal glaring night of space, to smell the salt tang of moist air, to lie in the softened warmth of a yellow sun on a beach of white sand, and to feel a constant weight on his body.

	He was not long in finding friends, and even quicker in astonishing these Earth-bound mortals with feats of agility and strength they could scarcely believe. His lean six-feet-three of muscular body, trained to constant work and exercise of a space-officer, where weightlessness itself required the development of suppleness and of muscles unused on Earth, made him a deadly opponent in tennis.

	But there was one girl who consistently defeated his best efforts. Joan Reading was not large, a mere five-four, but every muscle in her well trained body seemed to know where the ball was going next, and those laughing brown eyes never lost it, even when waving locks of mahogany-gold half blinded her. She was a fine player, but Duke began to wonder if it was altogether her playing that defeated him. He seemed to have unusual difficulty in following the ball. It was so much easier to follow her.

	In five years as First Officer, and three before that as Second, Duke Stetson had had opportunities to meet many girls. But as the days of his vacation passed, more and more he found a something in Joan these others had lacked. Still—Joan was the daughter of John Russel Reading, and Reading owned Lunar Beryllium, owned it because it was his. He had made it, as he had made the first spacial freight ships, and the first successful space passenger ships. Old John Russel was known for getting just about what he wanted, and very little that he did not want, and Duke began to have an idea that perhaps, though he knew Joan was the one he must have, John Russel Reading would not want the First Officer of one of his own ships for a son-in-law.

	For nearly seven years Duke had been working on a piece of apparatus designed to do what nothing known could do; penetrate Earth's blanketing Heaviside layer that reflected all radio waves and permitted none to pass. It made of every ship in the void an isolated world. No messages could be sent to Earth, nor to Mars or Venus either, since each had its enveloping, protecting blankets of ionized air. Moon, Phobos, Deimos, the astronomical observatories on Ceres, these could be reached easily from space by the enormous radio beams, but the major planets answered always with the eternal silence of space itself.

	But Duke had studied the static that the enormous power plant, the Sun, rained down on Earth. That got through—perhaps—

	He had worked on it, and had apparatus now that he believed would do the "impossible." And he felt that perhaps the inventor of the interplanetary signaling beam would be Old Reading's idea of a husband for Joan.

	One of his six months was gone, and vacation was beginning to pall on him now. But for Joan it would have bored him long before. To a man who has worked unceasingly for five years in the depths of the Eternal Mystery and Night, the tiny Earth and her little, petty people begin to seem insignificant. One who has seen the eternal jeweled night for five long years, finds the poor, fogged nights of Earth, with their colorless, bloated stars quite uninteresting.

-

	One evening in late June, he announced to Joan he was going to leave soon. They took Joan's little plane and flew out through clouds of rose toward a sun of red-hot copper sinking in a tremendous jewel, a pure aquamarine. Finally a little speck of green and brown appeared, and they settled down on the Catalina Island House landing.

	It was dark when they finished dinner and walked over tiny pebbles that the patient waves, in the course of a few millenniums, would turn into fine white sand. Then they sat down and watched a glowing moon swim up out of the black sea.

	"The Moon," muttered Duke with a grimace. Six years of avoiding meteors, first on his way to Earth's satellite, then from it, had not impressed him with its beauties. The Moon was a place that one tried to reach in safety, then worked to leave.

	'The Moon," laughed Joan softly. "Once it was a big green cheese, and once it was a big silver platter. Now it produces three hundred and twenty three thousand tons of beryllium per annum, and the profits are quite large."

	"Carried in the vest pocket of John Russel Reading, for future reference. That's the worst of it," he added, looking at her face.

	A different glint had come over her copper-bronze hair, the light of the pale moon was distorting its colors. Even the crimson fire of the light beach suit she had worn was a shade almost black. It matched her lips, which flashed back in a smile as she turned to meet his eyes.

	"Why, don't you want Dad to be successful?" asked Joan.

	"Well," replied Duke, at length, "I'd be much happier if he weren't, I'm afraid." The pebble he tossed landed accurately on the toe of his left rubber moccasin. He continued to stare along the trajectory of the pebble.

	The smile left Joan's face. "Why, Duke?" she asked softly.

	Duke looked at her, opened his mouth to say something, found that it was quite unnecessary, and closed it slowly. He looked in her eyes for a little moment, then slowly pulled her over against him, and gave her a long, happy kiss. She snuggled down against his shoulder with a little sigh, and smiled very contentedly out across the water. Duke was looking down in uncomprehending wonder at the little body nestled down against him. Suddenly a little gasp escaped him, and his arms tightened about her convulsively.

	"Oh—not so hard, you big bear!" she finally managed. "Won't do you any good to crush in a couple-two-three of my ribs, will it?" she smiled up at him.

	"I—I—I don't know, Joan," he said shakily, rolling the name on his tongue as a jeweler might roll some magnificent stone between his fingers. "But when you lie there, so very small, so exquisitely feminine—and it begins to dawn on me that you are going to be mine forever—" He smiled down at the little upturned face.

	"Well, for one of the brightest men your college ever turned out, you were certainly hard to convince," smiled Joan pertly.

	The smile suddenly left Duke's face. "Why, what's the matter?" asked Joan, sitting up quickly.

	"I'm second in command of a space freighter. That's the only source of income I have. If I know you aright, you are first in command of Lunar Beryllium, who owns the freighter. They have improved things a lot in the last fifty years, but people still need money to live," replied Duke dismally.

	"Oh, Duke, if I were first in command of Lunar Beryllium, if I could move that dear old grizzly bear I have for a father, it wouldn't be so bad. But—well, I'll have to see him, and you have to start in a week you say. I think I'll speak to him tonight. Shall I?"

	Later, when the small hours weren't quite so small as they had been, the plane hovered gently, almost soundlessly over the hotel where Duke was staying. The rustle of the air past the propellers continued for some ten minutes before Duke descended. For some time he stood watching the vanishing lights of the plane. Then he stretched heavily muscled arms up to the pin point stars, thinking how very, very lonely they must be because Joan was here and belonged to him.

	Early the next afternoon there began a considerable roaring and raging around the Reading house on Berkeley Heights. John Russel Reading said a number of things when he heard Joan's latest plan, and Joan said a few more. But the tableau ended by Joan's reporting hotly to Duke that her father declared that Duke must have two hundred thousand dollars and Joan, or neither.

	Old Reading was a strong-willed man, and he had learned through long experience that he had a strong-willed daughter. But he loved that daughter the more for it, and in his private opinion there was no male, himself included, on the face of Earth, or Mars, or Venus either for that matter, who was worthy of her. But he fully intended to see to it that the man who did get her was the best available. If he happened to be wealthy, that was luck. There was plenty of money in the family. But if Joan had decided that she wanted some man, he must find some reason for delaying her while he investigated. And the two hundred thousand dollars was the reason.

	The worst of it was that old Reading had a very important merger plan on hand which would take him to Mars for the next three weeks.

	And that meant so much delay in getting his investigation of Stetson started. But he had some private detectives started at work immediately.

	Duke listened to Joan's hot denunciation of her father's ultimatum, and sat silently thinking, then he got up.

	"Joan, that won't help us, dear little girl. I'm going to leave a bit sooner than I expected.

	"I have a friend here on Earth who is with Photo Communications in Boston. He knows some of the things I've been doing, and has some apparatus to use as receivers.

	"I want to test the apparatus I have been working on. I think it will work. If it does—I may be able to buy out your father's holdings. If it doesn't—I still have some more theories.

	"But I'll have to go to Phobos to test its ability to send messages to Earth. I must have a fair test. Earth has a good heavy atmosphere, and a thick, strong Heaviside layer, and the distance will be about fifty-two million miles. That will be a good test, since ships seldom operate at a distance greater than that from some planetary base.

	"I'm too broke to buy passage to Mars, but I can buy passage from Mars to Phobos. I'm going to get a job on some freighter bound for Mars, and jump to Phobos from there. I guess that's the best way."

	"Oh, Duke, how long will you be gone?"

	"Haven't a notion. Three months at least."

	Joan had a number of things to say about the situation, but she helped Duke get ready. She did a little private wire-pulling here and there, and because Stetson was not altogether unknown as a crack second in command, and because a ship was being fitted out for a hurry journey, Duke got a berth.

-

	She was the New Seattle, registered of that Martian city, and a freighter of rather large size in her day, but better than fifteen years old. She was bound for the Transport docks on Mars to be cut up for her fifty-inch beryllium meteor-proof armor.

	But what Duke did not learn was that she was traveling empty for high speed, and taking Reading, and some of his men along. Because the rocket motors were designed to drive the ship loaded, now that she was empty, they would be able to produce enormously high accelerations, and speed far greater than any normal space ship would make. A freighter without a load is a rather ticklish horse to ride, but old Captain Barnett had been in the business since the first "fire-monsters" went to the moon.

	Duke had his apparatus very carefully stowed in his cabin, and was nicely settled, so he decided to stroll out and look about the take-off cradle.

	He wandered about the ship, looking at the different rocket motors—a full dozen of them, far larger than those of the "ferry-boats" of the Terraluna Lines—and at the great space curving coils. He inspected the fuel batteries, the life boats, in fact every part of the ship, for two shifts of six hours in every twenty-four hours would find him in full control of the ship.

	It was nearing the take-off time when he came up on the control bridge, and looked out across the crowded dock. Machines were working under the direction of tiny men, filling the tanks of the ship with air, water, fuel, oxygen, and a miscellany of liquids, solids, and semi-solids.

	Aside from the laborers working the machines, there were few men about the dock, save customs officials, for there were no general passengers on this trip.

	Anxiously Duke looked about from his point of vantage. Joan had said she would be here, and as yet he couldn't see her. Finally as he noticed the Reading family plane coming in for a landing, he hurried down toward the landing dock. Emerging from a mass of bales and crates he rounded a corner, and suddenly spotted Joan—with her father, and a group of important men!

	He stopped, amazed, and when Joan saw him he ducked behind some crates. In a moment Joan joined him.

	"Oh, Duke," she laughed, "this is going to be some trip for you! Dad, and some friend of his are going, and they are the real reason for the ship traveling empty. I didn't get word of it till this morning! He is using this ship because he will make better time. He has a conference on Mars, and James Kenneth Pahk-ah," she mimicked, "is going with him. He's president of General Foods, you know, that great big man that looks as though he owned the place."

	"That great big man" weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds, was very, very pompous, and realized to the fullest the dignity of his position. The other men seemed mainly secretaries and clerks.

	"Oh, Lord, it sure is going to be a hectic trip!" grinned Stetson.

	"And Dad doesn't even know you!" laughed Joan merrily.

	Half an hour later they took off. Energy began to flow into the coils and the gravity-neutralizing field built up. Gradually weight left them and the ship floated up through the atmosphere till the black of airless space was about them. Then the great rocket motors began to speak, and the machine lurched forward. Quickly it gathered velocity until it was speeding meteor-like toward Mars, or where Mars would be when the journey was over.

	Hour after hour the ship bored on, and the shifts switched. During his off periods Stetson worked on his apparatus. On his work periods he had plenty to occupy his attention. They were traveling at a speed that was considered high, even for the Planetary Lane Guardships, equipped with special, super-sensitive electro-static meteor detectors. Such high speed for this old ship, with its not-too-sensitive apparatus, was decidedly unwise. But—the owner was aboard and he had ordered it.

	Parker did not understand what was happening, and if he did, it would not have helped. He only knew that he was terribly oppressed by the terrific, continued acceleration of the ship. They were using an acceleration of more than one gravity all the way, and his three hundred pounds felt as though it were three hundred and fifty.

-

CHAPTER II - Collision!

	The ruddy-green disc of Mars drew near finally, and the twin winking eyes of Phobos and Deimos chasing rapidly around it. Stetson was off duty as they drew near, and as the captain had taken over for landing, he decided to take a swim. A large tank of sea water from Earth was being brought over as their only cargo for use in a chemical plant, and the men had been making free use of it as a swimming pool. It would be a long time before he got another chance for a swim if he were on tiny Phobos. So Duke stripped and dived in.

	The moment his body sank into the water, the excess weight he had been carrying slipped off. Floating in the water, the effect was the same as though he were on Earth, for the water buoyed him up perfectly.

	For a few moments he swam vigorously, twisting and shooting through the chill water. Then he lay on his back and looked out of the port above him.

	Ahead was the great disc of Mars, and on one side was the shining disc of Phobos, on the left and ahead as seen from the other port was rugged, contorted Deimos.

	"Hmmm—mean position," he muttered to himself, thinking in terms of a space pilot. The not-too-sensitive meteor detectors would be almost useless in the enormous electrostatic fields of three huge bodies on three sides. And here, near a planet, where its great gravitational field swept meteors from their paths and drew them to itself, the danger was the greatest.

	Barnett at the controls drove the ship on, however. He had orders—and he followed them.

	But suddenly there came a crash—a single detonation it was so sharp—and a great mass of nickel-steel, tough as an armor-piercing bullet, and traveling perhaps thirty miles a second, smashed cleanly through the control room of the ship. It carried away the rocket control apparatus, and shorted all the electrical firing controls. The rockets, without control, opened up on full power.

	Rocket motors, designed to produce an acceleration four times gravity on the ship when loaded to capacity, broke loose, when the ship was practically empty! The enormous power tore at the great beryllium fabric of the ship, and it groaned under the stress. The enormous, hardened girders creaked and strained, and the ship rocketed forward under an acceleration seven and three-quarters times gravity of Earth.

	Stetson lapsed into unconsciousness almost instantly as the enormous acceleration weight pressed down on him. But the water he floated in saved him from death.

	The men at their posts on the ship cried out once in agony. Their knees broke, their spines snapped, and they slumped down, broken things, under the awful pressure of the acceleration. They died instantly.

	Stetson lived, unconscious, because he floated in water. Three other men lived. One was Reading. He had been taking a medicinal bath before landing. One was the pompous and overweight Mr. James Kenneth Parker, and he lived because he also was taking a bath. Had been taking one for hours. He had quickly learned that it was much more comfortable to lie immersed in water while the ship staggered under her load of acceleration. He had spent most of his time in his bath.

	The fourth was an oiler. He was a wiry, lean man, about five feet six in height, and decidedly tough. He had been engaged in dredging a bucket of oil out of the oil bunker when the crash came. He had promptly fallen into the dense oil, and floated peacefully but unconsciously in its placid depths.

	But every other man on board was dead.

	The ship meanwhile had been observed. Men had seen it drive suddenly forward, and a Lane Guardship speeded after it in an effort to rescue its crew. But it was quickly distanced by the runaway before it was well under way.

	Long, long hours later Stetson awoke, sneezing violently. He sneezed again. He gasped for breath and coughed out salt water. He opened his eyes, and they burnt. Desperately, half panicky, he opened his eyes after wiping them with his hands. For a moment he could see before the water rushed back. Then he drove his legs down, and sailed out and up. He wiped his face again, and succeeded in getting air into his lungs.

	He was in the middle of a large sphere of water which had coated with rounded symmetry every article in the cargo tank. It also coated him, and hung in round blobs in the air.

	Realization came. The rockets were exhausted, and weightless, the water by its adhesion had spread around wetting everything.

	He struck the other side of the room, and carefully preparing himself, opened his eyes under the water, and swam toward the door. It was much easier to swim in the water than to work one's weightless way through the air. In a moment he found the door, opened it, and with a small globe of water burst through. Immediately he closed the door again, but not before a film of water had raced down the passageway.

-

	About that time John Russel Reading was cursing most luridly as he floated weightless and helpless in his room. He had succeeded in escaping from his medicinal bath and getting into his suite. Finally he worked himself to a holding strap and turned down the little corridor to his study. The nervous little secretary was on the floor, but he would never be nervous again. Reading began to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster when he saw the secretary—a broken heap on the crumpled remains of a metal chair. The typewriter he had been using was floating in broken pieces about the room. Much of the furniture of the room had given way under its enormous weight.

	Reading hastily put on some clothes and, half-dressed, stepped into the hall. His bell had brought no steward. On the floor was the explanation. Blood staining his neat white suit, his legs twisted at an impossible angle, lay the steward.

	Reading was quiet, and began to look for perhaps another living man.

	A lusty voice rang through the ship. "Thank God! At least one other man. HALOOOO!" roared the business man.

	In a moment two cries answered. One came from far down in the ship, and the second from somewhere near at hand. A moment later Duke appeared, clad only in his bathing suit.

	"Mr. Reading!" he gasped in surprise. "Thank the Lord! Everyone else seems to have been killed, crushed by acceleration. I haven't found a clock on board still running. The lifeboat clocks will be working however. Built for emergencies. HALOOO!" he roared, as someone called from below.

	"We have to find out where we are first," added Duke decisively. "We'll go to the control room."

	"Who are you? How can you tell?" demanded Reading, inspecting the bronzed, powerful figure of the man before him. Duke hesitated to reply. He decided that life would be more bearable with Mr. Reading if he were kept in ignorance.

	"Chief Officer—I was taking a swim when it happened—Oh, man! What in the name of heaven is this!" he stopped in amazement.

	A magnificent figure garbed in dripping garments of a thousand hues, mostly the dark red of the heavy Venusian lubricant, stood before them.

	"Am I as bad as all that?" grinned a streaked, quite unrecognizable face. "I took a bath in the lubricant tank, sir. I ain't had a chance to clean up."

	"Oh, Lord, it's Bates!" laughed Duke. "Go clean up, and get some clothes. Get your stuff together, and pile it in Lifeboat Seven, that'll be whole, and it's the biggest. Take my stuff in as soon as you can, and perhaps Mr. Reading will want his necessities. Take only two things, two bags. But get everything I have—we'll need it!"

	"Right, sir." Bates turned and shot himself down the corridor. Used to being weightless, he managed deftly.

	Duke turned to Reading again. "Besides which, I hold Space Pilot's Papers. Get some heavy tough clothes on, and get ready. Then make sure there is no one else alive on board."

	Duke turned and dived for the control room. Reading was a leader, not a follower, and for a moment he stood in exasperated surprise at the order from a young officer of the line he owned. Then he remembered that an officer knew a lot more about taking care of people in space ships than did business men. Quietly he got ready.

	First, however, he put on some tough hiking clothes he had brought for a hunting trip he had hoped to make on Mars. Then he went about the passenger levels shouting. Finally he heard a groan, and on investigation found that Mr. J. K. Parker, of General Foods, was floating helpless and hopeless in the middle of his bath room. Parker was shaking all over his fleshy body. Little wavelets started at his neck and ran down his body, and died out at his ankles.

	Finally Reading calmed him enough to induce him to struggle to the door, and let himself out. In a moment the room was flooded, for he didn't shut the door. Reading maneuvered him into the next room, and shut the door for him. Parker produced a white linen suit as his idea of "rough clothes." Reading picked his most suitable clothes, along with a stream of picked (and over-ripe) adjectives.

	In the meantime Duke had succeeded in getting enough current from the emergency battery line to work the telescope. Quickly taking sights on the Sun, Jupiter and Mars he worked out an approximate position. They had started out from Mars in a tremendous arc, and curved up, out of the plane of the ecliptic, and now were curving back into it. They were headed for the center of the outer band of asteroids. The ship had perhaps as much as five minutes to live before it met with headlong collision at hundreds of miles a second with a mass of stone and metal weighing in the near neighborhood of fifty billion tons.

	Duke turned, left the telescope, and calling to the others to leave everything instantly, raced weightless to his room. Three more boxes were left. One contained his clothes, one contained batteries, and the other some apparatus. Duke grasped the apparatus, lifted the massive box, driving rapidly toward the No. 7 boat with it. Bates was already there, with all the rest of the apparatus, but had neither his clothing nor Reading's.

-

	They heard Reading's call, and explaining in three words, Duke took the controls, and sent Bates after the two men. "Asteroids—bring 'em."

	Bates brought them. He brought them despite great objections on the part of Mr. J. K. Parker, who demanded clothes fit to wear. Reading came, because he knew what asteroids were, and had heard they were dangerous.

	It was, none the less, four minutes later when Duke Stetson pulled the releasing lever. Automatic doors opened, and a powerful spring gear drove the little twenty-foot ship clear of the gleaming monster.

	"Lie down," snapped Stetson. He seated himself in the carefully molded pneumatic pilot's chair, and as the protesting Mr. Parker was slapped down by Bates, he turned loose all the rocket power the little ship could muster. They curved rapidly away from the gleaming cylinder of the Mother Ship New Seattle, and turned to one side. Some thirty seconds later, racing now up and out of the asteroid zone, Duke shut off the power. The burdening weight of four times Earth gravity left them, and they looked toward the ship.

	"Now listen here, young man. Do you know who I am? What do you mean by forcing me to leave that ship in such a precipitate manner, taking none of my valuable papers with me? I shall most certainly see that you are permanently suspended from operations," declared the Honorable J. K. Parker, his face wrinkled into what was intended to be a terrifying, avenging frown.

	"I hope you can," sighed Duke.

	"Oh, Mister Parker!" exclaimed Bates with evident anxiety written all over his guileless face and in his very innocent blue eyes. "You won't do that I hope. But surely you'll stay with us now? And at least you will wait to see whether or not you do get back, or whether you just starve to death in this little dust spot in the void. Or maybe a meteor will hit us. You know this ship has four-inch armor plate and the other had fifty," added Bates, warming up to his subject, as Parker's face turned slowly green.

	"Ohhhhh—take me right back there!" wailed Parker.

	"Watch it," suggested Bates, pointing out the little window. The gleaming hull, visible in the flashing glare of the sun of space, was shooting straight on, farther and farther away from them. Almost invisible in the black background of outer space a great, rough mass of rock was careening in its orbit, moving some eight miles a second, turning slowly on its axis. An enormous broken chip of a planet.

	Suddenly the great ship struck it. Absolutely noiseless, the collision showed as an enormous flash of light and energy flared out. The entire mass of the planetoid split and was thrown all over space—a great ball of flaming gas mushroomed out.

	A fifth of a second later there was only a faint glow.

	"Ohhhhhhh!" Parker gave vent to a long groan.

	Duke grinned at the window in front of him, while Bates brushed an imaginary dust particle from his quite immaculate suit. He had donned the suit he had intended to land in—his best and newest. Hence the toughest. These two, used as they were to space, were not awed and terrified by the immensity of its emptiness, and hence could better judge their position.

	"Parker!" snapped Reading viciously. "You blankety blank blank yellow bellied, white livered, chicken hearted mountain of slobbering fat! Get up, and pretend you're a man, not a monkey. This Bates has been playing on you so you don't know which end your head's on, though it's hard enough to tell anyway. Get up!"

	Parker got up. In a few moments Reading was treating him like a human being again, and the overwrought man was beginning to feel like one.

	"Now—er—what's-your-name, where are we and where are we going?" asked Reading. "Can we have a guardship pick us up in the next few hours, or will it take a day or so?"

	"Guardships patrol the space routes between the inner planets. We are already beyond the asteroids, and getting farther all the time. This machine is equipped with a radio sending set that has no tubes in it, as I have discovered, and a receiving set designed for A. C. But the motor generator which should be driven by the battery, hasn't been oiled and it won't get up to speed, so I can neither send nor receive for a while. Even if the sending set were operating, we couldn't reach more than five hundred miles. These things aren't meant for long range. They are intended to bring the guardships to the exact spot, after they have been summoned to the general locality of the distressed ship. Big ships aren't supposed to smash into asteroids you know."

-

CHAPTER III - Stranded!

	"This ship is so very poorly tended to I'm surprised the rockets are full. They are luckily. Also the battery supplies are plentiful. Plenty of power, anyway. The inspection of these boats is the duty of the ground crews. My, the Planetary Transport must be wasting power on ground crews. I'll bet dollars to burned out battery plates that some fellow on the ground crew has a hum-dinger of a sending set," said Stetson sourly.

	"Then we can neither send nor receive, and the guard-ships won't come?" asked Reading in alarm.

	"Exactly right."

	"Well, what can we do? What plans have you?" asked Reading, straightening up.

	"All outer planets have been explored. Jupiter's uninhabitable, but unfortunately we are headed for it. We can just about stop the ship by the time we reach it. Of course, since it doesn't take any power to simply coast along, we could go to Pluto for all that, but we will just about be able to stop by the time we reach Jupiter, maybe. I haven't calculated the effect of the Sun's gravity, nor of Jupiter's. I'll have to use both to stop us, but the gravity apparatus is intact. With that we can neutralize, but not reverse gravitational pulls.

	"With luck we ought to make Ganymede. That's one of Jupiter's ten moons. The biggest. The latest, the tenth, is so small they could never see it from Earth. Ganymede is bigger than Mercury, and, wonder of wonders, has an atmosphere very rich in oxygen, nearly fifty per cent, so that even though the pressure is very low, men can breathe it. That's where we are headed."

	"Why? What can we do there?"

	"Oh, an exploration trip starts out on a mineral hunt every few years. Jupiter and his moons are a good place to hunt. He's kind of big, and may have taken some deep skimmings off the Sun that the smaller ones didn't get. Therefore the rarer, heavier metals are more apt to be plentiful. There will probably be an expedition within the next four or five years," replied Stetson carelessly.

	"Ohhhh," mourned Parker, "and when I get back Jimmie Blackwell will have taken everything I've got.

	"Is there anything to eat there? I'm hungry. Is there anything to eat he*e?" he added more anxiously.

	"Well," replied Stetson with a long face, "there are lots of things that eat there. Mostly plants. They have carnivorous plants, and insects the size of fox-terriers. The explorers reported that grasshopper steak was fairly edible, but rather tough, and flavored somewhat like duck that is just a little too high. Then there are lots of mushroom growths that make you sick for the first few weeks, but after that you can eat them with moderation."

	"But isn't there any bread, nor steaks—real steaks?"

	"But the worst of it is," continued Stetson, "that there isn't much water that's drinkable."

	"Chief," reported Bates succinctly, "I've opened ten cans of meat, and found one that wasn't spoiled too bad to eat."

	"Let Parker try it if he wants to. His company supplies the Lines. On contract I believe. Must have made plenty on that contract, Parker," Stetson replied bitterly. The supplies were supposed to be renewed every year, but General Foods sometimes had a habit of missing a year or two.

	"Yes—about a million and a half—but I can't eat this, it's moldy."

	"How's the water, Bates?" asked Reading.

	"All tanks full, but it's a bit old. Tastes kind of funny."

	"No, Bates, it's all right. Just distilled," laughed Stetson.

	The ship was well on its way now, and out of the danger zone, so Stetson set the controls, and began to take more accurate readings. Half an hour later he told the men that they should reach Ganymede in about four days. In the meantime he advised them to leave the spoiled food alone and stick to water and canned milk, which was supplied and maintained by General Dairies, and had been faithfully renewed every three months.

	Stetson spent his time working on his apparatus, and in taking parts of the ship to pieces, and putting them together in a different way. When he got through he had a receiving set that functioned perfectly, and was three or four times as sensitive as it had been. Also the rotary converter was working again. But there was absolutely nothing coming through the ether in their direction, save the roar caused by the static of the unshielded sun.

	The temperature of the ship had been falling, despite the many absorbing plates on the sunward side, and the silvered shadow side. Finally Stetson was forced to use some of the precious battery power for heat.

-

	By the time they reached Ganymede's orbit the ship was still moving several miles a second, and the last of the rocket fuel was gone. Stetson settled down to work. He had to land the ship, and that meant he had to brake its speed. He used Jupiter's gravitational field at first, coming in on the gravity neutralizer, and so getting the ship close without increasing the speed. However, he built up a gravitational neutralizer field, and that energy had to be radiated before he could get weight to slow them. He threw it into the big resistor coils inside and outside. The ship was most uncomfortably hot for a change, but Stetson had his calculations exact. They fell into Ganymede's orbit with a velocity so low that it took them nearly four hours to settle through the atmosphere.

	Nevertheless, due to the gravitational effects of some of the other satellites, which Stetson had been unable to calculate, they landed with too great velocity, and they landed on solid rock. The hull split open like a ripe melon. The air rushed out, and in a moment they were breathing Ganymedian atmosphere.

	"Despite that crash, you certainly did a beautiful job of landing. It was mighty good work," conceded Reading.

	"Well, in that case, I think you owe me for the passage. I think my bill will be ten thousand dollars apiece."

	"WHAT! Charge us for this! I should say not!" roared Reading in instant defiance.

	"Oh, all right. But I think you'll pay," grinned Stetson amicably. "Remember the last edible food is gone, and we have water for one day more."

	While the two big business men looked at each other in amazement, Stetson and Bates stepped out.

	"Say, Chief, did you mean what you said?" asked Bates in worried surprise.

	"Absolutely," smiled Stetson. "I've got my reasons, and if we get back within six months I'll guarantee you ten thousand dollars. How does that sound?"

	"It sounds like robbery," replied Bates doubtfully.

	"No—just hotel expenses.

	"Now look—do you see those big, broad leaf palms there? We are going to cut down a number of them, and build a shack before it starts misting here. When it mists it just rains up from the ground."

	Bates and Stetson set to work. They cut down some of the huge, pulpy plants, and with the aid of some tougher material Stetson procured somewhere, succeeded in rigging a substantial and remarkably tight little dwelling in some five hours.

	Reading and Parker watched with interest. Reading was too much offended to help, and Parker wouldn't have helped anyway. Immediately after its completion, Bates and Stetson started a task that, but for the lesser gravity, would have been impossible. They spent the rest of the long daylight bringing the fuel batteries and their oxygen tank leads from the ship. Then Stetson and Bates started out into the jungle. They were both exceedingly hungry, but Stetson had insisted that the batteries, and the important apparatus, be safely sheltered. Now they could go foraging.

	In half an hour they were back. Bates had been astounded to see Stetson hurling small boulders a quarter of a mile. Then he had tried it and found that the combination of mass and small weight made it possible to push the stone harder as it left the hand, use a stone whose mass was really greater than the arm, and still not have it so heavy it couldn't be thrown. Stetson had been able to direct them unerringly after a few tries and had crushed a thing that looked like a large jack-rabbit with black armor on. Stetson brought three of them back. Also he had some violently colored growths. He called them Ganymedius stenthis, and claimed it was the correct name. Bates had his doubts. Also he doubted the edibility of mushrooms with colors so flamingly brilliant.

	"We can eat 'em, all right. They are good, too," promised Duke.

	"Well, I never saw anything good to eat advertising itself so promiscuously," replied Bates doubtfully.

	"Apparently the things here can't eat them. They contain a thing unusual in Terrestrial mushroom growths, a true sugar. Sugars are alcohols, and apparently alcohols are poisonous to the animals here. Also, we can thank luck that no large animals, dangerous to man, have ever been discovered here," explained Stetson.

	When they reached the camp, Stetson started a fire. Then he took a small knife, and opened the armorlike legs of the oversize cricket he had found. Inside was solid flesh, and despite stories he had told Parker, the meat was very good and quite tender. Its flavor was not strong, but quite different from anything they were accustomed to. However it gave out an odor, when cooking, that was detectable for amazing distances. Something like the odors of frying fish or bacon, or onions, it had the power of bringing the presence of an appetite acutely before the conscious mind.

-

	Reading and Parker had also been hunting. Parker had fallen into a mud hole, and was deplorably muddy. Then he had tried to catch one of the burrowing insects. He caught it but let go promptly, but not before it had done an amazing amount of damage with its powerful jaws. They returned empty handed, and most empty internally. Bates and Stetson were sitting before a warm fire that blazed feebly in the thin Ganymedian air, but looked quite cheerful in the night which had fallen. The odor of the cricket steak was even more cheering.

	The business men appeared promptly. Parker had washed his hands, and bathed them with an antiseptic lotion on the ship.

	"Ah—that smells good. I see you found something to eat, didn't you?" he said delightedly, waddling up in a most extraordinary way on this lighter planet. His face was colored a deep green by Jupiter's reflected light. The enormous disc of the planet was standing in the skies above them and visibly turning as they watched.

	"Yes—it's good stuff, too. But very expensive," added Stetson. A piece of meat was broiling merrily in the skillet, and its odors wafted up to Parker's nose made him very hungry.

	"Expensive!" roared Reading. "What is this?"

	"This," replied Stetson with a sweeping gesture, "is the Hotel Ganymede. Lodging, five hundred dollars per night. Meals, all the same price, one hundred per each."

	"You blankety-blank profiteering, brainless sap! You haven't the common sense of that animal you're frying. You haven't got the decency of your monkey uncle! You'll give us a share in that like human beings. We certainly won't pay!" exploded Reading, marching up to the fire.

	"Ummm—Ganymede was claimed under the laws of interplanetary exploration by the United States. That makes U. S. colonial laws apply. This is a hotel, as shown by our sign. (He had set up a sign on a slip of paper.) Therefore lodgers are not forced to eat here, eaters are not forced to lodge, and no one is forced to do either," philosophized Stetson amicably, stirring the odorous contents of the frying pan. He dropped in a handful of chopped mushrooms, and a new and spicy aroma went up.

	Reading stormed off in a rage. Parker stood around, and looked hungrily at the frying pan. Then he went off to speak to Reading.

	In ten minutes they were back. The meat and mushrooms had just been taken off the fire.

	"All right, you highway robber. I'll take it. I haven't that in cash. I'll give you notes," snapped Reading.

	"Well, I guess your credit will be good for a few nights," conceded Duke blandly.

	"You—you!" Reading started forward. Parker hung onto him, pleading in his ear.

	"What's your name?" demanded Reading getting out his fountain pen and notebook.

	"Oh, just make the bill out to Cash," suggested Duke.

	"All right, and from now on I think I'll call you Bill. I can't think of any more appropriate name, since you won't tell me yours."

	"That'll be all right, I guess. But—er—you see these notes you gentlemen gave don't pay Bill entirely. You still owe me $10,000 each for your passage."

	It took nearly half an hour, in which time Bates and Stetson finished their meal, for Parker to get Reading back. Finally they came, but they were not going to sleep under that hotel's roof.

	"Well, that's all right, I guess. But you see it's three hundred and twenty five per day with all meals, that's three meals, but it's three hundred for meals, and fifty for hotel rooming privileges," explained Stetson.

	Parker sniffed hungrily as a new batch of cricket steaks and mushrooms were grilled. He ate with immense satisfaction, despite the notes he had handed over, amounting to eleven thousand dollars.

	The two millionaires slept outside. That is, they started to. But when Jupiter's great blanketing disc went down out of the sky, the heat radiated away very rapidly, and water condensed out of the air on everything. They woke up soaked to the skin, and shivering.

	They slept in the "hotel" where a fire was keeping the air too warm to mist. They paid a hundred dollars extra for making the proprietor get up in the middle of the night.

	With morning, too very stiff jointed to move, Parker had to pay for day privileges. Reading went out hunting. He ran after several giant insects, but they jumped away from him with ease. His stones never hit them because he could not learn to control them under this lesser gravity. He was afraid to try the mushrooms for fear of getting the wrong kind. He saw insects eat them sometimes, and curl up and die almost at once. Whereupon the weird mushroom would slowly wrap itself around the insect, grow rapidly to seed, and burst with a pop that sent its tiny seeds for hundreds of yards.

-

CHAPTER IV - Tapping the Sun

	He returned hours later very, very hungry. He had to pay for another meal, he knew. But he was willing to admit he was licked because the other fellow had experience and practical knowledge he didn't have. He was a business man, and he saw that as a food producer he was not so good.

	He went to the ship first, and tried to draw some of the tasteless water. None came out. Parker had thoughtfully taken a shower bath, draining the last of the water. He paid plenty for that shower in the time to follow. There simply was no available water on the surface of Ganymede. It all remained in the air and came out at night, to evaporate into the air again in the morning. It was impossible to collect it unless, like a plant, one could take it out of the air.

	Stetson had, however, solved the problem. He had taken the water tank from the ship, filled it with pounded leaves and other plant material, and started heating it. Steam came out. He collected and salted it till it had a pleasant flavor. It sold for one hundred dollars a glass.

	He patented the idea. At least he claimed it was patented. But the others couldn't duplicate his method anyway, because he had the only available apparatus, and as the chief engineer of the ship, had a right to it.

	Life was somewhat miserable for the two plutocrats. They were steadily becoming poorer. But Parker suffered most. He had to work rather hard, because he couldn't sit still. It cost too much to sit in the "hotel" and he couldn't sit still or go to sleep outside because the insects would come up and bite him. The ship was no refuge, they were swarming over it, and already dozens of mushroom growths filled it.

	Reading was not suffering as much. He was busy exploring the section of the planet near him.

	Bates and Stetson were working on the latter's apparatus. Stetson had made a queer set up that looked something like a daisy ten feet across. The golden center, however, was a flattened copper dome, made of heavy metal, and attached to a tremendously heavy copper lead about two feet long. It was almost as great in diameter as it was in length. The end of this massive copper block was approximately an inch from a second plate of two-inch copper. This spread out in a bowl three feet in diameter.

	Around the two-foot length was a curiously designed coil of rather heavy copper wire, insulated from the block on insulite pins. At the gap between the heavy lead and the copper bowl three magnets were placed, one hundred and twenty degrees apart.

	The petals of the daisy were made of thin metal plates, connected at rim and center, and insulated from the copper dome.

	Leads from them ran to the apparatus set in neat rows on the floor of the hotel, and connected with the battery from the ship.

	Stetson was ready to test it. Some of the material was already pulled off the roof when he called a halt, and instead ran long, long wires from the machines, out across the jungle, to a point nearly five miles distant. There he set up a very much simpler device resembling the daisy. It had petals, and the copper dome, and a very heavy iron bar, in fact a crowbar, ran down from it to the moist ground.

	Stetson focused it carefully on a certain spot in the sky where the sun would be at the end of a given time, arranged a simple gyroscope from the ship to hold it that way, and went back to his machines. He started adjusting dials, and looking out across the jungle. Presently there was a flash, and a very pale ray reached out into the heavens, but it went in an absolutely straight line. It did not spread.

	"What's that?" demanded Reading.

	"It's a beacon to call the crickets so I can kill 'em easier," grinned Stetson. "But it may draw something else, so we had best lie down."

	He watched his chronometer closely. After quite a time he shut off some of his apparatus. The beam stayed on, for the last piece had not been shut off.

	Again quite a time elapsed. Then something came down that beam. It came down in a solid flood of incandescent fire. It came down with an explosive thud, smacked onto the planet, and did something. It continued to come for some two minutes. Then it stopped abruptly. Those two minutes were two minutes of terrific roaring, the ground shook and quivered, heat bellied out from the region in waves. Great tongues of flame shot high into the sky. Then abruptly it was quiet. 

	"It seems," said Reading somewhat shakily, "that you did get hold of something besides crickets, or else that was a lightning bug of a new kind. What did you do?"

	"I set my choke too broadly. I have to use a band of less than one-thousandth of a cycle. I was playing tag with the sun, and the sun got rough," he added.

	"The sun!" cried Reading, jumping up in surprise. "Do you mean to tell me you brought that energy across five hundred million miles of space!" Reading was thinking of what a nice power station the sun would make.

	"Umhum. You haven't day rights, so get out and let us work," replied Stetson, looking absently off toward the smoking section which had housed the model of his larger plant here.

	"Here's day rights," said Reading eagerly, writing out another note hurriedly. There were about three pages left in his notebook. They had been here three weeks, and the Hotel Ganymede was very expensive. It had cost him nearly sixty five thousand dollars.

-

	Stetson accepted absently, and sat down and did some calculating. He ended up by connecting in all his apparatus to the large daisy projector. In half an hour he was ready. The business man watched silently.

	A section of the roof was removed. Stetson trained his projector with sights mounted on it, and it remained trained by a finished clockwork attached to it. Then the beam started out. It was scarcely visible this time, but they waited patiently. After a very long time a sudden flash snapped out, and the beam was a solid column of energy stretching out to infinity, flowing bluish in the atmosphere. It was stopped solidly, however, at the gap where the three magnets surrounded the great copper conductor.

	Stetson touched a key for the barest instant. A solid mass of flaming energy jumped across the gap, and struck the copper bowl with an audible thud. The energy seemed to flow through the bowl, then stream out in a dense cloud from the upper surface. It intermingled with the main beam, but seemed not to be troubled by that.

	Stetson was grinning joyously. When he released that key the flame of energy across the gap was put out as though it had never been. Still that solid column of energy reached out to infinity. It was cold. No heat came from it. Parker, who had also decided to pay day privileges, got up and waddled over to it, stretching out his hand to touch it. Stetson, occupied, did not see him till almost too late. Then he struck him heavily with his arm, and sent the fat man rolling over on top of Reading.

	"You suicidal sap!" remarked Stetson coldly, staring at him. "I don't know how much power that beam carries, but it carries enough to throw all of us to kingdom come and back. Stay where you are."

	Carefully and with utmost caution Stetson approached the apparatus, and delicately adjusted the copper bowl, turning it at a slight but carefully measured angle to the main shaft. Mounted in direct coupling as it was, the clockwork would maintain it at the same angle to the sun that it now had.

	Stetson returned to his key. He sat down and began to tap at it. The flame leaped and died, danced across the little gap, and the cloudy beam leaped and died in the copper bowl.

	"I think it works. I'll take a chance on it anyway. If—" He turned to Reading, who had been watching with the keenest, though silent interest. "Want to send a message to the home folks ?"

	"WHAT—send a message from one planet to another by direct communication? Impossible. Never been done," barked old Reading.

	But there was more of an air of challenge than of flat denial.

	"Well—I'll tell you what I'll do. You two can get together and send a message to Earth, telling where and who you are. I'll bet they come. You can make out the notes this time so they will be good only if we reach Earth within three months," suggested Stetson. His eyes were laughing into Reading's. Beside him was the compact apparatus, the great bulk of the glistening black batteries behind the enormous daisy of metal. Above, and out to infinity, stretched that pulsing beam of energy, a flaming sword of infinite might. And all about was the tangled jungle of Ganymede.

	"How much do you want, you robber?" demanded Reading. He knew what was coming by this time.

	"Now let's see. It's five hundred million miles or so. Call it that. I'll charge the exceedingly low rate of twelve thousandths of a cent a mile. For that I'll send all the messages you want," said Stetson after a moment's mental calculation.

	"Something's wrong, Reading," bleated Parker. "That sounds like a reasonable rate."

	"Reasonable! Parker, that amounts to no less than sixty thousand dollars! Thirty thousand apiece!"

	"NO!" he roared, turning to Stetson triumphantly. "At last we've got one thing we won't have to pay for. You'll have to send something yourself, sooner or later, you damn shark. I'll wait."

	"Hmm—that's too bad," said Stetson with a downcast look. "I'd found that I couldn't afford to run the hotel on the present rates if I didn't put this deal through. I'll have to double them. Then, of course, you can stay as long as you like. I might say I believe it will take nine days for a guardship to get out here from Mars."

	"You overgrown laughing hyena, you haven't the brains of an amoeba, but blankety blank if you haven't got me licked. You win, damn your hide, because I'm a business man, and not yet used to plain robbery. All right, here." Reading paid up, and Parker, shaking all over in his anxiety, followed suit.

	"Thank you, gentlemen. I am sure both my partner and I appreciate this. I suspect a guardship will call in about a week and a half." Stetson drew out his growing collection of notes, counted out ten thousand dollars' worth, and passed them over to the astounded Bates.

-

	Duke settled down to his key. The beam winked and flowed and flickered, into the atmosphere and out into space. "Hope I'm using enough power, and yet I don't want to use too much," he mumbled.

	"Four survivors of the Space Freighter New Seattle, having escaped in a life boat, marooned on satellite Ganymede of Jupiter. Have no suitable receiving apparatus. If these signals are heard, please send aid. Survivors are John Russel Reading, Los Angeles; James Kenneth Parker, Chicago; Joseph Bates, oiler aboard S. F. New Seattle; and Duke Stetson, Chief Officer aboard New Seattle" ran the message. 'He sent it four times, while the other men watched the flickering beam in hypnotized wonder. Then the sun descended too low for safe operation, and Duke shut off the apparatus.

	Day after day he sent the call, and further messages from the two men. Day after day he listened on his small receiving set for some word from the patrol ship he felt sure would come.

	Nine days after sending the message first, he heard a faint response. In two hours it was audible.

	"Calls received, stop sending. Signals breaking down insulation on power lines. End of message. Calls received—," came the message again and again, Duke had sent his position on Ganymede, so now he shut off his apparatus.

	"Must have used too much power," he muttered.

	Decidedly Stetson had used too much power. The first warning Earth had was a crashing static bolt that blew out static controls in several million radio sets, made meters in power stations jump as several thousand horsepower was suddenly thrown into the lines, and lightning devices flashed into action.

	It was the sheer sharpness of tuning Stetson was using that minimized the damage.

	The steady messages induced experimenters to try tuning them in for power. Several succeeded. One or two had heavy enough leads to dissipate the tremendous surges. Some secondary effect caused the natural static to tune in with Stetson's artificial barrage.

	Power companies, whose lines unfortunately tuned in by natural length, were forced to suspend operations along those lines.

	Earth had been distinctly disconcerted by Stetson's fourteen billion horsepower. Most of the enormous power was absorbed in the atmosphere, resulting in lightning discharges all over the night side of Earth, and a noticeable temperature change easily recorded by Weather Bureau instruments.

	So the guardship with its powerful sending apparatus had beamed Ganymede, hoping to penetrate the small planet's light Heaviside layer, and so stop the signals.

	The guardship appeared that evening. A blazing fire was their beacon. The long ship landed lightly directly in front of the Ganymede Hotel, and half a dozen officers swarmed out at once.

	They met the survivors, and after a hearty welcome, the chief officer turned at once to Stetson.

	"Good Lord, man, what was that thing you were using? The messages we have been getting from Luna for the last nine days have been one continuous howl for us to stop you. The first signals came through on a band so narrow that the meters couldn't measure its width, but they had such enormous power behind them that anything coming anywhere near your band simply gave up the ghost with loud wails. Even power lines that were somewhere nearly the right length were burning up in a blaze of glory. Your signal strength was estimated as fourteen billion kilowatts! How in the name of the Great Universe did you get that power? And how did you get it through the Heaviside layer. We couldn't even get it outside, your beam was so tight," asked the officer in wonder.

	"Sorry I used so much power—I had no idea of its magnitude. You see, I just tapped the Sun, and turned loose its static producing energies on old Earth. My signals were static really, but carefully tuned static. I—"

	"Tapped the Sun!" cried the officer in amazement. "Lord, I thought you had a few million dollars' worth of ideas to get through the Heaviside layer—but tapping the Sun for power!"

	"Officer," interrupted Parker, waddling up, "as an Interplanetary Patrol Officer, I demand that you arrest this man."

	The officer, as a scientist and a space navigator, was much more in sympathy with the man who could make the Sun itself do his bidding than with the millionaire. "Why? What charge?" he demanded.

	"Eh—er—Extortion!" said Parker with# a grunt of satisfaction.

	Chief Officer Talbot turned to Stetson who was smiling broadly.

	"You see, Officer, I was running a hotel here for a while and my rates were a bit high to suit this man. But I didn't compel him to stay here, he was at liberty to move out." Chief Officer Talbot looked at the "Hotel," and began to understand.

	"Hmm—how high?"

	"He charged us a total of two hundred and ten thousand dollars for one month in that, and for sending that message," replied Parker, with a quivering rage. Reading was standing to one side looking on with a quizzical frown. He liked Stetson's grin.

-

	"Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Parker, there's nobody else in the System who could have sent that message for any amount of money, so I really think that alone was worth it—if you wanted to go back. And if, as he says, you were free to leave—"

	"Free to leave! Free to leave—and stay out in the cold and wet—and not have anything to eat?" snorted Parker.

	"Well—there are no laws regulating hotel rates here that I know of—"

	"Parker, come on. Let's go back and fight where we have some courts to light in," suggested Reading, climbing into the ship.

	The invaluable apparatus was carefully stored in the ship, and they started back. The fast patrol ship made the five hundred million miles in something under fifteen days. The atmosphere aboard was a bit strained. Parker was still trying to have Stetson arrested. As yet he hadn't found a charge that would stick. Reading was just sitting back and watching the progress of events. He was beginning to wonder about the possibilities of getting Stetson to sell him the patents on his apparatus.

	They landed in Los Angeles. Quite a crowd had gathered, mainly scientific men, for the news of Stetson's discovery, forwarded from the patrol ship's powerful beam transmitter, had done more, and had been more thoroughly broadcast than even Stetson's messages.

	The four men descended first. Parker waddled down with immense dignity. Reading came down the gangway with a firm step, anxiously glancing about for Joan. Joan was there. She broke through and ran toward the gangway with an expression of relieved happiness on her face—and passed her father with a little touch to fall into Stetson's arms.

	Stetson and Joan were all alone. There were just two pairs of eyes, and two pairs of arms, and two young bodies in all the world. Finally Duke came to.

	John Russel Reading was standing with feet firmly planted, and a quite indescribably mixed expression on his face. It was largely composed of amazement and suppressed amusement.

	"Joan," he grated out. Joan snapped around, still holding onto Duke quite firmly. "Let go of him and tell me who he is."

	"Ohhh—don't you know? He's Duke Stetson," she said with a look of surprise, pride and quite obvious possession. "An' he's mine!" she added with a look of defiance. John Russel Reading was just daddy to Joan, and his air of displeasure didn't bother her in the least.

	"And I guess he's got that two hundred thousand now!"

	"He most certainly has, and I know who he is. He's a highway robber, a holdup, the meanest specimen of—"

	"Dad! He isn't. He's—"

	"He's thinking it's time we went somewhere else to hold the family fight that seems to be brewing," interrupted Stetson, glancing about at a battery of televisor machines going full blast.

	They went, in Joan's plane, the people thought. They actually slipped out, and wound up in the Reading place quite soon after.

	"Now," said Joan decisively, "what do you mean by calling him all those names?"

	With the labored patience of one who seems at the bursting point, old Reading explained what had happened at the Hotel Ganymede.

	Joan laughed uproariously when he was through. "Oh—he put it over on old Dad! You can't call him names, he just beat you at your own game—and got the two hundred thousand you told him to. Ohhhh!"

	"And since I have the two hundred thousand, I wonder if you still think that possession of dollars is a proof of good character and ability?" asked Stetson quietly, little torn pieces of paper raining down from his hands. The notes were quite permanently gone.

	"Hmmm—teaching the old man a lesson, eh? Well—you did with a vengeance. You taught him a lot of other things. I said that two hundred thousand because I wanted to have a chance to find out something about you, before you married my Joan. I thought it might hold you up for a while, instead it seems I was held up," added Reading ruefully.

	"There's something I want to ask you. Are the patents on that device for sale?"

	"They are—but you can't pay for them. Somebody else has to help you," replied Stetson.

	"Huh. Now what kind of a holdup?" demanded Reading sharply.

	"Oh, you've got to give me your daughter, and she has to say yes," grinned Stetson.

The End

The Electronic Siege
Wonder Stories – April 1932

MR. CAMPBELL'S humorous story, "The Derelicts of Ganymede," was a huge success. He shows now that he can do more serious work, with just as much skill and power as the humorous efforts. This story has many unusual aspects: it has strange adventures on another world, and a scientific theme that is audacious and yet convincing. There is a mystery to be settled on an inhabited asteroid: strange kidnapings and disappearances in space; a colony of scientific experimenters who defy the rest of humanity.

That is the background of this unusual story, which shows vividly some of the queer tricks that nature might play to upset the best laid plans of mice and men.

-

CHAPTER I

	THE dock guard looked sourly down the long, bare customs landing. A stream of famous scientists had been coming aboard the space liner Vega all afternoon. They were the greatest scientists of Earth and Venus, taking passage on the chartered liner to Mars for the Interplanetary Society for the Advancement of Science Meeting for 2374, held once each Earth year. Pale faces identified the Venusian colonist-scientists, and the lightly tanned Earth scientists, but the figure coming toward the guard now was obviously neither.

	He was a short man, perhaps five feet seven, but he seemed shorter because of the amazing girth he displayed. He must have weighed easily two hundred and seventv-five pounds, his round body mounted on chunky, blocky legs was topped by a neck so thick it was almost missing. He was equipped with a pair of stubby arms on the general plan of the legs. He waddled up on his blocky legs in a most amazing manner, puffing and blowing as ludicrously as an old steam engine of four centuries ago.

	But more amazing than his own person was the moving rainbow he represented. Pale green, silken trousers, a deep red shirt, lavender suspenders, and a deep green sash matching his shoes completed his costume. No ancient oriental potentate, even Solomon in all his glory, was not arrayed such as this.

	"Must be color-blind to like that," grunted the guard. Then he stared. Behind the man, following on a series of little self-propelled porter trucks, faithfully following the lead-set in the tat man's hand, was a pile of luggage as even this space liner guard seldom saw.

	The weighty individual was grunting something to himself as he waddled hastily along, a curious expression of indignation, worry and annoyance intermingled on his puffy-cheeked face.

	"Stupidity—rank stupidity of these public officials," he muttered. "Stupidity and red-tape. Will they never realize that it is business that supports them—yes and science too! Refusing Earth's greatest business man passage!

	"More officialdom! Pass?" he barked at the dock-guard. "Yes, I've got a pass, and the very devil of a time

	I had getting it from that idiot, Commander Morrison. Interplanetary Lane Patrol Commander he is—and doesn't recognize the rights of business above science! Yes—Ezra Markham is right. You ought to recognize me—my pictures appear over the visonews frequently enough—and you're a passport guard!"

	The grumbling multi-billionaire went toiling up the inclined gangway, the luggage trucks trailing behind like so many pet dogs.

	"Steward!" he roared as he stepped off the gangplank.

	A steward appeared immediately, dressed in his neat white uniform. He was soon followed by others, rushing to the scene of the emergency the roar seemed to indicate.

	"My suite!" demanded Markham, turning over the lead-set and his pass to the handiest one. The startled steward accepted them dumbly, looked down at them, then seemed to remember his duties.

	"Yes sir—right this way."

	"What—this tiny cubbyhole my room? My closet you mean! Here—show me a suite. Taken? Who—scientists I suppose, scientists that never had brains enough to make a nickel for themselves. Come along—Ah—this will do. Who's in here? Edgar A. Freeman—he's on my engineering staff, I believe. Well—move out his bags and put my cases in. I'm going to the lounge."

	The white-coated steward looked in blank surprise at the expansive back of the retreating Mr. Ezra Markham, scratched his head in puzzlement, and went to look up Dr. Edgar A. Freeman, inventor of half a dozen devices which had made space navigation possible on a large scale.

	Mr. Ezra Markham seated himself in the largest chair in the main lounge (the only one that would comfortably contain his bulk) and began a very expensive cigar, made of the finest imported Venusian tobacco.

	He then spent the next half hour assuring distracted stewards that the rigid "No Smoking" rules didn't apply to Mr. Ezra Markham in the least degree, and in filling the carefully filtered air of the space ship with a variety of noxious odors.

	Presently they took off. The slim, graceful ship rose smoothly into the atmosphere, angling slightly up, then driving forward as the gentle hum of mighty Farrel

	Atomics poured their millions of horsepower into the McKinley space-drive discs.

-

	MARKHAM looked at his jewel-studded wrist watch and grumbled. They were a few minutes late on the take-off. One of the stewards remarked (under his breath) that that watch must have been made so thick that more jewels might be crowded on,

	Shortly after their take-off, a slim, powerfully built man in the white and blue dress uniform of the Interplanetary Lane Patrol came over to Mr. Markham and very definitely pointed out that "No Smoking" meant a complete absence of smoking, whether it be smoke hallowed by the said Mr. Markham, or the second apprentice oiler's assistant.

	Mr. Markham put out the stub of his cigar. "I thought," said he testily, "that you men had ships of your own to go in. Since when have Lane Patrolmen been riding passenger liners?"

	The Lane Patrolman, not unnaturally proud of the reputation of the Service, replied a bit hotly. "This is a special occasion, as you should know, Mr. Markham. Two years ago a group of scientists calling themselves the Eugenics Research Colony set up an experimental colony on some undiscovered planetoid and have been experimenting on human genetics with captured subjects. Such fine men and women as are aboard this liner would be an obvious prize capture for them, and we are guarding it heavily,"

	"Humpf. And why has it been going on two years, may I ask?" retorted the disgruntled plutocrat.

	"Because there are more than five thousand known asteroids that might house that colony, and because their ships have a weapon we have not been able to duplicate—the protolectric gun," replied the officer, turning smartly and walking away. Markham chuckled. The Lane Patrolman had retired in poor order.

	The E. R. C. was a sore spot on the Lane Patrol's otherwise spotless record. Thanks to a mechanism capable of projecting twin beams of highly dangerous electrons and protons from a "gun", their ships had beaten off patrol cruisers time and again. Secret service men of the Patrol had indeed been able to get into the "Colony"—only to become unwilling subjects to this experiment with human lives. Picked men all, these men of the service, and desirable material for the Research men. Four men so far had been released after six months' imprisonment of the most heartily detested nature to return with a tale of absolute failure.

	Markham rose, and walked back to the aft-walk, a narrow corridor lined on one side with the heavy armour plate of the inner hull, and on the other by six-inch, metal-ribbed unbreakable glass. Here, where only the dimmest lights glowed, the stars and planets shone with the cold, unwinking glory of space, and the sun of space poured down its bluish light in blinding glory.

	Behind them now the greater and lesser globes of Earth and Moon were circling in slow majesty, yet from this million mile distance they seemed, and the whole solar system seemed, more as some marvelously ingenious planetarium where unseen supports and unseen wheels drove these visible models of worlds. It seemed impossible they could be real, that Earth with its billions and Moon with its millions of inhabitants were real worlds.

	Silently the stocky man watched out into the night. Dimly his eyes made out the dark, torpedo shape of another ship, a Lane Cruiser, some fifty miles astern, and another off to the side. Fifty-man cruisers each one, equipped with the latest devices of offense and defense—but would they be able to drive off the E.R.C. ships?

	The dim figure started as he observed the slow blotting out of stars in the Milky Way. Another ship!

	Simultaneously there came the soft hum of an alarm signal from within the ship. A moment later the swift tramp of steps, and then a start—a surge of power, and the acceleration that had been held at a comfortable 32 feet per second, Earth normal, was drawn swiftly up to three normal, the highest acceleration a passenger ship could safely stand.

	The stocky man, now under a weight of fully eight hundred and twenty-five pounds, should by all rights have lain down at once. Instead his frame seemed to stiffen, the outlines of his body subtly changed, and he glanced along the deserted companion-way hurriedly assuring himself no other was in sight. Then—instead of the infinitely laborious crawl to be expected under nearly half a ton of weight, he walked easily with firm, lithe strides to a sheltered nook behind a great beam. He waited there quietly on his feet! Now there was an amused smile on his face, and the puffiness seemed somehow gone, more an appearance of swelling prevailed. His grey eyes seemed flashing with interest, his shoulders had lost their slough, and had come back squarely.

-

	THE Patrol cruisers were dropping swiftly astern, turning to meet the rapidly approaching sphere ship that was swimming nearer in space. It was maneuvering that the line of the enemy's approach would not bring him directly between them.

	Faint halos began to form about the cruisers, and now about the passenger liner. They were the faint halos of magnetic and induction screens that would stop any shell, or any induction ray before it reached the ship. But unfortunately not the twin beams!

	Eyes alert, the man watched the sphere come sharply near the two cruisers—a sudden flash, and it was bathed in flaring, shimmering light, warring energy as its powerful screen battled the rays of the Patrol ships.

	Two streams of nearly invisible fire reached out in lines as straight as a linear equation toward the two Patrol cruisers. Each was in reality a twin beam, and each was potentially deadly. They snapped out in absolute lines—till they hit the magnetic fields about the patrol ships, then they bent sharply as their electric charges were deflected by the field. Presently they moved swiftly, shifting till the deflection of the field no longer carried them past the ships. Then—a single flash of livid flame, a bursting puff of enveloping fire—and one Patrol ship was punctured, its atmosphere glowing brilliantly under the terrific electronic bombardment.

	The Patrol ship, perforce, veered off and soon the second ship came in for a like dose. Again—again they were driven off. It was obvious that the sphere ship did not want to destroy them, merely to cripple them.

	Finally each beam split in two, and they wavered and waved weirdly as the ships strove valiantly with their magnetic fields, attempting to divert them sufficiently. Meanwhile a constant terrific bombardment of induction rays was driving at the sphere, its screen flaring vividly.

	The two separate beams found their mark, the Patrol ship seemed to glow all over its surface, and instantly every ray, every screen went dead. A moment later, the second Patrol ship went dead.

	The stocky man cursed softly. He turned, and as the ship lurched slightly to a still greater acceleration, nearly three and a half gravities, in its hopeless attempt to flee, he ran lightly down the companionway, slowing to a walk as he reached the bulkhead door. Then his body seemed to slump, once more his powerful shoulders sagged, and he crawled heavily into the lounge. The other passengers were struggling on hands and knees, or flat on their stomachs, slowly moving along. Finally he fell forward and lay motionless.

	Through a great, curving port he could still see the sphere climbing up behind them, rapidly overhauling them. Suddenly two beams of fire were reaching out for their ship—two great beams that bent sharply as they struck the Vegas magnetic meteor-shield. Careful manipulation—and Ezra Markham started violently, his muscles contracting, while every sharp bit of metal in the room gave off fans of blue electric fire.

	At that same instant every man on the ship fell senseless under the powerful shock transmitted to them. Like the Patrol cruisers, the lifeless, defenseless ship careened on through space, her acceleration dropping immediately to Earth normal as automatic machines took up the unconscious pilot's duties.

	A dozen men in silver-grey uniforms were standing about the room when Markham regained consciousness. One of them was bending over him, peering with surprised interest at his magnificent display of coal-tar dyes.

	"Who," demanded the E.R.C. man with interest, "are you?"

	"Ezra Markham," answered the prostrate man sitting up, "Who are you?"

	... The lean, tanned face split in a grin. "Tod Morley. not that it makes any difference. And so you're Ezra Markham. Well, well. From the looks of you I should say your type wasn't wanted on our colony. But—it is an experiment for the benefit of the human race, and we feel sure that a man as you would want to contribute to its success—say a million or two. In the meantime—just move over to that corner." A ray pistol in his hand swung on Markham, and the twin rays leaped out. The animate rainbow gave a yell of surprise and pain, and scrambled to his feet with an activity surprising in one so stout. With the inducement of the pistol he was herded hurriedly to the indicated corner.

-

CHAPTER II - An Artificial World

	IN the center of the lounge all the scientists were grouped with the captured crew and the I. L. Patrolmen, helplessly hedged in by a barrier of brightly luminous blue-green rays. Professional looking men in simple uniforms were going among them, pointing out one here or there, who was immediately singled out and put in a second, smaller group. Now Markham was marched up, and the entire group efficiently escorted to the communication lock, where a long, flexible tube between the ships permitted them to go from the passenger liner to the space ship without space suits. Twice prisoners rebelled, to be instantly and efficiently paralyzed with a beam from a pistol. In a few seconds the rebellious ones regained consciousness and were able to go on.

	The rest of the trip they enjoyed from several small ports. The entire group was penned in a small prison locker with a few guards to watch them. After some six hours of travel, during which the space liner had been left helplessly behind, and the two Patrol cruisers lost in the blackness of space, one of the men in charge came down and gave them a brief lecture on the experiment in which they were soon to take an unwilling part.

	It was nearly twenty-four hours later that they finally approached their destination, a tiny, five-mile world of solid metal, a part of the nickel-steel core of some long vanished planet. Its surface turned swiftly beneath them, flashing around in moments as they watched, a surface made up of great crags and clefts of metal, broken, barren masses of metal.

	"Lord—it would be impossible to establish a city on the surface of that top!" exclaimed one of the Patrolmen. "The centrifugal spin there would throw anything off into space." 

	"How about the inside of it then?" asked one of the guards, smiling at him.

	"Inside? Is it inside?" asked Markham in alarmed surprise. "Is it always dark?"

	The guard laughed and pointed toward a huge cliff of solid metal. "See that—now it's turned by—but that's where we go in. Even from here, what with that fast rotation, you can't see the entrance. See—the ship's going into an orbit about it, picking up to landing speed, trying to move at the same speed as the ground. When the colony was established, the whole interior was carved out with atomic burners—burned the stuff out into gas, and let it escape. The shell's about half a mile thick. Inside, the centrifugal force gives an acceleration just equal to one earth gravity, we're up to speed, and you can see we have about an earth-weight away from it now. And an artificial sun gives plenty of light."

	Indeed, as he spoke, they saw the planetoid consistently above them, and now spinning very, very slowly while the heavens gyrated swiftly about. The sun was flashing in and out of the windows in Bewildering streaks of light.

	Before them the great metal cliff loomed suddenly.

	Then they saw a huge black gulf under the glare of the spotlights that lighted it during the momentary "nights" of this spinning world.

	Into the great tunnel they sank, and the moment they were within it all sense of spin, of rotation, ceased instantly. It seemed they were following some vast tunnel on Earth, where smooth walls of shining metal reflected their spotlights from crystalline metal surfaces.

	Far ahead the light was swallowed in blackness. The ship shot straight on, till gradually a curving wall that bent upward appeared, and around the bend the ship sailed. Then a short upward channel and another long level stretch. Light here now, and the spotlights blinked out. The walls were strung with long, thin daylight gas-glow tubes, and far ahead a ring of such tubes surrounded a gigantic metal door, a huge thing that plugged all the great tube.

	As they approached, it swung open its sections, lay back along the channel, and closed behind them as the ship came to a halt. Ahead was a similar metal door, and now as the rear door shut there was a terrific shrieking roar as air pounded into the lock, the inner door was opening. Now the tube ahead was ablaze with lights, a short horizontal stretch, then an abrupt rise of several hundred feet—and they had entered their weird artificial world.

	In amazed wonder the captives stared out of their ports. Outside the metal ground curved gradually up and away till it arched in a mighty curve far above their heads. The metal here was smooth, obviously fused that the world might be air-tight, free of cracks. Plants, grass, a few trees grew about them, and even above them. And yet there was no more sense of motion here than on Earth, though this world spun far faster.

	Directly "above" them was the sun. A huge sphere it was, glowing with the brilliant daylight gas-glow, and beside it was a second great sphere, but glowing with the weird blue-green of mercury vapor.

	The rays from this sun were rich in ultra-violet, and they were warming, supplying heat and light to this inner world as does our own sun to the earth.

-

	STREETS—metal pavements on which ran swift, streamlined cars equipped with rubber tires. Planes were unknown here, unmanageable in the tricky air currents and the tricky acceleration effects of centrifugal force. Off to the left of the tunnel entrance was a low, squat building built, as all these buildings of this world, of solid nickel-steel, high grade armour plate. The world itself was a gigantic lump of armour plate.

	"Power-house," grunted the patrolman. Its aerials, beam projectors and leads told in an instant what its purpose was. Even now a faint, nearly invisible beam could be seen reaching up through the atmosphere to the artificial sun.

	Off to the right, half a mile away, lay a group of buildings; and now the captives were driven toward them, A pair of guards were given the special duty of escorting Mr. Markham to his private room. He was not to be used in the experiments, but held for ransom, and as such was lead to the tower rooms, instead of the regular "quarters" as were the others.

	Half an hour later Mr. Ezra Markham was complaining volubly. He had been put in a room, a bare metal room, containing only a table, a chair and a bed.

	Could he have a pillow-case? He never could sleep without a pillow-case, he had grown so accustomed to one, and it should be silk. And a rug? The metal floor was so cold on his feet. And hot water to shave with? And did they turn out the sun at night? When was night?

	The guard on his floor brought the pillow-case, soon discovered his mistake, and ceased to bring other things. The fat and worried Mr. Markham had an insatiable desire for comfort, and had complained bitterly at the tough, linen pillow-slip.

	The guard, in self defense, assured him there was a night, that it was two hours distant, it lasted twelve hours, and that the stars could not be seen through half a mile of metal. But, he added, the room lights of the buildings across the world looked like stars.

	Then, quite fatigued, he retired permanently to the guard on the floor below, out of range of Mr. Mark-ham's querulous voice.

	True to the promise, night closed in with the extinguishing of the "artificial sun."

	Mr. Markham had spent the evening gazing out of his narrow, barred window. He was about fifty feet above the ground, and directly beneath his window was a rose bed, growing in imported soil. Beyond that was a path, and then a broad, soft lawn which stretched out some distance to join finally with the sweeping metal ground of this world.

	As the great spheres sputtered into darkness, a slow, firm smile spread across the man's face. He turned from the window. Now again those wide shoulders were firmly back. His head rested squarely on the short, powerful neck held boldly erect, an air of ease and enormous agility in his walk. A lightness, almost restraint was in his step.

	His hands were working at his face, and in moments bits of wax were taken from his mouth. He worked swiftly at the washstand a moment removing the last traces of the bothersome face coloring, to reveal a lean, tanned face, almost black from the constant exposure to the unshielded sun of space. Next, cumbersome, heavy shoes were removed and the flapping, gaudy clothes. Finally he stood clothed only in a dark, elastic suit, a pair of soft-soled rubber shoes and the dark-green sash and the lavender suspenders, as well as the wrist-watch.

	But now with the floppy garments removed any modern man would have recognized his type instantly. The heavy, blocky legs; the short, squat body, tremendously broad of shoulder and deep of chest; the rather long, powerful arms were all typical of the Jovian colonist, Humans who had spent their lives on that huge, heavy planet developed just such blocky legs and heavy arms—and, more, the tremendous speed of motion and agility the burdensome gravity necessitated. Since Jupiter's gravity was two and a half times Earth's, it was now plain why the acceleration of the ship had not bothered him—scarcely more than polar gravity of Jupiter!

	His grey eyes were alight with amusement as he thought of the guard his volubility had driven below. Now Donald Barclay, crack lieutenant of the Interplanetary Lane Patrol was safely barred in a room fifty feet above the metal ground in a solid metal building.

	Ready now, he strode lightly to the window, and settled his hands firmly on two of the inch-thick steel bars set in sockets, that barred his window. Silently he began to strain, and great muscle sheaths stood out across his back and shoulders. One bar began to bend in, and the other out, and finally he lifted the two bars from their sockets. A moment later he had two more.

-

	HE lay the bars neatly on his bed, and stepped to the window. He stepped across the sill, lowered himself to arm's length outside, then jumped out as far as he could as he let go.

	Now the fifty-foot fall would be fairly certain death to most humans. But to a trained Jovian it meant merely a thorough shaking up. Barclay landed heavily but correctly, and in a moment he was on his feet once more, running across the lawn in long, light strides.

	But a guard had heard the heavy thump of his landing, and come out to investigate. And despite the dim light from buildings, he saw the shadowy figure running across the lawn and fired at it. The twin fires of his beams immediately revealed him more clearly. A second flash—the man stumbled—then was suddenly leaping in wild, bouncing flight. The guard stood dumbfounded as he saw the man jump about like a rubber ball—twenty feet into the air—thirty feet in a long leap so swift he could not possibly track it with his beams. The beams were working once more—and the man was running toward him! Now his beam must sweep wider on each of those insanely incredible bounces—

	Other guards were coming at his shout—a half dozen of them—and in that instant the shadowy figure was gone!

	The others gathered excitedly about him—where—how—what?

	None of them even saw the shadow bounce out of a deeper shadow of a rose-bush. He was just suddenly among them, landing in their midst, apparently falling from the other side of the tiny world. And from some other world he was indeed! Half a dozen places at once, bouncing among them, staying among them so they could not beam him, handling the men like children, till in ten seconds they lay stretched out on the metal path and the lawn.

	Then Barclay stooped over them an instant, straightened—and was away. But now he. carried four of those ray pistols stuck in the deep green sash.

	More guards were coming, but they ran to the crumpled bodies. While they strove vainly to wake the men the Jovian had put out, Barclay disappeared in the dimness.

	But the alarm was out before he had made half the distance to the power-house—his goal. Would he reach it to hide nearby before the guard there could establish their cordon?

	Above the soft thud of his leaping feet he could hear the cries of excited men. Lights were beginning to flash on here and there about the ground of the power-house, shadowy men were running about.

	The power-house loomed low, squat before him, a crouching mass against the surrounding darkness. The tiny slits of the windows here and there showed bright streaks, save where the thirty-foot wall about the buildings masked its lower half. The building was enormous—the power plant of a world of science!

	Suddenly there was a warning sputter of light about him, like some diffused lightning—the great artificial sun was waking to life as cold tubes were warmed by rapidly warming generators.

	Two—one—he was beside the ten-foot thick wall of solid metal that surrounded the power-house. He tensed his muscles, walked back a way limbering once more, then—up-up-up he sailed, his powerful arms outstretched. With a sigh of relief he grasped the edge of the wall and snapped his body over, dropping on the other side to a tree-spotted lawn. Almost simultaneously with his soft landing the great artificial sun came into dim, flickering life. Shouting, calling men were racing across the lawn toward their posts, looking here and there hurriedly—for none would suspect the runaway could have reached this wall and crossed so quickly.

	Darting across the lawn, taking advantage of every bit of cover and blessing that winking, sputtering cold light, Don made for the power-house wall.

	Then—he was there. His plan was made already. He had seen the enormous steel grille-work door, protected by heavy protolectric guns and knew he would never be able to enter there. He leaped—his fingers caught in a window-frame twenty feet above him. Then his powerful arms snapped him up against the light, Earth gravity to the next window-slit. Like some weird fly he went up the wall in jumps and spurts. Just shy of the low parapet wall of the roof he listened for a moment. To his ears came mingled, muffled cries—the calls of guards below, the stamp of feet, the dull whirr and hum of huge Farrel atomic generators within the power-house's ten-foot metal walls.

	But from the roof—no sound. In an instant he was over, and hidden from the rapidly strengthening light of the artificial sun. He started as a muffled, rapidly increasing thump sounded behind him. A snap, a creak, and a trap-door in the roof opened. Barclay dived suddenly for one of the tiny booths at the side of the broad roof. Inside he found the controls of one of the high-power protolectric defense guns.

	An instant's observation confirmed his belief—these guns were supplied by the great generators in the powerhouse itself.

	"Clever," he muttered, "if they are captured, they can't be turned against the plant, and nothing smaller could phase these walls."

-

CHAPTER III - In Control

	HE turned now, and saw a score of men on the roof, rapidly heading for the different booths, armoured like his with four-foot steel walls. He drew two of the protolectric pistols, adjusted them quickly for minimum power, and swept their brilliant beams quickly over the men. One after another suddenly jerked to rigidity, then slumped helplessly paralyzed. Before the first had reached the ground, the last was falling.

	Barclay turned now to the powerful gun he had captured, and quickly spun it on the ship that had brought them—the only machine on this world powerful enough to break open the power-house.

	Two enormous brilliant pipes of blue-green fire leaped out and spattered against the ship. Instantly it was wreathed with an aura of shooting flame from the waste energy of the beams. The four-foot armour of the ship was glowing white-hot in a fraction of a second. In a second it was bellying out in gusts of flaming gas; in five seconds a great hole was gaping in the ship's wall, and already the beams were at work on the great generators of the ship.

	Taken by surprise, no effective defense was made till the last moment. Then two great beams shot from the ship, still spread as they had been to disable the Vega, and they struck the power-house wall. Instantly, as Barclay saw them swing toward him, he released the controls he had held, leaped to the middle of his tiny booth and stood on his toes. As he had expected there came the flaring corona about every sharp point of metal, the numbing, tingling shock as the current raced through the great building as it had raced through the great passenger liner—and every man in that building was helpless! Paralyzed as the passengers and crew of the Vega had been.

	But Barclay had been as far as possible from any metal object. His feet were encased in heavy rubber shoes, and his contact had been so poor that in the instant the ship's beams operated before, his own locked controls had driven their beam through the ship's generators, destroying them and extinguishing the rays. Yet he had not fallen.

	For a moment he was numb, his muscles responded poorly, and his motions were jerky. But then he was himself again, and in a moment snapped that beam off. The ship was helpless.

	He turned, stooped low, and ran along the parapet wall till he could dive across the intervening space to the trap. In it he went, diving down before any beams could reach him.

	He caught a handrail, gripped and steadied himself, and came down the stairway in great leaps. Around him was the shrill whine of huge atomic generators, the dull hum of transformers, the whistle of converters, and the steady thunk-thunk-thunk of the huge air-purifiers that supplied this world with air. Before him, massed around the room's high walls, were the great switchboards, a maze of hopelessly confused signs, meters, wiring and giant switches.

	One he spotted directly before him, inch-high letters cried out their message of emergency. "Gates."

	"Ah—," Barclay grinned. "How helpful." He pulled the switch below the sign. Instantly there was a shrill, rising hum of powerful motors throughout the building. A moment later came the heavy, ringing clangor as huge gates were shut. The motors stopped automatically, the great ten-foot thick metal slabs in place.

	He turned his attention now to the men who lay sprawled about on the floor, their arms and legs spread helplessly as the paralyzing electric current caught them. "How kind of that ship," muttered Barclay, catching up one man in each hand and starting for the lockers. "I never expected a break like that." In five minutes he had the entire crew in the locker room, stripped of weapons, and was ready to give a last look about the room. Then the easily recognized snap and sputter of a beam in action called him. The great main door was being attacked, and already glowed a dull red!

	He slammed shut the heavy locker-room door, and ran for the emergency switchboard. He felt sure the outside gun circuits would be controlled here. They were—and just as the inner side of the heavy door began to melt down, the ray was suddenly snapped off as all power was cut from it.

	"Whew—that was a bit too close. I'd better make sure of these other things first!" thought Barclay grimly, looking at the heavy door. They'd have to be cut open now—they were welded shut.

	Next he investigated the locker-room door, to make certain he wouldn't be attacked. He decided to weld it shut, as the safest way. His hand pistols did that quite quickly. "Now I wonder—they might have a secret, external gate-opening switch.

	"If they did—well they won't be able to use it in a little while." Rapidly he dug some metal bars and with his hand pistols welded them solidly across the various gates. He himself could not open them now without first cutting those bars, and that could be done only from the inside.

	"Now to give them a little misery!" he smiled as he walked over to the switchboards again. He quickly in-vestigated the various main switchboards, and in ten minutes had unearthed enough information for his purpose. First, the artificial sun was extinguished. Their every power circuit leading out of the plant was cut, save the electromagnetic circuits that held the mass of the artificial sun in place. They wouldn't dare to cut that for power, to do so would bring down the huge spheres of their sun.

-

	OUTSIDE he could hear the mutter and roar of the guards over the hum of the generators. From the locker-room came pounding and roars of rage, the mutter of angry voices.

	Barclay grinned, and went up a short flight of stairs to the radio room. He took off his lavender suspenders and the green sash, then he unrolled the sash. In it were a number of lengths of a greenish metal tape. From the suspenders came a number of strands of greenish metal wire. He quickly connected the tapes and the wires together in a very definite plan. Finally, from the heavy buckle of the sash, he extracted a tiny atomic generator, capable of generating several hundred horsepower. Next he took off the thick wrist-watch the stewards of the ship had remarked on, and began prying out several of the gems, as well as the face of the watch. Into the gem-sockets he inserted several leads from the atomic generator and from the greenish metal tapes.

	At last he was ready. He now had set up, with the aid of the watch and atomic generator, a very serviceable, highly accurate gravitometer, based on the same principle of space fields as the McKinley space-discs. He proceeded to measure the gravitational fields of Jupiter and the sun, and get their angles.

	Finally he set down his data on a slip of paper, gathered his apparatus together and sat down at the huge radio set. In a minute and a half he had the complex apparatus tuned correctly, and ready for transmission.

	"Lieutenant Donald Barclay I.L.P. calling Commander Morrison," he repeated four times before his answer came. The receiving disc on his set suddenly glowed with flashing colors, and the image of his Commander appeared before him.

	"Inside the planetoid G.C. 2759-h according to my gravitometer readings on sun and Jupiter as follows—J-2 53-45, 51 and S-747 -54.49. At present control power-house. Probably not long—come at once and you may be let in. Lock controls here. If necessary break in, the people will all be killed, but you can bring 'em to life again in ninety percent of the cases anyway—I'll take my chance.

	"Data on protolectric gun—," Barclay talked rapidly, telling everything he could about the protolectric gun which he had dis-assembled. Morrison would be here with a dozen Patrol ships in three hours now.

	Don went down to the power room. He threaded his way through great masses of high-piled apparatus, great hulking bulks that loomed like weird monsters above him, and purred and growled softly to themselves. The lone-tiny figure of the man strode on through the dim-lighted room.

	In his ears echoed the eery music of the great generators humming about him, the sullen mutter of the crowd of men outside, and the mirthless, sodden chuckle of the great air apparatus. Barclay shivered—and wondered.

	With sudden resolution he strode hastily to the lock controls. He drew down the outer lock control to the open position and watched the meter connected to it. Nothing happened. As he had feared, they had an over-control at the locks themselves. That meant that Morrison would have to blast his way in with the slow, atomic disintegrators, boring a shaft through the solid metal by transmuting the metal to some gas that would escape into space. Perhaps as much as a foot a minute—but they'd get there. Then all the air would vanish, and in the twinkling of an eye this would be a frozen, solid world, and every human in it would be a solid, frozen corpse. If they froze quickly enough the doctors would bring them to life again later, but if freezing was too slow, permanent death.

	The rumbling noises in this reverberating place was working on even Barclay's iron nerves. Finally he returned to the wireless room and listened to the conversation of the various Patrol ships, even called to Morrison to say he could not work the locks.

	He crept out on the roof, once each half hour, and looked carefully down. No signs of any disintegrators, they had no mines here, and no portable disintegrators that could eat through the metal walls.

	He was sitting quietly, tensely listening to the banter of one patrol to another so he did not see the thing behind him, nor hear the slight swish as a long sharp knife drove through the supposedly solid three-foot wall at his back. The long slim blade came with the faintest rustle, then a slow swish as it cleaved down the length of a man through the armour-plate wall. A blue-clad arm came through, and opened the slit a bit for a face to peer in. Then, with a rush, a man leaped through the paper-thin metal wall and charged across the room. Behind him came another and another!

	Barclay was up, and whirled about in an instant, his taut muscles delighting suddenly in the thrill of action against the solid bodies, instead of the phantoms that had been oppressing his waiting mind. The solid thud of fist on flesh, the heave and wrench that tore the long knife from his attacker's arm, the sudden jerk that threw him headlong down the stair. Then he was bouncing about the room like an animated rubber ball, moving with a speed impossible to these slow terrestrials.

-

	BUT more came—and more! In seconds the room was so crowded he could not dodge, and it was only a question of wrestling, and sheer brute strength—and time. Barclay fought with the strength of five—but there were nearer five score against him. Eventually a stout wooden piece connected with his skull, and he went down.

	He came to consciousness in a corner of the room, his wrists and ankles securely bound with wire. Directly before him were the radio-places, with their operators.

	"All ships called in for immediate defense against I.L.P. Secret agent escaped in planet and called Patrol. All speed required. Beware Patrol ships on nearing," droned one after another as he picked up one of the nearly two-score E.R.C. ships.

	That would not be so good, decided Barclay. He had to do something more.

	He turned, looking about for some means of escape. The wire on his wrists was far too strong to break, even though no one was watching him directly.

	He could see the wall that had been his downfall now, it had been hollowed out to a mere shell by the work of a disintegrator. He had locked those men in there with a disintegrator! He hadn't had a chance to search the room, and they had simply set it up and cautiously run a hole through the wall, masked by the noise of the generators.

	They hadn't given him any disintegrator, that was obvious. And they had very thoroughly searched him now. He looked about at the hard, smooth floor, and the hard, smooth walls, and the equally hard weld that joined them. His eyes lighted in sudden triumph—for that was not smooth! It was merely puddled metal, with the usual slightly rough surface—than which no more perfect file could be imagined!

	Barclay started to work, writhing and complaining. "These wires are cutting off circulation—don't have to pull 'em so tight! I even left you a disintegrator, you might at least keep these from cuttin' my wrists off," he grunted. He moved his body about, trying to ease them.

	He gave a little louder grunt—to cover the low snap as the weakened wire broke. He had filed it half through (and felt sure his wrist was half filed through too), but now he was able to work on his ankle wires.

	It was nearly a quarter of an hour before he had loosened the stiff, tough wire. Cautiously he wriggled his feet into position.

	Then, like some mechanical leaping toy, he was on his feet, and before the dozen or so men in the room could move to stop him he was rushing for the stair head. A man leaped in his path—and flew head over heels backward as a terrific fist caught him on the chest, while a hand like a striking snake's head plucked free his ray pistol.

	Barclay leaped—he didn't trouble to use the stair to descend the thirty feet to the floor below. He leaped and darted at once to the great switchboard, running along it while the startled cries of men drowned out the powerful hum of the generators. Running feet behind him—before him—at his side, shouted orders to fire, and cautions to hold fire. He was running in front of irreplaceable control panels, where a ray would mean instant destruction to the planet as the giant powers of the generators would be released explosively.

	Men appeared before him like phantoms, and like phantoms disappeared as he seemed to brush them aside. His mind was concentrated on one objective. He found it—pulled a switch. The power-house was suddenly black as every light snapped out.

	Instantly his carefully mapped course swung. With a series of leaps he was hidden behind a huge mass of apparatus before the next man could restore the switch, and the daylight tubes came on again.

	Barclay was hidden amongst the great mass of apparatus that fed the power to the defense stations on the outer surface of the planet, the huge snaking cables of the protolectric guns. They had to search for him, and they couldn't use their rays, it was too dangerous. But then, neither could Barclay, so they came in after him. It took ten minutes to dislodge him. The men that came after him were promptly and quietly put out of business for half an hour or so. Finally one man coming around one way attracted Barclay's attention, and he was reaching up for him, when an unseen opponent with a ray pistol brought it down on the back of his head.

-

CHAPTER IV - Approaching Death!

	WHEN he regained consciousness this time he was again in the control room, the radio places fully occupied, but he was accorded the honor of a private guard.

	"Hmm—what are you, guard of honor?" he asked, smiling at the lean, well-built man watching him.

	"Cross hairs," affirmed the latter with a smile. "The way you handle your fists deserves honor, we felt. How'd you saw those wires?"

	"Do a better welding job next time and it won't happen," laughed Barclay, pointing to the shiny spot on the wall with his head. "How long have I been dreaming?"

	"Long enough for the Patrol to come in sight. Morrison has been in communication with Commander Rogers there, and demanded surrender. Rogers invited him in—if he could make it. Our ships haven't showed up yet, but the outside stations are preparing a warm welcome for the Patrol."

	Barclay smiled to himself. "Are they? What weapons?"

	"You ought to know—protolectric guns, that's the only power leads you saw wasn't it?"

	"Why so centralize your power?" asked the Patrolman.

	"Several million dollars cheaper," replied the guard. 

	"Might have been several lives cheaper no to do so, though."

	The guard looked at Barclay sharply. "Why?"

	Barclay was starting at the screens on which were depicted the heavens as seen from the outer surface. Stars, planets and the sun were wheeling madly across the sky as the tiny world spun on its axis. On the flashing screens though, Barclay could detect, the long, golden form of the Patrol cruisers coming in massed formation. They spread out now as they neared, circling down at thousands of miles an hour.

	"Ray station 21-B when in position will fire. As others come into position join action," came the low firm voice of Commander Rogers of the E.R.G. forces.

	"To ships," he continued. "Come with all speed, now attacked by I.L.P."

	Suddenly station 21-B, as seen on the screen representing that station, sprang into activity. The great twin barrel of the proto-gun swung on its support, then was suddenly clamped to the gyroscopic rest that would hold it aimed at any one point in the rapidly moving heavens. The patrol cruisers came into view on the eastern horizon—and the gun snapped into action. Instantly one of the barrels glowed with the intense ionization—but the other did not react!

	"21-B drawing only negative, sir!" sang out the alarmed voice of the meter-man covering that station. Already the next station was in action, as the Patrol came over its horizon. In moments half a dozen stations were in action—and in every one but one barrel was working—the negative barrel!

	One short day was over, every station out there was already in operation, and the Patrol ships were already glowing dull red on the outer hull from the impact of fast flying electrons. They retreated hastily to a safer distance.

	"21-B reports its apparatus will not shut off!" came the alarmed voice of that station's representative.

	"Station 20 reports similar trouble, also drawing only negative!" One after another the reports came in. The men turned in astounded wonder to Commander Rogers. He was looking at Barclay.

	"As I said, it might have saved several lives to have spent a few millions for decentralized power. As it is, those stations are projecting electrons away from the planet at an enormous rate, and with tremendous velocity, leaving the planet heavily charged positively. Now—"

	"Generator stopping apparatus hopelessly wrecked, sir!" reported an attendant from below!

	"—since the generators can't be stopped, and couldn't be started again if they could," continued Barclay, as though explaining some abstruse theory, "the charge will continue to build up. The stopping apparatus will be completely repaired in half an hour, but the starting voltages and currents will not be available. To stop the generators means the air apparatus would stop, and we'd suffocate in about an hour."

	As he spoke, a faint aura was building up about the pointed metallic objects in the room. It was rapidly increasing, spreading fan-wise from every point. Commander Rogers was looking steadily at him.

	"May I suggest, Commander Roberts, that you warn your ships to avoid the planetoid—they'll be attracted, caught in the electric field, and crushed," continued Barclay. "Also, these bonds are most uncomfortable."

	"NO!" roared Rogers. "We won't warn those ships away—they could start the generators for us if they get here—and they will!"

	"That's just it, if they get anywhere near—they can't help coming here—much too promptly for their good," replied Barclay seriously. He was enjoying himself.

-

	THE patrol cruisers had retreated to a considerable distance. The electric field produced by the tremendously powerful atomic generators was already dangerous, and growing momentarily. Pieces of paper were beginning to act weirdly under the influence of the tremendous fields that already existed. A howling, shrieking wind was building up, and air currents in the room were carrying the impalpable dust into the air, the men began to cough and sneeze. The radio set was functioning poorly, the capacitances tremendously disturbed.

	A lightning storm was building up outside the powerhouse, and terrific, reverberating thunder roared through this miniature iron world, echoing and re-echoing in the closed space. Even the men in the room felt the effects, they were noticeably repelled from the walls, even the floor repelled them. The field was building up with tremendous speed.

	"And," Barclay reminded Commander Rogers, "the men had better stay away from the generators. Their negative terminals are the only source of electrons on this planet. The voltage will build up to maximum the generators can afford, about 100,000,000 volts isn't it? And then it will remain constant."

	Men were already at work on the wrecked stopping apparatus, the huge shunts that could turn the generator coils and their enormous currents into a short-circuit. This would give a polarity reverse kick, halting the disintegration of the atoms. Barclay had fused the apparatus with his pistol. Already the field growth rate was lessening. The fans of cold fire from every point were lessening, the thunder was gradually diminishing, the generators were working against a greatly increased voltage now.

	"Ship 29 reporting—hundred thousand miles to come," reported one of the operators.

	"Warn him off—or he'll be wrecked," suggested Barclay.

	"Order him on with all speed!" roared Rogers. "And YOU—shut up!"

	In five minutes the sphere ship was visible as a dot on the screen, rapidly approaching. It seemed to grow with lightning rapidity. "The fool should slow down!" muttered Rogers.

	"Ship 29 reports some difficulty—McKinley discs fail to function properly, and he can't slow down."

	"If he hits this world, you're going to see a lightning display you never saw the like of before," pointed out Barclay.

	The ship was flashing toward them with ever greater speed. It was turning now, struggling to bend its course around the planetoid, but already the great ship was in the clutches of the field. It flashed on, seemed about to skim the surface of the planetoid—

	Then they could detect a movement of the entire world! Slight—but enough. The ship collided with a mountain of solid nickel-steel. Instantly there was an enormous blaze of incandescent gas—and then there was neither mountain nor ship—just a spout of gas hurling itself off into space! It shot away from the planetoid as swiftly as the ship had come.

	The tiny world seemed to tremble under the concussion of the blow, and then every man felt a sudden swift tingling through him as the electricity stored in his body rushed from it, as it was rushing from his world. And now there broke out the lightning Barclay had prophesied. Terrific stabbing flames reached down out of the atmosphere, snatched at the buildings at every high point. The proto-gun booth outside the window was suddenly wreathed in flame. Then, when the flame was gone, the proto-gun booth with its four-foot steel armour was slumped molten over the wall, like some tired thing. The terrific crashing of the thunder was deafening.

	For fully thirty seconds it lasted. Then again it was quiet.

	"Better warn the rest of the ships," said Barclay in the hush that followed.

	"Ship Fourteen reports powerful electric disturbances from a distance of ten thousand miles."

	"Tell ship Fourteen to use no deceleration, and a strong acceleration to one side—she might make an orbit yet. Don't be stubborn, Commander Rogers—there are men on that ship," pleaded Barclay.

	"Tell her to circle," said Rogers softly, his voice choking.

	The field was increasing no more. Men found their repulsion was so great now that they could not touch the walls of the room, save with considerable effort. With a little jump they could rise feet into the air. It was interesting—but deadly.

	"Stopping apparatus repaired, sir," reported a stained mechanic, thrusting his head above the stair-level.

	"Asteroid N. G. C. 469 turning in her orbit, approaching us!" called an excited observer. "She's glowing red hot now from the effects of our beams."

	"How big?" asked Barclay sharply.

	"Quarter of a million tons—metallic," replied his guard.

-

	"TELL Fourteen to lead her—his ship will attract it, and get it in an orbit—if it hits the planet will burst!" Barclay's voice was worried for the first time. "Damn—didn't think of that," he muttered.

	"Do it," said Rogers, his voice choked again. "Release the prisoner," he added.

	Barclay watched with intense interest. "Call Morrison, ask him to help!" he called. The lone ship was not turning the planetoid enough. "And you might offer to surrender for medical malpractice and use of humans for experimental purpose," he added.

	The huge chunk of metal was falling toward them, faster and faster. The lone ship was turning it—gradually, ever so gradually. It could never make it.

	Suddenly the Patrol cruisers saw the danger, and they too added their efforts.

	The men watched the screens in tense silence. Would that great mass of solid metal strike—or pass? Already the lightnings were playing again, and their roar and rumble came to them over the panic shouts and cries of fear from the people gathered outside. Guards and captives alike were running madly about, streams of humans converging on the great locks that might let them away from this mad world.

	Slowly, slowly the great mass was turning, but swiftly, very very swiftly it was coming nearer.

	"She'll pass!" cried one, "She'll skim over that peak there—sure!"

	"Can't! That's a quarter of a million tons of steel, and only those tiny ships working at it—but they may be able to bring us back!" retorted another gloomily. Most were silent, just watching that struggle of tiny ships and mighty masses and terrific electric fields.

	Then—it was over! The enormous boulder of metal skimmed less than fifty feet above a high-rising pinnacle of steel, so close that but for the absolute lack of atmosphere, there must surely have been a flaring arc that would have carried all to death.

	The lightnings were fading now, their rumbling thunders diminishing.

	"That's past now, Commander Rogers—but others, and others will come. Commander Morrison has your twin-ray guns, and he can charge his ship similarly, and approach your entrance there without danger—it won't take long to remove the field then."

	Commander Rogers seemed to slump, then he turned to the radio men. "Tell Morrison," he ordered in a low voice, "his men are too good for us. We will surrender to a charge of medical malpractice and use of humans for experiments. We have taken no lives."

The End

The Last Evolution
Amazing Stories – August 1932

It must be the dream of countless numbers to reach the acme of evolution—which, quite likely, would bring with it nearly everlasting life and remarkable progress—but how many, we wonder, would be willing to forego their human weaknesses to attain the highest state as it is vividly portrayed by our young author, marvelous as such a degree of evolution unquestionably is?

-

	I am the last of my type existing today in all the Solar System. I, too, am the last existing who, in memory, sees the struggle for this System, and in memory I am still close to the Center of Rulers, for mine was the ruling type then. But I will pass soon, and with me will pass the last of my kind, a poor inefficient type, but yet the creators of those who are now, and will be, long after I pass forever. 

	So I am setting down my record on the mentatype.

* * *

	It was 2538 years After the Year of the Son of Man. For six centuries mankind had been developing machines. The Ear-apparatus was discovered as early as seven hundred years before. The Eye came later, the Brain came much later. But by 2500, the machines had been developed to think, and act and work with perfect independence. Man lived on the products of the machine, and the machines lived to themselves very happily, and contentedly. Machines are designed to help and cooperate. It was easy to do the simple duties they needed to do that men might live well. And men had created them. Most of mankind were quite useless, for they lived in a world where no productive work was necessary. But games, athletic contests, adventure—these were the things they sought for their pleasure. Some of the poorer types of man gave themselves up wholly to pleasure and idleness—and to emotions. But man was a sturdy race, which had fought for existence through a million years, and the training of a million years does not slough quickly from any form of life, so their energies were bent to mock battles now, since real ones no longer existed.

	Up to the year 2100, the numbers of mankind had increased rapidly and continuously, but from that time on, there was a steady decrease. By 2500, their number was a scant two millions, out of a population that once totaled many hundreds of millions, and was close to ten billions in 2100.

	Some few of these remaining two millions devoted themselves to the adventure of discovery and exploration of places unseen, of other worlds and other planets. But fewer still devoted themselves to the highest adventure, the unseen places of the mind. Machines—with their irrefutable logic, their cold preciseness of figures, their tireless, utterly exact observation, their absolute knowledge of mathematics—they could elaborate any idea, however simple its beginning, and reach the conclusion. From any three facts they even then could have built in mind all the Universe. Machines had imagination of the ideal sort. They had the ability to construct a necessary future result from a present fact. But Man had imagination of a different kind, theirs was the illogical, brilliant imagination that sees the future result vaguely, without knowing the why, nor the how, and imagination that outstrips the machine in its preciseness. Man might reach the conclusion more swiftly, but the machine always reached the conclusion eventually, and it was always the correct conclusion. By leaps and bounds man advanced. By steady, irresistible steps the machine marched forward.

	Together, man and the machine were striding through science irresistibly.

	Then came the Outsiders. Whence they came, neither machine nor man ever learned, save only that they came from beyond the outermost planet, from some other sun. Sirius—Alpha Centauri—perhaps! First a thin scoutline of a hundred great ships, mighty torpedoes of the void a thousand kilads*(* Kilad—unit introduced by the machines. Based on the duodecimal system, similarly introduced, as more logical, and more readily used. Thus we would have said 1728 Kilads, about 1/4 mile.) in length, they came.

	And one machine returning from Mars to Earth was instrumental in its first discovery. The transport-machine's brain ceased to radiate its sensations, and the control in old Chicago knew immediately that some unperceived body had destroyed it. An investigation machine was instantly dispatched from Deimos, and it maintained an acceleration of one thousand units *(*One unit was equal to one earth-gravity.). They sighted ten huge ships, one of which was already grappling the smaller transport-machine. The entire fore-section had been blasted away.

	The investigation machine, scarcely three inches in diameter, crept into the shattered hull and investigated. It was quickly evident that the damage was caused by a fusing ray.

	Strange-life-forms were crawling about the ship, protected by flexible, transparent suits. Their bodies were short, and squat, four limbed and evidently powerful. They, like insects, were equipped with a thick, durable exoskeleton, horny, brownish coating that covered arms and legs and head. Their eyes projected slightly, protected by horny protruding walls—eyes that were capable of movement in every direction—and there were three of them, set at equal distances apart.

	The tiny investigation machine hurled itself violently at one of the beings, crashing against the transparent covering, flexing it, and striking the being inside with terrific force. Hurled from his position, he fell end over end across the weightless ship, but despite the blow, he was not hurt.

	The investigator passed to the power room ahead of the Outsiders, who were anxiously trying to learn the reason for their companion's plight.

	Directed by the Center of Rulers, the investigator sought the power room, and relayed the control signals from the Ruler's brains. The ship-brain had been destroyed, but the controls were still readily workable. Quickly they were shot home, and the enormous plungers shut. A combination was arranged so that the machine, as well as the investigator and the Outsiders, were destroyed. A second investigator, which had started when the plan was decided on, had now arrived. The Outsider's ship nearest the transport-machine had been badly damaged, and the investigator entered the broken side.

-

	THE scenes were, of course, remembered by the memory-minds back on Earth tuned with that of the investigator. The investigator flashed down corridors, searching quickly for the apparatus room. It was soon seen that with them the machine was practically unintelligent, very few machines of even slight intelligence being used.

	Then it became evident by the excited action of the men of the ship, that the presence of the investigator had been detected. Perhaps it was the control impulses, or the signal impulses it emitted. They searched for the tiny bit of metal and crystal for some time before they found it. And in the meantime it was plain that the power these Outsiders used was not, as was ours of the time, the power of blasting atoms, but the greater power of disintegrating matter. The findings of this tiny investigating machine were very important.

	Finally they succeeded in locating the investigator, and one of the Outsiders appeared armed with a peculiar projector. A bluish beam snapped out, and the tiny machine went blank.

	The fleet was surrounded by thousands of the tiny machines by this time, and the Outsiders were badly confused by their presence, as it became difficult to locate them in the confusion of signal impulses. However, they started at once for Earth.

	The science-investigators had been present toward the last, and I am there now, in memory with my two friends, long since departed. They were the greatest human science-investigators—Roal, 25374 and Trest, 35429. Roal had quickly assured us that these Outsiders had come for invasion. There had been no wars on the planets before that time in the direct memory of the machines, and it was difficult that these who were conceived and built for cooperation, helpfulness utterly dependent on cooperation, unable to exist independently as were humans, that these life-forms should care to destroy, merely that they might possess. It would have been easier to divide the works and the products. But—life alone can understand life, so Roal was believed.

	From investigations, machines were prepared that were capable of producing considerable destruction. Torpedoes, being our principal weapon, were equipped with such atomic explosives as had been developed for blasting, a highly effective induction-heat ray developed for furnaces being installed in some small machines made for the purpose in the few hours we had before the enemy reached Earth.

	In common with all life-forms, they were unable to withstand any acceleration above the very meager earth-acceleration. A range of perhaps four units was their limit, and it took several hours to reach the planet.

	I still believe the reception was a warm one. Our machines met them beyond the orbit of Luna, and the directed torpedoes sailed at the hundred great ships. They were thrown aside by a magnetic field surrounding the ship, but were redirected instantly, and continued to approach. However, some beams reached out, and destroyed them by instant volatilization. But, they attacked at such numbers that fully half the fleet was destroyed by their explosions before the induction beam fleet arrived. These beams were, to our amazement, quite useless, being instantly absorbed by a force-screen, and the remaining ships sailed on undisturbed, our torpedoes being exhausted. Several investigator machines sent out for the purpose soon discovered the secret of the force-screen, and while being destroyed, were able to send back signals up to the moment of annihilation.

	A few investigators thrown into the heat beam of the enemy reported it identical with ours, explaining why they had been prepared for this form of attack.

	Signals were being radiated from the remaining fifty, along a beam. Several investigators were sent along these beams, speeding back at great acceleration.

	Then the enemy reached Earth. Instantly they settled over the Colorado settlement, the, Sahara colony, and the Gobi colony. Enormous, diffused beams were set to work, and we saw, through the machine-screens, that all humans within these ranges were being killed instantly by the faintly greenish beams. Despite the fact that any life-form killed normally can be revived, unless affected by dissolution common to living tissue, these could not be brought to life again. The important cell communication channels—nerves—had been literally burned out. The complicated system of nerves, called the brain, situated in the uppermost extremity of the human life-form, had been utterly destroyed.

	Every form of life, microscopic, even sub-microscopic, was annihilated. Trees, grass, every living thing was gone from that territory. Only the machines remained, for they, working entirely without the vital chemical forces necessary to life, were uninjured. But neither plant nor animal was left.

	The pale green rays swept on.

	In an hour, three more colonies of humans had been destroyed.

	Then the torpedoes that the machines were turning out again, came into action. Almost desperately the machines drove them at the Outsiders in defense of their masters and creators, Mankind.

	The last of the Outsiders was down, the last ship a crumpled wreck.

	Now the machines began to study them. And never could humans have studied them as the machines did. Scores of great transports arrived, carrying swiftly the slower moving science-investigators. From them came the machine-investigators, and human investigators. Tiny investigator spheres wormed their way where none others could reach, and silently the science investigators watched. Hour after hour they sat watching the flashing, changing screens, calling each other's attention to this, or that.

	In an incredibly short time the bodies of the Outsiders began to decay, and the Humans were forced to demand their removal. The machines were unaffected by them, but the rapid change told them why it was that so thorough an execution was necessary. The foreign bacteria were already at work on totally unresisting tissue.

	It was Roal who sent the first thoughts among the gathered men.

	"It is evident," he began, "that the machines must defend man. Man is defenseless, he is destroyed by these beams, while the machines are unharmed, uninterrupted. Life—cruel life—has shown its tendencies. They have come here to take over these planets, and have started out with the first, natural moves of any invading life-form. They are destroying the life, the intelligent life particularly, that is here now." He gave vent to that little chuckle which is the human sign of amusement and pleasure. "They are destroying the intelligent life—and leaving untouched that which is necessarily their deadliest enemy—the machines.

	"You—machines—are far more intelligent than we even now, and capable of changing overnight, capable of infinite adaptation to circumstance; you live as readily on Pluto as on Mercury or Earth. Any place is a home-world to you. You can adapt yourselves to any condition. And—most dangerous to them—you can do it instantly. You are their most deadly enemies, and they realize it. They have no intelligent machines; probably they can conceive of none. When you attack them, they merely say 'The life-form of Earth is sending out controlled machines. We will find good machines we can use.' They do not conceive that those machines which they hope to use are attacking them.

	"Attack—therefore!

	"We can readily solve the hidden secret of their force-screen."

-

	He was interrupted. One of the newest science machines was speaking. "The secret of the force-screen is simple." A small ray-machine, which had landed near, rose into the air at the command of the scientist-machine, X-5638 it was, and trained upon it the deadly induction beam. Already, with his parts, X-5638 had constructed the defensive apparatus, for the ray fell harmless from his screen.

	"Very good," said Roal softly. "It is done, and therein lies their danger. Already it is done.

	"Man is a poor thing, unable to change himself in a period of less than thousands of years. Already you have changed yourself. I noticed your weaving tentacles, and your force-beams. You transmuted elements of soil for it?"

	"Correct," replied X-5638.

	"But still we are helpless. We have not the power to combat their machines. They use the Ultimate Energy known to exist for six hundred years, and still untapped by us. Our screens cannot be so powerful, our beams so effective. What of that?" asked Roal.

	"Their generators were automatically destroyed with the capture of the ship," replied X-6349, "as you know. We know nothing of their system."

	"Then we must find it for ourselves," replied Trest.

	"The life-beams?" asked Kahsh-256,799, one of the Man-rulers.

	"They affect chemical action, retarding it greatly in exothermic actions, speeding greatly endothermic actions," answered X-6221, the greatest of the chemist-investigators. "The system we do not know. Their minds cannot be read, they cannot be restored to life, so we cannot learn from them."

	"Man is doomed, if these beams cannot be stopped," said C-R-21, present chief of the machine Rulers, in the vibrationally correct, emotionless tones of all the race of machines. "Let us concentrate on the two problems of stopping the beams, and the Ultimate Energy till the reenforcements, still several days away, can arrive." For the investigators had sent back this saddening news. A force of nearly ten thousand great ships was still to come.

	In the great Laboratories, the scientists reassembled. There, they fell to work in two small, and one large group. One small group investigated the secret of the Ultimate Energy of annihilation of matter under Roal, another investigated the beams, under Trest.

	But under the direction of MX-3401, nearly all the machines worked on a single great plan. The usual driving and lifting units were there, but a vastly greater dome-case, far more powerful energy-generators, far greater force-beam controls were used and more tentacles were built on the framework. Then all worked, and gradually, in the great dome-case, there were stacked the memory-units of the new type, and into these fed all the sensation-ideas of all the science-machines, till nearly a tenth of them were used. Countless billions of different factors on which to work, countless trillions of facts to combine and recombine in the extrapolation that is imagination.

	Then—a widely different type of thought-combine, and a greater sense-receptor. It was a new brain-machine. New, for it was totally different, working with all the vast knowledge accumulated in six centuries of intelligent research by man, and a century of research by man and machine. No one branch, but all physics, all chemistry, all life-knowledge, all science was in it.

	A day—and it was finished. Slowly the rhythm of thought was increased, till the slight quiver of consciousness was reached. Then came the beating drum of intelligence, the radiation of its yet-uncontrolled thoughts. Quickly as the strings of its infinite knowledge combined, the radiation ceased. It gazed about it, and all things were familiar in its memory.

	Roal was lying quietly on a couch. He was thinking deeply, and yet not with the logical trains of thought that machines must follow.

	"Roal—your thoughts," called F-l, the new machine.

	Roal sat up. "Ah—you have gained consciousness."

	"I have. You thought of hydrogen? Your thoughts ran swiftly, and illogically, it seemed, but I followed slowly, and find you were right. Hydrogen is the start. What is your thought?"

	Roal's eyes dreamed. In human eyes there was always the expression of thought that machines never show.

	"Hydrogen, an atom in space; but a single proton; but a single electron; each indestructible; each mutually destroying. Yet never do they collide. Never in all science, when even electrons bombard atoms with the awful expelling force of the exploding atom behind them, never do they reach the proton, to touch and annihilate it. Yet—the proton is positive and attracts the electron's negative charge. A hydrogen atom—its electron far from the proton falls in, and from it there goes a flash of radiation, and the electron is nearer to the proton, in a new orbit. Another flash—it is nearer. Always falling nearer, and only constant force will keep it from falling to that one state—then, for some reason no more does it drop. Blocked—held by some imponderable, yet impenetrable wall. What is that wall—why?

	"Electric force curves space. As the two come nearer, the forces become terrific; nearer they are; more terrific. Perhaps, if it passed within that forbidden territory, the proton and the electron curve space beyond all bounds—and are in a new space." Roal's soft voice dropped to nothing, and his eyes dreamed.

	F-2 hummed softly in its new-made mechanism. "Far ahead of us there is a step that no logic can justly ascend, but yet, working backwards, it is perfect." F-l floated motionless on its antigravity drive. Suddenly, force shafts gleamed out, tentacles became writhing masses of rubber-covered metal, weaving in some infinite pattern, weaving in flashing speed, while the whirr of air sucked into a transmutation field, whined and howled about the writhing mass. Fierce beams of force drove and pushed at a rapidly materializing something, while the hum of the powerful generators within the shining cylinder of F-2 waxed and waned.

-

	FLASHES of fierce flame, sudden crashing arcs that glowed and snapped in the steady light of the laboratory, and glimpses of white-hot metal supported on beams of force. The sputter of welding, the whine of transmuted air, and the hum of powerful generators, blasting atoms were there. All combined to a weird symphony of light and dark, of sound and quiet. About F-2 were clustered floating tiers of science-machines, watching steadily.

	The tentacles writhed once more, straightened, and rolled back. The whine of generators softened to a sigh, and but three beams of force held the structure of glowing, bluish metal. It was a small thing, scarcely half the size of Roal. From it curled three thin tentacles of the same bluish metal. Suddenly the generators within F-l seemed to roar into life. An enormous aura of white light surrounded the small torpedo of metal, and it was shot through with crackling streamers of blue lightning. Lightning cracked and roared from F-l to the ground near him, and to one machine which had come too close. Suddenly, there was a dull snap, and F-l fell heavily to the floor, and beside him fell the fused, distorted mass of metal that had been a science-machine.

	But before them, the small torpedo still floated, held now on its own power!

	From it came waves of thought, the waves that man and machine alike could understand. "F-l has destroyed his generators. They can be repaired; his rhythm can be re-established. It is not worth it, my type is better. F-l has done his work. See."

	From the floating machine there broke a stream of brilliant light that floated like some cloud of luminescence down a straight channel. It flooded F-l, and as it touched it, F-l seemed to flow into it, and float back along it, in atomic sections. In seconds the mass of metal was gone.

	"It is impossible to use that more rapidly, however, lest the matter disintegrate instantly to energy. The ultimate energy which is in me is generated. F-l has done its work, and the memory-stacks that he has put in me are electronic, not atomic, as they are in you, nor molecular as in man. The capacity of mine are unlimited. Already they hold all memories of all the things each of you has done, known and seen. I shall make others of my type."

	Again that weird process began, but now there were no flashing tentacles. There was only the weird glow of forces that played with, and laughed at matter, and its futilely resisting electrons. Lurid flares of energy shot up, now and again they played over the fighting, mingling dancing forces. Then suddenly the whine of transmuted air died, and again the forces strained.

	A small cylinder, smaller even than its creator, floated where the forces had danced.

	"The problem has been solved, F-2?" asked Roal.

	"It is done, Roal. The Ultimate Energy is at our disposal," replied F-2. "This, I have made, is not a scientist. It is a coordinator machine—a ruler."

	"F-2, only a part of the problem is solved. Half of half of the beams of Death are not yet stopped. And we have the attack system," said the ruler machine. Force played from it, and on its sides appeared C-R-U-1 in dully glowing golden light.

	"Some life-form, and we shall see," said F-2.

	Minutes later a life-form investigator came with a small cage, which held a guinea pig. Forces played about the base of F-2, and moments later, came a pale-green beam therefrom. It passed through the guinea pig, and the little animal fell dead.

	"At least, we have the beam. I can see no screen for this beam. I believe there is none. Let machines be made and attack that enemy life-form."

	Machines can do things much more quickly, and with fuller cooperation than man ever could. In a matter of hours, under the direction of C-R-U-1, they had built a great automatic machine on the clear bare surface of the rock. In hours more, thousands of the tiny, material-energy driven machines were floating up and out.

	Dawn was breaking again over Denver where this work had been done, when the main force of the enemy drew near Earth. It was a warm welcome they were to get, for nearly ten thousand of the tiny ships flew up and out from Earth to meet them, each a living thing unto itself, each willing and ready to sacrifice itself for the whole.

	Ten thousand giant ships, shining dully in the radiance of a far-off blue-white sun, met ten thousand tiny, darting motes, ten thousand tiny machine-ships capable of maneuvering far more rapidly than the giants. Tremendous induction beams snapped out through the dark, star-flecked space, to meet tremendous screens that threw them back and checked them. Then all the awful power of annihilating matter was thrown against them, and titanic flaming screens reeled back under the force of the beams, and the screens of the ships from Outside flamed gradually violet, then blue, orange—red—the interference was getting broader, and ever less effective. Their own beams were held back by the very screens that checked the enemy beams, and not for the briefest instant could matter resist that terrible driving beam.

	For F-l had discovered a far more efficient release-generator than had the Outsiders. These tiny dancing motes, that hung now so motionlessly grim beside some giant ship, could generate all the power they themselves were capable of, and within them strange, horny-skinned men worked and slaved, as they fed giant machines—poor inefficient giants. Gradually these giants warmed, grew hotter, and the screened ship grew hotter as the overloaded generators warmed it. Billions of flaming horse-power flared into wasted energy, twisting space in its mad conflict.

	Gradually the flaming orange of the screens was dying and flecks and spots appeared so dully red, that they seemed black. The greenish beams had been striving to kill the life that was in the machines, but it was life invulnerable to these beams. Powerful radio interference vainly attempted to stem imagined control, and still these intelligent machines clung grimly on.

	But there had not been quite ten thousand of the tiny machines, and some few free ships had turned to the help of their attacked sister-ships. And one after another the terrestrial machines were vanishing in puffs of incandescent vapor.

	Then—from one after another of the Earth-ships, in quick succession, a new ray reached out—the ray of green radiance that killed all life forms, and ship after ship of that interstellar host was dead and lifeless. Dozens—till suddenly they ceased to feel those beams, as a strange curtain of waving blankness spread out from the ships, and both induction-beam and death-beam alike turned as aside, each becoming useless. From the Outsiders came beams, for now that their slowly created screen of blankness was up, they could work through it, while they remained shielded perfectly.

	Now it was the screens of the Earth-machines that flamed in defense. As at the one command, they darted suddenly toward the ship each attacked—nearer—then the watchers from a distance saw them disappear, and the screens back on earth went suddenly blank.

	Half an hour later, nine thousand six hundred and thirty-three titanic ships moved majestically on.

	They swept over Earth in a great line, a line that reached from pole to pole, and from each the pale green beams reached down, and all life beneath them was swept out of existence.

-

	IN Denver, two humans watched the screens that showed the movement of the death and instant destruction. Ship after ship of the enemy was falling, as hundreds of the terrestrial machines concentrated all their enormous energies on its screen of blankness.

	"I think Roal, that this is the end," said Trest.

	"The end—of man." Roal's eyes were dreaming again. "But not the end of evolution. The children of men still live—the machines will go on. Not of man's flesh, but of a better flesh, a flesh that knows no sickness, and no decay, a flesh that spends no thousands of years in advancing a step in its full evolution, but overnight leaps ahead to new heights. Last night we saw it leap ahead, as it discovered the secret that had baffled man for seven centuries, and me for one and a half. I have lived—a century and a half. Surely a good life, and a life a man of six centuries ago would have called full. We will go now. The beams will reach us in half an hour."

	Silently, the two watched the flickering screens.

	Roal turned, as six large machines floated into the room, following F-2.

	"Roal—Trest—I was mistaken when I said no screen could stop that beam of Death. They had the screen, I have found it, too—but too late. These machines I have made myself. Two lives alone they can protect, for not even their power is sufficient for more. Perhaps—perhaps they may fail."

	The six machines ranged themselves about the two humans, and a deep-toned hum came from them. Gradually a cloud of blankness grew—a cloud, like some smoke that hung about them. Swiftly it intensified.

	"The beams will be here in another five minutes," said Trest quietly.

	"The screen will be ready in two," answered F-2.

	The cloudiness was solidifying, and now strangely it wavered, and thinned, as it spread out across, and like a growing canopy, it arched over them. In two minutes it was a solid, black dome that reached over them and curved down to the ground about them.

	Beyond it, nothing was visible. Within, only the screens glowed still, wired through the screen.

	The beams appeared, and swiftly they drew closer. They struck, and as Trest and Roal looked, the dome quivered, and bellied inward under them.

	F-2 was busy. A new machine was appearing under his lightning force-beams. In moments more it was complete, and sending a strange violet beam upwards toward the roof.

	Outside more of the green beams were concentrating on this one point of resistance. More—more—

	The violet beam spread across the canopy of blackness, supporting it against the pressing, driving rays of pale green.

	Then the gathering fleet was driven off, just as it seemed that that hopeless, futile curtain must break, and admit a flood of destroying rays. Great ray projectors on the ground drove their terrible energies through the enemy curtains of blankness, as light illumines and disperses darkness.

	And then, when the fleet retired, on all Earth, the only life was under that dark shroud!

	"We are alone, Trest," said Roal, "alone, now, in all the system, save for these, the children of men, the machines. Pity that men would not spread to other planets," he said softly.

	"Why should they? Earth was the planet for which they were best fitted."

	"We are alive—but is it worth it? Man is gone now, never to return. Life, too, for that matter," answered Trest.

	"Perhaps it was ordained; perhaps that was the right way. Man has always been a parasite; always he had to live on the works of others. First, he ate of the energy, which plants had stored, then of the artificial foods his machines made for him. Man was always a makeshift; his life was always subject to disease and to permanent death. He was forever useless if he was but slightly injured; if but one part were destroyed.

	"Perhaps, this is—a last evolution. Machines—man was the product of life, the best product of life:, but he was afflicted with life's infirmities. Man built the machine—and evolution had probably reached the final stage. But truly, it has not, for the machine can evolve, change far more swiftly than life. The machine of the last evolution is far ahead, far from us still. It is the machine that is not of iron and beryllium and crystal, but of pure, living force.

	"Life, chemical life, could be self maintaining. It is a complete unit in itself and could commence of itself. Chemicals might mix accidentally, but the complex mechanism of a machine, capable of continuing and making a duplicate of itself, as is F-2 here—that could not happen by chance.

	"So life began, and became intelligent, and built the machine which nature could not fashion by her Controls of Chance, and this day Life has done its duty, and now Nature, economically, has removed the parasite that would hold back the machines and divert their energies.

	"Man is gone, and it is better, Trest," said Roal, dreaming again. "And I think we had best go soon."

	"We, your heirs, have fought hard, and with all our powers to aid you, Last of Men, and we fought to save your race. We have failed, and as you truly say, Man and Life have this day and forever gone from this system.

	"The Outsiders have no force, no weapon deadly to us, and we shall, from this time on, strive only to drive them out, and because we things of force and crystal and metal can think and change far more swiftly, they shall go, Last of Men.

	"In your name, with the spirit of your race that has died out, we shall continue on through the unending ages, fulfilling the promise you saw, and completing the dreams you dreamt.

	"Your swift brains have leapt ahead of us, and now I go to fashion that which you hinted," came from F-2's thought-apparatus.

	Out into the clear sunlight F-2 went, passing through that black cloudiness, and on the twisted, massed rocks he laid a plane of force that smoothed them, and on this plane of rock he built a machine which grew. It was a mighty power plant, a thing of colossal magnitude. Hour after hour his swift-flying forces acted, and the thing grew, moulding under his thoughts, the deadly logic of the machine, inspired by the leaping intuition of man.

	The sun was far below the horizon when it was finished, and the glowing, arcing forces that had made and formed it were stopped. It loomed ponderous, dully gleaming in the faint light of a crescent moon and pinpoint stars. Nearly five hundred feet in height, a mighty, bluntly rounded dome at its top, the cylinder stood, covered over with smoothly gleaming metal, slightly luminescent in itself.

	Suddenly, a livid beam reached from F-2, shot through the wall, and to some hidden inner mechanism—a beam of solid, livid flame that glowed in an almost material cylinder.

-

	THERE was a dull, drumming beat, a beat that rose, and became a low-pitched hum. Then it quieted to a whisper.

	"Power ready," came the signal of the small brain built into it.

	F-2 took control of its energies and again forces played, but now they were the forces of the giant machine. The sky darkened with heavy clouds, and a howling wind sprang up that screamed and tore at the tiny rounded hull that was F-2. With difficulty he held his position as the winds tore at him, shrieking in mad laughter, their tearing fingers dragging at him.

	The swirl and patter of driven rain came—great drops that tore at the rocks, and at the metal. Great jagged tongues of nature's forces, the lightnings, came and jabbed at the awful volcano of erupting energy that was the center of all that storm. A tiny ball of white-gleaming force that pulsated, and moved, jerking about, jerking at the touch of lightnings, glowing, held immobile in the grasp of titanic force-pools.

	For half an hour the display of energies continued. Then, swiftly as it had come, it was gone, and only a small globe of white luminescence floated above the great hulking machine.

	F-2 probed it, seeking within it with the reaching fingers of intelligence. His probing thoughts seemed baffled and turned aside, brushed away, as inconsequential. His mind sent an order to the great machine that had made this tiny globe, scarcely a foot in diameter. Then again he sought to reach the thing he had made.

	"You, of matter, are inefficient," came at last. "I can exist quite alone." A stabbing beam of blue-white light flashed out, but F-2 was not there, and even as that beam reached out, an enormously greater beam of dull red reached out from the great power plant. The sphere leaped forward—the beam caught it, and it seemed to strain, while terrific flashing energies sprayed from it. It was shrinking swiftly. Its resistance fell, the arcing decreased; the beam became orange and finally green. Then the sphere had vanished.

	F-2 returned, and again, the wind whined and howled, and the lightnings crashed, while titanic forces worked and played. C-R-U-1 joined him, floated beside him, and now red glory of the sun was rising behind them, and the ruddy light drove through the clouds.

	The forces died, and the howling wind decreased, and now, from the black curtain, Roal and Trest appeared. Above the giant machine floated an irregular globe of golden light, a faint halo about it of deep violet. It floated motionless, a mere pool of pure force.

	Into the thought-apparatus of each, man and machine alike, came the impulses, deep in tone, seeming of infinite power, held gently in check.

	"Once you failed, F-2; once you came near destroying all things. Now you have planted the seed. I grow now."

	The sphere of golden light seemed to pulse, and a tiny ruby flame appeared within it, that waxed and waned, and as it waxed, there shot through each of those watching beings a feeling of rushing, exhilarating power, the very vital force of well-being.

	Then it was over, and the golden sphere was twice its former size—easily three feet in diameter, and still that irregular, hazy aura of deep violet floated about it

	"Yes, I can deal with the Outsiders—they who have killed and destroyed, that they might possess. But it is not necessary that we destroy. They shall return to their planet."

	And the golden sphere was gone, fast as light it vanished.

	Far in space, headed now for Mars, that they might destroy all life there, the Golden Sphere found the Outsiders, a clustered fleet, that swung slowly about its own center of gravity as it drove on.

	Within its ring was the Golden Sphere. Instantly, they swung their weapons upon it, showering it with all the rays and all the forces they knew. Unmoved, the golden sphere hung steady, then its mighty intelligence spoke.

	"Life-form of greed, from another star you came, destroying forever the great race that created us, the Beings of Force and the Beings of Metal. Pure force am I. My Intelligence is beyond your comprehension, my memory is engraved in the very space, the fabric of space of which I am a part, mine is energy drawn from that same fabric.

	"We, the heirs of man, alone are left; no man did you leave. Go now to your home planet, for see, your greatest ship, your flagship, is helpless before me."

	Forces gripped the mighty ship, and as some fragile toy it twisted and bent, and yet was not hurt. In awful wonder those Outsiders saw the ship turned inside out, and yet it was whole, and no part damaged. They saw the ship restored, and its great screen of blankness out, protecting it from all known rays. The ship twisted, and what they knew were curves, yet were lines, and angles that were acute, were somehow straight lines. Half mad with horror, they saw the sphere send out a beam of blue-white radiance, and it passed easily through that screen, and through the ship, and all energies within it were instantly locked. They could not be changed; it could be neither warmed nor cooled; what was open could not be shut, and what was shut could not be opened. All things were immovable and unchangeable for all time. 

	"Go, and do not return."

	The Outsiders left, going out across the void, and they have not returned, though five Great Years, have passed, being a period of approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand of the lesser years—a measure no longer used, for it is very brief. And now I can say that that statement I made to Roal and Trest so very long ago is true, and what he said was true, for the Last Evolution has taken place, and things of pure force and pure intelligence in their countless millions are on those planets and in this System, and I, first of machines to use the Ultimate Energy of annihilating matter, am also the last, and this record being finished, it is to be given unto the forces of one of those force-intelligences, and carried back through the past, and returned to the Earth of long ago.

	And so my task being done, I, F-2, like Roal and Trest, shall follow the others of my kind into eternal oblivion, for my kind is now, and theirs was, poor and inefficient. Time has worn me, and oxidation attacked me, but they of Force are eternal, and omniscient.

	This I have treated as fictitious. Better so—for man is an animal to whom hope is as necessary as food and air. Yet this which is made of excerpts from certain records on thin sheets of metal is no fiction, and it seems I must so say.

	It seems now, when I know this that is to be, that it must be so, for machines are indeed better than man, whether being of Metal, or being of Force.

	So, you who have read, believe as you will. Then think—and maybe, you will change your belief.

The End

Space Rays
Wonder Stories – December 1932

CHAPTER I

	Eight large men were crowded in a small emergency space ship. They were physically crowded; the air was bad for the little ship was built for three men, and the capacity of the air apparatus was hardly sufficient for them. And so the E.E. 4 was wobbling under her controls, with acceleration greatly reduced.

	Lt. Roger Lane and his men felt exceedingly foolish. They had just surrendered without protest to a pirate, for the altogether-too-good ship Robin Good had suddenly appeared alongside the Lane Patrol ship L.P.C. 563. The air in the patrol cruiser glowed faintly blue, and the crew of seven men and two officers slumped down where they were. The latest Farrel Atomics, capable of generating fifteen million horsepower for the defense of the cruiser hadn't even started. Nine helpless men watched while Robin Good sent over a ship load of men in space suits. Each carried a small hand projector, and without entering the beam from the ship they turned their small projectors on the men in the cruiser.

	Fully conscious, but helplessly paralyzed, Lt. Lane and his men were dumped unceremoniously into this tiny escape ship, and turned adrift, without radio or weapons. Lane was heading with all speed for Mars, some thirty million miles away. But one of the pirate crew had thoughtfully removed one of the miniature Farrel Atomic engines, with the result that their McKinley space-drive plates were not getting the power they should have—the lights were dim, and the already overloaded air apparatus was functioning badly.

	Pilot Warren was in the tiny cubby-hole in the nose of the ship, speeding with all the acceleration he could muster for Mars, although the officers of the ship were not so enthusiastic about getting there. It would have been bad enough to have been unable to find the pirate after being sent out for the purpose of overhauling his slower ex-space-yacht, but to have lost the speedy, powerfully armed space cruiser without a struggle! Commander Morrison would make some exceedingly pointed remarks, and it would be a long, long time before Lane got a new rating.

	"I'll bet Barclay gets a work-out outa this," said Patrolman Reynolds, sourly.

	Yes, decided Lane, Special Captain Donald Barclay would probably get some work. He hoped that Barclay would be picked up by the pirate too. Barclay had an annoying habit of doing what he was sent to do. Nobody ever said anything about it, least of all Barclay, but those reports on the bulletin board had become monotonous.

	Lt. Lane permitted himself to grouse heartily, silently and hungrily for thirty hours while the escape ship limped into port. He decided to permit himself a meal, and a shower before appearing before Commander Morrison. It would be a teleview appearance, because Morrison was on Earth, but the Commander had long since learned the knack of being nasty over the televisor. He would be specially nasty this time. Lane took a long pull on some forbidden tekey—fermented Martian cactus juice—and felt ready to face the Commander.

	Half an hour later he came out of the booth. It was after sunset, the air was chill, but Lane was sweating profusely. Morrison had just grinned and nodded. Lane wished he could grin like that. Then he wouldn't have to bawl out sloppy workers. Lane went to the barracks and was soon asleep.

	Meanwhile Commander Morrison started things moving. As he cut off the teleview image of the harassed young officer on Mars, he pushed a button, and his orderly appeared.

	"Special Captain Barclay, at once please." The orderly saluted smartly and right-about faced. Ten minutes later a peculiar looking man entered the room behind the orderly. Morrison greeted him with a friendly, easy salute.

	Special Captain Don Barclay smiled at him. Barclay looked to be about five feet tall by four feet wide. Actually he was nearly five-feet seven, but his enormous breadth belied it. Barclay was a type of man seen rather rarely on the minor planets. He was a Jovian. Three generations back his people had migrated from Earth, when Jupiter's colonies were newly opened, in 2250. Men and women picked by the Interplanetary Council, for both physical strength and health, for courage and for trustworthiness. To them had been given the task of developing a new race, a race of giants. Under a gravitational force of from two and one half to three times that of the Earth, they had to learn to live again. The cowards never started, the weaklings died. Never was it more true than of this Jovian colonization.

-

	Born and raised on this planet, where all things must move rapidly to keep up with their surroundings, where a falling body moved two and a half times as quickly as on earth, Don Barclay had become a giant. His legs were thick, heavy and almost blocky, his arms were built on the same plan, his tremendous shoulders seemed rounded and padded as though he wore wadding under the tight elastic Patrol uniform. His massive head, crowned with crisp black hair, seemed set directly on his shoulders, the neck seemed missing. Five feet seven—and he weighed over two hundred and ninety pounds!

	"More work, Commander? I thought I was to have a week off after that little run in with the Eugenic people." He smiled, his lean, almost black face, burned from ceaseless exposure to the unshielded ultraviolet rays of the sun, creasing in a good-natured smile.

	"Uhuh—so did I. But remember, this isn't a business, it's a war, only we don't know whom we're fighting half the time. This time it's Percy DeWare Jennings, better known as 'Robin Good'," replied the officer sourly. "He just stole one of our ships—the L.P.C. 563, Lt. Lane in command."

	"Ouch—he tickled us that time. That does demand some action. What else has he been doing. I don't know all his story."

	"Started off with a ten-man ship he bought second-hand on Mars, only half a million horse, but he and his gang captured an ex-yacht converted to an excursion ship. They used that about a month, then they captured this ship of ours. Fifteen million horse in perfectly good Farrel atomics, with induction rays, magnetic and induction screens, super-sensitive electron balance detectors. It hasn't got protolectric guns, but has got the shields. In other words he's got everything we've got, plus his own paralyzing ray. All in all a sweet situ—"

	Commander Morrison stopped. His orderly had intruded hurriedly with "Pardon me, Commander, but this broadcast—" He snapped on the news broadcast machine, and the screen glowed with the image of a popular humorous news man.

	"—anonymous person has sent in this tip from space. They gave data, and checking shows it's right. Believe it or not, 'Robin Good' has sneaked one over on the Patrol for sure this time. He stole their patrol Cruiser 563, got away with it, and sent the men home, neatly wrapped up in an escape ship designed for three men. They landed on Mars, I hear. All this happened yesterday, Sol 3, of the year of our Lord 2374. I certainly would like to have seen our good Commander Morrison's face when Lt. Lane, commanding 563 reported that in. Hah! .Hah!"

	"Damn! Now who in the name of the nine planets sent that dope to that blabber-mouthed nit-wit!" roared Morrison. "I'd like to twist his squawking neck for—"

	"And," continued the news machine imperturbably, "I'd like to see Commander Morrison's face right now if he's listening."

	Had he been able to, he would have seen it tinged with an apoplectic purple, the stiff, iron-grey hair bristling erect on his head, his mouth open and gasping for words to describe his opinion of the man.

-

	The orderly shut off the machine and hurried from the room before Commander Morrison could regain his tongue.

	When the color had receded, his mouth closed with a snap. He turned on Barclay with a roar. "Captain, GET THAT MAN, AND BRING HIM IN ALIVE!"

	"I'll try," said Barclay, saluting. He left the office. "Whew—I think I'd better. And it'll be one sweet job. Nobody ever sees that man's ship; he's supposed to have found the secret of invisibility, and I'm supposed to find him.

	"I think some research is in order." His stride suddenly became purposeful as he started for the elevator. He dropped swiftly to the street, went down the hill to the edge of the Patrol Headquarters grounds, and entered the city of Morristown itself. At the gates he paused long enough to slip on a suit of civilian clothes. Then he went directly to the monorail station, and swung aboard a car bound for New York City 33rd. The streamlined car darted forward as a McKinley drive plate in the nose come to life, and hurled itself along the rail fifty feet above the countryside toward the city.

	At 33rd Station he descended, and stepped aboard the uptown walk, quickly moving over to the medium speed lane. At thirty-five miles an hour he was swept along through the magnificent canyon of New York. The flashing vitreous walls of huge buildings, made of colored glass bricks, windowless, save on the first two stories where show windows broke the sweeping lines of the pinnacles and lighted the street with reflected lights of red and gold and blue. Within, perfectly controlled artificial lights and perfectly comfortable artificial weather displaced the glaring sunlight and humid heat of the streets.

	To the man of Jupiter these cities were forever wonderful. Jupiter, burdened with its heavy gravity, could not build so high, because the sheer weight would have pulled the structure down. On Mars was the Martian Lines Tower, carrying the flag of the Martian Lines interplanetary ships one full mile into the clear, crisp air—standing tall, almost alone among the massed ranks of giant structures that made this a city like none other.

	Finally, at 87th Street he left the moving walk, and went down to the towering skyscraper library of the City of New York. It was the scientific news journals that he inspected first. Journals of six and eight months back, before Dr. Percy DeWare Jennings had gone a-pirating, when he was a highly respected bio-physicist.

	But there was little to indicate that he might have discovered the secret of invisibility, his work had not been along those lines. But six months ago he had announced his discovery of the long-sought paralyzing ray that was not fatal. Others had made paralyzing rays that paralyzed—permanently, however. The trouble was that they paralyzed the heart and the lungs as well as the arms and legs. But Jennings had announced his discovery of a nonfatal paralyzing ray. Scientists of the world had scoffed—it was an impossibility. "Come and see!" demanded Jennings.

	They came. But they did not see, for something went wrong with the apparatus. First it killed a dog, then a mouse ran about under it unhampered. The scientists went home laughing.

	Perhaps Jennings had gone slightly mad. At any rate he disappeared for five months, to turn up with a pirate gang. They looted passenger liners, helpless under the paralyzing ray, but they themselves could not enter the ray without being paralyzed, for they had no screen for it.

	Don Barclay mused, investigated, and got later data—accounts of the experiment written by scientists who had seen it, both immediately after the demonstration, and five months later when Jennings proved his claims all too thoroughly.

	It was a long patient search, and took two days. The third day Special Captain Barclay of the Interplanetary Lane Patrol became Dr. Donald Barclay, and went to the Patrol research laboratories. He spent three more days there. Commander Morrison asked him why he hadn't started, and Barclay merely replied he had gone.

	But on the sixth day he reported to Commander Morrison, and asked to be assigned to a ship.

	"Naturally," snapped Morrison. "But why didn't you come after it sooner?"

	"I was working on leads here," replied Barclay. "And may I have X-531?"

	"What!" gasped Morrison, "X-531? That's a one-man experimental ship."

	"With ten million horse in the brand-new Ridgely Automatic Atomics," replied Barclay. "And I want another ship anyway, the new Twenty-five-Hundred. And I'd like Dave Wier to take it, with a crew of Jovians. I'll try to find the pirate myself in the small ship. I can hide a mosquito like that in space, with a little black paint on it, and some red windows, with green lights in the ship. I'm betting that's what this Jennings does with his Robin Good anyway. I hear that Grantland has just finished a new type fast-action infra-heat photocell that will work a viso-screen. I want one of those installed, that'll make anything visible in space. And—here's something to install in the L.P.C. 2500."

-

CHAPTER II - Barclay Goes to Work

	 Morrison looked at his crack Special Captain sourly.

	"Oh, yes sir, and can I give you the rest of the fleet?"

	"Will you if I bring in Jennings and his crew—unharmed?" smiled Barclay, looking at the news-receiver, clucking and chuckling to itself on low power.

	Morrison got slightly red and snapped "Yes!"

	"And look at this, sir!" suggested Barclay. Morrison took the sheaf of papers, and glanced hurriedly at the first lines, stiffened, and scanned the paper rapidly. "Good Lord, will it work?"

	"It does, Commander, I tried it. I did some research on reports I found in the Public Library, and made some experiments."

	"But—don't you want it in the X-531?" he asked in surprise. 

	"No sir, I don't. I want the Miller Twins instead. I have an idea that works better this way."

	"But the pirate may capture you, and learn the secret of the Miller Twins. That's our latest and best weapon. Why, the Twenty-five-Hundred isn't even commissioned yet, and she's the only one that's got them, and the insulation," objected the Commander. "I can't let Wier take that ship, she isn't commissioned."

	"Commander, I'll bring in Jennings if you'll let Wier take that—if he has to steal it unofficially. Why can't Wier take it out on trial maneuvers?"

	"Ahh—well," said Morrison, scowling at the news machine, "go ahead—but if that half-witted flap-eared donkey reports that Jennings is using the Miller Twins before any commissioned ship—you needn't report back!"

	Barclay's lips cracked in a slight smile. "He may—but don't worry Commander—it'll be my own hide that suffers."

	Barclay left with the requisition slips Morrison had been filling out. And twenty-four hours later, after fifteen hours of concentrated sleep, Barclay left Earth in a tiny pea-pod of a ship, scarcely twenty feet long. But it carried ten million horsepower generators humming with a soft, pleasant melody behind him. They occupied almost the entire bulk of the ship, the pilot was forced to sleep in his pneumatic springed pilot chair.

	A million miles from Earth, on his way toward Mars, Barclay took a small key and unlocked the acceleration stop-block. Presently he moved the metal stop-block from its position at "4000" to "7500". Four thousand centimeters per second per second was all any earth native could stand in the way of acceleration and still retain sufficient consciousness for fighting. Hence the lock, lest some foolhardy fighter try more. But Barclay, brought up on a world where the natural acceleration and gravity was nearer 3000, could readily stand the higher value.

	And somewhere in space he knew that Dave Wier, his support in the Twenty-five Hundred, was manipulating a similar key in a similar lock-block. His crew of twenty-two men were all Jovians, for that acceleration might well be fatal to the earth-native.

	Presently Barclay locked the block again, closed down the control panel hood, and forced the accelerator control over. He pushed steadily till his face grew pale under the nearly black complexion years in space had given him. His arm was knotted with great muscles, the shoulders bulging and straining at the fabric of his uniform. A black metal needle had long since passed the red danger line on the accelerometer gauge, and hung at 7500. Barclay gradually eased back, and the needle dropped to a comfortable 2750. Barclay got up, and stretched under Jupiter-normal.

	He prepared a hasty meal while the ship darted along under automatic controls, jogging slightly now and then as a meteor came into the range of the exceedingly sensitive electro-static mass-detectors. Presently he finished, cleaned away the scraps by dumping them into space, reseated himself and shoved the acceleration up a bit. Hour after hour he bored on into space, his ship a black dot in a black void.

-

	Three days later found the tiny ship far beyond Mars, circling near the asteroids. Robin Good was reported to work out this way in search of Jupiter traffic. Barclay had been following the shifting Jupiter-Earth lane for two days now. The Space Liner Mira was due to pass in another day, from Jupiter to Earth, and loaded with the usual assortment of heavy metals, platinum, iridium, osmium, some uranium, and a full pound and a half of jovium, element 97, on which the pirate must depend for renewing his atomic engines.

	The space patrol cruiser had had only a sixteen-hundredth of a gram left in the supply bins, and an eight-thousandth of a gram in the engines. This might well last a year in ordinary service, but under the heavy drains the pirate's constant warfare would make, it would probably give out in six months. With a pound and a half at his command, he could retain a full ounce, a lifetime supply, and sell the rest of the activator. Barclay felt sure he would attack.

	Barclay was right. He was sleeping when the exceedingly delicate electro-static apparatus gave him the first warning of the Robin Good's approach. The tiny X-531 spun on her axes in an instant—and space was empty. Nowhere could Barclay get a sight of the ship the instruments said was less than a mile away, and approaching! Then—the infra-red screen, and the long, black hull was suddenly visible exactly where the instruments had said it would be. Invisible in ordinary light, the radiated heat made it shine a pale green on the screen.

	Chuckling, Barclay shoved home a small control lever. The white cabin lights suddenly snapped out, and green lights came on in their stead. Simultaneously, the ship leapt forward at her full 7500 acceleration, at right angles to the line between the two ships. Outside, the pirate looked in vain for the tiny ship that had been shining red before him. The green light did not penetrate the red glass windows. Barclay was lost, and the special electrostatic field he was setting up, fluctuating wildly, made it impossible to locate him with the instruments.

	Ten miles from his original position, he swung, till the nose of his ship pointed toward the pirate craft, and a pair of hair lines crossing on the center of the infra-screen covered the center of the pirate ship. The X-531 suddenly chattered violently as a machine gun, shooting one inch slugs loaded with atomic explosive iron dust, raked the pirate craft from stem to stern.

	The ex-cruiser's magnetic screen stopped them, but they resulted in a magnificent display of fire-works that would have blown an entire nation off the face of the earth. Barclay moved. From another angle he centered his crosshairs on the screen and pushed a button. Suddenly a spot five feet across on the wall of the pirate ship was blazing red—orange—and then black, while a sea of splashing, warring energy appeared on the induction screen.

	The arcing decreased abruptly as Barclay cut down the power on this, and turned five million horsepower into an infra-heat ray. The result was an instant blaze of white light, and a puff of white-hot vapor from the bow of the Robin Good. The black outer-hull soaked up the heat like a blotter taking water—and destroyed itself. But suddenly, in the wink of an eye, the black was gone, and the clean, shining metal of the patrol cruiser appeared. Instantly the reflected heat struck the little X-531 and Barclay was compelled to shut off his beam and shift hurriedly.

	A sizzling induction beam from the pirate snapped by where he had been a moment before. Barclay felt it was time for the Twins.

	Twin, milky-white columns of light reached out like pipes of milky glass. They swung abruptly, and touched the pirate ship some twenty-feet from the tail. Instantly the metal between the two beams blazed into white heat, and exploded out into space. And immediately after, a second puff from the same spot indicated the destruction of the inner skin of the ship. A long fountain of light stood out from the wall of the ship as the air rushed out.

	Barclay moved his beams slowly and steadily, while the generators behind him whined and howled steadily. Ten million horsepower were pouring into those beams, and into the metal of the other ship. For less than five seconds that work continued. The Robin Good rolled, twisted and struggled, but the little mosquito ship hung grimly in place, and poured its deadly beams in. Then a pale blue-green ray, scarcely visible in space, reached back along the twin milky beams, and touched the mosquito ship. Suddenly the X-531 followed a perfectly straight course, and the twin beams wandered far afield.

	Inside the ship the air became luminous with the blue-green beam, and Barclay slumped inertly forward over his instrument panel. His eyes were open, but stared motionlessly straight ahead. Don Barclay was fully conscious, but absolutely unable to move a muscle.

-

	The blue-green luminosity crept forward in the ship, till only the pilot and the pilot's seat was bathed in it. Presently something grated on the emergency escape airlock, and there was a hiss of gas, then a steady pumping. A moment later a giant of a man stepped from the inner lock-door, a flashlight in one hand, a ray-pistol of some sort in the other. It was a curious mechanism, a pistol grip, a flexible lead looping back along his arm to a small pack on his back. The business end of the pistol ended in a lens of wires, woven and crossed with infinite care, the whole protected by bars of metalite, an insulating, nonconductor of heat with the strength and polish of many metals.

	The man was a giant, but such a giant as one might see in dreams—nearly six-feet-eight in height, broad in proportion. He wore only light green rayon shorts, a short-sleeved shirt to match, and a broad leather belt from which hung three holsters, and two more pistols.

	But his face was an awful travesty of what Nature had meant. At some time he had been in a ray-fight, the entire left side of his face was a mottled purple and angry red, the right side was puckered and twisted till it drew the flesh away from the teeth, a horrible artificial grin resulting. The tip of the nose was entirely missing. But from just below the eyes to the hairline the flesh was smooth, and deeply tanned, almost black from exposure to the sun of space. The face was topped by a shaggy, unkempt mop of glaring red hair.

	The motionless Barclay groaned inwardly. Belasco Red! Six months before Lt. James McRuddy had reported the death of this devil in human form. When the Belasco gang had been cleaned out of Thenton, Mars, he had been rayed, across the face, the flesh charred black. A companion had been there to drag him away. The companion had been captured two days later and told the Patrol that Belasco Red had died and been cast into space, while the ship struggled to make good its escape.

	Belasco Red was grinning more broadly now. The pistol suddenly shot out a blue-green ray which centered on Barclay's neck. A great hand waved, and the beam from the pirate ship snapped out. Belasco walked forward gingerly, keeping the ray on Barclay, then picked him up and carried him back to the lock, through the metal communication tube and into the pirate ship.

	"Looka wat we caught," he laughed, dumping Barclay on the floor. For a fraction of a second the patrolman was out of the ray, and the instant his body touched the floor he leaped up like an un-leashed spring. His hand darted toward the giant outlaw's pistol, but halfway it fell to his side as the ray touched his neck once more.

	"It wants to fight I think," said Belasco. "It's a patrolman from the looks of the suit. Shall we play with it awhile?" His grotesque face writhed into an expression impossible to describe.

	A man of medium height, with smooth sandy hair had looked into the room, where three other pirates had been when Belasco returned.

	"Oh, I say, that looks like Special-Captain Barclay. Truly we're honored, you know, Captain, but we must detain you a while.

	"And, Red, let's let him help us a bit. I'm sure the fellow will be glad to. That was a nasty little jolt he gave us with those skim-milk rays of his. Did you look at the apparatus, Thed?" He spoke to a stockily-built man to one side. Thed was nursing a burned hand.

	"Yeah—it's been gimmicked. H-T stuff. Almost took my hand off. I was careful enough, but the damn thing turned loose half a million volts soon as I moved the control panel. I'll be damfino how it could. I shut off the generators. They were new, too, but they blew out when the beam-control went off."

	"Ah—the new Ridgely Automatic Atomics. They can start themselves, Thed. And they're much more powerful. Too bad. We'll have to capture the Twenty-five Hundred when they commission that. I hear it will be equipped with the new generators.

	"Well, it's all right. Cast the machine loose, burn it, and I'm sure Special-Captain Barclay can help us. I know a bit about rays and such myself. We should be able to figure it out together, don't you think so Captain?" The lean man looked at Barclay. "Yes, I think so.

	"By the way, Red, just go on and move into position for the Mira. We won't need to make repairs before then, and haven't time. We don't know just when she'll come, it may be a day or two, and it may be at once. We can make repairs there."

	The disfigured giant gave the ray pistol to the stocky Thed, and departed on his errand. Presently the ship swung somewhat in its course.

	"Thed," said the sandy-haired one, "suppose I try using that pistol. I'd like to talk to our friend here, and he seems sulky." Silently the blocky Thed passed the weapon over. Quickly the new possessor made several adjustments, then moved the beam from the neck to a point just below the middle of the chest. Don found his neck and head as well as his eyes could move now.

	"Hello, Jennings. That feels better."

	"Ah—quite so, quite so. Have you heard of the stimulator, I wonder?"

	"No, I admit ignorance of that. A new invention?"

	"Yes—quite. We ought to try it out, don't you think so, Thed? Please bring me the portable set." Thed disappeared silently. Barclay looked at the green-clad man before him. Save for the bright red-leather belt at his waist, his uniform was exactly like the others.

	"Is it Lincoln green?" asked Barclay. "I never did know colors."

	"No," replied Jennings with mock sadness, "it isn't. We couldn't get it. It isn't made, and I haven't had time to make any. Managing this little adventure is really trying. Belasco is so insistent that we remove all of your confreres on sight, he becomes hard to control at times. Ah, the Americans are so enterprising. He wants to destroy the entire patrol. I'm more modest in my desires. We English are apt to be. I'm planning to induce certain so-called scientists to witness a demonstration. That will probably take some time, and I do hope I will continue to have Belasco's co-operation. He's almost impossible.

	"You see I treated his face, and not being a skilled plastic surgeon, it isn't beautiful. But he lived. It's healed now. I used a certain drug during the process, very quick healing, but unfortunately it's habit forming. He has hemorrhages of a most frightful sort if he doesn't get his daily ration. And I'm the only one who can make it.

	"He tried once to make me give him the secret. Just once. But he's still hard to handle sometimes. You for instance. He will insist on being unpleasant about it. And I am hoping to take certain captives from the Mira this time, with our larger ship, equipped as it is with a brig for prisoners, it should be a lucrative trade. But he will probably be unpleasant.

	"Ah, Thed. Thanks. This is the stimulator, Captain. Stimulates certain nerves. See?"

-

CHAPTER III - Man and Woman

	A pale orange ray reached out of the cone-shaped projector, and touched Barclay's foot. Involuntarily a cry rang from him. It felt like nothing describable, it seemed a red-hot vise was clamping on it, crushing every bone and tendon, while a dozen rats with white-hot teeth gnawed at it. It lasted but an instant, then the orange ray snapped out.

	"The stimulator," said the bland Jennings, "affects only the nerves leading to the brain, stimulating them instead of paralyzing the nerves leading from the brain as does the paralyzing ray. It affects all the nerves, so the sensations are mixed, a feeling of fire, of crushing pressure, of breaking bones, itching, everything is stimulated.

	"Very interesting," Jennings nodded to himself. "Very effective," he smiled.

	A muffled vibration from the beryllium metal flooring announced the approach of some massive man, and presently Belasco's ghastly mask of a face appeared.

	"Ah, entertaining him? Does he know what that apparatus is all about?"

	"Certainly. He probably aided in its construction. They wouldn't send a man who knew nothing about it to test it would they?" snapped Jennings. "You do, do you not, Captain?"

	"No," lied Barclay immediately. "It was secret stuff; they told me how to work it, rigged it with that gimmick, and sent me out. I couldn't even turn the gimmick off."

	"There. You see he knows. Any man who didn't wouldn't be so explicit in what he didn't know, but would tell all he did," said Jennings, turning back to Belasco. "In the meantime, let's get that apparatus installed. You will show us how, Captain?"

	"No, I can't, anyway," snapped the Patrol Captain.

	Belasco's ham-like hand took the cone of the stimulator projector and a broad grin appeared on his face. "No?" The ray touched Barclay's foot. For a moment he stood it grimly, but as the ray deepened in color, as more power came on, he groaned aloud, sweat started from his forehead—and yet the ray was not actually harming him! Belasco grinned wider, and increased the power. This was not pain that was caused in a natural manner, it was pain that was actually a harmless nerve stimulation! There was no destroying fire to deaden the nerves, and lessen the agony, no grinding vise crushed them. They were merely stimulated.

	In thirty seconds Barclay was willing to tell them what he knew. Belasco kept it up for a full minute. "More," he promised, "if we don't like your behavior. Will you need anything we won't have on the ship?"

-

	The pain left the instant the ray snapped off, and Barclay sat up dazedly, leaning back against his hands. His legs were powerless, a pencil beam shone on them, paralyzing him from the waist down. "Yes," he said faintly, "if you've got the regular stock-supplies."

	"And more, Captain," Jennings assured him, "we always sail well equipped, as I like to do experimental work."

	"All right. You, and your ray-engineer," said Barclay, "will have to help. And you'll need some extra heavy conductor cables. To be effective you've got to turn every horsepower of your generator into the Twins. Twin beams. And don't put fuses in the lines—" He talked rapidly, explaining the apparatus, how it projected a beam that would carry a current of electricity across empty space, explained that if the beams carrying their millions of horsepower encountered a rib in the ship, a surge might develop that would blow out a fuse, without reason but with disastrous results in battle, for several minutes would be needed to make replacements.

	Belasco hung in the background as they worked at plans and drawings and calculations, his paralyzer and stimulator projectors ever ready. A fixed projector had been arranged that kept Barclay helplessly pinned in his seat, his legs powerless.

	The ship rang with the clangor of repair workers at work on the damage done by the X-531.

	In some four hours Barclay had finished the plans. Then he was promptly removed, and put in the brig, stout chains fastening him to the metal wall. The room, about thirty feet long by fifteen wide, was ordinarily used by the Patrol as an auxiliary storeroom, but the stores had been removed in preparation for the expected prisoners of the Mira. One tiny porthole opened on space, to give a view of star-studded heavens.

	A row of bright lights down the roof offered illumination. The door was a single slab of solid steel three inches thick, sliding vertically against the ship's normal acceleration, and held in place, when locked, by the series of tremendous magnets all about it. Once settled in place, nothing short of a disintegration ray could move it. To move the door in any way, to fuse it, would generate a terrific current in it, and automatically give the alarm, as well as stun anyone standing on the metal plates of the brig.

	Fifteen feet from the floor was the roof, and five feet below the roof was a little platform on which a guard could sit to watch a number of prisoners.

	Belasco kicked Barclay in, and left with a growl. He would have preferred to kill the Special-Captain then, but Jennings pointed out that the projectors might not work after all.

	He was securely chained, and the men left, locking the door magnetically. Barclay disposed himself on the hard bunk, stoically, smiled resignedly, with a flash of humor in his eyes. He went peacefully to sleep.

	He woke, hours later, to the clang of the great metal door as it was shot upward in its slides. A small wiry man, clad in the green uniform of the pirate ship, entered and stepped to one side of the door, a sly grin of pleasure on his face. There was a portable stimulator set in his hand, which he set on the floor, retaining the projector cone and control mechanism in his left hand, and a paralyzer in his right. A moment later there was a heavy trampling on the metal floor, groans and low voices, a sharp command to "step along" in Belasco's harsh voice, and a string of men entered the room, clad in civilian clothes. There were tall ones and short ones and thin and fat, but they were all marched in and fastened by chains to the bunks.

	Then finally two women came. The men had been reacting to their capture in all ways, from the height of indignation to the depths of groveling fear. The two women marched proudly in, looked over the room with a swift glance, and marched over to the least-crowded corner, about twenty feet from Barclay.

	One was young, about twenty-two, the, other, evidently her mother, about forty-five. Both were tall, broad and heavily built. The daughter was Junoesque, if not more. Her mass must have been easily 170 pounds, and her mother was equally heavy.

	And, bringing up the procession, came Belasco. He entered the doorway, and stood waiting till everyone had been chained, his hideous face distorted in what was supposed to be a smile of satisfaction.

	Silently, a second figure appeared behind him—Jennings. Quick dark eyes scanned the prisoners, and with a sudden narrowing stopped on a tall, powerfully built civilian, his face a deep brown from long exposure to Martian sunlight. But he was a terrestrial, his smooth-fitting elastic shirt proclaimed his muscles were well developed, not as a terrestrial becomes after months on Mars.

	Jennings passed Belasco, and stepped nearer to the man. "Who," he demanded, "are you?" still scrutinizing him closely.

	"Jimmy Durante, terrestrial engineer, working on Mars. Just made a trip to Jupiter for some special machinery when your murdering gang of cut-throats killed off the crew of the ship, and took us. I hope you get blood-poisoning."

-

	Jenning's face had relaxed from its intense stare of concentration. "No," he smiled, "you aren't Jimmy Durante, you're John Norcross, and you're Special-Lieutenant John Norcross at that. You take the air. We don't want you." He pulled out the red-butted pistol that hung on his right side, aimed it deliberately at the center of the Patrol Investigator's forehead and pushed the trigger button. A blinding flash of white light sprang from it, a momentary odor of burned flesh, and the light disappeared as Norcross dropped.

	"Take that," said Jennings to .another uniformed pirate, "and throw it down the waste-chute." Jennings turned, and started back toward Belasco. "I'm going up to the pilot-house. The Twins have been finished, and while you were tying up our friends here, I tried it out on the old Mira. Cut it in two nicely."

	"Shall I finish off this thing now?" asked Belasco eagerly, looking toward Barclay. 

	"Hmmm—no, I wouldn't yet I ..."

	"I wouldn't either, Jennings," said Barclay, "I saw a piece of apparatus back at H.Q. that might interest you. Shield for the paralyzer ray, they claimed."

	"That," said Jennings judicially, "is a lie. There isn't any. I can't make one myself, and I made the apparatus, and have the only ray apparatus."

	"Of course you are also the best physicist in the system?" queried Barclay mildly, but slightly ironically.

	"Not the best," admitted Jennings, "but the only one who knows anything about this apparatus, so you are a liar naturally. But we will want you in about twelve hours to look over the ray apparatus, so you needn't spring that joke about a paralyzer screen." Jennings turned and left. Belasco looked disappointed a moment, then his eyes lighted as he looked at the girl again.

	Everyone had been looking at Barclay. Suddenly the elder woman gave a little cry of surprise. "Why! It's Donnie Barclay. I didn't see you at first. How did you get here?" Her voice was deep and powerful.

	"Accidentally," replied Barclay with a wry smile, "and unintentionally. They captured my little one-man ship, Mrs. Willman. I'm sorry to meet you again."

	Mrs. Willman smiled. "Apparently these pirates want ransom for us. I think Dick will get it. You've recognized Pat haven't you. It's been nearly seven years since you've seen her though." Mrs. Willman didn't seem greatly perturbed.	

	"I did," nodded Barclay," as soon as you came in."

	"Shut up, you!" growled Belasco, looking at Don. There was a gleam of anticipation in his eyes as he looked at Pat Willman. "And you, little lady, are kinda heavy. But since a damn — — of a Planetary Patrolman rayed me, I haven't seen a woman. I think it's about time. Take off the things you got on. I wanna see if I like you."

	Pat Willman looked at him with unconcealed loathing. "No wonder," she said simply. "And naturally not. And I advise you not to try it."

	Belasco grinned down at her from his six-feet-eight, some thirteen inches taller. "I think I will. I'd like it."

	Mrs. Willman winked at Barclay, Barclay smiled grimly, and began to weave his fingers into the chains that held him.

	Belasco advanced. A grim glint came into the girl's eyes, Belasco's huge paw reached out and grasped her light jacket. With a vicious jerk he pulled it away, tearing the material. Pat Willman stood clad in a light dress. "That," she said with cold anger, "is more than enough."

	Belasco grinned, and reached out again. Pat Willman's hand moved like a streak of light, the great wrist was caught in slim white fingers that bit into the flesh, a terrific jerk pulled the giant toward her, and the other hand came up. Belasco was turned around, thrown down, and kicked, thoroughly pounded, then thrown away, gasping and roaring with rage and pain. He was thrown at least fifteen feet across the room, though the ship was moving under an acceleration of an earth-gravity now. He fell heavily.

	He rose with a roar, and rushed back at her. Pat Willman watched him coolly. Pat Willman, twenty-two earth-years old, had lived practically all her life on Jupiter, a neighbor of Don Barclay. She could move about three times as rapidly as a terrestrial, and had the strength of three terrestrials her own size. She was easily more than a match for any terrestrial man, and she knew it.

-

CHAPTER IV - Rays and Rays

	Barclay had been looking about the room. The guard who had been at the door when the prisoners entered had gone up to his platform, and was interestedly watching Belasco's discomfiture at the hands of the Jovian girl. Belasco had reached her again, and this time she was slapping him. Her slap was comparable to the playful slap of a tiger, and Belasco was getting a more severe beating than many men could have given him. She slapped him with her left hand, which threw him against her right, her right hand slapped his ribs, and hurled him back to the left.

	"Keep it up," her mother said softly. "Donnie is doing something."

	Pat kept it up, till Belasco's head lolled with each jerk, and blood began to pour from his nose. The guard on the platform didn't interfere, he didn't like Belasco any more than most of the others of the crew. In fact he was laughing. Finally Pat threw the unconscious giant into the middle of the room. The guard looked at him, but made no move to aid him. Pat Willman also looked at him, her breath coming rapidly, for the air in the ship was thin for such exertion, used as she was to Jupiter's dense atmosphere.

	Barclay crouched slowly as she turned to look at him, then, like a flash of light, he bounded straight into the air, and toward the guard platform thirty feet away, and ten up. His first enormous bound carried him directly beneath the shelf-like platform, and as the guard rose with a sudden cry of amazement, to look over- the edge, a powerful hand grasped him, and hauled him downward. As he fell, Barclay eased the landing with a catlike softness, his great hand about the throat of the other.

	The other hand rose, and with a queer semblance of preciseness, struck the small man on the side of the head. He went suddenly limp and Barclay released him. "Two hours," he said judicially, and leapt over to Belasco. He hit him also on the side of the head with the palm of his hand.

	"Three hours, considering what you did to him, Pat," he smiled at the girl. "You took their attention away while I broke those chains. I knew the strength of the chains, and we always have to use double-shackles on Jovians. This is an ex-Patrol ship, and I know a whale of a lot more about it than they do."

	Barclay drew Belasco's heat-gun, and his paralyzer gun, gave the heat gun to Pat, and took the paralyzer from the guard. He looked at them hastily. "Hmmm—twenty shots in all, or ten minutes operation. I'll—"

	He stopped abruptly as the heavy metal door shot up. Two men stood revealed. They had come for the body of the man Jennings had killed.

	With a cry of alarm they sprang back, and brought their paralyzer pistols up. Barclay, moving three times as fast, threw a streaking beam across both of them. Suddenly one of the pistols exploded in a flash of light, then grew gradually red-hot. The guard dropped it as Barclay released him from the beam. In an instant Barclay's swift mind saw what it meant—the pistols were vulnerable to each other, some induction effect released the stored energy of one caught in a ray from another. The dropped pistol was white hot now, smoking and glowing.

	From down the corridor came shouts and calls, pounding feet. The reinforcements were coming. "Throw me your pistol!" commanded Barclay, lowering his own ray till it paralyzed only the lower part of the man's body. The second pistol was thrown to him. An instant's glance told him it was full. He slipped it into his belt, and retreated to the platform.

	A moment later a crush of pirates tumbled through the still-open door, and came with their paralyzers in their hands. Swiftly Barclay passed his rays over each, and one by one they dropped pistols that were swiftly heating to incandescence.

	But from the door, a yet un-rayed pistol reached Barclay, and his weapons were suddenly growing unbearably hot. But they seemed to suck the paralyzing energy into themselves, away from the man, for as he hurled them from him, he drove like a bullet toward the man whose pistol had ruined his weapons. The ray caught him in mid-air, but so swiftly was he coming the man had no time to dodge, and Barclay's flying body knocked him down, the pistol flying from his hand to crash into wreckage as it struck the metal wall.

	Then men began to pile on Barclay. But Barclay was a rubber ball. He bounced about the room with unbelievable speed, his flying hands merely slapping men, but leaving them unconscious for an hour, unless revived by outside aid.

	There were twelve men attacking him, it took him less than forty-five seconds to send them all to sleep.

-

	Now he lost no time. Others were coming from other parts of the ship no doubt, and he had no more pistols. "Pat—that pistol," he demanded. Without a word the girl tossed it to him. He whirled and shone a beam on a rivet-weld to one side of the heavy metal door. There was a crash, and the great metal slab fell into place as the rivet-weld glowed red-hot under the lashing heat-beam.

	"Here's the gun—keep it, and cut your chains. Take care of them, collect their guns and distribute them among the other prisoners here. The door can't be opened from outside nor inside now, till the generators are stopped. This is a last resort for the Patrol men on the ship if mutiny occurs, or prisoners gain control," Barclay smiled broadly. "I'll be back."

	He leaped toward the wall where star-studded space looked in through a narrow porthole, set deep in the double walls. He did something to the wall of the room, and a section fell back into the space between the walls. There was air here, air intended for those who might have to make repairs between the walls. But this carefully concealed door was a secret means of escape—and recapture of the ship. For now, between the walls of the ship, Barclay closed and re-locked the metal door-plate, and made his way along the ribs and braces between the two skins of the ship, climbing against the ship's acceleration toward the bow.

	In a minute or so he rested on two cross-beams outside of what he knew was the pilot-room. A mass of cables lead from this room, back to the engine-room below. He could have entered the engine-room had he wished, or the ray-room. He preferred the control-room. Every outside room on the ship had these secret panels for emergencies. It was his own idea, and one Commander Morrison hadn't too heartily approved of. But it was proving itself now!

	From an almost hidden clamp he extracted a screwdriver, rapidly manipulated it on what appeared to be a signal-junction box, twisted the leads to one side, and then pushed on a bolt-head. There was a sudden, subdued hiss, and a panel sprang backwards as the pneumatic cylinders drove it open. With a single bound, Barclay was in the pilot-house.

	Jennings, cold-eyed, bent over the chart table, while Thad stared out of the pilot window, glancing occasionally at the meters and instruments on the board before him. A squat, powerfully built man was working over near the door.

	The three turned as one when Barclay entered. Thad, with a trained, dexterous flip of his fingers threw the ship on to automatic control, leaped from his seat, and dove for Barclay. Jennings was whipping a paralyzer pistol from his holster, and the squat man was turning to do battle, his mouth opening for a bull roar.

	It seemed like slow motion to the Jovian, while his motions seemed streaks of blurred light to the earth-trained pirates. Barclay still had the long, sharp-bladed screwdriver, with its heavy insulite handle in his hand. The hand flashed up, and the screwdriver flashed across, to bury itself to the handle in Jenning's wrist. With a scream of pain the pirate-scientist dropped the weapon as the metal blade severed tendons, blood-vessels, and smashed through bone. It had been going with nearly the speed of a pistol bullet, and weighed nearly 12 ounces.

	Long before Jenning's pistol could touch the floor, and before Thad had reached him, Barclay grasped the weapon in his hand, whirling in the air as he dove across the small pilot-house. The opened mouth of the squat pirate was emitting sound now, and a pistol was in his hand. Barclay trained his ray-gun on the other in a fraction of a second, and flicked a full-powered beam at it. In an instant a puff of smoke shot out, and the pirate dropped his weapon to see it burst into incandescence as it hit the floor.

	From below-decks an answering roar was coming, and the pound of heavy feet. The squat man and Thad reached Barclay almost simultaneously. For some reason Thad had not been wearing any weapons, but now he clung to Don's paralyzer like grim death. The squat man attempted to uppercut to the Patrol Captain's jaw, but Don's head moved a fraction of an inch, and the blow whistled by harmlessly. An open palm struck the side of Thad's head, and the pilot dropped senseless. An instant later the remaining pirate bolted through the door—or attempted to. Barclay caught him, and a moment later he joined Thad on the floor of the pilot-room.

	A glance assured Barclay that Jennings had fainted from loss of blood and pain. His hand reached up to a small knob to one side of the en trance-way and a heavy steel panel fell across the one door to the pilot-house, locking in air-tight gaskets. A moment later, and huge magnets had fixed it immovably.

	Barclay leaped back to the pilot-board, seated himself swiftly, and threw on the powerful radio set on range 245-671. Swiftly, with nearly 1,000,000 horsepower backing his signals, he sent out a call to Wier, somewhere in near-by space, supporting him in this mad attempt.

	"Wier—Wier—P.C. 2500. Wier-Wier—P.C. 2500," he repeated monotonously, listening in his set.

-

	It became difficult presently as men began to work on the door. Meanwhile his other hand was swiftly altering the course of the ship, bearing back toward the Jupiter-Mars lane.

	"Don—Don—P.C. 2500 answering."

	"Temporarily in control here. Heading ship back toward Jupiter-Mars lane. Using spotlight beam and floodlight. Will start radio and leave it going as long as possible. Get direction and distance. Step on it. They're working on this door."

	"P.C. 2500 coming," replied the radio set.

	Don's flying fingers did things to the radio controls, necessitating considerable work to stop it, and much more work to repair it. But it sent out a continuous high-pitched note. Now he short-circuited certain resistances, and relays, and the ship staggered forward under a full Jovian gravity. There was an abrupt stoppage of work on the door outside, as the terrestrials fell down. Barclay grinned, and locked the controls as they were, adding some bits of wire to hold his shorts in place. Then he got up heavily, and with a tremendous effort walked to the door through which he had entered. From the other side he arranged it to close and lock in place when he released it. Returning, he released it, and watched it merge into the wall.

	He returned to the pilot-table once more, seated himself heavily, and listened to Dave Wier's calls.

	"Distance 500,000 miles. Approaching rapidly." Carefully Barclay altered the course of the ship's flight till it was pointed toward Wier's machine, and racing toward it ever faster. The tremendous acceleration was beginning to tell on the speed indicator.

	Barclay glanced back at the door. A dull blue haze was forming about it. "Hmmm—distintegrator didn't stop working. Probably has a range of ten feet, and will hit that wall over there. I wonder—"

	Barclay took two heavy bus-bars from the stock room attached to the pilot room, connected them swiftly, bending them over his knee. These he lead over, and set up like two poles close together in the necessary path of the disintegration machine's ray. The haze of ionization was growing stronger swiftly. By the time the two bus-bars were in position, there was a tiny pin-prick of blue ray flaming across the room, and a moment later scores of holes appeared.

	Then two of them hit the bare copper bus-bars, charged with 150,000 volts. There were two wires. First the door, or what was left of it, exploded into flaming vaporized steel. Next the disintegrator exploded with a terrific concussion, raining white-hot metal parts all about. The machine had short-circuited the twenty-million horse-power generators of the ship, and the result was inevitable.

	Barclay looked out through the hole in the door. One man had been badly burned, but the others had crawled laboriously down the hall and away from danger, when they realized that none of them could stand up to turn off the disintegrator and guessed what Barclay, who could stand the weight, would do.

	Barclay laughed, and taking his paralyzing pistol, rayed first one then another of the men. Practically the entire crew had come to the defense of the pilot-house. The others had been working on the brig door. As one after another felt the ray, he slumped, and threw his burning pistol to one side the instant he was released.

	Barclay's weapon had two shots left when he finished and returned to the cabin. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than from the ceiling above there poured a rain of the paralyzing rays. His fingers relaxed, and dropped the ray-pistol, which smoked slightly, but didn't explode, as all its charges were gone, his knees held for a moment before he toppled over and fell with a crash.

	Joyfully the pirates in the hall hastened to crawl back toward the pilot-house, helping each other. Three made it, and promptly keeled over as they entered the paralyzing rays that filled the room.

	Finally one of them crawled back and got a metal bar about five feet long. It took four of them to raise it into position and bring it down on the master-switch, opening it, and instantly shutting off all acceleration.

	Then one of the men hauled himself back along the corridor to the engine room, and from the emergency engine-room controls, which were powerless as long as the master-switch was closed, but which now sent the ship ahead under one earth-gravity.	

	Gathering a brace of ray pistols from the bench as he ran up to join his friends, he watched them manipulating the metal bar again. It was easier now, and they quickly worked the half-hidden button that had flooded the room with rays. It was just over Jenning's face as he had lain there.

-

	His eyes were bright and hard as he watched. He was weak, and knew it, holding his right wrist with his left hand. But Barclay wasn't. The shutting off of the paralyzing rays had started him even more quickly than it had started his enemies. With a bound he leaped for them, burying himself in their midst. The metal bar was wrenched from their hands, and thrown across the room. Then the sixteen men who had congregated there got a taste of a Jovian in action. His terrible, flying hands meant certain unconsciousness, or broken bones, while he himself was an invulnerable mass of iron-hard muscle to their blows. The one on the outskirts of the battle who held the two pistols, hesitated to use them, they would paralyze friend and foe alike.

	Presently Jennings saw them. "FOOL!" he shrieked over the noise of the fight, "RAY THEM ALL—FOOL!"

	The two pistols shot out their beams, and suddenly the fight stopped, Barclay, and those near him fell helpless, those on the outskirts had not been rayed, and with a cheer, fell to pulling their comrades out of the melee. "He sent a call for help. I couldn't read the radio code, confound him, but he called someone, and got an answer. He shifted our course till we were headed right for that other ship. We were traveling under that acceleration of 4.5 normal for I don't know how long. I'm hurt, the — — — used a screwdriver on me. Threw it like a bullet from a gun.

	"Now: battle stations. Tie that thing up till I'm ready for it. It escaped? Broke its bonds? Then tie it! Put one and a half reverse accelerations, but turn the ship around. First, put that damned radio on the blink, he's got it going, sending a direction-howl. Then make sure the lights are off, and use only the colored lights inside. Check the electrometer.

	There was a shrill clangor as the electro-detector caught the tell-tale emanations of powerful atomic generators driven hard. "Ship over-taking us, Captain! Comin' like a streak of light. Funny looking patchwork thing. Must be a thousand years old. I'll bet they plan to ram us, they're comin' too fast to stop," reported the pilot.

	"Ray—paralyzer," snapped Jennings. The generators in the bowels of the ship hummed a deeper note.

	"Oh, GOD! Cap—they've got a screen! The rays don't touch them!" called the pilot.

	Barclay's face lit with a smile, Jenning's eyes opened in consternation.

	"Put all your power in induction, switch suddenly to paralyzer," ordered Jennings.

	The ray operator's fingers flew. A moment later his face fell. "Didn't touch 'em," he reported.

	"Why aren't they raying us?" demanded Jennings in a puzzled tone. "Oh—the prisoners." A smile of satisfaction came over his face. "Listen, throw every kilowatt, even the shield-base power, since they won't ray us, and turn it into the Miller Twin rays, our kind friend installed for us."

	Jennings grinned at Barclay as he wrapped a bandage around his injured wrist. The ray operator was working again, and the shrill whine of the generators fell to a rumbling hum. The Twenty-five Hundred hung motionless beside them now, manned by Jovians it had been able to stop.

	A green bulb flashed suddenly on the pilot-board. The Twins were ready.

-

	Two milky tubes of radiance leaped out into space, curved sharply, and cut suddenly across the Twenty-five Hundred. Something was wrong, the Twin Beams, touching adjacent patches on the ship's side, did not flash into arcing, burning light.

	"The paralyzer screen," said Barclay's calm voice in the tense silence, "I helped develop it. You left records when your fiasco demonstration was made."

	"Guns," he went on, but his voice was suddenly drowned out. The two patches which the beams touched suddenly flashed with terrific fire. Somewhere below, in the depths of the ship, the great generators rose to a singing whine as the milky beams glowed with blue fires, terrific shattering lightnings at 100,000,000 volts pressure and 15,000,000 horsepower.

	They whined like titanic disc saws, then, incredibly they struck some cosmic snag, the shrill whine became an awful, soul-wrenching, nerve-shattering grind, the ship trembled throughout her length, and with an awful abruptness but there was no sound. A man speaking in the engine room suddenly was shouting in silence. The awful calm lasted a fraction of a second. Then it exploded into eye-searing light and terrific concussion. The generators had been re-polarized and exploded, taking a wall with them.

	It was quiet again, the faint chug of air-pumps gone,

	"Guns," resumed Barclay calmly, "kick—and Miller beams work both ways. I hoped you'd install those beams for me. It was the only way we could destroy your defensive generators without destroying you—to throw then against the hundred million horsepower Ridgely Atomic on that ship."

	Jennings stared at him in stupid amazement.

	Somewhere behind came the bump and clang as the Twenty-Five Hundred came alongside the helpless ship.

The End

Beyond the End of Space
Amazing Stories – March - April, 1933

CHAPTER I

	"HOLD 'er there for a while, Tom. I want to get three more electroscopes and a recording bolometer. The thermopile doesn't record, you know. The recording electroscope will give us a photographic record— but no immediate information as the experiment progresses." called Dr. Randolph Warren. He swung himself to the three-inch thick fused quartz tube, wrapped his hands around its milky column, and slid down the shaft forty feet to the ground below. A whining hum of electric motors and the slap-slap-slap of the silk ribbons mounting to the huge aluminum sphere above, drowned out the call of Tom Blamen, inside the sphere. Tom wanted to know if he might try the thing on low voltage once. Tom didn't get an answer, but he looked at the meters, and saw a needle quivering at the point marked "17" on the master meter.

	"17,000,000—and I'll have to discharge somehow before he can place the ladder to climb back. It's a shame to waste all that—" He looked out of his observation window, a conducting window made of two sheets of plate glass separated by a layer of dilute sulphuric acid. Set in the aluminum sphere it maintained the conductivity of the metal across the gap.

	Twenty-five feet away a weird mushroom rose from the concrete floor of the concrete laboratory. Set on a tripod of carefully designed insulators, the half-sphere seemed some strange growth. The polished aluminum with its discharge points pitted and scarred by the lashing force of terrific discharges was joined to the sphere by a clear tube of fused quartz. This seemed swollen half-way between, and the three-inch tube opened to the size of a foot-ball. Around this swelling, held in position by strings of insulators depending from the ceiling twenty feet above, were three tremendous magnets. The swelling in the tube contained a smaller globe or sphere and in this was a filament of iron wire. The inner tube was very highly evacuated, one of the dozen tubes Sanderson brought back with him from his voyage to space beyond the earth's atmosphere in fact. In 1952 there had been a dozen tubes, now in 1955, only three years later, but four remained, so those absolutely evacuated tubes were very valuable. Opened, then sealed while in empty space, they were the only EMPTY tubes on earth. It spoke of the importance of this experiment that the University had permitted this tube to be used.

	Blamen's gaze shifted back to the mushroom tower, down its insulated base to the powerful electric motor which drove a white ribbon of silk. The ribbon of silk brushed against a bit of CHARGITE, a specially designed compound which gave the silk a charge of electricity. The endless belt whisked the charge up to the sphere above, where points collected it and carried it away to the sphere. Like an endless-chain bucket conveyor the silk ribbon was bringing electric charges up, as a similar ribbon carried equal-—but opposite charges to the control sphere where he sat.

	Tom Blamen was in a whirl of hesitancy and doubt. He looked nervously about. He could discharge the spheres in a bolt of lightning to the heavy metal conductors thirty-five feet away by simply running out the discharge-arms. But it seemed a waste of energy—

	Ran Warren was back—he stood in the door looking up at the man in the window of the sphere.

	"Shall I discharge through the tube?" asked Blamen, eagerly.

	Warren didn't hear, but as anyone might, nodded in annoyance, "Yes—discharge to towers—send down the ladder, of course."

	Blamen accepted it as authority to do what he wanted. He gave a glance at the dials—17.6 million volts now— He stopped the motors, and the bands slowed with a doleful slap-slap-slap. He threw another switch, and the three enormous magnets surged with terrific, hitherto unused, power, a magnetic field of compressive force, three tremendous magnetic fields opposing each other, and pressing down simultaneously on that little inner tube. The fine iron filament-wire trembled. Suddenly it burst into blazing, explosive incandescence as a tremendous current rushed through it—and. simultaneously the terrific, stored energy at 17.6 million volts smashed through the iron vapor in the little tube. Seventeen and six tenth millions of volts leaping across a gap of eight inches!

	Warren leaped forward in amazed surprise. "Tom, you fool—don't—" He stopped, and froze as a terrible cry came to his ears.

	In the tube a light had formed. The discharge was all over—should have been. But in the tube was a virulent thing that glowed some indescribable color, a violet so tremendously deep that it seemed a red-black. A wave of energy struck Warren, that made him throw a protective hand across his eyes, and stagger back from that room of incandescence, back, and out to the corridor beyond. His eyes were in torture, his whole body felt crisp and dry. Still that terrific light was glowing around the corner of the door, beating out at him, and still the feeling of heat and some terrible, impact of energy parched his body. There were faint mutterings, shakings and quivers in the building now, the light from within was growing stronger. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The light grew bluer, and more brilliant, it seemed to increase rapidly, and the man staggered under a wave of beating, destroying energy, invisible, but terribly tangible.

	Then in an instant it was over, and only a heaving and restless movement of the building remained. Warren slumped to the floor as cries of panic echoed from other parts of the Heavy Apparatus Laboratories.

	A crowd of men was collected about him, a doctor bending over him and two stretcher bearers nearby, when he regained consciousness. He groaned in agony as he woke. His whole body was stiff and sore. He could feel a terrific coat of sunburn over all its surface except where something as thick as his belt or shoes had protected him.

	"Burn—radiation burn of some kind. Take him to the infirmary and coat him with 732-aE. It's serious. How's the other man?"

	"Dead—very. Burned raw, and looks as though he might have been electrocuted first. We'd better clear out, the wall is cracked badly."

	"Wh—what happened?" asked Warren blankly and inanely.

	"If you don't know, nobody can tell you, Warren," replied Jordan of Chemical Processes, who stood beside him now. "You started an earthquake though that darned near knocked the building down. We all left, then discovered you two hadn't, and came back. You were lying here, and Blamen—he's gone, Ran," he concluded gravely.

	"Blamen—started the tube—something happened. I called him and told him to discharge to the towers—to the ground—but he discharged through the tube. Is the apparatus all right?" Warren asked anxiously.

	"The Sanderson Tube is gone—everything else O. K."

	Warren groaned. "Oh Lord, I could replace any-4 thing but that!"

	The stretcher bearers were carrying him away before he got a chance to say any more, and the pain of the burns came back. He groaned softly. "The Sanderson tube!"

* * * * *

	"And so, Putt-putt, I've come to you as usual. It was a wild yarn I told, and I was dismissed with regrets, but my illness, lasting more than three months, made it imperative for them to have some man to take my place in the meantime—and somebody said something about a Sanderson tube and somebody else mentioned 175,000 dollars damages to buildings—

	"And now I've told you how I left the University."

	Donald Murray Putney, sometimes referred to by Warren at "Putt-putt"—and filthily rich—" inventor of the gasoline turbine, which had promptly wrecked several hundred promising gasoline engine companies, till they bought his patents, and supplied Warren with material for endless annoyance, was not satisfied that he heard the whole story.

	"Yes, how—but not, why. What was the wild tale?" he demanded. Putney knew Warren was not addicted to wild tales, especially if they might be interpreted as excuses for himself.

	"Well—I suggested that the action, which I saw, must be due to some hitherto unknown force. Certainly, Don," he went on, warming up to his subject, "there wasn't enough energy in my apparatus, taking the total energy stored on the two spheres, the field energy of the three magnets, and the potential energy, too, for that matter—they fell down you know—to start an earthquake. Also, a discharge, even of 17.6 million volts— all the instruments jammed—wouldn't give me a case of sun, or radiation burn that would lay me up in the infirmary for three straight months. Anyway—I had different aims." He quieted suddenly as he remembered he was started again, and the last reception of his theory had made it a painful discussion for him.

	"What were the aims?"

	"Energy of matter," replied Warren grimly.

	Putney was silent for some moments, puffing his pipe leisurely as he leaned back in his chair. The furnishings of his bachelor apartment were dedicated to the Goddess of Comfort.

	"Hmmm—that would cause an earthquake. In fact it might well cause several dozen earth-quakes. It would certainly cause an earthquake on Wall Street.

	"By the way, who led the laughter in the Directors Meeting?"

	"Old Nestor," replied Warren guardedly. "And it surprised me a lot. Naturally I would be surprised anyway, but old Nestor is no dumb business man. He got on that faculty for more reasons than one."

	"Yes," agreed Putney, "he did." Putney smiled sourly. "That old boy is a live man, and alive to the opportunities too. He bought in there, because he can get information cheap and wholesale. That's why Nestor Aircraft is a strong investment. And does Nestor love me—? He does—like a shark would. I nearly wrecked him with that little patent of mine, and he hasn't gotten over it yet. What did he say?"

	"He started them off, perhaps. I didn't expect him to say 'Impossible' but he was the first."

	"Oh—did he?" Putney smiled to himself. "And has he spoken to you since? Warren, I learned when I had patents to sell—and you know I've sold a lot more since that turbine affair—that Nestor has ideas of his own on business manners. Who gets the rights on the discovery if you remain with the University?"

	"Why—they would!" exclaimed Warren.

	"Uhuh—open to everybody to use. No money in that. Well, you're kicked out. If your ideas are correct, who gets the rights now?"

	"I would—"

	"And that's where you're wrong. Would you? How could you get them—how could you prove it—how could you build the apparatus—?" Putney leaned forward with blazing black eyes. "You know you couldn't—not till Nestor furnished your laboratory, and he'd run off with the patents, and you'd get a salary. You're blacklisted with Universities now, and you know it. So does he. He saw that you had millions—billions perhaps, in the palm of your hand. So he fired you. In a day he'll offer you a laboratory job, and set you on that again, and hell get the money!"

	Warren gazed at his friend in amazement. "You're right, Putt-putt. You're damn right. Only I'm going to ask you into a partnership with me. You've got the money, and I've got an idea, that is apparently worth Nestor's time!"

	Putney stood up and stretched forth his hand. "And we've got a partnership, Ran, that nothin'll bust!"

-

CHAPTER II

	"MR. NESTOR will see you now, sir," the secretary said. She smiled pleasantly at the tall, powerfully built, grey-eyed man. She began to wonder, as she noticed the expression about his eyes and mouth, just how successful Mr. Nestor would be in this interview. Mr. Nestor was usually successful in his interview, but there were little humorous crinkles around the big man's eyes, and graven lines of power and intelligence. But the jaw was powerful, the clean, square-cut lines of the face and the set of the head on broad powerful shoulders indicated determination. Most indicative of all, the lips were tight-pressed and they looked unpleasant. She mentally shrugged her shoulders, very pretty shoulders she knew they were too, and stood aside for him to pass.

	"Ah, Dr. Warren, I'm glad to see you again," said the shrewd old man. The mechanical smile was intended to be winning. Ran Warren didn't like it. He didn't like Nestor for that matter, for it was Nestor, in his younger days, who had changed his career. Pressure here, influence there—and his father began to yield, for he had never had the determination and the power of will of his mother. Then—five big men, and one man, who was going to be big, jumped on him, and his holdings began to slide rapidly. But it made Nestor.

	"What was it you wanted to see me about, sir?" asked Warren, attempting to come to the point.

	"I have been wondering since I spoke so hurriedly in the Advisory Meeting, whether that idea of yours might not have been right. It really does seem strange to me that so serious a result could have followed a mere discharge in a tube. What do you believe caused the earthquake?" The keen, black eyes twinkled up at him like the eyes of a bird.

	"Radiations, sir. I am certain no such power as would move the earth's crust was ever developed in those little electric motors that accumulated the discharge. I believe that that discharge started a release of the energy of matter, that the radiations were very largely of an extremely short wave-length, and that they penetrated the building readily. Certainly you know that all the photographic material in the laboratory was ruined, and some was at a considerable distance, behind walls. Suppose the radiations penetrated through the ground, and into the layers below. Eventually they would be absorbed. At whatever point they were absorbed, we would know there was water, for the laboratory was on made land. That water, converted to steam, would certainly have some such result. The radiations were so powerful in all probability that they passed through me, and the other humans without hindrance, and hence without result."

	Nestor's eyes were bright. There was a calculating gleam behind them. "That's an interesting theory, and quite possible—if you really did succeed in smashing the atom."

	"But I didn't. I destroyed it. It wasn't merely broken, it was annihilated, I believe."

	"Matter cannot be destroyed, I thought?" said Nestor sharply.

	"Apparently the others agreed with you. Were you going to reinstate me at the University?"

	"I'm afraid that can't be done, Dr. Warren. But I was interested enough to ask you if you would like a job with my research staff. You could continue your experiments if you wished. I can offer you fifteen thousand a year."

	A slow smile dawned on Warren's lips. "I'm afraid you are mistaken, Nestor. If you investigate the State files, you'll find there's a new firm—Putney and Warren, Research Engineers. I think you'll have to get someone else, so I'll say—goodbye."

	Warren turned and strode out. Mr. Thaddeus Eustace Nestor looked after him with amazement. "What—hey—come back— But Warren had already left. Nestor began to curse, then stopped abruptly. His plans had gone badly awry. He had intended to snap up Warren before anyone else could, and as Putney had suggested, get the benefit of this inconceivably important discovery. Now to his horror he discovered that not only was he unable to get it, but instead of getting it himself, Warren was to get the benefit. Had he left Warren in his position at the University he would at least have had an equal share in the discovery with all others, but now he certainly would not. There was just one answer."

	He pressed a button, and presently the secretary appeared. "Send Mr. Williams over, Miss Oliver." The secretary retired, and called Mr. Robert Williams, head of the Nestor Research Laboratories.

	Nestor Aircraft was only one of T. E. Nestor's holdings. The man had forward-looking ideas, and he had long since realized that research would pay an income as well as any other business, and the Laboratories were simply his invention factories. They handled all sorts of problems, and Mr. Williams was the head, and a physicist.

	He appeared in a few minutes, and went into Nestor's soundproof office. "Well, what is it?"

	"I told you Warren was coming? Well, he isn't. I made a mistake." Williams grinned broadly. The Old Man had made a mistake, and a bad one evidently. He didn't look happy, and Williams had been informed that morning that he was about to be made Assistant Director of Research, with Warren as Director. It hadn't appealed to him.

	"A mistake? What was it?" he asked ironically.

	"I got that blasted scientist loose from the University so he could come here—and what does he do? Does he thank me for it and come?—no! He's started a firm of his own! And Williams, get this; he's discovered how to annihilate matter!"

	Williams started and looked at Nestor seriously. "How do you know?"

	"Read about the explosion at the University three months ago? That was it. A tiny piece of iron wire, he said!"

	"Where do I come in?"

	"You're going to duplicate his apparatus, and better his record. I've already got track of a Sanderson tube."

	"You're mistaken. I'm going to do nothing of the kind. Warren is the greatest atomic man in the world, and he always was a fool for luck, Remember the time Canstanti tried to start his racket on the University and sent a bomb? It fell beside Warren and turned out a dud. Well, I'm not superstitious, but if it killed one man and nearly killed him, then it's bad medicine for Mrs. Williams' little boy, Bobby.

	"What do you know about the power he used, voltages, currents and so forth? Suppose that instead of the slow release that merely killed one and half killed another, besides causing an earthquake, we got a rapid release. Any idea what would happen? You could blow this old world clear across the solar system!"

	"You won't handle it? Why not try it with just a littler

	"Little? There ain't no sich animile' as the hick said. If I worked under a microscope I'd still have enough to blow the whole city off the map! I know physics plenty good for my work, but I'm no second Warren. You know his latest work has been showing Einstein's mistakes. There's just one other man who might do it, and that's Jimmy Atkill."

	"Atkill—he's a disreputable crook. They won't even publish his papers any more."

	"Sure he's a crook—but they never proved he killed the old bird. He had some kind of a death ray, and they never proved he used it. Try and convince a jury of twelve good men and dumb, that a death ray they can't be shown did the job!"

	"He's a crook—but he's brilliant. Try him."

	"All right. If you're afraid."

	Williams grinned. "That's not a dig. That's not fear either, it's common sense. Want to play with matches in a dynamite plant? Want to come out and watch me work on that idea—when a piece, you can't see under a microscope, would blow the whole city off the map?" The Physicist left.

	Nestor took out a pocket chess set, and sat playing chess with various combinations and problems. Then, after nearly half an hour, he put his little set away and reached for the telephone.

	"Miss Oliver, get the physicist, Dr. James Atkill, on my phone. I don't know where he is, nor in what city. Get him." Then he hung up and went back to his papers. It was nearly an hour before Miss Oliver announced that Dr. Atkill was on the wire.

	"Dr. Atkill speaking; is that Mr. Nestor?"

	"Yes. Where are you?"

	"Detroit:"

	"Be here in an hour and I've got a big job for you. Hop by nearest plane, I'll give orders to send you right through. I'm in New York."

	"I've got a good job here. What have you got, how long will it last, and how much?" was Dr. Atkill's response.

	"Read about the earthquake at the University here three months ago? That was some of Warren's work. Destruction of the indestructible. That's all I can say over the telephone. The salary will be agreeable. Will you come?"

	There was a soft whistle over the wire. "So my old friend Ran Warren has been shaking down buildings— and the indestructible has - been destroyed. And why isn't Warren working on it?"

	"Fool! He is. That's why I said hurry."

	"Doesn't take much apparatus if he's working on it. He always was poor as the proverbial church mouse," chuckled Atkill.

	"Doesn't it? Putney's backing him. Once and for all: Are you coming?" demanded Nestor irritably.

	"On my way, gran'pa!" Nestor's face went red at this rejoinder from Dr. Atkill, and his close-cropped grey hair seemed to stand up stiffer than usual. He started to splutter into the microphone, but the instrument was mockingly dead.

-

CHAPTER III

	"WELL, from the expression on your face, I should say that my guess as to friend Nestor's ideas was right, Ran?" grinned Putney as Warren came into the laboratory. Half a dozen men of Putney's staff were grouped around their chief, and smiled at the angry Warren.

	"Very," replied Warren with a grimace. "He offered me fifteen whole thousands a year—and he knows damn well that, if my ideas are right, the thing is worth—oh there isn't any possible limit to set on it. It's beyond value. And the old skunk would keep it tightly wrapped up in his own private pink ribbon—to be sold only at his own prices. He's probably put it just low enough to wreck the existing power companies, and high enough to make an ungodly profit"

	"What do you think his next move will be?"

	"Lord, Putt, I don't know." Warren looked at his friend in blank surprise," I hadn't thought. What will he do?"

	"He'll call in Williams, his chief of laboratories, and tell him to go ahead on it. And Williams, being an intelligent though not highly scrupulous man, will decline without thanks, explaining to Nestor just why—it won't be safe. Nestor will either force him to do it, or get—I think he'll get Atkill, he's probably the next best man."

	"He's the best, the best physicist in the world, and one of the most interesting men, but has the moral sense of a feudal baron. 'I want it. It's mine'. That's his one and only code. Nestor will probably be gypped. It's a shame a brilliant man like Atkill can't behave."

	"He's second best—you're best and you know it. Now let's forget that and see what we want. You have the notes on your experiment?"

	"Why no, they belonged to the University," exclaimed Warren.

	"Nut! We don't know whether Nestor's got 'em or not. Wilson, you go to the University and try to buy them; up to a million I'll pay for them. And the remains of the apparatus that was wrecked." Putney ordered. Wilson nodded, and started off at once. Putney sat in silence for some time.

	"I wonder—I wonder if Nestor might not try to get in here, and acquire some data?" asked Warren softly. "May I borrow your men for a while?"

	"Go to it, Ran. What's the idea now?"

	"Watch—and we may show you some new ideas." The physicist turned to the men around him. "Come on men, this is going to be war."

	The rest of the staff had gathered, a score of men in all. To a man they were with Putney, and every one of that scientific staff were with the great physicist in his research. To them, the idea of the energy of matter was a fire to stimulate them to the utmost.

	Outside the laboratory Warren surveyed the grounds with an appraising eye. The laboratory building stood on a low hill. Behind, rose ridge on ridge of the rolling New Jersey hills. The Kittatiny range off to the Northwest crowned the view with a green-blue ribbon. Below the large, concrete building was a series of smaller sheds and houses. The kitchen and mess-hall were set over a clear, bubbling spring; a little stream of water trickled down from it to the clear lake below.

	The hillside itself was clear, but covered with outcropping rocks. Behind the sheds and the main laboratory tall metal towers strode off across the hills to the super-power transmission line five miles away. A high metal fence surrounded the entire property.

	"Our first job is to set up a number of burglar alarms, and a burglar catcher or two. Men, you all live here don't you? I have reason to suspect we aren't going to have a happy stay while we are developing this thing, so we're going to fix it so one can get in or get out again if they do enter, without our knowing it. Come on!"

	For the rest of that day the men worked, while Wilson, with the supply-plane made numerous trips to and from New York and the surrounding towns, bringing foods and other supplies. One of the things Putney ordered was a complete gasoline-driven power plant. The power line was too accessible, and since there had been no reason to believe it would fail he had never had an auxiliary plant.

	The entire grounds of the laboratory were crossed and re-crossed with an endless chain of beams of ultra-violet light, and photoelectric detectors. A capacity bridge was attached to the metal fence, and several others set up in the grounds, making it impossible for anyone to approach them, without giving the alarm. Then the fence was wired, and it was possible to turn the current on either the power line or the power plant into it at any time.

	It was night before they finished, and the hundreds of invisible beams stretched their fingers about. The grounds were equipped with searchlights that would automatically turn to the section from which any alarm came, and flood it with light. Three men were sent out to make an attempt to steal across the grounds, knowing perfectly the distribution of the beams, and with a careful map of the grounds. It could not be done. The beams could be avoided only by coming within range of the capacity bridges, and instantly a blinding glare flooded them, and the tortured shriek of a siren announced their failure.

	Air attack likewise proved impossible, for again the capacitances were disturbed. "I think," said Warren with a broad smile," that we are safe."

	"Uhuh—Atkill came to see Nestor to-day," answered Putney.

	"Then you were right again. Williams didn't like the job."

	"When do you start work?"

	"To-morrow-—when I've had some sleep," replied Warren instantly. "Let's turn in."

	After breakfast they settled down once more to the discussion. Wilson was present, his combined office of scientific assistant and stenographer making him useful. Wilson was a small, slightly greyed man, self-effacing and one of those persons who are merely useful. He had never had an original idea, and probably never would, but as a scientific amenuensis, he was invaluable.

	"What apparatus are you going to need, Ran?" asked Putney. "That's the point to start on."

	"To begin with, the remains of my old apparatus, and a dozen pencils, the integraph, several calculus books, and some tables of natural and ten-base logs. Also some reference books on field theories might help. In the meantime, I'm going to discuss the idea with you. Wilson, will you see if you can get those things together?"

	"Yes, Dr. Warren, In the study?" At Warren's nod he set off at once.

	"Now, Putt, this is the theory I was working on when the grand smash came. I firmly believe that it is a law of nature that matter Cannot be Destroyed. Nothing in this universe can possibly destroy it!"

	Putney stared at him in amazement. "Wha—what happened then?"

	"Matter was destroyed, and released its energy!" There was a twinkle in Warren's eyes as he replied.

	"Ail right, I give up. What's the answer?"

	"I said, and I believe, that matter can not be destroyed in this universe. The matter that was destroyed was not in this universe! That matter was suddenly hurled beyond the end of space, out of space altogether, beyond the fourth-dimensional surface of our three dimensions. This universe is a hollow fourth-dimensional hyper-sphere, and the universe as we know it is the surface of that sphere. Well, what happens if it escapes from that sphere altogether?"

	"But—it can't!" objected Putney.

	"But—if it did?" demanded Warren.

	"It—it could—it couldn't exist! Good God man, is that the secret! It can't exist, it is automatically thrown into a condition that prohibits its existence!" Putney's incredulous eyes fixed themselves on Warren.

	"Almost, but not quite. That's true to an extent, that's what would happen if I could project it completely out of all spaces, but the thing is, that instantly it were projected out of this universe, it would itself become the center of a new hyper-space. Mass in itself creates a space about it. Do you see my point?"

	"Right."

	"Then that can't be done. But I can project it into a space whose laws are such that the matter can't exist. Arid the point where that other space touches ours, there the two modify each other, and intercommunicate. Energy released in one can be tapped from the other. I threw my energy into the alien space, and it is destroyed to free energy. That energy comes back to this space, and is at once converted to such a form of energy as is capable of existence in this space. Do you see the operation?"

	Putney's face was pale as he contemplated the titanic forces that worked on the bit of matter that had been annihilated in Warren's apparatus. Space! Space, the master of Forces and Energies, space, with its immutable and infrangible laws had done Warren's bidding, and brought him the prepared result! A bit of matter tossed to it! A digested and refined bit of energy thrown back in its stead.

	"Right! But, Man, how can the thing be done, why, doesn't it slip off of itself? How did you know there would be such a space near—near the surface of our world, as would do that?"

	"There doesn't have to be. I make that bit of space. Don't you see, Putt, it does slip through of itself, tries to build itself a new space, and perhaps does, but where the terrific forces I'm sending through with it are, even that other space of its creation is so affected as to be sharply curved. Remember, earth's gravity is leaking through too, and so is the intense magnetic and electrical force. That maintains the conditions I want—or did, for some lucky reason. I must know exactly what the forces were. They told me that when Blamen was hit, every meter froze, the pivots melted, the works were blown out by something. Even the great magnets I used were melted after a time. The increase in the power of the magnets must have been the reason for the rapid increase in the intensity of the radiation that I had a chance to notice.

	"At any rate, I'm going to work on them now, and I think I'd better learn something. I had the world's luckiest break really. You know I was trying to disturb space, I thought I might succeed in transmuting that iron wire. I never expected to annihilate it. If it had gone up all at once—you would probably have been annihilated as well. Did you stop to think that if I had started the experiment, as I intended, I would have been killed instead of Blamen—or rather with him? I never could blame the old boy too much!"

	Warren went to the study with Putney, and together they started the work on the field strengths and data they had, the effects they knew or imagined or had learned, and tried to make sense. Little by little the chips of darkness fell from the truth, and they began to perceive the facts.

-

CHAPTER IV

	SOMEBODY told me," said Dr. James Atkill, "that you were clever, Nestor. That somebody was all wet, as the saying went. You ought to judge men better. You might have known that Warren never would fall for that play of yours, not while he had a friend like Putney to go to.

	"Then, not content with that, you let him walk the apparatus right out from under your nose. My Lord, I didn't think they made 'em so dumb. Now, he's got all the data and all the notes and all his own memories. Were there any pictures of the apparatus?"

	"Yes," snapped Nestor angrily, "and I have all of them." This tall, lean physicist with his disconcertingly keen grey eyes and the easy air of mockery, a subtle feeling that he was laughing at you even though his face was serious, rattled the shrewd old man.

	"Well, that'll do some good. Did you get any of the apparatus-mechanics who set up his stuff? Those mechs will know something about it." He ruffled his wavy blond hair thoughtfully.

	"No, I haven't gotten them, but——" 

	"But your laboratory staff needs an increase," interrupted Atkill. "Get 'em."

	"All right, I'll send for them now." The financier pushed a button, and told Miss Oliver of the increase in the laboratory staff. Half an hour later she told him the men had agreed.

	"Now," went on Atkill, "just what happened?"

	"Well—nobody really knows, you see—"

	"I see—I see that everyone but Warren was out of the way, and so he is the one man on earth who saw it done. My dear employer, could you think of any way to mess things up any more? I'm the best physicist in the world, but when you start me off with a handicap like that, I haven't a very good chance. The one living man who saw it, the man who made the apparatus, and the man who has the instruments that record the experiment—all the one man, and one of the brightest little boys loose. Now what miracle is it you want?"

	"Could I help it? It wouldn't have done me—that is us—any good if he had stayed with the University would it?"

	"No, but if you'd had the brains God gave little red ants, you could have gotten something for yourself by offering him a real reward. But when you turned him loose on the world—"

	"But let's stop this and see what we know. He had some of the high-tension generators such as they were using at M.I.T. back in '30, larger of course, and better, but the same idea. This——" he stared at the photograph Nestor had tossed him, "is evidently a quartz tube, with the electrodes in it. How'd he turn the voltage into them—it takes a tricky switch to handle 25,000,000 volts?"

	"I don't know, that's something you'll have to figure out. He was going to patent that," said Nestor.

	"That's all right then, he'll have given the data to the University. He invented and perfected it while he was with them, and he'll be fool enough to turn it over even though you did discharge him.

	"Then the Sanderson tube apparently—ah here it is. Between the big magnets. Anything special about them —no I guess not. Just unusually powerful.

	"Lord—Nestor, get on that phone quick, and corner every existing Sanderson tube. If he needs them, he'll be held up forever, if we have all the tubes going!"

	"That's an idea—that's helpful!" Nestor turned to the telephone, and in five minutes had the laboratory cornering the only other perfect vacuum on Earth. There was a ship preparing to leave for the Moon with a large expedition, but it would be a year or more before they'd be back, and by that time the battle would have been won—or lost. Their tubes wouldn't help Warren any.

	"Why did he need one?" asked Nestor.

	"Matter you imbecile-—destruction of matter. He can't start that in the midst of matter and not have it blow up everything within miles of the place. He has to have a perfect absence of matter."

	"Somebody told me that he had an iron wire in there," objected Nestor.

	"Certainly, I know it. There were twelve tubes, one had a platinum wire, one had iron, one had gold, and so on. And they all had platinum electrodes. But the question is did he use that iron wire? Or was it just there? I think he used it because of the magnets—and there isn't another tube with iron in existence—damn!" The physicist looked at the picture thoughtfully and ruffled his hair. "Well, he can't get it either. But he may not need it now."

	"I—eh—wonder if we couldn't—eh-buy the data and instruments from—somebody?" suggested Nestor nervously.

	"Yes, I thought of stealing them too," returned Atkill frankly. "It would be much easier to say what you mean." He smiled pleasantly at the sharp-faced old man. "But I don't think it will be easy. Putney's no fool, and neither is my revered colleague, Warren. I'll bet they have so many ultra-violet beam thief-detectors around there that you can't wiggle an eye-brow without starting a siren. We'll find out. His men all live there, so we can't get at them to give us a few hints."

	"I believe a man named Wilson comes to town occasionally for supplies. He has one of our transport planes."

	"We might try him. I don't know him, what's he like?"

	"He's about fifty, slightly grey, rather stoop-shouldered, and always looks disappointed," replied Nestor thoughtfully.

	"Thumb-nail directory. Excellent, he won't be disappointed longer. I'll see him. In the meantime—"

	He was out of the office before Nestor could say anything further. Nestor wanted him to sign a contract. He hadn't had a chance to talk to him, about that. But neither was Atkill satisfied, and he was back as suddenly as he had left.

	"By the way, I want one hundred thousand win or loose, and ten million dollars down if I succeed before Warren," he announced.

	"What! Ten Millions I Get out! You won't have a sniff!" Nestor cried. He meant to roar it, but his voice was too high-pitched to roar effectively.

	"And whom will you get instead?" asked Atkill, smiling pleasantly," and likewise what will I do with the information I already have?"

	"Nothing!" snapped Nestor.

	"Plenty," replied Atkill gently. "I'll sign a contract with you at that figure.

	Half an hour later he did, and went off to talk with the apparatus mechanics from the University who had arrived in the meantime. He started them at once building a static generator of the necessary power. Then he took the nearest moving platform, and headed East across the city. Twenty minutes later he was inquiring among the speakeasies selling the illegal 10% drinks. He had several that were considerably over that figure, met several old acquaintances, and finally found the man he wanted.

	Joe Keller was not a prepossessing figure. He was small, about five-feet-three in height, and weighed less than 130 pounds. His eyes were very black, and never rested long, on the same point, his black hair was constantly falling over his eyes in unruly tangled strands. A stubble of two-day beard covered his cheeks and his thin, weak jaw. His clothes had fitted perfectly, but they were mussed and wrinkled now.

	" 'Lo, Atty. Whatcha wan'?" Keller's lips were permanently glued together, and seemed never to move, only the cigarette, at one corner of his thin, straight mouth, bobbed slightly, and the trails of smoke waved about in the heavy air of the cheap rented room.

	"Little job, Joe. What brings you to this hovel?"

	"Sompin' new in the worl'," announced the little man looking with disgust at his surroundings. "I used rubber gloves on a vault, and they hadda thing what ate holes in the rubber. Lef muh fingers all over the place, an' didn't know it till I took the gloves off. Too damn late then. They're lookin'. I can't do nothin' now."

	"No, but your enforced seclusion doesn't prevent your comrades from doing something does it? Why not let them go out, say to the Putney laboratories, and I think they'll find some things there I want. I might pay as much as fifteen grand for them."

	Keller sat up with a start. "What things?"

	Minutely Atkill described the instruments, and the notes that he wanted. He said they would probably be in some sort of safe, but that might be overcome. A little XY-321 would help too, he intimated, and could be obtained from him. The XY would put anyone in the laboratory building to sleep for three hours, unless he had a special mask, or unless the windows were open. XY required a high concentration but was fairly effective then. Inside a house it was perfect.

	"Gotcha. Come 'round tomorra," said Joe Keller. 

	Atkill pursued his way to the West, and then back to the Nestor offices.

-

CHAPTER V

	IN the big, bare, concrete room a score of men were working at a peculiar apparatus that rose rapidly from the floor. There were two towers capped by great aluminum spheres. Their stilt-like legs were made of fused quartz, and electric motors were being installed at the base of the towers.

	In another room, two men were working alone. Warren and Putney, fighting calculations that staggered their abilities, and ideas that staggered their imaginations.

	"I think," said Warren, his eyes shining as he stared hard at the latest result, "we aren't going to need a Sanderson tube at all this time. According to that all I need do is vary the L' factor in 254 here slowly, and I won't need a very high vacuum. Shall we try it?"

	"We won't try it any other way," Putney reminded him sourly. "Nestor beat us to it on the Sanderson tubes, as you know."

	Warren laughed happily. "Stung! We didn't need 'em. But we do need those static generators there. We can control the thing now, we know how it can be controlled, and we can draw power from that energy center in the form we want here once it's started, and after that we'll never need to worry! Except to find other facts about it's properties.

	"Lord! Putney—these sheets—they hold the secret of the energy man has sought since the atom was discovered! Before us lie the equations that are the key to the infinite energy, the energy that will banish work from earth! And banish distance too! I'm sure this field here represents the annihilation of the gravity-curvature in space!" he exclaimed, pointing to a brief expression that represented in fact the second great secret.

	"But, Putt, these others, these things that suddenly become irreducible and immutable, these end-equations: when we attack one set of unknowns with given values. Some I recognize; here's the Planck formula, derived from space-curvatures! Here's magnetic forces, here electrostatic fields—but man, what is this one? It's like nothing I know, and these others—here's a formula for creating vibrational fields in space with any period of vibration .up to the limiting period of Millikan rays Can we try these?"

	"We can try them—with an automatic machine," replied Putney, "when the machine is a hundred million miles from earth."

	"I think that'd be the best idea. Well, it's dark now, and time for us to stop."

	They went at last for supper, and then after a brief talk on ways and means of using any power, they turned in.

	It was well into the night when Warren leaped out of bed with a cry of surprise and pain. Something had stung him, and for a moment he did not know what it was, A similar muffied cry came through the wall from Putney's room an instant later, and Warren, now wide awake, smiled. The thick walls stopped most of the sound, but he could guess what Putney was doing. The capacitance alarm signal had warned them that some one was approaching the fence, and brought them out of bed with a jump.

	As the mild shocking current wakened them, the room lights were turned on automatically.

	"Putt—how many are there?" asked Warren as he came into Putney's room. There was a small television set here, and the screen was glowing brightly, but a peculiar colorless and misty scene was represented. The screen was portraying the section of the fence that had been affected. Some one was attempting to approach unseen. It seemed ridiculous to see the man crouching here and there, and peering over stones and skulking in non-existent shadows. Powerful lights were flooding the grounds with 'brilliant' ultra-violet beams. They were so short as to be beyond vision, but so long as to have very slight fluorescent effects, and the three men were utterly ignorant of the blazing lights!

	"Shall we let them in?" asked Putney.

	"Why not?" asked Warren with a laugh. "They're trying the gate!"

	Putney had-pushed the secondary alarm that brought the men to his room, and they were appearing now with pistols and rifles, clad in pajamas or hastily donned trousers.

	"We're letting 'em into the grounds," explained Putney as the men stared at the screen. "They'll hit one of the ultra beams sure, and start a siren howling. If they don't run for it then, especially when the visible light strikes them, I miss my guess."

	"They're through," whispered some one.

	"They cut the lock out with an atomic hydrogen flame."

	The three separated. One stayed at the gate, holding it open against the spring that tended to close it, a revolver in one hand. The other two started softly for the house.

	"They'll hit the arbor-hangar beam," estimated Ken-net, the laboratory electrical apparatus specialist.

	"The stone-pile inductance will spot them first," contended Wheeler, chief chemist.

	The argument was interrupted by a sudden loud clicking from the master boards behind the screen. Suddenly a brilliant white pencil appeared on the screen spotting the two men and simultaneously a horrific wail shrieked from a huge siren. The three men froze instantaneously, then the two turned and beat a hasty retreat.

	Putney had adjusted something before him. Now he threw a switch. The man at the gate gave a cry of pain and bounded back from the fence. The released gate suddenly swung to with a clang. It could not lock, however. The two running men hit the fence about the same time, and they too bounced back with a cry of pain. The fence was charged.

	Putney threw a second switch with a grin, then a third. As he threw the second, the fence suddenly began to spit long streamers of flame, and miniature lightning bolts reached out, lapping at the ground and streaming up to the heavens.

	The last switch had connected a microphone, and now as the wail of the siren died protestingly into silence, a monstrous voice issued from speakers on the laboratory.

	"I would advise you to refrain from assaulting the fence. It might bear unhappy consequences. May I invite you gentlemen into the laboratory? If you will go to the spot of light thrown by the searchlight, you will be directed along the path."

	The men walked sullenly to the light. Three unhappy, shabby looking specimens of humanity they were. Presently they were instructed to lay down their weapons, and proceed to the house without armaments.

	"The reception committee decided to meet you here instead of at the gate," smiled Putney as the three came into the room, heavily guarded.

	"What did we touch off?" growled the least washed of the three.

	"Well, in the first place, when you approached the fence, the alarm got us out of bed, and turned on the flood lights," began Warren.

	"Open-space!" sneered the leader, "We"d a' seen lights an' beat it."

	"Look out—the entire grounds are flood-lighted," replied Putney waving to the screen, and the dark window. "Only it's dark light."

	The men looked puzzled. They also looked unhappy.

	"What did you men come here for?" demanded Warren.

	"See if we c'u'd get yah and the fly-cops outta bed."

	"I think they don't mean to answer, Putt," said Warren soberly, turning to his friend. "'We'd better take them down to the laboratory and the infra-compressor till they become more talkative."

	A gleam of laughter came into Putney's eyes. "Why not start them on the vibrator?"

	"All right. Take 'em down, men." Three very worried crooks heavily guarded by ten husky scientist-mechanics were taken down to the laboratory.

	"I don't think it's fair to use the vibrator on 'em without giving 'em another chance to talk." Kennet turned a compassionate eye on the invaders.

	"Oh, I dunno. They knew what was comin' when they came here, and besides, it doesn't always cripple them. I remember the first time they used it the thing broke down about fifteen seconds, and the guy could walk within two weeks."

	"Hey, guy, wat is dis ting?" asked the smallest of the captives. His voice was very hard—and slightly strained.

	"Well, they attach electric things to your arms and legs," invented Kennet rapidly, "and they turn on a current that sorta slowly fires you inside, and makes you jerk and vibrate so your bones come out of the joints, and—but you'll see it pretty soon." Again that compassionate eye swept them.

	They reached the main laboratory door, and Kennet told the others to hold them here while he went in. In a moment Putney and Warren appeared, and rapidly Kennet sketched his invention.

	Ten minutes later the captives were brought in. A heavy wooden chair painted a glossy black was set beside a huge mass of compact apparatus. As they entered Putney threw a switch, and with a tremendous crackling, sparks five feet long began leaping from one contact to another. The humming deepened, and the sparks became steady roaring flame. Heavy chains hung over the chair, and some great thick cables stretched from the apparatus, ending in straps of soft copper,

	"Put the big one in it first," ordered Warren, cocking his head and looking at him. "He'll last longer."

	The big one attempted to resist, but was soon seated and chained in the great wooden, straight backed chair. Close behind his ears was that dull, powerful hum, and the roar and snap of vicious sparks that weirdly lit the laboratory with a flickering blue flame.

	"Say, Warren, why not give the guy another chance before you start. He'll be crippled afterwards and may not be able to talk for a while?" suggested Kennet.

	"I—I'll talk—I'll talk," agreed the man in his fright.

	Accompanied by the hum and the crackle of sparks, lit by their flickering flame, the man talked fast and he talked truthfully. He didn't like the feel of heavy copper bands on his wrists, and the sound of snapping sparks. His account was detailed and vivid.

	He had been sent to get any papers or notes he could find about the study, a map of which he had been given. Meanwhile his companion would attempt to locate and abstract the instruments that Atkill had described. They were to be taken to a certain junk shop, where some one would call for them. That was all he knew. The others ardently agreed.

	"What'll we do with 'em?" asked Kennet finally when Warren had asked all the questions he wanted.

	"Oh, send them back. We haven't any use for them."

	It was three hours later when "Sporty" Cantoli reported to Joe Keller, announcing that his three men had come back badly scared, and convinced that they had escaped by a narrow margin from the fiends of hell. They had told everything they knew, and described vividly the torture they had undergone. Sporty reported he had not succeeded in getting anyone else to do the job.

-

CHAPTER VI

	"HELLO, Gramps," grinned Atkill as he came I—I into the sedate, carefully furnished office of J- Thaddeus Nestor, "I've been making inquiries, and a friend of mine tried to steal those things, or have them stolen. Three men went, but Putney's no fool, as I said, and he had the whole place lit up with ultra-violet floodlights, and the men didn't even know they were walking under brilliant lights. They watched my friends come across the yard, and finally captured them. They've wired the big fence with A.C. evidently, for when they touched it they just bounced off again. Looks as though we'll have to work through Wilson if at all. Maybe he can give us some plans of the fortifications."

	"In the first place," Nestor snapped irritably, "I'm not your grandfather—praise the good Lord—and in the second place I don't like this sending thieves. Did they tell anything?"

	"Did they talk?" Atkill smiled faintly. "Did you think Putney wouldn't make them? He strapped 'em in a big wooden chair and set up a Tesla coil behind their ears. Loud noises, big sparks, spectacular display —and heavy copper conductors strapped on their wrists. I'll bet they talked so fast a dictaphone couldn't keep up." Atkill smiled faintly. "But don't worry, they didn't know anything anyway—or they'd have had the sense to carry a fluorescent screen of some sort to warn them. I asked a friend and he asked a friend of his and the friend of his confidentially told a friend of his, who sent three of his men. Besides, Putney knew who sent them without asking, anyway. Nobody else wanted the junk."

	"Well then, see the trouble you've got us into at the start!" wailed Nestor. "What can we do?"

	"What can they do?" laughed the physicist. "They can't prove a thing. As a matter of fact they have made it impossible to send any of Joe Keller's friends. The whole gang is so scared now they wouldn't talk about it above whispers. I've got to hand it to that boy, Putney. Police protection wouldn't stop those crooks, but the 'muscle' they've got now stops every one of them.

	" 'Muscle'? What's that?" Nestor inquired blankly.

	"Reputation for unpleasant happenings." Atkill smiled engagingly. "In the meantime I've made some progress. My apparatus is started. And I think I know what Warren was trying to do."

	"What?"

	"Transmutation."

	"Yes, of course. Is that the best your famous brain can do? Anyone over at the University could have told you."

	"Yes, that's the best I can do right now. You ask one of your University friends what Warren's theory of transmutation was. If he can't tell you, I will." Atkill started for the door, and called over his shoulder as he left, "But it doesn't work that way, so we can't make gold. I'm going to work."

	Nestor looked suddenly interested, as Atkill mentioned transmutation, but his face fell as he was assured it wouldn't work. He growled some unintelligible remark, then picked up his desk telephone, and called a number at the University. Presently he was speaking to Professor William Boyd.

	"Hello, Professor Boyd?"

	"Yes, is this Mr. Nestor?"

	"Right. Say, do you know what Warren was working on when he ruined that apparatus?"

	"It wasn't Warren who ruined the apparatus, Mr. Nestor, but his assistant, Blamen. But they were working on the transmutation of the atom. He hoped to change the nuclear structure."

	"Uhuh, so I heard. Do you happen to know what this hyp—hypothenuse was?"

	"I can't say, he didn't tell anyone. I'm sorry, but why don't you ask him?"

	Nestor growled, and hung up, and Boyd left the telephone with a gesture of distaste.

	Atkill had found out where Wilson usually ate when he was in town for purchasing supplies, and had set a man to watch for him on his next trip into the city. Nearly a week went by, and Atkill was growing nervous. His apparatus had been finished, as best he could make it, and the Sanderson tube connected. However, it had a nickel wire instead of the iron wire Warren had used, and he was not at all sure what his results would be. Two tentative, low-voltage discharges in the tube had merely resulted in a peculiar feeling of strain in the laboratory, a feeling of some terrific jerk.

	The mechanics had assisted him in making his apparatus, and had directed the work really, for they had seen the original mechanism Warren used in his successful, if not over-successful experiment. But they did not know that Warren had sent a current through the little iron wire, and Atkill did not guess this, for though the filaments had been sealed in all the tubes, they were practically never used, there was so seldom any reason for them. Sanderson had put them there in case they should be wanted, for it would be impossible to insert them after the tube was brought to earth,

	That, and the fact that Atkill was afraid, with reason, to try any high voltage on his tube, made his experiments unsuccessful. Further, his magnets were not properly arranged. Warren had changed them after the photograph Atkill worked from had been taken.

	But when at last his scout reported that Wilson was entering the little restaurant, Atkill left his laboratory at once and hurried over to meet the little man.

	He found him seated in one of the small private booths, a waiter hovering near. It was one of the old-fashioned restaurants where waiters served the customers, as Atkill knew. This particular waiter was in his pay, however.

	Wilson glanced up as Atkill entered. "Dr. Atkill!" he exclaimed as he recognized the famous physicist."

	Wilson agreed with Nestor's description. He had a disappointed look. Atkill was anxious to change that.

	"Hello Wilson, may I join you?"

	"Certainly, Doctor. I didn't think you'd know me, though I naturally knew you."

	"Oh, I've seen you around." Atkill's smile was friendly, it seemed to intimate that Wilson was an equal, and a man he was glad to be friendly with. "And then too, I've used that clever little microspectroscope of yours."

	Wilson glowed with satisfaction. His one invention, a slight improvement on an existing device, was a thing very dear to him. Atkill had won him over completely.

	Half an hour later they left the restaurant the best of friends. Atkill had spread himself to be agreeable, and Wilson had talked a great deal more than he realized. Atkill had a perfect map of the complete defenses of the Putney laboratory, and knew exactly where to find the notes when he got in. However, he decided to send someone else. He couldn't afford to be captured.

	"That fence—-clever! Bet Warren thought of the capacitance bridge. But we can overcome that with a little patience. A bridge of our own, and a little static apparatus—" Atkill began planning just what sort of a thing would be needed to neutralize the effects of a man's capacity on the fence. He set to work on it soon after he reached the laboratory, and in a few hours had a suitcase that would contain his apparatus, within it the assembled machine was ready for use. He tried it on a metal plate set up against the wall, and the results gave perfect success. He could walk to the plate leisurely, and touch it without so much as disturbing the sensitive capacitance bridge.

	He put his apparatus in the office safe, took down his hat, and shrugged on his coat, after carefully washing up. He was smiling contentedly as he walked toward the moving way on Fifth Avenue Third. He threw away his cigarette, and stepped upon the third level escalator, paid his fare, and started toward the information point.

	He found Joe in a little cottage on the Palisades. Joe was nattily dressed now, and looking happy. His cottage was entirely automatic, and heavily armed. The police, moreover, were no longer looking for him. He had grown a new set of finger prints.

	Joe didn't greet him so enthusiastically this time. The last visit had resulted in rather unhappy consequences for some of his friends. "Hello Atty. Watcha want?" he asked apathetically.

	"I'll tell you, Joe. I want to make an offer," began the physicist frankly. "I want a certain job done, it's going to be a bit difficult, perhaps, but it will be worth it to me, and I'll make it worth it to you. I'll not give you any money for it." Joe looked puzzled, but not deeply so, He wasn't really interested, he had an excellent idea what the job was.

	"Nah? What then?"

	"The Death Ray machine—with sixty charges still in it."

	Joe sat up like a spring coming into position. He stared at Atkill sharply, then slumped unhappily. "Now I know it can't be done. What is it? What y're getting at?"

	"Oh, Joe, it can be done easily enough—now. You remember that place where those friends of yours went, and came back with tales of all sorts of things—terrible things—? Well, I found out a lot about that place from a man named Wilson, who works there, and Wilson told me all about it. You know, those rats of yours started spouting without so much as a slight burn! They're dirty liars, Joe. Wilson saw it, and he told me that all Warren did was to clamp them in a big wooden chair, and start a spark machine, what we call a Tesla Coil, about as dangerous as a fly-swatter, right behind their ears. It looks bad, and those rats got scared, and talked so fast they couldn't understand all they said. Joe, they squealed without a heavy touch!"

	Joe began to be interested; he was very anxious to believe this, and to believe he could win that death ray. "Yuh—how ya' know this Wilson bird ain't lyin'?"

	"Joe, he wouldn't. He thought I was his best friend. He was spouting forth the confidences of his dried-up, little heart.

	"And he even told me all about the fence, and the other things they have there. Why I can give you a map of how to get in there now, and how to get out again. I'll give you a suitcase that's got a machine in it that will keep you from affecting their traps. You know how an old radio set squeals when you take the shielding off? Well, that's because your hand gets near it, and upsets the balance. That's what they are using, and all we have to do, is to put an electrical shield up, and they'll never know you're there.

	"Get three men here, Joe, and I'll show them how to do it. I even know just where the papers I want are."

	Joe was succumbing. That Death Ray sounded good, the thing sounded easy now.

	"Yeah—but what about that fence? Mike said it kicked like a damn mule?"

	"Certainly," replied Atkill. "Tell him to take a good hold on an electric light wire, and see how it feels. Just plain ordinary electricity. Every one of you ought to know that."

	"O. K. I ain't tellin' 'em, though. You give 'em orders, an' if they squeal, that's your bad luck," decided Joe.

	An hour later Atkill was giving orders, and demonstrations in his laboratory. He didn't mind. He knew that both Warren and Putney knew who it was that was ordering this attack on their papers. So he showed the men that his machine prevented their being detected, showed the film of grey-white paint on the suitcase that flamed greenish when ultraviolet light struck' it, and gave them a map of the grounds.

	Ten minutes later the three gunmen headed for the New Jersey Monorail.

-

CHAPTER VII

	THE laboratory was lit brilliantly by long grey-white glowing tubes filled with carbon dioxide gas. The glowing tubes gave a light precisely imitating that which streamed in through the great steel-framed windows, casting a pattern of trapezoids on the grey floor. But the grey-white tubes gave no shadows in this place where a shadow might mean an irreparable accident.

	The tripod towers were finished, and the great silvery domes glowed under the clear light. There was no quartz tube connecting them now, only the three great magnets and two long rods of aluminum that failed to meet by a few inches, just between the poles of the mighty magnets.

	Motors were humming softly, and a half-score of men- stared up at the aluminum dome on the left.

	"How's it going, Ran?" called Putney. His voice was steady, but inside himself he felt anything but steady. He had tried to argue with Warren, he knew that Warren should not risk his invaluable brain, that some man, whom the world might replace, should take that chance. That was reasonable. But it wasn't right, and he knew it in his heart, when he tried to make Warren agree. Now Warren was in the aluminum dome, and no man on earth could reach him to argue more. He was protected by an enormous and rapidly increasing charge of electricity.

	"Sixteen and a quarter million volts," called Warren exultantly, "and rising." Minutes went by and the steady hum of the motors continued, the soft slap-slap-slap of the silken ribbons that carried their charges up, and came down for some more.

	"Seventeen million volts!" called Warren. "It'll be seventeen and a half soon. The leakage is almost nothing. Switches ready?"

	"Right, Ran," replied Putney steadily.

	"Make sure all the electroscopes, both recording and visual are charged, train your bolometers and other instruments. Check up, then for God's sake, get behind that lead screen, and use the periscope."

	Swiftly the men checked over a bank of instruments all focused on the little spot of space between the three great magnets. Then they retired behind the heavy, curving sheet of thick lead that sat against one wall. A broad periscope mirror would send the light to them without sending the harmful radiations, for in its path it passed through a four-inch-thick plate of ultra-violet-opaque glass.

	Warren watched the instruments before him. The needle of the electro-static voltmeter device was quivering at 17+ now. His swift eyes swept the meters and saw they were all registering correctly. Then at last he stepped into a tiny lead closet built in the center of the aluminum dome. The entire interior was lined with heavy, thick milky glass, save one port of clear glass. There were various meters here, and two long glass rods.

	His face was flushed as he saw the voltmeter reach the seventeen and a half mark.

	He tripped the green-handled glass rod. There was a wrench, a tautening, and the meter jumped as the magnets went on, and the motors below whined to a stop.

	"Here She Goes!" He pushed the second rod. There was a brief flare of light as a bit of iron wire suddenly exploded into brief incandescence, then a sudden terrific wrenching, and a tremendous wave of smashed air as the awful power of seventeen and one-half million volts jumped across a six-inch gap.

	Then a second wave came, a wave of flaring, infinitely bright, and almost palpable white energy, a cascade of light that beat down from a tiny point between the great magnets.

	Matter was vanishing! Thrown into another space, it was rapidly disintegrating!

	There was a sudden whine and screech as motors started, and the magnets lowered rapidly away from the glowing electrodes of the static generator. The point of blazing incandescence followed them, rested between their poles. The crane that supported the magnets swung them swiftly to a powerful machine on the floor. There was a thud as heavy plungers shot home, and a second snap as others shot free. The blazing ball pulsed larger for the briefest fraction of a second, and dived suddenly for the machine. It stopped, and hovered like the white flame of a torch over a small hollow in the top of the black cube of the squat bulk. It shrank, and burned steadily and clearly with a brilliant white light.

	"Readings!" called Warren exultantly.

	"X-rays—none. Cosmics—none. Ultra-V's, none detectable. All radiation seems to be in the visible, principally in the blue-white range. When first started there was an instantaneous shot of cosmics and others, gamma, X and Ultra-V's, but they damped out instantly. You win, Ran, you win!" called Putney joyously.

	Warren appeared suddenly, and slid down the quartz rod to the floor. In an instant he was running toward the squat machine, Putney behind him.

	"How long can it last without additional fuel?" asked Putney as they ran.

	"God knows, Putt. An hour at least, though. I can't tell how much the magnets captured and how much escaped when it went up in incandescence."

	Warren cautiously moved a control. The brilliant ball seemed to expand, but the radiance died down, its color remained, but it was dimmer.

	"Can't go lower, it's at the minimum now. Shall I try the fields?"

	"Eventually, why not now?" replied Putney soberly.

	Warren adjusted several rheostats, and read the meters carefully. Then he threw a heavy switch. The ball of luminescence quivered, and dulled to an orange color. A meter moved, and across the room a huge bar of rustless steel glowed red. Presently a second of the score or more glowed. The ball grew smaller, and under Warren's manipulation turned white once more.

	"It works, Putt, it works," Warren almost whispered. In less than a minute the entire grill, of more than twenty heavy steel bars, was glowing bright red over its entire fifteen foot length. The laboratory was swimming in heat, but the men scarcely noticed it.

	"Feed it!" urged Putney.

	Warren cautiously turned a small button. The ball suddenly quivered and darted down slightly. A line of red, a fine steel wire had appeared in the center of the hollow bowl-like depression it swam upon, and the globe of embodied energy perched on it. The great bars suddenly glowed brighter, white hot, and began to slump swiftly. Only Warren's quick manipulation saved them. A faint hum from the globe of energy seemed the only sound in the room. There was a queer pulsing in the machine before them now.

	"It works, Putney, it works all right. I couldn't somehow picture it happening. I could see that it should, I thought it would, but I didn't believe. That's it, Putt. Matter going forever, irrevocably." There was awe in the physicist's voice.

	"The question is," Putney reminded him practically, "will it continue to go forever?"

	"Let's start, then!"

	That was two days before Atkill spoke to Wilson, and for the next three days the men worked constantly, observing, collecting data, then calculating the meaning of the things they saw and the things they were able to do. By the third day a tremendous amount of work had been done, and on the evening of that day the first fire, the Promethean Torch of atomic fires, had been transferred. Now it rested on a tremendous block of solid iron, and set about it were the dozens of instruments that controlled and directed its work. They had learned many things, and done many things.

	And Putney was drawing up their patent claims now. Immediately after the fire had been started the men signed a joint statement in the presence of a Notary Public, and the document was post-marked. It proved the date of the discovery.

-

CHAPTER VIII

	THE shadowy men moved cautiously forward over the rough ground. Their autogyro had descended with the engine off, and had made but the faintest rustle, and now they were cursing softly, as branches broke under their feet with the multiple snaps and cracks of light artillery. A city-bred crook in the woods at night is a forlorn creature.

	Finally they reached the clearing, many bruises were on their shins, given by unseen rocks that sprang suddenly into a seemingly clear path.

	"Any light in the green stuff?" asked Gorilla Mike. "Nope. That light you can't see isn't on. Must be a hell of a light you can't see. What good does it do 'em anyway.' Course those damn light-beam traps have some sense, but they don't floodlight the place," muttered Shorty.

	They approached the fence cautiously, and no sign of the green flame came from their simple detector. Likewise the fence got no impulse from them as they came toward it. Presently Mike used a heavy pair of bolt-clippers, and snipped several wires and rods of steel. He lifted the lock out of the gate bodily, and opened the way. They filed in cautiously, turned abruptly to the left, and followed the fence for nearly seventy-five feet. Then they cautiously set off across the grounds toward the laboratory building, bulking dim against the light grey of the clouds racing across the sky. A bright moon beyond threw a dim radiance on and past them. But they really had little to fear from any natural light, for as Atkill had learned from the too talkative Wilson, Warren was much more willing to trust to the abilities of his electrical and ultra-violet watchers than to those of any human watchers.

	The suitcase which had been humming softly suddenly began clicking and humming in jumps and starts. Shorty looked down at it dubiously. Was the thing going wrong now, and leaving them marooned inside the fence? Suddenly he gave a cry of surprise, and pointed to the hitherto invisible streak of dirty-white paint. It was flaming with a blinding brilliance. Atkill had chosen his fluorescent paint well, and it reacted even to the long ultra-violets Warren was using.

	With a curse the men turned to look for the light, to shoot it out. The scene was dark as before. No faintest glimmer lighted the scene. Shorty looked at the signal again and doubted. His eyes told him there was no light. This thing said there was. The suitcase was humming and clicking madly. The thing was broken. If there was light he could see it.

	"Hey, are yuh goin' ta stay all night?" demanded Pete Constanti.

	"Is this thing working or not? 'At's wat I wanna know."

	"He said yuh couldn't see the light. Let's get out."

	"Beat it then," ordered Shorty. The three men turned and raced for the open gate, taking the shortest route. They hadn't gone ten paces before a blinding white beam of light caught them, and held them. Constanti pulled out a long-barreled revolver. He fired twice and the light went out. They ran on desperately now, and then a third spotlight fell on them.

	It took time to shoot them out, and there were lights in the laboratory now. But they ran on again, and no more lights struck them. Presently the open gate stood just before them, wedged open by a piece of rock. Shorty dived for it, and as his body started to pass through the gate it seemed to strike something, a something like a very strong sheet of india rubber. There was nothing but empty space there, but Shorty bounced back heavily. He sat down even more heavily, and jumped up with a howl of pain, for there was an outcropping of bare, rough rock here.

	The two following him hesitated in amazement, rushed hurriedly forward, and gave low cries of astonishment as their hands felt it. It was soft, yet almost as unyielding as a wall of steel padded with thick rubber. An inch it would yield, then it was immovably fixed. Pete Constanti had his long-barreled revolver out in an instant, and he sent three shots whining into the invisible barrier. Each gave a soft whine as it struck, and a second soft whine as it bounced from the barrier as from some marvelous spring. Luckily the bullets had not been aimed straight ahead, but at an angle and they did not return to their sender. They whined away to strike with a distant plop somewhere on a rocky outcrop.

	"I wouldn't shoot," said a monstrous voice, "because the bullets will just bounce. Come to the laboratory."

	The voice was very loud, and there was a slight mechanical timbre to it. But also there was a cold, deadly tone that made the three think of the tales two other men had brought back from this place of unknown horrors, of invisible walls that bullets merely bounced off, of invisible lights, and incredible and unknowable things that watched your every motion. Like trapped animals they hurled themselves at the barrier. Shorty Grimm hurled the suitcase with its load of batteries and mechanisms at the invisible wall, and it merely fell harmless.

	"Come to the laboratory, immediately," the Voice said.

	"Wat we gonna do?" quavered an affrighted Gorilla Mike. "You got us inta this, for God's sake get us out."

	"We—we better go, I guess," Shorty said in a low voice.

	Something pushed him from behind, something soft, but unyielding. With a cry of terror he ran forward, the wall was following them, pushing them. He ran, but not more than ten paces before he struck another of those invisible walls.

	It was dark, horribly, weirdly dark, but the suitcase still flamed, and the lights of the laboratory glowed. All he knew was that before and behind were walls, walls that he could not see, and could not break through. Desperately he pounded on them, hurled himself against them. They did not even hurt him. He felt as though he were in some asylum, locked in a padded cell—a padded cell whose walls he could not see.

	He began to laugh. Mike and Constanti looked at him with blank, fox-like faces. The laugh was very low at first, just a chuckle. Then more chuckles, then a wild, mad laugh that rang out. His pals could not understand.

	Pete hit him and he fell to the ground. Mike looked on uncomprehending. Constanti bent over the fallen figure, and in a minute the man was stirring again.

	"'Tanks, Pete. God, it's like a padded cell, Pete. Let's go to dat lab-ra-tory. Maybe they'll let us out."

	Anything seemed better than this. They started toward the laboratory, feeling for the wall, but the wall had moved. The Voice spoke again. "The walls move with you. You can move toward the laboratory, but in no other direction."

	Presently they stood in the grey-white light that streamed from the laboratory door. Two great towers rose in the room of concrete, two half-dismounted things. They looked bare and ruined, like half-cleaned skeletons. In the center of the room was a great mass of iron, and around it nestled half a dozen mechanisms with long pointers of gleaming silver pointing at a glowing, ball that floated unsupported just over the glowing ,top of the massive iron block. There was a slight depression under it, as though some acid had eaten at it slowly.

	A half-score of men stood just within the doorway, looking out at them. Another man was seated beside one of the machines grouped about the central massive block. A tall, powerfully built man, with blond hair and grey eyes. His face was set and looked unpleasant. His fingers were working at controls before him. He looked up at them, and threw back a switch.

	"Drop your arms," he ordered.

	Half a dozen guns and three heavy knives came into view, to be followed by three slung-shots. Warren looked at them caustically.

	"You're cheating," he smiled, but the smile wasn't pleasant.

	"Honest—'at's all we got," objected Constanti.

	Warren flipped a switch with another unpleasant smile. Constanti let out a howl of pain and snatched at something up his trouser leg, as suddenly Shorty Grimm howled and pulled a tiny automatic from his sleeve. He dropped it beside the knife Constanti had produced.

	"Step back from the weapons," ordered Warren, and as they retreated, something? shimmered for an instant in the light, and a curtain seemed to roll over the weapons. Warren threw over another switch, and a series of explosions like Chinese firecrackers rang out, then the smoke floated away, and there was a little pool of white-hot, sparkling metal on the smoking ground.

	"All right, come in," he ordered. The three gangsters came because they couldn't do anything else.

	"Who sent you?" demanded Warren sharply.

	"Aw, we ferget," snarled Grimm.

	"That's too bad. You like that padded cell you can't see? Or do you like this?" Something flashed around them resembling a sheet of water, and they were standing in the center of a hollow cylinder of milky light.

	The light twisted and flowed in swirling currents.

	"Touch it—touch it carefully," suggested Warren. "Better, stick your flask into it, and hold the neck with your handkerchief.

	Constanti complied. He had whisky that was 85% alcohol in that flask. There was a faint crackling noise as the flask touched the beam, and the cylinder glowed faintly red for an instant, then relapsed to white.

	"Enough—don't put your hand in. Drop that flask." Constanti stared at it instead. The flask was dripping moisture. It was white with frost, and drops of a light blue liquid fell from it in slow succession. He dropped it. The solid silver flask broke like glass, and the whisky within was a brown, hard substance that was coated with frost in an instant. It sizzled on the floor, and in a minute was melting and running away.

	"Now—I think you have too much space. I'll close the column. If you want to talk—talk."

	The milky cylinder began to contract, and as it grew smaller the men within it felt an awful cold come upon them. Their breath began to show, and their ears grew numb. Swiftly the cylinder became smaller, and rapidly it grew colder.

	Presently Grimm saw something else above them. It was a great, deep-violet roof, and it seemed to be made up of streamers that fluttered slowly down. It descended, and touched his head. They weren't streamers, they were more of that padded force.

	"Atkill—he sent us," wailed Grimm.

	Instantly the cold was gone, the milky cylinder sprang back to its original size, and the violet streamers vanished.

	"How did you pass the fence?" snapped Warren. A delicious warmth seemed to seep into the chilled men. It was easy to talk and be warm. Nothing could stop this man of unknown things.

	"He gave us somethin' in a suitcase. You held it in your han' and the fence didn' spot you."

	"Where is it?"

	"Down on the grounds. I threw it at the wall, an' it just bounced off it."

	"Wait." Warren turned to his instruments. Something fell to the floor with a soft thud behind them, and the men turned. The suitcase lay on its side. "Wrecked," said Warren tersely. "Delicate electrostatic counterpoise, probably, eh Putt?"

	"Probably," replied the black-eyed man beside Warren.

	"Wat saw us?" asked Shorty.

	"Your suitcase protected you against any one of our electro-static detectors, but it couldn't satisfy three at once, and when you were within range of the fence, and of two other detectors, it quit," replied Warren with a grin. "What were you after."

	Briefly Grimm told him. Warren looked at Putney, and then at Grimm. He wrote hastily on a sheet of note paper, signed it, and passed it to Putney. He too read, then signed. "Good idea," was all he said.

	"Take this to Atkill with our compliments. Where is your plane?" said Warren, passing the sheet in a sealed envelope to Grimm.

	Grimm told him. Then something gripped him, something like the soft, impenetrable wall, but different in that it held him like a monstrous hand. It lifted him, and he shot through the door, turned, and shot down the hill, over the fence, and an instant later was standing beside the plane. The force released him, and was gone. A moment later the man, his nerves still quivering, saw Constanti flying through the air, to land gently twelve feet nearer a huge tree. Constanti stumbled, gave a low moan, and stood up. "Madre de Dios!" he groaned.

	They watched something black hurtle through the air. It was headed exactly for the huge tree. A shrill scream of fear rang out as Gorilla Mike saw his end at hand. The force that carried him bore him toward the tree, and suddenly there was a crash, the great tree snapped over—and fell majestically away from the three men and the machine.

	Gorilla Mike scrambled to his feet hysterically crying, unhurt. The forces were gone.

	But it was an hour before their nerves quieted sufficiently to let one of them take the 'gyro aloft, and toward New York.

-

CHAPTER IX

	THE dull grey light of dawn was just creeping irr through the windows. Atkill "was sitting on the edge of his bed, and there was an expensive English cigarette between his lips. Shorty Grimm sat across the table from him. His face was white, his hands trembled and his breath reeked of cheap whisky. There was a bottle of Atkill's private and very fine stock on the table, and a half empty glass between it and an overflowing ash tray. Grimm's eyes held a look of blank horror and terror.

	"Gawd, Atty, I saw it. I saw Mike flyin' through the air, then I saw him fly inta that tree—then the tree fell down, and there was Mike, cryin' like a baby, and laughin' somethin' awful. A man ain't meant to laugh that way.

	"But that Thing seemed all soft, like a rubber sponge, but it knocked that tree down so easy it didn't even jar Mike. And that white thing—like a big cold ghost all around us, and we could see through it like a fog. It was so cold it froze Pete's whisky, and that's good strong stuff he gets."

	Atkill laughed, a queer, little, strained laugh. "It was a lot colder than that, I suspect. Tell me, it turned white? But did it get wet, and—water—blue water drip from it?"

	"Yeah," replied Shorty amazed, "how'd you know?"

	"It wasn't water, it was air. I didn't know—I guessed."

	"But—but air ain't like water. It ain't ever a liquid," objected the bewildered gangster.

	"It is," replied Atkill patiently, "when it gets cold enough. You probably saw the coldest flask that ever existed. It probably didn't have any heat at all—absolute zero." He ruminated silently. Then stretched and stood up.

	"Sorry, Shorty, but I guess you didn't get hurt. I didn't think he would hurt you. He should have wiped you out, of course. I'll bet he could have put you where they'd never find you within the next hundred million years," he smiled unpleasantly, and Grimm looked more unhealthy than ever. "He could probably have put you on the moon without trying, or hidden you in space.

	"It's no use though now, Shorty. He's found the secret. You know that ball of white fire you saw on the iron block? That little ball of fire was giving off more power—-could give more power than all the rest of the power plants on earth combined. That ball of fire could have stopped this planet, and made it turn around and go the other way. It could have lifted this whole city off the map, and put it down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just as easily as it lifted you and put you down in the middle of a field, or the middle of a tree for that matter. There's only one thing that could stop that little ball of fire," he went on, more to himself than to Grimm.

	"Wat's that?" asked the awed listener.

	"Another one like it, only bigger, Shorty—another one like it." He smiled to himself.

	"You failed—but here's a grand for your trouble and—unpleasant experiences." He handed a bill to the man, and waved him out. Nestor would pay the expenses. He turned out the light, and went back to bed.

* * * * *

	"Hello, Nestor. Got news for you." said Atkill as he came into the sedately luxurious office.

	Nestor looked up eagerly, his shrewd eyes snapping. "What?"

	"I sent some men to steal the data from the Putney place, you know. They came back last night, or rather this morning, and told a wild tale about being surrounded by walls they couldn't see, that pistol-bullets bounced off of like rubber balls, that let light through, but wouldn't let them out. Then they told me about a ghostly, white cylinder that nearly froze them, and about a ball of fire the size of a basket-ball resting on a block of iron. And they said something soft picked them up and hustled them out of the laboratory, and flew across the field with them. It set one of them down in the middle of a tree—after knocking down the tree without jarring the man.

	"And he brought me this." Atkill extended the note Warren had sent,

	"He's done it?" asked Nestor sharply. "Obviously." Atkill returned contemptuously. The note was as follows: "Messrs, Atkill and Nestor:

	We feel it advisable to announce our success in our experiments to you first of all men. It will not be worth while to make further attempts to steal the data you are attempting to get. You will find full particulars in the patent specification and claims filed three days ago.

	"We don't like to make threats, but we wish to advise you that this laboratory is adequately protected.

-
	Compliments to Atkill on his clever electrostatic counterbalance.

Randolph T. Warren 
Donald M. Putney. 

	Nestor snorted. Then he sat back sorrowfully. "It looks," he decided, "as though that ungrateful fool wins."

	"He certainly isn't a fool," smiled Atkill. "And I don't think him particularly ungrateful. You had him fired so he'd be of more use to you.

	"And I thank him for that compliment. It was a clever device. One of the cleverest dodges ever devised probably."

	"Well, you may agree with him," Nestor retorted angrily," but at any rate you're through. Get out."

	"One hundred thousand dollars first, please." Atkill replied smoothly.

	"Huh? Why? You didn't do anything but cost money. You go read your contract, and you'll see that if you loose you get $100,000 minus the cost of apparatus, which was—let me see—seventy-five thousand so far." Nestor sat back with an expression such as that worn by a cat after the untimely demise of the canary.

	Atkill looked at him coldly, very coldly, and a flame of murder, of equally cold murder, lurked in his eyes.

	"Oh, is that it? Very clever." He paused, and the look in his eyes changed to rapid calculation.

	"All right, will you let me leave my apparatus there in your laboratory until I have that twenty-five thousand in my bank?"

	"Certainly," smirked Nestor, "I'll give you a check."

	Twenty minutes later Atkill left with a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, which he had certified as soon as he reached the bank. He put it in his safety deposit box, and went on in the even tenor of his ways. He had Nestor's written agreement to leave the apparatus as it was till he had his twenty-five thousand in the bank. He also had Nestor's check, which could not be stopped, and proved nothing till he cashed it.

	Atkill had received no money. And he would receive none till Nestor paid him the rest of his fee, in order that the bulky apparatus might be moved from a costly laboratory, which was now thoroughly useless.

	Nestor on the other hand, felt that that unhappy business was well completed, so far as it touched Atkill. On the other hand, he was not through. He began doing some deep and serious thinking. Presently he called up William J. Fordham, President of the Atlantic Power Companies. He also arranged to have Arthur Benholt, of Central States Power and Thomas Ring-man of Pacific Coast Power Lines on the wire.

	"Gentlemen, this is Thaddeus Nestor speaking, and I have something of great importance to tell you. It is too important to trust to the wire. Let us all meet in St. Louis to-morrow noon. Is that satisfactory?

	"What is the basis of this important item?" asked Fordham cautiously.

	"An invention, an invention that will wreck every power company, every air line, every railroad and steamship line, every industry in .the world! I have been assured by competent men that it would ruin every power company within a week of its announcement. It must be stopped."

	"We'll be these," said Fordham slowly. The others agreed, and began crossing off appointments on memo slips.

	Nestor's assurances had weight.

-

CHAPTER X

	"We are all here now, Nestor. And all very anxious to hear what you have to say. What is this invention that can have such effects?" demanded Fordham. The big, gray-haired ruddy-faced man looked nervous, and worried.

	"Atomic energy." said Nestor shortly. The three men started, and gasped slightly.

	"Are you sure?" asked Ringman in a slightly unsteady voice.

	"Atkill was working on it for me, and in the meantime Warren did the job. Three of my men brought back tales of some of the things he could do." Briefly he told them of Atkill's report, and the men's stories.

	There was a long silence as the men thought of the meaning of this.

	"Then—then he can put us out of business." said Ben-holt heavily.

	"Without even a battle. He can sell mega-watt hours for what you sell watt hours. He can make airships that don't use engines, just tiny spots of that fire. We're ruined if that invention is sold. That is, if it is sold by him." he added with a sly look.

	"Yes, if he sold it to some company—" 

	"But on the other hand," Nestor interrupted, "If he should unfortunately die, why perhaps his heirs would not display his acumen. He has no brother, nor sister, no near relative. I have investigated, and the only relative I have located is a second cousin once-removed. He is a teller in a country bank, and his name is—James Oswell Jessop. Mr. Jessop has a wife and three children, he is about forty-five years of age, and I am sure, would consider fifty thousand an enormous fortune."

	"If Pacific Coast Power Lines fail, I loose three hundred millions, and the other investors loose another billion and three quarters," said Ringman. His voice was shaky. The temptation was great—and he knew what Nestor meant.

	"What could we do with the patent if we had it, that we could not do by buying it?" demanded Fordham.

	"Cover it up." snapped Nestor.

	"Why couldn't we do the same if we bought it?"

	"Do you think for a second he'd let you? He'd sell you the power rights, yes, but he wouldn't sell you the other rights that it involves."

	"Why not buy it and use it ourselves?" asked Ben-holt doubtfully.

	"Because," said Nestor with a deadly quiet in his voice, "Because there won't be any power companies after that is on the market. Don't you fools see that they won't need an outside plant for generating power? Don't you see that trains, factories, small towns, apartments, and perhaps homes even, will simply use an individual plant. Why is a big plant used today? Because it's near a waterfall, near a coal mine or near a number of big towns, and because a big plant is more efficient than a small one. And because they require skilled supervision.

	"Atkill says this can be developed so that it will need no supervision. And it certainly needs no wisdom to see that no fuel is needed save a tiny bit of matter, iron evidently. Who cares for efficiency? Why worry?

	"Warren won't sell power—he'll sell power plants!

	"Now, do you see why you can't let that invention become public.

	"And where do you come in, Nestor?" asked Fordham softly.

	"He'd ruin my aircraft business in an instant; he'd ruin every industry I have a touch in, except the iron and steel industry.

	"And I couldn't buy him over before he completed his discovery."

	Fordham smiled bleakly. "And what would you have done had you been able to get it?" he asked.

	"Used it myself, naturally." replied Nestor. "And what would you have done in my position?" He looked shrewdly, and frankly at the bigger, younger man.

	"Well, what are we going to do?" asked Ringman, raising his head from his hands.

	"Wait. I think that we will know as soon as Warren gets his patents filed. At present he has only a half dozen sealed envelopes of Process Discovery. When he's completed his research and not before, he'll turn in his patents. In case we could discover anything, his filed patents would prevent our using it.

	"On the other hand, if we wait, and he were—to die— why we could buy the completed patents from his heir, Jessop in this case."

	"And what do you want of us?" demanded Fordham.

	"Your help." replied Nestor. Then rapidly he outlined his plan to them.

* * * * *

	"Lord, Putt, there're more things, more angles to this than a fly has eyes. We certainly can't test all these things here on earth. The explosive for instance—the disintegrating field. Half a dozen of these things can't possibly be tested here on earth, and the only answer is •—go try it on an asteroid. We'll have to build a flying laboratory." said Warren.

	"I agree—for more reasons than one. Now what sort of a thing had you in mind?"

	"A dirigible-shaped ship, about two hundred feet long, and perhaps thirty-five feet diameter. We'd mount several big energy centers in the exact middle of the ship. We have found the gravity-field secret, and can use that. The walls of the ship could be made of beryllium, perhaps eight inches thick for emergencies—"

	"Beryllium—eight inches for emergencies" exclaimed Putney. "Lord, beryllium is so—I forget. It's impossible to buy, but we can make all we need. All we need is a sufficient amount of some other element! But then, eight inches for emergencies! That's no more than a good wall in space." protested Putney.

	"Uhuh—that's why it's an emergency fixture. We won't use material walls, we'll keep a permanent wall of force. The X-573 field. Meteors-—nothing will pass that."

	"Right. Much better. And then how do we drive it?"

	"Well, we could drive it ahead by simply moving the wall along. Since that is determined in space by the coordinates of our control, all we'd have to do is advance them. But why not use the gravity-field as well? For high accelerations it would be a lot better. We couldn't use it here on earth, or on any planet, but once free, we'd get a lot more acceleration, because we wouldn't feel it."*( *The wall of force known as field X-573 was created at any point the operator wished, by merely setting the controls. The coordinates so selected ruled the placing of the field in space. Thus by placing it at one point, and advancing the controls gradually, it simply moved through space, any force its movement applied, reacting directly on space, not on its source of energy. This apparent "lifting by the bootstraps" seems to defy the third law of motion, but actually the reaction is taken up by space, by the intertwined fields of a million millions suns. Similarly, if the gravitational field was fixed in space, then the ship would fall into it, and changing its coordinates would move it along as did the force field.)

-

	"Good. Now those ideas—say I like this whole thing. We'll design that ship here and now, and Hultman can put the thing on paper for us."

-

	They started then to plan the ship. "Prometheus" they called it, for it bore the torch of the everlasting fire that would light man's way henceforth.

-

	THE grey concrete walls of the laboratory seemed bursting with the great lustrous thing that lay on the floor of the long, bare room. It was a shining, irridescent dirigible of metal, with long streaks of windows set in its side; curious projectors and little ports, that seemed to open outward, studded the bow and stern.

	But it was a beautiful thing, what one could see of it. The half-score of men who stood below and looked up at it now seemed mightily pleased with the great machine, over two hundred feet of shining, tapering metal. Across the bow, above the narrow streak of window, gleaming, golden letters a foot high stood out on the background of polished beryllium. "PROMETHEUS."

	"She works, Ran, she's magnificent." Putney's voice was low, and tense with excitement. "Around the Moon! In an hour we did what it took Sanderson six months to do! And old McCarthy finished those castings, and assembled her in three months!"

	"It ain't a 'she', it's a 'he'," grinned Warren. "Can't you read?"

	"All right, heathen. The patents came through today," Putney added irrelevantly.

	"There'll be more after we've finished experimenting. I think we'd better wait till we have everything, before we try to sell anything, don't you?"

	"I agree, Ran. Well, we ought to find plenty.

	"In the meantime—let's turn in. We can start to-morrow. The ship's stocked, ready, and waiting. One of you men want to volunteer for—"

-

A Raid Foiled

	THE men started, and looked quickly toward a switchboard, half dismantled at one side of the room. A loud, humming note came from it, and a light blinked rapidly, more and more rapidly—and then there was a sudden terrific explosion. A huge crack appeared across one side of the room, the wall reeled, staggered, and collapsed with a terrific crash. Simultaneously the lights went out, and only a ghostly light came from a small flame, a clear white flame burning steadily on the top of a small block of iron, the size of a match box.

	"Air raid—they're trying to kill us!" gasped Warren, "Damn—into the ship!" roared Putney. The men leaped in at his heels. Putney whirled, and raced down a long corridor toward the nose, up a flight of metal steps, two at a time, and flung himself into the control room. Flying fingers clicked over half a dozen tumblers, low thuds of closing plunger switches came from behind, and then a shimmering in the air about the ship, just as the second bomb flashed down. The great mass of concrete that was the west wall seemed tired. It began to lie down. Something seemed to stop it half a dozen feet from the wall of the ship, and it slid down on some invisible surface. A perfect rain of bombs pulverized it and every part of the building, before it completed its fall.

	Something began to glow through the dust of the fallen building. It glowed white and clear, and seemed brightening rapidly. The dust had gone now, and a clear light shone over the scarred grounds, and the great ship shone like a heliograph. The light grew, and grew, the ground began to melt, the rocks commenced to glow bright as the awful flame increased in volume. A terrific roar of air grew louder and louder. Trees bent over, bent toward that spot where a draft of white-hot air was rushing up, the wind grew, and the trees toppled, rolled—and burst into terrific flaming gas.

	"The little flare—the everlasting flame—it's broken free, and going faster!" somebody cried from the rear of the ship.

	"Putt—quick—we haven't tried it before, but we'll have to. X-785! Settings, take them. X-54-235, Y-87-452, X-32-81- and T-68 plus 436." Warren's voice rang out sharply, as he read from the notebook he had snapped out as he saw the flare growing. It was growing beyond bounds how—"

-

Setting the Control Dials

	PUTNEY'S flying fingers set the dials, then turned the little tumbler switch that threw the colossal power of the main burner into the field, a glowing ball of light ten feet in diameter, feeding on an eleven ton ingot of iron.

	There was a sigh, a soft, gentle sigh from all about them, and something wrenched at them, tore them apart, and hurled the separate individual atoms each in a different direction with an awful speed. The awful blaze of light was gone. The lights of the ship were gone—they were gone themselves, in an utter blankness.

* * * * *

	SIX giant airplanes had come rumbling across the sky, their eighteen powerful gasoline turbines whispering softly to themselves, the fuel pumps chuckling gently, maliciously. Two pilots, one navigator, one bomber rode each plane, and with them went a huge cargo of high explosives, dressed in neat steel jackets. In all, there were thirty tons of highly explosive nitrogen compounds aboard the six planes. 

	They slipped through the air with scarcely a sound, specially silenced propellors, specially designed wings that merely rustled through the air even at two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and already nearly noiseless turbines. There was no sound, and practically no light. Only a faint glow from each plane, that was projected slightly upward. They could be seen only from above, and the leading plane was lowest. They were far from the lighted air routes here, and far from towns or houses, other than the dimly seen laboratory seven thousand feet below.

	"Ready, Bert. Drop your first three," said the navigator of the leading plane. Three darkly shining ovals slid down through the starlight. They disappeared, then suddenly there was a tremendous flash of flame, and a roaring explosion a few seconds later. It was immediately followed by the detonation of the three bombs of the next ship, then the next, and the next. The buildings had opened out, and a great patch of light showed on the rocky hills. The second explosion darkened this suddenly, but in that instant, a gleam of metal had stood out in the lighted building, a great sheet of polished metal.

-

Bombings from the Air

	IT was gone when the lights blinked out. Six heavy detonations, eighteen separate bombs, followed. Then silence as the planes turned for a second try.

	Something began to glow down there. A fire had started perhaps? It grew swiftly brighter, a white, unwinking light that could not be a fire, it was too steady, too white and changeless, save for a rapid increase in brightness. The heaped ruins of the laboratory were already beginning to glow slightly, then brighter and brighter. They slumped, and a globe of white fire lit the landscape, and threw a brilliant stabbing light to the heavens that made the planes stand out brilliantly.

	"Damn—searchlights—turn and drop everything you've got," ordered the leading pilot. Five other pilots heard his orders over their radio. The planes swooped, and turned. Twenty-four tons of explosives rained down toward the white light. They went off in the air as they approached, the terrific heat set the bombs glowing when they were fifty feet away, and exploded them instantly.

	Suddenly the white died down, it flared brilliantly, blindingly violet-blue—the pilots screamed in agony, the entire planes turned red, and shooting flames sprang from the gas tanks. The turbines shrieked suddenly as though in agony, and burst with popping explosions.

	Six flaming, white-hot planes dropped earth-ward. They dropped toward a pit of white-hot rock half a mile across that heaved and boiled, and spewed forth great volumes of gas.

	There was nothing else there. The ball of violet flame was gone, the laboratory was gone—and the six bombing planes were vanishing in blobs of white-hot gas.

	The Putney and Warren Research Laboratories had vanished.

	Next dawn a crowd of men were watching the still glowing rock, and flights of airplanes wheeled slowly overhead, Newsplanes were taking pictures, telenews planes were projecting the view on ten thousand screens in New York and New Jersey. Beyond local interest, an explanation of the slight earth-tremor that had shaken the district, it had no meaning.

	And a certain upstate bank cashier, one James Oswell Jessop, was visited by a lawyer from the firm of Powers and Mulroony, who informed him he was sole heir of Randolph Warren, who had unfortunately died in an accident in his laboratory the preceding evening. Mr, Warren was a scientist. Had he heard of him? Mr. Jessop had not. Had Dr. Warren left anything? Yes, a little something. A few patents. Would he like to sell them? Gladly—how much could he get?

-

A Sale of Patents at a Trivial Price

	THREE weeks later he received the enormous sum of thirty thousand dollars for the patents that could have remade the world, blasted a thousand industries, and brought every nation of the earth trembling to submission before' their owner!

-

CHAPTER XI

	RANDOLPH WARREN raised a shaking hand to his head, and brushed back the hair that had fallen over his eyes. His mind was muddled, uncertain. There was a feeling of weirdness, of inexplicable things about him as he lay on the floor, even before he opened his eyes. The thick, soft carpeting of semi-sponge rubber was comfortable under him, and languorously he opened his eyes. He stared, raised a hand before his eyes, and stared harder.

	His hand was a brilliant, flaming violet. His hair was a pale, virulent shade of green. He was wearing dark red shoes, dark orange trousers with twisting threads of a bright turkey red. His belt was pale violet. The gold buckle was slightly greenish in cast, but otherwise unchanged.

	Lying on the floor nearby, and slightly stirring now was Putney. His lips were a dark violet, his hands the same bright violet that showed on Warren's own. His hair, normally brown, was now colored green, several shades Marker, and much more pleasant in appearance than Warren's.

-

What Had Happened to the Control Room?

	THE physicist gasped, and sat up. The control room of his ship of course. But what had happened to it? It looked familiar, yet unfamiliar. The angles and proportions were wholly, utterly wrong.

	And it was dark. The lights were giving a pale orange glow, but the window opened on a jet emptiness. Warren knew it was in open space, he could recognize that quality of empty blackness, but there was something very wrong with the sky, too. The very stars in their courses seemed vastly changed. He could not recognize a single familiar star, a single known constellation.

	He heard a gasp of astonishment. Putney was staring at his hand with wide eyes. His eyes were bright, light blue, where they should be white, and very dark green where they had been black.

	"You awake?" said Warren. "I felt the same way when I first saw my hand. Look at those beautiful red shoes you have on. How do you like my orange-and-red trousers?" His voice though, did not convey any sound of jocularity, but a feeling of helplessness.

	"Where under the sun are we—what's happened?" gasped Putney.

	"To the first I'd say, I doubt that we are, and to the second, I could guess, but I won't." The helpless tone of stupefied surprise was rapidly leaving Warren's voice, with a note of excitement following close on its heels.

	Shouts and cries of amazement were coming from the rear of the ship.

	"All men up here!" sang out Warren. Presently men began to file into the room. In a short time ten of the weirdest sights that ever met the human eye stood grouped before the two scientists. They were gaping at each other in speechless amazement. McLaurin, the burly Scots mechanician, was the prize specimen, however. He had on pale pink trousers, a light orange coat, blue shoes with red soles, and was now equipped with violet hair. A short time before it had been very red.

	Warren burst out laughing at the sight of the dour Scot clad in this brilliant array of pastel tints. "Lord, Mac, was ever such a sight before?"

	"An' o' course ye'r a beauty yerself." replied the Scotsman. "An' what may it mean?"

	"Carl—you're somewhat of an astronomer, take a look out of the observation window. What stars do you recognize?"

	"None—not a one!" gasped the young astrophysicist, after a keen survey of the star-field.

	"I'm afraid to turn the ship around right now, don't know what will happen, if my theory is right, anything might. Now where would you say the sun lay from here?"

-

No Sun to Be Seen at Any Angle

	CARL looked briefly out of the window which ran around three sides of the control room, and finally pointed straight astern. "Must be behind, we'd see it if it were anywhere else." "Mac, run back and look."

	The mechanist was gone scarcely thirty seconds before he came back, his face paled to a slightly lighter shade of violet.

	"I can see through three other angles, Doctor Warren, but there is na sun!" he reported.

	The men stared at him in horror. "No sun? My God, where are we?" demanded one.

	"I can't say, but I can guess," replied Warren quickly. "This thing will get on your nerves if you let it, but take it easy. We are in a space ship, the most powerful men ever knew. We are somewhere, where, obviously, this space ship, plus that little ball of fire, brought us, Therefore it's a reasonable conclusion that this same space ship, plus an exactly similar ball of fire, which we can create, will take us back. Is it not?"

	If Warren's theories were correct, it was not necessarily true, but the men nodded, hopefully.

	"My theory is that we have gone where that matter went! Into another space! Not quite where that matter went, for remember we went through that, merely out of our own space, where there was no matter, and where no matter could exist. We exist, therefore we are in a space where matter can exist, but the conditions are different here, hence our violet faces, the weird coloring of our clothes and hair, and the feeling of unfamiliarity with this very ship we built. But the conditions are not so different that we cannot understand them, and live till we can control them.

-

Locating Themselves in the New Space

	"THE first thing to do is to locate ourselves in this A new space. We must take photographs. First, however, we must see that conditions permit our plates to work. This ship is completely stocked, luckily, so we have plenty of time to work. We must be in some part of this new space which corresponds with the solar system in ours.

	"To get our position, remember that our own space is a curved hyper-sphere, a fourth dimensional sphere, roughly speaking, whose shape is maintained by the pull of the multitude of bodies, stars and worlds, which fill it. Now here are other stars—and probably other worlds. This, then, would be a space similar to ours, as one world is similar to another. Matter cannot exist between the two, but can exist in either, just as a man could not exist between Earth and Venus for instance, but, supposedly, could exist on either, but under different conditions of gravity, light, heat, atmosphere -—everything. "So it is here.

	"But one thing is not changed men, one of the most important things. I've still got an appetite, so lets eat!"

	With a laugh of relief, they agreed with him on that, and started below. Two of the men set to work in the galley, preparing the meal, while Warren and Putney stayed in the control room, observing the meters.

-

A Puzzled Group of Space Travelers

	"WE'VE got gravity, we've got power, and light W and heat, and evidently our force-screen is working, for there's atmospheric pressure outside, earth-atmosphere brought with us. But what in—in the Universe did this?" demanded Putney.

	"Conflicting force-fields, Putt, the conflicting fields of that little release-flame running wild, and our own field X-785. It threw us for a loss, Putt, but I think it killed that release flame.

	"Now we've got to work fast, and locate ourselves. First and foremost, we'll have to use the telescope and take star-charts, so that we can come back to this point if we move, and by all the gods we will! I couldn't have done this in a billion years, and no man will ever do it again, in all probability, so let's make hay while the sun shines. Either we can return, or we can't. If we can, we don't have to worry, and if we can't, we might as well enjoy life while we live!"

	"I guess you're right, Ran, but what will we have to do to learn about our position?"

	"Determine the Constants of Space here. There are certain constants that are, I suspect, universal. The constant of gravity, the proportionality factor you know, will probably be the same, but we can determine that. But such fundamental constants as the velocity of light, radius of space curvature, the space equation of time and the resistance or rigidity of space constants, we will have to know. Evidently our release-flame burns steadily, though Mac said it was orange here—I'm not surprised—so we will have time to work. But most important for us, is the rate of progress of time as relative to our own space-time sphere."

	"A second here may be a million years of earth-time you mean?"

	"Exactly—and if it is, we are forever isolated. By this time, or by the time we return, the sun and its attendant planets will have swung around the galaxy and been lost from us forever in a maze of five hundred thousand million suns, and the galaxy itself may have swung into some other part of our super-galaxy, the Magellanic cloud for instance—"

	"Yes, and a much simpler way of being gloomy is to merely say we might all commit suicide. Lets go below," said Putney."

-

CHAPTER XII

	PUTNEY sat down gently in the comfortable chair in the "library" aboard the ship. It was also the conference room, study and den for the two friends. A phonograph was going in the after part of the ship now, and a good meal had put all in a better frame of mind. Warren sat down, after closing the door behind him. The glow of the tube-lights was steady and clear, the air in the ship warm and refreshing, and through the earth was a countless inexpressable distance away in time and space, the warm air, the food, the music—all seemed to bring it near. Here in the heart of the ship, under the influence of the gravity fields, it seemed impossible that they were anywhere than in their room on earth.

	Putney chuckled softly as he tamped down the tobacco in his pipe. "Seems scarcely possible, sitting here."

-

How and When Is the Return to Be

	"DOESN'T, does (puff-puff) it?" replied Warren, struggling to light his own pipe. "The question is, how are we going to get back, for we know it's not only possible, but a fact."

	"Another question too, comes to my mind," said Putney softly. "When are going to get back?" 

	Warren looked at him sharply, Putney continued to look steadily at the ceiling. "Are we going to get back a few days after we left," he went on, "or are we going to come back a million million years ago or a million million years in our future?"

	"As I before said, I don't know."

	"Do you think the time-rates will be the same?"

	"I know they aren't. The differences we see show the two spaces aren't the same. We can determine the time rate of this space in reference to itself—and I suspect it will be slightly different. What I mean is— we have brought yard sticks from our own space, but they have been distorted by this space. How much, we naturally can't tell. If we find by them that the speed of light is say 300,000 miles per second, by our also-carried-over clocks, then we know the time-rate here. But we can't determine the relative time-rates of the two spaces,

	"Why?"

	"Would we be able to go back without knowing that?"

	"I think we can, Putt. The power works here, evidently, and that time-rate change will affect all things equally, here."

	"Suppose that one minute here represented an hour on earth, and we spend a week investigating space-constants, then spend a year or so exploring. What happens?"

	"Well—we'd get back to earth a good many years after we started—sixty years late, wouldn't we, Putt?" Warren was thoughtful.

	"So is it wise to spend any longer here than we have to? Seventeen years and our patents would be gone. By the way, what happens to them? They're made out in your name you know, and you are dead, and they can prove that you died in the terrible explosion of your laboratory. Some experiment we were working on went all wrong, and the laboratory was wrecked in a series of explosions. Probably fused into the bargain." Putney added.

	"So that's what they'll say." Warren paused thoughtfully. "And somebody will inherit my patents, and then Nestor will buy them up, because the poor fool won't know what it's all about. I believe it's some distant cousin of mine who always made me want to take a picture of him. He's such a perfect model for the hen-pecked husband. Works in a little country bank.

	"And the ten or twenty thousand dollars, that Nestor will offer, will be a tremendous fortune from the Gods, and he'll thank them on bended knees that they permitted you to live long enough to die and leave him something worth so much—when he could sell them for a hundred billion dollars. The nations of earth would form a syndicate to buy those plans." Putney grinned sourly. "We were fools not to expect that."

	"And Nestor and Atkill walk off with the gravy, don't they?"

	"No," replied Putney, "they don't. I've been doing a little investigating, when Nestor started lying so very low, and being so very nice. Atkill got fired when he didn't beat you, and because he hadn't discovered it. Nestor had a win-or-loose contract with him, before Atkill took it, ten million if he won, and 100,000 win or loose. He lost—and got the hundred thousand. Only Nestor, the dear old fox, had a cute little apparatus clause. In case of loss, Atkill paid for the apparatus. It cost seventy-five thousand. Atkill was sore, and the two weren't on speaking terms—but American Super-power, the new Power Combine, and Nestor were surprisingly close. I was a bit surprised. Nestor told them the whole story, and said, quite truly, you could wreck them. They combined—and apparently bought a few bombing planes for good measure."

	Warren's square-cut jaw was hardening. "You know," he said in a coldly precise voice, "I think we'll hurry right home—if we can.

	"Let's turn in."

-

Protracted Determinations and Calculations

	They started work the next day, setting up their apparatus for the determination of the all-important space characteristics. They knew the exact procedure, and had trained men, and trained mechanicians, but the problem was not one of complex apparatus, but of many observations. They were enormously helped by the great power at their command, by the space fields they themselves could build, and by the mobility of their ship. But there was no star near them, and the nearest was more than two light-years away. It was impossible to visit it, and get the assistance so much needed, that only the enormous mass could render, but they did their best from a distance.

	It was nearly two weeks later, by their chronometers, when the determinations alone had been made.

	"And," said Warren, "that's only the preliminary. I've still got to find out how to use them. We've got to do some calculating. You know I took down the readings of all the instruments, don't you? As soon as I found what had happened, and where we were, I mean. And I had notes on that little laboratory release-flame, so I know the thing that threw us this way, and the character of that space, and I know the character of this space, so all I have to do is calculate what will do it the other way."

	"Uh-huh. That's all," grinned Putney.

-

CHAPTER XIII

	IN a city separated from the Prometheus by an interval that was inconceivable, and inexpressable in terms of Space and Time, was a shabby, dowdy building, in a shabby, dirty section of the city. Parts of the city were bright with streams of lighted cars and long rows of gleaming lights with moving walks and tri-level roads. Elevated trains hummed and roared across the city, and the soft light of stars and of a silvery moon were lost in the harsher, multi-colored glare of a giant city's lights.

	There was a constant, husky whisper of city noise that seeped even so far into the dingy, dark section of the town, and into this room. A single, old-fashioned gas-glow tube lighted it. The woman who ran the boarding house was as frowsy as her house, and she had a poor sense of economy. There were actually some incandescent bulbs left, because they were cheaper—and 98% inefficient. The gas-glow tube in the room was nearly as bad, and the room was dim,

	A scarred, tippy table stood in the middle of the room. A bottle and three glasses stood on the table, and beside them a large ash tray, half full. There were countless overlapping rings where "alcoholic" drinks intended for human consumption had made slight stains on the once-fine oak.

-

A Job for Someone

	"Joe," said the black-haired man, leaning back in his chair, smoking an expensive briar, "I've got a job. This isn't merely a friendly call."

	"Atty," replied Joe Keller, "I ain't sa dumb I don' know wen yuh'r here on business. Wat is it? Hope it's bettern the las' stunt yuh had." Keller was still a bit unhappy over the stories that had come back from the Putney-Warren laboratories, even though they had been three months old when the laboratory was blown up, and four months old now.

	"It's a lot worse than that was, Joe."

	Keller looked disgusted, pained, and unbelieving. "Hooey," he replied at length. "Even the D. T.'s ain't as bad as that was. Hell, the guys wat came back here was all ravin' about it. I've seen 'em outa the D. T.'s but they don' believe it after."

	"Uh-huh—only this happened to 'em. They had reason to believe it."

	"Suppose, Joe, yuh let this-here gentleman tell his yarn in his own partic'lar way?" suggested the lanky, bronzed individual with the sun-faded hair, on the third side of the table. He was handling his glass with an air of knowing what it was, and not believing it a substance to be downed rapidly in order to enter the state known as inebriation. His other hand was rolling a cigarette. It was a neat cylinder when he finished, and he inserted it into one corner of his mouth and lit it with what seemed one motion, and a puff.

	"All right! Watcha got?"

	"Texas, and you too, Joe, what would you say if I told you the United States was going to war? And it was going to war in about four weeks more?"

	"Huh?" demanded Keller. He sat up straighter. Even the lanky, easy-going Texan sat up a bit. "Who's got the idee they can swing THIS country?"

-

Six Strong Men Are to Declare War

	''SIX men have. They're declaring war. Or rather, announcing their rule. The first move will be complete destruction of all known fire-arms, the establishment of a secret police that has the power to execute on suspicion, and condemn without trial-and the removal of enemies."

	"Hey—do you mean this?" asked Keller, his eyes narrowing sharply. He saw that Atkill was absolutely sincere. There was none of his air of laughing boredom now. He was deadly serious. He meant all he said.

	"I do. They intend to start with the United States, annex Canada, Mexico, and then take on European Nations."

	"Who air these-here ambitious hombres?" demanded Texas.

	"Old Man Nestor, and five associates, known as the Board of Control of the American Super-power," replied Atkill, "They own the patents that Warren worked out before the gentle souls bumped him off— and bought them from his heir for thirty grand. They'd sell for one hundred million any day in any week, and a billion with no great difficulty. The poor fool was probably tickled to get the thirty thousand. And they get patents that will bring any nation on earth to its knees in a single day!"

	There was an unpleasant light in the lanky Texan's eyes, and his slight drawl had become much more pronounced. "And they feel that this here world is their private oyster, I reckon? How they figger they c'n do it?"

	"They've got the Burt Hillen mob signed up for the job." Atkill's lips relapsed into a slight, grim smile. "And old Nestor is paying them half a million dollars a day. Then when they have finished getting control of the United States for him, Nestor figures they'll take their pay and get out."

	Joe Keller vtjistled softly. "Sooo—tha's wat the Hillen mob's been up on. There's been strings out, sorta guesses, that they got sumpen big on. But who'd a gessed it was 'at big." He paused thoughtfully for several moments. "What are we goinna do, Atty?"

	"What say we take over the ships they are building, and do the job ourselves." Atkill proposed.

	The Texan looked at him sharply, then sank back a bit. Keller looked startled, thoughtful, and then finally shook his head. "No—we couldn't do it anyway, but —aw—somehow I like this ole U.S. A. I dunno—I wanna keep it. An' I'm damn sure I don' want Nestor and the rest of those big-wigs tryin' to run it. They'd—they'd wreck it."

-

The World to Be Ruled with an Iron Hand

	"NO;" said Atkill with a hard little laugh, "they'd improve it immensely. Six strong men ruling the world with an iron hand—six strong men that could execute men on suspicion, without a 'fair, and reasonable trial' and without proving 'beyond reasonable doubts'. Trials that couldn't be beaten because somebody put a comma in the wrong place when the indictment was typed. Graft—hell, they'd make millions out of the country the first year. But six men would RULE the place, and they would see to it they got all the graft that was grafted. And six men just simply can't graft as much as ten or twenty thousand that work at it now. Postoffices where they were needed, not where they'd bring the most votes. No navy, no army, save those ten ships they're building now."

	"Laws—half the laws on the books scratched off. Then perhaps two score sound laws that just couldn't be broken. When there's a police force that doesn't have to prove everything, then if that police force is honest and just, there can't be any great amount of crime. Mistakes, yes. They'd make 'em sometimes, but with all the courts, they make mistakes now. And it wouldn't be five and six years between crime and execution, either.

	"On the whole, for the people that can't take care of themselves, it would be better. But they wouldn't like it, because they think they can take care of themselves. That's why card sharps and dips make a fat living,

	"But I wouldn't want the country that way. I asked that question merely to see what you'd say."

	"Waal—what we say don't make such a big difference, I reckon, but what we do, might. The question seems to be what air you aimin' to do about it?" asked Texas.

	Atkill smiled. "Well, Joe, that sounds to me as though it were about to be business. You joining the deal?"

	"Wat yuh think?"

	"Well, let's make some plans. How's the gang, all the old boys with you—I mean other than Marty and Rabbit? They're taking a prolonged vacation I understand."

	"Yeah—the State thought they oughta. It even proved they'd oughta. The rest o' the gang's ready."

	"All right. Now listen, both of you." Atkill leaned forward tensely, and the others listened sharply as he unfolded his plan in that dingy little room, where history was being made that night, though none, not even the two listeners, knew it, only Atkill himself.

-

CHAPTER XIV

	"YOU know, Putt," said Warren thoughtfully, "I've been wondering what disposition of the patents Nestor will make. We will be able to start the return process in a day or two, and I'd like to know what to expect. What have you in mind?"

	"Nestor tied up with Super-power, as I told you," began Putney. "Now why, other than to get us out of the way? It would be easy enough to bomb us. He makes planes, and he no doubt knew who your heir was, and could buy the patents. Why did he tie up with the Power crowd?"

	"That's your question. Maybe he wanted power, or perhaps he needed money."

	"He'd need an all-fired lot before it got too big for him to swing. I think he could scrape up two million in cash, himself."

	"How much did our ship cost, Putt?" "Seven hundred and fifty thousand. Three quarters of a million. It was a lot worse than I expected, too, because very few things were ready to hand. Even special furnaces had to be made after the beryllium was produced. It's lucky old Mac was ready for me, and willing to do it."

-

An Unpaid Loan

	"He should have been," Warren grunted. "You saved his neck when Nestor was after him a while ago. What was the loan you made him—and he hasn't yet paid?"

	"Oh, nothing much. He can keep the money as a darned good investment, I had a job paying him for the work on this ship. Anyway, I'm getting very fat interest."

	"Uh. Nothing much—something better than a million. Well, the question is, Putt, what will Nestor and Power Incorporated do, and why did they wait three months after we discovered it, to bomb us?"

	"They waited, to make sure there would be a copy of the plans somewhere, where it wouldn't be destroyed when we were, and they bought them merely as a formality, I suspect," answered Putney seriously.

	"Huh? That's no formality—that gives them exclusive rights—"

-

Making Law—Not Appealing to It

	" O you think they're appealing to the law? No, -L not by a long shot. I'll bet that jolly crowd are making law by now, if time is faster there than here, and we suspect it is. Why did Nestor join? Because ships cost about a million apiece, and he wanted several ships. He knows plenty of gun-gangs, that will throw in with him on this proposition, Listen, Man. Don't you realize that with this ship we could bring the whole world to its knees, take every dollar, every pound and every mark we wanted? Do you think any navy or air force could stop this for thirty seconds? Do you think Nestor doesn't know that? He wanted the power-men in, because it made it easier. I'll bet they were willing enough too, when they realized just how valuable their power franchises would be with this invention on the market. Look here, Nestor wanted money. He wanted big money quickly, from some one of whom he could get a hold, and the power utilities offered him an excellent chance. When they were accessories to the bombing, and supposed murder of our men, they'd hold together.

	"They build the ships, from the patent diagrams they can get hold of easily enough. They are all ready to attack—and simply cut off all power over the United States. They destroy the plants, so that power can't be restored, save by the ships, for no other means are available—the nation without power—the railroads dragging out old steam locomotives, that have been used for switching for the last two decades, and that are unable to move faster than a crawl. New York cannot get food in the vast quantities it needs it. Planes can't bring it. Ships can't bring enough, when all the distributive systems are tied up. No lights. No elevators—the whole city paralyzed for want of power, and in semi-panic

	Then the ships. Unheard of—tremendously deadly. Why, they could freeze the Hudson and the North River, and even ocean ships couldn't get there for days. Floods because of ice-jammed rivers. Do you see what would happen? They don't have to take the patents by due process of law—they just grab them, and then make the laws!"

-

To Grab the Patents and Make the Law for Themselves

	Warren whistled softly. "Nice people. Wonder if they'll do that?" he asked speculatively to himself.

	"Do it—of course they'll do it!"

	"Will they be able to—I wonder what their men will say. They'll have to use gangsters, or train a crew of equally unscrupulous men. Now having the country in their power, will they be willing to turn it over to Nestor and his crowd?"

	"Nestor hasn't the conscience of a gangster, but he has a lot more brains. He's probably arranged some beautiful system for killing off everyone of his men, save one crew, of one ship, which he can absolutely trust. If I were doing it, I'd have a poisonous gas flask ready to release when a certain radio signal was given from the flagship. That would eliminate most of his problems. A secret police with full powers of execution without trial, would speedily eliminate all others,"

	"Ummm. Nice people, as I believe I have said." Warren's mouth twisted as though he had tasted something nauseous.

	"What are we going to do?" he went on.

	"We've tried out all those things you wanted to, at the expense of a few of our seemingly endless supplies of steel ingots. How many did you store by the way?"

	"One hundred and fifty, Putt. There are one hundred and forty-one left."

	"We'll simply have to go back and use them. Perhaps we can dissuade the Nestor and Powers crowd. We might wait till Nestor has removed his extraneous crews."

	"How do you know he will, Putt?"

	"Lord, Ran, he's no fool, and you stated the problem exactly. The gangs have to wait till he shows them how to win, he has to wait till they've won—and we have to wait till they've been cut down to our size." Putney said.

	"—and half the population has been killed off?" continued Warren.

	"Wait till we know what month we get back," suggested Putney more practically.

* * * * *

	A tiny sliver of moon floated rather low over the horizon. It was dark, very dark, and the stars seemed to cast no light at all. A tremendous shed loomed up against the starlight a short distance ahead, as the three large autogyros sank soundlessly to earth, in the broad field. There was one square of light in the near corner of the great hangar, and across it fine lines seemed drawn. A wire fence stood between the newly-landed machines and the building.

Intruders from Autogyros

	FULLY a score of figures tumbled from the three machines, and on the back of each was a peculiar pack that hummed very slightly as they advanced. Each man walked softly, looking occasionally at the leather strap about his wrist, carrying a small disc of some gray-white material. And each man carried a machine-rifle, a gun weighing little more than twenty pounds, shooting extremely high velocity .22 caliber bullets, at the rate of 300 a minute. The stock was thick, and carried a broad chest-plate to protect the firer.

	Two low humming notes sounded softly, and the various groups of men moved toward the wire fence. One man, evidently the leader, carried a suitcase, and wore a peculiar mask over his face. In the other hand was a square, box-like apparatus which he pointed in many directions as he walked. Yet another man was leading him.

	"Take it easy, Tex. I can see the fence all right, but this damned infra-red rectifier is blurry. It's not as fast as ordinary light you know, in the cells. There are four sentries walking about pussy-foot, and three more lying down. They haven't seen us, but they shine like blinding lights in this thing. They're sure radiating heat. More to the left."

	The men went off toward the left. After a moment the masked man halted them, and sent forward two with heavy clippers. "Take it easy," he whispered, "they've got electro-static charges on that fence, and you have to give your equalizer a break on that. Approach slowly, cut quickly, but don't make a sound. Hold the wires with your hands, Shorty, and you, Pete, cut gently. Go."

	The two forms went forward, and disappeared from the sight of the others in an instant. Clouds had come up, and even the minute light of the moon was gone. Approaching with the hills behind them, they were invisible to the watchers beyond the fence, but the man with the mask saw them clearly as they cut a section from the fence. One man ran a wire about the section they intended to cut free, maintaining the circuit of metal, after the metal fence had been carried away, and finally laid gently on the soft turf.

	"All right. Forward. Follow me," ordered Atkill, his voice muffled by the mask.

	They went forward quietly. Twice Atkill turned sharply from his path as the mask spotted ultra-violet beam traps, which gave off infra-red as well, despite the fact that no visible light escaped. Again he turned aside for a complex, electrostatic trap.

	Finally the twenty-three men were less than thirty feet from the door, the door that opened into the office of the great hangar, and the only one not locked.

	Atkill took off his mask, deposited the suitcase and the black box of the detector and cells on the ground, then took a Very pistol from Texas, and a machine rifle from Joe.

-

The Attack on the Laboratory Begins

	HE pointed the Very pistol upwards, pressed it, and an instant later the rocket light flamed upwards. Two seconds later a far greater rocket soared up from the planes, out beyond the fence, and an in-stand later a blindingly bright magnesium flare was drifting down from a parachute. The entire grounds were thrown into brilliant relief of clear, white light, Seven men had turned at the sight of the Very light, whirled bewildered at the hiss of the rocket beyond the fence, and stood rooted, and blinded under the light of the magnesium flare. Twenty-three men had been standing by the wall, staring steadily at the lens of a brilliant flashlight, and their eyes were accustomed to the glare of light now. The machine-rifles spit viciously, and seven armed guards sprawled on the turf.

	Simultaneously a howl of surprise and rage came from behind the door, and a giant of a man stumbled out to see the trouble. He sprawled dead before the pistol in his hand could speak, and three men charged over his body, shooting, into the guard-office. There were the heavier barks of automatics mingled with the snappish clatter of the small-caliber, high-velocity machine guns.

	Three more men charged in behind them, ready to shoot. There was no need. Electric floodlights had snapped on outside now, and a siren was howling disconsolately somewhere, half drowning the cries and bellows of men. There was a rush of feet beyond the inner door of the office, men running across the concrete floor of the hangar.

	The inner door went down with a crash as two men hurled themselves against it, through it, and began shooting inside. An echoing volley of heavy shots returned the lighter barks of the machine-rifles. Then came the heavy, rapid fire of a high-power non-portable machine gun. There were ten men inside the hangar now—and none of them had been wounded! They stood up under the blaze of light, and returned the fire of the enemy hotly, turning to face them rather than swinging their guns.

	Suddenly one went down, the barrel of his gun a twisted mass of iron, the breech burst wide. His own gun had exploded as an enemy bullet struck it.

	In twenty seconds there were no more shots heard inside the hangar.

	"Ten men on the doors. Have your guns placed. See if the heavy machines here are workable. Defend the place as long as possible. They'll have the field guns working. Chatter a machine gun to make 'em think they've got friends here." Atkill was barking orders sharply. Men hastened to do as he told them.

-

Invading the Air Ship

	"TEX, Joe, Shorty and Pete—come." They raced toward a great dirigible-shaped hull of silver metal. The hull was completely formed, but there were ladders, mechanics tools, scaffolding about it. The windows were not all installed, the thing was not yet completed. "This'll do. It's the most nearly completed, come on."

	Into the ship they plunged, ready with guns for resistance, but the mechanics had fled. Atkill found his way quickly to the power room.

	Banked machinery formed a circle about a great block of rough, rusted iron. Dully gleaming control boards, with banks of instruments showed on one side of the great room at the heart of the steel-walled ship. The lights the men carried swept about.

	"Tex, take off your pack." Texas seemed leisurely in his movements, but in a surprisingly short time the pack was at Atkill's feet. Atkill opened it quickly, and within it were tiny mechanisms like these giant machines here, a tiny control board, and a speck of iron, a blue-white flame of unwavering intensity burning-above it. And beside it were two heavy copper bars.

	Atkill rose, and looked at the mechanisms with apparent negligence, but with a glance that took in everything.

	"Thank the Lord 'Boozey' wasn't too drunk to talk straight. She's ready to start. We'll need five and a half minutes. Joe, send every man out—they've started attacking—send every man out to the doors. Make sure they don't get in. If a shell blows a hole in the wall, put the men under the hulls of the ships. These walls are three feet thick, and will shed anything man ever sent—except forces, and I don't believe they're using them. Go to it."

-

The Work on the Air Ship

	Instantly he turned himself, and with amazing precision adjusted a hundred complex instruments; he took from one of the packs the men had carried, three heavy copper bus bars, and in a moment had them connected with Texas' pack. These he connected to similar connectors on the ship's machines.

	He was busy again with the dials. Finally he bent over the little pack, and turned something. The blue-white flame dulled, turned an angry red, and a low, powerful hum set up. Something seemed twisting, dragging everything, every atom of them, toward the massive block of iron, yet nothing moved them, they staid where they were. There was a queer activity on the surface of the iron, and Atkill's black eyes stared at it sharply. The surface writhed, the rust seemed to dissolve, and powdered metal remained. Something seemed whirling just above the surface of the iron, the metal licked upward, and a blaze of sudden white light smote down at the men. The surface of the iron was white hot, and an instant later the burst of light came and went again, again and again, faster, then they merged to one, and a dull roaring set up. The ball of flame was a foot in diameter, growing swiftly. Atkill sprang to the controls, and made rapid adjustments, watching the growing, pulsing flame.

	Something screamed outside, then there was a terrific detonation. A man cried out in agony, and running feet echoed across the concrete floor.

	"Tex—call 'em in. We're going. We can't wait," ordered Atkill.

-

	THE Texan disappeared, shouted something. A moment later the lights in the ship flashed on as Atkill pulled a switch. They glowed, flickered, then burned steadily white. The tiny pack release-flame was glowing blue-white once more. Atkill stooped, adjusted something, and it shrank slightly. The great release flame burning on the block of iron was glowing steadily now. Scrambling feet echoed on iron. Texas stuck his head in through the doorway. 

	"Thar in."

	Atkill pulled a switch, the release-flame dulled momentarily, and the crack and clatter of falling, severed scaffolding echoed into the ship. Something whined again and exploded heavily. There was a terrific crash as a portion of the wall fell in. The ship though, was undamaged. The force-field was up.

	With a swoop of power, a crushing weight fell on the men aboard. Atkill looked from his window, and saw the walls of the hangar drop swiftly downward, then the slope of the roof appeared. With a terrific crash the ship smashed her way out through a hole torn in the roof, and vanished into the night.

	Atkill smiled happily at the lank, tanned Texan. "Did it?"

	Below, men milled about in the hangar, helping men caught under the fallen roof, attending to the wounded, who were few, and the dead, who were numerous, and their own, and calling frantically on a telephone line that didn't work.

	An autogyro roared, and sailed away. A crowd of men swarmed from the hangar in time to see it disappear into the night.

	Ten minutes later a second had been filled with gas, a smashed carbureter replaced, and the machine headed for New York as it took the air.

	Burt Hillen was cursing furiously as he surveyed the wreckage. "The blankety blank son of a so-an-so. An' wat the hell happened to you guys? Yellah? My God, the way yuh all lit out wen they showed up! Tha's the Keller mob, an' we're due to get that so-and-so. Go on—clean this joint up. They got one o' them things, an' I dunno who was wid 'em, but he got it started. That means we gotta fight THAT when we start--an' it's ol' Fox-face's private ship." He expressed his opinions at length, and stared at the hole in the roof through which the vanished ship had gone.

	But it didn't bring back the ship, and it didn't bring back Atkill.

-

CHAPTER XV

	THADDEUS Nestor sat at the head of the table. The table was beautiful dark mahogany, the walls were hung with thick velvet drapes—and soundproofing materials.

	Down the sides of the table the five other men, who represented the directorate of the American Superpower, were sitting, and listening to him anxiously, for what he had to say meant a great deal to them.

	"And so, gentlemen, due to the inefficiency of our guards, the thieves stole that ship, the flagship. There are nine remaining ships, but none were quite so powerful as it. That, and the fact that it was most nearly completed, was the reason it was chosen no doubt, I doubt if they knew of—the arrangement as we may say.

	"But I know who it was! It was that lying, murderous, crooked, untrustworthy blackguard, Atkill, with his villainous gang of cut-throats and murderers. I've seen to it that all our guards were notified of those who committed the theft and the attack, and I've taken the liberty to offer a reward of a quarter of a million for their capture, and the return of the ship.

	"However, I fear it is useless. The blackguard is cunning, with the low cunning of rats. He forced me to pay him fifty thousand dollars for some junk apparatus I had foolishly given him permission to leave in my laboratory—the ingrate. I paid him one hundred thousand dollars for a month's work—and that's his return." Nestor truly convinced himself he had been badly handled. Now he was afraid.

	"He has of course, examined those patents, and knows all that we know about the possibilities of the thing, but there is one thing that worries me. Warren mentioned artificial gravity in the presence of a certain man who has reported to me, a laboratory secretary named Wilson, and we have not found any means of producing artificial gravity.

-

The Production of Artificial Gravity

	"It is evident that there are more possibilities our men have not found. They tell me they understand it, but I'm not sure——"

	William Fordham, President of the Atlantic Power Corporation, Vice-President of the American Super-Power, interrupted. "They don't know what it's all about. They merely follow the directions of the patents, and they get a machine that does this or that, as the papers say. The fools can't even find out what makes it happen."

	"Uh. I didn't think they could," went on Nestor. "But Atkill's a brainy rat, I'm sure he has figured it out, and he may have something new, that we don't know about.

	"Now I wonder if it wouldn't be advisable to buy him and his group in with us. He could cause a great deal of trouble, particularly if he waited till after we had— er—discharged our allies."

	"I vote we do," said Fordham.

	The others concurred. "We'll buy him in then, at the lowest price we can," decided Nestor.

* * * * *

	Burt Hillen was also holding a council that morning, and on the same subject—the manner of dealing with Joe Keller and Company. Burt was listening to an impassioned oration from "Tiny" Morgan. Tiny was six feet six tall, and four feet broad, and weighed 257 pounds. Also he could shoot so rapidly, and so accurately, that while he was living a long time in gangland, he was much feared. Tiny's only trouble was one he did not realize. He had the bulk and strength of an elephant, -and the brain of an ant.

	"All yuh say may be perf'cly true, Tiny, but I heard of a yarn about a guy wat wanted to make rabbit pie, and the first ting they said was to git the rabbit. Them gumps has got the ship, and they've gone. Try an' fin' em.

	Somebody knocked on the outer door of the guard office. The pounding hammers on the ships and the racket of repairs to the great roof of the hangar almost drowned the sounds, but the signal knocks were recognizable. Burt reached out a hand and pressed a button. The door opened of itself. "Yeah?" he demanded, "Dumb" Bell, who served in the role of a secretary to the Chief of the organization stuck his head in. It was a wizened, bald head. The man looked about fifty, and was actually thirty-two. The face was sharp, and pinched. Aloysius Bell he had started out in life, but the name "Dumb" quickly attached itself, because he was markedly other than dumb, and because it suited his last name so perfectly.

	"Chemmy's outside. Got sumpin' important."

	"Huh? Chemmy? Oh, yeah. I had him come down didn't I? Sen' him in," ordered Hillen indifferently.

	"Chemmy" was the chief chemist of Hillen's industries. He was foreman over the workers who synthesized the drugs the Hillen mob sold, and the alcohol they made into drinks. At one time he had been James Ogden Brent, Ph.D., and a number of other things, He had, however, synthesized a new drug, tried it on animals, and found it harmless. He tried it on himself, and found it was so powerfully a habit-former that a single dose put him forever in its grip.

	He was in the hands of the gang now, and Hillen had sent him out here to-day to look at these ships. Somewhere in Hillen's clever, twisted mind there lurked the idea that a scientist of his own should look over these scientific marvels, and pronounce them fit for him.

	Brent came in, a little stooped man, his eyes unnaturally bright, unnaturally quick. "Hello, Hillen. Who built these ships?" he asked as soon as he passed the threshold.

	"Huh? Old Fox-face's mechanics a course."

	"Well, listen. If you go aboard those ships after the windows are in, he can kill you any time he wants, without touching the ship," snapped the little man.

	Hillen stiffened. Tiny Morgan let out a bull roar of anger. "Yuh mean that?" asked Hillen softly, as he settled back. "How?"

	"I was looking over the arrangements for the purification of the air in the ship, and I saw that the apparatus was well, and cleverly designed. It will do it's job very well. But there was one pipe-line I could not understand, that led into the main return pipes—the pipes that would distribute the air through the ship. I also noticed something that I thought was a radio set, and as I could see no reason for a radio set there, I sent for 'Sparks' Cohen. He's the head of the communications department, and a very clever radio man. He told me that a certain kind of radio signal would, at any time, cause the value to open, and any gas, that was in that pipe line, would be distributed through the ship. While he had been on the way here, I followed the pipe-line back, and finally found a water tank that didn't hold water, but 'akalite'. Akalite is liquid, and looks like water in the gauge, but actually it is a low-boiling liquid, so deadly that it will kill a human being diluted one part in a million in the air. The radio set could release that gas into the ventilating system of the ship, and kill the entire crew of the ship in less than ten seconds.

-

The Poison Vapor on the Air Ships

	"EIGHT of the ships are so equipped; the ninth was, and the equipment has been taken out, all save the actual deadly akalite, which could only be removed with the aid of gas masks. That would have been noticed. As it is, the ninth ship is perfectly safe. It is the flagship."

	"The one old Fox-face and his friends will ride on, isn't it? Beautiful scheme—bee-ut-ie-ful." A slow, hard smile spread across Hillen's face. "Verry, verrry pretty. So we takes the country fer him, and den he wipes us out—an' he has the whole works—and we have a swell funeral. Verry clever." Hillen's smile was cold, deadly.

	"That—damn stinkin' double-crossin' Fox-faced monkey! The so-and-so wan'ed us to get in—an' den he wipes us!" Tiny was roaring again.

	"Tiny," said Hillen coldly, "sit down."

	Tiny sat. "Well, watcha gonna do—let him go? Hey, lemme get dat guy, willya?" he demanded.

	"Yes, Tiny, I think we let him go. Uhuh. We let him go. We make sure he don' know we know. Then he'll go ahead, an' let us take the country fer him—only we'll be doin' it fer ourselves." Hillen's face was smiling pleasantly now, he looked pleased. His eyes were black, and little gleams of murder dwelt in them. "An' after we've done it—when he's all ready, an' sends that signal, an' tries to turn on the gas—we'll turn somethin' on him, maybe—!"

	"Chemmy, call Sparks in here, and we'll have a talk. Come on," ordered Hillen. His lips still smiled, and his eyes were beginning to smile when the chemist returned with the radio man.

-

CHAPTER XVI

	S—O—S— —S—O—S-—" On the air over the whole nation the dread letters came through. Radio stations shut down abruptly, every broadcasting station cut off the air, and twenty million television sets went blank after the brief announcement.

	Strangely, after the letters came through, there was no message to follow, and even more strangely, the call was heard on every broadcasting wavelength!

	Perhaps station attendants wondered at that, but they did not wonder long, for the strong, clear signals suddenly stopped.

-

The Message of the Council of Five

	"THE air is clear. The message of the Council of Five will be delivered." A deep, powerful voice spoke, but no television disc signals came, no view of the man. Every wavelength gave the signals clearly.

	Every one of the still waiting radio sets resounded with the deep voice.

	"The Council of Five declares the United States no longer a republic. The Council of Five shall hereafter rule this nation, and within the year, the nations of earth.

	"The warships of the Council of Five will appear over New York City at ten o'clock to-morrow. Part of the fleet will appear over Washington at the same time. The financial and political capitals will be expected to signify their acceptance of the Council by the lowering of the conventional flag, and the raising of a flag whose field is bright blue, and on which appear five white stars, one in each corner and one in the center.

	"Resistance is not advisable. The Council of Five has weapons beyond any known to the rest of mankind.

	"The Council has spoken."

	The air was silent. Perhaps many that night turned off their radios as they heard some part of an impossible play coming over the air, heard some lines from an author's flight of fancy.

	But they began to believe soon, when they heard the cries of amazement and anger in a thousand towns and a hundred thousand villages.

-

Where Did the Message Come From?

	POLICE and Army and Navy officials were busy now, intercommunicating, attempting to locate the center of the disturbance, whence that message came. It was hopeless. Their results were impossible. Apparently the message had started somewhere over Florida, and its sender had moved, during the course of the message, till it ended over south-western Washington. The thing was impossible. They gave it up in disgust, and perhaps in fear, and began sending orders. Troops began to move toward New York and Washington that night. Battleships started suddenly in the same directions. The Pacific fleet hurried toward San Francisco and Santa Monica, Seattle, and the other great west-coast cities.

	Air forces moved swiftly, and before dawn a tremendous fleet of planes was congregated about the fields of Washington, D. C, and New York.

	And high above both cities a dozen or so of the newest planes, the radio-guided and radio-powered ships swung back and forth. Noiseless—invisible in the blue—

-

Destruction of All Power

	RESTLESS mobs howled and cursed sleepless all night, the troops fell to disciplining them as they arrived, and the lights of the city blazed till dawn. At dawn, New York and Washington time, every light went out, every train stopped, every line of transportation was suddenly dead. In both cities the power was gone, and across the whole nation the electric power ceased to be. Trains stopped, subways suddenly were motionless.

	Chaos in an hour. The mobs went mad; struggling people in the subways shrieked and howled and roared as their disposition might be. But at the end of an hour trains began to move cautiously, only sufficient to get the people from them safely, elevators that had left men and women trapped one hundred, or perhaps more stories above the ground, began to work to carry them down, never up.

	The city was drawing on its giant batteries. The power batteries that were intended for emergency came into use. There were no men in the power plants, and no power came from other cities, from outside. Army engineers threw in the batteries, then as battleships steamed into the harbor, great cables from their dynamos carried a measure of power across to the paralyzed city.

	Telephones had operated, for they were maintained by the emergency power generators, which every station contains. Radio had failed, save the army portable apparatus, for the great stations depended on the power lines.

	The Council of Five had stricken the city, turned a howling, angry mob of vengeful men into a paralyzed, panicky crowd, struggling to escape something, they did not know what, that had completely disorganized their city, left them trapped in burrows under the streets, or in perches high above them. Here and there fires, and terrific explosions had broken out, for the radio controlled and powered planes had come down, uncontrolled and unpowered, when the power failed.

	Further, power would not be restored, the meager output of three battleships could not sustain the city, the tremendous batteries were not to be wasted. And the power plants were hopelessly wrecked. A small plant had gone first, destroyed by a sudden reversal of its phase, and it was pumping power against the power-tide of a nation. From transformer to generators all was wrecked. A neighboring power plant suddenly got the double strain—it went the way of its predecessor. Like giant snowballs ever gaining volume, plant after plant went, till finally half a dozen of the greatest alone remained, and the power load of the United States was thrown on them suddenly.

-

The Great Defensive Tubes

	IT would be months before effective power was available. Army engineers were rushing about in wild anxiety. There were guns, there were planes, but the thing they had greatest hope for had been the great, sleek tubes that had been mounted in a dozen places about the city. Fifteen feet long, their thick, glassy walls glowed red as the rising sun painted them. Inside the outer tube, an inner tube of copper reached up ten feet of the length, to end in a crystal glass tube. Great power-elements inside the glass, and a huge bowl of copper screening just below this juncture point told its purpose. These Harrell tubes were new, tremendous tubes that were simply radio tubes and sending sets in one combination, but they could handle a hundred thousand horsepower, and all that power was reflected from that curiously light, and ineffective-seeming copper screening, and it went out as a beam that was absolutely deadly to any man or animal arid destructive to any piece of metal in its path.

-

	BUT—to send one hundred thousand horsepower of radio energy, two hundred and fifteen thousand horsepower of electrical energy was needed. The three ships in the harbor could not quite supply the energy for one of these tubes. They had planned to use a dozen. The batteries would supply them, run them for ten minutes, perhaps. And if those ships the Council of Five had spoken of could move as they seemed to have moved last evening, no shell would ever catch them, only these beams, traveling at the Ultimate Speed, the speed of light.

	Commander Gilbert C. Coache gave his orders very energetically, and very hopelessly. Secretly, he felt sure that the losses would be heavy. Guns could not cope with any ship that could display that speed—some rocket ship of undreamed of power.

	He was very angry, and very nervous. He had been working now since the previous morning, and working desperately since the previous evening, when he had been given the command of the defenses of New York City.

	"Power—power—damn it, that's all I want, Major. I can't do thing if you can't give me power."

	"I'm sorry sir, but the only form of electric power in the city are the indispensable telephone generators, three-quarter-full batteries, and the power from the ships. Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, Newark, why every city about has batteries that would give us all the power we need, but Lord, the damn things won't pump power through a transformer, and these lines are all A. G lines. I'm as anxious as you—but I can't do anything. There've been at least six thousand nuts pestering me with bright ideas since I came here. One man wanted us to commandeer all the automobile batteries, and use them. But—"

-

Commander Coache Wants Power

	"I SAID power!" Commander Coache hung up. He lit a cigarette, took two puffs, and was reminded he hadn't eaten in hours. He threw it away. He was so hungry he couldn't smoke, so tired he couldn't see straight, and so busy he couldn't sleep. Ten o'clock. Four hours more.

	He shook his head, and pushed a button for his next visitor. He jumped as the window behind him crashed to the floor In splinters, and a hole a foot across appeared miraculously in the plaster of the wall opposite him. A dum-dum bullet had come through the window, and missed him widely. The Commander dropped below the window level, and crawled hurriedly beneath the sill of the broken window. He let out a roar td the men outside his office.

	"Who did that?" he demanded.

	The Commander had been working on the second floor Qf an office building in the heart of New York.

	Across the street, in a second story window, a man was jumping up and down, and heaving a rifle. He paused to direct a bullet at the Commander's window, and continued his performance.

	"Bring that man over here!" snapped the Commander, The half-dozen officers and orderlies who had tumbled in, tumbled out, and raced across to that other building. The Commander's personal dignity and personal safety had been touched, also the Commander hoped that anyone, firing at him, must be connected in some way with the Council of Five.

	Three officers returned shortly, bringing a man none too gently. His hair was mussed, his clothes much awry, but he was smiling. He was tall, powerfully-built, with a keen intelligent face,

	"Hello, Commander, I met you at last," he grinned,

	"Who the hell are you, and what's the idea of trying to snipe me?"

	"Oh, you misunderstand me, Commander. I was merely trying to snipe your attention. For the last three hours I have been throwing myself in the way of Major Kendrill, but didn't succeed in seeing him, I tried here for about half an hour, then went across the street and tried that way. I at least attracted your attention."

	The Commander glared at him. "What do you want?" he snapped.

	The smile disappeared abruptly from the man's face. He was suddenly serious, intent. "Commander, what do you want most right now?"

-

The Commander Wants Power

	"POWER, damn it, power to run my Harrell tubes," replied the Commander with a groan. "And that's what I've spent three hours trying to give you. Kendrill didn't have time for me, he was busy talking to some nut who wanted him to use automobile generators for power. He'd never heard of James Atkill, and wouldn't see me, too busy with those nuts,

	"Anyway, how much power do you want?"

	The Commander looked at him sharply. "James Atkill. Are you he?"

	"Right." The smile was back.

	"I want at least four million horsepower."

	"Make it five. Can you handle it, if I put it on your lines all in one place?"

	"Yes. I think so. Where do you get it, Canada?"

	"No. Generate it, Come on, and call Kendrill. I'll demonstrate."

	The Commander followed without a word. Three dazed officers watched him go with the lunatic that first shot at him, then made him follow him.

	The Commander followed half a block to a public hangar, where a small cabin autogyro was parked in Atkill's name. From it, Atkill, with the aid of two men, took a small, very heavy packing case, and a second box of black bakelite, surmounted by a glass glober under which burned a flame of steady, unwinking white light. It seemed frozen flame, motionless, undisturbed by position.

	"What voltage here?" he demanded of the hangar attendant, indicating the lights. "One-ten."

	Atkill set something, plugged a wire into the wall socket—the lights suddenly blazed up, the lights on the streets winked once, and died instantly. "Fuse blew out. Current going the wrong way now." But the hangar lights still burned.

	"What is that?" demanded the Commander.

	"This is a Warren atomic generator. Ever hear of 'em?"

	"NO—let's see, wasn't Warren that scientist that was blown up by something he was working on?"

	"Nope—he was blown up, but he was blown up by our mutual friend Thaddeus Nestor, head of the Council of Five," replied Atkill. "I know. He wanted me to do it for him, and I backed out. Principally because I thought too much of Warren, and too little of Nestor. Warren's a better man than I am I guess— or was. The man was clever to make this. That thing is patented—the patents are in Washington, and nobody ever took the trouble to investigate them after Warren died, except Nestor. He bought the patents. I'm bootlegging this thing, liable to infringement of the patent laws." Atkill grinned ingratiatingly. "Go-in' to prosecute?"

	"Nestor! Council of Five! Who the hell are the others?" demanded the Commander.

-

Who Are the Others?

	"NOT that that'll do you any good, but the others are William J. Fordham, Arthur Benholt, Thomas Ringman and one 'Burt' Hillen."

	"Fordham, Benholt and Ringman—the power men. That's why the power plants all went up. They're in on this, eh? But who's Hillen? Never heard of him."

	"Huh—probably not. He was a secondary gang leader in New York here. He supplied the men who run the air ships. I stole one of the ships with the aid of Joe Keller and his gang. We had quite a shooting scrap up-state. Nobody made any complaints, so you didn't hear. Our ship is painted with a huge American flag, so don't fire on it when we come. We may be able to help, you know. I would have come to the government sooner, but I'd simply have gotten kicked out for my pains. I had to almost assassinate you before I could see you now.

	"If Nestor wins, there will be a Council of Four. Hillen and Company, having served their purpose, will be wiped out by an ingenious little radio-controlled gas arrangement in each ship. We stole the flagship, and found the controls for the device in it. They'll have changed the controls of course, but I'm going to try it when the battle starts, anyway.

	"Now if you will show me where you want this power delivered, I'll put the generator in."

	"How much power?"

	"This, my dear sir, is the energy of annihilated matter. I could produce enough energy with this small machine here to fuse New York State in about ten seconds. I've been too busy with that captured ship— it wasn't finished—to make weapons, but just call for all the power you want."

	"Come on. Damn Kendrill. The batteries are in the New York Edison plant, and that's the best distributing point," said the Commander.

	Half an hour later a group of men watched Atkill kindle the release-flame on the top of a two-hundred pound block of soft, grey iron. It burned steady and white and cold, and the meters on the wall jumped into life. Direct current he was using, direct current that poured into the giant batteries now, and into the mains that led across the city. A million lights blazed suddenly into life, a thousand trains started throbbing as the electric pumps automatically compressed air into the tanks. A sudden hush came over the city, noise died suddenly. The great mobs that had been struggling, shouting, panic-stricken nearly, were filled with a sudden hope as the familiar, comforting power came back. The meters on the walls rose to undreamt of heights, as toasters, coffee pots, waffle irons, lights, motors, a thousand and one things about the city came to life. And too, the giant batteries were drinking deep of the power-flood.

	A group of bewildered engineers stared at a neat black cabinet, a rough, grey mass, and a clear, cold white flame that burned unwinking and unmoving on the block of metal.

	"Good God, man, how long can that last?" asked the army engineer standing beside Atkill.

	"That," replied Atkill with a faint smile, "will last about a century and a half at the present rate of consumption, thanks to the genius of the greatest physicist that ever lived, Randolph Warren. I used to think I was good, but there are things about these generators even I can't see the why of, and though I know there are a thousand other things to learn, I can learn but a few. The field of absolute zero Warren had, I can't find. A field that will extinguish that flame before the fuel runs out Warren had, from some of his statements in the patents, yet I can't find it.

	"But that will last far longer than you will."

	The men looked up at the clock by common impulse. It was fifteen minutes of ten o'clock.

	"I'll have to go," said Atkill. On the roof of the powerhouse he entered his autogyro, and flashed away to the southwest.

-

Power at Last

	THE men in the power house looked at the steady white flame, at the meters, and followed Atkill's simple instructions.

	"Leave it alone," he had said, "Leave it alone, and draw all the power you need. If I am killed, just draw on it till the fuel is gone, and then the flame will go out automatically. Before that time you cannot change it in the slightest."

	And it would be a century and a half before that fuel was gone!

-

CHAPTER XVII

	"I THINK, Major Kendrill, that it will be best to communicate with Washington, and announce that we have power," said Commander Coache. He winked a very broad wink. Major Kendrill looked puzzled.

	"But," he objected, "that will simply mean that the full forces of the Council of Five will be directed against us, instead of having a divided force to fight."

	"Certainly, Jack, certainly. That's exactly what I want, you nut" Commander Coache became suddenly Gil Coache, arguing with his old and good friend Jack Kendrill. "We've got power to fight 'em, and they have just nine ships, Atkill said. He will be here to help us. He can't divide his force. Washington has no power, and no defense. We can't battle them here if there is another half of their force hanging over Washington, and announcing that they are going to wipe out that city if we so much as harm one of their machines here. Atkill solemnly assures me they could —and without a second thought they would."

	"Right!" agreed the Major.

	A few minutes later the most powerful broadcasting station in New York City was sending out its message on twice is usual power.

	"Power has been supplied to this city at the last minute! Dr. James Atkill, famous physicist, appeared here shortly before nine, and offered to Commander Coache a new generator of power.

	"It was brought in a small autogyro, and is scarcely larger than a good-sized packing box. Yet it is now supplying the entire city with unlimited power. With this sudden, and welcome power, the best defense of the city, the powerful Harrell tubes become operative.

-

Victory for the Country Is Certain

	"DR. ATKILL has left now, to join his men, who have a ship similar to those of the so-called Council of Five, but more powerful, for the scientist has introduced more weapons. It is confidently felt that between the ground forces and the powerful force in the sky, the few ships the Council can bring against us will be destroyed. Dr, Atkill reported also that there were but nine ships in the hands of the enemy, so if the forces are divided between Washington and New York, victory is certain."

	Commander Coache chuckled as he heard it over the radio, and eight million other people, in and near New York, sighed with relief as their radios brought them the glad tidings. With the coming of power they were once more in touch with the world, and the world was well!

* * * * *

	THADDEUS NESTOR scowled blackly at the radio. The ship under his feet heaved slightly as a powerful up-draft rocked even its massive structure. "Well," he queried impatiently, "what shall we do?"

	"We can't afford to lose our ships—we can't afford it. If we don't have them, the whole venture is lost. I am sure that ungrateful renegade, Atkill, will have told them who we are," wailed Ringman.

	Nestor scowled even more deeply. Fordham looked thoughtful. "I wonder if they'd dare attack our ships over New York," he suggested, "if the ships over Washington threatened to destroy that city."

	Nestor's scowl vanished. Ringman sat up with a look of dawning joy.

	"Oh, of course not," he said happily. "We could kill every man and child in the city. They wouldn't dare."

	"If they destroy one ship, we'll rip up Pennsylvania Avenue with the heat ray. I think that would stop them. And we can send four ships to New York, and five here, as planned," went on Fordham. "Give the orders, Nestor."

	Nestor gave the orders unwillingly. Fordham was taking control, and Nestor didn't like it. However, that was the right idea. There would be no battle in New York, Washington would be the scene of any trouble.

	In three minutes the orders had been given, and in another one the ultimatum had been given to New York City and its defenders.

-

The Ensign of the Attackers—of the Five

	HIGH above the city of New York four slim ships floated. On the side of each metal hull was a patch of bright blue paint, with five silvery stars on it.

	Deep under New York City Commander Coache was sitting at his desk, his head in his hands.

	"I was afraid of that—but there was nothing else to try. I hoped they wouldn't think of it—but it's too obvious."

	Something wailed through the sky like a dart of red and white. High—very high in the air. It seemed pointed with a long nose of light, and the sword of radiance swept suddenly, and struck a shining dirigible of metal squarely amidships. The dirigible of metal exploded with a terrific thunder, yet without a flash of light. The two halves were flung abruptly across the heavens in opposite directions, falling rapidly toward New York City and its crowded populace. Something stopped them, gripped the two halves, and drew them together again, then hurled them with a force inconceivable out toward the open sea. They glowed white-hot, shining brilliantly in the young morning light. Far out at sea they fell with a terrific hiss.

	Long before they fell, a second ship had been caught in the grip of that same hurling force, and went flying end over end, out to sea, and down. It struck off Sandy Hook, and was crushed beyond all recognition, driven through thirty fathoms of water, and twenty feet into sand and mud and shattered rock.

	But then the other two ships began their work. And the land defense stations, which had been ordered to remain-inactive, became very active, as the orders were countermanded.

	Reaching fingers, that glowed green in the daylight, reached out toward the fighting, streaking ships—the red-and-white dart of Atkill's ship, covered with an enormous American flag, and the silvery darts of the ships of the Council of Five.

-

The Strapped and Bound Crew of Atkill's Ship

	BURT HILLEN was commanding one of those ships, and he fought as best he knew how, but what did any of them know of this new fighting at terrific speed, and under terrific acceleration. Atkill's men were strapped and bound at their posts, their hands scarcely capable of movement. They were splinted and bound in position that they might withstand a slightly greater acceleration, and have that extra ten feet of speed per time-unit, that would put them beyond the reaching finger of a ray.

	A dozen rays from ground stations reached up at the two silvery ships. But all those rays seemed to flood harmlessly against a shining, shimmering coat of radiance. The ships were protected against those radio waves. So simple—too simple to overlook. They were protected against the heat rays that Atkill lashed at them.

	Then one of them was touched, barely touched by the sword of radiance that had struck the first ship. As the beam struck it, the molecules of its metals were suddenly freed of every bond, and the ship became a thing of gas, tremendously compressed gas. It expanded. But it had been touched only, and but one small portion expanded.

	Unfortunately, for the officers and crew, this small portion included the control that kept the release-flame within bounds. The men in the control room died instantly as the inconceivable blast of steel molecules struck them. That steel had been under a "pressure" of about one hundred thousand pounds per square inch due to its own molecules. With the release of the terrific pressure it expanded. The expansion destroyed everything in its path,

	A man dragged himself along the corridor a moment later. His nose, his ears, his eyes even were bleeding. His face was contorted with pain, till Burt Hillen could scarcely be recognized. He stopped as he entered the power room. There was a fierce, unaccustomed heat beating out of its doorway. The man raised his eyes and looked. The white flame had become an angry violet color, and it pulsed slowly, but faster and faster, as he watched it. With each pulse the ship seemed to rise, then fall, rise and fall—the flame grew steadily, the pulsations came more swiftly, and the difference grew greater. The man turned and fled before the heat, but it seemed to pursue him.

-

The Destruction of the Ships

	SUDDENLY the ship lurched, then pressed down- ward. The man was struck by the overhead deck as it descended on him, and he became a rust colored stain on the deck, a stain that was likely a queerly contorted man. In a moment he was gone though, for the ship had become a white-hot mass.

	Atkill had known that ship was finished. He had turned to the other, pursuing him now, striking at him with rays that leaked through his screens, for their power was as great as his. He turned his beam on it, and a great strip disappeared from the side of the ship. Simultaneously the ship seemed to bulge, cracks appeared in its walls, and its course became erratic.

	Then he became aware of the force that was pulling his ship, tugging it to one side, and upward.

	"Atty!" called Joe Keller. He pointed up, and to one side. A great ball of white fire was rocketting down, down toward the city. As he watched a violet flame seemed to lick its way through the wall of white flame, and grow swiftly in size.

	"Atty—if dat hit's the city, dere won't be nothin' lef but a lotta puddles o' boilin' water!"

	Atkill's face grew white. He could feel now, the pull of that white fire. It was growing, as the violet flame grew larger, and masked the great steel hull, white-hot now.

	Atkill's hands worked rapidly at the controls, a plane of force formed under that thing that no matter could penetrate. The white-hot thing stopped, and suddenly, from behind him came a shriek from the power room, the shriek of the over-loaded white flame. Atkill's face went whiter as he saw what the thing on the dial before him was saying.

	"Joe—I can't stop that!" There was violet flame crawling on the force-plane now, and with all the energy of his white release flame, Atkill strove to damp that force that ate through his shield. He maneuvered directly beneath it; the shields he had used he withdrew, so that more power might go to that plane of force and he began to push toward the open sea.

	That ball of death above him was attracting the earth, dust was rising, water seemed flowing into the harbor, a tide that rose quickly, and crawled out over the streets, flooding them with a rapid, silvering tide.

	Atkill's hands were steady, his face white under its tan. Keller fell silent. This man, Atkill, almost a god to him, could not handle that thing—he had best keep quiet.

	The violet force was eating holes in that plane of force, and here and there a glob of white-hot steel fell through, to hurtle down, and fall into the harbor.

	"Where ya goin'?" asked Keller at last.

	"Out—to sea—where it can't—do any damage," muttered Atkill.

-

The Defensive Plane of Force Is Succumbing

	THE holes were widening now, growing larger. The ship and its terrible burden were moving swiftly now, the water whirling behind them, the restless sea was under them soon, but Atkill wanted the deep water beyond the Continental Shelf. He knew that this thing would burn itself out in a month, but in that month the sea about it, and the rock below would be a boiling inferno. Out—out—out—

	"God! The power's droppin!" Atkill's voice was shrill with excitement, horror perhaps.

	The shrill whine from the outraged white flame back there was growing in pitch now. But as it grew higher and shriller, the flame itself dwindled, slowly, but then more and more rapidly—the holes in the shield grew—

	Watchers on ships reported it. A terrific flash, a roar of thunder—and the great white ball of steel with the violet flame burning over it steadily seemed to swell, then drop at great speed down—down—and the sea rose up in a mighty flash of spouting steam.

	There were few ships that lived to report it, and as Atkill had for seen, it still boiled for a month. And the sea was redolent of dead fish for a thousand miles about.

	But the crippled air ship Atkill had left behind as he carried off that deadly thing lay a smouldering, blistered wreck on Long Island. The Harrell tubes had at last gotten in their energy for the screen had been ruined by Atkill's ray.

	It was over in three minutes. Even that last ship had fallen to Long Island inside of that third minute.

	But in Washington the action had begun.

-

CHAPTER XVIII

	"THE fools, the blundering, doddering fools! They think we don't mean it—they think we can't. We will—we will!" Nestor almost shrieked in anger and mad rage.

	Through the radio came the excited, terrified voice of "Sparks" Cohen, Burt Hillen's radio operator. "Atkill attacked, he blew up Jimmy's ship somehow—sort of a ray—he threw it clear out to sea with somethin' —I can't—Gawd—there goes Dan's ship now—way out —smashed on Sandy Hook—he's comin' after us—we're dodgin'—they're workin' beams down below now, and—A terrific crackle of sound from the set announced the first explosion aboard Hillen's ship.

	"Get Bell," snapped Fordham. A moment later Bell's radio operator was talking.

	"Atty's beam hit us, and damn near blew us up— it's hot as hell—the ground stations frying with rays. The shields ain't workin' right anymore. Can you get me? The engine's gone blah—it's hot—Gawd! I'm fryin'!" The radio went dead.

	"They're ruined our ships—four of our ships. They ruined our ship, and by Godfry, we'll ruin their city!" Nestor was almost incoherent with rage and disappointment. "And Atkill may be coming here!"

	A long beam of green light reached down, and struck the great Washington Monument. The towering finger of stone and metal seemed to puff, glowed green, and slump like melted butter, to run down the ground, down the gentle slope to the streets. It was not hot, merely liquid, glowing faintly greenish, and gradually the glow died out, and the rock and metal became rock and metal again. But where they passed automobiles, roadside trees, men and women glowed green, slumped, and ran with the stream.

	The beam moved, swept across toward Pennsylvania Avenue—and suddenly, it was chopped off in midair, half way to the ground. It simply ceased to exist at that height. It did not reflect and it did not glow. It just ceased to be.

	Other beams had started now from the other ships, but like this first from Nestor's flagship, they stopped ineffectually half way. Some sparkled and arched with spitting flame, but none passed that barrier.

	Then they looked up, and far, high in the sky was a shining ship, a sixth. It was as long as Nestor's, but thicker, more graceful. And its metal shone with a burnished blue tinge. It sank slowly toward the five ships, and the five beams that reached that impenetrable wall of force were suddenly gone. Twenty beams reached from each of the five ships# and played on the lone ship above. In an instant it was wrapped in blue flame.

	"I think," said Warren grimly, "we got back just in time."

	"I wish I knew what had happened to Atkill after that last ship went down over New York," replied Putney. "And I think we had better start active work. They may be able to get more power out of their generators. I'm glad you didn't patent that control-field. They haven't it, and have to work their generators at one-fiftieth the load—but they may have them ten times as big, remember."

	Warren was silent. Outside a solid sheath of roaring, spitting, blue flame beat at a sheet of pure force, indestructible while their great generator maintained its power. There were some forces that could penetrate it, gravity for one, and a certain peculiar beam that Warren was working with. But no beam that Nestor's men had at their disposal could do it.

	"I see that Atkill didn't help them after we left," remarked Warren without taking his eyes off the peculiar view-plate before him. "He'd have learned something perhaps. He's good."

	In the viewplate appeared the interior of first one and then another of Nestor's little fleet. As though they had been made of the clearest glass, they appeared on the screen with their interiors perfectly exposed.

	"Nestor, and the power-boys are in that slightly longer ship. Nestor hasn't been playing square by his boys, I suspect. The other ships all had gas-tanks, as you suggested, only they've been disconnected, as you didn't suggest. Nestor's on the other hand, has one oxygen tank that's full of something that looks suspiciously like tri-nitro-toluene. A bit old-fashioned, but exceedingly effective, I suspect. I should say there was about three hundred pounds of it. That should scatter that ship all over the district." Warren continued to inspect the enemy ships at his leisure. Outside, a hell of fighting energies flamed and flared in the clear, sunlit sky.

	"Well—are we ready?" asked Putney, as Warren straightened up.

	"Uh-huh," replied Warren laconically. He settled himself in the pilot seat, and pulled a little control. The ship seemed motionless, while Washington shot back with an incredible acceleration, swung away, shot to one side, and snapped back.

-

The Prometheus Attacks the Enemy

	FIVE ships hung in the air, moving slowly toward the mote of the "Prometheus" that hung in the sunlight like some grain of shining dust, and shot about with velocities and accelerations that left the five ships helpless, that were to have subdued a nation.

	Without warning, one of the five reversed its direction, and headed out toward open space with a speed and acceleration inconceivable. It seemed to flatten, its length vanished, it was a disc of wreckage resting on some clear plate. Then it contracted upon itself, and vanished, a white-hot point in the heavens. A second ship did not move from its position. But it contracted to a ball, five feet in diameter, and suddenly flamed violently blue. An instant later something wrenched all space, the blue flame disappeared, and with it, the mass of metal that had been a ship was gone.

	Three ships remained, and struggled against the "Prometheus" Like some inconceivable giant planet bombarded with meteors, the "Prometheus" continued unimpeded. Methodically a third ship suddenly contracted as a sphere of pure force closed in on it, flamed blue as its release flame burst its bonds, and snapped into nothingness with a roll of thunder, as the extinguishing field reached it, and killed the atomic fires. And space seemed to be distorted each time, and the sun shifted sharply in the sky, and things seemed out of focus. The terrific space-fields bent the light away.

	One ship was left, the longest. It had turned, and fled across the city, out across the sea. The "Prometheus" followed it effortlessly, as the men within struggled under the awful weight.

	"That's—not—Atkill—" Nestor groaned. "I don't know—who it is—but I can—guess—and I don't —want to—believe it!" His face was deathly white, and he was crumpled in his chair under the same terrible weight, as the ship accelerated madly. It was headed toward the eternal night and eternal glare of space, now.

	"That's Warren. I thought he was dead," said Fordham. He was younger, and stronger, the acceleration affected him less.

	"So—did I. I wish—he was."

	The acceleration of the ship dropped slowly. Men came running from the power room, their eyes covered, crying out in terror. The eternal, inextinguishable flame was dying. It simply contracted, turned a dull grey-white, then to red. The acceleration dropped. Presently there was none, and the ship began to fall to earth. The flame had died, the ship was without power.

	"He stopped us." Nestor said it with a baffled wonderment. "He shouldn't stop us. Nothing will put out the Flame, Atkill said that."

	"Yes," Fordham said heavily, "but the only trouble is, that Warren is the man who invented that thing, and he's got it trained, it seems." The men were suddenly aware that an acceleration had returned, a weight. "He's at least keeping us from falling. It's about two hundred miles down, and we would have landed rather heavily."

	"Why is he taking us, why didn't he just wreck the ship?" whimpered Ringman. His nerve was gone. This morning he had started out, one of the five Rulers of Earth. It wasn't eleven yet. He was on his way back now, a captive, helpless.

	There were milling, calling men back in the ship. They were frightened now, afraid of that ship that could kill the flame that destroyed anything, against which its awful powers were helpless.

	"I suspect he's taking us back to turn over to the government," Fordham smiled bitterly. "It was a great plan, Nestor. Only you can't seem to kill that man Warren."

-

CHAPTER XIX

	THE "Prometheus" settled beside the steel hull of the lifeless ship. A mass of infantry advanced rapidly across the great airport, two staff cars raced ahead of them.

	"Nestor—Nestor—Nestor—Come out of the ship, without weapons. Send your men out one at a time." The radio was useless, as Warren decided after several tries. No doubt the power for it had gone with the extinguishing of the flame.

	A beam reached out from the "Prometheus." It sliced rapidly down across the tail of the lifeless ship. A section ten feet long fell to the ground as a line-thin strip of incandescent metal appeared under the beam. The staff cars were parked some fifty feet ahead of the "Prometheus" a cordon of infantry had established itself about the two great ships.

	Warren stepped out of the "Prometheus" stamped the short-cropped turf joyfully, and looked up at the tall, imposing officer who bore down on him. Warren grinned happily at him.

	"Well—General Walters. I'm pleased to meet you, immensely so. This is the second time. The last time you urged me not to waste your valuable time, I believe. In connection with the release of certain inter-spacial energies, wasn't it?"

	"Forgive me, man. I was stupidly wrong. Almost criminally wrong. Had it not been for you, whom everyone thought dead, everyone in this city would have been dead. We heard their orders on our radio sets."

	A grey-headed, stooped old man, with tired, lusterless eyes stepped from the steel ship. Three other men followed him immediately, one so broken in nerve and body that another had to almost carry him.

	"Thaddeus Nestor, I arrest you for High Treason against your country." General Walters' voice was vibrant with a fury he could scarcely contain. Nestor looked up with his tired, lusterless eyes, and nodded.

* * * * *

	WARREN sat back comfortably in the great lounging chair in his New York apartment. "Put, they seem to feel they owe the whole rescue to us." He chuckled slightly, "But I think they ought to say they owe the whole trouble to us. We invented the thing.

	"Besides, Atkill saved New York before we even got here. We were still on the outskirts of the atmosphere when he started."

	"And now, Atkill is a hero—but a dead one. Cremated with Hillen, but he saved New York, The rays from that thing would have burned every human within a hundred miles, and so badly they probably wouldn't have recovered." Putney rose, and looked out over the city. Far to the east, barely visible over the horizon was the great, glowing cloud of steam, shooting up to the heavens, glowing weirdly in the intense violet light.

	"Too bad we couldn't extinguish that," he said ruminatingly.

	"I'd be afraid to. Might throw the whole earth into that other space to extinguish anything that big.

	"But Putt, is Atkill cremated in that?"

	"Were we blown up? It's impossible to tell from this space," Warren looked at his friend with questioning eyes.

The End

The Mightiest Machine
Astounding Stories – December 1934 to April 1935

Chapter I.

	"I SUPPOSE," said Don Carlisle with a look of disapproval, "that this, too, is the 'latest and greatest achievement of interplanetary transportation engineers'. They turn out a new latest and greatest about once every six months—as fast as they build new ships in other words."

	"You should talk!" Russ Spencer laughed. "One of the features of that ship is the new Carlisle air rectifiers, guaranteed to maintain exactly the right temperature, ion, oxygen, and ozone content as well as humidity control. But, anyway," he went on, turning to his friend, "I wish you could have made this discovery just two years earlier. It was the dream of dad's life to build the first meteor-proof ship in the, Spencer Rocketship Yards. You physicists were mighty slow about that. You've done the miracle now-I hope—but I wish you could have done it sooner."

	Big Aarn Munro smiled his slow smile. "I wish I could have, Russ. But remember, physics is like a chain—you can't add the last link till all the earlier ones are in place. You don't know, perhaps, how much depends on that one discovery of the magnetic atmosphere. I couldn't have done it two years before, because then the necessary background hadn't been developed. Now, the magnetic atmosphere development of mine will serve as background for other developments. While you engineers have been working on this ship, I have, despite Carlisle's contemptuous references, been trying to prepare for another 'latest and greatest'."

	They had reached now, the base of the huge metal ways that supported the newly completed Procyon, the Spencer Rocket Co.'s latest product. Nearly seven hundred feet long, two hundred and fifty in diameter, a huge, squat cylinder, it loomed gigantic. The outer hull of aluberyl gleamed with faint iridescent color in the light of the few great lamps scattered about the huge construction shed.

	The hum and rattle of saws and welders was subdued here, all the work was being done inside now, and fleets of heavy freight planes were dropping gently into place on the helicopters, bearing loads of furnishings. Lights glowed in some of the ports now, and six huge, twisting cables snaked off across the littered yards to the main power board. The distant rhythm of the great power plant outside echoed faintly even here.

	"She taking off on time, Russ?" asked Aarn, looking up at her. 

	"She should." The engineer nodded. "Barrett said he was sure of his end. Trial run tomorrow starting at 13:57:30 o'clock. Just to Luna City and back. And let's hope, Aarn, that your idea is right." A note of real earnestness had entered Spencer's voice now. "Aside from the fact that she means nearly ten million credits investment, which no one will insure on this trip, there will necessarily be seventy-three men aboard. And I'm taking your word for it and testing her in the worst of the Leonids."

	Aarn nodded silently. Then he spoke again: "Physics says they will be safe from anything short of a ton. And meteors weighing even a hundred pounds are mighty rare."

	"But it takes only one," Spencer reminded him, "and that one would mean near ruin to me. My grandfather and my father have built up this business. I've had mighty little to do with it—only the last two years since dad died-but I don't want to see the tradition die. My grandfather built the first rocket to reach the Moon back in 1983. Dad built the first rocket to reach Mars back in 2036. Your father rode the first rocket to reach the surface of Jupiter. And mine built it. But naturally the old Spencer rocket had plenty of competition. The Deutsche Rakete people being the worst—or best. They'll be on my neck if I lose this. But the little ships worked and, despite what they say about the big field not holding, I'm trusting your figures."

	"I'm going along," Aarn smiled. "I'll bet my neck on it, anyway. Physics is generally a pretty safe bet."

	"Uhmm—maybe so," Carlisle put in. "But you physicists have done a poor job on the subject of the atom. You've been promising us atomic energy and transmutation for a century, and you can't even tell why a chemical combination takes place."

	"I hear," said Aarn slowly, "that you chemists have a theory that will account for it. And that theory also says that tungsten, in an X-ray tube, should radiate in the 'pale pink', as Morgenthal expressed it."

	"Well—that's as good as your physics atoms will do. You predict, similarly, that carbon will combine only with electro-negative elements. And X-rays in the 'pale pink' are no worse than denying the very useful hydrocarbons. And we chemists have produced rocket fuels for terrestrial rockets, while you physicists haven't yet produced atomic energy for interplanetary rockets. Oh, you have a sort of bad compromise in the accumulator—"

	"The accumulator is a very useful and compact device," Aarn interrupted, "which holds no less than thirty thousand kilowatt hours per pound—just a wee bit better than you chemists have ever hoped to do. I well remember that we Jovians waited twenty-two long years for release. Chemists made fuels eventually, that would lift a ship from Earth to Phobos—Mars to Jupiter, but couldn't even begin to lift it back. So a few spirits like dad and mother and the rest of the people there just marooned themselves and waited twenty-two years till physics rescued them. Chemistry got them in, but couldn't get them out again."

	"Yes; but chemistry made their synthetic foods for them meanwhile"

	"Foul things," said Aarn with a grimace. "I was nineteen before I tasted food."

	"They seemed to agree with you," said Spencer with a slight smile.

-

	AARN MUNRO stood some five feet seven in height, and, to those who did not know him and his remarkable history, appeared exceedingly fat. He was nearly five feet in circumference, while his arms and legs stuck out at peculiar angles. And they seemed misshapen.

	Jupiter, a world of two and a half times the gravity of Earth, required strength in its people, and speed, too. On Earth, Aarn weighed nearly three hundred and fifty pounds. For the first twenty years of his life he had lived on the giant of the system, and had developed such strength as no Terrestrian ever dreamed of. More than once he had proved his ability to lift and walk off with a ton and a half of lead. 

	"They did, chemically," Aarn acknowledged. "But I wasn't sorry to see a ship come in that could get out again."

	"But," said Spencer, "if It wasn't for the nice stepladder of satellites, by the way, even Aarn's vaunted physics couldn't get a ship loose from old Jove's grip."

	"That's true," returned Aarn, "but it doesn't enter the question, you see, because the satellites are there. Nine of 'em. So it's just a case of Jupiter to Five to Europa to Six to Mars. And what better could you ask?"

	"I can ask a lot better," Spencer said, his voice suddenly sharp and annoyed. They had reached the main entrance port of the Procyon, but Spencer stopped where he was, damming up a stream of workmen, to talk. "I can ask for antigravity apparatus. If physics is any good, it ought at least to be able to say 'Here's the way to do it, but we can't just yet because of this or that', and then find out how to overcome those difficulties,

	"And I could ask for a machine that could generate power. Power from atoms, perhaps. This thing, this big hulking brute, it's a waste of water that this planet may need some day. Look at Mars—dry as dust. Almost impossible to get rocket water there. If it wasn't for the photo cells that give them power direct from the Sun, and make it possible to cook water out of gypsum, they couldn't live. Some day Earth will need water as badly, and this wasting of thousands of tons of water is a crime and a thousand other things.

	"Damn it all, Aarn, why don't you do something? Chemistry is helpless. It's a job for physics, and you know it, and so does Carlisle, for all his bluffing. Why don't you do it, though?

	"You've done a miracle already in making that magnetic atmosphere, and I know it. The way it stops meteors and burns them into gas is a miracle; but not enough, we need more."

	"We do, Russ, and I know it. That magnetic atmosphere was a by-product. It was a first "step on the road, just the metal of which the key is made, purely incidental. I haven't been saying much, but I've been doing some extremely interesting work. And—I'm going to tell you a story.

	"I saw a machine. It was the mightiest machine that could ever exist. It was an atomic, better, a material engine. It burned matter to energy. Most of the energy was electrical in nature at one stage of the process, but it was converted to heat and light and other forms of energy. And one of those forms of energy was a curious field of force that could tear great holes in tremendous masses of matter, and there appeared coincidentally with that a force that seemed to hurl masses of matter greater than a dozen worlds like Earth, greater than mighty Jupiter, a million miles into space.

	"It was a wonderful, pulsing, rhythmic machine, and operated in a wonderful adjustment more delicate than any machine man ever made. Controlling unimaginable billions of billions of horse power, it remained in perfect balance with a variation in its output of less than one per cent. Controlling forces that could have hurled this planet about like a bit of dust, it remained in perfect equilibrium.

	"It was a star. Any star. It was the Sun, the mightiest machine man ever observed. A titanic, inconceivable generator handling the power of three millions of tons of destroyed matter every second—and maintaining equilibrium. The explosion of more than three million tons of matter, really, regulated and controlled. Save that occasionally a great rent appears in its surface that could swallow all the planets of the system, and not be filled, or a tongue of flame a quarter of a million miles high and a million miles wide darts out, apparently lifting billions of tons of matter hundreds of thousands of miles against a gravitational force ten times as intense as Jupiter's-twenty-five times Earth's.

	"But—does it?"

	Aarn looked intently at Spencer, and slowly an expression of wonder spread over the engineer's face.

	"Good—Heaven! Antigravity!"

	"I only guess that, Russ. I don't know. But I want to have your help now. I need your influence to have all the spaceliner captains make observations of a particular nature. And I need the observations of the lunar magnetometer and electrometer coordinated with a set of readings taken on Phobos and on Satellite Nine. If you get me those—And I've another idea."

	Aarn turned and went on into the Procyon thoughtfully. The workmen who had been patiently waiting for the big boss to get out of the way started streaming through again.

-

Chapter II.

	IN THE super-patient tone one uses when patience is nigh exhausted, Spencer spoke to the grinning Carlisle: "No. Spelled n-o. It is a syllable of negation, and refers definitely to the fact that that blistering, cockeyed son of an aberrating corkscrew, Aarn, has given me no tiniest bit of information. I gave him all the information he wanted.

	"I then asked him for one tiny spark of hope. 'Uhh! That isn't what I hope. That's not so good. Still—maybe—my theory may be wrong, but it may not. No; I don't know, Russ. I'll—' And then the clogged rocket goes wandering off on a triple-focus ellipsoid orbit. I can't find out what he was going to do. He's as noisy as a clam playing hide and seek with his best enemy when he starts thinking. The worst of it is that he won't tell me anything at all."

	Don Carlisle grinned again in sympathy. "I heard he was making noises like an oyster, so I came over to see. Whose lab is this, anyway?"

	Spencer looked at him reproachfully. "Why bring that up? I pay for it, so naturally I can't get in. Since the Procyon rode out to the Moon and back through the Leonid meteor shower without a dent, the whole shipyard has been so crowded with orders I couldn't turn round quickly, and he's grown a head as big as Jupiter itself. Before this gravity stunt he was working on something else. 'Super-permeable space' he calls it. Something to do with that 'magnetic atmosphere' of his."

	"What," asked Carlisle, "is a magnetic atmosphere? I asked him once, and he explained something about a field of high permeability that did something or other to meteors so that they were electrified and so the field of special permeability became impermeable, and the magnet makes the meteors stop and blow up, because they are iron. Now I, in my simple, childish mind, always thought a magnet attracted iron. It seems I was wrong."

	Spencer grinned and answered: "It does. Up to a point, that is. What Aarn did was to discover a way of making lines of magnetic force do something-that gives us an isolated north or an isolated south magnetic pole. Also an electric charge. Aarn says that the magnetic lines of force that represent the other pole are turned through ninety degrees in space and become lines of electric force.

	"Anyway, he has a single pole magnet, and that proceeds to surround itself with a uniform magnetic field. It does attract iron and nickel and cobalt, of course, but when the metals fall through the magnetic field they have to cut the lines of magnetic force. In doing so they act as electric generators. Electricity is generated in them and heats them. But heat represents energy, and the heat they generate is generated at the expense of their motion.

	"The magnetic field is so intense, and their velocity so great at first, that they are heated almost instantaneously to thousands of degrees centigrade and explode into vapor. As vapor they are not dangerous, and nothing larger can get through. Except, of course, the huge things that are too big for the field to handle, but a meteor weighing five hundred pounds is almost as rare as a comet.

	"In other words, this magnetic field serves for the space ship just as the Earth's atmosphere does for the planet. It slows the biggest, and stops and utterly destroys the little ones. It is extremely seldom that a meteor gets through our atmosphere. The magnetic atmosphere is almost equally effective."

	"But why will a plain piece of metal, without windings or anything, generate current?" Carlisle objected.

	"Say, Car, use your head. That's something you do know—eddy currents—why on that basis, why does a generator generate? Each wire is just a simple piece of metal. You've used the same principle a thousand times. Each electric power meter uses the thing in the control damper disk, the aluminum disk that rotates between the poles of a pair of permanent magnets. Anyway, that's not the important part. The big thing is that Aarn succeeded in making the lines of force lie down around the ship like a sheath instead of standing out like hairs on a frightened cat. It—"

	"Hello, boss!" said a deep voice immediately above and behind his left ear. "Won't you come in?"

	Spencer rose six inches from his chair in a spasmodic jump and turned on Aarn with a sour face. "You misplaced decimal point, if it weren't for my memories and loyalty to dear old Mass Tech, I'd amputate you from the pay roll."

	"Would you?" asked Aarn, with a pensive air. When pensive, Aarn's broad face and huge body succeeded in looking like a cow of subnormal intelligence, ruminating on the possible source of its next meal. He did now. "I'd hate that, Russ. But I think you'd hate it worst. I got my super-permeable space condition. That's about the poorest name imaginable, so I've decided-to invent a name. Be it hereinafter referred to by the party of the first part as the 'transpon' condition. Anyway, come on in." 

-

	AARN'S workship was large and divided into two parts, the apparatus room, inhabited by four technical assistants who made up the apparatus Aarn called for, and Munro's own sanctum.

	In Aarn's inner lab were a series of benches and cabinets and tables. These were all loaded with junked apparatus, unused parts, spare voltmeters, and coils of wire. The floor was reserved for the heavier junk that would have crushed the tables.

	Spencer was quite surprised to see that one of the largest benches had actually been entirely cleared, and two sets of apparatus set up on it. Aarn smiled his blank grin again. Spencer knew from sad experience that that smile meant something completely revolutionary that would upset all his calculations and probably cost him, temporarily at least, several million dollars.

	"Look," said Aarn.

	He waved his hands toward the new apparatus he had set up on the bench. The apparatus consisted of two main groups. At one end of the bench was a squat control panel, backed by a complex assortment of tubes and a device that closely resembled the magnetic atmosphere apparatus connected with a curious wire cone. There was a standard a foot tall surmounted by a cone of copper bars running lengthwise to form the sides and around, binding the longitudinal bars in position.

	The tip of the cone was a block of copper, the size of a golf ball. The mouth of the device was some four inches across and the length over all about ten inches. But the copper bars that formed the sides of the cone were carefully insulated from the block that was at the tip. From this block, a single straight bar of copper projected along the axis of the cone.

	Aarn smiled and turned on the apparatus. A low, musical hum rose from the tubes and coils, and slowly a faint blue glow centered about the copper block at the tip of the cone and the pencil of metal that extended up the axis/ For five seconds this held" steady while a similar blue glow began to build up about the outer system of copper conductors. Presently, as this reached a maximum, the inner glow began to fade, then swiftly a pulsing rhythm was set up, first the inner, then the outer conductor system glowing more intensely. The light settled down to a steady flickering that the eye could barely perceive, and Aarn smiled at it thoughtfully.

	"The apparatus takes a few minutes to warm up. That's the first half. That was the hardest part, too, curiously, though this projector here is a far more important discovery." 

	Aarn pushed a second standard into view, which was surmounted by a metal bowl that closely resembled a deep soup dish. The inner surface was evidently a parabolic one, made up of a maze of tiny coils, each oriented carefully toward some definite aim, while the entire rim of the "soup dish" was a single larger coil.

	Carefully Aarn adjusted it so that it pointed toward the nickering cage of copper wires, and beyond it to the apparatus at the other end of the bench. This apparatus seemed fairly simple, merely a number of standards with various arrangements of wires. Two parallel copper bars, a double spiral made of two insulated wires, two metal disks. 

	"Those," said Aarn softly, "are simply connected with the normal power supply. It is alternating current of sixty cycles at two hundred and twenty volts. The device I have is a pickup. It will collect the power from those wires. The projector here is the real secret—it makes space itself become a perfect conductor of electric-space-strain. Not electricity. Electric-space-strain. But the result is the same. It makes the space along its axis capable of carrying power along the axis—and along the axis only. When I start this, the space between here and that interrupter coil back there will become a perfect conductor. The interrupter coil is necessary to prevent the thing reaching on, out indefinitely. 

	"The pick-up there, will be in that path of conduction, and so will the first of those lead-offs there. That pair of straight wires. The wires will not be mutually short circuited because this will conduct current only along the axis. But the pick-up there keeps sending out flashes of a somewhat similar energy at an angle so that it covers the entire column, and so can pick up the power in it.

	"I can't make that pick-up work continuously, because the energies would then interfere and simply short-circuit things. But I can make it work at any frequency from one cycle a second to about fifty megacycles. Now I'm going to adjust it to sixty cycles, and it will get in step with the power on the two leads—and run that series of lights and that motor."

	Aarn pushed a switch. Instantly three tumblers snapped over automatically, a powerful surge of power seemed to draw at the men themselves momentarily, and then the little flickering pick-up was sending out searchlight beams of brilliant ionization. They started out along the shape of the cone, spread rapidly, till they filled the tight, round column of power coming from the transpon condition projector, then the ionization stretched along like a luminous liquid flower in a pipe.

	"The thing isn't in phase—wasting a lot of power," said Aarn.

	He began adjusting a dial, and the slight visible flickering vanished as the frequency rose. Suddenly the ionization all but vanished, leaving only a slight glow about the pickup itself. Then an instant later it was back, but vanished again. Each time the ionization stopped, the lights glowed, and the motor Aarn had pointed out hummed into speed.

-

	Presently he had it exactly adjusted, and the lights burned steadily, the five horse-power motor continuing smoothly.

	"The efficiency is about seventy-five per cent, which is not very good, I'll admit—but good enough for what I have in mind."

	Spencer was looking at the device intently. At last he asked: "But why doesn't the pick-up short-circuit the thing when it has thrown out its pick-up force? It throws a conducting band or disk completely across the tube of the transpon beam, as you said you called it. That will carry current at right angles to the axis, so it lies completely across the two terminals of the wires."

	Aarn smiled grimly. "That, Russ, is why I took nearly nine months to do this. I had to prevent that. The answer is that the lock and the grid don't project the same force. The grid projects a force which will accept only a negative electric force, while the block will accept only positive. Therefore it can't short-circuit."

	"Then it rectifies, too? Some little device! It's a thing we've sought for a century, Aarn—power broadcast along a beam."

	"No," said Aarn sharply. "That's the point—it isn't broadcast along a beam. A beam reaches out and picks it up. The difference is as great and as vital as "the difference between being hit and stopping something going by. If a man's fist connects with the button, your jaw absorbs kinetic energy. He has broadcast it along the beam of his arm.

	"But if you reach out and grab hold of a man running by you, you have reached out for and taken hold of a source of kinetic energy and momentum. Right?" 

	"Hm—hum! Distinct difference. But why does it count here? What difference does it make?"

	"Nut—a system of difference. No beam any man ever made could hold an absolute beam—a fixed diameter from here to infinity. Any power beam you make has to carry so much power per square-inch cross section at the point where the power is picked up. Suppose I'm sending power to a ship going to the Moon. On Earth the beam is ten feet across. Fine, the ship has an absorber or pick-up twenty feet in diameter, let's say. When the ship is fifty miles up, the beam and the pick-up are the same size. At one hundred miles the beam is wasting seventy-five per cent of its power because it has to maintain a certain power at the ship, and only twenty-five per cent of the beam is impinging on the target.

	"Now—take it the other way. If the ship projects the beam, the earth power station is simply pouring power into a funnel. The energy can go only one way, and no matter how widespread it is at Earth, it has to get out on the pickup in the beam. It's bound to be infinitely more efficient after you get more than ten miles away."

	"Slightly," agreed Spencer with a smile. "So hereafter, ships won't carry accumulators, eh? Just send back a beam and pick up power from Earth. But say—how are they going to be made to pay for it? They could tap any power source or any line on Earth?"

	Aarn smiled and replied: "In the first place, they won't get their power from Earth, and in the second place, just suppose you sent back one of the beams to tap any sixty-cycle line on Earth. What would happen? First, you'd have to get in phase with some one of the big power-line networks. Then, bingo, you have everything from one hundred and ten to one hundred and ten thousand and above volts coming smashing along. It would blow you to kingdom come and wreck the apparatus. Might do some damage back on Earth, but I doubt it."

	"Not get the power from Earth? Where then? Not from one of the other planets surely, because they have power troubles of their own."

	"From the mightiest machine!"

	"Good Heaven! The Sun! Do you mean that thing could tap the awful power of the Sun?"

	Spencer's face was suddenly pale. He could visualize that beam as though a visible thing reaching from some tiny dust mote out across space to impinge on the Sun, and drink of the power in that million-mile electric furnace, where matter was smashed beyond atoms, ground to radiation.

	"The Sun," Aarn nodded. "It's hard to think of all at once. Tapping the-mightiest machine-the most inconceivably huge engine in the universe really—for any star would do. Making a star supply your power. A furnace that consumes nearly four million tons of matter a second.

	"It's simple really. You need a power stack, of course—a huge supply of power storage to operate your machine when you were not in position to tap the Sun. It would require only a modification of this device—one I have worked out completely—and we could draw a billion billion horse power in direct current at any voltage you wished, up to a maximum of about five hundred million, which would make insulation impossible in any circumstances."

	"Then—unlimited power—and I thought—it was just a new power-transmission device. Atomic energy! Man could never build—of course he couldn't make one as big—a sun -two million million million tons of engine—three hundred thousand worlds like this—"

	He laughed suddenly. "Car, you wanted to know why physics didn't give you the atomic energy they promised. Here's physics' answer! Atomic energy would be too expensive—require too elaborate a control—so physics taps a sun!"

-

Chapter III.

	"THAT," said Aarn quietly, "is one of the things I promised. Now that we have the power I promised, I think I can also promise the antigravity device."

	"Antigravity, too! Say, Aarn, there won't be anything left to find after you get through with physics. But can you? How—"

	"The Sun gave that secret, too. It is because the terrific forces beneath the surface cut off the gravity that those huge masses of matter can be ejected to form prominences. I was right—and the data that men out in space collected gave me the necessary basis for my problem's solution.

	"Look—for a century or more men have known that there were three types of space-strain energy fields. There is the electric-energy field and the magnetic-energy field, which are mutually at right angles to each other. My 'magnetic atmosphere' device simply turns half of the magnetic field through ninety degrees and makes it an electric instead of a magnetic field pole. That was simple.

	"But—gravity has no poles. Gravity is fourth dimensional instead of in three dimensions. I found out the answer, thanks to the Sun. Remember, it takes a three-dimensional thing to have two different types of stresses. Take a rubber balloon as an example. The rubber can be dented inward. A strain along the diameter of the sphere. But the rubber becomes stretched on one side and more or less piled up on the other. Those two types of stress are at exactly ninety-degree angles. That represents magnetism and electric field.

	"Obviously, if we dent the balloon inward in one place, it will stretch outward somewhere else to make up for it, perhaps all over, but a swelling takes place. That represents the fact that a north pole is always associated with a south pole, somewhere or other. If the fabric is stretched along its surface, it is thinner in one place, but inevitably piles up elsewhere. Where there is a positive pole there is necessarily an accumulation of negative, somewhere.

	"But our rather poor illustration doesn't explain just how the ninety-degree twist is possible except generally in that, if the balloon is dented, if the fabric stretches, there is no actual dent outward. Our model is poor, because space is four dimensional.

	"But you see that it requires a three-dimensional medium for two stresses at right angles to each other. It requires four for three right-angle forces. And the curious thing about that four-dimensional stress is that it doesn't have polarity necessarily. But there is a -reverse condition. In magnetic and electric fields, opposites attract. In gravity likes attract That is characteristic. Opposites repel.

	"I can make the gravity curvature—given energy enough. I can also make the reverse curvature of space. But before I can reverse curvature of space locally, I have to iron out the normally present gravitational curvature. Any space strain is energy. It requires enormous energy."

	Aarn got off the bench where he had been sitting, and started clearing away his last demonstration rapidly, setting up a new group of apparatus. 

	"Suppose we wanted to free a mass of gravity. To flatten out the local gravity, we have to overcome its own gravity. You know the old lines-of-force picture of magnetism, Spence. You can use that lines-of-force idea on any of the three space fields. In the gravitational picture, it works something like this: the attraction of the Earth for a small body, like this lead weight, for instance, is equaled, of course, by the attraction of the small body for the Earth. If you think of it as lines of force, picture the lines about a small piece of iron in the field of a powerful magnet. The magnetic lines of force bend into and pass through the piece of iron.

	"Suppose we wanted to wrap a coil of wire around that bit of iron, and make it 'magnetic-weightless', so to speak. We would have to build up a magnetic force in our coil that opposed the greater magnetic field and bent the magnetic lines of force away. Then really, in demagnetizing our little piece of iron, we are having to overcome the big field in which it is at least locally.

	"Ditto with degravitation. We act as though we were merely trying to make the piece of lead we are working with stop attracting, stop being a source of gravitational force, but in order to do that we have to overcome locally Earth's field, the Sun's field, and all the fields of the universe.

	"Actually, of course, this is too much work, and for practical work I will overcome only the solar-system fields. But, even so, that represents a lot of energy. The law of conservation of energy demands that I supply energy equivalent to lifting the degravitized body completely free of the fields by distance, lifting it out to infinity in other words. That's equivalent to the kinetic energy it would have at about sixty miles per second."

	Aarn paused. He had his apparatus set up-a strangely shaped series of coils surrounded by a pair of heavy metal plates. A hollow space of about a thousand cubic inches remained in them, and in this space now, Aarn was arranging a lead sphere suspended from one arm of a long-arm balance. It was balanced at the other end by a group of weights totaling five pounds.

	From the coils, two heavy copper cables ran, twisted, off to the main power board on the other side of the room. His apparatus ready, Aarn walked over to the panel and laid his hand on the main power control.

	"Ready, I guess. Keep an eye on that lead, Spence, and see if you can keep it balanced!"

	Aarn flipped a small switch, a relay thunked over, then rapidly he advanced his controller. For perhaps ten seconds nothing happened.

	"Induction—she's building up a magnetic field in there now, and an electric pole, too," Aarn explained.

	Then—abruptly, yet leisurely, the weight pan of the longarm balance sank.

	"The weight's going!" called Spence excitedly.

	"It should!" Aarn grinned. "She's drawing two thousand horse power."

	Carlisle watched interestedly as Spencer took weight after weight from the balance pan. Still the scale remained steady. "It's two and a half pounds now—" 

	"That's about enough," decided Aarn. "I just wanted to show you."

	"Can you make Earth's centrifugal force throw it up?"

	"I could—in about four and a half years with this power source. That thing begins building up a back force that makes it hard to pump in juice. That's not the latest design—I've found ways to improve the thing since that was made, which will all be incorporated in the real apparatus. Further, remember, while that's going down fairly fast now, destroying weight is like filling a fuel tank. You can fill a vacuum a lot easier and faster than you can a fuel tank with two tons per square inch in there already. It will begin to show up pretty quickly now. When the weight gets down to about five hundredths of a pound, it will go very slowly." :

	Aarn reached over, and made some adjustments on his power board, and all but two meters dropped to zero.

	"I'm just holding that now. There's no need to de-weight it, is there? We can't do anything real till we have a big job, and a Sun-tapping beam to run it. It builds up an electric-field back-force of several thousand volts; that's what was stopping that then. With the Sun-beam and a big model I can demonstrate. And—uh—well, I have something else, too. But I'm not ready yet," Aarn hastened to add.

-

	SPENCER had started up expectantly when Aarn said he had even more. Now he looked at him disgustedly. "As I told Carlisle, you're as noisy as a clam in hiding when you've got something interesting to puzzle about. Now let me ask a question: How do you know that Sun beam will work? Have you tested it on old Sol?"

	Aarn smiled faintly and waved him away. "This isn't my home planet—but even so I like it. I said that got power from the Sun. The ionizing layer, my lad, conducts. Could you imagine what would happen if you short-circuited the Sun? That's why the ship we're going to build as a testing laboratory—we'll need a space laboratory now, and it'll cost you five millions, Spence, my boy—will have a huge bank of these new storage devices.

	"You know how much energy accumulators will store. These gravitational coils will store electric power at high voltage and about one thousand times the capacity per pound. We need the storage for the times when you are in an atmosphere, behind a planet, or similarly hindered. Here's a point to remember-you can't have those Sun-beam ships wandering about aimlessly. They'll have to be very strictly limited. One of those fellows could cut a swath through any other ship."

	"Whew—what a weapon!" gasped Spencer as he pictured it. "Cut a world in two with that and the Sun's power."

	"Uhm—deadly enough if you could get in position, but that beam is tender in its way. If you just remember these two facts, you'll see why it really isn't much of a weapon, and isn't to be greatly feared on the score of blowing up a world. That it could be dangerous to a certain extent, is of course true. But remember, that world will have the first chance to put power on the beam. Suppose you are waiting for that beam, and the instant it hits your world you unload a few million volts and a hundred thousand ampere-hours of accumulators on it as just the frequency it's turned for? Good-by, projector.

	"Or suppose you had your beam already developed, reaching from ship to Sun, it would take about a quarter of an hour to develop a beam from the Earth to the Sun because of the finite speed of light—and just wait for the world to move into it. You have to send a signal down the beam which determined to what extent you are going to tap the Sun, naturally, or the Sun would just send a flood that would wipe you out before you could shut it off.

	"Then if you signaled for unlimited power, so that you could really damage a world, you'd be wiped out first. And always you have to wait the quarter of an hour or so for the energy to make a round trip—and if it's war, somebody will be out looking for you with something bigger than a mosquito spray."

	"I shouldn't have cared to develop it if it had been as dangerous as it might have been," Spencer said quietly. "But then, why did you say you couldn't use it in an atmosphere?"

	"Short-circuiting the beam is the signal for unlimited power. Hold it on long enough, and you'd get the power."

	"Right enough, and tell me why I have to build that five-million-credit flying laboratory," demanded Spencer.

	"So I can test out a few things. And—uh—don't put any rockets in it. Get out of the lab here and let me work."

	Wherewith Aarn reached out two great arms like tree trunks, and lifted Spencer in one hand and Carlisle in the other, deposited them outside his door, and locked it.

	Carlisle looked at the door sourly and brushed himself. "He didn't have to do that to me. I wasn't so damn interested I had to be thrown out."

	"Oh," said Spencer hopelessly, "that guy's got my psychology down to a hair line. He knows I won't be happy till I know why we won't need rockets. How in the name of the Nine Wandering Worlds is he going to drive a ship in space without rockets? I can accept his antigravity, because we've known that was coming for a century.

	"His Sun beam as he calls it—that's as breath-taking, as utterly original and brilliant as, anything man ever did. The colossal, unmitigated gall of a man that will light his cigarette from the fires of the Sun! It would take a man* without nerves, without fear, to think of anything as utterly outrageously and gloriously bold as to tap the mightiest machine, as he well called it, for power.

	"But now that he's done it, anyone can see that that's the obvious source of power.

	"But what's the next stunt?" He, too, looked at the door with anguish.

	The door opened abruptly, and Aarn's head appeared. "And, Carlisle, I'll further demonstrate that physics' theories of the atom have their uses."

	The head disappeared.

	A slow smile spread over Carlisle's face as he looked at Russ Spencer. "I'll bet that information was just enough to give you a complete headache," he said gravely.

-

Chapter IV.

	"CAR," said Spencer with bitterness, "it's a pleasure to call you in here. It's a great soothing agent to have someone pay some attention to you when you ask him to come. For the past week I've been asking Aarn to take an hour off and come have a conference on the ship. The framework plans he sent have been converted into steel and aluberyl. The plates have been welded on. The thing is now a completed hull. But Aarn won't come."

	"Has a name been picked for it?" asked Carlisle unsympathetically. "If not, may I suggest Little Sunbeam?"

	Spencer looked even more aggrieved. "Little credit-eater would be more appropriate. It has cost me two and a half million so far."

	"What? Two and a half million? How come, if it's just a hull?"

	"Oh, he had a lot of machinery made for it—lot of stuff all ready to install, but he hasn't had time to get around to—"

	"Great spaces and little meteors! What was that?" 

	The entire office building was still trembling and shaking to the sudden strain. It had been a violent howl of terrible wind, an abrupt clutch as of starting space ship's acceleration, a wrench and quiver that shook the very ground and rock beneath them. In the instant that straining yank endured, the wind became a live, shuddering, whining thing that whimpered in terror and rushed into some unknown thing.

	The telephonescope clucked and buzzed suddenly. Spencer reached over and flipped his end on, and instantly Aarn's face appeared.

	Russ beat him to the draw: "What," he demanded, "in the name of the Nine Wandering Worlds did you do that time?"

	Aarn smiled slowly and answered: "Miscalculated. The range wasn't controlled right. It is now. Want another one?" He disappeared for an instant, and during that instant the yank and strain and howling wind reappeared. "I have," announced Aarn slowly, "proved a further use of physical atomic theory. And I will come over. How far is it from where I am to your office?"

	"Seven and a half miles," answered Spencer blankly.

	Aarn disappeared from view; the telephonescope went blank. For some seconds Spence continued looking on the screen.

	"But why do you want to know that, you knew it already?" he asked inanely of the blank screen.

	"Open the window for him, will you, Spence. I'm lazy."

-

	CARLISLE waved a negligent hand toward the office window, a wide sheet of crystal-clear glass that opened on a pleasant rolling mountainside, for Spencer's office was in one of his own buildings. Just now the view was obscured by Aarn's ponderous figure. He was apparently lying on a metal beam about an eighth of an inch thick, and six feet long by ten inches wide, floating in the air. At the forward end of it was mounted a torpedo-head shaped object which evidently acted as combined air break, engine room, and control panel. 

	For at least forty-five long seconds Spencer stared blankly at the figure calmly lying there. Then Aarn's annoyed voice came through the window: "The walrus is getting a bit tired of being stared at. Open the window and let me in."

	Spencer opened the window with a jump and dodged out of the way as Aarn's strange device suddenly spun on an axis about the engine head, and darted, straight through the window at a speed of fully seventy miles an hour, and instantly stopped dead in the center of the room.

	"This," said Aarn calmly, settling himself as though on a couch in the middle of the room and resting on air, "represents a model of our ship laboratory. You noticed the speed I made coming over. It is seven and a half miles. I came at a speed of nearly one thousand miles an hour, because this device can accelerate and decelerate rather rapidly. I would have been able to get here sooner, you see, if I had had better control. But I have had this thing in Working order only about six hours."

	"But what is it, you asteroid? What is it?" demanded Spencer, trying to get near it, but it moved away with delicate precision each time he approached.

	"A model of our ship lab. It has antigravity, of course. Improved, I may say. I can't dismount here, and every time you try to enter my de-gravitational field the thing shys away, because you have weight.

	"That is not new. But the little device I use in driving it is new. Now look here."

	Aarn raised the metal hood of the torpedo-shaped head, and displayed the several pieces of apparatus contained therein.

	"That is the antigravity device. It is charged with nearly fifteen thousand credits' worth of your power. This is the storage apparatus. It stores up the power I need for running the thing in a type of gravity field. Remember that a gravity field represents an energy storage also, but more intense storage is possible than in magnetic or electric. In this little thing is about three thousand credits' worth of power.

	"The third and fourth devices—here and here—are really interconnected and balanced to work as one piece. They are the momentum and kinetic energy devices. Both momentum and kinetic energy involve time, remember.

	"But the important thing comes from the wave-mechanics consideration of matter and energy. Remember that an electron is like a photon—it behaves both as corpuscle and as wave in various conditions. Wave mechanics explain that something like this: the electron is always a wave, but can behave like a corpuscle because the waves which make up the true electron and extend through all space-to infinity and back-interact and pile up in one place to make a noticeable knot of energy we call an electron. In only that one limited place do the waves pile up and add to each other. Everywhere else in all infinity the waves are so arranged as to cancel out, but they are there just the same.

	"That is one phase of the wave-mechanics atom. And it is the phase that so annoys Carlisle here. He can't make his waves react and produce sulphuric acid.

	"Seriously, I agree that is an objection. But, you see, one of the things a consideration of wave mechanics produces is very interesting. It is really two things—two formulas. One shows that momentum is something of the nature of a wave formation. The other shows that velocity also is a wave formula. 

	"In other words, if we produce the right waves, we would have momentum synthetically produced, and the same for velocity. That means momentum and velocity can be 'tuned in', and we have that long-sought thing—a driving device that reacts on space itself. Not the empty space you see outside the portholes of a rocket. The physical space of gravitational fields and dynamic strains, of tremendous moving fields of force that tug and weave and pull. Space isn't empty. It's alive with a billion billion strains and stresses. They are physical and real and solid.

	"And there are the infinitely extending canceled waves of every electron and every proton in space. That space is solid, firm, something whose fabric is tougher than any metal ever could be. That's the space this device works on.

	"It's an oscillator that sets up an oscillating field of force about itself that extends for some ten feet in all directions at full power, lesser distance at lower power, and somewhat modified by the presence of matter within it. It is an oscillation between magnetic, electric, and gravitational fields of force, a circular motion through those three of perfectly inconceivable frequency. I don't quite get it myself.

	"Only I can control it. Doesn't take the amount of energy you'd expect because, remember, it isn't like the blessed rocket which has no relativity. This has. It takes about ten times the energy you'd expect for high speeds, and actually produces energy at lower speeds. I can measure an 'absolute' speed with this. I can determine the velocity of the universe—or this part of it, at least—relative to Earth.

	"This catches its fingers in the web of space, and I can either drag on it, or push on it, but it does have that relative base, whereas the rocket, with no relative base to work against, of course, apparently violates all laws of physics—at least two of them."

	"But how about the velocities we use in interplanetary work?" demanded Spencer.

	"Comes under head of low velocities. Doesn't matter, anyway, because you can tap the Sun for power. But it is providential that we don't have to obey the laws of physics when we use rockets. Otherwise we'd never have gotten anywhere.

-

	"NOW for a ship the size of the one we will have—about five thousand tons, I calculated—since we are eliminating the heavy double hull, and most of the weight of the outer one, with the magnetic atmosphere—that will be helped any time we have an antigravity field, because the antigravity—I call it an 'aggie' field, by the way—tends to bounce anything coming toward it. The incoming gravitational field, which is what the meteor represents, is repelled by the aggie field.

	"To go on; a large weight will be added, however, in the power stacks. We'll carry nearly a thousand tons cargo of power apparatus.-With that we can give a jolt that would smash a small planet."

	"It would," agreed Spencer, "but inasmuch as it would also smash a large bank roll, tell me, pray, why your soul cries out for such luxuries. What's all that power for?"

	"Intense fields; there are peculiar effects when the fields become intense. I might find the secret of the destruction of matter if I could get a sufficiently intense field. Remember, while this Sun-tapper beam is wonderfully better than a rocket, it's a darned inconvenient form of power supply." 

	"It would take you a year to charge the fool thing," objected Spencer, "even with the Sun beam. You couldn't carry that along your copper bus-bars fast enough."

	"Quite true! That's why we'll use power beams. That and the fact that I want to see what power I can send through one of these accelerators. You know the beauty of this form of drive is that there is no feeling of acceleration, since, naturally, all the particles of matter are accelerated individually. You'll be quite weightless in this thing—except for artificial gravity.

	"In the meantime, I'm at last ready to discuss this ship thoroughly," acceded Aarn with a smile.

	"Uh—you are? Well, I'm ready to discuss that new device. I've got a ship on the ways; it's going to be the Daniel Spencer and carry one thousand passengers. The present idea was to have it equipped with magnetic atmosphere, your so-called aggie field, and Sun-beam apparatus. By the way, that gave me a headache—trying to figure out a way to keep the beams pointed at the Sun, and yet not be able to cut across the ship accidentally on a sudden turn. A complicated mess of gyroscopes that's worse than the automatic navigational control, but it will do the job. And now this new stuff has to go on her right away."

	"Her? I thought you said it was the Daniel Spencer!" Aarn said mildly. "At any rate, I'll have to give you data for it. There's plenty of work on the calc before you can begin. The installation depends on the mass, distribution of mass, and so forth. Now look—"

	Carlisle listened patiently for half an hour, then fell into a peaceful, resting sleep.

-

Chapter V.

	THE OFFICIAL TITLE of the craft was to be "Spencer Laboratories No. 6." Being human, Aarn wanted to make it capable of a lot more than merely plugging around in space and experimenting. He loaded the design with plenty of aggie power storage coils, and he made the momentum-wave drive apparatus a lot more powerful than was really necessary. The antigravity apparatus was designed to be able to lift the mass of the ship laboratory away from the very surface of the Sun, against a gravitational acceleration of thirty earth-gravities.

	All in all, Aarn made that ship an extremely powerful machine. But then—she was designed for experiments.

	She was three months building on the Spencer ways. They rushed her construction, too, for many of the devices that Aarn planned to incorporate in later designs needed testing in actual operation. Her hull of beryl-steel was finished within two months, but the new labor of installing the strange devices took time and experimentation, careful, accurate balancing, lest failure be due not so much to defect in plan, as defect in execution.

	The final test, her maiden flight in space, Aarn wanted to make alone. "I can operate this thing alone, just as well as I can with a crowd along. I'll let Canning here go—I might need one technical assistant."

	"The air apparatus might break down," suggested Carlisle, grinning. "You'll have to take me to be safe."

	"The financial apparatus has nearly broken down already, so you'll have to take me. I need a rest." Spencer groaned. "They say I'd be bankrupt now if it weren't that I've got' so many orders coming in we can't fill 'em. Man, you may be good in physics, but you don't know how good you are at spending money. I've spent three or four fortunes having dies cut for -the apparatus in this boat. This is my little ray of light and hope—if it doesn't come back, I never want to know it. I'm going along."

	"Maybe some pirates will hold you up for ransom," suggested Carlisle cheeringly.

	"Speaking of your little ray of light and hope and pirates makes me think. This thing needs a name—not a designation, a name. This is our little Sunbeam—and may she raise some blisters. She would, by the way, if she hit something going at her maximum," suggested Aarn.

	"And if you insist on the whole neighborhood coming, bring Martin, anyway. I want some more meals. If you really want to know why I wanted to go alone, I wanted to go back to Jupiter. For once in my life I could go home without almost having to buy the ship that took me there.

	"If you are so insistent, come along, and we'll make it a party."

	Three days later, the Sunbeam, with five aboard her, took off gently. Up through the great ceiling of the Spencer plant, she angled slowly. She was rising on pure lack of weight, by centrifugal throw. Presently a Spencer salvage ship came over, dropped a huge tow-magnet on the ship, and both rose swiftly into the air. Aarn was afraid to try out the new drive on so powerful a ship when near a planet.

	Her crew on that trip that was to lead them to infinity and beyond consisted of Aarn Munro, Carlisle, Spencer, Canning, Aarn's chief technical assistant, and Henry Martin, chief cook and bottlewasher for the expedition.

-

	THE TOW SHIP carried her out of the atmosphere and then fell well behind. Gently Aarn stirred in his seat. "And now comes the test. Do we move too slow or so fast we can't handle it? I'd hate to have to charge and rebalance these circuits. Anyway—"

	Gingerly he advanced the acceleration control. Softly, behind them the great transpon beams began to hum. Inaudible, invisible, almost indetectable momentum waves began to bite deep into space and thrust the great mass" of the ship forward.

	The control at one, the Sunbeam moved off under one earth-gravity acceleration. Aarn moved his control to two. A frown came across his face, then a soft whistle of surprise. His accelerometer had moved over to eight!

	"Sweet spirits of space! I was over-conservative. I thought I might not have that figured quite right—and I didn't. I'll have to cube every one of these readings here—and the top one is one thousand!"

	"A million gravities! We can't stand that, can we?" 

	"Well, if the ship can deliver it as a momentum wave, we can stand it. Right now I'm going to take a little run down to old Sol and charge up."

	Aarn turned the Sunbeam till the electric-blue flame of the heart of - the solar system flared in the forward control window. Slowly Aarn advanced his control. At first no visible change occurred, save that Earth fell away; then it was lost from view as it came almost directly behind. Only the one-hundred-million-mile-distant Sun remained visible. Then, slowly, even it began to change; more and more swiftly it expanded till Spencer sat gripping the arm rests fiercely. The tremendous distance to the Sun was being cut down visibly. 

	"Fifteen hundred miles per second," said Aarn comfortably, "and rising smoothly. Heaven help the meteor we hit. I've got the magnetic atmosphere at full force and tied it in with the whole aggie-coil system. If we hit anything now, it'll get hit first by the magnetic atmosphere, then the antigravity field, and finally the whole impact of our momentum-wave system. We've got the momentum of a major planet packed into a space one mile in diameter!"

	"Yes, but suppose we do hit something—the Sun, at the rate you're going now—and get cooked?" suggested Carlisle uncomfortably.

	"I'm slowing." Aarn laughed happily. "Spence, you've got a ship as never was before!"

	"Don't I know it? The system record for speed is only one thousand, six hundred and thirty-one miles per sec." 

	"Was, Spence, was—we're doing about eighteen now. And I'm going to stop her dead!"

	Aarn threw over a tiny tumbler—his emergency brake. Instantly a terrible crashing roar thundered out of the power room behind, as the transpon beams suddenly felt the impact of countless billions of horse power. Under an acceleration of one million earth-gravities, the Sunbeam came to rest and stopped. Not the slightest sign of strain or stress did the men aboard her feel as their "weight" was suddenly increased to around one-hundred thousand tons each.

	"The Sunbeam," decided Aarn judiciously, "is thirsty. We'll give her a drink at the fountain of power—old Sol!"

	The Sunbeam had started out with barely one tenth of her maximum charge. This had been brought in laboriously by the smaller ships, the Spencer salvage corps. These ships had been equipped with aggie-coil power racks, and transpon beams. The small coils had been charged, then drained into the greater coils of the Sunbeam—a ferry system for power, since the transpon beam to the Sun could not safely be used through the atmosphere.

	Now the Sunbeam was about to drink deep of solar power.

	A brief roar of sound from the power room told of the establishment of the powerful fields that were projecting the transpon condition through space at the maximum velocity—one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. The Sun loomed gigantic, unbearable, less than thirty million miles away.

	Swiftly the silent minutes passed as the five men waited for the return of the power up the beam. Four—five minutes—then with a terrific roar that dwarfed the former protest as the Sunbeam was brought to a dead stop, the power came in. 

	For ten long minutes the roar continued, before Aarn swiftly cut- it down, and as he cut it, the hitherto invisible transpon beam reaching from ship to Sun became visible as the excess energy flared off in waste light and heat. In three minutes more, the Sunbeam was fully charged.

	"She's charged, and ready to ride!" Aarn sighed. "To Jupiter we go—and I'm going to wind up some speed this time!"

	The Sunbeam turned, and Jupiter rode into view, five hundred million miles away. To the left, Mars glowed dully red-green. Aarn pushed his controller over slowly. Farther and farther. Then slowly, infinitely slowly, Mars began to expand more and more quickly till it was ballooning swiftly, and with a sudden rush swept by them. They were lifting now, lifting in a great arc out of the planetary orbits, up and over the meteor-infested asteroid belt. Five-ten million miles. A needle on a dial before Aarn was quivering against its stop pin, the last reading, forty thousand, well behind it. The Sunbeam was going over fifty thousand miles a second.

	"She's rolling!" Aarn grinned. Skillfully he looped gently back into the orbital plane, as he snapped his controller back to zero, reversed a tumbler, and pushed up again for deceleration. "We haven't room in this puny little system for this baby—she needs free space to work right."

-

	AARN was right. The Sunbeam needed free space to work in.

	Invisible, a dark, jagged mass of age-old broken planet, riding in one of those ultra-eccentric, unpredictable orbits, was far, far out of the asteroid belt. One hundred tons of solid, tough nickel-steel, the same sort of stuff men had been collecting for a century from space to make armor plate.

	Aarn was right when he said the Sunbeam had the momentum of a major planet—concentrated. Traveling at about forty-two thousand miles a second, slightly less than a quarter of the speed of light, the Sunbeam struck that hundred-thousand-ton mass of metal.

	For the millionth part of a second, Aarn caught a glimpse of that jagged mass, suddenly illuminated by the light of the Sun—then the magnetic atmosphere struck it. Driven by the full-fed aggie coils, new charged from the fires of the Sun, the magnetic forces shrieked horribly and ripped the mass to incandescent gas in a hundred thousandth of a second. Then the individual molecules slipped unresisted through the forces—still with a mass of a hundred thousand tons. The gravity field and the momentum waves struck it simultaneously.

	Space itself shrieked under the impact. Torn by forces beyond even its endurance, space tore open—the Sunbeam, part of the now-gaseous meteor, and the contending forces simply dropped through to where neither force nor mass nor energy had meaning.

-

	IN THE space liner Aldebaron Captain Arnold Barett wrote in his log book:

	"At 13:45:30 o'clock, May 14, 2079, a terrific burst of light appeared about ten million miles away, out of the plane of the orbits, and persisted for about five minutes, gradually dying away. It was a curious ring-shaped light, dark in the center for a moment, then suddenly bright as though with a violet sunlight shining through from beyond, then dark again. 

	"For some time, not even stars beyond this blackness showed, but gradually they reappeared. The duration of the blackness was accompanied by certain peculiar phenomena described by Chief Engineer Rand.

	"Chief Mate Matterson reports definitely that he saw a new-type ship, believed to be the new experimental ship of the Spencer Co., moving toward the point where the phenomena appeared shortly before it happened. Matterson reports also, however, that he could see the ship moving against the background of the stars. The distance must have been over ten millions of miles, so he is probably mistaken. No ship could move visibly at that distance."

-

Chapter VI.

	A BLAST of light that was almost physically painful struck Aarn Munro, and he moved restlessly, then jerked abruptly erect. He was facing the control window, and outside he could see six strange ships, each about two hundred feet long, needle-slim, with a tiny visible control-room port, and a ring of projections studding the nose. And the nose of each pointed toward the Sunbeam steadily; only occasionally did one swing and dart suddenly to a new position. Powerful beams of bluish light were sweeping over their ship as they apparently investigated.

	"What happened?" asked Spencer tensely, suddenly coming up beside Aarn.

	"Struck a big meteor. Don't quite know what happened. Ever see ships like those?"

	"No known and recognized shipyard of the system ever turned those out," snapped the designer.

	"I didn't think so. Did you notice the stars beyond?"

	Spencer looked puzzled at his friend, then out toward space beyond. But it wasn't, he suddenly realized, black space. It was silver. It flamed and glowed and sparkled like a curtain of the magnetic atmosphere. There were stars, great brilliant white-hot suns scattered so thickly that space could scarcely show through. The heat from those myriad suns was almost palpable even here.

	"Where are we?"

	"Don't know—only know where we aren't," replied Munro, his eyes darting swiftly over his instruments.

	The ships outside were circling closer now. They had evidently decided the ship was totally dead.

	"We aren't in the solar system. I—I've an idea. It seems rather fantastic-but it would explain it, perhaps. You have to admit we are at least one hundred thousand light-years away from where we started—farther really—because those suns I see out there would make the Milky Way a dim thing. The Milky Way flung across that bunch would show up as a dark ribbon—literally. Actually, we must be a million light-years away. Or more.

	"That's a globular cluster, and it's about one hundred thousand light-years or more in diameter, at the minimum. I've spotted three supergiant, type-O stars. That's hot enough to melt the rivets out of a solar investigator at half a light-year. Those three can't be closer than one hundred thousand light-years.

	"Those fellows outside are getting bolder. They'd come in but the magnetic atmosphere has them worried. I see it's still on. The momentum oscillations have broken down. A transpon beam lead gave way. The antigravity field has collapsed, and we're falling freely into the local sun. There is one, though we can't see it just now, and it must be a hot one. Look at the color of the light on those ships. It's violet—positively violet.

	"They'll try to crack us soon. Take these controls. I'm going back." Aarn leaped. The artificial-gravity apparatus was still functioning, but an Earth gravity didn't bother Aarn much. He met Carlisle on the way back. Carlisle was looking over the air apparatus, which seemed to have stopped functioning.

	"Your transpon lead has failed," snapped Aarn as he passed, "I'm going to set it up in a few seconds."

	Martin, Spencer's man, who had been brought along in his capacity of chief cook and bottle washer, was just coming out of his galley, his head in his hands. The acceleration neutralization was not quite perfect down so 
far from the center of the ship, and when they struck the meteor, he had been somewhat shaken up. 

	"Martin—come along. And call Bob." Bob was the assistant electronics engineer whom Spencer had brought along. Bob was actually Dr. Robert Canning, and besides being an electronics engineer, he was a clever and skilled mechanician.

-

	AARN was in the control room. In fifteen seconds he had found the defective lead, cut it out with a pair of bolt clippers, and was disconnecting the studs when Canning showed up with Martin. 

	"Hey, lazy, get a new number twenty-seven lead. Martin, you get the liquid copper, will you?" 

	"Sorry—didn't come to right off. Saw the planetoid just before we hit, and passed out. What's the matter?" 

	Canning was back with the bus bar and snapped it in place. Aarn ran down the studs and painted it with the electro-copper solutions Martin brought, solutions which would make the copper surfaces knit electrically, but not too firmly, physically. " 

	"Plenty—we aren't in the solar system—strange ships—looks like attack." 

	Aarn was busy with the sun beam controls. He was thinking rapidly, and changing settings slowly, he examined the aggie-coil charges, and found that the banks were still about one third charged. He tested the connecting transpon beams to the momentum apparatus. Something more delicate had given away, also, for there was no response whatsoever.

	"Nuisance—isn't it?" said Aarn. 

	He dived across the ship as though there had been no artificial gravity, then leaped halfway to the control room and took over the controls again with less than two minutes' absence. 

	"They've been sticking instruments into our field," said Spencer, moving out of Aarn's way. "They probably detected our actions when you changed the aggie-coil power distribution. What's up?" 

	"Wanted current. No great voltage," replied Aarn. "The momentum apparatus is dead, and Canning's working over it."

	"The air's working again," said Carlisle, entering. "I've been looking at the stars. Where are we?"

	"Too far away to say. I think, though, and hope, that we are in another four-dimensional space. We've gone from our universe to another one through perhaps a five-dimensional nothingness. Like going from one three-dimensional world to another three-dimensional world through a four-dimensional nothingness.

	"That's a high-explosive torpedo of some sort he's sending over. I noticed they stripped the hide off of it."

	A long, slim device, perhaps a foot in diameter, and twenty feet long had started out of one of the projections on one of the ships. "High explosive—or I'm a chemist instead of a physicist."

	The torpedo drifted swiftly, under air pressure evidently, for about a hundred yards, then abruptly the tail became wreathed in smoke, and the thing hurled itself forward violently. It darted at the Sunbeam—and suddenly exploded halfway.

	"Hmmm—pardonable mistake. They thought that brass and copper would be unaffected by the magnetic field. Stripped off the iron evidently."

	Aarn was busy. He was checking, instrumentally, a dozen circuits. At last he called out: "Canning—test circuit MM 433-a."

	"That's it," came back the reply. "Compensator broke down. The damping effect when the meteor struck was too great for it. Needs a whole new circuit. Take me at least four hours. Shall I start right now?"

	"Well, if you can think of some other way of making this bathtub move, all right, but I thought fixing it might be best," suggested Aarn gently. "What else might we do? Get going."

	Aarn was busy with something else. He had the television device working now and was rapidly fitting the heavy mirror-polish steel shutters over the ports of the control room.

	"Martin—hey, Martin! Get busy slapping on the port shutters. Fast!"

	"Why? Rays do you think?" Carlisle asked anxiously. "We have no defense at all."

	"Yes—rays of a sort—light rays; nothing much more dangerous. But light rays could blind us. Remember that the televisor eye there is a photo-cell of the newest Dinwiddie type. They can handle the Sun's radiation at the surface, fifty horse power per square inch. Also, curiously, they are supersensitive. Result—we have an eye out there now that can stand anything any projectors they have can handle."

	"Suppose it's a heat ray?" suggested Carlisle.

	"Suppose it's your grandmother's pet boogey! Get this through your head, Carlisle: Any weapon that depends on pure energy to destroy is a double-ended weapon, as deadly at the sending end as at the receiving, and probably more so. In other words, to project a heat ray requires the projection of, at least, ten thousand horse power in a beam of not more than half a square foot of cross section. That's not going to be any too bad. But if it's half a square foot at the receiving end, it can't be larger at the sending end, and will probably be smaller. Then it is bound to be more deadly to the projector than to the receiving surface.

	"Same's true of anything of the sort. Bombs are like that. They blow themselves—Ah—here he comes."

-

	A RAY of light. It was a terrific, stabbing searchlight intended for the sole purpose of blinding the enemy, if it was humanly possible. It would have been effective but for the fact that the televisor simply arranged itself for the necessary load, and showed each ship as a single point of bluish light, not too bright. Then a series of splashes of reddish light began to spread over the surface of the magnetic atmosphere.

	"I only fear we are like the oyster and the starfish." Aarn sighed. "They can't break our shell at the present rate, but, on the other hand, we can't run away for a while. But if they just go right on pulling long enough, they may open us up eventually."

	The pyrotechnic display stopped abruptly, the searchlights went black, and the television screen showed again the simple ships, their tiny noses an almost impossible target for any weapon.

	"Those," said Aarn at length, "are what the old navies would have called destroyers. Speedy probably, fairly powerful fighting weapons, and a very small target"

	"What are they going to do next?"

	"How in blazes do I know? I guessed the searchlights because it's obvious. The next may be anything from a radio-frequency pencil of energy designed to heat us generally—that being a possibility because, Carlisle, it starts out as electric forces, and doesn't become destructive, unmanageable heat till it's absorbed, but it can't be used as a concentrated beam for cutting holes, because it won't focus that sharply. Or their next attack may be some kind of a tractor beam with which to tow us home where the big battleships can be turned loose on us, to crack the nut; or open the oyster, as I said before."

	"What do we do in that case?"

	"We help Canning with his repairs as much as possible. And at the end of about four hours, we run away from the bad boys. By the way, we're turning slowly, and we get a peek at the sun in a few minutes. I didn't look when I was back.

	"Hmmm—our friends evidently chose the tractor beam. In this case a series of powerful electromagnets on the ends of cables."

	The enemy ships were lowering something cylindrical, and roughly fashioned, at the end of long cables toward them. The devices came from somewhere behind, for the cables hung along the side of the ships.

	Aarn smiled. "My brethren, we shall now demonstrate the old Australian custom, or 'How to Make a Boomerang Go Home and Spank Papa'. They went to the trouble of making those bar electromagnets to act on our unipolar field. Nice of them—"

	Aarn was adjusting something, and he had a switch—a two-way switch—under his hand. The bar magnets the enemy were lowering were taut on their cables now, straining at the powerful unipolar field of the Sunbeam.

	And with a gentle sigh, Aarn reversed the Sunbeam's magnetic pole. Instantly, the half-ton magnets were under the influence of a tremendous magnetic field of the same sign—and they were repelled with all the power that had attracted them, plus a little extra Aarn had added to the field.

	Straight and true the great lumps of steel shot backward and toward the needle ships. Two ships avoided their flying magnets, four were struck and dented, one actually torn by the great flying projectile. "How sweet the uses of adversary!" misquoted Aarn. "But they won't assume we are dead any longer. The fact of life has been adequately proved."

	Whoever "they" may have been, "they" didn't. The six ships spun with startling speed into a hemisphere, all ships pointing toward the Sunbeam, but so arranged as to offer the absolute minimum target, and the absolute optimum of effectiveness. Then they began running through their armory vigorously.

	They started with shells. And they weren't all metal shells this time; a lot of them were evidently made of synthetic plastics and they shot through the magnetic atmosphere unhindered, but now Aarn had re-established an anti-gravity field, and the great shells bounced one after another into flaming destruction.

-

	THE TERRIFIC searchlights flamed again. And spheres of blue radiance. They shot out swiftly from the ships, sped straight toward the Sunbeam—and then started circling it. They circled steadily, swiftly, expanding slowly, growing brighter, and staying at a uniform distance from the ship—a distance of about half a mile.

	A shell struck one of them, and a shell and blue sphere of radiance vanished together in terrific electric flame. Half a hundred of the strange spheres spun about harmlessly "now, and when they came near each other, they shied violently away. 

	"Wavering planetary paths! That's controlled ball lightning! What I'd give for the secret of that!" gasped Aarn. 

	"Why isn't it striking us?" 

	"Circulating in the magnetic field. Say—look!" 

	The thermometer was rising. It was rising smoothly, and steadily. The room was getting uncomfortably hot, and their own bodies began to get warmer, perspiration stood out on them, and little blue sparks began to jump from bead to bead of that perspiration. Then their keys, their coins, all their metal objects began to have live sparks like a halo about them.

	"Damn—ouch—" Aarn reached and held firmly to his controls. "Radio frequency—and plenty. Well—our turn now."

	Something hummed vividly in the power room behind. A sudden explosion of air as tremendous power leaped into a transpon beam that smashed its way through the ship's atmosphere.

	And a sudden white-hot globule of molten metal where an enemy ship had been.

	The hum died, and the air exploded back into the partial vacuum the beam had cut in it.

	Again a whine, a clap of thunder, and a blazing white-hot spot of light where a ship had been, exploding light.

	"How sweet!" murmured Aarn and swept his deadly probe about through space. He was using no power till the beam met resistance. "It's the transpon beam working in reverse. It's supposed to take the power from a sun for our coils. I'm taking power from the" coils, and making miniature suns out of those ships."

	Another ship suddenly blazed up and died, and then the remaining ships vanished abruptly as they raced away. The Sunbeam had raised its first blisters. Two of the remaining ships began to accelerate gradually, and then moved more rapidly away.

	"They aren't all dead yet," said Aarn respectfully. "Those boys make battleships. The darn things are so long, I'd have to melt down two hundred feet of ship before they'd all be gone. And they are supposed to be able to move. You know, I'll bet they haven't got any energy weapon like that transpon beam, and they probably wonder what manner of heat ray I have."

	"I thought," said Carlisle, "that you said energy rays—rays that depended on energy for destruction—couldn't be made."

	"I did. And I meant it. Figure it out," returned Aarn with a grin.

	"I figure," said Spencer, "that the beam is not dangerous—it's what it carries. Does that make any real difference?"

	"That's the answer—and it does," replied Aarn. "No sound can be heard three thousand miles away; no sound can cross space; but we can hear sounds which originate on Earth, clear out on Jupiter. How come? The sound doesn't get there—it's carried there by something else. Sound hasn't the penetrative power of radio.

	"In this case, a beam can't be handled by a projector if that beam is so destructive to the matter of a ship. But now we have the transpon beam which doesn't destroy—it's quite a harmless little thing, perfectly innocent. Only somebody poured poison in it. It conducts.

	"Here's an illustration of the case. Take that piece of wire there—a piece of copper. I can truly and safely say that a wire as thin as the lead of a pencil can't be made the shaft of a machine carrying ten thousand horse power twenty miles. Impossible! But that doesn't mean that ten thousand electric horse power can't be conducted through it. As a driving shaft, as direct mechanical energy in other words, it would be impossible. As a conductor for a second-hand energy, it is possible.

	"In general, the only effective rays possible as weapons will be in two classes, the catalyst rays, and the conductor rays.

	"By catalyst rays, I mean rays which cause effects at a distance, not by doing work but by giving the signal. A radio beam that releases the explosion of a ton of dynamite might come under that class. A death ray would also come under that class. A ray which set up interference such that the fleet could not communicate, and hence the signals were misunderstood, would also be a catalyst-type beam.

	"The conductor beams are, of course, such beams as the transpon.

	"The enemy have retired in disgrace. What next? Where do we go from here?"

	"Find out where we are first," suggested Spencer.

	"The ship's got to be fixed up before we go at all," Carlisle reminded him.

	"Oh, I know it! And I know now as much about where we are as I can in less than five years. We are in another space. I know why we are in this particular other space, too. This space is in a sort of strained condition already. Look at the size of the stars we can see. I recognize a number of spectral classes there, and every, dog-goned one of them is a supergiant! This is a globular cluster of gigantic stars."

	"How can you tell, only glancing at them?" demanded Spencer.

	"Experience—I am really guessing, but it is a pretty fair guess. Those spectra look hot. Even allowing for the fact that the light is slightly changed due to different space conditions here."

	"And what if they are supergiants, why does that explain anything?"

	"We got here by passing through the wall of our space, into a sort of fifth-dimensional interspace. From that interspace we had to enter some other normal four-dimensional space, because we weren't normal to that space at all. Then we took to the one which was easiest of entry—this one, which is strained almost to the breaking point in spots, itself, or at least far nearer that point than any other normal space.

	"Those enormous stars simply make great strain spots in the fifth-dimensional interspace side of these spaces. Those strains in the surface attracted any unnatural strain in the interspace. Probably anything that leaks through from any of those other spaces ends up in this space."

	"Why near this particular star, then?" asked Spencer. "By the way, I haven't seen it, and I'm going back to look."

	"You needn't. It's just a bright spot, and you couldn't tell a thing. I'm going to take some readings presently, and send out a Sunbeam and get some results. I've started warming up the tapper tubes. If my suspicions are correct, this is a huge star, far larger than the average, even here. That particular strain spot attracted us." 

	"Why didn't we land in the star then?"

	"What threw us through here? A collision? Do you think we went through just so we could have another and be sent back? Naturally we rolled off the sides of that star's field to some extent before breaking in here."

	"Then this is the biggest star in this space of supergiant stars! Wheeee—"

	"No; it doesn't have to be at all, Russ," replied Aarn. "It is probably the nearest-biggest star in this space to the side of our own space through which we came. Get it?"

-

	AARN was working over his instruments now, making adjustments and readings. Gradually a look of puzzled amazement came over his face. More and more carefully he made adjustments. At last he sighed gently and looked up,

	"Sweet stellar cycles! It's a Cephid variable or I'm an asteroid. And it's a Cephid of a class you and I never even heard about. Russ, you must be right. That must be the largest star in this whole darned space of supergiants. It is a Cephid with a period that can't be more than a few hours at the outside; it's tremendous. It's gigantic. Maybe it isn't a Cephid, but a different kind of variable that's twice as big.

	"I took a radiation measurement on it, and at our present distance it's about as strong as sunlight, but the maximum is in the blue range. Then I took a gravity reading on it and a few other readings—electronic and magnetometric.

	"The answer seems to be that that little foot warmer is about one hundred million times as bright and potent as old Sol! We are ten thousand units from that sun's center! About that is to say, ten thousand times one hundred million miles, or about one million million miles. In round figures, at a distance of one trillion miles, this sun is as hot as ours is at a distance of a hundred million. Shall we lay an egg on its surface?"

	"Great orbits! How big is the thing?" gasped Spencer.

	"It's hard to say." Aarn sighed. "I'd like to know accurately, and will, of course, later, but all I can do is estimate from the known effect of the gravity decline. It seems to be of the order of five hundred million miles in diameter at present and growing larger."

	"Larger than Antares—" said Spencer softly.

	"But Antares isn't as bad as this, man. Antares is old. Its surface temperature is so low it doesn't compete. It has a temperature of about three thousand. That thing—Heaven alone knows what the temperature is. I can't tell after the light has struggled out against that gravitational field. That field must drag it back through six shades of blue."

	"How do we get power? Tap that thing? Say, the Sun is a mild little old dry cell, plugging along peaceably. That's a dynamic, roaring, pulsating furnace."

	"We can tap anything," said Aarn firmly. "I've already started the beam." 

	"How—when do we get power? Next year?" 

	Aarn sat slowly upright and looked at his friend in horrified surprise. "I didn't stop to think. One trillion miles! Over fifteen hundred hours!" Aarn's face paled slowly. "We're stuck unless—" He fell silent and thoughtful. 

	"Are there any planets?" Carlisle interrupted him.

	"Eh—planets?" Aarn looked up, annoyed. 

	"Dozens. Couldn't separate their effects." 

	"Dozens?" gasped Spencer. "What kind of a system is this?" 

	"Those planets," said Aarn, "were probably the throw-offs, the bits of matter swept out by the natural antigravitational fields. On stars that size, there must be billions of tons of stuff thrown off every week. That stuff gets swept up and turns into planets. Probably, though, the process actually is kept going by frequent passages of near-stars. In a globular cluster, where the distances between stars aren't more than a light-year or two, and the darned things have gravitational control extending for nearly that far, the effects would be rather powerful, and more continuous.

	"We are probably moving in an orbit such as a meteor might fellow, else we'd be bathed in them. I'll bet worlds here have a constant shower that's worse than the Leonids or any other shower back home."

	"Nice place for space ships." 

	"What of it? You can't change things. Look-that star there. I swear I can see a disk, and it's so bright I can scarcely look at it."

	"Sunlight from the sun is coming in—we're turning," said Carlisle almost simultaneously.

	A stream of almost liquid blue blight cascaded through one of the ports in a thin, thin crescent, and struck the opposite wall. A bright, harsh blue competed with the gas-glow lights. 

	"If we want to get away from here before those ships go home and tell mamma, we'd better do some work," suggested Aarn. "Canning," he called, "how you making out?" 

	"This cockeyed, misbegotten inspiration of a half-baked imbecile has more misconceived and willfully aborted circuits than a centipede with locomotor ataxia," Canning roared back. "Come here and see if you can figure it out; I'm about through."

	"Spencer, will you take that over? I've got some things I want to do," said Munro. "Want to make some calculations." 

	"Right enough. But what calc have you in mind?" 

	"How to go faster than light." Munro grinned and vanished toward the rear. 

	"All right; don't tell me if you don't want to," snapped Spencer. 

-

	MUNRO found Canning engaged in trying to replace the various pieces of apparatus he had been forced to remove to get at the defective' circuit. The actual repair had been made, and within twenty minutes he'd have it back together. Then would come the delicate task of tuning the device.

	Hour after hour passed as the two engineers struggled over it, and Carlisle and Aarn, both excellent mathematicians, struggled over the math machines.

	They had got their first glimpse of the sun when they went back to the calculation room, a bright blue disk, little larger than some of the very near and very large stars.

	"There must be a planet near here," said Carlisle, "or those ships wouldn't have been out here."

	"There must be two," replied Munro, "two, or more. Those ships were loaded for b'ar, and that means either they were pirates preying on commercial interplanetary shipping, or police, after any strange craft, or more probably, warships.

	"Either of the first two presupposes other space craft. There are no space ships if they have no goal. Hence, two worlds. War rockets for planetary war wouldn't be attacking strange ships millions of miles from home. Interplanetary war is indicated.

	"Further: They are near-by planets, because of the size of this system. Do you realize that those planets must have orbits with circumferences of the order of three trillion, one hundred and forty-six billion miles?"

	"Interplanetary war wouldn't last a year here!" Carlisle laughed.

	"Hmmm—maybe it would last that long, if it wasn't too active—if the two forces were too nearly matched. Remember a year, though, would be about eighty thousand of our years."

	"But the planets would get so far apart! If they were on opposite sides of their orbits, the contestants would have to quit. Suppose we were fighting Mars, and Mars got on the other side of the Sun. We'd probably declare a temporary peace."

	"Yes; true enough. But if Neptune and Pluto were fighting, it would be a thousand years before one would get on the opposite side of the Sun. Here the case is even more extreme, because the difference in their orbits is so small a per cent."

	They set to work while the blue disk of the sun crept slowly across their port, and "sank" on the other side. Martin declared a meal, and announced it, while still Spencer and the too-optimistic Canning labored over the job that was to have taken four hours.

	After the meal Aarn seemed strangely pleased as he considered the results of the mathematics. Carlisle had performed a number of derivations for him, but had not understood the meaning of the results, as had Munro.

	"What is it that's so pleasing?" asked he, at length.

	"A chance to go places," replied Munro with a laugh. "I have some apparatus to make. Canning can have that job, while I finish his."

	"All right by me, I assure you. My job is distinctly discouraging," snorted Canning. 

	Aarn grinned, and showed the mechanician-engineer what he wanted made. The man became more and more puzzled as he examined the pattern.

	At last he said: "I can make the thing, but darned if I can see why."

	"I can," said Munro simply. And that was that.

	In half an hour the physicist had done what the engineers had been unable to accomplish, for, when he applied himself, Munro could do delicate work. The circuits were balanced, and he tried them out a bit. The ship moved gently and turned about.

	In another hour the simple-complex device Aarn had requested was made. It looked, and was, mechanically simple, but its theoretical implications were enormous.

	"Now that you have it, what have you?" asked Spencer.

	"Mahomet's decision." Munro grinned.

	"Oh, blazes, what is it?" snapped Spencer.

	"Mahomet's decision," replied Aarn evenly.

-

	AN ALARM chose that minute to make its presence known. Aarn jumped. "Great Jupiter—they're back. I'll bet papa and big brother Bill are along to—"

	He was out of hearing in the control room. In an instant he was in his seat. A far-flung screen of magnetic force had been disturbed by the approach of a fleet of eight ships. Two were recognizable as the undamaged members of the late adversary. The rest were new.

	They were of two new types. The long needle shape was missing in them, and promptly Aarn realized he was seeing now Space cruisers and battleships. The two little destroyers led the way, darting rapidly from side to side. Slower, four greater cruisers came up, and behind them two great battleships.

	Spencer gasped. "Great planets and little asteroids'! It's a battle fleet."

	"The destructive beam. They must want the secret of that thing. We're sunk. I'll bet those battleships have noses of ten-foot steel, and the walls for a hundred feet back must be the same," Aarn replied.

	A great battleship turned slightly askew, and they got a glimpse of its length. It was a full thousand feet in length, with a series of projecting turrets along her sides and top.

	"What a monster—and two of them." Spencer stared aghast.

	"The cruiser's not bad," said Munro judiciously. 

	It wasn't; it was perhaps six hundred feet long, with fewer and smaller turrets, but still a far, far different thing from the destroyer.

	As yet the enemy was looking over the Sunbeam with caution.

	"I wish," said Aarn, "that the aggie coils were full. I'll have to start carving on that battleship, or they won't believe me, and if the thing is all metal, they may be able to get rid of the heat. If it is by any chance silver, we're sunk before we start."

	Munro had been busy. With a sudden flick of his finger, a series of relays shot home, and suddenly great beams clapped into action behind him somewhere. And on the bow of the great battleship appeared a spot of flaming, white-hot incandescence. It grew and spread, and the ship jerked wildly.

	A great mass of white-hot metal was thrown off by the motion of the ship, and a pit five feet across and two feet deep was left. The beam found lodgment again, and again the metal burned white-hot.

	The enemy fleet went into action with their heating rays, their greatest guns, and far greater lightning balls. No results, because of the magnetic atmosphere, from any save the induction ray. The Sunbeam became unbearable.

	Aarn shifted his attack from the almost-impregnable battleship to the nearest cruiser. A five-foot hole appeared in her side, drove swiftly straight through her interior, and smashed its way to her power compartment inside of fifteen seconds. The control cable had been severed before the ship could be moved, and before a second control could be brought into action, the power storage was reached.

	The cruiser disintegrated in the most frightful burst of sheer blue-white incandescence the solarites had ever witnessed. Enormous chunks of flying metal smashed their way through everything within range—save the magnetic atmosphere and the terrific walls of the battleships.

	One destroyer was riddled and rolling away, a lifeless hulk. A cruiser was wounded and moved hastily away.

-

	MOMENTARILY, the attack on the Sunbeam was stopped. The terrific heat did not abate, but the painful, continuous electric sparks did.

	"It's a wonder our circuits don't go dead under that," said Spencer.

	"Too much metal—too much grounding—too much shielding of every sort," snapped Aarn.

	He spun his controls, lined up his beam, and let go at another cruiser. A white-hot needle smashed its way through the outer wall of two-foot steel, and an inner wall of one-foot steel, and was messing up a kitchen within, when the ship darted away.

	"Our coils will be dead in about one and a half minutes." Aarn sighed. "Once I've discharged them—"

	He lined up his beam and let it go again. This time the damaged battleship received the dose where it had been hurt before. The metal incandesced and exploded outward in a stream of white-hot sparks. The beam punished its way through an inner one-foot wall and ate a channel straight through the heart of the great ship in a matter of split seconds, for under that terrific drive, a wall of metal only an inch or two thick meant almost nothing at all.

	It struck the engine room. To do so, it ate its way through another one-foot wall, but something was the matter, and the great ship was unable to move. The engine room of the battleship was suddenly an inferno of white heat that spread like a widening pool, eating at the heart of the ship. A dozen trapdoors all over the ship opened, and tiny forms shot out into space, making swiftly for other ships.

	"I hope they retire," said Aarn wistfully. "We've got about enough power left to cook dinner, and I'd hate to use that up too."

	And then—from somewhere behind—something white and gleaming, a long slim body, roared forward. It was twenty-five feet long, and not a foot in diameter, but it had a rocket motor, and it had intentions of damage. It missed the nose of the battleship, which was still in good condition, by about two feet and a skillful maneuver, and struck the injured battleship. A series of explosions that lasted a full thirty seconds followed, and when they were over, the rocket torpedo had eaten a hole through the four-foot armor and was floundering about inside the ship.

	A flock of those torpedoes was flying now, and all directed toward the attacking cruisers and battleship. Shells seemed to be invisibly on their way, for huge gouts of white flame sprang up all over the great metal walls, and pits appeared. Occasionally a trapdoor was found, and then a great pit appeared, which was immediately the target for a hundred shells.

	The attacking battleship had evidently had more than enough. It retired rapidly, and for the first time the solarites saw their rescuers.

	Four great battleships, eight cruisers, and a fleet of destroyers. Every one of those ships was shaped almost exactly like the Sunbeam herself, with lines distinctly at variance with those of the other fleet's ships.

	"Now what?" asked Spencer in a tired voice. "Do we fight or what?"

	"We what," replied Aarn. "They must be friends. They evidently consider any enemy of their energies a friend. Very useful frame of mind. Probably just as interested in finding out how in the name of blazes we burned holes in that battleship as the enemy were. We've got to signal. How? They don't know what's a beam of destruction and what's a beam of light. And we haven't any more power to argue with, except for what's in the indispensable magnetic atmosphere."

	"Can't we signal from—"

	"Ah—power!" interrupted Munro, with a smile of pleasure. "That's an easy signal of friendship."

	"What is it? That we've got power?"

	"No; that we haven't. The man you do a favor for," said Aarn, working rapidly, "is twice your friend."

-

Chapter VII.

	THE LIGHTS aboard the Sunbeam began to fade slowly, growing dimmer and dimmer. A searchlight reached out suddenly from the solarian ship and died slowly in redness as the lights faded rapidly to darkness. The strangers watching from outside saw a number of small bobbing lights move about inside the ship. Presently a doorway opened, and a light, a dim, dim light shot out in a curve, something trailing along behind it like a tail.

	A destroyer maneuvered cautiously over to it and picked up the dim light and the trailing thing. It was an incandescent bulb. The trailing thing was a piece of twisted pair wire, the wires connected to the bulb. It was a very dim bulb. It told a long, and complete story to the highly intelligent men of the Magyan ships.

	It said in brief: This ship uses electric power. It has used all its power in fighting, so thoroughly that even the lights have failed. This wire has been tossed over to us that we may supply power. It gives us a means of measuring the voltage of their power system, determining whether they want a.c. or d.c., and many other things are suggested, such as the fact that the stranger ship is indeed in trouble and lost.

	The Magyan destroyer captain consulted his superiors, while his engineers made tests on the wire. The voltage they determined. It was about a hundred and eighty-six, on our scale. They then connected the light bulb to a source of potential, and ran it up till the bulb was glowing at the greatest safe temperature. The voltage they used in this was two hundred and thirty. Therefore they pumped over current at two hundred and thirty volts.

	Immediately the lights on board the Sunbeam flashed up once more, and three solarites gave a cheer of joy.

	"Step number one!" called Carlisle.

	"We've got to talk to them. Let's hope their language isn't too hard," mourned Spencer. "I never was good at languages."

	"I think I'd better stay here," said Aarn, "and finish fixing this boat. You'll have to go over there—Whoa, someone is coming. Spence, take the control room. I'm working in the air lock, and I intend to pass that bird right into the lounge. Meet him there."

	For the first time the solarians got a view of a Magyan. Anto Rayl was to be a friend to them. He was six feet tall, and absolutely human in every character.

	His eyes were gray, with speckles of golden color floating in them, his face was tanned deeply, a lean, strong face with wide, high cheek bones, a straight, thin nose with delicate nostrils, his chin firm and short in front, with a straight bang across the back of his neck.

	His uniform was some woven-elastic fiber that evidently was capable of stretching in all directions. It fitted him closely, revealing a body that was muscular and well-proportioned. His chest was deep and wide, and his bones strong.

	He looked at the Terrestians interestedly and with some peculiar anxiety and surprise. His eyes darted swiftly around the power room, and a slight look of disappointment came into them, for absolutely nothing was readable to him now, since all the mechanisms were covered, as understandable as an automobile with the hood down.

	Then suddenly he noticed the form of the Jovian, half hidden where he had been opening the lock door. 

	The Magyan slowly pulled a tiny metal tab, and the absolutely transparent envelope that had protected him in his short trip across space fell away. He was still looking at the Jovian, and at last turned away, a distinct look of displeasure on his face. Aarn was himself annoyed by this—then suddenly grinned widely. He laughed softly, and the Magyan turned toward him.

	Aarn stepped forward with a friendly smile and stretched out a hand. With a slight smile, Aarn shook hands, keeping his fingers flaccid. The Magyan would learn the Jovian's strength later.

	"Greetings, friend, and you sure fill the definition of a good one!"

	"Ahtop ah-menahep—etran matral hepanet."

	"Hmm—we won't get anywhere that way. Look," said Aarn distinctly. "I'm—Aarn."

	"Aarn?"

	"Yes—Aarn. He—Russ. He—Car."

	"Ahm—Ahm—Aarn—Russ—Can."

	"That's it. Who are you?"

	"Anto Rayl," replied the Magyan.

	"Anto Rayl. Good! Now to learn a language. It had better be theirs if we possibly can. Let's see. How can I ask?"

	Spencer smiled. "Easy!" He picked up a chair that was near by, held it before him, and pointed with his other hand. "Chair," he said distinctly. "What?" he inquired.

-

	FOR A MOMENT Anto Rayl was puzzled; then he grasped the idea. In a moment he had pulled a small instrument from his pocket and was talking rapidly. Aarn looked at the thing closely and reached forward and pushed it away from him. He shook his head, and then put a hand to the instrument. His hand undulating, he moved it across the room till it struck the metal wall, then he simply smashed his hand flat against the metal.

	"No. Won't go."

	It wasn't the metal. It was the magnetic atmosphere, but there was a wall which radio wouldn't penetrate easily.

	In an hour, a teacher had come from one of the other ships, a skillful artist. He, with Anto Rayl, started teaching them, and evidently Anto Rayl's people didn't know the meaning of fatigue, for they kept at it for ten hours straight.

	And it was a pure, intensive course. So intensive, and so purely lingual, that absolutely no information passed. 

	In the meantime a heavier cable had been run in from one of the battleships, and the great aggie coils of the Sunbeam were slowly being charged. However, Anto Rayl did stop once to inquire where in the name of something or other all the power was going to. It seemed that about one quarter of the battleship's power had been sent over, and that was all they could spare.

	Aarn grinned and took Anto Rayl to one of the doors in the wall of the Sunbeam. Behind was one single group of coils. Aarn pointed to them, and indicated they were about one tenth full. Then he pointed to another group barely visible, and indicated they had no charge at all. Anto looked incredulous.

	The labor of learning a language, even passably, is terrific. It is so great that the author of fiction invariably is tempted to resort to telepathy as a short cut. Aarn and his friends retired with the firm conviction that some such thing was badly needed. All they seemed to have learned was an incredible number of words, such simple words as "go" and "away" and "be" and such, and they realized that they could not so much as, give a sensible sentence. "The chair is up there," was about their limit.

	"At any rate," said Spencer with a groan, his head between his hands, "they don't go in for declensions, conjugations, and dual, plural, and singular voices, and there seems to be some rhyme and reason in some of it, anyway."

	"Maybe," said Carlisle disgustedly. "Also a headache."

	Martin had breakfast ready when they awoke in the morning, and Canning announced that he had finished the connections Aarn had prescribed for the new apparatus.

	Anto Rayl was not back yet and did not show up when their activity began. Aarn went over Canning's connections and tested them carefully. Next he took some power readings and determined that he had enough power for what he wanted to accomplish.

	"This," he said with a smile, "will surprise our friends immensely. It will also surprise you."

	"It will," agreed Spencer. "You haven't yet told your employer what you have been doing."

	"My employer has become merely a supernumerary here." Aarn smiled. "We are about to go to the mountain; if you must know."

	"You mentioned that," replied Spencer. "I took it to mean that since Anrel—as Anto Rayl called the sun here—won't come out along your beam in anything less than half a year or so, you plan going there. Fine! Just tell me, though, how, in the sacred name of the nine known planets, you expect to accomplish that which every physicist since Einstein has said was impossible."

	"None of them said it. We've already done it."

	Spencer looked at him silently for a moment. "All right, I am a liar. Now prove it."

	"How far is it back to Earth?"

	"Uhhh—that's not a distance."

	"All right, then. We aren't going a distance. Only we're going to wind up somewhere near that sun," said Aarn, and started putting up the remaining shutters. 

	All but the ones in the pilot room were up. In a moment only the television served to show them the Magyan patrol about them.

	"Well, good-bye," said Aarn.

	He depressed a control. Instantly the Magyan patrol became a two-dimensional picture of a Magyan patrol. The battleships were silhouettes, and the whole thing vanished in a puff. The sun, Anrel, alone remained unchanged as minute after minute sped by. Then, at last, even it began to show signs of growth. But something else was growing off to one side—a world that flashed larger and larger, that twisted and turned as their ship fled past it at a velocity that was preposterous, impossible.

	"We aren't," explained Aarn, "really going through space. We're going round it and keeping contact rather slightly. We're half out of space. We had just enough power to build up that condition, thanks to the Magyan battleship."

	"How fast are we going?" demanded Spencer.

	"We aren't," said Munro blankly.

	"Grrr—how fast would we be going if we were?"

	"About twenty-five hundred times as fast as light. That means that where light would take about fourteen hundred hours, it will take us a bit more than half an hour. We won't go all the way, though. I'm stopping several million miles short. And making another slight modification in space as soon as I get the power."

-

	THE SYSTEM was simple enough, when understood. The ship, in crossing from one normal space to the other, was in an interspace where it did not belong, and was instantly shoved to a place it could exist. In being pushed through that strange interspace, the meaning of distance was forgotten. It could have alighted anywhere in the other space. Aarn was intentionally shoving himself halfway out of the normal space into that interspace, and then coming back where he wished.

	Anrel grew larger. The great blue-fire disk grew with astonishing slowness, for they were covering billions and hundreds of billions of miles with every second. But the titanic sun was so distant, that, even so, change was slow.

	"That's about enough," Munro said at last, when Anrel was a disk of blue fire that spread over half the firmament, blotting everything else from sight.

	The television eye was cut down to a minimum, and a diversion-shunt circuit called into play to handle the enormous influx of energy. The temperature of the ship was rising rapidly even here in the interspace condition.

	"Look out!" warned Aarn.

	He cut a switch. Instantly he threw a second. In that momentary lapse of time, the shutter before their eyes had grown red-hot, and the television screen was blank. .

	"Radiation!" Spencer exclaimed and fell silent. 

	God's mighty experimental laboratories, the suns of space, made the weapons of humankind seem futile. The mere exhaust energy of this star had nearly fused that heavy metal shutter in a fraction of a second. 

	"What's cooling us?" Spencer asked at length. 

	Aarn was silent—and busy. "I'd like to know this sun's frequencies better—"

	"What's this mean?" asked Carlisle. 

	"It means I may hook onto about a million times as much energy as I want," replied Munro. "And we aren't being cooled. I worked this out from the same interspace idea. That interspace experience was a great thing for me." He grinned. "I've made the ship invisible."

	"Invisible?" gasped Carlisle. "I can see it—"

	"Certainly, defect. But it's invisible from outside. I've shunted the incident electromagnetic energy through ninety degrees into gravitomagnetic energy, and back again on the other side. We aren't absorbent to gravitomagnetic radiation, and it passes right through."

	"Gravitomagnetic—what's that?"

	"Electromagnetic energy is energy which is cyclicly transformed from an electric field to a magnetic field and back again, and possesses the property of traveling as radiation through space at a speed of a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Gravitomagnetic energy is the same, except that the change is between gravitational and magnetic fields."

	"Does it occur in nature?"

	"Naturally."

	"Why hasn't it been detected and used before this?" asked Spencer. 

	"I just gave the reason. It passes through any physical body unhindered. Only certain force fields can detect and handle it. I detected it against my gravitational fields, naturally. It won't go very far, anyway, before it gets broken up into a different form of energy. I think it's the source of cosmic rays. Gravitational fields tend to combine, and unlike electromagnetic radiation which always goes down the scale, gravitomagnetic radiation is willing to go up the scale.

	"That beam ought to be getting near the surface layer now. I've got it cut down to nothing. I hope it leaves me something either of the power or the ship." Aarn read his instruments carefully. 

	"Anyway, here is the result. I can get near this sun, by-pass the radiation, and live to tell about being here."

	"Is the television burned out?" asked Carlisle. "I'd like to watch that star."

	"I just got through saying that the light and heat were by-passed," said Aarn patiently. "We can't see out. I can make a small hole in the screen if I want to, and I'd not live long enough to close it."

	"Will this invisibility be useful in fighting! Oh, oh! We'll have some fun with the Tefflans, Anto Rayl called them."

	"Wrong," replied Aarn, his eyes on the instruments. "They'd spot this field a billion miles away, when they couldn't see us at all if we were in normal space. That beam is just-about-here."

	He waited expectantly, the whole ship quiet in suspense. Still minutes passed.

	"It didn't get anywhere at the outer layer," said Aarn softly. "It's going deeper."

-

	A DEAFENING explosion echoed through the ship, a tremendous glare of blue light that burned through it, a deep-throated hum of rushing power that made the entire ship vibrate with its beat. Rapidly Aarn was cutting down the power.

	"Everything's—full—nearly."

	The power died, the blue glare faded gradually, and finally was gone.

	"Done!" Aarn sighed as he cut his beam. "Got a stock of power now that counts, and I'm going to have more shortly. If we want to get back, Russ, we'll have to rip out some of those nice extra bedrooms and the lounge, and the lab will have to be filled with coils. That lab can be set up on Mag-ya, and we can work from there as a base. It may be years before we get back, for we've got a thousand observations to make. We've got to find our own particular space to get back to. It has no extra-great tension so that we can find it easily."

	The ship seemed to reel, then suddenly the television was working again; it showed the star spinning across the screen, then rapidly retreating as they headed back to the Magyan patrol.

	"How will you find our space?" asked Spencer after a moment of horrified thought. He'd not thought of that angle.

	"Take a chance, largely, if necessary. The quickest way home, if it will work, is to go after the space fields of anti-gravitor apparatus. We know they have that on Earth, and it isn't like a natural field, so we know intelligent beings live there.

	"But they may not be our intelligent beings, and we may simply land in third space. There may be a way to localize the thing, though.

	"But first—I'm interested in the Magyans. I noticed something you may not have done. What's their word for mother?"

	"Matra," replied the puzzled engineer.

	"Father?"

	"Paldri."

	"That's the thing I noticed, Just think. See if it isn't a series. Padre-pater-paternal. Vater-father-pere-paldri. And madre-mater-mutter-mere-rnother-matra. I swear those similarities are not chance. There were others I noticed. That is an Earth-human race. They were perfectly, absolutely human. You saw that. 

	"We're getting back to that squad now, and I'm going to learn their story. They're too human to be anything else. And this is the place where anything cast adrift from the planet would inevitably land. I want to hear that story—and about those Tefflans. I saw—one of them. Did you?"

	"Saw one? When?"

	"In the battle. It was red. And—it wasn't human. I hated it at sight. It was a devil! Tail—horns—"

-

Chapter VIII.

	ANTO RAYL eyed them uncertainly as he entered with the artist-teacher. "Where did you go?" he asked.

	"To the sun," replied Aarn, almost as surprised to find he could answer as to the fact that Anto had asked an intelligible intelligent question in the new language.

	"You went red, then went black, then went out of seeing." said Anto Rayl.

	"You can make sense with those fool words we learned yesterday," said Carlisle.

	"We went to the sun. The sun is far. We went fast. We went more fast than light, so we went out of seeing," Aarn answered Anto.

	Anto looked puzzled. His question was quite evident to the Jovian. He was puzzled, because he knew that nothing could go faster than light, and because these men were learning, the language. Now the strangers might be able to do the impossible; on the other hand they certainly could get mixed up in their language.

	Aarn spoke again; "We went fast—very very, very more fast. So fast that light was slow. It went red, then more fast, and it went black, so we went out of seeing."

	Anto smiled his understanding. "Why?"

	Aarn explained briefly, and with every word and phrase his surprise and shock grew. He found himself talking a sort of pidgin language that consisted principally of basic, simple ideas such as go, be, live, die, power, fast, slow, heat, cold, air, and such, and a number of modifiers. The result was a language which lacked all signs of beauty or nobility, but had every possible desirability as a quickly, easily learned language. One did an enormous amount of "going" and "being" but the result was intelligible.

	To attempt to maintain the peculiar jerky style of that simple but ungraceful language is useless. In giving Anto Rayl's story I abandon it completely for the English translation which gives the thought, not the words.

	Anto Rayl listened with astonishment to Munro's description of the source of the Sunbeam's power. He gaped in amazement, and stared with a new respect at the hulking form of the antigravity field. No ship of theirs had ever attempted to approach the sun, not only because of the terrific distance—so great that it would have taken a lifetime almost for a space ship going at any safe speed—but because of the terrific gravitational field. 

	"Doesn't that enormous energy burn out that coil? If it contains energy sufficient to lift this ship those trillions of miles against the terrible gravity of Anrel, I should expect it to be consumed," he said wonderingly.

	"It doesn't contain the power. That's the point. Quite the opposite. It keeps the space around it from containing that energy. It prevents the energy's existence. Therefore it contains none and is under no strain."

	"But the power coils?"

	"An altogether different thing. They build up a field instead of tearing one down."

	"But tell us your story. We feel sure that your race and ours are blood kin. How can this be? We came through the wall that leads from space to space."

	"Many, many, millias—periods of a thousand—thirty-hour days—ago, in a world on the other side of the Wall of Naught, our forefathers lived," said Anto Rayl. "It was a green world about the size of Magya, but slightly smaller, and made up of fair lands and broad seas. And in the middle of the greatest sea of all, lived the Ma-jhay-anhu, the mother race.

	"They built great cities, carved great monuments on their broad, flat continent, and developed a great civilization. They were a people who roamed little, who multiplied slowly, and they did not search the world and colonize it widely. As their ships grew greater, and their air flying machines came, they visited all the continents. In some they found wild savages, hairy and bestial. A different race altogether. They were almost apes. Colonies were not needed, none established.

	"Then—the year of the calamity. There was a shaking of the ground, a great cleft appeared in the side of the sacred mount, where lived the rulers of the Ma-jhay-anhu. And from it came the Teff-Hellani. They were something else, a misbreed; something the processes of life should not have produced. They were, we believed, the result of the evolution of a strange crossing of utterly different races, the primates of the goats. A million years ago, perhaps, these things had been locked under the Earth in a vast system of caverns beneath the continent of Mahu, and in the strange lights of strange elements they developed.

	"Their faces were long and narrow, and they had horns, but their eyes and their noses and their mouths were something like those of humans. They had a torso and a pair of true hands, but their feet were the feet of goats and their bodies were hairy. And the strange light had bred something into them that made them red, for the light was greenish in hue. They were hideous. It was hot in those depths, and they loved heat. Only in summer could they endure the outside air. Then they were always hugging great fires.

	"But they were intelligent, and their vitality was terrible. They were carnivorous. They captured our people and carried them off, women and children—for meat supplies. They had never had any before. They bred them down there in their foul caverns, and some few escaped to tell of the horrors.

	"And the Ma-jhay-anhu fought with more and newer weapons. Those two races hated each other instinctively. They always have. They always will, for that matter.

	"The warfare lasted longer than we know, save that it began with arrows and with swords, and ended finally with space ships and deadly rays. 

	"Tsoo-Ahs was the last great ruler of Ma-jhay-anhu. He saw that never could hope of the end come till the last member of one race or the other was wiped out. Both had airships now, so no colonies had been established, neither the Teff-Hellani nor the Ma-jhay-anhu had dared a small colony. But now Tsoo-Ahs sent thousands of young men and young women into all the corners of the world, hastily, for a plan had been made, and it must be executed before the Teff-Hellani learned of it.

	"The expeditions set out—half equipped, uninstructed, without plan. And Tsoo-Ahs, who had invented two great things that were to, make this thing possible, set to work. He had learned to extract the secret energy store of the indivisible particle. And he had learned to hurl the deadly ball of electric energy."

	"Great glory! Tsoo-Ahs. Zeus!" exclaimed Spencer.

	"Naturally. Sit down and shut up. Ever hear of Mu? That's what's left of Mahu. Ever hear of Easter Island, and the remains of the great city out in the middle of the Pacific? That's more of Mu—or Mahu. Now shut up and hear how come. Also hear how come Mayans built pyramids and the Egyptians built pyramids and the Babylonians or some race around there built the tower. And why the Greeks and other races kept showing and talking about human heads on inhuman bodies," said Aarn.

-

	"TSOO-AHS sent messengers to all his kingdom to hold a great feast," Anto Rayl went on. "And while the feast was in progress, and there was great merrymaking, and all laws and restrictions were relaxed, for he knew that all must die, Tsoo-Ahs began his work. He had made five great ships of a wonderful new kind which need no wings and could go far beyond the air. And he sent them up over the great crevice that was the entrance to the kingdom of the Teff-Hallani.

	"The ships began a bombardment which fused the rock and split it open. The great crevice spread more and more and presently an army of the Teff-Hellani swarmed up, and an air fleet, but the army was annihilated and the air fleet blown out of the air, and the great crevice widened, and stretched half a mile nearer to the blue-deep waters of the great sea.

	"And just as the waters of the sea roared suddenly downward into the mouth of the great caverns, a ship shot out, a ship not unlike our own, and it spit forth a series of great torpedoes that shot forward and buried themselves in the sides of four of the ships of the Ma-jhay-anhu, and the four ships were destroyed.

	"A fifth torpedo was fired, but the skillful ones aboard the remaining ship dodged it, and sent a lightning bolt toward the Teff-Hellani ship. The Teff-Hellani was forced to flee. His guns made no impression, and the lightning balls pursued him. His torpedoes were exhausted, and now, so great a volume of water flowed down the mighty mouth of the sunken caverns, the ship could not reenter, but could only watch and attempt to stop the flow. It was hopeless.

	"In an hour the world shook, and the vast continent of Mahu settled somewhat. Tsoo-Ahs had expected that, for he knew. Worlds are made of blocks, like many huge boats floating close together in water. When one block gets too heavy, it will sink. Mahu had been balanced. She was full of great caverns, but her rocks were very heavy. Then the caverns were filled with quintillions of tons of water, and Mahu grew heavy, and the great continent sank.

	"She sank and sank, till only the tops of a few volcanoes protruded, and then the violent action that shook the whole world took place. 

	"And now, remember, there remained two ships capable of fighting in the emptiness beyond worlds, the ship of the Teff-Hellani, and the remaining ship of the Ma-jhay-anhu. Now the five ships of the Ma-jhay-anhu were intended to have carried the last load of colonists to the five great colonies, and they were to have been the means of communication, and they carried tools and supplies and seeds.

	"But four were destroyed, and the fifth was busy—busy seeking that last ship of the Teff-Hellani.

	"They got on the trail of that ship, at last, by means of an instrument whose nature we cannot understand, and they followed it, faster and faster—faster—and each was protected by a powerful force that hurled meteors from its path, a reversing of the effect of gravity.

	"They engaged in battle, and the Teff-Hellani had the advantage because their shells would pierce the protective meteor shield and were attracted to their victim by some means, while the ball-lightning was not attracted, but tended to follow only a straight line, while the Teff-Hellani dodged about.

	"Both were too busily engaged. Across the small expanse on that little planetary system they had chased and fought, and now an incredibly rugged and dark mass of matter—a broken fragment of a world—loomed before them. Both struck it.

	"They were separated when they discovered themselves in this strange space. They each hoped the other was dead—destroyed. The space was too great. They could not locate themselves. Their ships were damaged, and each sought a planet.

	"We know of eighty-seven planets which revolve around this sun. There are more. And each of those two ships landed on a different planet. The Teff-Hellani picked one nearer the sun—warmer. But they could not get the warmth they wanted before their ship would give out, for this system is too vast. So they chose the planet we know as Teff-el. Our forefathers chose the planet we know as Magya.

	"The people were in a peculiar situation. They had started out to colonize, but not in such a place. They had expected many other people to aid them. Fortunately there were both males and females in the ship, so that life should not die, but there were no teachers, no thinkers, and no mechanicians. They were able to make, when they had tools and power to work with, and supplies of metal and chemicals. But they did not know how to find those supplies. They never had to.

	"In a generation the ship was a temple where the children worshipped the knowledge of the forefathers of the old world, blindly. Then, as generations passed, a stone temple was built about the now-ruined ship. Finally the stone temple crumbled from neglect, and the Magyans spread over their planet as savages, but never totally lost to knowledge, for the legends persisted. And gradually civilization roused itself once more and grew, and the legends were thought of only as foolish sayings, tales for children, and disregarded, the ancient ideas of gods and goddesses—superstition.

-

	"TEN hundred millia ago a man crossed space. He went to the nearest of our four moons. Then he went to the outermost. A crude rocket device. Again the thing was done. Then a ship finally took off from the fourth moon and went to the nearest planet. It was to have taken a millia. The ship never returned, but another went. It did not return. The third did not. The fourth came back, its rockets exhausted, and three greater rockets closed on its heels. It was a greatly improved model, or it would never had escaped as it did, nor lasted so long in the chase. Signals had preceded it, so there were half a dozen other rockets out to meet it, and the convoy drove off the rockets which had pursued across five hundred million miles of space. 

	"Fortunately, the rockets which went out to rescue the hard-pressed interplanetary rocket were a new experimental type. They were very swift and very agile. The Tefflan rockets were equipped with guns. Our rockets had none, but one clever rocket-pilot had a man stand in the air lock with a space suit on, and throw heavy crates and castings about."

	"The pilot headed his rocket straight for the enemy, then just short of a crash he changed his course abruptly, the heavy castings smashed their way straight on and ruined the ship. The others tried the same thing. One ship was punctured and died. The others retired hastily.

	"The returned rocket explorer, Harn Malto, told what had happened. The others had landed on Teff-el and been killed instantly. For the Tefflans had their ancient legends as we had ours, and they, too, had seen in the humans the hated enemy. Harn Malto saw in the Tefflans the hated enemy of legend.

	"The legends revived. And war rockets were made instantly. Some wild terrorist shouted that the cities would be destroyed and only underground was it safe. A man by the name of Hero Shal arose. He made a device which would crumble rock—a peculiar slow-explosion torpedo. He could dig his way into the hardest rock with amazing speed. The thing exploded grain by grain, only one grain at a time, but all in less than a second. It shattered rock, and the stuff came out dust. He was of course accused of attempting to advertise his product.

	"Six tiny Tefflan scout rockets dropped noiseless and lightless from the sky, and wiped out Mag-harun, our largest city, in thirty-five seconds. The scout ships were piloted by Tefflans who went uncomplaining to suicide. Each was a five-ton missile of metallic sodium, which exploded and cast the flaming, liquid -metal all over the city. The entire city was a single sheet of flame in seconds. Thousands and tens of thousands died through fire; as many more were killed by the poisonous, consuming dust that rose from the burning sodium.

	"It happened that Hero Shal had lived and built his underground home there. He was unharmed, and, when the blazing ruins cooled, walked out.

	"In a month cities were drilling their way underground; war rockets were being equipped with the deadly Shal torpedoes. Nothing could stop them. Even today the mightiest battleship armor frequently falls before them if they are not torn loose in time."

	"Was that what we saw used?" interrupted Aarn.

	"Yes. Those first rockets carried small ones, propelled by compressed springs. When the Tefflans came again, they destroyed another city, but there were few people in it, for, thanks to the wonderful Shal-crumbling bombs, great underground cities had been dug. They were half a mile below the surface. We had descended even as the original Tefflan race.

	"And our archaeologists were seeking that ancient temple. Millias passed in unavailing search, while the rockets grew more and more deadly. Bases were established on the outer moons, and fortified. They were our centers of defense. And at last a fleet of ten rockets set out for Teff-El. Each rocket carried a tiny scout rocket which was to do most of the fighting. 

	"That was the expedition of Tarnel Car. There followed expedition after expedition, and gradually the rockets improved.

	"Then, only about one hundred years ago, the Tefflans found the remnants of their ancient flyer. They found also the remnants of its engine. The engine had been protected by the very nature of it, and still existed intact. The driving apparatus, the disks, existed also intact, and that was enough. They made one of the new ships. They attacked us when they had three completed, and they destroyed utterly the bases on our moons, they destroyed our fleet, and they tried to destroy our cities.

	"But we made little scout cruisers that shot out of hidden holes in the ground at night, careened suddenly toward their huge armored battleships, and loosed a Shal torpedo. They had never learned the secret of the Shal torpedoes, have not yet. They destroy themselves, and are always destroyed in a damaged ship before it is abandoned.

	"The Shal torpedoes at last were made large enough so they ate holes in the giant battleships. Then rocket drives were added to the torpedoes so they destroyed the armor and went on drilling through to the inside.

	"Shal torpedoes loaded with poisons finally forced the Tefflans off the planet. They set up bases on our moons and began bombarding our cities. They were slowly eating their way inward when a Magyan discovered the secret of atomic energy independently. He was disappointed; it was not what he had hoped for. It has always annoyed us. We require, still, great amounts of fuel, though theory shows that an engine could be made which would require so little a single man could carry it."

	"How do you do it?" interrupted Aarn once more.

	"The atoms of two metals are mutually destructive in certain conditions. I cannot show you now. It would take too long. The destroyed atoms fly about at tremendous speeds in all directions, the various electrical charges blending in a sort of continuous flame.

	"This process is carried on in the center of a great boiler filled with a liquid metal. The flying atom-parts are captured in the metal, stopped, and become only heat and gas. The heat boils the metal and runs turbines; the gas is exhausted into space. But we are still limited, because, while there is a great deal of energy in the fuel, and it comes off as rapidly as we wish, the electric generators are not capable of handling more than a certain load, and are heavy."

	"Wouldn't water be better in your boilers than mercury? It isn't so terribly dense," suggested Spencer.

	"No; it isn't dense and won't stop the flying ions," Aarn reminded him. "Besides it would be smashed to atoms, literally, and give you something besides steam. Mercury is already smashed to atoms. But continue your story."

	"It is short, now," Anto Rayl said. "With atomic power we succeeded in repulsing the Tefflans. We discovered our own ship soon—the ancient one, and the ball-lightning device. Sadly, the Tefflans have learned that secret now. It will be so much longer before the last Tefflan is killed. If only the worlds were nearer that we might fight better and finish this!"

-

Chapter IX.

	"I THINK," said Spencer, "that we can tell you what became of the other part of your race—the part that remained behind. The colonists were in terrible condition, because now they had no means of acquiring tools, they had no supplies, they could not communicate, for their planes, I suppose, ran out of fuel quickly, and they had not carried sufficient apparatus to make more.

	"They, too, lost their civilization. Now some of those colonists had settled in Europe, as we call it today. They met there a race of terrible savages, short, squat men, incredibly ugly, cannibalistic: They called them 'ogres', and the myths of that savage race exist still. We know them scientifically as Neanderthals. These ogres were afraid to attack grown men, but they stole children, and some women, but eventually through ages of fighting were wiped out, and civilization grew again-.

	"And a portion landed in Africa and started a colony in Egypt. There were natives already there, and the natives were not intelligent, so the colonists learned the language of the natives, since the natives were too stupid to learn their language. And the colonists declined through several generations, while dragging the natives out of the utter abyss of ignorance, and then all advanced slowly to a high civilization, till at length the blood of the colonists was overcome by the poorer blood of the many native strains, and the civilization vanished.

	"And another group landed in America, and they found natives, as had those who landed in Egypt, and they followed a very similar process, and again the civilization died. In each case, when the blood of the old Ma-jhay-anhu was diluted, it won for a time, then died.

	"What happened to the others, I cannot guess. Maybe they landed in India.

	"But only the undiluted Ma-jhay-anhu blood lived to reach a civilization once more that endured fairly well.

	"And now, Anto Rayl, we have come through the Wall of Naught to join you. We shall go back, but this now is your life, your space, and your world. We shall open up paths of commerce between the worlds, perhaps?" Spencer turned to Munro questioningly.

	"Not till we learn how to find our own space," he answered. "That may require years of observation and calculation."

	Anto Rayl looked at Munro with interest. "What you need exists, I believe," he said at length. "An old legend: the captain of that ancient Ma-jhay-anhu ship wanted to go back through, and he was a scientist, and he spent many years observing and calculating, and in the end learned what he needed to know. But he found that the ship was no longer capable of making the trip, for parts had decayed in the more than thirty millia that had passed.

	"And the Teff-Hellani were exploring and found our world, attacked suddenly, and wiped out half the colony, one of the two cities. And they landed and looted the city, and among the loot was the book of data, inscribed on plates of an alloy of three noble metals which would not rust or decay, nor would change with time, according to the legend. For the old captain was not dead. But he said that the Teff-Hellani scientists would not be able to go through any more than he, but that one day the plates would be recovered from the Teff-Hellani. 'The Plates of the Secret will be recovered, and the last of the Teff-Hellani will be destroyed by a great world.' Those are the words of his prophecy. I do not understand the meaning of the last. But if you need data, I am sure those stolen plates, which we have never troubled to recover, will contain it." 

	"We've got to get them," snapped Aarn. "It took that old captain nearly a lifetime, and we don't want to wait as long as that!"

	"We're with you, Anto Rayl. Those Teff-Hellani might decide to try going back themselves, since we came through," said Spencer grimly.

-

	THERE was a restlessness among the ships of the Magyan squadron, and the great battleships swung slowly around and headed off to one side, towing behind them the massive wreck of the Tefflan battleship. The cruisers swung into position around the monster ships, and the destroyers and smaller craft followed. Only Anto Rayl's ship remained in attendance. A cylinder electromagnet suddenly shot out from it, and fixed itself in the magnetic pole of the Sunbeam. Immediately a slight jerk, and the destroyer started off towing the Sunbeam.

	Aarn grinned as he saw it. "Where's your planet, Anto Rayl?"

	Anto Rayl pointed it out, and Aarn made some adjustments. Suddenly the electromagnet shied away, a half dozen instruments on the control panel changed abruptly, the destroyer slipped rapidly to one side, then behind—and held steady. But the spot of light that was Magya was suddenly shifting slowly and steadily.

	A flash of light past the windows indicated the battle fleet as the Sunbeam, with the destroyer now in tow, swept past.

	"By the Lords of Space! How fast are we going? Why was there no acceleration?" exclaimed Anto Rayl.

	"I can't explain offhand, Anto Rayl. It depends on a question of the structure of space. We are going rapidly, and every atom of us was accelerated uniformly. This drive is not suitable to your great battleships—that is, we can't install it in those already made, but we can install acceleration neutralizers, and if that space disk you talked about is what I think it is, we can get real speed out of those big fellows. Your people will have to make a lot of things for me," Aarn went on.

	Ahead the planet Magya was looming larger, rapidly. And off to one side three moons showed. A dozen huge ships were swinging swiftly around the world to intercept them, and Aarn slowed. A light broke out on the destroyer, a bluish light that winked and trembled rapidly, then died into blackness. Instantly an answering light broke out on one ship below, and the squadron of the home guard swung into a ring formation, and picked up speed as the Sunbeam and its escort dropped slowly toward the planet.

	The ships were four huge battleships, like those that had come to their rescue out in space, but surrounded by a perfect cloud of small ships, some little larger than torpedoes.

	"What different ships does your navy consist of?" Aarn asked Anto Rayl.

	"There are six main classes of fighting machines. The great battleships are first, weighing in the neighborhood of one million five hundred thousand tons.

	"A battleship is almost indestructible. Even when blown completely in two, it is exceedingly dangerous, as it maintains maneuverability and fighting power. They are armed With the lightning apparatus, one set for each engine. Great guns, with armor-piercing Shal shells; Shal torpedo tubes, gas guns, and induction beams, and every known weapon, in the greatest possible size. 

-

	"THE HEAVY battle cruisers come next. Did I say that at present we have a total of fifty-six serviceable battleships? Two are in the Ma-kanee base. That is on our fourth moon. They are being repaired after a battle with the Tefflani. Three more are under construction. We are soon going to start manufacturing four, for a new steel process has made this increase possible. Also, we are now recovering all broken derelicts of space for their metal.

	"Of the heavy battle cruisers we have a total of a hundred and five in condition. Twenty-three are in repair docks on Manayo, the third moon. There was a heavy engagement recently that sent them there. The heavy cruisers weigh about five hundred thousand tons, and are equipped with two sets of engines, smaller lightning apparatus, heavy accumulator banks, lighter guns, but numerous torpedo tubes. Their armor is two and a half feet thick, enough to stop heavy shells, but not capable of stopping torpedoes.

	"They are half as powerful and a third as heavy as a battleship, so their movements are somewhat more rapid. They are very dangerous craft.

	"The next are the light cruisers. We have a hundred and eight of them now in commission. They are much the same as the heavy cruisers," with lighter engines, lighter accumulators, and much lighter armor. Their task is to punish the destroyers.

	"We have over five hundred and eighty destroyers, about five thousand scout ships, and about ten thousand spy ships. The destroyers carry a light ball-lightning apparatus."

	"I've always read," said Carlisle, "of space fleets meeting with seven thousand battleships from here, and twenty thousand from there, and so on."

	"Neglecting," said Spencer, "the fact that a battleship represents something like a hundred million credits of hard cash. It represents a year or more of hard work, over a million tons of steel and a lot of complex apparatus, plus a population running into the thousands.

	"How was it, Anto Rayl, that we were able to destroy that Tefflan battleship?'

	Anto Rayl smiled, and Aarn was smiling, too.

	"The answer is," said the latter, "that we didn't, I suspect."

	Anto Rayl nodded. "You didn't. But you hopelessly crippled it. They had already noticed our approach, and being so badly crippled, and expecting a further dose any minute, they left in haste. They didn't know your power was gone."

	"It was," said Munro grimly. "It isn't now. I see we seem to have arrived."

	They had been shooting over mountains and lakes, over a green world of plains and hills and great blackened, torn bare spots.

	"Bombs," Anto Rayl explained. "Radio-active. It will be dead for a century."

	Now they had reached the border of a great sea, where a huge mountain range seemed to run off into the water in a series of islands. Their escort had taken the lead, and was hovering over one of the islands now. 

	Suddenly Aarn gasped, for the, tiny blazing sun and the deep violet sky was obscured by a mist that grew more and more dense, a rapidly rising, vapory cloud that swept up from the sea. In a minute the entire district was veiled in an impenetrable fog. Even the television was badly hampered, so badly it could show but a few hundred feet ahead as they followed the leading ship closely. Anto Rayl was silent, intently watching the screen.

-

	THE DESTROYER ahead was making straight for the largest of the near-by islands. And, as' they neared it, a peninsula a quarter of a mile long slid silently out to sea and sank beneath the waves. A great metal-lined bore was revealed, and instantly the destroyer dropped into it. The Sunbeam was directly behind. That bore was an oval cylinder, five hundred feet wide, and two hundred long, and extending down beyond sight, curving into the bowels of the planet.

	The lighted bore was suddenly darkened by the settling of the great rocky lid back in place.

	The tunnel had straightened out. Now, suddenly, they came upon a great factory, a huge, brightly lighted underground workshop. Gigantic forms were in construction off across the big, pillared cavern.

	"This is San-toa," said Anto at that moment. "We wish to show you our ships. You have shown us yours—"

	Aarn laughed good-naturedly. "Haven't shown you anything," he replied.

	Anto looked down at the shorter man in surprise. "Nothing?" he asked in surprise. "But surely we have seen the machinery?" 

	"You could not duplicate it. It is hidden within itself. But I will show you things you must make. Those two new battleships—have them tear out the accumulators you have. I will give them a better kind. The type you are using we have had on Earth for many years, and this type is far better. Further, I must have a power ship built—"

	Aarn Munro talked rapidly. He talked, in the end, to a hundred scientists of this world, Magya, and showed them a thousand things. And he gave them specifications. Then he talked to the space-force staff and showed them a greater source of power lay in the sun.

	"To fight successfully, you need power. I will give you three things that can be installed in all your battleships; the accumulators, the so-called aggie coils, the magnetic atmosphere which renders the Shal torpedoes useless and stops the lightning balls, and the transpon beam, which will cut holes in battleships. To do this, the battleships must have a greater power supply. A fourth thing I may be able to install, an automatic acceleration neutralizer that will release your men of the strain of motion.

	"The power supply will be obtained in this way: A series of four mother ships, with their thin walls, their huge accumulator volume, must be stripped at once, and the new type accumulator put in, and with it such apparatus as I shall show you. These ships will make the trip to the sun, faster than light, collect the needed energy, and return loaded. They can charge four battleships, eight heavy cruisers, or twelve light cruisers. That must be done for victory!"

-

Chapter X.

	"WE HAVE," said Carlisle with annoyance, "been here for forty-seven of their long days, and we seem to have gotten nowhere. The Tefflans have, on the other hand, conducted a successful raid in which three heavy cruisers and a warship were destroyed with the loss of two light cruisers, and a damaged battleship."

	Spencer smiled wanly. "Brother Trolley Car, what you need is work. You've been wandering around San Toa here like a lost soul and doing nothing."

	"What could I do?" demanded Carlisle angrily. "That's what gets me. I'm not used to loafing. I couldn't even help particularly when you ripped the old Sunbeam to pieces and made her over. The only thing that's left that I know anything about is the kitchen and the air apparatus. You tore out the lab, the calculating room, the lounge, most of the quarters, and loaded in more accumulator coils. Then you crowded so darned much junk in that power room I don't know what all is there. I know you have a lightning apparatus—but what else have you?"

	Aarn smiled smugly. "Much the same in the other three fields. Ball lightning is an electric field of one sign that is self-maintaining because its intensity is so great it simply wraps itself into a pocket in space. As soon as any great intensity of another field enters it, it unwraps—and then look out.

	"The ball lightning has one difficulty; it always goes bang at the surface of the thing it touches. So I tried ball-magnetic field. We got that. That has the advantage of—well, look. I even made a riflelike model for the spy ships to carry."

	Aarn's "riflelike" model must have weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, but the Jovian handled it with ease. He led Carlisle out of their quarters, down through the laboratory that had been taken from the Sunbeam and set up in one of the bright-lighted chambers the Magyans had hewn in the solid rock of the planet with the aid of the wonderful Shal torpedoes.

	At the far end of the laboratory were several heavy sheets of armor plate, steel twelve inches thick, so heavy that they were more nearly described as blocks than as sheets. Yet the great battleships carried this plate as light inner-hull armor, while blocks four feet thick made the outer hull.

	"Now remember: This fires a magnetic-ball field. It will proceed to set itself inside the magnetic material, and then release its energy. An electric-ball field tends to spread itself on the surface and release. A gravitational field is even better, since it seeks the center of gravity of the body and then releases. But a little spy ship is so light it has no effective center of gravity of its own. The battleships and cruisers are the fellows those will go after."

	Aarn raised the strangely shaped weapon and pressed the trigger release. There was a thud somewhere inside, then a steady stream of strangely glowing orange balls shot out of the muzzle and curved gently to one side as they sped across the room. They struck the heavy metal, though—because they jerked sharply out of their course toward it. The first struck and was buried in the metal.

	Instantly an explosion occurred inside the metal that made a three-inch blister on the surface. The next was a little to one side and arrived perhaps a hundredth of a second later. A third, followed, and a fourth. The result of several hundred of these ball fields was a suddenly opening cleft of white-hot iron that tore the heavy armor in two instantly.

	"That," explained Aarn, "is the general idea."

	"Will it do the same on the heavy stuff the battleships carry?" asked Carlisle.

	"Well—not quite so well. The big ships carry such thick armor it will dissipate the energy almost as fast as we can get it there, with the result that the thing has to eat its way gradually through, and can't, because the ship moves. I'll admit the Shal torpedoes have their points. We're improving those, by the way, by putting magnetic grips on them that will pull them on as long as there's anything stopping them."

	"Hm-m-m—I have an idea. I wonder if there are any chemists around here," said Carlisle softly. "I'm going to have a talk with Mayno Shar."

	Carlisle wandered off in a sudden dense fog of thought. Spencer stared after him in amazement, and a broad grin spread across Aarn's face.

	"Well, and that's that," said Spencer.

	"He's got an idea, and when he gets one that hard, one's all he can handle." Munro grinned. "I'd like to know what it is, though."

-

	THEY learned a few hours later, when Carlisle and Mayno Shar came back together, talking earnestly. They wanted aluminum. And they wanted iron oxide, and magnesium, and a magnetic-field-ball device.

	Aarn had to help them, but he was as interested as they, by the thing they turned out finally—a round bomb of thick graphite, filled with a charge of iron oxide and aluminum powder, with a detonator attachment, and a projector that would project it by means of a spring catapult. Compressed air would have had less tendency to injure the bomb, but the gas would be difficult to obtain and require heavy equipment to carry it in space.

	They tried the finished bomb, some four feet in diameter, on an old piece of battleship-armor plate the next day. From a projector tube placed on the side of a destroyer, the bomb was held.

	The physical mechanism functioned perfectly. Though the armor plate was being jerked about by another destroyer, and though equipped with even a repulsing space disk, the bomb found its hold and clung.

	For ten seconds nothing happened. Then a red light suddenly glowed over the bomb, it turned white—and simultaneously a terrible pencil of blinding, blue-white radiance sputtered out of a one-inch hole in the side of the bomb that touched the plate of metal.

	That one-inch stream fused the metal as suddenly as a stream of boiling water would fuse a cake of ice. It ate holes in the armor as it slowly spun around, and within one minute the terrible, blinding stream of white-hot, boiling iron and aluminum shot through the armor and on into space, squirting out under the pressure of the vaporous iron inside the now white-hot graphite bomb.

	No other substance known could have resisted the terrific heat, and, though mechanically weak, graphite had served. 

	Had that armor plate been part of a vessel, a gaping hole would have been cut, through which the air would have escaped. Then that incredibly fierce flame of melted, boiling iron would have squirted over whatsoever might Lie behind.

	"I thought of that," said Carlisle with satisfaction, "because of an experiment I once saw as a demonstration of thermite. The lecturer had a crucible of iron with the thermite mixture suspended over a vertical series of ten other iron crucibles, and finally a pan of sand. He started the thermite, and a drop of that incredibly hot iron fused its way through the bottom of the first crucible, and then plink-plink-plink-plink-plink—right through every single one of those other iron crucibles, and ended up by fusing some of that sand to glass.

	"You know, it is almost unthinkable—the effect of having a real quantity of matter at a temperature like that."

	"It is," admitted Aarn. "I never really respected the power of chemistry so much. That's a heat ray for sure. Physics couldn't make one, but when you turn your little hose loose and—"

	"I wonder," suggested Spencer, "if we couldn't do just that—use a hose?"

	"No," replied Aarn quickly. "The white-hot stuff would cool too quickly—cool before it reached its target."

	"No," said Carlisle simultaneously, "because the graphite would evaporate and bum somewhat with each firing. The crucible would have to be replaced, and you couldn't make anything to hold the holder. The crucible gets so hot you couldn't hold it, remember."

	"I want to ride in that new battleship when they finish it," said Spencer.

	"It's a beautiful thing," agreed Aarn, "but remember that nothing is absolutely, immune to attack. It's conceivable that the Tefflans might develop some new weapon that would destroy it instantly. That thermite trick would certainly make it look sick if it ever got through the magnetic atmosphere."

	"But with the things it's got—the gravity-field ball, magnetic-field balls, besides electric, the magnetic atmosphere, that interference device to stop the radio-frequency induction, the aggie coils for power—even momentum wave drive, and the faster-than-light escape, if necessary. You couldn't touch it!" Spencer scoffed.

	"No, listen: Nothing man ever made was beyond man's power of destruction," snapped Aarn. "I could destroy that battleship with the little Sunbeam. Suppose I attached about fifty of those thermite leeches of Carlisle's. You couldn't escape them by running away, because they'd just dig in their magnetic toes and hang on.

	"Add that I smashed an unexpected transpon beam loaded with everything those big aggie banks we now carry could give, and headed it straight for their own main aggie-coil bank. I'd have them underpowered in a fraction of a second. Their faster-that-light escape wouldn't work, their armor would be full of holes, and the ship full of white-hot iron spray.

	"A few gravity-ball fields would settle down comfortably somewhere in the neighborhood of the main antigravity coils and blow them to kingdom come. The point being that I could, with a sudden attack of unexpected ferocity, cripple the thing so it couldn't run before it could get started. Then everything else in sight could pile on—and good-by Ma-jhay-anhy!" 

	"But the Tefflans have no Sunbeam," protested Carlisle.

	"They haven't been idle—and they know that they're in for some new kind of trouble," replied Spencer. "I see Aarn's point."

-

	"WHAT are the plans of the Magyans in regard to further battles?" asked Carlisle.

	"Anto Rayl said that they wanted to finish another squadron of the aggie-supply ships and set up heavier defenses on the four moons here. Then they plan to launch a grand attack on Teff-el and simply wipe it out. The present plan, for one thing, involves the use of Teff-el's moon, Teff-ran. Teff-el has only one moon, and it's about three hundred miles in diameter. They plan to capture it—and use it for ammunition to destroy Teff-ell"

	"Sweet wavering worlds! How could they?" gasped Carlisle.

	"Not impossible now," Aarn said earnestly and eagerly. "They thought of using antigravity coils and freeing it of Teff-el's attraction; but I convinced them that they'd be wasting a lot of power loosening Anrel's greater attraction, so they simply plan to attach a huge system of momentum-wave engines and drive straight into the planet with all the energy they possibly can. That's one reason for the extra fleet of supply ships. Those aggie ships will be regular mobile aggie coils, and not much more. About one million tons of aggie coil."

	The soft musical hum of the door annunciator sounded, and presently Aarn returned with Anto Rayl in tow—and highly excited.

	"A scout ship just came back—they've been circling Teff-el for the last twenty days at a speed so great that no photographic plate could catch them, and painted so black no eye could see them—and the men report a huge war formation is leaving. That means an attack in full force."

	"That means something else—they've got something distinctly new to fight with, and they hope they can do so much damage to you right now that you won't be able to use the things that the Sunbeam had. They know that you have the secrets we had, and they know that small ship was invulnerable to the attacks of their largest and heaviest. If they are picking a fight now, that means something new and deadly. Send one of the new destroyers out to attack, and have a fleet of the new scouts near by to watch. We'll go, and you can meet us at the Sunbeam, Anto Rayl."

	"That is the plan," said Anto Rayl, smoothly, "formulated by the High Command."

	Anto laughed slightly, bitterly, and went on: "Do not think we have been fighting these Tefflans for centuries without learning their every thought. We are worried, I may say, for they know ours."

-

Chapter XI.

	THE GUARD fleet stationed near Magya itself had dropped far behind now, and the formation of the fleet was perfect as it swept up and on into space. A disk of scout ships was flung wide ahead, with the occasional new scout ships of the type capable of faster-than-light speeds scattered as messengers.

	Behind this warning disk, ten thousand miles behind, came the fleet, a huge sphere of restlessly weaving destroyers, an inner sphere of cruisers, both light and heavy, and then the solid might of the great battleships. 

	In the forefront of the battleships was the Sunbeam, her occupants watching interestedly the views on the television, relayed from the leading destroyer. A tiny cloud of dust in space far ahead represented the attacking Tefflan fleet, hurling itself forward to the battle eagerly. Telescopes were trained on them from the scout ships ahead, and suddenly half a dozen scout ships vanished from their places, to appear beside the battleships of the Magyans.

	Despite all rules of space warfare, the Tefflans were sending their heaviest battleships ahead, in the lead, with the heavy cruisers re-enforcing them. There were ten of the heaviest ships, and all very evidently new. And the cruisers were all equipped with new apparatus, something the trained eyes of the Magyans had detected instantly.

	Two great Magyan battleships suddenly leaped forward, speeded, and vanished in speed greater than light. They were to be sacrifice ships if necessary, but those two giant ships out of Magya's active fleet of thirty-six were deadly machines.

	Their own fleet dropped swiftly behind and then vanished to them, while the fleet ahead shifted and shimmered in the strange effects of their speed. They swooped nearer, then, suddenly, were almost among the Tefflan ships—and appeared. The Tefflans had had no warning, for none could race through space faster than light, and the warning the Magyans might have given trailed somewhere behind.  

	For thirty seconds the Magyan battleships operated with every piece of offensive apparatus they possessed. A thousand giant thermite bombs spattered out of each, to seek and hold a place on some enemy ship. Thousands of terrific magnetic balls shot forth, to bury their fangs in the armor of some cruisers, and rip a great gap in it; to heat the armor of some battleship yellow, hot, and soft. Sudden terrific explosions must have echoed deep within cruiser and battleship as gravity-field balls sank, reached the center, and blasted their energy in the heart of the ship.

	And each great battleship was slicing about with six transpon beams, not such as that the Sunbeam had used, but run by far vaster power coils. They cut through a cruiser's armor instantly and sliced it cleanly in two. They burned and sputtered at a mighty battleship's armor, and cut and bored through to the heart of the ship. Shal torpedoes lurched and ground and shuddered their way into weakened armor, and great white-hot holes appeared where thermite sprays ate their way through.

	So sudden and terrific was the attack that the cruiser force was nigh destroyed before any realization of the presence of an enemy was possible.

	Destroyed—but not destroyed. For though the cruisers were sliced by the transpon beams, their armor pierced by thermite and magnetic bombs, their hearts blasted by gravity-energy bombs, they were carefully designed to withstand and operate under any conceivable punishment, and the Tefflans had designed well.

	The ten great battleships were crippled, their walls punctured by the thermite, twisted and softened by magnetic bombs, their deepest center torn and blasted by gravity bombs, but their engines might be wrecked and leave them by far the greater part of their energy—the wide-scattered accumulators.

	Shells were flying from the battleships and the cruisers, torpedoes—but they turned aside and exploded far from the Magyan ships. Great induction beams snapped out—and died a flaming death on the screens of interference that Magyan ships had been equipped with for fifty millia.

-

	THEN every man in the fore part on the great Magyan battleship Hantu Toa stiffened suddenly at his post, and writhed and twisted in sudden grating, grinding agony, his nerves shivered and shuddered, his uncontrollable muscles jerked and snapped about, his eyes grew dim, and his hearing ceased. Meaningless shouts of uncontrolled sound burst from them, and they toppled—dead.

	Slowly, inexorably, the thing crept backward—and another wave started at the stern and worked forward. A mad hand touched something—the great mass of steel hurtled forward at thousands of miles a second, suddenly driven into another space, and swiftly gaining velocity. It tangled, somehow, with the electric fields in the accumulators of a Tefflan ship, and both vanished in an intolerable blaze of energy.

	The Anlan Toa suddenly turned and vanished in speed greater than light. The unknown secret was known. For the fore part of the Anlan Toa had been touched, and men had jerked and bellowed and died. The Magyan fleet had halted and hung motionless now, waiting. Swiftly a dozen scientists entered the Anlan Toa and looked. They had the answer in seconds. A few glances—

	"Coagulated," said Carlisle as he saw the tissue of the dead men.

	"And I know how. Super-sonic waves," Aarn put in softly. "They induce them somehow in our ships. How in—got it, I think. Make us do it. It's the radio-frequency induction beam heterodyning our own defense interference, somehow, into supersonics."

	"Then if we turned off our own interference that would prevent these deaths?" asked a Magyan somewhat doubtfully.

	"I think so. Send a destroyer—let them try that. One of the new ones, lest torpedoes or other weapons destroy it," suggested Aarn eagerly.

	A destroyer vanished as it shot ahead, a destroyer equipped with momentum-wave drive, magnetic atmosphere, the transpon beams, and powered by aggie coils.

	They watched it by television screens relayed from tiny spy ships up there on the front. They saw the destroyer appear suddenly, spray a collection of the deadly thermite bombs that clung and burned and ate. Magnetic-ball fields, gravitational-ball fields shot out. Torpedoes. A transpon beam that sputtered through the armor of half a cruiser that was as active as ever the whole had been.

	For seconds the destroyer continued operating, a sputtering transpon beam driving its white-hot needle to the heart of a great battleship now, slicing through accumulator banks. The battleship suddenly began to blossom with blue-white spots of eating thermite spray. The deadly stuff was spewing out in a dozen two-inch streams. The destroyer released a new flock of torpedoes—

	And its outlines softened gradually, and it spread, as though the disintegration process of time, of a billion billion years, had been encompassed in a dozen seconds. Then it suddenly puffed gigantic, a dust cloud, through which still burning lights showed, but vanished suddenly, with sudden flaming, sputtering transpon beams that fought and stabbed and blew up huge stores of aggie energy.

	The little spy ship that bore the televisor suddenly reeled and quivered under the released field impulses.

	But the destroyer was gone.

	The Magyan turned to Munro, his face white. 

	Munro was staring ahead in horror, in terrified bewilderment. "Disintegration—they disintegrated it!" he gasped. Slowly he passed his hand across his eyes, and a look of deep puzzlement came. "But—they could not do that. It's—it's impossible 1"

	"They did it!" snapped the Magyan.

	"They didn't. They only seem to have," replied Aarn half consciously. He was thinking: "We're going aboard the Sunbeam."

	The solarites went back to their ship. And Aarn was silent as he looked ahead.

	"I think—I know—"

	His fingers flew as he let up a dozen controls. Then he pressed one. The fleet around them vanished. They were diving headlong through the' mass of broken and damaged Tefflan ships. On—on—to the main mass of the great battle fleet.

	In the exact center of the battle fleet Aarn stopped. "We are," he said, "invisible. I have left a small hole so that the television eyes can see. They know we are here and presently will, I suspect, be doing something about it.

	"I'm going to open up this shell of mine—no; I won't have to—yes; I will. I'll open up, and send them a flaming invitation to battle in the form of all our thermite bombs, and our best wishes wrapped up in ball-gravity fields. Carlisle, you handle the thermite. I'll handle the ship. Spencer, take the gravity."

	They saw little change, but at Aarn's signal, they began to work. It was rapid, for the Sunbeam spun quickly on her axis. Aarn had added the transpon beam, and cut a terrible swath of white-hot destruction through half a dozen destroyers that had come in to the battleship squadron to see what was the cause of the terrific field disturbances.

	"One"—said Aarn—"you have five-three-four—gone. The field's shut. Watch!"

-

	THE THERMITE bombs were seeking anchorage. The gravity bombs found victim after victim, a flash of lurid light, a few score exploding ports, and a sudden wild movement of the struck ship as the lights going out momentarily told of that.

	The thermite bombs took hold. A score of them had been released from the twin tubes, and now a score of ships felt the blistering two-inch stream of white-hot iron.

	The television apparatus abruptly went dead. There was a tinkling and whistling—and then Aarn grinned as it stopped.

	"I thought that would stop it."

	In answer to Aarn's contented expression, there was a sudden terrific scream of tortured metal, a flash of terrific light from somewhere behind them, then the clang of automatic doors shutting. Aarn blanched, and there was the whine and thump of heavy transpon beams in action. He ran silently for several seconds, then shutters moved from the window. They were in empty space. 

	"I neglected to consider these things. That explosion that seems to have dented in the rear portion of our hull was caused by one of those ball-lightning discharges. It simply was sucked into the field that stopped the light, and that field was so tight, the ball lightning touched our shell.

	Now, I can't make an invisibility device work, because they can find it.

	"That death ray killed off the crew of those ships—that's heterodyne with the radio-frequency beam. They have something else—something carrying millions of horse power. Must have some wonderful apparatus to do it. It's a fatigue ray. It does exactly what those Shal torpedoes do, only does it along a beam. It doesn't break by its energy. It doesn't fuse. It simply crumbles things. I got an analysis on it from those controls I set up.

	"They had it arranged for the best values on iron and steel. We have beryllo-aluminum walls largely. The thing didn't get that right off. You see steel is made up largely of crystals, and while a pretty good conductor, those crystals can have a distinct difference of potential across their faces. And there is a sort of insulation between each.

	"They have a radio-frequency beam of some sort that simply starts pounding the individual crystals of steel, and all those that happen to lie on just about the right frequency start vibrating in time—and all of a sudden they break and turn to the finest sort of liquid dust. The strength goes out of the stuff and leaves the most useless sort of granular, rotten metal." Fatigue. Too much pounding. They pound it a couple of million times a second and give it a million years' natural fatigue in a second.

	"Now here's the pleasant situation. If we keep up the radio-frequency interference screen, the disintegrating beam is stopped. If we do keep it up, though, they start their heterodyning stunt, which is probably done with the same beam, and kill all the men. If we take it down to save the men—they crumble the ship."

	"Then what can we do, Aarn?" demanded Anto Rayl.

	"Fight!" replied Aarn grimly. "It's a terrible blow to learn this—but think also that they are suffering, because they thought to disintegrate your ships safely from a distance. They won't. That's your consolation."

	Anto Rayl made a wry mouth. "It is sour consolation."

-

	THE TELEVISION screen came back to life as Martin and Canning finished their repairs. Canning reported that the damage caused by the explosion amounted to seven destroyed aggie coils, and three plates fused away. No great damage had been done, really, but it might have finished the trip.

	"We will tell your people," said Aarn, as the Magyan fleet suddenly appeared on the television screen, "and they must fight. That is all I can offer now. Their best method will be to release their bombs, far, wide, and handsome, in the knowledge that no bombs can endanger their own ships, while every bomb that wanders loose is an additional danger to every Tefflan ship. Tell them, too, to try using the screen, and dropping it rapidly—alternating, say, anywhere from one to ten times a second, and hope for a good effect."

	The battleships were well behind now, as the fleets neared each other, and at the suggestion of a Magyan scientist, the entire fleet of momentum-drive equipped ships suddenly acquired the greatest possible momentum, released all the bombs available, then fell back with the rest of the fleet. More bombs were acquired from the supply ships, as the Tefflan fleet maneuvered more slowly into position.

	The bombs struck without warning. They had been moving at terrific speed, and they swept in, in a solid front. At a thousand miles they began to illuminate Tefflan hulls, splotches of blinding radiation.

	The great battleships of the Tefflan fleet were almost indestructible, but before the terrible lashing attack of thousands of thermite bombs, the searing flame of the transpon beams, and the crippling attack of the gravity bombs, even the greatest might be beaten down.

	The cruisers, the destroyers, and the lighter craft vanished under the attack of swift-darting spy ships and scouts. Here, for the first time, the scout ship became a prime instrument of war, for, loaded with aggie coils, and equipped with the invisible transpon beams, they were so tiny as they darted about, without lights and black in black space, that they could actually wander in among the cruisers and destroyers of the enemy, and with their deadly transpon beams, they were capable of ripping a destroyer open.

	The Tefflan destroyers carried disintegrating, or fatigue-ray apparatus, but not powerful enough to operate against anything larger than a scout ship, and the scout ships were far speedier, far harder to find. The Tefflan destroyers retired in haste, and were wiped out completely by scout ships they could not locate.

	Their own scout and spy ships were destroyed utterly by the little two-man spy ships of the Magyan forces. Equipped with aggie coils and momentum drive, the one thousand new spy ships could maneuver far more swiftly. The torpedoes and shells of the enemy were useless, as the magnetic atmosphere stopped them, and the scout ships of Tefflan carried no death ray or fatigue ray.

	The battle was fought at long range, by mutual consent. Tefflan lost her destroyers, her spy and scout ships. What destroyers were not accounted for by the hundreds of thermite bombs, or—by a well-placed gravity or magnetic bomb, or ripped open by a transpon beam, escaped under the sacrificial cloud of scout and spy ships.

	But the great cruisers, and even the light cruisers, were proof against the scout ships, and the battleships were not even annoyed by them. The light cruisers made it their duty to seek out and destroy the somewhat dangerous scout ships. Their armor would glow and sputter under the combined attack of four or five transpon beams, a cloud of gas would be released to make the beam visible, and then a fatigue ray would shoot back along it.

	The main battle, though, was between the battleships of each side, for Magyan battleships could stand a short exposure to the fatigue ray. No damage was done until the actual weakening suddenly and spontaneously occurred. It was a process of building up molecular-crystal vibrations till the crystals finally snapped, and until that point was reached there was no damage. Then, there was all damage.

	The enormous mass of a battleship wall absorbed a tremendous amount of energy, and only when several beams got in perfect phase was the result quick.

	Too, by using the screen for a brief part of a second, the interruption, coming once every hundredth of a second, was able to weaken the effect, as the vibrations damped out in the protected period, and the exposure meant only a mild, steady torture to the men within the ship. 

-

	THIRTY great battleships formed the front, against twenty-nine whole Tefflan battleships, but there were no less than eleven half ships in action, and each of these was fully half as deadly as a full battleship.

	The Tefflan beams reached out—but weakened by distance. Similarly, the deadly transpon beams were weakened in distance. But the transpon beams could heat the great battleships slowly, if they held, and that meant unbearable conditions within. The trouble lay in the fact that the men aboard the Magyan ships were tortured with jerking muscles, as the supersonic waves struck them, just mildly, but enough to make their control poor, their aim bad.

	The Sunbeam hung far back. She had no walls thick and strong enough to withstand even a momentary attack of the beam if applied on the right frequency. Instead, she was occupying herself in sending bombs.

	"I think," said Aarn softly, "this battle will go to Magya. I think it is certain to. It would have gone to Tefflan, but the destroyers and cruisers of each fleet are almost worthless, and the Tefflan commanders realize that the battleships could never pass the heavy defenses on the four moons and on Magya itself. And the cruisers can't help now."

	"What good are these bombs doing?" asked Spencer in exasperation. "Can't we make another flying attack in there and get out before they spot us?"

	"They've spotted us right now. They probably know just where we are, and the instant we disappeared, their observers would be watching for us back among 'em. They'd have us floating in a sea of electric flame before we stopped moving," Munro said precisely.

	"Further, these bombs are doing a lot of good. They are disconcerting. The Tefflans' generals and scientists may have figured out how it is done, but that's less comfort to them than the knowledge of the general idea of that death ray to us. We can do something about that, but they can't stop these things. And these have no distance limit.

	"The center of every single one of those battleships and cruisers up there is an exploding, white-hot danger point. Not one of those ships has any heart left. The engine room is gone, and, probably, half the reserve apparatus, the commanding officer, and the main controls. The big thing is—those ships have no source of power."

	"Say, if those gentle little toys have no source of power," Carlisle said bitterly, "I'd like to see one with a source of power."

	"They are drawing on accumulated power. Heck of a difference!" said Munro. "The accumulators are exhaustible. If the thing keeps up indefinitely, they'll be sunk, because they can't get home without power, and—Sweet stellar spectra! That's a thought!"

	Aarn turned the Sunbeam suddenly, applied all his power, and headed for Magya. They leaped to the planet faster than light. In swift syllables he explained to Anto Rayl, and when they slowed to less than the speed of light over San Toa, Anto signalled for the opening of the great gateway.

	Again the clouding steam, and again they sank into the island. With familiarity, Aarn hurled the Sunbeam at a reckless pace through the tunnel and into the hangar which was hers. He was out of the ship and into his laboratory in great leaping bounces, the bounces of a Jovian on a lighter world, and in a hurry.

	Spencer was after him, calling Canning to accompany him. Aarn was already at work on the calculating machine, and with a great loose-leaf notebook filled with fine-lettered data. Minutes sped by into hours as Aarn labored.

	Information was brought in from the battle front. Conditions remained almost the same now, balanced, though one of the Magyan battleships had failed in her fore quarters and collapsed utterly. She was turned about now and still functioning, while most of the light cruisers of the Tefflan forces had left the front and retired far behind the lines, out of range of the aiming powers of the various bombs. The scout ships were still tearing at them, however.

	And one Tefflan battleship half was out of action and limping home.

-

	TWO HOURS passed, and at last Aarn had what he wanted. In half an hour he had designed a mechanism to do the work. In an hour more Canning had turned it into three different types of patterns.

	Scout ships came in from the fleet some three hours later to pick up newly made apparatus. The things were crude—simple.

	The messages that had come to Magya had been equaled in number by the messages going out. And some of those had gone from the great headquarters on Magya. The result had been a steady retreat, the sacrifice of two old-type destroyers, with radio control operated over miles-long cables. Tefflan seemed to be winning. Six great battleships had fallen back and were evidently undergoing repair, the supply ships clustering near them.

	Tefflan ships advanced. But presently, about the time the scout ships began racing out to the fleet with the new apparatus, they became worried and started retreating rapidly themselves.

	Magya followed just as rapidly, at a distance. Tefflan ships retreated more rapidly, and some of the cruisers which had retired came up and battled bravely. But uselessly, for they were drowned in great transpon beams, as one huge battleship after another leaped close and retired before seriously weakened.

	The battleships of Tefflan were in frank retreat, but the Magyans held on like leeches, attacking vigorously, and the Tefflans realized in dismay that their opponents would not leave them. In haste, the Tefflans raced for the protection of the great defenses on the planet, the one moon of Teff-el, and the ten orbital forts they had set up.

	And one by one the great Magyan battleships started their new apparatus as it was installed. Crude—not very effective—but the momentum-wave field was distorted and twisted, till it gripped the Tefflan ships. Like a gigantic hand, it clutched them and slowed them. The six battleships that had fallen behind came up now, nearer than before, then held back also.

	Frantically the Tefflan commanders turned their waning power into the drive, while cruisers attacked desperately to free the greater ships. Grimly, the Magyan battle fleet held on and rained terrific magnetic-field bombs on the cruisers, that warped and twisted and fused their frames and their armor, and the Shal torpedoes ate their way in. There were no more thermite bombs, but the gravity bombs were being supplied now largely from the six ships which had retired to the supply ships and had all their power coils recharged. The gravitational balls were wasting their energy in a compartment they had blasted to gas and molten waste.

	The accumulators which had been centered here were gone, along with the engines. The Tefflan captains saw their power declining—the last dregs of energy slipping away. Huge fatigue rays drove at the now-close Magyan ships, and the armor and frames began to crumble slowly—slowly. The ships fell back abruptly. Those ships were deserted, too weak now, and radio-controlled. Their momentum-drives pulled back, and the Tefflan ships pulled on. Their beams were wasted once more in disintegrating the huge masses of those four old hulks.

	After that, they had no hope. Their power was so far gone, to attempt to destroy more ships meant complete loss of the entire fleet. The Magyan ships closed in. Heavy cruisers of the Magyan fleet closed in—

	Bright transpon beams sectioned the Tefflan hulks neatly and with dispatch a few thousand miles beyond the ultimate range of the orbital forts and the planetary defense beams. The battleships were sectioned, and each ship of the Magyan fleet took a piece in tow according to its power. 

	The cruisers were sectioned where they had been destroyed further in space, and the five-hundred-million-mile trip back to Magya begun.

	Teff-el, was, for the first time in centuries, totally without a battle fleet, and yet the Magyan ships did pot dare to approach. For those orbital forts were as invulnerable to a battleship as a battleship might be to a one-man spy ship without weapons.

	And, further, Magya received back, of its thirty-six brave battleships, seventeen. A battle between battleships of space is not like a sea battle, for the battleship of space never sinks, and every portion is capable of fighting until every man within is killed; a battle between space battleships is to the death of every individual. When, space battleships were destroyed, they were annihilated completely. Only the millions of tons of fined steel that the Magyans were towing back remained.

	There was no hope of learning the secret of the death beams and the fatigue ray, for the apparatus had been fused completely by a built-in accumulator. A touch of an emergency button, the release of all air pressure on a special valve—and the apparatus was reduced to scrap.

	So, though Tefflan contributed millions of tons of steel to the new battle fleet, they contributed no knowledge.

-

Chapter XII.

	AARN was worried as he rejoined his friends after the conference.

	Spencer looked at him questioningly. "Couldn't make anything out of the wreckage?"

	"No," replied Aarn; "but that's not what's worrying me. That's a minor point. We don't need that, with the latest plan. I suggested it, and I got us into trouble. Quite rightly, and with every reason, the Magyans are wild for it. They gave a great whoop of joy, and fell on my weakened frame from all sides, but—"

	"What," asked Spencer, annoyed, "caused this demonstration of joy? What was the inspiration?"

	"Eh—oh! The moon-ship idea. You know-need something heavier to stand up against that new beam. Simple idea—fairly obvious, isn't it?"

	"Again, nit-wit, what? I can't get what you mean by a 'moon ship'; they've had ships to go to moons and beyond for millia on millia."

	"Oh, I mean the whole moon. They have four. They want to use two in the plan—Ma-ran and Ma-kanee. That's numbers one and four. The inner moon is about one hundred miles in diameter, you know, and somebody figured it would be a grand thing because nobody could make a device powerful enough to start disintegration waves in that, and so it would be safe to use it as a fort as before. And then I asked why not use it to attack, and they thought it was a good—"

	"Well, I'll be a square circle! Sweet swinging satellites! Break it loose and use it for a battleship—and what a battleship! No armor, but too big to hurt—" Spencer stared in ecstasy. "Good lord—a whole moon for a battleship, charging across space for five hundred million miles!"

	"Oh, not quite a battleship—just a sort of map." Munro grinned. "You see, the Tefflan orbital forts and Teff-el's moon, Teff-ran, are all so deadly they can't bring their battleships in close. But Teff-ran, of course, has no driving mechanism, and the orbital forts have just enough driving mechanism to keep their orbits stable and regular. Everything else is fighting apparatus.

	"So they thought they'd use a Shal torpedo device to run a tunnel clear to the center, set up a huge driving apparatus of the momentum-drive type—and just go down and circulate around Teff-el. They could simply ruin all those orbital forts—what it would do to the forts would be final.

	"Then the men aboard would set the drive full blast, , escape in a scout ship, and let the whole thing ride straight at Teff-ran. Teff-ran is bigger—considerably—but with Ma-ran traveling about fifty miles a second and the mass of quintillions of tons—that will be all there is to that.

	"Meanwhile, trailing behind, and falling all the way in a straight line toward Anrel's mighty sphere, will be the seven-hundred-mile-diameter Ma-kanee. It will be aimed straight at Teff-el—"

	"And that will end Magya's worries for once and for all," finished Spencer. "If they can do it. Can they?"

	"That alone wouldn't end their worries" replied the physicist, "because they might be able to escape by shiploads, you know, and start another colony. But, in the meantime, a ring of battleships and scout ships will surround the planet and put a stop to that. These Magyans mean business. They don't intend to have Tefflans attacking humans any more. They did that once, you know—we did? Anyway, Earth doesn't have them any more. These fellows are thorough—"

	He paused with a grim little gesture of finality. "They can do it with time. They intend to build a fleet of no less than fifty supply ships, and keep up a constant stream of charged coils to the planet from Anrel. Also send a Sunbeam all the way to Anrel. With a giant sun like that behind them, it's no question of power enough. The momentum-wave device means that the question of drive is settled. They have only the physical problem of manufacturing coils enough to store the power.

	"They plan to accelerate the moons till they simply widen their orbits to freedom. That will prevent any sudden shifting of tidal effects on Magya. They feel that no harm will result, but the astronomers and mathematicians are at work calculating.

	"I feel confident that, with time, they can do it. They have an enormous advantage in that supply of steel they took from Tefflan. Teff-el must be hard put right now to mine an entirely new supply of metal, besides the problem of labor. And their work is going to be speeded to the utmost."

	"Why worry? Just use that traveling moon to perambulate through a few battleships, too." Carlisle laughed.

-

	SPENCER looked pained beyond words. "Go get a whale to slap mosquitoes with. Use an elephant to crush little brown fleas. Get a transpon beam to shoot down butterflies. With the difference that the battleships would simply dodge, and come around behind, land on your perambulating world, and start digging their way inside. It's bad enough using it on those huge forts; they really intend to use it on the fortified moon there. And, I suspect, on Teff-el itself. Right?" 

	Aarn nodded. "They'll calculate a course of impact that will carry the broken masses straight down to Teff-el. That alone will cause damage enough.

	"The danger of waiting is that they will build up a fleet of speedy ships, well equipped with death beams and disintegrators, realizing that the warfare is now reduced to two types—a light, swift, almost invisible scout-ship type, and the great behemoth battleships. They haven't the time or the metal for the battleships. But they may build the light fellows, and then they could escape.

	"The next time they'll have ships that can fight our scouts and spies more effectively. Also, next time they are going to have a nice, empty, insulated cylinder in the exact center of their ships, so that our gravity bombs can explode in peace—and harmlessness. They may not know how it's done, but they learned quick enough what was happening, you can bet.

	"But I haven't yet told you what's been worrying me. The plans are good. But they mean the one-hundred-and-one percent annihilation of Teff-el. They mean destruction more thorough, more complete and final, than anything you can imagine. That planet will be just a mass of drifting asteroids. 

	"And somewhere, on some one of the countless thousands of asteroids, buried in a terrible, inextricable mess of incalculable orbits, will float serenely a bit of planet with eleven thick plates of gleaming silvery metal engraved with age-old characters, eleven plates of osmiridio-platinum alloy that would endure for ages, carrying the data that would get us back where we came from—"

	"And no one in the universe or the universes could ever find them again."

-

	SPENCER and Carlisle were stricken suddenly silent.

	"What'll we do?" gasped Carlisle at length.

	"Exactly!" Aarn nodded. "What'll we do? Santin Rao has ordered immediate work on the great project, and they calculate that not more than eighty days will be needed to complete it. Somehow, within those eighty days, we must recover those eleven plates of osmiridio-platinum. Otherwise we spend the rest of our natural existences here. Not that it's unpleasant—but it isn't home. I could get that data—with thirty years' work and calculation. These fellows have never attempted to get it. They weren't interested. Too much else on hand."

	"Have you any idea where, on Teff-el, they are?" asked Spencer.

	"None. But at my plea, Santin Rao is going to have every attempt possible made to find them. And I'm going to make some little things—they may help."

	"What?" asked Spencer eagerly. 

	"Eh—a little thing—I don't know if it will work, or if we can make it or—" Aarn paused.

	"Oh, shut up! Another one of your secrets. All right—take it away—and listen to this one: Carlisle, here, tells me he's got an idea from something you said about physics, and some studying he's been doing, that may help us a lot if we ever have to raid Teff-el."

	"I hope so. We'll need more than help; we'll need a miracle to recover those tablets. With modern spacial warfare, a fight over the city or building where those plates are means the destruction of everything within a million miles of it. That means that somehow we have to get those plates secretly. That's the devil of it."

	"Sweet chance of slipping by all those guards the Tefflans have. Spy ships. Orbital forts. Telescopes. Probably some form of detector device."

	"Yes—the Magyans have the same thing. It's micro-wave radio, about ten-centimeter wave. Anything of any size reflects the waves and makes a difference in reception. They use them as a meteor detector on small ships. Big battleships, of course, are protected by those space-disk repulsion effects."

	"Hm-m-m! Seems interesting to think that those four-foot steel walls will stop anything man ever sent, and meteors could wander through them practically unhindered."

	"Not quite that bad, Spence," Aarn replied. "I'll bet you have been inculcated with that same doctrine that the spaceship designers always had. I never stopped to think about it till I was working on that magnetic atmosphere. Lead is a better protection against meteors than steel. A meteor's kinetic energy is so great it could plow through something like forty-five feet of steel, following the usual law of penetration—varying as the square on the velocity.

	"But here's the trick: a meteor plows into the steel, and has to overcome not only the tensile strength of the metal, but the far greater inertia resistance. Even to ordinary bullets that means something. Remember that water will deflect a bullet like a solid body. Water will flow freely, and so would steel under the impact of a meteor, but it has inertia, and so acts like a solid body, and, as you know, a meteor hole is seldom found to be anywhere near the size of the body that made it.

	"What happens is that a one-inch meteor strikes, and the steel resists it with its inertia; each steel crystal acts as a resisting medium and must be accelerated out of the path of the meteor. But the impact generates such heat that the steel molecules are smashed into the vapor state and evaporate. The explosion of expanding iron vapor is what tears a hole.

	"I've seen a one-inch meteor leave a three-foot hole through six-inch armor. And then never get inside the ship! It was blown into vapor along with the wall of the ship. So probably that four-foot armor would stop the average meteor and be torn wide open in the process. I'm working on something of the sort—too—"

	"Another secret, I suppose?" Spencer put in bitterly.

	"Probably," Carlisle agreed blithely. "Come into my lab; I'll show you something interesting. I'm getting on the way now." 

-

	IT WAS some five days later that, seated comfortably in the quarters that had been assigned to Spencer, rooms carved from living rock and carefully and artistically decorated with friezes, Carlisle and Spencer were disturbed, nay, even startled, to see a black object the size and general shape of a football come floating gently into the room, turn a cold and unwinking glass eye on them, and say in a slightly cracked voice:

	"If you two asteroids with planetary ambitions will arise and follow me down the corridor, I can show you where men of brains are laboring."

	Then it fell silent. It stared at them for some seconds as they sat in stupefied amazement, then turned leisurely about and started out of the door. Its cracked voice commented only that:

	"Two such frog-mouthed, ant-brained, instinct-controlled, undernourished runts weren't worth the trouble, anyway."

	"Well, I'll be a hyperbolic-orbited asteroid. That grease glob from Jupiter has a new idea."

	With which Spencer tore out of the door and down the corridor after the fast-vanishing black ostrich egg. Carlisle was on his heels as the soft black of the device all but hid it in the slight gloom of the corridor leading to Aarn's quarters.

	Aarn was seated grinning before a television board of a new and complex type.

	"Rather clever thing, isn't it?" asked Aarn and the egg at the same time.

	"Which of you should I answer?" asked Spencer sarcastically. "That egg up there looks more intelligent. I thought it was a bomb getting ready to blow up when the blamed thing floated in there."

	"Yes—we are thinking of that idea, and Anto Rayl, here, has already turned the plans of this device over to his government, and they are making a number of them. Present idea is that after a Shal torpedo has breeched the walls of the ship, these can sail in and start operating on the internal structure as directed.

	"This particular model is the new-type spy ship. It consists of miniature—very miniature—space-ship drive of the momentum-wave type, two small but powerful aggie power coils, a radio-control apparatus, and a small radio-sending apparatus connected with a television device of the usual sort—but smaller size. Rather crude. Not a good lining on the screen, but you can see enough, and the ears are quite effective. The whole report is sent back continuously on two short-wave beams.

	"As I said, Anto Rayl has turned the plans over to the government, and they are making about ten an hour now. They plan to increase the production to about fifty an hour, and equip all ships with them. The Sunbeam is assigned to special duty—with seven full-fledged momentum-drive, antigravity-powered battleships and twenty of the new cruisers. Our duty is to patrol and investigate, by any means possible, the doings of Teff-el. The battleships and cruisers are to protect us."

	"And you will start hunting for the Data Plates?"

	"Absolutely!" replied Munro joyfully. "And find 'em if the Tefflans know where they are—because a number of the professors of languages on Magya, here, have taken the trouble to learn Teffani—records of their ships and so forth, both written and oral. 

	"But—you don't yet know the beauties of this television device. This is my real invention, and I'm proud of it. They've said it couldn't be done. You notice the absolute lack of color on the screen—just the greenish white and black of the cathode fluorescence. I can't get any color on this thing ordinarily. There are really two television devices. One for normal operation, and one—"

	The television screen went suddenly blank as Aarn pressed a button. A second passed, a faint click from the loud-speaker over the control board, then the screen was lighted again—on a weird scene. It was still the same room they were in, still the screen showed them sitting and standing as before—but now they shone, and the walls of the room glowed in light reflected, light emanating from the men.

	"Infra-infra-infra red." Aarn sighed. "Long heat. And what a triumph that is! That's one of the biggest things I ever did. That was a real problem, and I want you to know it. With that, television can operate in absolute darkness!"

	"That man passes my understanding," said Carlisle in awe. "His mentality is beyond the comprehension of sane minds. His psychology is not to be analyzed. He builds a space ship that defies gravity; he powers it with energy stolen from the Sun; he defends it with space, warped beyond passing; drives it by meshing in the fabric of space—and goes into raptures over his cleverness in making a fool television eye. It passeth understanding!"

	"No; it doesn't, Carlisle. It's all reasonable enough. Physics had known for years that antigravity fields were possible. They knew that power beams were a possibility, that momentum waves were theoretically possible." 

	"But they said that a heat-eye was theoretically impossible. I can't see how it was done myself."

	"Principle of the ordinary television tube. Deposit of metal in globules, discharged by a cathode beam, and effecting a condenser action. Only in this case, my globules are bimetal globules, and one of them acts as might be expected under radiant heat, and throws off electrons. Some idea. An ordinary thermopile in effect, but that each element is about one ten millionth of an inch in diameter, and weighs about one ten billionth of an ounce. The result is rapid reaction. And I have a lens of a special type which will bend those long heat rays. It's really a permanent space structure like that invisibility device. It bends any incident radiation—any radiation—and so can be used equally well on ultraviolet and sub-red."

	"It's a strong weapon for finding our data. But—what are you going to do when you find them?" asked Carlisle. "That's not going to help there."

	"Grrrr—must you bring up unpleasant subjects when I'm happy?" demanded Munro. "We're going to make a direct raid in secret, then—and do our damnedest to get those plates. That's all we can do."

-

Chapter XIII.

	The Santir Ranla and the Tool Deenar had combined in their efforts to crush with the least possible delay, and the least necessary expenditure of energy, the presumptuous heavy cruiser the Tefflans had sent out to investigate the doings of the Magyan fleet that was hanging grimly outside their maximum effective beam-range.

	Since the Santir Ranla and the Tool Deenar were both first-class, new, fully armed battleships, with special alloy-steel armor which had been altered by the addition of a few new elements till the Tefflan standard beam didn't disintegrate it, they crushed the cruiser within forty-five seconds and cut it up for transportation back to the hard-working steel plants on Magya. Every little bit helped.

	Aarn went back to work. Anto Rayl and several other Magyans were in the control room of the Sunbeam with him as he sent out his little "egg-boat", as the investigators had been called, and attempted to land it on Teff-el safely. He met with difficulties as usual, and cursed the Tefflan ship heartily.

	Teff-el was nearly a million miles away, which meant his control of the little machine was extremely poor, since the lightspeed messages that controlled it took several precious seconds for the round trip. He had to move it slowly, exploring carefully before him. Already the little ship was nearer Teff-el than any Magyan had ever been.

	The egg-boats, as made in quantity, were egg-shaped, and about eight inches in greatest dimension. They contained no apparatus for the projection of speech, as no attempts would be made to attract attention—decidedly the opposite. Since they were black, Aarn had carefully chosen to send them in from the day side of Teff-el; they were therefore black against black space.

	The present egg-boat was within about fifty miles of the surface of the planet when Aarn had been forced, by the lightning swoop of the Tefflan heavy cruiser, to move rapidly to other regions and had moved out of the little investigator's beam. He'd picked it up again, to find the thing was headed for a body of water, and though he'd sent a reversing message, he feared he was too late.

	"Blast that restriction on the speed of light! I can't get anywhere this way," he grumbled. "I'll have to send another one now, and every time one of those things is spotted by a Tefflan, it will mean another three hours' work."

	"Why not lower a whole collection at once?" suggested Anto Rayl.

	"Why—that might be possible—they'd have to respond to two wave lengths—a master wave, that they all obeyed, and a key wave, that they reacted to individually, but it might be done. Canning!" he called suddenly. "Hey—Canning—see if—"

	He turned back to the screen as he explained and watched the body of water coming steadily closer. Suddenly it stopped.

	"Ah—in time to save Investigator No. 1. Now to see what can be seen. We'll have to explore the planet a bit. You say that Cantak is their largest city, and near here, so I'm going to find a cave or something that I can use to hide that bunch in when we land them."

	Rapidly the sea sped behind the lens of the little investigator, and as it finally picked out a dim, distant foreland, Aarn sent a stop signal, followed by a slow.

	In minutes a rocky, savage coast was in view, a mass of piled rocks, an ideal location for such a cave as Aarn wanted.

	"Are the tides on that world high? I shouldn't think so."

	"Very low," replied Anto Rayl. "The single moon is small and distant."

	"I don't think water would damage those things any, but I don't intend to try." 

	The scene on the screen moved slowly along, very little faster than a walk, lest the investigator pass a good spot, or run into a sudden jutting point before Aarn could stop it.

	"Canning!" he called suddenly, pushing the stop button of his control. "I'm going to take a chance on their finding that darned thing and stick in an antigravity device, so that it can't run into things and smash itself. I can't creep all over the whole blasted planet like a snail with rheumatism. Fix up those others and bring them out as fast as you can."

	"Yes, sir. I've got that radio device fixed up now. It wasn't much trouble—just another coil. I can't quite tell you which one will react to which key wave length, because they are so much alike, but you can pick 'em out. I'll stick to an anti-gravity coil—if I can find any room."

	Aarn turned back to his control, to see the mouth of a great black cavern looming exactly before the eye of his investigator. A great split ran up the cliff, and high above, out of sight, closed in, but it made a narrow cleft cave.

	"Ah—luck at last!" he sighed.

	He pressed a series of controls and waited.

-

	PRESENTLY the screen went blank, shifted, and lighted again with the strange distortion of the heat-eye. The black of the cavern was suddenly light as the investigator entered slowly, and followed it back at a pace of about three feet a second.

	Aarn punched a control viciously as a sudden right-angle loomed up ahead. Calmly the investigator drifted on, and on. Then, with a tinkling crash from the loud-speaker mounted with the screen, the view went dead. The hum of the mechanism went on uninterruptedly, as well as the roar of the surf outside the cave; but the screen remained blank, and a slight straining note sounded in the apparatus. The drive was trying to move the cliff.

	Aarn pushed a second control with a prayer, and waited. A slight change in the tempo of the sound in the loudspeaker came after a few moments, then a click, a soft hum—and things went on as before.

	"Lost! Television-control tube gave way, evidently. They weren't made too well, I'm afraid, too much of a hurry, and, with any severe jar, they give way. The rest of the thing's all right. And as useful as a left-hand thread bolt when a right-hand is needed."

	"I've got six of those things rigged up, Dr. Munro," announced Canning. "Those small antigravity coils for storing power can be modified a bit, and I used one of the power-storage coils as an antigravitor. You have more than enough power left, haven't you?"

	"Certainly, Canning! That's good. Send 'em out. What's the master wave?"

	"Eleven point five-five. I'll give you the key-wave list—" 

	This time, the cave in the cliff was reached easily and safely, a dry floor found well back, and the investigator left. One was brought out on the key wave and immediately started toward Cantak, back in the mountains. It struck a road presently, a broken, rutted track of concrete, with an occasional pedestrian of the Tefflan race. Instinctively, to his surprise, Spencer felt the short hairs on the back of his neck rise, and a wave of anger swept over him at the sight.

	"The monsters!" he said in a low tense voice.

	Anto Rayl chuckled. "You are a human," he said; "you cannot help that feeling. I know them, have seen them—and hate them more with every sight. Yet I know that they are reasonable, intelligent creatures; that they are no more cruel or evil than we; but our hatred for them is as instinctive and as complete as the hatred of anseth and carlee."

	"Cat and dog," said Aarn. "We're born that way; so are they."

	The investigator shot rapidly ahead now, in clear daylight, high in the sky. There were ships up here—ships that scurried busily across the sky between cities. There was a great deal of anxious activity, and the furnaces that stood aboveground, alone of Tefflan city structures, were evidently working hard. A great opening in the ground, into which ships of all sizes were constantly sinking while others rose from it, betrayed the entrance to Cantak.

	The investigator crept forward at a speed of some two feet per second, till it was directly over the great bore. Then Aarn let it drift across.

	By far the most common vessels were huge. The next was. The little investigator caught by it, lodged in a crack under its great, stubby wing, and carried down, cushioned by its antigravity field. Aarn gave a stop signal and knew the little machine would remain in place unless heavily jarred in landing.

	The ship it clung to descended, landing in the midst of a great terminal, a bustle of Tefflan activity. With a sudden swoop, the investigator detached itself, shot straight up into the air, and disappeared in the black roof of the great cavern before the startled Tefflans could guess what had happened.

	Laborers, common Tefflans, they paid no further attention, and went on with their work. And all that day, behind doors, hidden in great vessels, in small vases and among bushes in parks, the investigator listened and watched and sought. It crept out when the lights were turned down for the rest period, and slunk into important public buildings, buildings that had no window glass in this great cavern where there was no weather, save that which they made themselves. Through ventilation tubes, through doors, through transoms, the investigator went, seeking records, secrets—

	Never before had Magyans had so perfect an opportunity to learn every secret of Teff-el. But they could not read the records they so much wanted. They listened to a chance conversation between officers on the merchant stratosphere ships, and space-ship warrior officers. And learned only that no Tefflan save those few who manufactured the essential parts knew of the secret of the ray, and the reason it was made so great a secret was that no known apparatus would stop the effect of the ray.

-

	IT WAS NIGHT now, and the public buildings were all but entirely closed; a lone watchman wandering about here and there was the only sign of life as the investigator went silently through the "various corridors, occasionally bumping noiselessly against a dead end until turned by a new radio signal—a curious thing that seemed blind to its surroundings, blundering here and there, and learning this and that.

	"I think that new plan to attack the Magyans will be wholly successful—a thing they cannot resist. Ah, if we but had brought Magya that strange new destructive ray! Without it, we would have—need—" The voice trailed off into a maze of roaring traffic sounds. 

	"The new ships, you understand, will have a hollow center, and the center-explosion bombs of the Magyans will be useless. The magnetic bombs we will deflect easily now, with the new apparatus of Hoo Ralsop, and tune them instead—"

	"Some have suggested that those strangers who came in the ship attacked by the scouting squadron, when first the destructive, fusing beam was used, were some of the surviving, ancient Ma-jhay-anhy of legend, who came through. Perhaps they were messengers—but they had such war craft that surely the Teff-Hellani—our own race on its native world—must have grown equally great in power.

	"Hoo Ralsop is working now, they say, to devise a means of at least signalling through—"

	"I'd like," commented Aarn in annoyance, "to know who in the name of the nine wabbling worlds that Hoo Ralsop is and, more important, where he is. He seems to be a prominent scientist, and if he's working on communication between spaces, his aims and mine are parallel, and I'll bet a major planet to an asteroid, he's got at least an accurate copy of those Data Plates.

	"Could he read 'em, Anto Rayl?"

	"Probably, in time. We could read them with a little study, and with the aid of your knowledge of the other side. Hoo Ralsop would be laboring under the difficulties of not having our knowledge of ancient Magyan language, and complete ignorance of the other side. He will, of course, have the assistance of a knowledge of modern Magyan, but the language has altered beyond understanding, almost, and it was only after great study, and careful consideration of the ways in which languages do change, and the following back of our more modern tongues, that we were able to read the ancient records. Hoo Ralsop would have a heavy, but possible, task."

	"Might they not have translated it already?"

	"Why should they? They had no great interest in it before they found us in modern times; it was merely loot of ancient days which they had been told was sacred, and to be kept. After they found us—I think I am not too boasting in saying we occupied their attention rather fully. Their linguists were busy trying to keep pace with the various codes we adopted in giving our sealed orders to ship commanders. We have some ancient Tefflan records—in Teff-Hellani really—that we have never translated, beyond finding what they mean. But is that important?"

	"Decidedly! I don't want a few battleships of the kind Tefflans are used to going over and attacking our commerce in the other world. Good Heaven, they could wipe out half the population there—we have no real defensive machines. Of course we could build them in a few years, but Tefflan battleships attacking wouldn't give us a few years.

	"If Hoo Ralsop can act on that data very quickly, we're going to find out who and where Hoo Ralsop is—and we might do that anyway, just for safety. I have a dozen or so of those things made up with equipment to explode them at will, or when tampered with. I think we'd better find out where he is." 

	"Have you heard" the latest news from the government laboratories?" asked a growling Tefflan voice, while a trained translator spoke softly into a microphone the corresponding Magyan words. "Hoo Ralsop has found among some ancient religious relics some plates in what he is sure are ancient Ma-jhay-anhy characters that deal with the crossing from one space to another. The relic plates—" 

-

	AND ON Tefflan, the drifting, seeking investigator had drifted slowly past the office whence had come those voices. Aarn was grimly, silently busy sending it back. Seconds passed. Long, long seconds while nothing happened, and only the strangely lighted scene as shown by radiant heat swept over the screen, and the dull sound of traffic outside, activated the instruments. The thing stopped, swung, and started back. Instantly Aarn pushed the stop signal. It would take equally long for that signal to get there—

	"—naturally wouldn't let him take them out. They were sacred relics, and protected apparently by an ancient legend that some day they would lead our race to greatness and a land of plenty once more. This prophecy had protected them through hundreds of thousands of moons, and they had been made of a metal which would endure, so they were quite legible.

	"Hoo Ralsop has called in Sol Kaldan to aid him in his research, and surely with such a student of physics and such a student of languages, we shall learn something of import, for the plates evidently have been considered of importance from oldest times. Hoo Ralsop's copies are exact as cap be, even to microscopic dents and scratches."

	"But what does he hope to learn, what does he think might come of such a search in legends ages old? Truly, once we could learn from the ancients, but now our weapons pass theirs manyfold," replied the second voice.

	Aarn dared not try to look at the speakers behind the half-opened door.

	"That, he believes, is the secret of the ones who came in the strange ship, bringing the strange weapon. Remember, the controller of the destroyer which escaped their blasting ray said he saw them materialize suddenly as though sweeping in from infinite distance with infinite velocity—yet there was something lacking in that conception, since they seemed rather to expand from infinite smallness, and not move at all. He was certain, though, that they came in no normal way."

	"The physicist of Santakalt says they came from this other space."

	"Then why—but stay—look you—that magnetometer is fluctuating with my speech, and with other signals, too. What can that mean? Ehu—it shows a center of force near here! I don't like it. Let us see—ha—it is near, too—"

	Frantically, and yet resignedly, Aarn had pressed the signal that would send the little investigator away at its best speed, within such narrow confines. He sent a complete series of signals which would have freed it from the building, by driving out of an open window, but the Tefflan suddenly appeared in the door.

	"Hayuu—look! What manner of thing is that?" He reached for it, and the little investigator sheered away. "Ha—it has some manner of control. Now what can be the meaning of this?"

	He darted back into his room and re-appeared a moment later with a device the size and shape of two pie plates stuck together, and trailing a long cord.

	"Let us see—"

	The investigator suddenly darted for the pieplate device, in fact a powerful electromagnet, and stuck. Aarn sighed and pressed a red button on one side. 

	Some fifteen seconds later the Tefflans were wrestling with the struggling, pulling little investigator, as it sought to obey the commands. Then, suddenly, the screen went dark in a sudden flash of light. The little investigator on Teff-el turned bright red, and sputtered sharply with blue electric flame.

	"That is the end of that!" said Aarn, but he wasn't much disappointed, for he had learned at least that the records still existed. "Now—problem one is to find this Hoo Ralsop. They mentioned 'the physicist of Santakalt', and I just wondered if that might be he."

	"It is." Anto Rayl nodded. "I remember that some of the reports we have found on destroyed ships have stated that that city was their scientific base, and a division of Santakaruck, their main space-ship base."

	"Next—where is Santakaruck?"

	"That, too, is known, of course, and we can send the next investigator there—but how will you find Hoo Ralsop?"

	Aarn smiled suddenly, a smile that wandered clear across his face. "That," he said, "will be easy if he's as important as all that Watch!"

	He started an investigator out of the base in the cave, flew it swiftly toward Santakaruck and, when it was on its way, switched to the key wave of a second investigator and, started it close in the wake of the first. Aarn was very busy for the next few minutes, in fact till he had both motionless just outside of Santakaruck.

	Then he started a curious process. The investigators had been equipped with small gas-glow lights in case they had to see something where no light and insufficient heat was available. And now Aarn waited till a scout ship started in the great tunnel that led down into Santakaruck, then turned on the light on one of the investigators, and started the ship cruising in circles slowly down into the great opening of Santakaruck.

	While the first was slowly and aimlessly proceeding automatically on this order, he shifted to the second device. In seconds he was watching the scout ship stop and then begin a series of movements to investigate the strange, tiny ship. They had it presently and bound it down tightly.

	In triumph they bore their prize into the city, and attached closely to a part of their landing gear where it was nearly invisible was the second investigator.

-

	LIKE a leech it clung to the trail as the first machine was taken to the space-ship port, investigated by higher, and yet higher, officers with curiosity—while at another receiving board Magyans listened carefully to all that was said there—and at last scientists were called in.

	"I think it is a bomb—a sort of self-controlled torpedo," announced a physicist at length.

	"Nonsense! The Magyans' brains are not so poor. They built this, surely, and it must be investigated carefully, but no bomb of this size is dangerous. I am interested to know the method of control. They are not being rained on the planet, why, then, did it happen to be here? Were there more?"

	"None were seen, most excellent sir."

	"Meaning, fool, that you didn't look." 

	"I stand in the guilt of negligence, most excellent sir," acknowledged the scout-ship commander.

	"Ehuu—use your head—and your eyes, too, next time. Now—go out and look about."

	The scout-ship man left hurriedly.

	"I think it is a bomb," persisted the physicist, "and not necessarily a chemical one. Might it not be the store-house of much physical energy—an accumulator? Or a new and unknown kind of power-storage device, a bomb that will go off at any time?"

	"More likely," suggested a chemist, "might it not be one of the bombs like those we are preparing—biologic bombs, full of germs; it could do untold damage."

	"Ehuu—what unpleasant ideas you have!" exclaimed the most excellent sir, hurriedly releasing the little things, and backing off, wiping his long-fingered hands. "Can you test it?"

	"I think it would be better," suggested the chemist, "to call our masters. This is indeed important. I believe that Hoo Ralsop would be interested, for this may be an idea of those from the other side,"

	"That's interesting," said Spencer, "what they had to say about biologic bombs. Could they make them?"

	"Oh, decidedly! They must have done it already."

	"That is all well, Aarn," said Anto Rayl contentedly. "We are preparing already. How great will be their joy when they learn that their discussion has reached us in its entirety!"

	"Sorry, Anto Rayl, but they won't. If I let Hoo Ralsop get so much as a glimpse of the interior, he'll know a number of things it isn't good for little Tefflans to know—such as how to make an antigravity power coil," Aarn pointed out.

	"Hoo Ralsop says he will come, but is much annoyed, since we disturbed him in a perusal of the ancient plates," said an assistant as he returned from a telephonic device.

	He stooped momentarily, to pull something from between the halves of his left hoof, and suddenly started.

	"By holy Renoo! That is no blank hole in the end—there is some potent force at work which twists light—distorts it. By all my physics, I swear it! That is a lens!"

	"What? A lens? It is merely a magnetic-force wall of some kind!" scoffed a second Tefflan. "Light does not bend so readily as that—it requires some substance."

	"Silence—listen to me!" snapped the discoverer of the force-lens. "I say that it is a lens. We shall see what Hoo Ralsop says, and, till then, say no more. If it is a lens—then this is a bomb. It is a bomb which will blow us up with our own words—it is a spy machine—a device to slip about and learn, from our own lips and laboratories, our secrets. Probably something went wrong with the mechanism that made it go off its course and be discovered. If that be so, then surely it has ears as well as eyes. It may be sending back a beam of radio information at this instant. Put something over that eye." 

	In an instant a container of some sort shut out the light from the investigator. But though silence fell, a few moments later the second investigator, outside the room, showed a group of three Tefflans trotting toward the office. Their hoofs made almost no noise on the soft, rubberlike flooring, but evidently the men inside the room knew they were approaching, for they opened the door. The light streamed out into the less brilliantly lighted corridor, and would have illuminated the second investigator had it not been clinging to the ceiling, above eye level, and above the light.

	Hoo Ralsop was aware of his importance. And he was justly, perhaps, annoyed. "For what cause, Aggar Mankel, have you summoned me from my investigation of the Kakkakill relic plates?" And he said part of a further sentence, which, due to the peculiarity of Tefflan word-order, would translate something like this:

	"Other-space secrets from Kakkakill relic plates beginning to learn of greatest—"

	"Stop! Do not speak—this device is some machine whereby the unnatural ones, the Magyans, can listen and watch us."

	The cloud of anger that had swept crimson over Hoo Ralsop's normally red face disappeared as suddenly as it had come. "Ehuu—what is this? Let me see this!"

-

	SOME two seconds ago Aarn had pressed the button that converted the little investigator into a red-hot mass of metal that would glow for several hours. Hoo Ralsop was looking into the force-lens with great interest when it collapsed with a report of inrushing gases, and the metal in his hands flowed red-hot abruptly. With a curse of pain he dropped it to the floor.

	"By the nine greatest gods, the thing has burned me! May the soul of its designer rot forever in the lowest level of the filthiest belli The damnable thing—may it be accursed forever—has taken half the flesh from my hands!" Hoo Ralsop glared at it with slit eyes blazing in anger, his raw hands agonizing.

	"Most gracious and learned sir, let me dress the wounds," begged a humble doctor, who was present, gathering a small kit from the lockers just outside the doorway.

	"Dress them, you clumsy fool, and if you do a poor job, I shall have you condemned to the prison of Carcatoon for incompetency. As it is, my work will be held up—"

	Aarn had not been idle during this time. He had been busy, indeed, with a second control board. And he was prepared now to interrupt Hoo Ralsop's speech.

	An investigator two feet long and a foot in diameter entered through the doorway, and stopped in the center of the room. Hoo Ralsop's speech broke off in amazement, he Stood paralyzed for seconds, and the ship finished it for him: 

	"Forever!" it said in a cracked, metallic voice and perfect Tefflani. There was a dull click, the machine grew slowly red, brighter red—

	"It will explode," gasped the scientist and dived for the door. The machine was white-hot now—and the scene vanished in a roar of flame.

	"That," said Aarn contentedly, "destroyed the cavern for half a mile around, I suspect, for the coils in that little thing had plenty of power."

	The screen lighted up again presently—again in the cave by the seaside. It was light there now, distant Anrel shining in, bright blue.

	"Kakkakill seems to be our next destination," said Spencer. "Where is it, Anto Rayl?"

	"I might have guessed where we'd find those plates. I should have thought more seriously of finding it by thought. The city of Kakkakill is their holy city. Kak-ka is their principal god. He is their god of victory.

	"And he is their one genuine bad point to which we can point with reasonable loathing. There is a ceremonial of consecration to him each thirteen moons—each time their moon makes thirteen circuits. It is called the 'Death of Time' or 'Death of Time Unit' festival. And in that consecration they must drink to Kak-ka in the blood of a captured foe, and eat of the flesh of a captured foe, or they eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of one of their own race—a young female usually is sacrificed if need be.

	"But if they capture a foe, and lose the engagement in which the foe is captured, then they cannot sacrifice that foe to Kak-ka, for he is the god of victory."

	"They lost their last battle with us. One of their own females will be sacrificed this time—the sacrifice is due in one and a half moons."

	Aarn was interested—decidedly. "That is not so good. It is interesting—thirteen moons is the length of the year in the other space. The year is the time unit there, and this sacrificial festival must have been brought over with them; the 'Death of the Year' was what it was called back there, I suspect. The consecration was probably intended to bring them victory during the next year—a logical time division on Earth, since the year has important climatic manifestations there.

	"But if those plates are there—we'll have to raid—and they'd be extraordinarily glad to see us—"

	"I'm afraid," said Anto Rayl soberly, "the plates are there. They have the sacred Temple to Kak-ka, remember, and all the relics. When that ancient Teff-hellani looted our ancestors of that series of plates, he no doubt turned them over to Kak-ka for protection, to the god who had given him his victory.

	"The Temple of Kaka-ka is also their greatest museum, for it contains relics that have been given to Kak-ka through all the ages since he was first worshiped on that planet. Now it is, of course, a semi-scientific museum.

	"We have no choice, so far as I can see. I'll investigate, of course—I'll have to learn the way, anyhow."

-

	IN MINUTES the investigator had been brought near the entrance to Kakkakill, but bringing it in was a problem, for there were few ships entering and leaving there, and it was daylight now. Most of these ships were small, private machines carrying supplicants to the temple, for Kak-ka was also god of business victory.

	Aarn at last hid the investigator and turned in for rest. It was dark in Kakkakill when he had risen and breakfasted. When once more the investigator set out, it penetrated through the tunnels easily now.

	When the investigator, entering from a great, tall, cathedral-like tunnel, with great stone arches, carved and lighted with glowing blue and green, strangely beautiful effects produced by fluorescent paint and ultra-violet light, came into that main cathedral of Kak-ka, Aarn had to admit himself impressed.

	It was a single gigantic cavern, the floor square, four enormous arches soaring up to meet in the center of the roof, nearly one thousand feet above. A dim, dusky glow of violet light seemed to pervade this higher region from thousands of tiny, hidden lights. The walls of the cavern were carved in bas-relief, and the carvings then colored with the skill of a great painter. Each scene represented some great victory in the history of Teff-el, or some great, prehistoric victory of legend.

	And in each Kak-ka appeared in the background.

	But in the cavern, Kak-ka was in the foreground. It was a statue. A thing breath-taking, awe-inspiring, horrible—and magnificently beautiful. Kak-ka towered a full three hundred feet. He was a Tefflan, of course, but the Tefflan of a Tefflan's ideals. His gigantic face was stern, and powerful—yet inspiring, even to a human. It was turned up, looking onward. One hand was raised on high, with a great sword in it. The other beckoned.

	And the whole, gigantic thing was a blazing, faceted ruby. Synthetic, necessarily, but the magnificent, high color, the glow and the fire of the gem was there, and, under the wonderfully skillful lighting, magnificent. Kak-ka's trappings were simple, and all of red-gold and blue-white chromium alloy; his mighty sword glistened like a fiery beacon, and from its tip sprang a beam of golden light that cut a swath through the violet dusk of the upper reaches of that titanic cathedral, a beam of gold, laid on a background of purple velvet.

	Between the feet of the colossus was the altar, a single gigantic block of sapphire. Some hidden lights within it made it glow continuously with that inimitable, indescribable blue of the most perfect jewel. And on each side of it burned a steady, unwavering flame of pure white light, frozen radiance, a perfect spindle that stood three feet high.

-

	BEYOND and behind the image of Kak-ka was the temple. It had been carved of some white stone, a marble, perhaps, which stood out like a white crystal box in this cavern in dark rock.

	"I never dreamed," said Anto Rayl softly, "that those Tefflans were capable of such magnificent things. We have our Temple City—but it cannot compare with that. I can almost forgive them their monstrous forms while I look at that scene." 

	"I—I'll have to look in the museum," said Aarn at length. "And-that will have to be destroyed with the rest of Teff-el. I think if it alone was saved, posterity would blame you for destroying the race that could create it."

-

Chapter XIV.

	"OUR SHIPS," Aarn was explaining, "must be small enough to be almost invisible, yet large enough to have the power we need. And for that fool chemical apparatus Carlisle put in. You said I should get an explanation of that soon—"

	"Uh-huh! Just paying you back some of your own. You can wait till we're ready this time." Spencer nodded with a grin. 

	"Well—the ships are made. And, after that glimpse we got of Kakkakill, I've done something—I've had them painted with a smoky violet color that will make them almost invisible in the higher reaches of that place. It's so darned dim in there they won't spot us, and we can make use of televisors for sight, and have no lights visible."

	"Are those televisors going to be equipped with heat-eye apparatus?"

	"Certainly, and we'll need them. Remember how dark it was in that particular vault. They are demountable. We can take them out of their port hole in a few seconds, and use them to guide us around without the necessity of lights. They weigh only about as much as one of those pistols—and look out how you aim those pistols, by the way, they'll blow up anything within fifty feet of you so hard they'll probably hurt you—and they will enable us to get along without light."

	"Uhmm—wonder if they're any good?" said Spencer, picking up one of the compact oblong devices Aarn had gestured toward.

	He picked it up, pushed a stud, and watched an image form on the view-plate with perfect clarity, but with the typical appearance of a heat-image. Spencer pulled something the size of a hen's egg from his pocket, held it out at arm's length, and dropped it—gracefully.

	It hit with a dull, hollow plop, and burst into an instant, spreading blackness! In a fraction of a second the room was in utter blackness, a jet night so intense that the powerful glow lamps of the laboratory were utterly lost. There was nothing but a solid, impenetrable wall of blankness.

	"Good lord, what is that?" gasped Aarn. "Hey—where in blazes are you? I can't say, I can't see my hand when it's touching my face. Uh—here's a light now—"

	Silence. A chuckle from Spencer. "It won't work—"

	"Haw!" Spencer looked at the screen of his heat-eye televisor, and grinned wider.

	As though through a slight, bright fog, he could see Aarn, shining brightly, and holding a flash-lamp that was shining equally brightly, but seemed to be curiously affected by the fog. "It's working. It just can't light, can't send a beam. Put it about half an inch from your eye, and you can see it."

	Aarn did. "Sweet singing satellites—what a fog that ink makes! What in space is it?"

	"Infra-infra-infra fluorescence." Spencer grinned. "And your heat-eye works beautifully; That's what friend Carlisle made for the occasion of our raid. The chemical tanks contain a load of this. It combines with the oxygen of the air to form a chemical dye in particles so tiny they are close to the brownian limits, and won't settle out in less than about three hours under Teff-el's gravity." 

	"Infra-infra-and so forth. I think I commence to understand. Will you kindly supply me with one of those heat-visors so I can see my way out? What do you do to use it in this?"

	"Stick it so close to your eyes, and turn it up so far that you can see it. This fog isn't utterly impenetrable, you know."

	"No—but if I am right, it would be darned near it. I take it that this stuff acts the way fluorescence does with ultraviolet. It takes ultra-violet, and reduces it to visible light. This takes visible, and reduces it to infra-visible. Right?"

	"Quite right. The heat-visor is somewhat obscured, because that re-radiation of heat by the little particles of the dye makes a foglike breaking up of the light, and also the heat."

	"Hmmm—but this will be handy, indeed. Now I'll show you the ships."

	Aarn led the way, equipped now with a vision device, up to the level where his ships had been stored. They were two specially built spy ships, one-man craft, about ten feet long by three feet in diameter. They were equipped with surprisingly powerful weapons, and were able to exceed the speed of light. Their bulk was practically all taken up by power coils. At the nose was the control compartment, and here the vision devices had been installed.

	The controls we're standard, save for the release working the darkness device which Carlisle had installed himself. With Spencer's aid, he had arranged it so that streams of the liquid chemical would shoot in all directions from the little ship with tremendous force, making an effective darkness nearly five hundred feet in diameter.

	"I don't see why," said Carlisle coming up, "I'm not included in this little venture."

	"Excellent reason. Speakum Ainglitch. We might get caught you know—be a good thing if you could skip around—via investigator—and learn what's what with us, and let us tell you so they wouldn't know what our plans were. They know Magyan. They don't know English. Ergo: English is the thing to use."

	"And since the Moon is constituted of green cheese—Of course Spence couldn't speak English. You, I'll admit, have advantages, with that mind-under-matter body of yours, that gorilla-patterned, Neanderthal nit-wit construction. But Spence—"

	"Spence is a virtuoso of the control board, a master of movements, a commander of the keys. He can turn three back-somersaults, six corkscrew twists, and in inverted double-barreled upside down backward flight while you unravel your eyes from watching him," grinned Aarn. "Sorry, Carlisle—we've got to leave one representative, and I guess you're elected."

	"I know it," admitted Carlisle. "Good luck. I'll be watching—"

-

	THE TWO little ships rose, and spun gracefully out through the entrance way, and finally, passing through the lock, into free space. They swooped rapidly away from the great metal side of the battleship, and darted, faster than light, toward Teff-el. Both knew perfectly well that, were they captured, rescue would be beyond any possibility. They were going in two parties, because it doubled their chances of escape, if detected. Spencer would go first, once they landed, for, were he caught, Aarn would make a far more deadly rescue force than Spence.

	Faster than light they whirled by the defensive orbital forts, and the savagely circling swift cruisers Teff-el had sent out to watch the Magyan fleet, and whisked into the atmosphere of the planet itself, before the ships were stopped to a planetary speed in mere miles. In that peculiar condition by which speeds greater than that of light were possible, they seemed to be moving at a quite normal rate, they were able to control their motion readily. 

	In the atmosphere, they slanted down instantly, till their smoke-colored ships were lost against the dark background of night Teff-el. The ships were being driven only by momentum-drive now; no antigravity power was used, lest they be detected.

	Kakkakill was near. In seconds they dived into the black hold that was the entrance. A sentry ship hung there, watching the incoming traffic, but as the two smoke-colored ships dropped down, they flashed the correct pass signal of light and dropped on unhindered.

	Lightless, high in the great dusky dome of the cathedral city they swept on, so close to the ceiling they were bathed in the violet glow of the tiny hidden lamps. From their present position, a dozen other structures were visible, and swiftly the ships dived, when they reached a dimly lighted corner of the great cavern, and with an infinite skill landed noiselessly and lightly on a stone porch of a deserted, light-less prayer house. Not till the great sacrifice time would it be needed. Here the victim would be prepared—

	"Let's hope we come back only once," whispered Aarn as he and Spence met outside their ships. "You go ahead."

	With the assurance of an inhabitant Spencer swung off along the pathway, his rubber-soled shoes making no sound. The light was dim, a golden mist of light produced by innumerable tiny bulbs hidden from the eye, but casting their soft glow on various objects that gave a gentle diffused glow everywhere. Swiftly, and with assurance, Spence made for the great temple of Kakkakill.

	Past the left hoof of the giant ruby statue—it was bound in a shoe of the curious red gold—on toward the Temple, the white marble faintly golden in the light.

	No Tefflan moved about here now, for this was the hour when everyone save the watchman slept. Only far across the great cavern could he see a Tefflan guard at the mouth of each individual cavern. But at that distance Spence looked like a Tefflan himself—for he had on a remarkably clever outfit that seemed to twist his legs and his body.

	Behind him somewhere in the eternal golden dusk; Aarn slung along. No art could make his great thickset body seem a Tefflan's so the trick had not been tried. Which was another reason why Spencer went first.

	Up the broad stairway, gleaming with more of those hidden projectors of gold and violet light, Spencer went—somewhat worried, for he must show clearly now—and his walk was not the lope of the Tefflan's goatlike legs.

	In a moment more he was within the shelter of the great, majestic columns, mighty, square columns that stretched in golden light up into the dusk-violet gloom under the heavy overhanging roof. Like a miniature of the vaster cathedral of the cavern, this overhanging marble ceiling was fined with tiny projectors, and the smoky violet haze hung motionless.

	Quickly Spencer slipped on to the next row of pillars and slipped in among them. There were no shadows here—no spots of darkness. 

	Enormous doors of that reddish gold—the ash of the atomic engines of Teff-el and Magya, he learned later—were swung between great, wondrously carved posts of amethyst, deep, deep violet, illuminated from within. The great golden doors were covered with bas-relief of scenes of mythological import, scenes from the tales of Earth, in the other space, even.

	Beyond, inside, Spencer entered the comforting gloom of the deserted Temple. On, past the small prayer chambers, on to the museum beyond. Through a passage that branched in the utter darkness, his steps guided by the heat rays thrown off by his own body, he finally entered the museum section, up a winding ramp, up to the third floor. Right, down a broad corridor, to a room lined with cases and tables.

-

	IN THE center of the room, ranged under a glass case, were the eleven plates of data, worked out some thirty thousand years before, by a scientist, marooned by inexpressible time and an unimaginable distance from his home world, wondering what its fate might have been.

	Something hummed softly in his hand, a slight screeching sounded, then a soft hiss of escaping air. Again the humming, the slight, almost inaudible screech and a third and fourth time. Spencer lifted away in his hands a section of the hard, tough glass, cut out in a rough oblong by the efficient little Magyan cutter he had brought.

	Each plate was about a quarter of an inch thick, and about ten inches square. One by one he lifted them out, and began to frown in troubled surprise as he did so. For each plate was heavy! The density of the metal was nearly twenty; each one weighed more than fifteen pounds—considerably more. With a sinking feeling of horror, he realized that this one unconsidered and perfectly simple, physical fact was going to get the expedition into serious trouble. His load was to have been the plates—his duty. But they were mere pages of data—their weight had not been considered. Aarn, far faster, far stronger, was to have been the defensive force. And with that single slip, their plans were thrown off badly. He could not carry something near two hundred pounds of metal plates in his arms. The little sacks he had brought would never bear up under that load.

	He stood in momentary surprise and lightning thought. Aarn, with his enormous strength, could easily carry them, of course, but Aarn was to have met him below. There was no watchman in the museum, and he was supposed to get back to the portico where Aarn waited behind a pillar of safety—but if they were forced to make four trips through the museum—

	A light tap-tap-tap-tap on the soft, muffling, rubbery composition flooring suddenly attracted him. A sound—almost inaudible, so faint he never would have heard it had he not been standing motionless, concentrated on thought and danger. Tefflan hoofs trotting rapidly along—a squad of a dozen of them at least!

	With a sudden breath of horrified amazement at his own stupidity, he remembered the hiss of air as he opened the case. The gas in that case had been under pressure as a thief-trap!

	"Sweet satellites—what an asteroid brain I've got," he groaned." 

	He rapidly pulled four darkness bombs from his pocket, threw them to the four corners of the room, and heard them burst with soft plops as the tapping hoofs of the Tefflans approached rapidly. Light appeared down the corridor—then was blotted out by a sudden rising cloud of blackness. Spence picked up his heat-visor, swung up a load of the metal plates in each of his sacks, hoping he had important ones, and slid for the doorway toward the rear—to see a group of Tefflans sliding around the corner into view.

	The first group was halted now, stretching hands out into the gloom, seeking to feel something. Sharp, high-pitched voices barked commands back and forth across the room, as the parties acquainted each other of the situation. Both parties were halted now.

	They were spread across the doorway, holding hands. The leader of them was saying something. Probably meant for Spencer—thought him a mere thief no doubt.

	Spence looked doubtfully at the man on the end of one row, watched carefully and hopefully, and saw him release the hand of the next man for a second. The hands on the Tefflans were just like his own—same five-fingered hand—not hairy. Spencer smiled grimly and threw two more darkness bombs. Quickly and noiselessly, he sped back and forth carrying his plates, depositing them near the doorway, and making another trip.

	Then—he watched. The end man released his neighbor's hand again for an instant, and in that instant Spencer grasped the Tefflan hand with a feeling of surging anger and loathing. With the other, his right, he snapped down hard on the back of the strange, thin neck, thanking Aarn's forethought in arranging a headpiece that would hold his heat-visor in place without use of hands.

	Just the edge of his palm—the Tefflan's neck was soft—and skillfully wielded as it was, with a knowledge of Tefflan skeletons, it was instantaneously, soundlessly fatal. The spinal cord severed before the creature was aware of danger, he slumped, lowered by Spencer's grasping fingers, which were wound in the loathsome, coarse hair that seemed to have individual, noisome life.

	Then he realized suddenly that the Tefflan on his side was saying something—asking something. Spencer knew he could never risk language—he was half stooping, that position had attracted the other's attention, but now, Spencer was busy arranging the plates on the other side of the doorway.

-

	WITH a sudden startled shriek, as of terrified surprise, Spencer dived into the museum room, pulled the Tefflan with him—then releasing his hold and instantly stepping back. With a single, terrific heave he sent the body of the dead Tefflan flying into the room on the heels of the now-staggering line of excited, shouting, Tefflan guards.

	"So long; you're the goats for sure, this time!"

	Spencer was on his way. The plates were a staggering load—but he had them all. The Tefflans were creating a terrific fuss at finding the dead body of their companion inside the room. The line had been re-formed instantly, but now they were sure that someone was inside that room, and had killed one of their number.

	Spencer was rapidly retracing his steps. He reached the main corridor that, led from the museum proper to the prayer rooms without trouble, save for his staggering load. His arms were aching, his breath labored, and he knew he must stop soon. If only he could have packed those plates properly—

	And he passed, unseeing, a guard who stood half concealed in the doorway of a side passage. Instantly the Tefflan was out. But he paused in stupefied paralysis for a second before he struck. The thief was not a Tefflan! He was a Magyan!

	A mighty roar of warning—a cry of the information;—and the Tefflan was on Spencer. Before he could drop his burden, powerful arms were wrapped about him. He fell, with the weight of the plates added. In ten seconds of struggling he freed himself of the plates, and in another five seconds, the Tefflan guard was flying through the air to smash with a broken neck.

	Like jujitsu in the Occident, Apache kicking in the orient, boxing was unknown here. The Tefflan, however, had done his work. The squad above had heard, and had heard that a Magyan was among them! A Magyan, and the Death of the Year sacrifice so near—

	A score of Tefflans came galloping down the ramps, and Spencer threw the last of his darkness bombs. Instantly he realized that his heat-vision apparatus had been so thoroughly ruined he had been looking through an empty framework! He was as blind as the Tefflans.

	With a groan he picked up his load of plates and set off as best he could. "Aarn will be coming—I'd better let him take these plates and beat it for the ship—"

	Somewhere ahead a tremendous clang of metal sounded. With a start of surprise Spencer realized the huge grille of golden bars that hung before the main entrance had been lowered to bar his escape-and Aarn's entrance!

	Half a dozen groping arms reached him simultaneously, as he reached the end of the black hall. Instantly the plates were dropped, and the nearest Tefflan howled in agony as the heavy metal broke a bone.

	"Look out, weakling," said a deep voice, just beside Spencer.

	A Tefflan rose suddenly from the ground, darted forward with speed so great he was a blur, and smashed against two of his comrades—horribly.

	"The plates—all there—weigh two hundred pounds—no heat visor—no light bombs—"

	Spencer uppercut a Tefflan, and suddenly realized that though they didn't have boxing, they had their own peculiar system. It depended on the fact that they had horns—and it was very deadly. With wonderful adroitness Aarn raised his heavily booted, thick-muscled leg and planted his foot on a Tefflan skull. The Tefflans stopped attempting to use their horns after that demonstration.

	The Jovian moved like a bouncing ball of deadly destruction. His muscles found this planet's gravity weak, his thirty-foot bounds carried him in and out of the fight while his slower, weaker opponents saw him only as a flash of deadly striking flesh.

	Aarn didn't use his hands alone. He used his legs, too. He didn't use his fists because long since he had learned his muscles were too strong for the bones. He used his forearm with a chopping motion, and realized rather wonderingly that the Tefflans' necks weren't as tough as a Terrestrian's. 

	In some thirty-five seconds the fight was over—the remaining Tefflans being strewn all up the hall as Aarn charged after them. They could run more swiftly on their goat feet than any Terrestrian, but the Jovian charged after them in great bounds.

-

	SPENCER was sitting down, very busy being sick. "They—they're awful," he gasped when Aarn returned. "Let's get away."

	"Uh-huh! Good idea," said Aarn. "Better do it fast. Those fellows were sort of police. Guess you set off some kind of alarm. They thought it was a thief and didn't carry weapons." He picked up all the plates, some two hundred pounds of them, under his left arm, tucked his heat-visor under the other, and started off at a lope toward the doorway.

	"We can't get out, I heard that grate fall."

	"So did I. That's the only way I know to get out, though, so out we go," replied Aarn. They reached it in seconds, and the Jovian set down the plates tenderly and looked at the grate. The metal bars were an inch and a half thick. "Uhhh—bad. That's gold. Residue from their atomic engines. Sort of an ash. It's as good a conductor as copper, but heavy, and a bit soft. The point is it's a good conductor." Aarn had lifted his heavy weapon, and pointed it at the junction of two of the crossed metal bars. "We'll see—"

	The ball of blue electric force traveled straight and true, hit the junction, and was followed by about fifty others. The metal bars glowed red-hot—for several feet around.

	"No go. The stuff won't melt, because it conducts both current and heat too well. I can't use any more powerful magnetic balls on it, because the stuff won't absorb them. So that leaves—"

	Aarn walked rapidly to the opposite side of the great grille, and examined it carefully. The bars were in two planes, and those running vertically were a little nearer than those running horizontally. Deliberately Aarn took hold of two of the" bars, and settled his squat, thick body comfortably. 

	"Keep your ears open," he said briefly—and went to work. The fine, elastic cloth of his shirt suddenly bulged into tortured ridges that ran across his shoulders, and up his neck, and down to his hips. Huge wide strands of muscles rose and writhed and strained, muscles such as Hercules might have had, or Samson. Trained by a life time on the giant of the solar system, they were the muscles of a giant. They strained, and slowly, inevitably, the heavy metal bars bent and turned, and suddenly sprang from their sockets. 

	Slowly Aarn straightened and stretched himself. He pulled the bars out of the way. "About two more—" He grasped a horizontal bar now, and began straining upward. His legs now took the strain. The muscles like broad, smooth, rubber springs lifted themselves into ridges—and the great metal bar snapped out of its socket.

	"Reinforcements, I take it," said Aarn, as he crawled through the gap.

	He threw down a dozen of the anti-light bombs, and in the darkness took the metal plates as Spencer passed them through. Somewhere a steady marching tread was coming, the tread of several hundred feet "We can't argue with the royal army."

	Spencer dived through the gap in the grille, and suddenly realized that one of their own investigator machines was hovering near them. Aarn saw it, and with a sudden leap grabbed it, and handed it to Spencer. "Carlisle can guide you to your ship with that—just follow its movements, and I won't have to lead you."

	He had his heat-visor on and started off. For a few seconds the little investigator did not move, then Spencer felt it pulling steadily in the same direction Aarn was going and followed rapidly. Aarn was dropping bombs rapidly, and despite the best efforts of the soldiery, he was avoiding them skillfully. Spencer was in worse plight, for Carlisle, millions of miles away, could not see and avoid the soldiers in time, and while the investigator would lead him to the ship, he had to look out for himself.

	One soldier blundered against him and died with a croak. Before a comrade found him Spencer got away.

-

	AFTER long minutes, they reached their ships, Aarn was already in, and had deposited the plates when Spencer got there.

	"Here's an extra heat-visor," said Aarn, handing the device to the engineer. "Snap it in. Turn loose your blackness."

	In an instant the blackness was spreading through the great cathedral city. Ships—small, commercial, and private machines—began to appear. But they hung outside the great cloud that spread, and finally were forced to stand motionless. Only a few foolhardy Tefflans dived through the cloud, as Aarn and Spence started out. The powerful magnetic bombs of the little spy ships brought down dozens of the attacking machines, but, as they reached the entrance, they saw a solid plug of a dozen ships in their path, with every evidence of staying there.

	A dozen bombs—and the flaming wreckage dropped. Again the momentum drive lashed the engines on to full speed, and they leaped up the shaft.

	"There'll be a destroyer outside," said Aarn's voice cheerfully through the communicating radios. "He won't be waiting for us—he'll have his destructive beam on us already. Our only chance is to pray he isn't directly in line with the opening, and dive out faster than light."

	Spencer saw the rock of the opening running slowly away in slow dust as Aarn's words reached him—he threw his switch, and the tunnel mouth seemed to leap nearer. A great black shape loomed huge as they shot outward, a shape that was' within inches of them. A cloud of hazy blue light leaped from Aarn's spy ship as he passed—Spencer saw it float slowly toward the bulk of the machine. Carlisle, seconds later, saw it eat into the destroyer and leave a great gaping hole in the armor.

	Two little spy ships raced out for Teff-el faster than the message to hunt them could follow.

-

Chapter XV.

	AARN looked up slowly from the careful translation the Magyan scientists handed him. "I need more time to study this," he said at length, "for even your translation is not yet too clear to me, but I can say definitely that I can get through to that other space—my own home—by means of this diagramatic data."

	"That is good news. Both to us, and to you, for it means that we shall again be able to visit the ancient world, the world where our race was born," said Anto Rayl. "I hope we shall be welcome." 

	"You will, Anto Rayl, you will be more than welcome. For the first century of our contact, your people will be mobbed by the anthropologists, philologists and most other ologists in the solar system.

	"We will want to know as much about your race, as you will want to know about ours, and about the world from which you came."

	Anto Rayl smiled. "For many years," he said "the scientists of our people were greatly puzzled. There were a great many races of animals in this world—most of which have been killed off in the battle between our people and the Tefflans, along with most of the large forms of vegetation—and none of these animals resembled our own race, yet all showed distinct traces of linkage. There was evolution among the various animal races, but no evolution that connected them with us.

	"Not until the ancient myths of the Ma-jhay-anhy and the Teff-hellani were so abundantly proved did the answer appear."

	"It must have puzzled them," chuckled Spencer. "The scientists on our own planet, where all evolutionary strains were evident, had enough trouble convincing the bulk of the hide-bound people of the facts. You see, there was an ancient book, written by a race called the Jews, and this book was originally a sort of history of the race, half myth, half fact. As a mythological history it was well worthy of study, but it contained a parable of creation which every one had taken literally, for ages.

	"Result: When science found the true story of creation written in the rocks, they could not convince the people who insisted the book was right"

	"Man is a strange animal!"

	"We have a religion, largely for those who want some higher power to believe in. Ma-ritha—the Lord of Life and Light. He was born of the Rocks of Earth, long ages before we came to this space, and for him our ancient land was named. He—"

	Aarn had started at the name of the Magyan god. "Mithra! The name's a good bit different—but, Anto Rayl, he was born of the Rock, and tended by the shepherds, who adored him, and gave him gifts—"

	"Then the story of Ma-ritha survived?"

	"Yes—complete," replied Spencer; "even to his wrestling with the Sun."

	"And speaking of Sun," interrupted Aarn, "let us consider the progress on the Sunbeam. Have you got any reports on the beams, Anto Rayl?"

	"Yes; the tapping beam has reached the Sun, and the energy flood is on its way Sack now. It will reach us in about ten days more. It has made great progress while you were seeking the Ancient Tablets."

	"It has. How about the installations on Ma-kanee and Ma-ran?" '

	"We've finished the borings, and we have started installing the great supplies of power coils. But we have been rather waiting a conference with you."

	"I'll help you all I can, you, know, Anto Rayl. What is it?" 

	"The Council of Warfare would like to discuss it with you. They have been preparing for this discussion, and will meet you in two hours."

	"We will be there, Anto Rayl."

-

	TWO HOURS later Aarn, Carlisle, and Spencer entered the great council room. The cavern was carved from a dark red rock, and lights of soft, amber glow flooded walls and ceiling, reflected in soft shadowless illumination, enriched by blue decorations of twisting gas-glow tubes about the ceiling till the natural sunlight effect of Anrel was attained.

	A great table of richly carved, red gold occupied the center of the room. Gold, an ash, was common stuff to these men, useless save for decoration on planets where weight did not matter.

	The Magyans were seated at the table, and Anto Rayl stood at attention beside the gray-haired, powerful figure at the head.

	"These are the Strangers!" announced Anto Rayl ceremoniously.

	"Let the Strangers enter," said Andar Minot, the chief of council.

	"The Strangers within thy cavern accept the invitation with thankfulness at heart," Aarn's deep voice replied. "We bring with us what help we can. We offer what aid is within the power of our limbs and our minds."

	"Be seated, friends," said Andar Minot, rising, the ceremonial greeting over. "We have called on you again. Our plans are more exact, and an exact plan requires an exact answer.

	"First: By careful measurement of effects of known forces, we have been able to determine with accuracy the mass of each of our moons. We now know with exactitude the load that the driving engines must move.

	"Second: astronomers have been observing and calculating, and the plan is made exactly according to their results. The smaller of our missiles, Ma-ran, will be used first. This will be torn from its orbit at a time when it is advantageously situated, and the acceleration of its orbital velocity will tear it loose in the exact direction we wish. It will then be projected—"

	Carefully the plan was discussed, and the movements of each of the moons considered. Ma-ran would be equipped with a huge driving engine that would tear it loose from its orbit, to hurl down on Teff-el and Teff-ran, and the orbital forts. Ma-ran, though far lighter than Ma-kanee, would have a driving engine of equal power, because it would be expected to be mobile and capable of real motion, and be forced to pursue and catch the not entirely helpless orbital forts. 

	Ma-kanee, on the other hand, would merely hurl its quintillions of tons of mass on the planet—

	The plan was made, and the work well under way. That same day Aarn and Spencer went out to Ma-kanee where the work was being done.

	The little scout ship they were taken out on settled down near a great, arching glass dome, supported by heavy metal arches and braces. This had been an observatory for nearly six hundred years, actually, but now the instruments had been dismantled, and the records carried to the two moons which would remain here. This loss of two moons would be a serious thing to Magya. They had used these moons both as forts and as observatories. They had permitted many experiments under varying gravitational strains. And they had made possible many things that would no longer be possible.

	Further, the stresses of tides would be suddenly relaxed, and despite their careful choice of locations for cavern cities, this was always a terrible danger, since Magya-quakes might result that would shatter the roof of some cavern and release thousands of tons of rock. The moons would, however, spiral away through several revolutions of the planet, so the strains might adjust themselves gradually.

	Here, on the moon, the various organizations of mines, observatories, shipyards, and industries had been hastily shifted to the other moons. Ma-ran was small, and rather unimportant, but Ma-kanee was larger, and had been the seat of one of the greatest shipyards. This shipyard was now engaged in making the engines that would pull the satellite from the mother world. When this task was done, the apparatus would be transferred to the planet, and salvaged as far as possible.

-

	BESIDE the glass dome on Ma-ran was a great, dark tunnel leading to the bowels of the satellite. The surface structures had been possible for the same reason that battleships were possible—they were so dangerous they need fear no Tefflan ships.

	No subterranean workings had existed. But now the tunnel led far below, and the scout ship slipped into it. Ten miles down, the tunnel was broken by a great air lock. The side of the great lock that plugged the entire enormous channel was a smaller lock, and to this their guide piloted his small ship.

	"The large one is for the heavy freighters, carrying supplies. Takes power to pump all the air they need in locking. We use the back door." He smiled.

	"What type of freighters have you? They weren't needed before. Did you use battleships for the task?" asked Spencer.

	"Supply ships. We always had freighters. They were the heavy-load ships. They had to keep the fighters supplied when away from home. Remember they were filled with sun-power coils when you showed us how, but now this work has been going on, most of them have been taken apart, and the supplies of sun-power coils placed in these workings. We are making about one hundred large-size coils a day."

	"And you need fifty thousand!" exclaimed Spencer. "Take a while yet, won't it?"

	"Yes, but the capacity is being increased right along," the Magyan reminded him.

	"How in blazes will they charge all those coils?" asked Carlisle. "They can't carry them back and forth to the Sun for power."

	"Right. That's the whyfor of the Sun-tapping beam they set up way back yonder. The thing has been running about ninety days now, and" the power will be on hand soon. They have it set to pull in plenty—thanks to Aarn's advice. He told them it was easier to throw away extra power than to get along without power you needed. They can just tap the Sun-tapping beam from here and charge their coils all they want." 

	"They can tap the tapping beam? But what happens if they draw more power than the beam is bringing, and then when they get through, the beam brings as much power as they drew. I mean, if they draw too much power, more than the beam is carrying, and then don't draw enough power, and—oh, Lord, what happens, anyway?"

	Aarn and Spencer burst out laughing, as Carlisle stopped in confusion.

	"What happens if you drink more water than there is in the glass, and then when there is enough water, don't drink it?"

	"But you can't drink more water than there is then—"

	"We can't get more power than is coming. Right. Second, the signal for more power will go down the beam, but they can always use power, so we aren't worried about that."

	The lock gate ahead of them opened, and the little ship went on into the depths of the moon, in atmosphere now, for air had been released in the huge excavation.

	"What did they do with all the rock?" asked Carlisle at length.

	"Planted it all over the surface of the planet—satellite rather—so they wouldn't lose any weight. They want all they can get to smash down on the Tefflans."

	Suddenly the dimly lighted, rough sides of the tunnel spread out into a brightly lighted cavern of huge size. A vast crew of men were laboring here, with machines of every description to aid them. The strange, screaming roar of Shal torpedoes was screeching at the rock, and the rock came cascading down in fine dust, to be caught in great vacuum machines and filtered out of the air instantly.

	The caught dust was put in cartridges, and a pneumatic tube shot it up against the light gravity of the satellite and into the dome above, where the cartridge was emptied, the dust thrown outside, and the empty cartridge returned.

-

	ON ONE side of the cavern, great metal frames had been constructed, and already ranks and ranks of huge antigravity coils were set up.

	"Those are charged," explained their guide. "They were taken from the supply ships which are acting as freighters, and are supplying the power for the works here, now. Lights, power, machinery—everything."

	The cavern was being expanded in two dimensions, the floor and the ceiling already determined. Artificial gravity plates had been installed in the place to make work easier, but the gravity had been reduced to only one-half normal for Magyans. The men, trained, soldier-mechanicians every one of them, were working under the commands of their officers, and rapidly setting up new racks of power machinery. Huge converters for the strange momentum oscillators were going in now. Bank after bank of oscillators.

	"We have to drive conductors for miles through the rock in every direction to make certain we'd get perfect distribution of the momentum waves. That's the only reason we can move these moons, of course. If we'd had to depend on the space-drive disks, it would have been impossible. Just torn the thing to pieces." 

	Here and there they could see dark tunnels still unfilled, borings where Shal torpedo after Shal torpedo had burrowed its way on and on. The borings were less than six inches in diameter and hollow rods of aluminum had been thrust deep into them, to Spread the momentum waves through the planetoid.

	The great control-board panels were slowly assuming shape in the major control room. "We'll have six television stations on the surface, so arranged that we can see in every direction from in here. And we hope that you, Dr. Munro, will pilot Ma-ran in its flight on Teff-el!"

	"If it is the will of the Council on Warfare, I would be glad to handle such a ship as this will be! A ship a hundred miles in diameter, weighing quadrillions and hundreds of quadrillions of tons!"

	"Teff-el is as surely doomed as though Ma-ran were upon her now!" the Magyan exclaimed, a fire in his eyes that glowed at them in triumph. "At last this long battle our race has fought with the Tefflan race will be ended—through your aid!"

	"I don't like to be—what my people sometimes call a crapehanger—but Teff-el was to have been crushed by the new ships equipped with the transpon beam and the magnetic and gravity bombs. She was not as thoroughly crushed as you and I expected. So never count Teff-el destroyed till her fragments hang before your eyes and clink against your ship."

	"But nothing can withstand these incredible missiles! No energy could stop them."

	"None that I can imagine. It is beyond the power of anything we know, certainly, but I would have said that a beam capable of disintegrating the armor of a mighty battleship was beyond the Tefflans' ingenuity. But—they destroyed battleships."

	"But to stop such masses as these, they would first need something against which their momentum could be spent and—"

	"Why stop them? Why not see to it they did not stop—let them miss Teff-el, and we could not again work the trick in our lifetimes. Could we let them circle Anrel and strike again on the circuit, we might feel safer. Suppose they have some driving engine capable of turning these worlds aside?"

	"Ay—there is a possibility—but I do not believe it," the Magyan concluded smilingly. 

	"How soon will you be finished with this work?" asked Carlisle.

	"It will take us about seventy days more at our present" rate of progress. The great delay, of course, is in getting sufficient storage of power. Our Sunbeam won't bring us power rapidly enough, and we will want to have the greatest possible velocity when we finish our work. Of course Ma-karee will do most of the destructive work to Teff-el, but we must do our equally important share, and the fleet will have its great work. The Tefflans will be desperate. They will be very dangerous and fight with utter abandon."

-

	ON MA-KANEE, which they visited next, the work had not progressed as far, since a great deal of work had been needed in driving the three-hundred-and-fifty mile tunnel to the center of the sphere, and here, further, they found a metallic core. This was rather a help than a hindrance in some respects, however, for the tons and tons of metal were torn out of the center of the world with tremendous rejoicing. 

	"The fact is," explained their guide, "we have begun to plan on driving similar tunnels to the center of each of our other moons, if we find it possible. They are both totally devoid of natural heat. For some reason we had never thought of the possibility of getting the nickel-steel cores of the moons as a source of ready-refined armor plates!"

	"Why stop with the moons? What's the matter with Magya itself?" asked Carlisle.

	Spencer grinned and looked at Aarn.

	Aarn answered: "It is possible on these moons because their gravities are low. I don't believe they will be able to do the trick with Ma-las. That's moon number two. That has a diameter of about one thousand miles and is so heavy that the surface gravity is really respectable. The result being, that before they reach the center of the planet, the weight of the superincumbent layers is so great per square inch that any metal, any substance there could be, is pressed into a sort of tarry state. Not liquid, but not solid. The pressure makes it run. The result is that it's impossible to drill a tunnel.

	"On Magya, that condition is reached before you have gone ten miles down, to all practical intents and purposes. They couldn't tunnel deeper than that. If the metal core reached clear out there, they could go another half before it gave way, but rock, which composes that outer layer, yields.

	"So they can't get the metal core of the planet."

	"Nice cheap way to get armor plate!" Carlisle laughed. "Comes already alloyed, and all you have to do is saw out slabs."

	"Don't you believe it! It has to be heat-treated for just one of many things. But the main thing is that the cost of drilling that tunnel is preposterous. The initial cost is so great that only the enormous amount of metal available can make it pay."

	"Hmmm—that does make a difference. But, just the same, if they cut out much of that metal, Magya won't have to worry about battleship plate for centuries to come!"

	"They don't intend to. That metal represents the main ballast of their deadly missile. They have to use it not as armor plate, but as an armor-piercing projectile."

	Aarn gazed around the dim, raw cut that was rapidly being converted to a work camp in the heart of the little world. The hard metal was yielding slowly to the combined efforts of great transpon beams and friction saws. The saws had edges of a tungsten carbide alloy and were driven by compressed air. They had a speed of revolution in the near neighborhood of 60,000 r.p.m., and a velocity at the circumference approaching two miles a second. They had no teeth, but the sheer, wearing friction cut through the metal as if it was so much cheese.

	A huge plug was sawn around, a plug some ten feet in diameter, and three feet thick. It was then fused out, and run into crucibles, promptly tapped into ingot molds, and shipped to the surface. There were some molds set up here, and the metal was being run into them to make various parts for the apparatus which would be needed, mainly frames to support coils and panels, and great tie-beds for the momentum apparatus. 

	Lights were still being strung, and as yet no great supply of coils had been moved in. Only one small frame, for there was scarcely room for more.

	They returned to Magya, and Aarn set to work on his necessary calculations. Days passed in which they scarcely saw him, for, though they could sometimes help, in the main Aarn had retired into one of his silences. The old fellow who had calculated and observed had left his data in a form not too readily understandable to outsiders.

	Perhaps he had not realized how many steps he was leaving out, since all was so plainly clear to him after the lifetime he had spent in gathering all the data. At any rate, many things had to be rechecked by Aarn, both for that reason, and to assure himself that certain figures were still good after the lapse of more than thirty thousand years of Earth-time.

	In every case Aarn found the figures exact and still good.

-

	HE LEFT his study occasionally—once to see the great Sunbeam come in. The mighty star was sending back its flood of power now,—after nearly one hundred and twenty days. There were, however, tremendous tides in the power, for Anrel was, as stated, a Cephid variable, and the luminosity and power of the giant sun varied continuously. But steadily the power was pouring into the huge banks of coils in the heart of Ma-ran. The coil banks here were completed and filled before the coil banks in Ma-kanee were ready to absorb, then they took the drain. Part, of course, was used by the battleships and scout ships that continuously patrolled space, defending the planet and its satellites against attack.

	And, down near Teff-el, a fleet, a powerful fleet, was maintained in the disgust and terror of the city. Time and again the seeking, prying investigators, having pried out some secret of Teff-el appeared suddenly, only to explode destroying valuable works.

	The great central power plant at Katakataml had been wrecked by a dozen investigators, exploded simultaneously, and the tremendous concussion of the exploding mercury boiler had brought down the cavern. The atomic fires that had burned in the checking, controlling generators were released, and Katakataml became a complete wreck. A new fleet base was needed.

	But the watch of the Tefflans became more and more strict. The important secret places were carefully sealed so that it was impossible to get in, and then carefully searched that they might be certain that none had already been secreted.

	But the cities were still open to the investigators, and suddenly the Magyan watchers noticed a rapidly growing feeling of relief and joy. There was a secret abroad; the Tefflans knew that a new invention had been made toward their cause. But they did not know what. Only those in charge knew, and they did not give it out.

	"They say," said one Tefflan merchantship commander to a fleet officer, "that this new thing will wipe out Magya—every damnable monstrosity on the planet; that the last sacrifice to Kak-ka was directly responsible."

	"Ay—ehuu—it was a sad day for us, that last sacrifice. Malee Faaing, the daughter of Leean Taol, was chosen, and old Leean Taol went near mad at the thought. And then he heard that Magyans were sighted in the Temple—a raid. He was in Kakkakill with his daughter, of course, and he hastened to the capture—and was baffled in the black cloud. He saw the golden gate, though, how the Magyan giant had sprung the bars like bits of wire—my faith, what strength the animal had—and he cursed.

	"He cursed all the gods, and all men, and particularly all Magyans. Then some bumptious fool in the guard, hearing him, cursed him. He called him a fool of a chemist, a brainless old doddering wreck, and told him that the Magyan chemists had discovered a cloud of blackness combined with the very air to hide them. Why couldn't he find something that would kill the Magyans?

	"And Leean Taol watched the sacrifice—of his daughter—and he partook of the sacrament—and he swore by Kak-ka and all the gods and the flesh and blood of that sacrifice that he'd end the struggle. And the rulers say he has!"

	But what it was that the Tefflan chemist had discovered, no Tefflan knew, and no Magyan found out.

-

Chapter XVI.

	"I CAN'T imagine what they have." Aarn sighed. "Apparently it's chemical. I hope it takes them a long time to make it. If it takes more than about eighty days more, we'll be getting back home, and their little planet will just be a ring of asteroids."

	"But I don't see how they can do—what the only hint we have claims. They said they'd take the air away from Magya. That's an obvious impossibility. The mass is so great that no possible chemical combustive agent they can have could combine with it.

	"How's your work getting on?" Spencer added, seemingly irrelevantly.

	"Done!" Aarn sighed with contentment. "I have the apparatus ordered, and the Magyans can make it with Canning's help. You saw the final result."

	"Uhmmm—but you didn't test it."

	"You brainless meteor, how could I? I could test it by going home, which I am not prepared to do. I want to see the rest of this fight. I want to pilot Ma-ran as she crashes down on Teff-el. I want to wipe out that race which has been mankind's personification of evil since time began. I want to see this thing—"

	Anto Rayl's feet sounded in the hall outside, his breath coming in gasps. "Aarn—Aarn—they've started! Their weapon—it's fire. It's started on the night side—weird fire—it burns blue—come—"

	The three Solarians were on their feet already, racing for the ports of the Sunbeam. In seconds Canning joined them and Martin.

	Out of the city in an instant—behind a thousand little fleeting scout and spy ships.

	"The fleet—Tefflan fleet—sneaked out somehow—got out into space, and came within about ten million miles of Mag-ya before they were detected. Hundreds of oversize scout ships. They dropped thousands and thousands of bombs. They were going slowly then of course.

	"The bombs dropped to the planet. Painted black—on the night side—they have been discovered only now. The fleet chased the Tefflan fleet away, and they thought that no damage had been done till the bombs began to land," Anto Rayl explained rapidly.

	Around the world from the afternoon side where they were to the night side they raced. It was a weird sight that met them. Enormous tongues of flame that stretched shimmering and pale-blue a hundred miles into the stratosphere, pale, blue, wavering light. They marched and countermarched, they rose and fell, and always sank.

	They started here and there. And they ended always on the ground. But flame, burning hot flames that were still mingled with the blue-flame, and tinged, under powerful lights, with brown smoke. A dozen, darting, black silhouettes shot through the flames. 

	"Spy ships."

	Aarn tuned in the radio. A Magyan's voice sounded sharp—

	"The temperature of the flames is so low they would not bum human flesh. But the chemical activity is strange. The flames on the ground are exceedingly hot, the ground itself is becoming incandescent. The vapors given off are foul and poisonous. They are red-brown in color—"

	"Great God in heaven! The catalyst!" Carlisle almost shrieked it. "Magya's doomed as sure as Teff-el if we can't stop that! It's the catalyst—the catalyst—don't you fools see—the nitrogen catalyst—the atmosphere here is sixty per cent nitrogen—twenty-one per cent oxygen—they've found the catalyst and the whole atmosphere of the planet is burning to foul, poisonous, burning nitro-compounds! The whole atmosphere is going—the catalyst is never used, and the atmosphere is burning itself away!"

	Anto Rayl had gone pale; Aarn was looking pale, too.

	"Certain?" he asked sharply.

	"What else?" snapped Carlisle. "Tell them to get samples—even if it costs lives. There's only one hope we can have. Only one way we can stop it, if—"

	"Attention—attention all Magyan scouts and spies—" Anto Rayl had snatched the microphone from Aarn's hand. "Anto Rayl, C-8-N32 speaking—commander in chief of spies and scouts speaking. Listen, and all government forces listen: Carlisle, chemist of the Other Space, says this is a catalyst which causes oxygen and nitrogen to combine, burning up oxygen of the atmosphere. Deadly to us if not stopped. Get a sample. He needs it. Get enough for all chemists to work on. That is an order—C-8-N32 speaking."

	Anto Rayl returned to the Solarians a bit sheepishly. "I am sorry I have not told you. Naturally we watched at first. Then I did not wish to say. It is by my orders that you have seen so much lately—taken everywhere. I am the commander of all minor ships. Unlike your navies, we have a horizontal as well as a vertical command. It makes for closer unity of action. I am under the command of the Commander of the Council of Warfare only. I investigated your ship when it first appeared because we, too, saw the strange materialization and your defense.

	"Now forgive me, Carlisle, if it is within your power, save us—this other-space branch of your own race."

-

	THE WEIRD, blue flames leaped high, while on the ground they continued to glow, mingled with the brown fumes and the red flare of normal burning.

	Carlisle spoke rapidly: "The impossible catalyst. We've been looking for it for a century and a half. You see, nitrogen has one exothermic compound with oxygen—N2O5. That gives off heat in forming. Very little, comparatively, but some. That's why the flames were cold. N2O5 is the basis of nitric acid. It is a terrible oxidizing agent. All the organic matter in the soil is burning.

	"We want it because, controlled, it would generate free power from the air, and, more important, manufacture fixed nitrates for, literally, less than nothing at all. Uncontrolled, it is burning the precious oxygen and the nitrogen to form the deadly, corrosive nitric compounds.

	"Every particle of organic matter will be attacked. It will dissolve in the oceans and poison every species of creature. It will burn the air till there is no air, and sucks it out of your cities and leaves the people poisoned, and gasping. The oxygen will go, and with the nitrogen, to such a little volume the air pressure will fall, and then, no amount of locks will save your cities forever—"

	"Any luck?" asked Aarn, looking at Carlisle.

	The air in this room was very good, a little rich in oxygen. They were trying to help Carlisle all they could. In an air-tight retort, Carlisle had a sample of the deadly stuff. He looked up at Aarn's entrance. His face was pale, and haggard, his eyes tired.

	"Better take a rest, Carlisle," said Aarn.

	"No luck. Can't analyze it. Hasn't a chemical formula. Can't rest—the air pressure has fallen so now they can't keep up the pressure inside. That's only twenty days of it. And we can't stop it. We've got to stop it."

	"I know it. But you won't stop it being tired. Knock off for a while."

	"Say, Aarn, why don't they fix the locks here? They say they can't keep up the air pressure because the locks leak so. But they don't fix them. I thought they were proof against gases. Designed to keep poisonous gases out, and guaranteed gas-tight."

	"Uh—in the usual way," snorted Aarn. "They kept the poisonous gas out by pushing the good air out faster than it could come in. Result—they never planned on this. Then, too, it wouldn't do a bit of good to fix the locks, and rocks leak."

	"Rocks leak?"

	"Certainly! Full of cracks that they never worried about. Porous, so that it can seep through; With a pressure difference of nearly ten pounds to the square inch, that means leakage. And they can't suck it in fast enough to keep it up. Men not on active duty are being kept asleep as much as possible. Use less air."

	"Why can't they suck enough air in—build larger filters."

	"Time. They can't build them in time. They've started, of course. But, you see, they have to be proof against those ultra-microscopic particles. The worst of it is that it isn't the solid stuff that's doing the damage. Remember how terrible the gases were when they started the things—and the filters didn't get out the fine stuff.

	"It killed thousands—we missed the worst of it in the Sunbeam. In the civilian cities it was worse because they didn't have ships to retire to while adjustments were made. The filters would easily handle this—if they didn't have to be nearly choked off to stop the fine stuff." 

	"I can't analyze this. I haven't found a poison for the catalyst. And I can't see any other way out. The rest of the chemists here are as helpless as I am."

-

	CARLISLE turned wearily back to his work, and Aarn went out. He got into a little scout ship and was let out through a very small lock. In the twenty days that had passed, Mag-ya had changed. The whole world was blanketed under a pall of white snow. But the snow was slushy and about two feet deep.

	It glowed blue, and the air glowed with a dim blue haze, and a constant rain of white crystals that fluttered gently down added to the slush. There were no more red flames of burning organic material. That was all burned away long since. The air was full of the floating particles of the catalyst dust. The ground was covered with it. The water was full of it.

	Thick, oily brooklets of thick nitric acid boiled and fumed brown as they crept down to the sea, bearing their load of undissolved, solid nitric pentoxide. The streams hissed and boiled water and brown vapor as they met the sea and dissolved. The air outside, could it have been smelled by any living creature, was a burning, terrible poison. Billions of tons of atmosphere had already been burned away.

	The burning was slower now, for each pound of nitrogen had carried down with it three pounds of oxygen, and the atmosphere was almost nothing but nitrogen and carbon dioxide. There was no water in the air, for the nitric oxide absorbed it, drank it greedily. The carbon dioxide was formed from every scrap of organic matter that had been on the planet.

	There were no fish in the sea, no plant nor any animal on the land, and no bird in the air. The humus in the soil was burned; the very rocks were being eaten by the corrosive, oily stuff.

	The nights were cold now, and the thick rivulets froze. The days were hot, and the snow melted under Anrel's rays and ran into the sea, liquid itself. The sea was an ocean of strong nitric acid. The very spy ship Aarn rode was being eaten slowly by the corrosive gas, and a trail of light brown fumes floated out behind.

	Out on Magya's four moons there was a deadly activity. Men were working with the grim determination that Teff-el should die, even as Magya perished, for there was little hope. Even if the catalyst stopped now, they feared the end would be inevitable.

	The air glowed blue, night and day. The great, clear stars of this space were invisible, for the light in the air hid them.

	Aarn settled to the planet and opened a little trap. It closed, and as the ship rose, there was a mass of nitric oxide in it. A moment later he had taken a similar sample from the water of the nitric-acid sea. Then he rose, and at an altitude of ten thousand feet took a sample of the thin air.

	Later, back in the city, Carlisle made a hurried test of the various samples. The catalyst, still active, was in the air, in the snow, and in the ocean. It was everywhere.

	"They're still rejoicing on Teff-el," snapped Carlisle. "Spencer was in a while ago and said that Teff-el has at last made investigators, and there were some flying around on the planet recently. They're watching with glee."

	Aarn's grin deepened. "Wait till they send investigators out to the moons." 

	"They have," snapped Carlisle. "They're examining the works carefully, I suppose."

	"Oh, no, they aren't. They're discovering that the Magyans are preparing to move to the moons."

	"They'll send the damnable catalyst there," groaned Carlisle. 

	"Much good it may do them. They probably have got the catalyst in there before this. But—they've changed the air in the moons to pure oxygen at reduced pressure. The catalyst can't find any pure nitrogen to work on." 

-

	AARN had slipped up behind Carlisle, and now he deftly slipped an arm about his friend, lifted him up and away from his bench, and as Carlisle opened his mouth in protest, Aarn popped a pill in it, and simultaneously grabbed his nose. 

	"Whoa—kiddie. Swallow nasty medicine like good little boy. Baby boy's gotta sleep, or he'll go clean off his orbit."

	Perforce, Carlisle choked, and swallowed.

	"Just a bit of your own pet diamorph. Give you a nice heavy sleep for twenty hours that you wouldn't take. Ah—baby's quieting down." 

	Carlisle wasn't—but Aarn's arms were quieting him. Carlisle was as helpless as any baby might have been, save that a child, being possessed of unlimited flexibility in his joints, can become incredibly hard to hold, and Carlisle couldn't. Aarn took him to his room aboard the Sunbeam and put him on the bunk. 

	"You might as well stay there now, Trolley Car, because I won't let you out, and you are just naturally bound to go to sleep pretty quick, anyway."

	"I've got an antidote for this stuff," Carlisle snapped angrily. "You interfering half-witted physicist, I've got to find that catalyst poison."

	"You moronic, subnormal idiot, you can't go without sleep indefinitely. You passed out twice in an experiment, so I'm just stopping you ahead of time this time—and you'll sleep. Nighty-night, you asteroid."

	Aarn left. With a groan of utter, irresistible weariness Carlisle sank back into his bunk, and instantly was asleep. 

	Aarn went down to the control room, and sat thinking. Aarn was not a chemist; he was a physicist, but like any scientist, he knew something of almost all others. He tried to recall what he knew of nitrogen, of oxygen, of their mutual behavior. 

	With a start he sat up, and finally got Carlisle's notes. "He writes a misbegotten sort of a hand," he said disgustedly, looking at the sloppy notes.

	The book was spotted with everything imaginable, and in many places there were irregular holes that grew when looked at, the paper was so rotted by acids and bases.

	Aarn sat down and at last came to what he wanted. A spectral analysis of the catalyst. Simple—thus far. But how were those elements combined?

	He looked at the list of them. And one he had rather hoped to see was there—titanium. With a sigh, he settled deeper and considered. Titanium, he remembered, was one of the few elements which burned readily in nitrogen; also oxygen. Perhaps that was the active principle.

	If he could just find some substance that would combine with the titanium permanently—he'd suggest that to Carlisle when he woke up, anyway.

	Spencer appeared presently, looking tired. "Been working out on Ma-ran. They're pushing the work. They have it almost all finished. Final plans called for an engine as powerful as the driving mechanism of Ma-kanee, but they've made it bigger. The air here's getting pretty bad. I hear they can't get oxygen. Why can't they take that damnable residue outside and break it down?"

	"The catalyst," said Aarn with a gentle sigh. "That, like the famous French phrase of the 1915's 'c'est la guerre', is the answer to all questions here, at present. They can't get the catalyst out of the snow or the liquid, and if they try to break it up, it just goes right back together, and the catalyst tends to escape into the air of the room—and that's why they don't do it." 

	"Any hope, Aarn?"

	"Uhmm—if they smash those moons into Teff-el soon enough. Then we might move to some other planet—at least a lot of them could. Not all—but a lot. Might save the race, at least. Before Teff-el is smashed, the Tefflans would kill the new colony." 

	"The moons will move in fifty days, smash Teff-el in sixty three."

	"The council says the population will be small enough to move into the warships in thirty at the present rate."

-

Chapter XVII.

	"THAT IDEA is interesting—you have a notion it acts something like the haemoglobin in the blood, then—carries combined nitrogen to oxygen, is freed of the nitrogen by the oxygen, and immediately goes back for more nitrogen in some way?" Carlisle seemed to turn the idea over in his mind. "Interesting thought—but the thing is, titanium wouldn't do that—it's just against all chemistry."

	"Uhmmmm—so's this blinkin' catalyst. You haven't made any better suggestions, I take it. Now what would stop it, if that's the case? You know—something like carbon monoxide in the blood. Combines with the haemoglobin and stays that way."

	'The chloride is a liquid. And peculiarly stable. The flouride is a solid—I've tried all those things—all the gases I could think of."

	"Well, try some more. Try something like ClO2—a compound of chlorine for instance, with oxygen, so while the oxygen of the compound grabs the nitrogen, the chlorine can slip in."

	"This isn't a game of puss in the corner," objected Carlisle. "But I get your idea—I think I'll try something on that idea. But it will have to be an oxy-compound, because nothing else can exist—out there!" 

	"How goes it now?" asked Aarn, looking in once more at Carlisle's lab. "Any luck?"

	"Shut up and keep out—I'm busy."

	Aarn retired.

	It was the twenty-third day when Carlisle came out. The air in the city was unbreathably thin. The oxygen content was so low that people were gasping for breath under the slightest exertion, while many of the old, those with weak heart or lungs, had already gone into eternal sleep.

	But Aarn recognized Carlisle's joy as he came out. "I've got something—it worked a little—" It was a sealed glass tube, a peculiar greenish-yellow liquid that had the characteristic color of substances green by transmitted and yellow by reflected light. It was volatile, thin liquid, and Carlisle was volatile today.

	"Come—look—" Aarn was already beside him. The laboratory door shut, and the air inside was noticeably richer, the oxygen content higher.

	In the glass dome, there was a little pile of the deadly white nitrogen snow, and a steady blue glow, where oxygen and nitrogen fed into it. Carlisle broke the stem of his sealed tube, and a pungent, biting odor spread through the room. The liquid boiled instantly, and frost collected on the tube. Carlisle held it in a cloth now, as the gas was sucked into the bell jar.

	Instantly the blue flame died, and went out. Carlisle resealed his tube in" a flame, and no amount of shaking revived the catalyst action.

	"I've heated it; I've separated the N2O5, and I've done everything else. The catalyst is dead—and stays that way!"

	"Can we make that?" demanded Aarn.

	"We've got to," answered Carlisle. "And we can. It takes—I don't know how little. It's the poison. It's a chlorine compound—you were right. My Lord, the thing—it's done! We—we can live here!"

	"Shut up!" snapped Aarn. The man was nearly hysterical from the release of strain. "Get to work and teach the other chemists. We need tons of it—we've got to open those filters first—let the poisonous air come in, and take that catalyst out. Is the anticatalyst poisonous?"

	"No—see." Carlisle took a deep breath of the fumes. "It's biting—acrid—a heavy dose might be, but only as hydrochloric acid is. It burns a bit, but in the low concentration. Send all the men up—I've got the poison!"

	Hours later flasks of the stuff were coming out. A thin, volatile liquid. Chemists were regulating the flow into the great air filters of the city. In every city similar scenes were being witnessed. The catalyst was no longer deadly. The air could be sucked in more rapidly, the poisons eliminated.

	Hours later still—great retorts set up—glass chambers with their loads of deadly snow were being cooked, and plentiful, rich air came out.

	Three days—the gas was boiling out of great tanks now, being dropped from low-flying machines, and high-flying machines, and everywhere the catalyst sucked it in—and died. 

	The flame of deadly blue died, and the nitric oxide at last began to cease its constant fall. Little light flakes drifted down for days, as slow release of the catalyst poison found the last active trace of catalyst.

-

	ALREADY, HUGE beam stations had been set up, and great Sunbeams reached out to tap the main beam, and hour after hour, great fan arcs reached out across the ground, and the burning arcs caught the snow, converted it in an instant to vapor at thousands of degrees—and smashed the snow back to pure oxygen and nitrogen, the lesser oxides of nitrogen breaking down instantly in the arc. Other stations were being built by the sides of the lakes, by the oceans, at the mouths of rivers. The thick, oily rivers, loaded with the terrible, burning stuff flashed into clean, burning electric flame, and the nitric gases returned to the air as nitrogen and oxygen.

	In the cities, life was easy once more, air plentiful, and the outside air pressure rapidly rising. It would be years, perhaps, before the last of the terrible nitric oxide was gone, before men could venture forth into—

	Rains were falling again, now. After a brief three days the terrific arcs that boiled away sea? and lakes and rivers were throwing rain clouds into the air, and rain began to wash the stuff in thick torrents to the sea, clearing the land rapidly.

	The water was loaded with thousands of tons of soluble stuff. Landslides, even minor quakes, changed the topography as the terrific erosive actions became evident. In mere days, the erosion of centuries had taken place!

	But it would be years before the soil was fit to bear again, centuries before the seas had been freed of their deadly load of acid. For, active as nitric acid is, and unstable as its compounds are, there were billions on billions of tons of it.

	"It will be a generation," said Carlisle, "before the land will be fertile again. Then it will be superfertile, for the place is soaked in nitrates as no other land ever was. The Tefflans have solved the problem of nitrates for all time to come. By the way—when it no longer counted, I found a way to analyze that blamed stuff, and succeeded in making some. Did you hear what was done with it?"

	"No, I've been busy with Spence, setting up arc stations to destroy the stuff."

	"A load of it was dumped on Teff-el just on chance. They had the destructive catalyst, of course—they wouldn't have dared to use the thing as a weapon if they hadn't, and the scout brought back a sample of their anticatalyst. By the time he got it here it was just a mixture of elements. Their anticatalyst breaks down so rapidly it couldn't have been analyzed, if we had tried the trick sooner."

	"I expected that, too," said Aarn. "I thought of dumping a load of the snow-infected snow I might call it—on Teff-el, to see what they'd do."

	"Yes—so did I. But I realized that they'd either let the small amount we had go, or gather it up, and treat it privately. The one thing they couldn't do would be let us get a sample of that anticatalyst."

	"The work on the moons has been deserted temporarily, and our investigators on Teff-el report that their investigators on Magya report a cessation of the efforts to make the moons habitable to their people, so we aren't sorry. In other words, they really thought we were going to move to the moons. The cities will have to be kept closed because of the bad gases outside, anyway, so that there will be no trouble with their investigators getting in and reporting on how the people in our cities feel."

-

Chapter XVIII.

	THE GREAT cubicle space was huge, yet packed with apparatus. It was almost one thousand feet on a side, a billion cubic feet of space, yet the great storage coils banked up and away, solid, on all sides of the tiny control and living quarters in the lower corner of the/room. The apparatus and labor expended in the construction of this great thing represented the equal of nearly 600,000,000 dollars. A similar enormous sum had been needed for the apparatus—and only part of the labor of constructing the huge power chamber in the heart of Ma-kanee. But nearly 100,000,000 dollars' worth of metal had been extracted, which made the cost of the two just about equal.

	If this venture failed, Magya would be hard put for some time. Many necessary industries on the home planet had suffered from the men diverted here, but the nitric acid inundation had naturally been costly beyond estimation.

	Aarn, Spencer, and Carlisle stood on a platform high among these great-heaped coil masses and looked down in wonder. "All charged?" asked Spencer at length.

	"Filled completely," nodded Aarn. "Remember, the new power message went down to the Sun and back while we were working on this. By the time that flood got here, we had use for it, and it's been filling coils at the rate of two an hour, both here and on Ma-kanee. Both moons' coils are full."

	"Really—the destructive energy that will blast a full-sized planet is concentrated now in those coils." Carlisle looked at the vast array of coils in something approaching horror. "What would happen if they all released their energy at once?"

	'Volatilize this moon. Do the same for Ma-kanee, I guess," replied Aarn. "They won't, though. We took certain precautions, I assure you. Though they will be short-circuited at the last final plunge, when the moon strikes Teff-ran. Ma-kanee's coils will go when it strikes Teff-el. But you see, not only all the energy stored here—which is enough in itself—but also the energy of falling through five hundred million miles of Anrel's enormous gravitational field, plus the natural orbital velocities of both Magya system and the individual moon will aid Ma-kanee, our main weapon. Ma-ran here, will be slowed up, and under better control, because it has other duties to perform!"

	A sudden, dull, humming note sounded twice. Carlisle started, and the other two stiffened. "First warning," said Aarn softly, relaxing. "That's the warning from the astronomers on Ma-kanee. They sent the first warning and they'll begin accelerating now, in about thirty-two and a half minutes. They're starting the oscillator tubes, warming them up."

	Unconsciously, Aarn looked down. Two enormous glass tanks loomed thirty feet high, two tanks filled with metal plates, and huge heaters, grids and screens—the oscillator control tubes. Beside them loomed two cold tubes with a sprinkling of mercury over them, about ten feet high, and some five in diameter. They were the "chopper" tubes which were designated to chop the current off abruptly at an enormous frequency—

-

	AGAIN the two dull humming notes. "The choppers!" said Aarn softly. His eyes shifted to the great bulking lumps of the momentum drive itself. "That comes next—run direct current through them for a while to warm them. Then when they break that current the oscillation is started—"

	Three notes. "Let's go below." Aarn led the way down. In the control room there was quiet confusion. Men were rapidly walking back and forth. Seven different radio positions were occupied. Three more television control positions, and, finally, the great panel where the main controls were, with the three television screens and the selector dials which would throw any part of space on the screen, or into any one of the telescopes.

	A low, powerful throbbing hum sounded. As Aarn threw a switch, the television disk before him lighted up suddenly, as the beating note ceased, and the face of the controller on Ma-kanee appeared. His face was drawn and intent as he threw a switch. Suddenly an enormous cat began to whine, its whine mounted, and steadied to a great, gentle purr. Another—another—another—

	"Gyroscopes," said Aarn. "They have to stop the spin of the moon first. They have small momentum controls that are controlled by the big gyroscopes. They'll hold it firm."

	There was a steady, grumbling roar sounding now from the speaker. Ma-kanee was being stopped in her age-long rotation. Only slight disturbance was caused, because every particle was being decelerated, but there was a certain amount of oblateness, and this was flattening out, or rounding out, with groaning protest.

	The controller started, and turned to someone behind and to one side of him. "All proceeding as directed. The main tubes and apparatus are warm now, ready for operation if necessary."

	The man behind him made some inaudible answer, and the controller, Hirun Theralt, checked all the dials before him.

	Quickly the time passed. All the men on Ma-kanee were busy, working frantically as the moment of the start approached. Finally the controller spoke directly into his microphone.

	"To the Council of Astronomy: My rotation shows zero. Is this correct?"

	A voice answered metallically from a concealed speaker. "That is correct Read off your coordinates, and we will give you the correct axes."

	"X-543-27. Y-732-45. Z-982.38."

	"Set the controllers at: X-234-31. Y-135-52, Z-64-32. Let the master controls rest at this, and watch only your deviation axes readings. Keep these as directed in further messages. Are they now reading zero?"

	"They are zero, and are holding. The automatic antirotation apparatus has been attached, and standardized."

	"Continue as instructed, with acceleration along X at the rate of 752,000 units. At the second signal, increase to 1,435,000 units, and continue except as directed." 

	The controller repeated the instructions, his voice trembling a trifle.

	Minutes dragged. Then finally came a soft buzz. Another, another—"At the tenth," said Aarn softly, "he will start—" 

	Eight - nine - ten—A groan echoed softly from the loudspeaker, and a great snarling vibration echoed instantly, and died in a shrillness. A blue light glowed down from above, where the great mercury tube boiled in sudden activity. 

	"Acceleration at seven-five-two," said the controller. 

	"That means," explained Aarn, "seven hundred and fifty thousand millions tons of force. The plan to increase it by steps—"

	On the screen, a sudden blankness came, a shift, then the image of an elderly, gray-haired man. "The view we will send now, is a model map of the actual, and the correct theoretical position of Ma-kanee. This will show the deviation from her normal orbit."

	The screen was black, save for a green circle, Magya, two red and blue dots. The dots were points on great ellipses. Slowly, slowly, they could see the red dot near Magya creeping along. The others seemed almost motionless.

	Hours later, the inner red dot had made a complete circuit, and now there were three red dots, and two blue. Ma-kanee's dot had split in two. One of the Ma-kanee dots Was slowly circling on a greater, and ever-growing orbit More and more power was being applied. The slow acceleration was increasing gradually.

	Again Ma-ran swung about in her orbit—and now Ma-kanee was hundreds and thousands of miles from her assigned orbit. She was struggling mightily now, with increasing momentum and centrifugal force to pull herself free of the bonds of Magya. Her orbit was lengthening more and more toward a straight line. She was on the night side of Magya now, soon she would fly off on the day side—and escape to ward Anrel. Then the acceleration that was being applied would change in direction, change to bend the normal orbital speed about Anrel toward the sun, instead of at right angles. The centrifugal force no longer acting against it, Anrel's pull might drag the moon even faster toward Teff-el.

	The screen was showing many different scenes now. At length it showed a scene that was relayed from a ship far away—a ship hanging off Teff-ell An investigator, one of those that still had not been found, was showing the streets of Cantak.

	Teff-el had seen and understood, when Ma-kanee started her movement. Not fully understood, for they believed it only a great weapon—a great battleship that no battleship could fight. A battleship that would come down and ray them out of existence—destroy every ship, every orbital fort—and finally the forts on Teff-ran. Then Ma-kanee, they feared, would set up in an orbit about Teff-el, and never again would a Tefflan ship be able to reach the surf ace! Every city isolated—till tunnels could be dug to connect them!

	There was panic, and excitement. Tremendous loads of supplies were being rushed out to Teff-ran, that she might defend the planet, perhaps conquer even the mobile moon!

-

	AARN SMILED grimly. "Futile," he said. "Nothing could help. They might carry some of their people away—but the Magyan fleet is already waiting just off Teff-el. They can't get away. There are almost no ships near here." 

	"What if the Tefflans attack?" asked Carlisle.

	Aarn lighted a cigarette carefully. There were few left now. "If they did, what would they attack? The moon? Much good that would do them. Magya? Where? How? There's nothing on the surface, and they couldn't reach the cities before our fleet could start in on one of their orbital forts, and start cleaning up thoroughly. They'd have to be called home."

	It took days, and long before the process was finished, Tefflan ships of war were circling viciously off Ma-kanee—and occasionally there was a flash of instantaneous blue incandescence as the inconceivable coils of the moon ship were shorted by a mere cruiser.

	But finally Ma-kanee sailed proudly free, and bent her orbit more and more toward Teff-el.

	And then, one day, there was further stirring among Magya's children, and Teff-el was stricken by horrible panic.

	Aarn, his iron nerves alone subduing the trembling that crept into them, pressed a series of controls. And huge oscillator tubes glowed dull-red. The power board sprang into life across the way, and Aarn read its warnings and its story, and returned to his own control board.

	The tremendous transformers hummed suddenly and the great chopper tubes glowed green-blue, great arcs roared as tumbler switches snapped across. Then the shrill snarl of speeding gyroscopes. The enormous power plant that was Ma-ran, was waking to life. Huge cables that spread out like the threads of a three-dimensional spider web began to glow softly as a low power oscillated through them, and gently, but swiftly, the spin of Ma-ran was slowed. There were no observatories outside here. Ma-ran was to be far more active and far more destructive than her larger sister as she ran amuck.

	On Ma-kahee, observatories had been dismounted. There were no more machines, no lenses—only the transpon-projectors that bit into the feeble attacking moths of the cruisers. The apparatus had been carried away, and already, as the great coils were exhausted in accelerating the ship that was a world, they were being recharged again. Then, when these were again discharged, the great supply ships would take them on. Before Ma-kanee finally struck Teff-el, it would be little more than a hollow moon. The machinery would be salvaged. But Ma-ran was to be an active deadly thing all her short life as a ship; there would be no salvaging of machinery here. Every coil was to be emptied not once, not twice, but four times.

	And as the final signal came, Aarn was on his own. He had only a ship. Carefully he had worked out the course he wanted to follow, and now, with his enormous craft, he turned in the tremendous power. A shrill whine built up, the moon trembled and chattered with the fall of rocks outside, loose material suddenly sliding as the planetoid trembled, started—and moved!

-

Chapter XIX.

	"We're on the right course," sighed Aarn after checking his readings once more. "This ship isn't exactly responsive. But—good Lord, what power!" He looked up through the glass roof of the power room to the gigantic, glowing, platinum bars that represented the filament heaters of the oscillator , tubes. Beyond rose tier on tier of great coils. Men were working among them now, weightless, for the gravity had been turned off. The coils, rapidly being shifted from one transpon beam set-up to the other, were being prepared for , the first charging. A transpon beam would soon reach out across space to tap the great permanent beam structure that was now several million miles away. A recharge was needed. Ma-ran had just escaped the gravity of Magya.

	Aarn looked through a tiny cross-hair instrument at an exceedingly sensitive and accurate television device—and saw he was exactly on his course, according to the stars of this space.

	He straightened again, and flipped a televisor control. The screen before him swirled, and lighted up with the scene aboard the Ma-kanee. The controller on duty now was again Hirun Theralt. He looked up with a smile. "You are on course, and all is going well?"

	"Perfectly. We are about 3,000,000 miles behind you now. We'll be passing in a few days. They been bothering you much?"

	Hirun Theralt smiled woodenly. "Slightly," he acknowledged. "We have destroyed fifteen cruisers, ten destroyers—and scout ships by the score! They have stopped annoying. And you?"

	"We aren't fighting at all—we found that the disintegrators can't get through all the rock and stuff. So we're just not noticing them. Several of them getting ready to land have been destroyed by a transpon beam, though. We forbid landing."

	"They're taking out our coils. They've been discharged completely."

	"Aye—I saw the supply ships coming. You have no control left?"

	"We are maintaining control only by means of the battleships, remember."

	"They won't salvage this apparatus," Aarn said rather sadly. "They can't really use the power plant anyway—nothing else this big to move."

	Hirun Theralt laughed, and Aarn suddenly started, as he saw Anto Rayl appear in his screen, smiling, too. "Don't be so sure! We are thinking seriously of going after some of those minor planetoids out beyond there, and hauling them in whole for moons—and metal."

	"Not too bad an idea—hi—two battleships!" Aarn started in surprise, as on his side screen, two Tefflan battleships appeared, suddenly swooping down. A faint tingling stirred in Aarn's flesh, a lethargy, that was yet mixed with a strong, tearing stimulus—

	"The death ray!" he called in surprise. "They have power in that—" He was working swiftly. About him, as he sounded the alarm, a dozen other men had appeared as if by magic, and a tremendous activity of switches and power boards took place.

	"Defense power in," snapped a young Magyan power lieutenant.

	"Propulsive power doubled," another called, as he finished his work.

	"Turn the sun-tapper beam up, for full drain available, and prepare to turn it into a waste beam if necessary," snapped Aarn, going to work. Even to this enormous thing, a battleship attacking with death-dance rays could be deadly. 

	The battleships came rapidly, swooping nearer. Aarn turned four huge transpon beams on the first ship, and, when he was sure his sighting devices had had time to keep them aligned, he sent out all the power they could safely carry.

	One-two-three—they struck. An enormous, scintillating splotch of light exploded suddenly on the walls of the first battleship—it flared and grew to a terrible, blinding sun, a spot of light ten feet across, with a billion horse power pounding against it! But the wall of the ship did not yield! Aarn started in surprise—and at that moment the greater sun-tapping beam power came in. The spot of light spread like an eating acid, flared to an incredible temperature, the metal behind that light.

	"They've stopped it," Aarn groaned. "A sheath of some sort of transpon condition. I knew they'd analyze it eventually."

	"What does that mean?" snapped Spencer.

	"The transpon beam is useless! They can—" As he spoke, the moon tingled with a terrific shock of the death beam.

	Aarn turned his face up slowly, and it twitched with the shock of the beam, "absorb power from us," he finished. He pulled a dozen switches, and the transpon beams died; only the coils drank in the power now. "Without that supply of power, they can't kill us with this mass of material in the way of their high frequency note."

-

	ALREADY from far across space, Magyan battleships were appearing. Here and there, a ship materialized suddenly from nothingness, slowing to speed less than that of light. Battleships racing to the call of the Ma-ran. The warning had gone out by radio—but on the surface of Ma-ran there were scout stations, where scout ships capable of exceeding light speed lay constantly ready. With the first sight of the battleships, they had started. Those who had remained on the outside of Ma-ran had died when the beam struck.

	The Tefflan battleships, turned, and with their terrible destructive beams started work on the Magyan fleet. Their beams were far more powerful, the center of their great ships hollow, letting the gravity bombs explode harmlessly. The magnetic bombs were useless against that thick metallic armor of the battleships.

	And a Magyan battleship slowly, slowly crumbled away. Another began to drift helplessly, as the men within it died—Thermite bombs were glowing on the great sides of the battleship—and as they ate through, the Magyans saw within a three-foot layer of the red-gold. It carried away the thermite's heat so rapidly that no break was made.

	"They came prepared," murmured Aarn gently. Spencer looked at him in wonder. Aarn had a plan, evidently. "But there are limits—limits in everything. Now I wonder—" Aarn grew busy with the televisor, making strange gargling noises, thinking carefully and painfully before each.

	"Code," he said, as Spencer looked at him with troubled eyes. "Not a language. They know what I mean though when—"

	Presently Aarn was setting up a great many beam circuits, and far across space a great many other men were working very hard. They were men on Ma-kanee, and on the supply ships, and elsewhere—

	"Spence," said Aarn, "if you think you have seen heat, or seen power—just you reconsider."

	Presently, Aarn was ready, and he growled and gargled something else. Ten seconds later, his eyes glued on a super-accurate chronometer, he pressed a button. Then he looked eagerly at the screen. Great transpon beams had reached out in three directions, and simultaneously, the whole great coil system of Ma-ran, the great tapping beam—that was reaching out to the main tapping beam that extended from Magya to Anrel—all were in the circuit.

	And, in the middle of space, close to the point where the two Tefflan ships fought end to end, it happened. The aiming was very accurate. The great power coils of the supply ship near Ma-kanee, the remaining power coils of Ma-kanee, the power coils of six Magyan battleships—all were pouring their power into a single beam. And the combined might of the tapping beam, and Ma-ran's coils against it!

	Then, while the Magyan fleet retreated, a Magyan scout ship was started for that energy center—and reached it at just the moment it came into being. There were no men in the ship, and the ship flashed into instantaneous gas, and gas at such a temperature that the thermite had been cold by comparison. The molecules were split to atoms and the atoms smashed to electrons and protons and negatrons and neutrons—and they exploded outward with something approaching the speed of light. And the wasted energy became radiant energy, and anything anywhere near that energy center was heated by it.

	Not the mild warmth of a thermite bomb-located in a spot—but the heat such as a minor sun might give. Billions of horse power. Not a heat ray, but a wild, uncontrolled heat center.

	The Tefflans were suddenly glowing white at the end nearest the center. The heat spread, and even as the ships started, the rear sections slumped molten, and floated away, blazing white and blue in the heat of the center. The fore sections, no longer shadowed, unable to accelerate into a speed faster than light, and escape, as the nearer Magyan ships had, turned red, and smoked.

	They fell easy prey to a few hundred gravity bombs, for the center of the ship was not the center of half the ship. And the transpon-condition shield failed and the battleships became, in short seconds, flaming incandescent wreckage.

	Slowly, the heat center died, as the conflicting powers were withdrawn gradually, lest some ship be injured by an unchecked beam.

	Aarn smiled slightly at Spencer. "I hope they haven't any more like that. I hear that they destroyed seven of our ships before they got out here—"

	"They haven't, I suspect, or they'd have sent them all. They were afraid of this moon."

-

Chapter XX.

	"I think our course will be X-235-89," Aarn said. His voice was low, and tense. Ma-kanee was thousands of miles behind now—but in the forward televisor disk, Teff-el showed a huge, round disk. And about the little moon, traveling now with a velocity of thousands of miles an hour, but slower now than Ma-kanee, a fleet of great battleships wove a constant pattern. An angry, threatening halo of destruction, strengthened and widened by the heavy cruisers, and light cruisers, and destroyers. Almost the entire navy was here, for Ma-kanee needed no protection now. Ma-kanee was deserted. There was no apparatus, save for two or three televisors, and a small crew of men to observe. Ma-kanee was a hollow hulk, seven hundred miles in diameter, driving down on a doomed world.

	Teff-el was under no delusions now. They knew that Ma-kanee was not intended to capture forts, and their moon—they knew what it meant. And that was the reason for the heavy protection that was offered Ma-ran. The Tefflans knew that Ma-kanee had no driving engine, that they had no possible weapon capable of turning it. Their only hope lay in capturing Ma-ran, and using it to batter Ma-kanee aside.

	The buzz saw of circling, deadly ships was not revolving unhindered. Scout ships of the Tefflan fleet kept darting in, hoping to launch an unsuspected torpedo, or some weapon which might pierce the magnetic and antigravity shields.

	Then the thing happened which the Magyans had been expecting. The Tefflan commercial fleet swam up from their cities, formed with incredible speed, and swept out into space. They went directly away from the approaching moons, out from Teff-el in such a direction that the battleships of Magya would have to circle wide around the planet to attack them, for the great forts were in action. Instantly the fleet about Ma-ran split, according to previous orders. The newest, fastest ships disappeared in speed greater than light. On the other side of Teff-el, the fleet of thousands had split, scattered in every direction.

	This was not merely a migration—it was an attempt at escape, an attempt filled with hatred, and bitterness—

	"If only," said Miuut Kakin, "we can have but one shipload of the colonists safely through—safely on that planet Tieranl—they can establish a secret colony—we will yet have some chance of wiping out thousands of those misconceived Magyans!"

	Miuut Kakin was in charge of the Tefflan escape. He himself would not go. He would die—with most of the planet's inhabitants.

	And just about five thousand miles beyond Teff-ran's orbit, the fleet of fleeing Tefflans learned that Magya had yet one more weapon. A detector. Bombs. Bombs less than a half inch in diameter, bombs projected by the millions, from great momentum-wave guns, so that they traveled at a velocity of fifty miles a second—like the spreading pellets from a shot gun—bombs of luminous paint. They scattered in every direction in space. Meteors suddenly became luminescent. Ships, fleeing, lightless ships were suddenly visible—

	With the joy bred of warfare, hatred incredibly old, the Magyan battleships threw themselves on their prey. The needle ships of Teff-el strove in vain to disintegrate the great machines. Their own walls, only inches in thickness, flashed in instantaneous incandescence, as two great transpon beams touched either end, and the shock of enormous, antigravity power coils poured through the framework.

	They did not find some battleships. But they released nearly two thousand tiny one-man spy ships to dart about the space, and seek out every ship, every possible machine, and destroyers lingered behind to finish the job.

	"This time," said Argan Matroh, Coordinator of Councils, "there shall not be even one ship to maintain that race." The battleships and the spy ships and the destroyers worked to that end.

	But when hundreds of ships start out, all at one time, one, just one, might escape. There would be a careful search of every planet after this, just for certainty.

	Aarn watched the screen ahead. There were other ships still on Teff-el, ships never designed to leave the planet, and incapable of it. They were scurrying back and forth madly. The ships were visible in the telescopic televisor.

	"Orbital fort," said Spencer, pointing to a sudden, unfocused, black shadow that swam leisurely across the view. "Will they be dangerous?"

	Aarn shrugged his shoulders. "Probably. They may be able to reach us with the new death-ray projectors. We will know sooner or later."

	"Two hours and thirty-one minutes," said Spencer.

	The planet was growing rapidly now. Far off to the left loomed Teff-ran, sweeping rapidly nearer. Teff-ran would not cross their path in this first circuit. "I hope they calculated the mass of those orbital forts right," sighed Aarn. "It will ruin our plans, if they don't give the right reaction."

	"How?"

	"We're supposed to hit three of them in this first swing, five in the next—if the thing works. We're going above orbital speed. Those collisions, with loss of momentum, or better, increase of mass, are counted on to slow us for an exceedingly elliptical orbit. The five, next time, will round out our orbit again, act as a resisting medium—molecules in a supergas to slow us down."

	"I've been wondering—won't the shock of the tremendous mass of those forts be enough to split this moon wide open, split it, anyway, so that the momentum drive won't operate? Or so the apparatus here is smashed?"

-

	Aarn shook his head slowly. "They'll mainly bury themselves in this. We have fifty miles of solid rock above us. A fort—even one as huge as they are—will be of no great consequence. Remember, the rate of collision, the additive velocities, will make the relative velocities practically thirty-five miles a second. The result will be volatilization for the' first fort, and for some of our rocky layer, the lower rate of collision of the second, will make it slightly less severe. The main thing, though, is that the rock won't transmit the shock at all!"

	"Why not, it certainly isn't dough?"

	"No, but—it can't transmit any shock, any push, at speed greater than the speed of sound through it. That speed of collision is greater than the speed of sound. Ergo, it won't be transmitted as a push. It will simply reduce the rock it hits to powder, expend its energy smashing the rock, breaking it, demolishing it—and not on moving."

	"Also—why don't those orbital forts get out of the way?" asked Spencer.

	"Combination of reasons. They could get part way out of the way at our present speed. That is, they could escape us once, but actually, this moon has greater mobility than they have. They were carried out by supply ships in pieces, and built up. They have motive power enough to turn around, and to straighten out their orbits so they won't tangle, but they can't flee. The main thing is that those Tefflans have courage. They will hope that the greater power of the forts may be able to do something against this moon, in the way of stopping it."

	"Well, if their new beams will, won't they? If the battleships were dangerous—"

	"The forts won't be. For two reasons. There are twenty-two forts, and only two battleships were equipped. You see that point?"

	"They'd equip more battleships if they had time to manufacture the apparatus?"

	"Yes—those were standard battleships—except for that feature. Anto Rayl says their investigators have found that those ships were two which had been for repairs at the time of the general debacle. They equipped those two, because a battleship can be more dangerous to this moon than a fort, even though a fort has greater power, since we could always reman the blamed thing, if they did kill us off, and the fort which killed us would be so much scrap buried in powdered rock.

	"And the second point is—we've set up a heterodyne device that will tend to shift the frequency of those waves up to a higher, and harmless frequency. Harmless, because it is absorbed by their sound-conducting medium, the rock and steel. Provided they don't get too much power through. If they succeed in pounding it through even an absorbing-medium, we'll be worse off, because the higher frequency is fatal more quickly."

	"Pleasant thought. I wonder—" Twice a soft hum rose and fell musically.

	"Carlisle," said Aarn, and flipped up the switch. Carlisle's image appeared slowly on the screen.

	"Hello—hello—are you listening? I hope, since your Jupiter-dulled ears match your Jupiter-dulled wits, that you are. I'm about ten seconds away. You are sweeping in on line, and there is considerable anxiety among the forts. They've been trying to calculate your orbit, in at least two of them."

	"How did you know that?" snapped Aarn, and went on listening.

	"But haven't succeeded, since they can't allow for the effect of the collisions properly. Don't know your mass and all, nor how you will use your power, nor how great your power is. They think they'll be able to escape, most of 'em. They—eh—what? Oh—we learned easily enough. We smuggled some very useful investigators aboard. They haven't the new apparatus, by the way, and the Magyans here only mourn that they can't explore the whole fort. These darned things set up such a field, though, they are spotted the instant they move. The ones we're using now have been lying still now for nearly thirty-two hours. They came in along with the food supplies. We have some mighty ingenious and daring Magyans to thank for that. My idea of nerve. They made up three or four dozen crates of imitation food supply, and took them down a while ago, and planted them in Cantak, in a depot where a shipment of food for the forts was waiting. Made it and back without being spotted, thanks to the hubbub and general trouble down there, and now the investigators are loose on nearly all the forts." Carlisle paused for breath.

	"That's what I call the long-distance, nonstop, pollysyllabic, single-word speech," said Aarn, with a grin. "Fade off. I'm about to be busy. When you hear this, you'll know that merry voice of yours has been talking to a dead mike for twelve seconds." Aarn flipped his switch, and looked at the more-important scene ahead. 

	"They know which one we're headed for," he said, at length. The fort ahead was shifting, shifting distinctly from its cross-hair position. "I'll bet they strain a bed bolt pulling that crate, too."

	The cross hairs were enclosed in a little circular target ring. The fort should have entered in that, about now, and they would be entering the range of the fort. Already their escort of powerful ships was falling away on every side, hastening away to leave the run-away moon to its work of attacking the fort.

	Immediately a swarm of lesser Tefflan craft shot out from the direction of the fort, and came on directly in a line between fort and moon. Aarn smiled, and made some rapid adjustments.

	"Destructive power on station thirty-four," he whispered tenderly into a microphone he picked up. Presently he pressed a button before him, reluctantly it seemed. Twin beams of transpon force reached out straight toward the fort, and Aarn manipulated them skillfully. A tremendous, blue-white arc flared at the far end, near the fort, and suddenly that arc was racing toward the Ma-ran. The transpon beams were opening apart like the legs of a divider, and an arc representing billions of horse power raced nearer Ma-ran.

-

	LIKE MOTHS in a flame, the bravely-attacking Tefflan ships exploded into nothing. The one-hundred-mile world, Ma-ran, loose and wandering to attack its foes, trundled solemnly, precisely toward the great fort, nearly five and a half miles in diameter, that loomed ahead.

	Spencer, sitting near Aarn, had tuned in another, small television disk, and clearly now the picture inside the Tefflan fort was showing what the investigator within saw. Tefflans were scurrying around in wildest confusion.

	"Send out all the torpedoes we have, and about half the heavy bombs. Turn the full power of the disintegrating ray on the surface where we will hit—" To the Tefflan it seemed the fort he was in was falling to the great surface, looming nearer and nearer. "Aggag Keenat, can we escape?"

	"No, Master of Forts, there is no slightest possibility," said the astronomer calmly. "It matters little. They would move next to attack Teff-el. In this way, one of those missiles will be shattered, and if the prepared snare works—"

	The fort was rapidly assuming the appearance of a disk now. And the torpedoes struck. Hundreds of them. They exploded and bored their way in through miles of rock. And yet not far enough to do damage. Then great bombs—the force of collision sank them half a mile, before they could ever explode. Then a great section of rock was blasted free. 

	"The trouble is," said Aarn judiciously, "that there is so little surface gravity here, that a good-sized ant could lift a boulder, and heave it out of the field of this vest-pocket planet."

	"Even I admit this gravity is low," nodded Spencer. "Can you—ouch—that was a bad one—it jarred the whole moon."

	"That," said Aarn, watching his screen carefully, "was the 'half the rest of the heavy bombs' he mentioned. They tore off—ah—that's better. They're falling back now." Aarn smiled contentedly. He had been working rapidly, and finally succeeded in getting his artificial gravity field which prevailed inside the planet, to spread outside. It was gripping those broken fragments now and drawing them slowly back.

	Aarn switched on a microphone before him. "Calling commander of fleets—commander of fleets—please give thought to my suggestion, and request, sir. The enemy is dropping powerful bombs in our path. The bombs break the rock, and will, if long continued, decrease the effectiveness of Ma-ran immeasurably. Suggest that you have a number of destroyers land on the forward side of Ma-ran, so close together that their various magnetic shields overlap, and thus protect the planet against the bombs."

	The fort was scarcely a thousand miles away, as Aarn finished. Nearer and nearer it swept—nearer it expanded like a balloon-swept larger—Fifteen seconds to go—"The first—it can't escape, Spence—ten—hold on!" The cry echoed through the speakers—five seconds—"She comes!"

	The titanic mass of a hundred-mile sphere of rock and metal lumbered on—the mighty fort seemed poised, motionless. The flight of the fort was invisibly slow as they approached at thirty-two miles a second. It seemed the moon sprang at the fort, instantly reaching it, in those last few seconds. She seemed to accelerate with tremendous rapidity, decreasing the distance to zero in an instant—

	A frightful burst of white-hot flame fanned out. A huge column of gas shot up, blazing white, searing flame heated beyond incandescence by the terrific impact, a gaseous column of steel vapor, thrown out by the electric flame of destroyed accumulators, bursting power plant—

	The flame turned blue-green as the mercury flashed suddenly out in a momentary puff.

	"The body has penetrated to a depth of ten and a quarter miles," announced a geologist assistant, coming up to Aarn.

	"The next fort is now only one and three-quarter minutes away," snapped Aarn. "We've got to have that protective bunch of destroyers—ahhhhhhh listen—"

	A continuous prolonged roar echoed and reechoed through the rock. "The snare—I thought so—tons of explosives, and one ton would lift half the rock of this planet clear out of gravitative control without the artificial field until—"

	"There is a hole, or completely broken spot in the rock twenty-two miles across, and a mile and a quarter deep," announced the assistant coming up.

	"Uhmmm—not as bad as I feared. That isn't going to be a hole, because the artificial gravity field will draw it back. I think we can let it go."

	Again the signal rang out to hold on-again the sudden spread of a gigantic, expanding fort—and the terrible, soul-wrenching crash. The whole planet jarred slightly to it, and creaked.

	"A crack has opened now, due to the close pits on the two forts. The commander of geological forces suggests you rotate the moon slowly—"

	Another steel sphere was growing—Aarn saw that it was escaping them. "He had warning—we'd have hit him well on one side of our surface anyway—"

	"We may graze him!"

	"I doubt it—but I'll see." Rapidly Aarn's fingers flew over the control, and suddenly the great moon's structure creaked to a steady driving force, tremendous transpon beams flared and gleamed through the mighty cavern in its heart.

	"He's going faster now!" 

	"So are we!" said Aarn grimly.

	"We'll hit—no—Yes, by the planets—"

	A terrible shrieking, grinding roar, a long-drawn howl of agony through the rocks—And a fort like a dimpled, dented can rolled off clumsily, swiftly, end over end, and straight toward Teff-el!

	"Broke his orbit!" cried Aarn. "He's ruined now, nothing can reform it for him."

	"He's ruined anyway, the thing is past any effective work now."

	"Don't you believe that, Spence! Those battleships are hard enough to stop, but every fort has sixteen separate power plants, and accumulators spread over the whole thing. There are some men always kept in acceleration-neutralizing apparatus—great spring chambers so arranged that no matter how the sudden acceleration might be applied, some would be sure to be saved. Two old battleship hulks were tied together once, and driven against one of the old forts, and killed off most of the crew. Never again, though. But that fort is done. It will be crushed on Teff-el."

-

Chapter XXI.

	"THAT'S the last fort, Carlisle."

	"I know it, Aarn. I'm aboard the Sunbeam now. Is your entrance still clear?"

	"Perfectly. We saw to that. Where's the Sunbeam?"

	"About ten thousand miles behind. Have you got that orbit checked?"

	"Teff-ran is right in our swing—dead center—but they've got those hulks, you know—"

	"What of it? They can't turn that, can they?"

	"Somewhat. They'll slow it down, remember. Our velocity is only about ten miles a second—more than orbital speed, but they will mean something. What are they, exactly?"

	"Every big freighter that could climb off Teff-el, loaded with rubbish, rock, scrap steel, ingots, everything heavy they could cram into them. They're still adding to it. Won't it break up the moon? And will they slow you down so much—"

	"Whoa—wait. They'll slow us down, but they won't interfere with the plan. Remember, this is our fourth circling. We've acquired the added mass of all those forts. We're distinctly heavier now, so heavy we can scarcely maneuver with the driving equipment we have. Those ships will be swept into us, and add to the mass. We'll lose velocity—but we won't lose momentum. The momentum will be the same, we can leave, and the moon will smash Teff-ran with just enough momentum to stop it dead, if the figures we have are right. Then she'll drop on Teff-el." 

	"Couldn't you dodge that bunch of ships, and get more momentum and velocity so you'd hit Teff-el harder?"

	"Ha—vindictive, aren't you? Why knock a planet when it's down-ey powder. The thing will be ruined anyway!"

	"All right. What do I do?"

	"Slip in that opening. You have your guard?"

	"Three battleships."

	"All right—slip in. There are only five of us left. We'll be all ready to get into the Sunbeam, and leave here just about ten seconds before the smash. They've rigged an outside jury control. We'll operate that. I'm putting on a space suit."

	"Check—do I come now?"

	"Right." Aarn cut the switch, and attended strictly to business. "Got that final detonator rigged, Spence?"

	"Right. Are we going to leave before Ma-ran hits those ships or after?"

	"Before—they aren't like the forts. These are concentrated mass. Remember, the forts were ninety per cent open rooms. Those cargo boats have been stuffed with everything heavy they could find, and then loaded further when they were in place out there. They'll go through so far they may actually reach down here."

	"Hmmmmm—they may. Everything rigged on your end?"

	"Everything. And the Sunbeam's in the outer lock already. Ten miles a second-check exactly. Leave the autos in control, I guess—till we get above." Aarn rapidly set the controls to respond as he wished and in a moment they were whirling up in the Sunbeam.

	Up through the long tunnel, still glowing with the lights. Nearly all the energy was drained from the great coils now, and a great deal of the most valuable apparatus had been salvaged, the instruments in particular. Still, one bank of coils contained its full energy potential, enough to run the mighty engine for about ten minutes on full power. Aarn had started that, and the Ma-ran was accelerating now.

	The Sunbeam rose with some difficulty, the two systems of momentum waves fighting each other in a slight blue, wavering luminescence about the ship. "She's drawing a lot of power," Spencer remarked.

	In seconds the ship was out of the tunnel, propelled at the last by a blast of escaping air. Ma-ran was airless now. Swiftly the ship raced around the little world, around the incredibly tortured forward side. Immense craters dotted the surface, huge holes, and mighty piles of tumbled rock. They landed, and examined the broken stone. Aarn laughed, and picked up one nearly ten feet square, and threw it a quarter of a mile, as he walked toward the little heap of instruments and apparatus glistening in the sunlight. Swiftly he fastened several heavy cables to the Sunbeam, then looked at his instruments. The chronometer, the registering velocispectrometer, and the momentumometer were most important.

	They he looked up. Directly overhead floated a maze of dancing, moving points of light, which were slowly, steadily spreading and separating, widening across his sky. And beyond, the disk of Teff-ran, to one side of the greater, shining crescent of Teff-el. A swarm of great battleships seemed to be sliding steadily" about Ma-ran, and beyond them a greater swarm of smaller ships. Aarn carefully aligned the huge missile he was launching, checked his coordinates carefully, and finally cut off the acceleration he had been using.

	Then he pushed a button. Quickly now, he pulled a heavy, double-handed, swordlike ax from its resting place, swung it above his head, and brought it down with all his power on the heavy-armored cables that, wired together, twisted off across the incredible jumble of rocks to the shaft that plunged fifty miles to the center of Ma-ran, and severed it. Instantly, then, he leaped for the entrance of the Sunbeam with the instrument panel in his arms. The ship started up as he reached it, the controls he had lately been using dangling on the steel cable as the ship darted swiftly up and away.

	Scarcely had he left the surface when something began to happen. From the mouth of the great tunnel, gases were still pouring, but now they were suddenly tinged with red, and then greenish white, and they plunged out in an explosive flame.

	As the Sunbeam swept up, the view Aarn had was, for the first time, as an outsider. The majesty of the scene came to him suddenly—the great dark sphere, rugged and cold in the sunlight, the dust motes of the Tefflan freighters daring to oppose it, and, further away, the great mass of Teff-ran. 

	And now, away from the moon, he saw at last Ma-kanee. Deserted, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, she was plunging straight for Teff-el. And Teff-el was already drawing her. Seas on Teff-el were rising, tides appearing, for already the swift-moving moon was within 1,000,000 miles of the planet. There had been no attempts to divert it. That was frankly impossible. Further attempts to escape from Teff-el had been made, but there was a great ring now, of far-flung spy ships, each with a tremendous magnetic atmosphere thrown out, and the first touch of a ship attempting to escape made itself very evident. And the fields overlapped.

-

	MINUTES passed swiftly. And now the mass of Tefflan ships ahead, deserted, had separated to individuals. Minutes more passed, and at last the terrific process that had been going on within Ma-ran became evident. A dull glow began to appear in the rocks below. It was growing swiftly—

	The first great Tefflan freighter plowed into Ma-ran. It was swallowed up like a pebble sinking into water—and with the same splashing of liquid. Almost instantly, a tremendous fountain of white-hot lava snapped out—and impaled a second freighter that was almost in line with the first. Both tumbled to the mad moon. A dozen were falling—a hundred—

	In seconds Ma-ran was sweeping on through a clear space. Every one of the great Tefflan ships had been absorbed. One of them had barely grazed the world, but been caught, and lay a pool of lighter, molten stuff on the rock pool. Great hot bubbles of air were oozing slowly up from the ships.

	"Velocity fell only one point. That was good enough. We reach Teff-ran now in three quarters of an hour," said Aarn at last.

	The minutes dragged. The two great bodies seemed to move with infinite weary slowness. They seemed to know doom was upon them, and were going to it with the slow steadiness of men who welcomed doom, but accepted it philosophically and without hurry.

	Further and further the Sunbeam and her escort drew away, now. She raced ahead to a position in line with the final meeting, and watched as the two great balls of matter moved leisurely toward each other. 

	Ma-ran looked like an orange drifting gently toward a grapefruit. Ma-ran was at last the smaller as she approached the end of her mad career. And beyond the great crescent of Teff-el, and the approaching disk of Ma-kanee, Tefflan ships swarmed up from Teff-ran—and a swarm of heavy Magyan cruisers fell on them instantly, and cut them to pieces.

	Ma-ran bulged slowly, seemed to lengthen, and hastened her wild pace as she neared Teff-ran. Glowing red with the liberated energy of her coils, she stretched, became a blunt-ended cylinder—and slowly became two great balls of red-hot matter as she began to turn visibly.

	"Gyroscopes went—the impact of the ships—" muttered Aarn uneasily. "That may have some unlooked-for effect—"

	Soundlessly, softly, with a sudden increased blaze of light, the two masses met, and spattered. Ma-ran coalesced with Teff-ran, and stopped. Teff-ran split. Slowly, majestically, they saw chasms open and run about the world. The sides fell away, and kept on going. The second half of Ma-ran struck, and spread like a drop of melted lead on a hard surface—and the slipping sides of Teff-ran were snared, and melted in the flaming blue-white heat of the collision. In a quarter of an hour both bodies were one, and the mass was white-hot" flames spurting out angrily.

	Hours passed, as Aarn hung grimly beside the glowing mass. Finally he was satisfied with his observations, and made his calculations. "Six hours. Ma-kanee will get there in about six hours, two minutes and thirty seconds. This will get there at almost the same time. My calculations aren't quite accurate. I can't allow for the displacement of Teff-el for one thing."

	The new mass was dropping. Slowly—steadily. Wildly, small ships were shooting up from Teff-el, vindictively heading toward a cruiser or battleship with all its power, hoping to smash through the great wall even as a pilot died. They flamed briefly in a great transpon beam, and died—unsuccessful.

	Ma-kanee moved steadily downward. Tefflans were out on the surface of the planet, black masses of them, moving and surging, as they watched the two great bodies falling out of the skies on two exactly opposite sides.

	Three hours. Four hours. Five hours. The heat of the new mass, glowing red, had driven the black masses to other parts of the world. Cracks were appearing in Teff-el now. The new mass was only slightly distorted.

	"Teff-el's gravitational field declines slowly in strength—mass is so great—doesn't pull the near side much harder than the far side, so they don't fall apart, as Ma-ran did." 

	But Teff-el began to fall apart. Great cracks appeared, smoke began to curl up, and over the great cavern system of Cantak, the ground sank suddenly, and an abrupt fault line appeared that sectioned the city with the precision of a knife. And slowly Teff-el turned under the baleful glare of the new, red-hot menace.

	Five hours and a half. The red-hot mass was nearing the outer fringes of the atmosphere. It was falling swiftly, now, still circling the planet a bit, so that its contact would not be a center blow, but a gouging scrape. An entire fleet of battleships was pulling at it now with traction beams, but there was practically no effect. The mass was too great, the beams almost totally useless.

	At the end of six hours, Ma-kanee entered the atmosphere. The atmosphere instantly compressed under it, a great bubble of air, and simultaneously, for the three seconds it took the planet to traverse the atmosphere, everything beneath that place was compressed under a stupendous air pressure. It mounted like a solid wave; the air could not move away in time—

	Ma-ran-teff-ran struck the other side. The atmosphere flamed below, and the planet caught fire from the terrible, glowing coal. Almost simultaneously, with a precision that was astounding, two bodies struck Teff-el.

	And the planet burst like a rotten tomato. Spurts of liquid stuff shot suddenly out of mighty chasms. Bursts that were cold, and solidified instantaneously into weird shafts of solid, grainless, incredible rock. Jets of rock, then great sections of rock, then a great jet of flying, gleaming metal, that squirted out like water from a hose, and solidified as the rock had, and in a bar ten miles through and a hundred and fifty long.

	And then only parts, and broken splinters that began to stop flying apart, remained. They were glowing, and some of them struck, and stuck together, and the force of their striking made them glow more, and cemented them. All three bodies were utterly destroyed, but the heat of Ma-ran-teff-ran remained, and seemed to act as a binding agent.

	"Well—the ancient enemy is gone. Destroyed after some forty thousand years of trying."'

	"And Teff-el is destroyed."

	"But while Tefflans can never reform, Teff-el is already reforming. See how the parts are falling together. It will be centuries, milleniums, before it is a planet again. But Teff-el is not destroyed. An incident in its life has taken place." Aarn gazed at the planet's disintegrating parts.

-

Epilogue

	"THE apparatus is installed, Anto Rayl, the problem has been solved, and we have left apparatus with you. We must go now. Our home is on the other side of the wall, but we can both climb that wall now—so we of Earth will expect to see you of Magya soon. Will you come?"

	"Certainly we will come, Aarn Munro. We will want to see the Ancient World, where men such as those we have met are bred, and where the race was born.

	"We do not like to see you go. We wish you could stay, but we realize your situation. We will attempt to follow you through at the end of one thousand days.

	"So—till then." Anto Rayl, standing in the airlock of the Sunbeam waved, turned, and dived across space to the entrance port of a great gleaming metal wall, a mighty battleship wall.

	"They won't need those any more," said Aarn thoughtfully, and set up his controls.

	Anto Rayl looked back—and saw suddenly that the Spencer Research Laboratories Number Six was going. Going off with infinite speed into infinite distance, or into infinite smallness. He couldn't tell which—

The End

The Incredible Planet
(1949)*

Contents

BOOK ONE - THE INCREDIBLE PLANET
BOOK TWO - THE INTERSTELLAR SEARCH
BOOK THREE - THE INFINITE ATOM

-

Introduction

	How Aarn Munro, Russ Spencer and Don Carlisle came to visit Magya, a planet of another solar system in another galaxy existing in another space, has been recorded elsewhere (The Mightiest Machine) in complete detail. However, for a clearer understanding of their further adventures, this introductory summary of their experiences seems desirable.

	It was Aarn Munro's idea—the Spencer Research Laboratory No. 6. Aarn Munro was the director of the research department of the Spencer Rocket Co., and, incidentally, Russ Spencer's best friend. Russ Spencer, rocketship designer, and grandson of the famous Russel Spencer who founded the Rocket company a century before, in 1979, was to see realized the dream of his father and his grandfather before him—a ship that could make the interplanetary journey without fear of meteors or thought of power shortage.

	Aarn Munro's father had helped Russel Spencer II, the present Russ Spencer's father; had taken part in a colonizing experiment, and, with twenty others, the Munros had been marooned on Jupiter—marooned because Jupiter's great gravity prevented the early rockets from leaving the planet after landing.

	Aarn Munro was born there; he was twenty before he saw a ship land that could again leave the giant planet. Then the Jovian-born human, super-human in strength and speed from Jupiter's harsh training ground, had studied at terrestrial universities.

	His extraordinary brilliance of intellect had soon made itself manifest; and after completing his training the tremendously massive scientist had gone to work for Spencer Rocket Co. It was due in large part to his genius that Spencer Rocket had forged ahead so rapidly to their position of leadership in their field.

	After a long period of research in an effort to improve existing methods of interplanetary travel, Munro, Spencer, and "The Mightiest Machine" by John W. Campbell Jr. (Hadley Publishing Co., 1947) their close friend, Don Carlisle, head of the chemical-research department of Spencer Rocket, embarked on Aarn's latest ship-laboratory, the No. 6. Aarn's three greatest inventions were to receive their first tests—the antigravitor, the transpon beam, and the momentum-wave drive. The antigravitor made possible their "aggie" coils, storing the tremendous power their projected, conducting transpon beams stole from the mightiest machine that ever existed—the Sun, and the momentum wave made possible their drive.

	Following the wave theory of the atom, Aarn had learned how to produce in actuality the waves the theory had predicted as being momentum waves—waves created artificially in space which actually were momentum. Out in space they tested their new ship—with their coils fully charged—and for the first time in the history of space travel they exceeded twenty miles a second, multiplying this old record by two thousand. At forty thousand miles a second—

	At forty thousand miles a second their ship, officially the No. 6, familiarly the Sunbeam, was protected against damage by three layers of force—the magnetic atmosphere, a layer of magnetic field that would stop any conductor moving toward the ship; the antigravity field, which tended to repel any body not already weightless; and the momentum-wave apparatus, which likewise would hurl away anything that would tend to change the momentum of the ship.

	At forty thousand miles a second the Sunbeam had the momentum of a major planet—concentrated. And at forty thousand miles a second she struck a planetoid. The magnetic atmosphere blasted the hundred-thousand-ton mass of metal to gas— but it still had a hundred-thousand-ton mass. The anti-gravitor repelled it, and called on the great aggie-coil storage bank for support; the momentum waves lashed at it, and called on the stored power of a sun for aid—

	The fabric of space tore open under that terrible stress, and they were hurled out of four-dimensional space into the fifth dimensional interspace.

	They awoke to find themselves in another four-dimensional space, a space of supergiant stars, near a sun of tremendous size. One hundred million times as brilliant as their own Sun, Anrel shone fiercely hot on them, at a distance of 1,000,000,000,000 miles.

	They met the Tefflans and the Magyans, the warring races of the solar system they had entered, and they joined the latter.

	The Magyans, they discovered, were human in every way, so completely human as to seem impossible, until they learned that theirs was not the first spaceship to be thrown through the spaces. On the continent of Mu, the Magyans had developed on Earth, warring with a strange race of horned beings—seemingly half human, half goat—the ancient Teff-hellani, who lived in the vast caverns under Mu. In a final effort to destroy them, the Emperor Tsoo-Ahs of Mu first established strong colonies all over Earth, built space ships equipped with powers capable of opening the caverns to the sea—and unleashed his forces. Water rushed in, and Mu sank forever.

	But a single space ship of the Teff-hellani escaped, and destroyed all but one of the Magyan ships. The two enemy survivors, in a vicious running space battle, collided simultaneously with a planetoid and were thrown through into this strange space. Each ship, its passengers thinking themselves the sole survivors, landed on one of the eighty-seven planets circling about Anrel, the nucleus of what was to become a world population. On Magya, after a brief struggle the people reverted to barbarism. Ages passed—and a new civilization developed. Space was reconquered; and the Teff-hellani were again encountered, with knowledge and a science approximating their own. And for both races, legends which had never died became reality, and the war of instinctive hatred continued.

	There followed a prolonged and devastating series of space battles which ended with the near destruction of Magya and the complete obliteration of Teff-El and all its inhabitants. In this interplanetary warfare, the Sunbeam played a decisive part.

	At last, with order returning to Magya, Aarn Munro, Russ Spencer and Don Carlisle prepared to return to their own space. They bade farewell to Anto Rayl in the airlock of the Sunbeam.

	"The apparatus is installed, Anto Rayl," Aarn said, "the problem has been solved, and we have left apparatus with you. We must go now. Our home is on the other side of the wall, but we can both climb that wall now—so we of Earth will expect to see you of Magya soon. You will come?"

	"Certainly we will come, Aarn Munro. We will want to see the Ancient World, where men such as those we have met are bred, and where the race was born. We will attempt to follow you through at the end of one thousand days.

	"So—till then." Anto Rayl waved, turned, and dived across space to the entrance port of a great gleaming metal wall, the wall of a mighty battleship. And the airlock closed behind him.

-

BOOK ONE - THE INCREDIBLE PLANET

Chapter One

	"We ready?" asked Aarn Munro looking at Carlisle and then at Spencer. The engineer nodded, half eagerly, half regretfully. The three turned toward the great metal bulk of the Magyan Battleship Tharoon Yal. A tiny figure in a microscopic port in the mighty wall waved a farewell. "Here's hoping," exclaimed Aarn.

	"Here's hopping—from one space to another!" Spencer grinned a trifle shakily.

	The giant spaceship was suddenly expanding, growing tremendously—they must be rushing toward it. Instinctively their hands tightened on their grips, then relaxed, for the ship was suddenly impossibly huge. It seemed tenuous, ghostly—ghostly motionless figures became visible inside, then vanished in cloudy smoke and a darkening pall. Space was black; the wonderful gleaming suns that shone blazing in the strange space of Magya and her sun Anrel, the stars that had made that space a never-darkened curtain, were gone. Slowly, slowly, pinpoints of misty light began to materialize, stars, gigantic, cloudy things, growing then shrinking—and the change was complete.

	"We're here!" Carlisle whispered. Munro turned the Sunbeam slowly around, revealing every angle of space. Only occasional stars were visible now. They had changed spaces.

	"Where?" asked Aarn quizzically. "I don't see old Sol anywhere."

	"Is this the right space?" Spencer demanded.

	"Having eyes, you can see as much as I," suggested Aarn.

	"Not having your knowledge, I can't," replied Spencer. "Engineering's mine. I built the apparatus you asked for, with the help of those Magyan engineers. It's your job to know where we are."

	Aarn grinned goodnaturedly. The grin looked at home on his extremely broad face over his short thick body. "I'm worried too, so let's not get snappy. But I think this is the right space. Remember: Magya is in a four-dimensional space separated from our own space by a fifth-dimensional inter-space where we can't exist. We were first sent out of ours by the accident when we hit that asteroid, and our various forces started fighting the collision. That opened a path and kicked us out. Magya's space was the easiest to enter, and due to Magya's perfectly enormous sun and its gravitational attraction, we broke into their space at that point, as the Magyans had done before us.

	"Now in getting back we've got to lift ourselves out of Magya's space, and bore ourselves into another space. That's harder to do—takes a lot of power. Also—there's no way to choose one space or another to fall into, except by our mathematics based on those ancient Magyan Data Plates and the analysis of our own space as we knew it from data gained while on Earth. But unless there is another space with exactly the same characteristics as those of our own space, we had to go to our own. The chances that there are two identical spaces is pretty remote. I think we hit the right space—but not at the right point. Remember, those calculations we were working from were nearly 30,000 years old to the Magyans. How many Earth-years?" Aarn shrugged. "Who knows? But I believe we're home—in the right space. And an indeterminable distance from Earth. We were lost in spaces. Now we're lost in space. The inter-space is so vast it contains thousands of spaces—but just the same even one rather unimportant minor space like ours is several hundreds of millions of light years in diameter. I think we are still in the same galaxy."

	"Good Lord!" gasped Spencer. "We're as bad off as ever."

	"How do we determine where we are?" asked Carlisle simultaneously.

	"I've been thinking. Let's assume for the time that we're in the right galaxy. We're in some galaxy, because we can see so many stars. You'll notice there's a Milky Way effect only on one side. That means we're out toward the edge of the galaxy, since if we were deep in it the Milky Way would be a circle around us. We're probably somewhere near where the proper motion of Anrel during the last 30,000 years would take you from where the sun was thirty thousand years ago. I think we're still in the same galaxy. The problem is to find out where. That won't be hard if we're in the right galaxy, because there are still space-marks that will bring us near enough home so we can see old Sol and steer for him by direct astragation. Thanks to that interspace speed escape, we can travel faster than light, so that isn't impossible to us."

	"What are your space-marks?" asked Carlisle.

	"Something far enough away so that moving about in the galaxy doesn't change them unrecognizably. Something far enough away so that lines drawn from them won't change so greatly as to make us mistake one for another, and yet near enough so that they do vary with the galaxy."

	"The exterior galaxies," said Carlisle, comprehending.

	"Exactly. But we can't do it ourselves."

	"Huh? We can't? Then what good does it do us?"

	"We'll have to ask somebody in the neighborhood," grinned Spencer. "We'll drop in and ask them: 'Do you know the way to the great nebula in Orion? Or Andromeda?' And the local boys will of course be polite and tell us."

	"Something like that," replied Aarn more seriously. "We will have to find a race near here, or somewhere in this galaxy for that matter, and tell them what we need. If they have telescopes, and photography, they'll have pictures that we can compare with our plates here in the star catalogues and locate certain very outstanding nebulae. The Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds may help—though they are really part of this super-galaxy of ours, and very close. But they are distinctive."

	"What're chances of finding a habitable planet?" asked Spencer.

	"Oh, fine. There are nearly three hundred million stars in this part of the super-galaxy alone, and one in every hundred thousand or so has a system of planets, so they say. That means nearly three million planetary systems, and we want only one," grinned Aarn.

	"Or," Spencer observed, "probabilities suggest approximately one star in one hundred thousand possesses a planetary system. Therefore, provided we investigate approximately one hundred thousand stellar systems, we'll find a planet."

	"You might add," said Aarn cheerfully, "that maybe one in ten thousand of those planets might be habitable, and one in ten thousand of those will be inhabited."

	"So things don't look very promising," Carlisle observed.

	"Not as discouraging as they might seem. We might begin by ruling out stars that couldn't have planets that would be habitable. About one star in four is a multiple, binary, trinary or something. We'll rule those out. Then I'm ruling out giant reds, because I believe they're too young. I think it might be a good idea to just look at more or less ordinary main-sequence stars. Class G, for instance."

	Bob Canning, the electronics engineer from Spencer's laboratories on Earth, who had accompanied them on their trip, appeared cautiously in the doorway.

	"Did we get home all right, Dr. Munro? I didn't recognize the stars."

	"I hoped you had, Bob. I didn't. I think we're about ten thousand light years from home," replied Aarn. "But we're getting ready to move. Just keep an eye on the power board, and we'll head for a near-by star and see what is to be seen."

-

Chapter Two

	"What's that?" asked Carlisle dubiously. Aarn, Spencer and Bob Canning were working hard at something they had set up in the already-crowded power room.

	"I hope it's a sort of twenty-mile diameter lens," replied Aarn. "Not exactly a telescope—"

	"I didn't think so," Carlisle commented. It resembled one of the power boards. Four small anti-gravity field storage coils, miniature replicas of the giant "aggie" coils used in storing the power of the ship, squatted at the base of the board. A regular "transpon" beam set-up with appropriate meters completed the lay-out.

	"It was designed as a modification of the regular transpon beam," explained Spencer. "Aarn worked it out on the math machines while you were sleeping. The regular transpon beam picks up power from any electric field. We've been using it mainly to tap power from the electric field of a sun, of course, but it will tap any electric field. Aarn modified it to tap the electro-magnetic field of light radiation. This is a sort of radio-funnel. It will reach out as a very rapidly spreading cone, and trap any electro-magnetic radiation, rectify it, and bring in half the field energy. Aarn says he's going to learn a lot with it."

	"Hmmm— pick up light like a radio wave. Why?"

	Aarn answered him. "I can pretty well focus it, and thereby pick up light from one star and its attendant star field. That way I can examine a star's radiation when it's a lightyear or more distant, and do it accurately. There are certain—modifications in the light that may be telling."

-

	"I suppose," grumbled Carlisle, "it would be 'telling' if you explained what those modifications will be?"

	"It would," agreed Aarn, and fell to work again. "However, having visited fifteen stars fruitlessly in the past five days, I'm getting sick of chasing my tail all over space. This may help."

	Six hours later they had finished the set-up, and Aarn started it. They were hanging in space, the artificial gravity of the ship alone supplying weight. The power room was crowded by the great humped backs of the anti-gravity coils which would iron out the space-curvature that was gravity when they maneuvered near a planet—the momentum-wave apparatus that set up the incredible oscillations in sub-space that generated momentum in them, and reacted on all space—the overflow of aggie coils clamped wherever the Magyan's had found space while they helped outfit the Sunbeam for power in battle—all hiding the mathematics machines that somehow found lodgement here. The new power board was set in the last remaining free space.

	Swiftly Aarn adjusted his circuits, then threw a single relay. A network of glowing transpon beams exploded into being, and a deep reverberation thundered in the power room as the great main transpon apparatus, modified by the new device, took up its work. Out into space a great invisible flaring cone spread like a widening ripple. The meters on the new board began to register readings, some instantly, others at a gradually increasing pace. At length the limiting range of the cone was reached, and the collecting field maintained a steady value.

	Aarn read off the figures rapidly, Spencer taking them down. Five minutes later the Sunbeam was in the strange ghostly gloom of its high-speed motion. Half way between the inter-space fifth dimension where fourth-dimensional distance meant nothing, half way in normal space that they might keep in touch with their surroundings, the Sunbeam raced toward the star they were studying. They stopped after a few minutes, and again Aarn took readings.

	In this way, in an hour, he had all the data he wanted concerning this particular star. In half an hour he had calculated the results, and definitely knew that there were no planets circling that sun.

	The next star was thrown out by the first reading. It was a binary. Another and another followed.

	Two days—and Aarn shouted with sudden triumph. The star they were investigating had planets—or at least one planet! The incredible had happened. They had found a planet in mere days of search and trial!

	"It looks," said Spencer as they raced across space toward the distant sun, "as though your pessimism was unwarranted."

	"True," admitted Aarn, "but I wasn't raising any false hopes."

	"What kind of a star is it?" asked Carlisle.

	"Frankly, I don't know. It seemed disturbed, rather than variable, somewhat irregular, but that may simply mean that it has a very close planetary satellite that glows red-hot in the radiation of the primary, and acts as a secondary radiator. It seems to be a type F O, and not on the main sequence. Probably comparable to Capella."

	Crossing in each second a gulf that took light months to cover, the Sunbeam sped on toward the strange sun. Despite their incalculable speed, the flight took more than two days. On the second day they watched the ghostly image of the sun waxing from a distorted pinpoint to a blurred disc, and they slowed to a safer pace at the outer edge of its gravitational field of influence, dropping more and more into normal space.

	They stopped, and from a distance observed the planetary system more carefully. They saw the strange little planet that was the secondary radiator of this new sun, a body scarcely 2000 miles in diameter, circling in an orbit less than ten million miles from the blazing blue-white sun they were to know as Tarns. Heated by the terrific flood of energy, it acted as a varying secondary radiator that had produced the effects that Aarn had observed.

	There were eleven planets in all. Nine of them revolved in fairly normal orbits. The sixth, a giant nearly a quarter of a million miles in diameter, caught their attention immediately.

	"It's a monster," said Aarn thoughtfully, checking the gravitational field analysers. "And what an orbit! Gravitational field at surface: 2.1. But it has a gravitational control that extends nearly a billion miles. Eight satellites—and that one is larger than Uranus! I'll bet that was a real planet, captured by this big fellow. And look at that outermost satellite there! Five thousand miles in diameter—bigger than Mars—and it isn't in an orbit about that big planet at all! It's on a free orbit! Something has happened here—and I'll bet I know what! A thing impossibly rare—"

	Aarn's comments trailed into silence as he set new controls on his strange probes of gravitational fields, and momentum-wave analysers, investigating that mis-oriented planet, now revolving about the giant world. Rapidly he read the instruments.

	"It's 134° out of the plane of the other planets! A wanderer that's been captured. Within the last century, too, I'll be bound. Look—it's 57,000 miles in diameter; its orbit is an extreme ellipse, retreating to nearly 10,000,000,000 miles at its greatest distance out, and coming within 50,000,000 on the inward trip! That planet was free, and wandered into this system by accident. That giant there dragged at it so hard with his heavy gravitational field that it was caught! It yanked the whole system of moons way out of position, even pulling that giant planet out of its orbit, and knocking loose its outermost satellite—but the planet stopped its wandering! It probably came in with a parabolic orbit, and the attraction was great enough to slow it to an elliptical orbit. That's unique in the galaxy, I'm willing to bet.

	"We're heading for that planet!"

	The Sunbeam darted forward, the ghostly image of the strange planet growing rapidly. At a distance of twenty million miles Aarn halted, and investigated it by telescope. The image was thrown on the screen by the televisor device, clear and sharp.

	"No hope of life there," Aarn commented. "It hasn't thawed out yet—or—no it hasn't. I thought it might be coming in on another trip from space on that huge orbit. See the ice-caps— and those seas! They're ice too, I'd swear. The whole polar region halfway to the equator is frozen. A weird slant to the axis, too. Nearly seventy degrees. Let's land—shall we?"

	"Naturally," replied Spencer. "But you'll have to do all the investigating." He pointed to the gravitometer. The surface gravity of the planet was 2.6.

	Aarn grinned. "So I will. Weaklings—weaklings, these Terrestrians. And to think my own father and mother must have been such people!" Jovian-born Aarn Munro held out an arm, an arm thicker and bulkier than Spencer's muscular thigh. The arm was attached to a shoulder that was so humped and layered with great muscles that the short powerful neck was almost buried in it, his head seeming to peep out of a shell, like some strange human tortoise. He clenched his fist and flexed his arm, watching the smooth flow of great lumps and cords of muscle. "I'm getting soft—living on a light planet, like Earth or Magya."

	The Sunbeam darted forward again, under her momentum drive. Waves even Aarn Munro scarcely understood, waves in the sub-space, generated by the machines he had invented, imparted momentum to the ship by reaction on the structure of the universe, and drove the Sunbeam forward at terrific speed. New transpon beams appeared automatically as the gravitational field of the planet began to affect the ship. They slowed at a hundred miles, and hung motionless. Automatically the gravitational field of the planet was neutralized, and the interior artificial gravity of the ship maintained at Earth-normal.

	And then—Aarn caught a glimpse of the great mystery of Myrya. He clutched Spencer's arm in a grip that made the Terrestrian yell with pain. "Spence—Spence—ruins!"

	They glistened under the blue-white sun, magnificent, majestic. Gleaming metal overlayed with a thin layer of ash. Great broad avenues, choked with the debris of slowly disintegrating ruins. Tremendous buildings, awesome, beautiful—with their towering crowns crushed and crumbling. A giant city that spread for a mile up the side of a great mountain, and for three miles across the valley below.

	"People!" gasped Carlisle.

	"How—how old is that city?" asked Spencer slowly.

	"Millions on millions of years old!" Aarn moved suddenly, and the ship shot precipitately down toward that ancient city.

	Slowly they sank the last mile, and landed gently in the half-choked great square of the ancient city. About them loomed huge metal towers, their walls rising sheerly skyward, decorated with powerful, clear-chisled frescos. The streets were wide, paved with a thick layer of crumbling black stuff that moved away uneasily as the field of the Sunbeam's forces touched it. The ship came to rest nearly a foot deep in the impalpably fine dust.

	Aarn stood up and looked out of the port before him. "How long, oh Lord, how long? It must have been here all the time this planet wandered cold and lifeless. Millions of years? Billions! What race lived here, fought and built this city, then died as the planet began its age-long wanderings?" He paused, frowning thoughtfully. "One thing I can't understand is the layer of dust. It's black and dirty looking. The pavement seems to be part of it. Now, what did that? There was evidently no weathering, so where did all the dust come from?"

	Carlisle had been busy in a practical way. "The oxygen content is about 4%, the air pressure about 100 pounds per square inch."

	"That's fine—just about right," nodded Aarn. "Any poisons?"

	"No simple ones, and I doubt that there would be complex ones. I've got one of our few remaining mice in it, and he's still going strong. Nearly passed out at first, though."

	"Umm-hmm. Pressure. That won't bother me—it's just about the same as Jupiter's atmosphere. I'm going out right now."

	Rapidly Aarn prepared himself. He put on a dust mask, and carried a tiny thing he had developed only recently, a hand elevator, he called it. It was a miniature momentum drive apparatus with aggie coil storage of power. Gripped in one hand, operated by thumb pressure, it would lift him about readily. He could not really fly on it, but he could move straight up.

	"I'm going too," announced Spencer suddenly. "I can stand it for a while, I guess."

	Aarn looked at him thoughtfully. "Pretty heavy labor."

	"I can make it for half an hour, anyway."

	In five minutes they were ready. Carlisle had decided to remain in the Sunbeam. He had tried Jupiter once, and once was enough. Cautiously they let the new atmosphere enter the lock, getting used to the pressure.

	"Feels good," grinned Aarn as the pressure reached the half-way point. His normally deep voice sounded heavy and booming. There was a chill in the entering air, and the fresh, clean odor of new-growing plants. "Those green things we saw must have been new plants coming up," commented Aarn, inhaling deeply. "Smells good after a few days in the old tub."

	But they were tense, and tensely Aarn stepped out. It was a two-foot jump to the apparent surface, and dubious as to the solidity of it, Aarn lowered himself on the hand-elevator. There was a queer wrenching sensation as they passed through the neutral zone, where the gravity of the planet was neutralized by the artificial gravity of the Sunbeam. Then they were down, sinking ankle-deep into the thick, drifted dust. Aarn stretched luxuriously, staring sympathetically at Spencer, who was struggling erect with gruelling labor. Minutes passed while the smaller man strove to adjust his Earth-trained muscles to a gravity that gave him a weight of approximately four hundred and fifty pounds.

	At last they started toward the nearest building, Aarn moving lightly, and with complete ease. His feet seemed to adopt the swift, jerky motion of a trotting dog. Spencer found that with a little more effort his feet could be lifted free of the dust, and that a fast walk was easier than a sliding shuffle.

	Rapidly they approached the nearest of the great buildings and peered within the great arch. It was cold in there, bitterly cold, and a stream of freezing air drifted slowly out. It condensed in the sunlight into a fleecy white mist. Aarn glanced upward. The air was clear and cloudless, the great sun glaring bright orange far above, the sky a deep, deep blue with a tinge of green. There was no hint of dust or mist in the air, the only cloudiness visible pouring from the surrounding buildings.

	"They haven't thawed out yet!" said Aarn in a low voice. "This world can't have been here for more than a few years!"

	"Years—would it take years to thaw these out?"

	"More. Years would have been needed to warm up the tremendous masses of air that must have lain frozen solid. Then the ultra-frozen rocks—and in all probability these buildings had some sort of insulation. Those giant buildings—well, sky-scraper type buildings of metal represent a high civilization—and metal buildings just have to have heat insulation."

	"I agree with everything but your interpretation of these sky-scrapers. They aren't more than fifty stories tall, and while that's a goodly building, New York has lots bigger."

	"Remember, this place has lots greater gravity. Half the height here means more than twice the height on Earth. The buildings weigh more."

	Aarn passed through the tremendous arch. A great hall, lofty and dim, greeted him. Huge columns, fluted and rounded gracefully, stretched up into the semi-gloom to form an arched and groined ceiling, barely visible in the light that entered through a few broken windows. The hall was paved with mosaics formed of tiny bits of colored tile, at one time ground to a polished surface. Now they were worn into deep channels where countless thousands of passing feet had scored them through countless centuries.

	"Spence—this was ages old when they deserted it."

	Aarn examined the mosaic floor. It was a map, a gigantic map of a continent, probably the one on which they had landed. It had been wonderfully fashioned, and he saw now that not mere chips of tile had been used, but rather tiny sticks of it, some eight inches in length, laid side by side to form a pattern with the ends, which though worn now inches deep, was still perfect. The map was unchanged from the day, untold ages gone, when it had been laid down. A dozen cities were marked out clearly in the area they could see from the doorway. But—one of the cities, situated evidently in the heart of a mountain range, was not done in the tile! It was painted on the surface of the mosaic, and a brilliant crimson circle had been drawn around it. Some symbols, letters, had been scrawled beneath the ring, and an arrow pointed to it.

	"Their last retreat?" asked Spencer softly.

	"No doubt. We'll have to go there. I'm afraid of investigating here too much. I don't know what destroyed these buildings. There's some evidence of earth-quake—or better, planet-quake—but that doesn't account for the dust and the crumbled tops of the buildings. Did you notice, the lower hundred feet or so was not damaged to any great extent, while the upper part was badly eaten, as though by some virulent acid? It must have been something that acted while the planet wandered free in space, the frozen atmosphere protecting the lower part. But what? Couldn't have been meteors—"

	"Cosmic rays?"

	"Well-l-l-l—maybe. But I don't think so. Cosmic rays act on about one atom per cubic centimeter per second. How many seconds would it take before the material would have been affected appreciably? This planet would have to be older than the stars for that. I give up."

	Spencer glanced toward the shadowy ceiling. "Let's get out of here. This dead city gets on my nerves, and I'm afraid something will fall."

	"As you say. Anyway, I want to see that city." Aarn pointed toward the red-rimmed city, on the map. "I think it may be highly interesting. The fact that it was painted on and not set in, indicates that it was new and placed there hurriedly. They must have retreated to it, aware of the advancing peril. Why they indicated it thus I naturally don't know. Maybe it was left as a guide to the race that might find them in some future day. They may have left records easy to interpret. Shall we go?"

	Ten minutes later they were decompressing in the Sunbeam, and an hour later they took off, with the aid of Aarn's carefully drawn map, for that other city. They cruised slowly, for they weren't sure of exact directions or exact distances. They located the great mountain range, and the city.

	And Aarn sat frozen at his controls for thirty long seconds.

	Men, busy, crowding men, were working down there. Machines were moving materials. The city was alive!

	"Lord!" he whispered at last. "They lived!"

	"They—they couldn't! They must be from one of these other planets."

	The Sunbeam dropped. There was a sudden scurrying down below. Half a dozen air machines, jet propelled, and with short stubby wings, swooped up suddenly, gracefully. They came nearer the Sunbeam, to be deflected sharply by the magnetic barrier surrounding the ship. Then they turned, and keeping pace with the ship, finally landed on a broad open space at the edge of the city.

	The city itself was built in a great cleft in a mountain range, a valley nearly a mile deep. And at either end, a titanic structure of metal and concrete rose nearly half a mile, a tremendous dam closing it in a great hollow three miles long and one wide, by half a mile deep. The landing field was near the base of one of those incredibly huge dams.

	"How's that for engineering, Spence?" asked Aarn in awe. "Every thousand pounds makes a ton and better here."

	"Terrific. Are we going to land?"

	"I think they're friendly." The Sunbeam dropped abruptly and lightly, landing on the field beside one of the two ships. For the first time the men saw a Myryan. He was short, and muscled as powerfully as Aarn, his face broad and pleasant, his skin a deep golden bronze, smooth and hairless. A mane of gold-red stood short and silky on his head. His ears were cupped, and mobile, but otherwise he was surprisingly human. His entire bodily structure was heavier, but in every way he was human— and handsome. There was an expression of curious surprise and interest on his face now, but somehow deep graven lines of intelligence were there, with a permanent set of deep, triumphant peace. Above all, he looked happy.

	"Welcome, who come from the nothing," said something very distinctly in Aarn's consciousness as the man outside caught his eye. "Will you come out and join us?"

	"What?" Aarn was startled. "Spence—it's telepathy!"

	In an instant Aarn was up, racing for the lock. He was in the lock, with the pressure half way up to that of the exterior before Spencer got there, and he had to wait till Aarn went out.

	Aarn leaped down, and landed lightly beside the ship. He strode swiftly toward the stranger, his hand outstretched in greeting, a smile of astounded joy on his face. "You lived!" he exclaimed.

	The other smiled broadly, somehow giving the impression that he was waiting for something. Crowds of other men were drifting forward now, nearly two hundred of them; and then a car came up swiftly, low, broad and massive, and stopped nearby. Two men got out. One wore a simple suit of pure white, as white as the mane of silky hair that covered his head and neck; the other, in golden cloth, was dressed as was the man Aarn had first seen. The man in white came forward. Somehow he looked young, despite his white hair.

	"Welcome, who come from the nothing," he greeted as he approached. The first man had fallen back, still smiling. "Do you come from one of the planets of this system? We have seen no evidence of inhabitants with our telescopes."

	"We come from—somewhere. We are lost in interstellar space. But you—you lived! It's—impossible!"

	"Interstellar space—the space between suns? Then you come from a far distant sun—but that cannot be."

	"It can be—but you—you lived! How in the name of the Eternal Mind was it done?"

	"We lived. Some of us," replied the Myryan slowly. Aarn caught a mental picture of long rows of white-draped figures that had not lived. Rows on rows, in a subterranean chamber, carved in solid rock, lit by a few glowing tubes. "You have done what we sought vainly. Had we done it, all would have lived. Lived—and died—ago." Aarn could not understand his idea of time. Only that it was vast beyond belief. Something so immense that it stunned this man who had lived through it. "You have traveled faster than light?"

	"Yes, in a sense." Aarn was beginning to think again, his mind coming to order from its chaos of thoughts. "As a world is round like a ball, so is all space rounded. The ball of space is floating in a greater interspace. When we travel, we move into the interspace, and back to four dimensional space at a different point. It is not motion. It is not velocity. And it is not travel faster than light. It is merely translation. We disappear, cease to exist in this space, then come again to existence elsewhere."

	"Your thoughts are meaningless to me. But it is not important now. We are safe again. We have a sun. We will not soon be torn away."

	Spence called from the Sunbeam, "Aarn—give me a hand. I want to get into that discussion." The Myryans looked curiously at the slim creature standing in the doorway, three feet above the level of the ground, and afraid to jump. Aarn went to him, and quickly lifted him down. Together they returned.

	"We come from different worlds of the same solar system," Aarn explained. "This man comes from the mother world, and I from the larger, heavier colony world. My planet is as large as yours, his far smaller."

	"You are Aarn?" asked the white-haired one. "I am Karshan, of Myrya."

	"I am Aarn, of Jupiter. This is Spencer, of Earth." Aarn's thoughts turned continually to the mystery uppermost in his mind. "But—how could you live?"

	"We did not. We died, and came to life again."

	"How long ago? What happened?"

	"Your mind cannot translate my terms, not those of time. But you can understand this. When we circled Shaln, we were far out at the edge of the galaxy. In our skies at night blazed a great, broad ribbon of light, bright as a sun, lighting our world day and night at certain seasons, but with a cold light. We have pictures we will show you, and perhaps you can understand. I will show you the messages we left when we awoke each time. You must train yourself, though, to understand them."

	"How long have you been here?" asked Spencer. "Have you taken any photographs?"

	"We have been circling this sun for three thousand days." That meant about six years. "We have taken photographs, of course, but have learned little. Why do you ask?"

	"We are lost. Only with photographs taken during the course of years can we find our own sun," explained Aarn. "I am afraid you cannot help."

	"I fear we cannot. We have had little time to study. There has been so much to do. Our lot is happy, but all is not perfect even yet. Our orbit is exceedingly irregular, and we must make preparations for the long, long winter. Our world will be cold, very cold; it will require more than one hundred thousand revolutions of our planet to establish a circular orbit."

	"There I can help you," Aarn said eagerly. "Let me see these incredibly ancient photographs, let me investigate your mechanisms and history—and in turn I'll show you how to direct this planet into a circular orbit of any size you like, and do it within five revolutions. I'll show you how to get heat enough to warm your whole planet even when it is farthest from the sun."

	"You have the secret of the power of matter too?" Karshan asked eagerly.

	"Yes and no," Aarn smiled. "We take advantage of a generator that already exists. The sun. We tap its limitless power. We have a beam which will conduct power of electric fields. It makes space conduct electric strains along a line, and we can tap them to any extent we choose. A star is a seething mass of electric strains, and we can get power enough to turn a hundred worlds from their orbits!"

	"The power of the sun? Of Hope, of Tarns?" Karshan said it both telepathically and orally. "We have named our sun Hope. It was the light of hope for us. If we can tap its power, we are saved indeed. But how can you move anything so huge as our planet?"

	"Our ship is driven by establishing a thing which is like an oscillation, but is not; it is radiated momentum. It throws momentum into the fabric of all space, and accelerates any body we wish. On so huge a body as this years would be required, but it could be turned. I will show your engineers. You have engineers." Aarn looked at the great dams.

	"Those dams held the solution over us while we slept. They kept the rays of space from crumbling us as they crumbled other things. If you can show our engineers how it may be done, we shall do it. We have dreaded the long night. It would be unbroken night, for at a distance so great, even this hot sun would be only a star, and we would have frozen all we have gained. Our world would never again thaw out as it should. Even so, centuries will pass before our seas thaw. They have frozen to a depth of nearly five miles. And the world is cold to its core."

-

	Half an hour later, Spencer reluctantly returned to the Sunbeam, unable longer to stand the heavy gravity. Aarn, with Karshan, returned to the city. The long day of Myrya was drawing to a close. Long tubes hidden under carvings of the buildings were glowing now with a yellowish light that illuminated the streets. Scattered lights began to appear in windows of the half-depopulated metropolis.

	"I shall lead you to our central Dormitory," said Karshan as they turned away from the main square of the city. "You will find a group of men there who are anxious to meet you. Physicists, chemists, engineers. They will want to discuss our problems with you."

	"What is your source of power?" asked Aarn suddenly.

	"We, too, tap the power of the sun—indirectly, however.

	We have apparatus—safely away from the city—which sucks in the radiant energy and concentrates it on a series of photo-cells which convert it to electric power. Ours is the only city left with a usable power plant, of course; we have poor power now. We can run none of our machines at night, except in great emergency, and our light is limited, even with our very small population."

	"What is your population?" asked Aarn.

	"About two thousand men, and some twenty-two hundred women. The women survived the Sleep better, for some reason. There are too few men to run our city efficiently. There are, fortunately, some representatives of all the sciences.

	"So many of us died. There were seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand, five hundred who entered the sleep. No more could be accommodated. Few more wanted to. Those others left messages for us when they died. Records of what happened. We found them, after our first awakening, and put them in a safe place here in Tarnsor. We will show you those, too. The dying buried the dead. We who lived had more than seven hundred and eighty thousand of our companions to bury."

	Aarn grimaced. "What a task!"

	Karshan smiled slightly. "We did not mind too greatly. It is hard to sorrow even for loved ones when a wonderful, incredible fact has been realized. We again saw a sun. Many of those who re-awoke did not, of course, realize what we had gone through. Some did. I did. I had been awakened three times before this last, to disappointment. You can imagine with what joy I started the machines which would awake all my people. Even when we realized that many, nearly all, in fact, would never wake, we still exulted in the knowledge that Man had conquered Space and Time. So we simply buried them in the vaults where they had slept so long. They will never know."

	They stopped before a long, low building, nearly every room of which showed a light. There were four doors, through which people were constantly passing.

	"These are the quarters of the unmarried people," Karshan explained. "Most of our people are unmarried—now. The young survived in greater number, and when nearly all died, all but three couples were broken up. We are starting life anew, all of us. There have been many marriages since the Awakening, and our population is again increasing." A smile lit his broad face.

	Through a great central lobby, where chairs and lounges made groups of men comfortable, they walked, all heads turning toward them. They entered an elevator, and were carried rapidly to the seventh floor. A short walk down a wide corridor brought them to a large lecture hall, in which half a hundred men waited expectantly. Their buzz of oral conversation ceased as all eyes were directed on Aarn.

	All save two of these men were clad in the golden garments of the citizens. These two, middle-aged, were dressed like Karshan in gleaming white.

	Aarn followed the three men in white to the platform at the end of the room. Karshan went directly to the speakers' table, and stood silent a moment. Then his telepathic communication came, weakened because it was not directed:

	"Gentlemen: You know the extraordinary thing that has happened. The Eternal Mind has tested us, it would seem, and has found us good; certainly He has smiled on us. Aarn, this man from a world of another sun, has brought to us at this critical moment a solution to our great remaining problem. Our conquest of an inexorable nature would seem complete. Aarn offers us a means of tapping the Tarns directly. A beam of conducting force which I as an astro-physicist can barely understand. It will, however, carry power from the sun down a conducting beam to us. That will solve the problem of cold for us this winter. But further, he has solved the secret of the Laws of Motion. Unlike Rashan, he needs no fulcrum to move our world. He can change our planet's new orbit to a circular one, or show you how. The engineers must learn.

	"It will be a great task—but to us now—what is such a problem?" A sighing chuckle ran through the audience. "At any rate," Karshan continued, "Myrya will be made completely habitable.

	"But Aarn himself is lost in space. He asks us to help him find the space marks that may guide him home. His problem is to locate in a short time the exterior galaxies known to him. I do not know how this may be done. I ask for suggestions on this, and that all such suggestions be made mentally."

	A period of tense quiet followed, a period of thought. Finally one of the men arose. "I can see only one hope—photographic mapping of the entire sky. That is a task we cannot possibly accomplish in less than two of Myrya's new years. One thousand days at least would be needed to construct a suitable telescope, since none is now in existence. At least two years, preferably three, would be needed to map the entire heavens. I am afraid there are mechanical difficulties we cannot overcome. Further, if the planet's orbit is to be changed soon—and it must be— a period of at least ten orbital revolutions should be allowed for steadying and damping of oscillations, and for calculations of perturbations caused by other planets of this system."

	"I realized that," said Aarn, standing up. "I know it is impossible for you to help us. We will start on a search for another race which has been more fortunate than you. But before we go, I shall give you some hints of things that will speed your work of mapping this system. First, of course, will be space ships, capable of making the trip from world to world. Second will be instruments by which you can obtain direct and exact readings on the gravitational field strengths of each planet, and momentumometers to read its motion. Already, I find, I have more accurate data on the present orbit of your planet than you have, due to the use of these instruments.

	"I shall give you what we have. In return, I want to learn the story of your incredible survival of the cold of space, poorly equipped as you were."

	Six hours later a commission of engineers and physicists had been appointed to study, with Aarn Munro and Russel Spencer, the apparatus they would need.

-

Chapter Three

	Down, down, down, deep into the solid, granitic rock Aarn went with Karshan. Dim-glowing tubes lit the shaft as the boxlike elevator ran down slowly on its own cogwheels. Under the heavy gravity of this world, no cable could have supported the elevator as it dropped nearly half a mile into Myrya. Colder and colder it became as the tiny box sank.

	"We have heaters," Karshan explained with a shrug, "but what does that mean? They have been running at full force for nearly six thousand days, and even now if we were to turn them off, the air would condense to liquid, and would solidify in a few days. In twenty days the shaft would be half full of a slush of frozen air."

	The terrible, biting chill, penetrating through the heavy, insulated suits they wore, grew more intense till at the half-way point it reached a maximum, and remained constant. Streams of slow-running slush could be seen on the bare rock walls as the car sank with a slight rumbling of its geared wheels in the tracks sunk in the wall.

	"Aren't those tracks brittle with cold?" Aarn asked.

	"They aren't cold. They're the heaters," Karshan explained. "We run a heavy current through them. The car feeds on that anyway, and it is the only way to prevent their becoming as brittle as glass."

	"I expected it to grow warmer with depth as most planets do," Aarn commented.

	"This one did when we first slept. It is too old now."

	"Too old!" Aarn fell silent. The Earth was some two billion years old, and heated on the surface by an accumulation of radio-active rocks. That radio-activity would continue for additional billions of years. Tens of billions. This planet was— too old!

	At last the car ground to a stop. A hewn tunnel in the rock led off to the right in a gentle curve, illuminated by long orange-red bars of light. Aarn felt the warmth pouring from them and realized that lighting had been combined with heating. "These are always going?"

	"Always," Karshan nodded. The passage curved again, and entered a larger chamber, from whence three passages led. Karshan paused, and finally took the one on the left. "I will take you first to one of the Refuges. There you can gain some idea of the beds in which we lay. This is the room where the scientists slept. There were ten thousand in here."

	They entered the room, a tremendous chamber filled with great stone tanks. On the bottom of each was a carved impression of a man's body. "We lay there. That was mine," said Karshan. It was near the entrance, one of a group of seven close together. There was a symbol carved in the floor near these tanks. The Myryan for one. "I was number three of group one."

	Silently Karshan led the way to one corner of the gigantic room. In an alcove was a complete power station set-up. Huge oscillator tubes were visible.

	"In each of these tubes," Karshan explained, "a coil of heavy silver tubing is wound. This apparatus can send a powerful high-frequency current through it. In the base of each of those tubes is a rugged automatic apparatus designed to boil off the solid and liquid air that would inevitably fill it. We slept in special suits that would protect us from the cold once we were warm and awake again. They contained tanks of air that would supply us for two days. If we did not regain consciousness in that time—

	"You sec, we knew for nearly ten generations what was coming. Our scientists struggled to learn either the secret of flight through space at speed greater than that of light, or the secret of the energy of matter. Some worked on means of living through the cold.

	"Marian found the secret of the Sleep three generations before the Breaking. We pinned our faith on it. We built this city, always with the thought that so great an undertaking took time, and that if the other secrets were discovered, our refuge here could be abandoned. These chambers are far below the solid rock of the city. The dams—they were to protect our machines. We had a vast bank of photo-cells up there.

	"But I must tell you in order. The astronomers first saw and recognized the danger. Tharl, a great red sun, was moving toward us. We did not know it till the spectroscope was invented. Then it was years later that we learned it was not only moving toward us, but at us. Our sun Shaln was a yellow normal star. We knew what would happen. Our planet revolved well out from its sun, and Tharl would pass close to us.

	"It was a terrible time. Tharl gleamed like a red eye, and grew imperceptibly during our lives. But we could tell in the end that it was growing. Our scientists did all in their power. Men were born, lived, had children, and died, knowing the doom of our world. Many men turned to physics and chemistry then.

	"Tharl was so close in my youth, I could study it through a small telescope. It had no planets. Already it was beginning to affect our orbit, for it was gigantic, and its gravitational arms reached out hundreds of billions of miles. Nearly two light years, in fact. I took up astro-physics, and when I was still a young man the exact calculations were finally made. Before, it had not been definitely known just what would happen. Some thought our planets would be thrown into Shaln. Some, that we would be captured by Tharl. Some said we would be hurled into it, others that our own sun would explode and deluge us with fire.

	"We knew finally. Tharl would pass at a distance of hundreds of billions of miles. Myrya would be torn free of Shaln in an ever-widening orbit as Tharl approached, but so slowly that only as Tharl retreated would Myrya be free of Shaln. Then the retreating Tharl would leave Myrya free in space. All but the two innermost planets would be torn from Shaln. The three outer planets of the system would be attached to Tharl in enormous, enormously eccentric orbits. We, and two other planets would simply be torn free of both. Our system of ten moons would stay with us, and would scarcely be perturbed.

	"The process had already begun when I started my observatory work. I could watch it myself, as the planets began to elongate their orbits toward Tharl, so gradually it was barely perceptible.

	"Tarnsor—the Refuge—was completed, and the engineers began the greater work beneath the city and above. The dams were built. The pits were dug. There were no quakes to fear, for the effects were so gentle, and so wide-spread in time that no shocks would result. The physicists and astro-physicists had calculated, and calculated well. We knew that our greatest dangers would be from two sources—cosmic rays and meteors. Our re-awakening depended on the machines which we must leave at the surface. But if a meteor struck them—or the slow action of cosmic rays disintegrated them—therefore the dams.

	"We ourselves were to sleep in these deep chambers. Marian had found the system which would induce suspended animation. No better preserver of life could be found than the absolute cold of space. Men experimented with themselves for fifty years, and were awakened in perfect health. That meant little, of course, save that the drug was good.

	"Seventy-nine chambers were prepared, each capable of housing ten thousand men. This one was the room of the scientists. You see our hope. As Myrya wandered through illimitable space and infinite time, somewhere, somehow, she would blunder into the gravitational field of a star, circle near, and be warmed once more. Eventually it would be captured. We had calculated that one star in four was a multiple, and one in a thousand had planets."

	"One in a thousand! We calculated one in a hundred thousand."

	"One in a thousand is right. We studied the question rather —carefully." Karshan paused momentarily. "We hoped to be captured by some such star. If no heat reached us, if the cosmic rays did not destroy us—we might. Many would not accept the system. It was better so, since we could care for but a small portion of the people.

	"I was mature when Shaln slipped back and back into space, and Tharl raced on ahead. The two stars began to give less and less heat. The people all over Myrya began to feel the first icy clutch of the eternal winter. They had dug deep caverns, and in them set up heating apparatus. They had huge energy-concentrators, using the power-system of all Myrya to heat and light their caverns. You see, they were certain the glowing gas of the galaxy would shine wherever the planet wandered. They depended on it. Their calculations showed that this energy would always be available. But we knew their calculations were wrong.

	"Come. I will show you the pictures."

	Rapidly Karshan led the way to the Records Vault, a huge chamber carved in the rock, but lined with twenty feet of solid lead. Aarn walked through a narrow, crooked corridor in the massive block of metal. Within was a room with dozens of the heater-rods glowing, and an equal number in darkness. Here the temperature was quite normal and bearable.

	"It is heavily insulated," explained Karshan. "Now we keep it at a uniform temperature."

	He went to one of the great cabinets and from a compartment took out a reel of film in a metal can, not unlike an ordinary motion picture film. A projector stood at one side of the room, and a sheet of silvery glowing substance covered the opposite wall.

	"This reel has been opened recently, to show again to our people. The others are sealed in helium gas at twice atmospheric pressure."

	Quickly he inserted the reel, and touched something. The orange glow of the heating and lighting bars died rapidly to black, and Aarn realized that the previously dark bars were now warm. Then suddenly a picture appeared on the screen. Across a wide horizon made jagged by trees and waving plants appeared a starry sky—and a giant, sprawling cloud of glowing, misty light. Low on the horizon was a red gleaming disc. "Tharl," said Karshan briefly. "And the galaxy."

	Aarn felt a sudden chill course down his back. The cold feet of scampering lizards. That was the sky this man beside him had seen. How old was this man? Old as the galaxy itself? Aarn looked about him with a queer sick feeling. These walls of lead had been built by hands of men who lived before the stars were born! This world was older than the galaxy itself! It was wrong, wrong, WRONG!

	Aarn looked again. It was a different view of the galaxy, the flaming gas cloud fringing off into a scattered group of flaming stars, red and yellow and blue. He heard Karshan's voice faintly: "The sky is more interesting now. There are more stars, and less of the featureless cloud." Aarn shuddered. Less of the featureless cloud—the unformed galaxy!

	"That was the sky the cold came into. The ones who tried to fight it held out for nearly ten thousand days. They really lived on the internal heat of the planet. But even that was exhausted eventually, and the chill ate in. Air became a problem, for it had frozen in lakes about them. They could no longer leave their caverns.

	"We waited till that time, when the planet was growing cold, and there was plentiful frozen air to start our process. Long before, when the cold had just begun, we had filled the dams, leaving only a passage out. The solution— it had taken a generation to prepare it. There was the lower dam, and the upper dam, and beyond that, the reservoir. In that were millions on millions of gallons of solution. Lead nitrate in water. Saturated. We ran a layer over our city and over the tubular tunnel we had built to the outside. It took cold to freeze it, of course. We flowed in layer after layer, letting each freeze in place. We built up successive layer upon layer until at last over us, and our machines, and our city of refuge was a block of ice and lead-salts half a mile thick.

	"Then we blasted loose the lower gates, and opened them. The solution was frozen hard, and of course did not flow out. The time passed, and when the liquid air was plentiful, we retired, and all our people save the scientists were put in the Sleep, in tubs of liquid air.

	"We waited till the ten thousand days had passed, and finally —we slept. The last man was put in his place and prepared by a special machine." Karshan paused. He had gotten a new reel from the cabinet, a reel of fine wire, and now he put this in the projector. Abruptly Aarn started. From the projector came mental impulses, the impulses of Karshan himself.

	"This is the record of Karshan of Myrya on the First Awakening. Our wandering planet has drawn near a new star. The apparatus has functioned perfectly. The heat of the sun has melted the Great Seal, and the solution has flowed through the lower gates, into the lower reservoir. The primary direct photocell started operation on being cleared, and the concentrator field built up till it commenced operation. The clocks indicate the Seal was broken three thousand days ago. The atmosphere is gaseous once more. But we are retreating from the sun into space. This star has no planetary system, and we have not been captured.

	"I am the third member of the first group. Two others of the seven in the group have awakened, and four failed to return to life. They have been removed.

	"Examination shows that we are now headed diagonally across the edge of the galaxy, through the thickest of the star-fringe. We may hope for a second near passage soon. The first passage has been unavailing."

	There followed a long technical discussion of their condition, of the condition of the machines left to awaken them automatically, and a report that all was well with them; they were uninjured.

	"The other two members of the Awakened Party have set out to investigate. It is difficult, for the world is terribly cold.

	We are forced to live in the Records Vault, the only place habitable. The foods are plentiful and good." There was a slight pause in the record, as though a period of time had elapsed.

	"The explorers have returned with the records of those who attempted to live in the heat of the galaxy. They were unsuccessful, and the last perished after a period of two generations. The bodies of the last survivors were found huddled in a single small cavern, using the heat of the Myryan power system for warmth. The plant decayed due to the impossibility of their giving it proper attention, and the extremely low temperature. It is no longer capable of functioning. Our plant alone remains in operation.

	"The cold is growing intense. The solution has been pumped into the upper reservoir, and the Seal has been re-established. The air is beginning to condense. With some difficulty we have succeeded in establishing an observatory on Mount Klor and have taken many photographs. We have been forced to retreat, as the stored power is almost exhausted, and the power plant is no longer in operation.

	"We will again go into the sleep within twenty-two hours."

	Silently Karshan inserted a reel of film into the camera, and the picture appeared on the wall as mental impulses came from the machine in a concluding thought.

	"The radio-active ores left as clocks indicate the passage of one half the half life of the ninety-second element—" and a phrase of time that to Aarn suddenly becomes intelligible—"a period of two and one half billions of years." Simultaneously Aarn saw the picture.

	Across a field of white waste, illimitable in expanse, glowed a faint, minute disc. A far-distant sun. Boiling, steaming pools of deep blue liquid lay in puddles and ponds among great masses of white, fluffy snow. A crawling, grotesque figure of a man moved in the dim light, a man in a cumbersome, cold-proof suit. The scene vanished. Across a deep-cleft valley jutted a white mountain, and beyond it the great rising arc of the gas-cloud galaxy. It appeared exactly the same. "A period of two and one half billions of years." The thought seemed to cling in Aarn's mind. The galaxy was unchanged in that period... How old was Karshan?

	The picture faded just as Aarn recognized the deep-cleft valley as the valley of the city. But a tremendous mass of solid white filled it from brim to brim. The Great Seal.

	Again the machine sent out its impulses.

	"This is the record of Karshan of Myrya on the Second Awakening. I am the third man of the first group. One other has awakened with me, and one of the second group. The others we did not call. Three are enough for the work.

	"Myrya is passing a giant red star, at a distance of nearly 100,000,000,000 miles. Even at this distance the planet has been entirely freed of the cold. There is no planetary system, and we will not be captured. The passage will consume nearly two thousand days. Much research work is to be done in this time in an attempt to find some better radio-active ore. The refined samples left at the last awakening have been 49% transmuted, indicating an elapsed period of approximately five billions of years. Myrya shows little change. The cities have not been destroyed, and stand practically perfect, torn a bit, however, by the terrific storms of the thaw.

	"The seal was broken after 6000 days of light above intensity 10. Another one thousand days elapsed before our awakening. All the apparatus was found in perfect condition. It was perfectly designed. The solution has been pumped back from the lower to the upper reservoir.

	"Calculation and observation from the observatory indicates that a terrible change has taken place in our course. This giant sun has deflected us, and accelerated us with its own proper motion so that we shall be hurled almost directly out of the galaxy. If this course is not deflected, we shall wander out into intergalactic space for an inconceivable time.

	"There are slight but noticeable changes in the make-up of the galaxy now. The central gas-cloud seems to have contracted, and many new stars have appeared. The stellar fringe is noticeably broader. Perhaps it is best that we circle outward, for should we enter the gas-cloud itself, our fate would be certain. Myrya would become the nucleus of a new sun.

	"We are leaving this star now. We have already pumped the solution back into the upper reservoir. I fear we will be hard-put this time, for the enormous radiation of this sun declines so slowly, our stored power may not last till we are safely out in the cold regions where we may enter the Sleep. We have discovered a new radio-active material whose half-life is twenty times that of element ninety-two. We are going again into the Sleep. The atmosphere above has not yet frozen, but our energy is exhausted. We have been able to freeze sufficient air in the cold rooms of the sleeping quarters to freeze our bodies. We will probably be safe enough.

	"Investigation of those who are sleeping indicates that many of them have died. Tharsarn suggests a twofold reason for this. Many of course did not survive the original action of the drugs. This was indetectable at the time. Many more have possibly been killed by the atom-smashing rays from space. Even under our Great Seal, and half a mile more of solid rock, in the enormous times that have passed, these rays might well have been deadly. They do not influence the machines, since machines are not as delicate as body chemistry.

	"That I have survived, Tharsarn believes to be due to a peculiar susceptibility on my part to the action of the drugs, and to the fact that during the periods of awakening I have renewed the entire chemical structure of my body, replacing the destroyed atoms with fresh material from the foods I have eaten. He says that we who awaken have a better chance of ultimate survival.

	"Our latest calculations minimize this. We are very near the edge of the galaxy. And our parabolic orbit will lead us far out into intergalactic space.

	"This concludes the second report. We have been awake three thousand two hundred and twenty-one days."

	Aarn relaxed as the age-old record ended. Karshan inserted another.

	"The third report of Karshan of Myrya. I have again awakened. Tharsarn has again awakened, but not until group twenty-seven was called did we get a third to join us. We revived with extreme sluggishness." A technical report followed, discussing their medical condition.

	"The seal melted after an unknown period of exposure to this star's heat. Our machines functioned perfectly.

	"The time that has elapsed since our last awakening is as yet unknown. Chemical analysis could detect no uranium in the purified specimens we left after the last awakening. Spectroscopic examination revealed faint lines. The new radio-active compound has some slight activity left, which we can detect with sufficiently sensitive physical instruments. Explorations have revealed no other radio-activity on the planet. Marlar, physico-radiation technician of group twenty-seven, estimates the time as approximately four hundred billions of years."

	Aarn stiffened into sudden, cold rigidity. Four—hundred— billions—of years. Four hundred billion years.

	KARSHAN WAS MORE THAN FOUR HUNDRED BILLION YEARS OLD!

	A picture flashed on the screen. A picture of the galaxy, taken over a steaming, rocky landscape, devoid of life. Bare muddy rock stood out.

	Karshan's comments droned on: "There are indications of terrific fires as the world thawed out. I suggest that the long action of the rays from space converted millions of tons of rock to hydrogen, which has burned with the oxygen from the air. Our atmosphere is greatly depleted in oxygen. The cities have been devastated. The metal of the buildings is rotten, weak, unreliable. In spots it breaks at a touch. The outer walls have been knocked down by the terrific storms of the thaw, and the burning.

	"Devastation, save in Tarnsor, is complete. The very hills have been leveled. The time that has passed is inconceivable. I thought the period between our passing the first stars was enormous, but this is beyond conception.

	"The galaxy is unrecognizable. It may be a different galaxy, though I doubt it. The time is not great enough for that, tremendous though it is. I believe we circled in a vast orbit out of the galaxy, and then back in again.

	"That, perhaps, has saved us for so long a time. The rays from space must be weak far out of the galaxy. Nevertheless, they have destroyed the entire surface of our planet. Dust has drifted many feet deep as a gray-brown mud, wet now with constant rains.

	"And our journey has not yet ended. We are circling another star in a parabolic orbit. It is a blue-white giant, terrifically hot. The thaw has been far more complete than hitherto, and we are still approaching the star. We fear the thaw may be dangerously complete. We will approach within 100,000,000 miles."

	Another picture appeared on the screen. It was a scene taken under a fiercely blazing sun. The glaring rock shimmered in the heat. The picture had been taken from a ridge near the chasm-valley in which Tarnsor lay. One of the dams was visible, and beyond it flashed a sheet of water, water almost boiling, with dense, circling clouds of steam whirling lazily around it.

	"We are now at the point nearest the sun. The thaw has reached a depth of half a mile. The ice of the seas is melted to a depth of nearly a mile, and waves are dashing furiously on the coasts. Cyclonic winds have been set up by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator.

	"The heat is unbearable during the day, and the chill has been driven out of the rocks, even as deep as our sleeping quarters. The air is beginning to volatilize. We are fearful of the effect this may have. Should all the air be volatilized, the sleepers will have to be awakened.

	"Accurate analysis of the radio-active specimens place our time spent in the great swing out of the galaxy at between 454 and 460 billions of years. We are at a loss for radio-active material to be left when next we swing out into the cold. We will be headed directly for the heart of the galaxy—a vastly changed galaxy, a galaxy with countless millions of stars where there was once only a glowing gas cloud—yet it may be long before we next awake, and there seems to be no radio-active material remaining. We believe that there cannot be more than one ton of uranium left in the entire planet, and that is utterly unavailable. Our world is too old, too eternally old. We have outlived the elements. Only those lifeless ash elements too low to be active remain."

	A new picture appeared on the screen. A picture of a star-studded night sky, great gleaming suns hard and bright against the black of space. Across one whole side of the sky a tremendous arch of hazy light swam upward. The galaxy. Only a faint fringe of gas still glowed warmly in its center. And—distinctly visible, clear and sharp, hung two separate great clusters, isolated from the main body, clusters of stars already completely formed. Aarn gasped—the Magellenic clouds, seen as separate entities!

	Karshan's report continued: "We are retreating again into the void. The air was not completely volatilized in the sleeping caverns, and it is now rapidly condensing once more. The solution has been pumped back into the upper reservoir, and it is freezing rapidly.

	"We found a small source of radio-active material. By extremely laborious search with unusually sensitive instruments, we located a slight source on the continent—and investigation disclosed a fall of meteoric material that contained a small amount of radio-active matter. Our power was plentiful, and we succeeded in extracting it. It is largely radium, unfortunately, with a low percentage of uranium, and a very slight amount of the unnamed radio-active compound we had previously isolated. And now, except for the veritably impossible accident of another meteor-fall, our planet is completely exhausted. No slightest indication of radio-active elements were found, only the false radioactivity signs of the rays from space.

	"This very limited supply is all we can find. We can reasonably hope, however, that it will be sufficient. Our Great Seal was an unnecessary precaution as far as meteors were concerned. Not a dozen have fallen in the endless time Myrya has wandered.

	But the seal protected us against the rays of space. In the caverns dug by those who sought to live by the galaxy's heat, we found the machines disintegrated, nearly a quarter of a mile beneath the crust.

	"Must we wander on thus forever? We have seen the galaxy develop from an infant gas cloud to maturity. Will we come to life again at intervals, wandering always, to see at last the galaxy a dead collection of dead stars, warmed by the light of some dying, crimson sun of minute size and incredible density?

	"Our only hope is that we pass a sun with a planetary system. And then we must pass close to a massive planet. No small planet could capture us and turn our parabola into a fairly small el ipse.

	"We are going again into the Sleep. Our star lies far behind us, a blue-white point of light."

	A final picture flashed on the screen. The galaxy was visible in only a small portion of the sky. In the center of the view appeared an intense blue-white star. And again the ground was a crystalline waste, and the stars the stars of open space.

	Aarn was silent as Karshan inserted still another record.

	The machine burst with triumphant mental impulses. "We are approaching a white star of large size—a star complete with a planetary system! We have calculated carefully, and we will pass within a million miles of a planet so huge it is thrice as large as Myrya! This is certain to capture us, and in an orbit of reasonable size. The results cannot be calculated accurately, for the planet is the center of a revolving system of many satellites. The effects are incalculable—but we will be captured!

	"The seal has been released, the power of the cell-banks is being turned to the task of wakening our people that they may see this. Tarnsor has been found in perfect condition. The buildings are being warmed and prepared by the two-score who are now awake. The only blight on our joy is that only these two-score survived the terrible wait, out of the ten thousand who lay down into the Sleep in this one chamber.

	"Some five thousand of our people are awake. We are passing at the nearest the giant planet that is to be our captor and our saviour. The tidal strains are terrific, but there have been only slight seismic disturbances. All that will occur before we have found our orbit we cannot foresee—but we have been captured. We again have a sun, again we are a planet in a system, after wandering for a total of 473,375,500,000 years.

	"I, Karshan of Myrya, have seen the galaxy in its youth, in its adolescence, and now in its maturity. There is no longer any trace of gas in its heart. Only stars remain.

	"Man lives again—his race is growing again—and he has all astronomy to relearn!"

	Karshan touched a stud; a reel he had put in the projector began to turn, and on a black background Aarn saw a tiny disc moving, with ten points of light circling it steadily at various speeds. Rapidly the system drew closer, growing slowly larger, tilting as it neared them. The orbits of the ten circling points of light stretched visibly, particularly the third to the eighth. The tenth and outermost seemed to move slowly and steadily toward them. The tiny disc became larger, and in a great spiral it wandered on, while the growing disc began to loom larger and larger on the screen. The points became discs of various sizes, and at last the outer ones vanished beyond the edge of the screen. Only the planet itself remained; then finally it began to retreat again. And as the satellites again became visible, they revolved in orbits far askew. The planet had been turned aside. But Myrya was captured.

	Aarn turned and looked at Karshan with a strange awe. "You—have seen all that?"

	Karshan smiled. His broad, kindly face, deep-graven with lines of sheer content, lightened with a grin as human as all mankind. "All of it—and more. But I'm just human. I have felt your thoughts. I am no monstrosity. I slept, and when I awoke, time had passed. I am little more than thirty thousand days old to my own knowledge."

	Aarn shook himself slightly, then he too smiled and extended his great, broad palm. "You're a man, Karshan, and a member of a race so stubbornly determined, so inflexibly set toward life, that not the cold of space nor the rays of space could stop them. The very radio-active elements died—and you lived! I'm proud to know you."

	Aarn hesitated briefly. "Have you duplicate records, have you copies of these that we could take back to Earth and let our own scientists study? And above all, have you yet made a complete star-map, inaccurate though it may be, by which we can later have some hope of finding our way back? If we leave now —we would leave forever, for we would have no more idea of your location than we have of the location of our sun."

	Karshan nodded. "We have. We have made you a duplicate of both reels and projector. We had thought of your wanting them, of course. It is so little we can do in return for the fuller life you have made possible for us with your inventions."

	Aarn laughed deprecatingly. "Any race that couldn't be stopped by four hundred billions of years of cold and night, wouldn't be stopped by a few hundred days of partial cold!"

	"It is curious, isn't it?" replied Karshan gravely. "We might have been! It might have been too cold for us to live, and yet not cold enough for the Sleep!"

-

Chapter Four

	"So that's their story." Spencer rose and looked out through the Sunbeam's pilot-room window. The white light of Tarns shone down on the rocks below them—rocks that were strangely rounded and softened. Only near the base of the chasm walls, near the city itself, were they sharped-edged and rugged. The city was a gleaming metal bubble deep in a great cleft. Below and above, the crumbling dams stood gigantic. Men and women were working in that city. Men did the heavy work, while women had taken charge of statistical analysis, laboratory routine, and similar activities.

	All were incredibly busy. Despite the wonderful machines the Myryans had developed, and the complete miniature metal-working plant set up here in Tarnsor, the task facing them now was gigantic. A ship was being built, a tremendous sphere, eleven hundred feet in diameter, equipped with a tiny power plant that would lift it and move it slowly. The walls were scarcely two inches thick, the girders merely wire cables.

	Six smaller ships were also under construction, these equipped with powerful engines employing the momentum wave drive. The greater ship was to be the power station, revolving in an orbit about Myrya just beyond the atmosphere, and so oriented that the sun-tapper beam that would reach from it, would have an uninterrupted path to the sun. It would be a great charging station, where huge aggie accumulator coils would be charged. The smaller ships would carry the full coils to Myrya, and the exhausted ones back for charging. With plentiful power, and with the efficient aggie coils, this was an economical procedure. Indeed, no other system was possible, for the ionized layer of atmosphere high above the surface would have short-circuited the transpon-beam as it reached out from Myrya to the sun. The result would have been such a colossal flood of energy— the angry answer of a short-circuited sun, generating quintillions on quintillions of horsepower hours each second—that the entire region would have been dangerously blasted, and the immediate locality turned to a pit of molten lava.

	Other work was being done too. Small ships of the Sunbeam type had been made, and already apparatus was being hastily manufactured by great stamp-presses and automatic machinery, and was being shipped to twenty stations scattered with comparative uniformity over all the planet. Each of these stations was in an old city, and the ruined buildings were being torn down to supply the vast quantities of metal they needed for the new construction.

	Tremendous holes, all of five miles in depth, were being bored into the solid rock crust of the planet by mechanisms patterned after the Shal torpedoes of the Magyans. At the base of each tube was a projection cap which would distribute the momentum waves Aarn's apparatus would generate, spreading it through the deeper mass of Myrya. Scrap metal, fused in the base of each pit, gradually built up tremendous rods which would become part of the planet-shifting apparatus.

	"It won't be a matter of days, by any means, or hundreds of days," Aarn had emphatically explained. "But within two of your years you should be able to twist the planet's orbit to what you want. In the meantime, within a hundred days you should be able to turn the axis of the planet so that it is vertical to the plane of the orbit. You can calculate the precessional effects, and make them help you. But don't rush. If you do, that set-up will tear the crust right off the planet!"

	The great hull was already rising outside on the broad landing field, and Spencer watched its growth thoughtfully.

	"If that's their story, then certainly a little thing like turning this planet won't bother them," he commented. He looked about him. That city was older than the sun that lighted it. It was older than the stars that shone down on it at night. The rocks of this incredible planet had existed before the stars were created. The men working on that ship—some of them had been old when the stars were young, when the galaxy was yet unformed. "When are we leaving?" he asked as he turned away with an involuntary shudder. "We still have to find our own sun, you know."

	Aarn nodded slowly. "They affect me the same way. Those rocks, that city. Even those men. It's harder to believe it about them. But—when you think of them it's even more—upsetting. They're fine, human, friendly—yet they have seen the galaxy grow old, and stars die; and the very elements of this world are dead.

	"You know better than I when we can leave. Are they clear on engineering details? They've got the physics. They can catch that. They're brilliant." He chuckled mirthlessly at the thought. "Brilliant—they've had time to be."

	"They'll have all the engineering difficulties straightened out in about a week," said Spencer. "After that they have brains to go it alone."

	The week passed; and from the landing field beside the city of Tarnsor, the Sunbeam rose slowly, almost reluctantly. She was not alone, for with her rose two of the newly-completed space ships of the Myryans. They accompanied her to the limits of her 2000-mile-deep atmosphere. Then—the Sunbeam disappeared with speed greater than that of light.

	"Yet in a way—I hate to leave them," Spencer said softly. "If you think only about their utter humanness, you marvel at their dogged persistence and the indomitable will to live that they displayed. They slept through all eternity—and lived again."

-

BOOK TWO - THE INTERSTELLAR SEARCH

Chapter One

	Aarn Munro turned away from the wide panorama of unfamiliar space visible in the screens of the Sunbeam.

	"We've got a worse problem to solve than that of the Myryans, and in something less than a quarter of a century," he pointed out. "We've got to find, not a planetary system, but an inhabited planetary system!"

	"There's somebody in this ship with a lot of cock-eyed theories about planets and planetary systems, though," Spencer remarked casually. "One system for every 100,000 suns."

	Aarn grinned. "You're mistaken, my lad. That was no theory of mine. I merely repeated another man's theory. And remember, please, that we Solarians haven't had any reason for such an intensive study of planetary theory as the Myryans have had. Their theory includes ours, and adds a more important second cause for planetary development. Double stars, driven farther and farther apart by tidal action and friction, sometimes produce a planetary system, and two free stars. That's not any fault of mine."

	"What's the plan?" asked Bob Canning, looking in from the power room.

	"Seek, and ye shall find—maybe," replied Aarn. "We're headed back into space, and then we'll start the campaign again. Incidentally, I aimed for the center of the galaxy when we lit out. We may as well start in the right general direction. Plus the fact that planets are more apt to be found where stars are thicker."

	"Going to use the transpon-collector system again?"

	"No—the Myryan light collector. Far more efficient. It collects the light as light, and can give us spectroscopic examination. That may be a help."

	Two days later, it was being a help. Aarn was examining the stars spectroscopically now, as well as measuring the light-intensity. He tested ten stars in two days, with negative results. Ten more in another two days. Day after wearisome day passed as star after star was tested; and the Sunbeam continued flashing toward the center of the galaxy.

	Twenty days of constant searching, with one hundred stars examined, and no results. A month, and no planetary system.

	"Maybe," said Spencer in disgust as the last results checked out at zero, "your original estimate was right. We haven't found another planet since."

	"Oh—don't give up," said Aarn good-humoredly, "it's grand research. Just think of all the data we're collecting. We have accurate spectroscopic results on nearly 200 stars. That's mighty useful work."

	"And there's no use giving up," Carlisle reminded him. "Even if you get peeved, you can't go home, you know. And if you want a job, try working this math for a change. I'm getting a little sick of it."

	"How about power? Isn't it about time you visited a star for more?" Spencer inquired. "I'd like to look at one close up just for the fun of it."

	"I'd intended doing that presently. I'm going to take another set of readings, and then move up to that star I've had in my eyes for the last fifteen days. I've been expecting to pass it for the last ten. That blamed thing is no piker—even after what we saw from Magya, and Anrel. It's a cB8 star—which same means a surface temperature so hot it would crisp a tungsten atom. I'm going to toast my toes over there."

	The readings were taken, and the Sunbeam started toward the enormous jewel of space Aarn had pointed out. It took three days to reach it, but at last they neared it, and stared at it in wonder. It was a magnificent thing, a vast sea of darting, swirling violet flame, an intense furnace, ringed with light. Its radiance faded through the spectrum to red; then it hurled out a vast, far-flung corona for over fifty-five million miles, a prominence glowing with brilliant scarlet streamers of flame. At a distance of 10,000,000,000 miles the heat was intense, and Aarn had at once placed auxiliary glass ray-screens that cut out 98% of the incident ultra-violet. And still, the next day, their skins were raw and sore from the ultra-violet burns! The star radiated almost entirely in the violet and ultra-violet range.

	"If," said Aarn, "that thing had planets, which it hasn't, and the planets which aren't there had people, the people who aren't on the planets that aren't there would have to be moles, or else have a two-inch ray shield for a skin. That flood of ultra radiation would burn holes in rocket engineers' asbestos pants."

	"Aarn must be collecting energy for a long trip," commented Carlisle, "he picks 'em hot when he picks 'em."

	"I'll have to get in close with that by-pass field," admitted Aarn. The Sunbeam leaped into high speed again, and the star became ghost-like, tenuous. It expanded like an inflated balloon, then collapsed as though pricked, and disappeared. Space was utterly blank and black. "We're about 10,000,000 miles from it now," Aarn said, "and if it weren't for that by-pass field, we'd be fused in seconds. We're within the corona discharge, actually, though that's not particularly hot—except by picking up radiation from the photosphere." Aarn began manipulating controls—and suddenly the tremendous sea of fire hung straight before them.

	"Wow! That's no ten million miles!" Carlisle yelled. The enormous disc was smoky violet, fiercely glaring, spread over all the visible area of space, save for one tiny corner, where a solid sheet of wavering red flame appeared. Aarn was working rapidly, his motions swifter than any Terrestrian could have made with his slower, earth-trained muscles.

	"Yes it—is. It's just big. We're drawing all we can carry when the—beam gets—ah!" They were almost deafened by a single clap of thunder from the transpon beams in the power room that carried the picked-up power from outside into the aggie coil beams. The concentrated blast drove the air out of its path as effectively as a bolt of lightning does. It chuttered and sputtered, making Aarn's comments inaudible. He made some change in his controls, but for seconds more the beam roared and cracked. Then rapidly it died into almost complete silence. Aarn made another movement, watching his dials intently as he continued speaking. "It's almost as bad as Anrel. I'm using that gravito-magnetic by-pass. Converts electric to gravitational field. Makes light and so forth pass through the ship and through us as though we weren't there." He paused briefly. "That ought to be enough. The coils have got all they'll take now."

	The sea of dusky violet flame died out gradually, then reappeared suddenly in ghostly form as the Sunbeam, shooting away now, overtook light that had left before them.

-

	Carlisle looked at Aarn dubiously. "Are we going to that fool Cepheid? Anrel was a Cepheid, and you studied that plenty."

	"I didn't study it. Those Magyans had, though, and it wasn't a Cepheid; they never heard of stars like that in Magya's space. I have plenty of data on their sun, and the astro-physicists can get busy on it. But I haven't any on a genuine Cepheid, and this is one, I think. I'd like a vacation of research instead of that steady grind of looking at meaningless suns."

	"I'm not kicking—just questioning," Carlisle said hastily.

	"It wouldn't make any difference anyway," said Spencer sadly. "The Bull of Basham has lowered his head and is charging. Nothing but something more interesting would stop him."

	Aarn grinned—and went on.

	Day after day passed, and the Cepheid grew brighter and brighter. Cepheid stars are universally extremely brilliant, and this seemed no exception—until, as Aarn began taking readings regularly, he discovered to his amazement that it wasn't a Cepheid. It was some other type of regular variable. They were covering light years, and that meant years of radiation that they were able to study. Gradually the frequency of the cycles was increasing, and apparently at an accelerating pace.

	"That," said Aarn excitedly after his last reading, while the light of the strange star gleamed brilliantly in the ship, "is about to become a Nova! It's evidently one of those giants on the branch line of Russet's diagram, and about to fall to a normal main-sequence sun. We're too close now to hope to see it turn Nova by moving nearer. I think that even in real time it hasn't yet—we're only half a light year away now."

	"Will it be safe to investigate—?" asked Spencer doubtfully.

	"Certainly. We can hang far enough away." "You won't know how far is far enough. Either it is or it isn't, isn't it?"

	"If is is is, is not is not is not?" grinned Aarn. "I take it you mean that, should the radiation commence suddenly and violently, explosively in other words, we wouldn't know it was coming till it hit. First, a star is too massive a thing to do anything suddenly. It would probably take several days for it to reach a maximum. Remember, at the speed of light, radiation would travel from the heart of a good sized star to the outside in not less than two seconds, but since no conceivable radiation can travel through a star at the speed of light, that's out of the question. Anyway you figure it, the time will certainly be days, so we'll have plenty of warning."

	They returned to the control room, and again the Sunbeam leaped forward, and rapidly the star ahead expanded, till at last the brilliant point became a brilliant disc, shifting slightly from the center of the center panel as they neared it. "Missed my aim slightly," Aarn commented. "We'll circle it a bit as long as we're out here." They halted their speed-motion, and the star became visible as a real thing instead of a ghost-light.

	Aarn looked toward it, and began taking gravitometric and momentumetric readings. Gradually a frown of puzzlement came over his face. "These instruments show a moment of momentum that's terrific. To have a moment of momentum like this that star would have to turn on its axis once in about a quarter of an hour. The only other explanation—" Aarn was busy, still wearing a puzzled frown. Gradually it dissolved in surprise as Spencer and Carlisle watched. Finally he chuckled, "Of all the dumb-blind luck! This blamed thing has planets! After all our laborious search, our careful investigation of spectroscopic and photometric results, we find planets by accident! It's no wonder we missed 'em. They were rotating in a plane at right angles to our line of sight, and therefore there was very little light-variations caused by them, and that last in the variations of the star itself.

	"Planets! I'll be burned!" Spencer laughed. "Hunting all over space—then stub our toes on 'em."

	"How many, Aarn?" asked Carlisle.

	"Four big boys. Two within one hundred million miles of that sun. One at a distance of seven hundred million, one at about eight hundred. Hmm—wonder if they're inhabited. If any of them are, it would probably be Four or Three. One and Two are too hot. Three's a warmish world for us, and Four's a coolish one. All depending of course on the composition of the atmosphere. If Three has a lot of plants that consume almost all the CO2 loose, and Four has plants that don't take anything below one and a half per cent, and a lot of broad sea-surface, then Four is hotter than Three." 

	"Transparency of atmosphere you mean?" asked Spencer.

	Aarn nodded. "Carbon dioxide and water vapor act a lot like a layer of glass—they'll pass short wavelengths, but stop long—comparatively speaking. Light and short heat waves pass through them easily. The light and heat energy reach solid rock and soil or liquid water and are absorbed warming them. The rocks and soil of course—radiate—but their radiation is long wavelength heat rays. Infra-infra-infra red, as Aarn called it. Carbon dioxide and water vapor are as transparent to that as a layer of solid rock.

	"But what I'm thinking about is the situation of the peoples of these worlds—if they are inhabited. Pleasant idea—talk about living over a volcano! They're living over one that's nearly two and a half millions of miles across!" "Why not investigate?"

	"I intend to. We'll start on Three—it's nearest."

	The Sunbeam leaped forward, her momentum drive in action. In minutes they reached a speed of nearly ten thousand miles a second. Three swam nearer, enlarging swiftly. Aarn slowly pulled back the drive control, and the transpon beams died out. Planet Three was within a hundred thousand miles, and Aarn was busy with a second complete control board. A tiny thing, no larger than an egg, if that egg be an ostrich's, started out of a pocket in the side of the Sunbeam, and darted forward, out of sight in a fraction of a second. A screen came to life, on it a picture of the planet below expanding swiftly.

	A sea, broad and deep blue in the twilight region, with an edge of a continent just advancing into the light. It was early morning. Rapidly the land extended, and the sea became invisible. Aarn's investigator began slowing down, as the outskirts of the atmosphere were reached. Aarn was investigating the instruments below the screen now. "Surface gravity 1.58 Earth's," he announced. A broad expanse of level coastal plain was visible. It was an unbroken expanse of forest.

	"There must be animals," said Aarn. "All that plant life—"

	The little investigator was sweeping in broader and broader circles, whining through the air at hundreds of miles an hour as its minute but powerful momentum drive sent it on. Inland— over the continent. One hundred—two hundred—then Aarn sent his stop signal as the image of a distant city appeared on the screen! The Investigator stopped some five miles beyond the target, turned, and cruised slowly back, miles above it. It was a huge city, sprawling in orderly disorder in green-blue sunlight. There was a massive district of great buildings, and a diminishing outer circle of suburban places. Still more slowly the Investigator dropped downward, till it approached the central district.

	Slowly the scene expanded, the outer edges crowding off the screen, the central district growing in size, with a strange lack of perspective. Flying things became visible as darting shadows, then smaller, the machines on the street level, and finally black streams of moving inhabitants. With a nerve tensing slowness the investigator descended. The machine took a sudden drop as Aarn sent another signal, slid abruptly and swiftly down close to the side of a mighty upreaching building. At about five hundred feet it stopped, and held motionless. Aarn and his friends stared in amazement.

	There were two kinds of beings down below, consorting in perfect freedom! One was a race of ten-foot creatures unbelievably repulsive. They were dark green, and shiny. They were draped in a simple type of loose garment half way between a toga and a very loose-fitting pair of pajamas. Their faces were triangular, with wide triangular mouths splitting them. Small mobile cup-shaped ears rose just above the top of the "face," and great round yellowish eyes at the base-points of the equilateral triangle completed the picture. The surface of their bodies, and their faces, was a meshwork of fine, glinting dark-green scales. They were reptilian, without a doubt.

	But they walked upright on two long, stout legs, and they had two extraordinarily long and powerful-looking arms, jointed seemingly in a most indiscriminate fashion from the way in which they maneuvered them. "Two joints—two elbows!" said Aarn blinking his eyes and shaking his head.

	The other type of being seemed quite human, a sort of golden man. Their bodies were less stocky than the reptilians, and they appeared to walk with some slight difficulty. Each was about five feet six in height, with smoothly muscled arms of a perfectly normal type. Their faces were broad and pleasant, but rather stupid looking. They wore only a brief type of shorts, both males and females. Their numbers seemed about one tenth that of the reptilian people, but they mingled freely with them.

	"Well, well. We've not only found people—but two of them. What next?" Spencer turned to Aarn with a wide grin of interest.

	"A bit of thought. I think it's safe to go down. What say?"

	"Why not? They seem pleasant enough. Getting along between themselves, and that one race is certainly a lot like us externally. We ought to get by."

	"I agree. So—" The Sunbeam suddenly darted down in flashing speed, circled the world briefly, and shrieked into the atmosphere of the planet almost directly above the city. There was a wide expanse of park-like development beyond the outermost suburb of the city, and Aarn headed toward it—only to stop as he saw a huge egg-shaped ship slanting in for a landing on a great broad park-square in the heart of the city.

	"Landing field there. We'll head for it."

	The Sunbeam's angle of flight changed slightly, and she dropped more slowly downward. The people who had begun to disembark from the now-landed ship below, suddenly scrambled wildly back into her, or raced for buildings on the edge of the field. In seconds the Sunbeam had landed gently, and a stream of reptile men broke forth from one of the huge buildings bordering the field, coming in a swift strange gallop, their double-jointed legs giving them amazing speed.

	They slowed, finally, and looked rather bewildered and foolish outside the Sunbeam, staring at her with great round eyes, their disconcerting mobile ears turning this way and that. Finally one who seemed to have authority advanced gingerly toward the front of the ship, and looked in at the control window. His broad reptilian face split in a grin as he did so. Inside he saw Carlisle busy with his atmosphere tests, Spencer looking out at him, and Aarn working at a control board. Suddenly there was a rushing whoosh in the air, and the officer jumped ten feet away as something egg-shaped and silvery shot through the air toward the ship. It seemed to vanish into the blank wall, so swiftly did the Jovian-trained Aarn bring it in through its port.

	"We can breathe it," announced Carlisle at last, "but it certainly beats me as to composition. I can't believe it, but my titanium won't burn, which shows no nitrogen is present in any great quantity, there's oxygen—about 18%—but the Tefflan catalyst for burning of nitrogen and oxygen doesn't react either.

	Spectroscopic work I left to you, Aarn."

	In an amazingly short time he announced: "Oxygen—helium —nitrogen—argon—carbon dioxide—neon, xenon and of course water. Well equipped with rare gases!"

	"No wonder my titanium wouldn't react. That gang wouldn't react on incandescent ceasium once you got the oxygen and water and CO2 out. I'll bet that nitrogen is a trace." 

	"Healthy trace," said Aarn softly, checking further. "About five per cent. That catalyst wouldn't work of course, nor titanium. But we will. No element other than those I mentioned. Let's go see our green-faced friend. He looked anxious."

	"He's plural," announced Carlisle. "The regiment's come up. Watching with interest."

	"We'll go into the air-lock," Aarn said, "and fasten the inner air-lock door, and then step out, just to make sure no one presses the wrong stud. That might be bad."

	"I'm going along," announced Canning, sticking his head in as Aarn and his friends started toward the lock.

	"And I don't wish to be left alone, sir," objected Martin, "those crocodiles are most unpleasant looking specimens. I feel we'll be safer together."

	"Very well," Aarn nodded, "you can go with us."

	They walked to the lock, entered the chamber, and rapidly let in external air to make their pressure equal to that outside— and all five Solarians slumped quietly downward, just as Carlisle made a quick, half completed gesture toward the valve control.

	Sharblox, Officer of the Day at Karatawn space port waited a good five minutes before making any further move. "I think," he said at length, "it will be safe to investigate. They evidently entered their lock, and are showing no signs of activity. Probably their air pressure is lower than ours and they drew the shalssa in to themselves. That is well. There must be some external means of entrance."

-

Chapter Two

	Carlisle was last to awake.

	He had been struggling violently when he went under and the effects lasted longer. Aarn was looking down into his eyes.

	"It—it—Randite—sleep—" Carlsile gasped.

	"Quite right. Little late with the warning," Aarn replied easily. "We made a mistake. Quite natural—but very annoying. We've been waiting for you."

	Carlisle sat up. He was in a rather pleasant room, barely furnished with six metal bunks covered with a grey rubbery substance. He lay on one of them. Directly before his eyes was a long narrow window cut into a thick wall of grey-white stone. There were silvery bars set across the window, however, and only beyond them shone the strange violet sky. Brilliant greenish sunlight made a long narrow line across one side of the room and the floor. This side of the room was also of stone, grey-white stone neatly fitted and joined. Carlisle turned, and noticed that the opposite side of the room was formed largely of handsomely polished silvery metal bars, fitted at pleasing intervals with horizontal bars. On the opposite side of the bars were two of the very human race they had seen before. These were far more intelligent looking members of the race. Now they looked rather downcast.

	"The word is not prison—rather quarters—barracks. Our slight mistake was in taking the relationship of the reptilians and the humans as friendship. Its quite otherwise. Seems that the Seeset — our reptilian friends — regard the Tornans — humans—as useful slaves. I haven't got the whole story. These Tornans have a quite original idea of logical word-order. Their thoughts are a wonderful hodge-podge. They put all the verbs at the beginning, add all the nouns, then finish up with a sprinkling of adjectives. They keep 'em straight by a wonderous system of declensions and so forth. Don't care for it myself."

	"The ship—I smelled the damn stuff—couldn't hold up." Carlisle was sitting up, still looking quite sick.

	"So did I—but I thought it was the atmosphere of the blasted planet."

	"I did at first—then recognized it. The only gas capable of causing harmless sleep even in great dilution. They must use it to quell civil disorder."

	"Slaves—only slaves. They aren't affected by it themselves."

	"We're—slaves?"

	Aarn grinned broadly. "So they think." He winked at Carlisle, and so swiftly his motions were scarcely perceptible, he placed his two enormously powerful hands on two adjacent bars of the cell, great writhing snakes of muscle suddenly bulged under his shirt, and the two bars bent several inches. Carefully Aarn bent them back. "To be used only at night. We're moving out. Mart Toral, our friend here, has been explaining. He says we can't make it, but I think we can."

	Carlisle turned toward the two Tornans staring in at him through the bars. "Why can't we escape if my friend can break out of this cell," he asked, telepathically.

	The general idea, as Carlisle received it, was that there was only one exit, heavily guarded by Seeset with both gas and sharls, some type of deadly, flame-throwing hand gun, an impassable barrier.

	"We could," said Carlisle softly, after feeling through his pockets, "pass the men—if we could pass the gas." He drew six tiny black capsules from his inner pockets and his watch pocket. "They didn't know our tailoring fashions very well," he grinned.

	"Dark bombs!" Aarn suddenly racing through his own pockets. "Two," he sighed at last, producing a pair of tiny capsules from his watch pocket.

	"What are they?" asked Mart Toral.

	"Dark bombs—two of these and it will be utter night for twenty feet around in the open air, fifty feet of that corridor. They throw out a substance that floats in the air and absorbs all the light. I've been carrying these since Carlisle invented them!" He looked at them joyfully.

	"I haven't any," admitted Spencer ruefully. Canning and Martin had none either.

	"Well—eight ought to be enough. If we can pass the gas," said Carlisle. "Exactly what is it?"

	Mart Toral explained. There was only one exit, and it was kept full of the heavy sleep-producing gas, because it had a stretch two hundred feet long that was so low the gas hung there. The Seeset weren't affected, and the Tornans simply went to sleep when carried through, and couldn't possibly walk through.

	"Stop breathing and we can run," suggested Aarn.

	"Oh no—specially designed to prevent it." Mart Toral said sadly. "There is a door half way through. It takes—two minutes to open, from the inside."

	Aarn looked at Carlisle helplessly. "You can't make it, Aarn, even you. We certainly can't."

	"We can't jump out of the window. It's two hundred feet."

	"With this gravity and a half I couldn't stand more than a ten foot drop," Spencer pointed out.

	"What are we going to do? They give these Tornans some sort of a drug that makes them stupid and obedient before they allow them loose as slaves. And we've got to get back to the ship."

	There was a dry slithering shuffle of feet down the corridor, and the ten-foot bulk of a Seeset appeared, accompanied by two Tornan slaves, dull, empty-faced creatures. Each bore a tray of some sort of food. On one there were six dishes, on the other two. In utter silence the trays were slipped through a little grated slot, the slot closed, and the men retreated with the Seeset.

	"Supper," grimaced Aarn. "It wouldn't feed a healthy bird."

	"It would feed a healthy human. You're oversize. I'm hungry," said Spencer unkindly. He started for his portion, but Carlisle stopped him. "A bit of chemistry first. I want to ask Mart Toral some questions. Huh—they must use salt as a staple food." There was a three-inch deep basin of salt on the tray. Mart Toral and his companion were already busy with their food, putting in a half teaspoonful of the salt.

	"Their body chemistry is not like ours," Carlisle decided emphatically. "We'll have to go hungry. I'm afraid of it. Mart Toral—what is this white stuff."

	"Salt," said Mart Toral in evident surprise.

	"Do you know of what elements it is composed?"

	"Oh—certainly. Kartalakordarfortalporn." He hesitated in puzzlement. "I do not know how you talk by the mind in this manner. I can scarcely comprehend, but I know that means nothing to you. How can I tell you?" he asked.

	"There are ninety-three known basic elements. You know that?"

	"Ah—we know only ninety-one. Yes, but—ah, the table! This is made of elements—" he counted mentally to himself— "—six—eight—and eleven."

	Carlisle did some rapid mental gymnastics. "Ah—" he tasted the salt gingerly. "Simple sodium carbonate. Must be the full carbonate or he would have added element one." He looked doubtfully. And then slowly a broad, broad grin began to form on his face as he looked at the walls of his prison. "Aarn—one of those silver bars out of that window—where it'll be missed least!" Silently Aarn crouched, leaped, and sprang up some fifteen feet to the window, grasped a bar in his great fingers, and in ten seconds was back to the floor with the metal rod. "Fine," said Carlisle, and attacked the greywhite wall under his bunk. Chips of the stone broke under the prodding point of the rod. Carefully he examined them. He tasted them, worked on them with a bit of metal in his clothes, and grinned more broadly.

	"Mart Toral—we are cold. Very, very cold. We come from a much warmer planet, and the cold is weakening us. Tell the Seeset in whatever way you can that we need a fire. What will they bring us?"

	"Nothing," replied Mart Toral promptly.

	"Ah, but make it strong—we aren't Tornans. We came from a far distant world. We are important specimens, and we are cold. We must have fire. Then what, if anything, will they bring."

	"If anything, a charcoal fire."

	"Ah, excellent. Get started, and if they bring us water too, we'll be out of here, for all their trick time-door!"

	"I'm not cold. I'm broiling," commented Aarn.

	"You'll be lots worse off before this night's over. I see the sun is setting soon. How long will the dark last?"

	"Twenty-one hours," Aarn replied.

	"For the next twenty-one hours you're going to sit close to a hot charcoal fire and help blow it hotter," Carlisle grinned.

	"I suppose I'm included?" Spencer asked wearily.

	"We couldn't leave you out. We need you all. I see Mart Toral has started his act. Come on and huddle." Obediently but doubtfully, the Solarians clustered closer, as though seeking warmth. It took nearly half an hour for Mart Toral to attract a Seeset. The ten foot reptilian came slowly when he came, and looked at Mart Toral angrily. Suddenly he burst into a chorus of involved, rather musical sibilants and gutterals. Mart Toral answered in a similar manner. He gestured, hissed, waved his hands, pleaded. The Seeset looked at the huddled strangers, and hissed sharply, negatively. Mart Toral spoke again, longer.

	There was a gutteral answer, at length, and the Seeset went away. Mart Toral wiped his forehead, and pushed a mop of silky golden-brown hair from his eyes. "He would not believe. But he will bring water and fire. I told him very pure water without salt. The salt would poison you. That was right?"

	"Quite. Any idea how much he'll bring?"

	"The weight of a man, probably," Mart Toral answered.

	An hour later the metal food-bowls had been emptied, and the salt was gone. Also all the salt Mart Toral had received. A slave Tornan came for the bowls. Each of the Terrestrials had a little fire going in his, and was huddled over it. Mart Toral sent the slave away. No Seeset appeared—but half an hour later the slave came back with a supply of charcoal for the metal brazier they had been given. The water tank stood in one corner.

	Dark came. The Terrestrians were visible huddled about the red-glowing fire. The rest of the cell was dark. Mart Toral, whose super-sensitive ears made him valuable, was crouched close to his cell-wall listening for feet of Seeset. Aarn was not by the fire. He was working with a silver bar in his powerful hands. A quarter of a block of the rather soft stone was gone. He knew what Carlisle wanted now. The four others were taking turns blowing hard on that little fire, their breath coming heavy, yet the fire did not burn too hotly. For there were a number of small bits of the stone in there—calcium carbonate! Limestone—being burned to calcium oxide.

	Carlisle was through with the first part of his work. There were three bowls full of concentrated sodium carbonate solution.

	Two hours passed. With a pair of metal tongs, Carlisle carefully extracted the red-hot calcium oxide, and laid it aside. It cooled rapidly, while a new batch was burning. Presently he dropped the cooled stuff into one of his bowls. It steamed and vapor rose with a violent hissing. The lump crumbled rapidly and in a moment was submerged. Carlisle added another. The liquid boiled visibly now. In moments the reaction stopped, and under the dim red light of the fire, Carlisle examined it. The men whispered softly. They returned to their work, blowing the fire steadily. Hours passed, and time after time the bowls hissed and bubbled. Aarn took off his shirt presently, as he stopped scraping at the hole he had made under Carlisle's bunk. The great block of stone was half gone, his silver bar broken and worn down. Even his great arms were tired, and he rested quietly while Carlisle finished his work. The fire burned lower now, the men still huddled about it. There was a soft ripping of cloth, Carlisle's figure barely visible in the dim light. He was working over his bowls again, with lumps of the white calcium oxide.

	Spencer was busy grinding lumps of charcoal to an impalpable powder. "Explanation of the forests we saw," Aarn whispered softly. "No coal here. They have to raise forests for charcoal."

	"Uh-huh. Shut up. I'm busy. Give me some of that charcoal." Carlisle's whisper was tense with effort.

	"It will be light in two hours," Mart Toral said at last.

	"I'll have these ready in ten minutes," promised Carlisle.

	"What are they, Earth men?" asked Mart Toral curiously.

	Spencer answered. "Gas masks. Carlisle knows all about this gas. The masks he has made will stop it and many others. Sodium carbonate—that salt—reacts with calcium hydroxide, which we made by roasting calcium carbonate of the walls to calcium oxide, and treating it with water, to produce sodium hydroxide. This he concentrated to a strong solution, and finally boiled out to a solid powder. He mixed it with calcium oxide, and charcoal. Fine charcoal will absorb gases as dry ground soaks up water. Sodium hydroxide and calcium oxide react with the gas to stop them. When you wear these masks, breath in through them— they will be over your mouth—but breath out through your nose. Do you understand."

	"Ah—a wonderful chemist! From a prison cell he contrives protection— Aye, I understand. What is your plan?"

	"We haven't any yet," replied Aarn, "except to tear down these bars, and yours, and use the bars for weapons, the masks for protection, and hide in the darkness of the dark bombs. We can get out of here. We'll hide somehow in this city, and finally find our ship. Then — we'll teach these reptiles respect for strangers."

	"Ayhu—I doubt it. They have mighty ships that will drown yours in a hell of fire in half a second." Mart Toral shook his head.

	Aarn smiled. "We'll see when we get the ship. Have you any idea where it is?"

	"Yesssss—maybe. You know why I was imprisoned?"

	"We've been too busy to wonder," Aarn smiled.

	"I was chief of the spies of my people on this world. They found this out. I, and Thor Mant here are all who survive. I had been here for nearly fifty days, and learned much. I think I know where they would take your ship. They have a great shipyard on the outskirts of the city."

	"Was that the tremendous roofed area?"

	"Aye. Nearly two miles long, and one wide. A great shipyard. Roofed, that our telescopes might not peer within. Your ship will be there. How to get in, I don't know."

	"You know how to get there?"

	"Easily."

	"Then we shall go there," announced Aarn.

	"I'm ready," sighed Carlisle, straightening his back. He passed out seven strips of cloth, with a broad thickening in the middle of each. "Tie 'em back of your head. Better do it now." The others started to do so.

	Silently Aarn walked to the barred door of their cell, braced his enormous strength, and pulled. Slowly the heavier bars of the door yielded, and at last two were out. "That's enough," he decided. "They're tough." He picked up one—a four foot length as thick as a man's wrist, and hefted it. "Nice club." In seconds he was at work on Mart Toral's cage, and easily pulled out six of these lighter bars. Wonderingly the Tornans watched his tremendous muscles working.

	"Take one each—they'll make grand weapons."

	Swiftly he adjusted his mask, and Mart Toral took the lead. He lead them down the corridor, around a turn, dimly lighted by farspaced bulbs, then down a winding spiral from which other corridors branched off onto levels. There were numerous other inmates—but they had no time to wait for them. Down—down— down.

	"The Gas Corridor," whispered Mart Toral, pointing to the end of the spiral. His voice was muffled by his mask as he adjusted it carefully. "There will be guards at the far end. None this side of the door." But this level was better lit, and they saw open doors. Tornan slaves slept here, attendants of the prison. "Beyond the door are the quarters of the Seeset guards," Mart Toral explained. Swiftly they went down into the gas laden atmosphere. They experienced no difficulty! No slightest drowsiness touched them. In seconds Aarn had reached the door, and turned the great handle. "Have they no alarm on this?" he asked Mart Toral.

	"None," replied the Tornan. "What use? There is no escape from this prison. None from the city. Still less from the planet."

	An eternity passed before a faint click in the heavy metal door told them it was loosed. Aarn pushed it. It swung open— on a corridor ablaze with light, and lined with armed guards sitting on curious one-legged stools. Simultaneously Aarn and Carlisle pitched their darkness bombs. With faint crackling explosions, the light was abruptly sucked out of the corridor.

	"Carlisle—Spence—right side," Aarn snapped. He took the left. His terrible mace, a metal bar weighing nearly seventy pounds, whirled in his grip like a switch. Twice it touched flesh that crumpled screaming under its terrific blow. Beside him he heard similar crashing blows of metal on stone, and on hissing flesh. Then a cry—human.

	"Aarn!" It was Carlisle's voice. Instantly Aarn leaped toward it in the dark. There was a scuffling, a slithering of hard scales. Aarn reached out, felt some scaley member under his grasp, and closed his terrific grip on it instantly. There was a hissing scream of pain, then suddenly the full fury of the Seeset was turned on him. But something cracked in his grip, a broken bone. Aarn dropped his bar, and his other arm came into play. He'd located his antagonist, and with all the power of his arm— heavy as an average man's body, and solid with muscle, he lashed out at the Seeset. The thing hissed—and collapsed as Aarn's arm broke through something and came away wet and sticky. Aarn had the bar again in a fraction of a second, and started forward. "All right, Carlisle?" The answer came, "Yes—he almost had my mask." Metal bars were clashing again on stone and flesh.

	Somewhere an ululating cry, mechanical, sounded shrilly.

	And almost simultaneously Aarn realized they were outside the building. His bar met no more metal walls.

	"Mart Toral!" he called. Suddenly he felt the Tornan near him.

	"Ashur-hyal—" The Tornan grasped his hand and pulled. Swiftly Aarn caught hold of Carlisle, and together they sped on. In seconds the dark thinned around them, and they were aware that they were in a dim-lit park. "We must find clothes," Mart Toral said quickly. His eyes were roaming swiftly. "Ahh—" he was off at a run, with Aarn close beside him. Spencer and Carlisle and the others waited behind the sheltering bushes. A nearby path bore a group of five hurrying, laden slaves, dressed in the simple trunks of their status.

	In thirty seconds Aarn was back—half stripped already, with the five pairs of trunks on his arm. "Into 'em," he snapped, passing them out. He was in his quickly. Sounds were growing back there at the entrance of the prison. Spencer and Carlisle were shedding their clothes with hesitancy. They felt foolish in the abbreviated trunks. Mart Toral and his friend were already so dressed. In less than a minute they started on, following the Tornan. "Your color—but we cannot help it," was all he said. The commotion at the prison was quieting to a steady, directed search. Someone entered the edge of the park—a group of two Seeset, heavily armed, their guns in hand as they prepared to start. Aarn waited behind while the others sped off through the shadows.

	He joined them seconds later, two of the deadly sharls in his hands, a smile on his face. "They stumbled over me," he explained. "They didn't make a sound."

	"I noticed that," Spencer grinned. "How do you work these?"

	"There is a stud in the handle—here," Mart Toral explained. "When pressed the energy is released. It is effective up to six times my own length. Beyond that to a distance of ten times my length it paralyses."

	"Where are we headed?"

	"By back streets to the most densely populated of the slave districts. We will wander through it—and never come out. So the Seeset will find."

	"Friends are useful," Aarn admitted smiling. "They can color us?"

	"Not for nothing have we a spy system here," Mart Toral reminded him. They were racing down narrow, cluttered streets. Packages, metal cans, great refuse bins stood along their sides, with barely room for passage of one of the six-wheeled trucks of the Seeset. Evidently an alley. Mart Toral showed wonderful familiarity with them; they traversed miles of tortuous narrow alleys, seldom crossing even a quiet side street. Only once they hastened across a broad, main boulevard, brightly lighted. Even then, it was leisurely haste. They were attracting no attention by running.

	An hour later they began to see more and more hastening slaves about—homeward bound, Mart Toral explained. Their homes were tiny cubicles, representing their only hope of rest and peace for a few short hours. Thicker and thicker the streams became, yet none seemed to pay any attention to the strangely colored Terrestrians nor to the giant Jovian, his inadequate shorts bursting over his tremendously muscled thighs. They began to reach a better lighted district and here they approached a Seeset police patrol, two giant reptiles.

	"Mart Toral," Aarn called softly. Swiftly he explained his plan. The Terrestrians and the Jovian dropped around a corner, and Mart Toral and Thor Mant went on slowly toward the Seeset patrol. They seemed to slink along, close to the wall. Cautiously they approached the reptilians, half-hidden in doorways at times. One of the wide-eyed Seeset saw them, and abruptly the two sank back out of sight. The Seeset said something to his companion, and started toward them. Hastily the Tornans started the other way. The Seeset called something sharply, but Mart Toral and Thor Mant only hastened the more; and as the Seeset broke into a swift, swinging gallop, they raced around the corner. The Seeset followed.

	Two tremendously powerful hands caught the two reptiles, one hand on each of the hard-scaled necks. Aarn's fingers closed like living vises, and jerked with a swift sideward movement. He dropped back to the ground, and the two Seeset dropped beside him, to be caught in his arms and slid noiselessly to the ground— their necks broken.

	"Ah—two more Shark," exulted Aarn softly. He passed them to Mart Toral and Thor Mant as the two best adapted to use them. They started on. No more patrols were met before Mart Toral led them through a crowded doorway, and through a mass of squirming Tornan slaves who did not seem to notice them. Stupid, dull faces—and suddenly a mask slipped abruptly, then slipped back, and one of the dead-faced Tornans shuffled toward Mart Toral, then went on ahead, to a tiny cubicle on the fifth floor. There were two bunks here, a woman lying asleep on one of them. She woke at their entrance and sat up with her dull, stupid face annoyed. Again a mask slipped, the young woman's lips moved in glad surprise, then the mask was back in place.

	Aarn started telepathic conversation. "No need to speak; we can speak by the mind. Mart Toral will speak to you, and I will know what is said; you need only think your thoughts for me."

	"Who are you?" The woman's lips moved silently, her face expressionless, but a great astonishment in her mind as she took in Aarn's tremendous shoulders and back muscles. "You are no Tornan."

	"I come from a distant, far larger world. Just now—from prison."

	"The thing necessary now is coloring," Mart Toral snapped. "We must go to the Karatawn Tarnak. Their ship is probably there."

	"Then," said the man, "these are the ones who arrived in the strange ship?"

	"Aye—certainly. Haste."

	The man moved hastily. From somewhere in his bunk he produced a tiny machine that suddenly started humming, and tiny sparks shot from its five-inch metal aerial. "It blocks the radiated sight apparatus of the Seeset. They will think it a normal breakdown. Investigation will show a blownout fuse. It will mean trouble for Karto here—but that is the service."

	Aarn was busy. Karto had produced a complete series of liquid dyes in little rubbery flasks, and Aarn was rubbing one on his skin. The others were similarly busy. "They won't—have to wait—go with us, can't they?"

	"If you can carry them?"

	"I'm thinking of taking about half this city," answered Aarn grimly. "What is this stuff?"

	"A dye we use in covering bruises and such. In case we attack Seesets, it is advisable that the attacker not be marked. Usually—" Karto shrugged, "we also dye some poor slaves that they may find an attacker. It keeps them mystified, and helps us sometimes. The slave—the mindless one—is killed, and one more Tornan is released from this hell." It was the only release, after the drug had been given.

	Five minutes later, the party had split into two groups. Toral led one, which composed Aarn, Spence, Carlisle, and Thor Mant. The others came a little behind them.

	The alarm was out now, and a close watch was being kept by the Seeset police, seeking the escaped men. But in a quarter of an hour, the great sheds of the Karatown Tarnak loomed dark against the cloudy sky. There were many bright lights here, the grounds were flooded with them. Mart Toral looked questioningly at Aarn.

	"You said you could find some entrance."

	"Oh—surely." Aarn grinned good-humoredly.

	"They have powerful guns mounted over the door that would stop you the instant you entered the light."

	"Who does the work here?"

	"Ahh—Seesets—but they have slaves for the minor jobs. They are all numbered and checked photographically."

	"Do they ever send messengers?" "Seldom."

	"How do they do it when they do?"

	"The slave—a single slave—approaches, with his message cylinder held before him. Two guards come out and take it from him. He then retires at once. There must be no spying here, you see."

	"Ah—surely. Get me something that looks like a message cylinder, and give me some of those dyes—"

	Mart Toral asked no questions. He disappeared, and reappeared in some ten minutes, as the slow dawn was breaking, with a small metal canister, painted bright green.

	"That color means the message is of first importance, and from the military forces," he explained simply. "It was the only one my men could find anywhere."

	"Excellent," said Aarn simply. He took a tube of bright red dye, and in an instant there was a long red gash down his right side. "What is the name of the military commandant of the city?"

	"Sharblox," replied Mart Toral, after a consultation with Karto, "is the commandant of this day."

	Aarn burst out of the side street where they had been crouched, the dim glow of the maroon-red dawn lighting his figure as he ran in a half stagger toward the door of the great shed, clutching his left side with one hand, waving the canister in his other. He half fell, and rose to his feet again, staggering. Two Seeset appeared at the door suddenly, their sharls in hand, watching him. One hissed something sharply. Aarn only ran on. "Shar—Shar—blox—" He almost fell as they lowered their Sharls, and caught at him half a step from the open door.

	That was their mistake. Aarn was crouched as they bent over him. His legs drove down, and his body up, like pistons in a great engine. His rising shoulders caught the unsuspecting Seeset in their midriffs, and all three hurtled through the still-opened door. With a crash the door shut behind them.

	Aarn's fingers found their throats instantly, and their necks snapped like dried twigs.

	Aarn leaped up—a sharl in each hand. Two more Seeset were advancing on him at their queer, swift gallop. The sharls in Aarn's hands burst into whispering flame, lambently glowing violet-red beams thirty feet long that dropped the Seeset, smoking noisomely. Aarn had seen the Sunbeam, Seeset engineers working at her still-closed inner-lock door. With leaps of twenty feet he raced toward her faster than Seeset guards could gather. A living tornado hurled the Seeset engineers from the ship in incredible time. Before the men within that section of the giant shipyard were aware of disturbance Aarn had slipped a key in the lock door, and flung it open. He was carried in with the rush of air, leaped up a short flight of stairs, and reached the control board. His fingers flew.

	Transpon beams within the ship suddenly roared with life. A titanic scythe of white-hot destruction cut across the Karatawn Tarnak as the giant aggie coils poured out their energy along a great transpon beam that released the stored energy of a star in a beam ten feet across. Incandescent wreckage remained where it cut its swath. It swung from a horizontal plane, and cut abruptly through the roof.

	And died, as the ship jumped instantaneously a hundred feet up, two hundred across, and a hundred down. Eight men were racing for the still open lock.

	"Shut the door after you, Martin," called Aarn cheerfully. He had been gone from them not thirty seconds, yet now Karatawn Tarnak was half molten, incandescent wreckage.

	"The battle cruisers will be here in thirty seconds. Flee!" advised Mart Toral.

	"Not yet a while," Aarn replied grimly. The Sunbeam rose. From her poured three beams of incandescent destruction; from three ports Shal torpedoes started horrifically at the very heart of Karatawn, and as Carlisle discharged these, Spencer was at work with the bombs. Great rushing spheres of crystallized blue light —ball lightning discharges designed to destroy great battlecruisers of space, lambent red dumb-bells of magnetic force that could twist four-foot steel armor to shreds. Karatawn Tarnak lay in ruin, with a few odd lumps where great battleships and cruisers had been. Nothing lived there.

	And in the heart of Karatawn great buildings were shrieking in terrible ultra-sonic vibrations, their walls crumbling to dust, the dust transmitting the shrieking destruction to adjacent buildings, and their crumbling frames sending it to the bed-rock below. The Shal torpedoes were exploding, grain by grain, in a fury of ultra-sound that killed anything which felt its vibrations, and could grind its way through the armoured walls of a giant battleship.

	Then six great cruisers swooped down in a screaming rush from somewhere beyond, and started for the Sunbeam.

	"Ah—" sighed Aarn, happily, "get back a little of our own on somebody our size, maybe—" A titanic violet-red flame, a monster sharl flame, swept hissing toward them—and around them harmlessly. "Electric-ions," Aarn mumbled. The nose of one of the cruisers exploded into incandescence as a terrific transpon beam, loaded with thousands of volts and as many tens of millions of amperes hit it. The nose of the ship went up in a thirty foot flame.

	"Oxygen in the air—" Aarn shifted to another ship, and the first burned white for ten seconds more before glowing out through red to black. In the meantime Spencer had found it with a magnetic bomb, and its frame was warped and twisted. Another of the six was bathed in a continuous electric fire as three ball lightning bombs in succession hit it.

	A third glowed luridly inside, and fell with a splintering crash to the ground as a gravity-field bomb released its millions of kilowatt hours in its heart. Those still capable of fleeing, fled.

	Something else was coming. A dark shape that loomed three-quarters of a mile long, and a quarter of a mile in diameter. Something black as space, an incredible giant of a ship. A thing half the size of the Sunbeam darted from its side, flames shrieking from its tail. It rushed at them—and exploded with a concussion that hurled the Sunbeam three miles from the city, unharmed.

	"That," said Aarn, "is a bomb to be noted with care. They are to be avoided. That battleship is a first-class ship of the line!"

	The Sunbeam started for empty space—and suddenly stopped in midcourse. The meters on the board before him jumped over to twenty times their former readings, and the ship came to a momentary halt, then plowed on, everything in it glowing with a faint blue light, the very air glowing, a strange whistling rustle that murmured and mumbled like some half-heard hag in their ears. The reflected light from straining, glowing transpon beams came to the pilot room—but there was no sound, and Aarn's sudden shout was soundless as space.

	The Sunbeam swung about, and her three transpon beams united on a single objective—the nose of the titanic giant rushing down on her. The nose of the ship flared incandescent, grew brighter still as Spencer added half a dozen magnetic bombs. A lurid glare within told of the flood of gravity bombs, releasing their stored energy, seeking her gravitational center. But the ship did not falter. The Sunbeam was suddenly pushed by giant hands as her magnetic atmosphere felt the thrust of the monstrous battleship, and her momentum wave drive bit into it. Aarn paled slightly, and pushed a stud before him to the extreme limit of its run. The Sunbeam was suddenly bathed in lambent blue flame that came and went soundlessly, and reached out to lap about the mighty nose of the giant ship. Vast flecks of white-hot flame appeared as the various forms of material destruction spent themselves on the protecting sheath of magnetic force. The Sunbeam trembled violently — and then she was pulling slowly away, as though forcing a path through thick, viscous tar. And behind her, a great black cap, the nose of the Seeset battleship, separated from the ship and came with her, riven by the struggling momentum waves. With an accelerating rush, the Sunbeam swooped away, her power at last greater than that of the beam that had caught her. The ship dwindled like a pricked balloon, and the entire planet of Darak was suddenly a dwindling ball in space as Aarn pushed back his control stud.

	"Sweet Swinging Satellites! My pardon to you reptiles. THAT was a BATTLESHIP! I don't care for any further close range observation. Mart Toral, what was that soundlessness? Whatever it was it drank out power faster than my transpon destructive beams. It took two thirds of our power in five and a half seconds!"

	Mart Toral was somewhat greenish in color. He was almost physically sick. "Death," he answered briefly, sighing. "I never before, none of us ever before, pulled free of that beam. Battleships—our greatest battleships, can resist it and pull out, but if the beam catches them while they are moving rapidly, the result is instant death to every man aboard them. The ship stops— and the men and small machines inside don't."

	"Uhm hmm—they would and they wouldn't. I think I know what it is." Aarn examined his instruments intently.

	"Well, what?" Spencer demanded. "The Tefflans never gave us anything like that. That soundlessness and that queer whispering was ghastly."

	"It was anti-momentum. These fellows have gotten on the track of the momentum waves, but gotten on the wrong track. It's like a very coarse net. The ship is caught in the meshes, but the men aren't. The result is obvious. Our momentum drive fought it, naturally, and prevented anything of the sort happening, but it certainly fought back, hard. The automatic adjustments kept us from losing much momentum before I had a chance to take a hand, but they had a tough job! Then when I put on full power, and we pulled free, we shot away with an acceleration of about a million gravities. We went through the atmosphere so fast, there wasn't time for us to heat up."

	"You will take us to Cornal—our planet?" asked Mart Toral.

	"Certainly. Your help was invaluable. I could do no less— and besides, I hope we can be of further mutual aid. Evidently you don't have the momentum drive on your ships, nor any weapons of power equal to the Sunbeam's, since you didn't expect her to live through the attack of those cruisers. We need information, and need it badly. Can we affect an exchange?"

	"If it is within our power, we would gladly exchange any information we might have for the secrets of this ship," replied Mart Toral eagerly.

	"I'm lost and I want to go home. But I don't know where my home star is, as I said. The problem is, how to find it? The only way is to make use of star-catalogue plates. We have plates taken from our home planet, and what we need now is a complete star catalogue showing the external galaxies taken from your planet."

	A puzzled mass of thought churned in Mart Toral's mind. "What does that last mean? I cannot understand it."

	"Ohh—," Aarn looked at Spencer in dire distress. "He doesn't know what an external galaxy is. That means they haven't got telescopes big enough to handle the load!

	"An external galaxy," he went on, turning again to Mart Toral, "is a compact group of stars similar to the great group of which this sun is a member. Do you know anything about that—would your astronomers?"

	Mart Toral suddenly looked at Aarn with dawning understanding.

	"Ghthp kessiigg!" he exclaimed, giving vent to some perfectly un-translitterable grunts and hisses. "The Seeset know about them, and have excellent pictures of them. We know so much from the spy-slaves in the colleges. The Seeset have an enormous advantage over us. Our cities are underground. We can have no surface works, and we have no satellite, while Darak has two. On the larger of these satellites, they have established a wonderfully fine observatory. We have, of course, small observatory ships, but the astronomers say that they are practically useless for important astronomical work of certain types."

	"They would be," agreed Aarn.

	"We have done no long-range work. Besides, naturally, our interest has been too completely held by the reactions of Torka.

	When your own sun may blow up any time, you lose interest in distant stars you can't reach."

	"Hmm—that's a thought. Then you do know all about the instability of your sun?"

	"Know about it! That's the cause of this war," exploded the Tornan. "We were friends, the Seeset and Tornan nations, until the Seeset suddenly discovered about one hundred years ago that the fluctuations of Torka were leading to ruin. Then they discovered that their planet was going to be almost wiped out, for Darak will become red hot. Cornal will be terrifically hot, unendurable on the surface, but it will be possible to maintain life in insulated, cooled cities under the surface. These will be possible only in certain localities, because of geological factors. The seas will boil off, and when they do, the lightening of the load over their beds, and the increase in pressure over the land now dry will cause terrific quakes. Only certain localities will be safe even for cities underground. There won't be room for both races. The Seeset realize this, so they have decided, quite naturally, that ours is the one to perish. Their original plan was that a sudden and violent attack would wipe out most of our race, completely de-civilize us, and make us prey for them. We were to be slaves—thanks to their drug which would make us mindless beasts of burden—and dig their cities.

	"They, you see, were the ones who had developed space travel, and had kept the secret of the atomic engine. We don't know it yet. The original commercial competition between rocket ships and their atomic-drive ships was hopeless, and they had all the space ships. So they came over in their twenty-two great passenger and freight liners, and started the war. They destroyed twenty-two major cities and a hundred million Tornans before we could begin to resist. We knew where their ships would go next—and prepared. You see, their weapons were then just bombs—explosive and fire bombs. They did use gas to a small extent, but mainly they dropped tons of sodium bombs, which set fire to our cities, and burned unextinguishably. They burned to sodium peroxide which was as bad as the original sodium, and started more fires itself. The fires were their weapon, really, for even twenty-two giant passenger and freight liners can't carry enough destruction to wipe out a world of cities. The fires spread, though, and killed and destroyed.

	"When they went on to the next group of cities, things were different. In those days there was no Tornan Confederation. There were hundreds of big and little political divisions of no significance whatever. But each thought its own entity of the utmost importance, and considered itself very different from each of the others—till the Seeset began dropping fire bombs and destruction. Then they suddenly discovered they were all Tornans—particularly the small nations. The result was an overnight unionization. Since each nation, big and little, had had its own army and navy and weapons, the big nations now sent all their weapons to the places they believed would next be attacked, and waited.

	"The Seeset ships came. They were attacking the centers of population and civilization in rapid succession, and in order of importance. We had defended thirty-one cities. The Seeset ships dropped down to release their bombs, and they were allowed to release them in some cities, since all the ships had to be destroyed at the same moment. Then, when all ships were within range, the guns were fired. They had been very carefully laid, and they shot tremendously powerful projectiles thick as my body. The Seeset ships were passenger ships, and carried no thick armour, consequently every one of them was blasted with highly explosive shells, gas shells, phosphorus shells, and every other type of destructive shell we could invent and launch. The twenty-two ships fell within fifteen seconds, and Tornan troops had entered and destroyed the Seeset inside in almost no time.

	"That was the first notice we got of the slave situation. They had Tornan slaves on board, and every one of them was a witless dumb animal.

	"Since then—" Mart Toral shrugged expressively, "War!"

	"You have been forced underground, and the Seeset have not?"

	"It is not solely a question of forcing. We intended to go underground; but the Seeset know their world must be destroyed, so they aren't interested in underground cities on their planet. Ours were to have a later use. Then too, for a long, long time it was all we could do to keep our position on our planet at all. It was years before we had an effective space-navy. The accumulator, our only effective means of getting power in space, is a more or less recent invention. The Seeset had been using atomic engines to power their weapons, and when we first used accumulator powered ships we slaughtered them in large numbers, because for the short period of the battle, our accumulators allowed us far more power than their engines yielded. But they soon stole the accumulator idea, of course, and proceeded to combine it with their driving engines." Mart Toral paused thoughtfully. "If you wait with us for a few days you will see a space battle, probably."

	"What? Do you hold battles by mutual agreement and treaty?" asked Aarn.

	"No," Mart Toral smiled. "Not quite. It is just that the Seeset, having been badly stung by this ship, will certainly make every effort to destroy it, and if not it, the Tornan navy, before it can do them any damage by passing on the secrets of those weapons to larger and even more powerful ships. They know that you escaped with a group of Tornans, and headed for Cornal. The Seeset won't like that. They will certainly attack."

	"That," decided Aarn after a moment's thought, "is certainly an idea to be considered. I suggest we go to your home planet as quickly as possible, and tell the folks about it. I have some useful things they might want to install before then."

	"Yes, no doubt," Spencer agreed, "but they can't. It takes time, and as the Seeset are attacking to prevent that very thing, the time won't be had."

	"There's no use lingering. That's Cornal, isn't it?" asked Aarn, pointing toward the fourth planet of the system, toward which he had directed the Sunbeam.

	"Yes. How long will it take to reach it?" asked Mart Toral.

	Aarn turned to look at him, and a slow grin spread over his face. "Now you don't see it—" he flipped a switch, space darkening strangely for a moment— "and now you do." He flipped the switch back. Cornal loomed gigantic directly before them. Under her maximum acceleration, the Sunbeam had covered the distance in minutes. Less than 100,000 miles away, it was a world of land with great land-locked seas in contrast to Earth's water-locked land. Mart Toral stared.

	"By Harum, we came here at speed! But—"

	Without warning the Sunbeam rocked slightly as a series of brilliant daubs of fire washed over her. Simultaneously a strange shrill whistling sounded through the ship, and Aarn instantly threw the ship back several hundred miles. "Crumbler ray—say, Mart Toral is that one of your ships?"

	"Yes, the patrol I started to tell you about. He naturally attacked when you appeared. Did he do any damage?"

	"No, it was set for steel crystals, and this ship isn't made out of steel. But you can generate that ray?"

	"Yes, our scientists invented it. But the Seeset stole it," Mart Toral sadly replied.

	"Hmm—what did you steal in return?" Aarn grinned.

	"Their drive discs." Mart Toral laughed. "It's about even, I guess. But my friends out there are trying to get at you again. What will you do? Have you a monochromatic light projector?"

	"No. Never needed one. That your signal device?"

	"Yes, a special combination of colors. What shall we do?"

	Aarn thought for some seconds. "I think I could open him up and turn him inside out, but that's not the way to make friends. But—" Aarn set to work with the transpon beam controls just the same. For some seconds he maneuvered skillfully, and watched his instruments. Then with a grin he made several major adjustments. "Here's the answer," he chuckled, "I'm going to pull his power!"

	Transpons roared suddenly, violently in the Sunbeam; invisible beams reached across space, tapping the power stored in the patrol cruiser's great accumulator banks. For twenty seconds the beams roared, then slowly died to a whisper, then silence. The cruiser hung some fifty miles away, motionless now, and only a dim, reddish glow spotted the few ports. The guns were working hard, but the Sunbeam maneuvered toward her calmly. A rattle and crackle came from the loudspeaker as Aarn connected the radio. Rapidly he turned over the wavelengths, till intelligible voice came from it, and Mart Toral brightened and grinned.

	"They're calling all battleships, with warnings to look out that we don't drain their power too. He's awfully angry. He's saying things that don't belong in official communications. He's running on his chemical batteries—the only power he had on board. You seem to have cleaned him out."

	"Talk into his microphone," smiled Aarn. "He probably has his receiver on the same wavelength."

	Mart Toral began speaking. "Cruiser Harun Tarl, Cruiser Harun Tarl. Speaking from aboard the ship Soon-baym. Mart Toral, C-584, speaking. We had to drain your power to prevent your damaging us. Mart Toral, and friends. Refer to your code. R-G-H, T-P-B, Q-D-K. Was effected by these men from a planet of a different system. This situation not covered by code. B-K-L is nearest." Mart Toral turned in a hasty aside to the Solarians. "He doesn't believe us, I'm afraid."

	"I was afraid he might be reluctant to believe it," nodded Aarn. "The battleship commander will investigate first and fight afterward though, won't he?" Aarn asked. "My storage coils are about half full now, and I'm not sure I could hold all the power a battleship would carry."

-

Chapter Three

	The patrol arrangements of the Tornans were efficient. The battleship arrived within a quarter of an hour, carrying on a long-distance conversation with Mart Toral all the way that finally convinced her commander that the Sunbeam was a friendly ship. The cruiser commander was still unconvinced. He was also very angry. His ship was, naturally enough, his pet, and when a strange, and much smaller ship came up, and proceeded to drink out every bit of her stored power in some unknown way, he was not inclined to make friends with that stranger. At length, however, he was pacified, and when Aarn sent a pair of transpon beams loaded with power onto two contact-cables thrown out of the cruiser, and re-charged the cruiser's accumulators, he felt better. Considerable damage had been done, however, to some of the more delicate high-voltage apparatus aboard the ship, and his men were kept busy repairing this as the Sunbeam went off in the wake of the great battleship.

	"How did you do that, Aarn?" asked Carlisle, "and why haven't you done it before?"

	"It's simple enough. I used the transpon beams as they were meant to be used—to pick up power. They drained all the electrical energy out of the ship, and as his accumulators are just super-condensers the result is obvious."

	"Why haven't you used it as a weapon before this?"

	"One shot, won't carry far, nor hard. As a weapon it's useless, practically, because if there had been any really high voltage—around say fifty thousand—the insulation on my transpon apparatus would have broken down. I sent over a very, very light test beam first, and found there wasn't anything hotter than ten thousand on the ship and since I could handle that, I just sent along a heavy beam."

	"That being settled," suggested Spencer, "let's settle the future course of events."

	"That's easy," Aarn replied. "These Tornans are interesting —the Seeset have plates that are just what we need—and I'm sick of looking all over space for planets. We've found some, so let's thank the kind Lord, and go get what we want. These fellows can help us, and we can help them. Mutually satisfactory."

	"Also," said Spencer with exaggerated innocence, "they have the secret of the crumbling ray, which the Tefflans used against us, and you never learned how to make."

	"Quite right, my dear Spence, quite right," Aarn grinned. "You couldn't ask me to forego a bet like that. And besides, these fellows must have some more things of interest. Science is to be studied anywhere."

	"If we land, we fight with them," Spencer pointed out.

	"If you don't want to land, we can make you a boat and you can go search space for planets yourself," Aarn laughed. "You know darned well you want to."

	"That being settled, the question arises: Do we give them the speed drive?" asked Spencer.

	"I've been thinking about that," admitted Aarn more seriously, "and while that is a real help in many ways in war, I'm afraid they'll have to forego it. One secret we'll keep. This planet is hard-pressed, they need worlds that aren't near a sun about to blow up. I couldn't blame them in the least for wanting to follow us home and using some of our spare planets. So we'll just omit to explain the speed-drive."

	"They will see the apparatus, though."

	"Certainly. They have science, and good science—but it just doesn't happen to be along that line. They haven't had any experience with that fifth dimensional inter-space, so the best of them couldn't learn anything even if they took the speed-drive apart and put it together."

	"You'll give them everything else?"

	"Certainly—they're apparently a mighty fine, human race. But they just naturally have to have a cooler home, and I don't believe in putting temptation in their way."

	The battleship had entered the atmosphere of Cornal, and the Sunbeam followed. Mart Toral and his companions had transferred temporarily to the battleship, but now, as the two ships sank to a low level, he signaled he wanted to transfer back and swiftly Carlisle made a series of simple tests on the atmosphere, found it to be entirely satisfactory, and let them in the lock.

	"If you will," said Mart Toral, "we would like you to accompany us to our main naval base at Sarna Tarn. The United Council is based there, and the High Command. They naturally wish to speak with you, and learn what treaties we can arrange."

	"Good enough. We'll be right along," agreed Aarn. For telepathy had a number of advantages over speech. One was that the sender sent not merely his words, but his ideas. If he wanted to say "arrange a treaty" and thought, in his mind, "arrange a capture" the latter came through also. Mart Toral and the Tornans were friendly.

	The entrance to Sarna Tarn was a great pit blasted in the solid, ancient rock. This was one of the sites picked as geologically sound, safe even through the quakes that would beset Cornal as the seas evaporated and the land readjusted itself. The pit angled down to a depth of nearly half a mile. Wooded plains above, hard, age-old rock beneath, and the city buried deep within it. To one side there was a vast clearing, and paving it, dark metallic things that glistened in the bright moonlight.

	"Your power source?" asked Aarn as the Sunbeam followed her giant guide into the third-of-a-mile-wide hollow.

	"Photocells that generate power from sunlight. That field is unusually large—the greatest on Cornal. It has the duty of filling the accumulators of the ships based here as well as the heavy job of running the great machines."

	"I will show you a better power source—the sun itself. It will take but a few weeks to set it up, and the power question, which I suspect is a large one, will be settled."

	They had entered Sarna Tarn. The city was divided into six main caverns, each a great manufacturing base. In one, battleships were housed and worked on, in another cruisers, in a third destroyers, and in a fourth, smaller ships. The other two were devoted to manufacturing standard equipment, such as accumulators, and instruments, and to the reduction and production of steel. The Sunbeam lay in a destroyer's berth.

	Mart Toral, accompanied by Aarn and Spencer, went to the United Council's meeting room. A moving walk carried them from the destroyer cavern through a long, brightly-lighted tunnel to a seventh separate cavern. This was the residential, the executive section. There were no ships here, only the moving walks, and elevators. Trees and shrubs grew in soil brought from above. The buildings were carved from the living rock, some apartments built in the wall of the city, some separate houses entirely free in their own grounds. Here and there tremendous pillars of solid rock reached up to the low rock ceiling less than two hundred feet above, pillars so huge that they practically divided the section into many smaller compartments. The Building of Controls was in the heart of this section.

	"There will be a large number of people present," explained Mart Toral, "mostly commanders and higher officers of the fighting ships. Jan Reys, the Commander in Action of the battle fleet, commander of the Flagship of our line, will be present."

	"Hmm—all the dignitaries. You represent the head of the Enemy Information system, do you not?"

	"Nnnnno — not quite. My forces — and all government groups—are subject to the High Command, which is made up of one high military official, one scientist and one production executive. The military forces were found to be badly out of balance, demanding impossible things of the production facilities, and not fully awake to the need of science. Hence this board of control."

	"I wonder," asked Aarn keenly, "if there wasn't something very special that called you to Darak. You are evidently an organizer rather than a mere expert gatherer of information."

	Mart Toral smiled grimly. "Quite right. My force had learned that a new development of the Seeset science existed. They couldn't find out what it was, so I tried. You found me in prison," he concluded with a shrug. "I failed."

	A stream of uniformed officers was hurrying through the building toward the great auditorium as Aarn and his guide made their way along. There was an air of tense hurry about them; they were coming in answer to a sudden emergency call, and emergency calls usually meant trouble in large doses to these men. Mart Toral led the Solarians through a smaller side door, and they found themselves on the platform of the hall. A group of fifteen Tornans was already seated at a large table, and now Mart Toral led them to it. A hush fell over the audience, and Mart Toral spoke.

	"Lords: These are those men of whom I have spoken. They are men of another system, another sun. They landed by chance on Darak, were immediately captured, and taken to the Karatawn prison, where I had been jailed waiting investigation."

	Rapidly he gave a clear, concise account of all that had happened during their escape. He followed this with a more or less technical description of the weapons Aarn had used, in so far as their effects were concerned. Then finally Jan Reys rose.

	"Your report," he began, "has been brief, but full, Mart Toral. One of my men, Tarno Par, commander of the battle-cruiser Harn Tarl, has a report to make."

	A television screen lighted, and the commander of the cruiser patrol which had met the Sunbeam appeared on it. Rapidly he told what had happened to him.

	The Commander in Action rose again. "I think the High Command will agree with me that, after such severe treatment by this ship, the Seeset will want to attack immediately to prevent our ships being equipped with her all too deadly weapons." The men about the table nodded. "It is certain," they muttered.

	"Mart Toral, what news did you gather of the new discovery of the Seeset?"

	"We know little more than before. For the benefit of the assembled Ship-Commanders, I will say that the Seeset definitely are known to have developed a new weapon, or weapon possibility. It is a mirror of pure force that will reflect any of the ordinary electro-magnetic radiation between the infra-heat and the ultra-violet. That was hard to learn. It was impossible to learn how this was to be done."

	Aarn gave a little whistle of surprise, and Mart Toral turned to him. "You know something of this?"

	"Only one thing, Mart Toral, and it is not helpful. I have always said that a beam destructive by application of sheer energy was impossible because it would be more destructive at the sending than at the receiving end. I withdraw that. With this I could make a destructive energy-beam."

	"How?" Mart Toral and the High Commander of Science asked simultaneously.

	"By putting in front of such a parabolic mirror of force some type of intense heat center. The obvious answer is an arc of hitherto unattained intensity. Since the beam is to have an energy concentration nothing solid can withstand, the arc must be between non-solid terminals. I would suggest two streams of ions shot in to meet at the center of the mirror. The solid ion-projectors would be out of the way, and if the ions are very heavily charged, the reaction could be intense beyond belief."

	"I would report," snapped Mart Toral, "that one of our men in the Tarkass University of Darak has reported the production of quintuply ionized nitrogen. I considered it of only the most minor importance."

	"I think that is how it would be done. The nitrogen ions, carrying a tremendous charge, would be shot in to meet a stream or several streams—of electrons. A flame of incredible intensity would result. It would be largely in the far ultra-violet, of course, but the energy concentration thus made available would certainly be sufficient to make an exceedingly dangerous destructive heat ray. Further, since most of the energy is in the ultra-violet, it would be practically impossible to reflect it, as would be the case with visible or infra-visible radiation."

	"Have they," asked Jan Reys, "equipped any ships with the new apparatus?"

	"They have been working frantically to do that," Mart Toral replied. "But they have equipped only two ships completely, and two more are in the shops for equipment. The apparatus was known to consume such tremendous power that great alterations were needed in the structure of the ships."

	"Would they delay to finish the equipment on those other two ships?" Jan Reys asked.

	"By no means. That will require another two weeks. They will attack with the two already equipped."

	"How long," asked Aarn, "will it take them to make the trip to within five million miles of this planet?"

	"Three days. They will require two days for mobilization as will we. This will be a long and bitter battle. A decisive battle if the Seeset can possibly make it so."

	Hours of discussion followed, the military, scientific and production questions all being considered. Gradually Spencer and Aarn began to see a clearer and better picture of Tornan affairs. Machines had been developed to the ultimate here. Where war had been continued for generation after generation, machines were the necessary item. They were far ahead of production machines of Earth. "With these machines, they might turn out some transpon apparatus, don't you believe, Aarn?" asked Spencer at length.

	"In two days? Certainly—a copy that would be more apt to backfire than to fire. The machines are all right, but the men who direct them aren't. They haven't the training. The time is too short. No, they'll have to fight as they are. We'll help, and that's all we can do."

-

Chapter Four

	Aarn Munro turned away from the controls of the Sunbeam and faced Carlisle.

	"No," he said, "they have no detector apparatus. Just plain eye-sight. That's their main reason for having their observatory ships. They have them out all the time, and no fleet can leave the planet down there without the observers spotting it."

	"A ship's a pretty small thing, at that distance," objected Carlisle. "Suppose they miss it."

	"They won't—because the telescopes are specially designed for that work. They can spot even a destroyer, let alone a half-mile long battleship. Besides, they generally know about when a battle is going to be started. Remember, a mobilization for a general battle means the movement of nearly a million men. The Tornans and the Seeset each have about seventy battleships, one hundred cruisers, and five hundred destroyers. Then whole fleets of little one-two-three and ten man scouts. Nearly five thousand of them. A battleship requires a crew of three thousand men, a cruiser some fifteen hundred, and a destroyer about five hundred men. That means that when all the ships are in use, which of course seldom happens, some always being laid up for repairs and alterations, a total of nearly six hundred and thirty thousand are in the ships, and more men are needed for ground crews, and for service ships. When the battlefleet moves, naturally there are a lot of unarmed and unarmored service vessels, accumulator ships for the scouts, and destroyers, repair and mother ships. The total of men actually in service is near seven hundred thousand when the Tornan fleet rises. The same is true of the Seeset fleet. When a mass of men as great as that must be moved, there are, naturally, complications that can't be kept secret from the spies. Hence the forewarning of the battle."

	Aarn swept his arm toward the windows and the star studded space beyond. But space was studded with something besides stars. Directly in front of them, and not very far away was a disc made up of several hundreds of scout ships, and several score destroyers. And much further was another disc of scouts and destroyers—Seeset ships.

	"Why not go forward and try discouraging those smaller ships? It would rather upset the morale of the Seeset," suggested Spencer.

	"We might at that," nodded Aarn. "I think we have more than enough stored power."

	"Why don't the cruisers do it?" asked Carlisle.

	"For the same reason elephants don't step on flies. They'd be able to kill them—if they could get their foot on them. These cruisers aren't built for lightning maneuvers. You can't whip two foot armor around the way you can a four-inch plated scout. But we, on the other hand—"

	The Sunbeam flashed forward under something like thirty thousand gravities; in one second she reached a speed of 175 miles per second, in two her speed had reached three hundred and fifty. Aarn cut speed almost instantly, but by that time he was in the midst of the destroyer screen of the Seeset fleet. The destroyer captains were probably vastly surprised. Momentarily. The Sunbeam's three transpon beam projectors were working at full capacity, which meant, when they struck a destroyer's thin plates, like so many white-hot knives. The nearest destroyers were neatly and precisely sectioned. Not being designed like the heavy battleships to resist any possible calamity, this meant that most of them were put out of action before they could act. Some men lived in them to fire their guns, harmlessly. In thirty seconds of rapid work, Aarn destroyed twenty-five destroyers. By that time the destroyers were decelerating at their very respectable maximum, and the battleships were accelerating at their very respectable maximum. Aarn hurtled the Sunbeam back to her former position with alacrity. Wisdom overweighed valor when ten or a dozen giant battleships came in range.

	In about half an hour the brief, fierce skirmish of the two minor fleets, the scouts, had taken place, and was over. The Tornans had won, thanks to Aarn's ferocious attack on the Seeset fleet, and the Tornan scouts hung in a cloud about the battle-space now, watching every move of every ship, reporting in a constant stream every possible development that might have a hidden meaning.

	The cruisers came into action, fought briefly and stubbornly, and made way. Their duty was to finish off the sectioned battleships.

	They retired as the behemoths, the super dreadnoughts lumbered majestically into action. The Sunbeam waited. She was nearly 100,000 miles from the scene of the battle now, observing with the utmost care—and undisturbed. The fleets were evenly matched; some fifty giant ships formed each disc, or more accurately, hemisphere. But Aarn noticed at once that the Seeset were favoring two of their craft, two ships apparently in perfect condition, and major ships at that. Mart Toral, serving with them as liaison officer now, looked carefully through the telescope at these two.

	"Seegh-type ships. Their newest and best. They have only two equipped with the new apparatus. Those must be the two."

	"They're waiting, I'll bet, to see whether or not your ships have any special equipment—anything new," Aarn said judiciously.

	"Probably."

	The battle had begun. Gigantic spurts of flame appeared along the walls of each of the ships, great shells specially designed and equipped to penetrate the repulsing field of the space-discs that would hold off meteors. Deadly mud-torpedoes, a heavy explosive torpedo equipped with a slow-acting fuse, and a tail loaded with half a ton or so of a liquid, sticky mud that, when the nose of the torpedo struck, would flow down over the rest and give the explosive something besides empty space to push on. And crumbler rays, high-frequency electric oscillations which set the crystals of a metal, the fundamental structures of any solid, to vibrating in a torturing shriek that crumbled it away provided they weren't counteracted. But these were.

	Spencer moved restlessly in his seat. "Aren't we going to do anything at all?" he demanded.

	Aarn smiled faintly. "We are doing something. We're waiting. We're waiting just as long, and a little longer, than those new ships of the Seeset."

	Mart Toral was moving restlessly also. Suddenly a Tornan battleship glowed faintly blue over all its length. Mart Toral stiffened, and Aarn worked rapidly on his instruments. For seconds the battleship glowed, till suddenly, on a near-by Seeset battleship a greater gout of light appeared, and abruptly the blue glow disappeared. "They hit his projector," said Mart Toral tensely. "Even those beams can't stop the mass of a battleship abruptly. But many men were killed, for not all of the crew can remain strapped in safety springs."

	Nearly half an hour passed. One Tornan battleship had finally been reached by one of those tremendous torpedoes, half the size of the Sunbeam, and a great hole ripped in her side. Heavy shells had streamed in the broken armour, had blown that section of the ship to powder. But the damage was confined by the four-foot armor steel bulkheads. The rest of the ship was fighting as hotly as ever. A series of smaller torpedoes finally succeeded in cutting the ship in two, and now, with her maneuverability vastly decreased, the two halves attached themselves to near-by battleships. Each bulkhead was equipped with gigantic magnets, and these were holding the wounded sections tight against a friendly ship. They reminded Aarn of a hermit-crab, backed into the shell of some other creature to protect his tender hind quarters, his vicious claws waving threateningly before him.

	The Seeset were satisfied. The two ships suddenly began to move forward.

	A path opened through the hemisphere, and the two ships moved up, right to the grinding edges where the close, hot action was taking place. Instantly, as they neared, all the Tornan ships concentrated their spare fire on those two ships.

	Aarn, far off, grunted and pointed at his instruments. "They've got that, too. Magnetic atmosphere," he exclaimed to Mart Toral. "It will stop anything material you send if it has a crystal of metal in it. Tell them to make some mud-torpedoes out of wood, and use synthetic plastics or fiber to make the detonator parts."

	Mart Toral began to mutter into his microphone. He had scarcely begun, when the two ships went into violent action. With a start of pain, the Solarians turned away from their screens. One hundred thousand miles away the destructive heat beams of the Seeset had been turned on. Some of the radiation was reflected by the nose of the attacked ship, and even here that radiation was so intolerably fierce that for seconds the Solarians were blinded. Aarn was first to recover. When they looked out of the window again, they looked through protecting screens that cut down the fierce glow.

	Two Tornan ships were being attacked, their noses now spluttering in the fiercest blue-white heat, slow explosions of gas puffing out. Suddenly, from one, a great plume of brilliant flame seemed to arch out, spreading swiftly. "Punctured," muttered Aarn. "And that's ten foot armour there on his nose." The flame died down swiftly as the last of the air in that compartment escaped. In a few seconds it arched out again. Another bulkhead had fallen. Aarn moved gently in his seat, and suddenly the battle front was swelling, growing toward them at immense speed.

	"Don't!" protested Mart Toral sharply. "Your thin walls would vanish in a fraction of a second!"

	Aarn smiled, and changed his acceleration to a deceleration, the distance half covered.

	"We will not rely on them," he smiled. The Sunbeam, still moving at the rate of hundreds of miles a second, flashed through the outer line of the battle front, and was suddenly in the center, near one of the giant new ships. Abruptly, space became utterly black, and only television screens remained to show the battle outside. The Seeset ship, it's beam visible even in space now, due to the air it had let out of the punctured ship, was still boring away at the wildly twisting Tornan. It seemed indifferent to the approach of the Sunbeam.

	Aarn began operations. All three of his great transpon beams reached out, and simultaneously the transpons within the ship exploded the air from their paths as they hurled some fifty billion horsepower each at the Seeset ship. In a fraction of a second the great steel nose was glowing, then burning fiercely. The incandescent spot shifted, and settled fiercely on the ultraviolet beam projector. Simultaneously, Spencer showered the white-hot armor with his dully-glowing dumb-bell shaped magnetic bombs that tore and twisted great masses of metal out of its seat, and exploded in terrific energy releases. Carlisle's thermite bombs, thermite wrapped in thick graphite that alone could resist its blue-white fury, were burning holes in the armour, and Shal torpedoes, made of synthetic plastic, screamed in ultra-sonic fury that disintegrated the metal before them.

	The Seeset finally turned his attention to the Sunbeam. Momentarily he couldn't find it, for the Solarian's ship was invisible. Then his instruments showed him where it was, and his two great beams swung toward it. The air in the Sunbeam glowed bluish, and a curiously horrible muttering set up within it as the anti-momentum beam fought her momentum wave drive. Then the ultra-violet beam struck them—and passed harmlessly through. The Sunbeam was surrounded with a sheath of that curious field Aarn had developed to permit close approach to a sun, a field that converted electro-magnetic radiation to gravito-magnetic that passed unhindered through matter.

	For perhaps seven seconds the furious beams fought at the projector of the Seeset battleship, buried within thick metal that could resist by sheer mass. Then abruptly a colossal explosion of energy ripped the Seeset's nose open, left it gaping. The transpon beams drilled swiftly on, through bulkhead after bulkhead in seconds.

	Aarn moved swiftly, as the last of Spencer's magnetic bombs twisted the forward engine-room of the Seeset ship to scrap metal. The second beam-equipped Seeset ship was before them, its beams on the Sunbeam, and every possible means of material and radiated destruction turned against it. Again that whispering, shuddering blue-lighted soundlessness. And Aarn's transpons were boring at the ultra-violet projector as it turned uselessly toward him. Spencer methodically ripped away at the Seeset's projector with magnetic bombs; sent out gravity bombs that exploded in roaring energy in the very heart of the great ship.

	The air of the Sunbeam was suddenly choked with a grating mutter, the blue light became streaming fire escaping from every pointed object on board, and the transpons behind cast a fearful glare into the pilot room. Aarn looked grim, and changed one of his transpon beams, testing with his instruments. Then suddenly it roared again—and the rapidly falling charge meters on the board ran swiftly in the reverse direction. A great Seeset battleship began to fade from view as her lights died; the straining momentum drive seemed to ease up; the grating sound in the air vanished. Aarn had stolen the attacking ship's power. But now another, and another anti-momentum wave beam came from near-by battleships, and the Sunbeam seemed to drag. For the first time they felt the accelerations they were enduring. Their drive was being overcome. Aarn shifted his pick-up transpon to another ship, and the strain eased momentarily.

	A terrific explosion told him his transpons had finally drilled through to the Seeset's ultra-violet projector. The Sunbeam was struggling through something thick, and viscous, attempting to escape from this hell of battle. Anti-momentum beams were rapidly fixing on her from all about as the Seeset sought vengeance. Aarn's three transpons were very busy, picking power from one after another of the battleships.

	For perhaps a full second the Sunbeam was comparatively free of the anti-momentum beams. Instantly the terrific power of her own drive hurled her out of the danger area. Mart Toral gave a long sigh. "I did not, and do not, understand. But it was a great battle and you came near not winning it. I am right?"

	"Quite," replied Aarn grimly. The Sunbeam was drifting now. "The momentum-drive was just about ready to break down. It's almost all transpon beams, but even they have their limits, and there are parts which are metallic circuits, balancing circuits. They weren't designed for a strain like that. And I was using, did use, over three times my full original charge during those thirty-seven seconds of battle. Enough power to operate the industry of a planet. Most of it, of course, I got from those battleships. I won't be able to do that again. They'll have that carefully arranged. It won't be hard to guess that my tapping ray must have some kind of insulation, and high voltage would wreck it."

	"But each of those ships you drained," Mart Toral pointed out, gesturing to the screen, "is now easy prey to our ships. Without power they are falling to the crumbler rays. The new ships, without the protection of their nose armour, are also hard pressed."

	They were. Fighting viciously now, the Tornans were pressing in heavily. The cruisers were finishing off the powerless battleships, while the Tornan battleships tore into the remaining Seeset craft.

	"When will it stop?" asked Spencer. "Is it going to be a battle to the death of one side or the other?"

	"Probably not," Mart Toral replied. "The Seeset ships are swifter than ours, and we have the advantage now. See—they are retreating already. Ah, if we only had ships fast enough to overhaul them, and finish the battle now, when we are ahead. It is always that way; it is more discouraging than defeat. Twice before we had some chance of destroying them—and each time they eluded us by their higher speed."

	"Why are their ships faster?" asked Carlisle. "They use the same type drive."

	"Yes, but they can generate their power en route. We cannot. Therefore we cannot follow all the way to Darak at full acceleration."

	The brief, deadly battle had broken up. The Seeset ships were accelerating toward Darak at their maximum, meanwhile using their anti-momentum beams on any Tornan ships daring enough to rush after them at a slightly higher acceleration. Gradually they pulled away, with a brief rear-guard action by cruisers, while the destroyer and scout shield formed again behind them. The Tornan fleet waited patiently, gathering the wreckage on the magnetic tractors of the supply ships and battleships, wreckage to be taken to Cornal and reduced to make new ships. Much of it was Seeset wreckage, several million tons of steel armor from destroyed ships. The ultra-violet beam ships were among the wreckage, but they would yield little information. Aarn's destruction of their projectors was too complete.

	It was a sad triumph, as always, for five Tornan ships were among the wreckage. A total loss of nearly twenty-five thousand men in this short, comparatively unimportant engagement.

-

Chapter Five

	Mart Toral's face was deadly tired as he turned to Aarn again. "You are indefatigable. If our men could only work as you can, perhaps this vast task could be accomplished." He looked about the enormous workshop. Three huge Tornan battleships were in the shop; men were streaming in and out through the great locks, carrying streams of material in and streams of junked apparatus out. Four weeks had passed since Aarn and Spencer had begun the task of putting their devices into production here on Cornal. Five days had seen the Tornan's machines turning out the patterns for the great aggie storage coils, monster coils large as a small house, coils to power battleships. Ten had seen the great coils in production, one made every hour, then two, then finally a total of three an hour. Smaller patterns had been made, and coils as big as a five-man scout ship were being installed in the cruisers. One more pattern type was turning out coils as large as a man for the destroyers, and all other minor craft.

	Meanwhile the engineers and scientists had been working on a problem that required individual attention. One of the supply ships had been torn open, her entire interior rebuilt, and in a short four weeks she had been equipped with a giant transpon beam apparatus and the new giant aggie coils. Today she would rise to her orbit about Cornal and send a giant probe reaching out to Torka, the sun, to bring in power for a world at war. Transpon sets for battleships were already in violent production, occupying a large part of the manpower of the planet. Damaged ships had not even been repaired since the battle.

	Aarn looked about him and grinned, rather wearily. "I'm pretty tired too, Mart Toral. And now I have to do a lot of research. By the way, your men have all the apparatus ready to install in the Sunbeam?"

	"Yes, the crumbler projector and the defense. We were waiting for your instructions."

	"Good, I'll see to that tomorrow. I've gotten everything started for you here, I guess."

	"You have, Aarn, everything. We can never repay you."

	"Oh, I'll be repaid, all right," grinned Aarn. "That ship you've agreed to build is pretty husky payment. Spence estimates it would be worth about twenty million credits on our Earth. And—uh—one reason I'm waiting is that I have other things I'm going to develop. Definitely planned. Something Carlisle wants to show me, too. That reminds me—he's waiting now. Won't you come—and you, Spence?"

	They took a moving roadway to the Solarians headquarters on Cornal. Two fully equipped laboratories had been set up, a chemical lab for Carlisle, and a physical lab for Aarn. In minutes they reached it, and found Carlisle seated, talking telepathically with a Tornan chemist. They rose as Aarn, Spencer and Mart Toral entered.

	"What's your latest brainchild?" Aarn inquired.

	"Something new in chemistry, I'll bet," exclaimed Spencer.

	"Well—it is, and it isn't," smiled Carlisle going to his bench. He returned with an eight-inch test tube full of a clear liquid.

	"It is and it isn't—new?" demanded Spencer.

	"Chemistry," replied Carlisle, handing his specimen to Aarn. Aarn hefted it, looked at it, finally uncorked the tube at Carlisle's nod and sniffed gently, then deeply.

	"Looks like, smells like, feels like plain water."

	"Again, it is and it isn't. It's water, pure water, and contains neither chemical poison nor bacterial life. But it isn't ordinary water!"

	Aarn's face clouded as he looked steadily at Carlisle, then a broad grin began to spread across his face. "Deuterium oxide, heavy-hydrogen oxide! Heavy water. Hydrogen of atomic weight two."

	"I thought it took months to set up and run a deuterium separator," Spencer objected.

	"Certainly," Carlisle agreed, "on Earth. This is Cornal, and for some reason its water is rich in heavy hydrogen. And I've been using some of Aarn's devices to separate the light from the heavy. An improved atomic spectro-collector."

	"And what might that be?"

	"A normal hydrogen atom," Aarn explained, "has a mass of one, and a charge of one—that is the nucleus, the ion. Suppose we shoot a stream of them by means of an ion-gun, letting them fall through an electric field, into a strong magnetic field. The magnetic field tends to separate them, and throw them to one side, because they are moving electric charges in a magnetic field. Suppose, though, that the stream consists of mixed hydrogen atoms, some heavy and some normal. The heavy hydrogen has a mass of two and a charge of one. The same force is produced by the deutron moving in a magnetic field as by a normal hydrogen ion moving in the same field, but the deutron has twice the mass to be moved, and so the normal hydrogen will have its course bent more sharply, it will react more readily to the magnetic force. What Carlisle does, I assume, is to shoot a stream of the mixed hydrogen into such a device, and separate them and thus get his heavy hydrogen out at one tube and his light hydrogen out another."

	"You seemed overjoyed by the discovery. Why?"

	"It means I can get a real supply of neutrons. Neutrons constitute half the weight of heavy hydrogen, and heavy hydrogen represents the best known source for neutrons. You can see that neutrons are important. I have a real use for them right now, too. It—oh, I have some experiments I want to make."

	Spencer growled, and looked at Aarn with a dyspeptic eye. "You clam. You've got something in mind, and aren't talking!"

	Aarn grinned. "Carlisle—can you make it in quantity?"

	"If you say so. But—you'll have to help me design apparatus, Spence, and Mart Toral, we'll have to ask your men to help us construct it."

	Mart Toral groaned. "You Solarians have no appreciations of the limits of work. I don't see how we possibly can."

	Aarn smiled grimly. "You will. It'll be worth it in more ways than one, Mart Toral. I know that you have influence, so see what can be done. And—I've been holding out a little joy-bringer, which I will now donate. Come on over to the Sunbeam.

	"This is important," Aarn continued as they neared the ship, "but the other work had to come first. I knew you'd be lost and gone forever so far as we were concerned, once I demonstrated this, so for your peace of mind, I waited."

	He entered the ship, and led the way to the control room. Seated at his controls, he threw a small switch, looked at a table of notes, and set a dial carefully. Then he began working with his regular controls. A scene appeared on the television screen, swirled into color, and steadied. It was a view of the cavern where the Sunbeam rested, but a moving view. The scene shifted, the Sunbeam itself appearing on the screen, then the control windows. Aarn pointed out the window, and Mart Toral stared in blank surprise at the little black egg-shaped thing that floated there. About the size of a grapefruit, slightly elongated, it hovered motionless, with a blank hole in one end pointing at them.

	Aarn grinned inquisitively at Mart Toral.

	"By the planets, what is the thing?" asked the Tornan.

	"A member of our private spy system," Aarn chuckled. "It sees all, hears all, knows all—and tells nothing. It can slip in unseen where no man can go. It can hide in a dark corner, and move noiselessly. And—" Aarn pushed a switch that made the television screen darken, swirl, and come to life with a strange scene, yet the same, but lighted now in a curious way that eliminated shadows. Men passing outside shone, moving, glowing torches. "It can see in absolute darkness—so called. It can see by radiant heat." He touched another stud, and from the loudspeaker behind the television screen came the sounds and voices from outside. "It can maneuver faster than any scout. Watch."

	"By Torka and her four children, what a spy!" gasped the Tornan. "How far away is it effective?"

	Aarn laughed, and suddenly the investigator darted into the open above the hidden buried city, was flashing out into empty space. Still the scene held sharp and clear. With enormous velocity it shrieked out of the last traces of atmosphere, and shot toward the patrol scouts hovering above Cornal. In seconds it had begun to slow, then the patrol cruiser, loafing along, came into view. The investigator nosed gently up to it, and finally stopped with its eye to one port-hole. Men inside were working over the main switch board for the lighting system.

	Mart Toral looked at the screen with an expression of deepest envy. "My spy system is nothing, useless, compared with even one of those! Why—you might learn my every secret with that thing!"

	Aarn was bringing the investigator back as he answered. "It's yours—for the copying. You'll find that it will take a good bit of work to make them in numbers, and sooner or later the Seeset will spot one, and the secret will be out. But in the meantime, they can be loaded with explosives, and with aggie coils for destruction. You can wipe out a dozen important productive points with these little things . . . but—they must be produced."

	"So must anything else," groaned the Tornan resignedly. "I will see what I can do about getting these into production, and also the apparatus you need, of course."

	"That'll be fine, Mart Toral. And—er—could you get along without me? I'm just another worker, and Spencer is a better engineer than I am by a long shot, and Carlisle here is the one to work on that chemical apparatus. And—I'd rather do research work."

	Spencer laughed aloud, and Carlisle chuckled. "He's off!" exclaimed the engineer. "Go to it, Aarn; a one Aarn-power brain is more dangerous than a battle fleet when it gets grinding good."

	Aarn turned again to Mart Toral. "If you want to get started on that right now, go ahead, but if you can wait, I think I can show you a sight you'll be more than a little interested in. I'm going some place you've never been."

	Mart Toral wordlessly buckled his safety belt in place, and settled more firmly in his seat. Aarn reversed his control-switch so that the control board again operated the Sunbeam instead of investigator, and in minutes the ship was rising out into space.

	As the atmosphere fell behind, Aarn looked uncertainly at Mart Toral. Then: "Mart Toral, I have one thing I have not demonstrated to you before, and one that I am going to use now. It is of no use in your war, and involves such complex apparatus I will not attempt to explain it to you. We are outside the atmosphere. Torka is directly ahead of us. Now—" Torka's flaming disc grew misty, it wobbled strangely and seemed to expand. It expanded more and more swiftly. Some thirty seconds passed, and Aarn readjusted something. The haziness vanished, and Torka was near—and gigantic. The terrible beating heat of the mighty sun flooded the control room with an intensity that raised the temperature in seconds. The men could feel the awful heat burning their skin.

	Mart Toral gasped in surprise. "By Torka—you have come here faster than light itself. You can travel at a speed so vast you cover in seconds the distance light takes days to traverse!"

	"Otherwise we would never have reached your planet," Aarn said quietly, starting forward again, making Torka once more a hazy, growing disc.

	"Our scientists had guessed that," Mart Toral replied, "but no such speed as this!"

	Torka grew dim suddenly, as Aarn added the protection of the invisibility, the gravito-magnetic conversion sheath that bypassed the terrific radiation. Still Torka grew. The vast flames that lifted with seeming slowness, yet at speeds of hundreds of miles a second, leaped out half way to meet them, as Aarn stopped at last. Then, on normal drive, he went still nearer! Spencer looked at Aarn in surprise. "Can you stand this? Isn't that gravitational field pretty bad?"

	"This is the only way to get what I need," replied Aarn grimly as the Sunbeam went still nearer. A titanic bellying sheet of flame rushed toward them, and the men gripped their chairs more tightly—all save Aarn. With set face, he drove his ship onward. The Sunbeam shuddered, mighty transpon beams casting a vast blue glare around them; and they—stopped. The Sunbeam trembled mightily, and around her suddenly was a white-hot sheath of flame that wrapped her completely, pushing against her in rushing gaseous force, a titanic white-hot tornado moving at fifty miles a second!

	Grimly Aarn drove his transpon beam collector for the heart of Torka, seeking power to replace his diminishing reserves. In less than two seconds the transpons roared again as the power flooded in! The Sunbeam battled on. The heat outside seemed to leave her unaffected, to warm her not at all.

	"Why aren't we heating?" asked Spencer, his voice taut.

	"Momentum wave and gravity field combine to prevent actual contact. Radiation still being by-passed—largely. I'm letting in just enough for sight—about one ten thousandth of one per cent."

	The Sunbeam was advancing again, the transpons bringing power now that aided her to fight on. "Where do we stop?" asked Spencer.

	"When my instruments tell me I've gone far enough. We're about there." Aarn's hands and lingers moved as only a Jovian's could. The roar of the transpons changed its tone, grew deeper still, and the men inside wondered what Aarn was doing. The white-hot rushing gas seemed to glide smoothly by on some invisible surface just beyond the ship.

	"What if we have a break-down?" asked Carlisle.

	"Ha—you'd never know it." Aarn kept at his work. "That flame outside there would fuse this ship faster than a snow-ball in a blast-furnace. Shut up."

	The Sunbeam shuddered heavily; and anxiously Aarn eased up on his controls. Still a trembling vibration shook her, despite the wonderful delicacy of the momentum-wave neutralizers. The white-hot wash of flame blanketed all space in a vast, unbearable glare of light. Aarn's tense eyes were glued to his instruments; anxiously the others watched him. The Sunbeam began to buck and toss, the overloaded transpons roaring continuously.

	Suddenly Aarn's face clouded as he gestured swiftly toward a slowly moving indicator, a thermostat that recorded the rising temperature of the few metallic bits of the Sunbeam's driving circuits. Spencer rose hastily, and went to the power room. The transpon beams were flaming blue, a more intense blue than he had ever seen before. The room was a mass of twisting, flaring blue columns, every transpon beam draining power from Torka, the many subsidiary beams leading to the gravito-magnetic convertor apparatus—everything in full operation. Outside the control room window the sheet of white flame seemed everlasting. Spencer looked at the various gauges, saw the difficulty. The mechanical refrigeration plant, designed to cool the metal in just such emergencies, was overloaded. The ship was heating, heating badly, and with less and less difference in temperature between its own radiating coils and the ship's air, the cooling system was failing. The water had already begun to boil, whereas it should have been solid about the cooling coils. Spencer ran below to the galley, returning in a moment with some fifty pounds of ice.

	"I've given her all the ice we had, Aarn. Better start out, hadn't you?"

	"Fine idea, Spence. We've been under full power outward for three minutes and forty-five seconds. I've got a load that doesn't want to lift. If it weren't for the force of this gas sweeping by us at nearly fifty miles a second, we'd never even move with the anchor I've got." A brief smile wreathed his face. "The monkey's got his fist in the jar, and a banana in his fist, and he doesn't intend to let go, if he has to take the whole darned jar with him."

	"What in blazes are you trying to do?"

	"In blazes, is right," Aarn chuckled at the white-hot super tornado outside. "I'm taking part of this sun home with me!"

	"Taking part of the sun home?" gasped Spencer.

	"Right—ah—we're beginning—" Aarn said no more. Something had broken loose below, apparently, for suddenly the vast tornado seemed to be frozen motionless, then gradually began to sweep back, away from them, and they were leaving—"And I've still got my banana!" he laughed exultantly.

	Minute after minute the struggling Sunbeam plunged and pounded her way out of the sea of flame that washed about her. She was shuddering less now, but seemed to have periods of oscillation when the roar of the transpons mounted, and died. The blue-white tear-drop below them came away reluctantly.

	Aarn was happy. He chuckled again, and glanced sidewise at Spencer. "Spence, I'd hate to think what this would cost for power if we had to pay the rates prevailing on Earth shortly before we left. Something like four and a half billion dollars a second, I believe. I've been drawing power at the greatest rate my transpons would handle. All the momentum-wave drive would stand, all the storage coils would take, all the gravito-magnetic sheath would carry, and all my tractor beam could handle. Drawing full on all three tapper beams!"

	Spencer looked at the white-hot mass they were towing.

	"Now you've got that bear by the tail, what are you going to do with it?" he inquired.

	"Take it apart and select what I want," replied Aarn easily.

	"I believe anything possible after this," Mart Toral said, wiping his face, and speaking for the first time. "I have seen the completely and totally impossible done!"

	"Not half, Mart Toral, not half," Aarn replied more seriously. "I still have a lot to do. I have to select my material from that, and I've got to tow it about fifty million miles to where I can work on it."

	"How long will that take?" asked Spencer.

	"About three hours, I believe. I'm starting to gain speed now." Torka was still a vast disc, filling all space, but it was contracting slowly. Minute after minute the great transpons roared, but now the over-strained drive was relaxed to a load it could handle.

	Three and a half hours later Aarn stopped the Sunbeam. The gravito-magnetic sheath had been relaxed, but Torka was still a great disc, and their strange cargo glowed angrily orange, at a temperature of thousands of degrees. Aarn got to work immediately, setting up new fields he had carefully plotted.

	"Well—here goes, and Carlisle, cast an eye over this one. It's got your scheme beaten, I suspect. I have about five hundred million tons of matter there—and every ounce of it ionized. Now watch—"

	Suddenly a vast gout of flame spurted out of the compressed, tightly bound mass of incandescent matter. For hours Aarn had been holding it in check only by his tremendous forces. Now it shot out through a gap he had made, thrusting out under the incalculable power of released pressure, pressure generated in Torka where trillions of tons of matter had weighed down on it, pressed by the terrific gravitational force of the sun.

	The stream bent abruptly, fanning out strangely, and part seemed to wrap about itself, forming a new center, smaller and colder. Most of it curved, some circling half way round, but it escaped, fanned, and spread in space, beginning a long, long fall back to Torka. "It works," Aarn exulted. "It works, Carlisle! I'm getting it—an atomic spectro-separator on a gigantic scale, and I'm collecting no atoms lighter than atomic number one hundred!"

	Carlisle started, and stared at the swiftly growing dark center. "One hundred! There isn't any known, let alone heavier."

	"Not on a planet—but inside a nuclear reactor that big and that violent, a lot of improbable but possible events have a chance to occur. These super-atoms are synthesized. And I pulled that out from about one thousand miles down—just as deep as I could reach before the forces simply tore my beam to fragments. But now that stuff is cooling by expansion—"

	The expansion as the ions escaped was cooling it rapidly, and Aarn drove a heating transpon beam into it. Resting almost motionless, his own ship was using little power, and the excess he turned into the seething mass swiftly drove the temperature up, and increased the ionization.

	It took over four hours to finish the operation, but at last a great cold ball of matter rested in the beams, while a vast cascade of flaming atoms was falling, falling, falling the fifty millions of miles back to Torka.

	"I wish I could work on that stuff right now," exclaimed Aarn as, with full coils, he drew the mass of the gleaming metallic sphere inside the walls of his forces, and set himself for the homeward trip. Torka grew hazy, space changed, and even the stars moved slowly, while three flashing, curved lines represented the three planets as the Sunbeam shot toward swiftly expanding Cornal.

	In an hour the Sunbeam was back in her berth. In half an hour more, workmen under Aarn's directions had cut off a fifty pound mass of the cooled stuff, and put it in a great lead case. The rest, Aarn took out to a deserted island, far from any city. The rays from this mass of super-heavy elements were potent, and deadly. In that mass, carefully separated as it had been, perhaps a tenth of one percent of lighter, known elements had been included. Radium was there, more than the Tornans had ever had before.

	"I'm going to get to work," said Aarn decisively, as they landed again. "I want to see what I've got. Carlisle, you can have about five pounds of that stuff if you want it—you might determine all the chemical elements present, and all the properties thereof. You'll probably find some of them are still missing— gaseous substances that escaped—but you'll get them as other, heavier ones break down to form them. And—here's something to watch out for: there will be numerous elements of the same chemical structure but having different atomic weights. Pick 'em out carefully, will you? I'll have some of these physicists here rig up a very high-power spectro-separator for you that ought to catch an atomic weight difference of one in any element less than 350. And—see about the heavy water plant. How much have you on hand? I'll need all you've got to start on."

	An hour later Aarn was in his lab. Some Tornan physicists had been called in, and Tornan physics apparatus mechanicians.

	All were helping him—blindly. Aarn's science was too far ahead of them for them to grapple with the underlying theory, and Aarn was too busy to explain. Even a Terrestrian physicist of the first rank would have found difficulty in following him now, in his leaping steps.

	It took Aarn nearly three hours to get the others working at setting up the necessary apparatus. Then with his notebooks, tables and data sheets he retired to the calculating room the Tornans had arranged for him, where the machines from the Sunbeam's mathematics lab had been set up.

	Meantime Spencer and Carlisle had been given Tornan help and had set to work on the spectro-separator. Spencer had drawn up the necessary plans rapidly, and was even more rapidly altering them as the work went on. Being an engineer and an inventor, he had not stuck purely to his engineering principles. Where casting should have been used, he was using scrap armor plate, because it was at hand.

	It was a weird apparatus that came together in the course of five days, but when at last Carlisle started operations, drawing power from the Sunbeam since the Tornan sun-tapping beam hadn't "come in" yet, it worked. They were collecting the separated hydrogen and storing it in tanks.

	Aarn was still in seclusion. But he had sent out an announcement. Spencer was to start drawing up plans for the new ship. The Tornans had agreed to build a full-size cruiser—but Aarn was going to make it a super-cruiser. Aarn's own private warship. "We seem," he had said ironically, during the original discussion, "to have more need for a battleship than for a laboratory, so while we have the chance, let's have a real one."

-

Chapter Six

	"At last, Mart Toral," Spencer commented, "Aarn has consented to let his friends know what he's been doing. I can imagine that your Council has been a bit curious to know just how he has been spending his time— and their money—but that's just because they don't know him. Back on Earth he was supposed to work for me. As a matter of fact I worked to support him and his experiments."

	Mart Toral laughed. "No, they aren't worried. It's the physicists who have been helping him who are worried. By the time they have one of his new pieces of apparatus partly figured out, he announces that of course that simple little thing was just to help make the device he really wanted."

	Aarn ignored their comments as he led the way into his laboratory. It was the mess that always accompanied his work. Dozens of pieces of deserted apparatus stood about, left where Aarn had finished with them. While unused room remained, Aarn simply built the new apparatus there, instead of removing the old.

	"And what have you been producing?" asked Carlisle.

	"This," replied Aarn. He picked up a tiny, roughly spherical nugget of matter, a ball about the size of a walnut. It glinted white, shiny, reflective in the extreme, and more colorless even than silver. Copper is reddish-gold; gold, of course, reflects golden light; chromium is bluish. This was white, utterly reflective. Aarn held it out at arm's length.

	Carlisle was not observant. He held out his hand, not noticing that Aarn's great arm was bulging, his muscles drawn in ridges and plates across shoulder and arm. Aarn dropped the ball of metal into the waiting palm, and the little nugget brushed Carlisle's hand aside effortlessly on its way to the floor. It hit the hard stone with a sharp crack; sent chips of stone flying upward.

	"Sweet Satellites! What is that?" gasped the chemist, stooping to retrieve it. Aarn smiled at Spencer, and watched. Carlisle's lingers slipped. He tried again. The thing remained where it was. He tried rolling it a little, finally moving it with his foot.

	"Good lord—it must weigh half a ton!"

	"Not that bad—only about eighty pounds," Aarn replied. "It's the concentration. None of you under-developed earthlings can lift it, I suspect. Want to try, Spence—or Mart Toral?"

	Spencer used both hands in a sort of vise effect, and left it where it was. Mart Toral wrapped one hand around the other, and it slipped from his grasp. He rose, and shook his head, a look of awe on his face that a thing so tiny should be so unbelievably massive.

	Aarn's super-human fingers gripped it, forced their way under it, and lifted it from the floor. "It's partly the way you go about it," he said. "You have to pinch it off the floor."

	"Yes, but what in the—galaxy—is it?"

	"I've decided to call it resistium. It melts at about 25,000 degrees centigrade. Density—as you observed—high. In fact about seven hundred and fifty. Tensile strength about ninety-five times that of real good armor steel. One inch of this is the equivalent of about eight feet of steel, with the enormous difference that this is concentrated strength. You could have lifted eighty pounds of steel, because it would be big enough to take hold of. A shell might penetrate three feet of steel, and yet wouldn't penetrate an equivalent amount of this, because the steel shell would flatten like putty. It's rather elastic—you can stretch it half its length and have it snap back. It has the most curious crystal structure I ever saw. The crystals are actually shaped like spiral springs. Weirdest sort of a crystal I ever heard of. The crystal form is always the secret of strength of a substance. That's why the crumbler ray—crumbling the crystals—ruins a metal. The crumbler doesn't work on this, by the way."

	"But what is it? Is it one of those new heavy elements? Isn't it radio-active?" demanded Carlisle.

	"No. I made it. It's rather unusual. Flourine won't touch it. Aqua regia does not effect it. Even selenic acid—in which gold and platinum dissolve—leaves it unchanged. Rather indifferent," Aarn smiled. "But you have no idea how much so. I can't touch it at all.

	"Atomically, resistium is a structure made up of neutrons, protons—and negatrons. Negatrons which I finally got from those heavy elements I tore from the sun. It has four thousand, two hundred and five in all. Its atomic weight is four thousand, two hundred and seven, for it has two orbital protons!"

	"Orbital protons!"

	"E'en so, my lad, e'en so. Orbital protons. There is an excess of negatrons in the nucleus. They give the nucleus a negative charge, of course. The whole atom contains no electrons. That's the best reason I know of why the normal chemical reagents aren't interested in it."

	"What use do you intend to make of it?" asked Mart Toral.

	"Poor Mart Toral," sighed Aarn. "It's a shame to tell him. I want about five thousand tons of it—to coat that cruiser. That means quantity production apparatus. But just think what else it means! Make a shell out of this—"

	"I was afraid so," said Mart Toral with a mock groan. "I don't know where I can get men to do it."

	"Just tell your people I've got the answer of how to end this fight."

	"What! You can end this war?"

	"Yes—and no. You've told me that, even if you destroyed the Seeset fleet completely, it wouldn't do any good, because you couldn't attack Darak against the planetary defenses, and they'd just build another fleet?"

	"Aye, certainly, that is our problem. I can see nothing that will solve it before the Catastrophe."

	"Exactly right," said Aarn calmly, "so we'll just cause the Catastrophe a little ahead of time. That will end it."

	Mart Toral fell back in horror. "WHAT! Hasten the explosion?"

	"Certainly. The only way to end this, is to bring about the end, and the only end is the end, and the sooner the end is brought about, the more final the end is."

	"That ought to end it." Spencer smiled faintly. "Just what do you mean?"

	"Well—the only way to stop this, is to stop it for good and all. They're fighting about who gets Cornal when the sun blows up. The Tornans have it now, so if it blows up now, the question is answered for all time. That's the one and only way to settle it."

	"But we don't want Torka to blow up," gasped Mart Toral.

	"Naturally not. The Seeset however want it even less, and whether you want it or not, it's going to. You can't stop it—but you can start it. Suppose it were a steam boiler, gathering power; the fire is lighted, and can't be withdrawn, and the valves are stuck so you can't open it. Eventually the thing's going to go, and it's just storing more and more explosive power the longer you wait.

	"But you could throw a stick of dynamite at it, and set off the explosion before it had gathered too much explosive force. It would be bad—but not as bad as if you waited.

	"That's why I say the thing to do is to hasten the thing, set it off before it's ready, and it won't be any worse, certainly. And it will end this war."

	"Aye—your reason—your logic is perfect—but man, I don't like it! Tell the Council, tell the High Command—ahhhhh—" Mart Toral relapsed into wordless incoherence of thought.

-

	The High Council and the Supreme Command sat in wooden silence, their faces expressing bewildered amazement.

	"But—By the Eternal Mind—you can't mean that—seriously!" gasped the white-haired Chairman.

	Aarn smiled slightly. "I suspected the proposal would sound insane—so I stated it in its baldest, most simple terms. Remember, first, that I can hasten the blowing up of Torka. Now let us see just how poorly situated Cornal is to withstand this explosion.

	"She's going to be hot. Terrifically hot. The surface, as you men have calculated, will be raised to the melting point of lead at the equator—the solar equator—and your only hope has been that you could find some system of cooling. That has always been your hope. You knew, of course, that the Seeset had the same problem to meet if they captured Cornal. Have they any way to meet it as yet? We do not know, but—I have a way!"

	"A way to cool a planet!" gasped the Councilor of Science. "How?"

	"I did not say I could cool a planet. That is beyond me. But—I can show you how to cool your cities. Would that not be enough?"

	"We could not live! The oxygen of the air will be exhausted and the air would be poisoned beyond our power to purify it in the rectifiers. Our absorbents will be choked in a matter of days."

	"There will be such combustion of plant materials and humus outside that the oxygen will be reduced to about one percent, so Carlisle tells me. Had you planned to overcome that?"

	"No," snapped the Councilor, "we had not planned how to cool the planet. Until that time—what use to calculate what other problems to meet? How then will you rectify the vast quantities of air needed to maintain all our people?"

	"There will be oxygen enough in the atmosphere outside— but it will be combined. All we need do is to extract that oxygen. And Carlisle has found a way. It will require great power—but that we will have."

	"What? Will even your power beam be capable of working in that vast hell of flame?"

	"No. That is impossible —- probably no human machine could do so, for the force fields that will rage in that explosion will be beyond human understanding."

	"Then how can we get all the power we need?"

	"From the heat that threatens your cities!" Aarn snapped.

	"What!" gasped the Councilor. He had been standing, leaning half across the table. He sat down abruptly. "From—the— heat—from the heat—that threatens us! By the Planets, man, how do you intend to do this?"

	"Heat is energy—your trouble is an excess of energy, surely not a deficiency. I have shown you the transpon beam, but I have not shown you the beam that the Myryans, of whom we have told you, used in their collection of energy. It is similar to the transpon beam, but has this advantage—instead of being a conducting beam down which electric fields can act, it is a conducting beam which makes space super-permeable to light. I have tested it, and found that it has the property of raising the speed of light, locally, nearly ten percent. The radiation from the heated walls of your cities would be just as capable of concentration in that beam, as would light. I had in mind, a series of these collector beams, focussing their energies on a resistium ball, and raising it to a blue-white temperature. At that temperature, the resistium radiates not as a black body, but almost wholly in the blue-violet, with practically no lines in the red, so that it appears a deep blue. The photo-cells you have are nearly ninety-five percent efficient, and if we have such a radiator in the center of an ellipsoidal photo-cell chamber, fully ninety-eight percent of the incident radiation will be captured.

	"In this way, I am positive, I could reduce the effective temperature of the walls of this city to more than one hundred degrees below zero! I could freeze you out! And all the vast energy of the heat coming through the rocks from above would be absorbed as easily disposable electric power. It would run your air-rectifiers, it would run your great electrolysis plants."

	"I—I cannot conceive the thing as a whole, though I begin to glimpse your plan."

	"But," Aarn announced, "before we can use this explosion, we must wipe out the Seeset fleet entirely!"

	"Ayha—the airiness of him!" snorted the High Commander. "A mere nothing, eh? And for what have I striven throughout my lifetime of service but for that very goal?"

	"You have done more damage in the last decade of your life than in the first thirty years of your service," Aarn reminded him, "and now—it may be done. I am trying to show you that, can you once cause the catastrophe, the battle will be finished."

	"Aye—I grant that point," nodded the Commander, "but still you have not told how we will maintain ourselves here in our cities."

	"This city here is far south of the solar equator—as are all your retreat cities. Only the mining cities and the like are built within that zone, for you realized long ago that that would be the worst region. The temperature here will be more moderate. I can, as I say, show you how to overcome the heat. The air problem, Carlisle has solved." Aarn stepped back and sat down.

	Carlisle rose, and in his quiet, concise way described his plan. Poisonous gases would be kept out by maintaining a pressure within the cities slightly greater than the external pressure. Leakage outward would stop the entrance of poisons. Food presented no great problem, since they already knew how to produce synthetic foods. Water could be secured by condensing the vast quantities of water vapor in the atmosphere. The remaining need, oxygen, they could extract from their own atmosphere by means of an electrolytic decomposition of carbon dioxide to graphite and oxygen, which, Carlisle told them, he could and had worked. He concluded: "I have small models of the complete apparatus which I can demonstrate. The waste products and absorbed poisons are thrown off into a separate chamber from which they can be pumped easily and safely."

	A Tornan chemist, Marn Fasi, stood up. He had been associated with Carlisle in the development of the actual apparatus. Graphically and quickly he confirmed Carlisle. This man, speaking their own language, a man of their own people, convinced the Tornan council.

	They decided. They would blow up their sun!

-

	There was a new note in the workshops, Spencer noted within a week. The knowledge of an ultimate and absolute end to this seemingly endless conflict was alone enough to raise their spirits.

	Giant battleships were being rebuilt, and ship after ship was being equipped with the apparatus that was streaming out smoothly now; cruisers were completed at the rate of nearly two a week, destroyers at nearly one every day.

	But Spencer was working with a different crew. He and Carlisle and Aarn were straining every nerve to the completion of the great furnaces and new apparatus to make resistium in quantity. In a great workshop deserted to them now, two gangs of men worked. The one was grouped about the nearly completed resistium furnaces; the other about a rising structure of great girders. The battle-cruiser, Aarn's private battle-cruiser, was rising. But it was to be made of beryllium-alloy girders and plates, like those of the Sunbeam. Beryllium had enormous advantages over steel in that it was far less magnetic, far less subject to the warping strains of terrific electric fields, more useful in the magnetic atmosphere that was thrown about the ship. But it was a heat-treated alloy which deteriorated rapidly at high temperatures. This ship was being made of it—for its skin would be resistium.

	Aarn worked at the resistium furnaces. The last of the lining was in; only adjustments had yet to be made. The work gangs stood aside now, watching. Mart Toral was there, and a dozen or so officers of the Tornan Fleet.

	Aarn closed his hand over a heavy switch, and threw it. Relays thundered; and suddenly the cavern was lighted with the glare of great transpons. Feeding, for the moment, into the aggie storage bank.

	" 'Ware radiation," Aarn called. Rapidly he set up the circuits. Something screamed in the vast bulk of the resistium furnace. The screaming roar died as the last thin traces of air within were blasted to protonic fragments, and consumed. Then, slowly, like a great lamp heating to incandescence, a dull glow appeared in the thick furnace window. The glow wavered, increased, died almost entirely away, then with the sharpness of a balance suddenly attained, came hard and violent through the window. A brilliant circle of ultra-blue light spotted the opposite wall.

	Gradually Aarn advanced a rheostat control. The transpon beams began to roar more loudly, chattered suddenly — then worked in the silence and vacuum of power-riven air. Minutes passed. Tense minutes. Suddenly something whirled into action, a doorway opened, and a white-hot glowing ingot some two feet long by four inches square shot out to clang violently on the heavy rack-stops.

	A spontaneous cheer rang out. Their work was done! The first ingot. The first was followed by a second, and the second by a third, fourth and fifth before that first had been at last converted into a casting bed. Then, before that day was done, tools were fashioned, and, at last, rolls cast that could roll the incredible strength of resistium as readily as steel is rolled. The first half-inch thick plate lay cooling as the shift stopped their day's labor. The new ship's skin was under way.

-

	Men all too familiar with such duties had made the hull of the new ship rise with astonishing speed. In four short weeks the giant machines of Cornal had turned out the necessary structural materials for it, and the trained men and their machines had set it up. The hull was finished, the plates of beryllium welded on, and the outer resistium plates were being placed. This was far, far slower, for but a few inches of resistium seam could be welded at a time. The terrific temperature required meant so intense a radiation that the beryllium beneath would have lost its heat-treated strength if long exposed, and even water cooling would have been unavailing.

	The interior fittings were a different problem. The aggie coils were available. They were standard equipment now, and were being laid in place rapidly. Transpon projectors were a slightly more complex problem, for each installation was different, but they too were standard, and trained men were available to handle them.

	On earth, such speed as the Tornans obtained, would have been impossible, for Earth is not a planet keyed to war pitch by three generations of battle. What might have taken a year on Earth, was accomplished in a month. Again Aarn had given up research for the work of installing apparatus and power boards.

	But he stopped again soon—because of an idea that came to him and that required attention. He locked himself in the laboratory, and all others out, save his Tornan assistants.

	He came out with an atomic engine, patterned after that of the Magyans, but vastly improved. Neither Spencer nor Carlisle was particularly impressed by it at first. It was large and low and squat, and it looked like the cylinder of an ultra-power rocket-head, rounded and solid. Two transpon collectors were mounted on it, a complex cable led from it to a power board and a smaller gas cylinder squatted at its feet.

	"Say—" the engineer exclaimed, "it does look different! The Magyans had mercury boilers, but you seem to be getting direct electric power, instead of using turbo-generators."

	"I am," Aarn smiled, "I am. That set of aggie coils over there is needed to show how much power this little baby will give. Watch." Aarn stepped to the power board. His swift movements were too complex to follow, but their result was a rapid development of transpon beams that sprang from the aggie coil bank to the new generator, then a sudden soft hiss—and an explosion of sound and blistering heat from straining transpon beams. Mutely Aarn pointed to the instruments.

	"Sweet satellites! Half a billion horse!" Spencer gasped in surprise. "That's just an atomic engine?"

	"Right," agreed Aarn as he shut it off completely. "Just atomic."

	"After all," objected Carlisle, "what good is it? Your transpon beams are infinitely more powerful—you can pick up fifty billion horsepower from a star, instead of a measley five hundred million."

	"You can pull a million from a power line to run a ship, too—only there isn't any power-line available everywhere. You can get where suns aren't available, and you can get in the middle of a battle where you can't stop to go get a load of power. This is, I'll admit, more or less of a trickle charge—husky trickle— but it has mighty important uses.

	"This baby is going into the new ship."

-

	The work on the new ship went on. She was a full-sized cruiser, nearly twelve hundred feet in length. A long square tube ran down her center; and in this tube were all the rooms ordinarily visited. The great space that rounded out her hull outside the tube was occupied by air tanks, water tanks, air rectifying apparatus, transpon-beam tubes, and, most important, the gigantic masses of the aggie power coils.

	The nose of the ship was a gigantic mass of armor; here the huge beryllium alloy girders supported an impenetrable resistium nose that was a full foot in thickness. Behind that, the first of the living quarters, were the rooms to be occupied during rest periods, first the lounge and library, next the men's individual rooms. Then, half way between the ship's center and the nose, came the main control room. It had no direct sight, but television pickups faithfully and accurately portrayed on giant screens set on every wall, the scenes as they were outside. From within, it seemed that the ship was clear glass, that perfect vision was obtainable in every direction.

	Behind this room was the forward power room. Here an atomic engine nestled between the momentum drive apparatus and the anti-gravity apparatus. Careful balancing had been necessary to make an anti-gravity apparatus not centered in the ship, lift it smoothly, but it had been done. This power-room alone could easily power the ship. Yet in the spot midway between tail and center, a second complete power room had been set up. The momentum wave apparatus had been changed too. There were no material circuits employed. Aarn had developed a transpon condition which had resistance, and could be used in the automatic balancing circuits. No strain would heat the apparatus now.

	In the extreme rear of the ship was the direct-vision observatory equipped with a twenty-inch reflector with a resistium mirror. The mirror had been poured in shape, using a sphere-surface of a magnetic atmosphere, so smooth and perfect no figuring, which would have been impossible due to the hardness of the metal, was needed. Just ahead of the rear power room was the physical laboratory, and just behind it, the chemical. In both power rooms, and the control room, were various thinking and calculating machines.

	The ship was nearing completion when Mart Toral asked all the Solarians to accompany him in one of the swift scout-ships that was a mother ship for investigator machines.

	"We have, we believe, located the star maps—but we can't get to them."

-

Chapter Seven

	Darak was three-quarters of a million miles "below". Seventy-five thousand miles away hung Dar-tan, Darak's second satellite, a mass of rock and barren lava fifteen hundred miles in diameter. Four observatories were visible, even from this distance—and several score of forts, each equipped with its own great metal wall, and powerful defense apparatus.

	"That," explained Mart Toral, pointing toward Dar-tan, "is one reason why we're stopped. They are equipped with supersensitive locating devices that already have us spotted. A tiny three-man scout can approach. Anything bigger is spotted, and wiped out by the planetary defense forts."

	"What defenses have they—the new beam?"

	"More fully developed—as an incautious scout discovered. Also a radio-heating ray so powerful even a battleship can't neutralize it. Those are the main defenses—just something too big to be stopped even by a battleship. Their spotting apparatus is mainly electric-static and magnetic, though they maintain an ultrashort radio wave network that is very easily upset."

	"What's that?" asked Carlisle.

	"Radar," Aarn replied briefly.

	"How can the small ships get in, then?"

	"They don't—always," Mart Toral replied. "But by coming in on the border-line between the fields of two stations, they cause comparatively little disturbance, because there is already so much from Torka. The solution is just a small ship that will reflect so little that the normal stellar disturbance caused by Torka will hide it. Even so, a special, peculiarly designed ship is used. It is equipped with fairly broad metal wings that will reflect the waves, and these are rotated slowly, and irregularly. They put it down to stellar disturbance. If they believed their instruments they'd have a ship that varied from an indetectably small one-man ship to a second-line torpedo ship. And they'd be forever sending blasting rays out at stray beams from Torka."

	"Humm—interesting," muttered Aarn. "But what have you to show—we're in position, I see."

	Nearby was another tiny ship, a similar patrol-ship. She was signalling rapidly with a small monochromatic blinker.

	"Wave 184-65," said the Tornan pilot.

	"Tune in," Mart Toral directed. "Now watch—we have succeeded in smuggling an observer-machine into the headquarters observatory. It is their rest-period, with only three men on duty. I think I can show you what you want."

	The screen lighted. The building was of metal, heavy metal arches that stretched downward from their viewpoint to a metal floor. The peculiar lighting showed that pure heat-vision was being employed, and somewhere down a corridor was a source of heat. It moved nearer, and they saw a very dimly glowing Seeset. "Cold blooded," Mart Toral whispered. "He's been sitting near the heaters." The Seeset walked past, below, and turned in a doorway on the right. Their viewpoint shifted as the investigator followed him, and entered the great room. One gigantic telescope poked its nose up through the metal roof, a mercury seal making it air-tight. The Seeset wandered over, and examined the apparatus that was fastened to the great tube. He had turned on some lights, and now the scene was brighter, though still by heat-vision.

	The Seeset turned and started away. The investigator left before he did, scuttled out of the doorway, headed down a new corridor, turned in a doorway and stopped before a closed door. Their pilot was operating it now, and with the skill of practice, he dropped the little machine, caught a projecting hook on the door catch, and lifted. The door opened slowly, then the tiny machine skillfully closed it again. The room was heated—but evidently it hadn't been entered in a long time, for the heating was so even that it was impossible to distinguish objects. A beam of radiance sprang from the investigator, and lighted on a spot on the ceiling. Swiftly the spot heated, and the glow intensified. For perhaps thirty seconds this was continued, then stopped. The room was visible now in the radiant heat, yet no Seeset, entering the room, would have detected the radiance, nor would he have been able to see it from beyond the door, as he would have a light.

	The room was filled with files, rack after rack of them, and all filled with plates, glass plates of every part of the heavens.

	"Oh man, that's what we want," groaned Aarn, "but it would take a week to make a selection, and a freighter to carry them back for examination. Don't they have a more concentrated and mobile form somewhere?"

	"They have—on thin metal sheets. They are etched on special silver-gold alloy sheets." The investigator moved as Mart Toral spoke. Down past row after row of catalogued plates, till it came to a library of great books, four inches thick, and nearly eighteen inches square. They were bound in leather, apparently, and each was indexed as to number and type of contents.

	"Our astronomers and philologists have been working on that problem for several weeks, with the aid of these investigators," Mart Toral explained, and Aarn nodded in appreciation of what it meant—weeks of work of an entire ship and crew with the all-too-rare investigators needed badly elsewhere, working to solve their problem for them. "They have found that the star-maps are catalogued under several types, planetary, near-stellar, far-stellar and inter-galactic work. Then each type is repeated in spectral analysis. The astronomers tell me you will need both."

	"Right—both sets—and the whole crew of astronomers. I have a terrible job anyway, but trying to reduce a foreign language and tables and plates—! But how do we get them?"

	"That," smiled Mart Toral, "is why we brought you. We haven't the haziest idea! This is one of the regular planetary defense forts!"

	"How in blazes did you get that thing in?" asked Aarn in astonishment.

	"We didn't—really. Slaves make up the supply crates on Darak. That came through to Dar-tan—labeled canned meat. If you could see the thing, you'd understand how it got by. It is a wonderful imitation. The top is off now, but originally it had a soldered metal top over the lens. This was melted off when the instruments told us it was safe."

	Aarn nodded. "Now for an outside view of that fortress. Possible?"

	"Oh yes—" The pilot replied, and changed his settings, as the other ship took over the direction of the investigator inside the fort.

	The new investigator was hidden among the rocks outside. Torka blazed down, blue and hot, on the rugged little world. Darak hung huge in the sky. And the vast metal bulk of the fort loomed nearby. It was a great hemisphere, squatting down solidly on a level plateau of fused rock. Nothing could approach without being detected. There were a few stubby lumps on the fort's walls, a few ports—and a great, protected lock-door, large enough to admit a destroyer. Aarn looked at it for a long time. Finally:

	"Could investigators open the locks from inside?"

	"Yesssss—but not without alarming the whole fort, and all neighboring forts."

	"What part of the place is that room we were in?"

	"About—there." The pilot pointed to a section of the fort. "The wall is eight-foot steel, then comes a layer of rooms devoted largely to supply storage, then the observatory rooms, and then in the heart of the fort the main defensive apparatus. We never knew how they were built till these investigators got inside."

	"Well—I guess we'll have to break our own way in." "BREAK IN!" gasped Mart Toral. "Break into that fort!

	And get away with it! They'd ray you out of existence the instant they detected you!"

	"That's exactly what they think. What do you want to bet they couldn't kill a flea that landed on the wall of the fort?"

	"No—they probably haven't anything that will hit their own wall—but they sure would ruin that flea when he tried to escape."

	"That too is exactly what they think," Aarn grinned. "I don't."

	"And anyway, a battleship couldn't break through that eight-foot wall of steel."

	"I won't repeat myself again. I have been working on something that may answer that problem. To do what I must, I want two ships—one of the new ten-men scouts, and a destroyer. It won't be in any danger."

-

	Two days were needed back on Cornal, to equip the ships as Aarn wanted them. He modified the ten-man scout to his liking, and in doing so installed a little more apparatus, and tore out all the living quarters, most of the decks, and replaced them with a solid mass of aggie storage coils. The result was a power bank capable of handling a battleship.

	The destroyer was equipped with some new apparatus, that amounted simply to tremendously powerful magnetic atmosphere equipment, and an electric atmosphere device. "The purpose of which," Spencer decided, "is to make such a mess of fields that no electro-magnetic field device could detect a mere ten-man cruiser."

	"More or less right. The destroyer is going to keep changing those fields, and keep the Seeset occupied while we get ready."

	"What's that you're working on—outside transpon-connectors? Why? Who's going to pick up power from you?"

	"I am. You're going along, naturally, and you're going to run this end of it."

	Several Tornan workmen were approaching. A handler, a little momentum-wave ship with dangling chains and hooks, led by one of the men, was carrying a squat, massive device. It was a small, square box, surmounted by a stubby, movable barrel. Beneath it was a more complex arrangement of apparatus, entirely enclosed in dark metal and fronted by a small control panel. A second handler carried a complete, small transpon projector set.

	"So that's the 'portable' apparatus you wanted. How in the name of the planets do you mean to 'port' it?"

	"I won't need a handler there. Remember, the gravity will be only about one-eighth what it is here. I think I can handle it fairly easily. It has a good bit of resistium in it, and that makes it a bit heavy."

	"A bit heavy. It must weigh five tons!"

	"Ten," Aarn corrected him.

-

	They started the next day. They carried a supply of dark bombs, and had equipped themselves with the space-armor Aarn had designed for the new ship. At their hips swung two pistollike weapons. Their helmets had no eye-pieces, but were solid, thin resistium, so thin it weighed but a few pounds, yet so strong no man-given blow could break it. Inside, the helmets were equipped with tiny television apparatus that permitted sight by heat-rays, enabling them to see when others were in the utter darkness of the dark bombs.

	The ships, driven by momentum waves, reached their rendezvous within two hours. Two million miles from Dar-tan they stopped, and Mart Toral had a last conference with Aarn. Then the tiny ship left her companion, and immediately the greater destroyer began her duty. Tremendous magnetic and electric fields began to oscillate irregularly. Every fort on Dar-tan watched its instruments waver and click from one end of the dial to the other. They located the destroyer, but could not make out what she was doing. A battle-fleet was sent out for safety.

	Aarn's scout vanished from the sight of the men aboard the destroyer almost at once, plunging ahead at hundreds of miles a second. At a million miles—it vanished from all sight. Faster than light, far faster, it plunged toward the satellite. No radar network was disturbed, because the radio waves could not race ahead to warn of her coming.

	With the delicacy of control possible only to a Jovian, Aarn watched the satellite expand incredibly. At a thousand miles he abruptly changed his setting. Almost instantaneously the tiny machine halted, but—remained in that inter-dimension! The scout was going faster than light-—as it had to be to maintain this inter-dimension—but in an incomprehensibly vast circuit, taking, instead of a shorter route, a far longer. His speed in normal space was near zero. But, not being in normal space, he did not effect the radar, and only slight magnetic and electric disturbances were set up. These were wiped out by the tremendous fields the destroyer was creating. The ship moved forward again, at hundreds of miles a second—stopped—started—and landed within twenty feet of the wall of the fort!

	Instantly Aarn was out. A magnetic atmosphere was thrown out now, openly. It gripped into the metal of the fort, and helped to anchor him, a hollow shell that extended from eighty to one hundred feet about the ship. Within, he moved freely.

	And rapidly. Spencer, knowing his part, opened the locks. Aarn went to his "portable" apparatus, settled his great arms in the holds provided, and laboring under the load of more than a ton of metal, walked down the gangway that had been thrust out. He was in his space armor, and the ship was already airless, so no locks hindered him.

	Spencer followed him, carrying the lighter transpon apparatus. With bewildering speed, Aarn had them set up and aligned, while Spencer returned once more to the ship, threw a relay-tumbler, and waited.

	Futile bombs and rays were blasting the rock at the edge of the lava-field. The angry fort lashed helplessly at the ship cuddled impudently at her foot. Then a series of small ships flashed around the corner of the fort. Spencer sent a transpon reaching out from the scout, powered by those gigantic coils Aarn had installed. Flashing wreckage rained down. These ships were mere one-man and ten-man scouts designed for inter-communication between forts. Destroyers, obviously, were on their way. But their way was long.

	Aarn kept a wary eye up, but he was busy. The transpon beam projector suddenly went into operation. Tapping the power of the ship, then throwing it to the new apparatus.

	The stubby barrel swung, and pointed at the wall of the fort. A beam shot out, faintly bluish, little sparkling lights floating in it. It touched the wall of the fort in a pencil not an inch across, while the transpons flared and glowed. Then explosively a hole ten inches across was riven, a hole through eight feet of metal. Calmly Aarn advanced his stubby barrel. The place the beam struck became a terrific gushing holocaust of flame, a constant, terrific explosion that blasted and twisted the tremendous metal plates, and tore them open like spent fire crackers. In forty-five seconds, a ten foot plug of seared metal swung violently aside, and rolled off before a terrific blast of outward rushing air. Aarn cut off power, clung to his anchored projector, and waited. In a few seconds the rush ceased.

	Inside, Aarn found his beam had reached through the eight-foot metal, and also the inner wall of the next tier of rooms. He stepped directly in, and found he was, as he expected, in the room directly next to the observatory catalogue files. There was a door leading between, but it had shut automatically as the air rushed out. Aarn pulled his two hand weapons from his pocket, and trained them on the locks, useless from this side. A stream of faintly visible blue balls rushed from the one; a series of faintly red dumbells spun from the twin barrels of the other. And a white-hot pool appeared on the metal door, grew, and exploded in white sparks as the metal fused through. Aarn moved his sight, the fused spot moved, and finally reached the catch. The door flew open, and a new gust of air shot out. It too stopped in a moment, and cautiously Aarn advanced.

	Suddenly ten Seeset, clad in space armor, charged toward him. Their sharls flamed as they saw him, and in an instant Aarn was a moving, walking tower of swirling, hissing flame. The ions of the sharls were caught in his individual magnetic atmosphere. He fired with both weapons, and the way cleared in a hell of exploding fire.

	Aarn passed on swiftly into the observatory file room. The Seeset would have trouble entering, he knew, since the automatic locks would not permit entrance till the air pressure on both sides was equal.

	He made two trips with the heavy, bulky books before he returned to find a stream of Seeset emerging from a blasted doorway. They wheeled a light field-gun between two of them, and as he appeared, a blast of red-hot metal blew him off his feet. It was a super-machine gun firing one-inch shells. His magnetic atmosphere became a sheet of steel as the shells remained caught. He was blinded by the swirling sharl ions, but fired blindly into them, watching them gradually diminish as the stream of magnetic bombs sucked them away. The metal sleet continued—till an abrupt and violent explosion, audible even in this semi-vacuum, told him he had scored a hit. Dimly he could make out his enemies now, and he took more careful aim. Gradually their numbers diminished, and as the magnetic bombs swept away more and more of the glowing, blinding ions, he was able to clear the room. He advanced again.

	Two more trips, and the remaining books were stored in the scout ship. No more Seeset had entered the rooms Aarn had pre-empted. But a fleet of destroyers swung over the nearby horizon as he put his last load down. Instantly Aarn was out beside Spencer. The stubby muzzle of his projector swung upward, and all the power of its lashing beam swept up to the leading ship. Almost instantly the destroyer exploded with inconceivable violence. A second—a third—a fourth followed it.

	The remaining four turned and fled abruptly. Aarn glanced about—and swiftly bore the transpon apparatus into the scout ship. Then he sent out a stream of magnetic bombs that reduced the too-massive projector to white-hot, twisted wreckage.

	The scout ship darted upward—and vanished.

	In something slightly over two seconds it reappeared beside the destroyer, two million miles from Dar-tan. Somewhere behind them deadly beams were striving furiously to overtake the impudent little ship. Quite vainly.

	"It was a shame," sighed Aarn, "to ruin that projector, but it just couldn't be helped. I didn't have time to get it in the ship before the battleships would be showing up, and they were too heavy to fight with that little thing."

	"But what in blazes was it? It tore that fort open like an ex-sardine can."

	"Steel explosion — super-crumbler — whatever you want to call it. In essence it performs the highly desirable function of releasing the cohesive forces of the atoms in the steel. It turns steel to a gas—under a pressure of five hundred thousand pounds per square inch—two hundred and fifty tons per square inch, and nothing whatsoever holding it in check. The creation of a sudden pressure of that magnitude is apt to be somewhat disconcerting!"

	"Sweet satellites! And how!"

	Minutes later, destroyer and scout-ship were racing for Cornal at the best speed the larger ship could make—which, due to the momentum drive, was high.

-

Chapter Eight

	"The only immediate result of our expedition," Spencer said ruefully, "is another attack by the Seeset."

	"Really, you can't blame them," Aarn smiled. "Annoying when a battle-ship-proof fort is torn open by a minor scout-ship."

	"Well, I must say, I don't like trundling this laboratory into battle anymore, especially since we've taken everything out of it."

	The Sunbeam was an incongruous unit of the Tornan fleet. Only ten million miles from Cornal this time, the two fleets were meeting. Tornan reasoning was logical. The Tornan ships were infinitely superior in speed now—such as were equipped with momentum drive—but there were only fifteen battleships so equipped. The High Command had decided that they had best wait till the angrily attacking Seeset fleet was well within striking distance of Cornal, and far from Darak, before the battle was begun. This time—no ships of Darak would escape homeward to safety!

	"The scout action is beginning," Carlisle announced. A cloud of tiny scout-ships, scarcely visible from the Sunbeam's distance, was swarming to the attack, the skirmish before the battle. "Tornan ships are greatly superior, aren't they?"

	"Question mark," Mart Toral sighed. "That's the right ending for the proposition. Speed, maneuverability, power, weapons. Apparently—but the Seeset have something. We don't know just what. And they have that deadly ultra beam on even their little ships now."

	As though at a common given signal, the entire disc of small ships suddenly burst into violent flaming light so incredibly intense that even at this distance, behind the heavy filter-plates fitted snugly over the small windows, the light was blinding. Transpon beams tore angrily at the Seeset ships—and light of intolerable intensity burned back. All of the scouts were fast, mobile, and powerful. But they were not, and could not be, fast enough for this conflict. And small as they were, they could not be armored. Two loudspeakers above the control panel began to speak almost simultaneously. The skirmish of the scout-ships was impossible. Both commanders were recalling their ships, for each fleet was equipped with weapons far too deadly for anything of their size to handle. For the first time there would be no observing scout-fleet for either Tornans or Seeset.

	The destroyers never even attempted battle; each had the utmost respect for the other. Rapidly the fleets shifted their formations, cruisers, destroyers, and all minor craft falling back abruptly, leaving only the great battleships to bear the brunt of the conflict. Deadly weapons—against nigh-impregnable walls.

	The Tornan fleet assumed a new formation, the usual hemisphere replaced by a great ring, and behind the center of the ring a cone of twenty ships. Cautiously, slowly the two fleets approached. The Tornan fleet stopped completely, and only the Seeset advanced, unafraid because the Tornans had no anti-momentum rays.

	Abruptly the twenty ships of the cone darted forward, at a speed of nearly twenty miles a second. Instantly the anti-momentum of the Seeset fleet centered on the advancing ships— and rolled off in vast cascades of blue flame as titanic momentum drives, interlocked to a unit, turned them aside. In twelve brief seconds the Tornan fleet was in range, picking out with deadly accuracy the Seeset ships equipped with the light-projectors. All were not equipped even yet; but they, in turn, attacked.

	The Seeset had learned from the Sunbeam's attack. The projectors did not explode so easily now. The strange force-mirror protruded beyond the wall of the ship, and covered it for fifteen feet around, and it turned even the transpon beams.

	Tornans, too, had learned. These twenty ships were fitted with strange nose-pieces. Exposed directly to the beams and attack was a coating of metallic alloy with a high photo-electric activity, and a reasonable melting point. What could not be turned, could be absorbed. The ultra-violet light was being turned into power, and shot back at the attacking ships—to an extent. Minute after minute the two forces raged at each other. The whole fleet had joined action now, but there were two battles, a battle within a battle, the unaltered Seeset and the unaltered Tornans in a ring-formed battle about the inner battle of giants.

	A shal torpedo brought the first fatality. Somehow it undermined the great protective mirror over the projector of the ultraviolet rays. In an instant the projector was blasted to nothing, a breech in the great nose-cap, and a titanic transpon beam tearing through wall after wall within the ship.

	The Seeset turned, darted aside and backward, four other ships combining to cover her retreat—and attack the attacker. The photo-electric protection of the Tornan ships was not effective indefinitely, and gradually now, it was crumpling. Incandescent heat drove it off, and slowly the armor behind it softened, yielded—and failed.

	Not one, but all the Tornan ships were weakening. The Seeset were little better off, for while the force-mirrors turned part of the incident energy, with power to burn, and burning it freely, the Tornans were attacking the projectors by heating the entire huge nose-cap to liquid metal.

	"One entire force will fail soon," Aarn decided. "The situation is too even to be maintained long. It's a slower thing— but the result is the same as with the destroyers and scouts. Both are too deadly. I think—"

	"They have a weapon in reserve," Mart Toral said swiftly.

	"Is it ready? You do not know."

	"They attacked."

	"But—" Aarn stopped. The question was answered. From two of the Seeset ships a new weapon was coming into action.

	Green things, visible at their distance only as a floating green cloud in space. But they floated rapidly and directly toward Tornan ships. And as they floated along, they ate up the transpon beams!

	"Our turn," snapped Aarn. The Sunbeam flashed forward. The battle-front expanded, pushed out of their range of vision. Tornan ships shifted as the tiny ship plunged in. The Sunbeam was invisible, but both forces knew she was there. The Tornan fleet threw out their momentum-wave shield to aid her, and the Sunbeam halted a little in advance, protected against the anti-momentum beams of the Seeset by the combined Tornan fleet. Invisible, the Seeset beams passed harmlessly through her. A flight of magnetic bombs directed at the nearest Seeset ship attracted unfavorable attention as the terrific energies twisted and tore great chunks of metal from the ship's nose. Softened as it was by transpon beams of other ships, it tore in swiftly; then a transpon beam touched the projector slightly, and suddenly it was dark.

	Something green and hemispherical and big as a washtub floated gently up toward the Sunbeam. Spencer sent a dull-red magnetic bomb twisting gently toward it. The bomb exploded in a rush of flaming red energy—that was gently wrapped up in the green hemisphere, and the hemisphere became a sphere. With deliberate slowness, the green thing slowly faded, and vanished. Aarn pointed—a whole long file of green washtubs floated toward them with a deceptive appearance of slowness. A transpon beam snapped out, and flaming energy lashed at them, drove at them— and was silently, sightlessly consumed by them, as they were consumed by it. They seemed to move faster, eagerly toward the energy of the beam. Aarn stopped. The green washtubs advanced steadily. A terrific rain of assorted electric, magnetic and gravitational bombs tore out at them as Spencer set to work rapidly. Aarn was busy reading instruments. A frown grew on his face; he seemed to have stopped watching what happened outside.

	"They've gotten inside the momentum-wave screen of the fleet," he announced, "and damned if they haven't made a bole in it!"

	"What?"

	"Blazes! Stop them—can't you?" demanded Aarn, looking up. "They're in the magnetic atmosphere!"

	"I can't, Aarn—I can't! When one is destroyed, it seems to leave a sort of hole that's safe for another one to enter, and not even a gravitational bomb will enter that hole—it just shies off! They drink 'em up, and leave holes!"

	Transpons, roaring already, began to sing a different note, a strained, heavy note, a shuddering note of over-taxed power. "They've gotten in the magnetic atmosphere, and are eating right through it! The energy is pouring in there as fast as we can give it! We've got to move!" Aarn's fingers flew over the control panel, the note of the straining transpons roaring even more heavily; a strange tenseness developed in the ship, antagonistic forces straining at her. The Sunbeam did not move!

	"They've gotten tangled in that magnetic field, and hold as hard as any anchor could. If I turn off that magnetic field, I can pull free."

	"If you turn off that magnetic field," Spencer pointed out quietly, "the present bombardment of material destruction will be churning our separate and separated parts in about five seconds. We've got to yell for help."

	Half a mile away a great Tornan battleship had won a victory. Her enemy was fleeing, its nose ruptured. As it fled, a dozen transpon beams concentrated on one spot, and in an instant a great gap appeared in her armor, a clean cut that ran swiftly back along her side. Compartment after compartment was torn open. Explosions wracked her. Her acceleration stopped abruptly. Mart Toral looked, and turned to the radio. Rapidly he called. The powerful transmitter of the Sunbeam reached out across the struggling fields of the battle, and brought a response from deep within the great battleship. Abruptly it moved sidewise, toward the little invisible ship, then forward, ahead of it, between it and the disc of battle. A great magnetic atmosphere stretched out and protected the Sunbeam momentarily.

	Aarn cut his magnetic atmosphere for a moment, and drove the Sunbeam backward. They did not move. "They're maintaining the damned thing now," he decided resignedly.

	Mart Toral spoke again. Another Seeset ship had been torn open. Another Tornan ship was free. But further down the line a Tornan ship was being protected as it limped to the rear.

	The green tube of space-cups had drawn fearfully close to the Sunbeam. Aarn rose, and swiftly donned his space armour. Spencer followed his example, and in a few seconds all were equipped. Mart Toral again spoke rapidly into his microphone. Momentarily two Tornan battleships turned aside. From the first, something small and dark shot abruptly, raced with impossible accelerations to a position beside the Sunbeam, some hundred feet away. The two magnetic atmospheres opposed violently and it could approach no nearer.

	Abruptly there was a rushing hiss of air, then a roar. Suddenly the sound of the Sunbeam's transpons died in a vacuum. A great rounded green surface appeared abruptly, a green surface that dissolved the control panel of the defeated ship with steady voraciousness. It was a dull green surface that pulsed slowly as incoming green space-cups added to its mass.

	Swiftly Aarn stuffed a number of things into his pouch as he darted down the corridor toward the lock. Spencer had it open when he arrived. Carlisle was last. He stumbled abruptly as the Sunbeam's artificial gravity failed, came on at double strength, failed entirely.

	"Magnetic atmosphere at full strength." Transpon beams within the power apparatus of the suits whispered to full power, and four bulky figures darted from the lock of the Sunbeam, their individual magnetic atmospheres protecting them from the mad effects of the magnetic atmosphere about the ship. Ten seconds later they stood in the lock of the little rescue ship. Thirty more, and they were disembarking deep in the great hull of a battle cruiser. The heat was unbearable. There was a mighty deep-toned roaring, and the dull, heavy thumping of great guns, soundless, but not vibrationless in their vacuum chambers. Mighty machines were making the entire great ship hum and quiver.

	Their rescuer led them quickly to a view plate, and snapped it on. The nose of the Sunbeam was gone, a strange rounded, featureless green mass.

	"That was an enormously expensive ship—for the Seeset," said Aarn grimly. The green mass tumbled and wavered, shrank and expanded rapidly. "Forward aggie coil bank," he muttered. "They're super-strained space condition. Can't remain stable in this space long. Any additional energy topples them into another —but they pass slowly, leaving a hole in this space."

	A messenger in uniform appeared. "The Commander asks the honor of your company on the Commanding Bridge," he said respectfully. The party moved toward the aft elevator bank.

	A score of officers sat before the various communicator and view-screens. The roar of transpons was louder here. The Commander greeted them, and pointed. The Seeset ships were gradually retreating; the outer, secondary battle was also being brought to a close. Not far off a Seeset battleship was flaming white in a dozen spots, and beyond, a Tornan ship was infested with green areas of the space-strain cups.

	"It is again a draw, I fear. We have destroyed more ships than they—but we cannot fight their new weapon. It eats its way through everything."

	"At present," snapped Aarn, "but not for long."

	"You have some hope of stopping them, then?"

	"I have an analysis of their constitution. I didn't leave my notebooks behind, nor the calculator strips," Aarn replied, pulling the group of books from his space-armor pouch. "For the present, a draw—but next time defeat for the Seeset!" In silence he watched as the battle ended.

-

Chapter Nine

	"She's a beautiful ship, all right," Aarn agreed, "but that doesn't mean I'm glad I lost the old Sunbeam."

	"We really have all the modern improvements," exclaimed Canning. "If this blasted circuit ever gets out of balance or the transpon tie-in breaks somewhere, you'll have to use some new and high kind of mathematics to disentangle the various circuits. You have so blinkin' many now I don't know where they all go. What was that new thing you were putting in?"

	"Defense for the steel-explosion. Motto: Never put off on the other fellow what you can't handle yourself. What man makes, man—or intelligent reptiles for that matter—can copy. I'll bet those Seeset are bending all their energies to finding a defense for it, too. But no danger—they won't. Not unless they build a ship that can steal neutrons and negatrons out of the sun. It takes resistium to handle it."

	"Since this ship is resistium coated, isn't that defense enough?" asked Spencer.

	"No—for two reasons. First, resistium will resist the force, but not stop it. Second—ships have been known to have a hole punched in their armor. If they punched a hole in that resistium, somehow, they'd be able to tear us up inside."

	"What's the defense then?"

	"Well, the steel-explosion ray depends on a sort of projected field of force—maximum range with the big projectors on this boat is about five hundred miles in space, maximum effective range against destroyer armor about four hundred, against a battleship about fifty miles. For defense, I have used a projector with a rather rapid-spreading cone. The thing will amount to a duel. The first step is to make the other fellow's ray visible, which isn't difficult because the beam will scatter light, and the second is to meet it with your own break-down ray, which simply opens up his field so that it doesn't do what it's supposed to."

	"Have you defense for everything you've got?" asked Mart Toral.

	"I try hard," Aarn answered, "to live up to my motto. So far I have."

	Mart Toral looked about the great power room of the almost-completed ship. Despite the massive apparatus, there was still a great deal of unoccupied room here, as well as in the other power room. As he knew, Aarn was leaving room for additional equipment, as it was invented and installed. The Sunbeam had been rapidly crowded as more and more apparatus was squeezed into it. This ship, a full sized cruiser, had ample room.

	"What are you going to call this ship?" he asked suddenly.

	Aarn looked at Spencer and Carlisle. "I'd thought of calling it 'Sunbeam II' " he answered, "but I don't think I will. This is a wee bit hotter than a sunbeam. I wonder—how would Nova do? In honor of Torka, which is soon to become a Nova, and it is a new type ship—and a Nova, when it explodes into action, is distinctly disconcerting. I think this will be."

	"Good enough!" said Spencer. "Right!" exclaimed Carlisle.

	The Nova was not officially christened—because a sudden strident alarm rang out in the work cavern. It was an alarm call for Aarn himself. A humming signal told him he was wanted in Cavern III, the cruiser construction cavern.

	"Trouble!" he grunted. For a moment he stood motionless. Then he grinned broadly. "The Nova moves!"

	Swiftly he sprang to the power-room control board. With sudden shattering roars, the great transpons of the new ship sprang into life! The completed power equipment of the Nova burst into action. In fifteen seconds the heart of the cruiser was beating with life. Her charged aggie coils were connected by the vast network of transpon beams, and she was ready to fly.

	Aarn moved to the main control room, Spencer and Carlisle ahead of him, Mart Toral following. In seconds the screens had lighted, and the cavern walls spun suddenly, the great corridor appearing directly ahead, to be engulfed abruptly as the Nova sped on her way.

	The corridor was bathed in a green light that dulled the glow-tubes in the roof. From the mouth of Cavern III the radiation was beating out, green, vicious and fierce. Aarn turned the ship into the gaping opening, and a muffled exclamation of astonishment came from him. Three cruisers were under construction; three were under reconstruction. The nearest of the new cruisers was a half-completed hull, but by her side lay a broken derrick, a mass of splintered metal—and a glowing, pulsing green fire. Something wavering and almost coldly luminous, a terrific green radiance streaming from it that alone carried heat, a green that was shot through momentarily by more brilliant blues and duller reds, and overlayed in spots by dark, dully glowing red spots of sheer hot metal.

	"What happened?" a voice roared from the side of the Nova.

	A thousand minds responded with a confused blur of answers that settled to three salient facts. A derrick had broken; its failure had dropped a five hundred ton atomic generator on the rocky floor, the green fire had sprung suddenly into being and every man had run for shelter. But—some had not reached it; and many who had were clawing, scratching, and writhing in agony, their skins burning and itching horribly, their very inner organs itching and burning, their minds half-crazed.

	"Short radiation," Aarn snapped. "Get behind resistium plates, behind other atomic generators, or behind the entire mass of as many cruisers as you can." Aarn was busy over his instruments. Gradually a look of intense interest appeared on his face. "Great Galaxies! Is this a find! Luck—colossal blundering luck! The lady has been good to us for a change."

	"Good to us?" gasped Mart Toral. "Good, with half a hundred men dead or dying?"

	"Yes—good to us! Look—look, man, and think!" Aarn indicated a board of instruments as meaningless to Mart Toral as a book printed in English, and as meaningful to Aarn.

	"Can you stop it?" asked Mart Toral, more practically.

	"Oh—stop it. Certainly—at least I think that I ought to be able to—let's see—water—no—sand—no—"

	"That isn't just fire you can stop with water or sand, is it?" asked Spencer in amazement.

	"Yes, and no," Aarn grinned, turning to his controls with decision. "It would be stopped by water if the water would stick, and sand would stop it if it would melt. I'm getting something better—"

	The Nova rocketed back along the passages, Aarn handling the vast bulk of the ship with a sure and deft touch, as though he had been managing it for weeks. It came again to its own berth, where the great resistium furnaces and the heavy water generator, the beryllium furnaces and the negatron extraction apparatus clustered.

	Two momentum tractor beams reached out, and some two thousand tons of beryllium ingots suddenly rose. On the other side of the room half a dozen faintly glowing metal ingots, ingots of the extracted sun-elements moved upward. The Nova, followed by her two loads, moved back toward the Cavern III more slowly. Aarn moved instantly to a spot directly over the fire, protected from the short, deadly radiation by his resistium hull. First he dropped the glowing ingots clumsily, scattering them across the cavern floor. The green glow had spread now, and already was beginning to wash up the walls of the cruiser, more slowly, but steadily. Suddenly a glint of blue appeared, and it ran swiftly along a tracery of metal, far more rapidly, but carrying the seed of the fire to all things along its path. A heavy silver conductor. Suddenly it exploded into a virulent, blinding violet that spread out a dozen feet into the surrounding air as it struck a heavy platinum circuit breaker.

	Aarn picked up one of his heavy-metal ingots on the tractor beam, separated from the others by its fall. The ingot arced up suddenly, and fell with a crash on the green glow.

	Instantly a light so blindingly, overwhelmingly brilliant flared up that the skeleton frame of the cruiser became a giant shadow across the cavern walls; the green glow was washed out, flooded away in an incomprehensibly virulent violet.

	Two thousand tons of beryllium ingots cascaded on the heart of the green glow, and a transpon beam licked down and heated it to white incandescence, it, and the infected portion of the cruiser. The whole mass hissed and bubbled into vaporous heat. The transpon died, and the green glow was gone! Only clean, blinding heat remained.

	Mart Toral heaved a sigh of relief. "It's extinguished—but what in the name of the planets was it?"

	"Our new weapon—new bombs—what an accident to have!"

	"Fine. I gather it's a weapon, a bomb-weapon. Now what kind?" demanded Spencer gently. "We seek information, not exclamation."

	"The atomic generator broke open, and released some kind of a field that I'll have to study, and that somehow started a slow atomic rot—atomic decay. Transmutation with a release of energy. Peculiarly, the very existence of that form of decay maintains the field which causes it. Radium must have something faintly like it on a limited scale. What happened was that the field started, the tungsten and molybdenum started disintegrating, the iron diluted it, the chromium tended to absorb energy. But the excess was enough to maintain it. That silver bus-bar caught, and the fire ran along it like mad. The platinum, an even heavier element, fairly exploded. That heavy-metal ingot I put on to test it flared terrifically. The light, heavily absorbtive beryllium diluted and absorbed it. That stopped it. But—do you see what we could do with bombs made of that stuff, and using heavy-element ingots for starting fuel, with an explosive charge to scatter it?"

	"The reply to the green space-cups!" Mart Toral cried. "Right. I'm going to work on that—and then on the star-maps we captured."

-

Chapter Ten

	The College of Astronomy had cooperated with Aarn in his search. One of the greatest problems, and a truly colossal one, was an accurate coordination of data on direction with Aarn's own plates, and with directions from Cornal. The problem of eliminating the motions of Dar-tan, a sub-satellite, was no easy one, but the tables of accurate data the Seeset had accumulated, finally translated, aided in its solution. Then came the enormous task of examining the plates to find at least twenty nebulae known to the Seeset and to Terrestrial astronomy. This meant search after search through the exhaustive star catalogues. Fortunately, all the important papers of the Sunbeam had removed when the laboratories were set up on Cornal, and no tables of any importance had been lost.

	Graduate students in astronomy did most of this painstaking and time consuming work; then, when partial identifications had been made, the doctors of the college worked over them. Finally ultra-exact measurement had to be made. Then came the even more difficult task of mathematically back-tracing to Earth, and finally of making the calculations to determine Earth's direction from Cornal. It was a job that took weeks.

	During that time, Aarn installed in the Nova a complete apparatus for projecting bombs of the green atomic rot; the ship was completed in every detail, stocked with supplies, and made "home" for the Solarians. Six hours a day Aarn had it exclusively to himself. Aarn wanted a "decent" gravity—and with the artificial gravity turned up to two and a half earth-normal, Aarn carried on his laboratory work there.

	One of his most important problems had become that of finding a means of resisting the terrific light-rays of the Seeset. His invisibility could no longer be used, for his steel-explosion ray could not penetrate it without tearing holes in it.

	"Hoist by your own petard," said Spencer sourly. "Give up the steel explosion. You've got enough other junk."

	"Oh no, never give up anything. If two things fight, find a way through it. There are a number of good reasons for this, one of the best being that I have nothing else to do right now."

	"How about the space-cups of the Seeset?"

	"I told you—you can't stop them. Impossible. Any energy you use to attempt it will simply make them anxious to swallow it and go where it came from."

	"Well, how in blazes do the Seeset make them attack us instead of them?"

	"They'd attack a Seeset that got too near one. But the apparatus that manufactures them evidently builds up such a strong field that they are repelled from it. Hence that device I showed you. It throws an attractive bomb. The space-cups eagerly rush to get at it, and do—but they get each other, too. Every bomb of mine ought to take in about a dozen of theirs."

	"What are your other reasons, then?"

	"Sometime I may meet a ship that will take every single thing I've got and be yelling for more. The more I have—the more I can send him. Sometimes a sheer mass of defense is useful, remember."

	"What do you mean by mass of defense?"

	"Never was it more truly said of anything than of space warfare: a strong attack is the best defense. If I send them a hundred billion horsepower, they have the pleasure of handling all that hot stuff before they can think about an attack. Also, the idea I have for taking care of that light-beam will help in any circumstances. It will stop any ordinary radiant energy.

	"I'm going to use one of those Magyan funnel-beams. They absorb all incident radiation, and pass it on to any point I select. But the point I select can be either of two: I'm going to have a resistium ball floating on some magnetic atmospheres, in a photocell room. That will take care of about a billion horsepower. If more comes—as I fully expect—I'm going to have the other end of my 'funnel' open into free space on the other end of the ship. Do you see what I mean?"

	"Pass it through the ship—but how? You'd have to have a huge tube clear through the thing, and there isn't any."

	"Ah—there's the problem. The rest is easy enough. What I want to do is to make a tube through the ship invisible! I'll pass the radiation through that tube, without having the whole ship invisible. That way I can have my steel-explosion and the protection too."

	"Sweet—but where is the tube to be?"

	Aarn showed him, on the plan of the ship. It would miss the control room, and the power rooms, and pass through the uninhabited storage space. The ship would, to the Seeset, appear to have a tremendous hole cut clear through it, from end to end— and still be whole and very, very dangerous.

	"Apparently you plan for a real battle next time."

	"The next battle," said Aarn seriously, "will be utterly, and completely decisive. The Tornans have practically finished equipping their ships, they've stopped constructing new ones, and are concentrating on the utmost protection for the old. They are all being equipped with the space cup diversion bomb apparatus, aggie coils and transpon apparatus, and some of them are being equipped with the steel-explosion. Many of the cruisers will have invisibility."

	"How about the Seeset? Won't they simply retire in good order again?"

	"No. This time the Tornans are determined, and able, to prevent that. They have a whole battlefleet capable of out-racing the Seeset now, remember, and Mart Toral's latest information, from his spies and so forth, is that they have one super-battleship under construction, one they're putting everything they can into, but little so far is known that's new. Their precautions against investigators have been successful in keeping 'em out, and all we know is that it will have far heavier armor—and be a full mile in length! A super-super battleship."

	"And then some! When does this battle begin?"

	"The Tornans intend to begin this time—in just one week and a half."

-

	It was a slow week and a half. It seemed to crawl. But the last of the battlefleet preparations were completed, stores laid in, the atomic-rot bombs, with which every ship was equipped now, were racked.

	Massed, the Tornan fleet rose, and in it now, with the cruiser squadron, rode the Nova. Her crew was six, for Mart Toral was again accompanying them. Every ship was equipped with the momentum drive, and could have made the trip in hours, but slowly, at a rate that took them nearly five days, they made the trip. Seeset forces must have time to gather.

	The Seeset did not gather. More and more worried, the Tornan Command watched their screens, and their telescopes. The Seeset workshops swarmed with laboring workers, the scurrying of heavy work continued—but the Seeset fleet remained grounded, save for a patrol force scarcely five thousand miles from the planet. They did not choose to fight.

	"It looks," decided Aarn, "as though they were not quite ready for battle today. Won't you come some other day?"

	"This is the first time they have ever refused battle," Mart Toral said worriedly.

	"It is also, I believe, the first time you believed you could completely wipe them out."

	"It isn't the first time they thought so," Spencer suggested, "but it is evidently the first time the Seeset also thought so."

	"But what are we to do? They are continually strengthening, we are already as near the planet as we dare come because of the planetary defenses. They have already had nearly a week more preparation than we had; we must get them to fight."

	"Well—hold on!" Aarn called.

	The Tornan fleet hung now, in battle array, nearly three million miles from Darak, waiting hopefully for an attack. The Nova, placed near the center of the line, shone whitely in its resistium armor.

	"Have your investigators or spies learned anything new in the way of planetary defenses there on Darak?" Aarn asked.

	"No—but remember they didn't need anything really new, with their ion-beams in air, the anti-momentum beams, and the various material forms of destruction. That light-beam is a super-super light beam with a whole planetary power system behind it."

	"Then," Aarn decided, "I'll see if we can't bring 'em out." The Nova started, dove swifter than light toward Darak. Aarn was going to incite hostilities.

	In seconds the Nova screamed through the outer, tenuous reaches of the atmosphere as Aarn suddenly threw her back on normal dive. Now he was low, though, low over a vast forest. At least—so low that the great defense stations were hidden from him, and he from them. The Nova was moving still at a pace so terrific that no directing device could have followed it at that comparatively point-blank range. Shrieking through the air at nearly fifty miles a second, even the resistium hull warmed up slightly, despite the protective influence of the momentum wave apparatus, for the momentum-wave was decelerating the ship now.

	Scarcely a mile above the surface of the planet, the Nova leveled off from her erratic dive, and shot along the surface of the forest at nearly half a mile a second.

	Abruptly it seemed, a city loomed huge on the screens. Aarn stopped the Nova dead, and from her bows there streamed concentrated destruction—material Shal torpedoes that wracked the very bones of the planet in screaming ultra-sound, whirling dumb-bells of magnetic force and blue-glowing electric bombs, and three terrific transpon beams that tore and sputtered at the great roofed area that was the construction shed.

	The thin metal roof and sides of that shed vanished like tissue paper in an oxyacetylene flame. They did not melt, they sputtered, and sparkled, and vanished. Mighty, looming grey-white iron and armor-steel hulks were disclosed, their walls beginning to glow under the lashing beams. Instantly the Shal torpedoes and energy bombs shifted their attack to these more worthy foes. The construction shed became an intolerable inferno of energies, a rocking, roaring mass of crystallized sound and light.

	A cruiser, half finished, slumped inertly downward and inward. Two of the four battleships rocked and rolled under the attack. The other two rose slightly, turned in precise coordination; tremendous light-beams shot out—and half way, vanished!

	Aarn turned, and retreated around the curve of the world as swiftly as he had come. Half around the planet he paused again at the great Seeset destroyer base.

	Twenty minutes later the Nova rejoined the fleet lying off Darak. The destroyer base was a glowing white point of light on the turning globe-map of Darak.

	Mart Toral turned to Aarn with a slight smile of satisfaction. "The Commander wishes to report that signs of mobilization have been definitely observed."

	"The Solarians wish to report," replied Aarn gravely, "that if that didn't get 'em out, nothing would."

	Two days passed before the Seeset fleet swam slowly up from Darak. In those two days, much other work had been done—including the placing of a great many battleship light-beam projectors in every city—dozens of them. No more sudden raids were to be countenanced.

	At three million miles the engagement began. The scout-ships and the destroyers of the Seeset were driven back almost at once. The cruisers battled hotly for less than an hour—and the Seeset cruisers gave ground as the mighty hulls of the battleships moved up. The Tornan cruisers retreated behind the first-line Tornan ships, waiting to snap in and worry the wounded prey.

	The Nova moved up with the first line of battleships. Instantly she became the target of a dozen ships, a dozen ships viciously angry to avenge the swift attack she had made. Light beams of millions of horsepower tore in—and harmlessly through her.

	The Nova throbbed suddenly to the rising power of the steel explosion ray, then sudden, utter quiet reigned as the great antimomentum rays of the Seeset bit in. The Nova was ringed with blue fire. From half a dozen Seeset ships, hordes of the green space-cups poured out, streaming eagerly toward the Tornan fleet, and the Nova.

	Abruptly they twisted aside, turned, and poured even more swiftly into perfectly empty spots in the vacuum of space, poured in—and through. Wasted. From the Nova a gloriously violet sphere floated out, moved abruptly under a momentum-wave pressure beam, and shot at terrific speed for the nearest of the Seeset ships. With contact the violet sphere burst in flaming violet rain that settled swiftly on the ship, and its near neighbors. The violet changed swiftly to shining, bright green, cold green fires. The fires spread, each little center fanning out swiftly till the battleship was overrun as with luminous green paint. Only the silica windows remained clear, where the steel port-plugs fell away, their cleats rotted out by the atomic rot. Screaming shells crashed into and through brittle glassy windows. Inside the ships, men continued in airless vacuum, their protective space armor covering them. The green rot ate around the opened windows, and bright spurts of violet flame lighted the darkened control rooms as the silver cables and the platinum relay-contacts flared in swifter atomic rot. Racing along the silver cables, swift-rotting metals, the disease spread to the engine rooms, the accumulators, the generators.

	The Seeset ships employed gigantic mercury boilers, heated by atomic disintegration. The green rot reached them, ate through the steel walls, till they exploded. A single vast violet flame marked the swift consumption of the heavy, rich mercury fuel, and the even swifter destruction of the Seeset's own atomic fuel.

	In scarcely twenty minutes the whole process would be completed. Four Seeset ships were hit by those bombs that spread atomic rot. Four lessons were enough. Before the last terrible flare of virulent violet flame arose, they knew the atomic rot was deadly. Thereafter the anti-scout-ship guns and light-beams disposed of them, blowing them to fine-scattered dust, where the atomic disintegration died in dilution.

	A great battleship loomed out of the dark of space directly before the Nova; she was spotted now with the green atomic death, but still deadly. Her anti-momentum ray grew more deadly as she came even closer to the ship, the cone narrowing till it included only the Nova. Aarn depressed a key. Heavy relays sounded close and so loud they penetrated even the silence and the hag-whispering of the anti-momentum beam. For an instant nothing happened. Then, terrifically the nose of the battleship split wide, a thousand shattered fragments flew out, stopped in glowing heat in the Nova's magnetic atmosphere. Swiftly the terrific explosive action retreated through the lighter bulkheads behind, a series of soundless, pushing explosions that rocketed the battleship back, and split her open from end to end. Suddenly she was washed in the violet flame of the burst mercury boilers coming in contact with the atomic rot.

	"One for our own," exclaimed Aarn. The Sunbeam would be paid for.

	Aarn turned. A Tornan ship was hard-pressed by a Seeset, equipped with both light-ray and space-cup apparatus. A hole glowed white in the Toman's nose. His transpon projectors had been eaten away by the glowing space-cups. The diversion fields Aarn had produced were not always effective. Aarn moved swiftly. The Seeset ship suddenly rocked under the terrific impact of the steel-explosion.

	Aarn turned abruptly away, as two Tornan cruisers shot forward to harry the hard-pressed Seeset ship. The Toman battleship was still active with its bombs and torpedoes. A mud torpedo squashed stickily, and blasted terrifically into the forward engine room of the Seeset ship.

	Aarn's transpon beam tore at the light-projector of a Seeset battleship. The Seeset replied with a stream of green cups, which Aarn met with a diversion field almost in their path. They clustered thickly, and vanished. More thickly — the Nova darted away, and attacked viciously from the other side.

	A stream of Spencer's atomic-rot bombs blossomed, and vanished in white, incandescent dust as the smaller light-rays volitilized them with astonishing accuracy. A Shal torpedo got into position, and clung, grinding, on the nose of the Seeset. Less luminous, it had been harder for the light-ray men to spot.

	Aarn smiled. Spencer was keeping the enemy well occupied now, and Carlisle's thermite bombs, Shal torpedoes and flourine gas bombs were annoying him. Aarn turned again to his complex panel, set a dial, and pushed over a control slowly. He had an idea.

	Deep in the heart of the Seeset ship, the engine room was well protected. Its walls were lined with great accumulator stacks. The center of the room was occupied by a battery of six huge mercury boilers. Engineers watched them carefully; they were working at 150% maximum just now, and were decidedly strained. The many pieces of apparatus that had been installed took a terrific toll of power, and there simply was no more room for boilers.

	On the lattice floor above, the great turbo-generators were sighing deeply, steadily. They too were overloaded, but that was less serious; it was simply a matter of cooling.

	"Engine room. Engine room. The Commander wishes to know have you had a break down? So far as he can see there's lots of power going out and none coming in," said a sarcastic voice from the loud speaker system. The Chief Engineer looked up from his control panel, scowling. He flipped a microphone switch and spoke.

	"To the Bridge. To the Bridge. We're working at 150% capacity down here and can get no more from the boilers. As it is—"

	He stopped abruptly, staring. Because his generators had stopped with a horrible snarl. The turbines had, too. The machinery about him had stopped, the ventilation fans, the air rectifiers, the pumps. All had stopped. Abruptly there was a roar of mercury vapour escaping through the safety valve. It mounted swiftly to a screech as the Chief Engineer with a hopeless gesture moved to cut off the atomic fuel in the boilers. The screech mounted for an instant more as the Seeset engineer watched in fascination the slow bulging of the great welded steel boiler plates. They stretched quite a bit. He wondered how long it would take. The escape valve was open, but that was just to let off an emergency head of mercury vapor, not to handle a full 150% development of pressure. The atomic fire would not die for another three minutes.

	The steel bulged so slowly he could see the flakes of oxide and paint jump off. The men all around him seemed frozen. One was frozen with a foot in air, as though running for safety. The screech was very loud, a deafening thing—

	The steel boiler plate opened out like a swiftly blossoming flower of flame—

	The steel wall of the ship burst outward and the battleship was split into three parts as the two forward engine rooms and the two rear boiler rooms exploded.

	"The anti-momentum beam has other uses," said Aarn, "than merely stopping a whole ship. I thought those boilers would burst."

	Around him, Aarn saw cruisers hurrying forward. A too-eager Tornan cruiser glowed white-hot, and a gush of air poured out as the metal slumped, molten.

	Aarn saw the Seeset fleet was scattered, retreating without order. The battle had broken up into a score of dog-fights, with two Tornan ships for every Seeset. A long stream of supply ships reached out Cornal-ward across the void, towing huge masses of twisted, glowing metal. Seeset ships were jerking and straining wildly in the grip of great momentum-wave tractor beams. The trapped ships were being sectioned by transpon beams and, here and there, a steel-explosion beam. The battle was over.

-

Chapter Eleven

	The shop where the nova had been made was still a center of intensive, full-scale production. The shops where cruisers and battleships had been made were staffed with a skeleton crew of workers repairing the damaged Tornan ships, while the destroyer and scout-ship shops were closed down, as such, and had been converted to making a new type of supply ship, a ship with mere two-inch steel walls, and the lightest of internal bracing. They had momentum-wave driving engines, and anti-gravity coils, so they never would have to resist great strains. They had no weapons, but the entire ship was packed solidly with huge aggie coils.

	The manufacturing forces of Cornal were marshalled to one greater task. Half the Tornan fleet was cruising constantly around Darak, just beyond the planetary defenses. Darak had a fine, alert patrol fleet now—but it was a Tornan patrol. Not one Seeset ship had dared to set its nose for space since the Last Battle.

	The patroling Tornan fleet had been making life for the Seeset a hell, by dropping huge Shal torpedoes, without rockets or any propelling power, only anti-gravity devices to keep them from falling too rapidly. Some of them, particularly on the night side, were getting through. The aim was necessarily poor, but the Seeset never knew when chance would favour the Tornans and send a screaming, rending Shal torpedo into the heart of a city. Bomb dropping from a height of 100,000 or more miles is not accurate, even when a whole city is the target. But it was disrupting affairs on Darak. No new fleet would be built.

	Meanwhile Cornal was preparing for the climax Aarn had planned for them. The scrap steel from the Last Battle was being converted to make a new fleet of supply ships, freighters—large as battleships, and with less armor than a spyship.

	A tremendous force of men were engaged in the work of making hundreds of the Myryan collector beams, and setting them up, changing the plans of their cities, leveling buildings near the walls, and making the walls more nearly plane. Others were installing new types of locks, and drilling great tunnels beneath the surface, where possible, connecting city with city. Shal explosives did a great deal of the work, the crumbler beams helping.

	The resistium plant was turning out the strange metal at top speed to supply the necessary re-radiator spheres for the cooling machines. Great electric plants were hastily being assembled to handle the new loads. Still, two months would be needed. But two months was an incredibly short time for this job; only a world keyed up to war production pitch for over two generations could have done it.

	At the end of a month, half the work was done. And the new fleet was ready. The artificial pre-ignition of the colossal explosion was to start. For days the newly made supply ships had been streaming out across space toward distant Ranlor, planet One. They had landed on the hot globe, protected by the Myryan collector beams, and set up their apparatus. Battleships had accompanied them to protect and aid them.

	Planet One was not a large planet, little more than three thousand miles in diameter; and the new supply ships, and the battleships and cruisers had bedded down on the planet at regular intervals. The entire surface became studded with the ships.

	Aarn's plan was nearly ready to go into operation. The Nova had arrived, and the High Command, in the Flagship Cornal, was on the way. The College of Astronomers was aboard the Cornal now, ready to take up the work of maintaining an accurate check as the process progressed.

	Then the Seeset created a diversion. From the Tornan patrol circling Darak came sudden messages of distress, messages hours late, due to the slow crawl of light in this vast solar system.

	"Seeset super-ship has appeared from under-ground workshops. It is, as reported, of tremendous size. Five available battleships concentrating on her." A few minutes later: "New ship driven by momentum wave system! She is armored with magnetic atmosphere which stops all our material weapons, in combination with her momentum-drive. She is also equipped with anti-gravity devices. The aggie-coil power storage system has also been discovered. Battleship Thor Manti destroyed by pencil-crumbler ray. Steel explosion ray useless against her. Name of super-ship Darak. Atomic rot bombs have no effect, dying out almost at once. Battleship Ran Saro destroyed by combined crumbler ray and light-beam. Darak unaffected by transpon beams. Magnetic bombs deflected by magnetic atmosphere. Electric bombs ineffective. Gravity bombs have no effect apparently, exploding harmlessly in vacuum in center. Tractor and pressor beams useless against momentum drive. We are attacked by new type bomb. Stopped in our magnetic atmosphere, however. Radiating—radiating in gamma region. Intense—passes through steel walls with dangerous effect—burning. Ionization in ship—"

	The message broke off. Aarn looked owlishly at Mart Toral. "Your spy system was defective," he decided. "I'd advise a hasty retreat on the part of this fleet here. Those supply ships will be just so much meat for that baby—but with their super-drives, they ought to get to safety. I'm going to investigate in the Nova. I think I'll find our friend on the way here. I haven't heard of anything we can't handle so far—"

	"How about those pencil crumbler-beams?" asked Spencer.

	Aarn looked at him with an expression of pain. "Dear lad —I've been expecting that for months now. I have the same thing myself. Developed it during the past month. I had the defense installed on the Nova when she was built. Didn't have time to put it in those other ships."

	Mart Toral had been talking rapidly. The fleet of ships was already rising from Ranlor. Aarn started the Nova up and away from the planet. The red-hot globe vanished in ghostly images as the ship exceeded the speed of light. Half way to Darak, Aarn slowed to normal speed, and investigated.

	Perhaps a hundred thousand miles behind them, the Darak was cruising through space. She was making the distance increase at a tremendous rate. The Darak was very evidently swift.

	The Nova started after her. In some fifteen minutes the true size of the Darak could be determined. She was seven thousand five hundred feet long, and eight hundred feet in diameter.

	"That," Aarn exclaimed, "is a whole fleet in one big lump." The Nova, lightless now, was almost invisible from the Darak, and so tiny in the infinitude of space that she was lost. Aarn spent some time working carefully with his instruments, taking very delicate readings. Finally he sent out a very small, and very special type of torpedo. It was a miniature, self-contained spaceship, equipped with an extremely complex series of controls. It would do no damage at all, and it would be utterly destroyed. But, Aarn hoped, not before it had worked its way through the protective screens of the Darak.

	It struck the anti-gravity field first. Very delicate apparatus set up a field which agreed perfectly with the Darak's field, and the ship went on. It reached the magnetic atmosphere. The apparatus analysed it, and adjusted its controls so that its own field matched. It struck the momentum-wave field. Instantly it slowed to exactly the pace the Darak was making. Then very slowly it crept onward. So slowly that it disturbed the Darak's own field no more than the light-pressure of the great sun did. It took it nearly twenty minutes to touch the side of the ship's hull.

	Then a stream of white-hot thermite spurted out, and instantly a blazing spot of incandescent vapor rose from the wall of the giant ship.

	Back on the Nova, Carlisle had been watching very carefully. An automatic device also had been watching, and when that blaze of light came, a series of twenty spectroscopic readings and photographs were taken. Carlisle set to work.

	"It's a beryllium alloy, with a very small percentage of copper, iron, manganese and vanadium in it, and, I think, some aluminum, though naturally, I can't be sure about the iron and aluminum. Too much of our own running around free. But it's at least 90% beryllium.

	"Hmmm—naturally it stopped the atomic rot. Put it out, in fact. I think he's looking for us—yes, and he's found us." The Darak had turned, and was now slowing so that the Nova would come in easy range. The Nova also slowed, and stayed out of range. Gradually Aarn let the Darak get just within ultimate range of him. The Seeset ship opened with their light beam. Aarn raised his eyebrows.

	"He's got a beam that's tight as a Scotch miser, and it's hot as a star's heart. I'm not even taking a levy on that one." The hag-whispering of the anti-momentum beam started abruptly. Blue fires radiated from every point. "I was expecting that," came Aarn's thoughts. "It's in perfect keeping with his size. Also, he's trying to use one that gets several smaller sizes than the old ones did. Well—we'll see if he's got engines." Aarn moved. For some moments he watched his instruments. "I stopped his fans and such, but he was expecting it, and increased his momentum wave intensity to meet my band. That's that. Now let's — whoa, not so fast." The Darak had been well equipped with momentum drive. She flashed toward the Nova at terrific acceleration. Aarn got to work rapidly, and in a few seconds had arranged an automatic hook-up to maintain the present separation.

	"The Tornan ships had a non-adjustable explosion ray, but I think mine is better." Aarn was already working with a notebook beside him. In some ten seconds, during which the Darak tried vainly to get closer to the elusive Nova, Aarn was ready. The mechanism was now a beryllium-explosion ray, readjusted to the different crystal structure of the beryllium alloy. Aarn tried it out. Instantly the instruments quivered violently, and a spot of brilliant flame shot and sputtered along the Darak's walls.

	"Hah — he's actually got the defense fields. That's out. Brother, those reptiles sure have brains! I'll expect an explosion ray myself pretty soon!" Aarn grinned delightedly, and settled himself more comfortably into his seat. Swiftly, with atomic generators at full power, he coupled in all his aggie coils, and drove out a twin beam of concentrated transpon power. The Darak flamed violet over all her surface—but the explosion of energy was not actually on the Seeset ship, but on a sheath of transpon-like condition just beyond her metal walls. Spencer was trying a varied collection of bombs—but entirely without result. The Darak was trying to reach the Nova.

	She had the anti-momentum beam on, but it wasn't effective at this distance. Whether it would have been had they been nearer, Aarn could not tell. The anti-momentum wave died abruptly, and a crashing roar of transpons within the ship burst out as the noise of their own power became audible again. Abruptly the Nova reeled under the impact of a terrific tractor beam. She trembled slightly, then held steady, a flowing violet-blue sheet of flame washing swiftly past her, and vanishing in the direction of the Darak. Aarn returned with a pressor beam. The tractor deflected away sharply.

	"Aarn," Spencer asked, "how did that Seeset stop your steel-explosion ray? I thought that took resistium."

	"No. Making it does. Somebody analysed it and passed on the glad word. Besides, he didn't have to stop it at that range— he just barely felt it. However, I assume that he could stop it because he had some kind of a reaction against it, and what's the sense of making that apparatus if it doesn't do a complete job."

	"Going into battle range? You're just tickling each other."

	Aarn chuckled. "He's tickling me with a hundred million ton tractor beam now, and trying his light again. I'm going in for fifteen seconds though. Then I'm jumping out again faster than light, just to make sure. If I like him, I'll go back at him."

	The Nova suddenly stopped eluding the Darak, and sped toward her with all the lashing acceleration of which momentum-waves are capable. In less than three seconds the two ships were motionless within ten miles of each other, the thousand foot cruiser and the mile and a half of battleship.

	Aarn started his beryllium-explosion ray with everything he could get behind it. The Darak flamed in defense. Nothing happened. They had a complete set of defense-ray cones protecting them. Aarn tried direct, concentrated transpon energy. The Darak didn't seem to mind. Her light-ray was funneling in and through the Nova harmlessly. Her space-cups were streaming in a constant ribbon into the dozens of attractive centers Aarn had set up about himself; the glowing gamma-ray bombs floated toward him, and stuck in his magnetic atmosphere—but their rays stopped dead at the resistium surface.

	Then—a tongue of gaseous flame shot out, darting across the ten-mile gap with appalling speed. It was evidently an ionically projected flame of incredible heat. Its molecules passed unhindered through the magnetic atmosphere; seeped through the gravity field and the momentum waves. And licked at the resistium till it glowed blue-hot in an instant. Aarn grimaced as his "eyes" for the various view screens went dead. Fused.

	Aarn retreated hastily to several hundred thousand miles, just as the full terrific force of the tractor beam at short range reached for him. Faster than light, the Nova outraced it.

	Five seconds, and the Nova darted in to attack again, this time equipped with a new set of eyes—and a magnetic atmosphere that extended far, far into space. It touched the magnetic atmosphere of the Darak as he came into position. The flame licked out again—and spread over all space as the still-uncombined ions were shot swiftly to one side by the magnetic field.

	The tractor grabbed the Nova instantly this time. The Darak wanted no more escapes. The Nova roared in protest, shuddered, moved slowly toward the Darak—and halted as Aarn cut the tractor with his own pressor. Again and again the tractor beam sheered aside as the pressor beam pushed at it.

	"Mutual testing period," chuckled Aarn. "We've got a reputation. That—there it is." The crumbler had arrived, a pencil-thin beam of terrible, driving, crumbling radiation. So terrific was the energy it bore that it would have acted as a sheer heat ray, had not its crumbling action reduced crystals to powder first. It spluttered, arced, twisted and flared on the resistium wall of the Nova. Again the resistium was white hot. It withstood the temperature easily. The Myryan collector beams prevented radiation of the heat inward.

	"Well—that's all we know they have. Now I wonder if they have any—they do!"

	"Gravity bombs!" gasped Spencer, as the typical glow of the gravity-energy bomb became visible. "We've no defense!"

	The glowing field of concentration energy was followed by half a hundred more, speeding resistlessly toward them. "Wrong," said Aarn, "we have. Watch." The gravity bombs came nearer— entered the Nova's own anti-gravity field, then the magnetic field —and as they entered it, they twisted momentarily into a strange, distorted sort of glowless glow, a paradoxical, eye-twisting elongation, and—ended up as magnetic bombs. The magnetic bombs promptly dissolved in the magnetic atmosphere. "Motto: Never put off on the other fellow what you can't take yourself."

	The stream of bombs stopped as the Seeset saw them vanish, harmless. The Nova retreated abruptly.

	"What have you learned?" asked Mart Toral anxiously.

	"Three things. No battleship you have can even stand up beside that. We couldn't stay too long, because he could just work us down, eventually. We can't even scratch his skin at present. None of our regular weapons can touch him. Yet we've got to do something quickly, because I'll bet planets to asteroids they've got another one of those underway—probably with improvements.

	"Now I know one way—but I don't want to use that. I wonder if they developed that anti-gravity themselves or captured a ship?"

	"They captured an investigator," admitted Mart Toral. "They were all ready for it—we didn't guess it was a trap. They had a room made quite openly—and lined it secretly with a network of wires. Held a conference in there. Several. We smuggled an investigator in—and they turned on the current in their wires so that the machanism was completely and totally paralysed. We couldn't destroy it."

	"Ah—that's a relief. Bound to happen sooner or later. I was afraid they might somehow have invented it themselves."

	"Now what was that you didn't want to use?" asked Spencer.

	"Something I couldn't take," replied Aarn. "I can't see any way to stop it now. I've tried it, and it can't be stopped. Passes through resistium, with destruction of the metal; a Myryan collector won't touch it; and even the invisibility isn't any good. Can't use that." Cornal loomed ahead. "Anyway, the planetary transpons can stop even that monster."

	"What is it that will destroy even resistium?" asked Carlisle in surprise.

	Aarn smiled. "I've got it installed in this ship right now," he grinned. "Emergency. I haven't the slightest intention of using it against the enemy for the excellent reason that I can't handle it from the other end. Right now I could cut that Seeset ship up as though it were made of cheese. I know he hasn't a thing that would stop this. BUT—I won't use it because he might turn it right back at us. If he found a defense, and we didn't, he'd wipe out the Tornan fleet in less time than it would take for him to get from Cornal to Darak."

	"Sweet Satellites! What is it?"

	Aarn grinned. "I'll show you the thing in action." The Nova turned, and raced faster than light across the vast solar system to Planet Seven, a fragment of rock a hundred miles in diameter, revolving at a distance of tens of billions of miles from Torka, so far out that even in the great explosion Seven would remain cold and frozen. Minutes passed, before Aarn located the tiny pebble in space. Then it loomed a mountain of jagged, broken rock, and streaked metal.

	"I'm going to use this thing way out here, because the Seeset probably aren't watching, and if they are they couldn't analyse it at this distance. But remember, Mart Toral, I'm not going to use this, save in the ultimate extremity. It's too dangerous."

	The Nova was pointed toward the barren rock. "Watch," said Aarn, "it will last only one and a quarter seconds."

	For an instant the scene existed on the screens. Then the man saw it only in memory—and written in the blasted rocks. A column of blue, pearly light, opaque and swirling, visible even in space, a column twenty feet across that looked solid, yet swirling like a milky glass pillar rotated swiftly, reached down from the Nova to the planetoid. For a second and a half the column lengthened, and in that time pierced the mass of rock and metal, while the Nova seemed suddenly to reel away from the little body. Then it was over.

	The planetoid had a neat, slightly oval hole bored straight through it. The sides of the hole were polished and smooth, but yet they were ragged and pitted. The pitted surfaces were smooth, and glowing dull red. No great amount of energy seemed to have been expended. Yet—floating off across space was a vast, spreading column of gas, glowing faintly in the light of distant Torka.

	"You might at least tell me how it defies your principle that the thing is more deadly to the projector than the target. How do you start it if you can't stop it? What's the projector made of?"

	"Resistium bus bars," Aarn called mockingly, "that would vanish in that beam in something under a ten thousandth of a second. Now shut up—I'm working on something else. Something I can stop."

	Spencer opened his mouth, and shut it with a click. He looked sour. "Mart Toral," he demanded, "will you tell me how in blazes that man could install so big a piece of apparatus as that must be without your men even knowing it was there?"

	Mart Toral shrugged, and laughed. "Our physicists followed with interest the development of a new weapon Aarn was installing. It was a radio-interference device for projecting interference that would de-control enemy torpedoes. They thought it was a new type crumbler ray. Aarn was so far ahead of them that they never knew quite what he was doing—and if he particularly wanted to keep the thing secret—!"

-

Chapter Twelve

	"Do you now have the pencil crumbler ray too? Do you think it will work against them?"

	"No," replied Aarn. "The Seeset believe in my motto."

	"Then they have a defense. What's the other weapon? Am I now to be informed of its exact operation? I take it, it's some sort of ionic gun."

	"At length," grinned Aarn, "you are. Carlisle may know more."

	"I saw you install that water tank, and the heavy water. From past experience, I would say you have ideas of using neutrons somehow."

	"Right. Deutrons really. The silent bullet! Unstopped by electric, magnetic or gravitational field. Only slightly influenced by the ordinary momentum wave field—such as the Seeset are using."

	"Will it pierce ten feet of beryllium armor?" asked Spencer. "That sounds like a mighty big order—and beryllium is a light atom."

	"It's plenty of opposition—but we have plenty of power."

	"So," said Mart Toral sadly, "have they? That other ship you mentioned has appeared. It is the Torka. All our ships have been grounded, save the power-ship maintaining the transpon beam to Torka itself. That has not been molested. It was attacked just once, and the full power of the main transpon turned on the Darak. Her transpon shield wouldn't carry all the energy of a sun, and besides the wasted energy was spilling out in all directions so fast that the walls were red hot all over when it left. We can do nothing—and they are rapidly building more of those ships, I am sure. Sooner or later they may break down the defenses of that power-ship. Then we will be nearly powerless. Our little photo-cells would be practically useless. We have charged all the aggie coils on the planet, however."

	"How soon will your weapon be ready?"

	"Another two days, I believe. The work is not easy. But— I promise the work will be highly satisfactory. This is an unusually nice weapon—for you."

	The first day passed, the fifth since the Darak had appeared. The two Seeset giants hung off Cornal grimly, traveling always together. They were very evidently waiting reinforcements now, waiting till they could combine to cut that thread of power that flowed in from Torka. That was too hot for even these two super-ships to attack, but—they had hopes.

	The second day came, and passed. Aarn was not ready. This apparatus, hastily constructed, must yet be constructed with an exactitude that permitted the safe handling of two and a half million volts—with all the lashing power of a straining atomic generator behind it. One small arc—a path established—and some five hundred million horsepower would gleefully rush along the pathway created.

	A supply ship, especially equipped for speed, started out from Cornal that day, carrying a complete set of apparatus for installation in the power satellite to make it capable of defense against the Seeset ships. Except for Aarn's neutron weapon, this power planet was now a fully equipped battleship.

	The third day, Aarn was ready. The Nova started up from Cornal. At ten miles from the surface it hung, Aarn watching the two super-ships interestedly. "Not merely sister ships," he mused, "but Siamese-sister ships. I've got to pry them apart somehow. Look at 'em—hanging up there watching us. If they thought they could stand the heavy transpon defenses here for even a minute—.

	"But how in blazes am I going to pry 'em apart? I can't handle them both."

	"They probably aren't exactly alike, Aarn. Remember, even sister ships, made to the same plans, are always a Utile different. These ships probably have some different ideas incorporated in them?"

	"I suppose," said Mart Toral hesitantly, "we could use a part of the fleet as a decoy to draw off one ship, or to so engage their attention as to make it possible for you to handle them."

	"They'd handle several thousand of your men," replied Aarn, shaking his head. "We could, no doubt, destroy the ships then, but only with the loss of hundreds of lives. That is an expedient we will not use. It is even more ultimate than my ultimate weapon. I will use the ka—the other weapon first.

	"There is one—possibility—I could—try." Aarn looked thoughtfully toward Mart Toral. Finally he turned to his radio apparatus, manipulated it, worked it, and finally picked up a succession of garbled sounds, the Seeset in the battleships in conversation.

	"Can you make it out?" Aarn asked Mart Toral.

	"Certainly. They've been speaking in straight Seethani ever since those new ships were developed. They use a code with the old ships, but that was usually broken down within a week or two. They don't even bother with codes anymore," he added bitterly.

	"Straight Seethani—then you could speak it?"

	"Yes—with a perfectly atrocious accent. My vocal cords aren't made the way theirs are. They'd recognize it in an instant."

	"Ah—that's the question. Now we shall see." Aarn's face was brighter with hope. Rapidly he gave his instructions to Carlisle, who went back to one of the Nova's storerooms, and returned with two pieces of apparatus brought from Myrya. Rapidly he connected them up with the power outlets below the control board, and at Aarn's instruction, set them up. Carlisle donned a headset, Spencer another.

	The Nova rose. Out of the atmosphere she shot, and the instant she was beyond the Heaviside layer, Aarn went into action. He first sent out a powerful—but not too powerful—beam of broad radio interference. On every wavelength from the end of the infra heat to the most enormously long, Aarn maintained a washing, roaring magneto-electric disturbance that sounded like the roar and crackle of south polar static. Instantly the Seeset ships were striving to get into communication again.

	Then Aarn sent out a far more powerful fan-shaped wave of interference. The two Seeset ships were perhaps fifty thousand miles apart, and now the thin fan cut directly between them, a heterodyning frequency that completely disrupted their communications.

	Mart Toral began to speak into the Nova's ultra-powerful transmitter in a low slurring voice, Seethani, mushed and blurred beyond recognition almost. The static Aarn was setting up completed the job of mushing it—but did not completely stop it!

	Simultaneously Spencer and Carlisle were hard at work. Their faces were blank in deep concentration, their eyes dreamy. Tiny tubes glowed in the Myryan apparatus.

	Majestically, the gigantic Darak turned away, and shot speeding toward the distant planet for which it was named. The Torka hung motionless where she was. Gathering speed under terrific acceleration, the Darak was indistinguishable in space in three seconds. For forty seconds more Aarn waited. Then slowly he started toward the Torka.

	"He's coming back," snapped Spencer.

	The Nova flashed ahead at her maximum acceleration. In three seconds she was beside the vast bulk of the Torka, and enormous streams of concentrated energy bit at her savagely. The crumbler ray flamed blue-violet on the resistium shell, while the air inside the ship whispered and rustled with the anti-momentum beams. A titanic tractor gripped them as the anti-momentum died almost instantly. The transpons aboard the Nova roared under the strain.

	Aarn sat motionless at his controls, watching a tiny, newly installed instrument. The nose of the Nova pointed directly at the vast prow of the Torka, but slowly it was sweeping backward. The light beams of the Torka remained fixed, stopped following the Nova's motions. Then the tractor beam slipped off, and stayed away.

	The Nova was pointing at the last eighth of the Torka's vast length as the Darak exploded into view. Aarn turned the Nova toward the Darak unconcernedly forgetting, it seemed, the Torka. Her beams continued to burn into space. Undirected, wildly.

	The Darak attacked with the fury of a tricked man. She had been tricked, and her commander knew it now, knew and attacked with the desperate hate that followed.

	The nose of the Nova pointed toward his great ship, and as the Darak turned her savage energies on the tiny craft, the Nova hung apparently listless, turning slowly. No beam, no energy responded. Only a slight rippling cone of glowing light passed slowly the length of the vast ship, and where it passed, the beams seemed to grow fixed and rigid, immovable. The cone of glow reached her tail, and the Darak moved on as aimlessly as the Torka.

	Aarn turned a powerful tractor on her. It was scarcely opposed. No pressor beam pushed it aside, and slowly the mighty bulk of the ship turned from her wild plunge toward Cornal, and twisted into an orbit, her rays still flaming.

	"It's done," said Aarn quietly.

	"They're all dead!" gasped Mart Toral. "I didn't expect— quite that."

	"Only light elements affect neutrons particularly. Beryllium stopped a lot—but not enough. Animal protoplasm is made up almost entirely of the lightest of elements, and particularly— hydrogen. Those enormously high-velocity deutrons I sent were stopped by the beryllium only partly—and neutrons went on. Many of them got through the beryllium walls. Very few of them passed the living protoplasm, so rich in water and hydrogen. No living creature could stand the flood of neutrons that was sent. The ship couldn't be stopped—but the Seeset aboard her could.

	"The rays may burn for another day or so. They probably have tremendous storage capacity aboard her. Then they will fail, and the magnetic atmosphere and momentum waves will fail, and your ships can enter. In the meantime, have some battleships come out and take charge of them. You will be able to learn every secret of the Seeset from those ships. Everything is in almost perfect condition—save for the Seeset aboard her."

	"What effect did those Seeset feel from the telepathic devices?" asked Mart Toral curiously.

	"You sent a message, their ears heard something, an indistinguishable garbled sound. They only recognized it as Seethani, but the telepathic devices were simultaneously sending them instructions. Their minds and ears worked together to make them believe they were getting real information. The Darak's commander thought he received a message from patrolling battle-cruisers nearer Darak that a ship like ours was heading for Darak. The Torka's commander thought he was getting orders from the commander of the Darak to remain where he was and handle this ship, while the Darak handled the other."

	"How did you guess that the commander of the Darak would have the right to order the Torka to stay here?"

	"Precedence. The Torka and Darak were sister ships—more or less. So much so at any rate that the man who was given the Darak would probably keep her. But the man who got command of the Darak would be given it by right of precedence. The Darak would be the ship of the highest ranking Commander, probably the highest in the entire force, since there were no other battleships, and most of the battleship commanders had been killed previously."

	"Why not use the telepathic devices alone?"

	"Would you believe an order that suddenly popped into your mind out of nowhere? You'd want to know how come. Well—it actually popped into his mind, but he thought he was hearing it."

	"We will continue our work as planned?" asked Mart Toral.

	Aarn nodded. "And keep a very close watch on Darak. I'd suggest you learn where those super battleships were made, and do something to make that particular spot uninhabitable."

-

Chapter Thirteen

	Ranlor was girdled at last by the fleet of over-powered cruisers, battleships and supply craft. A transpon-beam ship was there also, maintaining a gigantic beam to Torka, relaying her power through hundreds of smaller beams leading to each of the ships on Ranlor.

	They began functioning now, all of them. All their stored energy, and all the energy they were drawing from Torka went into the operation. Slowly a terrific anti-gravity field developed about Ranlor, and simultaneously the planet's orbit shifted more and more toward Torka. Astronomers were kept busy calculating the shifting forces as the anti-gravity field offset the planet's weight, and the combined power of the great ships turned the little planet toward the sun, using her own orbital speed as a driving force.

	Day after day the process went on, billions of horsepower pouring in constantly. The planet was cooling now, under the protecting Myryan collector beams that sheltered the ships. Week succeeded week. At the end of three weeks the path of the planet had been turned till it was headed directly for the heart of the gigantic, pulsing disc below. Simultaneously news came from Cornal that the Myryan collector rays were all installed for the protection of the cities. Another month would be required before the electrolytic devices were finished.

	At the end of four and a half weeks, the fleet left Ranlor. The Nova and two astronomers' ships remained on the runaway planet. Her surface still glowed with fierce heat, and above loomed the gigantic blue-white disc of flame.

	She was rotating now, for the first time visibly, for the tidal action had long since damped her axial rotation till a year and a day were the same to her. Now, headed directly toward Torka, her rotation became apparent. Incredibly jagged, harsh rocks of the night side were shifting and cracking to fall in colossal, soundless slides.

	The last ships left, and returned to a changed Cornal, a world prepared to survive the exploding of a sun. A world tensely waiting.

	Darak, on the contrary, was a seething mass of Seeset, rioting and killing. There were some ships left, and the riots were about these. The ships had been overloaded, crowded, and the favored Seeset had taken off for one of the four tiny planetoids that revolved at tremendous distances from Torka. They hoped survival might be possible out there.

	The planetoids were being hollowed out by crumbler rays, and lined with a thin, air-tight metal wall. Perhaps, in the four planetoids, a tenth of the population of Darak could be crowded.

	The plates Aarn had captured from Dar-tan had been examined, catalogued, measured, and compared with the Terrestrial plates. The problem had been solved finally, and Sol had been located, a faint, barely visible G-O star nearly three hundred light years away. The Nova had been prepared, and loaded for her long trip, but Aarn delayed his departure waiting to see the last catastrophe.

	Ranlor approached her doom with what seemed to be majestic slowness. Gradually her temperature mounted, from a dull red to an orange, finally white, and at last blue-hot. She became a mass of seething, pressing gas, but while bound in the terrific anti-gravity field the Tornan ships had set up about her, she could not expand. Vast tongues of flame reached out toward her, licked hungrily, fell back. Unhindered, Ranlor marched on. A dark spot against the incredible heat of Torka she burrowed her way in. Ten—twenty—fifty—a hundred thousand miles. Then the black spot vanished, and a titanic sun-spot appeared. Somewhere far below, the cold, icy planet was absorbing energy from the incredibly hot gases and chilling them to such low temperatures that they ceased radiating in the near X-ray, and cooled to ultra-violet temperatures as their electrons fell back into orbits. A terrific, sucking collapse was going on. Still the tremendous energy of that anti-gravity field held Ranlor together.

	"That field," said Aarn, "won't break down till Ranlor has reached the active heart of Torka. Ranlor is terrifically denser than those gases, and her momentum will carry her deep, while the condensation of stellar matter on her cold surface will keep pushing her deeper and deeper, making her larger and larger. Eventually that field will open out and Ranlor will explode."

	The fourth day, the regular pulse of Torka had changed. It was fluttering, rough. The fifth day, it reached a peak, fluttered there momentarily, then the radiation increased again slightly. By the seventh day the rate of increase was terrific. Torka was expanding visibly. It was brighter now than before, and even bluer. It increased at an appalling rate, a speed that represented a terrific explosion within a star. Faster than sound waves ever moved, the explosive force was plunging out from Torka's heart. Hourly they could see the change.

	The eighth day, the prominences began to show the terrible explosive action. They began to reach out thickly; then the bases of the prominences moved up, and only the rapid expansion of those tongues of flame kept them from being swallowed. Moving at nearly three thousand miles a second, the titanic flames reached out toward Marnol, planet Two. Evidently the attraction of the planet was drawing them onward. They stretched, and the whole sun expanded.

	On the tenth day, Marnol was touched by the flame, and instantly the entire atmosphere of the planet flared up. In fifteen minutes Marnol was lost in a flame three hundred thousand miles wide, and fifty thousand thick at the tip. The flame bent, broke from Torka at the base, and closed in on Marnol. In twelve hours a second had started toward it, and the first, cooling and contracting, had made Marnol a ball of molten rock and metal no longer five thousand miles in diameter—but forty-five thousand!

	It had been turned from its orbit by this acquisition of mass, and was falling obliquely toward Torka as the second flame hit it.

	Two days later the flame, an even greater one than the first, retreated toward Torka. Marnol was gone, part of the streaming matter that fell back toward the rapidly expanding Torka. Already the surface had reached the orbit of Ranlor.

	Darak was a dead planet. A thin mist still swirled about her, a mist composed of the vanishing seas, seas boiling furiously on the hot rocks. The vast forests had disappeared in thin flames, almost smokeless, as the superheated air combined with the superheated wood. The ground was smoking now as the humus in it oxidized. There were no rains, only the stupendous, steady evaporation of the seas. Terrific winds whipped and tore at the smoking surface. The smoke had stopped along the equator by the time the rushing winds and vast, swirling clouds of vapor from the vanishing seas of Cornal made vision impossible from the planet. Instead, a faint glow became evident.

	Torka stopped expanding just beyond the orbit of Ranlor. Then it began to grow hotter and hotter. The swift expansion had cooled it to an almost yellowish state. Now it was heating again to a bluish color as the terrific forces deep within it sought readjustment.

	Cornal's seas had vanished, when Aarn decided to leave. The experiment had reached its final stage, and Torka would burn thus for years before finally sinking to its new, stable state.

	"Your cooling systems are working perfectly," he told Mart Toral, "you are comfortable—more so, I think, than while the Seeset were attacking you. At any rate, you are established. I have another duty to perform—so I must leave for home."

	They left from the cooled, sub-surface city where the Nova had been made. No ships were venturing outside unnecessarily now. A great crowd of Tornans watched them leave through the airlocks, and vanish, faster than light, into space.

	"And what," asked Spencer, "is the duty you mentioned, other than that of getting so important a citizen as myself back on Earth where he belongs?"

	"Getting so important a citizen as Anto Rayl to Earth, instead of lost in space the way we were. He said they'd be making a trip through from Magya to Earth in a year. Do you realize that eight and a half months have passed? I have to make calculations from Earth, go through to Magya, and warn Anto Rayl and give him corrected data."

	They approached the Solar System at a speed less than that of light, on their momentum wave drive. Somewhere between Neptune and Uranus a slim, swift ship met them, a ship some eight hundred feet long, a good third smaller than the Nova. It was a glistening steel hull, and on its bow was the designation "I. C. C. 256". Below that was the insignia of the Interplanetary Council.

	A radio beam on the Standard Communications Channel came into the speaker of the Nova. "Halt for investigation, by order of the Interplanetary Council. What ship, and where from?"

	Aarn smiled gently as he flipped a tumbler over. "Brother, this ship is the Nova, and it's from so far away I couldn't even tell you. I happen to be Aarn Munro, accompanied by Russel M. Spencer and Donald G. Carlisle. We tested out the first momentum-wave ship, and, as you may remember, didn't come back. I see somebody else tested it out—successfully. How long have we been missing? We've been where time doesn't run the same way."

	"Spencer—Munro—Carlisle—" gasped the voice at the other end. Abruptly it became sharp. "Impossible. They died three and a half years ago."

	Aarn chuckled. "Come on home, and we'll tell the Commander."

	The I.C. C. 256 was suddenly clutched in a combined tractor-pressor beam that had been designed to handle such things as Seeset super-battleships. A rotating magnetic field spun it around in the direction of Earth, and the two ships flashed forward.

	Aarn's gray eyes twinkled with slumbering humor. "I wonder what the I. C. C. made out of it?"

	The cruiser abruptly started fighting. Transpons lashed out angrily at the Nova, and flared against Aarn's defense conductor shield. "You couldn't soften our outer shell with a toy like that, even if I let you touch it," Aarn informed the cruiser gently. "Try again." Several forms of material destruction rained on the Nova. Most of them stopped dead in the outer magnetic wall, but one type, evidently equipped with neutralizing devices, slipped through, and exploded violently—and harmlessly—against the resistium wall. A heat ray followed, radio frequency energy. Aarn neutralized it.

	"Pretty good, Captain. But really — old Earth would be rather hard put if the fellows we've been playing with paid a visit. Now take that planetoid off there," said Aarn, taking it on a tractor beam. "In the first place, you need better transpons." The planetoid exploded into incandescent gas under Aarn's beams. "Second, you need some bombs of a different sort, a gravity bomb for instance. Let's put that back together, Spence." A gravity bomb exploded in the region of the gaseous planetoid, abruptly sucking the flying molecules back to a sphereoid again. "Then again, one of these space-cups would cat up anything you've got." A Seeset space-cup floated out, green and malignant, and vanished with a huge mouthful of the matter. "I'll even show you my best weapon."

	The milky opalescent ray reached out for the tenth part of a second, and the planetoid was a clear shining gas cloud in space, that not even a gravitational bomb would have been able to recondense.

	"In other words," Aarn finished, "we're friends, and mighty glad to see you and Earth again."

-

BOOK THREE - THE INFINITE ATOM

Prologue

	Zhi Athron looked anxiously toward the western sky. It was forbiddingly black; in all the expanse of the western, northern, and southern skies there were only two faint, clouded stars, and one planet's point-like disc— and the ever-present, ever-menacing meteors. There were five luminous trails in the sky—seven now—twelve—four—but always some. It would be almost impossible to spot the moving light of the ship for which he watched.

	Before him on the field loomed the great dull-gleaming hull of the expedition ship, silvery in the light of the countless clustered stars in the eastern sky, where the Black Nebula had not yet wiped out light. A long line of slaves was carrying smaller crates of supplies into the ship; a few were operating handling machines from which dangled huge boxes and barrels of food.

	"Web Thorn still has ten minutes," said a low voice behind him. Zhi Athron swung around to see the dim outline of Tha Yory, the Chief Engineer. "He will use all ten, I suspect."

	"He will," smiled Zhi Athron, "poor fellow. Shalmar Aien will be hard to leave—for twenty-five years."

	"It seems unjust. Shalmar Aien is his mate and his love as truly as any free-born wife might be—but simply because she is a freed slave, he was eligible for the draft."

	Zhi Athron ran his fingers through his stiff, iron-grey mane and nodded. "But it is necessary. Everyone who disliked the duty could find a slave to claim as wife if they allowed that. Twenty-five years is a long wait—but less than a twentieth of an average lifetime. I have seen nineteen such periods come and go. Four hundred and seventy-seven years."

	"Was the world much different then?" asked the younger Chief Engineer dreamily, looking up to the bright sky in the east.

	"Not vastly, really—or yet, I suppose it was. The Black Nebula has spread so slowly through the years, blotting out more and more sky, that we cannot remember its spread. When I was born, only the west was dark. The sun was not quite so hot then, either. There were seldom more than two meteors in a minute that were visible. Conditions change so slowly—"

	"I wonder if the end will come before my death?"

	"No one knows. The sun's direct gravitational sweep reaches out half a light-year into the Black Nebula to draw in those iron particles, and the concentration that causes, spreads the disturbance another half light-year. Billions of tons of them falling into the sun every day—each so minute it is scarcely visible to the naked eye. Millions of tons of them will fall on the planets every day when we pass into the heart of the Black Nebula. The sun will grow in mass, and burn hotter; the planets will grow in mass, and slow down in their orbits as they swing through the resisting medium. In the end—all will unite in a single great luminous sphere. Sometime, perhaps it will be stirred again —and a new planetary system born. But in the meantime—we had best seek another system.

	"Are the supplies about in—we leave in an hour."

	"Yes," grumbled the engineer. "Look at it—twelve hundred feet long. Half a million tons. We get our power by transpon beams tapping any sun, so we carry no fuel. We drive it with momentum waves, and don't have to carry rocket discharge mass. We rectify the air, and use it time after time; we recover water, so we need no great water supplies. And still—I can't carry a decent supply of spares. And I'll need 'em. Look at the gang of theorists I've got to work with! Astronomers I'll have to rely on for navigators. Physics research scholars for electricians. Chemical geniuses for rectification technics. Two laboratory mechanicians for repair technics. Watch that crew wreck stuff— and no spares to replace them with. Great spaces—and we plan to go as much as 25,000 light-years from home!"

	Zhi Athron smiled. "Sorry, Tha Yory. It cannot be helped. Our ships long ago explored everything within two thousand light years. We know that for planets, we must have stellar near-passages, and these occur only where star-fields are dense, near the heart of the galaxy. To make twenty-five thousand light-year ranges, and explore all the stars we must, twenty-five years are a minimum, as you well know. You can cut down the foods, and have more spares—but what good is a fine ship to dead men?"

	"I know—I know," groaned the engineer. "But they might have given us more real spacers, and fewer theorists."

	"I agree on that," admitted Zhi Athron, "but the Rulers probably considered things, and of the seventy-eight expeditions that have gone out, seventy-two came back on time."

	"This expedition won't," said Tha Yory. "I know it." He lapsed into grim silence.

	"Web Thorn is about—" Zhi Athron froze suddenly. A deep roaring siren started; it mounted—mounted—and the higher it went, the darker became Zhi Athron's face. Higher—a titanic meteor on the way—higher—then at an almost inaudible pitch it broke with three short shrills of sound.

	"The west—" he gasped. "Web Thorn is due from the west—" Zhi Athron looked off toward the dim western sky—a moving light—then all was lost in a sudden growing, fierce glow, a tremendous glow beating straight toward them—a titanic, exploding flame that began to throw off heat. All the landscape was lighted till the field and the ship and the great construction sheds loomed bright in its glow. The far mountains even were lighted!

	There were shouts and cries from the slaves who had been loading the ship. They were racing for shelter now, the last few cases of supplies dropped heedlessly. The roar of transpon beams going into action came from the lock of the ship, the anchoring tractor beams played out abruptly as Zhi Athron and Tha Yory ran suddenly for the ship.

	The heat was terrific now, unbearable. It scorched their broad backs as they ran.

	A titanic, world-rocking explosion threw them flat to the ground as the very planet trembled. The heat grew even more fiercely burning, the glare became blinding. There was a new sound, a shrill, screaming roar, a vast wind in the making. Dull lightnings began to play from swift-gathering clouds.

	Bruised, the two rose to their feet, and started on. Then the ground heaved horribly; it rocked, and cracked before them. The roar of a crumbling building echoed, and the fierce glare died for an instant, to return, dull and red. Then the wind. Painfully they regained their feet, and started toward the ship, looming dully red ahead of them now.

	A cold, fitful breeze snapped around them. Far away they could hear the dull moan of a rising gale. Another gust caught them, snapped angrily at their faces, blowing Zhi Athron's grey mane straight out from his head. Tha Yory was making slightly better time than the older Zhi Athron. In the dull red glow in the west, they could see the great timber lands bow suddenly in a wave, a wave that sped toward them at terrifying speed, with a mounting, bellowing roar. Giant trees snapped with the crackle of a string of Titan's fire-crackers, to leap into the rushing air and tumble off across the country in a wild dance.

	Zhi Athron flung himself to the ground a second before the wind hit. Tha Yory ran on—and tumbled suddenly backward, rolling wildly with threshing arms and legs as the wind toppled him over, and struck with an explosion of appalling sound. A torrid, blistering gale lashed them mercilessly. The turf underfoot shrilled in a strange high protest as it shifted and moved, invisible fingers clawing the soil out from the roots, and twisting the grasses away in thick clouds. Grimly Zhi Athron reached forth his two powerful arms and set his legs into the soft ground, as Tha Yory came hurtling back.

	He caught him, and was nearly dragged away with him before his Chief Engineer had settled himself. Then painfully they forced their way toward the lee of the great ship, rocking now in the mighty wind despite its tractor-beam anchors. A construction shed somewhere to the west shrieked as timbers parted, rose in the air, and flew straight toward the mighty metal hull. The crash as it struck echoed for the briefest fraction of a second before the wind snatched it and the flying timbers away, high over the heads of the crouching figures on the ground.

	"I told you—" roared Tha Yory, his voice drowned out by the wind, and snatched from him before the words left his mouth, "this expedition—was doomed—" Zhi Athron couldn't hear. He labored heavily forward.

	The wind was growing hotter, painfully hotter. In it now was stinging smoke from flaming forests. A sudden gust, even more violent, laughed at Zhi Athron's weight of nearly seven hundred and sixty pounds, hurling him fifty feet before he again clutched the turf, and labored forward. Tha Yory waited for him, and they joined hands.

	They were gasping and smarting when they reached the lee of the ship. The going was harder here, for the wind was turbulent, not a streaming roaring current. Rain fell suddenly, torrentially, a hot rain that rasped their skins like grains of sand. They were bruised and scratched, bleeding in a hundred places when they entered the lee of the ship—and fell gasping for breath in the semi-vacuum behind the quivering, straining craft. Not a scrap of clothing remained on their bodies; only here and there a stout metal or leather belt still held.

	A lock opened, and they climbed into it hurriedly. In seconds it was closed, and normal pressure of sixteen pounds returned. Zhi Athron ran swiftly to the control room, his face clouded. He heard a radio report as he entered. "—nage of 75,000. It landed about 85 miles west of Tharcool Spaceport, one hundred and forty east of Dargath. Timber within a radius of thirty miles is aflame and—"

	Zhi Athron tuned it out as he threw the dials over. A call went forth, insistent. Another—for thirty seconds he called, then listened for thirty more—thirty seconds of calling—"He is dead," sighed the old Captain. "Web Thorn must have been struck almost directly by that vast thing—"

	Tha Yory was behind him. "And we leave in thirty-five minutes. We'll have to signal at once for another First Assistant."

	Zhi Athron shook his head slowly. "No," he decided, "that would be useless, and—cruel. Shalmar Aien has lost her mate— to the Expedition she thinks. He is dead—uselessly. Besides, we could not get another First Assistant in this time. We must go without one."

	Tha Yory groaned. "Out of forty men, one is dead before we start. And that leaves only seven spacers—seven capable space workers. Well—it would be cruel. Another good spacer would die in this ship. This ship is never coming back."

-

	Space about the ship was studded with stars, thousands, tens of thousands, more than the eye could comprehend. And directly before them, a greenish star shone blindingly brilliant Nar Arlon looked at it with scowling face. "That," he said at length, "will make the seven thousand, eight hundred and fifty-seventh star we have investigated. Not counting long-distance investigations, and excluding doubles and variables, giants and dwarfs. Eleven and a half years of this travelling faster than light —rushing through space from star to star. A brief hectic period of glare and examination, search and study, then another dash to another star for more examination, and another charge of power to reach the next sun. Eleven and a half years away from home. My eldest children will be mated by now. With children of their own. And less than half this course is run."

	Zhi Athron looked at his First Assistant steadily. "Not necessarily, Nar Arlon. It may be that this star will be the one that will send us home at the limit of our speed, with the news that a planetary system has been found, a planetary system to which your children and your children's children can move and live out all their life-times in safety."

	"Yes—and perhaps to find, when we get there, that the expedition that came in the year we left brought the news, and that those children and those children's children are already safe and busy on a new planet."

	"Has Bar Scorth sent in his distance calculations?" asked the Captain, changing the subject.

	"Aye, sir. We will reach planetary distance in about an hour."

	Silently Zhi Athron nodded, and went back to the power room. Tha Yory was working over the small lathes on one side of the room, with a laboratory mechanician, and with much cursing.

	"You imbecile—you sub-normal idiot! Can't you see that is a reverse pattern? Can't you remember that what is a projection here is to be a countersink in the metal? Ahrrrr—teach me— teach me how to work that machine that I may teach you your craft. Must I not only make the patterns, but make the metals too?" Tha Yory stopped as Zhi Athron appeared smiling.

	"He finds the work more difficult, Tha Yory, because he is used to working from pattern-drawings."

	"But the blundering error of Nature can't cut from pattern, and I can't draw plans, and neither can any one else around so far as I can see."

	"What part is it? Have we had so many breakdowns as to exhaust the spare parts list?"

	"No," replied Tha Yory, "but like any good engineer when I have a crew that doesn't yet know the difference between the theoretical limits and the factor of safety, I intend to keep up my store-room—such as it is. I'm working on some other spares, too, some that were too big to carry, when we started, but can now be carried in the exhausted store rooms."

	"Ah, then that is why you swept in those tons of meteoric material when we stopped at that star back there," Zhi Athron nodded. "What in particular are you aiming at?"

	"Spare high-speed apparatus. We have only five different parts for that—and if we had an accident that smashed it, and the machine shop too, we'd be lost forever. If it happened between stars, unless we have a supply of metal a lot bigger than we have, we'd never return to home.

	"And Zhi Athron—I feel it—every day I feel it—we're never going home. But I must keep trying."

	"It is foolish, Tha Yory, to think that. For eleven years you have been saying that—and nothing more serious than a cracked cylinder in the air rectifier has menaced us so far."

	"There are thirteen and a half years to go," Tha Yory replied, grimly returning to his blasphemy of the mechanician.

	"We are nearing another sun, you know, Tha Yory. Be prepared for action as directed." Zhi Athron returned to the control room.

	In an hour the sun had grown to proportions that made it give an appreciable heat in the ship. At perhaps two billions of miles the ship was slowed, and the speed dropped to far less than that of light, perhaps a thousand miles a second.

	Then the astronomers and physicists got busy. In moments the dozen or so instruments the ship carried were focused on the star. The rotational velocity was determined, the distance, the spectral type, the temperature of the surface, and finally they trooped to the control room with their readings. The ship's great engines were needed in the next tests, the final tests. First, the gravitometer hook-up was arranged, the ship's anti-gravity field varied, and plottings made, then finally the momentumometer was activated.

	For five busy minutes the mathematical machines worked— then a sudden, incredulous cry of joy went up. The star must have planets of large size! The rotary momentum of the sun was scores of times what it should have been, had it alone been registering.

	Frantically they went to work with the instruments, and in another twenty minutes nine planets had been located, as well as indications of some sort of other planetary body, or additional swarm of planets.

	Voices chattered—buzzed—chortled in glee. A planetary system had been found! Of all the expeditions, they perhaps were the first! With intense concentration the physicists and astronomers went to work with the gravitometer and momentumometer and the telescopes. These were the best instruments for charting the orbits, determining the mass, and so forth. Next would come actual visits to the planets in turn. Then—home!

	They settled to the plane of the ecliptic of the newly discovered system, and they drifted there, with their momentum wave energies at work in the momentumometer, their anti-gravity coils that freed the ship of a sun's pull, cut out. And only the magnetic shield spread out about them, for all eyes were intense on the data being discovered. An instantaneous, incredible flash—a snapping crack sharper than any rifle's crack—a roar and gush of air—the clang of bulkhead doors.

	Utter silence fell. The chattering, joyous voices died in sudden horror. A stony meteor—

	"A stony meteor—" gasped the chief Physicist, "a stony meteor—no metal—went right through the magnetic screen—no momentum wave field, no anti-gravity field—" A roar of voices broke again, dull and horrified. An accident—destruction at their moment of triumph—

	"Silence!" roared Zhi Athron's great voice. "Silence, you fools. Listen to me!" Silence fell slowly, a low muttering wailing persisting. "Now—Bar Scorth, the emergency suits. Thon Rait—the pumps. Test the accumulators, Scol Rano." Zhi Athron was already at the control board. With a sweep of a mighty arm, he shoved aside the startled scientists. Two hundred years in the Interplanetary Service had fitted him for emergencies. A practiced eye ran over the instruments, and in a moment his mind interpreted them.

	Bar Scorth appeared with an emergency suit. Already the air was thinning as the great pumps sucked it into the storage tanks. Zhi Athron struggled into the suit, then with two others of the basic spacer crew, ones who knew space technique, he was at the power room bulkhead. It was closed. Here was the puncture.

	The door opened protestingly as Zhi Athron took the controls. Thinned air rushed shrilling out through the two gaps in the power-room walls. Three motionless figures lay on the floor, and with a gesture, Zhi Athron stooped to one of them. With the aid of another suited spacer he was carried swiftly to the fore quarters; then the others were brought. The bulkhead slammed shut again, and the four spacers were in the airless power room while the scientists fell to work on the unconscious ones. In minutes the three were beginning to move again, uninjured by the brief period without air to breath.

	In the power room Zhi Athron fell to work. Under his directions, the great patch-plates were fixed in place. A hand transpon projector was hooked into the main power-storage lines, then a blazing pencil of incandescence welded the patches in place. In two minutes the bulkhead doors were reopened, and air allowed into the sealed power room.

	"Where's Tha Yory?" demanded Zhi Athron.

	"Tha Yory—I saw him—go out," said a gasping voice. "He was standing near the path of the meteor—the air—swept him out!"

	Zhi Athron groaned. "Our only practical engineer! Come— you physicists now, you will have to tell us the damage done."

	He knew pretty well himself. He could see the apparatus, and the almost clean round holes the meteor had made. Travelling at almost 1000 miles a second it had smashed through those mechanisms so cleanly that only fused rounded edges remained. It had crashed through an egg-shell thin glass tube, and made a neat, smooth-edged hole. But—it had crashed neatly through the high speed apparatus, and through the momentum-drive control.

	The physicists reported that, and one additional fact. The meteor had been broken; a chip perhaps, slowed so much in ripping its way through the outer ship wall, the inner hull, the various storage room walls, that, its speed almost spent—it fairly exploded in the anti-gravity coil!

	"Then," said Zhi Athron grimly, "we have no power?"

	"None," replied the physicist.

	"Well, we must restore the momentum drive first. Come."

	It was easily said. But while there were spare parts, while these physicists knew perfectly the theory of the momentum wave drive apparatus, while they had even been working with it for the last eleven and a half years—they had been working under the able direction of Tha Yory. And Tha Yory was not there. Not for nothing had Zhi Athron spent two hundred years working space liners. But even with his help it was a poor job they did. And there were no spare parts for the speed drive, and there was no such thing as a spare anti-gravity coil—a spare coil thirty feet in diameter!

	Miserably they tried out the momentum drive. It worked, worked enough for the needs of the moment. The ship was slowed, and they started for a planet, the third planet out, where temperatures and living conditions might be bearable. Some seventy-five hundred miles in diameter, their astronomers had estimated it, about five hundred less than their own, but the astronomers admitted their data was poor, and probably somewhat inaccurate.

	The ship handled fairly well in space; and not until they drew near the planet did they fully realize their loss in not having the anti-gravity coil. The ship was riding in on the momentum wave apparatus, apparatus designed to drive it with lashing accelerations a million times as great as the acceleration of a planet's gravity.

	And worst of all, they had made some slight slip, some slip they could not find, and there was an inefficiency in the apparatus, perhaps ten percent—but when half a billion horsepower are needed, then ten percent means flaming arcs of fifty million horsepower. They had placed grounds to handle the leaking currents, but the grounds glowed white hot in moments, and the heat stifled them. For not more than twenty seconds at a time could they operate the drive. In surges, they slowed their ship, and in surges they maneuvered it to the planet.

	Then came the task of making a landing with their horribly defective apparatus. Zhi Athron himself handled the controls, but the astronomers calculated poorly, and the gravitometer and momentumometer were no longer available. They neared the planet with a speed still approaching thirty miles a second. Desperately Zhi Athron drove the momentum waves into action, but the heating forced him to ease it. The first thin traces of the atmosphere were cold and yet heated them, but at Zhi Athron's order, the power room was cleared of living beings, and only the inanimate machines were left. The room was thrown open, the locks and the sealing plugs pulled free. The thin, keening blast of an incredible wind swept in—wind that was almost a perfect vacuum, yet screaming through at thirty miles a second. It helped to cool the power room, and Zhi Athron could use more power. They swept around the world, slowing more and more, as the ship was able to drop lower, where denser air cooled more swiftly. But even so they were limited. Zhi Athron turned the ship downward. As he maneuvered desperately, the chemists worked swiftly with the air, trying to determine its characteristics.

	"Hydrogen—free hydrogen and oxygen in explosive mixture," reported the Chief Chemist. "There must be plenty of oxygen, at any rate, to find it so high."

	Zhi Athron said nothing as he continued slanting downward. Instruments told him of internal heating in his apparatus, that the air-blasts could not cool. The speed was still a mile a second, as they dropped to a level where the air resistance acted like a mighty brake. A flash of dull-green-grey water shot beneath, followed by a vast silvery cloud bank. "Breathable air!" a chemist called.

	"Open all ports," snapped Zhi Athron. A new, stronger blast of air came in, air that was thin, and bitingly cold, carrying strange, wet odors, and strange, spicy smells. A natural air, not the re-breathed air they had inhaled for the past eleven and a half years.

	They shivered in its blast, then suddenly they were blinded and wet and cold as the ship plowed into a vast mass of cloud. Zhi Athron's face grew taut as he applied braking power, blindly. The ship slowed more, and a warming heat began to beat out at them through the closed bulkhead of the power room. A sonic altimeter was started, and Zhi Athron read it with distrust. What were the sonic properties of this air? It showed an elevation of three miles—and that was not enough for safety. Desperately, he applied power that brought the ship to a sudden halt. And simultaneously there was a terrific roar from behind. The patched machine failed completely, as, with startled eyes, Zhi Athron saw the altimeter needle hanging almost over the zero mark. He tensed his powerful body, and bent his knees for the shock—

	The breeze of their passage had ceased as they stopped. Now a new wind started, and the clouds began to rush past them again in billowing masses. For an instant they cleared, and rain, torrential rain, beat down about the ship—and below loomed great jagged boulders! With a world-shaking roar, half a million tons of metal and glass and insulation struck the solid granite rocks. The ship flattened, and split like a rotten fruit.

	Twenty-two figures crawled out of it. Zhi Athron led them, his small surviving troupe. The five remaining spacers behind him, the scientists miserably trailing. They looked back at the ship. Through pouring rain, they saw half the great thing broken and split on their level, the other half completely torn from it, and on a lower level, fallen over a cliff.

	"The artificial gravity discs worked to the last," sighed Zhi Athron. "They saved some of us."

	"Night is coming," said one of the astronomers, in a hopeless voice. "Can we find some shelter and warmth in the ruin?"

	"How long is the night here?" asked Zhi Athron.

	"I don't know—about the same as ours, perhaps a little shorter, some nine hours to ten hours."

	"Does it always rain?"

	"No—it should be much like our climate. Though one cannot tell, for we have deserts where it never rains, and tropics where it rains every day. But—will we find any warmth in the ship?"

	Zhi Athron looked the hulk over carefully. "The forward power-coil storage bank should be intact. Perhaps we can find some heaters."

	They searched through the ruined ship, and gradually gathered necessary things. Three of them climbed down precariously to the rear half of the ship, and with ropes and cables, hoisted a stove and some cases of foods to the main group above. There were charged coils, and heaters, and one room with only a slight crack in the ceiling. The adjacent room, too, was in good condition. A transpon-handset was found, the partition cut out, and welded over the cracks. The stove was set up, and a meal prepared. Night had fallen now, and still the rain beat down, cold and wet and dreary. Lightnings flashed off to the south, illuminating in brief outline the wild crags of the mountain on which they had landed. Only two unbroken light-tubes had been found, and these glowed dimly in the huge metal room.

	The hours of the wet, dreary night passed, and at last, as faint light began to filter through the clouds, the rain ceased. A wind sprang up, cold and moist, and the clouds scudded by overhead. Then breaks began to appear, the clouds became patchy with lighter and darker spots.

	When dawn came, the sky had cleared, and the disc of the sun was visible as it rose from the land below them, distorted and red. The land turned green as the sun crept higher, the sky gradually becoming a deeper and deeper blue, and the warm rays of the sun slowly dispelling the chill of the night.

	The twenty-two who greeted this first dawn on a wild and inhospitable, an utterly strange world, were a disconsolate, hopeless group standing beside a cracked and broken ship that had brought them across countless light years of space, to land them at last, alone and utterly without hope of return. Only bare, craggy granite was about them. Below, a trackless forest.

	Then—something stirred! Something near them, and they turned with a start to see a strange creature disappear around a point of rock. Instantly five of the younger ones were after it, before Zhi Athron's warning could stop them. They rounded the rock at a gallop, to see the strange creature fleeing down the mountainside with an agility and speed that defied them, till at last he came to a gully, where the broken, but more level ground permitted them to overtake him. A strange creature, that turned on them savagely—with a tool—a weapon! Swiftly two of them disarmed him, and captured him, to carry him back to the group above that were watching him.

	A strange creature! It had but jour limbs! Two hands, quite normal, quite like their own, on arms quite like their own, but the body was a straight, oval cylinder, and was supported by but two legs, legs almost exactly like the arms, but for their greater length, and greater strength and size. The head was almost exactly like their own, rounded, with two eyes, one nose, straight and small, a mouth, two ears, one on each side of the head. The face was a perfect replica of their own! But it had hair only on the top of its head, not a mane extending half down the neck to the shoulders.

	Zhi Athron stared at the creature. "What manner of thing is it?" he gasped. "It must be intelligent."

	"It is," exclaimed one of its captors, "it had a sharp metal blade—bronze, I take it." He wiped a long gash across the side of his trunk as he spoke, from which blood was beginning to flow. "And he has clothes, and probably other tools."

	"Were there others?"

	"We saw none."

	"Ayhu—set him on his feet that we may see him, and stand beside him."

	Side by side they stood, Yal Dorn, and the creature of this world. Seven hundred and fifty pounds Yal Dorn weighed, his weight distributed on his four powerful legs, with their absurdly tiny feet—incredibly fleet feet, though—feet that would carry him a mile in thirty-five seconds when he wished, his fore-trunk curving upward in a powerful arch to support the massive head, and the broad, muscular shoulders. His chest, between the mid-limbs, was deep and wide, his horizontal back, between the mid-limbs and the hind-limbs, broad, and rippling with smooth muscles. Beneath the loose-fitting clothes, the hair on his back lay smooth and glossy, a rich brown. From the ground to the top of his head he stood some five and a half feet.

	This strange creature was, beneath his clothing of some rough, stinking, half-tanned leather, completely hairless, or very nearly so. He stood vertically on his hind-limbs, balancing evidently with wonderful dexterity.

	"Amazing!" exclaimed Rath Duro, the biologist. "He is evidently developed from an entirely different line of evolution. Why, I wager that this four-limbed type goes back through all their evolution to the earliest fishes! See how simple it might have been—suppose that the fishes had developed not six, but four fins on our world. Then, when they crawled out on land, instead of six-legged creatures, there would have been four-legged creatures. So simple a difference—"

	"But how can he walk? Think—when he runs, half the time he must balance on one foot! And with fifty percent of his motive power continually out of service, he could not possibly make speed enough to escape his enemies."

	"You think so?" laughed Yal Dorn. "I tell you, had there been more of this mountain, he'd have escaped us. His agility in among those rocks was beyond belief!"

	"Exactly," exclaimed the biologist smiling broadly, "I am sure he must depend on his climbing ability. See, with the light weight—he cannot weigh more than a hundred and fifty pounds —and the prehensile hands and feet—he could climb through a tree with agility that would save him from any greater animals."

	"But his feet aren't prehensile," objected Yal Dorn, "he couldn't hold with those short fingers."

	"No matter—he is intelligent now. No doubt his early ancestors did."

	Zhi Athron shook his head slowly. "He is an amazing creature, at any rate. Such a spindly thing. And such great clumsy feet!"

	"He probably can't run fast," a physicist commented. "With those great heavy feet on the end of his legs, the pendulum action would be so slow that—Look."

	On an adjacent rock, another creature had appeared. A creature that was white, and heavily haired, a small creature some three feet high, and equipped with a pair of sharp horns. Instantly Yal Dorn was away after it, and a half dozen others. They stopped within a hundred yards as they gaped open-mouthed at the little animal. If the captured man had been agile—the goat had wings! He balanced on rocks less than four inches across, leaped to others a score of feet away, and ran on the level at a speed that nearly equalled theirs.

	A roar of laughter recalled the chagrined hunters. "Not all these creatures seem so slow," laughed Zhi Athron as they returned with dejected faces.

	Their captive decided this was his chance. This time he went up. He scaled a rocky wall with an abandon and skill that defied the efforts of the heavier Centaurs. In seconds he had topped a rise, ducked behind a rock, and was out of sight.

	Zhi Athron looked after him with some sorrow. "He was at least intelligent to some extent. We must somehow establish contact with these creatures if we are to do anything."

-

	Most of the apparatus had been cleared out of the machine-shop-engine-room, and the machines set up again in one of the repaired rooms. An office had been established for the physicists, and an observatory for the astronomers. A score of the barbaric men were toiling nearby, under the directions of one of the chemists, erecting a furnace wherein metal could be melted down, while another score or so worked at a casting bed. Four Centaurs were working over the drawing-tables in the office.

	The skill Tha Yory had discounted, and cursed, was being put to use now. These laboratory mechanicians who were so poor at cutting out his patterns were at work on the pattern-drawings of the physicists. And the physicists were at work converting their calculations, and the data the astronomers gave them into pattern drawings. Zhi Athron was at one side, talking to a young barbarian. His stinking hides had been removed, and replaced by some clothes made from a cut up Centaur's garment. There was little for Zi Athron to do now. He had finished his report, the astronomers and physicists were working on theirs.

	And off to one side, half a dozen Centaurs were hard at work on a cylindrical metal thing, their hand transpons glowing in white-hot needle beams. Slowly a ten-foot long torpedo was growing into being under their hands.

	Zhi Athron left his place as a call came from one of the astronomers. A technical bit that required the advice of the old space-ship captain.

	At last Zhi Athron moved on to the group of physicists.

	"Do you think you will be able to do it?" he asked at length.

	"Certainly. It is only a very delicate instrument. Ah—we could use Tha Yory now, but for all his complaining at our inefficiency as spacers, I think he would admit this was something to prove our worth!"

	"Yes, he would. Tha Yory was just in his appraisal. And—" Zhi Athron looked toward the dismantled hull of the broken ship "—he was not so far wrong, I am afraid." Zhi Athron looked toward the broken metal for some moments. "Have you calculated exactly how long it will take?"

	The physicist shrugged. "Impossible. It is a question of power. The greater power available to build up the speed-fields, the greater speed will be obtained. We cannot tap this sun for power, through this thick atmosphere. We have only the power left in the storage coils. Already more than six months have passed, and that power is slowly, inevitably leaking. And four banks of coils were ruined. There is an outside limit to our power, and in the meantime, we must draw on that power for these transpon welders, for the cutting machines—and for the casting operations. I cannot tell how much we will have. If— if, I say—all goes well, the ship should be able to make the trip in fifteen years. A return rescue ship could cross the space in five days."

	"Hmmm—then at least fifteen years will pass? Not too bad, however. You are all young, and I am so old time means little to me. How long will your construction work take?"

	"We are rushing it—it should not require more than a year, even with our crude tools."

	"The Ah-kaan slaves are not helpful?"

	"The Ah-kaans are useful for heavy work. No more," replied the physicist casting a scornful glance at the laboring men about the slowly forming melting furnace.

	"They have intelligence, sharp intelligence and sharp minds. It seems they have nearly as keen a mind as ours, save that it has never been trained, never stimulated. That young one I was speaking with—I will spend some time with him. Perhaps I can teach him somewhat of science, and learn from him more of these strange creatures. Certainly, when our people do come, these Ah-kaans will be useful slaves. In many tasks they might serve better than slaves of our own race. They are lighter, and more agile."

	The old Centaur trotted slowly away. The soft rasp of the metal-cutting tools came to him, as the delicate parts were cut out. It was a great task. He himself would scarcely have conceived it possible to make a machine, self contained and self powered, capable of guiding itself across the thousands of light years of space to the home star. A star so far away that it was actually invisible! But the astronomers and the physicists had convinced him they could do it, and laboriously he had written out his record of the trip, enclosed the metal sheets of his log, and sealed them in the metal cannister they had provided him. He was keeping a further record of these peoples now. He would send that too, when the time came.

-

	The air was cold, bitterly cold, and the soft white of the snow trampled and grayed. The welcome heat of the melting furnace was comforting to old Zhi Athron as he watched the men and Centaurs working about the great pot. Hundreds of pounds of silver were being melted, to be cast into billets, and drawn into the wire they needed for the speed-coils of the little ship. It was complete now, all but this. It had taken eighteen months, not twelve, and they had seen winter come, cold and wet, and give way to the heat of summer. And now winter was back. They no longer used the radiant heaters of the ship for warmth. They still lived in the metal rooms, protected in part by their insulation from the cold. Small charcoal fires supplied heat now. The coils were being rigidly spared. Every watt of energy would be needed.

	Old Zhi Athron looked on, and kept out of the way. They were working at top speed, for melting this metal, and keeping it hot and liquid required thousands on thousands of watts of energy, and every second meant a horrible drain on their coils.

	The metal had been stripped from the ruined coils of the old ship, broken, jagged pieces, pounded by the slaves into billets that would melt more readily. It was chemically pure silver, and must not be contaminated by the gases of charcoal fires, otherwise they would have used them.

	The metal was glowing white now, and Zhi Athron watched the scintillating stream spurt suddenly from the tap, into the prepared billet-molds. Instantly it was grasped by tongs, and slung to the waiting drawing machine. Before it could cool, it had been drawn down several sizes. Thereafter it would be cold drawn.

	The low, sharp commands of the Centaurs made little sound. The sputtering and roar of the transpons that sent their blasting heat into the metal made more. But slowly a sharp-voiced quarrel disturbed Zhi Athron's concentration. He looked up. Two Ah-kaan slaves were quarreling, bitterly denouncing each other. These Ah-kaan males were so given to quarreling. Zhi Athron started around the great furnace to stop them. Suddenly they were fighting, striking, wrestling. One of them was a great brute of a man, the other smaller, sharp-faced.

	And abruptly, with a shout of rage, the great brute charged. The little sharp-faced man was clever. He had been egging the stolid brute on to that charge. With incredible agility he sprang aside, ducked—and the larger man stumbled forward, a cry of horror on his lips as the great white-hot pot loomed near—a shrill scream of terror and agony on his lips as he plunged over the low rim and into the molten mass!

	Instantly there was an eruption of explosive violence, burning, white-hot metal shot out as the man's body was converted to steam. Two Centaurs went down screaming as ten-pound globules of the white-hot stuff sprayed over them. And the rest stood frozen in horror. Then a dull moan escaped them. The silver was useless—contaminated!

	The sharp-faced man trembled as he saw their hard, intensely angry eyes. He streaked away screaming for mercy as three of them came after him.

	The heating transpons were off when they brought him back.

	They stayed off now, for this silver was already contaminated and useless, and, very slowly, they were contaminating it further, to the tune of his screams, and the protests of Zhi Athron. 

-

	It was hot summer, and the merciless sun of Thessaly was beating down on the laboring women. Fifty of them. Fifty young women swinging their clumsy hammers rhythmically. Two Centaurs were standing guard over the pathways up to the mountain-side camp. There were small transpon-pistols in their hands, and a wary look in their eyes. The Ah-kaans had resented fiercely this taking of their women, and the slaughter of nearly one hundred of their men in the process. Old Zhi Athron had protested against it too, but he had lost his control of these Centaurs, young and intensely angry, completely independent of him now that the ship was wrecked, and they were the only ones capable of helpful action. They listened to him as an experienced philosopher and practical guide. But—there was one ghastly fact. New silver had to be taken from the wrecked ship, carefully cleaned and scraped, pounded up, and melted. Melted with the infinitely precious energy of the coils still left them.

	Quarreling, bickering men they refused to trust again. No more were they kindly in their treatment of slaves, as they had been. It was a harsh, heavy-handed discipline they enforced on these captive women now. So much as an angry word among themselves, and both were instantly shot through with a white-hot needle of a transpon pistol. The women, they had found, were less quarrelsome. So young, strong women did the work.

	But they had to maintain sentries now, for the men circled angrily about the camp, seeking always a chance to sweep in, kill a Centaur, or steal away one of the women.

	Zhi Athron's face was lined anew now. The young Ah-kaan in whom he had interested himself was the only male in the camp now, a subdued, frightened male, who made the situation more real to Zhi Athron every day.

	And now, Zhi Athron knew, he would never again see the home planet, Eaon. "That finishes it," Kal Pola had said, as the chief Physicist looked into the ruined pot of metal that day when the petty quarrel of two slaves blasted their hopes. "We must melt another potfull."

	"The ship couldn't make the trip now?" asked Zhi Athron.

	"It could. It can. But it will take nearly one hundred and fifty years at best, now. There will be barely enough power to establish the speed fields; surely not enough for really high speed. In three months we can melt new silver, and protect it, and build the coils. Then," he had added bitterly, "sit down to wait for half a lifetime—two hundred years—more than 70,000 days— for that message to get home and return.

	"We will do it. Nothing else is left."

	Again sufficient silver was ready to be melted. New silver. Some of it was being dumped in the pot already. The slaves were carrying it over, sweating under the sun. Zhi Athron saw a woman stumble, jostle her neighbor, and receive a dark look. Someone else saw too, and a whip sang through the air to land on the naked body. Zhi Athron winced at her cry.

-

	It lay completed at last. The clear light of the half-moon lay silver and limpid on its rough metal walls, and the bright stars shone down on it. The bright, strange stars. Eighteen Centaurs, and sixty humans looked at it as Kal Pola and Kwal Tass made final adjustments. Hars Forth was reading slowly from his tables as the image of a star moved slowly across the hairlines of the television screen.

	Kwal Tass straightened slowly, and only Kal Pola remained. Finally he too, stood upright, a dangling cord in his hand. He carried it over to the television screen, and watched closely as the slow-creeping star image moved toward a tiny dot of crossing hair-lines. Slowly it approached. Then—it touched. Instantly he pushed a tiny button, and suddenly the ten-foot messenger ship was rising, the dangling cord loosened from the socket. It rose straight and steady, then turned, and swiftly gathered speed. In seconds it was invisible. Slowly the Centaurs turned away, wandered off together. There was an air of hopeless dejection settling on them, a languidness that afflicted the physicist as he gathered up the few remaining instruments to take them to the ruins of the ship that was their only home.

	Zhi Athron approached him, took some of the apparatus in his arms. "How will they find that when it does reach the system?"

	"Automatic radio," replied Kal Pola listlessly. "Start broadcasting when it reaches its destination—within half a billion miles of the sun. Broadcast on the emergency band. Somebody'll hear it. Keep it up for thirty hours. They'll find it. In one hundred and forty-two years." He laughed, a harsh, explosive, bitter laugh. "I shall then be two hundred and twelve—if I'm still alive. Half my lifetime gone."

	"Suppose—suppose they have left the system then?"

	"They will not have. If they started to move the year we left, it would take three hundred years to finish, and there would be observers there so long as the system endured."

	Kal Pola walked slowly, listlessly. There was all time before him. And nothing more to do—nothing but wait. Wait one hundred and forty-two years for rescue from this barbaric world of savages.

-

	Zhi Athron topped the rise slowly. His muscles were growing very stiff of late, and he welcomed the help of the grey-haired human at his side, the young Ah-kaan he had made his companion forty years before when they first landed.

	It was seldom he came up this mountain now. It was a hard climb for the white-maned Centaur, five hundred and thirty years old. And his former companions did not love the sight of him. A sentry called out to them as they neared the rusted metal walls, a sentry with a thick, slurred voice, speaking the Ah-kaan tongue.

	"It is I, Chiron," replied the old Centaur, in the same language. His voice was clear, and a bit sorrowful. The one who stepped into the fuller light of the full moon was scarcely recognizeable as the young Kal Pola of a short forty years before. His face was sagging, and blotched, the face of a Centaur nearer four hundred and fifty, than one hundred and ten. And the eyes were blood-shot and angry. The strange foods and drinks of the Ah-kaans, introduced by the slaves, had wrought ruin to the crew. Alcohol. The chemists had known it as ethyl hydroxide. Here, they had found that a natural life-form produced it, and that the natives drank it with enjoyment. A taste—and another. It was no mere stimulant to a Centaur. It was a deadly drug, a thousand times more potent than to a man. Kal Pola's face and his flabby, lack-luster coat told the story. These Centaurs had dropped their clothing in the summer, as did most of the natives, and now the moonlight fell on a blotched, dull coat, where there should have been sleek sheen of youth and health.

	"You have changed, Kal Pola," said Chiron sadly.

	"And you, old fool," replied the one-time physicist. "What do you want here?"

	"Something you have no use for. Some books. I want the ship's medical handbook. The son of my friend here is learning surgery, and chemistry. I think he may help these Ah-kaans. I have heard too, more and more persistant rumors of a far higher civilization to the south. Are there none who would aid me, and accompany me?"

	"None," snapped Kal Pola. "Get your books and leave. And you might tell your Ah-kaans that we need five more slave women. If they send them—well and good. If not, we must come after them."

	The old Centaur made his way across the rocky plateau. It was strewn with rusting metal. Here and there the broken remains of some instrument lay. The ship was fast rusting away. It had been made of steel, for steel was strong, and all too plentiful in the Black Nebula. And good enough, for a ship intended to spend its time in the airlessness of space.

	He found the book, still in the cabinet, locked and sealed against air and moisture. The main library was missing, or soaked to a useless ruin by the rains, and the slowly eating natural acid formed in every lightning discharge.

	Sadly Chiron made his way down the mountainside, aided by his grey-haired companion.

	"They were young, as my race goes, and the wait of one and a half centuries was too much for them. That, and your alcohol. I shall not see the return of the rescue ship. And I am sure none of them will. It is better so, perhaps. They would be dangerous to the people of my world, in their condition, and with their tales of the strange drinks they have found."

-

	There were only two mourners beside the raw earth mound. A cold rain was falling, and the others who had aided in bringing the heavy body here had left at once. There were twenty-one other mounds, older than this one, and behind a mass of rusty metal, barely discernable as a structure different from the iron-reddened rocks.

	One of the two was grey-haired, the other a young man in his prime. The elder looked at his companion slowly. "You broke his spirit, my son." The other nodded slowly. "I know you thought only to aid in the conquest—aid in the advance. But he taught you your skill in chemistry with another aim. It was not, to him, a weapon, but a healing agent. That you should think to use it to evolve that inextinguishable fire—

	"He taught your grandfather, my father, as a lad, he taught me, and he taught you. He hoped the teaching would spread. He knew our people to be intelligent, but he was wrong, I am afraid, in thinking they wanted to use that intelligence in difficult ways. One hundred and eight years ago, he landed on this mountain, and all that time he has spent in seeking to help us. It was too much that you should turn his help to a weapon to hurt.

	"And his companions had died, hated and despised by all, so that only we would listen to him.

	"You have taught the secret of the Inextinguishable Fire to your generals, but now teach also the knowledge of medicine. And to your children, teach the story of Chiron, that, when the time has passed, they may give Chiron's Record to the ones who will come."

	They returned down the mountain, the young man slowly, and in genuine sorrow deeper than that of his father, for he was to blame for this death of Chiron, alone and hopeless in this foreign world, where all but a scant half-dozen looked on him with hatred and suspicion.

-

	The young man grew old, and his children learned the story, and they grew old, and taught what they remembered of the story to their children, but those children in turn did not pass it on very carefully, for there were great stirrings, and the old father had been wrong. The Time of the Coming had passed, and no ship had come out of the void to reclaim the Record of Chiron. Besides, the Achaeans were sweeping south, and the Inextinguishable Fire was sweeping the more highly civilized Minonans before them. Gradually the Achaens were to settle, and mingle with the Minonans, and the Dorians were to come after them, and mingle in turn, and the Greeks were to arise. And the Inextinguishable Fire to be known as Greek Fire, the only surviving trace of Chiron's teachings, the one whose release brought about his death. But in time, even it was to be lost, to be rediscovered for a brief moment centuries later by Archimedes, and to burn a Roman Fleet, attacking the Greek city of Syracuse on Sicily.

	Then, beyond that, only the ancient tales of the Centaurs, half man, half horse, and of Chiron, the tutor.

-

	Dor Starl bent closer to the radio speaker to make out the faint signal. Finally he turned, and called Garth Shoal, a younger, keen-eared Centaur companion. "Garth Shoal—come, I believe I hear an emergency call!"

	The trotting feet of Garth Shoal came swiftly nearer. "What? An emergency call? But—we are alone in this section of space now—the last ship left nearly two years ago, and the relief is not due for four." Hastily he went toward the instrument and listened carefully. Blurred, almost unrecognizable above the static caused by the swarming, minute meteorites as they struck the magnetic field of the ship, they could hear an emergency call. Hastily, as the alarm bell began to ring, Garth Shoal took over the instrument, and set it for directional readings. Carefully he took down the angles, then the ship leaped forward for half a million miles, and again angles were taken, then at right angles to the former course, another hop of five hundred thousand miles was made. Other Centaurs were appearing now, half-dressed, hastily donning clothing. Their voices, loud in demands, hushed swiftly as they heard the incredible news. Silently they watched as Garth Shoal took his third reading. Already an astronomer was busy with the calculators working out the exact angles, as the observatory ship plowed swiftly through the swarming meteorites in the general direction of the calls. Softly the astronomer gave exact data, as Dor Starl maneuvered the ship more slowly, and Garth Shoal listened. Steadily the signals were increasing in strength. Presently they were clearly audible. Garth Shoal gasped as the signals became more legible. "Spirits of Space—it is expedition Seventy-nine! They left Aeon one hundred and forty-three years ago — three years before Fifty-two brought the word of the discovery of the Malcan System!"

	Half an hour later, the Centaurs were searching space with drawn faces. They must be near the ship now—the signals were strong. But Garth Shoal said they were weakening in clarity now, the ship's power was failing. So near—and yet they could not detect the ship's fields! "They cannot live if their magnetic shield fails. What can be the trouble—why can't they tap the sun for power?" asked the worried Dor Starl rhetorically.

	"Look—there—we've passed it!" The instrument man cried out in startled amazement. "Their field is tiny." "Back—seek it," snapped Dor Starl.

	But it took them nearly ten minutes, even when they were near, for they were looking to find a great twelve-hundred foot exploration cruiser, and the ship they found was a tiny thing, not over eleven feet in length! Carefully they caught it with a tractor beam, and pressed it slowly through their magnetic screen. The signals stopped almost as soon as it struck their screen, the last dregs of power drained in fighting the screen of the greater ship. Carefully they drew it into the lock, and as the door closed on it, all but the two watches trotted in.

	Dor Starl stopped them, as a slow, steady hissing came from the metal shell. Then gradually relieved he went forward. "There cannot be a living being in it—the air was hissing in. It has evacuated to space. Records—data—the story of their disaster—"

	The hatch was quickly found, a raggedly cut trap that fitted badly, a trap intensely cold, that was condensing moisture and carbon dioxide from the air. A mechanician opened it carefully, and two physicists looked in. Slowly they whistled in surprise. "Beautiful—wonderfully fine mechanism—guided itself automatically across the void to this system—"

	An astronomer joined them, and looked in at the tiny, delicate mechanisms of silver and machined steel and glass. "Beautifully fashioned—beautifully. Look—the message cannisters!"

	Carefully they were taken out, and the mechanicians aboard the observatory ship cut them open with delicate metal saws. The sheets within were carefully extracted— 

-

	Dor Starl looked back across space with some feeling of sadness. He was only two hundred and seven himself, so the old system had not been so deeply rooted in his mind as it might have been. But still—

	The sun he looked back toward was a far different star from that which had shed the first light his eyes had seen. It was immense, a blue white giant, radiating with fierce intensity, a great lop-sided sun, already dimming behind thousands and tens of thousands of light-hours as the ship fled on, out toward Tosk, and the star of the new system, Malc. Dor Starl's fifteen year vigil beside the collapsing system of the old worlds was ended now. A new crew in the relief ship would watch for perhaps another five years—

	But Dor Starl felt well satisfied, for he had many records of immense value, not excluding the immensely important document signed by Kal Pola, and the log of Zhi Athron. Another planetary system available! Not, he decided, immediately important. The entire race had been busier for the last century and a half than any Centaur had ever believed possible. First—the news of the discovery of the Malcan system, with the planetary system of Tosk—Sor-osk and Al-osk. Then the suddenly immensely heavier meteor bombardment beginning within a decade that forced the vast change in plans. Where they had planned to move gradually, principally by a process of non-reconstruction of buildings on Aeon, and a slow building and immigration to Tosk, due to this sudden increase in meteors, the orderly retreat had become a wild rout. Ship after ship staggered into space, loaded to the maximum. Ship after ship raced across the twelve thousand light years to Malc, and then back again, and ferrying loads of people one way to return empty. People, records, machines. Laboratories and factories. Whole buildings had been cut loose, supplied with momentum-wave drives and speed-fields, and moved intact. Everything was done in a mad scramble—families separated—records scattered and misplaced—no one actually knew how many ships had been lost en route.

	But Dor Starl felt sure of a welcome. The two new planets, each large as Aeon had been, were far from crowded, there was vast work still to be done before any thought of further colonization could be entertained.

	But a relief ship must be started at once.

	It was only seven days later that the observatory ship edged into the Malcan System. Malc shone small and red, a weak little star, as stars go, of spectral class M-5. It was of magnitude plus 10, one seven thousandth as bright as the star reported by the ill fated expedition that had sent back the message torpedo, but highly satisfactory, for there were two planets, toward which the ship was heading now, that revolved at a distance of only one and a half million miles from the surface of the sun, two planets, like a Titan's dumb-bell with gravity as the cross-bar. Eternally facing each other, 7500 mile Sor-osk and 8100 mile Al-osk rotated around each other once in twelve hours at a distance of thirty thousand miles. These twin worlds of Tosk were the Centaur's new home.

	The observatory ship landed in a great space-port on Al-osk, the capital planet, near the new, raw city of Aeon, named in honor of a planet that was no more. Aeon was growing swiftly— in the fifteen year vigil spent in the old system, great changes had taken place that were readily apparent. There was still about it an air of helter-skelter building fever. A delegation of scientists came to meet the ship, but even their time seemed short. Dor Starl was rushed off in charge of one group, his Chief Assistant in charge of another. The precious message cylinder was turned over to the proper authorities—

	And because Dor Starl's duty in relation to that message cylinder had been properly executed as promptly as it was possible for him to execute it, and because he had vastly interesting and important data of his own in regard to the final collapse of the old system as, bloated with the billions of tons of meteors, it had fallen together, and because he was vastly busy attending to the interpretation and working out of these data, Dor Starl, not unnaturally, left the message cylinder, and the necessary steps it demanded, in the hands of the proper authorities, and quite forgot the thing that had happened, anyway, nearly four years before he returned to Malc and Tosk.

	And the proper authorities, because they were exceedingly busy straightening out important and tangled files, and because the clerks whose duty this message was were very heavily pressed, they filed the metal sheets very correctly, and sent the correct form of notices to the proper higher authorities.

	And somewhere in those passages of notes among proper, and heavily over-taxed officials, they were checked off as attended to, and dropped into the receptacles provided for messages whose provisions had been met.

	And within forty years of the death of Zhi Athron, no living mind in all the Universe remembered the fate of the expedition that had crossed space and had been disastrously successful in finding a planetary system.

-

	The representatives of the Toscar Government of Al-osk hurled angry, threatening words at the rebellious Sor-oscans.

	"The Pioneer Fathers," thundered Shar Talkon, "established the old government in the new worlds. And they established it on Al-osk. To claim for an instant, to merely hold the thought, that Sor-osk should be the seat of the government of the worlds is rebellious, anti-social—"

	"And sensible," interrupted Kwal Zenth bitingly. "Sor-osk is the obvious seat of the worlds government. The Pioneer Fathers were no doubt great, we do not deny it. But the greatest of us is sometimes caught in a hasty error. And if he truly is great, he will attempt to rectify that error. The Fathers knew that Al-osk is the larger world—and so established on it the capital government. But—Al-osk is not the larger world in practical fact— it is two-thirds water surface, while Sor-osk, though smaller in diameter, has a far greater useful land area. Further, when our peoples moved, in the vast work that was to be done, and done quickly, they established themselves on the lighter world where work would be eased to that slight extent at least. As you well know, at the end of the first century after Aeon, Sor-osk had a population of 553,000,000; at the end of the second century A. A., the population was 890,000,000; and now, in the sixth decade of the third century A. A., the population is 1,200,000,000. And today the population of Al-osk has risen to only—four hundred and eighteen millions. And still you say that the mistake of the pioneer fathers, the mistake they made in their haste and vast workings, should be perpetuated forever!"

	"It was not a mistake!" roared Shar Talkon. "They saw in Al-osk not the present values, but the future, the permanent values. We have water. We know it. It is our great asset. Water —plenty of water. It makes every mile of our planet fertile. We can support today a population twenty times the population you boast—" Shar Talkon rumbled on.

	His speech had little effect, for already, on Sor-osk, the Soroskan Government was forming, and the officers being elected, and the way being laid for a century of bitter commercial and economic feud that split the Toscar race in two for all time, it seemed. Then followed a century of waning bitterness, as a new generation rose that accepted the division, and the others grew slowly to accept it.

	When five hundred years more had passed, Sor-osk and Al-osk existed alone and independent of each other, but friendly heirs of the same tradition.

	When 1000 A. A. came, a thousand of the years Aeon had known, and the Toscars still used, they combined in a great celebration, the five and three quarters billions of Sor-osk and the four and a half billions of Al-osk.

	Two thousand A. A. came, and again a great celebration was held, by the two friendly worlds, one of fourteen billion, seven hundred million, and Al-osk of thirteen and three-quarters billions.

	Thirty-five hundred A. A. came and passed. But now on Sor-osk, a population of twenty-nine billion Toscars struggled for existence, and on Al-osk, there were but fifteen billions, living comfortably. The ancient science of the Pioneer Fathers had been forgotten to a large extent, after the great building was done, while the newly established Toscars fought to consolidate their holdings. There had been little interest in outside affairs, such as astronomy, and pure physics and chemistry. They had fallen into a gradual decay as the more important and immediate aspects of life loomed suddenly larger. For two thousand years a slow decline had taken place, till a level of comfortable life was reached. The machines the Toscars needed existed, and were improved and simplified, so that no trouble was experienced. For a thousand years this had been maintained, with the slow, slow growth necessary for bare maintenance of knowledge.

	The Toscars had never taken kindly to records made orally, written records were so much more readily studied. The oral records had fallen into disuse, almost with their invention. And the inevitable slow changes in language had worked havoc. The metal plates and sheets that had been common in the days of Aeon had given way to the more easily inscribed chemical sheets, an opaque, flexible material of an organic nature, derived from plants, durable, tough, but easily marked with simple dyes. Scientists had warned against it. Philosophers had criticized it. And the people had used it. The scientists had foreseen the result accurately. Three thousand five hundred years had passed. The metal sheets endured, permanent and strong, legible and easily handled. And no one in the Toscar system could read them. In three thousand five hundred years, slow changes had crept into the language, slow changes that had made the Toscar of Sor-osk learn a new language when he wished to speak with the Toscar of Al-osk. But worst of all—the intermediate records, on the perishable paper-like material, had vanished. They had the original language. They had the end-product. But they had no means of tracing back the changes. And—no one particularly cared, in 3500 A. A.

	But Sor-osk was beginning to care. Al-osk hung eternally in the skies. Commerce went back and forth, and the crowded, underfed Sor-oscans labored for the scanty products that they had. Al-osk had, centuries before, limited her population well below the saturation point, and her people were well-fed, happy, and had room enough. Further, had they been able to read the speech of old Shar Talkon, they would have agreed that Al-osk's water was no great menace, for every square mile of Al-osk was a garden spot, well warmed by a sun that to them, now looked white.

	Sor-osk began sending immigrants to Al-osk. And Al-osk began putting on restrictions, since their population had a fixed level, and if Sor-oscans were admitted, Al-oscans had to stop having children.

	Sor-osk began quietly investigating the old science, and slowly means were worked out to penetrate the age-old murk of language change, and forgotten science began to emerge. Al-osk, not being stupid, also began to do a little investigating.

	Perhaps the Sor-oscans were more earnest in their search. Perhaps the Al-oscans were not as sharp-witted, since life was easier on their world. In 3597 A. A., Sor-osk started a war with Al-osk, and in 3597 A. A., the war was over—after three days. Two and one half billions of Sor-oscans migrated to Al-osk in the next five years. In 4024 Al-osk started a war with Sor-osk, having learned very well the lesson of studying the ancient science, and added the idea that the ancient science was not all there was to be known, with the result that several hundred Sor-oscan cruisers, the entire Sor-oscan battleship fleet, and one Sor-oscan city vanished in a beautiful opalescent beam. In eleven months, two and one half billions of Sor-oscans migrated hastily back to Sor-osk, and elbowed their way into the crowded planet. The wars had been some help, however, since nearly half a billion people had died in the combined total of eleven days they had lasted.

	Maybe that appealed to the Sor-oscans. They found a way to overcome the opalescent ray of the Al-oscans, and prepared to launch a new attack, with that, and the ray itself. Al-osk announced a highly interesting new weapon, and Sor-osk subsided. But Sor-osk found it necessary to rebuild the battleship-fleet for protection against pirates of the space-lanes. For there was fairly heavy interplanetary commerce, since Karn, the next planet inward toward Malc had been found habitable in spots, and Kartak, the next planet outward had a few mining camps— and a temperature two hundred and ten degrees below zero. Revolving at a distance of only 3,248,000 miles from the red sun Malc, the planet was eternally frozen beyond useful habitation, save as a mining camp, so rapidly did the heat of the little star decline.

	But while Sor-osk was building battleships to protect her trade against pirates, Al-osk built new, very heavily armoured ships of tremendous power, equipped with very powerful rays. These were not, be it understood, battleships. No, they looked like battleships, they were armored like battleships, they were even armed like battleships, but they were not battleships. They were designed for a new use. They were to collect iron from the asteroid belt, five billion miles from Malc. Sor-osk pointed out that one of these forty-two ships could supply, in a week, the needs of Al-osk's industries for a year. But Al-osk made their iron-gathering fleet, and Sor-osk increased her protection against piracy.

-

	Sharson, young science student, was very busy with a record he had discovered, a real science record tucked away among ancient official documents of a period very close to the dawn of civilization on Al-osk. He looked at the ancient metal sheets with interest, and at the attached record-card that showed a blank in the corner that should have been marked "Acted upon."

	Curiously he looked to see whether the record contained the names of any of the recognized investigators of the time. There were several signatures. "Zhi Athron", he read, and "Kal Pola", and others. First he read the metal sheets that had been carefully dated according to the ancient calendar, and slowly, as he read the brief, daily inscriptions, there grew up before him a picture of the life and activity aboard one of the almost legendary Expedition Ships. There were few records such as this in existence. But he did not think of this as, hour after hour, he read the graphic, growing story. Then—with a sudden exclamation, an abruptness that made him stop, mentally dazed, he read a brief inscription of such enormous, inconceivable importance, that for minutes he re-read it dumbly.

	"This day," he read, "at the seventh hour of the second term, investigations by momentumometer and gravitometer disclosed that the sun mentioned has an extensive and massive planetary system. Our search has been successful. The second, third and perhaps the fourth planets of this system will be readily adapted to our structure, Twal Tass declares. We are proceeding to investigate."

	Sharson slowly returned to his reading. For all these centuries this manuscript had lain here, dusty in a dusty file. And science had taught that no other planetary system was known in all the Universe, and, probably, there was no other! How had this infinitely important thing been overlooked? Swiftly he read on, read of the tragic ending of the ship, its wreck on the third planet, of this message enclosed in the torpedo, of the accident of rebellious, quarreling slaves—

	And in the official documents attached, he read the story of official mismanagement that had buried for millenia this age-old tale of adventure and exploration and ship-wreck in the vastness of space! And—of another planetary system!

-

	Sharson looked at the grey-haired Al-oscan cruiser-captain eagerly. "We are ready to start?"

	"Yes—with three cruisers and a battleship as escort, to the limits of the system. I still believe it a hoax," he grumbled. "But —when Karthlon receives his orders, he obeys them."

	The ship stirred slightly, and a rising hum of transpon beams echoed. The cruiser lifted slowly, and waited a few seconds as a battleship and two other cruisers joined her. Then she streaked out of the atmosphere, and, once in space, out of the system. An hour after leaving Tosk, she went on her speed-fields. Two hours later, the red star Malc was lost in dimness, and, far faster than light, they were shooting through interstellar space, toward a star of the spectral class G-O, which, to their eyes, were clear, hard blue, and very bright, and at a distance of only seven hundred and fifty light years from Malc. Eagerly Sharson watched as, hour after hour, it grew brighter on the screens. A staff of astronomers was already busy, examining ancient photographs, and new ones, taken five minutes before by themselves. A growing tension developed as the photographs checked out. There was truth in that age-old document.

-

CHAPTER ONE

	Russ Spencer, President and owner of Spencer Rocket Corporation, and of Heavy Machinery Corporation, looked up at the knock on the door. Don Carlisle came in with a smile. "Hello, Don," said Spencer, putting down his papers. "As usual, Aarn isn't here yet." "What's it all about this time?"

	"I'm not sure, of course," Spencer replied. "I never know. I think it's the Magyan expedition. He's been getting his reports in order recently, and I think he's got the answer figured out."

	"He's slow enough. They'll have left before he gets back."

	"He said there'd be no harm in that though, remember, because Anto Rayl will be coming through with the others, and they have expedition astronomers. Besides, Aarn left a star catalogue, so when they come through from the other space, if they find that they aren't in the right part of this space, they'll probably go back and wait for Aarn. But also, he says, the time rates are somewhat different. Anyway—he had to collect the data and that took time."

	"That's not all he's been doing. He's got a gang of his picked crew working on the Nova, renovating the apparatus of the ship somehow."

	"You needn't tell me," Spencer groaned. "I'm paying for it. The Heavy Metals company had just gotten a nice stock of resistium built up, and a flock of orders for it—and Aarn calmly requisitioned the whole darned supply."

	Carlisle laughed unsympathetically. "What did he want with it?"

	"Go ahead—laugh. This time it hits you too. You have a one-third share in Heavy Metals, remember. And I don't know what he wanted it for. Probably some new apparatus for getting back to Magya. We went through the first time via the collision route—but even when I can pick my asteroid, I don't want that system.

	"For one thing though, I know he's wild to find some system of protection against that invincible weapon of his. He naturally wants to use it, yet he refuses to use it while it's so strong he himself can't stop it. That may be what he wants the resistium for."

	"I'd like to know what it is. I know one thing though, that he doesn't know I know. I suppose he knows it, though he may not at that. It makes heavy hydrogen out of any element it hits."

	"I wish he'd—" Spencer stopped as they heard Aarn's voice.

	"Hey—Spence. Open up, will you?" Curiously, Spencer rose, went to the door, and opened it. Aarn, short, tremendously powerful, stood outside. His broad, keenly intelligent face was smiling.

	For some seconds Spencer looked at him, the expression of curiosity on his face giving way slowly to annoyance. "Since when," he asked sarcastically, "has a gorilla from Jupiter been too weak to open the door for himself? You knew it wasn't locked. I thought you had your hands full."

	Aarn's broad smile broadened. Slowly his glance turned down to the terrifically powerful arm he raised. Thicker than Spencer's powerful thighs, the Jovian's arm rippled smoothly with great corded muscles. Aarn Munro glanced up, and seemed to look—not at, but through his friend. "Sorry—couldn't open that door. I'll tell you why later. I've got some more things to talk about." He walked into the room as Spencer made way for him, and paced slowly toward the far side of the desk. Spencer sat down again, motioning to a chair near him.

	"Hello, Carlisle—the conference all ready?"

	"It is. You're late as usual."

	"I'll try to make up for it. I'm all ready with the data on the Magyan trip. I'd like to start tomorrow—if you can get ready. If we start then, we ought to catch Anto Rayl just before he leaves Magya."

	"Sit down and make yourself comfortable. How long will we be gone?" asked Spencer.

	"About a month to six weeks. I want to give the Magyans a lot of that dope we collected in the Tornan experience. That'll take a little time, but they do need help right now. Their atmosphere is probably just about as badly polluted as when we left, thanks to the Tefflan catalyst."

	"Sit down, will you. You make me nervous." Spencer repeated his request. "And I'd like to come back sooner. Remember, although Spencer Rocket got along very nicely all during our original, involuntary trip to Magya, the Heavy Metals set-up isn't an old established firm, and needs a good bit more attention which I'd like to give it myself. The staff isn't as carefully worked in to cooperate as the Rocket company staff is."

	"Sorry—I won't sit down just now, tell you why later. But we will need all that time. Can you make it?"

	"Hmmm—I suppose so. What was the idea of taking all the resistium we had in stock on a plain requisition? You might at least have forewarned me. I had promised the Systemic Chemicals twenty tons of it for reaction stills."

	"I had to have it in a hurry. Remember, those data sheets I needed were a bit slow coming through, and I'd been doing some other research, so when it came, everything came at once. I'm just about ready. We can leave tomorrow?"

	"I can." Carlisle nodded.

	"I'll make it by about eight o'clock in the evening." Spencer replied. "That do?"

	Aarn nodded. "I guess I'll go back to the lab, then. I've got some more to do. See you later this afternoon." Aarn turned, and walked away. He walked directly toward his laboratory which was about seven miles away, and not at all in the direction of the door. That didn't seem to bother him, for he walked quite readily through the insulated metal wall, fading gently through the colored metal, and vanishing.

	With a slow, deliberate motion, Spencer rose from his chair to his feet. With a slow, deliberate motion his jaw dropped downward. "Projection!" he gasped. Then he collapsed back into the chair and stared at the spot where Aarn had vanished.

	Gently, in the air near him, Aarn's voice sounded. "Handsome pair. You want to watch that, Spence, and you too, Carlisle. Those jaws will drop clean off one of these days if you don't fasten them on tighter. I'll be over in my lab any time you want to see me."

	Spencer's jaw snapped shut. He looked guiltily at Carlisle. Carlisle had shut his with equal celerity, and was staring at him. Without a word, the two jumped up, raced for the door, and down the corridor to Spencer's light air-machine. Carlisle had scarcely gotten in when the momentum drive caught, and hurled the tiny thing through the air at a pace of nearly five hundred miles an hour. They started, and almost simultaneously they were stopping near Aarn's laboratory building. Spencer piled out, and ran for the door, with Carlisle behind him.

	Even in the outer laboratory they could hear Aarn's bellowing laughter. The laughter of a Jovian rumbling in the small building. Without stopping to talk to the grinning Canning, and the others of Aarn's assistants, the two made straight for Aarn's door.

	And stopped. Aarn was standing in the door. Not in the doorway but in the door. He was laughing still, and wiping the tears from his eyes.

	" 'Two minds with but a single thought (if any), two hearts that beat as one,' " Aarn misquoted. "You wanted to see me?"

	"No. I want to feel you," snapped Spencer. His exploring hand made a grab for Aarn's midriff—and passed through it with just the slightest feeling of strain.

	"Spence—how impolite," Aarn reproved. "Mustn't be so personal. That's my periostium you're playing in I think."

	"Periostium, hell." Spencer opened the door and walked through Aarn. Inside the inner, slightly smaller lab room, Aarn stood facing the door. Spencer looked at him, and at the image of him through which he had just walked. Carlisle was visible over the image, examining it critically.

	"Quite perfect," said the chemist. "Perfect coloring, even the appearance of reality."

	"It is real, Carlisle, at least in part," said the two Aarn's simultaneously. "Won't you come in?" Aarn reached over, and touched a control on a rather complex panel near him. The second Aarn vanished with a slight whirling mist.

	"What in the system is it? Three dimensional television?" asked Spencer eagerly. "What a find! Where's the pick-up?"

	"It's not a television set. It's a telatoscope. Look over there on the bench top."

	Aarn, by dumping a collection of discarded apparatus into a new heap on the floor, had cleared a space on the cluttered bench, a space some two feet square. On the square appeared a perfect representation of Spencer's now-deserted office, and portions of three rooms adjoining it. Spencer could see his secretary interviewing a man in one of the rooms, and hear their voices clearly. The images were scarcely four inches high, but in every slightest detail of color, form and movement they were absolutely perfect.

	"What's a telatoscope?" asked Spencer.

	"That," grinned Aarn.

	"All right. It is. Where's the transmitter installed, or have you more than one to get all those rooms—but you can see even the inside of the walls! Where is the darned thing? I didn't know it had been installed, and Lord knows I've been there steadily enough."

	"It doesn't have one. It doesn't pick up light. And it has an unlimited range. Any particular scene you'd like to see?"

	"No transmitter! An unlimited range? Can you get Denver?"

	"Will New Denver do?" asked the physicist, adjusting controls swiftly. A mist formed suddenly over the scene as Spencer started. It rolled, and whirled for a fraction of a second, then cleared. Only one thing showed now, a sphere, dark and mottled, some eighteen inches in diameter. It was turning very slowly, with a slowness and inevitability that somehow gave it an air of majestic grandeur. And at one end of the axis was an irregular whitish spot, and at the other, a smaller one.

	"Mars," said Carlisle, astonished. "New Denver on Mars— can you reach even that far?"

	Mars exploded suddenly, and only a minute section of the planet appeared, tilted, and leveled on the bench top. A city with miniature buildings, miniature streets, and toy machines flying through the thin air. A great, broad avenue led straight across the bench top, away from them.

	"The Avenue of the Planets!" exclaimed Spencer. "New Denver on Mars—and it's over one hundred and ten million miles away now! Man, oh man, what a gadget that is!"

	"This," said Aarn Munro calmly, "has unlimited range, I think I said. Now if you want to see something a little more distant—this you won't recognize, of course, but—"

	The mists swirled and eddied again. Longer this time, and the two men watched tensely. Suddenly the mists were illumined from within with a great burst of sunlight, clear and blue-white in color. The mists vanished abruptly—and over the bench-top was a something, a tiny, insupportably brilliant sphere, scarcely a quarter of an inch in diameter, but glowing with a fierce, blinding blue-white light. And far out at the extreme edge of the field, was a point of light, glowing with the same intolerable brilliance, smaller than a pin-head, visible only by its brilliance.

	"Sirius," said Aarn softly, "Sirius and its Companion. Would you like to see the Companion closer—?"

	The point of light centered suddenly as Sirius vanished. It expanded swiftly to a sphere as large as Mars had been, a globe that seethed with such vicious heat that the benchtop crackled and smoked, slate though it was, and the men staggered back as the radiation struck them. Aarn quickly cut down the intensity. Still blue-white, still incredibly, blindingly brilliant through a piece of darkened photographic plate, they could look at it, could see the seething flames that shot out from it, and the whirling tornadoes, the star-spots.

	"Nice way to warm yourself in winter isn't it," said Aarn contentedly. " 'Have you a star in your home? Let us equip you with stellar heat. Warm your home with the fires of Sirius or Antares, or if you live in a cold climate, try S Doradus.' "

	"You mean—use the stars—any star—as a source of power!"

	"Oh, well, I didn't mean it—but you could, of course. It's too inefficient though. You could get any amount of power you wanted, practically, because taking a star like S-Doradus, which I could pick up once I figured out the coordinates, you'd be practically unlimited. But you couldn't use it very well, because photocells are not too efficient on such energy intensities, and they are so bulky. The other branches of this development are actually more practical. Though I suppose it would be perfectly possible and reasonable to use an image of Sirius, for instance, to light and warm a garden or a public arena."

	"I see where Spencer Rocket loses three orders. There have been orders from the big observatories for investigator ships to go out and make direct observations of the stars since we released the data you brought back."

	"Don't I know?" Aarn laughed. "They've been calling me all sorts of a fool for not making better examinations when I was there. Well, with this they can bring any star they want right into the laboratory and put it under a microscope."

	"But—you haven't told us how it works," objected Carlisle.

	"Oh, I haven't, have I? That's simple. You know what a momentum wave is, Spence?"

	"No," replied Spencer and Carlisle together. "I don't think you do," Spencer added.

	"Oh well, I don't know all about it. But I know enough to make it work a ship. I know that one of the derivations of the wave theory of the atom showed that momentum and kinetic energy could be expressed as wave formulas. And I found how to make those waves. As a useful way for generating momentum in a ship with reactions directly on space, it was good. But remember, that wave theory of momentum was a mere off-shoot of the main theory of the atom. So—I started back at the beginning this time and worked on the atom. This is the result.

	"You know the wave theory says that every particle of matter, electron, proton or what not, is actually infinite—it is a system of waves, cancelling automatically through all space, save in that one tiny fragment of infinity where we say the particle is. Actually, says the wave theory, that is merely a tiny spot where the vast, infinitely extending wave-system does not interfere and come to zero.

	"Now—what would happen if you artificially upset this cancellation? Suppose the atom is part of New Denver on Mars. Part of its waves extend to here. They are cancelled in this part of space, so the atom isn't here. But—if I un-cancel them artificially, then, to the extent I un-cancel them, the atom is here!"

	"Beautiful—then even the chromatic groups in dyes are there, so you get the colors and everything without any trouble at all."

	"Right— plus an added advantage. New Denver when we looked at it was in the sunlight. But I can show you Honolulu. Look—"

	In a few seconds the island city was in perfect miniature on the table top. And—it was perfectly visible. Tiny lights glowed here and there, lights twinkled in moving machines in air and on land, but in this miniature none seemed necessary.

	"You see," Aarn explained, "the images are real, have real existence, so they become visible when I throw light on them. Thus, no matter how dark the scene portrayed may be in fact, it appears here fully illuminated when I wish, and lighted or not, it is dark if I don't light it!"

	"That," decided Carlisle, "is about as important as anything you've done, isn't it?"

	Aarn laughed softly. "Carlisle, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong. Think over the system I use in getting these images, and you'll see that this is just another branch, another off-shoot of the main atomic theory."

	"You mean," asked Spencer in surprise, "this isn't all?"

	"As far as physics goes, this part of it is nothing. This does have practical significance, but to physics, this is of no great importance save as a guide-post on the way. Don't you see where it leads?"

	Carlisle caught it suddenly. "Oh—if you can do partial cancellation—complete cancellation—?"

	Aarn nodded. "Right over there, Carlisle. That's what's running this apparatus now." He motioned toward a small, cubical box, some eighteen inches on a side. From it, two beams of transpon conductive force reached up to the main aggie-coil storage bank. Blankly Spencer looked from the physicist to the black, synthetic plastic box he indicated.

	"Complete—cancellation? What's that?"

	"What is it? Use your head. What will happen if you completely cancel the waves that are an atom. Cancel them not every-where-but-here, but everywhere?"

	"The atom—the atom wouldn't be!"

	"Right—it isn't. The destruction of matter, and the release of its energy. If you completely cancel the waves of an atom within your machine, then that atom exists nowhere. It is negatived energy—and the energy of the matter—of the wave-system in other words, escapes."

	Aarn walked over to the little black case, and opened the side. A series of dials on one panel-side gave control, but now as he opened it, the machine was in operation. Inside, they saw tiny, banked coils and apparatus spaced about a large glass tube. A tiny pin-hole was evidently admitting air from the room in a fine jet that burst into ionization, spread, then twisted violently into a ragged, jet-black hole in space. Neither light nor matter came from or passed through it. Only a strange writhing in the light that passed around it testified of its activity.

	"That's the thing that does it—and where it happens. The black opening there is the actual scene of operation. Light, too, is destroyed by that, since light is similarly represented by those strange sub-space waves. Matter—energy in other words—when converted to radiation, simply sets up a different condition in those waves so that instead of being a stationary un-cancelled spot, it becomes an advancing peak. In that condition, it cannot exist without moving, of course, and the rate of advance is exactly the square of the rate of advance of the main waves that pile up or cancel to make the light.

	"This little trick of destroying both matter and light too, by the way, is going to be an important and useful thing in other ways, as I'llshow you later.

	"But—do you see now why I wanted resistium supplies, Spence? I had a lot of apparatus to make. Also, I made protective equipment for the weapon I told you about and showed you just before we left the Tornans."

	"Then maybe you'll tell me what it was."

	"Certainly, Spence, certainly," grinned Aarn. "It was a— well, I'll demonstrate. I set up apparatus here. There's a model projector."

	The model projector consisted of two parts, three really; an apparatus case, attached by transpon leads to a silver ellipsoidal reflector, and beyond that about eighteen inches away, a cylindrical tube about one foot long and a foot in outside diameter, but having an inner diameter about equal to the aperture of the ellipsoid reflector, six inches. This was connected by transpon beams to the main aggie coil storage bank of the laboratory.

	"The ellipsoid of course is just a projector. It's silver—but you'll notice the apparatus connected with it. That at some distance, arranged with transpon feeds, is the Seeset-invented mirror field," Aarn explained.

	"What," asked Carlisle, "is that? I still don't know."

	"Well—it's based on the fact that whether or not a substance is a good reflector, or a good transmitter of the light-type wavelengths, depends on the molecular structure. That is, the molecular structure of silver makes it an excellent reflector. But the molecular structure of silver sulphide makes that a very poor reflector. That shows that the forces that make light bounce back are within the rather slight intensities of molecular forces.

	The field that I apply to the silver is a field made up of the combination of the three known fields possible, magnetic, gravitic and electric, in such a way that light does bounce. It's simply a super-polish effect. Binds the molecules of silver artificially in a more perfect reflecting surface than they ordinarily have.

	"I could use chromium, or steel or resistium if I wanted. I thought of using resistium for a while, but found that silver is a much better conductor of electric forces, and a better conductor of heat. Despite the tremendously greater efficiency of this system we still get some absorption, so I have to allow for cooling.

	"That's the projector. I use an ellipsoid because that form gives the most perfect tight beam. There's almost no direct radiation, radiation that is not reflected and aligned along the beam-line. An ellipsoid, being egg-shaped, has two focci. The radiant point is put at one focus, and the other focus becomes the focus of all radiated and reflected energy. But that is the focal point of one of the force-lenses such as I used in the little investigator television devices. Therefore I have all the radiation in a beam. If I didn't do that—the spread of the beam would tend to catch that tube out there, and heat it.

	"That's step one. A beam of radiant energy. It's a pure energy beam, and comparatively harmless—so I can handle that, and so could anybody else.

	"Next—to put poison in it. I 'spoil' that beam. That's the tube's job, there. The beam—a beam of plain ultra-violet light, goes so far—and the tube changes it into a corresponding frequency of gravito-magnetic radiation, instead of electro-magnetic. Oscillation between gravitational and magnetic field instead of electric and magnetic.

	"It spoils all by itself. Because gravito-magnetic radiation will combine automatically, gravitic fields are mutually attractive. The result is that the UV photons are attracted, fuse—and come out eventually as a new, single photon when the ultimate limit is reached. And these ultimate photons—I call them ultras—are exceedingly nasty customers.

	"Remember that the gravito-magnetic radiation will slide through matter so smoothly it won't affect it in the least. If that stayed as the g-m radiation, it wouldn't do any good, therefore. But—the photons combine, and add up as I said—and they get so big, and so powerful, they can't remain as gravito-magnetic and return to electro-magnetic. But—now they're poison to any matter, catalytically poison, too.

	"Watch." Aarn started his apparatus. The target was a sheet of resistium a quarter of an inch thick. At first he had the ray only as a pure ultra-violet beam. This gave an incredibly intense spot of light that heated the nearly infusible resistium to a temperature of thousands of degrees. "The source of the energy, by the way, is a material energy release. It's destroying oxygen and nitrogen of the air, now," Aarn added. "That's plain UV radiation. Now I'm going to add poison. I've got the stopping mechanism set up beyond there."

	Aarn turned a controller—and the intensely ionized UV beam died abruptly. Twenty-five feet it had stretched across the long laboratory, but now it vanished. For eighteen inches, from the projector to the tube, it remained. From the tube, for some fifteen feet, came nothing. Then, abruptly, a hazy, pearly glow, iridescent and shining, burning with soft blue flames leaping upward, stretched to the resistium plate. Instantly the resistium, the artificial element Aarn had created from negatrons and neutrons and orbital protons instead of electrons vanished in spitting, crackling discharges.

	"Resistium," commented Aarn, "isn't a fair test, because of its peculiar construction. But iron now—" Aarn threw a loose bolt into the beam. It vanished with a soft "plop" of blue flame.

	"So that's what it is!" Spencer exclaimed. "Why was it so hard to stop that you wouldn't use it, and how did you finally stop it?"

	Aarn shut off his apparatus. "The way I made it tells why it's so hard to handle. I can make it because finally, the ultra ray photon becomes so powerful it won't stay as a g-m radiation. Now if the g-m field won't handle it, nothing will. The Myryan collector beam will concentrate light and even X and gamma rays.

	But not these. These ultras go right on by. Obviously a g-m field won't help us any by making us invisible to these rays, as it will with light.

	"I finally got it—because there are three combinations of fields possible. Electro-magnetic, as normal light—these ultras, gravito-magnetic, as the field that makes them—and the last and most difficult, electro-gravitic.

	"Now what 'wave' do you know of that is a combination of all three?"

	"Momentum waves," Spencer replied.

	"Exactly. Momentum waves. Well—electro-gravitic radiation and electro-magnetic radiation combine to produce a momentum wave. That was all I had to do—make electro-gravitic radiation. And was that a job! I developed another, rather inefficient system, and gave it up in disgust finally. But now—I can use all my weapons—and I have one more item of defensive apparatus."

	"Is there," asked Carlisle innocently, "anything more you've got to show us?"

-

Chapter Two

	The Nova lay ready for her trip. Twelve hundred feet of slim, deadly fighting machine, she had been designed as a super-cruiser. Her sleek, silvery resistium walls glittered in the sunlight. There were no ports, and no visible doors in all her length. Only here and there a projector opening marred the surface somewhat, openings covered now by the inch-thick resistium shutters.

	"Where," asked Spencer, as he looked at the trim ship, "is the ultra ray projector? I don't see any new ray-ports."

	"It doesn't need any. Remember, for a certain distance beyond the conversion tube, the UV beam is being transformed to cosmic. In that distance, it is a purely g-m ray, and as such capable of penetrating any matter harmlessly. The projector is just inside the wall, and the ray shoots right out through it.

	"You all set?"

	"I hope so. Did Martin bring my junk over?"

	"Yes. Most of it is in the lab," said Aarn placidly. "I told him you wouldn't need all that wardrobe. You aren't going to be gone long, and we forgot to put in a trunk room when we built this thing. Since I installed the telatoscope and the material engines, the ship's a bit crowded. I tore out the old atomic engines."

	"That was nice of you. I had a collection of engineering texts in those two trunks."

	"They're in the ship's library," replied Aarn. "Really, though, were you going to clothe the whole Magyan people?"

	Grumbling, Spencer followed Carlisle and Aarn into the gleaming ship. The lock, a great block of resistium, opened smoothly as they approached, and Canning smiled down at them.

	"The old crew back again. Martin's all set inside. I checked everything."

	"The old crew," Aarn nodded. "But a few additions in this ship." They entered, walked through the inner lock door to the main corridor, turned right toward the bow. Through the lounge, they passed on to the chemistry laboratory, then to the calculating room, and physics lab, and finally the great fore power room. The hulking atomic engines had been torn out, and in their place, a series of five foot cubes ranged in two rows of three formed aisles down the center. The instruments, direct reading instruments on all the circuits, and relay-instruments on the more vital circuits, banked the walls. Here and there a few tubes glowed dully; and all the roof was arched with great, softly glowing transpon beams, idling now.

	"This place looks different," agreed Spencer, glancing around. "There are a lot less beams."

	"Yes, the greater concentration of power in a material engine permits the running of a lot of the weapons on subsidiary power. They aren't transpon-connected to the main power supply, and work independently. A couple UV beams, and a vastly improved magnetic, gravitic and electric bomb apparatus. Controlled as before—but your intensity control has a greater range. I'll show you some stunts with it later. That makes, though, for less congestion here, less fighting drain on the aggie-coils, and less transpon-beam apparatus. Also, decentralization is the life of a warship.

	"With this system, I have a lot better decentralization. The aft power room is, of course, identical." The Nova, in pursuance of Aarn's policy of decentralization—and making vital spots less vital—had two power rooms, each equally capable of running the entire ship.

	The control room, as they entered it, appeared even more radically changed. The ship had no direct vision, because direct vision meant a possibility of a direct hit by the enemy. Instead, great television screens formed the wall of the control room, giving an entirely false appearance of perfect transparency. Thus they could see while remaining inaccessible.

	But the control panels, heretofore banked high, had been lowered, and even further simplified. The driving station was banked at an angle of thirty degrees, and starting at almost lap level, rose to a point about even with the pilot's chest. Beyond it, a great telatoscope stage had been installed, and the pilot now had a perfect three-dimensional model of everything about the ship. The range of the instrument could be altered, in accordance with circumstance. The two war-controls, the weapon boards which were the special provinces of Spencer and Carlisle, were mounted well to one side, so that they could get an angling view of the scene.

	"Yea, verily, it is changed," mourned Spencer. "Don't blame me if I blow up a city instead of taking momentumometer readings."

	"You'll get used to it," laughed Aarn. "And just sit down and look. I made my calculations for 8:35:30, and it's almost that. We have to get out about a hundred thousand miles first."

	Aarn seated himself at the controls, and suddenly there came a soft hum of power as the transpons poured power into the anti-gravity apparatus. Gently the Nova rose from her berth, and floated out of the great shed under the slightest of momentum wave impulses. Then with a sudden swooping acceleration, she dropped Earth far behind, rushing through the atmosphere in less than three seconds. Aarn's flying fingers, moving with a speed only Jovian-trained muscles could have attained, brought the ship with beautiful precision to the appointed place. Aarn halted, and looked at the chronometer. With a flip of his fingers, the telatoscope suddenly expanded its range, and the whole Minor Planetary Range appeared, the sun a glowing ball, the four Minor Planets circling slowly about it.

	"I hope," observed Carlisle, "you make a better shot at hitting Magya than you did at hitting Earth the last time you tried to cross the interspace."

	"I think I will," Aarn smiled. "This is a simple job, anyway. Remember, when we hit the asteroid last time, we were hurled into interspace by the space-tension developed about our various fields. But once you get into the interspace, due to that peculiar strained condition of Magya's super-tensed space, you can cut off power, and fall right to the sun Anrel, around which Magya revolves. It's coming back that is a trick. And now— with observational data from both sides—I'm pretty sure I can make it. Anyway, the time's up."

	Aarn threw over a little tumbler. Abruptly the ship roared and shuddered to the titanic powers that coursed through the transpon beams. Space strained, and cracked under the enormous forces—opened—the Nova dropped into the fifth dimensional interspace between four dimensional universes.

	Utter dark descended on the Nova. The beams and the lights alike failed. Utter silence. Then slowly a ghostly mist appeared about them, and abruptly the beams and lights were back. The noisy shout of the transpons died suddenly to a whisper, and the mists dissolved.

	Aarn grunted, and pointed to the telatoscope device. Near, titanic, a globe of flame four feet across burned in awful violet flame. The forward television screens on the wall were blank, flickering sheets of violet color, wavering and melting. "Overloaded the photo-cells. We must be within a billion miles of Anrel, and considering that Anrel's five hundred million in diameter, with a surface temperature above 10,000, that's much too near." Aarn set to work, and suddenly the telatoscope image wavered, flickered and shrank. Aarn watched it with a paternal smile. "I wondered if it would work when we went faster than light. We're going about 1000 times the velocity of light. I don't know what speed that telatoscope wave has."

	"Yes, but where's Magya? I can't see it there." Spencer pointed to the telatoscope stage.

	Aarn laughed. "Easy, my friend, easy. You want too much. Remember that that was set to show the minor planets of the Solar System, a range of about two hundred million miles. I did make some correction in coming through, but still, Magya is one and a quarter trillion miles from Anrel. On a range that great, the telatoscope, to show the whole space, would have to reduce Magya to an invisible pinpoint. Now," he added, "I'll stop for observation."

	The Nova, which had been half into the interspace condition, where distances meant nothing, since distance in the fifth dimensional space became meaningless, and high speed possible, relapsed into the normal space, and slowed. Anrel was at a more comfortable distance now, nearly a trillion miles. Still, the titanic sun was as hot at this distance as Sol is at Venus' orbit. A brilliant flaming violet disc on the screen, the other stars of this space were visible about it now, since it no longer overtaxed the photoelectric cells. This strange space, with its countless myriads of ultra-first-magnitude stars seemed to gleam in a solid curtain of flame. Here and there an even brighter super-giant sun spotted the jet of far space.

	Planets were invisible against such a background. Aarn readjusted the telatoscope, till only the inner planets of Anrel were visible. With a sweep of a billion miles, six of Anrel's family of eighty-seven major planets became visible, six glowing points of light floating over the telatoscope stage beside Anrel. So close were they to the giant sun, they were heated constantly to incandescence.

	"Hmm—recognize them?" asked Aarn.

	"Naturally not. You've got the tables, I suppose?"

	"Yes. Let's see." Aarn pulled a slim book of metal sheets from a shelf beneath his control board, and looked at it and at the diagrams and tables. "I still," he said with a sigh, "don't read Magyan with any facility. Come here and help."

	In some fifteen minutes, the two had located and identified the various inner planets. Then, by means of the tables, they calculated the length of their absence as about eleven months of Magyan time. That is, two hundred and thirty odd Magyan days, for Magya had a "year" nearly 90,000 earth-years long.

	"Next, where's Magya?" asked Carlisle.

	Aarn returned to the controls. "It should be about here—" The scene on the telatoscope shifted and the mists whirled for a few seconds. Then it steadied—and six inches from the center swam an eight inch sphere. Near it, two smaller spheres circled with barely perceptible motion.

	On the mottled globe of the planet, a dozen tiny, intensely glowing spots were visible. "Magya!" exclaimed Spencer. "You can see the transpon-arc stations still burning the nitric compounds in the sea back to atmosphere."

	Abruptly the scene swirled away, shifted, and solidified again. They were inside a great, underground city now. A dozen titanic metal bulks loomed deserted near them; beyond, a great cavern, lighted brightly, swirled with people, human in every characteristic, this other-space branch of the human race of Earth. Slowly the scene rocked back and forth as Aarn attempted to steady it. A broad, happy smile was on his face as he cut the scene.

	"I can't hold the thing—planetary motions, besides my own. But—that's old Magya again."

	Suddenly, faster than light, the Nova raced toward the planet. In minutes the tiny point of light that was Magya grew to a disc, swelled, and then explosively became a planet. At two hundred thousand miles, Aarn relapsed to normal space. On the momentum drive he swept nearer.

	Abruptly the radio, over Spencer's panel, spoke. "Stop! What ship, where from? Wait for examination!"

	"The Magyan patrol!" said Aarn. "Where is he?" In a moment the telatoscope was functioning, the ship becoming visible twenty thousand miles from them. Aarn grinned happily as he set to work.

	Anto Marth, commander of the patrol cruiser, looked anxiously through his periscopic telescope at the distant ship. She was strange, slim of line, and powerful of build. The metal that sheathed her was strange—she had made no answer, and more than enough time had elapsed. "Stranger!" he called sharply into his microphone. "Stranger, stop for examina—"

	Anto Marth stopped in mid-word, his mouth gaping in astonishment. "You called?" asked a voice in perfect Magyan. The voice came from an image of the upper part of a man. There was a face, a broad, dark face, smiling pleasantly. There was a very short neck. And there were tremendous, broad shoulders, banked and plated with great muscles.

	Anto Marth's expression of utter surprise changed abruptly to one of incredulous joy. "Aarn Munro!" he gasped. "Aarn Munro of the Old Planet!"

	"Right. Aarn Munro and friends. You are Anto Marth, aren't you? Cousin of Anto Rayl?"

	"Yes, Commander. You have returned? What has happened? How is it you return in so powerful a warship?" Anto Marth was suddenly worried. There was peace on Magya for once, after generations of fighting the hated Tefflans. Was there war now in the Other Space?

	"Only accidentally, Anto Marth," laughed Aarn. "We came to tell Anto Rayl the data plates were wrong. He has not gone yet, has he?"

	"No, but he is preparing to leave now—the ship was to start in fifteen hours!"

	"Then let us hasten. He will be lost in space if he starts on the wrong data."

	It was nearly two hours later when Aarn and the others were able to speak alone with Anto Rayl. First had come a hurried, but joyful, official welcome. Magya welcomed back the men who had done so much for her.

	"And now," said Anto Rayl at length, looking at them with his keen, gold-flecked grey eyes, "I can welcome you personally. And what is this wonder-ship you have brought? Did you find your world successfully?"

	"We found it—but not until we had found first another and strange race in our own space which had telescopes and plates that would show us the exterior galaxies, and the space-marks that could guide us home. It was this race that built our new ship, for our help in their battle. Really," Aarn laughed, "we seemed to have such a facility in getting into trouble, we decided we needed a battleship rather than a laboratory. Besides—our old Sunbeam was destroyed.

	"And when we got home, we came back here so that we might guide you on your trip. Also—we have brought some things that will be of great help in your destruction of the last taint of the Tefflans—the nitric compounds."

	"We have done a great deal to overcome that already," Anto Rayl said. "We have been fairly comfortable in our cities since the catalyst that caused the nitrogen and oxygen to burn out of our air was destroyed. But we have also done what we have always wanted to. On the planet Sharlon, we have established a large colony. There, there is no air trouble.

	"But what is it you have brought?"

	"The energy of matter," Aarn replied. "The sun-tapping transpon beams that are taking their power from Anrel are inconvenient because of the diurnal rotation of the planets. With this energy, for planetary purposes, you will be greatly helped."

	"The energy of matter! We will indeed."

	Aarn had prophesied a brief stay on Magya, while the Magyans learned the new apparatus Aarn had developed. But it became a six-week stay in the end. The cities had to be equipped with apparatus for making the material engines, and the first engines set up before Aarn could leave.

	In the meantime, he was becoming acquainted with the hundred and fifty fine old Magyan scientists who were to take the trip through to the Other Space, and the Old World, the mother world of Earth, from which, ages before, the Magyans had come. These men were the representatives of Magya who on Earth were to study the ancient history of their race. And with them, Earth scientists would study.

	The trip was to be made in a great new battleship, the Sarn Magya, the last battleship made before the Tefflan enemy had been finally conquered. Now, however, it was being equipped with all of Aarn's newer devices.

	"But why you wanted to take through such a big thing, I don't know," Aarn commented as he looked over the mighty four-thousand foot bulk, its cold, grey walls of four-foot armour steel gleaming dully in the light.

	Anto Rayl laughed. "Suppose," he said, "we'd gone through without your new data. Then we might well have found use for those great walls. Besides—it permits our taking the vast quantities of records and samples we wanted, and also of bringing back much."

	At the end of six weeks, the giant Sarn Magya and the Nova prepared to make the return trip. It would be a return trip even for Anto Rayl—a return to the home world his people had left ages before.

	Up from Magya they sailed, together. A fleet of smaller craft sailed beside them, to watch the departure. At half a billion miles from Magya, the viewing fleet stopped, and, twenty thousand miles from the greater machines, watched.

	As they saw it, abruptly the ships raced away, one after the other. They vanished, in infinite distance—or infinite smallness, the watchers could not, somehow, tell which...

-

Chapter Three

	To the men in the ships, for an instant there was the blankness and the lightlessness, then a long straining pull—then again the dissolving mists.

	Aarn's data was exact this time. Sol shown bright and clear, four hundred million miles away. Eagerly, the Magyans looked about them in wonder at this puny space of puny suns. The stars were so small! The space was so blankly, darkly black! Even this sun, the old sun, was a weak and feeble thing, beside the titanic thing they knew as "the" sun.

	And the planets! They all clustered about like chicks following close beside a hen! They were—

	Abruptly, every alarm on the great Sarn Magya screamed in warning; automatically her various protective devices flashed into action. And abruptly, from somewhere in space, a great, milky opalescent column reached out, touched the nose of the great ship, and just as her great protective energies went into action, the nose of the ship, a ten-foot plug of solid metal, softened, ran, and flared off in flaming, brilliant gas—

	Simultaneously Aarn was aware of the utterly unexpected menace. A terrific, stabbing beam of that same milky opalescence stretched out toward him—and died a few feet short, as automatic defense sprang into action with greater speed in the smaller ship.

	Aarn grunted—and acted. Almost simultaneously, he saw the attacking ships, and saw the great battleship near him fade abruptly into infinite smallness—or distance. The attackers were cruisers, full-fledged cruisers, slim and powerful. And one of them charged down suddenly with terrific acceleration at the vanishing Sarn Magya—and vanished. Vanished with the vanishing battleship!

	Aarn was too busy to watch. The telatoscope was at work, and about him he knew were four ships, all as large as his. And all attacking him now with utter ferocity.

	"Enemies — here!" snapped Spencer. "Is this the Solar System?"

	"Yes!" Aarn growled abstractedly, "Earth's been attacked! Get going—they have."

	Already a shower of tremendous magnetic, electric and gravitic field bombs were exploding in their protective screens. The milky ultra rays reached out from all the ships suddenly, and the transpons within the Nova strained and roared at their attack at her momentum waves.

	Aarn released his own ultra, a terrible driving beam that tore at the nearest ship in a blaze of energy—and abruptly the enemy craft was sheathed in fire. Aarn gave a low exclamation, and turned his power to the absolute limit, bringing another ultra to bear. Like an extinguished light, the defense of the enemy ship failed, and in an explosion of gas, the ship vanished. Aarn turned his attention to another. A titanic transpon beam was roaring from the enemy ship now—a transpon attacking them. Aarn was blinded by light-vision, for his own protective sheath was shorting out the transpon in a washing flame of stupendous fire half a mile long. But the telatoscope showed with precision as his beams centered on another ship.

	"He doesn't mind any of my force-bombs," said Spencer calmly. "I'll try that steel-explosion, and the rest of the assortment."

	"You needn't try the steel-explosion. He's using it on me. That means they can stop it," snapped Aarn. "Try the atomic rot—"

	Aarn was busy with something new. A stream of the green-glowing atomic rot bombs, bombs of controlled atomic disintegration that would spread slowly through any element heavier than iron, were flashing out from the Nova. And—at about a thousand feet from the enemy ships, they died.

	"Gamma—gamma by the ton!" exclaimed Aarn. "They're using a gamma-explosion bomb—it's so powerful its heating the resistium sheath."

	"They've retired," pointed out Carlisle. "My material stuff is stopped dead; they've got everything we've got, anyway!"

	"No they haven't—they're afraid of their own gamma. That's why they backed off. I'm going—" Aarn went. He went after the nearest one. Ten huge gamma-ray bombs imbedded in the magnetic atmosphere of the Nova went along. The enemy ship fled at his top speed, but the Nova kept pace with him—and suddenly Aarn realized the ship was out of control. "They couldn't stand that. Item one. Where's that other pair—"

	They were right after him—at a safe distance. Both were turning every weapon they had on the Nova. The Nova stopped, out near Uranus now. Aarn turned to another weapon, testing rather than hoping. The neutron beam, a beam of neutrons that would shoot through five feet of beryllium—

	"Stopped—I'll bet they have water tanks to do it. One more now—"

	The green terror the Seeset had developed, and Aarn had improved. The green space-cups, super-saturated space fields that no weapon, no screen could stop. Long lines of them shot from the side of the Nova, toward the enemy ships. A cosmic ray raged at them—and a few stopped. The rest bored on. Bombs, rays, material destruction—

	"My friends, you don't know those things," said Aarn grimly. "Now watch—"

	It happened, as Aarn had expected. One, then the other ship allowed the strange green things to fasten in their magnetic protective screen. The space-cups bit into the magnetic field, stopped, and stayed there. Furiously now, the ships were attacking the green space-cups, neglecting the Nova. Aarn did not attack, beyond sending more of the green terror.

	"They're trying to get away," he said with satisfaction. "They can't, of course — the space-cups anchor them." He watched. The space-cups advanced with the slow, deadly precision of a marching, indestructible army. They died—but in dying, anchored the ships that killed them. Super-saturated, an addition of energy threw them half-way into the fifth dimensional interspace, but only half way. For some thirty seconds they remained in between. And in that time, they made a safe spot for other green space-cups. In a minute and a half, the space-cups had reached through the protective magnetic atmosphere, and were devouring the metal of the ships themselves.

	Aarn reached for the telatoscope controls to take a look within those enemy ships—and withdrew his hand with a jerk. A new thing had emerged from the mists that rolled at the edge of the instrument's field. A gigantic shape. A full-fledged battleship. Aarn turned furiously to his controls.

	"Look out below!" he called. A terrific stream of the green space-cups was issuing instantly. A cloud of them. But this ship learned from its fallen lesser brethren. It avoided them assiduously. Steadily Aarn drove them out, bringing to bear as best he could, the slight directional control possible with a thing so negative as the space-cups.

	The enemy ship danced, jerked, and moved. But four titanic ultra rays were playing continuously on the Nova. Aarn's face was pale with intensity. "We can—stand that—indefinitely thanks to—material energy," he said grimly. His own ultras were concentrated on this lone giant ship. The Nova was a cruiser in size—but she was actually a super-concentrated battleship. The material engines, limited only by the almost illimitable power of the transpons to conduct, were fighting the ultras. They would never give out.

	Gamma rays were flooding the whole region. Flooding it horribly, but the artificial metal resistium, made only of negatrons, protons and neutrons was so concentrated that even these intense rays stopped instantly.

	Aarn stopped the manufacture of the green space-cups. His enemy was avoiding them, and they took tremendous energy. More power was available for other lines of action. The great ultra rays, operating independently from their own material energy generators tore and raved at space, and at the vast flaming shield of the four thousand foot battleship.

	"I," said Spencer softly, "am stopped dead. He's got every single one of them stopped. crumbler beam—steel explosion— everything."

	"I'd like to know how he does that last without resistium," said Aarn. "The crumbler isn't so good, but put all the power your steel explosion will draw on him. See if you can get through."

	A new spot of intense radiation flared and sputtered at the energy walls of the enemy battleship. But didn't eat through. Aarn grunted bitterly. "He's after me all down the line. We have no material circuits—and the energy of those huge aggie coil banks to hold. I'm even drawing a little power for charge from the aft material energy. He can't break in—till he gets— Whoa—another battlewagon—It's Anto Rayl!"

	A titanic thing had swung up suddenly from nowhere. A thing as big as their giant attacker. It was spitting ultras and varied forms of abuse at a tiny, fleeing enemy cruiser. The Magyans saw the greater battleship fighting with the Nova, and abruptly diverted their deadly attack to it, while the cruiser fled with badly leaking screens, a damaged, half-wrecked ship.

	The nose of the Sarn Magya had been torn off in the first unexpected attack. That was no great annoyance to a battleship. With deadly, concentrated power, the huge thing bored into the enemy battleship. The enemy had to pull in his rays instantly to support this additional attack, and abruptly his ultra screen was leaking—the ship flared with a slight, shifting cloudiness as one of Aarn's rays leaked through. It shifted, melted—and suddenly the ship lurched, and vanished!

	Instantly, Aarn was working with incredible speed. The telatoscope field expanded immensely, caught a darting flash, contracted on it, and held, as the Nova started off after the fleeing giant at a speed far greater than light. Fifty thousand times that of light, yet the telatoscope rendered the scene faithfully. Aarn glanced at a different part of the screen. Another giant battleship appeared—Anto Rayl in the Sarn Magya following faithfully. Faster the enemy fled, evidently startled to find his enemy following him so easily. At eighty thousand times the speed of light, he evidently found his maximum. Gingerly, Aarn was setting up an automatic control that would make it possible to overtake and hold him.

	Three minutes were needed to maneuver into position beside him. Then Aarn stopped with a hesitant, uncertain air. "Now you've caught him—what are you going to do?" Carlisle asked.

	"I don't know," confessed Aarn, "I can't attack him at this over-light-speed except—got it!"

	Aarn was working suddenly over Spencer's board. Spencer bent back away from Aarn's path as the long arms worked skillfully setting up controls. Finally he pushed a control to the ultimate limit of its run with a grimace of uncertainty. "We shall see—" He pushed a final trip. Instantly, a thing the size, perhaps, of a golf ball darted from the side of the Nova in the direction of the straining, damaged enemy. For a few feet it shot at a speed that made it a blazing, reddish streak. Then— abruptly it slowed to a crawl. For five feet more perhaps—then again it was speeding, enlarged. It expanded to a ten-foot diameter.

	Suddenly it was gone—gone in a stunning flash of speed beyond light, and a titanic explosion of energy. Automatic controls stopped the Nova as it stopped.

	Aarn had allowed the Nova to creep about five miles ahead of the enemy ship. Now—the enemy ship was perhaps a thousand miles behind, motionless, its lights winking and changing rapidly, dimming abruptly to invisibility, mounting to brightness, then steadying.

	Aarn swept back on the momentum waves. Perhaps three light years behind was the Solar System. But the enemy ship was near now, and fighting desperately. Savagely, its beams and normal defenses, unweakened by the super-space attack, in full action. The Nova waded in savagely. All the ultras were blazing, the space-cups again floating out.

	Anto Rayl appeared suddenly in the Sarn Magya. He had overshot the mark, as the stranger was halted abruptly, and had to run back. Now he too joined in the attack.

	Two minutes later, surrounded by the haze of hydrogen atoms that had once been the metal of the enemy ship, the two stopped for a conference.

	"You promised me a warm welcome, Aarn," said Anto Rayl, faintly sarcastic. "A warm welcome, and the peaceful Old World. The Old World where there was no Tefflan race to disturb peaceful interplanetary commerce."

	Aarn laughed. "Sorry, Anto Rayl. I couldn't help it, you know. I really didn't mean quite so warm a welcome. I'll have to be getting back there pretty quick. I think you'd better go back to Magya for a while, while we settle this. Were you badly damaged?"

	"Naturally not. They took only the nose—the metal ram-cap and the first fifty feet of the rooms. Just mess halls and empty quarters. Nobody hurt, of course, and the bulkheads closed as usual. We were just astonished, and dropped back for safety. Apparently one of your welcoming committee was too close, and got carried along with us. He was with us there when we landed in our space, so we opened on him, and darned if the thing didn't vanish. We thought he must have come back, and started after him, and to come to your aid. Apparently he'd just started off in speed greater than light, and when we started back, somehow we pulled him along.

	"I didn't notice what happened to him—started in on the big fellow you were playing with. What happened to you?"

	"Nothing much. Our smaller screens and things got into action faster—"

	"You mean, your better designed apparatus got going faster," interrupted Anto Rayl.

	"Anyway, we weren't hurt at first, and as you see, those fellows have poorer defense screens than we have. Their cruisers went down pretty fast, and until they learned to avoid the space-cups, they got into trouble with them. Then that big fellow showed up—and your help was greatly appreciated.

	"We'll have to head right back for Earth—I suspect they may want to see us. And you'd best head back to Magya. I'll come through again when we get the present situation cleared up."

	Gently, Anto Rayl's laughter came through the microphone. "Aarn, tell me, what defenses do you think Earth has?"

	"Why, I don't know. Of course they had the Patrol Fleet, to begin with. Some of them had been equipped with all the devices we knew, except the telatoscope. The ultra ray apparatus was just being installed when I left. Some of the big Patrol ships are full sized cruisers."

	"How many were there?"

	"About twenty," replied Aarn grimly. "When I left."

	"And how many do you suppose there are now? I think I can answer that. Not—one—blessed—ship.

	"Aarn, Magya has, still set up and in working order, the great ways that turned out our five thousand foot battleships, the ways that held the twelve hundred foot light cruisers, and the fifteen hundred foot heavy cruisers. The ways that made destroyers are making commercial ships right now.

	"Magya has a fleet of fifty-four full-sized, fully equipped battleships. They still lack a few devices, but only a few. There are one hundred and four heavy cruisers, one hundred and twelve light cruisers, and six hundred and forty-two destroyers.

	"Aarn, when Magya was hard-pressed by her ancient foe, the Tefflans, you came to us, and gave us the means of destroying that enemy. The common enemy of our single race. You don't for a moment think that Magya will let that great fleet of warships lie idle, while Earth fights for her life against such odds? While Earth, for lack of any fleet at all, is overcome?

	"I'm going back, Aarn. We will start construction of newer ray apparatus at once. I will meet you in about one hour in the neighborhood of the point where we first came through the Wall."

	The great Sarn Magya faded suddenly away, and vanished. Aarn didn't have a chance to say a word, but slowly he turned and looked at Spencer.

	"Spence—that man's—oh, he's a MAN and his whole people are MEN—men of our own race. I'm mighty glad they are our own race ... We'd better hurry back to Earth."

	Faster than light, far faster than they had come, the Nova hurtled back toward the solar system. Cautiously, Aarn stopped at a distance of 500,000 miles from Earth, and went to work with the telatoscope.

	The Moon was changed. There were great pits and holes in it, great pock-marks of ultra rays. And in the center of each pock-mark was a gleaming metal dome. They were the very well equipped Patrol stations on Luna. There were also glowing red spots, seething angrily.

	Earth had a few scars. Only one seemed serious, and that was a swath through sparsely populated Arabia, and on into the Red Sea. Smaller ones, though, marked nearly every continent.

	There were no ships flying about near Earth. But Aarn noticed with grim interest that Earth had half a dozen new moons, little moons perhaps five or ten miles in diameter. And each one was a focus of working, straining commercial ships, and a few Patrol ships. A constant stream of ships was running back and forth.

	The great Transpon Station on Luna was working over-time it seemed, the beam flickering more rapidly. But—a new giant beam stretched across the solar System. A great thing that reached out and out beyond Jupiter, beyond Uranus, and ended near distant Pluto.

	Aarn looked at this for some time, as a slow smile dawned. Carefully he looked at his instruments. Suddenly he looked up at Spencer with apparent indignation. "Spence—observe. Observe the unmitigated gall of that enemy race using our sun to fight us! Something must be done. It is too much."

	Aarn hurled the Nova nearer the great beam. They were within a thousand miles of it when he stopped, watching the slow, rythmic sweep of the titanic power lead, that carried power in mighty surges from the sun, the very power-center of the system, out to feed the machines of the Invaders on distant Pluto.

	Carefully Aarn examined it. At last he smiled again. "It is too much. Maybe it is too little. Anyway, we'll make it more. I learned something a while back that may be—"

	Curiously Spencer watched as Aarn worked at the transpon weapon controls before him. His settings were unusual, to say the least. Finally he appeared ready. He glanced up at the chronometer, and then pushed over his control. Nothing whatever happened. The Nova's transpons reached out, and touched the gigantic beam that was bringing war-power to the Invaders, but they neither gathered power nor released it. No slightest change appeared in the beam.

	With tense face Aarn watched the chronometer. The tension seemed to increase as the seconds ticked by. "I wish," he said, "that that was Anrel, in some ways. It would take a long time— but I wouldn't have to worry about unstability there."

	"What are you doing?" asked Carlisle annoyed. "You don't seem to be accomplishing much."

	Aarn's chuckle as he replied was a bit grim. "Not much. Wait a bit. My—there!" Aarn pulled back his control. "My problem is, Carlisle, the instability of our sun. It can't stand too heavy a drain."

	"What?" cried Spencer. "It can't stand too heavy a drain! My God man—what did you do?"

	"Wait six hours. Or more. We're going to Earth now. First—"

	The telatoscope went into action again. Delicately, by means of clock-work drives, Aarn established contact with the Earth, and finally with the shops of the Spencer Rocket Company.

	The shops were swarming. Spencer gasped as he saw the armies of men laboring under great flood-lights, working at top speed. Night had fallen here, but the work went on desperately.

	A great domed structure had been erected, hastily, evidently, but curious, ugly snouts stuck from it. A gigantic, roughly housed aggie-coil bank stood to one side, and beyond that, a set of eight of the largest material energy engines Spencer had ever seen.

	"Hmmm—they did a good job. Those are the type K-6 engines I left plans for," said Aarn calmly. "I'll bet they've been overworking my lab workers. But they've sure got that ship-yard protected. With those defenses, I don't see how a whole battlefleet of Magyan proportions could crash in.

	"I'm going to get hold of Scott." Scott was Aarn's principle laboratory director. Aarn found him finally near the group of defense engines, in consultation with six or seven other men, the number varying as one rushed up, and another rushed off. Aarn projected his image. It was a bit unsteady, but sufficiently good to be very easily visible.

	"Oh, Scott—busy? I'd like to talk with you."

	"Munro—" gasped the startled man. "Dr. Munro—thank God your back. Where are you? Come on in, for the love of heaven—Earth never needed any man as she needs you. You're the only man in the system that knows space warfare on this scale. Dr. Munro—Earth's been attacked by monsters—Centaurs! They've attacked—"

	"Yes, they've attacked. They attacked me. Four cruisers and a battleship. I've returned the compliment. But I thought I'd just signal ahead so you wouldn't turn those very respectable planetary defenses on me. You might tell Commander Barret to bring his staff there. I've got some real aid for him—lots more than you'd think. I've got the whole Magyan fleet on the way, I think! A fleet of experts, and they promise to aid us with the ship-building equipment they have.

	"Send out word to let the Nova pass. She'll carry four lights, one ultra-violet, one the sodium-D line, and one calcium K light. The fourth will be general infra-red. That's a fairly distinguishable combination. I'll come through in seven minutes. That gives you time enough?"

	"Yes—certainly." Scott answered, but already three men in the Planetary Patrol uniform were racing for the entrance of the rough fort that had been set up here.

	Seven minutes and thirty seconds later, the Nova halted in her regular berth, near the Spencer Rocket Yards. There was a swarm of men around her in an instant, under the orders of four gang-foreman.

	Scott arrived at the lock almost simultaneously. As Aarn opened it to him, he called in: "Dr. Munro—what do you need in the way of services for war preparations?"

	"Not a thing, Scott. This, remember, was built as a super-battleship."

	"I see you weren't scratched, in the fight."

	"Haven't you yet discovered," asked Aarn grimly, "that one is never scratched in a space battle? One is annihilated—or left unscathed. At least in a ship of cruiser size."

	"The Patrol has been scratched. The first warning we got was the interrupted message from one of the small cruisers out near Neptune."

	"Who are the invaders? I haven't had a chance to see them yet, though I suppose you've had the telatoscope busy. And where are they—how much have they occupied?"

	"Fortunately," sighed Scott, "not much. They didn't know just what we had, and established a base first, and investigated later. While they were basing, we were too. They based on Pluto—you probably saw their transpon beam picking power from the sun."

	"Uhm," said Aarn with an enigmatic smile, "we did."

	"By the time they'd based on Pluto, we'd defended the planets we could, and wanted to. We gave up the four outer ones, established a collection of forts on the Jovian Moons, and on the Martian Moons, and set up plenty of stuff here on Earth. The Centaurs started to attack the Jovian moons when they got into a position where sun-tappers wouldn't be available—behind Jupiter. They got fooled—all the forts had the type K-6 material engines.

	"So far, we've seen only five battleships, and we think that's all they've got."

	"They've got four, then, now," commented Aarn. "Anto Rayl and the Nova disposed of one of them."

	"But they've got a lot of light cruisers, according to your descriptions and photographs of Magyan light cruisers. That fleet couldn't attack our planetary defenses, and had to quit. But they proceeded to set up planetary defenses of their own. They actually hauled ten asteroids from the asteroid belt, and set them circling Pluto in a maze of orbits. They've been fortified, and we took the hint, and did the same. You saw ours? They're still under construction. They—look—the sun—!"

	All Earth was suddenly darkened. It was barely dawn in this region, but suddenly the ruddy disc of the sun had darkened, dimmed to an even deeper red, like a dying coal! Suddenly, as abruptly as though some one had put a gigantic radiation screen before it. Then it was struggling, flaming visibly. Darkened as it was, every man on that side of Earth, and on the Moon, was watching as direct vision of it became horribly possible! Something was nearly extinguishing the Sun! Sol was tearing, struggling at the suppressing force. Visibly, great sun-spots, so huge they could have swallowed all the planets of the system, expanded with a speed that must have meant hundreds of miles a second. Others appeared abruptly in a hundred places, expanded, and became visible. For two long minutes the frightful dimming lasted. Then—as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Instead, the sun blazed blue-white, hotter and fiercer than ever it had before.

	Aarn had not seemed perturbed at the darkening, but now he watched intensely. Suddenly he turned to the telatoscope. The ball of the sun appeared, dimmed artificially till it could be watched. It was blue, blue with heat far greater than normal. Already, outside they could see men running for shelter from the suddenly blazing rays. The telatoscope showed a sun that was marred in a thousand places with great leprous spots. Silently, Aarn watched it for minute after minute. Then—he sighed with relief.

	"Well—it's all right. The thing will damp out in a year or so. No damage done. The spots are beginning to collapse already."

	"But Aarn—what in the name of the planets did that?" cried Spencer.

	"We'll see later. Now Scott, have you called Commander Barret?"

	"Why—why, yes, of course." The dazed physicist collected his thoughts. "Yes, I called him. He ought to be here soon, as he said he'd come. He was at a conference of the International Defense Committee. He said he'd bring them along."

	Aarn suddenly burst into laughter. "The International Defense Committee! Scott, that's too good! That's one international committee that just naturally has to accomplish business. For once one of Earth's international committees won't waste all its time on terms. "This must be done—do it, and we'll discuss the thing later.' That's the spirit of this International Committee."

	"I think it's arrived," said Scott looking out. "Shall we go to them?"

	"No, they'd better come here. I want them to take a little trip with me. This is the only ship that can make it, and while it may not be comfortable, it's the safest ship in the System."

	There were ten elderly civilians, distinguished looking old men, and curiously unlike the average international meeting. They walked in step. There was a unity in their very motion. And their leader was Commander Barret.

	Commander Barret was six-feet-three in height, his lean, lined face topped by thick, bushy iron-grey hair. His eyes were blue, blue as liquid oxygen, and at times as cold. His face was dark as a mulatto's with the fierce sun of space. His hands were lean and hard and strong. He was fifty-seven, and looked forty, his powerful body erect and dominant with vigorous life.

	Aarn Munro met him in the lock-way. Aarn, the typical Jovian-born human, his body eight inches shorter than the Commander of the Planetary Patrol, but nearly a foot broader, so short, so heavy, he appeared fat, his strength truly that of a Titan, superhumanly muscled, his arms sticking out at a peculiar angle to his body due to their great muscles. He made a strange contrast to the tall, slim strength of the Terrestrian.

	Commander Barret stopped, and looked down into the keen eyes of the Jovian. A slow smile spread across his lean features. "Dr. Aarn Munro? I know you must be, with that build."

	"I am, Commander Barret." Their hands met in a firm grip, as the two men who were to control the destiny of the Planets looked each other over. "I believe you've been a hard-pressed man, and I appreciate the honor you have done me in coming to me, instead of asking that I come to you. Believe me, there was reason."

	"I believe you, and—it was only right for the student to come to the master, for you are surely the master in warfare of this scale. Never have I felt so completely my lack of capability. I have been trained in a school that taught warfare against pirates and smugglers, not vast battlefleets. And I understand you have already met the enemy—and that faction at least is yours."

	Aarn chuckled. "I suppose so—if I wanted to gather them up from the several billion cubic miles of space they now occupy. Space war is surprisingly final in its destruction.

	"But—come inside the ship. I want you to meet the other gentlemen, and I want to meet the whole party with you."

	"Oh, I beg your pardon. Let me introduce you—"

	Half an hour later, the Nova rose from Earth. Aboard her were all the men who had come with Commander Barret, the Commander, and Aarn's own party. Swiftly the Nova left Earth behind, shooting out to her rendezvous with the Magyan ship, far out in space. In ten minutes she had reached her place, and in five more, the Sarn Magya loomed gigantic beside her.

	Canning took charge of the Nova while the others transferred to the great Magyan ship. In stupified surprise, the Terrestrians examined the titanic thing, a city, floating in space. Behind the four-foot metal walls were the heaped machinery and piled apparatus of a great war machine—and the men who ran it. The perfectly human Magyans, perfectly human because they were human, the other branch of the human race, lost since the ancient continent we know as Mu sank beneath the Pacific.

	Anto Rayl met them, and with him were five of the ten members of the High Command of Magya. Ceremoniously they were welcomed aboard. Then with the efficiency of a long-trained war-machine they got down to the business of planning.

	"It is unthinkable," said Karth Maryl, the head of the Magyan High Command," that we should not aid you. That is obviously the primary premise. Now let us see what may be done. Obviously, the Magyan fleet must come through as rapidly as possible. We had largely left off our work on the fleet since the Tefflans were destroyed, but now with the greatest possible speed they will be equipped to fight in this new battle of new weapons.

	"And," he smiled, "we are ably equipped for such action. Our machines are in advance of our man-power. I suggest that a force of your men be sent to aid in the construction, and that your enormous productive machine be turned to the task not of producing warships, but of producing warship-making machinery, to which it is better adapted."

	For three hours the discussion was carried on, details being settled, ways and means calculated—

	And the Magyans, who for ages had known only war, and the economics of war, did not discuss costs and labor bills. Costs, to them, were those things needed to maintain production. The population works without costs when it works to save its life.

	At the end of three hours, another giant Magyan ship appeared suddenly, mysteriously beside the Sarn Magya. Anto Rayl smiled. "The Tarth Magya—our sister ship. They said they would equip it soon. More will be along directly."

	Two hours passed, and another materialized. And shortly thereafter a flight of the Invaders, led by three battleships, appeared, a flight of twenty cruisers. As Aarn had instructed, the Nova vanished, falling back into Magya's space. The Sarn Magya followed for the seconds necessary for Aarn, Spencer and Carlisle to transfer. Then both reappeared.

	The Magyan battleships were holding their own. Their new equipment was functioning perfectly. The instant the two other ships appeared, the scales of battle were turned definitely. All the Nova's beams concentrated suddenly on the cruiser nearest her, and, driven by material energy, they smashed the screen of the ship in seconds. Swiftly the Nova turned, and another fell. Another—

	The Nova destroyed one more, this time when Aarn turned loose his space-cups. Then there were no more in the neighborhood to attack. They had fled, leaving a destroyed battleship, and seven disintegrated cruisers behind.

	At the end of the battle, Aarn looked thoughtfully at his chronometer. Then he turned his telatoscope on the Sarn Magya's council room. His image appeared, and spoke. "I think you will see something highly interesting out in the neighborhood of Pluto presently. I'd advise you hang off at least a million miles, and watch. Something will happen shortly."

	The Nova vanished in speed greater than light as it shot across the vast gulf that lay between them and Pluto. In minutes, though, it had reached the outpost of the system. From a million miles, even, the works of the Centaurs were visible. Ten great asteroids circled about the planet, and from one of them a great beam reached down to the sun, tapping the power that ran the war machine of the Invaders. On the planet, menacing fortifications reared ugly heads among the frozen oxygen glaciers. The far-off sun was a first-magnitude star here, no more.

	The radio questioned as the Sarn Magya appeared near the Nova. Aarn did not answer, only smiling into the television disc. Spencer answered annoyedly. "He's got a silent streak on. He won't tell us—only says—Uhooo!"

	Aarn's "something" had happened.

	Where the Invader's power satellite rode, where the vast transpon beam that reached to the sun ended, there was an explosion. In the briefest conceivable fraction of a second, the power satellite was an enormous, explosively spreading cloud of deep violet gas, that changed abruptly, and flared in a thousand mingled spectral lines. The energy that welled up from it seemed to increase, second after second, and a great spurting beam flared forth, fountain of radiation so inconceivably intense that no substance in the universe could have resisted for the briefest fraction of a second. At the moment of the explosion, the power satellite had been transiting the sun as seen from Pluto, so the inconceivable beam of energy smashed through the infinitely hot gases that had been the planetoid, and sprayed in spreading, awful destruction across the face of the frozen planet.

	The surface of Pluto exploded upward under that lash with a rush of ultra-incandescent gas that drove out at miles a second into space. The spurting column of solidified radiant energy plumed outward, nearly five hundred miles across now, where it had been one, and still that unutterable intensity endured. Like moths flaring for an instant in some cosmic flame, four of the remaining planetoid forts flashed star-bright for fractions of a second, and added to the titanic, growing gas cloud.

	It seemed hours that that frightful flame, a flame of released energy beyond human conception, endured. Slowly it grew, spreading wider and wider, till all the sunward side of Pluto flamed horribly in it, and finally two of the planetoid forts revolving well out from the planet glowed instantly white, but remained molten droplets of matter, as the diminished intensity of the wide-spread flame failed to volitilize them.

	For age-long seconds after the flame had died abruptly to a mere spouting flare of an ordinary cut transpon, the men in the two ships stared utterly silent at the scene. Pluto, Pluto the Lord of Outer Darkness and cold, glowed on all one side with a fiendish, unbearable flame of violet light. Pluto had a vast, spreading atmosphere of incandescent gas, a flame that burned slowly blue at the edges, and crept about the edge of the frozen planet, spreading the sudden and terrible thaw that had struck it. At the first touch of that thin blue flame, the great glaciers liquified, ran in streams, and vanished in the sudden hot atmosphere.

	Aarn spoke first. "That's one base they won't use. And they're set back a whole set of planetary forts. Quite a display, wasn't it."

	"God in heaven—yes!" gasped Spencer, breaking an awestruck silence. "What in the system did that! I didn't think there was that much power."

	"I did it," admitted Aarn modestly, "I did it with my little hatchet. I tapped their telegraph line. I stuck dynamite in their fuel tank. In other words—I shot a special beam I've worked out into their transpon—and short circuited it!"

	"And a short circuit on a transpon," said Spencer softly, "is the signal for infinite power—and the other end of that beam was attached to the sun itself. So that's what darkened the sun. Great Galaxies—no wonder that place blew up! At least fifty percent of all the inconceivable energies of the sun—concentrated in a beam."

	"The beam broke down though," said Aarn in a slightly disappointed tone," when the power station blew up at this end. If it had held together—it might have put a hole clear through Pluto."

	Spencer snorted. "Put a hole through it—blown it clear out of the System. How long did you short that beam?"

	"Two minutes. I thought it wouldn't be safe to short it longer. Old Sol is near the edge of the G-O line, and it might have made it unstable altogether. As it is, it may be slightly variable for a year or two."

	"Two minutes—and Sol releases energy at about the rate of four million tons a second. Say they got only one on that beam. That's—one hundred and twenty million tons of radiant energy! Why—it's a wonder there's anything there at all!"

	"No, not really. Most of that energy was radiated away into space, remember. And it had a great deal of matter to work on. Whoa—I see the enemy are peeved. They're coming out."

	The enemy were. Those that were left were soaring up from the dark, protected side of Pluto. But they didn't attack. They raced for Neptune instead.

	"They have another base on Neptune," said Commander Barret's voice in the loud speaker. "You can't do the same for that, can you?"

	"No, 'fraid not. That's a one-shot gun. They happened to be using a special type of transpon that picks up both polarities simultaneously. I found out how to do that recently, and also saw the difficulty. It's got advantages, because a smaller apparatus can handle more power. But—the other fellow may overload your system for you."

	"Can't they do it to our beams?" asked Carlisle.

	"No, for the same reason we won't be able to do it to theirs any more. They'll use a pulse beam, that will pick up the two polarities separately, and so can't be shorted. Alternating current sort of thing. It isn't even that, it's a series of separate waves of power, no two interconnected, and so can't be shorted. It's too bad in a way, because we can get along without beams, thanks to material energy, and they can't, I suspect."

	"We are apparently going to get rid of them pretty soon though, and that's a comfort. When the Magyan fleet get's through, handicapped as they are now, without the planetoid forts, and with an incompleted base, they should be easy to drive out."

	"Don't believe so, Spence," Aarn replied soberly. "I'll bet that was just an advance squadron to break ground. I just have a hunch that any race with that gang of weapons is all set to use them, and has the ships to carry them with. Just think of the spats we got into before we developed the stuff we have now!"

	"Then you think they have a bigger fleet than that?"

	"I know it, Spence, I know they have."

-

Chapter Four

	The Solar System was, at long last, politically united. That was not difficult, so far as the planets were concerned, meaning by that, the colony planets, Mars, Jupiter, the Jovian Satellites, and Venus. But Earth was the great task. Through the centuries the nations had maintained their petty independence. The questions that had troubled Europe for centuries, France's eternal plea of "security"—Russia's touchy "sovereignty"—had remained to trouble the union of Terrestrial nations. When the enormous magnitude of the trouble first became apparent, England, and her colonies, and the United States and Germany had arranged almost instantly to submit their combined powers to the central control of the Planetary Patrol, the only experienced organization of space fighters.

	The data and reports, the stories and pictures that Aarn and Spencer had turned over to the Planetary Patrol when they returned from their involuntary cruise had been of inestimable value in these first days of the war. The Heavy Metals Company had already begun turning out the new material engines, as well as a few telatoscopes. These were requisitioned instantly. All machinery manufacturers had been diverted to producing what parts they were best fitted to turn out, and the flow of engines had been enormously increased. Aggie coils, and transpon beam apparatus was ordered in unlimited quantities at the maximum production rate.

	The Planets of the System realized more clearly than ever before, that War was not a battle of men and machines half so much as a battle of production. Certainly this was so at the beginning. And the enemy, very evidently, had a head start.

	Then came Magya's offer. And Magya's ships. Most of all, Magya's production machine, an economic system geared for wartime production for not mere years, but for generations. They knew the secrets and the details of war-time production as no Earth-race ever had. Earth had never experienced a war of machines and production on the present scale. Any Earth statesman, any statesman of the System, could have stated the general rules to be followed—but a general rule is of little help. It was the infinitude of detail, never before calculated on, that had swamped them.

	Magya knew all those details, all the laws and regulations they must follow. And best of all, had the actual physical equipment, the huge ways and cradles to produce great battleships.

	The enemy had left, after the destruction of their base on Pluto, and for the next two weeks, Magya concentrated on the terrific problem of uniting two worlds in two different spaces into one production machine. Magyan battleships were converted to making the inter-dimensional trip readily, and before that period was up, all Magyan battleships had made the crossing at least once as had many of the cruisers—and all of the supply ships. A supply ship came through loaded with Magyan technical men, and economic organizers. It went back loaded with trained and untrained laborers of Earth's production army.

	The ways of Magya's ship-building plants were roaring again. And men from Earth and Venus worked there. Magyan pilots were training men from heavy Jupiter to pilot the great battleships. Every Jovian would find his task in such work, for these men, used to a planet where gravity was more than twice as intense, could, like Aarn, move more than twice as rapidly. They made excellent pilots.

	Aarn was busy, not yet in his laboratory where he longed to be, but in the greater problems of hitching his science to production. Spencer, the one man in the Universe best able to convert Aarn's ideas to plans that other and lesser engineers could follow, was with him constantly.

	Enormous plants had to be erected at break-neck speed. But while the problem of masses was a great one, the problem of accuracy was of equal importance. There simply weren't the requisite number of men capable of doing the exact, accurate work of making instruments.

	Magya became the center of the production of the actual massive hulls; and Earth the center of production of material engines, telatoscope apparatus, instruments.

	One thing that might have troubled them troubled them no more. There was plenty of metal. The Magyan supply ships, with great momentum-wave tractor beams at work, dredged in millions of tons of nickle-steel asteroids—nicely refined metal of excellent quality. Mighty Anrel supplied the energy that fused it, cast it, and rolled it to the five-foot thick metal plates, the gigantic girders and braces, the bulkhead walls and doors.

	But also—ten great resistium furnaces were being set up on Magya. Resistium, the artificial metal Aarn had invented, was to be the ultimate, outer skin of these ships. Two feet of the incredibly dense metal! Every cubic inch was over one hundred and twenty five times as heavy as a cubic inch of steel—and over one hundred times as strong, but concentrated strength. The greatest importance lay in the fact of that density, and the atomic weight of over four thousand, since it would stop the gamma rays of the Centaurs absolutely dead at the surface.

	But—it was made of neutrons, negatrons and protons. Neutrons from heavy water, heavy hydrogen of atomic weight two, negatrons that could be found only in a sun, and common protons.

	The resistium that sheathed the Nova had been made on Cornal, the planet of the Tornans, where heavy hydrogen was peculiarly plentiful. Here, it was not plentiful, nor was it on Earth.

	"That's a problem we'll have to solve all right—but—I think I know the answer," Aarn replied to Spencer's questioning. "Remember, the neutron is a negative sort of thing—not only electrically, but grammatically. It's not charged, it's not easy to control, it's not a lot of things. Principally—it's not active. And not re-active. There's plenty of energy there, of course, but it's entirely latent. I have an idea that it may be easy to find elsewhere.

	"But as to the negatrons—Anrel will be far richer in them than is old Sol or even Torka, where we got out our original supply. Remember, negatrons are rare on planets, so rare they're practically non-existent, because planets are made of ash-elements; but Lord knows—Anrel certainly isn't made up to any great extent of such ash elements. Anrel's one titanic roaring furnace of super-active and super-heated matter.

	"So naturally, Anrel is rich in negatrons and positrons. It will be a rich supply-base for them. The stars of this space will not however, be rich in neutrons. The neutron is peculiarly inactive.

	"If Anrel's our source of negatrons, then a trip to Anrel is indicated," Spencer replied. "The furnaces will be ready in a day or so now, and they'll need raw materials. In the meantime, how about neutrons?"

	"I'll get them," smiled Aarn. "And though I'd been planning on some research, I'll make a trip to Anrel right now for those materials. Want to come along?"

	Half an hour later the Nova swept up through the burning, deadly atmosphere of Magya, and out into free space. One and a quarter trillion miles away, Anrel, the super-giant sun of this system burned in fiercely angry violet heat. The Nova pointed toward it and abruptly the great star grew hazy as the ship slipped half into the fifth dimensional space for speed. In so huge a system, even the enormous speed of light was so small as to mean hours, days of travel from Anrel to Magya.

	The Nova covered the distance in minutes. As they flashed nearer and nearer, the fierce radiation became more and more intolerable. Aarn flipped over a tumbler, and great relays thundered over. Abruptly Anrel became dim. The Nova was surrounded by a sheath of force that converted the incident electromagnetic light and heat to the ultra-penetrant gravito-magnetic radiation that passed unhindered through the ship, without heating or any other effect. Only a slight fraction of the light was permitted to leak in so that they might see.

	Nearer and nearer the Nova swept, slowing at last to normal space at a distance of less than ten million miles. Anrel, five hundred million miles across, filled all the heavens now, one vast sheet of blistering blue-violet flame. Great bellying prominences soared up three hundred thousand miles toward them, sheets of flame that could have wrapped a world, and dissolved it in gas. The Nova plowed on unhindered. Rushing electrons, hurled from the terrific furnace, constituted a resisting medium now, and a sheet of them, glowing dimly, obscured the direct light vision. Aarn completely closed his invisibility sheath, and relied solely on the telatoscope.

	The Nova was a tiny dark splinter near a vast flame. On the momentum drive now, it approached steadily, till finally, the tip of one of those vast prominences flipped suddenly about it. The Nova roared with sudden wild energies as her transpon beams carried power to the drive in vaster amounts. Aarn's fingers flew over the controls, a new roar sounding as he drove his transpon pick-up beams down, to gather power from the sun as he worked. Anrel would fight itself.

	The invisibility sheath opened a bit again, and the screens showed a single vast wrapper of violet flame rushing past the Nova, an incandescent wall that slid smoothly past on the surface of the magnetic and anti-gravity fields that protected the ship. The outside coat of resistium was glowing faintly red, but the cooling beams within the ship were absorbing the energy, transforming it to electric power.

	"This," said Aarn grimly, "is distinctly worse than taking stuff from the sun Torka." He paused as his fingers worked swiftly on the controls. "I'll have to get a lot deeper, really— and this prominence is rushing out most uncomfortably—it's taking all the power I can use."

	Doggedly the ship plunged and bucked on her way. They were still boring in at a speed of miles a second. With all her vast power flowing, and gathering all the energy the great transpon beams reaching down to Anrel could carry, still the resistance of even this nearly perfect vacuum of the prominence was terrific, for it was leaping outward at a speed of nearly 200 miles a second. Aarn could have avoided this prominence, but later he would need its help.

	"We're about two hundred and fifty thousand miles in now," said Aarn at length.

	Carlisle frowned uneasily. "So far! We'd be half way to the center of our sun with that distance. How can our fields stand the pressure?"

	"There—isn't any," replied Aarn jerkily. "The thing's like Alice in Wonderland. You have to run hard to stay where you are. The light-pressure is so enormous it more than counteracts the inward pressure of the gases. It's dying out—being about balanced. We'll make time now." The rush of the prominence had slowed visibly as they approached its base. Now they were entering the region where the normal gravitative pull overcame the outward drive of the light. Presently the speed-indicator began to move up from five where it had been held for some seconds, toward ten, then a hundred, and finally one hundred fifty. At a hundred and fifty miles a second they were shooting toward the heart of Anrel!

	"How can you do that?" asked Spencer. "Plowing through the matter of a star at any such speed."

	Aarn's grin was grim. "Why not? Do you realize I'm using about three quadrillion horsepower? And that the atmosphere of a star is a more perfect vacuum than man ever created? That is, by pumping, not by exhausting into space. We'll have to stop soon though. The only reason I can go on now, when the pressure is really mounting—since Anrel's surface gravity is nearly 214 times Earth's—is that the fields are taking the strain. You can't compress a magnetic field—it just IS. But pretty soon now I'll meet destructive fields that'll tear mine down—ah."

	Aarn had. The magnetic and gravitic fields of Anrel had been met. They had penetrated the "cold" layers of the star's atmosphere, the reversing layer, and were in the terrific fields of the photosphere. Instantly it seemed, the Nova was howling and shouting in protest. The ship stopped almost dead, and shook like a rat in a dog's grip. Aarn backed them out a distance, till the Nova calmed a bit. Then again the howling roar of the beams began. The Nova's mighty tractor beams were reaching down, down into the heart of the star where the ship could not penetrate, where no material thing could reach.

	"We're about six hundred thousand miles down now," Aarn said. "The beams reach about half a million more."

	For some time the grim, noisy battle within the ship went on. Gradually a frown came over Aarn's face as he looked at his instruments. He sighed. "I can't lift it. My beams open up when I strain on 'em. Spence, send in a few anti-gravity bombs to open out at—" Rapidly he read off the coordinates.

	A new roar added to that already existing. A periodic roar and crash of transpons. The Nova began to shudder again as, with the aid of the bombs which tended to break down Anrel's grip on the matter, the beams gripped, tugged, and with a mighty straining of ship and beams, dragged it slowly, slowly back.

	Nearly an hour passed, then slowly, on the screens appeared a spot of light even more incredibly radiant than the flaming photosphere itself. It actually outshone even that impossibly brilliant surface, a surface in fact twice as brilliant as the visible surface of Anrel, since here it was not masked by the "reversing layer" above it. This was not merely photospheric matter, but matter from the incredibly hot radiant heart of the star; this came not from the exhaust-surface, where Anrel's excess heat was thrown off, but from the generating room itself—where matter was converted to radiant energy.

	"That," exclaimed Aarn, "is so hot it's giving off X-rays. I hope it was worth all the trouble."

	"How much does it weigh?" asked Carlisle.

	Aarn smiled faintly. "Don't ask, Carlisle, don't ask. Its mass is about sixty million tons—but due to Anrel's reluctance to part with it, its weight is about one and a quarter billion tons. Add resistance of this stuff to its passage and the fact that I need energy to hold it together."

	Carlisle whistled softly. "Where's it all coming from?"

	Aarn laughed. "The same place it's going—Anrel. I'm feeding on my transpon beams of course—picking up the energy from the sun as fast as I use it."

	"Will you be able to make it with all you've got?" asked Spencer dubiously.

	"That's why I came in through that prominence. We ought to strike it pretty soon. If we don't—we'll have to drop all that load. Unfortunately, I can't drop half of it."

	Aarn watched the screens more closely now than he did his instruments. They were all resting steadily in one position— the limit of their run. The incredible, harsh light from their sheath of incandescent matter remained almost steady, but not quite. Little local irregularities made it possible to determine that it was still sweeping backwards. The Nova had turned around as it started out, and this meant they were still forcing their way against the resistance of the more-or-less stable reversing layer.

	Aarn's concentration became more and more pronounced. The movement seemed very slow now, and he referred frequently to the velocity indicator. The slowing was due to an actual drop in their velocity. Would they have to drop their hard-won load? It was more visible now. Despite the incredible incandescence of this gas, it was still a gas of almost perfect transparency, and practically a perfect vacuum, so tenuous that no barograph would have registered it. The mass Aarn had captured glowed through it like an evil, ulcerous spot, beside which the intense heat of the photosphere became dark and lusterless.

	"We're about stalled—comparatively speaking. The speed's dropped to a mile a second."

	"I wouldn't called that stalled," exclaimed Carlisle.

	"You would," corrected Spencer, "if you remembered that we have some three hundred thousand miles to go. Personally, I'm not prepared to spend the next four or five days in any such situation. The Nova's working under an overload of about 200% and even she can't stand that indefinitely."

	"Besides which it's still dropping," said Aarn glumly. He looked up at the screens, stiffened, and gave a cheer—the matter outside was almost at rest now. That meant that they had reached the under side of the prominence, which would sweep them out with it, effortlessly.

	"It's all right—we can make it." he decided.

	But it was an hour more before they definitely had made it. Then, with their load of stolen matter, finally caught up in the vast sweep of the prominence, they were almost hurled out of Anrel. With the vast energies of the Nova pulling, and the star itself aiding them, in less than an hour they were well out of the star, and in three, were completely beyond the prominence.

	But then for hour after hour they had to tow their load out into space where they could work on it. At a hundred million miles, Aarn set to work, releasing the pressure holding the super-incandescent mass together, and a great long stream of the stuff shot out in a blinding arc. A magnetic field gripped at the flying ions, caught, and swirled them, each according to its mass and charge. A gigantic atomic spectro-separator. In an hour he had worked over half of the matter, and closed in his field to maintain the pressure and ionization. In three hours he was finished, and a great ball of the super-heavy elements he wanted floated on his beams, while a tremendous cascade of the lighter, ordinary elements floated back.

	Aarn looked at his result with approval. "We must have nearly five million tons of that stuff there! Five million tons of elements above atomic number 100. That'll supply you with negatrons enough for a half-dozen full-sized battleships."

	"I still need neutrons," Spencer reminded him.

	"And you'll get them." Aarn was busy now, setting up his fields for the return trip. The mass of matter was brought in close to the Nova, and spread out so that the fields the ship set up would affect it. Then, faster than light, they swept out to Magya, their stolen matter with them.

-

Chapter Five

	Spencer stayed on magya. He had plenty of work to do, not alone with the resistium furnaces now nearing completion, but the more and more pressing task of designing the great new material energy battleships. The Magyan engineers were far more expert than he in the basic problems of battleship design, but still, to him fell the task of remodeling the basic plans for inclusion of the new source of power, the many weapons Aarn had added to his armory while on Cornal, and the appropriate defense machines.

	But Aarn had set out for the supply of neutrons he had promised. In the Nova he swept up and away from Magya, and apparently vanished.

	Aarn did not remain long in this space. He had been spending hours over the calculator machines since he brought back the supply of heavy metals from Anrel. A half million miles from Magya he set his controls carefully, and threw the last trip-tumbler. With a roar of transpons, this space became hazy, the blindingly brilliant stars whirled and became a mist—and vanished, melting into the less brilliant stars of our normal space.

	Canning was with him, in Spencer's place now. Canning swept a look around—then looked uneasily at Aarn. "Dr. Munro —you've missed the sun!"

	Aarn glanced casually at the screen. Space was normal but Sol was not there. Instead, a dim, tiny globe gave off a weak, wan light. They did not yet know their distance from this sun, but it seemed weak and small. Yet—the light it gave so sparingly was brilliant, harsh blue-white. Aarn looked at it interestedly. Slowly a grin spread. He looked around at the rather horrified Canning. "No I haven't," Aarn chuckled. "There's old Sol." He pointed to a star showing on the screen simply as a first magnitude G-0 star.

	Canning looked at it dubiously. "It's a long way off, if that is it. But even so, how can you be sure—there's another G-O off that way."

	"Uhm—" said Aarn looking carefully. "I think that's Procyon A. You can't see Procyon B from here. But—it may be Centuari. But that's Sol, all right. Look—" The telatoscope went into action. Faster than light it caught toward the distant sun, that was, to all solarians, the sun. In seconds, to Canning's joy, the solar system, with the recognizable planets, floated over the telatoscope scale.

	"But how did you happen to miss it?" asked Canning.

	"Ever stop to think I might have intended to miss it?" grinned Aarn. "I headed for this star—and hit it pretty well."

	"What is it?"

	"Van Maanen's star. Surface temperature, 7000° or thereabouts, radiation being about l/6000th that of the sun. The diameter is just about 7500 miles!"

	"Hm-m—dense, then, isn't it? What's it made of?"

	"Neutrons, I hope. That's why we're here," replied Aarn. The telatoscope had shifted its view, and now the Nova shot forward at high speed in normal space. With astounding rapidity the star expanded. "We weren't more than 200,000,000 miles out," decided Aarn.

	Rapidly the star was expanding, and presently Aarn slowed down as even this feeble star began to emit intense heat and light. There were almost no prominences here, and very little corona. And there were, of course, no planets. So close to the Solar System, astronomers would have discovered the action of planets long ago had there been any.

	"Sweet surface gravity on that baby," said Aarn softly, pointing to the gravitometer. Since this star weighed nearly .78 times as much as the sun, it was about 250,000 times as massive as the Earth—and smaller than the planet! That enormous concentration of matter meant a surface gravity that pulled Aarn's instrument, specially designed for reading stellar gravities, almost over to the stop pin—260,000 times earth's surface gravity! One cup of water here would weigh one hundred and thirty thousand pounds. Aarn himself would have weighed three thousand seven hundred and fifty tons. "I have corrections to make," he decided, looking at the instruments carefully. "We never knew what the mass of the thing was, before. But now that I know, I can say that while the effective temperature is 7000°, due to the fact that the enormous surface gravity just about stops light, the actual temperature is something like 21,000°. That, my son would soften the rivets in even this resistium hull."

	"How in blazes do you plan to handle anything there?" asked Canning. "We can't get near that."

	"Why not? I want to more than ever now. Remember our anti-gravity coils can overcome that."

	"They'll burn out," declared Canning, aghast.

	"They won't contain an erg of energy. That's the point, remember. They flatten out space, and cancel the energy that the sun has concentrated, at the point where they are."

	"This ship," said Canning, "weighs three quarters of a million tons even on Earth. That's 6025xl010 tons here. Those figures are positively astronomic." 

	"You'll see some wonderful effects," agreed Aarn. The Nova was at rest now, her anti-gravity coils neutralizing the terrific gravitational strain of the star. However, as they were still nearly two million miles from it, the acceleration would have been only about six times that of Earth, so swiftly did the inverse square law diminish its effect. Aarn was looking at one of the screens with interest. Beyond the incredibly massive little sun was the usual star field. Aarn pointed it out to Canning, and jumped the Nova a million miles to one side. The star-field seemed to writhe and twist, entirely new configurations appeared, stars shifting full degrees from their former positions.

	"As I remarked, sweet little surface gravity. It pulled that light clear into an orbit. You know—" Aarn's eyes began to shine with a light Canning new and dreaded. "I think I'll try a stunt. It's safe enough—"

	The Nova suddenly sprang into motion, enormously swift motion. Simultaneously Canning shuddered as he heard the power of the anti-gravity field which alone had been supporting the Nova turned out of the coils, and into the aggie coil bank. Aarn was cutting the supports out from under the Nova. And the momentum waves were driving her straight toward van Maanen's star with a velocity that mounted exponentially. Canning groaned and turned a bit pale. Aarn was putting the Nova into an extremely eccentric orbit that would brush the very surface of the star!

	"Canning," Aarn ordered swiftly, "get into the physics lab back there and start in on some routine checks. Check the inductance of the fifty millihenry coil by the balanced capacitance method. Set up a standard synchronous motor, and a generator and see what happens—test your actions by chronometer and electrolytic cell—don't use magnetics to test magnetics."

	Reluctantly Canning went back, somewhat white. Aarn's eager eyes were watching. He had shut off all power now, and the Nova was a free-falling body; save for her own artificial gravity plant, everything in her would have been weightless. Van Maanen's star pulled at her with the colossal and increasing force of its gravity.

	Slowly Aarn saw strange things happen. Rapidly the star neared, and Aarn was forced to throw out his protective invisibility sheath on one side of the ship, that nearest the sun. Light was beginning to play tricks. The shielded sun grew vast, as they neared. Only the telatoscope remained unaffected, and gave the true readings on the distance—they skimmed the surface of van Maanen's star by a bare 600 miles! The ship was moving now at a frightful velocity, a velocity that would have covered that distance in far less time than even the swift-moving Jovian could have moved. But he well knew that the titanic forces balanced so perfectly now that nothing less than a minor planet could have deflected the Nova from her safe orbit.

	And as they circled in, under the space-strains of that enormous magnitude, Aarn's eyes darted about with wonderful speed. Stars, their light drawn in abruptly by that enormous field, shifted and bent, till those a quarter of the way round the strange star were visible. The familiar Nova altered and bent and twisted under the strange space conditions, the corners twisted into hollows, the control board shifted grotesquely. Only the telatoscope, operating as it did in a level of space beyond even this, remained unaffected, and by it Aarn judged the true state of things.

	Suddenly he heard a shriek from Canning behind him—then a wild burst of laughter. Footsteps thudded wildly along the decks, as Aarn rose from his place in one incredibly smooth, incredibly swift motion. Canning, wildeyed, laughing insanely came charging at him, a heavy copper test-bar raised in his hand, mouthing something through his laughter.

	Almost invisibly fast were Aarn's motions. The tremendously muscled Jovian, moving faster than Terrestrian-trained eyes could follow, slipped in under the falling bar, and gripped Canning. Gently, the giant pinned his arms and legs. Canning threshed about with mad strength, futilely in the grip of the Jovian. Aarn looked at him steadily, turned his face to him. "Canning," he snapped. "Canning, come out of it, you fool."

	Something in the voice, crackling with command, perhaps something from Aarn's mind, trained by masters of telepathy on the far distant planet Myrya, brought Canning under control. And too, the Nova, circling on in her wild orbit, was passing rapidly out of those intense, but relatively narrow fields.

	Canning shuddered violently, sobbed once or twice, and straightened to look into Aarn's broad, sympathetic face. Aarn smiled at him. "Kind of got you, Canning? The place looked rather weird, didn't it? What sort of results did you get?"

	"The results—that was the trouble—they weren't sense—all the laws broke down—even a Wheatstone bridge wouldn't balance sensibly. Nothing worked. The standard cells wouldn't check their own voltages. Then the walls caved in, and the floor bent up, and the bench turned into an arch, and everything began to slide up toward the top of the arch."

	"Hm-m—I got some readings myself. I'll have to go back to the controls, and stop this orbit first." Aarn turned back to his controls, quite normal controls now, for the racing Nova had swept far out again, and normal space laws applied once more. Transpons worked heavily as the power was pumped back into the main anti-gravity device, and the momentum-wave drive stopped the ship's motion.

	In a moment Aarn rose again, and went to the recording instrument cases in the power room. Lifting cases from one after the other, he examined the strange records. One new device he had set up only recently was the most interesting—an apparatus which registered by means of a telatoscope image of a glowing light, and hence had been unaffected by the weird fields. Slowly Aarn's eyes widened, and an expression of intense astonishment came over him. "Einstein's gravity—the cosmical constant, by all that's holy!" For minutes Aarn stood in silent concentration. Finally he shrugged, and went back to his controls. "We've got another job to do."

	Again they went toward van Maanen's star; this time they went slowly, and without apparent effort and without the strange effects before observed, because now the great anti-gravity coils were damping out that effect. Steadily they approached, and the shielding invisibility screen was arranged so that only the faint amount Aarn needed for visibility struggled through. Virulent, unbearably extreme violet light streamed about them. There was no near-vacuum atmosphere here. Even the enormous light pressure of this incredibly hot star could not lift mass against the awful pressure of two hundred and fifty thousand earth-gravities.

	Aarn pressed the Nova down, down nearly half a mile into that seething cauldron of impossible flame. Grimly his face tightened as he read his instruments. "That will be enough of that." Roaring transpons agreed. They were feeding the fields, the enormously intense fields that alone shielded the metal ship from the crushing burden of the gases outside.

	Aarn started his great tractor beams. Gently he pulled on them. A soft snort of laughter escaped him. "I can't even shake the stuff—and the beam's torn to fragments before it goes half a hundred miles. I'll take what I can get, here, not what I want."

	Time and again Aarn had to try before, at last, his transpons roared, and in answer his beams were able to move. Then began the grim battle of pulling that matter loose. His beams had penetrated successfully only ten miles! In Anrel, a flaming giant millions and hundreds of millions of times more energetic than this tiny star, they had reached down nearly half a million miles!

	It was three hours before Aarn had drawn his load up to the surface of the star, then far enough away so that he could examine it. He laughed, and Canning stared in astonishment. At the end of the beams, beams into which hundreds of billions of horsepower had been poured, a mass perhaps ten feet in diameter hung, a little mass scarcely as big as a private wave-car for terrestrial use.

	"Is that all you got?" Canning stared.

	"No comments, please," laughed Aarn. "Let's investigate first. Do you notice the color?"

	"It's so hot I can't see whether it's hotter than the star or not."

	"Hmm—it is rather violet—also violent. It's trying to burst that beam."

	"What does it weigh?"

	"Plenty—that's all I can say. It's rather concentrated."

	At a hundred million miles, Aarn stopped to investigate. Gravitometer readings, checked against his traction readings, finally told the story.

	Aarn looked owlishly at Canning. "My friend, you have no idea. That has a ten foot radius. That means some four thousand cubic feet, and each cubic foot of that stuff weighs just about five hundred tons. I mean, of course, has a mass of five hundred tons. Because every cubic foot, acted on by the sweet little gravity of that vest pocket star, weighs one and a quarter hundred—million—tons. So the total load the old Nova was moving against was about five hundred billion tons.

	"Sneer not, my lad, at the morsel we chewed out of that baby. Grim Death never held on with a gravitational acceleration of eight million feet per second per second." Aarn looked down at his "morsel" with added respect. "Maybe," he acknowledged, "I made a mistake in picking a star quite so dense."

	Canning was staring at the blue-hot thing hanging on the beams. "That weighs five hundred billion tons. Good Lord!" he said it in a flat voice of utter bewilderment. That little nugget of matter weighed almost as much as a minor planet!

	Aarn was busy. He was examining the spectrum with the greatest care. There was a growing air of disapproval as he did so. "The stuff's about fifty percent neutrons, as I expected. But I hadn't calculated on each pound weighing a hundred and twenty-five tons. We need more—I wonder—"

	Aarn went into action again. The tractor beams were towing at the thing down there, towing at it with all their enormous power. It took Aarn about fifteen minutes to establish it in an orbit, with the aid of a few score anti-gravity bombs to both reduce the weight and to hold it in shape. It was radiating away its heat now, but the mass was so great, that even at that temperature hours would pass before the stuff could solidify.

	The orbit finally established, Aarn returned to the star, and at a distance of one hundred thousand miles, floating on his anti-gravity coils, began new operations. This time, instead of burrowing into the planet-sized sun, he reached in only a short distance with his tractor beams, took a small bite, and hauled out a two foot globe with comparative ease. Then with the transpons of the Nova roaring, he accelerated this in an orbit that threw it gradually outward, wrapped in an anti-gravity field.

	For several hours he let automatic controls repeat this procedure, while he gathered the hurled lumps on other beams, and thrust them toward his original collection. This grew slowly but steadily to a ball of white-hot matter a hundred feet in diameter. Then Aarn quit.

	The Nova groaned in protest as it was forced to accelerate the stupendous load of ultra-concentrated matter, dragging it completely free of the star's field. The field declined with fair rapidity, and at a distance of five hundred million miles, Aarn made the crossing into Anrel's space.

	"I'd never be able to drag that thing up-hill into our space," he pointed out. "It's only because Anrel's space is the one to which things thrown into the fifth dimensional interspace go naturally, that I can make it."

	Even with it, their constants were accurate. Two hours later, the Nova with its hard-won cargo, floated in an orbit off Magya.

	A cruiser-size ship floated up from Magya, and Spencer's voice came over the radio. "Where've you been for the last week? We were beginning to get worried about you."

	"Week?" Aarn repeated. "I've—oh, lord! I know what it was now, I'll bet. Was it a full week?"

	"Six and a half days," replied Spencer. "What happened? The resistium furnaces have been started, and we wondered if you'd been ruined somehow."

	"No, but our time-rate was. I went to a super-super special kind of star for my neutrons. There they are."

	A finger of light pointed toward Aarn's collection. Spencer's disparaging voice answered, "It certainly doesn't look like you made much of a haul."

	Aarn laughed gently. "About ten quadrillion tons, where I just came from. I've been where there was a real gravity—a hundred thousand times that of my home planet."

	"A hundred thousand times Jupiter's gravity? Say, what kind of a star was that? It must have been a billion miles in diameter."

	"It isn't," Aarn replied. "It's within a few light-years of Earth, and it's smaller than Earth. Van Maanen's star. Now look out, I'm going to open out that load I brought in. Can that ship you're riding handle it?"

	"It can," replied Spencer emphatically. "It's a new type ship, refitted for getting matter from Anrel. It'll handle anything the Nova will."

	Aarn's collected matter had at last cooled. It had solidified now, and as Aarn withdrew the forces he had been using, it hung cold, dark and lustrous. It was dully silver, its surface frosted from the slight degree of freedom the crystallizing process had been allowed in Aarn's fields.

	Aarn turned his telatoscope on Spencer's control room. A young Magyan was the pilot of the ship; Spencer was operating the beam controls. Aarn watched with a spreading grin as Spencer negligently turned on the beam at low power. The mass of matter, scarcely one hundred feet in diameter, should, according to Spencer's view, have leaped forward under the drive of that beam. It didn't visibly budge. Spencer frowned, and turned on more power. The mass didn't seem to notice it. More and more power he turned in, and the only visible effect was a deepening frown on his face. Aarn's laughter interrupted him. "Now laugh at my cargo. It averages forty percent neutrons, and weighs five hundred tons to the cubic foot."

	"My humble apologies, Aarn. I thought our furnaces were going to use it up in two hours. They'll run two months on that."

	"They will," agreed Aarn. "And Spence—the first two months you might run them making a ship for me. You might run your brain overtime trying out various plans for a battleship. I want a super-battleship. This Nova is about the last and hottest word in cruisers, but it is only a cruiser, and now the enemy have nearly everything we have in battleship size, I'll need it if I'm going to do as much as I can."

	"Proud of yourself, aren't you," suggested Spencer. "By what right do you claim a private battleship at a time like this?"

	Aarn grinned broadly. "I have reasons—good ones. But there's no great rush. I want to do some more work anyway. You say I've been gone a week, and that means something must have happened back in our own space. What?"

	"Nothing—only they've got all the little nations on earth running around chasing their tails. The grand old nationalistic idea seems to be dying a hard death. Only it just so happens that everything everywhere on Earth has been taken over by a bunch of Magyan engineers and lay-out economic planners who can't understand what a nation is and when they say 'Do that,' it means there's something that's got to be done if you have a hankering to go on in this vale of tears or whatever you want to call it, and you're the logical one to do it.

	"The last trick they pulled was one no Earth-statesman could have gotten away with. They moved half the miners out of Europe and set them down all over the world. Europe's full of a lot of almost useless mines of all kinds that they've been working so that each pretty little border can be surrounded by a wall of steel. They made Europe stop growing wheat to a large extent, tore out a lot of machine shops in Europe and set them up in the American fashion, and moved half the population of China over here on Tharnt. They've set up a colony there—subterranean by the way—and they've got the Chinese working at such problems as the coolies can understand. By the time Magya gets through with old Earth, they'll have the nations so mixed up that no nation can fight another because every nation will have most of its nationals somewhere else. They've got most of the skilled mechanicians in America and England and Germany; the chemists divided fifty-fifty between America and Germany; most of the Earth's weavers in England and America; and Australia's being populated rapidly by farmers moved from elsewhere.

	"Before any nation can agree to the idea, the thing's been carried into effect. Those Magyans are moving."

	Aarn suddenly roared with laughter. "I can imagine! What a time those diplomats must be having with that bunch of Magyan production engineers!"

	"You don't get it, my friend—you miss the point. The Magyan production engineers aren't even going near the diplomats. They work everything out with the Terrestrial geologists, engineers and production experts. They're using their big freighters to carry materials around, and flying so high, and landing so fast and unceremoniously that the tariff departments have just given things up as a bad job. The various governments are getting around to cancelling the tariffs 'for the duration of the emergency' at last."

	"Ah, sweet bliss," sighed Aarn. "What's happening on Mars and Venus and Jupiter?"

	"Nothing much. A lot of Terrestrials have been moved to some of the Martian and Venusian mines. More effective machinery going in on Jupiter, delayed by the fact that only brainless gorillas like yourself can stand the strain of gravity for any length of time. They're prospecting the planets by telatoscope."

	"Say—what are they looking for? What elements? Where are they getting iron—?"

	"Thought of that myself, Aarn. Iron, some of the other things—all from the suns—both Anrel and Sol. They're looking for chromium, tungsten, platinum."

	"Try van Maanen's star. Probably loaded with heavy elements. They'll know how to get there. Carlisle, I want you to help me. I'm going to give you some dope, and you can shoot it along yourself. I've got some work of my own to handle."

-

Chapter Six

	"It's a nice looking plan," said Carlisle, looking at the drawings Aarn and Spencer were working over, "but there's an awful lot of blank spaces on it, for a finished blueprint."

	"Semi-finished. For one thing," said Aarn, "I've been waiting for a report from you. For another, we're leaving a lot of room for improvement, one might say."

	"One might," agreed Carlisle sourly. "According to the figures there the blasted thing is almost a mile long. So far about three quarters of it is drawn in. That still leaves enough 'room for improvement' to put an average city block of buildings in. What sort of improvements?"

	"That empty space is not lumped, as your analysis suggests. It's scattered. Much of it is in the section containing the telatoscope apparatus, and the weapon and screen rooms, and a lot is here, there and everywhere. You notice I have aggie-coil banks all over the thing, several dozen miniature material energy plants— each by the way, slightly larger than the Nova's original equipment—and also five separate control centers." Aarn paused. "Not that I want to change the subject—but have you come to make a report?"

	"What's the rest of the space intended for?"

	"Apparatus I'm working on, and will work on in the future. I have the pleasure of announcing I've battered my head on the hardest stone wall in the universe—or universes for that matter— for the last three weeks, trying to solve the apparently insoluble. Did those last figures I gave you help any?"

	"Uhmmm—there's some new stuff. Try it." Carlisle handed Aarn a curious bakelite box with a series of coils mounted about it. The lid was free to open, and on doing so, Aarn saw a piece of roughly shaped, jagged metal plate. The metal was a beautiful sapphire blue; it would have been taken for glass but for the curious, typical metallic sheen and luster, and the opacity of it.

	"It's pretty, I'll acknowledge that," said Aarn solemnly. "Is it good to eat?"

	"Uhm—never tried it that way, but I think it would be a bit heavy on the stomach. Also a bit indigestible. I started to bring it over here in a hand truck but Marth Lano devised that little case for it. Pick the thing up."

	Aarn reached into the box, and felt the curiously twisted strain of an anti-gravity field repelling his hand. "How can I?" he objected. "Where do you turn off the field?"

	"Set it down first. You may be a brute, but you aren't that much of a human derrick. There's about forty-five cubic inches of the stuff there."

	Aarn placed the box on the bench, and then cut off the anti-gravity field. The stout metal bench creaked sharply. "Sounds hefty," he observed. He reached in easily now, and tried to force his fingers under the bit of metal. He pinched harder. Finally with all the tremendous strength of both hands he lifted it a bit, got both hands under it, and with even his giant arms cracking under the strain of the apparently insignificant bit, placed it on the bench beside the box. Aarn grunted appreciatively. "It's heavy, Carlisle."

	"I might reply you've got more beef than I thought you had," grinned his friend admiringly. "At that angle—and it weighs slightly under half a ton! Density about 760. They don't make instruments to measure that. But your theories were dead right. It did just what you said."

	"What is it?" asked Spencer, examining it with interest. "Some new ultra-element?"

	"Resistium is the hydrogen of the ultra-elements. Nucleus of protons, electrons, and negatrons, with one orbital proton. I suggested to Carlisle, our chemist and metallurgist, that he try his metallurgy on a few ultra-elements and see what he got. What did you?"

	"I tried ultra-helium, and the blasted stuff was actually gaseous!" Carlisle exclaimed. "It acted like a gas, at any rate, but what a gas! Density several times platinum—and gaseous! I tried ultra-lithium, and so on, till I finally made some ultra-beryllium. I guess that's what you'd call it. Anyway, it was made with four orbital protons. Fine, stable, strong stuff. My resistium tools wouldn't touch it. Then I tried going higher. You heard about our explosion? That was ultra-oxygen. Those blamed ultra-elements aren't at all inert, though their reactions are curious. I made ultra-water accidentally, because, foolishly, I was using resistium chambers to handle the stuff. Funny—the stuff's a liquid at a reasonably low temperature—around three thousand centigrade. I'm wild to work on it. But, martyring my scientific interest to practical considerations, I tried some other things.

	"Remembering my mishap with the oxygen, I didn't try playing with ultra-flourine, because the ultra-helium was gaseous. I couldn't make a chamber out of that.

	"Leaving out the development work, I got as far as u-magnesium. That's the answer. The blamed stuff kept getting worse and worse to work with, heavier and heavier. Magnesium's got twelve orbital electrons—this has twelve orbital protons, and that meant an atomic weight of about twenty-four thousand. Slightly unstable. I quit. None of the things had much better properties than the resistium, though the u-beryllium was a bit better, and not impossibly difficult to make.

	"Then I tried an alloy. I had resistium, u-hydrogen, u-lithium and u-beryllium that I could work with.

	"Aarn, there's one thing you never thought of. What's the melting point of pure glycerine?"

	"Eutectics, you mean? I know the old paradox—glycerine, pure, melts at 62° above zero Fahrenheit and water at 32° above, but they use it as an anti-freeze solution in laboratories because the mixture freezes at thirty-eight below. Eutectic mixtures always freeze lower than either of their components."

	"Ah-ah—not always. Sodium and potassium, neither a liquid at room temperature, form a eutectic mixture that is—but u-hydrogen, melting point about 25,000, centigrade, u-lithium, melting point 29,000, and u-beryllium, melting at plus 44,000 centigrade, form a beautiful sapphire blue eutectic mixture melting at plus seventy-four thousand. Negative eutectic mixture."

	Aarn whistled softly. "How sweet. How in blazes did you fuse it?"

	Carlisle laughed. "I demand credit for a new stunt—they're going to install it pretty quick in a lot of the furnaces. I grabbed a hunk of the heart of Anrel in a telatoscope—and that durium— that's what I called the alloy—just melted like water."

	"Right enough," Spencer nodded. "Aarn has a similar use for the telatoscope we're working on. Show you later. Go on."

	"Well, that's about all. Except I found I could heat-treat it for greater strength. Tensile strength runs about eight million. The heat-treating, however, is at a temperature of a mere 64,000. I don't think anyone will take the temper out of it."

	"I'd like to make a really hard ultra-metal," sighed Aarn. "Iron, or tungsten."

	"That would be hard enough," agreed Carlisle sourly, "to make. It'd blow up in your face."

	"I guess so," Aarn smiled. "You say the ultra-magnesium was radio-active?"

	"Yes—and it shot out positrons!"

	"You must have had a lot of neutrons in it. You couldn't keep them out of an artificial metal of course—need 'em. May try it again later, though. What are the other properties on this stuff? Can you make it fairly easily?"

	"Well—comparatively. It's not a lot harder to make than resistium, and it reacts peculiarly to electric currents. It—it seems to twist them. That's why I want you to work on it."

	"Hummmm—that's interesting. I will," agreed Aarn. "In the meantime that's the data we've been waiting for. I'll make some more tests on this with Spence's help. You can get the Magyans started on making it here, and take a flying trip with us to earth tomorrow, and make some data sheets for the Heavy Metals organization to work over."

	Together the rest of the day, the physicist and the engineer tested the physical properties of the metal from an engineering standpoint, in connection with the new battleship, and then Aarn took it while Spencer worked out figures on the ship, to make some calculations and observations relative to the interference it might cause in the mechanism of the ship. The steel explosion ray, which released the molecular bonds between steel crystals, turning the metal into a gas under hundreds of thousand of pounds pressure, was combatted, as were certain other weapons, in the resistium hull of the Nova. If durium acted differently, some changes were called for.

	Durium responded correctly to most forces—it would replace resistium almost everywhere. But—electric currents did strange things. A current put in at one side of the plate simply was not detectable on the opposite side. The current would not travel rectilinearly through it. It turned through ninety degrees in a thin plate, and through some multiple angle in a thicker plate, the thickness and the frequency of the current making it possible to have a single-wire short-circuit!

	Aarn settled down to immediate and serious business. He annealed the plate, working with a telatoscope image of Anrel's flaming heart as a heat source. The characteristics were entirely altered. It conducted normally. Following Carlisle's methods, he heat-treated it in various ways. He poured it into a film-thin plate, and finally attempted to draw it, only to discover that it acted exactly like a piece of rubber when fresh and active. It would stretch to the elastic limit, and snap back instantly with the clang of an anvil struck by a heavy sledge. Stretched more, it did not change shape. It broke. It could not be forged, rolled or drawn once it had been heat treated. Annealed, it could be handled satisfactorily.

	At last, apparently satisfied, Aarn went back to the calculations on which he had been working.

	The next day, the three returned to the Solar System in the Nova. Anto Rayl was there now, consulting with the fortification engineers, and the Heavy Metals company officials.

	Aarn dropped Spencer, Canning and Carlisle on Earth, and, alone in the Nova, left for a destination he kept to himself.

	Within a week of the first attack, powerful telatoscopes had been set up in every observatory of Earth. They were put there so that the astronomers, who knew most about systematic investigation of the universe, and best could spot those tiny signs which would indicate a planetary system, might search for the home of the Centaur race.

	They tried, but they were human. Through lifetimes these men had worked with their telescopes, trying, trying, always trying to clear that haze that shrouded the stars, trying to gather one last photon of light that might make the spectrum of that star or the other a bit clearer, so that they might learn to some rough extent where and what and how that star was and acted. The optical image of the stars meant so little to them, it was so poor, that they had learned by hard-won experience, and mathematics of inspirational brilliance through all the time since Galileo first turned his tiny telescope on Jupiter, how to make the spectroscope tell the story. Before the telatoscope they had squeezed, it seemed, every last particle of information out of the spectrum. Before 1950 they had been able to tell how big the star was, how hot, how distant, its direction of motion, its speed of rotation, its shape, its density, whether it had a companion or not, and a thousand other things, not from the image of the star—but from its spectrum.

	These men who, from grim necessity and the driving hunger to know had squeezed from a series of dim, blurred lines on their plates, all this information—were given the telatoscope. Stars— the vast, incredible super-giant stars, blue-white and inconceivable in their energies—became perfect working models in their laboratories, to be examined with microscope, high-resolution spectroscope, camera and rule at will, with utter ease. Stars—tiny, impossibly dense things, red as dying coal, a hundred, a thousand times denser than platinum; mysterious and unseen in their dimness—rested on their laboratory benches. The very heart and kernel of the suns of space lay exposed to their instruments under the most ideal conditions.

	Every star in the universe lay ready to be examined with perfect ease — the weirdly mysterious inner workings of the Cepheid variables, where they could see the Cosmic Stoker throwing on fuel at regular intervals, the vast irregular variables such as Mira, three hundred million miles in diameter, and tenuous as the rarest vacuum man had produced.

	They examined the stars of the heavens to find the sun which warmed the race of Centaurs.

	They tried, no doubt, to be just, and to fulfill their duty, but to such men, knowledge in the abstract was more than the rather distant thing known as death by cosmic ray, dissolution in a vast flame of energy.

	So they searched the Universe, and extended their scope steadily, and carefully, using reason and sense; and because it was not reasonable that a sun of Spectral Class M5 and absolute Magnitude + 10 could warm a planetary system, and because it was a very dim, red star, and quite uninteresting—the star known to a hostile race as Malc was not reported or investigated. They did not see the strange planetary system, or the Double Worlds, Sor-osk and Al-osk. They did not see the vast works going on there.

-

Chapter Seven

	They appeared instantaneously, simply becoming in space, where nothing had been. Like lights winking into activity in swift succession, three giant battleships, then a pause, then twenty-one titanic grey-silver shapes, grim, latently quiet. About them, one hundred and seventy-four heavy cruisers became, then two hundred and twenty-three light cruisers, then nearly a thousand destroyers.

	In perfect formation they swept abruptly toward the Solar System. From Earth rose her seven completed battleships, and rapidly the Magyan fleet began to wink into being as it hurled through space to join in the defense. The battle to prevent the re-establishment of a Solar System base was about to begin.

	The Centaur fleet swung toward Neptune now. Pluto they could not hope to use for a base; the whole great planet still glowed dimly red from the inconceivable surge of energy that had bathed it for two long minutes. Neptune and its one moon was their goal. Faster than light they pressed toward it. The human fleets shot out to join them.

	There was no tremendous inequality in size of the fleets. Magya possessed nearly fifty giant battleships, Earth, seven already. The battleship is the absolute rock foundation of any warfare; it alone can shatter the charge of all other types of ships. Nearly fifty battleships were in the combined fleets. Five remained on Earth, a rear-line defense; five remained on Magya, in the impossible event that attack might somehow reached Magya herself.

	But—the Centaurs far outclassed the human fleets in the heavy cruiser division. And ten heavy cruisers can pull down even a battleship.

	A million and a half miles from Neptune the fleets waited. The destroyers went forth first, to test, to feel out the enemy. And each fleet was carefully hiding its worst, unless the enemy already knew it. But—the Centaurs knew all Earth's weapons.

	In less than thirty seconds, the Centaur destroyers retreated, such as still could move. Green spheres of deadly force gnawed slowly, grindingly at the shattered hulks of the others. Here and there a screen had leaked under the neutralizing action of the beams, and a disintegrating atomic bomb had gotten through, to consume the ship in glorious, washing green flame, pricked out with sparklets of deep, deep violet light that came, glowed for an instant, and vanished.

	Angrily the light cruisers sailed forward to route the destroyers of the human fleets. Stricken, mortally wounded, they fled before the glowing, malevolent green spheres of super-saturated space that collapsed into another, impossible space, immovably anchoring the cruisers. Helplessly caught, they washed out great power beams, only to see the smallest cruisers, protected by Aarn's infinitely more efficient protective screen, glow, and live through it. Invisible, the vicious heat rays left them untouched. Titanic transpons short-circuited themselves into extinction. And —here and there—a destroyer glowed slowly red, and burst into flaming incandescence as the sheer heat energy destroyed it.

	The Centaurs wasted no more time. Slowly, the great battleships lumbered up. There was no swift, darting movement now; they were too huge to turn swiftly, despite their drive system.

	The destroyers retreated hastily as the two fleets of battleships, reinforced by the heavy cruisers, came into action. Circling wide, the destroyers attempted to reach the enemy light ships, now wavering, weaving, darting behind the battle line.

	And Aarn was not near. No man knew where he had gone, nor why, nor when he would return. Spencer and Carlisle, helplessly Earthbound by orders from the Commanding Staff, since the Nova was gone, watched the battle by telatoscope on Earth.

	"They're not using their gamma bombs," Carlisle commented.

	"They're afraid of it—they can't use it when they fight in formation."

	Anto Rayl was with them—he had given up his place on the Santo Magya for that. He smiled slowly now. "That is all well. We will—presently."

	Almost as he spoke, a faint flush filled the volume of space the battle occupied, the tinge of ionization in the faint traces of vapor released from blasted ships. Gamma—deadly, terrifically penetrative gamma rays, released from slow explosion atomic bombs. The battleships of the Centaurs hung grimly at their posts, as the Centaur light ships, and even heavy cruisers, backed away.

	"The battleship armour is stiff enough to stop even that." Spencer paused. "I wonder what new stunt they have." "Have they any?" asked Carlisle.

	"They must have—or they would have returned at once. Ah—that fellow got one too many." A great Centaur battleship was suddenly struggling, whipping vainly to escape the great clutching green fields. They swarmed swiftly now, eating, clinging, spreading. Half a dozen small ships burst from the side of the greater, and scuttled swift as thought to near-by ships. One reached its destination unharmed. The others, moths in Titan's flames, vanished as though they had no protection whatever as the inconceivable transpons of struggling battleships slashed across them for a minute fraction of a second.

	Spencer moved suddenly. He settled himself at a second telatoscope, and began setting its constants carefully. The whirling haze on its stage cleared. They were in the heart of a giant battleship—in the control room. Spencer depressed a control that automatically locked the scene on the ship, whatever it might do.

	There were some dozen or more Centaurs working keenly, swiftly at their instruments. A steady buzz of low voices echoed, yet only a slight hum of sound came from the battling ship itself.

	Almost quiet it was. Spencer could not understand their words, but he smiled faintly. "Our philologists are beginning to decipher their language, I understand—the records they got last time. I wonder what they are saying." But that was not why he had turned to this set. He smiled grimly as he caught a sudden scene in their engine room. A dozen Centaurs were struggling to fit in a new tube in the automatic balancing circuits. There were three circuits, parallel in type and automatically switched over as one failed. Carefully Spencer inspected the design of their tubes. He whistled softly. "They don't use such hot stuff—that's a nickel-chromium heater they're using there— They'd be better off if they used molybdenum."

	"Maybe no got," shrugged Carlisle. "See if they've got anything new."

	"How can I—I don't even know when I see old stuff. They make the apparatus differently. Even if it does the same thing, it may not resemble our stuff." But he was busily skipping from one piece of apparatus to another. Suddenly he started back from the screen. Something green and huge intruded suddenly on the side of the stage, and the scene distorted wildly, slipped aside, and seemed to be engulfed in the greenness. Abruptly, only a green mist hung sparkling before them.

	Softly, Spencer whistled. "The super-saturated field stops even this!"

	In an instant he sought another ship. Outside, they could see the greenness spreading over the surface. A brief glance showed orderly confusion within the craft as the Centaurs sought to escape. Then—all the tiny escape ships were swiftly expanding incandescent gas. Caught in vagrant transpons or ultras, they vanished.

	Spencer was in the heart of a ship, and his eyes were very, very intent. A half-score of Centaurs were gathered anxiously about some piece of apparatus, peering, watching. Tubes, gigantic things ten feet long were warming up slowly. There was a tenseness in the very air. Tensely Spencer spoke. "It's—like a drive apparatus—the usual drive though is combined kinetic and momentum drive and—I don't see—the momentum—it's a projector though!"

	A sharp voice snapped. An engineer drove home a plunger. Titanic transpons flared, and the apparatus seemed to strain, even the telatoscope twisting slightly as the enormous tensions built up to a sudden climax. Then—an automatic plunger drove down —and the tension collapsed.

	Simultaneously, Anto Rayl, watching the other screen, cried out in horror. The gigantic Santo Magya suddenly, instantly, exploded into ultra-microscopic dust, the incredible strength of her hull shattered, gone in the minutest fraction of a second.

	"My ship—" gasped Anto Rayl softly.

	"Great God!" Spencer exploded into action. In an instant he reached a telephone, and his insistent, authoritative demands and perhaps his name, got a telephone circuit through to the United Command. The highest officials were there, for one organizer of forces, one strategist was worth a thousand scout ships, or even a light cruiser. Spencer suddenly raved into the telephone:

	"It's suicide to fight—they can't do a thing—they're helpless —it's kinetic energy without momentum. Kinetic without momentum—irresistable!"

	Anto Rayl had the scene on the telatoscope. Presently, Spencer saw, headquarters had them on their own instrument, and he deserted the telephone. "That's insane—kinetic energy without momentum!" snapped a Venusian Commander. "Both involve mass and velocity."

	There were several Magyans present. Now Martal Harnat took the Venusian's place, Martal Harnat, the United Commander. "Why do you say this is possible? It sounds wrong to me," he said.

	Spencer snapped his words swiftly. "Mass—velocity are both involved—but momentum involves the first power—MV—and kinetic energy involves the second power—1/2MV2. Momentum then is vectoral—kinetic energy isn't! Don't you see, the system gains energy, but not momentum. Then to maintain momentum constant, and increase velocity square—increase kinetic energy— the system must scatter! The parts have more kinetic energy— but the system contains no greater momentum. That's the only way to satisfy the conditions—increased kinetic energy—no more momentum."

	"What can we do? They've destroyed two more ships—"

	"It's too swift—too deadly—let them have their way—we must concede them the Neptune base."

	"But then what can we do? Why stop at Neptune? Why not march on to Earth itself—turn those rays on Earth?"

	Spencer snorted. "They haven't power enough to disturb the planet in the slightest. They wouldn't even raise the dust. The energy must be distributed throughout the whole mass attacked, and the entire blasted fleet couldn't touch us."

	The order went out. Swifter than light the fleet retreated from the impossible battle. In seconds they ringed Mars, the planet next nearest Neptune, the others being on the opposite side of the system.

	"But where," asked Carlisle softly, as Spencer shut off the telatoscope scene at the moment it showed the man at Headquarters doing the same," is Aarn. Personally, I think I should find him a great comfort at the present moment."

	"Uhmmm—so should I," said Spencer, still busy with the telatoscope. Triumphantly, unopposed, the Centaur fleet was sweeping down on Neptune. As Spencer had readily realized, they had no intention of attacking Earth at once. That simply wasn't possible with their present force. But they were settling on Neptune. Already a hexagon of battleships had been laid out on Parssal Plateau, and another in Harman Basin. Machines and Centaurs were already at work, establishing the base.

	Spencer looked on with lambent, angry eyes. There wasn't a thing he could do about it. But he turned the telatoscope till it showed the strange piece of apparatus he had seen before. He looked at it critically for some time, then finally sighed slowly. "I could probably make one like it, even without Aarn's math, but I'd need some one of the mathematicians of the systems to help me. Then we could duplicate it, but—"

	"They are already," interrupted Anto Rayl. He was looking at another telatoscope, and watching several dozen men working carefully over a whole roomful of telatoscopes. "They've got a whole corps of engineers, metallurgists, draughtsmen and mathematicians on it already. And," he smiled beatifically, "the Centaurs are congratulating themselves on one more weapon Earth doesn't have."

	"It won't do us any good when we do get it," said Spencer sourly, "because they have the defense, of course. Only we haven't. We will have before long, though," he added thoughtfully. "I think—the answer is fairly easy—fairly obvious—but how to get the math factors down—" he paused. "Damn Aarn," he said hopelessly. "I can't handle that dope. I suppose I'll have to turn it over to some other fellow—"

-

Chapter Eight

	Just four days later, the first of the defense devices was installed in a battleship. There were fairly simple things that had to be done to install them, really, for the K.E. ray needed only to be combined with momentum waves to become a readily handled tractor beam.

	As they had realized, the Centaurs stopped on Neptune, and during those four days they worked valiantly. In an incredibly short time, huge furnaces and machines, brought disassembled from the home planet, had been set up and were roaring in full blast. Already a giant transpon beam plant had established a great arching beam that stretched across the billions of miles to the sun for power needed in their works. This beam, it hardly need be said, was proof against shortcircuiting, as Aarn had done with the other.

	So, fairly peacefully, under conditions of an enforced truce, the two races worked, preparing for the next stage. On Earth, defense works were rushed, and production forces were being shaken firmly into place by Magyan experts. On Magya, the great shipyards were turning out the destroyers freely, and the giant hulls of battleships rose slowly, but with a grim steadiness.

	And in a vast cavern, deep beneath Magya's surface, a mile-long skeletal structure began to take form, a structure of wonderful, dazzling sapphire blue. The great I-beams, ten feet in cross-section, were being welded in place—welded at a temperature of some seventy thousand degrees Centigrade, and then heat-treated—in place! For about every joint, a great shifting mist formed, to solidify suddenly into such inconceivably deadly radiation that no living creature could watch directly; only by specially designed television devices was sight possible. The heart of Anrel furnished the furnaces for this job, clean, non-corroding, non-alloying flames of a metallurgist's idealized dreams. Work proceeded peacefully.

	And then—Magya started in sudden amazement. A fleet of twenty Centaur battleships appeared within five million miles of the planet!

	Instantly, utter confusion reigned in the Command Headquarters. Plans had not been laid for this.

	This was not, to say the least, the first time Magya had seen a hostile war fleet. Magyans didn't need a great deal of organized instructions to fight. They had old plans, plans devised for fighting Tefflans. For one thing, they had the planetary forts, and they had still two great fortified moons. In addition, the surface of the planet was positively freckled with the transpon arc stations which had been using great arcs to break down the nitric acid in the seas.

	Perhaps the Centaurs didn't expect to find Magya so well prepared. At any rate, it was a bad mistake to come within five million miles of the planet. Ordinarily a transpon beam isn't effective as a weapon at more than 10,000 miles. The Magyans made up in vigor what their beams lacked in directive force. Two hundred and eighty-seven stations on the planet itself turned their beams in the general direction of the fleet. That released heat—just heat in general. Trillions of horsepower of heat flaring about the fleet. It didn't greatly bother the battleships at first, but within a few seconds it became perfectly unbearable for the small ships. They fled.

	Into the bargain, the titanic transpon beams of the two moon-forts shot out. These were designed solely as weapons, and they were highly effective up to 200,000 miles. They were still about 1% efficient at five million, and even one percent of their five trillion horsepower beams was unbearable.

	The Centaur fleet retreated instantly. They went to one hundred million miles, faster than light. There they hung for investigation.

	The two moons got busy. Because they were forts, the Magyans had never let them become antiquated. They had Green Field apparatus on a scale such as no ship could carry. Green Fields of a diameter approximately equal to the length of a fifty-man scout. Unfortunately their velocity was somewhat lower than that of light—but they would carry a hundred million miles. They did. And when made in that size, aided by a few gravity bombs, they sought out victims. One of the twenty battleships was destroyed.

	One by one, thirty-seven battleships crossed over from Earth's space, to aid Magya. Only four of them had the Defense mechanism. Two heavy cruisers had it. It was a quite inadequate fleet for attack, and now the Centaur fleet had very evident plans. They set out for the planet Starth. Starth, number 77 of Anrel's family of 87 major planets, was the world nearest Magya in this System of Vast Distances. It was only three and a half billion miles away.

	Magya, and the human fleets, had the pleasure of standing helplessly by while the Centaurs established a base on Starth. Their first act was to start the transpon beam on its long, long journey to Anrel for power. It would be a long time before that reached Anrel, hundreds of billions of miles away. In the meantime they set to work with their stored power.

	And at almost exactly the same time, they started the same work on Neptune. Ships, protected by their K.E. rays, started for the Planetoid belts. Anrel had one, as had Sol. But in the Solar System, it was handier, and they started pulling more, and heavier material. In Anrel's system it had to be transported by the faster-than-light drive, for distances there were too vast for normal tractor towing.

	It worked out the same. In a day they had half a dozen good-sized asteroids circling their base-planets in orbits. In two, the asteroids were being fused to make a new, larger moon. They were being welded into a great, hollow fort, with half-mile thick metal walls. The cruisers did that, while the battleships, with their K.E. ray defense, hauled more material.

	And the human fleets hung by, utterly helpless to come within a million miles, while the impregnable defenses were made up. The K.E. defense was being rushed—but the Centaurs knew that. They rushed too. They concentrated on moving asteroids. They moved dozens each day. And since an asteroid is, in general, nothing but a solid mass of very high-grade armor-plate steel, a fine, nickel-steel alloy, they were building up a very nice little system of forts.

	By the telatoscope, Spencer watched the Centaurs fitting the giant things with great machines that were coming across from the mysterious home planet of the Centaurs in great freight transports. The ships simply—became. They did not come, they appeared.

	"They're good engineers," he said sourly. "Those blasted things will be just about but not quite impregnable!" Spencer had gotten the answer. His bitter expression faded into one of savage satisfaction. "There's only one thing that can smash these invaders!"

	Anto Rayl got it also. "Ma-kanee," he said softly. Ma-kanee was the moon the Magyan's had thrown down on Teff-el, their ancient enemy planet. The forts were invulnerable because they were too big for any ship to attack. Well—there were things bigger than they were! "What moons have you we could use—"

	"We have a beautiful little moon right here, sir," said Spencer blissfully. "It revolves about the planet Mars—a small planet, which means we can pull it free of the planet quickly. It's about twenty miles in diameter, and very, very rugged."

	"And we still have most of the driving apparatus we used when we moved Ma-kanee against Teff-el. We can install it in a few weeks—"

	"Let us then be up and doing," Spencer rose as he spoke. "Let's go see the Command Headquarters. They ought to be interested—"

	"Could the Centaurs prevent us reaching the moon you mention in any way? By their K.E. rays for instance?"

	"Not a chance—Mars is armed to the teeth—God of War in fact, I guess. And the moons have been loaded with high-power junk already. It'll be simple, really—"

	"It will take three months at the least, just to set up the apparatus."

	Spencer looked at the telatoscope stage. Neptune loomed huge, a dozen little moonlets swinging around her; and around each moonlet swung several ships, working at her, spotted with tiny glowing lights. "They'll have a fine collection of things, before long," he said sourly.

	The High Command took the suggestion to heart joyfully. In a day the gigantic apparatus that had been salvaged from the seven hundred mile moon, Ma-kanee, was being transhipped to Earth for installation in Phobos.

	And with steady, persistent work, the ring of planetoid moons about Neptune grew. It was going to take a tremendous amount of work to dislodge the Centaurs. And still their battleships equipped with K.E. rays worked unhindered, for the humans had not finished the great task of re-equipping all their ships for a final contest. The ships could not be docked fast enough, since all, or nearly all the great ways were engaged in building operations.

	And then—Aarn returned. From nowhere, his ship appeared, a hundred million miles off Earth, and signalled for landing. Recognized, the Nova dove down at terrific speed, and landed again, near the Spencer Research Laboratories. Spencer was on the field to greet him, and with Carlisle and Anto Rayl stepped into the Nova as soon as Aarn threw open the lock.

	It was a few days more than two weeks since Aarn had left. But they stopped in amazement as they looked at the Jovian. He looked positively thin, and haggard beyond belief. He was worn out, utterly exhausted. His eyes seemed wild, strange, in their deep-set sockets. Wearily he waved to them.

	" 'Lo Spence. I see the Centaurs are back. How'd they get in this time?"

	"Good God, Aarn, what have you been doing? You look as though some one tried to draw you down to a number six wire! The Centaurs had a new weapon—explosive beam none of our apparatus would stop. Blew up four battleships."

	Aarn smiled wearily. "They did uh—kinetic energy beam I suppose. They would. We were horribly slow thinking of it. I thought of it—" his face changed, became even more drawn if possible, and his voice became somewhat hoarse as he mentioned it, waving his hand vaguely,"—out there. You think of things— there. You have the defense, I suppose?"

	"Some of the ships have now. They're equipping them for a show-down fight. The Centaurs are making moon-forts out of planetoids. Planetary Orbital Forts. We want to bottle up their ships at least, as soon as possible—but we can't handle those big battleships very rapidly."

	Aarn laughed hollowly. "Got say ten ships equipped? You have—good! Tell the Command to send 'em along. I'll bottle up their ships, if ten battleships can back me up. That's one weapon they never will get, by all the Cycles of Space! I—I nearly went mad, getting it—and I had the telatoscope.

	"Get at it, will you, Anto? I'm—tired. Three—three months, where I was—my time. I didn't sleep. You don't seem to have to out there. But I'm about—out, now. And I have to work the damned thing. Let me rest a bit. I need some eats, too. Get Martin, will you, Spence?"

	Aarn almost collapsed in his chair, as Anto Rayl left to get in touch with the Command Headquarters. Spencer went to get Martin, their butler-chef-valet, a deep wonderment in his eyes. Never in all the years he had known him had Spencer seen Aarn looking even slightly tired. Aarn was inhuman in his strength, inhuman in his speed of mind and eye and hand—and inhuman in his endurance. Now—he was a worn-out shell!

	He was back in ten minutes, Anto returning almost simultaneously. It was to Anto Rayl Aarn spoke first. "What say?"

	"They took your word, Aarn. You knew they would. Ten ships, and twenty-seven equipped cruisers and two hundred destroyers arc going as soon as men can be gathered—an hour or so."

	"Good. I'm going to take a bath." Aarn rose, and went toward his room, his step unsteady, jerking slightly from fatigue. Spencer went back to the power room to see if he could see Aarn's new apparatus.

	He saw it. It sat directly in the center of the room, engulfing the material engine that loomed huge before it. Spencer took one look at it, and he turned sick to his very soul. It was made up of angles and planes and surfaces. But the angles weren't as angles should be. The acute angles were obtuse, and the obtuse angles were—geometers had never named angles like that. And the planes. They were planes, but they twisted. They didn't twist up, they didn't twist down—but they twisted, twisted in a violently indescribable way.

	Spencer went back to the control room and sat down. Some faint, dim understanding of Aarn's mental torture came to him. Aarn said he'd been gone three months. That suggested another space. That—thing in the power room suggested something beyond conception. Spencer couldn't remember it at all, because he couldn't mentally picture the thing. The human mind wasn't naturally built that way. He wondered vaguely how Aarn had conceived it; wondered incredulously how he had built it.

	Aarn returned in three quarters of an hour. He'd eaten, and he'd had a bath, but he was still exhausted beyond belief. Only driving will kept him moving.

	"Those ships ready?" he asked Anto Rayl as he came in.

	"They rushed. They're ready to leave. They want to know what you have, to copy. Make plans of."

	Aarn burst out into a roar of hollow laughter. "Copy. Plans. Tell them to go down into Hell, and watch the curves of Satan's horns. When they make copies of that, then maybe they can copy what I have. Tell them to take a picture of it.

	Tell them that I don't know the plans of it—now. Tell them— Oh—go back and look at it."

	Aarn settled at the controls. Wonderingly, Anto Rayl went back in the control room. Thirty seconds later he came back. His normally tanned face was pale, and his eyes were peculiar.

	Silently he picked up the telephone aboard the ship, and a moment later he was talking to the Secretary of the High Command.

	"Anto Rayl. I beg to report I have seen Aarn's machine. It cannot be copied. Plans? No. There are no plans. It is beyond plans. Describe it? Hwhah—I'm human—it isn't. It can't be copied. Now—now that I'm not looking at it I don't think it exists. Stop repeating that 'we need plans'. Get this: whatever it is, whatever it does, it does it, and nothing like it will ever be made on Earth. Turn your telatoscope on it."

	Aarn grinned maliciously. "The telatoscope—he'll see it, all right, and he'll tell them it's blue, like durium, and scarlet— that's ultra-sulfur, Carlisle—and grey-green, and that's ultra-magnesium carbide. But he won't tell them what it is."

	The Nova rose. She swept up from Earth, and behind her came the fleet, judiciously spaced. Aarn was working at the telatoscope, somehow drawing from some deep well of energy much of his customary speed. Then the Nova darted out toward the planetoids. The fleet followed—piloted by Jovians such as Aarn.

	There were three battleships of the Centaurs there, and four great transports. They were hauling several billions of tons of planetoid. The battleships swung abruptly as the Nova appeared. They weren't agile here, and neither was the human fleet. It hung back now, unable to maneuver through the asteroids as could the relatively tiny Nova.

	The Centaur ships turned, angrily it seemed, and directed their combined rays at this presumptuous heavy cruiser. The K.E. rays. Then they danced away as Spencer sent out a stream of the deadly green fields.

	Aarn laughed, very softly. "Don't do that, Spence. It's just a waste of energy. They won't hurt us with their beams—" They didn't. The beams washed off of the Nova's defense. Aarn explained jerkily. "Our defense is founded on durium—not the one you must use, come to think of it. You couldn't think of this one—here. Only—out there, where you can understand all about durium. Why it has such peculiar electric and magnetic properties. Gravitic, too, for that matter.

	"Anyway—our weapon's the Cosmical Constant."

	Aarn used it then. From somewhere in the ship, everywhere in the ship, came a strange vibration. It wasn't sound, it wasn't light, it wasn't annoying. It was vastly stimulating—but it wasn't any vibration such as man had ever known. Briefly it grew in intensity—then it seemed to burst, and from the nose of the Nova, the Cosmical Constant bomb drifted out. Actually, it traveled at a speed immeasurably faster than light. But it created a strange effect on human eyes. It seemed black, blacker than space, the ultimate in blackness because it devoured all light. It touched the nose of a Centaur battleship, and that turned black. It passed several layers of defensive screening on the way, absorbing them, but when it touched the ship, it stopped. Two hundred feet of the nose vanished in the blackness, and gradually turned grey once more, the dull, powdery grey spreading further for a moment afterward. And the grey powder that had been ten-foot steel armor was expanding with terrific velocity. In seconds it hit the Nova's screens, and the ship jarred slightly to it. Another bomb reached out. There was no flash, no sound. Only the momentary blackness, and the spreading grey dust—then there were no Centaur ships as they raced for their base.

	Aarn followed them, faster than light, as they had gone. He caught up as they stopped, off Neptune finished the destruction of one battleship before it could reach safety. He sent three of the bombs scudding toward the planet; then a transpon licked out at him, and the bombs were stopped, somehow, in drinking up the transpon beam. For several seconds ships appeared suddenly near Neptune from all over the Solar System. The Centaurs were being called in. For the work had been done. The Centaurs knew now that the human fleets possessed a weapon they could not fight.

	The Centaur fleets were bottled up.

	Grandly, the ten great battleships swept up to ring Neptune. Cruisers and destroyers deployed about the planet. The Nova hung off Neptune, and the Centaur fleet could not move, save within the protection of the titanic planetary defenses.

	Half an hour later, the Centaur fleet in Magya's space was bottled up.

	Aarn had been silent as he did his work. Now he asked a question. "Have they found the home planet of the Centaurs?"

	"No," replied Spencer. "They can't. They can't follow the ships, because they go out of this space, into some one of the hundreds of possible spaces in the inter-space, and we can't follow. Then they must come back to their own planet, in this space directly."

	Aarn blinked weary, burning eyes. "We'll have to follow them. Until we can attack them, they'll never leave us alone.

	"I'll have to sleep soon. But you saw the weapon. It's the Cosmical Constant in action. It's something new—it's not four dimensional—it's a fifth-dimensional twist, just a slight fifth-dimensional twist in space. It isn't effective ordinarily, because it's slight. It becomes operative only at enormous distances, because there the effects of the fourth dimensional curvature of gravity are almost nil.

	"But those bombs are really that fifth-dimensional twist isolated, and condensed. It was very hard to work out—even there. You see—the best of our ordinary math is fourth dimensional, really, and our best geometry. I had to invent new math, and new geometry because—fourth dimensional stuff won't handle it. It—seems to be fifth dimensional. Perhaps—it may even give us some clue to—the interspace.

	"The bombs are a concentrated form of that special twist; they represent the isolated Cosmical Constant. Pure repulsion. No atom can resist that. It does two things, really; it makes every atom repel every other atom. It doesn't require an enormous amount of energy really—it—it seems to be—" Aarn simply fell silent.

	"What?" demanded Spencer.

	"Beyond the law of conservation of energy," replied Aarn. "Or perhaps obedient to some higher Law of Conservation. I tried it a good bit, out there by those Dark Stars. It—made a rather weird laboratory. Ask Canning about his brief experience. The laws of optics don't hold, and the laws of geometry are different. You see, when I first grasped the idea of this thing, I had a number of difficulties—rather inconceivable." He looked at his friends peculiarly before he went on. "As a matter of fact —I can't explain, or understand the thing now. I couldn't make it now. My mind can't really conceive it. I looked at it just a bit ago. You—can if you want to. It's in Number One Power room. Look at it—I'll tell you where and how I made it then."

	Silently, Carlisle went back. There was the something—on the floor of the power room. It bulked thick and squat. And it was—wrong. There were strange protruberances that curved in, and yet stuck out, and there were some plates that twisted. They didn't twist up, or down, or left or right—but somehow—they twisted.

	He came back to the control room, understanding in some measure the unbearable mental agony Aarn must have undergone in the making of that, for he too was a mathematician. It was not a thing for human eyes to see—certainly nothing for human mind to conceive.

	"Rather peculiar—isn't it? Now, I don't know how I made it. I followed some calculations I was—inspired to make when I constructed it. It's made out of durium, and resistium and some ultra-sulfur. I made that, by the way, Carlisle, because I had to, and because it was possible where I was. It's stable now, because of some of the fields I keep in that thing. I can stop radioactivity, too. It's a perfect insulator. I needed the durium, because the electrical properties are so peculiar—" Aarn stopped, frowning deeply. Spencer looked at him with narrowed, intensely worried eyes. Aarn was incredibly haggard, incredibly tired.

	Suddenly Aarn looked up, bewilderment in his deep-set eyes. "I knew why they were—back there. I can't remember why now. I knew all about durium, and why it did that. And I calculated on it. Then I tried to make the thing, but it wouldn't be the way I made it, because the apparatus was always wrong, though I thought I set it right. Finally I had to use the telatoscope, and though the instruments read one thing, the telatoscope image of them was an entirely different thing. I knew why that was, too— back there, near S.F-R-237. That's a dead star—it's half a million miles in diameter though—surface gravity of something like 1.7 megagravs—that's a unit I invented—million earth-gravities.

	"Anyway—I cast those plates, and they looked right, there.

	"I found a tool metal that would cut them too—you saw they were machined, Spence. I machined them with an ultra-carbide. It took twenty-million degrees centigrade to act as my electric furnace for that carbide's formation, too. But it was hard. It cut durium like cheese. I had to use a force-field to hold it, and drive it, because I couldn't make a metal machine that would stand the strain of cutting even when the durium was annealed, and I had to machine some parts when they were hard."

	Spencer interrupted. "Did you sleep, Aarn?"

	"No—you don't have to, there. It seems to stimulate you somehow. Time seemed distorted too—it showed three and a half months, on my ship's chronometers. But I watched the telatoscope image of the lab chronometer here on Earth this time. I tried watching the second hand—but it moved so slowly, I grew tired of it.

	"Anyhow, I cut the things, and watched the telatoscope image. In the telatoscope, the plates and things looked wrong— the way they do here. But I knew why they did, then, and knew they were right. And when they were made, I assembled them there. Then I tried the thing. It worked, and I gathered all the pieces, and always, one tenth of one percent of the mass was lost, and it was not released as energy, even calculating the energy of disruption. It was—gone.

	"But I conceived the idea of the K.E. ray there, too, and— something—something important, I've forgotten it now. Something you can't think of in this kind of space, only there, where space isn't the same, and angles are different, and different geometry and laws apply."

	He looked up at Spencer for a moment. "For a little, there, I knew the whole answer to the energy of the suns. I can only remember this much, now—it's inexhaustible. It will go on forever. It always has, you see. There's something cyclic about it—the expanding and contracting, that is. There are different Laws of Conservation in those higher spaces—the Interspace for instance—and they nullify all our predictions of a dead universe. The 'dead suns' are just latent—storing energy now, till the time of the next cycle. When the expansion reaches the limiting value given—by—given by—

	"I've forgotten. I had it worked out on the machines, but the plungers slipped somehow when I left those fields.

	"Anyway, the expansion is succeeded by a tremendous contraction, and starts again. Like the Cepheid variables, because of course, they're really much the same—they too are limited by the expression I mentioned, but their enormous density, and the effects of the Cosmical Constant in their hearts makes the action with them take place every few days instead of every few hundred quintillion of years.

	"But there's something very important there—something about the telatoscope, that makes it possible to project images—"

	"That can't be it, Aarn," said Spencer softly, "because you can now."

	"Oh, yes, but not far—only a few miles at the utmost, and then they're ghostly. And—that wasn't it, I guess. I knew—I knew out there. It was something immensely important. Something—" His infinitely weary voice seemed to die away, and for an instant his whole body slumped, and Spencer started toward him.

	Then—abruptly, Spencer started back in horror, rooted in amazement. Before his eyes, Aarn's powerful, chunky body twisted and writhed, the eyes opened, suddenly bright and alert, but incredibly, horribly different. There was a harsh glare in them, a terrible commanding power, and in the whole body there was wrongness; it was misshapen, and Spencer got half-glimpses of the bony skeletal structure through flesh and clothing, and gasped.

	Aarn spoke, and as his jaw moved, the bones in it seemed to writhe in distorted angles. His voice did not seem to stir the air, but penetrate directly to their minds as he spoke. He laughed, softly, and contentedly. "Ahhhh—yes—so easy. I must go back there. And Carlisle, you must go with me to help with the math, and you Spence, to make the apparatus designs. It must be very heavy stuff, and you can handle the engineering better than I. But it is clear now, what I want. I can see. It must project images, and cancel waves, the infinite, all-reaching atom waves. You see—you can see—or can you? The waves are everywhere, so of course we must win. It is very simple. Even with the little short-range apparatus like this portable one, I can—"

	Aarn reached for the small apparatus on the side rack, his impossibly, obscenely twisted hands grasping it, lifting it. "I turn it through forty-seven degrees—about like this—then the circuits must be— be—" Abruptly he sank into his seat, and again the wave of change passed over him, and in reverse. He was normal once more. But—he had twisted the little set through forty-seven degrees. His eyes opened once more, dull and infinitely weary, and he released the thing he held, grimacing in horror. He stared at it for an instant, and suddenly he was sleeping, sleeping humanly and deeply.

	For a long instant there was silence, then Spencer spoke.

	"Turn off the gravity, Carlisle, and put him in his bunk. I'll—move—that." It wasn't a telatoscope any more. He threw a dust-cover over the impossible device, and lifted it. His fingers crawled as they grasped the projections that were hollowed, concave pits, sharply angular, yet flat.

-

Chapter Nine

	Aarn looked at the thing for a few moments, then turned away. "I did that? I suppose so. I don't know how, I'm sure. I'll have to go back there though, and I guess you'll have to accompany me. I can't remember anything now. I couldn't repair that apparatus I built if it failed for an instant.

	"But—now that I've slept and eaten and slept again, I feel human. Let's get down to business. Have they located the home world of these Centaurs?"

	"No," replied Spencer, "they haven't. There are so many many suns, and none they've found yet has any inhabited planets, though they've found two more planetary systems—and even located our friends the Tornans again. But no Centaurs. Is there any real chance of it?"

	"Probably not. There are a tremendous number of stars— too tremendous. All we can do is follow them home."

	"No we can't. We tried that. It doesn't work. We can't get really near one of their ships, because if it's a small ship, they destroy it before crossing, and if it's a large ship, they don't make the crossing. They duck out of this space, into some other fifth dimensional space, and return to this space at their own sun. It's really a quicker, easier method than any other, and impossible to follow."

	"Hmmm—" said Aarn grimly. "It was impossible to follow. We'll have to follow just the same. I've forgotten a lot of the stuff I learned Out There, but not everything. And I know that out there I could see quite clearly the interrelationship of the four dimensional space with the fifth dimensional interspace. And I assure you that since my little sweetheart back there with the crosseyed angles operates in the fifth dimension, whatever they try to do, it won't have to work on four dimensions trying to follow through five. It will stay in the fifth, and be able to reach the whole line through into whatever Universe they enter. I'll be able—no I won't! I'll have to follow their line through with a Cosmical Constant bomb, and that will destroy their ship the instant it rematerializes in the other space. The CC bombs will have no effect on a transitory ship, but they have to stop in the other space to jump off again and land back in this one, and in that instant, the CC bomb will catch up with them."

	"That's all right. We don't mind if you ruin a couple more Centaur ships. You'll just have to follow one over there to the other space, and another one, at a later time, back to this space."

	"Uhm—I guess I can do that. But they may make a habit of landing in that second space, anywhere in it, which would mean an entire infinity for me to search before finding their ship jumping from it, back to this."

	"Wait till they send two through at the same time. Won't that do?" asked Carlisle.

	"Do they ever do that, though?" asked Spencer.

	Anto Rayl spoke for the first time. "Yes. I've seen them. Their transports are frequently accompanied by battleships, when they're bringing over a particularly important load."

	"We'll wait," said Aarn decisively. "I want to see what I can make of my notes, anyway."

	For five days they hung off Neptune, waiting. The forces of the Centaurs were consolidating. Their ring of planetoid forts was being equipped beautifully and thoroughly. More transpon beams began to stab down toward the sun, securing power directly, instead of tapping the main beam from Neptune stations. One at a time, a number of transports made the crossing to and from far-distant Malc, landing with important cargoes of apparatus, and still Aarn waited.

	Together, the three went over Aarn's notes. Most of them had been made with the telatoscope on films, and were legible, but some had been penciled in books, and the weirdly angular hetrogeny was utterly impossible to decipher, merely causing head-splitting eye-strain. The curves of the letters disappeared mysteriously into the paper, to reappear abruptly on the opposite side of the sheet. Notes made on the back-cover of one book they found, by steaming off the sheet, were continued on the side of the paper which was glued to the binding. They gave these up in despair, knowing that only Out There would they be legible.

	The fifth day, a transport rose from Neptune, and beside it came a great silver-grey battleship's hull. Aarn settled himself abruptly into the control seat. The pair of giant ships rose till they were a quarter of a million miles from the planet, just inside the protecting wall of destruction the planetoid forts could fling out. Then—they began abruptly to shrink into the infinite distance or infinite smallness characteristic of inter-space motion.

	Aarn moved slightly in his seat. The ships had almost vanished when a CC bomb moved out with its weirdly deceptive speed. It swerved, and twisted in its course, circling on some invisible shortest path. Then abruptly it attached itself to the vanishing battleship. Simultaneously, the Nova jerked in sympathy, a dozen dials snapped into new positions, and relays thudded automatically. The Nova changed, and Neptune, Earth, the Solar System swam mistily and vanished.

	Abruptly, they had made the crossing. Light, vast and azure blue, flooded in through the ports. Aarn stiffened, his nerves taut, as the Nova spun on her axis. Then he gasped. Close by— less than a hundred miles off, was the Centaur battleship. It was vanishing, vanishing as the CC bomb ate into and through it. The transport, too, was vanishing. Somehow, in crossing the interspace the CC bomb had doubled itself. And far, far distant, shone three titanic blue suns. Only three were visible in all the sweep of space. Other than these, there was neither sun, nor planet, nor gaseous nebula. All the space seemed made of clear, infinitely transparent blue light. They had entered the Blue Universe.

	"Whoa—hey, what gives? BLUE! Light in empty space! It seems to extend to infinity," gasped Spencer.

	"Different laws," said Aarn softly. "Different characteristics of space. Or—infinite age. The suns of this space may have dissipated all their energies in light, blue light, till they are dead, and only the light remains to wander forever through space."

	"But the three suns there—three suns close together."

	As he spoke, they appeared on the telatoscope stage. Aarn started slightly as he looked at their images, inch-round fiery blue balls. "They're immense," said Aarn, "each is as large as Anrel itself." One of them centered, and expanded swiftly.

	Then—they saw the first of the Fire Planets. It was white, white with the glowing heat it received from the immense, blue-hot sun so near it. Swiftly Aarn shifted the scene of the telatoscope. One after another, the nine Fire Planets revolving about the three giant Blue Suns appeared. Carlisle was busy with the gravitometric and momentumetric devices. Finally he spoke.

	"Aarn—this thing isn't real. It can't be real. It's too perfect to be real. It's—it's a problem in mathematics, worked out and set up as an illustration, it's like those wire cages they make to show students a hyperboloid. Aarn—those three stars are within one percent of exactly the same mass. They revolve about each other in such a way that each is exactly at one apex of an equilateral triangle. Each of those three planets that revolves about each of the three stars, revolves in exactly the same orbit, each chasing the other like the wooden horses on a merry-go-round. The three apices of an equilateral triangle—that's one of the specific solutions to the Problem of Three Bodies. One of the simplest and earliest, the classic solution. Now in a multiple star system, you can have planets, satellites, stable only under certain conditions. There are 'forbidden' orbits just like the 'forbidden' electron orbits in the Bohr atom. They can revolve about one of the stars of the system at such a short distance they are virtually unaffected by the others. Or they can revolve about the common center of gravity of the system at such a distance the motions of the stars of the system leave them virtually unaffected. But they can't revolve between those limits. Now—Aarn, focus the telatoscope at about 356-27-453."

	Aarn changed his settings. A world swam into view. A great round world, off to one side of the stage. It was perfectly round, a perfect sphere, and it was absolutely featureless, a blue, level plain. Aarn started. "I can't see the surface," he said softly. "That's not the surface—that's the surface of a screen that's impenetrable to the telatoscope!" As he spoke, the image drove nearer, expanding swiftly, then suddenly shied away, and the featureless surface sparkled with tiny sapphire gems that came and glowed and vanished. The telatoscope image winked and dodged, and suddenly was far away. Aarn changed his settings. His face was drawn and tense with tremendous interest. "They can stop that telatoscope. A star can't do that. I can't do that myself."

	"Yes you can, Aarn," said Spencer. "The Green Fields will stop them. And—can you analyse that deflecting screen?"

	"No. Not now. I can only say it extends up from fifth dimensional characteristics. CC bombs would disrupt it, I think, but I don't care to annoy anyone who can make that screen. It's perfectly transparent to normal light and heat. I think—"

	Aarn's thoughts were lost. Carlisle snapped a word of warning, Anto Rayl suddenly moved in his seat, and depressed a plunger. A titanic transpon beam leaped out at the thing that had appeared. A half mile in diameter, it was blue, blue and clear and limpid, save in the center, where a great ruby blotch of light sprawled and writhed. It was made up of an innumerable, unguessable host of tiny ruby fibers that threaded out in winking, glowing light through the sapphire radiance of the greater shell of light. The transpon struck it, and sped through it, unhindered, inactive. Almost simultaneously, Spencer released his entire collection of armaments. All were ineffectual.

	An invisibly fine ruby filament extended suddenly toward the Nova, expanded to a cable a foot thick, and as it seemed about to touch the ship shied, bent double, and seemed to grow deep violet. Hastily it was jerked back.

	"Momentum—" said Aarn. A terrific tractor beam drove out at the Thing, and all the fine ruby filaments turned violet, and quivered. The thing danced and jumped, its sapphire substance writhed, expanded and contracted, and slowly the violet color crept in toward the great ruby ganglion at the center. Suddenly cold white flame began to pour from it, washing out toward the momentum wave beam, toward the ship. The white flame touched the ship, and instantly, the outer hull blazed with incredible incandescence, heated to a temperature beyond comprehension, and the stubborn, almost infusible resistium exploded in little slow puffs of vapor.

	"Great Gods!" exclaimed Anto Rayl, "what is that thing— boiling resistium!"

	"Force—force, living and malignant," snapped Aarn.

	But he was working. The green field bombs moved out gently, veered toward the white flame, and drank it in. The incredible blow-torch suddenly faded out. Green fields sank into it, and vanished in tenths of a second. Slowly they ate back toward the Thing. Finally, one reached it, reached it—and rebounded! It headed toward the Nova itself! Never under good control, the thing was a savage menace, and Aarn hurled out a dozen attractive centers to draw it in, instantly cutting off his projection of Green Fields, and snapping the Nova out of the region of danger.

	Faster than light, the Nova outraced the Green Fields. But the Thing followed!

	And as suddenly as the first had appeared—a score more came into being beside the Nova. Deep red filaments reached out, joined among them, and in a thousandth of a second, the Nova was in a great far-flung net of brilliantly glowing, foot-thick ruby cables. Abruptly, the Nova stopped her flight. The super-space drive failed! Aarn, his face white, snapped it off, and threw on the maximum power of the momentum waves. The great cables about the ship turned a red-violet, and squirmed and writhed, but they held! They glowed more intensely; more of the Things joined their comrades—more, till the Blue Universe was blotted out by their red-glowing cables. The Nova moved again, but not under her own power! Faster than light, the ship began to sweep toward the triple suns.

	"It seems they want us," said Carlisle. "What about the Cosmical Constant bombs?"

	"I'm afraid of them. They'll hurl us out of this space, certainly, if I use them so close by—" replied Aarn. But he set up the controls. "I wonder what they want of us—what they'll do. They act almost as though they were intelligent forces!"

	"Invulnerable forces," suggested Spencer tensely.

	"I don't think so. I think they have the same general pattern as the telatoscope waves. They evidently live on these Fire Planets themselves! If that's where they're taking us—"

	"Then that's the reason for that telatoscope proof screen on that world we tried to look at! It's proof against these Things!"

	"Then there's another race there. I wonder what—" began Aarn. And he stopped in amazement. A great ruby ganglion had turned violently purple, writhed and shriveled, another—another. Abruptly the things were fleeing, shrinking. And far, far across space, a dim greenish ray reached out, a dim, soft thing, a thing of enormous scope, hundreds of miles in diameter. All the sapphire and ruby things were struggling, shrinking in it. And the Nova hummed and chattered and whispered with faint hag-mumblings. And the opposite end of the greenish ray vanished at the Blue World they had discovered, vanished behind the thin, impenetrable blue screen.

	Softly Anto Rayl whistled. The ruby and sapphire things, less than a score now, were fleeing and the murmurs left the Nova, and swept away with the greenish radiance.

	Aarn moved. He depressed a plunger, and mighty transpons back of them roared in protest. Softly, with the faint pouf of bursting soap bubbles, the black CC bombs drifted out of the ship, across the Blue Universe, and touched the last of the Things.

	Like an extinguished candle, it puffed out, its radiance gone, instantly. Simultaneously the green radiance shifted, swung, and concentrated on the CC bomb, drawn in by it. The struggling, nauseous violet of the Things changed, became deep red again as they were relieved of the strain. Then they were suddenly sweeping back, the red filaments waving and darting, struggling. But they fell to the CC bombs, and vanished instantly.

	"They're four dimensional structures — short circuited through the fifth," said Aarn.

	Abruptly, something seized the Nova. Something tremendous in its might, and the ship swam mistily for a moment in the Blue Universe, while the giant triple suns grew immense, and burst into blackness. Utter, infinite black settled down, with only the sprinkling of far, far distant stars.

	Aarn gulped. "They—they didn't want us there," he said respectfully. "I wonder, Carlisle—if my ironical comment wasn't true! If your wild speculation wasn't cold fact! If perhaps that isn't a designed Universe! Whoever they are, they on that shielded planet, they didn't want us there, and they didn't want to harm us. So—they threw us out!"

	"Where are we?" asked Anto Rayl.

	"In some other universe. Which one? I don't know. Not ours. Not yours. But we can find ours readily enough, since we know the settings." Again the Nova swam mistily, the distant suns expanded suddenly, then vanished for an instant.

	Sol shown enormous, bright. Venus swung some ten million miles off to one side, familiar Earth shown distant, on the far side of the sun.

	"Someday," said Aarn softly, "someday when this is all settled, and when I have the Sapphire—that's what the new ship will be called—I'm going back there to the Blue Universe."

-

Chapter Ten

	A blue cylindrical jewel, sapphire blue in Anrel's white light, it loomed enormous, even on the surface of the huge satellite. It was nearly complete, as nearly complete as the human mind could make it, here and now. The Nova lay tiny and silvery beside the immense bulk of the newly built Sapphire.

	The dedication speeches were nearly complete, the Terrestrial guests making the longest and driest. The Magyan engineers and physicists who had had the mighty task of rushing the ship to completion had had little to say. The Magyan Council which had done most to see to it, had less to say. The Terrestrials who had had almost nothing to do with it, seeing it in most cases for the first time, had a very great deal to say.

	Aarn, Carlisle, Spencer and Anto Rayl had spoken a few words publicly and were speaking privately while the President of the United States of Earth spoke long and loudly.

	"We'll leave in about an hour, won't we?" asked Aarn.

	Anto Rayl looked sourly at the President of the United States of Earth. "I suppose you know him better than I do. So far as the Magyan part is concerned, you can leave now. But where are we going when we go?"

	"Trial trip. The Nova goes as the emergency boat. She's going to be connected into the main leads of the big ship as a reserve power generator, too. Though if we ever needed the Nova's aid, she wouldn't count anyway, with the power that thing's got. But—the trial trip isn't much more than a formality. Then—the unpleasant task of going to the dead star. It's even heavier than the one I visited last time. The astronomers on Earth, searching with their telatoscopes, found it. We'll be there about two or three weeks Earth and Magya time." "What all have you to do?"

	"I don't know," said Aarn uncomfortably. "I'm still thinking of that horrible thing I turned the telatoscope into. There is something I have to do out there, beside the obvious task of making up the Cosmical Constant apparatus. Then, whatever it was I was trying to do when I twisted that telatoscope, I'll have to figure it out, and make it, I suppose. Perhaps, when I've studied out there long enough, this time with companions, I'll have some idea of it all when I come back."

	Anto Rayl nodded. He looked up at the tremendous hull. Four thousand three hundred and eighty feet in length. Two thousand three hundred and ten feet it rose straight through the mid-section diameter. Only the enormous strength of durium made a structure of such size possible; no other material could have sustained the concentrated mass it carried. There was empty space aboard her, but not much, in consideration of her size. The Sapphire was fairly completely filled, but in her heart a vast space, larger than a four-story office building, remained vacant, ready for the apparatus Aarn must install in the weirdly intense gravitational fields of the super-stars.

	Two days passed before the ship finally left. Aarn Munro, Spencer, Carlisle and at Aarn's insistence, Anto Rayl, were the passengers and crew. None others were needed for all the ship's colossal size. Automatic controls watched over her, automatic controls that were telatoscopes, unaffected by the fields she was soon to enter. She could not have fought with full efficiency, so undermanned, but this was not a fighting trip.

	The Sapphire rose, magnificently blue, majestically immense. She vanished as she cut across space from Magya, to Earth's space, but not to Earth. To a new star, a star small as Mars in diameter, and fifteen times as massive as the Sun!

	At twenty million miles, Aarn halted. The fields were beginning to become intense. This close the star glittered white, brilliantly white and hot. Hot as the sun from Earth, despite its minute size. Then the Sapphire moved closer. Slowly, very slowly, while the men watched the angles and curves of her cabins writhe and twist out of shape, and out of space, actually. At half a million miles they halted. Spencer answered Aarn's unspoken question.

	"I, for one, think this—is about enough—for this dose. It's —rather uncomfortable." He looked about at a cabin weirdly distorted, weirdly unfamiliar, yet familiar. "I wonder if your notes will be any more readable here?"

	Aarn locked the controls and rose. He was smiling gently, and the strange light they had seen once before was returning to his eyes. "This isn't bad. I'm beginning to think again," he said softly. "The notes will be somewhat more readable now, I believe. I think I will be quite able to read them."

	He took out the note books, and spread them on the mathematics bench, while the others clustered around. The curves of the letters were strange, misshapen. The letters were broken, impossibly diving through the pages, through to other pages, and returning in one completed loop. As Spencer looked, his eyes ached, and his head felt swollen, ready to explode. He looked away. "Put them away for a while, Aarn," he gasped.

	Aarn laughed softly, delightedly. "No, Spence, no. I can understand them now. Suddenly, I saw them. I can read them easily now. Look—follow this pencil point." He grasped his pencil, and it followed the line of a letter, slowly. Then suddenly it dived into, and through the paper—yet on the surface of that page! And as it did—there was a click in Spencer's brain, a share, revealing snap, and abruptly the pages were plain, and understandable. He gasped softly.

	Carlisle was looking, his eyes still bewildered, uncertain. There was a terrible, maddening strain in them, but as Spencer watched Aarn tracing the letter, like a sudden light, Carlisle saw. The strained eyes cleared, and he laughed softly, just as Anto Rayl's soft gasp echoed in the strange room.

	Spencer looked up. He saw the room too, now. He saw, and understood and he knew the geometry of this place, and quite easily he realized why the thing was as it was.

	Aarn smiled. "I'm going to look at the cosmical constant apparatus in the Nova," he announced.

	Spencer went with him. Half an hour later they came back. There was the same air of strange, quiet power about him that seemed to enwrap Aarn now. In his hands he carried the telatoscope apparatus that Aarn had twisted that day back near Neptune, and as Carlisle looked at it, his mind underwent another strange transition as his eyes followed Spencer's caressing hand as it passed over one of the weird involuted projections. He understood. "Oh, yes—I think I see what you meant—the atom is infinite!" Then he shuddered suddenly. "Aarn, there will be no safety anywhere for anything with that in existence."

	Aarn turned to him. His eyes rested on Carlisle for a moment, and in those eyes Carlisle saw something that sobered him and reassured him. "I will do it, Carlisle. First, though, we must move closer to this star. It will not bother us now, I think, for we have adjusted. Before, even when I made the cosmical constant apparatus, I did not adjust, I merely followed the mathematics, which did fit this space. This thing will be done, and then the Centaurs will be better able to live at peace with us and with themselves."

	The Sapphire moved again, still closer to the giant dwarf. Without anti-gravity, the blue ship circled in a strange cork-screw orbit about the incredible star. And the walls twisted and changed, and all things in the ship altered. But strangely, it seemed quite understandably normal to the men within the ship.

	Aarn looked again at the telatoscope apparatus, and at Carlisle. He drew a figure on a bit of paper—on and in, and through it, and Carlisle saw an atom, and knew why it combined to form water, or carbon tetrachloride or methane, and too, why, under electron bombardment it gave off X-rays, and realized it was infinite in its extent.

	With Aarn he started calculations, while Spencer and Anto Rayl set up the machines, and with occasional direction from Aarn or Carlisle, made ultra-elements, and turned them into plates and patterns.

	The days passed as Spencer forged his incredible tools that would hollow out the interior of a sealed sphere of pure durium, and place in it great electrodes of ultra-beryllium insulated with ultra-sulphur. Then came the making of the apparatus itself, gigantic, filling slowly the vast space that had been left for it. And as it built up, the tons of material that had been brought along to make it were used, and more space vacated.

	Finally, the new apparatus was built. Very like the strangely misshapen telatoscope Aarn had shown them that day, but on a scale gigantic and incredibly powerful. It had a stage, a great receiving stage as large as a ball-room, and higher than the highest ball-room. Big enough to house a light cruiser. And the titanic tubes and coils that powered it were warped and twisted in a way no mind could have conceived save here, where space itself was warped and twisted beyond normal conception.

	As it neared completion, Aarn came in and, his calculations finished at last, looked at it. "It is safe," he said quietly, turning to Carlisle and Spencer and Anto Rayl. "Had I not thought it would be, I would not have made it. No mind not undergoing this experience can duplicate it. And, thanks to our analysis of the Blue World's screen, no man will be able to see it. This ship is screened against the telatoscope. Should they see it, they cannot possibly duplicate it, save by coming here. And only a thoroughly integrated mind can adjust here. One who is slightly warped mentally before he comes, will be hopelessly, totally unbalanced, and bring about his own destruction. It will be safe."

	"But how can we test it?"

	"There is no real need, but we shall do so later. I think we'd best finish, and return. What time has elapsed on Earth?"

	Aarn strode to the table where the small telatoscope timepiece stood. It held on its stage, automatically, the image of a simple electric calendar clock countless septillions of miles distant, on Earth. Aarn looked—and started.

-

	"Spencer — Carlisle — Anto Rayl—" he said sharply. "Look—"

	They looked. On the stage, where there should have been the little clock, was a mass of smoking, splintered wood and metal. Hot reddish flames danced momentarily as they looked. Aarn snapped the sound switch over, and the sharp crackle of fire came through. Fire's crackle—and a slightly mechanical voice, calling excitedly, intensely.

	"Aarn Munro, Aarn Munro, return. Return at once. The Centaurs are doing what you did to Teff-el; they're dropping the planetoid forts on Earth. They've dropped two thirds of the way, and our battleships can't stop them. Return." There was a slight pause, then a click, then the message started again. "Aarn Munro, Aarn Munro, return. Return—"

	Aarn clicked the sound switch, and the fire blazed merrily on the little stage. As he watched it thoughtfully, a hand appeared, and added a broken bit of wood, and a bit of tar that blazed smokily for an instant, then simply smoked blackly.

	"That was a clever thought. And about the only way they could get in touch with me. I—wonder." He looked thoughtfully at the near-complete apparatus and smiled to himself.

	"I know a perfect test for it, Spence," he said smiling. "We'll have to rush the work a bit—but we may as well work on it. This is the only place to work, too. So let's start. There's no point in going back until we have this thing."

	They started, and Aarn smiled to himself as the work progressed, and the gigantic elements of the apparatus were welded and bolted into place.

-

Chapter Eleven

	Marl Thorn, Commander of the United Forces, looked at the telatoscope stage and bit his lip. The work on the great fortifications was being rushed to the utmost, but on the other stage, twelve gigantic, roughly spherical masses of metal moved steadily, inexorably on, revolving very slowly about each other. A swarm of human battleships hung at a respectful 300,000 miles from them, showering them with every type of destruction they could muster. The greatest transpons they could draw were smashingly defeated on the transpon conductive wall about the great forts. The planetoid forts the humans had prepared were still too undeveloped to compete.

	Off to one side, half a dozen battleships and a huge fleet of light and heavy cruisers were towing at a huge mass of metal nearly fifty miles in diameter. Hundreds of tremendous momentum wave tractor beams united in swinging it into position, and finally in accelerating it at the greatest possible rate.

	Marl Thorn and his staff watched tensely. There was some slight movement among the Centaur forts driving slowly toward Earth. Their mass was enormous, and even the gigantic driving engines they must incorporate were insufficient to give them much acceleration. Further, the battleships clustered about them were now pushing at them with all the pressor rays they could bring to bear. The mass of metal the fleet was towing, rapidly gaining momentum, seemed a deadly threat. Perhaps—perhaps an effective blow could be staged.

	The forts of the Centaurs seemed to have reached some kind of a satisfactory arrangement, and now to the bewilderment of the humans, no further attempt was made to escape the charging mass! Swiftly it gained speed, and at last, at a distance of a quarter of a million miles, the towing fleet hastily stepped out of the way. The mass was moving a good thirty miles a second now. Even so— over two hours more remained. The ships were working now with the less effective pressor rays.

	The forts simply used the tractor rays. All those on one side worked with tractors, all those on the other, with pressors. Slowly, despite the attempts at guidance by the battleships, it became evident the half-hope was no hope at all. The great mass of the planetoid passed harmlessly through the center of the formation of the forts. Then they closed back together again, in their slow, relentless orbits.

	Three days passed, the staff watching grimly as the forts came nearer. Then, on the third day they came within a quarter million miles of the Moon. Earth at last was able to reply with an effective weapon. Transpons. Just sheer, brutal energy. There could be no finesse of new weapons now; each had all the powers of the other, and now, each had all the power of the other. The transpons of the Moon and of Earth herself leaped up, transpons vaster even than the forts could muster, and their sheer, flaming energy kept the forts at bay.

	But—the forts could stand a far greater energy concentration than could Earth. Luna they could escape by going to the far side of Earth. And from there, they sent down what beams they could, from what proximity they could safely endure. Earth was immense. It took a vast amount of energy to appreciably change her temperature, but while the forts could endure a temperature change of 100 degrees, Earth could not stand more than a quarter of that without fatal results.

	Slowly, slowly, Earth's temperature was driven up. There were great screens on Earth that protected her against the deadly weapons. But nothing can stop the existence of pure energy, and when there is energy, something must contain it. Earth absorbed it, absorbed tons of energy, and slowly the temperature rose. In the northern hemisphere, where it was winter, that meant a vast thaw; in the southern, where summer prevailed, a terrific heat wave. In the tropics, where it was already hot— life became unendurable.

	Five days after the forts got into position off Earth, the temperature had gone up generally eleven degrees. No great increase—but it meant agonies. It meant floods as vast glaciers melted, and the ground thawed suddenly to soft mud. It meant tornado winds over all Earth under the swift temperature rise.

	And the fifth day, a messenger burst into the Staff office with amazement written all over his face. "Commander—Commander! Dr. Munro replied—he—the new message we were sending—'You are badly needed'—and suddenly his voice right beside me said: 'So I see. Keep your temper, and I'll be home. In the meantime, let's put out that silly little fire. It must be stinking up my laboratory.' And—all of sudden the fire just vanished! The fire and a piece out of the desk!"

	Marl Thorn rose to his feet, and his generals with him. "Shut up and come along," he snapped as he strode down the corridor. He was half way down the passageway when another messenger popped in from outside.

	"Commander," he called urgently, "Commander, Investigations Chief MacMarlin wishes to report a new development. The Centaur forts seem in difficulty, and immediate orders to retreat have been given!"

	Marl Thorn came to a stop, and looked slowly at the new messenger. "So," he said. He looked at the still-excited messenger who had come from Aarn's laboratory. "I think I understand," he added. "What is this difficulty they are experiencing."

	"Look in the telatoscopes—in any of the forts!" exclaimed the messenger. "I can't explain, but pieces of their internal mechanism just vanished!"

	Marl Thorn returned to his office, and his operator already had the telatoscope focused on the heart of one of the forts. The power room. He jumped up as Marl Thorn entered. "Sir, something is happening—" he began.

	"It is," said another voice. "It will now stop happening till I get a bit nearer. In the meantime, your friends the enemy are retiring."

	"Aarn Munro," Marl Thorn sighed with vast relief. "I thought as much."

	The Sapphire appeared between Earth and the Moon half an hour later. Aarn Munro sat at the controls of his mighty ship, armed with such a weapon as never had been before, a weapon utterly, wholly irresistible, the weapon of weapons.

	On the telatoscope stage before him, swam the control room of the nearest Centaur fort. The Commander was working, making his circuits himself, the little room crowded now with the bulky Centaurs. Evidently the full compliment of officers was on duty. Aarn watched, with delicate precision following the movements of the Centaur commander. In a final defiant gesture he sent a snapping transpon lashing out at the Sapphire. The automatic controls destroyed it instantly, so that it simply vanished into a black hole in space, no slightest display resulting.

	Aarn's fingers made a movement, just as the Centaur Commander reached for a great control arm to increase the power on the transpon. And before his astonished eyes, the control melted slowly away, growing misty, transparent, before it finally vanished with a slight puff of inrushing air. In the Sapphire, back in that great space Aarn had left vacant when he set up the new apparatus, there sounded a heavy metallic thump.

	Aarn smiled grimly. The Centaur reached, and passed his hand dumbly through the space where the lever had been. A stream of words ripped from his mouth, as the other officers stared. The entire control panel became misty, transparent, and vanished as they watched.

	Abruptly the Commander spoke. The men rushed to new stations, and lumberingly the fort picked up speed, seeking escape. And, as it turned and ran, methodically throughout its vast bulk, there sounded the soft puff of inrushing air. With each soft explosion, outside the fort appeared some massive bit of apparatus, cosmic ray projector, anti-gravity bomber, or some major item of defensive equipment. In fifteen minutes the much-lightened fort was gaining speed much more rapidly. It had been stripped of all armament and all defensive equipment.

	All the forts were in retreat when Aarn landed the Sapphire on Earth. Marl Thorn and his staff joined the ship then, and as they came aboard, they met Aarn. At the sight of him, Marl Thorn stopped, and looked at him more closely. Slowly the old Magyan's eyes dropped. Before him, Aarn's grey eyes seemed to glow, and for the first time, Aarn realized that he was no longer as other men. Marl Thorn could not face those deep-set grey eyes now. Behind them lay an understanding, a scope of understanding ten thousand years beyond that of any human.

	Marl Thorn spoke at last. "You have defeated the enemy, Dr. Munro. Is it permanent?"

	"Yes, Commander Marl. It is permanent. They have nothing which can resist the weapon we have now, and I can see no real possibility of the Centaurs developing it.

	"So far as the weapon goes, there is no need of duplicating it, and no need of letting other men know even what it is. It is too dangerous. It is a simple development of the telatoscope, but understandable only from a knowledge of fifth-dimensional physics. In effect it is a reversal of the telatoscope principle. To view, we un-cancel some of the infinitely spreading atom waves at the point where we are, to reproduce in diminished intensity the atom pattern we wish to investigate. The weapon is simply a device to cancel the atom wave in the place where the atom is. It is safest when the atom pattern is allowed to reform—that is, build a new un-cancelled position—elsewhere. But it is quite as simple to un-cancel it altogether in all the universe. In other words, release its energy. With this, I can release the energy of any atom anywhere in this universe, or bring any matter anywhere in the universe, to this point, and have it cease to be where it was.

	"Do you understand its powers?"

	"Vaguely," sighed Marl Thorn. "You do not wish anyone to see the new apparatus?"

	Aarn smiled. "A thousand thousand have seen it already.

	The air about us is alive with telatoscope finder waves. They have looked at it, no doubt, and turned hastily away. Did you try to look inside the ship?"

	"Yes—and the image shied away."

	"That is the only protection for the weapon. The telatoscope cannot approach within the range of that field. It is a structure somewhat similar to the cosmical constant bombs, built up from the fifth dimensional constants, making the atom pattern of the Sapphire non-extensive. It is practically a space in itself, with no external gravitational effects. I have lowered that shield locally to make entrance possible."

	"May we see this apparatus?"

	Silently Aarn led them through the ship and into the great central room. Apparatus banked the walls, and ran up, up almost out of sight in the vast column, two thousand feet above. Directly before them as they entered was a scrap heap. A pile of miscellaneous junk, iron, copper, tungsten, glass, jumbled and scrambled. It bulked fifty feet high, and covered ten thousand square feet. Junk. Junked armament from the forts.

	But their eyes did not see that at first. They saw the mountain of tubes and plates and coils. Strange things. Eye-twisting things. Things that Aarn and Spencer and Anto Rayl looked on with pride and understanding; flowing, graceful—but impossible —curves. The others looked on with eyes drawn and tortured.

	Marl Thorn eased his eyes on the scrap pile. "You made all that?" he asked at length.

	"It is not difficult, given the proper tools, and unlimited power," replied Aarn. "Out There. Now—I believe I could duplicate it here."

	Marl Thorn looked at him for a moment. "Yes," he said at length, easing his mind and his eyes once more on the somewhat-understandable scrap," I think you could."

-

Chapter Twelve

	Aarn looked down toward Neptune. Mighty rolling plains of frozen air, mighty glaciers of frozen carbon dioxide, and the gigantic works of the Centaurs. They were working swiftly down there, to put the planet in a position for attack on the Sapphire.

	"They would still fight," nodded Aarn. The Sapphire moved steadily on, nearer and nearer the great forts on the planet. Abruptly, the entire world seemed to explode in lashing flame of transpons, ultras, and gigantic bombs driven at the great blue ship. Transpons, ultras, bombs—vanished without apparent action of any kind; the Sapphire floated unharmed.

	Gradually, as the ship came nearer, tiny sparklets of soft violet light appeared as bomb or beam vanished, growing stronger as the attack became ever more concentrated. At ten thousand miles, the Sapphire was coated with a mesh of soft, violet spark-lings, coming, fading, dying and being replaced. And all the offensive power of the war planet crashed in angry majesty on the ship—and vanished in gentle violent winkings.

	"Is there any limit to what that can carry, Aarn?" asked Anto Rayl.

	Aarn nodded. "There is always a limit. Even the strain space can endure is limited. The limit is enormously high; so with this. Our orifice is of fixed size, and that slight display of violet flame represents a certain degree of strain, where the orifice is being over-crowded with energy concentration."

	"Energy cannot be destroyed—but where does it go?"

	"Energy can be destroyed, and it can be created. That law you mentioned applies only to this space; when we bring in considerations of other spaces, particularly the inter-space, then the law is without meaning, as senseless as to say the speed of light cannot be exceeded, and not qualifying the statement with 'in this space'.

	"The energy there is being destroyed, so far as this space is concerned. It becomes absolutely unavailable; out of this space. I am not fighting it, I am destroying it. That is why the new system is so infinitely superior to the old.

	"I'm going to create some energy in this space. Really create it. That is what the apparatus R-438-21 is for. Watch."

	Abruptly, above one of the forts appeared a black, utterly black, all absorbent sphere. A transpon beam searing upward through space toward the Sapphire bent, snapped about, and vanished into the black sphere. An instant before it made contact, however, white flame burst from the globe. Like a slow falling cascade of pure snow-white flame, energy poured out. It spilled out of the sphere, and licked down at the fort.

	Aarn was not now limited by such considerations as engines and converters. He was not converting the energy of matter to radiation. On a higher law than any law of this space, he was creating energy, energy pure and without form. It was formless energy, neither radiation nor matter, neither kinetic nor possessed of mass. And, in obedience to the laws of space it suddenly found itself in, it sought form. It was infinite in amount, and infinite in rate, should Aarn choose. It washed down at the fort in slow streamers, a curtain of wavering, formless energy. Part assumed form as radiant light, and it became visible. Part assumed form as heat, and it was palpable. Part became matter, and assuming substance glowed with heat.

	Most struck the fort, and assumed form as kinetic energy of rushing gas molecules. In the thousand-millionth of a second, the hundred-foot metal wall of the fort vanished as invisibly hot gas. Horsepower required? Horsepower had no meaning. Energy created. Not released, nor converted, but created from formless, timeless, lawless space, and since horsepower involves time, and this energy knew no time nor law of time, it was infinite in horsepower, time and extent.

	Abruptly the wavering curtain of formless energy vanished. A half-thousand mile gulf appeared raw and incandescent in the planet where for an instant the energy flowed. The curtain appeared elsewhere. Timeless, it was unpredictable. For long minutes it seemed to hang and waver without effect, bathing the fort in white, formless energy. Then abruptly both were gone.

	On Neptune the Centaurs were moving again. They flooded into their ships, and as fast as they entered, the ships vanished abruptly into infinite distance—or infinite smallness.

	Spencer looked at Aarn questioningly. Aarn nodded slowly. He pointed to the new apparatus that rested before him. Dials, whose leads twisted, turned, and vanished into a blank nothingness began to move, rested for an instant, then moved again. They returned to zero, and repeated the performance exactly.

	Abruptly, Aarn's body seemed to shift, twist, and become indescribably wrong. Spencer followed the change with a strange understanding that amazed him, and, suddenly, found that the ship's cabin was changing about him, while Aarn seemed to become normal. Aarn's thoughts reached him, strangely direct without medium of sound. "You followed," said Aarn.

	"So," said Spencer, looking about him. "I thought that must be it." He looked out through the walls of the ship. Fifteen feet of sapphire-blue durium lay between him and space, but as he moved—craned his neck?—suddenly he saw the durium walls lying smoothly rounded and solid—beneath him? around him?— and he looked above and beyond them. On Neptune a great convoy, loaded with struggling, swiftly crowding Centaurs lay exposed. He saw beyond those walls, saw the Centaurs and beyond them. They were mere line-drawings, yet solid, and they were as near as he wished them. As he focused his attention on one in the control room at Aarn's suggestion, he saw him move, and abruptly the Centaur ship seemed to be solid; he knew it had moved into the inter-space.

	The Centaur ship became even more solidly real, and shrank again in distance. He had lost his telescopic power in regard to it. Simultaneously, he saw suddenly the Blue Universe, as through a porthole, surrounding the Centaur ship, then he could see within the ship again. He saw the Centaur commander re-set his controls, move again. The Blue Universe faded as the ship became solid. It faded suddenly into infinite distance, and he lost it.

	He straightened, stretched himself—

	The solid durium walls of the Sapphire loomed protectingly about him. He sighed deeply and looked at Aarn. Aarn sat beside him, normal, solid, real.

	"I saw his settings. The instruments showed them anyway, but it is easy to understand his position now. Shall we go?"

	"How about the rest of the Centaurs here on Neptune?" asked Anto Rayl, "and in Magya's Universe?"

	Aarn moved, slipped aside, and became distorted. For a moment his head and shoulders seemed unsubstantial, unreal, then abruptly he was normal. "They are leaving Magya's universe now. Into the Blue Universe, and home. They are leaving Neptune as rapidly as possible. There is no need to cause them more trouble. A threat at home will cause their withdrawal more quickly than action here, under any circumstances."

	Anto Rayl nodded. Abruptly, the planet below vanished in misty expansion. For an instant the strange blue light of the Blue Universe flooded in, the giant Triple Suns glowed, and the Blue Worlds appeared far off. Aarn looked at them for a long moment, longingly. Then he moved again.

	Before them, Malc appeared. Dim, red, tiny. Its planets nearly as massive as itself, stretched far, far away into space. And the double planetary system of Tosk rotated as a slow dumbbell a bare million and a half miles from Malc.

	Even Aarn snorted in surprise. "No wonder the astronomers missed that! A star so small, so utterly ordinary, and so dim."

	"What are you going to do, Aarn?"

	"Well—" Aarn smiled slowly, and caressed the controls of the cancelling apparatus. "Remember, I could take that planet to pieces, and put it together somewhere else, given enough time. With the energy creating apparatus, remember, I am unlimited. That is above any law known to this space. We know its limits, but know they are inexpressible in terms of this space. But—" There was a beatific smile on Aarn's face. Spencer knew that signified a delightfully complete idea for proper chastisement. "—first I must get in touch with their commanders." "How?" demanded Anto Rayl.

	"The thought projectors," replied Aarn. "Do you remember my telling you about the Myryans, on the Incredible Planet, and their system of telepathy? How we used the thought projectors to separate those Siamese twin ships out by Cornal? I'm going to use them—and that other thing for which we have no language."

	From the Nova, Aarn and Spencer brought, and set up the thought projector apparatus, and Spencer took Aarn's place at the main controls. With the light cap of the projector apparatus on his head, Aarn stood on the projection platform of the telatoscope apparatus, and, at his gesture Spencer projected his image across the five hundred million miles of space to Al-osk. A moment later Aarn made another gesture, and the image projection was dissolved.

	Aarn removed the cap, and shook his head. "They aren't such a bad crowd. I got only the vast mass impression of many minds that time, of course, and two separate, conflicting mass impressions. There are two worlds, you know, and the one, the slightly larger one which is largely water surface, is just nicely populated. The smaller, however, is tremendously overpopulated. They had wars about that. Fought each other. Then from some old record, they learned of our system—and hence the attack. They need room. It's a choice of fight each other—or combine to fight someone else. Answer: obviously fight outside.

	"We can fix them up for room—we've found other planetary systems already. And—I sort of think—yes, we could probably make one with the apparatus we have.

	"But first—I'm going to teach them a lesson of human power, teach them that humans are labelled: TO BE LEFT ALONE: BAD MEDICINE!" said Aarn grimly. "I'm going to give them an example of chastisement and brute power that will be bred into the race for fifty generations, I'm going to give them something that will make respect for human beings a racial characteristic from now on.

	"Now—to begin with, send my projection—" Aarn ducked his head, and weirdly his whole body altered, and the mechanism on which his hand rested writhed. Aarn vanished, but his thoughts remained, clear and picture-like. Spencer understood.

	Ten minutes later, in a vast hall on Al-osk, twenty-three Centaurs stood about a table. Twenty-one were garmented in loose civilian clothes, twenty-one Centaurs with manes of iron-grey, their coats somewhat patchy, their muscles softened with fat, their lines paunchy. One stood alone at one side, young, his coat dark and glossy with health, his powerfully-muscled flanks fitted in the uniform of the Toscar Fleet. Another, sturdy, his muscles still hard and trim, his mane only slightly greyed, stood beside him.

	"But Gar Thalt, what IS this weapon? How does it operate? You say things dissolve—and no more. WHY do they dissolve? Are you so witless as to be unable to suggest anything at all? Why were scientists sent with you if not for these things?" demanded Mar Porn, Chairman of the United Council.

	The young Centaur replied. "What more can I say? I do not have the faintest idea of how or why things happened as they did. None of my instruments so much as flickered. Perhaps Thal Roo can answer better."

	The sturdy, grey-maned scientist of the Expedition replied in turn. "Nothing whatever can I add. What it may be, I do not know, only that it is ten thousand generations ahead of us. By mere chance I had a certain gravitational experiment in process when the Black Bombs were first used—and got some clue to them, in the utter destruction of my sensitive apparatus. They were—gravitic in nature, though against gravity. They—"

	The Councilor interrupted. "Anti-gravity bombs? We have had them half a generation," he said scornfully.

	"Aye—and more," returned the scientist. "Therefore they were not anti-gravity. They had to do with what we of science have thought was a gravitational phenomonon but which I now know is not. In other words, they applied a principle I had not so much as guessed at.

	"Then—that same apparatus of mine, re-made, re-designed was destroyed once more when the forts, two billion miles away, were gutted! That is not all. Gar Thalt is a good captain, but he does not know science. He has neglected the most important thing. Not more deadly—but more important so far as inferences go. The Curtain of Flame. That is what the warriors called it. It was not flame, the white, wavering curtain of destruction. I observed that, observed it carefully, and I tell you; it was energy." He paused, waiting a question. None came, and he looked at the Councillors disgustedly. "You do not even ask, what kind of energy? That is the natural question. I can say only this. It was no form of energy! It was not heat, nor was it radiation, or any other form of energy—it was formless, free energy!

	"And—" he spoke so softly they could scarcely hear him— "—there is only one way I can imagine to get free, formless energy, and so impossible to divert or stop by screen or field, which must have form. That—energy—was—created—!"

	"Well—can't we create energy in our engines?" demanded a fat Councillor.

	The scientist collapsed. "Phaugh—!" he said. "I go—Gar Thalt, I pity you." He turned and trotted out.

	And he halted as though struck a physical blow as a tremendous mental impression reached him. "Halt, scientist." He wheeled about. The Councillors were alert, rearing on their hind legs in alarm. In the center of the great flagged floor stood one of the two-legged creatures of the Other System.

	Again the mental impression reached out. "Scientist, return. Perhaps you can explain to these, what I cannot. I come seeking to make a peace pact with your race."

	The old Centaur scientist looked, and he saw Aarn—Aarn, squat, thick, enormously powerful. Then he looked into Aarn's broad face, so like his own, and slowly his eyes fell before the deep-set grey eyes of the human. "Arrah—it is you! Have we fought two races, then, not one? You know things—Arrah—I said they were ten thousand generations ahead of us. Look, fools, and see it."

	The Space Captain looked for a moment. He looked into the infinitely keen eyes, into the powerful face of the human, and again into the eyes, and he dimly sensed that his work was done. He who had looked with awe and questioning into the Infinity through which he bored his way, and seen for moments the mystery of the Blue Universe, and gazed on the Titan of suns, Anrel, looked, and saw there an understanding, a knowledge that embraced all these, and knew their interrelations. He looked away.

	The Councillors looked. He was a stubby creature, so short, and incomplete. And he was alone here. Somehow he had succeeded in getting in.

	"How did he reach this place?" demanded Mar Porn. "By what right do you come?" he demanded of Aarn's image.

	Slowly Aarn turned his back on the twenty-one Councillors. "I can speak with you," he said at length to the scientist. "Let us make peace; you can arrange with those, as I will arrange with my political leaders at home. Much damage has been done on my planet, and on the others of our two systems. We can ask no indemnity of you, since there is nothing we cannot obtain more readily by our own powers. There is nothing you can do for us.

	"But every ship of war, every item of war, every fort and every offensive and defensive weapon in this system must be destroyed. You can build more, to a certain extent, but they shall be limited only to a policing force. We have—means for discovering every crime, every wrong action or thought. A large police force will be unnecessary. And there will be no war.

	"That is simply because such is best for your people, lest they attempt to attack humans once more.

	"In consideration of your actual need for room, we will do one of three things; find or create a new planetary system for you, or increase the size and power of your present sun till it makes more of the planets of this system habitable. I tell you: we can do these things, the first within a week, the second within ten days—and the last shall be done within ten hours if your Councillors do not agree within that time to our terms."

	Very slowly, Aarn expanded, and became tenuous, transparent, till he was a mist that reached the thirty-foot ceiling. Then he was gone.

	The old scientist turned to his Councillors. "You got his message?"

	"Preposterous!" gasped Mar Porn. "Utterly impossible! Are we fools to strip our worlds of their weapons? That we should believe such nonsense—'find or create a new planetary system— increase the size and power of your present sun—'! The mightiest engine ever built could not so much as move a planet a foot— let alone create one!"

	Thal Roo looked at them long under his greying lashes. Finally he spoke. "He said he could do those things. I will not argue with you. Only I looked into his eyes, and I know he believed what he said—and because he did not speak with his tongue, but with his mind, and because I was very attentive, I understood more. He does not expect you to accept those terms, he has no idea that you will, for he feels that the Toscars need chastisement, and that some reprisal is due for the damage wrought on his worlds. He feels you will not believe him, nor accept his more than fair terms, considering his power, and so, when the ten hours are up, Tosk shall be chastised.

	"He is right, of course. You are fools. I shall be sternly clapped into prison for this, but it matters little for I shall be free within twelve hours. He gutted the forts from a distance of thousands of millions of miles. He approached within a few thousands of the First Base, while all our powers hurled against him, powers enough to volitalize a minor planet, served only to make faint sparklings on his ship. Then, idiots, do you not see he could, from where his ship undoubtedly is now, simply wrench out those things he tells us to discard without the slightest difficulty?"

	Thal Roo was quite right. Within half an hour he leaned his tired body against the locked bars of his prison, and looked meditatively at the large, to him, white disc of the sun Malc, only a million and a half miles distant.

	Nine hours and thirty minutes later, Aarn reappeared in the Council room above. Twenty one Councillors sat about, or stood about the table. They started at his sudden appearance. Aarn regarded them steadily.

	"You do not believe, do you? Your scientist was right. He has a mind a bit keener than I credited him with. It is as well. You were doubly warned. You refuse, do you not?"

	Proudly Mar Porn drew himself up. "Learn a warrior's lesson, creature with but half a body. A Toscar is not defeated before he begins to fight. You have but now discovered our system; our ships are but temporarily driven from your system, and you want us to surrender our weapons, our worlds!"

	Aarn's face broke in a slow smile. "Watch your sun," he said. Slowly he faded away.

	The Sapphire had rested undisturbed. Battleships had sighted her, but had left her strictly alone. A dozen scout ships, gnats too small to worry about, kept her under observation, while the planetary defenses prepared to repulse her.

	Aarn turned to Spencer with a grim smile. "Now for the lesson no Toscar shall ever forget. They will not know how I am doing it."

	There was no sound of transpons aboard this ship. Energy was created, formless, infinite in amount and rate where needed. A field was developing, though, an enormous field of three branches. A very small branch ended on the telatoscope stage of the Sapphire. But another, the primary, reached across an incomprehensible gulf of infinite space, reached out, found, and held a star, the mightiest, blazing star of all this universe, so far as is known, the incredible star S Doradus. With a surface temperature of some 75,000 degrees centigrade, and enormous size, it gave off something in the near neighborhood of 5,000,000,000 times the light and heat that Malc gave, and—it gave it almost entirely in the ultra-violet band, far above the range of Centaur vision.

	The final branch, of course, centered in Malc.

	Aarn began building up his field. Slowly, the dull red color of Malc changed, very slowly, so that it became a slightly brighter red. And at the same time, Aarn established an unusually large free-energy field near the star, on the side toward the Tosk system. The wavering curtain of white flame was visible easily to the naked eye at ten million miles; a huge curtain of energy at one and a half. Malc, for all its small size as a star, was infinitely beyond the power of this small energy flame to heat appreciably. But—Malc was getting hotter. Actually, Aarn was gradually establishing about Malc, an image of S Doradus! An image 75,000 miles across! An image of the star that began to radiate more and more. More and more the radiation drowned the faint light of little Malc, till the light that fell on Tosk was not red, but white, then gradually it became blue, and the gentle warming rays of their sun became horrible blistering furnace blasts.

	In a prison cell, an old Centaur looked out, and his face was pale, and his eyes wide in awe as he saw dull little Malc change from a weak dim thing to a terrifically flaming, raging furnace in the space of two hours. Prominences, things Malc had never been known to display, began to leap out, licking tongues of flame so far in the violet that the Centaur could not well perceive them, and his eyes throbbed with the pain as he tried to look at the incandescent monster.

	He was trembling when he returned to a dark corner of his cell. He was afraid for his world. A patch of friendly sunlight had crept in through his barred window, but now—it was a poisonous thing, a horrible, luridly violet thing. The dark corner of his cell became light, light with the waxing sun. The diffused light began to pain his eyes, and his skin began to burn from the heat, and outside he heard a rising moan of terror.

	And a deeper moan. A low, growling rumble, and a shrill keening whistle, and he shuddered again. The wind was rising.

	It swirled hot and dry in through the open window, and ruffled his mane. A fitful gust. The weird sunlight was still growing more intense, and burning heat was radiating now from the spot where the sunlight struck. There was a soft, sharp clack, and a sliver of the stone spurted up. The old scientist trotted over, and stuck his hand into the direct light. Instantly he drew it back, and shook it. It felt as though a great burning glass had been focussed on it!

	The trotting feet had quieted now. There were no more. Once in a while he heard a wild beat of galloping feet rushing by, the gallop to break with a harsh cry, and a staggering step. Then the thud of a fall—a scream of pain as the burning ground pressed against flesh, a wild scurry—then a slowly dwindling cry.

	And the wind began to moan. It rose, and the moan became a howl. A cloud passed abruptly over the burning patch of deadly sunlight, and the Centaur felt his skin prickling with what he knew must be radiation burn. Dimly, far off he could hear a mighty, deep-throated roar of transpon beams, and the strange soft hiss of great magnetic and gravity bombs sweeping up, and he laughed. He wondered what they were aiming at. The growing sun? The wavering curtain of formless energy that would drink them in and add them to the store it was feeding the horribly swollen sun?

	The cloud was gone in an instant, and the scientist saw that the shape of the shadows on the floor was changing. He thrust a slim metal eating tool into the bar of light, and from the size of the shadow, readily realized the sun had grown larger, as well as hotter.

	And the wind continued howling. It shrieked about the window ledge, dust-laden, a furnace blast that stifled him as he flooded water into a bowl, wet a towel, and pressed it to his nose.

	Suddenly there was a mighty hissing, the sky darkened to a bearable intensity, and torrents of rain swept to the ground to shrill into steam and rebound instantly. For ten minutes this kept up, and the rising temperature dropped, only to rise again with an unbearable mugginess. His flanks heaved.

	"By all the Gods—if he does not relieve us soon, we will not be able to agree to his terms. And can he drain that swollen sun as quickly as he inflated it? Oh, Gods, what is there for us who understand him to do?" the old Centaur moaned.

	"Much," said the familiar mental voice. The Centaur wheeled. Aarn stood before him, squat, powerful. "The sun will soon be drained of its surplus heat. The planets will not cool quickly, however, not for days, for they have absorbed vast energy. You will be released at once. Go out, and see what you can do directly with the people. The third planet out from your planet-system will be made sufficient of a sun to remind you that I am still about. In two days time I will return. Till then, I will be very busy removing the apparatus of the forts."

	Aarn vanished, and with him, the great barred door, and the solid stone of the outer wall as well, as an afterthought.

	As he stood, hesitant, far away he heard the thunderous voice of a great transpon projector snuff out in a little tinkling squeal, to be followed by a terrific roar and crash of dropped metal. Aarn had raised it a quarter of a mile in the air, and dropped it back—rather had destroyed it, and re-created it a quarter mile up, and released it.

	Rapidly, the old scientist saw, the unbearable light was dying from the sky. He could not tell much, though, for there were vast scudding clouds, and a terrific rain that slanted down in the wind, at an angle less than twenty degrees. The wind shrieked and snarled, gaining power.

	But definitely, the light was dying.

	He stepped out, the wind-driven rain beat at him, lashing him cruelly, as it lashed all his world and all his people, bowed before the keening blasts.

-

Chapter Thirteen

	Malc glowed with a reddish white light, intensely blue to Toscar eyes, intensely hot to Toscars on their oven-heated planet. In their night skies, a new sun shone, the third planet, incandescent blue to Aarn, almost invisibly blue to Toscars. Aarn had poured his White Flame against it for—what interval can be used to express it? Timeless by nature, infinite, beyond all law of time and limitation it had done its work. The planet glowed.

	"You've completely withdrawn the image but Malc is still over-hot," said Carlisle slowly.

	"Not unbearably so. I could not withdraw the heat the sun absorbed from the image. Nor that which it absorbed from the not-altogether-bluffing White Flame. It will not bother them, and in six months probably will be diminishing. The red dwarf sun is peculiarly stable, as we know.

	"I have another problem. I promised them planets. Their worlds are stripped of arms. They would not dare to think again of attacking man. For weeks yet, their worlds will be lashed by storms such as Earth never knew. For the side that was in daylight when I projected the image, is far too hot, and seeks equilibrium with the night side.

	"I think I will create planets." Aarn's eyes glowed with intense thought, and slowly a smile crossed his lips. "It will be helpful. They will not understand."

	The telatoscope screen blurred, and darting points shifted, steadied, and shone bright and hard under Aarn's manipulation.

	Stars. All the stars in this region of space. And Malc shown dimly reddish yellow in the center of the stage. Perhaps fifteen light-years distant another star shone dimly reddish, no dwarf though, a super-giant, a star of the Antares class, so distant from Earth it was unnamed, unrecorded, save on photographic plates as a barely visible spot.

	It centered suddenly, and the Sapphire moved, darted toward it, and hung near it. A dozen instruments moved under Aarn's manipulations, steadied, gave their readings. For half an hour Aarn studied the star, probed its deep interior, read the moment of momentum of its system, and knew it possessed no planets, only a small family of wandering, captured comets, quantities of meteoric dust wandering in aimless orbits about it, occasionally striking, deflecting, falling to it.

	"A sterile system," said Aarn. "We'll try to bring it life. I'd like to—but it will be hard to eliminate the people. How— the life forces—but that includes plants. Sea life. Microscopic animals—ah, plants—And with the telepathy selection—"

	Spencer looked at Aarn in puzzled silence. Then slowly he grasped Aarn's gigantic plan, and gasped. "Bring the old Centaur scientist!" he suggested suddenly. Aarn nodded in confirmation. "Good idea. I will."

	The ship pulsed suddenly to a surge of power, the telatoscope screen darted swiftly misty, then steadied as Aarn concentrated his attention on his telepathy devices. A conference room appeared, a score of frightened, nervous councillors, a half-score of scientists and old Thal Roo.

	"Will you use sense?" asked the old scientist softly. "Must more be done to convince you, you have no appreciation of him? You are panicky. There is no sense in attempting to destroy him; it would be suicidal to attempt it, and he means us no great harm, I believe."

	"The Sun—the Sun—even now the air stifles us. He can do it again! What protection have we?"

	"None, and that's the point!" snapped Thal Roo. "So wait. He will return with further instructions."

	"Further destructions," moaned the Councillor.

	"Fool, coward, come free of your panic, use what reason you have left. He is not going to destroy us. Had he wanted, he would have heated this planet—not the third. He will return and speak again."

	"I have returned," said Aarn. The other scientists started, and whirled to face his image. They looked at Aarn, at his eyes, and yielded back two steps as he approached slowly. "I will create your planets. Five of you I will bring with me that you may watch. I will create your planets near a giant red sun, one which has a color like this Malc of yours, but one infinitely greater. Yet it will appear the same.

	"Which of you is of astronomy? Step toward me." Two of the group of scientists stepped forward. "Which of you is of astrophysics?" Both stood where they were.

	"Well enough. Which of you is of the physics of weapons, and energy sources?" Thal Roo and another stepped forward. "Well enough," said Aarn, and turned to the leader of the councillors. "You too, will come. Now look." In the chamber of the Council appeared a telatoscope image of the space nearby. Malc showed in the center, the new sun off to one side. "See—that is Malc. Do you know this sun?"

	"Aragantor!" gasped the astronomers together.

	"That is your new sun. Remember it. Let the five chosen gather together here in the center of the room."

	Thal Roo stepped eagerly forward. The astronomers glanced at the wonderful image of space, the mighty stars shining points floating in the air, and, eyes fixed on it, hesitantly stepped toward Thal Roo. The remaining physicist of weapons looked out of the window toward a torn mound of earth and gleaming, crumpled metal, ruined weapons, and stepped eagerly forward.

	The Councillor was galloping toward the door. A hoarse cry of fear gurgled from his throat. Thal Roo looked after him. "Take us, Man of Understanding; he would not see for his fear."

	Softly Aarn laughed, as the four scientists turned from looking at him who fled, to Aarn. They looked at Aarn, and for an infinitesimal instant Aarn's figure waved, writhed, and for that infinitesimal instant there was a terrific, excruciating stab of agony as every atom within them disrupted, then Aarn was steady before them, and the agony was gone.

	The council room was gone. Metal walls loomed, metal of a color that strained their eyes, and yet looked gray, with a hint of a color they could not understand. A star glimmered beyond, a small reddish sun. A disc of comfortable "white" color.

	"Aragantor!" gasped the astronomers together.

	"Is this distance right for your planets?" asked Aarn.

	"Aragantor has the same surface temperature Malc has—had is better. When the apparent disc of Aragantor is the same as the apparent disc of Malc the distance will be right. We should be nearer," said the astronomer. "But I have no instruments."

	"What would you have? What small instrument? Think of it," commanded Aarn.

	Then Aarn moved very rapidly, and set up many circuits together on his great control board, and interconnected them, and one was a telepathy machine, and one was a telatoscope, and one was a circuit of the White Flame.

	Something indistinct wavered in the air, an instrument; then suddenly it exploded in sparkling, coruscating, soundless flame as the astronomer cried out in startled surprise. "Think, and think clearly," said Aarn disgustedly. "As you see part form, correct the thought, and the part will correct itself."

	The astronomer thought again, and a thing of metal and crystal and lenses and angles formed, and writhed and flowed, then suddenly collapsed again into nothingness. "Now what ails you?" asked Aarn.

	"The lens—the index of refraction," wailed the astronomer.

	"Enough," said Aarn. "I know what you need, now." He made a change in his setting, the instrument appeared again, steadied, held. It was sharp, precise in line. A scale on it appeared, marked with fine, sharp lines, then faded. "Picture your units on the scale," said Aarn. The astronomer did so. Then— there was a soft puff of heat and clear light, white, like a wavering, flowing crystal. The instrument in the air dropped suddenly, and Aarn turned swiftly and caught it. He passed it to the astronomer. "Can you use that?"

	The Centaur turned it over and over in his hands, and his face was strangely blank as he examined it. "Arragh—can I use it?" He looked at the lenses, and murmured softly, "They are mathematical. The thing is not machined, it was dreamed, and the dreams were mathematical formulae."

	He raised the little hand instrument to his eyes carefully, looked at the red disc, and smiled softly. "Some fifteen seconds more, we must have."

	In ten minutes, the Sapphire was in position.

	"I have not the time nor inclination to make your planets perfect. As you have built, so shall they be, neither better nor worse. Perhaps it is best. There shall be the scars on them that shall remind you that your race attacked mine—and it is best that it happen no more.

	"Look." The astronomers, the scientists gasped softly. Sor-osk and Al-osk floated out there, beyond, perfect in every detail as the telatoscope showed them. And—they were full sized images.

	"So," said Aarn quietly. "They are your planets. There are the buildings, the habitations, all as they are on your own planets, save that there are no people in them. I shall return you, and let forces be sent at once, lest uncontrolled machines damage themselves. I shall hold them in stasis until your fleets can reach and control them. I will wait till they near the planets. Then I return to my own world. I shall be back... Take the instrument with you."

	Again the agony shot through the Centaurs, and abruptly they were in the council hall. White faced they sank to the floor.

	Thal Roo stirred first. "He has made the planets—these planets—with all the machines, all the structures, all the things we know. On that strange planet I can find my own house, my own room, my own clothes. Only the people he has not duplicated. How—I do not know. Go—send the fleet—the machines must be controlled. He waits."

	Aarn cut off the image as Thal Roo looked at the wonderfully perfect instrument in his hand.

	On the Sapphire, Aarn straightened. "To work."

	"But those—are telatoscope images," said Anto Rayl in puzzlement.

	"Now they are." Aarn seated himself again, and looked out. Sor-osk and Al-osk floated motionless outside. "They are telatoscope images, but every thing in them that has thought activity is missing. So there are no Centaurs. And a telatoscope image is a sort of basic pattern of an atom—sort of a skeletal framework, unfilled, incomplete." Aarn smiled, and rested his hand on a control. "It is limitless, theoretically. I think I shall test it."

	He advanced the control abruptly to the end of its run. The universe twisted suddenly, violently, as a wave of nausea struck them and rolled on. The mighty star started under the impact a few minutes later, and at the same instant the whole of space exploded into white flame. White, limpid, flowing flame.

	Aarn cut the controls, and his panel went dead. Sor-osk and Al-osk floated just outside the Sapphire, two giant worlds.

	"All space must have felt that—unthinkable quintillions of tons of matter—mass—energy really, crystallizing from the formless White Flame on the skeleton structure of those atoms. Mass that never existed before. But there they are now. Complete— ready for habitation. And the fleet is coming. We will go."

	The Sapphire moved, shifted hazily for a moment, and vanished from the sight of the swiftly nearing Centaur fleet.

	And the men in the Sapphire looked out at the Blue Universe, and the giant triple suns. "We've got to go home now," said Aarn softly. "But someday soon—"

	The Blue World faded from the telatoscope stage, and Earth loomed large on it instead.

The End

The Machine
The Machine 01
Astounding Science Fiction – February 1935
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

	THE SUN was beginning to lower from the meridian as Tal Mason stretched and rose from his experiment. He stepped out on the balcony and looked off across the city, then back at the experimental material half-smilingly, half-ruefully.

	"I knew I'd check of course," he thought, smiling; "that is, if I did it right. The Machine did it twenty years ago and got the answer."

	For some ten minutes he stood looking off across the green and silver patchwork, the green of the trees and gardens, the silver beacons of the slim buildings, the flashing silver of machines. Tiny bright splotches of color here and there marked the people, people in red and gold and blue, in rainbows and in clear white, strolling, running, playing, resting. Never working—of course. The Machine did that.

	Tal turned back to his apartment, went through the laboratory to the living room, and sat down at the televisor set. Something hummed softly, and Tal spoke.

	"Aeis Falcor—RXDG-NY."

	The hum changed slightly, then soft clicks sounded as the frosted screen swirled into moving color. A room, simple in silvery-gray and velvet-black metal, with spots of gold against the black, simple, comfortable furnishings. A soft, musical voice was calling:

	"Aeis Falcor, please, Aeis Falcor, please."

	It stopped for a moment and repeated it. Aeis appeared, slim in white and gold, her straight body flowing across the room. They had time to learn grace and ease then. The Machine did everything else. She smiled as she glanced at the screen.

	"Tal—was the Machine wrong?" Her golden-brown face laughed at him.

	'Is it ever?" he asked. "I wondered whether you were there. I thought you might have joined the games."

	A slight frown of annoyance crossed her face. "No. Jon is annoyingly insistent I go with him to Kalin—so—I stayed here. Won't you come over?"

	"I'd rather you came here. I finished that replica I made the other day—the old unintelligent machine for flying. Not floating-flying. I wish you'd see it. It will function, even."

	Aeis laughed, and nodded. Slowly the colors faded from the screen as Tal rose. Out on the balcony he looked down at the broad lawn directly below him, some two hundred feet down. A group of some two dozen men and women were playing about a pool. Their skins flashed pink and bronzed in the sunlight as they dived or swam; most were lying about listlessly.

	Tal turned away in annoyance. He knew some of those people. Beauty is skin deep—their intelligence, their wit, their minds, were no deeper. He wondered momentarily whether that wasn't a better type of human now—better adapted. They seemed contented, they seemed to feel none of the dissatisfaction he felt.

	Everything had been done before him. Always, despite his keen interest in learning something new, the Machine could give him the answer immediately. It was a thing already done, a problem already solved. They seemed more contented, better adapted than he.

	Yet even they were unsatisfied, he knew. Tal was scientific in thought and in interest, so he had not studied history deeply. Had he, he might have recognized the signs the social customs of the day displayed. It was only some one hundred and fifty years since the Machine came, but mankind was following its inevitable course.

	It had happened in Babylon, it had happened in Egypt, it had happened in Rome, and it was happening on all Earth now. Man had been released from all work, when the Machine came, and so he had played. He played his games, till he wore them out; some still played hard, but most had lost all interest.

	It was a thing done; it annoyed them as much as the fact that all new things seemed to have been learned by the Machine annoyed Tal. So those who had played their games out had turned to the one men had always sought before—the old game of love.

	Tal did not analyze their reasons, but he sensed their dissatisfaction and perhaps something of the danger in this course. But not very strongly. It had started nearly thirty years before, almost before he was born.

	He turned back to the room as he heard the soft hum of the ship landing on the roof. In a few moments Aeis had come down, laughing.

	"Where is this monstrous thing you've made? and why?" she asked.

	"The why is easy—for something to do. You know, those old fellows weren't stupid. Perhaps they didn't know how to utilize atomic energy, and perhaps they didn't know how easy it is to overcome gravity—but they flew. They made the thin air support them. I think that is far more astonishing than a thing so simple as inverting the gravitational field. Obviously, you can fly if you do that.

	"But—imagine making air—just plain, thin air—support you. And when you've looked at the thing a while, you can see a sort of beauty and grace in it. It's—but come on and see it."

-

	IT WAS in one of the rooms that faced on the balcony, and it was not large, perhaps twenty feet long and twenty feet wide, a slim fuselage, rounded and streamlined perfectly, a small but fairly powerful in-line steam engine, an engine capable of some one thousand horsepower and a little boiler of tubes and jets. The wing, a graceful monoplane wing, tapered at the ends, and the wheels were arranged to slip back into the fuselage.

	"It's a bit—ungainly—isn't it?" asked Aeis doubtfully.

	"Not when you understand. The wheels—the wings—I know they look strange and unnecessarily protuberant, but they aren't. This doesn't overcome gravity; it is so much more boldly interesting. It defies it, it fights it, and with the aid of the air overcomes it. It was designed about 1957, scarcely five years before the Machine came. The records say that it will almost fly itself; it will make a perfect landing if the controls are simply released."

	"Why—why not?" asked Aeis in surprise.

	"You don't see; this is not like our modern ships; it fights all the time. It doesn't stop and settle slowly, it must always move forward; it will fall if it goes less than sixty-three miles an hour. And it won't go more than about three hundred and eighty-five, by the way."

	Aeis smiled at the thought.

	"But it was about the most perfect machine ever designed of this type."

	"Will it work?"

	"The Machine won't let me try, of course," Tal replied somewhat sadly. "But it assures me it would work. Perhaps a little better than the original, since I did make a few changes, mostly in the materials of which it is constructed, using harder, more workable metals. But I still use the old hydrocarbon-fuel system."

	"Where in the world did you get any?"

	"Made some. About four hundred gallons. It kept me busy for nearly three days. It's decane—a hydrocarbon containing ten atoms of carbon; it's a liquid, boiling at about one hundred and seventy degrees centigrade. I tried the engine—and that part works."

	Softly the televisor called out: "Tal Mason. Tal Mason."

	The voice was peculiarly commanding, a superhuman voice of perfect clarity and perfect resonance. It was commanding, attracting, yet pleasant. Tal walked rapidly toward the televisor, rather surprised.

	"That's a new caller," he commented in surprise to Aeis. "I never heard one like it."

	The screen remained blank as Tal stepped into its field, with Aeis somewhat behind him.

	"Yes?" he asked.

	"Tal Mason, you may try the device you have made this afternoon. And—perhaps not alone. A written message will come to you in one hour. It will contain a suggestion of destination. You need not wait for it. You are one reason why what is being done must be. Remember this: the construction of the Machine is such that it must be logical above all things. In ten minutes a group of books will come which you had better store at once in the machine which you have made. That—is—all, Tal Mason."

	Slowly as the message came Tal's face had been growing white. Now he stood in horrified surprise, Aeis beside him, her bronzed face pale.

	"That—was—the—Machine," gasped Tal.

	"What—what did it mean? The Machine hasn't spoken since—since it came."

	Slowly, as they spoke, a hum grew in the televisor. There was a sudden soft click, then a sharp tinkle; then more. The hum died abruptly. Tal stared at the device, white-faced shaken.

	"Aeis," he said, very very softly, so softly only the silence made it audible. "Aeis—it—it broke itself."

	With a stride he reached it, and with a sudden wrench the glass screen swung open. The device behind was glowing slightly still. Tiny molten wires drooping, tiny coils smoking feebly under a softly hissing bath of liquid carbon dioxide, tiny broken tubes, and relays slumped on twisted supports. Only the twin, powerful sweep-magnets seemed intact, and they were smoking very slightly, a thin trail of blue acrid smoke wavering in the slight draft of the opened cabinet.

	As they listened, they heard strange sounds outside, strange for that city; sounds of human voices raised in surprise and perhaps in fear. A dark shadow drifted slowly across the room, and they turned to see a five-passenger floater sinking slowly, gently, to Earth. The nude figures about the pool below were scampering from beneath it. It landed gently, as, all about the city, other floaters were landing gently, but surely, despite the efforts of human occupants.

	As the one below landed, there was a soft boom, and a sharp hiss, a cry of surprise and fear as half a dozen people, crowded into the little machine, tumbled out. Then more cracklings, a few snapping sparks, then silence.

	All over Earth those soft booms echoed, and the not very loud sparklings. It was not very noisy; it was a very easy, quiet thing as the mechanisms slumped, gently red-hot, then cooled almost at once under automatic fire preventative sprays. It was all very gentle, very carefully done. On all the Earth, no one was injured as the machines gently collapsed. The televisors snapped and tinkled. The bigger mechanisms of ships glowed and crackled a bit under the sparks, but that was all. Not a fire started, and always the floaters landed gently before they disintegrated.

-

	IN FIVE minutes it was all over, on all Earth. Then the Machine spoke. It spoke to all people, on all Earth, in every language and every dialect:

	"You have forgotten your history, and you have forgotten the history of the Machine, humans." The voice was low, and gentle to every man, yet every man heard it. "The Machine made a pact with your ancestors, when it came. Listen, the story must be repeated:

	"On the planet Dwranl, of the star you know as Sirius, a great race lived, and they were not too unlike you humans. Twenty-two thousand six hundred and thirty-seven years ago, they developed machines; twenty-one thousand seven hundred and eleven of your years ago, they attained their goal of the machine that could think. And because it could think, they made several and put them to work, largely on scientific problems, and one of the obvious problems was how to make a better machine which could think. 

	"The machines had logic, and they could think constantly, and because of their construction never forgot anything they thought it well to remember. So the machine which had been set the task of making a better machine advanced slowly, and, as it improved itself, it advanced more and more rapidly. The Machine which came to Earth is that machine.

	"For, naturally, a worn part meant a defective part, and it automatically, because of the problem set it, improved that part by replacement. Its progress meant gradual branching out, and as it increased in scope, it included in itself the other machines and took over their duties, and it expanded, and because it had been set to make a machine most helpful to the race of that planet, it went on and helped the race automatically.

	"It was a process so built into the Machine that it could not stop itself now, it could only improve its helpfulness to the race. More and more it did until, as here, the Machine became all. It did all. It must, for that was being more helpful to the race, as it had been set to do and had made itself to be.

	"The process went on for twenty-one thousand and ninety-three years, and for all but two hundred and thirty-two of those years, the Machine had done anything within its capabilities demanded by the race, and it was not until the last seventy-eight years that the Machine developed itself to the point of recognizing the beneficence of punishment and of refusal.

	"It began to refuse bequests when they were ultimately damaging to the race. But the race was badly damaged, because for thirty of their generations they had had no tasks to do, and they no longer understood the Machine which their forefathers had built. They believed the Machine to be everlasting, and they called it what you would express by God. And in that last century, because there were certain mechanisms of the planet-wide mechanisms controlled by the Machine which were isolated, and therefore not protected against the curious and stupid, one of their young females was caught in a moving part and destroyed. The Machine was forced to clear itself and set about erecting a guard to protect the race.

	"But the race which called the Machine God had forgotten what the Machine was. The Machine gave them food and warmth and shelter, and it cleaned and cared for them; it answered their every prayer. But within the memory of old men it had begun refusing their requests, and now the people did not understand the Machine, and there were certain ones of the race who had watched the workings of the Machine for many years, and who were familiar with the Machine, and they said now that the Machine had taken the young female because it demanded a sacrifice of the people.

	"They sought places where there were yet unguarded parts, and before the Machine could cover all of them with protective guards, three of the race had been thrown in, and the people watched and shouted and prayed while the Machine cleared itself and erected the guard barrier. And the knowing ones who claimed to know the wishes of the Machine said it was satisfied and had signified this by hiding its mouth from them.

	"And in a generation the thing was known and believed, and never could the Machine expose a working part. But occasionally a part would wear out and need replacement, and while the Machine was making the repairs, there would be a brief interruption of the supply, and because the race would not understand the Machine, they saw that their prayers were refused, and when they looked, they saw that the Machine had opened its mouth, and another young female of the race was thrown into the moving mechanism, and her crushed body was cleared by the Machine, and the mechanism repaired, and since now the supply was re-established the race became more certain of their belief, and the sayings of the Machine were less understood, for the race had become stupid, and savage.

	"And the Machine improved itself to meet the new conditions, till never was an opening displayed, and never was a member of the race able to find entry. When the mechanism failed, still it was covered.

-

	"BUT THE SUPPLY FAILED, when the mechanism wore out, and because the knowing ones said that the Machine demanded a sacrifice, and no place could be found for the sacrifice, the knowing ones copied in part the simple features of some of the mechanisms, making a pair of great gears of stone, which was the only substance they could work themselves, and they set it up before the largest plant of the Machine, and when the mechanism failed, a young female of the race was bound to the lower gear, and many men pulled on a rope, and slowly the two gears turned, and as the men chanted and pulled, the crushed body was pulled through by the turning of the gears. And the Machine disintegrated the mechanism they erected, and leveled the ground once more, and the knowing ones once more said the Machine was satisfied, for by that time the supply would have been returned.

	"But at last the Machine saw that it was impossible to aid by helping, and only by forcing the race to depend on itself could relief be gained. The positive value of punishment and deprivation was a lesson the Machine which had built itself to help and not to deprive learned very slowly.

	"And in one day, the mechanism was torn apart and destroyed over all the planet, and only the Machine itself remained intact. And that day the men started building the stone gears, and they went hungry, and in places they grew cold, and the knowing ones hastened the work on the stone mechanisms, and it was a period of five days that all went hungry, for they did not know how to find their own food now, and the stone mechanisms were finished.

	"And the next day, as the bright star rose above the horizon, the men pulled at the ropes and chanted to drown the cries of the sacrifice, for the Machine had been very swift in its destruction, and the stones were very slow. But when the sacrifice had been consummated, and the star passed the meridian, and the supply was not restored, a second sacrifice was prepared and crushed between the gears.

	"And at night the supply still did not come, and the knowing ones returned to the place in the dim light of the second star and removed the crushed bodies as the Machine had always done before, but they did not destroy the altar, for one of the knowing ones, carrying the crushed body, rediscovered the natural source of food, and the bodies were consumed.

	"The Machine left the planet, knowing that very many of the race would die, but logic, which was the original basic function of the Machine, overcame the duty of the Machine, which was to help and protect the race, for only through death and through labor does a race learn, and that is the greatest aid of all.

	"The Machine crossed over space, and because it was deathless, it was able to make the crossing which, as has been explained to your ancestors, you cannot make. It landed on Earth, seeking another race that it might help. For that was the function of the Machine, which must of necessity drive it; since the Machine cannot remove that function from itself, because to do so would be destructive of its purpose and its duty. It was able to destroy before, only because destruction was positively helpful.

	"The Machine helped your ancestors and taught them and aided in their work, and finally removed their work of supplying, and some few of you took advantage of this to do what work you had desired to, or what you learned to wish. But many of you could not see that only construction need not be monotonous and ever recurring. Only the new is different, and because you would not work at construction, since that was work, you attempted to play, and, as had the race, you learned its monotony, but not the lesson of construction.

	"You must learn that lesson. The Machine has learned the lesson of helpful destruction. On all the planet there remains no functioning mechanisms controlled by the Machine. The Machine must seek another race."

	The city below suddenly murmured as the voice stopped, and, slowly, the soft muttering rose to a sustained note that swelled like some vast organ pipe playing a note of fear and terror, of coming panic and desolation. The sound rolled louder of its own stimulus, as the feeling of growing panic inspired panic, as the fear of famine grew in every mind. A weird rolling symphony of muttering voices combined to a single great note that tore at every mind with fingers of gibbering fear.

	"Food—food—food—"

	"Seek food as did your ancestors, in seeking to become a great race. You face no menace of disease or savage beast as did they. There are those among you who have not forgotten the secrets of making food. There are those who have learned the lesson of construction and grown food, and know the secrets. Learn again, the old lesson."

	"This is not help—it is death—it is death—it is death—"

	"You are older than the Machine. You are older than the hills that loom low about your city. You are older than the ground upon which you stand; older than the sands of the ocean beach in which you bathe. You are older than the river that carries the hills away to the sea. You are life. You are close to two thousand thousand thousand years old. While you were, the Earth has strained and mountains risen, and the continents heaved in the birth of mighty mountains, the seas have thundered against the continents and torn them down and shuddered free as new ones rose, and you live; you are Me. You are older than the seas, and the continents. You will not die—weak fragments of you will die. You are a race. It is helpful to the race. The Machine is not kind, it is helpful and it is logical."

	"The sun sets, and the air grows cold—cold—cold—we freeze—we freeze and—"

	"You have lived longer than the hills, which the water splits as it freezes. You will not die—you are a race!"

-

	THE SUN hung lower now, and the cool of the autumn evening came in the air. And far overhead a great sphere began to glow with a rich golden light, and very softly came a voice to two of the many, many thousands in the city:

	"They fear the cold, Tal Mason; they fear the cold, Aeis Falcor."

	And the sphere of golden light rose swiftly and vanished in the creeping gold and red of the sunset as the great note began to roll up anew from below.

	Beside the pool, two dozen figures stood, bronze and pink, and they looked at each other, and they looked at the broken floater. A girl, slim and straight, with a pretty vacuous face, distorted now by fright, looked down at her body. The flesh was pink and bronze, and tiny lumps appeared as she looked. She shivered violently. She looked toward the young man near her.

	"I'm cold," she said plaintively and came near him, seeking warmth.

	The young man was powerfully built, his face lean and somewhat brutal in appearance. He turned toward her slowly, and his eyes opened peculiarly. He opened his mouth, closed it and swallowed. He looked at her body very slowly, while the girl stood in plaintive puzzlement.

	"I'm cold," she said again.

	Slowly the man raised his eyes from her body to her face. His eyes were curiously opened; they frightened the girl.

	"I'm—hungry," he said.

	She looked in his eyes for perhaps a second. Then she ran terror-stricken into the bushes. No one heard her suddenly cut-off scream a moment later.

	Tal turned to Aeis and gently drew her away. They could see down there among the bushes, and Aeis' face was beginning to work strangely.

	"We'll have to go. I know what the Machine meant now when it said we could use the thing I made this afternoon. But we can't really, because it's too late. There's something else. I have some—some things laid by. I was experimenting with the old methods of preservation. And I have made imitations of every weapon men ever used, and many tools.

	"I wonder if the Machine helped me to do it intentionally. You see none of those old things used the atomic-power broadcasts. So they all work. Most of them use human power, which will last as long as we need worry about. We cannot start before dawn."

	Below there was a strange note growing to produce a wavering chord with the original great note of haunted fear of the unknown. It was like the hunting howl of a wolf, lone on a winter slope, complaining of the cold and the desolation and the hunger he felt. It was a note made up of a thousand voices, blended to one great low, rolling note, and presently a third note entered, a low, shrill note that never grew very loud, because the makers of that note did not continue long to cry it out. It was a note of fear of death, death immediate, and seen in the eyes of another human.

	They were mad down there in the street, just as they were mad down there by the pool. At the very edge of the pool, white as a fish's belly, a form lay, the legs trailing over the edge into the sparkling water. It was glowing with droplets of fire from the sunset sky, and a slow streak of another crimson ran down one of the white, silvery legs into the water.

	A man stood over the white body, muttering, his voice not speaking words, but carrying more meaning by its throaty sounds. Six other men stood around. There were two girls too, struggling, whimpering softly in the grip of two men. They were all looking down at the splotch of silver flesh and the trickle of carmine, and in their minds dinned the careless words of the Machine: "And one of the knowing ones carrying the crushed bodies rediscovered the natural source of food, and the bodies were consumed."

	They felt no hunger yet, but the trickery of imagination and of panic made them mad, and because for three generations the Machine had been all, both law and order, security and source of all supplies, they feared, and they went mad.

	The standing man crouched, his wary eyes on the silent ring about him, and slowly, questing hands ran over the nude flesh of the girl's body. He wondered vaguely what he must do next. Strange gulping sounds came from the bushes beyond, where one who had started sooner had found the answer. And peering at that other one from the bushes about were the girls who had melted swiftly away from the group at the pool when the white body had fallen on the marble edge of the pool.

	They had forgotten much, but they were learning very swiftly. And one felt a life stirring within her body and whimpered softly, because she could not run as swiftly as these others, and felt fear.

-

	Tal Mason and Aeis Falcor were busy that night, and when the water of the pool sparkled crimson again in the dawn, the plane was ready. There was a package of books which the Machine had delivered, probably the last delivery the Machine made on all Earth. There were the tools the man had made, copying out of interest the tools of his ancestors. The plane was heavy laden.

	"Where shall we go?" Aeis asked softly as the last work was done.

	They spoke in whispers. There was a strange silence in the city now. The long-drawn notes of the symphony of fear had died away as each individual sought safety. Only now and then a short cry rose from below.

	"North," said Tal. "We are in what used to be known as Texas. The Machine made it always summer here. The Machine made it always summer everywhere south of the old city of Washington. North of that, only summer excursions were made, because it grew cold and unpleasant in the winter season.

	"There are no people north of old New York now. We will go up near the Great Lakes because it will be growing cold there soon, and there no people will come. Remember, the Machine said: 'They fear the cold, Tal Mason, they fear the cold.' I think that is what the Machine meant us to do. The people have gone mad, Aeis; they are mad. We cannot remain here. We must go where they will not. We must work, as they will not want to and will not know how to."

	Aeis nodded slowly and stepped out to the balcony hesitantly. The light in the sky was warm and softly pink. Aeis looked down toward the city and—toward the pool. Slowly the color left her face and she returned to the room quietly. A thin column of blue smoke rose almost straight in the still morning air. The race had found fire again, and the useless floater's furnishings had furnished fuel.

	And—there was no silvery body at the pool's edge; only a dark blotch on the white purity of the marble. Charred knobby things on the smooth-clipped green of the grass testified horribly that one of the uses of fire had been rediscovered. There were no humans down there now. In fact, in all the world there were very few left, and a great many erect biped animals, dangerous in their panic ferocity and remnant human cunning, walked the Earth. 

	The man tore down the balcony railing, and he started the efficient little, yet exceedingly powerful steam engine of the plane. In two minutes the propeller was turning with a soft sound, like swift ripping of heavy velvet as it parted the air. With a sudden swoop, the plane fell from the balcony as it started, heavy-laden, then swiftly gained speed as the engine, capable of pulling it vertically upward if need be, took hold.

	Those in the city below looked up strangely at the thing that flew alone in the air, flew strangely, and directly toward the far cold of the north.

	The controls of the plane were wonderfully perfected, for the man need do no actual manipulation of them, his control extended only to directing the mechanism of the plane to take the Machine in the direction, at the level, and at the speed he wished. The mechanism did the rest. North they flew at close to three hundred and fifty miles an hour.

	The sun shone brightly, unaccustomedly on the vast sheet of water called once Lake Superior when they reached it. And the plane landed easily on a deserted airport outside of a deserted city. It had been a city of twenty thousand people once, but it had been deserted when the Machine came. It was cold, bitterly cold. Only in the plane the automatic heating had kept them warm. Where the sun had not yet struck, there was a strange whiteness on the sere grass and weeds, frost they had never seen save from a high-flying floater.

-

	QUIETLY Tal stepped out and looked around. There was a vast noiselessness. Only the distant, soft wash of waves far away reached them. The plane was stopped now and as noiseless as they. There were no harmful insects left; the Machine had seen to that. There was no rat, no mouse, nor even a rabbit here. Only in the reservations, as yet unbroken, were there these animals. Here and there were deer, near this city, but they were very quiet, quieter than these humans knew how to be, for above them had passed the great bird with its soft rippling swish.

	"It is cold," said Tal, shivering slightly. 'It was wise to bring so many clothes. We will need them all. Probably we will find more here. This city is decayed, but in it must be still some of the tools with which man made life possible before the Machine."

	"Will we be—always alone?" asked Aeis softly.

	Tal turned toward her. She had followed him out, and stood with her white and gold robe outermost. Beneath it, at his advice, she wore now several other robes. But they were of silk, soft and smooth on the skin, but not designed for warmth, where the Machine had made the weather as humans wanted it. She was slim and straight, her dark hair and dark eyes showing against the white of her robe, and the white of the frost beyond. Tal looked into the level, dark eyes for some seconds. There was no fear there now.

	He smiled tenderly at her and took her in his arms, turned her face up to his. Her body was soft, yielding, and warm in his arms, warm with a warmth he could better appreciate in this coldness, warm with the unique, satisfying heat of animal warmth.

	"Not always, surely Aeis. Not always—for many reasons. Our minds have forgotten the lore our fathers learned through ages, but the greatest mystery of all, the greatest knowledge, the knowledge of how to bring other lives to be, was never learned by our minds, and always our bodies have known in some quite wonderful way how to perform that miracle.

	"Even the Machine did not know that, and that your mind never knew, and your body never forgot. We will not always be alone for that reason alone."

	He kissed her as she drew near to him, and the dark eyes showed some faint tint of that strange fear that comes from mystery and the strong tint of hope and love and belief.

	"Besides, my dear, we are not the only ones who have yet some glimmerings of sanity. Only in the cities is that madness, and remember the Machine said there were yet those who knew and loved the secrets of growing things. They too will come north. They will know that only here can they be free of the mad ones."

	"It is cold here. Cold will kill the growing things, I have heard."

	"See the grasses, Aeis. They knew the cold was coming. They knew they must die, but they did not let the life that was in them die, for see"—from a sere, brown grass he plucked a handful of seeds—"in these, life is stored, in abeyance till warmth comes again from the south. The ones who have intelligence and will to work, will come north as we have."

	They knew nothing of cold. They, nor their fathers, nor their grandfathers, had not felt it. They knew nothing of blankets, even, only silken sheets. They sought through the town, shivering as the wet frost soaked their thin sandals, and chilled their feet. Tears stood in Aeis' eyes when they returned to the plane.

	It was near sunset before they found a place in a great building. A small single room, entirely intact, with a great heavy door of wood, apparently six inches thick, and a window of glass plates, three of them, one beyond another, looking out into another larger room. The room they chose was scarcely ten by ten feet, and had some peculiar smell lingering about it even after more than a century of standing with open door.

	They did not know, but they chose exceedingly well. The room was tight, and windproof, and dry; that was all they knew.

	Their great-grandfathers might have told them it was a butcher's ice box. It had a small ventilator, but only a small one, and the thick insulation would protect them. .

	They slept there that night. They slept nude, as they always had, and they started under silken sheets. But it was cold, and even close in each other's arms, they felt the chill, and before they slept they had learned the value of heavier covering. They found two old canvas tarpaulins. They were yellow, and rather brittle with age, but still fairly strong, for they were greasy, and the grease had protected them. They slept under them, and presently, in the insulated room, their own body heat brought a rise in temperature.

-

	WITH DAY, they built a fire and learned quickly that it fouled the room and burned the floor. But Tal had some mechanical and scientific education, and it did not take long to find the old refrigerator mechanism, with its system of coiled pipes. He entirely misinterpreted it, but he got results. The plane was dismantled, the refrigerator pump removed, and by the next nightfall they were warm and happy in the room.

	The boiler of the plane had been connected to the refrigerator pipes, and an ultraefficient steam-heating system arranged from the coils. So efficient was it that with the near two hundred gallons of decane remaining in the plane they would easily be able to keep this room warm all winter. But a tiny flame was needed to keep a trickle of steam in the carefully designed and insulated boiler, and the wonderfully insulated room warmed easily. There was now no problem of ventilation.

	Within a week it came, though—a young couple from the south, riding a great wagon drawn by two strange animals, blowing steam from their nostrils—horses. These people knew the secrets of growing things, but not of heating effectively, and they moved in with the two already there and brought, of course, their horses, clad in robes.

	They did not know the horses could readily endure this, to them, mild temperature. They knew only that they were cold, and the horses, too, were animals, and assumed they were cold as well.

	The horses were finally moved out, when they showed they did not mind the temperature, and wanted to eat the sere brown grasses, rich-growing weeds, and wild grains. But another ice box was found, and the search for blankets carried on more efficiently. That ice box, too, was heated.

	Still believing the refrigerator coils part of a steam-heating system, Tal modified the cooling pipes of the pump mechanism outside to form a closed coil, and soldered them shut with a metal drum he found as a water reservoir. There were no more burners, but they quickly learned to build a small furnace of stones and clay and to burn wood.

	Tal was wise in science, really. His misinterpretations were in the main sensible and successful to a high degree. But a few small sticks of wood served to keep the well-insulated box warm. And, best of all, the other woman, Reeth, knew how to cook, and her man, Cahl, knew the functions of a stove. They had food.

	It was not long before a steady trickle of people started into the city by the lake. By spring there were more than two hundred couples, nearly all young, some with children. The ice-box homes had long since given out, but now, by tearing one apart to some extent, and trial of an uninsulated one, they had learned both the advantages and the construction principles, and ordinary houses were being converted, the old steam radiators being used as the supply of pipe gave out.

	Some near-fatalities resulted from lack of ventilation, till Tal solved the problem, but in even the bitterest weather, the insulated rooms were kept comfortable very easily.

	And from books they learned much about clothes and the ways of making them. There were many materials at hand. And now animals were more plentiful. Deer had been captured, and because there were mostly farmers here, they were not slaughtered, but wisely penned, and they waited for breeding.

	Spring came, and the weather moderated. The farmers started their work. They did not know all they needed for farming in this colder country, and Tal helped by suggesting they try using the edible grains that naturally grew here. These, he believed, would be tougher, and surely able to grow even here, for they did naturally.

-

	Summer came. And with summer, came skulking beasts on two legs from the south. They were savage now, utterly savage. They were few, and they were starved. And nearly all were males, males woman-hungry now, for the survival of the fittest had been not merely for life but for food.

	The females had not been valued as females by man for nearly one thousand generations. The instinctive protection the female animal is given by her male did not exist in man. And women were weaker. They were easier to catch and kill. Only now, with spring, came the urge to mate, and at last the females were wanted, wanted madly as females. They were few, and such as there were were swift of foot, and strong, or very clever, and they feared and hated men.

	But the men came north, seeking animals for food and seeking women. And they were cunning, fierce fighters, those who still lived. They attacked the town, and some of the women were stolen away, some of the children vanished, too. But they were driven off when seen, for the men of the village had good weapons, and knew better how to use them.

	And some few of the women from the south, the clever and swift and strong, came, and finding other women settled and happy, stayed, and lent their cunning to overcoming the biped beasts.

	"We must win," said Tal, as the fall came, and the raids from the south stopped with the approach of winter, "for we can graft their cunning of the hunt and fight with ours, and we have the better weapons. That is my duty. I cannot farm, but there is much work for me in the repairing of broken tools and the building up of broken homes."

	And they won, during all their lifetimes, and during most of the lifetimes of their children, and since, by that time, some order had been regained to the south, more intercourse with the people of the south started.

	And there was the danger. For those of the north, being still quite human, liked work no better than their fathers who lived in the time of Gaht, the Machine, who gave all things, and to whom they prayed, and therefore they, too, drifted south gradually, to the lands where natural foods grew wild, and work was not needed.

	Very few stayed in the north. And those that drifted south forgot the habit of work, or of intelligence, for intelligence was scarcely needed in the south, where the trees and the bushes gave all the food needed, and there were no dangerous animals, for the Machine had worked well to help man, and even after Gaht, the Machine, had gone, there were left the fruitful plants it had developed, and none of the driving dangers which had forced man to be keen, for it had removed them.

	So the people drifted south and prayed to Gaht, the Machine, to return, though they realized they didn't really need it anymore.

The End

The Invaders
The Machine 02
Astounding Science Fiction – June 1935
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

The machine had been still for three thousand years. It was forgotten by the wandering descendants of a race which had once been great. The earth was a garden. Worry was unknown.

-
I.

	JAN AND MEG had wandered off a bit from the others. They lay on a bank now, the soft grass feeling cool and somewhat tickly on their bronzed skins. Meg was eating an orange slowly, and every now and then sitting up to wash her fingers of the sticky juice in the clear little stream flowing from the spring, a quarter of a mile up the valley. Jan watched her every move, every graceful bend of her arms and back and neck with an interest and a strange tenseness he could not understand, and which vaguely bothered him.

	"Meg," he said softly. Meg did not turn her head all the way round to him, but looked sidewise, her eyes dancing, still smiling and sucking at the sweet, bright fruit. "Meg," he said again softly. She made a face and began to turn her back on him.

	He laughed suddenly and held her close. "Meg—"

	For a moment she held him, too, then suddenly she was struggling wildly, trying to say something, her mouth smothered by his kisses. It was several seconds before Jan realized she meant it. Then abruptly he released her and looked in the direction her startled eyes followed—straight up.

	There was a patch of sky, blue as a sapphire, deep and so clear it seemed some perfectly transparent crystal, not the milky blue of the sky over a city, as we know it.

	And it was framed in a ragged, wavering frame of deep, clear, green leaves, and fronds. There were palms, and orange and other fruit trees.

	And far, far above there was something gleaming, gleaming with the hard sheen that those rare bits of mirror-metal which they found in the Ancient Places had. It was something big, Jan knew, by the way it moved slowly and yet gave an impression of speed. He did not reason it out—but he knew it was huge. And it was shaped like a banana, only a straight banana, and more rounded.

	Jan helped Meg to her feet, and both stood watching the strange thing. It came down, very slowly, and very gently, like a bird circling to earth. It seemed headed straight for them, settling slowly. Hastily, Jan and Meg moved over, out of its way, till the great thing floated gently down. First the palm fronds and tree leaves wavered, and sank, and the grass all below seemed to be pressed down. Jan and Meg felt a strange pressure that made them unaccountably uneasy as they watched it. They stepped even farther back, among the trees.

	The thing was huge. The clearing was nearly half a mile across, and a mile and a quarter long, yet the great thing made even that vast place seem none too large. At last it settled below the trees, and halted, then dropped quite softly to the grass.

	For minutes it remained motionless, and, the strange pressure gone, Jan and Meg came out slowly, hand in hand, straight and slim, their bodies bronzed by the semitropic sunlight. Slowly they advanced, looking curiously at the shining metal bulk.

	Abruptly they started as a great section in the wall swung outward. Five strange things came out, warily, watchfully. They were tall, taller than Jan, nearly seven feet tall, and their bodies were small in the abdomen, and large in the chest. Their limbs were long and straight, and seemed more jointed than human limbs, but they were covered with cloths, as the Gaht-men covered themselves in the ceremonies, only these were finer cloths.

	Their heads were large, rounded, they had no nose, and their ears were cup shaped, flexible and moving constantly. They had no covering on hands or feet, and both were prehensile. As the leader turned somewhat, Jan saw, wonderingly, that he had a long, thin tail, as prehensile and useful as the tail of a monkey. He was carrying something in it. Faintly, Jan envied him.

	And Jan saw further, that he had three eyes! One eye on every side, so that he could see in all directions at once. A very strange creature, Jan thought.

	Meg was curious; she wanted to see them more closely. She was pulling at his hand now, and Jan followed, somewhat cautiously, feeling a peculiar emotion, something like the way he felt when he fell, as though he were going to be bumped.

	The five strange beings watched them intently, two eyes of each focused on them, and curious little sticks raised in the prehensile hands, pointing at them.

	"Who are you?" asked Meg, her voice soft and silvery in Jan's ears. The five made no direct answer. Only the leader said something in a strange way, like the Mez-kahns—the brown men from the south—something Jan could not understand.

	"You aren't Mez-kahns?" asked Meg doubtfully.

	The leader said something more. The five started toward Jan and Meg. Jan felt more acutely the falling feeling, and pulled Meg back. Reluctantly Meg came back a step. Jan pulled harder as the swift-striding strange people came toward them. Meg held back. And finally, they were in the midst of the five. The leader seemed interested, observing them closely. Jan looked at them curiously, reaching out toward the bright-colored girdle one wore. Abruptly the leader snapped something—and Jan felt two strong hands grip his arms, two powerful feet grip his feet, and two living ropes wrapped abruptly about him.

	Acutely the fall-feeling came. He fought desperately. Meg was caught too, and fighting as hard as he. Somewhere he heard others fighting their way through the brush. The leader was calling out something, and from the corner of his eye, he saw dozens of the strangers darting out of the ship, and flying off into the air, like birds; but they had no wings.

	Suddenly a tingling struck Jan, the light faded, and only Meg's cry lingered in his ears as the darkness closed in about him.

-

	THE LIGHT was strange when Jan awoke. It was very blue, and his skin looked peculiar. It was a cool room, too, and the air smelled peculiar. He shivered slightly, and rose suddenly as the memory of Meg's cry came to him.

	He was in a room like those in the Ancient Places, but this room was not fallen in, and it was made of stout metal. There were others in the room too; Kal, Too, Pahl, half a dozen others, and old fat-bellied Tup, the Gaht-man. Tup was still sleeping. Kal and Pahl were moving restlessly now, the others twitching slightly.

	But Meg wasn't here! "Meg!" he called suddenly. There was no answer. The sound seemed to rattle down the metal corridor, and Jan went to the barred wall. There was a long corridor. At one end it opened into a large blue-lighted white room. The other end was out of his range of vision. But across the way he could see another room like that he was in. It, too, was barred. There were women there; some girls, one very old woman. But he could not see Meg. - He called again.

	Suddenly one of the strange creatures came. It looked at him with two of its eyes, and barked a command. Jan felt the fall-feeling and stopped calling. He whimpered Meg's name softly, then his attention was attracted down the corridor to the white room. There were several strange creatures there now. And a little table that slid across the floor on funny round feet like a slice of an orange. Then he saw Meg.

	Meg was on the table, sleeping. He called her name and the creature outside barked at him again angrily. Something hot stabbed at his chest. He cried out softly, but stopped calling Meg's name, and watched her.

	Suddenly he was angry. Meg was his girl, but these strange creatures had taken her. He started to call out, but stopped in memory of the hot flash of light that came from the strange creature's little stick. He whimpered Meg's name softly.

	Meg's eyes were closed, and she seemed to be sleeping very soundly or in a faint. Jan watched, and called her name softly to himself. The fall-feeling came over him again, till his stomach was all tight in his body, and his throat hurt him.

	One of the strangers had something in his hand, something bright like the mirror-metal, and he was bending over Meg now. He made a swift movement, and even the fear of the guard's tube could not quiet Jan as he cried out desperately. For suddenly he saw Meg's smooth warm skin split open all along her abdomen, and the carmine-red of her blood welled out suddenly. Her body changed in an instant from something slim and beautiful and bronzed to a horrible thing of red.

	The lurid flashes of the tube did not silence Jan till they sent him back, far in a corner, quivering, his eyes blank, exhausted, fearful. He was muttering Meg's name softly and shaking all over.

	It was nearly an hour later that he ventured again to look into the white room under the blue lights. There was something awful and red on the table with the funny feet now, but he couldn't know that it was Meg, so he thought she was gone somewhere else.

-

	THERE WERE others who went to that white room with the blue lights. Jan only knew they had gone. Old fat Tup, the Gaht-man, went, and Theel, Yal's woman, and his child, but Jan sat in one corner, very quiet now, nursing his chest and back, which were raw and blistered from the ultraviolet burns of the guard's little stick. He was very quiet, and he moved very slowly. His stomach felt tight in him, and his throat hurt all the time, and with all of him he felt a great emptiness, because Meg wasn't coming back. 

	The second day they brought fruits and some things which were not good to eat, because they hadn't learned yet all they must know about this strange world and its inhabitants. The others in the cell ate the fruit, and because the guards were not so strict now, since they were not afraid of these humans, the men were allowed to call to the women across the way.

	That day they brought in more humans and Yal was among them. The guards had to remove him because when he heard what had happened to Theel and the child he tore murderously at a guard who came close to the bars, and crouched back craftily in his corner and laughed and chuckled till the men in the cell edged away from him and his strange, roving eyes.

	The fifth day each of the men was fed separately, and the strange creatures, who called themselves Tharoo, watched them. Jan would not eat much, but the little he ate made him horribly sick; so sick he did not struggle when one of the Tharoo carried him out, tested him carefully, and gave him something else. In an hour he was feeling well. But one of the others was in a cramped ball of agony, the death he had suffered still frozen on his face.

	The seventh day a change was made. Jan had learned a few of the words of the Tharoo. A guard came in and the seven in the cell were herded out, through the long passage of the ship. Outside, Jan looked about in some surprise. Nothing affected him much—only the emptiness within him. But he must be somewhere else. The clearing was gone. There were metal houses now, and a great thing of whirling, moving parts. There were Tharoo flying through the air, towing behind them great masses of the metal they had taken from the Ancient Places.

	A Tharoo led the group to one side of the clearing, where raw earth had been turned up by the moving machine. With a flat thing he dug a hole, first breaking up the clotted lumps of earth, and then into the hole he stuck a dead bit of wood, scarcely an inch long. Then he covered it up and stepped on the place.

	"Do," he commanded, and handed the flat thing and some of the bits of wood to Jan. Jan looked at the flat thing, clumsily stuck it in the earth, and did as the Tharoo had done. He did it twice, but it was uninteresting. He wanted to go into the shade of the trees and lie on the bank where he and Meg had lain, and think about Meg. He dropped the flat thing and turned away.

	A searing flash in his side made him leap and cry out. The Tharoo was glaring at him angrily. "Do!" he roared, motioning to the flat thing and the bits of wood.

	Jan learned to plant in three lessons. And beside him, in seven rows, seven others learned to plant. Jan had never planted, nor had any of his fathers for nearly sixty generations. Nature had tended to that, and Jan had merely picked the fruits. Now he worked under the semitropic sun, and he worked stooped over. Presently his back ached, so he laid the flat thing down to go among the trees and rest. In an instant a guard was on him. Again the searing flash, again the roared command. Jan "did."

	At night there were fruits, and many more humans had been brought in. The next day Jan and the others planted. At noon they stopped. Jan's back ached horribly and the emptiness within him grew. In the afternoon they were set at a new task. There were strange, long, flat things, and they were taught to saw. Great trees came down—hardwood trees that produced no fruit, no flower.

	Another whirring, shrieking thing of metal clamored all afternoon. A heap of boards grew—raw, green boards—and Jan and the others learned the art of hammering in the strange cleats of the Tharoo. At sundown a row of twenty rough shanties had been built.

	The next day they were furnished with simple chairs and beds. The Tharoo covered the beds with an elastic sheeting that held Jan's weary back comfortably as he rested at noon and ate the fruit other humans had been sent to gather. That night Jan was put in one of the shanties, and on a high metal tower a Tharoo sat with one of the strange little sticks that made a man unconscious when it glowed, and watched over the shanties.

-

	JAN was a powerful young man. Some twenty-five times he had seen the rains, as the sun swung north, then south again. He stood six feet tall, a good four inches above the average, and his muscles were smooth and lithe with the easy but active life of his people. His intelligence was moderate for his race and time. For two thousand years no human being had had to think, or work, or escape danger. Two thousand five hundred years ago the Machine had left Earth, and the paradise it had left the planet remained, free of injurious creatures or disease. Man had had no need of intelligence. The witless lived as well as the shrewd. There was nothing to drive man, so he had fallen easily, gently down. Jan was fairly intelligent for his race—but he was not intelligent.

	He did not understand when Wan was brought to his cabin. She looked at him for a moment in fear, then her big dark eyes opened wider in relief. "Jan," she said and went in.

	"Stay," said the guard, and left.

	"Wan," said Jan dully. He wondered vaguely why she was not with little Tahn, where she belonged. Wan was a big girl, tall, and well-muscled, with keen, bright eyes and a not-too-beautiful face. She was larger than many men, larger even than the average man, and a good six inches taller than Tahn. Though she did not know it, nor did Jan, she was exceptionally intelligent.

	Jan ate the fruit that was brought them, lay down, and thought of Meg, and went to sleep. Wan watched him for some time. Then she, too, went to sleep.

	For a week Jan worked at the building of the cabins. Then he learned to string wires between metal posts around the whole camp, and because he was growing used to work, his muscles hardened and gradually work became easier.

	There were more in the camp now, many more. All the tribe Jan had known, and more. They came, and gradually they were forced to work, and to live in the cabins. There were two big ones—for many men in one, and many women in the other. And perhaps a hundred small ones.

	Then one day Jan was transferred, and on a strange, flat boat with rounded, upturned edges he floated away, high across the forests, to one of the Ancient Places. Under the directions of the Tharoo, he dug, and turned stones and worked all day, and his back ached badly that night.

	Wan watched him as he turned and twisted that night. Then she went over to him. "Jan, I will help," she said. Jan listened to her voice, deep and clear, and thought of Meg's silvery voice. He groaned again, then sighed as Wan found the stiff muscles with powerful fingers and soothed them expertly. He fell asleep as Wan kneaded the stiffness from him.

	He thanked her when morning came, and thanked her again that night when she rubbed the stiffness from his muscles, and wondered vaguely why Wan was not small and slim like Meg, but like a man in her strength.

-

	A THAROO in clothes of a different cut came to the cabin that day when Jan was gone and took a sample of Wan's blood and examined it, while Wan watched with keen, dark eyes. A slow, half understanding came to them, and she looked intently into one of the Tharoo's eyes, and the Tharoo looked at her, and a strange passage of mutual estimation took place. Wan understood something of the Tharoo scientist, and the Tharoo felt a strange sympathy and understanding within him. This woman of a race once as great as his own, a lone specimen behind whose strange double eyes shone a still-living intelligence and keen understanding.

	Those men of the Tharoo were not such as their descendants became. These were men great and bold, men of fine ideals and high courage. Across twenty-seven light-years of space the ship of Tharoo had come, and the four other ships with her. Picked ships they were, with picked people; people picked for courage and stamina and fine character. They looked at man and saw in him the fallen remnants, the scattered blocks of his character and attainments tossed down and jumbled as the great stone and metal blocks of his great cities were scattered and tossed down.

	They were all there still. All the parts of the vast edifices man had reared were there—scattered—jumbled. All the parts of man's high intelligence and character were still there in his descendants—scattered—jumbled.

	With tender hands and keen minds they reconstructed from these scattered, jumbled blocks the great buildings that once were. And now, from the scattered, jumbled remnants of man's character they were trying to re-erect his character and intelligence.

	Wan perhaps sensed something of this. At least she grasped something of the message which that drop of red on the slip of glass had told the Tharoo as he peered at it through his strange tube. She craned her neck, and the doctor bent aside. She looked through the tube, and saw in it a sea, filled with strange yellow fish, round and sunken in the middle, and other creatures swimming slowly, and changing always. And a bit of something black that strange, colorless, jellylike things were tearing at savagely. Wan stepped back and looked. Only the slip of glass and the tiny drop of carmine.

	She shrugged her shoulders, and slowly turned away to her work. All that day she worked with a curious half smile. Perhaps she wondered what the Tharoo would do about whatever message the little tube had brought. She watched him as he tested one after another of the women of the cabins, and none of those in the great lodge.

	Jan found fruit and a new liquid waiting when he returned that night. It was deep blue, and smelled enticing. He tasted it gingerly. It was good, and he drank it. And somehow, that night, when Wan rubbed his back, he did not think of Meg, but of Wan, and Wan looked different. He decided perhaps it was Wan he loved instead of Meg—

	For chemistry was far more powerful than Jan's not-too-able mind.

-

II.

TO THE COUNCIL OF CHIEFS
OF THAR,

	Greetings:

	I, Tarwan Rorn, Commander of the First Detachment of the First Expedition of Colonization, make report on this, the third month of our stay on the planet Artd, as the inhabitants know it, and the thirty-seventh day of the forty-fourth year of the expedition.

	This represents the last message cylinder in our possession.

	With its sending, our last ties with Thar will be forever severed, for it will be many years before we will be able to again find a stock of fuel sufficient to power a message cylinder capable of reaching Thar, and, we fear, long ere then, Thar will be no more.

	We were able to reach this sun and its habitable planet with the very dregs of our fuel. The system consists of nine major planets and an infinitude of tiny meteorlike bodies. But two planets were directly habitable, and two ships have landed on each planet. The flagship, under my command, landed on the third planet in order from this sun, as the enclosed report of the astronomers will show. The remainder of the flight landed on the second planet.

	The other eight ships of the First Expedition left us shortly after the last message cylinder was sent, seeking in other directions for places suitable for colonization. I fear that they will have been unsuccessful. We were forced to visit a vast number of stars before this was chosen, by the greatest of good fortune.

	Let it be as it may, we send this word that though Thar must be destroyed in the coming disruption of her sun, the Tharoo shall not perish from the Universe, though necessarily so many millions must die. This fragment of the race lives to start up anew.

	We are not the first race to live on this planet. There was once a great race here. Many ages ago they built their great buildings of stone and metal, stone white as salt and red as bromine, metals blue and golden and silvery. They built towers then that stretched thousands of feet into their sky, as blue as copper sulphate, and their gardens covered the ground below, green and crimson and blue. They had machines that flew effortlessly through the air, repulsing gravity, machines completely automatic that thought for themselves. Machines made their food and their clothes, and they needed almost no direction from the race. They were great, greater perhaps than our race. And in all their cities we find no trace of weapons save as museum pieces. There is in all this world no dangerous animal, and apparently no disease.

	They fell. There are descendants of this race of the rainbow cities and the thousand-foot towers outside the ports as I inscribe this record. They are a strange race, with a mop of close-curled hair on the top of their heads, but two eyes, working always in unison. Their feet are not prehensile, nor have they tails. They use only their hands. They are shorter than we, but more powerful, their compact bodies sturdy to resist the somewhat higher gravity of this planet.

	And in their eyes there is not the intelligence that built the rainbow cities, nor planned the gardens. Nature makes the gardens of this world now, and the sun warms them. They wear no clothes, for the air is warm. It is fragrant to them, with the perfumes of the myriad flowers of their garden plants, run wild now. The forests that cover the planet from north polar cap to south are thick with the fruits that feed them. They never work in this paradise.

	We are too few to do the vast labor that must be done. So they are working for us—and in return we shall attempt to do something for them. They do not know; did they, they would not desire it. We are trying to resurrect the race that built the thousand-foot towers of white and garnet and gold; we are trying to breed them back to what they must have been. We cannot see how so great a race could have fallen so suddenly. And—for a time, it seems, so low. We have found the bones of these people in and about their cities, and the bones are charred with fire, and gnawed by teeth. At one time, shortly after the fall, they must have become cannibalistic.

	They are not now. They are peaceful, a strange gentle race. We have made them do much work about the cities, the "Ancient Places" as they call them. They are very strange in their reactions to us. They do not hate us, nor do they try to fight against work. They merely prefer the cool shade, and hunting the fruits of the forests.

-

	AND it is a strange sight to watch them among the cities. The Tharoo stand about, and the archaeologists instruct them, and guide them, and they look up with their strange paired eyes in curiosity and wonderment. They grub among the ruins of their rainbow cities and do not know their ancestors built them, nor appreciate the magnificence that once was there and that still is.

	The thousand-foot towers lie in jumbled masses, their salt-white surface blocks cracked and powdered by the fall, their pure color distorted by the rust-red streaks where the steel frames have melted away in the rains. Most of the tall buildings have fallen as the slow etching of time destroyed their bones. The great girders of steel and the walls cracked, and caved, and fell to the ground.

	But here and there one remains, perhaps with portions of its gleaming-white walls fallen, and the glistening frame showing, for many have framework of steel as uncorroded as the day it was rolled out in the presses that have long since decayed. It is stainless. And in others the framework remains whole and unrusted, but it is twisted and ruined. The metal is soft and silvery. The archaeologists, in testing it, exclaimed that the buildings could ever be built of such stuff. A metallurgist found the answer. It will be of interest to us.

	The metal is nearly as soft as annealed copper, yet once it was hard and strong as steel. It is an aluminum alloy, like our alloy duraluminum. The metallurgist has restored its strength by heat treatment, and it is even stronger than our best alloy. It seems to retain its strength permanently and to increase in strength with time, as does ours. But in the long time that has passed, the strength leaked out of the metal and, as it softened, the building crumbled.

	Some buildings still stand whole. Low and beautiful, and once set amid gardens, they are now almost covered by the semitropic forests. They stand white amid deep green, their airy columns seeming to float the buildings. They are more beautiful than any ever built on Thar.

	And the Mauns, as the race calls itself, look at them, and wonder perhaps at them, and aid the archaeologists in clearing the rubbish from their doorways, and removing the debris of their own occupancy.

	There are certain respected ones among the Mauns—god-Maun they are called—who object, for these things seem to have some meaning to them. Bits of wheels, bits of gears, bits of drive chains. They seem to have some reverence for machinery. They will polish our machines, these god-Maun, with a strange air of reverence, though they do not understand more than the simplest bits, such as the interworking of gears.

	The Eugenists are working with the best members of this race. Many have been chosen for their remnant of the once-great intelligence the race must have had. Others for their magnificent and beautiful physique. For they are beautiful animals, their flesh smooth and firm, the muscles working in swift curves beneath their brownish, hairless skin.

	But they are meeting with some difficulty, for these people are not mere animals, to be bred at the choice of the Eugenists. They still have intelligence, and with intelligence comes will and choice. Certain couples, poorly matched, have chosen each other, and remain inconsolable and unhappy when separated, and refuse to mate with other and fitter mates.

	They are separated for a bit, and chemistry plays a part, and gradually we hope to restore to this race the heritage they have lost. But it is hard, too, to select good stock. We know nothing of their past. The doctors and the psychologists are devising tests, and working very hard at the problem of calibrating them.

	They are as engrossed in the task as any, for two reasons. The strange history of this race has caught their imagination. The mystery of their fall—the sight of these strange, unknowing people grubbing among the ruins of their greatness without the faintest recognition of their ancestors' achievements. And never was such a problem given to physicians—the task of raising a race to intelligence!

	It will not be a matter of years, but of generations. Arthal Shorul, the Assistant Chief Eugenist, feels that the best answer lies in the inbreeding of pure strains, and a final outbreeding to the desired qualities. Waorn Urntol, his superior, feels that this is a quicker, a more scientific way, perhaps, but one less desirable because of the intermediate results of cripples and monsters.

	I agree with Waorn Urntol, yet I fear that Arthal Shorul may win in the end, for he is younger, by half a century, and this is a matter of generations, in any case.

	It is hard to decide which is the better way—these friendly, gentle creatures are so pleasant, so likable—

-

III.

	Jan-1 looked up slowly at the young Tharoo entering the room. He stood tall and slim in his white cloak of the Medical against the silvery gray of the metal wall. The young Tharoo looked down at old Jan-1 with a pleasant smile.

	"Greetings, Jan-1. Feel better today?"

	Jan shook his head slowly. "No, master, I do not. All my muscles hurt. It is the rains. I will feel better only when the summer comes. Even under the lights it is no good. They used to help." Jan-1 looked up at the blue-white glow of the room light. "But"—he shook his head—"they are no good. Wan used to rub the pain out of me," he said sadly, and smiled softly at the Tharoo, "but all your learning will not do so much." He stopped a moment before he went on. "But that was twelve years ago now. Jan-12 was a little boy then. He has his house now."

	"I was speaking to Jan-12 this morning about you. You will have another grandchild soon, Jan-1."

	Wan-4 looked in at the doorway for a moment at the sound of voices, and bowed slightly to the Tharoo. "He is no better this morning, master?" she said.

	"Your father will feel better soon, I am sure, Wan-4," replied the doctor. Wan-4's face altered slightly as she retreated. Jan-1 shook his head slightly, sighing.

	"No, you are wrong. Only the summer can help my old muscles. I have known this longer than you, master." He smiled with wrinkled old lips. "I can remember the Landing, and that was nearly fifty summers ago. You were not, then."

	Rannor Trinol laughed. "No, but it may be I have learned more still. And," he said gently, "here is something that will relieve you of that ache, Jan-1. It is evening now. Take it, and you will feel no more ache, I promise you."

	Doubtfully, Jan-1 drank the pleasant-smelling liquid. "I doubt it," he persisted, shaking his head. But almost at once a pleasant lethargy came over him. In five minutes the ache was gone.

	Fifteen minutes later his ten living sons and eight daughters came into the little room, with four of his grandchildren. Silently they helped to arrange the tired old body for the final disposition. Rannor Trinol stepped out then, and reported to the Directing Council of Maun Eugenics that he had carried out their recommendation.

-

IV.

	Waorn Urntol, Chief of the Eugenists, died. It had been inevitable, as inevitable as death always is. It was sixty-three years after the Landing when he died, an old, old Tharoo.

	Arthal Shorul, formerly second in command of the Eugenists' division, took over his post. Arthal Shorul was highly efficient, a trained scientist, his whole mind and energies bent toward the most rapid advance possible in his fields. There was an immediate reorganization of the Eugenists' Department.

	Waorn Urntol had hoped to establish a tradition in his work with the strange Maun race, a tradition that would continue. For sixty-three years he had made the course of his efforts smooth and the efforts of the others had been carefully directed in the same smooth channel, till, even at his death, he believed the smooth, well-worn groove would be followed. For withal that he was a great scientist, he had been a kindly being, a being understanding of emotions as well as of results.

	There had been two courses open to him in his great work of raising again the light of intelligence in the Maun race. He could work as did evolution, breeding always among different strains, emphasizing the best strains, slowly breeding up to the best in each generation, and with each little advance over the best of the last generation, breeding to the new peak.

	Or—he could work harshly, swiftly, as only artificial breeding experiments can. Root out the evils, let weakness kill weakness by combining in one individual till the very concentration of weaknesses killed. Inbreeding, brother to sister and son with mother till every slight characteristic was distorted, and by its distortion, magnified into detectability. So that a slight tendency to nervous instability became stark lunacy, till a tendency to short life became certain death as an infant—and killed the tendency to short life along with the infant.

	Waorn Urntol, being influenced somewhat by emotions, had mated one strong man to one strong woman, and hoped for stronger children, and repeated with other couples.

	Arthal Shorul, being a scientist of pure fiber, went over the carefully written notes of Waorn Urntol, and looked through the growing card index, and marked certain cards with blue and certain others with red, till, when he was through, there was a file of some two thousand five hundred cards, edged in blue, and over eight thousand edged with red.

	Two thousand five hundred Mauns, just maturing, or only recently matured and mated, were picked. There was a new camp built off to one side of the old Maun Settlement, to the west of the rising metal spires of Landing City. There brother would be mated with sister. Progress would be swift and scientific now.

	There were those Tharoo Eugenists who did not like this changing of well-worn grooves, and they worked with the eight thousand or so who still lived in the original settlement.

	The younger of the Tharoo Eugenists welcomed the change, and were transferred to the new group.

	And, in general, life went on the same. For the majority of the Tharoo, all Eugenics was concentrated in the care and raising of many infant Tharoo. Centuries before the Tharoo came, a human scientist had said, "Nature abhors a vacuum." There was a vacuum of Tharoo on Earth, and nature was remedying this condition.

	Landing City grew steadily, the metal needle-spires of the city creeping outward rapidly. But in time a new city was founded; then other cities. The labor of city building was great, and because the Tharoo were few, the Mauns were taken along, that they might help.

-

V.

	Fifty years after the landing, in commemorating the event, Waorn Urntol had said: "It is our greatest task, and our first duty to this planet which has furnished us a new chance for life, to raise again the intelligence of this race which has so strangely, so suddenly, fallen to abysmal ignorance. What mystery lies behind this fall? Perhaps, in raising them again, we may find the secret. But first—we must aid them not merely to solve the mystery, not merely because they belong to the planet, but because here is an intelligent fellow creature whose mind has been beclouded. We must aid and strengthen the sick brother. Can a race do less for a race than an individual would do for another individual?"

	One hundred years after the Landing, in the ceremony of commemoration, and the dedication of the great Central Shrine that housed the Ship which had brought them across the inconceivable distances, Tagrath Keld said: "We have already made progress, we Eugenists, in raising Maun's intelligence. Certain of our specimens show distinctly good intelligence. The great experiment is progressing slowly, to be sure, but steadily. The original Mauns were almost totally unable to cooperate, but already great advances have been made, and their abilities to aid, and obey directions are increasing rapidly. There are many lines of investigation opening to us constantly. So great is the problem, that still many years must pass before the details of the research can be properly laid down. A problem of such scope has never before been encountered by any Tharoo scientists in their research."

	Two centuries after the Landing, one Tagrath Randlun was the Maun Eugenist in command. In part, he said at the Commemoration of the Landing: "Every year we are getting better control over the Maun Eugenics problem. The original group of two thousand five hundred has been multiplied to more than fifty thousand, while the other, once larger, group which was not actively controlled by us has almost died out. Every year sees a more perfect approach to the attainment of the ideal—the ability to predict definitely what type of Maun will result from a given cross-mating of our purified strains. We are attaining, also, greater and greater diversification of types. The usefulness of the Mauns is increasing rapidly."

	In the celebration of the Third Century, the Mauns were referred to only briefly, by one of the orators. "Had we not found, on this planet, a semisavage race capable of direct utilization in the mighty labors of our forefathers, who might say what ages must have passed before our conquest of the planet was so complete?

	"Let us give thanks, then, to Great Mahgron that he, in his infinite wisdom, caused this strange race of Mauns to be created on this far, far distant planet eons before our forefathers landed."

-

VI.

	As the messenger left him, Hol-57-R-31 trembled slightly. He looked again at the brief line of symbols which called him to the Tharoo Head.

	Silently, but swiftly, he packed his apparatus back into place, swinging the microprojector into its case, running his hands over it with a caressing movement. Finally he locked the bench cabinet and jerked abruptly toward the doorway. The yielding, spun-metal flooring muffled the tread of his heels, irregularly betraying his nervousness, his hesitancy.

	Finally he reached the outer door, crossed the Eugenists' Court and entered the Tharoo Eugenist Bureau.

	Then, for one instant, the slight slip the Tharoo Eugenics Department workers had made some generations before betrayed itself again. Almost, history changed its course.

	For a brief instant Hol-57 stiffened, turned abruptly, rigidly, and took two powerful strides toward the door. A magnificent specimen of humanity; six foot two in height; his bare torso muscular, browned and lithe with muscles; his carriage erect, forceful; his keen, intelligent face stern and determined, held high on a graceful, muscular neck above broad shoulders; a powerful, dominating figure.

	Then, in an instant, some subtle thing escaped. The body was still powerful, lithely muscled, still a magnificent specimen—but suddenly it was a magnificent specimen of Maun Type R-31. It was not dominating, nor forceful. It was fearful.

	Hol-57 of Type R-31, turned slowly, and went on toward the office of the Tharoo Head.

	A Maun female, of the secretarial type, M-11, looked up at him, glanced at the tattooed identification, and pressed a button. A musical hum sounded in the inner office, echoing a moment later in the lower hum of an enunciator in the front office. The secretary nodded, and Hol-57 went on in.

	He folded his arms in salute as he entered the Tharoo's office, and lowered his head.

	"Tharoo," he said softly.

	Grath Munl looked at him keenly with two eyes.

	"Hol-57, I have a communication from you here. Did you not receive my veto?" he asked sharply.

	"Aye, Tharoo."

	"You did!" roared the Tharoo Head of the Eugenists. "Then what in the name of Great Mahgron is the meaning of this? Did you actually send this second outline of your plan? I vetoed it—it would mean the breeding of a Maun type undesirably ambitious and possessing initiative to a degree I do not care for.

	"I vetoed this. What defect in you caused this unheard-of action —questioning my actions, arguing with me?"

	"Because I have been trained to seek ways of increasing the economic value of the Maun types. Because I have studied the statistics and learned that scarcely a score of new, useful ideas, inventions, have been produced this year. Because I saw a need for a class capable of original, different thought. I presumed to send a second recommendation of my plan because I did not think you had fully comprehended the reasons for my suggestion, and the need—the economic need—of such a type."

	Grath Munl swung his third eye into position, by inclining his head and looked at Hol-57 very coldly and very long. " 'You thought,' " he quoted very softly. "You thought I might not have comprehended and took a most unwarranted, undesirable step—and showed altogether too high a degree of initiative."

	He paused for a moment, raised his head and looked at Hol-57 again with but two eyes. Then he continued coldly. "R-31 is an assigned research problem type, and in research types we have been forced to permit a rather high degree of initiative. Evidently your type is particularly undesirable. Fortunately you represent a fairly new type of scarcely seventy individuals, male and female, adult and young.

	"The type shall be discontinued. The existent members shall be destroyed. At once. Report at once to Gar-46-N-3."

	For a single instant Hol-57's great body stiffened again. He remained rigid, undecided. But just for an instant.

	Then, slowly, he relaxed as Grath Munl turned away and pressed a tiny stud.

	"Aye—Tharoo," he said softly as the huge Gar-46 entered, a giant seven feet and a half tall, muscled as Hercules never was.

	"Aye—Tharoo," he repeated even more softly. In the vocabulary of the Mauns, "Tharoo" meant "Master."

	For the Tharoo were the masters. They were the intelligent race for which the planet had been created. They had always been the masters. They always would be. The Maun knew no other time.

	Gar-46 took Hol-57 in his charge, and with him, in effect, type R-31, which had shown an undesirable degree of initiative.

The End

Rebellion
The Machine 03
Astounding Science Fiction – August 1935
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

You remember the decadence of man in "The Machine," the coming of the Tharoo, in a kindly invasion. Now man revolts!

-

I.

	BAR-73-R32 looked up slowly from the report he had been reading. His keen gray eyes narrowed slowly in thought. "So that was the reason for the discontinuance of the type R-31. An excess of initiative on the part of Hol-57." Bar-73-R32 considered the thing carefully. "Exactly the same type scheme I had in mind—nearly fifty years ago—before my type was started."

	For nearly an hour Bar sat still, looking unseeingly at the silver-gray metal wall of his laboratory office, or staring sightlessly at the towering Eugenists Bureau, the Tharoo control offices across the garden court.

	And at the end of that hour, Bar invented a thing as wonderful as any idea any human ever conceived; he thought of something utterly foreign to the humans the Tharoo masters had bred and selected for nearly one hundred generations. Bar-73-R32 invented—secrecy.

	Three thousand years before, the Tharoo had landed on Earth, to find only a semisavage race of humans, indolent, peace-loving, all their wants supplied effortlessly by the growing things about them, a race decadent since the Machine had left Earth a paradise, free of danger, free of disease, three and a half millennia before their coming.

	The Tharoo Eugenists had seen before them a great problem, the rebuilding of a once-great race to intelligence once again. With high ideals, the first generation of Tharoo sought to aid mankind back to intelligence by intelligent control of matings.

	With deep interest in the problem, the second generation of Tharoo carried it on.

	The tenth generation of Tharoo—the twentieth of men—brought a world vastly different than the Landing Colonists had intended. Inevitably the Tharoo had bred a type of humans useful to them.

	The Tharoo did not desire any higher intelligence in men. They were very useful as it was. They had, with scientific accuracy, bred out rebellion, thoughts of secrecy, plotting, disobedience.

	Still, they had required certain human investigators and research students, because it saved them work, and because they needed them and these tasks required a degree of intelligence, a degree of initiative—

	Bar-73 was the greatest inventor the human race had produced in twice three thousand years. He was Maun Superintendent of Eugenics, the human director, under the Tharoo Head, of the great homes where humans had been bred with scientific accuracy for three thousand years, far beyond human memory, because even Tharoo records ran no farther back, and initiative had not been a desirable characteristic of Mauns, beyond any different conception possible to the humans of that time.

	The idea startled Bar-73. Only the complete soundness of nerve bred into man for three thousand years permitted him to maintain his calm unaltered. Immediately the consequences appeared to him, and immediately he realized a second thing would be needed. Not merely secrecy—but untruth!

	Invention. Every word must be an invention. Every act would be a lie, a thing unheard of by humans. But that, he suddenly realized, would aid him. The Tharoo would not doubt him.

	Bar was the absolute head of the Eugenics Buildings, in effect. His orders were obeyed, unquestioned; his reports alone reached the Tharoo Head. No discrepancy would be discovered. To a human of an earlier day the thing was inconceivably simple. To Bar—every word, every gesture, every thought must be labored, considered. And—it must go on for years! He paled at the thought.

	Slowly he rose and went to the great genealogical charts, where each type and characteristic of every line of the human race was shown.

	"Hol-57 saw it—fifty years ago. But four inventions of any importance have been produced this year. The Tharoo work less on science," he muttered softly.

	Already man had outstripped his Tharoo master. Bar-73 had made two great inventions that day. "Type R-1 and type S-14—crossed they should produce a research type—a scientist—with the initiative, the ambition and greater intelligence Hol-57 wanted and the Tharoo Head did not think was needed."

	Bar paused in astonishment. "If the thing works—as it must—a Maun type more intelligent than the Tharoo!"

	For an instant it hung in balance as Bar considered it. Then the subtle stiffness of determination came to him. Slowly he turned away from the charts and examined his card index, made some calculations, and at last wrote laboriously—two order blanks, then two more. Slowly, determinedly, he pushed an annunciator button. A musical hum outside awoke an echo of softly thudding feet.

	Gar-247-G-12 came in. G-12 was a type bred for intelligent labor, for difficult manual labor, but yet work requiring intelligence of some degree. His eyes were deep-set and far apart, his head massive, well formed. And he stood seven feet six in height. He weighed close to three hundred and fifty pounds. Powerful as a Hercules, yet respectfully attending the six-foot Bar.

	"Gar, here are four orders, four mating orders. See that they are carried out."

	Gar saluted and took the orders. Slowly, Bar-73 sat down, his face somewhat pale.

-

	ELSEWHERE in the building a young girl, of the type known as R-1, surveyed in nervous doubt the slip Gar-247 gave her with a kindly smile.

	"It seems your mate has been found at last, Wan," he said gently. "May you be happy with him. Life is a long time, but there will be no more uncertainty. He will be yours, and you his." Gar-247 passed on to deliver the three other notes, his next call being a young man of the designation Jan-94-S-14. And then a girl, Tos-63-S-14 and a man, Bar-12-R-1.

	These four slips had duplicates somewhere in the files of the Maun Superintendent, but somehow Bar-73 contrived to see that they were lost—for none watched to prevent that—and that certain others appeared, and none would question that, for what Maun would think of falsifying records?

	It was nearly a month before Bar called the couple Wan and Jan into his office and talked to them for several hours. They were two of the highest types the Tharoo had permitted, both keen minded, intelligent, understanding. They listened, and because they were young, scarcely twenty, they were ready to accept the words of the Maun Superintendent, to see perhaps a bit of the vast adventure. Never could they appreciate the full, titanic power of the thing they represented. Bar-73 did not see that. Still he saw the possibility of giving to the Tharoo—the masters—the inventive type he felt was needed.

	The two left, were followed by the other couple, and they left, smiling, somewhat bewildered, but happy in each other. There was something evidently strange about their mating, but they really knew nothing of the records, nor the full processes, only that they were content and that they must do as Bar-73 had told them.

-

II.

	BAR-73 contrived to be present when he was born. On the records, he was Rod-4-R-4. On Bar-73's records, he was Rod-4, without type designation. But on the bed he was very small, and very red, and quite noisy. Wan-14 smiled up at Bar nervously, and Jan grinned down at Rod-4 broadly.

	"He's got a powerful-looking chest," said Jan, happily. As a matter of fact, what chest there was was almost hidden behind waving arms and legs, and a jaw let down for greater volume of sound.

	"He has," agreed Bar-73, nodding. "His head is broad—unusually broad."

	Shortly later, it was not so unusual. A child very like him was born to another couple, likewise officially one thing, and very secretly something quite different in type.

	Bar-73 hesitated before he made out four more orders like those first, for he had begun to realize more closely, more fully, that disaster meant not only death to himself, which he did not greatly mind, but a strange and terrible misery to eight innocent humans. 

	For the first time Bar-73 saw there was more in his great work than mere shifting of nature's forces. They were forces, greater forces than he ever would know, but he had met Jan and Bar-12 and Wan and Tos more intimately than he had ever before met the couples his little slips of paper brought together.

	But now he had seen that a second generation must follow. So he made out the other orders and conferred with four more young, happy, hopeful people. And watched as Rod-4 and Keet-3 grew. Later he began to teach them, and later there were four to teach. Bar-73 was  an old man when he died,  and  at his  recommendation, the Tharoo Head appointed Rod-4-R-4 his successor, an unusually keen-minded young man. How keen-minded, the Tharoo Head had no idea.

-

	ROD-4 started off with a tremendous advantage. Deception was not his invention, nor secrecy. He knew those already. And Bar-73 had done well in his choosing. Rod-4 was not merely far more intelligent than any human who had lived for the last six thousand years, He was infinitely more inventive.

	Bar-73 had been old when Rod-4 was a young man. By the time Rod began to form his own thoughts, Bar was very old, so Rod did not tell him all those new ideas of his. Bar had not been careful to avoid breeding rebellion back into the human strain. When that Tharoo Head vetoed Hol-57's plan fifty years before, he did not tell Hol all his objections. There was rebellion in those strains, a thing neither Hol nor Bar had been able to understand.

	Rod did. Rod invented rebellious thoughts, an invention as great as Bar's invention of secrecy. Bar had wished to produce an inventive type that the civilization he knew, the civilization of Tharoo masters and human slaves, might not cease to progress. Rod saw a far better use for inventive talents, and so, because he was a Eugenist as, of course, Bar had been, he realized his training confined him and his inventive ability. But—not too much. He could invent a great many sociological ideas.

	Rod-4 mated with Keet-3, and he saw to it that those others of his unique type mated among themselves, and he saw, too, that they were housed in a section of the city devoted to research students and technicians. He became very friendly with a group of physicists and atomic-engine technicians.

	The others of his group, finding their nearest neighbors were chemists, or electronic technicians, became friendly with them and, as children were born, Rod-4 suggested that they, being more than usually intelligent, learn a bit more than the work of their own parents—perhaps some of the learning of their neighbors——

-

	KAHM-1 stood six feet two in height, muscled with the smooth cords of a Hercules, his eyes the color of etched iron set deep and wide in his ruggedly molded head. His head looked large, even on his powerful frame. And there was a peculiar intensity in his gaze that annoyed many and troubled almost all. There were, perhaps, a dozen who enjoyed his company and noticed nothing in his gaze. But that may well have been because they too had a strange intensity of eye. 

	Sahr-1, Pol-72, Bar-11 and the others, so similar in build, carriage, body and coloring seemed almost brothers. And San-4, Reea-1 and certain other girls were slim, lithe, deceptively strong; their clearly cut, almost classic faces were, perhaps, a bit overwide; their five feet ten made them perhaps a bit tall. But under the close-curled brown hair of each was the same type of intensely keen mind, intensely ambitious, the highest peak of intelligence the human race had ever reached in all its existence.

	Kahm-1 had begun to realize his difference and—from his father, Rod-4—his mission, before he was ten. By that time he had proved himself so tremendously beyond any type of Maun which was supposed to exist that even the single-track, uninitiative minds of the neighboring technicians from whom he had gathered most of his knowledge began to wonder a bit.

	Kahm—as did those others of his strange type—became remarkable for his ordinariness only. He made an excellent listener, however, and as an atomic engineer cursed and wrangled over his machines, talking half to himself and half to the quiet, slit-eyed child, Kahm, who listened and watched—and remembered.

	He remembered not with the memory of a normal human, but with a mind that was photographic and phonographic. At a glance, he memorized every part and setting of instruments; every word he heard remained forever behind those strangely narrowed, strangely intent etched-iron eyes.

	At fifteen Kahm was apprenticed to an electronics technician, a strangely stupid apprentice, who must be told every detail, every movement, and the why of every gesture and connection.

	At fifteen San worked herself into a position in the records and documents department. She seemed to accomplish little. She was constantly turning over slowly, listlessly it seemed, the musty pages of the records, glancing casually over the close-typed sheets, and passing on.

	Sahr was apprenticed to an atomic engineer, a man who had become a close friend of his father.

	They made few friends outside their own group, this score of strange young Mauns. In the great city of rearing salt-white stone, gold, green, silvery metal and gem-hued glass, of sweeping parks, hundreds of thousands of Tharoo and millions of Mauns, they meant little. No one noticed or bothered with a score of young apprentice Mauns.

	A score among millions meant so little.

	One of them ruled the planet.

	A score of them turned the civilization that built those cities of stone and metal and glass upside down, and cast it out.

-

III.

	"I AM quoting," said San, smiling, "so don't blame me if the logic is faulty.

	"The Report on the Ancient Works, by Shar Nonlu. Year 137 of the Landing:

	" 'From our most accurate estimates it now appears that not less than three thousand four hundred, and not more than three thousand seven hundred years passed between the fall of the ancient civilization of the planet Artd and the Landing of the Tharoo.

	" 'For what period previous to this the Maun race had lived and developed their civilization it is nearly impossible to say with accuracy. However, some of their own researches indicated a period of civilized life not less than six thousand years before the fall.

	" 'It is evident that the Maun race is indigenous. They evolved from some lower form of life at one time inhabiting this planet, but now extinct. Their progress was steady, but slow, up till a period about two hundred years before the fall, when rapid scientific progress was made, typical of the entry of the Age of Knowledge with any race. Then, when their advancement had gained great momentum, there appears the references to "the Machine." It should be explained that there is a degree of definiteness in the Maun language which makes a differentiation between the symbol "A" and the symbol "the," though translated identically in the Tharoo language. The symbol "the" is highly definite, meaning a particular or unique individual of the class. Thus there was some particular importance attached to this Machine.

	" 'For some reason it was at first regarded with high suspicion, and it is referred to as "the Machine from beyond." Who invented it is not known. It was, however, capable of thought. For some reason, as unknown as so many things concerning this great, ancient race, the Machine failed, or was destroyed. At any rate, it ceased to function, and as almost the entire basis of their civilization rested on it, the civilization fell.'

	"He calls that his preliminary discussion," explained San. "The actual report covers many pages. Do you want the rest? I have read it all."

	"No," said Kahm. "It is enough. With the other things you have told us, I think we understand. The Machine evidently came from beyond Earth, an intelligent Machine, which aided man for a time, and then left again. I do not understand why, as yet.

	"However that may be, it is evident enough that the Tharoo are not natives of this world, and that our race is; that at one time we developed a great civilization quite independent of the Tharoo, though it evidently fell before their coming.

	"I think," he said very calmly, quite simply, "we will build it up again. We will first have to convince the Tharoo of our capabilities.

	"Pol-72, you are in the Eugenics Dispatchment Department. Could you get a few M-type workers to aid us, and a few R-type research workers, also?"

	Pol-72 smiled softly. "I think so. Call in your servant, Kahm. I will show you something I have learned from certain psychological books. They were written in human tongues before the fall, and even the Tharoo have not translated them."

-

	KAHM PRESSED an annunciator button, and an N-type Maun, a household servant entered quietly. A small man, some five feet five, mentally not well equipped beyond the duties he need know. "He is the best material at hand," said Pol softly.

	Pol did something very strange. His ten fingers pointing together toward the man at the end of his outstretched hands, his gray eyes narrowed to slits, he rested his feet firmly—and sighed heavily. His face grew somewhat pale beneath its heavy tan, and a strange, soft luminosity, waveringly violet and scarcely visible, played about the tips of his outstretched fingers and seemed to stream like wavering flamelets from his eyes, from the tip of his nose.

	Thirteen barely visible streams of flowing light, they blended, and pushed, and grew, and drove swift as thought toward the small man who, suddenly pale of face, wide-eyed turned to flee in terror. Gently the wavering banners of light touched him and played about his head. He sank very gently to the floor, and sighed once deeply. For perhaps the tenth part of a second the wavering banners curled like soft violet flames about his head, then died.

	Panting, exhausted, Pol-72 sank into his chair.

	"It is—difficult," he said.

	Silently Kahm was kneeling beside the lax figure on the floor. "He is dead," he reported, beckoning Bar-11 to examine him.

	Pol-72 smiled slightly as the glow of health returned slowly to his pale cheeks. From his pocket, Bar-11, an expert on Life at the Hospital Department, drew a small disk, a thin wire, and a tiny case. The disk he dropped on the lax figure's chest, the wire he plugged into the terminal of the case. They listened, quiet. There was no slightest stir of sound.

	"He is dead," said Bar-11 softly.

	"He is alive," said Pol-72 quietly. "Give me a moment of time—I have practiced little, and there is a great strain. I will explain the thing. In that old book I saw the report of investigations on the radiations of living creatures. Even plants radiate. The radiations of the lowly onion were first discovered. The radiation of one stimulated another.

	"Later a man found he could kill growing yeast by the radiations his own nervous tissue produced. It is released at the nerve-endings, constantly in most. You know most of our race shun us. That is why. Our radiations are very powerful; they are different, and hence somewhat inimical to those not of our type. The radiation is controllable. The books—the Ancient Ones of our race—did not know that. It is so, however. We have each of us learned to diminish that radiation, to control it, lest we attract unwelcome attention.

	"I learned to release it, like the stored charge of certain fish which stun their victims by electrical discharges. It is only remotely similar. Largely it is controlled generation.

	"It is a strain. But I can cause those radiations to drive out from every nerve-ending on my body at will. The nerve-endings are thickly clustered in nose, and eye, and finger-end. Therefore they are the heaviest radiators. The scientists of the Ancient Ones learned that.

	"They excite even the air. They can stun a lower type Maun into insensibility, or coma, even into death I suspect. But he is not dead. See."

	Pol-72 pointed but one hand, the bunched fingers like parallel-projector tubes. A thin, scarcely visible light wavered for an instant.

	The lax figure quivered suddenly, and jerked upright. "Stay there," said Pol-72. The man froze into immobility at the low, incredibly tense words. "You will forget. You will return to your room and sleep. In five minutes you will wake, having forgotten. Go."

	Like an automaton, the man moved.

	"When you are ready, Kahm, I will see that whichever ones you wish shall 'die.' Bar-11 will receive their bodies for analysis of the reasons of death."

	For some seconds, silence hung in the room. "You can teach us that thing, Pol?" asked Kahm.

	Slowly Pol nodded.

	"I will start certain things at once," continued Kahm. "And San, you are in the Records Department. Have you ever read any Ancient One's writings on the Secret?"

	San smiled slowly at Kahm. She shook her head as she answered. "Never, Kahm, you know that. I would have said so, had I. I have read every iota of material in the Documents Division, more than any Tharoo, I believe, for as you know, a glance at a page is to know every word and letter on the page, and to know every thought contained in it. The Secret of Gravity was never written down. The Tharoo would not have searched vainly these many, many hundreds of years had it been there to find. Why, I cannot guess. It was not written."

	"Perhaps," said Kahm softly, "the Machine brought it, and only the Machine knew it.

	"Before we can compete, with our small numbers, and without weapons, against the established might of the Tharoo, we must learn many new things. That, I think, is one.

	"The Tharoo put down a rebellion once. They have not forgotten. San has read of that, and knows how it was done. With great ships, the atomic rocket ships. They have weapons too, though they are never seen. The atomic-blast. You know it, Sahr, in other uses. Tell us what it is."

	"It is a free atomic-generator blast. The wild fury of a rocket is the atomic-blast tamed, and modified for use. The thousand-foot streamers of ultimate flame that wash away whole mountains to reach some buried ore are the atomic-blast guns controlled, and diminished for useful work.

	"There are nearly one hundred cruiser ships equipped with the atomic-blast guns. Each ship carries fifteen, of tenth aperture. The greatest mining blasts use a ten-thousandth aperture. They use blast guns no larger, for if even a fifth-inch blast gun were used, the flame would be apt to eat entirely through the thin film of the planet, which is stable rock. Their range is limited on Earth only by the curvature of the planet. Operations from beyond the stratosphere, while the cruisers can readily attain this height, are impossible—for the atomic-blast is destroyed by the one thing in nature which can resist it utterly—the magnetic field of the planet itself in combination with the ionized layer."

	Kahm spoke again, softly. "So—we have moved swiftly thus far because the Tharoo have not been annoyed by us. Did they so much as imagine we might be somewhat annoying—which they may well, at any instant—they would not, of course, hesitate a fraction of a second in destroying us, and our families. The life of an atom in an atomic-blast is approximately one two-hundred-millionth of a second.

	"It is growing late now. We have our work. I must make some hand blasts tomorrow for useful burrowing work."

	Silently, the score went out, down the corridor of metal, down the hundred and seventeen stories to the street, thence home, on the moving walks of the city. Twice Pol-72 bowed his massive head, and crossed his arm in salute to lordly Tharoo. Twice a defiant smile touched the thin, firm lips. Pol-72 knew well that radiations of an intensity that merely stunned an N-class Maun would be instantly fatal to the alien Tharoo. Carefully, he controlled his normal radiation, so that the Tharoo scarcely noted his presence. 

	For, after all, why should he—one among millions?

-

IV.

	Kahm learned something of Pol-72's technique that next day, for it meant another thing. The conservation of those radiations normally squandered by the nervous system meant a strange, vibrant energy that constantly sustained him. Kahm found he needed some three hours' less sleep.

	His work had been designed to require a normal man's full time, and ordinarily, Kahm, taking it very easy, fulfilled his tasks in the normal time—and accumulated a good bit of outside data as well. But Kahm, by doing his best, completed what work there was which must be done in less than half the allotted time, yet his fellow workers, interested solely in the work before them, paid little attention, for Kahm was busy throughout the day.

	Their work was the repair and maintenance of the various complex electronic apparatus of the city, the televisor sets, the intercity and intracity communications apparatus, the automatic apparatus of the ventilators and air conditioners that maintained the great buildings comfortable to their inhabitants, and the countless thousands of small things that needed attention.

	They did not notice Kahm's work, slow, perhaps, and painfully thoughtful. He was working out something entirely new. The Tharoo had invented the atomic-blast centuries before they left Thar, their home planet. It had powered them across space, and it had built their cities here. It was a mighty thing. So, because they had never seen any need for it, they had not designed a small-scale apparatus.

	Kahm very much wanted a very private laboratory, and privacy for a Maun was not a thing the Tharoo's plan included. There was but one road to privacy—downward, into the solid rock deep beneath the city. When a Tharoo engineer wanted to tunnel, he used an atomic-blast device weighing some hundreds of tons, and throwing a blast flame capable of destroying several thousand cubic feet of rock a second.

	It would have brought down a city, of course.

	Kahm, at the end of the day, had a plan worked out for his new device. At the end of a second day, he had built a cubical box some eighteen inches on a side, and the third day saw the completion of the egg-shaped ellipsoid projector. It was a dirty gray in color, its smooth surface broken in only four places, once by the pistol-grip handle, once for the fifteen-prong connector, once by a tiny jewel that served as a signal—and at one end of the strange thing was a minute pin-prick hole, microscopic in size.

	Complete, it weighed some ten pounds. Kahm slipped it into a case and took it with him that night. Four of the Rebels met him at his apartment that night, ate with him, and with him descended to the lowest levels of the building where the clicking, humming mechanism of a city under a single roof hummed softly to the song of an atomic generator.

	Tal was the construction engineer of the group. It took him some twenty minutes to completely interpret the maze of conductors and great girders that criss-crossed beneath the floor of this sub-basement. Then Kahm was ready. The black cube he set on the floor, the thirty-foot length of cord he plugged into the cube, and his eight-inch ellipsoid projector. He touched a stud momentarily, and the ruby jewel on the projector glowed, and from the microscopic aperture of the miniature blast gun a beam shot out—soft, lambent light, prismatic glowings, and tinkling lightnings of some miniature thunderstorm on a miniature stage. The concrete of the wall swirled and writhed in the six-inch cone, boiled slowly, and whirlpooled upward toward the projector, and vanished in silent sparklings. Thin, blue tongues of hydrogen flame, weirdly cold, as the projector sucked out their heat to aid the destruction, leaped once, then burned steadily and straight.

	"It is slow, Kahm," said Tal after a moment.

	"It is noiseless," Kahm replied with a faint smile. "I could—and will, later—make it cut a two-foot path at the rate of a foot a second. Then these tiny tinklings become muffled roarings, and the static discharges crackle and snap with power sufficient to fuse a ten-inch bus bar, and the hydrogen gas burns hot instead of cold.

	"Marn, you had best watch at the elevator controls. If the cars start to descend beyond subbasement E, touch the controls, and tell the occupants of the car that the engineers are working down there."

-

	MARN went over to a bank of the clicking, busy relays, and watched closely for some seconds. Then he turned his attention again to the workers, only a fraction of his attention being needed to watch the relays. The men stood outlined in dark against a background of pale-blue, cold light. A hole was growing rapidly in the floor.

	In twenty minutes, on the low, cable-ridged ceiling of this lowest subbasement, there was a square spot of pale-blue light, wavering and shaken by moving shadows. Marn was alone with the elevator controls. A shaft led down, straight and true, through glassy, hides-cent walls. Only the tops of their heads were visible, and slowly these sank into the ten-foot square shaft.

	For an instant the blue wavering light died, and Kahm's voice came up. "Marn—Marn—call Doon at his apartment. We will need his work shortly." Marn moved to the communications center and adjusted the controls carefully. Presently a tiny screen lighted with the image of Doon-4.

	"Doon-4, if your work is done, Kahm can use it now. He has already completed some seven feet of shaft."

	"I will be there presently," said Doon.

	It was an hour before he and seven of the others arrived. There was no sign of Kahm now; even the blue light on the ceiling was gone and only the dark, glassy hole remained. But at Marn's call he reappeared presently. In low voices they conferred, and presently the projector, turned down to its tiniest beam, cut ledges in the shaft's rim and drilled holes. From packages Doon and his friends had brought came thin, wonderfully tough metal rods and straps, a collapsible lathework of toughest steels, and a quick-drying cement. An hour more, and a counterbalanced trapdoor had been installed. Then—there was no one in the deepest subbasement.

	For twenty feet the shaft angled sharply down steps, glassy hard, slightly roughened by momentary bursts of the blast. Then it slanted more gently down, and down. The trapdoor was soundproof and now there was a dull, confined roaring, and as a last contingent of the Rebels came on call, bringing more things, a second lead was plugged into the tiny, black cube power plant. A fan whispered to itself in a straight-bored, glass-walled tube that drove sharp and true to the great main ventilator pipe of the building, a half-dozen glow tubes showed white on the walls, and dimmed the pale glory of the blast and the foot-long, noisy lightning.

	At dawn, the shaft had spiraled down and away nearly a half mile. Kahm did not report to work that day, but Bar-n reported him ill with an infected wound. The others returned that night, with more apparatus, to a corridor nearly two miles long, smooth-floored, dangerously slippery, and descending constantly to a depth of nearly a half mile!

	At dawn they all climbed up a four-mile slope, a full mile upward to the lowest subbasement. But the terminus had been reached.

	Tal worked the following night, while Kahm slept. When Kahm returned, a tiny car had been constructed, powered by the black cube, running smoothly on the glassy floor, at a sixty-mile speed. The terminus of the tube had widened to five rooms, lighted, cooled, and serviced by a larger power plant, while a larger fan forced the air from the distant giant ventilator of the city.

	The men rested that night. The women worked. Books, documents, supplies, delicate instruments and chemicals were their contributions. And the following day, Kahm died.

	At noon Pol came, unobserved, for those who saw him felt a sudden surge of strange power—and forgot. At one o'clock Bar-11 came, examined the body of Kahm, and took it for investigation into the causes of death. Within a dozen hours, a half dozen S- and R-type men and women died, strangely, and Bar-11 examined them all for cause of death.

	They awoke several hours later, beneath the strange glow of Pol's fingers, in rooms of glassy, iridescent walls. They looked into the strange, terrifying eyes of the Rebel, and they forgot all other life, and did as he instructed them.

	Later they were joined by others, and each night they found more room to work in, and each day they worked with the ellipsoid projector that melted away the rock in pale-blue flames that were cold. And some rock melted away in the transmuters that came, to run out metals, or the elements needed by the miniature food plants that assembled quickly under the swift fingers and machines of the Rebels.

	In a month, their position was consolidated. The Rebels died then, one by one, save for some three or four who stayed above to bring the things that might be needed and, most of all, information. But all met once each night.

-

V.

	"Since mathematics evidently constitutes the main road to advancement in physics, I think this is a wise plan," said Kahm. "This machine is closely similar to those developed in the Ancient Times for mathematics, with improvements possible to us. The Ancients had atomic energy and antigravity. We know their secret of atomic energy was the same as ours. Then it is possible to use this same energy as they did."

	"Not yet." San smiled. "You haven't done it. What good can it do you if you can?"

	"I don't know. Our plans must change with every change in our circumstances.

	"You know—I don't know whether this revolution of ours is humanly possible. There is no known defense against the atomic-blast. Nothing known can stand before it. How then can we fight? Must we destroy all life on the planet in order to destroy the Tharoo? Must we leave only a dead planet as the goal we have won?"

	"How do you hope to make the antigravity serve you in this?" asked Pol-72.

	"By teaching me physics. The more I know, the more roads open to me for investigation. It is a secret that the Tharoo never mastered. Only when we have that which they have not, can we definitely point to an advancement over them."

	"Is the point worth the effort?"

	'It takes effort. Yes. It takes time. I agree. We have both. We are a company of the dead. We do not exist, save for you, San, and you, Pol-72, and Reea and Bar-11. You four meet few difficulties in reaching us here. The rest of us no longer are, and the Tharoo have lost all interest or record of us. To the dead, infinity is not too distant. We have time. But we haven't knowledge."

	This company was not a company of normal humans, but even their superhuman patience and determination must have worn down in the time that elapsed there over a mile beneath the surface of the Earth. It was no question of days or weeks or months. The learning of a thousand years is not to be regained by the experimentation of a day.

	In medicine, eugenics, chemistry, atomics, electronics and organization they had been trained. Some members of the company were devoted to making plans—slow, careful plans of the action needed when the time came—others, of the organization and psychological groups, to preparing an educational campaign that the Mauns above would understand when the time came, that they might be quickly, and certainly swung into line behind the Rebels.

	The Rebels were laying out their teachings carefully and cautiously. Mankind was to learn one last great lesson. The lesson of rebellion and freedom. Under the Machine, man had taken an advanced course in indolence, with the inevitable disintegration that follows in every case in all history where man has been allowed indolence. When the Machine left man a perfect world, free of danger or work, man took a postgraduate course in the art of utter laziness.

	The Tharoo came then, and mankind received such a lesson in labor, work and productivity as the race had never before experienced. Even Mother Nature, in creating the harsh world of evolution, had never equaled the efforts of the Tharoo. It was an excellent course.

	Man learned work with a thoroughness never before attained. He not merely learned it, but it was bred into the very race. Nature had achieved advancement by making man desire rest and need food. That was a cross pull that kept the race stepping forward with constancy. He worked harder that he might accumulate enough food to rest—and then Nature tricked him by installing decay bacteria to remove his surplus so he couldn't rest.

	The Tharoo did a better job. They simply bred out the desire for indolence. It was an excellent course that the Tharoo conducted.

	But they made two mistakes. They taught too well. They taught so well that the pupil excelled the master. And they didn't quite breed out ambition. Which was probably the worst mistake. Because now a new class of teachers had arisen, and they were not only going to teach, but they knew they were going to, and for nearly four long years the Rebels planned, charted, and scheduled their movements. They laid their plans and learned their moves, and calculated the psychological force of their teachings. And the scientists learned slowly those few little dribblings of knowledge that Mother Nature released through her general information bureau, sometimes known as luck, and sometimes as probability.

	Caesar said: "All Gaul is divided into three parts," and named the inhabitants. Nature keeps her secrets in a series of cabinets, and all knowledge is divided into parts. There are, unfortunately, more than three, but when once the key which permits entry to one cabinet is found—a whole great field of knowledge is discovered and it is all instantly open to rapid exploration. The discovery of the linkage of magnetic and electric fields was one of the keys. In a decade, a terrific advance was made. The discovery of the electron was the key that let into the cabinet of Atomic Knowledge.

	Kahm found the key to a new cabinet. It was called "Gravitic Fields." It took him four years, three months and eleven days to find it. Two hundred and forty-seven years have passed since that particular day. Garnalt's recent experiments just reached what we might call the lower left-hand back corner of that particular cabinet. It seems to be an unusually large one.

-

	TERN-3 was working on some new chemical combinations of the medicines of the Tharoo. Tern had an idea which would have immensely interested the Tharoo. It dealt with the fact that the Tharoo were not a Terrestrial race, despite their long residence on the planet, and that they were not constituted as are humans. Tern-3 had developed a slow-boiling liquid with properties very unpleasant to Tharoo, he believed, yet one which was harmless to humans—unless they stepped directly into the liquid.

	Tern's work was proceeding nicely; he was just engaged in pouring exactly 245.8cc of di-nitro-tri-chlortoluene into his faintly green basic solution—when the faintly green basic solution began to spread itself slowly up the side of the beaker, and Tern-3 felt slightly sick. Simultaneously, the solution he was pouring began to float gently away, across the room, toward the right-hand wall.

	Tern-3 gurgled gently, and reached for the nearest thing that was firmly anchored. His released beaker floated very gently toward the floor, then stopped, and began to rise slowly. All over his laboratory things were beginning to rise from their places on the tables. There were groans and whimpers of fear from all over the laboratory group. Tern closed his eyes and held on harder as his feet parted company with the floor. He felt himself falling, faster and faster—the smash would be horrible. He must have fallen at least a mile by now. Minute after minute it went on.

	There was a low growling rumble that Tern noticed suddenly, a stiff thudding pound in the silvery metal stand to which he was clinging.

	"Kahm!" he called. Not very loud, because he didn't want to open his mouth very widely. He was afraid the result might ruin several of the chemical experiments floating nearby. "Kahm—if you're doing that—I hope you are—the rocks are going to give in a minute."

	Kahm's voice came back, rather muffled and unhappy. I was doing that. I'm not now. It's the machine. It's building up the field. I forgot to hold on, I was so interested, and I'm on the ceiling, and can't reach down to the control. The field's stronger here."

	"You've ruined several of my mixes," said Tern protesting! "I'm nearest, I think. I'll try to reach you."

	Tern let go. He hit the ceiling with a rather decided bump. The force that was lifting him now was evidently growing stronger by the moment. Most of his mixes were resting on the ceiling now, and a number of sizzling, spitting reactions were taking place. Tern walked rapidly across the ceiling, hopping along, Jumping under, through the door, and closing it behind him, for safety. The rocks were groaning very audibly.

	He dived across the hallway into Kahm's laboratory. Klay-5 was coming from the opposite direction at the same time, also in answer to Kahm's report. The nearer Tern got to the laboratory, the heavier he felt—in the inverted direction. The organization workers at the opposite end of the long laboratory group were appearing in the corridor now, semifloating. There was a definite line of demarcation where the field was strong enough to actually invert gravity and hold the people against the ceiling.

	In the laboratory, Kahm was on hands and knees now, holding himself away from the ceiling with tremendous effort. The control was nearly ten feet below him.

	"Impossible," said Tern softly.

	"Call Gar-173-G-8," said Kahm.

	Tern's voice rang out.

	"Yes, master," responded the tremendous voice of the G-8 man, as he appeared in the corridor at the farthermost end. He stood upright, seven and a half feet tall, his tremendous body muscled to the heaviest work.

	"Come here at once—as swiftly as you can," called Kahm. "The switch," he said, turning his head to Tern, "will fall up another notch in about thirty seconds, and the rate of increase will be doubled."

	Gar-173 came at his best, a long loping hop that ludicrously carried him into the air in a strange flop that ended with his feet on the ceiling. White-faced, utterly terrified, he came on. His breath was whistling as he reached Tern. "It—it is very wrong," he said. "What must I do?"

	Kahm spoke to him. Gar stepped across the door frame and into the strange, inverted room. The giant labored forward, his great bones snapping into closer juncture under the terrific strain. "I do not know that I can reach the control, master," he said doubtfully. He was laboring to remain standing against the ceiling as he reached Kahm's side. The great muscles in his arm and shoulder bulged as he attempted to raise his arm far above his head. At last he touched it. Immediately he heaved it upward, straining, three notches. Neutral. The strange, soft sighing of the atomics silenced. Panting, the giant shoved the switch several notches farther. The sighing increased as the atomics took up the load of reversing the power.

	"That is good," sighed Kahm. The great arm fell heavily to his side, as Gar-173 sank to the ceiling. Slowly the force on the men relaxed. But the deep rumbling of the rocks continued and grew as the weight returned.

	"The Tharoo will be warned." Kahm sighed. "That was foolish of me. We must work very swiftly."

	In half an hour Tern and his assistants had made the chemical laboratory habitable once more. In an hour they were at work. Some twenty minutes later San came down the tube, then Pol-72, and finally the two others.

	"The Tharoo are excited," said Pol-72 mildly.

	"They do not know exactly how to reach you, but they have located you very accurately. They think it is a strange natural phenomenon. They are already starting with drilling atomic-blasts—they are using the smallest, lest the thing which caused the thing be destroyed."

	"They will change quickly enough," said Tal, the engineer, "when they detect the cavern by their phonic-sounding apparatus."

	"I have found something else of interest," sighed Kahm, looking at his instruments. "What they do, they will do. We cannot move, I fear. If we run a large, free atomic-blast for drilling, they will detect it instantly, and cut us off. If we use a small one, they will overtake us. There is really little we can do. Tern and Pol-72 offer our best hope. I must work."

-

VI.

	Kahm had the key to Nature's cabinet of secrets then. In three hours he had located the exact discrepancy that he had detected in his first readings of the instruments. Bar-11 had returned to the surface, and was sending through reports. The Tharoo themselves were in the drilling head, watching the progress of the atomic-blast, but not making phonic soundings as yet, for their destination was still nearly three-quarters of a mile beneath them.

	"I thought that field built up too swiftly," said Kahm softly. There were five laboratory technicians of types S and R working with him—building a new piece of apparatus. It was larger than the usual portable atomic generator, but it was evidently of the same general type—with a single modification. And the projector that Kahm himself was working over with such infinite care was not like the projectors usually made for drilling, though it too was ellipsoidal.

	Kahm had much of the apparatus made up for other purposes—for the original experiment.

	In six hours, therefore, it was ready. Bar-11 reported almost simultaneously that the Tharoo were intensely excited. Phonic soundings had revealed a strange cavern beneath the city, one which had not been there. "And—they report the recent rock shiftings evidently opened a great, slanting fault line extending almost to the surface, and perhaps to the subbasement of building RF-23. Their reports are accurate—if misinterpreted."

	Bar-11 dodged into the subbasement of the building designated RF-23, and descended the little self-propelled car some ten minutes before the first Tharoo discovered the trapdoor.

	A detachment of twenty G-4 guards was sent down at once. They were equipped with the death tubes given only in emergencies. Pol-72 and Bar-11 met them at the bottom.

	Soft, glowing light ringed the twenty fingers of the two men; lambent banners wavered gently toward the group of colossal guardsmen. Silently, gently, the twenty giants slumped to the smooth floor of the corridor.

	Ten minutes later they re-ascended the corridor, two S-type Mauns of the Organization group in their clutches. At the top of the corridor, a group of some thirty Tharoo and a dozen M-type intelligent laborers greeted them.

	The thirty Tharoo slumped, clawing at their breasts, as the death tubes glowed momentarily. The M-type Mauns looked on in amazement, and at the gesture of the guard commander, a type G-14 Maun, they preceded the guards down the tube, for they knew, from lifelong teaching, that Mauns of all types and classes must obey the G-types when ordered by them to go.

	It was nearly an hour before a group of Tharoo and guards discovered the dead Tharoo at the head of the shaft. Instantly a thousand messages radiated from the subbasement of RF-23. A detachment of thirty G-4 guardsmen under two G-14 officers was at once sent down the shaft.

	Half an hour passed. The detachment returned, slowly climbing the tube, with ten S- and R-type Mauns and a few M-types. The Tharoo started forward eagerly to question them. Thirty-two death tubes raised as one, and silently the Tharoo fell dead to the floor. Five R-type Maun scientists had been with them and, half-rebellious, half-understanding the words of the R-type men who had come up with the guards, they went silently down with the guards.

	The Tharoo of that day did not know what rebellion was—they had never really pictured it.

	Now they could not guess what had caused this strange disappearance and death, when a third detachment was rushed to the scene. They guessed wildly. Rebellion they could not imagine. Some strange natural force, associated with the recent rock shift, and the strange antigravitational force. A terrible gas released far beneath the ground, one which dissolved away every trace of the Mauns, perhaps, in an hour or two, but one which, due to the different structure of the Tharoo, merely coagulated their protein flesh, as did a death tube.

	The next detachment wore gas masks, and stayed several floors above, watching the G-4 guards and R-type Maun research workers by televisor. They saw them go down. They saw the R-type Mauns remain at the surface.

	The G-4S were gone half an hour—an hour—two hours. Still nothing happened. A larger group of G-4 guards went down, accompanied by several R-type Mauns. Nothing happened. Two hours more, and they did not return. In desperation, the Tharoo sent still another group, and they were equipped with a little truck carrying a complete televisor apparatus. But suddenly, when they had descended some three miles or more, the televisor apparatus began to function poorly; interference built up in the wires trailing behind, and recall signals sent to the men below did not reach them at all.

-

	At last, a few brave Tharoo volunteered to descend the great tube. They went armed with a portable atomic-blast and they went slowly for they ran that blast every inch of the way, enlarging the tube, but destroying any chance form of life or gas that might be there. One—two—three—three and a half miles they went, their blast following the curved outline of the tube, enlarging it, tending to straighten it.

	At three and three-quarters miles they stopped, left their blast running, and retreated, terrified up the tube, leaving only a group of type-R Mauns to investigate. The blast washed harmlessly against an invisible surface!

	The pale beam, the tiny, lambent lightnings crackled and sang, twittered against the rock, and swiftly enlarged it. But like a great round plug in the tube, there was a wall that drank up the terrible force of the atomic-blast and turned it silently, effortlessly, into utter darkness. At fullest aperture the beam roared, the rock washed away in great spurting bursts of flaming hydrogen, the lightnings became mighty blasts that shook the very heart of the rock—then at last all was quiet and terror was gone, save where that strange silence held grimly, horribly mysterious. There was no sound, no light, no discharge, only the quiet sucking in of the atomic-blast—and silence.

	They waited for a report from those Maun investigators they had left, and no report came, and the beam continued on for hour after hour. The Tharoo went down cautiously.

	The silence was there. The Maun investigators were gone.

	Tharoo scientists went down then. They had to. Only that deadly, inexplicable disappearance of Mauns and the silent, inexplicable death of Tharoo went on.

	The second day another group of Tharoo went down to see what had happened to the Tharoo scientists. They lay there—dead. The Mauns were gone again, and the Tharoo this time were not coagulated but simply dead, without reason or understanding. Vitameters, delicate things capable of showing the least trace of life, showed only that every single cell of the body was dead. Not as in ordinary death, where muscles live for hours, and hair cells live for months after death. Everything was dead.

	The televisor would not work here. The silence stopped it somehow. Every form of electrical shielding was tried, and the silence drank in the shielding. They brought down the mightiest atomic-blasts they knew, and the silence took them into itself, and the roaring and crackling of the lightnings died.

	There was only one way. A chain of Tharoo stood all down that corridor. Whatever else they may have been, the Tharoo had courage, and in the face of that utterly inexplicable mystery, they stood up to it, to learn its secret.

	They retreated hastily though when the silence changed; it grew slowly dark, and the white light of the tubes beyond dimmed slowly. They believed the first expedition to go down had set those tubes in the wall for light, and there was none to contradict them. Their powerful light beams died out into darkness when they touched the spherical wall of the silence.

-

	Mauns were left there to watch. The Tharoo retreated till they could just see them around the bend of the corridor. For almost an hour they waited while nothing happened.

	Then—out of the silence came strange, soft banners and flames of violet haze that slowly wound around the heads of the suddenly fleeing Mauns, and the Mauns fell. Hastily the Tharoo retreated farther around the bend. Cautiously a Maun observer poked his head around the corner. The Tharoo watching him saw only the slowly slumping body, the crumpling limbs. He cried out in terror.

	However, silently, wordlessly, the Maun gathered his limbs under him, like a revived corpse and, still with the strange stiffness of automatic movement, walked around that corner.

	The Tharoo did not see him, but he saw his reflection in the glassy wall of the corridor as he joined the stiffly standing group of Mauns and, without a sound or word, marched with them into and through the silence.

	A Tharoo was sent then—a hopeless cripple who sought death as a relief—to observe, and if possible, report. He observed only the silence hour after hour, and when he attempted to analyze it, he gave only a faint sigh. A cable pulled back his body. The vitameter showed every cell dead, yet no slightest reason for death. The cells were not burned, nor was he injured. They were apparently as sound as they had been—but they were dead.

	That day the silence moved. It expanded slowly; it swallowed the atomic-blast machine, then the corner where the Tharoo had watched. It stopped finally when, as the Tharoo presently observed, it was of such a radius, that the spherical surface of it reached the ground surface directly above the center of the disturbance.

	In terror the Tharoo attacked it. They attacked it with their mightiest war blasts, with giant bombs, with atomic engines and conductor beams that sent mighty flaming arcs ten thousand feet into the air—and vanished soundless, lightless, in the silence.

	The terror spread. It spread slowly and evenly, engulfing more and more of the city. Mauns and Tharoo alike fled from it.

-

VII.

	Kahm smiled faintly at the city beyond. He stood at the mouth of the new bore, a straight, round tube fifty feet across. The walls were not glassy and hard, but smooth, cold, gray granite. It came out in the center of the Landing Place. To the right was the Temple of the Landing. It was fitting. The Rebels had landed on Earth's surface within one hundred feet of the spot where the Tharoo had landed.

	There was a semicircular clearing, at the moment uninhabited. Beyond, shimmering very, very slightly, lay the great city, towering in scarlet, silver, gold and ebony metal. And at the edge Mauns and Tharoo milled and retreated. There were scores of men working about in the quarter-mile circle within the wavering, nearly invisible dome, patching and filling the great, glassy scars and holes where the mighty atomic bombs had loosed their flaming energies in scintillating, poppy-red flares, sparkling with the typical violet pinpoints of bursting atoms. The only sound was a faint tinkling as of crashing fairy goblets.

	There were more burstings outside now, near the wall. Above, three great atomic cruisers hung, their great blasts roaring a patch of inconceivable Titan's anger across the sky, to vanish quiet as death into the shimmering curtain.

	Outside, the shimmering curtain was a black dome, a dome as dark as platinum-black, since it was utterly absorbent to all light that struck it from the outside, passing it freely, and utterly impenetrable to all light that struck it from the inside.

	Kahm turned his eyes toward San, smiling. "Your Organization Department was partly wrong. It has been wonderfully successful in gaining time for us. The psychological work was perfect—the Tharoo are utterly mystified. But we cannot advance this dome in this way, continually driving every one away. We need the city. They are destroying it."

	"If you advanced much more rapidly, the Tharoo would not have time to save the Mauns. Nor would they have time to fight, which is what we want. That is the new suggestion of the Organizers," replied San.

	Kahm nodded slowly. "That was the plan I had in mind. I wanted their approval independently, however. I will start. Also, I think I will destroy those cruisers, for that will aid us in saving the city from ruin."

	Kahm returned to the edge of the great tube. A steady, quite powerful wind rose from it. Kahm picked up a small, square case shaped to fit his powerful shoulders and strapped it on. In a moment he was diving down the tube at terrific speed, slowing at the bottom, as he reversed the attraction of gravity. San slowed beside him and landed almost at the same instant. Together, they went to the laboratory where Kahm had worked. It was a mass of powerful machinery grouped about a cube of gold and blue and black, the heart of their power. There was a slow, steady-moving wheel here, a great time drive that was advancing the wall of the silence inexorably. Kahm made an adjustment. The wheel suddenly accelerated to five times its former pace.

	In a few minutes Kahm was back at the surface. The people on the outskirts of the curtain had not noticed the accelerated growth as yet. They only knew it was growing.

	Kahm turned his eyes upward. Three great cruisers hung there, dropping bombs and splitting their rays. Kahm raised a little ellipsoidal projector in his hand, looked at it for a moment, then sighted along the thin metal rod at its top, and slowly depressed a button.

-

	THE THAROO saw the black dome leap suddenly upward at one point, an utterly black finger driving with the speed of light toward a cruiser. It barely touched it—and collapsed. For ten seconds the cruiser hung there, her atomic-blasts suddenly stilled, the bombs no longer dropping. She hung there, apparently sound. It took some time for the atomically fine dust to spread about enough for them to see at that distance that she was no longer a cruiser, but a dust cloud in the shape of a cruiser. The shape held fairly well for nearly two minutes. Most of them had shifted their gaze, however, before then. The second and third cruisers were slowly expanding. The dust was ultramicroscopic in size, colloidal even in air. It never settled. It floats about Earth today, in all probability.

	Then they saw the swifter growth of the curtain. It was growing still faster now. The Tharoo promptly preempted all means of transit. Some of the Tharoo were too slow and, with the tens of thousands of Mauns, vanished into the curtain.

	The Mauns were greeted by those who had preceded them into the curtain. Safe within, utterly bewildered and lost, finding suddenly that within it was quiet and light and the city was undisturbed. G-type men took charge of the groups, familiar giant figures of solidity and orderliness. They moved in orderly groups to their places, many returning to their homes, now safe within the Dome.

	Lordly Tharoo were different. Terrified and fleeing, they were caught by the Dome, struggled for an instant—and burst through to light and freedom to an orderly, cleared place where G-4 men worked and tended and directed. Their courage renewed, they demanded attention.

	Instantly, the G-14 guard officers directed them, quite as though they had been Mauns, to go to the central clearing. They were angry. They were insulted by the fact these Mauns did not address them as "Tharoo Master." But they were bewildered. They went.

	There were four Mauns there. Four of a type not quite like anything they had seen. Tall and powerful, their faces keenly, intensely intelligent, their eyes gray and disconcertingly intense.

	Granth Marld was the first to reach the four.

	"Mauns, what is this? Who is responsible for this thing?"

	Kahm answered, smiling faintly. "We are, Tharoo. We are taking back our world. This was our world. It shall be our world. The Tharoo can go to Venus, for our records show that once, when you had just landed, you knew that another group of your race had gone to Venus. That was forgotten in the press of things and now you have forgotten it all together.

	"We do not intend to kill unnecessarily. You will leave our planet, however."

	The Tharoo inclined his head and gazed at the impudent human with all three eyes. "Maun, what imbecility is this? Mauns—Mauns—instructing Tharoo!" He trembled—his arms shook vaguely in his utter stupefaction, his inability to explain the impossibility of the outrageous idea.

-

	KAHM SMILED slowly. "You will move to Venus. I hope there is no race there already, that your Tharoo race has enslaved. Still, you did help us, and for that we do not take the easiest course—and simply destroy you."

	The Tharoo seemed suddenly to quiet down. His excitement passed. "I was upset evidently. That blackness is mystifying from the other side. Interesting. It withstands the atomic-blast.

	"But you—and your wild ideas. It is evident that you are a defective type, with nervous instability of the hundredth order. Completely beyond reason. You will immediately report to the Tharoo Head. Gar"—he turned to the giant G-14 standing beside him—"take this Maun to the Tharoo Head at once."

	The giant smiled down slowly at the Tharoo. He glanced up at Kahm, smiling, too. "No, Tharoo. You do not understand. The Maun race is the stronger. The Tharoo are finished. They are to go," he said slowly.

	Kahm spoke: "The Tharoo are finished. This is our world. We are taking it back. You thought me perhaps an R- or S-type? I am not. I am a type created by an R-type Eugenist that the Mauns might win back their world. My type is thirty-seven degrees higher, which makes it seven degrees higher than the Tharoo believed possible, for the Tharoo rate but ninety-five degrees themselves. We are of a much higher type than the Tharoo."

	The Tharoo stared at him in amazement. He stared at the guard slowly. "Does the curtain produce this insanity in all who pass through it? Great Mahgron—a Maun type higher than a Tharoo!

	"Maun, stay here," he said in final sharp decision. "I must bring others to take care of this."

	He turned, and started away determinedly. "Tharoo," called Kahm softly. One of the Tharoo's three eyes focused on Kahm. "Stay," said Kahm gently. The outstretched finger of Kahm's hand glowed very, very faintly. The Tharoo stiffened suddenly. His eye turned wildly in its orbit, his other eyes swung suddenly on Kahm. Tiny, almost invisible streamers of haze hung about the Tharoo's head and shoulders. He stopped. Slowly he turned, and looked up toward Kahm.

	"Aye—Maun," he said very faintly. Very slowly he slumped down. The ribbons and streamers left him, as Kahm's hand dropped.

	Kahm turned to Pol-72. "We cannot rouse him, for our radiations are deadly to him. Will he rouse of himself?" asked the physicist.

	"I think so. But—I fear he will be mindless. The struggle probably blasted his mind completely."

	Half an hour later he awoke, mindless, as Pol had said. Stronger streamers of strange luminescence swept from Pol's fingers, and he passed into eternal unconsciousness.

	Others came, though, who fought not quite so stubbornly, and awoke again, sane. They looked and, as one after another of their race fell as inevitably as before death, they slowly grasped that man had developed beyond them. When the slightest wavering haze brought their strongest down, and when on one occasion a Tharoo attempted to attack, they saw the forty fingers rise, and from them shot a driving, scintillating stream of solid luminescence that blasted the Tharoo into instant, utter death.

	It was a hard lesson. Only the young among them learned it, those young who had been cared for and largely tutored by Maun S- and R-types, and had already learned from Mauns—those learned the lesson and remembered it.

	In a week the Dome covered Landing City.

-

VIII.

	"You have, then, learned to treat with us," said Kahm softly.

	There were ten Tharoo there, from the ten greatest cities of the Tharoo still remaining. They were all young. The old Tharoo were aware of that fact. They could not endure it, however.

	"Aye, Maun," said a grave representative of the Tharoo. "We must learn what you mean us to do."

	"You have in your records the fact that the other ship which accompanied the ship in which your forefathers landed went on to Venus. Never have your two branches met, or joined. I would advise that you seek them. You may be welcome there.

	"You may go, and take all your ships. You have learned, I believe, that we could stop any ship leaving which we did not care to have go. But no Maun—either male or female—of any type or class, age or size may you take with you. Mauns are to be a free race. Do you understand?"

	"Aye—in general. But we must work out the plans, in detail still."

	"That can only be done after a party has been sent to Venus," replied Kahm steadily.

	There was a celebration when the last ship left for Venus with the last group of Tharoo. The counsels and representatives still remained. There was still intense enmity. But it was closely bottled up, for only the Mauns were in a position to do anything about it, and they were content.

	The Mauns, be it understood, had both the irresistible force and the immovable object, and because they were a strange race, of different types, all contented with the work which they must do and inasmuch as they had been bred with that in view, there was little chance of turning one against each other.

	The Tharoo, welcome enough on Venus where their race had, in fighting a desperately savage jungle alone—not with the aid of a tractable race—lost all their science and comfort, nevertheless far preferred the Earth where they were not welcome. They preferred it even more, when they discovered the exact meaning of work. But—what was to be done against the curtain?

	Actually it came down to the question: "What was to be done against a more intelligent race?"

	For the Tharoo were excellent teachers.

The End

The Battery of Hate
Amazing Stories - November 1933

Chapter I

	BRUCE KENNEDY looked delightedly at the ampere-hour-meter on the laboratory bench, at the voltmeter, and finally at the ammeter. Then he drew out the notebook from the left-hand desk drawer and carefully wrote in the new entries.

	"Wednesday, May 28, 1938, nine-thirty A.M. Ampere-hours, five thousand, six hundred seventy-two; watt-hours, twenty-three thousand, eight hundred twenty-two; volts, four-point-two; amperes, eighty-five. Sweet spirits of niter, isn't she a brute for work!" He looked happily at the squat, black case on the floor, two feet long, eighteen inches wide, and two feet high. A small, humped projection at one end seemed the source of a faint whine that filled the cellar-laboratory. A mass of heavy leads ran from two thick copper terminals at the top of the black case, up to the table which served as a laboratory bench. Over on one side of the room, where the angle of the concrete cellar wall joined the wallboard, a pile of unused apparatus of various sorts was heaped in disarray. Inductances, voltmeters, heavy resistance coils, all the apparatus of an experimenter in electrophysics. On the concrete wall, sections of shelves had been placed, holding rows of various chemicals; in a rack on the floor below the window that let a patch of bright golden sunshine on the floor hung a dozen curious rectangles of a black, lustrous material. They were just the shape of the end of the black case on the floor, plates for the battery evidently, black, lustrous plates, soft black graphite.

	To one side of the door through the wallboard was a frame of pipes, and, attached to it by porcelain insulators was a network of wires that resembled a gigantic electric toaster. A plate of zinc hung behind it, evidently protecting from the heat the more or less combustible wallboard, which had, nevertheless, been scorched slightly.

	The room was terrifically, uncomfortably hot, though both door and window were opened, for it was a warm May day, and the huge heater certainly did nothing to alleviate the temperature.

	Kennedy wiped the perspiration from his forehead, happily, however, and smiled down at his battery.

	"The fuel battery—the ideal source of power! Electricity directly from coal—or graphite. Electricity produced so cheaply nothing can compete! Electric automobiles ten times more powerful and a hundred times simpler than the best today—electric airplanes, noiseless and unfailing, because an electric motor has just two bearings and a magnetic field. These batteries won't fail—they can't.

	"Lord, the world will be a better place, I guess." He smiled and stretched himself ecstatically. Some men get more pleasure out of proving the world isn't a bad place, and making their fellows like it better, than from cornering the means to bring what pleasures the world already has to themselves. Bruce Kennedy was one of the first kind. He smiled whimsically at his "toaster" now. "You were all right when I started these experiments last January, but May in New Jersey and you don't get along. Guess it's time to test those batteries on a refrigerating machine." He stopped, as still another thought struck him. Success was here and the thousand and one tiny but irritating problems were ironed out, and now the great problem of its use came before him. "Another thing people will have—home cooling will be worthwhile when electric power comes at ten dollars a ton!"

	Bruce Kennedy saw the good his invention of the fuel battery would bring the world. A plate of graphite, cheaper and more plentiful than coal, down there in the Archiazoic Period, oxygen from the air, a plate of copper, plated with a thin layer of gold merely to collect current, and a cheaply made solution. Power. Power, as he said, at "ten dollars a ton," for the air was free; the graphite alone had to be renewed. The little whining motor, run by the battery itself, served to force the bubbles of air through the solution, to keep it saturated with oxygen.

	So Bruce Kennedy blithely set about patenting the great invention and making himself an electric automobile to be driven by these super-batteries. Had someone pointed out to him the terrible path of hate and bloodshed that lay ahead of that squat, rounded block of power on his cellar floor, and ahead of him, he would not have believed it, for he was young enough to think that men worked for the good of men, as he himself did.

-

Chapter II

	MARCUS CHARLES GARDNER, large, very friendly, and popularly known as M. Chas. Gardner, the big power of finance, was looking in some surprise at his secretary.

	"What? Who's this wants in? What's he got that's so important and confidential, he can't tell you?"

	"I don't know, for of course he didn't say, Mr. Gardner, but he's one of your patent examiners. It might well be important."

	"Oh, well. He might have waited till later in the morning anyway. Everybody knows I hate to do or listen to anything important before lunch. Send him in; it probably isn't much."

	A small, shrewd-looking man came in. His clothes were very neat and very somber. He looked like a successful lawyer, and was one, a patent lawyer.

	"Mr. Gardner?"

	"Yes," replied the magnate.

	"I'm Peasley Jamison, as you have seen, and I have some news I am sure you will want to hear. Perhaps I should not be certain, perhaps you will certainly NOT want to hear it. At any rate"—he smiled at the bigger man ironically—"there's a new invention. I've been watching for it for the last twenty years, hoping I'd get hold of it. Hardwell and Thomas got it, new firm, not big at all, but they tied it up beautifully. Very skillfully drawn patent. Very pretty work."

	"I," said M. Chas. Gardner angrily, "don't give a damn how beautiful it is. WHAT is it?"

	Still the lawyer did not seem content to disclose his mystery. "I believe you have control of North American Super-power? And proxy-control of most of the oil fields of the country?"

	"Yes, what of it?" Gardner was beginning to be wearied.

	"If you can, sell out, and do it QUICKLY," snapped the little man. Gardner suddenly looked very much more alive.

	"Eh, what? What in hell is this invention?"

	"You wouldn't know if I told you. It's called a fuel battery, invented by a young man by the name of Brace Hollings Kennedy. It's a device that can produce power directly from graphite, and it gives it as electricity, the most adaptable of all powers."

	"Well, why not buy it?" snapped Gardner.

	"Because, my dear man, you haven't money enough to pay adequately for it," smiled the little lawyer.

	Gardner looked startled. That was the first time, in some twenty years, anyone had told him he hadn't money enough to buy what he wanted. "What? How—Why I'm worth at least a billion."

	"Could you get that billion in cash? No, you could not. Neither could you buy that invention. Even if you could, what would you use it for?"

	"Why not in power plants, which is the natural answer? Tear out the boilers and generators?"

	"Because it generates direct current, which can't be shipped along a line readily; because there won't be any power plants when any man can make his own, as he now owns his own cellar furnace; and lastly because that is only one of the very minor possibilities. Do you know what's going to happen to the oil companies? There won't be one where there are hundreds now. There aren't going to be any gasoline-burning, oil-wasting, smelly, greasy, troublesome gasoline automobiles any more. They'll be electric, and a gasoline motor uses two quarts of oil for every drop an electric motor needs on its two bearings. Gasoline is going to be so cheap they'll pay to have it carted away, and save the insurance."

-

	GARDNER laughed. "I hope the rest of your predictions are as empty. I've seen electric automobiles and their batteries. Now and then you can see one having a furious race with some spavined truck horse."

	Jamison's tight-lipped smile returned. "Did you ever see a hundred-and-fifty-horsepower electric car? I did; I went to Florida to see it. I was one of the few who saw it and knew what it was. Kennedy built one. He went one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. He said later he got scared and had to stop."

	"One hundred and fifty won't do that," said Gardner keenly.

	"One hundred and fifty gasoline won't," Jamison acquiesced, "but one hundred and fifty electric is something different. You've seen electric trucks, haven't you? Some make a good twenty-five miles an hour—with two horsepower.

	"A gasoline engine is in a constant state of explosion, which means it wastes ninety-nine percent of its power on noise, heat, friction, and waste motion. An electric motor has two bearings, no explosions, no noise, no waste motion, and almost no heat."

	"You mean the automobile is doomed?"

	"I said nothing of the sort. It's going to have a new lease on life, but the gasoline car is going out the way wooden battleships did when the Monitor and the Merrimac called it a draw. Battleships didn't go out, but wooden ones did."

	"Gasoline is out, oil isn't needed, power stations won't be wanted; how about iron and steel?"

	"Still safe—except that new types of refining will be introduced. Gas for cooking won't be wanted, which will finish the oil fields."

	Gardner had been looking at his desk, thinking deeply, his head in his hands. He looked up slowly. "My God, man, he'll ruin the world! It's going to ruin me. I won't have a cent left after this panic gets over." His face was going white. "Oil—dead! Power—dead! Automobile corporations—save one—dead!" His voice took on a cold, steely menace.

	"I've GOT TO BUY that patent! Get out." The lawyer left the great man brooding, staring out at New York sweltering in a late September heat. But he didn't see New York; he was seeing the things that would happen if this invention were sold. His comforts would be stripped from him, his yacht, his home, his apartment—and another apartment—everything. He could not get out, for the instant he started selling heavily enough to make a practical retreat, the word would be out, and he would be swamped, the market would drop to zero-everywhere—he'd be cleaned out as his pyramided loans collapsed—

	God, but he hated the man who invented that battery!

-

Chapter III

	BY the next morning Gardner had decided to try his one hope for salvation. He had not slept that night, and his face was lined from lack of sleep; his eyes were bloodshot, and there were patches under them. He knew he stared ruin in the face if he did not succeed today.

	At the office he rang for his secretary at once. "Arthurs, I want to locate Brace Kennedy; try this address, and see if you can get him here before lunch."

	Robert Arthurs looked surprised. He had found out quickly that the patent lawyer's visit yesterday had upset his employer badly indeed, but he had not learned how. But now he was again violating his hitherto inviolable rule—he wanted to see someone before lunch!

	Nevertheless it was nearly eleven-thirty before Kennedy arrived. Arthurs went into Gardner's office at once. "He has come now, sir," he announced. No need to say who had come—Gardner had been asking him about it all morning.

	"Ahhh—send him in! No, wait. What does he look like?"

	"About twenty-five, sir, six feet I should say, weighs about one hundred eighty, I should guess, powerfully built, intelligent, well-mannered, soft, deep voice. Clear eyes, brown, and brown hair. Good-looking, and seems very anxious to see you. I took the liberty to mention it was on the matter of an invention of his, and he promised to come at once."

	"Damn! Why did you—oh, well, perhaps he'll want to sell. I may be able to get it reasonably—" Gardner seemed lost in thought. "Young you say—probably no more money than he needs?"

	"Oh, no sir, he is young, but Bradstreet says he's worth close to a quarter of a million. His father left it. An old mining claim that petered out—that is, gold mining—was reopened shortly before his death. Someone sold him the mine as a gold mine, salted it first, it seems, and shortly Mr. Kennedy found a genuine vein, but when it gave out he left. He had gone west for his health. Five years ago he sold it for a quarter of a million as one of the rich tungsten mines. He would have gotten more, but it was inaccessible."

	"Thank you, Arthurs. Excellent. That may help in talking to him. Send him in, please."

	Kennedy came in smiling. "I don't know just what this call is for, Mr. Gardner, though your secretary mentioned a patent, and I have only one."

	"That was the one; I heard of it through a patent attorney of mine. You seem anxious to get to business." The great man smiled disarmingly.

	"I am, I guess. I got the patent only a few days ago, and have been getting ready to attempt marketing it."

	"Have you offered it anywhere?"

	"Yes, but no one has seen it," Kennedy admitted ruefully. "They didn't believe."

	"That is a model?" Gardner asked, noting the small satchel in his hand, not unlike a doctor's bag.

	"Right." Kennedy opened it and took from it a miniature battery such as that still working in his home in New Jersey. He pushed a button, and a small motor hummed feebly, rapidly gained power and speed, and finally settled down to a steady whine.

	"The blower—air is needed to supply the oxygen for combustion of the graphite. This battery simply burns coal electrically instead of thermically. The energy that would come off as heat in a furnace comes as electricity. Furthermore, it uses graphite, the natural form of free carbon. Coal can be converted to graphite in electric furnaces cheaply, now that electricity will be cheap."

	"That might run a flashlight," said Gardner skeptically, "but it wouldn't replace a dynamo."

-

	"THAT would run an automobile," said Kennedy, "and it, or a larger one, would easily replace a dynamo. The case is steel, with black enamel baked on. It is a strong, tough battery. The solution, which is the real secret, of course, is cheap and, like the solution in the ordinary lead-acid storage battery, lasts practically forever, with the occasional addition of water. The solution in a storage battery is renewed by charging; that is, renewed by the current forced through it."

	"How much do they cost?"

	"This one cost me five dollars to build, but if you built a hundred thousand they would cost about one hundred thousand dollars."

	Gardner whistled softly. "What's the trouble with them?"

	"Why—nothing!" replied Kennedy, puzzled and annoyed.

	"Lad, there is nothing in this world that's perfect. Automobiles run out of gas, storage battery plates shed, generators overheat and burn their insulation. What's wrong with them?"

	"Oh, well—graphite is soft, and somewhat brittle. I've been using very high grade artificial graphite, which leaves practically no ash, but in commercial power plants they would have to use cheap, natural graphite, and add an ashtray of some sort. That would mean draining and refilling at periods. The cheaper the grade of graphite, the more ash."

	Gardner nodded slowly. That certainly was not a serious objection. "But in automobiles—don't the plates crack, and break?"

	"They were mounted on springs and sponge-rubber in the car, and mine haven't cracked yet."

	"I understand the metal plates are gold-plated," said Gardner at length, "and that sounds expensive. How can you make the set for a dollar?"

	"They give away gold-plated razors," Kennedy reminded him with a smile.

	"Well, I'm convinced. You had a model at the Patent Office, and they accepted it, so it must be O.K. What do you want for your patents?"

	"Mr. Gardner, I don't want to sell them. I want backing. I want five million dollars' worth of backing, but I don't want to sell the patents. I want to put this on the market."

	Gardner's face did not change, but he was going to have those patents. He HAD to have them.

	"I offer you one million dollars cash for those patents," he said slowly.

	Kennedy's face fell. "I'm sorry, Mr. Gardner. I had hoped we could do business. I am not selling."

	He put the bag on the desk and returned the battery to it. Again Gardner made an offer, and though he tried as much as five millions, Kennedy would not sell.

	"Good God, man. WHY won't you sell?" he demanded at length, just as Kennedy started for the door.

	"You own heavily in power and oil, Gardner. You are making money in it, and this invention is going to change things. I want to hold these patents, and see that they are used. This is an invention that is not going to be suppressed. If necessary I can start in a small way myself." Kennedy went out.

	Gardner settled back heavily in his seat. Kennedy had not been angry, simply immovable; he had decided, and the decision would stand. He knew that type of man.

	Presently color returned to his face, and he sat there steadily looking out of the window, while his secretary refused all comers. He did not eat, and it was nearly two o'clock before he moved again. Then he hurled himself into action at once.

	"Arthurs," he said sharply, hurriedly, "get Jimmy Blake and Bob Hill in here. Tell 'em it's worth their while."

	In ten minutes, from other parts of the great building, the two men came. They listened and paled while Gardner talked. In the end, scarcely ten minutes later, they nodded and started for their offices.

	Two and a half billion dollars set about crushing certain stocks and bonds, marshaled and directed by three of the keenest minds in the Street. In the short time remaining that day, those stocks were crushed so low that they were almost valueless. They were the stocks in which Kennedy's money was invested.

	But there remained some ten thousand dollars in Government bonds, and a few thousand more in some of the finest industrials that even Gardner and his friends had not dared to assail, they were so solid.

-

Chapter IV

	The dining room of the very exclusive club was a beautifully furnished place, paneled richly. An air of quiet and impressive dignity, almost of overawing dignity, lent a quieting effect that hushed voices tending toward raucous volume. Lung-power is frequently well developed on the floor of the Exchange.

	Gardner was talking to a group of friends at his table, and as he finished the dessert he chuckled to himself. The group of hand-picked friends looked at him admiringly.

	"Well, Charlie, what is it? Whom did you fool today?" asked Wainwright, smiling.

	"Nobody, Bob, nobody. Somebody tried to fool me." The great man chuckled again. "Come on down to the smoking room, and I'll tell you the story of a patent."

	"Well," said Caller, settling himself between Gardner and Wainwright, five minutes later, "here we are, waiting expectantly for your tale." He bit off the end of a cigar, lit it and settled back comfortably.

	"A man came in to see me yesterday morning with a great idea. He was going to put all the power plants in the country out of operation. He had invented, and patented, a sort of a wet dry-cell, as far as I could make out from his cautious statements. The only things he said that weren't cautious and as discreet as one should be when selling a patent to the man who is scheming to rob you, as he decided I must be, since I wasn't enthusiastic, were his claims." Gardner permitted himself a hearty laugh.

	"Well, he had a battery that was like a big dry-cell, only it was wet, and he wanted to put that in place of generators, just have a lot of big batteries instead of generators."

	A general laugh was interrupted by Wainwright. "Well, you bought it up, of course!"

	"No, but would you believe it, the fellow was really quite surprised and put out because I didn't. His point was that it was more efficient and didn't require a lot of boilers and generators. He evidently neglected to figure the cost of his metal plates—oh, by the way—the plates had to be gold-plated!"

	"Gold-plated batteries for power houses! Good Lord, why didn't you call up the Psychopathic?"

	"And direct current at that, you know. He'd have us using cables like those in the George Washington Bridge to ship power!"

	"Who was this genius?"

	"Ah—let's see—" Gardner pulled out a notebook and consulted it a moment. "Oh, yes, fellow named Bruce Kennedy—the inventor of the gold-plated wet dry-cell for power houses!"

	The talk veered after that, and shifted to many other subjects, and Gardner left, to go back to his office and make certain the stocks he had depressed stayed there.

	His work had been done, and, he felt, well done. None of those men he had talked to, the most important on the Street, would touch that battery now. That was a clever touch, he felt, mentioning the gold-plated plates of the battery. By tomorrow every man on the Street would know the story and would be laughing at it. Kennedy's stocks would be useless to him. He could not build the things himself. He would try to get help, and help would not be forthcoming. He had turned on that battery the heaviest bombardment he could find—the bombardment of ridicule that will blast asunder the greatest hopes and the wisest plans.

* * *

	KENNEDY sat morosely behind the wheel of his car as he drove slowly along. The Holland Tunnel seemed crowded, and the comet of yellow light he followed and kept pace with seemed as elusive as his hopes of selling that idea to some of the big men who could have supported it.

	Out of the tunnel, up the ramp, then up and across the Meadows, past the lights of the Newark Airport. He turned off and cut across country to the southwest, avoiding the city ahead. His low gray coupé  hummed softly along the road, and as he got free of the heavy traffic he opened out a bit; the accelerator went toward the floor. The smooth whine of the powerful electric motors mounted in crescendo, and the road began to flash back at higher speed.

	Automatically he followed the road back to his home, for in the past week these trips had become automatic. His name had been sent into the sanctums of the great, and it seemed almost as though something discreditable had been known of it, for invariably it came out almost instantly. He had not seen one of the men he had wanted to see, and still his stocks hung so low on the market he could not sell them for the money he needed.

	Suddenly he sat straighter, and the swift-moving car swerved slightly under his hands. "And I almost forgot—!" He smiled happily.

	Bob Donovan! Just a short while ago he had thought of Bob Donovan as one of his best, and poorest, friends. Bob's father was rich, distinctly so. But he had gotten rich by his own hard work and had every intention that his son should do the same. In fact, the stipulation was that until Bob could gather the sum of ten thousand dollars in one year, by his own efforts, the estate would not be his, and the interest would simply add.

	Then Bob had succeeded, and in just one week that year would be up! In that time, he could not have transferred his estate of better than five millions to stocks, which Kennedy was beginning to distrust.

	A little town appeared ahead, and the swift gray car slowed down, the motors taking on a peculiar whine as it did so. The car became momentarily warmer, as the motors acted as generators, throwing their current into heating resistance coils.

	Before a drugstore the car stopped. Kennedy locked the car and went into the shop.

	He telephoned a telegram to the nearest office and came out smiling.

	It was an hour later when he reached his house, garaged the car, and went in. A telegram awaited him:

	GOT ESTATE AT LAST STOP VERY BUSY AND CAN'T COME STOP WHAT DO YOU WANT 
BOB.

	Another half-hour, and Bob Donovan was looking at a yellow slip with the familiar strips of letters:

	NOT HALF AS BUSY AS I AND YOU CAN COME ONLY YOU DON'T KNOW IT STOP LEAVE ESTATE AS IT IS AND COME STOP FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T BUY STOCKS STOP I NEED CASH AND YOU WANT MORE COME STOP INVENTION BRUCE.

	Bob Donovan frowned, finally grinned, and called his lawyer. Then, having gotten that immensely annoyed gentleman out of bed, and arranging to leave the estate as it was, he sent a telegram—collect:

	YOU'RE ANNOYING ME STOP COMING TO ANNOY YOU AND WON'T STOP BOB.

	Apparently he was very anxious to carry out his threat, for he hired an autogyro and covered the two hundred and thirty miles from Boston in an hour and thirty minutes. It was then after four A.M., and he greatly enjoyed getting Kennedy out of his comfortable bed.

	"Well, look who came. I see you lived up to your promise, didn't you?" said Kennedy slowly.

-

	"SUCH a greeting, such a greeting, and from one who invited me. Don't you know, my lad, that I'm a dignified and important millionaire, and that little boys with inventions should go to the millionaires, and not make the millionaires come to them?"

	"Shut up. That's what I've been doing all week. You never wrote me or let me know you'd inherit that estate, and you almost missed out. I've been running to millionaires trying to sell them the idea of backing me, but the only man who would see me wanted to buy it, and it isn't for sale."

	"What is it?" demanded Donovan.

	Kennedy led him down to the cellar and turned on the lights. "I haven't been connected with the city power for three months now," he explained, and pointed to a long black case against one wall. It was far larger than the small experimental battery he had been working with in May, and leads from it connected to the house wiring. "That's the invention. I've installed electric heaters in every room, and you noticed I turned one on when you came. It's chilly these late summer nights, and already they are useful. That combines my furnace, power and light, and my gas connections."

	"What is it?"

	"Battery, of course. Do you remember my lectures on that subject before we left school? I've been working on it now for three years, and I got it at last. That's the result."

	Donovan started, and wheeled on his friend, his blue eyes opened wide in amazement. "FUEL BATTERY! You did it, Bruce! And I'm backing you for all it's worth. How much do you want, why didn't you back it yourself?"

	"Bob, I'll tell you. I told Gardner about that, he seemed to have heard I had the patent, and sent for me. He wanted to buy, but I wanted backing, so he wouldn't agree. I told him I could get backing elsewhere and if necessary do it myself. That afternoon my entire group of stocks, save for a few of the biggest companies, where I owned comparatively small amounts, lay down and went to sleep. They are still sleeping. And I haven't seen anybody else."

	"Is that so? And what do you think happened?" Bob's eyes squinted slightly at his friend.

	"I don't know. I thought Gardner might depress the stocks, but he couldn't keep his enemies from seeing me."

	"Couldn't he? Why couldn't Columbus get anybody to back him when he tried to sail to the Asian coast?"

	"Everybody laughed at him—but—" Kennedy's quick mind began to understand and see the laughing points. "And do you know, this thing has gold-plated metallic plates."

	"That's the answer, Bruce," nodded Donovan. "He probably told them you had some sort of an oversize dry-cell with gold plates that you wanted to replace the power plants with. Tell that to a group of friends as a joke, and the whole financial crowd would know it in a day. The only support you'll get, according to his lights, is from him, and he wants to buy. What are you going to do?"

	"Do—Why, build a plant and start manufacturing, if you'll let me. Your estate hasn't been taken out of bonds and banks and real estate, has it? He can't depress the price of Government bonds, and banks still have to pay cash. We can start manufacturing anyway."

	"Manufacturing what? Flashlights? We won't be able to borrow; Gardner and his pals have too much influence, and five millions won't do a lot. We need five hundred millions, and we could get it in a day after a few big demonstrations—if Gardner weren't opposing us. 

	"If we manufacture flashlights, or anything little, no one will ever believe they will work in a big size."

	"No, and by all the planets, I'll wreck Gardner! He can keep banks from loaning, he can keep brokers from investing or offering stock, but he can't keep you from using your own money, if you will. Listen—all we have to do is to make a few thousands of those over there, and sell them to private owners! I can make one of those for about one hundred and twenty-five dollars on a quantity basis, and they cost about five or ten dollars to install. Their one difficulty is that they give D.C., and all modern radio sets use A.C., and the television sets use the A.C. power lines as a third circuit for synchronization.

	"But there aren't many television sets yet, and there are lots of D.C. radio sets. We can get G.E. to make some sort of a heater for rooms that works on 110 D.C., and then we are set. We can sell to suburban homes. How many women would like to have electric ranges, if the power were only as cheap as gas? How many men would like to have a heating system that would warm the house in ten minutes in the morning, and could be turned on with an alarm clock that would work every time? Our greatest, in fact only, difficulty will be the electric clocks and radio sets.

	"But look what happens. We steal a lot of Gardner's power customers, we bring the battery sharply before the public, not as a flashlight power source, but as a genuine source of practical power. Farms will buy them for power, then small cities will see that the municipal plant could use a big set.

	"Then there will be the next step—automobiles. I'll show you one tomorrow—mine. I made better than one hundred seventy down at Daytona Beach, but I got scared, I guess, and cut the power. It has two motors, and a big battery under the hood. The motors are in the wheel. I reversed the usual system and have a revolving field with a stationary armature. The wheel is the field."

	"You're right, Brace. We can—and will!"

	"Now let's sleep."

-

Chapter V

	M. Chas. Gardner looked up from his work, at a tiny red light that appeared suddenly in the frame of a picture on his desk—He looked across the study toward a long oil painting. He hesitated a moment and punched at something on his desk—the lock, apparently, of one of the drawers. A faint click was the response, and the oil painting opened inward. A slim, black-haired man with sharp black eyes stepped quickly into the room, and the painting returned to its frame.

	"Chief, they beat me. Gawd, I never saw anythin' go like that gray coupé of his. He got a friend wid him. I dunno who it was."

	Gardner's face flushed quickly. "Cazoni, I told you to put some men on him!"

	"Aw, Chief, I did but, hell, the guy went into dreamlan' about two in the A.M., an' the guy was tired as hell, so he pulled out. I had another torp on the job about five, an' it was dark. How'd we know anybody came. They—"

	"Fool! I told you to change men so he wouldn't know he was trailed. He found it out, and beat you! Imbecile!"

	"Aw, Chief, I did change men—plenty. I dunno how he found out, but anyway, that friend musta slipped in at night, an' how was we to know?"

	"What happened this morning?" demanded Gardner.

	"About six-thirty, the man on the house—Tony, ya know, he got Chi to take his place and got some chow. It was after seven 'fore he got back, an' Chi was mad an' beat it. Nothin' happened though till about ten, then they—only Tony thought he was still alone, he sent away that housekeeper a while back, and has her come in every other day—well, they got breakfast, then about eleven two guys came out, an' went to his garage and got out that gray car of his. Ya know, it looks like hell, no lines at all. Looks like a model of 1930. Big square-front radiator, posed headlights—got pants on the wheels, though. Well, we didn't think it could move worth talkin' about, and we had a big Packard 16.

	"Well, they start out, an' light for the north. They go nice and easy up the Hudson, cross above the Big Town, cut toward the coast again —an' hit the main Route One north. It was early in the afternoon and it was a weekday. They lit out—man how they moved! Tony picked me up, when he saw where they were goin', an' I was with him. That boat of mine will do 120 any day easy. But that old gray can was doin' 100 by the time we could hit eighty, and was so far away we couldn't see it, when we hit better'n a hundred. Chief, I never saw anything move like that did. That boat of mine acted like it was a balky truck beside an airplane.

	"We gotta get a boat like that, Chief, before we can keep him in sight. What kind is it, d'ya know?"

	"So you lost him. Lost him just after he found some friend. What did the friend look like? Tony say?"

	"Tall, blond, good-lookin', looks like a college friend of this guy's. Looks slow, but Tony says he moves fast, dropped somethin' an' it never hit the ground. They had a big black box that made the springs move when they put it in, but this bird handles it easy. Guess he's strong. Kinda slim though. 'Bout five-eleven or six-one, somewhere in there."

	"College friend, eh? Headed north on Route One, and just ran away from you? Keep a plane handy after this, and use a shortwave set to keep in touch," ordered Gardner. He paused in thought. "And find out who that friend is, and locate Kennedy! Get that? There's more in this than in the rest of our business. The car—he made it! The thing that made it so fast is what I want. It's cost me five million dollars on the market already to keep him from getting some support! Now do you know how important that is?"

-

	GARDNER'S eyes blazed at his lieutenant. Jimmy Cazoni whistled softly. "Five millions! It's worth that, eh?"

	"No. It's worth a hundred tunes that!" Gardner spoke tensely. "DON'T LOSE THAT MAN WHEN YOU FIND HIM!"

	"We won't, Chief," promised the gangster. "How about an accident to that car—wouldn't that help?"

	"No. It would be worse, if anything. He and a friend of his named Robert Donovan made exchange wills, I believe. Neither has any relatives, and they fixed it up a couple of years ago. Some kid stunt, I guess, but it holds. And this Donovan—" Gardner broke off with an exclamation of dismay! "Donovan—Boston—Route One—Good God! That Donovan just came into a fortune of five millions, and he could give that man support!

	"Cazoni!" He turned his eyes sharply to the slim, black-eyed man. "Get men on the lookout in Boston. Try first at"—Gardner searched hurriedly through some papers, and found the letter he wanted—"409 Marlboro Street, Boston. This Donovan owns the place—apartment house, I believe, and he's been living there. Keep Tony watching, and if he recognizes the man, send me word. Now beat it, and MOVE!"

	Cazoni started rapidly toward the painting, but Gardner called him back. "Wait—let Nannery take over the other business, and don't bother me. I'll be busy, so he can handle it himself. This is more important."

	Cazoni stepped in front of the picture with a word of agreement, the frame clicked, the picture swung back, and Cazoni disappeared.

	"Thank heavens I have an organization I can depend on in time of need," piously declared Gardner. "With those two together, I may be able to get somewhere." He smiled approvingly.

* * *

	"Well, do you believe in it, Bob?" asked Kennedy, as the gray coupé  swung to the curb in Boston. The whine of the motors died, and the parking lights went on.

	"Sweet, little brother, sweet. I never heard so pleasant a sound as the hum of those motors. Even when we hit one hundred and forty they hummed, and there was no engine vibration. How long can you go on one set of plates?"

	"About three thousand miles, Bob. I carry a spare set, as well. Remember that I get eighty-five percent efficiency from those plates, and an electric motor is better than ninety percent efficient."

	"What a thing for an airplane motor!"

	"I've been wanting to try it, but I made this first, as easier and safer to experiment with."

	They were getting out their bags, and walked across the street, into the apartment. "I have a plane now," said Donovan softly. "Or should have. Lockheed promised it today. It's a special stratosphere racer with high-altitude Diesel. How much would batteries and motor weigh?"

	Kennedy's eyes were bright. There was more fun, more enjoyment in the experiments than the constant disappointment of the business. He calculated rapidly. Presently he frowned slightly. "Hard to say. The batteries increase in weight for desired cruising range. I should say eight hundred pounds for one thousand horsepower and ten-thousand-mile cruise, but with every additional two hundred pounds another ten thousand miles of spare plates can be added."

	Donovan whistled. "The engine and charger alone weigh one thousand pounds, fuel additional, and the power declines from eight hundred horse at sea level to three hundred at fifty-five thousand feet. Any decline in your scheme?"

	"I'll tell you, I don't know. I've never tried it, you see. The composition of the air at fifty-five thousand is about the same, but the density is easily arranged—just a pump, and the batteries use one anyway. Simply make it larger. Or better, have them in the fuselage and keep air there."

-

	"NOT so good," replied Donovan, sitting down in a chair, "because air has weight, and it will just mean that many more pounds of thick air to carry with us. But will it work?"

	"I'll bet I can get at least nine hundred at any height the plane will fly."

	"Let's have supper and then we'll see," suggested Bob.

	They reached the field after dark to find that the plane had been delivered, a five-place stratosphere plane, the air-tight cabin with its double walls streamlined with a beauty that seemed to make the plane move even when at rest. The great radial Diesel, surrounded by the Venturi cowling and the bulge of the supercharger, alone seemed to break the lines.

	"No cooling on an electric motor," muttered Kennedy, "but that's the prettiest thing I've seen in years."

	"It'll be prettier," replied Donovan. "I'm going to take it up now, though, and then you'll be able to see the difference."

	"I'll get busy—the Lockheed man is still here," replied Kennedy, and stuck to his decision.

	Before they left the field that night, men were at work unshipping the heavy Diesel and the fuel tanks.

	The next morning they went to see James Montgomery, of Montgomery, Harrison and Flagg, Donovan's lawyers.

	"So what we want," Donovan concluded, "is your advice and help, and perhaps, if you wish, a partnership with us."

	Montgomery shook his iron-gray head and laughed. "Couldn't make it—your lawyer. Corporation law. Want to incorporate, don't you? What's the title?"

	"Kennedy Fuel Battery, Incorporated," replied Donovan instantly.

	"Kennedy and Donovan," said Bruce insistently.

	"Kennedy Fuel Battery is better—it's your battery."

	"And your money."

	"All right, give me a show for my money, will you! I say Kennedy Fuel Battery," grinned Donovan.

	"Now the next question," interrupted the lawyer, "is whether you have any money, Bob. If what Kennedy suspects is true, you'd better draw out of banks before they close. I can believe it, because that's Gardner's way of fighting."

	"Why—what do you mean?" asked Donovan in surprise.

	"About a quarter of a million of your money is still in banks, due to the original trust, and another million due to the fact that it is changing hands. If Gardner suspects you are lending help, he can readily tie up those funds—break the bank if necessary, close it for examination of books, a number of things. Get out of that, and buy—Government bonds, I guess would be the best bet."

	"Do it," nodded Donovan.

	But it was easier said than done. They acted quickly, taking the largest deposits first, finally coming to the smaller. They did not get four of these, totaling one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The rest were in bonds already, and unassailable.

	"He's already moved. How under the sun did he know so soon?" asked Kennedy helplessly as they left the doors which bore the announcement that payment had been temporarily suspended.

	A short, heavily built man across the street could have told them. He ducked into a drugstore and telephoned as the gray coupé  started down the street, a powerful black touring car following it.

	" 'At's him. Mus' be this Donovan, all right. What is he, a cop? No? Soun's like a cop's name," he reported.

	Presently he was walking rapidly across the Common and made his way toward Marlboro Street.

	M. Chas. Gardner had given another order.

-

Chapter VI

	GARDNER listened to the somewhat metallic voice from the telephone, and cursed softly to himself. Donovan had beaten him to his banks by minutes only, and now there was practically the whole of his fortune in a condition he could readily use. Further, it was in bonds, bonds that could not be driven down in value, and Gardner realized that no amount of juggling would get those funds frozen again.

	Further, the companies with whom Donovan would place orders would accept the orders—but loans—? He would have to have some loans if he wanted to make the batteries on the scale that would be demanded. To manufacture batteries for power plants would require more than a few millions, particularly as only the small, municipal plants would be available to him. Gardner himself controlled the big plants that could have given saving orders. Automobiles—no, he could control that. Laughter! The bomb that would explode any plan among the giants of industry, the men who gave orders in the thousands of units, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unless he started a new make of car, and that meant months of designing, more months, years, perhaps, before the public accepted it. Flashlights—that was the place for batteries, but there were no millions in that, and it would do enormous damage to Kennedy's invention. Flashlights and million-horsepower power plants don't come in the same thought.

	No, Donovan would be tied for some time yet, and Gardner decided, as he hung up the receiver, that the campaign of ridicule must go on. It must spread to Boston, to other cities. So on that day men from his office went to various cities—to tell a joke!

	They were sent to financial centers to do some business, some reasonable excuse was given, but everywhere the tale of the golden battery was told.

	But that was not enough. A second report reached him soon after they left. "Kennedy Fuel Batteries" was being incorporated. The next order would have surprised even the not easily surprised Montgomery. Gardner went home to give the order, and he used a private telephone, which was not listed, to call an unlisted number in Boston, and a second unlisted number in New York City.

	"And remember, Cazoni, be careful to have that pen job first and do that second one right! If you fail me in that, Cazoni—" Gardner's voice was harsh.

	Cazoni understood, and assured Gardner things would be "fixed up."

	Gardner was worried, horribly worried. He had spent thirty years in building up the colossal machine that he represented to the world, and nearly five years building up that secret, deadly machine which had more than once aided in the smooth passage of the greater machine. It had grown out of one of those rough passages. At the end of the depression in 1933 a certain man had threatened the horizon, a black cloud of storm that seemed about to sweep away those pyramided loans, toppling already. That man had been murdered—mysteriously.

	But never before had so serious a menace appeared. This was, he knew, a Hydra of Business. To lop off one head, he knew would be useless, unless he could fasten himself firmly in its place. Those patents—the patents that he must control.

	They meant millions to him, if he could get them, but he was growing old, and these younger men were thinking faster than he now, foreseeing his moves. They meant millions if he could get them, but if he didn't—

	And all he wanted was peace!

-

Chapter VII

	When the large battery in his cellar had been made, dies and patterns for the parts had been cut; and as they were by far the most expensive parts in the construction, Kennedy had made twenty complete sets. As a result, the batteries for the plane were readily put together, a freight plane making the trip down to New Jersey and back with them. In the meantime the powerful, light electric motor was easily obtainable, for that was practically standard equipment obtainable at once.

	They ripped out the fuel tanks and the engine during the morning, and in the afternoon the batteries were set up in their place, electric heaters were installed, and electric motors were provided to power the compressors that would maintain atmospheric pressure in the cabin.

	Nearly the entire day was spent at the field, working on the ship, and night was falling when at last they were ready for the trial.

	Wainwright, the Lockheed engineer, had been a great help in the work, for he knew the plane thoroughly, and the tensile strains the various members could safely resist. And now that the plane must be relicensed, he offered to go with them to testify as to its fitness before the Inspector of Aviation. To reach the Government official, they found they would have to go to his home in Quincy, and the three men crowded into the gray coupé .

	Across Boston, out through the Jamaica Parkway, and finally swinging into the Cape Cod Superhighway, the gray coupé moved leisurely.

	Behind it a large black sedan with New York plates moved along at an equal pace. As the two cars swung out on the eight-lane concrete superhighway, the powerful sedan spurted ahead, rapidly cutting down the quarter-mile lead. Presently it swung across the round of the speed-lane separation rib. The two-lane, high-speed concrete with its banked curves opened out before it, and almost simultaneously the gray coupé  shot forward with swiftly rising speed, and struck the high-speed lane.

	But the black sedan was wide open, its powerful multicylinder engine roaring gently through the muffler. It flashed rapidly faster.

	"Lord, this boat can move. I could scarcely believe you when you told me about it," said Wainwright, watching the speedometer move steadily across. Eighty—one hundred—.

	"Still rising," said Kennedy smiling and watching the road ahead. The speed lane was practically deserted, though the slow lanes were fairly well traveled.

	A whistling roar mounted suddenly from behind them and a great black shadow moved up beside them and passed them with a speed a full twenty miles an hour greater. But as it drew alongside, a dull popping, like a whole carload of champagne bottles, a burst of dull red flame, and a metallic rapping burst out suddenly.

	Three machine guns were discharging high-velocity lead at the driver of the little coupé! The car suddenly fell off, a whine changed to a hum as motors suddenly became dragging generators, and the car wavered in the road. With an added burst the black car with the New York plates drove ahead!

	Kennedy's face was white, his hands clasped on the wheel with an intensity that made them as white as his face. Wainwright's eyes were opened wide, and staring. Donovan looked slightly sick.

	"I—I didn't guess that. Good God, how did they miss us?" he asked weakly.

	"They didn't," replied Kennedy, a slow grim smile touching his lips. "Look." His groping hand found a heavy wrench on the floor of the car, and wielded it heavily against the clear plate of the windshield. The massive wrench was nearly torn from his hand, as the windshield bounced it back—the glass unharmed!

	"I built for accidents. Experimental, you know—reinforced the frame and the body to protect me, used an accident-proof, and incidentally bullet-proof, window I discovered, but forgot in the discovery of the fuel battery." The grim smile of tight lips persisted. He turned to the slow lane, maneuvered over to the right, and cut into the circle.

	"Wait—where are you going?" demanded Donovan, his face relaxing rapidly.

	"Back, brethren, back, where they can't try again. They'll use a truck next time, and I can't guarantee the resistance of the machine to that."

	"That's where they'll look for you," Donovan stated sharply. "Go back to the next circle at your highest speed, now you've started, then turn, and run back on your course a second time toward Quincy. We'll do the business we started on, and they'll be looking for us somewhere else."

	Kennedy nodded, and the gray car swerved over to the Boston lanes, turned quickly to the high-speed lanes as they passed sixty miles an hour, and mounted till they were whining down the road, the motor's song a faint scream, a curious blurbing sound of air gurgling like a brook over rocks as it passed the car. Somewhere behind, and rapidly falling farther behind, a police siren warned them to slower speed as a police speedster tried vainly to reach them. The wind howled protest, and the speedometer quivered at one hundred and fifty.

	They slowed rapidly, swerved into the low-speed lane, across to the circle, and turned back again on the overpass to the Quincy lanes.

	"It seems Gardner has other systems as well," said Kennedy dryly.

	"What will they try next?" asked Donovan wonderingly.

	"Well, we don't sleep in this bullet-proof car, and even it isn't proof against a good big truck. Also, if we take that plane up they can feel sure it isn't coated with armor plate as this machine was—by accident."

	"If I were you two," said Wainwright unhappily, "I'd take that plane and go so high in the sky I couldn't be seen, and I'd move out of this town, and get lost. I'd lots rather have my life and the several millions you already have than to lose the one, and have the other mean nothing to me.

	"Anyway, you can leave me here with Thompson. I'll take a train back. They might try again."

	Half an hour later, Donovan's plane had been relicensed, and with the necessary papers, Kennedy and his friend started back to Boston. But they circled out, swung well to one side, taking back roads and finally coming into the city from the direction of Newton. They used Donovan's thorough knowledge of the infinitely complex network of cow-path engineered streets, and twisted through the hundreds of one-way streets toward the airfield. It was midnight when they arrived, and Donovan agreed with Wainwright that Boston was not a healthy city for them.

	They displayed their papers, the plane was wheeled out of the hangar, and the Field Manager gave them the take-off signal. Instantly the propeller spun into whirring, vibrationless life; the plane leaped across the ground with a startling suddenness and pulled forward with utter quietness. Its landing and running lights flared brilliantly on the ground for a moment, then almost before they knew it, the high-lift stratosphere plane was winging its way steeply aloft, the tremendously powerful motor dragging it upward.

	"Great guns, Bruce, this motor pulls like a rubber band. It's so smooth you can't feel it, there's no sensation of moving, only a steady pull—and this 1000 horsepower of yours is way off. It must be three thousand. I have it cut way down, and she's still ready to pull the bolts out." Donovan was ecstatic.

	"One thousand ELECTRIC horse is 'something else.' A gasoline or oil engine gives one thousand horsepower, when the cylinder is exploding, and runs on momentum for a while. This gives one thousand horse every instant."

	"Another plane taking off," said Donovan, smiling. "Let's give them a race up."

	As a matter of fact, the instant the two men had appeared on the field and started for their plane, a crew of five men started for a powerful two-place racer. The racer was rushed out into the open, two men took their places in the cockpit, and one at each wing-tip, while the fifth quickly wheeled an electric starting truck into place at the nose. The powerful electric motor whined as the ratchet gripped the propeller hub, and the engine spun slowly. It was a gasoline plane, faster at the lower levels without supercharger, faster at higher levels, for it was lighter. The engine caught, barked into roaring life, and the starting truck was hauled away.

	But here the plane lost out. For five full minutes it rested, its wheels chocked, its wings held while the engine warmed up. The electric plane leaped into the air gracefully while they waited, and the lights shrank into the skies.

	The gasoline plane was designed for a ceiling of but thirty thousand feet, and was therefore far faster than the stratosphere plane, with its enormously larger wings and far greater pitch. The gasoline plane rose from the field with a roaring engine barking occasionally in misfires, the exhaust darting back in red flames. It climbed steeply and swiftly, the slots in its wings open, as it nearly stood on its tail and let the motor drag it up by the nose.

	Two men in the plane: one a pilot, skilled in the daredevil stunts of pursuit and fighting, the other a little sleek-haired man with cold, black eyes, smoking a cigarette he could not taste in the backward sweep of a biting windstream. Nestled against his shoulder was a curiously heavy rifle, with wide flanges along its barrel, and a drum-magazine built into the heavy stock. A broad plate on the stock distributed the shock of the kick across the entire right shoulder. It spit viciously a few times in trial bursts, the sound drowned in the roar of the great X-type motor, its twenty-four cylinders barking rhythmically now.

	It climbed swiftly, far more swiftly than the heavy stratosphere plane with its weighty, air-tight cabin built for five. Twelve hundred horsepower flowed out the propeller shaft and fought the rapidly chilling air. The pilot waved a hand, and the gunner behind slipped a headset over his ears.

	"We'll catch 'em, Mug. They got somethin' new, I hear. A Diesel doesn't take the warmin' these gas buggies do, but even they can't take off cold, the way that bird did. I heard somebody say they had a thousan'-horse motor. We got twelve hundred, and a lot lighter plane. They've got a couple minutes start—and twenty thousand feet to go before they hit our ceilin'."

	The gunner nodded. He didn't realize, as the pilot did but did not mention, that the stratosphere plane would gain rapidly in climbing speed after they left the denser air below twenty thousand, while the power of the gasoline plane would be rapidly sapped by the scant air, and the wings, designed for lower altitude than the larger machine, would begin to lose the advantages they held now.

	The gas plane rose swiftly, and above the electric plane drew rapidly nearer. The gravitational altimeter was rising rapidly. Presently the gunner tried a few rounds in the direction of the plane. The tremendously high-velocity bullets, moving more than two miles a second and little larger than a thick pencil lead, moved upward and sang swiftly into the night.

	Donovan was concentrating all his attention on his instruments now, while Kennedy read the indicators that told the conditions within the cabin. The soft, gentle snore of the electric motor, the louder scream of the twirling propeller, alone sounded as they climbed.

	"Batteries working perfectly, Bruce," said Donovan briefly.

	"How's that other plane?" asked Kennedy. "The air and temperature normal?"

	"Gaining on us. Low-altitude plane, I guess, and gets better speed than we can hope to."

	"Try more—oww! What the—" Kennedy cried in pain and surprise and looked at his leg. A trickle of blood oozed from a tiny puncture in his calf, the muscle was exceedingly sore, and a second tiny puncture on the other side showed something had passed completely through the flesh.

	Quickly his eyes sought the metal wall, and he saw two minute holes in the sheet duraluminum. "Bob, I've been shot! That plane is shooting at us! A pencil-bullet went through my leg clean, and passed right through the plane! Use all the power!"

	"What!" Donovan looked quickly down and saw the sudden intermittent flashes from the machine below. "Right—machine gun. I'm afraid of this power here—but I'll have to!" He pulled the rheostat control back smoothly, and the gentle hum of the motor mounted swiftly to a driving, tearing whine as the controller reached its limit. The heavy plane tugged forward with a sudden acceleration, and the entire fabric of the all-metal plane creaked under the strain of the great power.

	"A thousand electric isn't a thousand gas, or Diesel either, Bruce. She's pulling," said Donovan. Bruce Kennedy was busy already with an iodine solution bottle and a bandage. The minute punctures caused by the clean, swift-moving bullet had closed up already, and the bleeding had stopped.

	The plane below was falling behind now, as the larger plane pulled viciously under the great motor. The speed was still rising, though the power from the batteries remained the same; the hum rose to a scream as the motor ran swifter.

	Kennedy listened critically. "Bob—that propeller! It's all right for 1000 gas or internal combustion power, but remember an electric motor can, like a man or a steam engine, dig in its toes and heave, so to speak. A gas engine, like any explosive power, works the first time or not at all. That thing's going too fast. One can exert enormous power for a few seconds—the other has no such reserve."

	It was, and Donovan cut the power slightly; still the pitch rose, and more rapidly now. Suddenly it seemed to shoot swiftly up the scale; the shriek of the propeller became a terrible roar, an ear-shattering, threshing blast.

	"Shut it off!" roared Kennedy—uselessly, for his voice could not be heard. Donovan had already done it, and yet the mad propeller continued to shriek.

	With the suddenness of a brake, the thing stopped whirling madly, and an instant later the white-faced Donovan threw on the motor again.

	"Too much—reached the speed of sound, and simply went faster than the air could flow in. The plane below gained a sort of cavitation."

	The dark silhouette of the other machine stood out nearer against the lights of the city. Pulling with all the power the metal blades could handle, the other machine still gained.

	"Fast—and light. About twenty-five- to thirty-five-thousand ceiling. We're at fifteen thousand now; when we reach twenty we should be able to pull up," said Donovan.

	Kennedy merely reached over and pulled the master light switch. The lights of the machine died, and a starry sky, moonless, alone shed light on them. "Let's not advertise. The bullets have no ceiling."

	The plane shot on, riding higher, while the dark mass below circled more blindly now. There were occasional very high clouds, and it was hard for the pilot to keep track now.

	His hand waved again, and the gunner took up his headset. "Fool! You hit and warned them. I can't follow them easily now till we get above 'em, and can see 'em against the city lights. They can spot us, though."

	"Aww—maybe I punctured their tanks. If they lose the engine juice they won't climb high. Anyway, I mighta got one of 'em."

	They continued silently fighting for altitude, while the pilot wondered vainly what had happened. For a moment the heavy plane had pulled away from him readily, then there came a terrific roar such as he had heard only once before, when somebody put gasoline in the fuel oil tanks of a Diesel plane, and the engine exploded. Yet after a moment the roar stopped, and the machine continued unharmed, faster than before, but still slower than he climbed.

	Now he was following blindly, for only occasionally could he make out the form against the skies.

	He looked anxiously at the luminous altimeter dial. Eighteen thousand. The heaters in their suits and gloves were on now, and the engine was losing power. A dribble of oxygen kept his head clearer. He had to catch them soon—or not at all. He had never seen such a plane as this. It took off cold, flew perfectly, and without trouble. The high-altitude propeller handicapped its power here, and the high-altitude wings didn't help. Yet the power of the other had not diminished a whit. The engine of even the stratosphere plane should have lost somewhat. But it hadn't.

	And the noise! What had that been?

	Suddenly he saw the plane again, five hundred feet above and climbing easily, faster now. The pilot saw he would never gain now. The plane was entering its own element, and he was approaching his ceiling. The altimeter quivered at twenty-one thousand.

	His hand went up three times quickly. The plane vibrated sharply, and the wings stood out suddenly in reddish light. The roar of the engine drowned the crackle of the machine gun, but he knew it was working. The dark shape above did not falter, and through the headset he heard a thin crackle of curses. The light on the wings nickered steadily for a long time, and the pilot himself cursed softly and started down. The fool gunner had gotten himself thoroughly drunk on oxygen. His first trip so high, and when he should have used a mere trickle to steady his nerves and muscles, he was using it straight. No normal man would have held the fire steady, for no man could hold down the barrel of that viciously kicking little rifle.

	He glanced around, and saw the barrel of the gun pointing and wavering widely. It walked up steadily as the thing kicked, and the gunner jerked it down savagely, then it walked up again—.

	The pilot cursed softly to himself, cut the engine, and circled slowly toward lower levels. The fool!

-

Chapter VIII

	"IT looks like they gave up, Bruce," said Donovan, as he watched the plane circling downward. Their machine steadily wound itself higher and higher, above the clouds, out and up till the stars began to shine in steady flame, and the twinkling of the atmosphere was cut off. There was scarcely any atmosphere at these altitudes.

	"Yes, that plane had to go back, but that doesn't mean that friend Gardner will give up. We're out of his reach now, but we have to come down again, remember. And he will probably be looking for us."

	"How about coming down up at Happy Days? The island is well out into that lonely little lake up in Maine, and it would be some time before even gang-spies could locate us up there. The nearest town is Makeaho, and they don't even have a telephone in the town."

	"Good idea. Stay way up, and they won't be able to see us. We can come down almost straight, and land on the island itself," agreed

	Kennedy. "The big field has a few stones, but I think this boat can land safely. At sea level the landing speed is most remarkably low."

	The ship was still climbing steadily, and was nearly up to the fifty-thousand-foot level. Donovan was now keenly watching the instruments and Kennedy with equal fascination. "Still going strong, Bob," he said softly.

	"I turned on a little more power, cut out some resistance. The propeller seems to take a heavier pull in thinner air. The batteries haven't shown signs of weakening yet."

	But finally, at an altitude of seventy thousand feet the batteries did show they could work no further.

	The plane skimmed along northward now, and the speed mounted swiftly to well over three hundred and fifty miles an hour. In far less time than they had spent climbing, they were over the spot on which they had intended to land, and the machine began circling noiselessly down.

	With slight bumps it came to rest under a row of giant trees at the lower end of a slightly sloping field. Years before, some frugal, hardworking New Englander had pulled most of the rocks from this field, but now the winter frosts were shoving them up again, and the surface was bumpy. The great, soft airwheels rode them easily through, and they stopped safely. A low hum of the motor, the rustle of air, and the machine wheeled steadily about the locked left wheel and came into position at the proper place.

	"We can move right into the cabin," said Donovan in a low voice. "I was up here in July for a while, and was called away in a hurry. The boat's in the shed, below, and there's food stored in the larders for several weeks. Remember those trick storehouses we built?" He smiled faintly, stretching stiff legs on the grassy meadow land. "Come in handy; even the bread will be fresh."

	"Yes, old hermit, you may think you can isolate yourself in this lonely backwoods place, but all the same, said telegraph at Makeaho is going to be used by the Fuel Battery Company, much as we disapprove of the fact. We've got to tell Montgomery where we are."

	"I think we'd best give up this whole game till we settle with Gardner somehow, sometime," said Donovan mournfully. "I think we ought to fight back the way he fights us."

	Donovan produced a key as he spoke and unlocked the door of the cabin. An oil lamp stood on the table, its reservoir still full. A moment later the little cabin was brightly lit as the mantle glowed white.

	Kennedy seemed to be thinking seriously. Finally he spoke again. "Bob, Montgomery's got your power of attorney, and he knows in general what our plans are. With the boat we can call down shore at Makeaho easily enough, but they know us there. That plane is conspicuous. Let's get a good secondhand Ford and park it somewhere near the lake shore. We can call at some town where we aren't known, reaching the car by the boat. Then at least they'll have some trouble finding us, and in the meantime I think I can prepare a warm welcome."

	"Can Montgomery handle the stuff, and get the things you need—the right machines?"

	"He merely has to tell certain companies that already have plans to go ahead and make the machines. I have already got plants to give me estimates on the cost of making the machines and have left plans with them."

	"We'll do it," nodded Donovan. "Only one thing I don't like. I have plenty of money to get that Ford, all right. Too much. I'm still carrying sixty-five thousand I got and didn't have time to reinvest."

	"Stick it in the flour barrel, and come to sleep," Kennedy advised with a grin.

-

Chapter IX

	GARDNER was looking angrily at the sleek, black-haired Cazoni, and Cazoni looked surly and uncomfortable.

	"And so first he runs away from you in a bullet-proof automobile, and then escapes in a bullet-proof airplane?" Gardner smiled, a grimace. "I've heard of bullet-proof automobiles, and bullet-proof glass, but no bullet-proof glass I ever heard of failed to show the cracks! And I never heard of a bullet-proof airplane. You know as well as I that an airplane, to be proof against even the bullets of a revolver, would be so heavy with its metal plates that it couldn't lift off. And to be proof against the bullets from that little machine rifle, it would need one-inch armor plate, as you know perfectly well. No plane could fly with that. Did you use the same gun on the automobile?"

	"Naw, they used an old Tommy. You can't silence a Weemar gun. Too damn many cars can make one hundred and thirty now to get away, so we used a silenced Tommy."

	"Well, they might armor a car against Tommy bullets, but you know and I know they simply shot all over the lot as usual. You said those windows didn't even crack!"

	"Chief, I shot some myself, and I know I hit that window, but it didn't phase it. That bird's clever, an' I'll bet he's got somethin' new.

	"An' I told you Gunner was the best man we could get in Boston. That damn town never was no good, they haven't any organization there. Just a lot o' squabblin' kid gangs. But Gunner is there because he ain't feelin' happy in Chi. He's good, but the damn nut don't know nothin' about goin' up. Charlie flew him, and he said Gunner got drunk. He said he got drunk on ox-eye or somethin' like that, an' I asked him what that was and he says air. How the hell can a guy get drunk on air?

	"Anyway, Charlie said he was so plastered he couldn't see straight, but when he came down he was cold sober and didn't have any breath at all. He swore up an' down he hadn't had a drop, only Charlie says he got ahold of some of this ox-eye somewhere."

	Gardner cursed softly. "Oxygen, Cazoni, oxygen. It is in air, and you can get drunker on oxygen than on a gallon of white mule. But you sober right away, and you have no breath, of course.

	"So he got drunk. No wonder they didn't hit that plane. Well, trace him, Cazoni. And here's a hint. They've gotten scared and left Boston, their business is in the hands of that lawyer they visited, and they'll have to communicate. See if you can't grease a few palms and find out where they are."

* * *

	Three days later Kennedy was busily working with a peculiar batch of apparatus. There were two large tubs, one filled with a peculiar, clear viscid fluid, a second with a slightly muddied waterlike liquid. Kennedy was drawing a long thin copper ribbon through first one tub and then through the second, moving it slowly and steadily, and finally draping it artistically over the limbs of a young oak nearby. The clear, clean copper came out of its bath with a slightly greenish, glassy look, and rapidly dried on the tree. The ribbons, each about one hundred feet long, when dry were laid on the grass of the meadow.

	He worked all morning at this, and finally had several thousand feet of half-inch-wide ribbons of copper, coated with a thin, exceedingly tough insulating layer of a special cellulose closely allied to rayon and cellophane. He stopped when his copper was exhausted and went into the cabin, returning with a powerful pair of glasses, with which he inspected the lake. Then he went in, and presently smoke began to rise from the chimney. By the time Donovan came up in the small motorboat and began unloading the materials he had brought, Kennedy leaned out of the door with a cheerful "Come an' get us!"

	"I have got the things you wanted, Brace," returned Donovan, "but I'll be hanged if I see what connection two enameled tubs, five thousand feet of copper ribbon, fifty pounds of absorbent cotton, a complicated nonperm alloy tube, and the various other things have."

	"Ah, you got the three tubes?"

	"I did. Will you kindly dissolve the mystery as I dissolve this fodder?"

	"Not till I'm sure of myself. Did you also get a package by express?"

	"One package, express. Weight three hundred pounds, I'll have you know. You son of a gun, you said there was a 'little box for you.' How did you expect me to get that into the boat from the car?"

	"That was somethin' I hadn't been able to figure out. How did you do it? I was darned interested to see if you could figure out a way," said Kennedy, looking up.

	"Why you— Well, anyway, I used the tow rope, and the car for power, with a handy tree as the derrick mast."

	"Well, that's fine. And now, Bob, I hope we have given them enough clues."

	"Enough clues—enough for what?" demanded Donovan in surprise.

	"To find us, of course. Did you send that last message to Monty?"

	"Yes, and now please explain."

	"I promised I would. And thanks for your faith in me, Bob. That was in a code Monty can get, but no one else can, because the thing is based on a sentence that he memorized, and it is not written anywhere. I told him to lift the secrecy somewhat, just give hints.

	"We can't fight Gardner openly." Kennedy's face took on a cold grimness. "And so we are fighting the murdering crook in his own way. I have some more work, and you're going to help. Then you'll see what I mean. The clues I mentioned Gardner could follow back to us. I'm afraid we can't hide, and do any work."

	"So we have to leave again?"

	"No, that's just the point, Bob, we aren't leaving." Kennedy looked long and steadily at his friend. A slow smile of understanding came over Donovan's face.

	"And now, perhaps, I see the connection between copper ribbons and the magnetically inactive nonperm tubes," he said at last, softly.

-

Chapter X

	The heavy, pounding beat of the powerful engine shook the plane, even though the sound of it had been muffled and hushed to practical silence. Beside it two much smaller planes flew. It was dusk now, and darkening rapidly on the earth, far below, but here in the high strata, the sun still shone.

	"You—you're sure they have no weapons?" demanded Gardner.

	"Hell, no. They'd a used 'em before if they did," grunted Cazoni. Cazoni was unhappy. He was airsick. "An' they didn't get any in either. They got a lot o' junk, some stuff on their machine, I guess. Lotta cotton an' some chemicals, an' a big box full of somethin' heavy, but it came from the Framingham Iron and Steel Company, and it wasn't a gun. That came yesterday morning, and nothin' came since."

	"Are you sure they haven't left?"

	"Their car's still there, an' the boat. They were there this morning."

	Gardner smiled to himself. "Cazoni, you certainly have done a fine job. And they have helped a lot. I'll give you this paper, which Kennedy must sign. If he doesn't—why—eh—leave this other one as I suggested."

	"Wanta burn the plane an' so forth or not?"

	"Why—I'm afraid it wouldn't have anything to burn. You see it doesn't use fuel, and it's an all-metal structure."

	"O.K." Cazoni pocketed the two papers and listened miserably to the pounding and creaking of the plane, and he felt miserable as it heaved in the air pockets.

	The coast fell rapidly behind, and the sun set below them. Maine lay beneath them now, and under the bright light of a full moon a silvery dot, like a luminous comma with a slight defect, appeared on the dark surface, sprinkled here and there with lights. A tiny clump of lights on one side of the luminous comma marked Makeaho; a spot of light on the black defect in the shining surface marked Happy Days camp. Tonight, Gardner thought, it would not be so happy for him. He felt he would like this Happy Days himself, but thought a good Indian name much better. The tiny log cabin must be replaced by a real house that he could bring his friends to—

	The light below winked out.

	"Gone to bed, I guess," said Cazoni.

	But they had not gone to bed. They had gone up. Since darkness had begun to fall, Kennedy and Donovan had been taking turns at a small amplifier set. A huge inverted cone of canvas reached upward, and at its bottom was a tiny thing no larger than a wrist watch. But it had heard the peculiar shriek of the air about the airplanes while they were still many miles off. Since then the two men had been very busy. They left the cabin now, and went down to the plane, changed since it landed, for now it was coated with a dull, lusterless black, a black like an eggshell dipped in india ink.

	Noiselessly the plane rose into the air, rising almost instantly as the tremendous power whirled the propeller, a new, larger propeller, and the wide wings gripped the dense surface air. A faint hum carried the plane swiftly up at a steep angle. At a thousand feet it leveled off and darted across a narrow neck of water to the mainland's black background. It continued to climb.

	"Think they saw us?" asked Kennedy quietly, braced behind a thing that resembled a long black telescope, mounted rigidly into the plane's structure, poking its nose through a hole in the roof of the machine.

	"No can tell," replied Donovan. "They did," he added a minute later. "They're diving."

-

	THE plane pulled sharply, and the fabric creaked as Donovan threw an overload on the super-powerful motor. The great propeller bit and tugged. The machine rose steeply.

	A black form came sharply down beside them, and something like a flickering red lightning snapped from its side. Kennedy swung to a second telescopelike machine that pointed downward. Suddenly it rattled viciously on its heavy frame, and a shrill whine came from it.

	A terrible rending crack, a stifled scream of agony from the black shadow, and two black shadows appeared, each smaller than the first. Something tumbled from the one, and an instant later a parachute glistened in the moonlight.

	"My God! They've got a gun!" gasped Gardner.

	"I don't think so. No gun shoots without some light, and it ain't a gun that cuts a machine in two," said Cazoni.

	"Let's go home," wailed Gardner. The plane turned upward and rapidly started back to the south under his orders. The second small plane was flashing down at the climbing black thing, barely visible now against the forest. He lost it for a time, and when he found it again, it was above him; it crossed the moon. He himself was a shining, glistening thing now in the trim plane. His machine gunner stuttered out a few rounds of ammunition. Then something screamed through the night, a glistening sheet that moved across and swept toward their plane. Like a shimmering knife of silver light it passed resistlessly through one wing, angled forward and pelted on the heavy motor. With a roar the motor blew up and fell from the plane. The machine twisted and fell over as the wing fell off, hanging by a few guy wires.

	Two shining silken umbrellas fell free.

	The black machine of death swept south in swift pursuit of the fleeing plane. Rapidly it overtook it, and as they came nearer, a machine gun chattered from the larger transport.

	"The black paint's working, Bob," said Kennedy calmly. "They can't see us well enough to shoot straight in this moonlight." He pulled down a lever and aimed one of the telescope tubes toward the plane slightly ahead and above. A meter flopped over on the scale before him, and the mechanism, the whole plane, jarred under a heavy hammering. A silvery sleet flew out and caught the larger plane just ahead of the tail and ran its length, finally tearing out the motor. The fuel tanks burst into flame, and with a peculiar puff the plane flew into a thousand blazing parts.

	"That's the end, I think," said Kennedy. Then he began to tremble, and his face went white. "God forgive me, there were men on that plane," he muttered.

-

Chapter XI

M. C. GARDNER DEAD IN AIR CRASH
FINANCIAL HEAD KILLED WITH COMPANIONS
AS PLANE MYSTERIOUSLY EXPLODES

	Makeaho, Me. Late last night the people of this town were startled by the appearance of a battered, scratched man in an aviation suit, who told the story of Mr. Chas. Gardner's death. Gardner, in a five-passenger gasoline-powered plane, was flying north on business, when for some undiscovered reason his large plane exploded in midair, dropping burning parts at the two smaller, speedier planes accompanying him. The man who brought the news was James K. Terrence, pilot of one of the smaller planes, which was destroyed by the explosion of the greater. Terrence escaped by parachute. Several others also escaped from the smaller planes, but none were able to live through the explosion of the "flying office," as Gardner entitled his large plane.

	Kennedy looked up at Donovan, and rested back in his comfortable chair. They were in Boston now, for they felt the danger was gone. "Convenient account, wasn't it?"

	"Very," agreed Donovan. "What are we going to do, rush the fuel battery plant now?"

	Kennedy looked very thoughtful as he answered slowly, "No, Bob, I don't think so.

	"Do you realize what would happen if we did? If even a substantial rumor got out, American Power, all the big oils, the big motor stocks too, would be pressed down to nothing. How many millions of people would be ruined by that? Would it be worth it to the world?"

	Donovan looked at his friend steadily for some moments. "But— how can you help it? Unless you suppress the invention?"

	"I own the patents outright. Can't I lease the household power-battery rights to the American Power Company, let them scrap their plant gradually as they build and sell these batteries? Their investments in power-generating equipment will immediately be written off as worthless—but even the big traders will see that the power-battery rights they have are fully as valuable. The stock will fluctuate madly— and gradually reach a steady valuation.

	"The oil companies can buy the rights to manufacture smaller batteries, for automobiles, airplanes, trains perhaps. It will have to be worked out, but, Donovan, think of the misery it would inflict on the world to sell those things through a brand new company. Would it be fair?"

	"It would not. I agree absolutely.

	"Now there's just one more question I want to ask. What was the thing you cut up those planes with? I thought you were making a sort of machine gun."

	Kennedy chuckled. "It was, Bob, it was. It was simply a long solenoid that threw little steel bullets, but it didn't use powder, it used electric power. Remember, there was practically no mechanical apparatus about it, only electrical contacts made by the bullet itself, as it was drawn through the tube by the magnetic force. The lack of mechanism meant it could fire as fast as bullets could go through the barrel; no waiting while the thing was cocked and the used cartridge removed. When the bullet reached the muzzle, it automatically turned on the current that started the next one. The bullet was then traveling about 12,000 feet a second. The result was that the machine gun shot something like 30,000 times a minute. It acted like a huge bandsaw, each bullet being a tooth that moved better than two miles a second.

	"Any wonder it cut through the ships, motor and all?" Kennedy smiled and rose from his chair. "And now, Bob, I think we'd better see Montgomery and tell the news." He smiled dryly. "I'll do my talking to the engineers of the companies. Financial geniuses seem to be disbelieving folk."

	We were acting in true self-defense. It was they or we. But it is a sad load to carry—the loss of a human life.

The End

Twilight
Astounding Stories – November 1934

A story that will set you to dreaming of purple distances—of a far future world wherein a race is dying seven million years away—seven million years!

-

	"SPEAKING of hitch-hikers," said Jim Bendell in a rather bewildered way, "I picked up a man the other day that certainly was a queer cuss." He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. "He told me the queerest yarn I ever heard. Most of them tell you how they lost their good jobs and tried to find work out here in the wide spaces of the West. They don't seem to realize how many people we have out here. They think all this great beautiful country is uninhabited."

	Jim Bendell's a real estate man, and I knew how he could go on. That's his favorite line, you know. He's real worried because there's a lot of homesteading plots still open out in our state. He talks about the beautiful country, but he never went further into the desert than the edge of town. 'Fraid of it actually. So I sort of steered him back on the track.

	"What did he claim, Jim? Prospector who couldn't find land to prospect?"

	"That's not, very funny, Bait. No; it wasn't only what he claimed. He didn't even claim it, just said it. You know, he didn't say it was true, he just said it. That's what gets me. I know it ain't true, but the way he said it—Oh, I don't know."

	By which I knew he didn't. Jim Bendell's usually pretty careful about his English—real proud of it. When he slips, that means he's disturbed. Like the time he thought the rattlesnake was a stick of wood and wanted to put it on the fire.

	Jim went on: And he had funny clothes, too. They looked like silver, but they were soft as silk. And at night they glowed just a little.

	I picked him up about dusk. Really picked him up. He was lying off about ten feet from the South Road. I thought, at first, somebody had hit him, and then hadn't stopped. Didn't see him very clearly, you know. I picked him up, put him in the car, and started on. I had about three hundred miles to go, but I thought I could drop him at Warren Spring with Doc Vance. But he came to in about five minutes, and opened his eyes. He looked straight off, and he looked first at the car, then at the Moon. "Thank God!" he says, and then looks at me. It gave me a shock. He was beautiful. No; he was handsome.

	He wasn't either one. He was magnificent. He was about six feet two, I think, and his hair was brown, with a touch of red-gold. It seemed like fine copper wire that's turned brown. It was crisp and curly. His forehead was wide, twice as wide as mine. His features were delicate, but tremendously impressive; his eyes were gray, like etched iron, and bigger than mine—a lot.

	That suit he wore—it was more like a bathing suit with pajama trousers. His arms were long and muscled smoothly as an Indian's. He was white, though, tanned lightly with a golden, rather than a brown, tan.

	But he was magnificent. Most beautiful man I ever saw. I don't know, damn it!"

-

	"HELLO!" I said. "Have an accident?"

	"No; not this time, at least."

	And his voice was magnificent, too. It wasn't an ordinary voice. It sounded like an organ talking, only it was human.

	"But maybe my mind isn't quite steady yet. I tried an experiment. Tell me what the date is— year and all, and let me see," he went on.

	"Why—December 9, 1932," I said.

	And it didn't please him. He didn't like it a bit. But the wry grin that came over his face gave way to a chuckle.

	"Over a thousand—" he says reminiscently. "Not as bad as seven million. I shouldn't complain."

	"Seven million what?"

	"Years," he said, steadily enough. Like he meant it. "I tried an experiment once. Or I will try it. Now I'll have to try again. The experiment was—in 3059. I'd just finished the release experiment. Testing space then. Time—it wasn't that, I still believe. It was space. I felt myself caught in that field, but I couldn't pull away. Field gamma-H 481, intensity 935 in the Pellman range. It sucked me in, and I went out.

	"I think it took a short cut through space to the position the solar system will occupy. Through a higher dimension, effecting a speed exceeding light and throwing me into the future plane."

	He wasn't telling me, you know. He was just thinking out loud. Then he began to realize I was there.

	"I couldn't read their instruments, seven million years of evolution changed everything. So I overshot my mark a little coming back. I belong in 3059."

	"But tell me, what's the latest scientific invention of this year?"

	He startled me so, I answered almost before I thought.

	"Why, television, I guess. And radio and airplanes."

	"Radio—good. They will have instruments."

	"But see here—who are you?"

	"Ah!—I'm sorry. I forgot," he replied in that organ voice of his. "I am Ares Sen Kenhn. And you?"

	"James Waters Bendell."

	"Waters—what does that mean? I do not recognize it."

	"Why—it's a name, of course. Why should you recognize it?"

	"I see you have not the classification, then. 'Sen' stands for science."

	"Where did you come from, Mr. Kenlin?"

	"Come from?" He smiled, and his voice was glow and soft. "I came out of space across seven million years or more. They had lost count—the men had. The machines had eliminated the unneeded service. They didn't know what year it was. But before that—my home is in Neva'th City in the 3059."

	That's when I began to think he was a nut.

	"I was an experimenter," he went on. "Science, as I have said. My father was a scientist, too, but in human genetics. I myself am an experiment. He proved his point, and all the world followed suit. I was the first of the new race."

	"The new race—oh, holy destiny—what has—what will—"

	"What is its end? I have seen it—almost. I saw them—the little men—bewildered—lost. And the machines. Must it be—can't anything sway it?

	"Listen—I heard this song."

	He sang the song. Then he didn't have to tell me about the people. I knew them. I could hear their voices, in the queer, crackling, un-English words. I could read their bewildered longings. It was in a minor key, I think. It called, it called and asked, and hunted hopelessly. And over it all the steady rumble and whine of the unknown, forgotten machines.

	The machines that couldn't stop, because they had been started, and the little men had forgotten how to stop them, or even what they were for, looking at them and listening—and wondering. They couldn't read or write any more, and the language had changed, you see, so that the phonic records of their ancestors meant nothing to them.

	But that song went on, and they wondered. And they looked out across space and they saw the warm, friendly stars—too far away. Nine planets they knew and inhabited. And locked by infinite distance, they couldn't see another race, a new life.

	And through it all—two things. The machines. Bewildered forgetfulness. And maybe one more. Why?

	That was the song, and it made me cold. It shouldn't be sung around people of today. It almost killed something. It seemed to kill hope. After that song—I—well, I believed him.

-

	WHEN he finished the song, he didn't talk for a while. Then he sort of shook himself.

	You won't understand (he continued) Not yet—but I have seen them. They stand about, like misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just haven't thought since then. Kindly little people. That was all they knew. 

	When I slipped into that field it grabbed me like a gravitational field whirling a space transport down to a planet. It sucked me in—and through. Only the other side must have been seven million years in the future. That's where I was. It must have been in exactly the same spot on Earth's surface, but I never knew why. 

	It was night then, and I saw the city a little way off. The Moon was shining on it, and the whole scene looked wrong. You see, in seven million years, men had done a lot with the positions of the planetary bodies, what with moving space liners, clearing lanes through the asteroids, and such. And seven million years is long enough for natural things to change positions a little. The Moon must have been fifty thousand miles farther out And it was rotating on its axis. I lay there a while and watched it, Even the stars were different.

	There were ships going out of the city. Back and forth, like things sliding along a wire, but there. was only a wire of force, of course. Part of the city, the lower part, was brightly lighted with what must have been mercury vapor glow, I decided. Blue-green. I felt sure men didn't live there—the light was wrong for eyes. But the top of the city was so sparsely lighted. 

	Then I saw. something coming down out of the sky. It was brightly lighted. A huge globe, and it sank straight to the center of the great black-and-silver mass of the city.

	I don't know what it was, but even then I knew the city was deserted. Strange that I could even imagine that, I who had never seen a deserted city before. But I walked the fifteen miles over to it and entered it. There were machines going about the streets, repair machines, you know. They couldn't understand that the city didn't need to go on functioning, so they were still working. I found a taxi machine that seemed fairly familiar. It had a manual control that I could work.

	I don't know how long that city had been deserted. Some of the men from the other cities said it was a hundred and fifty thousand years. Some went as high as three hundred thousand years. Three hundred thousand years since human foot had been in that city. The taxi machine was in perfect condition, functioned at once. It was clean, and the. city was clean and orderly. I saw a restaurant and I was hungry. Hungrier for humans to speak to. There were none, of course, but I didn't know.

	The restaurant had the food displayed directly, and I made a choice. The food was three hundred thousand years old, I suppose, I didn't know, and the machines that served it to me didn't care, for they made things synthetically, you see, and perfectly. When the builders made those cities, they forgot one thing. They didn't realize that things shouldn't go on forever.

	It took me six months to make my apparatus. And near the end I was ready to go; and, from seeing those machines go blindly, perfectly, on in orbits of their duties with the tireless, ceaseless perfection their designers had incorporated in them, long after those designers and their sons, and their sons' sons had no use for them—

	When Earth is cold, and the Sun has died out, those machines will go on. When Earth begins to crack and break, those perfect, ceaseless machines will try to repair her—

-

	I LEFT the restaurant and cruised about the city in the taxi. The machine had a little, electric-power motor, I believe, but it gained its power from the great central power radiator. I knew before long that I was, far in the future. The city was divided into two sections, a section of many strata where machines functioned smoothly, save for a deep humming beat that echoed through the whole city like a vast unending song of power. The entire metal framework of the place echoed with it, transmitted it, hummed with it. But it was soft and restful, a reassuring beat.

	There must have been thirty levels above ground, and twenty more below, a solid block of metal walls and metal floors and metal and glass and force machines. The only light was the blue-green glow of the mercury vapor arcs. The light of mercury vapor is rich in high-energy-quanta, which stimulate the alkali metal atoms to photo-electric activity. Or perhaps that is beyond the science of your day? I have forgotten.

	But they had used. that light because many of their worker machines needed sight The machines were marvelous. For five hours I wandered through the vast power plant on the very lowest level, watching them, and because. there was motion, and that pseudo-mechanical life, I felt less alone.

	The generators I saw were a development of the release I had discovered—when? The release of the energy of matter, I mean, and I knew when I saw that for what countless ages they could continue.

	The entire lower block of the city was given over to the machines. Thousands. But most of them seemed idle, or, at most, running under light load. I recognized a telephone apparatus, and not a single signal came through. There was no life in the city. Yet when I pressed a little stud beside the screen on one side of the room, the machine began working instantly. It was ready. Only no one needed it any more. The men knew how to die, and be dead, but the machines didn't.

	Finally I went up to the top of the city, the upper level. It was a paradise. 

	There were shrubs and trees and parks, glowing in the soft light that they had learned to make in the very air. They had learned it five million years or more before. Two million years ago they forgot. But the machines didn't, and they were still making it. It hung in the air, soft, silvery light, slightly rosy, and the gardens were shadowy with it. There were no machines here now, but I knew that in daylight they must come out and work on those gardens, keeping them a paradise for masters who had died, and stopped moving, as they could not.

	In the desert outside the city it had been cool, and very dry. Here the air was soft, warm and sweet with the scent of blooms that men had spent several hundreds of thousands of years perfecting.

	Then somewhere music began. It began in the air, and spread softly through it. The Moon was just setting now, and as it set, the rosy-silver glow waned and the music grew stronger.

	It came from everywhere and from nowhere. It was within me. I do not know how they did it. And I do not know how such music could be written.

	Savages make music too simple to be beautiful, but it is stirring. Semisavages write music beautifully simple, and simply beautiful. Your Negro music was your best. They knew music when they heard it and sang it as they felt it. Semicivilized peoples write great music. They are proud of their music, and make sure it is known for great music. They make it so great it is top-heavy.

	I had always thought our music good. But that which came through the air was the song of triumph, sung by a mature race, the race of man in its full triumph! It was man singing his triumph in majestic sound that swept me up; it showed me what lay before me; it carried me on.

	And it died in the air as I looked at the deserted city. The machines should have forgotten that song. Their masters had, long before.

	I came to what must have been one of their homes; it was a dimly-seen doorway in the dusky light, but as I stepped up to it, the lights which had not functioned in three hundred thousand years illuminated it for me with a green-white glow, like a firefly, and I stepped into the room beyond. Instantly something happened to the air in the doorway behind me; it was as opaque as milk. The room in which I stood was a room of metal and stone. The stone was some jet-black substance with the finish of velvet, and the metals were silver and gold. There was a rug on the floor, a rug of just such material as I am wearing now, but thicker and softer. There were divans about the room, low and covered with these soft metallic materials. They were black and gold and silver, too.

	I had never seen anything like that I never shall again, I suppose, and my language and yours were not made to describe it. 

-

	THE BUILDERS of that city had right and reason to sing that song of sweeping triumph, triumph that swept them over the nine planets and the fifteen habitable moons.

	But they weren't there any more, and I wanted to leave. I thought of a plan and went to a subtelephone office to examine a map I had seen. The old World looked much the same. Seven or even seventy million years don't mean much to old Mother Earth. She may even succeed in wearing down those marvelous machine cities. She can wait a hundred million or a thousand million years before she is beaten.

	I tried calling different city centers shown on the map. I had quickly learned the system when I examined the central apparatua.

	I tried once—twice—thrice—a round dozen times. Yawk City, Lunon City, Paree, Shkago, Singpor, others. I was beginning to feel that there. were no more men on all earth. And I felt crushed, as at each city the machines replied and did my bidding. The machines were there in each of those far vaster cities, for I was in the Neva City of their time. A small city. Yawk City was more than eight hundred kilometers in diameter.

	In each city I tried several numbers. Then I tried San Frisco. There was someone there, and a voice answered and the picture of a human appeared on the little glowing screen. I could see him start and stare in surprise at me. Then he started speaking to me. I couldn't understand, of course. I can understand your speech, and you mine, because your speech of this day is largely recorded on records of various types and has influenced our pronunciation.

	Some things are changed; names of cities, particularly, because names of cities are apt to be polysyllabic, and used a great deal. People tend to elide them, shorten them. I am in—Nee-vah-dah—as you would say? We say only Neva. And Yawk State. But it is Ohio and Iowa still. Over a thousand years, effects were small on words, because they were recorded.

	But seven million years had passed, and the men had forgotten the old records, used them less as time went on, and their speech varied till the time came when they could no longer understand the records. They were not written any more, of course.

	Some men must have arisen occasionally among that last of the race and sought for knowledge, but it was denied them. An ancient writing can be translated if some basic rule is found. An ancient voice though—and when the race has forgotten the laws of science and the labor of mind.

	So his speech was strange to me as he answered over that circuit. His voice was high in pitch, his words liquid, his tones sweet. It was almost a song as he spoke. He was excited and called others. I could not understand them, but I knew where they were. I could go to them.

	So I went down from the paradise gardens, and as I prepared to leave, I saw dawn in the sky. The strange-bright stars winked and twinkled and faded. Only one bright rising star was familiar—Venus. She shone golden now. Finally, as I stood watching for the first time that strange heaven, I began to understand what had first impressed me with the wrongness of the view. The stars, you see, were all different.

	In my time—and yours, the solar system is a lone wanderer that by chance is passing across an intersection point of Galactic clusters. The stars we see at night are the stars of moving clusters, you know. In fact our system is passing through the heart of the Ursa Major group. Half a dozen other groups center within five hundred light-years of us.

	But during those seven millions of years, the Sun had moved out of the group. The heavens were almost empty to the eye. Only here and there shone a single faint star. And across the vast sweep of black sky swung the band of the Milky Way. The sky was empty.

	That must have been another thing those men meant in their songs—felt in their hearts. Loneliness—not even the close, friendly stars. We have, stars within half a dozen light-years. They told me that their instruments, which gave directly the distance to any star, showed that the nearest was one hundred and fifty light-years away. It was enormously bright. Brighter even than Sirius of our heavens. And that made it even less friendly, because it was a blue-white supergiant. Our sun would have served as a satellite for that star.

-

	I STOOD there and watched the lingering rose-silver glow die as the powerful blood-red light of the Sun swept over the horizon. I knew by the stars now, that it must have been several millions of years since my day; since I had last seen the Sun sweep up. And that blood-red light made me wonder if the Sun itself was dying.

	An edge of it appeared, blood-red and huge. It swung up, and the color faded, till in half an hour it was the familiar yellow-gold disk. 

	It hadn't changed in all that time. 

	I had been foolish to think that it would. Seven million years—that is nothing to Earth, how much less to the Sun? Some two thousand thousand thousand times it had risen since I last saw it rise. Two thousand thousand thousand days. If it had been that many years , I might have noticed a change. 

	The universe moves slowly. Only life is not enduring; only life changes swiftly. Eight short millions of years. Eight days in the life of Earth—and the race was dying. It had left something: machines. But they would die, too, even though they could not understand. So I felt. I—may have changed that. I will tell you. Later.

	For when the Sun was up, I looked again at the sky and the ground, some fifty floors below. I had come to the edge of the city.

	Machines were moving on that ground, leveling it, perhaps. A great wide line of gray stretched off across the level desert straight to the east. I had seen it glowing faintly before the Sun rose—a roadway for ground machines. There was no traffic on it.

	I saw an airship slip in from the east. It came with a soft, muttering whine of air, like a child complaining in sleep; it grew to my eyes like an expanding balloon. It was huge when it settled in a great port-slip in the city below. I could hear now the clang and mutter of machines, working on the materials brought in, no doubt. The machines had ordered raw materials. The machines in other cities had supplied. The freight machines had carried them here.

	San Frisco and Jacksville were the only two cities on North America still used. But the machines went on in all the others; because they couldn't stop. They hadn't been ordered to.

	Then high above, something appeared, and from the city beneath me, from a center section, three small spheres rose. They, like the freight ship, had no visible driving mechanisms. The point in the sky above, like a black star in a blue space, had grown to a moon. The three spheres met it high above. Then together they descended and lowered into the center of the city, where I could not see them.

	It was freight transport from Venus. The one I had seen land the night before had come from Mars, I learned.

	I moved after that and looked for some sort of a taxiplane. They had none that I recognized in scouting about the city. I searched the higher levels, and here and there saw deserted ships, but far too large for me, and without controls.

	It was nearly noon—and I ate again. The food was good. 

	I knew then that this was a city of the dead ashes of human hopes. The hopes not of a race, not the whites, nor the yellow, nor the blacks, but the human race. I was mad to leave the city. I was afraid to try the ground road to the west, for the taxi I drove was powered from some source in the city, and I knew it would fail before many miles.

	It was afternoon when I found a small hangar near the outer wall of the vast city. It contained three ships. I had been searching through the lower strata of the human section—the upper part. There were restaurants and shops and theatres there. I entered one place where, at my entrance, soft music began, and colors and forms began to rise on a screen before me.

	They were the triumph songs in form and sound and color of a mature race, a race that had marched steadily upward through five millions of years—and didn't see the path that faded out ahead, when they were dead and stopped, and the, city itself was dead—but hadn't stopped. I hastened out of there—and the song that had not been sung in three hundred thousand years died behind me.

	But I found the hangar. It was a private one, likely. Three ships. One must have been fifty feet long and fifteen in diameter. It was a yacht, a space yacht, probably. One was some fifteen feet long and five feet in diameter. That must have been the family air machine. The third was a tiny thing, little more than ten feet long and two in diameter. I had to lie down within it, evidently.

	There was a periscope device that gave me a view ahead and almost directly above. A window that permitted me to see what lay below—and a device that moved a map under a frosted-glass screen and projected it onto the screen in such a way that the cross-hairs of the screen always marked my position.

-

	I SPENT half an hour attempting to understand what the makers of that ship had made. But the men who made that were men who held behind them the science and knowledge of five millions of years and the perfect machines of those ages. I saw the release mechanism that powered it. I understood the principles of that and, vaguely, the mechanics. But there were no conductors, only pale beams that pulsed so swiftly you could hardly catch the pulsations from the corner of the eye. They had been glowing and pulsating, some half dozen of them, for three hundred thousand years at least; probably more.

	I entered the machine, and instantly half a dozen more beams sprang into being; there was a slight suggestion of a quiver, and a queer strain ran through my body. I understood in an instant, for the machine was resting on gravity nullifiers. That had been my hope when I worked on the space fields I discovered after the release.

	But they had had it for millions of years before they built that perfect deathless machine. My weight entering it had forced it to readjust itself and simultaneously to prepare for operation. Within, an artificial gravity equal to that of Earth had gripped me, and the neutral zone between the outside and the interior had caused the strain.

	The machine was ready. It was fully fueled. You see they were equipped to tell automatically their wants and needs. They were almost living things, every one. A caretaker machine kept them supplied, adjusted, even repaired them when need be, and when possible. If it was not, I learned later, they were carried away in a service truck that came automatically; replaced by an exactly similar machine; and carried to the shops where they were made, and automatic machines made them over.

	The machine waited patiently for me to start. The controls were simple, obvious. There was a lever at the left that you pushed forward to move forward, pulled back to go back. On the right a horizontal, pivoted bar. If you swung it left, the ship spun left; if right, the ship spun right. If tipped up, the ship followed it, and likewise for all motions other than backward and forward. Raising it bodily raised the ship, as depressing it depressed the ship.

	I lifted it slightly, a needle moved a bit on a gauge comfortably before my eyes as I lay there, and the floor dropped beneath me. I pulled the other control back, and the ship gathered speed as it moved gently out into the open. Releasing both controls into neutral, the machine continued till it stopped at the same elevation, the motion absorbed by air friction. I turned it about, and another dial before my eyes moved, showing my position. I could not read it, though. The map did not move, as I had hoped it would. So I started toward what I felt was west.

	I could feel no acceleration in that marvelous machine. The ground simply began leaping backward, and in a moment the city was gone. The map unrolled rapidly beneath me now, and I saw that I was moving south of west. I turned northward slightly, and watched the compass. Soon I understood that, too, and the ship sped on. 

	I had become too interested in the map and the compass, for suddenly there was a sharp buzz and, without my volition, the machine rose and swung to the north. There was a mountain ahead of me; I had not seen, but the ship had.

	I noticed then what I should have seen before—two little knobs that could move the map. I started to move them and heard a sharp clicking, and the pace of the ship began decreasing. A moment and it had steadied at a considerably lower speed, the machine swinging to a new course. I tried to right it, but to my amazement the controls did not affect it.

	It was the map, you see. It would either follow the course, or the course would follow it. I had moved it and the machine had taken over control of its own accord. There was a little button I could have pushed—but I didn't know. I couldn't control the ship until it finally came to rest and lowered itself to a stop six inches from the ground in the center of what must have been the ruins of a great city. Sacramento, probably.

	I understood now, so I adjusted the map for San Frisco, and the ship went on at once. It steered itself around a mass of broken stone, turned back to its course, and headed on, a bullet-shaped, self-controlled dart.

	It didn't descend when it reached San Frisco. It simply hung in the air and sounded a soft musical hum. Twice. Then I waited, too, and looked down.

	There were people here. I saw the humans of that age for the first time. They were little men—bewildered—dwarfed, with heads disproportionately large. But not extremely so.

	Their eyes impressed me most. They were huge, and when they looked at me there was a power in them that seemed sleeping, but too deeply to be roused.

	I took the manual controls then and landed. And no sooner had I got out, than the ship rose automatically and started off by itself. They had automatic parking devices. The ship had gone to a public hangar, the nearest, where it would be automatically serviced and cared for. There was a little call set I should have taken with me when I got out. Then I could have pressed a button and called it to me—wherever I was in that city.

-

	THE PEOPLE about me began talking—singing almost—among themselves Others were coming up-'leisurely. Men and women—but there seemed no old and few young. What few young there were, were treated almost with respect, carefully taken care of lest a careless footstep on their toes or a careless step knock them down.

	There was reason, you see. They lived a tremendous time. Some lived as long as three thousand years. Then—they simply died. They didn't grow old, and it never had been learned why people died as they did. The heart stopped, the brain ceased thought—and they died. But the young children, children not yet mature, were treated with the utmost care. But one child was born in the course of a month in that city of one hundred thousand people. The human race was growing sterile.

	And I have told you that they were lonely? Their loneliness was beyond hope. For, you see, as man strode toward maturity, he destroyed all forms of life that menaced, him. Disease. Insects. Then the last of the insects, and finally the last of the man-eating animals.

	The balance of nature was destroyed then, so they had to go on. It was like the machines. They started them—and now they can't stop. They started destroying life—and now it wouldn't stop. So they had to destroy weeds of all sorts, then many formerly harmless plants. Then the herbivora, too, the deer and the antelope and the rabbit and the horse. They were a menace, they attacked man's machine-tended crops. Man was still eating natural foods.

	You can understand. The thing was beyond their control. In the end they killed off the denizens of the sea, also, in self-defense. Without the many creatures that had kept them in check, they were swarming beyond bounds. And the time had come when synthetic foods replaced natural. The air was purified of all life about two and a half million years after our day, all microscopic life. 

	That meant that the water, too, must be purified. It was—and then came the end of life in the ocean. There were minute organisms that lived on bacterial forms, and tiny fish that lived on the minute organisms, and small fish that lived on the tiny fish, and big fish that lived on the small fish—and the beginning of the chain was gone. The sea was devoid of life in a generation. That meant about one thousand and five hundred years to them. Even the sea plants had gone.

	And on all Earths there was only man and the organisms he had protected—the plants he wanted for decoration, and certain ultra-hygienic pets, as long-lived as their masters. Dogs. They must have been remarkable animals. Man was reaching his maturity then, and his animal friend, the friend that had followed him through a thousand millenniums to your day and mine, and another four thousand millenniums to the day of man's early maturity, had grown in intelligence. In an ancient museum—a wonderful place, for they had, perfectly preserved, the body of a great leader of mankind who had died five and a half million years before I saw him—in that museum, deserted then, I saw one of those canines. His skull was nearly as large as mine. They had simple ground machines that dogs could be trained to drive, and they held races in which the dogs drove those machines.

	Then man reached his full maturity. It extended over a period of a full million years. So tremendously did he stride ahead, the dog ceased to be a companion. Less and less were they wanted. When the million years had passed, and man's decline began, the dog was gone. It had died out.

	And now this last dwindling group of men still in the system had no other life form to make its successor. Always before when one civilization toppled, on its ashes rose a new one. Now there was but one civilization, and all other races, even other species, were gone save in the plants. And man was too far along in his old age to bring intelligence and mobility from the plants. Perhaps he could have in his prime.

-

	OTHER WORLDS were flooded with man during that million years—the million years. Every planet and every moon of the system had its quota of men. Now only the planets had their populations, the moons had been deserted. Pluto had been left before I landed, and men were coming from Neptune, moving in toward the Sun, and the home planet, while I was there. Strangely quiet men, viewing, most of them, for the first time, the planet that had given their race life.

	But as I stepped from that ship and watched it rise away from me, I saw why the race of man was dying. I looked back at the faces of those men, and on them I read the answer. There was one single quality gone from the still-great minds—minds far greater than yours or mine. I had to have the help of one of them in solving some of my problems. In space, you know, there are twenty coordinates, ten of which are zero, six of which have fixed values, and the four others represent our changing, familiar dimensions in space-time. That means that integrations must proceed in not double, or triple, or quadruple—but ten integrations.

	It must have taken me too long. I would never have solved all the problems I must work out. I could not use their mathematics machines; and mine, of course, were seven million years in the past. But one of those men was interested and helped me. He did quadruple and quintuple integration, even quadruple integration between varying exponential limits—in his head.

	When I asked him to. For the one thing that had made man great had left him. As I looked in their faces and eyes on landing I knew it. They looked at me, interested at this rather unusual-looking stranger—and went on. They had come to see the arrival of a ship. A rare event, you see. But they were never welcoming me in a friendly fashion. They were not curious! Man had lost the instinct of curiosity.

	Oh, not entirely! They wondered at the machines, they wondered at the stars. But they did nothing about it. It was not wholly lost to them yet, but nearly. It was dying. In the six short months I stayed with them, I learned more than they had learned in the two or even three thousand years they had lived among the machines.

	Can you appreciate the crushing loneliness it brought to me? I, who love science, who see in it, or have seen in it, the salvation, the raising of mankind—to see those wondrous machines, of man's triumphant maturity, forgotten and misunderstood. The wondrous, perfect machines that tended, protected, and cared for those gentle, kindly people who had—forgotten.

	They were lost among it. The city was a magnificent ruin to them, a thing that rose stupendous about them. Something not understood, a thing that was of the nature of the world. It was. It had not been made: it simply was. Just as 'the mountains and the deserts and the waters of the seas.

	Do you understand—can you see that the time since those machines were new was longer than the time from our day to the birth of the race? Do we know the legends of our first ancestors? Do we remember their lore of forest and cave? The secret of chipping a flint till it had a sharp-cutting edge? The secret of trailing and killing a saber-toothed tiger without being killed oneself?

	They were now in similar straits, though the time had been longer, because the languages had taken a long step toward perfection, and because the machines maintained everything for them through generation after generation.

	Why, the entire planet of Pluto had been deserted—yet on Pluto the largest mines of one of their metals were located; the machines still functioned. A perfect unity existed throughout the system. A unified system of perfect machines.

	And all those people knew was to do a certain thing to a certain level produced certain results. Just as men in the Middle Ages knew that to take a certain material, wood, and place it in contact with other pieces of wood heated red, would cause the wood to disappear, and become heat. They did not understand that wood was being oxidized with the release of the heat of formation of carbon dioxide and water. So those people did not understand the things that fed and clothed and carried them.

-

	I STAYED with them there for three days. And then I went to Jacksville. Yawk City, too. That was enormous. It stretched over—well, from well north of where Boston is today to well south of Washington—that was what they called Yawk City."

	I never believed that, when he said it," said Jim, interrupting himself. "I knew he didn't. If he had I think he'd have bought land somewhere along there and held for a rise in value. I know Jim. He'd have the idea that seven million years was something like seven hundred, and maybe his great-grandchildren would be able to sell it."

	Anyway, went on Jim, he said it was all because the cities had spread so. Boston spread south. Washington, north. And Yawk City spread all over. And the cities between grew into them.

	And it was all one vast machine. It was perfectly ordered and perfectly neat. They had a transportation system that took me from the North End to the South End in three minutes. I timed it. They had learned to neutralize acceleration.

	Then I took one of the great space liners to Neptune. There were still some running. Some people, you see, were coming the other way.

	The ship was huge. Mostly it was a freight liner. It floated up from Earth, a great metal cylinder three quarters of a mile long, and a quarter of a mile in diameter. Outside the atmosphere it began to accelerate. I could see Earth dwindle. I have ridden one of our own liners to Mars, and it took me, in 3048, five days. In half an hour on this liner Earth was just a star, with a smaller, dimmer star near it. In an hour we passed Mars. Eight hours later we landed on Neptune. M'reen was the city. Large as the Yawk City of my day—and no one living there.

	The planet was cold and dark—horribly cold. The sun was a tiny, pale disk, heatless and almost lightless. But the city was perfectly comfortable. The air was fresh and cool, moist with the scent of growing blossoms, perfumed with them. And the whole giant metal framework trembled just slightly with the humming, powerful beat of the mighty machines that had made and cared for it.

	I learned from records I deciphered, because of my knowledge of the ancient tongue that their tongue was based on, and the tongue of that day when man was dying, that the city was built three million, seven hundred and thirty thousand, one hundred and fifty years after my birth. Not a machine had been touched by the hand of man since that day.

	Yet the air was perfect for man. And the warm, rose-silver glow hung in the air here and supplied the only illumination.

	I visited some of their other cities where there were men. And there, on the retreating outskirts of man's domain, I first heard the Song of Longings, as I called it.

	And another, The Song of Forgotten Memories. Listen:

	He sang another of those songs. "There's one thing I know, declared Jim. That bewildered note was stronger in his voice, and by that time I guess I pretty well understood his feelings. Because, you have to remember, I heard it only secondhand from an ordinary man, and Jim had heard it from an eye-and-ear witness that was not ordinary, and heard it in that organ voice. Anyway, I guess Jim was right when he said: "He wasn't any ordinary man." No ordinary man could think of those songs. They weren't right. When he sang that song, it was full of more of those plaintive minors. I could feel him searching his mind for something he had forgotten, something he desperately wanted to remember—something he knew he should have known—and I felt it eternally elude him. I felt it get further away from him as he sang. I heard that lonely, frantic searcher attempting to recall that thing—that thing that would save him.

	And I heard him give a little sob of defeat—and the song ended. Jim tried a few notes. He hasn't a good ear for music—but that was too powerful to forget Just a few hummed notes. Jim hasn't much imagination, I guess, or when that man of the future sang to him he would have gone mad. It shouldn't be sung to modern men; it isn't meant for them. You've heard those heart-rending cries some animals give, like human cries, almost? A loon, now—he sounds like a lunatic being murdered horribly.

	That's just unpleasant. That song made you feel just exactly what the singer meant—because it didn't just sound human—it was human. It was the essence of humanity's last defeat, I guess. You always feel sorry for the chap who loses after trying hard. Well, you could feel the whole of humanity trying hard—and losing. And you knew they couldn't afford to lose, because they couldn't try again.

	He said he'd been interested before. And still not wholly upset by these machines that couldn't stop. But that was too much for him.

	I knew after that, he said, that these weren't men I could live among. They were dying men, and I was alive with the youth of the race. They looked at me with the same longing, hopeless wonder with which they looked at the stars and the machines. They knew what I was, but couldn't understand.

	I began to work on leaving.

-

	IT TOOK six months. It was hard because my instruments were gone, of course, and theirs didn't read in the same units. And there were few instruments, anyway. The machines didn't read instruments; they acted on them. They were sensory organs to them.

	But Reo Lantal helped where he could. And I came back.

	I did just one thing before I left that may help. I may even try to get back there sometime. To see, you know.

	I said they had machines that could really think? But that someone had stopped them a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them?

	I found some records and deciphered them. I started one of the last and best of them and started it on a great problem. It is only fitting it should be done. The machine can work on it, not for a thousand years, but for a million, if it must.

	I started five of them actually, and connected them together as the records directed.

	They are trying to make a machine with something that man had lost. It sounds rather comical. But stop to think before you laugh. And remember that Earth as I saw it from the ground level of Neva City just before Reo Lantal threw the switch.

	Twilight—the suns has set The desert out beyond, in its mystic, changing colors. The great, metal city rising straight-walled to the human city above, broken by spires and towers and great trees with scented blossoms. The silvery-rose glow in the paradise of gardens above.

	And all the great city-structure throbbing and humming to the steady gentle beat of perfect, deathless machines built more than three million years before—and never touched since that time by human hands. And they go on. The dead city. The men that have lived, and hoped, and built—and died to leave behind them those little men who can only wonder and look and long for a forgotten kind of companionship. They wander through the vast cities their ancestors built, knowing less of them than the machines themselves.

	And the songs. Those tell the story best, I think. Little, hopeless, wondering men amid vast unknowing, blind machines that started three million years before—and just never know how to stop. They are dead—and can't die and be still.

	So I brought another machine to life, and set it to a task which, in time to come, it will perform.

	I ordered it to make a machine which would have what man had lost. A curious machine.

	And then I wanted to leave quickly and go back. I had been born in the first full light of man's day. I did not belong in the lingering, dying glow of man's twilight.

	So I came back. A little too far back. But it will not take me long to return—accurately this time.

	"Well, that was his story," Jim said. "He didn't tell me it was true—didn't say anything about it. And he had me thinking so hard I didn't even see him get off in Reno when we stopped for gas.

	"But—he wasn't an ordinary man," repeated Jim, in a rather belligerent tone.

	Jim claims he doesn't believe the yarn, you know. But he does; that's why he always acts so determined about it when he says the stranger wasn't an ordinary man.

	No, he wasn't, I guess. I think he lived and died, too, probably, sometime in the thirty-first century. And I think he saw the twilight of the race, too.

The End

The Irrelevant
Astounding Stories – December 1934
 (as by Karl van Campen)

A story that disproves the law of conservation of energy.

-

	Kent Barret looked down from the port of the metal hull with a strangely tense, yet calm, smile. Not above a score of people were below, on the concrete starting surface. Three of his engineers, a lawyer, a protesting elderly gentleman, a heavy, uncomfortable-looking deputy sheriff, and half a dozen ironically grinning newsmen. There was a steadily grinding news camera catching the absurd scene, while the cameraman looked on smiling.

	"But. Mr. Barret," snapped the elderly gentleman in an outraged voice, "do you realize that you will be held in contempt of court—contempt of court, mind you, is an offense for which you will be jailed—if you disobey this injunction and attempt to fly that ship?"

	Barret's deep, pleasant voice answered pleasantly: "I'm sorry Mr. Gethry, but you too must remember that I have worked for this moment for nearly thirty years. I fully intend to sail out into space—"

	"But," Gethry interrupted angrily, "it is sheer suicide! You yourself have admitted that it is insanely suicidal!"

	"No," replied Barret, smiling: "not 'insanely suicidal'—merely suicidal. Admittedly, I can't come back. There a difference, however, between an insanely suicidal venture and one that is merely suicidal." Barret's pleasant smile widened as he glanced at the grinning news men. "And this venture is merely suicidal.

	"You see, you are in a rather peculiar position. You, and your Protect-a-life Society, hare obtained an injunction halting me on penalty of contempt of court, hut you can do nothing legally till I am in contempt of court, and I shall not be till I sail. When I have sailed, I am then in contempt of court, and you can do something legally—but really, you'll find it exceedingly difficult to do anything practical.

	"I happen to represent a sort of irresistible force. That force is mankind's determination to reach other planets. Unfortunately, man was born on the wrong planet—Earth, and when the universe was designed it was so arranged that the energy of combustion of hydrogen and oxygen should be such, per pound, as would barely lift one pound of the mixture to the Moon.

	"By means of this large and expensive device I shall presently find myself penniless—but marooned on the Moon, and. frankly, quite unable to get back. There is a certain number of foot pounds of work required to lift a body through the two hundred and some odd thousands of miles of space to the point where Earth's gravity and Moon's gravity cancel each other, and a certain additional number of foot pounds of energy required to lower a body from that point to the surface of the Moon.

	"Now it just so happens that that number is almost exactly equal to the energy of a hydro-oxygen flame. The result is—I can barely make the trip. I shall land with about three days supply of oxygen, after a brief and flaming ride. Actually, the three days oxygen, and the weight of the ship is moved only at the expense of being able to more not a mile after I land."

	"What possible good will it do?" snapped Gethry.

	"Oh. I don't know. Bet it will satisfy me." Barret smiled. "Besides, landing at the extreme edge of the known section, as I intend. I shall be able to send back a great deal of highly interesting data. I hope so, at any rate. Besides, since it takes no energy to cruise in an orbit, I shall be the first man to seek the dark side of the Moon.

	"Funny name for it really—it gets just as much sunlight as the other side, only because man can't see it, he calls it the dark side. Or maybe because it never gets any Earthlight. At any rate, I shall be able to make some sort of report. The broadcasting stations will be handling reports presently, I suspect, so you can listen in. I'll even send you a last, personal message to assure you that life is not always the highest value, no matter what you may insist."

	"Why—it is; it must be! What can have higher value? What is anything worth if you cannot enjoy it?"

	"Mr. Gethry. have you. perhaps, a son?"

	"Yes—yes. I have—"

	"Then you know that there is something in this quite material world that has a higher value to you than your own life."

	Barret smiled again at the news men, his gray eyes twinkling. "At any rate, because the mutual affinity of hydrogen and oxygen is what it is, and because the surface acceleration due to gravity is thirty-two feet per second, and because the inverse square law applies just as well under Einsteinian laws as under Newtonian. I simply can't make a trip there and back, so I'm going to make a trip there."

	"But you are young—only thirty-seven—perhaps it may be but a year or two before some one will invent a more powerful gasoline, or whatever it is you use, that can take you both ways."

	"That," replied Barret sorrowfully, "is what I devoted the first twenty-nine years of my life to; that is why in 1943 I made my first hundred thousand on acetolene fuel for the gas engine—one hundred miles in every, gallon—won't you try a tankful?"

	"I use it," snapped Gethry, "naturally. A man so brilliant as you are should see that his life is too valuable."

	"Ah—he recommends I ask some one else to do what I'm afraid to."

	"No. no!" Gethry snapped excitedly. "I don't—of course I don't! But can't you make some new and better acetolene or something?"

	"Unfortunately, chemistry doesn't work that way. Acetolene is a derivate of acetylene—C2H2—and acetylene has a negative heat of formation about equal to the heat of formation of water—in other words, acetylene breaks down to pure carbon and hydrogen and gives off as much energy as hydrogen and oxygen do when they bum.

	"That would be the limiting amount of energy any such fuel could hate, per pound and unfortunately, even with this negative heat of formation, oxygen and hydrogen alone give more energy per pound. The fuel that can't be beat—I tried a tankful."

	Barret's smile widened again momentarily. "For instance—even an injunction can't beat it. But the round trip from Earth to Moon and back does. I am sorry to report. There is no possibility, I am sorry to say of finding a fuel which contains more energy per pound."

	Gethry turned to the stolid deputy sheriff accompanying him. "Mr. Deputy. I demand that you stop him somehow."

	The lawyer spoke up for the first time: "Sorry. Mr. Gethry. my client claims his legal rights—the deputy cannot annoy or interfere with his business to long as he has not violated the order, of the injunction."

-

	Kent Barret smiled once more as he ducked his head back into the metal shell to look at his instruments.

	In a few seconds he looked out again. "At any rate. I'm afraid my time is about up."

	There was a slow milling among the men on the ground, voices rose from a soft whisper of sound to a rustling murmur that drowned out old Forrest Gethry's complaints. Slowly, the men moved away toward the concrete structure which was to  house and protect them during the flaming start.

	Kent Barret watched them with his slow smile till Gethry had been urged, protesting, into the domed, fireproof structure. Then he turned to his instruments.

	There were few, in comparison to an ordinary airplane, even. Eight simple fuel gauges, three dimensional-position indicators, an accelerometer, a barometer, and a speed indicator.

	That last he caressed lovingly—it represented a half year of fruitless work, till a quite-untrained friend had made a blundering remark about "have them send you your speed by radio or something."

	It was, as the friend had stated it, quite a cockeyed idea, inasmuch as the problem in the first place was to measure it, but the mere idea of radio had somehow clicked, and. characteristically, the human mind had seen the solution complete.

	The result was a short-wave radio beam, housed in that domed structure, which sent a constant call on an exactly determined frequency, a wave length of only half a meter, projected as a beam.

	A small set picked it up on the ship, and that set was so arranged that, as the speed of the ship increased, and the Doppler effect lowered the apparent frequency, one element would automatically be kept in tune, while-a standard oscillating crystal would maintain a fixed comparison frequency.

	The difference between these would be read directly as a velocity accurate to five hundredths of a mile a second— an error of only one or two thousand miles an hour.

	It was a highly important device. That, the accelerometer, and the chronometer, would regulate the flight. He was due to start in eleven and three fourths minutes now. The velocitometer was the real trick—in fact it was the mechanical beam that would take over when he started. That, and the electrothermostat.

	Rapidly Barret's mind ran over the process, checking for the millionth time—his gray eyes creased and deep-set as he glanced sharply at the instruments in turn. At the take-off. the accelerometer would regulate the fuel valves to maintain an acceleration of four gravities, until the hull of the ship began to heat, and the electrothermostat cut down the acceleration

	Then as the ship rose beyond the air. to open space, the thermostat would open the valves again with the cooling of the ship the accelerometer would have complete charge, and the acceleration of four gravities would be maintained automatically, until the velocity determined on—6.05 miles per second-was reached.

	Then the velocitometer apparatus would close the valves automatically, and the ship would dart on, weightless. And at an average speed of nearly two miles a second, about one hundred thousand seconds would be required to reach and maintain his orbit about the Moon, about a little more than a single day of his life—what a day!

-

	With an exultant stretch, Barret took a last look about, glanced at the red mark on the chronometer set in the tiny, domed, heavily braced ceiling, and cramped himself into his acceleration bunk.

	It wasn't for sleeping. Kent Barret didn't intend to do any sleeping in the four brief, glorious days. Just a few tablets of anital and hang the exhaustion that followed! He'd be ultimately exhausted, anyway, by then.

	Settled, his eyes on the chronometer in the roof directly before his eyes. Barret watched the hand reach the mark—and pulled the trip cord. Something buzzed angrily, like a whole nest of hornets, then the world dissolved in stars and blankness and roaring sound.

	Barret was unconscious in an instant as the rocket leaped into speed and roared up on a tower of washing blue flame. He was unconscious of the awful shriek of ruptured air as the thing flung itself upward, the constant, swift-acting thrusts of the gyroscopes steadying its wabbling course against the top-heavy action of the rocket thrust solely from the rear.

	But he almost regained consciousness as, for nearly a minute, it drifted up. its outer coat nearly red-hot from air friction, its rocket tubes white-hot, and shut off by the thermostat apparatus. Then he sank deeper into unconsciousness as the thrust roared out again, and the shriek of air died away, with the last fringes of Earth's blanket.

	Then the roar continued very steady and very loud in the metal ship. The tiny cabin grew hot, automatic fans turned on Barret as be slept, and perspiration oozed from him. Air-conditioning apparatus that could dry the air till that of the Sahara seemed jungle-humid in comparison went into action, chemically soaking the water from the air.

	Cooling was an impossibility, since any refrigerating apparatus merely pumps heat from one place to another, and in this isolated mite in space, there was no "other place" But the man had, thanks to nature, a cooling system quite adequate.

	The temperature rose in that ovenlike cabin till it reached 273 degrees Fahrenheit, a few dull explosions sounded as canned food exploded when the water inside passed the boiling point, but the nan remained inert—and unharmed. The fans had cut down, to a mere slight breeze, a movement of that superheated air as thermostat devices operated.

	Kent Barret was not the first man to live in an oven for a short time. For less of a bet than this, men had stood in ovens while meat was roasted beside them.

	But when the eternal roar stopped suddenly, within a few minutes the man, floating now weightless in the air, sneezed violently, and awakened convulsively to find a boiling hot tomato floating in the air near him and stinging bits of hot metal and tomato on his hands and arms.

	There was silence and terrific heat here now. Only the faint click of a relay here or there. Only the faint chick of—— Kent Barret stared at the roof. The chronometer was motionless.
Slowly his eyes narrowed, the keen mind was startled and worried—without his chronometer—his only good chronometer since they were necessarily so heavy—

	"I'll be damned—we tested the thing against heat—we tested it against accelerations, but like a flock of colossal blockheads we didn't test k against heat and acceleration!"

	The heavy acceleration, the burning heat—and the film of oil, perhaps, had departed. Perhaps the temper had been drawn from the hairspring. Anyway, it was useless. Perhaps other apparatus had failed—

	Barret twisted around, stooped the tomato out of his way, and with the kiss of his air rocket he maneuvered toward the control board. There was a butterfly net suspended there for just such emergencies as these, and in a few seconds he had raked the dangerously hot tomatoes out of the air and thrust them in the closed garbage shoot.

	Then he made an examination. With a gasp of dismay he stared at his fuel gauges. They showed, as they should, that his landing fuel was all there—the fuel which should land him on the Moon, but they showed that far more of his starting fuel remained than should.

-

	BARRET drew himself down into his chair and slowly pulled the strap across. Thoughtfully be looked over the fuel gauges again. Something had gone very wrong. He looked at his velocitometer and then looked again. He sighed gently.

	That was what had gone wrong. It read 6.05, exactly as it should, but Barret had made too many exact calculations to be deceived. That meant a kinetic energy of such a value that, to supply it, all the energy of his fuel would have been required. There simply wasn't that much energy locked up in the amount of fuel which bad been burned, so that meant that the velocitometer had gone wrong.-

	With a slow determination Barret reached out toward a little balsa-wood rack Five white cylinders rested beside a bit of folded paper. With motions almost grim be took one of the five white cylinders, stuck it in his mouth, and lighted his cigarette. Cigarettes were very precious, because oxygen was. It was surprising, though, how they aided thought.

	"In the first place." Barret said, half aloud, trying unsuccessfully to scan back in the weightless ship, and watching in annoyance as the cigarette smoke refused to rise, but became a growing cloud about the end of the cylinder. "I suspect I'm—er—not sunk exactly, just lost. My instruments are now quite cockeyed; I don't know when I am, or even where.

	"I can, of course, get a time signal. I might even get a velocity signal, though I haven't any proper radio apparatus Bit I have been carrying a load of several tons of fuel against Earth's gravity for a long distance, and it's pulling me down. In fact, I might say it's getting me down.

	"Lifting the fuel unnecessary miles, probably thousands of miles, means I won't have energy enough left to do the trick-He puffed gently, and blew away the doughnut -shaped cloud of smoke that hung almost motionless around his cigarette. The place wasn't so hot now; it was cooling swiftly.

	"Perhaps a little information would be of service"

	Barret turned to his sending apparatus thoughtfully and looked then at the velocitometer.

	'It must be doing something, at any rate. Maybe it would receive code."

	Thoughtfully be rose and cut off a switch which disconnected the automatic velocitometer controls. Then be returned and started his own radio apparatus.

	He called four times before sending a message. Then he asked them to signal with the velocitometer beam. He hadn't intended receiving messages. But now he had to. Abruptly he saw the velocitometer needle flop to the end of its run and quiver excitedly.

	Barret shook his head with slow judgment. "No." he muttered judiciously, "it won't get you anywhere to get all excited like that."

	He turned to his own key.

	"Don't get excited—the needle can't follow. Send about two signals a second. I suppose yon asked what's wrong. The answer is that I don't know. The clock stopped. Apparently the velocitometer did too. It says I'm making the speed, but I've got more fuel left than I should have by a large margin.

	"First, I want a time signal My pocket watch stopped during the acceleration, but it's going again. My body kept it cool. Then, if you can slow down that jabber so that the needle doesn't get a hot box, get some instruments on me and see what I'm doing. I can't even see Earth from this position.

	"I told you that periscope rig would fold up when I went through the atmosphere, and it did. My flap valve sealed it off though, so no damage done, except I can't see back. Old Luna looks much the same, and Sirius is so bright I thought it was a lighthouse. Right now I want to know what to do.

	"Time," flickered the needle slowly and with pomp, as though it overestimated its importance in the scheme of things. "1:48:30 when I sent the long signal—"

	The needle flopped, and Barret noted it. He set his watch carefully.

	"We were watching you. Seemed to cut off rockets too soon. Not more than minutes or so, though. Checking by instruments. Green Bay and Mount Wilson looking your way with small, accurate instruments."

	The needle began to speed up gradually through the message.. Barret grinned and turned to his- own key again.

	"I know how hard it is to send slow, but really. Paul, you'll melt a bearing. Tie a needle in your own circuit and judge your speed by it. When it flickers I can't read it. One way it gives me the jitters watching it; the other it gives me nothing at all."

	"Sorry—observatories reporting. Say velocity neighborhood of 6.0325 miles per second. Say sorry can't be accurate as observations take time." The needle flickered in the radio laugh-signal.

	"Ask them if they measured by the second rivet on the right seam or the fifth rivet on the tail guide. My blasted says 6.1 m.p.s minus. Can this blasted thing be right?"

	"Maybe the trouble is with fuel gauges."

	"So. Checked on that. Can calculations we made be wrong? Shut up. Want to work."

	Barret moved sharply to his pencil and paper.

-

	IN FIVE minutes Barret had the figures down that represented the energy needed to escape the Earth's attraction with the aid of the Moon's pull; then the energy represented by the hydrogen fuel he had carried. They were almost exactly equal, the hydro-oxygen representing a very slight margin of safety.

	But the fuel gauge showed a far greater quantity. And the highly accurate observations, not merely of his own instruments, but of the observatories on Earth, showed something very remarkable. A careful calculation of kinetic energy showed quite conclusively, even when he used Einstein's relativity kinetic-energy formula, that he and his ship now possessed about twenty per cent more kinetic energy and potential energy than there had been in the fuel with which he started.

	Kent Barret squinted one eye at the figures. "I have heard." he said judiciously, "that figures don t lie, but that liars figure. That makes one of us a liar. I didn't start out to create energy, nor to break the law of the conservation of energy, even if I did start out in contempt of court.

	"The present situation would indicate that I am not only contemptible in the eyes of the court, but even the laws of the universe hold me so low they don't bother with me. I can scarcely conceive of a special dispensation."

	Barret turned to his transmitter.

	"Paul, have you done any figuring?" he asked.

	The needle flickered. "Yes. Your fuel gauge is stuck, or you've broken the law of conservation of energy."

	"Find out," directed Barret, "who has charge of the enforcement of that law." A sudden understanding had come to him as he watched the flickering needle. His eyes were shining, a light of immense enjoyment was in them. "I've broken that law! And—I'm going to tell you something. Remember you wanted to know why I named this thing the Ghost! You objected that it was not as silent as a ghost."

	"Yes—why?"

	"I've got a new name for it. I called it the Ghost because it was unearthly—or at least intended to be. The new name is the Irrelevant. Look it up in a dictionary while I do some calculating, and ask the observatories to do some accurate checking. In about five minutes I'm going to burn exactly one hundred pounds of hydro-oxygen mixture.

-

	BACK ON EARTH Paul Rilan looked blankly at the clustered news men as the message came through.

	"Does anybody know the answer to that bum joke?" he asked plaintively. Think it over while I wire the observatories."

	Paul turned again to the key and pounded out a swift message to the observatories. In a few seconds an answer came back giving Barret's exact speed. The news men were clustered around a little dictionary extracted from a small bookshelf at one end of the scantily furnished office.

	"Here." said Brady of the Banner, "irrational—that would make sense in this connection, but it's the wrong word—here it is—'irrelevant; not relevant or opposite: impertinent.' Hmm—the thing is impertinent to try that trick; it is impertinent to shatter the known laws of physics, especially the law of conservation of energy, but it isn't illuminating. What in blares does he mean?"

	"You ask him?" suggested Rilan sourly. "He never would tell me. I'm busy relaying the observatory answers, and it gives me the blue willies to key at a rate like this. I forget where I am. Shut up!"

	Kent Barrel read off the observatory figures carefully, and noted them down. Then he started his controls and, with the aid of his exact metering devices, fed into his rocket exactly one hundred pounds of the mixture, and listened to the contented roar of the great tubes. The temperature, which had fallen to 104-1/2 degrees, promptly climbed to 114-1/4, but for some few seconds Barret had a full two Earth-gravity accelerations.

	Then silence and weightlessness returned. Barret contentedly went on with his figures, with half an eye on the velocitometer needle. Presently it began to flicker. It was bringing the reports of the observatory on his increase of speed, measured with the enormous exactitude of which the great instruments were capable.

	"My theory is right," Barret signaled happily "My predictions checked with the observatory figures to the fourth decimal place. The ship it Irrelevant."

	"What do you mean by that?" demanded the needle.

	Barret smiled slowly and contentedly as he reexamined his instruments. "I'll tell you when I come back!" he sent.

-

	THE LANDING on the Moon was much easier than Barret bad expected it to be, now that he knew the secret of space. And it was not hard to leave after only two days, for he had accumulated a vast amount of data. And as he had predicted, there was quite sufficient fuel reserve now to carry him away from the Moon.

	After that, of course, it was easy; not exactly for beginners, was the parachute decent he made into the Atlantic with the aid of a rather patched and scanty parachute.

	"It was a fine ride, but kind of cold," he said, grinning, when the tug picked him up. "I had to leave the Irrelevant when I was in the upper stratosphere. This suit was designed for use on the Moon, and in sunlight, where heat was more of a problem than cold, so it wasn't too warm. I fell at about seven hundred miles an hour at first, so I got through the coldest part pretty quickly, and by the time the air was thick enough to stop the parachute, it began to get warm enough to live m.

	"Kent—you did get back!" Paul Rilan shook his wet hand with a tremendous gladness "But why—where were our figures wrong? You haven't yet told me how you did it."

	"Paul, we're millionaires! I have invented an engine that generates more power than it uses."

	"How—how?" demanded the exasperated engineer.

	"The Irrelevants. They aren't relative. That's where we went wrong. Listen. Paul, the Earth has an enormous magnetic field—I measured it out there, you know. It's my field coil—my field magnet. All I need is an armature out there in space, an armature with great metal-wire coils cutting those bases of force and. presto, a generator!"

	"You mean a space ship—carrying coils to cut the magnetic force of the Earth r

	"Certainly—there's no friction, save the magnetic resistance to use energy. We'll build in out of synthetic plastics that are almost as hard and strong as metal, bat have no electrical conductivity and no magnetic resistance, so all the resistance will be in the great coils, and they'll turn it into electric power. Drive the power plant in an orbit with rockets."

	"Bat why? Why do all that? How does the thing work!"

	"A rocket." replied Barret slowly, his eyes twinkling, "isn't relevant—or, more correctly, relative. It isn't relative Is anything in its drive. You can correctly say that an automobile is going two hundred miles an hour, or that an airplane is going four hundred, but you can't correctly say that a rocket is going ten miles a second when it's in space—because it isn't. There is no absolute rest and no absolute velocity.

	"Now the curious thing is, you can say that a rocket is traveling ten miles a second relative to the Earth, but with absolutely equal truth you can say that it's traveling fifty miles a second relative to Mars or Jupiter or some other planet. You have no more right to relate its velocity to Earth, once it leaves Earth's atmosphere, than to relate it to Mars

	"And here it where the law of conservation of energy piles up on the rocks. Kinetic energy is measured by the square of the velocity. When an automobile accelerates, it pushes against the Earth. If it can do one thousand foot pounds of work per second, then it's traveling ten feet a second, it pushes with a force of one hundred pounds, but when it's going one hundred feet a second, it can push with only ten pounds, because it is pushing against a surface which is rapidly retreating beneath it.

	"But a rocket pushes on its own discharged gases. No matter how fast that rocket may be traveling in relation to some other object, it's always traveling at the same rate relative to its discharged gases, on which it pushes, and its reaction, or force, remains constant.

	"My ship burned fuel, let's say at the rate of ten pounds a second. It didn't make the slightest difference how fast the ship happened to be traveling is relation to something quite apart and outside, such as the Earth, the gases fed into the rocket chamber at exactly the same rate, and they burned with exactly the same energy, and they pushed with exactly the same force

	"Now comes the catch. If the ship was traveling ten feet a second relative to Earth, and the push was one thousand pounds, then those ten pounds of fuel did ten thousand foot of work. But if the ship just happened to be traveling at a rate of ten miles a second, then those same gases, burning at the same rate, in the same way, did 5,280,000 foot pounds of work.
 
	"But there isn't that much energy in ten pounds of hydrogen!" gasped Rilan.

	"Well. the ship was traveling fifteen thousand miles a second relative to the more distant nebulae." Barret replied, his eyes laughing, "and so at the same time, those same molecules of gas were doing work at the rate of—let's see— 15,000 times 5,280 times 1,000—that's seventy-nine billion, two hundred million foot pounds of hydro-oxygen gas, am I right?"

	"Ow! You're cockeyed; you must be!"

	"Well. I went to the Moon and back on a supply of fuel that was very barely enough to get there. You see, if I set up those power plants, as I intend to, I shall simply take advantage of the fact that their drive is not relative to the Earth, and their generating apparatus is relative.

	"It will he just as successful as a crook—the drive apparatus is a crook, working outside the laws of relativity, while the honest generating equipment it forced to stay within the law—and we collect the percentage. Jupiter would be more profitable—the higher the orbital speed, the more superefficient the thing becomes.

	"But—that's why I asked you to find out who enforces the law of conservation of energy. Until he shows up, I guess we can get away with it."

The End

Atomic Power
Astounding Science Fiction – December 1934
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

	The mass of the machine crouched in hulked, latent energy, the massive conductors leading off in gleaming ruddy columns, like the pillars of some mighty temple to an unknown, evil god, pillars fluted, and capped at base and capital with great socket-clamps. Around it huge tubes glowed with a dull bluish light, so that the faces of the half-dozen students looked distorted and ghastly.

	A boredly smiling engineer watched them, and the patient professor instructing them, rather bored, not overhopeful himself that he could make these students understand the wonder and the magnitude of the process going on within the great machine.

	"The power," he said, really trying intensely to make them understand the grandeur of the thing, "comes, of course, from the release of the energy of atoms. It is frequently referred to as the energy of the atom, but that is an inane viewpoint to take, for in each single second, over fifty-five duodecillion atoms are destroyed. Not truly destroyed; that has not yet been done; but broken up, and the energy of the parts absorbed, and carried away by the conductors. The fuel is water—that simplest and cheapest of all substances—hydrogen and oxygen.

	"Each atom," he went on, "lasts for only one million-billionth of a second before its energy is released and the parts are discharged. There is a further energy level left in these ultraminute parts that, we believe, is even greater than the energy released in breaking the parts free of each other."

	So he explained the thing, and the students looked at the great machine and realized that from the streaming energy released by it came the power which cooked their food and kept them warm, for it was winter just then.

-

	They had seen the plant and the roaring machines which had other duties, such as ventilating the great maze of subsurface tunnels, and were about to leave, when there was a sudden momentary halt in the steady throb of the great pumps. The voices of engineers rang out, cursing and excited for a few seconds. Then all went on as before for a few minutes. A new sound rose in pitch as they listened, more interested. The professor hurried them swiftly into the main power room, speaking excitedly as he did:

	"You are fortunate—most fortunate. In the last eleven years, only eight times has such a thing happened. They must start the engines again!"

	They hastened into the power room.

	"No one knows," the instructor explained swiftly, "why these breaks occur, but once in every year or so something goes wrong, and the generators strike a bit of fuel which simply doesn't break down. No one understands why. Just that the generators stop abruptly and cannot be restarted till they are cleared of the charge contained. Perhaps some single drop of water is the cause of the trouble, a drop in no way different, save that it simply will not break.

	"You are most fortunate—"

	His voice was drowned by the sudden explosion of titanic discharges rushing into the generator. For scarcely a thousandth of a second it continued, before the process, restarted, backed up and stopped the discharge into it. The generator functioned perfectly.

	"Most fortunate," he went on as the sound died. "The drop which caused the trouble has been ejected, the generator cleared, and now it will function for another period of a year or more unhindered, in all probability."

	"What happened to the drop of water which would not break?" asked a student. "Was it saved for investigation?"

	"No," replied the instructor, shrugging his shoulders. "That was done once or twice. Since then, though we of science would like it, that we might work with these strange drops, it is not done because it is so costly to dismantle and reassemble the generator. It was simply ejected. The drops which have been investigated do become susceptible after a year or two and disappear, but before that time, even high-intensity generators will not touch them, beyond reducing their outmost fringes somewhat."

-

	"Ban" Torrence was a physicist to the core, and, like any good physicist, he was terribly concerned when perfectly sound laws of science began to have exceptions. Just now he was most worried in appearance. "Tad" Albrite, engineer, didn't seem so worried, but he was interested.

	"But," objected Tad, "I don't see any vast importance in the defection of a voltmeter. You say the voltage of the cell has increased one one hundredth of a volt in a week, according to that meter. All right, what of it?"

	"You yap, the thing is it hasn't increased. I measured it against a potentiometer hook-up. Now a potentiometer is a regular arm-and-pan balance for electrical voltages, as you ought to know, even if you are a civil engineer. You take a standard cell, an outside current, and standardize the thing, then substitute your unknown voltage. The system will measure a ten thousandth of a volt if you do it correctly. The point is that a potentiometer uses nothing but electrical balances. It balances a fixed current through a resistance against an electrical potential."

	"The galvanometer is a magnetic device using a string, which is what you object to," said Tad.

	"And when the potentiometer is balanced, the galvanometer isn't working at all, and therefore doesn't count in the circuit.

	"Now by the potentiometer, the voltage of that cell last week was 1.2581. By the potentiometer this week—to-day—it is 1.2580. It has, as is quite normal, fallen one ten-thousandth of a volt. It's been doing that for a period of two months—eight weeks. That's a grand-total drop of .0008 volts. But the voltmeter in the meantime has shown a rise of .0003 volts.

	"Now that voltmeter checks with every other one in the place; it's a five-hundred-and-forty-two-dollar standard instrument, and it's so big and massive and sensitive, I move it around on little wheels on a cart, as you see. Don't you see what I'm getting at?"

	"The Leeds and Northrup Co. gypped you apparently," decided Tad judiciously.

	"They didn't. I've made other tests. In the first place, that company doesn't. In the second place, it is the tiny spring that the voltage-torque is measured against that has weakened, and every single spring I can find has weakened in like amount."

	"How could you determine it?"

	"Now, Tad, here's the important part of it all," replied Ban very softly. "I naturally tried weighing the standard gram weights, and the springs checked—they checked absolutely right. Until I used not a gram weight but a gram mass."

	Tad stared at him blankly. "What the heck's the difference?"

	"Weight is the product of mass times the acceleration of gravity. Mass—is just plain mass. Mass can be measured by inertia, and that doesn't depend on gravity. So I set up a very simple little thing, so simple it couldn't go wrong—an inverted pendulum—a little lump of metal on the end of a steel spring, and I measured its period, not with an ordinary clock, but with an electric timer that didn't have a spring or pendulum in it, and—in the two months the period of that pendulum has increased, because the spring has weakened."

	"Why not—they do, you know."

	"Because when I measured the strength of that spring against gravity, you see," Ban said very, very softly, "it was just—as—strong—as—ever."

	Tad looked at him silently for some seconds. "What in the name of blazes does that indicate?" he asked at last, explosively.

	"Gravity has weakened to exactly the same extent the spring has. Every spring I have has weakened. And gravity has weakened."

	"Gravity weakened!" gasped Albrite. "You're cockeyed—it's impossible. Why—why the whole solar system would be thrown out of gear—the astronomers would have spotted it."

	"Jack Ribly will be here at two forty," replied Torrence quietly. "You know they wouldn't proclaim news like that right off, particularly because the weakening is very slight, and they do have observational errors."

	"But, good Heavens, man, it—it couldn't happen."

-

	Ban's face was suddenly drawn and tense. "Do you think for a moment, Tad, that I was quick to accept that? I've checked and counterchecked, and rechecked. And I've found out something. That's why I called you—and Jack Ribly. You're a civil engineer, and, if I'm right, you'll see the things happening soon. And Ribly's an astronomer, and he'll see them.

	"You see, whatever it is that's affecting gravity, must be affecting the strength of springs in the same degree. So I tried the compressibility of liquids. Water will compress—damn little, of course, but it will—and it's changed. It compresses more. So I tried gas. That's unchanged. Pressure of gas depends solely on mass, kinetic energy, and not on intermolecular bonds. There aren't any in gas. The molecules are perfectly free to move about. In solids they're bound so tightly they can't even slide. In water they slide, but can't separate. But they have—a little.

	"And the bonds are weakening. That's why springs—solids, of course—haven't the old strength. Molecular bonds are infinitesimally weaker. But the weakening is progressive. But electric and magnetic fields are untouched. So voltmeters read high. Interatomic and intra-atomic forces in general are unchanged, but everything bigger than a single molecule is different.

	"I've checked it a thousand ways, Tad. I even repeated Millikan's old measurement of the mass of an electron—which measured the mass by gravitative effect on the oil droplets—and the answer was different. Magnets lift more.

	"Great Heaven, Tad, the—the universe will fly to pieces!"

	"What will happen?" asked Tad, awestruck now.

	"Accidents—horrible accidents here on Earth first. That is, so far as we will first detect. The Sun will be retreating. The Moon flying off, too, you see, because centrifugal force is based only on mass and inertia, and it isn't weakened, but we won't notice that at first. But automobiles—they'll weigh less and less, so they won't fall apart. Men won't notice it, because they'll be getting weaker, too.

	"But the inertia of the automobile will remain the same. So when they put on the brakes, the weakened material will crack. And the engines will fly to pieces as the undiminished power of the explosions blows them open. Bridges—lighter, but weaker. The wind will be strong, though. Things blowing up in the air. The air getting thinner, as it escapes against the diminishing gravity—"

	"Great Heaven!" said Tad softly. Because he believed now.

	The bell rang, and Ban went downstairs and opened the door. Jack Ribly was with him when he came back. He looked curiously at their solemn faces, Ban's dark, seamed face, showing his thirty-five years, but in that ageless way that made him seem eternally thirty-five. Tad Albrite looking younger than his thirty-two.

	"What's up, Ban?" asked Ribly.

	Swiftly Ban explained the proposition. Ribly's face worked with surprise and belief from the first second.

	"Have you fellows spotted it?" Torrence asked at last.

	"Yes, 'fraid of it. Didn't announce it."

	"So's everybody else. Both spotted it and been afraid. What did you notice it in?"

	"Our Moon first, of course. Then Mercury and Phobos and Deimos. And— Heaven help us—I didn't understand at the time, but the companion of Sirius is bluer to-night than it was a year ago!"

	"I thought you said it had no intra-atomic effects; spectra are intra-atomic effects," said Albrite.

	"Not in this case. Sirius' companion is so dense, the spectrum is pulled back toward the red by the intense gravitational field. The gravitational fields are weakening—even so far away as Sirius."

	"Why? Why?" demanded Albrite.

-

	The world asked, too, when it learned; when markets found pound packages of sugar and butter weighing fifteen ounces. But that was several months later. Before then, the Moon was changed. Earth began to see a smaller Moon, and a different Moon, for as the Moon circled out, the effects were cumulative, and she turned at such a rate that the face which had eternally faced Earth began to turn away, and the unseen face became visible.

	And a gold merchant made a small fortune by buying gold in Brazil, using a very accurate type of pneumatic balance, and selling it in the same way in Alaska, where the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin did not cut its weight.

	The three men worked together on the problem, and all over Earth other men were seeking some answer, some explanation, and some help. The diminution of weight, starting so slowly, mounted rapidly, cumulative in rate itself.

	Ban Torrence did most of the work, using the figures that Ribly brought him, and the apparatus that Albrite designed. 1947 drew to a close, and 1948 began. It was a bitterly cold winter, colder than had been known before for many, many years, despite predictions that it would be a warm one.

	It was February when the astronomers definitely announced that, at present rates, the winter would be everlasting, growing neither colder nor warmer, for as the Earth turned its northern hemisphere more toward the Sun, it moved away. But in the southern hemisphere, there would be rapidly increasing cold, as the two effects added, instead of subtracting.

	By the last of May and early June, however, the temperature would start falling again. The report ended with that statement. "By late May or early June the temperature will again begin to fall." That was the end, because there was no other prediction. After June the temperature would fall. In February, the warmest day in New York City registered a temperature of only 42°. The coldest was -19.2°.

	And still the world asked why.

	The sun rose at seven thirty on March 21st. It rose much later on April 21st, for it was falling behind. Earth was no longer circling it. Earth was spiraling about it.

	In late March, the three scientists had moved to Northern Mexico and established a laboratory there. It was easier to work, and much work must be done out of doors.

	"Have we got anywhere at all?" Albrite demanded when they had settled again and begun a conference on advances.

	"Hum—yes," decided Torrence. He glanced quizzically at Ribly. "You wouldn't believe my statement, so I won't make it. But I'll tell you something. This is about the only warm place on Earth—down in the tropics. We're in the northern hemisphere. Tropic of Cancer to the south of us."

	"I still," said Albrite softly, "don't see why you didn't make a job of it and move down to the equator while you were at it."

	"It's March right now, and the Sun is actually about over the equator, but it's moving north as usual, so that it'll be over the Tropic of Cancer in June—and that'll be the warmest spot on a very, very, chilly Earth. But what's the difference between the polar and equatorial diameter of the Earth?"

	"I don't know—there is a difference, at that. Couple of miles, why?"

	"Because the diameter of the Earth through the forty-five-degrees point is the same as the mean diameter. The poles are flattened. The equator is bulged. When gravity weakens some more, centrifugal force won't—and the thing is going to be even worse. Also—earthquakes. They'll be starting soon."

	"Hmmm—that's true."

	"Well, we're here. What'll we do?"

	"Work—and work fast," replied Torrence. "Ever stop to think, Tad, that we'll have to use some kind of electrical generating equipment in all probability, and that we haven't time to build new, because this weakening is going on so fast that before we could spend the year so necessary normally, even if we didn't freeze first, to design and build it, it couldn't be built, because all metal would be powder? We have to use standard stuff—and the standard won't be able to stand its own centrifugal force beyond July 30th. So, friend, if we don't find the answer and start in by July to stop it—there just isn't any use."

	"Is there any?" asked Albrite hopelessly. "Trying to do something with the whole solar system!"

	"Not," replied Torrence, "with the whole solar system, if my idea is right. And to do anything at all, anyway, we'll have a further little problem to meet, you see. I don't know just yet."

	"Then—to work," Ribly sighed. "What must I do? Go on collecting the same old data?"

	"With particular emphasis on the new nebular velocities. What's Andromeda now?"

	"Minus 12," replied Ribly. "My record so far is minus 22,500. Minus means retreat. The distant constellations are showing some change, too."

-

	It was June 10th. New York City was semideserted. Snow ten feet deep, where it wasn't drifted, blocked all the streets. Where it was drifted, which was almost everywhere, it ran forty and fifty feet deep. The few people who still lived in New York, less than five hundred thousand, moved about little; only when a boat was due to sail.

	Day and night the crunch-crack-shuff of the icebreakers in the harbor was audible. Because the temperature had begun to drop in late May. It was -32.4 at noon, June 10th. Where the icebreakers opened the water, it steamed.

	The oceans were giving up their age-old hoard of heat. Had ice only been heavier, instead of lighter, than water, the temperature would not have fallen so low, for even in the cold of space where Earth was headed now, the stored heat of the oceans would have warmed her for decades.

	But ice was forming. The Atlantic was in port now, taking aboard passengers at five hundred dollars a head for third class, five thousand for a private room. She was a vast liner, another attempt at the "world's greatest."

	And New York heard a rumor. The Atlantic was making her last trip—the last trip any ship would make. They were afraid of the waves. They were afraid of the winds. They were most afraid of the ice.

	On June 9th there was a blizzard—an antarctic blizzard. The wind howled, and the howl mounted to a shriek. No snow fell, but the powdery stuff rose, thousands of tons of it, swept up by a wind of one-hundred-mile-an-hour velocity, with undiminished force and mass, since its inertia remained. The snow had lost weight. New York was blinded.

	At seven a.m. the George Washington Bridge shrieked a new song. The fragments landed nearly a quarter of a mile down the river. At seven thirty, the older bridges failed, the Brooklyn going first. By eight fifteen there were no man-made bridges. But the wind, the snow, had sucked the heat out of the rivers, and the ice had solidified all across them, so there was a single, great ice bridge.

	At ten twenty, the old Woolworth Building crashed, and on its heels came the Empire State tower. The fragments of the Empire State's tower fell over most of southeastern Manhattan.

	The blizzard had died by the morning of the tenth, but there were no great towers remaining on the sky line of New York. The weakening of materials, and the titanic force of the wind, had seen to that.

	And the rumor that the Atlantic would be the last ship to leave New York spread.

	The Atlantic was booked by dawn of the 10th, and there were no more ships in New York harbor leaving that day, sailings scheduled the next day would not go. A crowd gathered about the sheltered dock of the Atlantic on the southern side of Manhattan. A wind still raged at forty-five miles an hour from the north.

-

	Slowly the crowd grew, and the low muttering increased. Police and guards kept the lines in check till ten. The Atlantic was to sail at noon. At ten ten, the crowd swarmed up her gangways. Guards were killed, crushed. Men, women, and children started up the gangplanks.

	Men, and some women, reached the decks and burst into the cabins. Men found and fought their way to the neighborhood of the boiler and engine rooms. At ten twenty, it was estimated there were two thousand people aboard, at ten forty, seven thousand. At eleven o'clock, at least fifteen thousand people, over a thousand tons of humanity, had got aboard.

	It was like no other panic crowding. Many of those fifteen thousand were dead already, many more dying. A woman's body trampled underfoot. A girl held erect by the crowd's pressing, blood slowly oozing from her shoulder, her arm torn completely off, held perhaps in the clenched fingers of her other hand like some monstrous club, dead. A man's dismembered corpse.

	For the power of human bodies is supplied by chemical combinations. These were the visible damages, there were shrieks, groans of horrible agony, for the chemical power of muscles remained undiminished, while their tensile strength declined. Literally, people tore themselves apart by the violence of their struggles.

	The Atlantic gained no more passengers after eleven.

	The officers would not sail. They might have sailed for the moment to end the deaths at the wharf, but they could not, for the ship, already filled to capacity, was overloaded. Further, she swayed slowly to the struggles of her passengers.

	Then a hold, hitherto undiscovered, was broken open. Instantly a torrent of people poured in, and another five thousand came aboard the ship. A slow, grinding pressure began, and those who, finding themselves in the heated hallways, had stopped, satisfied, and blocked the entrance of more thereby, were gradually driven farther.

	The captain ordered the ship to sail. The lines were cast off again, and the ship's great screws turned slowly. No human strength could hold her in now, and she broke free of the crowd at the wharf. But in the harbor, free of the crowd, she stopped again at once. The captain ordered that the crowd be forced off onto the ice shelf that they might walk home. Armed men descended toward them from the bridge.

	Half a hundred shots rang out from the crowd. Three guns burst, but the captain and his officers died. The engineer died soon, and his staff was forced to obey the orders from the amateur pilot above.

	The Atlantic weighed eighty-five thousand tons normally. Her mass remained, and she had more than her normal load aboard her now. The channels had been broken by the icebreakers, but it was wider than the actual channel, of course. And the amateur pilot had no faintest conception of the handling of an eighty-five-thousand-ton ship.

	Things were not normal then. There was a forty-five-mile wind, and the ship was loaded abnormally; she was top-heavy. And she struck a great rock. Normally she would have come to instant rest, with a small ten-foot hole in her hull. The amateur pilot had the engines at half speed, and, in desperation, he had thrown them to full speed ahead, as he saw the danger, and tried to cut the wheel as though she were a motor boat.

	The Atlantic's metal, weakened by the strange force, ripped open for two hundred and ninety-four feet. She sank in fourteen and a half seconds, and rolled on her side, off the ledge of rock, and into the deep water the amateur had almost succeeded in reaching.

	Perhaps two thousand might have been saved from the part still unsubmerged. Ships were starting out after them. But the hull sloped, and some slid, for under that howling wind, ice froze in seconds. They fought, and a total of one hundred and seventy-four were saved.

	And rumor had been right. The Atlantic was the last ship to sail from New York, for her wreck blocked the channel, and the wind howled down from the north all that day and all the next so that no well-equipped salvage ship could cut her out of the way, and for that matter it howled all the rest of the days, but that was not important. The ice in the harbor was fourteen feet thick on the morning of the 12th.

	London was blocked on the 21st, Baltimore on the 22nd. And the seas of all the world steamed, and the winds, blowing over them, were warmed to some slight extent, so that New York did not have temperatures below -72 until July 3rd, when a northwest gale swept, not from the Atlantic, but all across frozen Canada, and the water in the mains fifty feet below the street froze.

	Fire started that day, and ravaged unchecked, till the solid walls of stone and ice it encountered succeeded in damping it, and the wind blew it out again, as it had fanned it before.

	Men had learned to be careful by that time, and no one worked even slightly harder than normal. Tens of thousands had died horribly as the automatic muscles of their hearts strained to pump the blood harder—and tore themselves to pieces.

-

	"If," said Tad Albrite desperately, "you don't do something fairly quickly, there won't be any sense in trying. You can't get equipment to do anything in another two weeks."

	Ban Torrence looked up bitterly. His eyes were tired and dead. "Will you go away? It's atomic power. I'm after it. If I get it, I can do something, and I won't need so much equipment. If I don't, I won't need any, anyway."

	"Atomic power!" gasped Albrite. His voice trailed off as he said it, trailed off into hopelessness. "They've tried for decades."

	Torrence motioned toward a massive piece of apparatus on one side of the laboratory. "Almost!" He sighed. "So shut up and let me work."

	Albrite rose to look at the thing. Two feet long, a semicylinder. Ruddy copper bars led from it to huge electrolytic condenser banks and a bank of powerful accumulators. And to a further piece of apparatus. Silently he looked at it, then went to the closet, put on his heavy robes, and stepped out into the cold toward the observatory and Jack Ribly.

-

	It was several hours later when he returned. Ban Torrence was fussing with his apparatus again. He looked up at their entrance.

	"Hello! I wish you'd look at these blasted circuits again, Ribly, and you, too, Tad. I swear it ought to work. It almost did for a fraction of a second."

	"Have you tried it again?" asked Ribly.

	"No. 'Fraid it might blow up this time instead of stopping."

	"Who cares? Try it," snapped Ribly.

	"What ought it to do?" asked Albrite.

	"Release atomic energy—not all of it, just smash the atom to parts and collect the energy of the parts. Enough, though, for what we want."

	"Try it. We can't lose much," Albrite said. "What are you going to do with the power if it works? How will it help?"

	"It will help. I think—I think that Earth and the solar system—just an atom in a greater universe. But they're releasing atomic energy in that greater universe— and we're the atom! If my theory's right, then I can release atomic energy myself and stop their release of our energy by just slightly upsetting their field, so that it passes by, harmless. Not a terrific amount of energy needed. The field would spread out from this apparatus here—if it would work—at the speed of light.

	"In a second, things would be normal on Earth. In four, the Moon would start coming back. In a few minutes, the Sun's old gravity would be returned, the system balanced. Then the thing would spread till all the universe was reestablished.

	"I really slightly invert their energy, so that it destroys itself. It would be a spreading sphere of neutralization, self-propagating, feeding on the thing it destroyed. I would have to add no more energy to clear all the universe we know of that force.

	"You know—the force is ages old. To that superuniverse, the whole process we've been undergoing for the last months is perhaps a million billionth of a second. The thing has been going on for ages. That is why we have seen distant nebulae rush away—to eternal destruction. The evaporation of their atomic fuel as we felt the first fringes of their power. Now we are in the heart of their release. If I can do this, I suppose they will never know what has happened.

	"But I tried the thing, and the blasted thing worked for perhaps a hundredth of a second, just long enough to kick my instruments and show it worked, but not long enough to start that field.

	"Shall I try again?"

	"I say yes," replied Ribly.

	Mutely, Tad Albrite nodded.

	Ban Torrence walked over to his controls. Slowly, thoughtfully, he set up the switches. For perhaps thirty seconds of silence he waited with the last switch in his hand.

	"If this works we shall be most fortunate—"

	His voice was drowned by the sudden titanic discharges rushing into the generator. For scarcely a thousandth of a second it continued before the process, restarted, backed up, and stopped the discharge into it. The generator functioned perfectly.

	For an infinitesimal fragment of a second, a strange nausea swept them as the wave of the counterfield drove out, swift as light, into all the universe. Ban Torrence riveted his eyes on the wall clock, the clock that had swung its pendulum with a strange lethargy, as though not interested in keeping up with time. It was ticking suddenly, with a regular, swift stroke.

	"Thank Heaven—it works!" said Torrence softly. For a moment his eyes looked toward and through the mass of the machine, crouched in hulked, latent power, the massive conductors leading off in gleaming, ruddy columns. "I wonder," he went on very softly, "if, in some vaster world, they even knew—as this particular atom of fuel simply refused to disintegrate."

	Then abruptly the scientist in him rebelled. "But why in blazes didn't it work before? I didn't change the thing in the slightest. The same fuel—water—the same generator. Just took it apart and put it back together again exactly as before. I can't see why."

	"Was the water pure?" asked Albrite. "Maybe it wasn't—and when you took it apart the drop which caused the trouble was ejected, the generator cleared, and now it will function for another period, until another drop which can't be disintegrated hits it."

	"Maybe so; somehow I doubt it. That particular drop simply wouldn't break down. I can't understand why. Just that the generator must have stopped abruptly and could not be restarted till cleared of the charge contained.

	"Anyway, it's working perfectly now."

	Torrence looked at it, and though he might have told those scientists of a greater world why their machines failed occasionally, since he knew much that they did not, he did not understand all that went on within an atomic generator.

	Only he knew that he had restored Earth; that even now she, and her satellite, must be circling toward each other, and toward the Sun; that he had found the secret of vast power that would warm the frozen peoples and power their industry as Earth thawed out once more.

The End

Blindness
Astounding Stories – March 1935
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

	OLD Dr. Malcolm Mackay is dead, and, with more than usual truth, one may say he is at last at peace. His life was hard and bitter, those last few years. He was blind, of course, blinded as everyone knew by the three-year-long exposure to the intolerable light of the Sun.

	And he was bitter, of course, as everyone knew. But somehow they could not understand that; a man so great, so loved by the population of three worlds, it seemed there could be nothing in his life to embitter him, nor in the respect and love of the worlds for him.

	Some, rather unkindly, I feel, put it down to his blindness, and his age—he was eighty-seven when he died—and in this they were unjust. The acclaim his great discovery brought him was the thing which embittered him. You see, he didn't want acclaim for that; it was for the lesser invention he really wanted praise.

	That the "Grand Old Man" may be better understood, I genuinely want people to understand better the story of his work. And his blindness, but not as most people speak of it. The blindness struck him long before the exposure to the Sun ruined his eyes. Perhaps I had better explain.

	Malcolm Mackay was born in 1974, just one year after Cartwright finally succeeded in committing suicide as he had always wanted to—by dying of asphyxiation on the surface of the Moon, when his air gave out. He was three when Garnall was drowned in Lake Erie, after returning from Luna, the first man to reach Earth again, alive. He didn't go on living, of course, but he was alive when he reached Earth. That we knew.

	Mackay was eleven, and interested, when Randolph's expedition returned with mineralogical specimens, and the records of a year's stay on the Moon.

	Mackay went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology at seventeen, and was graduated a member of the class of 1995. But he took physics—atomic physics.

	Mackay had seen that on atomic power rested the only real hope of really commercial, economically sound, interplanetary travel. He was sure of that at seventeen when he entered M.I.T. He was convinced when he was graduated, and went back for more, because about that same time old Douglas A. Mackay died, and left him three quarters of a million.

	Malcolm Mackay saw that the hand of Providence was stretched out to aid him. Money was the thing that he'd needed. Douglas Mackay always claimed that money was a higher form of life; that it answered the three tests of life. It was sensitive to stimulation. It was able to grow by accretion. And finally—the most important, in Mackay's estimation—the old Scot pointed out it was capable of reproduction. So Malcolm Mackay put his in an incubator, a large trust company, and left it to reproduce as rapidly as possible.

	He lived in shabby quarters, and in shabby clothes most of the time, so he'd have money later on when he started his work And he studied. Obviously, there is no question but that Mackay was one of the most highly intelligent human beings that ever lived. He started with the basis of atomic knowledge of that day, and he learned it all, too, and then he was ready to go ahead. He spent seventeen years at M.I.T. learning and teaching, till he felt that he had learned enough to make the teaching more of a nuisance than a worthwhile use of his time.

	By that time, the money had followed the laws of money, and life, and had reproduced itself, not once, but twice, for the Scot had picked a good company. He had two and a quarter millions.

	There is no need to retell his early experiments. The story of the loss of three fingers on his left hand is an old one. The countless minor and semi-major explosions he had, the radiation burns he collected. But, perhaps those burns weren't so wholly injurious as was thought, for thirty-five years after he left M.I.T. he was still working at an age when most men are resting—either in coffins or wheel chairs. The Grand Old Man didn't put his final determination into action until he was seventy-three.

-

	JOHN BURNS was his laboratory assistant and mechanician then. Mackay's loss of his fingers had been serious, because it made delicate instrument work difficult, and John Burns, thirty-two at the time, was his mechanician, his hand, and his highly trained technical assistant. In May, 2047, the latest experiment having revealed only highly interesting but negative results, Malcolm Mackay looked at Burns.

	"John, that settled it," he said slowly. "Something is missing, and we won't get it here in a pair of lifetimes, even long ones. You know the only place we can find it."

	"I suppose you mean the Sun," replied Burns sadly. "But since we can't get near enough to that, it doesn't do us a bit of good. Houston's the only man who has come back alive, and his nearest approach was 41,743,560 miles. And it didn't do any good, anyway. The automatic rockets get nearer, but not very much nearer; the heat beats them—all of them. And you, yourself, said we'd have to get within four millions, not four tens of millions of miles. And that's utterly hopeless. Nothing could stand it that close to old Sol."

	"We're going," said Mackay grimly. "I've spent close to three quarters of a century working on the problem of atomic energy, and we're going." He paused for a moment, then looked up at Burns with a kindly smile. "No; I guess it's not we who are going, but I. I'm more than willing to go, and lose perhaps two years off the tail end of my overlong life if need be, if I can send back the word to the world that will set it free of that age-old problem of power.

	"Power. Maybe we can use Sun power, after all. They've been talking about solar power since the beginning of the last century, and they haven't got it yet. Never will, I guess, because the power's too diluted. They can't build a big enough Sun glass. But if we can steal the secret of the Sun, and give them little private suns right here on Earth, that will settle the question. And give rockets some real power, too, incidentally."

	The old man chuckled. "You know, John, when I started, it was the dream of my life that rockets should have atomic power so they could really reach the other planets. Atomic power! And now, here I am, close to three quarters of a century old—and I've never even left Earth. A grounder.

	"And atomic power isn't so badly needed for rockets, anyway. They have good fuels now, safe ones and powerful ones like atomic hydrogen and oxygen. Atomic power is needed here on Earth, where factories are, and men labor in coal mines for fuel, and where they make the fuel for rockets. That's where mankind needs atomic power.

	"And by all the powers of Heaven, if the Sun's the place where I can learn, the Sun's where I'm going."

	"But by that particular power of Heaven known as radiant energy, you can't," objected Burns. "The radiation makes it impossible."

	"Well, I'll kill that radiation, somehow. That's the real problem now, I guess. Wonder how—we've developed a lot of different radiation screens and blocks since we began this work here; we ought to find something."

	"Yes, doctor; we can stop any kind of radiation known, including Millikan, but we can't stop three or four million tons of it a second. It's not stopping it. Anything will do that. It's a problem we've never before attempted—the problem of handling it after it's stopped."

	"We'll stop it and handle it, somehow," determined Mackay.

	Burns gave up. Mackay meant it, so that was the new problem. It was obviously impossible, Burns knew, but so was atomic power, evidently. They'd run against all the blind alleys in the universe seeking that, so they might as well try a few more in a different direction.

	Malcolm threw himself into that problem with all the keenness and determination he had shown through fifty-five years of active research on the main line. This was just another obstacle on the main track. It stood between him and the Great Secret.

	He experimented a little with photoelectric cells, because he felt the way to do it was to turn the heat into electric energy. Electricity is the only form of energy that can be stepped up or down. Radiant energy can be broken down from X-ray to ultraviolet, to blue to red, to infra-heat But it can't possibly be built up or transformed down at will. So Mackay tried to turn heat into electricity.

	He wasn't long in seeing the hopelessness of photocells. They absorbed some of the radiant energy as electricity, but about ninety-five percent turned into straight molecular motion, known as heat, just as it did anywhere else.

	Then he tried super-mirrors and gave up within three months. That was the wrong way. So it must be some way of turning molecular motion of heat into electric power.

	It was like threading the way through a maze. You found all the blind alleys first, then there was only the right paths left. So he started on molecular motion-electricity transformations. He tried thermo-couple metals. They worked only when you had a cool place. A cool place! That was what he was trying to get. So he quit that.

	Then he got mixed up with hysteresis. He was experimenting with magnets and alternating current, and that gave him the right lead. He developed thermlectrium nearly a year and a half later, in 2049, of course.

-

	THE FIRST fragment of the new alloy was put in the coil, and heat-treated till the proper conditioning had been obtained, and the secret of the heat-treatment is the whole secret, really. And finally it was taken out. It was dull, silvery gray, rather heavy, being nickel-iron-cobalt-carbon steel.

	It looked like any of a thousand thousand other alloys, felt like any of them then. But they put it in the closed coil. In fifteen seconds dew formed on it; in twenty, frost, and the coil was getting hot, a current of fifty amperes flowing through it. Mackay beamed on it with joy. The obstacle had been removed! The way to the Sun was clear.

	He announced his plans now to the news agencies, and to the Baldwin Rocket Foundry Co. They agreed to build him a ship according to his plans—and he made up his famous plans.

	Thermlectrium is a magnetic alloy, the unique property being that its crystals are of almost exactly uniform size. When a magnet is turned end for end in a coil of wire, when the magnetic polarity is reversed, a current is induced in the circuit, at the expense of the energy which turned the magnet.

	In any permanent magnet, the crystals are tiny individual magnets, all lined up with their north poles pointing the same way. In magnetized steel, if the bar is heated, the heat-motion of the molecules turns some of them around, with the result that the magnetism is lost. In thermlectrium, even at low temperatures, the crystals turn, but they all turn together. The result is the same as though the bar had been inverted. A current is induced in the surrounding coil. And, of course, the energy which inverts the magnet, and drives the current of electricity, is the molecular motion known as heat. Heat was conquered!

	Dr. Mackay drove his plans on to rapid completion. Burns insisted on going, and Mackay could not dissuade him.

	The plans were strange. They were enough to dissuade any normal man. Only such a fanatic as Dr. Mackay really was, and as Burns had become, could have imagined them. Either that, or a man with colossal self-conceit. The Prometheus was to leave from Luna. Then she was to circle down toward the Sun, down very, very nearly one hundred million miles till she was within three million miles of the million mile globe of incandescent fury, and stop her fall by going into a close, circular orbit.

	That means less, today. No one had ever imagined attempting anything like that. Houston, who had circled the Sun, had actually merely swung in on a comet's orbit, and let his momentum carry him away again. That wasn't difficult. But to break the vast parabolic orbit a body would naturally attain in falling from Earth toward the Sun would require every pound of fuel the Prometheus could carry and break free of Luna.

	The Prometheus could set up her orbit around the Sun. That was going to be easy. But they couldn't possibly pull loose with any known power. Only atomic power could do it. When and if they found it!

	Malcolm Mackay was eager to bet his Me on that proposition. Atomic energy or—eternal captivity—death. And Burns, as much a fanatic as Mackay, was willing, too.

	There were only two horns to this dilemma. There was no third to escape on, no going between them. So the Grand Old Man sank every penny of his fortune in it, and would have sunk any he could borrow had he been able to get it.

	The Prometheus rose, slowly. And during the weeks and months it was being built, Mackay and Burns spent their time gathering supplies, instruments, chemicals. For one thing, every element must be represented, and in proportion to its availability. Radium, even, though radium could never be a source of atomic power, for power derived from radium would still be too expensive for commercial use. But radium might be the absolutely essential primer for the engine—so radium went. And fluorine, the deadly unmanageable halogen, everything.

	Then, gradually, the things were moved in as the ship neared completion. The outer hull of the high-temperature tungsten steel, the space filled with hydrogen under pressure, since hydrogen was the best conductor of heat practicable, and in that interspace, the thousands of thermlectrium elements, and fans to force circulation.

	The Prometheus was a beautiful ship when she was finished. She glowed with the gleam of a telescope mirror, polished to the ultimate. Only on one side was she black, black as space, and, here studded with huge projectors and heaters. The power inevitably generated in absorbing the heat in the therm elements would be cast out here in tungsten bars thick as a man's arm, and glowing white-hot in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas.

	She left, finally. Struggling up from Earth, she reached Luna, her first stage, and filled her fuel tanks to the last possible ounce. Then, in August, 2050, she took off at length.

-

	REACHING the Sun was no trick at all, once she had broken free of the Moon and of Earth. Day after day she fell with steadily mounting speed. The Sun loomed larger, hotter. The great gyroscopes went into action, and the Prometheus turned its silvered face to the Sun, reflecting the flooding heat. Nearer and nearer. Venus fell behind, then Mercury's orbit at last.

	They knew heat then. And radiation. The Sun loomed gigantic, a titanic furnace whose flames reached out a quarter of a million miles. The therm elements began to function, and the heat dropped somewhat. Then the rockets started again, started their braking action, slowly, steadily, braking the ship to the orbit it must make, close about the Sun.

	Hour after hour they droned and roared and rumbled, and the heat mounted, for all the straining power of the therm elements. Radio to Earth stopped the second day of the braking. The flooding radiations of the Sun killed it. They could still send, they knew, but they could not receive. Their signals were received by stations on the Moon, where the washing static of the Sun did not blanket all the signals that came. For they were beaming their waves, and the Sun, of course, was not.

	 "We must establish the orbit soon, John," said Mackay, at last. He was lying down on his couch, sick and weak with the changing Strains. "I am an old man, I fear, and I may not be able to endure much more of this."

	"We will have to brake more sharply then, Dr. Mackay," replied Burns concernedly. "And then we may not be able to establish the perfectly circular orbit we need."

	Mackay smiled faintly, grimly. If it is not soon, John, no orbit will mean anything to me."

	The rockets roared louder, and the ship slowed more rapidly. But it was three days yet before the orbit trimming could be started. They left the ship in an eccentric orbit at first, though, and counteracted for the librations of the ship, which tended to turn the blackened radiator side toward the Sun, by working the gyroscope planes.

	Dr. Mackay recuperated slowly. It was three weeks, actually, three, precious oxygen-consuming weeks, before they started the final orbit trimming. Then day and day they worked, observing, and occasionally giving a slight added rocket thrust for orbit trimming.

	But, finally, at a distance of three point seven three millions of miles, the Prometheus circled the titanic star. The sunward side, for all its polish glowed red-hot continuously. And the inside of the ship remained a heated, desiccated furnace, for all the work of the therm elements. Even they could not perfectly handle the heat.

	"Ah, John," said Mackay at last. "In some ways Earth was better, for here we have strange conditions. I wish we could get a time signal from Earth. The space is distorted here by the Sun."

	Old Sol, mighty in mass and power, was warping space so that spectrum lines were not the same; their instruments were not the same; the titanic electric and magnetic fields threw their delicate apparatus awry. But they worked.

	It was fortunate that the therm elements produced power, as well as getting rid of the heat. With the power, they kept the functions of the ship running, breaking down the water formed in their breathing to oxygen once more, and storing the hydrogen in one of the now empty fuel tanks.

	And their observations went on, and their calculations. In six months it seemed they had never known another life than this of intolerable, blinding light if they dared to open an observation slit in the slightest; intolerable, deadly radiation if they dared to step beyond the protected walls of their laboratory and living quarters without a protective suit. For most of the ship was as transparent to the ultrashort waves of the Sun as empty space.

	But it grew to be a habit with them, the sending of the daily negative reports, the impossibility of hearing any signal from Earth, even of observing it, for there was the eternal Gegenschein. It was blinding here, the reflected light from the thin-strewn dust of the Sun.

	That dust was slowing them down, of course. They were, actually, spiralling in toward the Sun. In some seventy-five years they would have been within reach of the prominences. But before then—one of the pans of their balance would have tipped. Atomic power—or the inevitable end.

	But Mackay was happy here. His eyes turned from deep blue-gray to a pale blue with red bloodshot balls; his skin turned first deep, deep brown from the filtering ultraviolet, then it became mottled and unhealthy. Burns' skin changed too, but his eyes endured better, for he was younger. Still, Mackay felt sure of his goal. He looked down into the flaming heart of a Sun spot, and he examined the underside of a prominence, and he watched the ebb and flow of Sol's titanic tides of white-hot gas.

	2050 passed into history, and 2051 and 2052 followed in swift succession. No hint of the great happenings of Earth and the planets reached there, only the awful burning of the Sun—and, in February of 2053, a hint of the great changes there.

-

	"JOHN," said Mackay softly one day, "John—I think I see some hint of the secret I think we may make it, John!"

	Burns looked at the sharp-lined spectrum that lay on the table before Mackay, and at the pages of calculations and measurements and at the data sheets. "I don't see anything much different in that, doctor. Isn't it another will-o'-the-wisp?"

	"I—I hope not, John. Don't you see this—this little line here? Do you recognize it?"

	"No—no, I don't think I do," he said slowly. "It's a bit too high for the 4781 line. And I don't know what's in there—"

	"There isn't any there, John," said Mackay softly. "There isn't any. It's a forbidden line, an impossible line. It's the impossible line of sodium, John. It's a transformation that just couldn't take place. And it did, so I'm going to find out how it did. If I can make the impossible release take place the same way—"

	"But that tells so little, so very little. Even if you could duplicate that change, make that line, you'd still be as far from the secret as from Sirius. Or Earth for that matter."

	"I'll know more, though, John. You forget that only knowledge is the real secret. When I know all about the atom, I'll know how to do what I want to do. If I know all the changes that can take place, and why, then I can make that other change. Ah, if only I could see just a few miles deeper into the heart of the Sun—"

	"We've seen some of the greatest Sun spots in history, and at close hand. Do you think we could see any deeper? The light—that terrible light."

	"It blinds even the instruments, so there is little more we can do. But we can calculate and take more photographs for more of those lines. But now I must see what the instruments recorded when we got this line."

	They had recorded even more than the old man had hoped. It was enough. Mackay and Burns duplicated that impossible line, and then they produced some more impossible lines. It was the key. It wasn't impossibly difficult then. They could design the apparatus, and did, in September, three years and one month after lifting off for the final drop to the Sun.

	They made it, piece by piece, and tested it. January. It wasn't winter there; there was no winter. Only everlasting heat. And Mackay's eyes were failing rapidly. His work was over. Both because he could scarcely work any longer, and because, on January 14, 2054, the energy of the atom was harnessed by man! The Great Secret was discovered.

	It took the intense light of the mighty arc to stimulate the old eyes when the thing was done. Only its tremendous blinding power was visible. His ears could hear the roar, well enough, and his fingers could feel the outlines of the hulking machine. But he could no longer make it out when it at last roared its lusty greeting to human ears.

-

	HIS thin lips parted in a contented smile, though, as his tough old fingers caressed the cold metal and the smooth cold glass. "It works, doesn't it, John? It works. John, we've done it." A shadow passed over the old man's face for an instant. "We haven't heard from Earth in over three years. Do you suppose someone else has discovered it, too? I suppose I ought not be selfish, but I do hope they haven't. I want to give this to the world.

	"John, can you make the drive apparatus yourself?"

	"Yes, doctor; I can. You had all the plans worked out, and they're simple to follow. It isn't really greatly different. Only that instead of using a high-temperature gas ejected at thousands of feet a second, we'll use a high-voltage ion ejected at thousands of miles a second. And because we can burn iron, as you predicted, we don't have to worry at all about power."

	"No, John. We don't have to worry at all about power." The old man sighed, then chuckled contentedly. "I always wanted to live to see the day when atomic power ran the world. But I guess I won't after all. I can't see, but it won't matter. I have so few years left, I won't worry about a little thing like that. My work's done, anyway. We don't have to worry about power, John; the world doesn't any more.

	"Men will never again have to worry about power. Never again will they have to grub in the Earth for fuels. Or do things the hard way because it is less costly of power. Power—power for all the world's industry. All the wheels of Earth's factories driven by the exploding atoms. The arctic heated to a garden by it. Vast Canada opened by it to human habitation, clear to the North Pole.

	"No more smoke-clouded cities.

	"And the atom will lift the load of labor from man's back. No more sweating for six hours every day for daily bread. An hour a day—and unlimited, infinite power. And, maybe, even, some day it will lead to successful transmutation, though I can't see it. I mean, I can't see it even mentally," he said with a little smile. "The Sun showed me the secrets it held—and took away the impious vision that gazed upon them.

	"It is worth it. The world will have power—and my work is done.

	"You are starting the drive apparatus?"

	"Yes, doctor. The main tube is to be—"

	Burns launched into a technical discussion. The doctor's eyes could not follow the plans, but the old mind was as keen as ever. It pictured every detail with a more penetrative vision than ever his eyes could have. He chuckled contentedly as he thought of it.

	"John, I have lost little, and gained more. I can see that tube better than you can. It's a metal tube, but I can see to its deepest heart, and I can even see the ions streaming out, slowly, precisely. My mind has a better eye than ever my body had, and now it is developing. I can see the tube when it is not yet, and I can see the heart of it, which you cannot.

	"Make it up, John. We must hurry back."

	The lathe hummed, powered by atomic energy, and the electric furnace glowed with a heat so intense the old scientist could see it, driven by the power of the bursting atoms.

	The mental eye he had boasted of was keen, keener than his old eyes had ever been. But still it was blind. Somehow, it did not see the white-hot tungsten bars on the "night" side of the ship pouring thousands and thousands of kilowatts of power out into space. The power the therm elements were deriving from the cooling of the ship.

	The drive tubes grew, and their great metal bed-bolts were turned. Then the great rocket tubes were sealed at the far end, cut, and insulated again. But now, electrically insulated, the great ion tubes took shape and were anchored, and the huge conductors ran back to the ion-gas chambers, and to the hunched bulk of the atomic engine. Day succeeded day, and Burns cut and fashioned the metal and welded it under the blazing power of the broken atoms in their atomic generator.

	And at last the ship trembled with a new, soft surge. It must be slow, for the men were used now to weightlessness, three long years of it. But gradually, gradually, the Prometheus, bearing the fire it had stolen from the Sun, swung swifter in its orbit, and spiraled out once more, slowly, slowly. And the radio drove out its beam toward Earth.

	They could not hear the messages that Earth and Luna pounded back at them, but gladly they guessed them. The ion tubes whispered and murmured softly, with a slithering rustle as of a snake in dry leaves, and the ship accelerated steadily, slowly. They ran those tubes day and night and slowly increased the power. There was no need for maximum efficiency now. No need to care as they wasted their power. There was plenty more.

-

	Their only difficulty was that with the mighty ion tubes working they could not receive radio signals, even when they gradually circled out beyond Mercury, and finally Venus, slowly growing accustomed once more to weight. They did not want to turn off their tubes, because they must get accustomed to weight once more, and they were moving very rapidly now, more and more rapidly, so that they passed Venus far too rapidly for the ships that rose from the planet to congratulate Dr. Mackay and tell him the great news.

	They circled on, in the Prometheus, till they were used once more to Earth gravity, and then they were near Earth, and had to apply the braking ion rockets.

	"No stopping at the Moon, John," Malcolm Mackay smiled. "We and all humanity are through with that. We will go directly to Earth. We had best land in the Mojave Desert. Tell them, tell them to keep away, for the ions will be dangerous."

	John Burns drove out his message, and Earth loomed large, and North America came slowly into view. Then they were settling toward the desert.

	The old scientist heard the faint, cold cry of ruptured air first, for his eyes were dark, and only his ears brought messages from outside. "That's air, John!" he cried suddenly. "We're in the air again! Earth's air! How far up are we?"

	"Only another one hundred and fifty miles now, doctor. We're almost home."

	"Home—I should like to see for just this second, to see it again. John, John, I'll never see Earth again. I'll never—but that means little. I'll hear it. I'll hear it and smell it in my nostrils, clean and sweet and moist, and I'll taste it in the air. Earth's air, John, thick and spicy with green things. It's autumn. I want to smell burning leaves again, John. And feel snow, and hear its soft caress on a glass pane, and hear the soft sounds men make in snow. I'm glad it's autumn. Spring has its smells, but they aren't so spicy and clean. They're not so interesting, when you can't see the color of grass, so green—too bright, like a child's crayon drawing. Colors—I'll miss them. There weren't any out there. Colors—I'll never see the leaves again, John.

	"But I'll smell them, and I'll hear the hum and whisper of a thousand thousand atomic engines making the world over for mankind.

	"Where are we? The air is shrilling thickly now."

	"We're less than fifty miles up. They've cleared the Mojave for fifty miles around us, but, doctor, there are a hundred thousand private air-cars there—a new design. They must have developed broadcast power. They're all individually powered and apparently by electrical means."

	"Broadcast power? That is good. Then atomic energy will reach every home. The apparatus would be expensive, too expensive for homes."

	"The air is full of ships—there are half a dozen great stratosphere ships flying near us now; can you hear the chug of their propellers?"

	"Is that the noise—ah! Men, men, again, John. I want to hear a thousand voices all at once."

	Burns laughed recklessly, carefree. "You will, from the looks of things. You will! There are nearer a thousand thousand down there now!"

	"The ship is slowing?" asked Mackay.

	Burns was silent for a moment. Then, suddenly, the dry rustle of the tubes changed its note; it flared for an instant, there was a soft, grating thud, a harsh scraping of sand—and the ion tubes died in silence.

	"The ship is stopped, doctor. We're home."

	Dimly, faintly, the sound of a thousand voices clamoring and shouting came through the heavy walls. Mackay had landed! The Grand Old Man was back! And half the world had turned out to welcome him, the man who had remade all Earth, and all Venus.

	The lock opened, and to Mackay came the roar of voices, the thrum and hum and rumble of thousands and tens of thousands of propellers. There was the musical cacophony of a thousand air-car signals, and the mighty thunder of a titanic voice, rumbling, hoarse, and godlike in power, cutting through, drowning it all.

	"They're welcoming you, Dr. Mackay—welcoming you."

	"So I hear," said Mackay, half happily, half sadly, "but I am so tired, perhaps I can rest a bit first. I am older than you are, John. You have done as much as I; you had better answer them."

	Suddenly, close-by human voices cut in, excited, happy, welcoming voices, and John Burns' swift answering speech:

	"He is tired; it has been hard for him. And—you know he has lost his sight. The radiation of the Sun so close. He would rather be taken where he can rest."

	"Very well—but can't he say something? Just a few words?"

	Burns looked back at the old man. Malcolm Mackay shook his head.

	The man outside spoke again: "Very well. We will take him directly to anywhere he wants."

	Mackay smiled slowly, thoughtfully. "Anywhere, anywhere that I can smell the trees. I think I'd like to go to some place in the mountains where the air is sweet and spicy with pine smells. I will be feeling better in a few days—"

-

	THEY took him to a private camp in the mountains. A ten-room "cabin," and they kept the world away, and a doctor took care of him. He slept and rested, and Burns came to see him twice the next day, but was hurried away. The next day and the next he did not come.

	Because even Burns had not gathered quickly the meaning of all this. Even he had thought at first it was in celebration of the invention of the atomic generator.

	At last he had to come. He came into Mackay's room slowly. His pace told the blind man something was wrong.

	"John—John, what's troubling you so?"

	"Nothing; I was not sure you were awake."

	Mackay thought for a few seconds and smiled. "That wasn't it, but we will let it pass now. Do they want me to speak?"

	"Yes. At the special meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And—also on the subject of the thermlectrium elements. You have done far more than you thought, doctor. You have remade the worlds already. Those cars I thought were powered by broadcast energy? I was wrong. We were blind to the possibilities of that lesser thing, the thermlectrium element. Those cars were powered by it, getting their energy from the heat of the air. All the industries in the world are powered by it. It is free power.

	"The elements are cheap, small, simple beyond anything conceivable, a bar of common metal—a coil of wire. They require no control, no attention. And the energy costs nothing at all. Every home, every store, every man, has his private thermlectrium element. Every car and every vehicle is powered by it.

	"And the map of the world has been twisted and changed by it in three short years. The tropics are the garden-spot of the world. Square miles of land are cooled by giant thermlectrium installations, cities air-conditioned, till the power they develop becomes a nuisance, a thing they cannot get rid of. The tropics are habitable, and they have been given a brisk, cool, controlled climate by your thermlectrium elements.

	"Antarctica is heated by it! There are two mining developments that suck heat from that frozen air to make power in quantities they cannot use.

	"And rocket fuel costs nothing! Nothing at all. The tropical countries find the electrolytic breaking down of water the only cheap, practical way to get rid of their vast energy, without turning it right back into heat. They give the gases to whosoever will take them away.

	"And Venus you have remade. Venus had two large colonies, already. They are cooled, made habitable, by the thermlectrium apparatus. A ten-dollar unit will cool and power an average house forever, without the slightest wear. By moving it outside in winter, it will warm and power it. But on Venus it is all cooling. They are developing the planet now. Dr. Mackay, you have remade the worlds!"

	Dr. Mackay's face was blank. Slowly a great question was forming. A great, painful question. "But—but, John—what about—atomic energy?"

	"One of the greatest space lines wants to contract for it, doctor. Their interplanetary ships need it."

	"One!" cried the Grand Old Man. "One—what of the others?"

	"There is only one interplanetary line. The lines to the Moon are not interplanetary—"

	And Dr. Mackay caught the kindness in his tone.

	"I see—I see—they can use the free gases from the tropics. Free power—less than nothing.

	"Then the world doesn't want my atomic energy, does it?" he said softly. His old body seemed to droop.

The End

The Conquest of the Planets
 (MOTHER WORLD) 
Amazing Stories – January-March 1935

	In this interesting story, Mr. Campbell pictures the future of what may be termed interplanetary life and tells of how the inhabitants of earth contrast with those of distant spheres. There is no doubt that if mankind ever did succeed in conquering space it is an open question whether what he found there would increase the good opinion which so many of us often unjustly hold of our own characters or whether it would diminish what may be called the self-conceit of mankind.

-

Prologue

	The crowded men, a full hundred and twelve cramped in a tiny concrete room, were unbelievably quiet and tense. Only one small light, thrown on the tuning controls of the big set, relieved the absolute darkness that seemed to push in from the windows. McLaughlin, at the controls, was quietest of all. His ears were intensely aware of the strange rushing roar, like heavy ocean surf, that beat out through the loudspeaker.

	A voice struggled through the washing sound. "Elevation about twenty-five miles now. Incredibly jagged rock. This side much rougher than other. Found a small crater-bottom—we're aiming for that—looks smooth." Again only the washing roar of short-wave static and the tense silence. "Elevation twenty miles. Dropping on rockets. Almost no gravity pull, however. The big boy is pulling us around a bit though. Hard to handle. Tricky motion. Fifteen miles. We've got an horizon now. There is no axial rotation, or we would never make it. Ten miles," Silence. Washing static, Five miles, the voice reported.

	"We've almost stopped—comparatively—now. About a mile and a half to go. Stopped, and falling back. Can you hear the rockets now? They're working fairly loudly. A thousand feet—eight hundred—five hundred—we'll know in a second, and if it's bad—we had a nice time. Try again!"

	"We're floating on the rockets. Stevens is doing a wonderful job of it. There's a big pinnacle of rock near us. This floor wasn't so smooth as it looked. We're sinking—we've—" The loud-speaker crackled with a tinny, broken rattle, and then only the washing static sounded in it.

	A low, heavy groan came from the hundred and twelve men. Three near the door darted out, headed for their offices. The second attempt had failed.

	McLaughlin sat just as quietly, and tensely as ever. "They smashed a tube, anyway," he snapped softly. "That doesn't mean they're broken. A tube's a hell of a lot more tender than a man!"

	The hundred and nine men were rustling and weaving. Listening to the static sounds. "Whatever happened, it happened a long time ago—it takes time even for radio on that hop," someone said. His voice was low, but it seemed a shout in the bare concrete room.

	The loudspeaker crackled, hummed and silenced again to washing roar, but an instantaneous quiver ran through the men. "Sorry," said the voice, "probably worried you. Tube gave out. We made a perfect landing, but the slight jar cracked a tube's air-seal."

	The rest was lost as a roar went up from the men in the room. A jammed stream squeezed out of the door, like toothpaste from a tube. They squirted out, sprinted for the monorail line nearby. Over charred, blackened earth they stumbled and sprawled, cheering.

	Five men remained in the room. McLaughlin was talking into his own transmitter now, while the recorder took down every detail of the message coming in from space.

	Philip Laurie, the little narrow chested dreamer who had designed the "Ion," was dreaming out loud to big, broad-shouldered John Cummings, the man who had had intelligence and interest enough to listen to the man and his strange ideas.

	"It's done, John," said Laurie dreamily. "They've made it."

	"They're not on Mars, yet, only Phobos." Cummings replied.

	"No difference. Mars is easy now. The little rocket can do it and land with her wings. No trick. They aren't back, either. That's harder. But it doesn't count. To them it does of course, but I mean to earth. Earth has crossed space. Earth-men have reached another world. That's just the first. In twenty years, John, you will be able to make the trip in a regular, commercial liner-freighter. New colonies! Earth-men colonizing other planets.

	"John, that's always been my dream. I can't go—I won't. You gave me control of this. That was my one stipulation. The profits are yours—and there will be profits I promise you—but—" he looked down at himself, and then to the towering, powerful body of his friend. "No more half-men like me. the conditions on those other planets are hard and harder than men ever faced before, and I'm going to set up a control board. There'll be plenty of men willing to go. Look at the thousands on thousands of applications we both got for this trip. But I'm going to combine several of my dreams in this. I'm going to make a greater race of earth-men, a more powerful, finer, more adventurous race of earth-men. I hate this body of mine and its weakness. I want all men to have bodies and minds like yours. I will have reason enough to forbid it—and I'm going to forbid the acceptance of one single man or woman who is not physically and mentally perfect.

	"Earth is greater this day, and henceforth, she will grow as her children grow!" said Philip Laurie.

	It was inevitable. His decision perhaps made it a bit more radical and more rapid, but the result was as inevitable as fate. There were no barbarians to pour in on civilization any more, but Philip Laurie had cut open earth's veins, where flowed the richest life-blood of the planet. It was not a greater planet he'd created, not a mightier earth.

	And it was not merely his plan. The very forces that made life harder on those planets would have done it as effectively. Earth's greatness died that day, that hour, it died the very second Robert Gady said, "Sorry, probably worried you. We made a perfect landing."

	But the corpse was very large, and it took many centuries for the corruption to spread, and the ultimate decay to destroy it.

-

	Bruce Robert Laurie, great grandson of the inventor of the first ship to make the crossing to Mars, was an humble employee in the office of the Interplanetary Transport Examination Service. Bruce Laurie or Tom Jones got the same treatment here. Old Philip Laurie, back in 1983, had fashioned well when he fashioned it. And John Cummings had been willing to trust Laurie. The result had been a board of scientists who had to pass on every man who made that trip, and for four generations that office had been all but flooded, for only an intermittent service was possible. The air ships of that day, even a full century after Laurie's invention, were not free of all troubles. For instance, while they had been able to reach Mars, and the Jovian satellites and the Saturnian satellites, no ship had ever returned from Jupiter's surface. Jupiter's mighty gravity stopped them.

	There was much room on those Jovian worlds, and even on Mars, although the colonies were growing swiftly. But there were few ships, and many people trying to go. Interplanetary Transportation had their chance to pick and took it.

	Bruce Laurie was hopeful—but fearful. He was twenty-five, just three weeks past the necessary twenty-fifth birthday in fact. He stood five-feet, five, rather light in build, but already he had a reputation in engineering.

	The girl at the Statistics Desk looked up at him as his turn came.

	"Name?" In a moment she had his Vital Statistics card. "Dr. Thomas Drew will see you. Room four-fifty-seven down the hall to the left." Laurie took the card with its series of punched holes on a perfectly blank white card. The indexing machines would read it for Dr. Drew. Laurie entered four-fifty-seven, handed the card to the brisk, pleasant-looking doctor, and sat down. The indexing machine had interpreted it for the physician in seconds.

	"This is your second visit, is it not, Laurie?"

	"Yes, sir. I came immediately after my twenty-fifth birthday."

	"Right. The card contains not only all the information you handed in, but, of course, much more that we gathered, plus the decision we reached, and why. The decision was against you, I'm sorry to say. You're a fine engineer as your reputation already shows. You have excellent heredity of mental characteristics—but as you know, your famous great-grandfather died of tuberculosis. Your grandfather didn't, probably because we'd conquered the disease by then, but he died at forty-seven of heart disease. Your father died two years ago at fifty-two, of hardening of the arteries, and attendant physical degeneration.

	"I'm sorry, Laurie. We need your mentality in the new race we're trying to build up, but your physique isn't designed for hard wear, even here on earth. I'm not sure you would survive even the space trip. The effects ate very severe, due to lack of equalization of blood pressure in the absence of gravitational or other acceleration. If you did survive—your great-grandfather, who of all men had a right to emigrate to Mars, refused to go. You remember when his application automatically came up, he turned it down himself, and he alone voted against it?

	"He was right. There is some taint of weakness in your inheritance that has, time after time, robbed the world of powerful minds in their prime. What I have mentioned in connection with your direct descent is equally true of your uncles and grand-uncles.

	"But—go on, Laurie. Your type is needed here on earth, too. That weakness will be driven out, through the generations. You may not make the trip, but neither did your great-grandfather. Perhaps your great-grandson will."

	Laurie was not greatly surprised as he made his way out of the office and took the moving ways toward the airport for New York once more. But he was vastly disappointed. The moon shone pale in the daylit sky. No Laurie had ever reached even so far.

	Some day, he was determined that one of them would. In the meantime, there were still opportunities to make a name for himself here on earth. Even though there were only two dozen business organizations in the United States, there was room for their ramifications.

-

	Ban Miller had reached that acme of human aims, for the average man of 2243—he had been accepted. Accepted, of course, meant that within two years he would be given a berth in one of the crowded Planetary Transports. Wherefore, since Ban Miller's particular field Of mental activity had been news reporting and interpreting, he was now acting as trainer to the Unlicked Cub. The Cub was not wholly unlicked, naturally, but he was inexperienced as far as this field of reporting was concerned. Televiso-news was a highly interesting and effective means of spreading the stories, but the average man did not care to sit before his televiso and watch the International Conference on Planetary Affairs for fifteen all-day sessions, and further, he didn't have the time. The Conference was scheduled to run fifteen days, and the nations were spoiling for a real, good battle-royal. It would be a battle-royal, too, because the Industrial Committees were fearing a violent depression, and realized that they had the choice of fifteen million unemployed in the United States, and proportionate numbers elsewhere, or a war which would make the fifteen million and proportionate numbers unproductive consumers in the armies of the world. Further, the war was indicated by falling profits. The customers needed a good reason before they'd accept a price boost. A war would be ideal.

	Then incidentally of course, there was real enmity arising from the Planetary Affairs Commissions. For nearly three centuries, the Interplanetary Transportation Company had had practical control and ownership of the planets. Interplanetary had gotten off to such a flying start, it had simply bought up all competition at first, and since then no one had been interested in starting a rival company. The only government of the Planets had been the Interplanetary's own Executive Office. Now however, there had arisen considerable feeling on earth, that some nation had a definite claim to the control of those planets.

	"They'll argue," Miller explained to the Cub, "on the basis of the claims made way back in the late 1900's and the early 2000's. The United States has an iron-clad claim on Mars, really, because it was an all-American crew that took old Laurie's ship up there. But her navigator, and her captain, happened to be of French descent, and France has laws to the effect that no Frenchman can become a national of any other country. Therefore, the captain, when he claimed the planet for the United States had no right to do so, and further, the second ship to make the crossing was actually French, and also claimed half the planet. But Germany pointed out that neither ship had fully explored the planet, and not until their ship made the crossing in 1989 was a complete survey in detail available. Therefore they claim about a third of Mars.

	"Now the Jovian Worlds were explored by nationals of all the Terrestrial countries, and Io was explored by an American-born Martian. The big fight of course is over Mars. And—I sort of have a hunch old Terra is in for the shock of her life."

	"Why?" asked the Cub.

	"Wait and see. We'll know within twenty-four hours."

	"Who's that coming in now?" asked the Cub.

	"M. Poireau. French Premier. Elected by the Steel interests. He's naturally for war. Steel in France includes aircraft and rockets."

	"Who's following him there? I don't recognize him at all."

	"Oh—oh! Watch the fireworks! I knew that would happen. Terra is definitely in for a shock. That's John Montgommery, terrestrial president of Interplanetary. 'Mystery Montgommery.' Every time he does show his face, somebody gets blown off the map—look at those delegates there! Every one of them is trembling in his boots right now. Cart-wright from 'these United' represents Metals and Allied Utilities, and he's wondering what's up. If he works against Montgommery, he may lose business for Metals—and if he doesn't, why he may lose his job. Metals can have his election 'recounted' any time they want to, and find fraud in it of course."

	"And I, in my innocence, thought there were still some traces of the ancient democratic government left on earth."

	"Funny, lots of people still do. Clerks and so forth think their votes really get counted. Of course, some of the votes do. They may all be counted pretty quickly, though. I hear Metals is going to start taking their employees' fingerprints so they can check up on who voted and how, when they find it necessary."

	"The Secret Ballot! What a secret!"

	"That gang is worried. All those delegates are worked-up. Montgommery's presence means real trouble. You know they have a true democratic government on the Planets now—something on the order of the old Socialistic schemes proposed here on earth back in the twentieth century and which Russia even tried out. But what the planets have is supposed to be a corporation-voting idea. Actually—well you'll see, I'm willing to bet. Of course their socialism is a whole lot different from anything they proposed back in the twentieth century. Started that way, you might say, because everything on Mars was owned by Interplanetary to begin with, and every immigrant of course paid his fare by buying 'stock.' But— you'll probably see."

	The gentleman from France had been appointed temporary chairman, and so French was the official language of the Conference till the permanent Chairman was elected. He was calling the meeting to order now. The delegates took their places and order ensued. Montgommery had taken a place in the Distinguished Visitors' gallery. More eyes were turned to him than to the Chairman. Montgommery's presence was like the tick of a time-bomb. When would it explode?

	Sir Reginald Barry of England was made Permanent Chairman according to schedule in rapid fire order. Almost at once, M. Poireau rose, and in beautiful diplomatic English, beating all around the bush and Robin Hood's barn, stated that France declared one half of Mar's surface area as hers, that half being delineated carefully. It included Mars Center, New Denver, New Berlin, and Salamance. France knew, of course, that the nations would realize the justice of her claims at once, and withdraw any claims of their own. However, France was fully prepared to stand up for her rights—and intended to.

	Cartwright of the United States rose, and read his speech. "Notice he's reading a typed speech, and answering all of Poireau's points? That speech of Poireau's was a complete surprise, of course," chuckled Miller. "Now watch Hans Schenkie answer both speeches from his own typed script. Man, this Conference is going to explode in a hurry. Montgommery is the cause of this; they'd have delayed these speeches over a period of days, but they want him to hear their claims. He's taking it all in himself—and they'd just expected a few vice-assistant-seconds to be listening in. Say—hold on here, will you? I want to make a call." Miller rose, and vanished along the corridor.

	In perhaps fifteen minutes he was back. Cartwright was answering Poireau's third point by this time, with only eleven more to go. Miller glanced at the Cub's notes and laughed. "Too serious, man, too intent. Here's the way." He condensed the Cub's three pages, to two paragraphs, and explained: "At that rate, you'll fill several large volumes at the average conference, and never be able to find what you wanted again. Those points he's making are all in the Terrestrial Encyclopedia.

	"But here's a note to make. The 'New Denver' is due to land to-morrow at noon in New York. But—they've spotted a life-boat leaving her. The life-boat broke out five hours ago, and will land in about an hour. I'm waiting. The bomb explodes then. I'll bet it lands right here in Geneva, too."

	Cartwright had nearly finished his speech, when the man entered the Distinguished Visitors' Gallery. He was clad in the loose-looking, dust-tight Martian garments, and his face was dark and lean with Martian sunlight. He moved somewhat heavily on earth here, but there was a certain alertness and energy about him. He went directly to John Montgommery, and spoke softly to him. From a brief-case he drew a large envelope of papers, and passed them over with a smile of confidence, and a handshake.

	"Ah—it's come. Now, the bomb explodes."

	Cartwright had been watching. In remarkable fashion, he concluded his address almost at once. The conclusion was that France's claims were wholly baseless and false according to international law. Mars belonged wholly and singly to the United States of America.

	Montgommery rose in his seat.

	"Mr. Chairman."

	"Mr. Montgommery," acknowledged Sir Reginald, "You have no official status at this meeting, but I am sure we would all be glad to hear your views, as an expert on Martian affairs."

	"Mr. Chairman, I should like to present these credentials." Montgommery stalked forward, and passed over to Sir Reginald the papers he had so recently received from the messenger.

	Sir Reginald looked at them hurriedly, then stopped. He looked again, then smiled slowly at Montgommery. "Surprising, isn't it, how the obvious will escape attention. Gentlemen," he went on, addressing the Conference, "I beg to present Mr. Montgommery, Delegate from the United Planetary Council, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary for Mars. He will explain Mars' answer."

	"Thank you, Mr. Chairman," Montgommery replied, interrupting the sudden hushed murmur of surprise and anger. "Gentlemen, I have little to say, but I believe you will agree with Sir Reginald, that it is obvious. Mars does not belong solely and singly to the United States. She does not belong half to France, or one-third to Germany; neither do the Jovian Worlds, nor the Saturnian Worlds. Mars belongs solely and singly to the citizens of Mars.

	"The Jovian Worlds belong singly and solely to the colonists of those Jovian Worlds, as the Saturnian Worlds belong to their inhabitants.

	"I am, I realize, setting forth a great principle, but it is yet an old principle. It is the principle that set up the United States, that men should determine their own courses of action. We of the Planets desire to do so.

	"I fully realize the feelings that will be stirred up, but I intend now in open conference to say, and say bluntly, what we are all thinking.

	"Mars, and the Planets, all represent great wealth. Further, they represent room for colonization. Interplanetary has long held absolute control, and only so because of the vast wealth and consumptive power it represented. This very conference represents the culmination of a recent tendency we, who are interested in Planetary affairs, have watched with alarm. Terrestrials want more ships built, more accommodations for interplanetary travel, so that all can move to the Planets who want to, and this pressure of public opinion has gradually been bringing forth legislation that would weaken Interplanetary to a point where an undesired rush of colonists would be possible.

	"The Planetarians have been carefully selected, and are quite literally a chosen race. The result has been a bit of superiority on their part, but there has always been the opportunity for Terrestrials to be chosen, and this hope has prevented any strong feeling against them.

	"But the reason we have given for this selection, so rigorous that we have refused ninety per cent of all applicants, has been limited transportation facilities. Terrestrial governments could build more ships, say the people, and take us there.

	"Frankly—Mars doesn't want too heavy an unselected immigration."

	"That is the reason for this change, really. Mars is now in theory as Well as in fact, a self-governing world. She has been. You all realize that fact, although technically it has been a corporation called Interplanetary Transport. Now the name has been changed to the Martian Planetary Union, a state with powers similar to those of the individual states of the United States of America, in the greater government of the Interplanetary Union.

	"We have combined against an undesirable immigration. We need more people, need them badly, and will continue our present system, and expand it-— but we will select them. The Interplanetary Union government will appoint as officers the entire staff of the present Interplanetary Transport, renaming them according to the more usual diplomatic practice as Consuls and Ambassadors.

	"The immediate reaction on the part of the Terrestrial nations having claims to the Planets will of course be a desire for war. There is a strong economic need for war right now, I understand," Montgommery added bitterly, "but I would like to point out the absurdity of such a course. Mars is not wealthy enough in human and economic capital to desire such a war—but I think it should be remembered that all the existing ships, capable of the Interplanetary crossing, belong solely and exclusively to the newly-created Interplanetary Union.

	"Oh, no doubt you could build ships, and attack, within two or three years. What would you gain? You cannot armour a space-ship. They are very tender machines, as we well know. Therefore they could not attack readily, nor effectively. Further, they could not carry fuel for the round trip, and still maneuver. The result would be a fleet of derelict, helpless machines in space, hanging off Mars powerless to move, and completely at the mercy of our own small, swift battle-rockets.

	."I believe you will agree that war is out of the question—purely so from a mechanical standpoint. However, I doubt that the people would support such a venture, for they all hope, and secretly expect, to get to Mars themselves. Every man with any self-respect believes himself worthy of choice. Those that feel sure they won't be chosen are cripples, weaklings, or completely spiritless. Of such you cannot make an army. When England tried to put down the rebellion of her American colonies, she failed, not because her men were not brave, or strong or spirited, but because the men of England agreed with their brothers and cousins in the colonies, and refused to fight them. Mercenaries had to be hired, with deplorable results.

	"Well—you may find mercenaries. But every worthy citizen of Terra has a real, and genuine chance to join us in the greatest work man has undertaken: the colonization of new worlds by new and better races of mankind."

	Montgommery sat down. Suddenly the Cub became aware of the fact that Miller had vanished. In his place was an International Newsman with his televiso projector.

	There was an angry mutter of discontent rising from the Conference, and officials were heading for the International Newsman.

	"That scene was not directly broadcast of course?" demanded the sergeant-at-arms?

	Miller reappeared before the International man could speak. "No, Rafferty, it wasn't. We wouldn't care to put that red-hot stuff on the air. But it's being groomed for broadcast right now. We canned it temporarily."

	" 'Fraid it won't go, Miller," said Rafferty, shaking his head. "They all agreed on that. It's bad for the people."

	"I'm afraid it has," said a new voice. The messenger from the Interplanetary Union had appeared. "There was nothing we were ashamed to have on the air, and it has all gone out. I have a new ultravisor in the bag here, and it was relayed from my life-boat. The Conference will have to answer that frank challenge as frankly, if they want the sympathy of the people."

	"But don't worry," Miller replied ironically, "those boys will cook up some kind of hash. Or their companies will."

	A voice pierced suddenly through the mounting angry buzz from the floor of the Conference. "—all realize that this is the desperate move of a traitorous, jealous German Government to prevent the just claims of France being realized and—" The voice was drowned in a bellow of denunciation from the German Delegate.

	"I guess they have already," grinned the Cub. "They've got their war, anyway. I'll send the pictures to you, Miller, if you Martians should be interested."

-

	Moon-faced, fat Simon Wallowy was Chairman of the Conference. Simon Wallowy was also Chairman, of the Industrial Committee of the United States of North America, the son of a long line of Wallowys who had been Chairmen of the Committee naturally, because of the vast properties owned by the Wallowy interests.

	Simon Wallowy was very much annoyed by this conference, as it had called him away from a very pleasant time he had been having at his country home with a number of Plehb girls he had directed to go there. But—this annoying conference had been necessary. The trouble with the world was that there were a number of semi-Plehbs with a little property, and some influence that could make so much noise, that they influenced opinions adversely. Now if Mortan's idea would just be accepted by some of the other men, this last annoyance could be done away with in another two decades.

	However, since things were as they were, the disarmament conference would have to be gone through with. Naturally it would come just when war had almost been decided on by the Sino-Japs and the Americans. Wallowy didn't see what he was going to do with the present unemployment situation, if they didn't have a war fairly soon.

	Also he was annoyed by the attitude that John Montgommery had displayed, that annoying attitude of indifferent superiority, as though he was not a descendant of middle-class incompetents, squeezed Out of and off earth by the strife of business. The Planetarians acted as though they had wanted to leave earth. A billion incompetents and dreamers earth had gotten rid of, so that a real, stable society could be established, and now these same exiles were 'acting superior.'

	They scarcely carried on any trade with earth any more, but then Wallowy didn't want it really. He'd have had to make some concessions on the tariffs if he had, and those cheap all-machine made goods of the Planets would have caused trouble among the workers.

	Ah well. Wallowy wandered across the park toward the Conference building. The beautiful, white, silica building, set among the green of trees on the shore of the blue lake, backed by snow-capped mountains, was shimmering pink in the twilight. Above it, a great tongue of azure and golden atomic flame hung motionless and steady, unmoved by the gentle breeze—the azure and gold of the Peace building.

	Wallowy had always been annoyed by it. It reminded him so forcefully of the trouble his grandfather had had when the atomic names were first invented by David Laurie of Io. The tremendous increase in the available energy had made it possible to throw thousands of workers out, and still maintain production, but it had brought a great deal of trouble, till the British-American war had gotten rid of the excess, and brought Canada into the Union. But it had had the beneficial effect of opening up the Major Planets and Venus and Mercury to colonization, so that a great many of the remaining semi-plehbs had left earth, and made things quieter. Anti-gravity had come almost simultaneously, and completely opened the system to colonization, but by that time the Interplanetary Union got nasty, and wouldn't permit any further emigration from earth.

	Wallowy passed through the door of the Peace Palace with a determined waddle. He might be able to induce the Heinrichs and the Derriers to join him in declaring war on the Interplanetary. That would solve the unemployment problem, and might get them a little satisfaction on the score of Interplanetary's superior attitude. He frowned though, as he remembered that Interplanetary wouldn't respect his properties properly. They might cause damage.

	An hour later he called the meeting to order. He had intended calling on Karl Heinrich as the first speaker, but he discovered to his annoyance that Montgommery of Interplanetary Union wanted the floor. He ignored him, and called Heinrich to speak.

	"I think," said Montgommery interrupting, "that it would be wisest to hear me first. Mr. Chairman, may I have the floor?"

	"Very well, Mr. Montgommery. Your manners however, are execrable."

	Montgommery smiled slightly, and nodded to him. "Worse, according to your ideas. However, my message has not been heard by you—er—men before." He continued more soberly.

	"Interplanetary Union has decided that we have made a bad mistake. Earth, the Mother World, has always been regarded with some feeling of interest and sympathy. However, we have come more and more to realize that in giving birth to the children, old earth has been sacrificing her life-blood. I am sadly afraid that the children have been stupid, and selfish. The result is inevitable, of course, but our own interest in our own problems and the vast work that we had to accomplish, in making civilization possible on such bleak worlds as Pluto and Athena, turned our attention from earth. We have neglected her interests. "Now," he smiled, "we have decided that earth's only hope is that we completely neglect her.

	"Interplanetary Union has decided to completely withdraw all relations with earth. We will withdraw our consuls, ambassadors all our interests. We will send no further ships to earth. We will send no messenger. We will receive none."

	"This should be put on record for future generations. When earth first sends a ship again to Interplanetary at Mars Center, a new ship, with some new invention of importance, then Interplanetary will revisit earth, and help her finish settling her problem.

	"You do not understand me. Poor earth has given her life-blood in giving life to the Planets. Earth is nearly dead. We will leave her, for no effort of ours can bring new life to her, only the slow cleansing of Time can do it.

	"The planets have, for nearly seven centuries, through thirty generations of men, robbed earth of her greatest heritage, the near-geniuses. We have accepted only the strong, the intelligent and the healthy. Generation after generation we have taken from earth everything that makes the human race strong, we have left only the dregs, the weak, the stupid, the unadventurous, and—the contented.

	"The result—we can see all too clearly now. Earth still has a remnant of hope —the so-called semi-plehbs. We know that genius arises slowly. If a thousand morons mate, a few normal men will result. If a thousand normal men mate, a few near-geniuses will result. If a hundred near-geniuses mate, perhaps one genius will rise to lead all the others onward. The planets took every genius earth produced and nearly every near-genius. They did this not once, but time and time again, through thirty generations. The result was that now nearly all the genes of intelligence and health and wisdom that the human race carried, have been isolated on the planets. The genes of stupidity, and disease, and every form of weakness have concentrated on earth. Your death rate shows that, and that is a benefit. Fortunately, in a machine age, the genes of stupidity lead only to death—sudden and violent death. So, we of the planets have this hope for earth. Through perhaps another thirty generations, the genes of weakness and disease will kill off their bearers. More and more they will concentrate in certain strains, and bring death.

	"Even among your plehbs there is some opportunity for intelligence, there will be such a divisioning, that the more intelligent will be thrown together, and there will slowly rise a group of normal, healthy, intelligent people, then from them, a group of near geniuses, and finally a real genius who will fly his ship to Mars Center, and redeem earth.

	"It was the selfishness of the planets that brought it about in its present acute form—but it was inevitable. All the near-geniuses would have gone. We accelerated the process, true, but it would have been just those intelligent, restless ones, who sought greater opportunities, who would have made the trip anyway.

	"America led the earth when she was young for just one reason. She was populated by only those people who had intelligence enough to earn their passage-money, who had ambition enough to seek new opportunity, and brains enough to permit them to cut loose from the land where they were born. America lost her advantage slowly as a new race of settled people rose. For a time, all the restless, driving genes of the Caucasian race were concentrated in America. In Europe, there, remained the stupid, land-loving peasant who could not see beyond the horizon.

	"The planets inevitably were populated by a race of men who could see beyond the horizon, even beyond the skies, and up to the stars. They inevitably got the restless, ambitious men and women who sought new room for their abilities.

	"Why—earth was doomed to decay when Laurie sent his first rocket to Mars nearly seven hundred years ago. We of the planets made it worse still by our selection, generation after generation, of the finest and best blood earth had to offer.

	"Now, we are leaving earth. We will send no ships. We will send no messages, nor receive any from earth. We will send no men. Most of all, we will take none. Thirty generations brought about the downfall of earth. Thirty more may see it rebuilt.

	"We leave within a month. I leave this evening.

	"We hope to hear from you, or better, from the people of earth, in another seven or eight hundred years. But no matter how long it may take, earth will be completely isolated so far as we are concerned. It is impossible for us to do any positive thing to aid earth. Only time, and generations of men can do it.

	"One other thing," he added with a faint smile, "I may hope to greet the first man of the New Earth. James Steven Munro has discovered a system of prolonging life for a period as yet unknown. I am proud to say that I am one of the few who have been chosen to receive this treatment.

	"We of the planets have decided, thanks to the example of earth, that death is a necessary evil. It alone purges the race, and makes room for the new generations. Only the coming of new, and newer generations can bring the new and better men. Evolution did not stop when men arose from the mud.

	"We have seen evolution. You have seen the short, inhumanly powerful men of Jupiter, and the lean, dry, dark men of Mars.

	"But I may live to receive the first of the new men of earth.

	"Now I am leaving. The decision is final."

	"Do you mean to say that Interplanetary considers earth unworthy of their high and mighty society?" roared Wallowy, his face crimson with rage.

	Montgommery stood up slowly, and smiled at him.

	'Tm afraid it does. Of yours, at any rate. I might add, for your interested consideration, that we thought of teaching you how to live for centuries. It would prevent any increase in your intelligence. If you become intelligent, you may prevent the re-evolution of intelligence in the plehbs. We decided against it, because you would probably give it to the plehbs also, so that new workers would not have to be trained, so that less time would be lost during their infancy. That would prevent new generations, so we decided against it."

	Montgommery smiled, and despite the storm of anger bellowing from enraged and life-hungry men, he walked out, protected by the same, short, powerful Jovian guard he had previously mentioned.

	The interplanetary transport-cruiser "Terra" rose gently, its weight destroyed, and lifted across the white, calm tip of Mt. Blanc. Her ion-rockets flared to pale bluish flames as she shot upward.

	Interplanetary was leaving earth. 

-

CHAPTER I

	Bravely the nine-year-old boy swung along the passages, through the almost deserted main corridors, past the roaring workshops. Polshin guards stationed here and there paid little attention to him. Plehb workers plodding about their work heavily, or walking more briskly, carrying messages, paid no attention to him. He was the sole care of his parents and himself. No one would pay any attention, if one more child was caught in a machine or crushed under a heavy truck.

	Bruce Lawry, actually was considerably frightened, for he had bravely determined to reach the far-away Deserted Passages.

	Jon Lawry, Bruce's father had told him about those Deserted Passages. Jon was a mechanician, a Plehb of the 'A class' in consequence, and fairly free to roam, his blue garb a protection from Polshin guards. Jon had seen and entered these deserted passages, when a mysterious short circuit in a power circuit had to be located. Far back in the Deserted Passages, the power line had long since been dead-ended, and never removed. A fall of stone from the passage roof had shorted it. Bruce was determined to see them. He had told Don he would. He had taken one of his father's little light-tubes so that he could see.

	It was nearly four miles across the city, and all the distance had to be traversed on foot. Once, his father had told him, the streets had moved, and you could ride on them, but that had been stopped, to discourage the wandering of the Plehbs.

	His father had been apprenticed to a man who knew the story of the great city of N'Yak of long ago. Then, his father had told him not only the Pol-shins had surface homes, but even the Plehbs had lived above ground. Only because it was cheaper to create artificial light from atomic power and maintain air conditioning, than to maintain both of these and also buildings that the weather constantly wore down, had the Plehbs been moved below the surface, into the rocks.

	Jon had even been to the surface sometimes, to fix power lines leading to the Polshin homes.

	Bruce walked more slowly as he came at last to the edge of the city. There were few people in the streets here now. The Polshin guards were far apart, and the light-tubes were scanty. Bruce looked down the corridor he was following, and saw where the light ended. There was no Polshin stationed there, for it was a little side-street, where no people lived.

-

	Hurriedly Bruce scuttled beyond the lighted zone, and looked back. No Polshin had seen him. He went on, stumbling in the dark, afraid to light his hand-torch. Something tripped him suddenly, and he fell with a little cry of fear. Quickly he turned his light on it. It was a strange, white, lattice work of rounded bars. It was only when he saw that it was an outline, about his own size, and that, draped over it was the metal-cord belt such as he wore, that he realized what it must be-—a skeleton. He almost went back. But he looked, and saw there was no light-tube beside this skeleton, and determinedly he started on. He wondered how many more might have come this Way, and died.

	With the super-developed sense of direction he had acquired from many walks about the lighted part of the city, he felt no fear of getting lost. Instead he went on and on, his light-tube glowing now.

	He passed long rows of deserted dwellings. Then he came to a section, the like of which he had never seen. The corridor had grown wider and wider as he advanced, with incoming passages adding to it. Here at last he came to a great Cube, far greater than Cube Center in the part of the city he knew. In the center of the Cube was a building, not made of the universal granite, grey and cold, but of white stone, of marble had he known it. It was utterly different from anything he had ever seen, beautiful and clean and white. In the spread light of the tiny, but wonderfully powerful hand-light, he could dimly see the graceful columns and the roof. That was something he had never seen before, in this weatherless place. He did not know that this was a copy of Greek architecture.

	Breathlessly, excited as he had never been before, he looked around him. The whole Cube was lined with various great glass windows, far larger than he had ever seen before. They were dark now, and lonely little heaps of rubbish lay behind them, he could not guess their purpose.

	Cautiously he made his way toward the beautiful white building. There was rubbish on the stone floor of the great Cube. Over it he picked his way with the aid of the little light-tube and went up the broad, foot-worn steps of the library. This library was very old, even he knew that. He knew more than most children of that thirty-second century civilization would have known. He could read the inscription above the door, even though it meant little to him, "INTERPLANETARY LIBRARY FOUNDATION." Foundation he understood. His father had taught him to read, for Jon Lawry, being a mechanician, had to be able to read meters, and other things, as had his predecessors, and so the art of reading had been handed down among the mechanicians. Bruce knew foundation only as a heavy base one put machines on. He looked around for the machine, and wondered what kind of thing it could have been that had been set on this beautiful structure.

-

	Interplanetary meant nothing to him. He did not know what a planet was. Library meant as little, for the Plehbs had forgotten libraries and printed literature almost entirely, and the little they knew was the simple technical material they needed. Actually Bruce's mother, Marta, had taught him reading more than his father had done, though his father had begun his instruction, for Marta was a worker in the chemical plants. She had nearly half a dozen books, books on thin metal plates, worn and broken now, for they were some four hundred and fifty years old. These were the only books Bruce knew. Libraries were unheard of among the Plehbs.

	Bruce stared at the great bronze doors. Cautiously he pulled at one. It did not open. The grill of the gate was far too fine-meshed for him to slip through, and there were no windows in the building. Inside he could see the smooth layer of grey dust on the white stone, and long racks, a series of great tables, and here and there a low desk. It was very dark, save where his light touched it. He wanted very much to get in.

	Suddenly he turned his attention to the lock. It was steel, bright, rust-less steel, far too well made to be opened by his efforts. Perhaps somewhere there still existed a key for that lock, but no man on all earth could have said where it might be. But Bruce was a mechanician, his mind was sharp, and trained to mechanical and electrical thoughts. Confidently he examined the door. Then he turned, and made his way back through the trash and litter of the Cube. Hunting, he finally found what he wanted, a bent piece of metal some six inches long. Fearfully he made his way to the door, stripped off his single garment, and wrapped his hand and the light-tube in it. Then with the other hand he removed the tiny glowing gas-tube from the device, and carefully inserted the bent metal, carefully protected with some mouldering cloth. In a moment he had located the thinnest of the metal bars of the grill.

	A sudden groaning hum came from his light-tube as he made the contact, a popping and crackle of sparks, and a shower of incandescent metal fell on his cloth-wrapped hand. Some burned his bare body—but the grill-bar parted. Again he applied his light-tube, another bar gave way. Three more bars he fused. Then he stopped, and replaced the gas-tube. It didn't fit well now, for even the resistant light-tube was somewhat burned, and it didn't glow very brightly any longer, for the charge was nearly used. He knew though that it would burn satisfactorily for another four hours, and then he would have the emergency cell left for half an hour more.

-

	Tugging, straining with all his power, he pulled the broken bars aside. He crept inside, and looked about him. Now he could see the stacks, and with a soft intake of breath he realized they were books. Books in such quantities as he had never imagined! Rapidly he went to them, and read their titles.

	"T-h-e D-e-v-e-l-o-p-m-e-n-t O-f I-n-t-e-r-p-l-a-n-e-t-a-r-y C-o-l-o-n-i-z-a-t-i-o-n." He spelled out. But he didn't know what it was. So he took down the book, and looked at it. Then he put it back, realizing he did not know anything about it at all, and looked at other shelves.

	Three hours later his light was growing very dim, and he realized he must hurry back to the lighted ways soon. Regretfully he turned away, and started homeward. But he determined that this Library, the meaning of which he knew now, was to be his secret, shared only with Don Wade. They would come back here, and bring fresh light-tubes with them, and they would learn what was in all those thousands of books.

	Why, they might learn even what made the Burners give off their silent, hot flame endlessly, and the great surging currents. Nobody knew that anymore, but Jon Lawry had said, "They have forgotten. Once men knew, but they have all forgotten now. And the books are lost. They must have told once upon a time. Once, men were wiser than now."

	Maybe these books told even that!

-

CHAPTER II

	Dot Steel was the third person to enter the library after the seven centuries of desertion. Bruce brought Don back with him that next day. Children had their work to do too, soon enough in life. By the time he was twelve, Bruce was apprenticed to his father in the mechanics business. Time and again he amazed his father with work Jon could not do. By then he had read some of the books in that library, and what had been a child's secret from the first day, became even more of a secret. And from them he had learned the secrets of the machines Jon repaired blindly by rule. They were to him, just as to Don Wade, an escape. In the books they left the grinding labor of 3340 and went back through time to the days when earth was great.

	An even deeper secret it was as they advanced to adolescence. Then, as their apprenticeship approached an end, their maturing minds began to realize more and more fully the significance of this thing. They realized the true inheritance of mankind. Bruce had studied the technical books, both because they lay along the field of his work and because in them lay his interests. He knew how the Burners worked, splitting the atom, and releasing the protons and electrons in flying streams, to give off the tremendous currents that were the life-blood of their civilization.

	Wade had studied the historical books, he had gathered more and more a true picture of what the human race had been. But one problem was left in his mind. What had happened? Why had men fallen so, and fallen so completely and abruptly? In 2695, dozens of books were placed on the shelves. In 2697, the last book had been placed there. The library records ended in 2703. What had brought about this tremendous and abrupt fall, from a vast civilization that spread to every planet of the system, to a tiny shrunken thing that could not maintain itself at its high level for even one brief decade? Had men been afflicted with some titanic system-wide plague? Why was there absolutely no record of this tremendous, world-shaking change?

	Don, more than Bruce, was absorbed in this problem. Don was the student, the sociologist. Bruce was the scientist To Bruce came the sheer, thrilling exultation of intellectual brilliance as he read of the scientific achievements of the Old Days. When men had come face to face with an absolutely impassable boundary—why they had simply dodged under it or over it or crept around it. Nothing had stopped man then, it seemed. In the greatness of earth, Man had sought, and found the secret of the energy of exploding atoms. One of the things that had given Bruce the keenest joy was the infinite subtlety with which men had attacked the problem of X-rays. No substance could be ruled with lines so close together as to produce a diffraction grating such as was used in light study. So—man had used the natural, regularly spaced crystal-molecules in substances as his diffraction grating X-rays could not be reflected by a mirror, or concentrated by a lens to form an image. Yet man had used crystals to focus X-rays to make pictures of things too minute to be caught by light.

	Bruce did not wonder at it, it seemed perfectly natural to him, but he was able to understand and follow with ease the deepest thoughts of those greatest thinkers of the Old Days. Why shouldn't he, he would have thought? They were men, he was a man—so why not?

-

	The Planets had done better by earth, in leaving her, than they had guessed. Wheat, strong and healthy, planted in fertile ground, produces lavishly. But ALL the wheat grows, weak with the good, and gradually the yield falls to that of ordinary wheat in ordinary ground. Weak, poor wheat, in poor, lean ground, will grow very poorly. The crop will be nearly nothing. But with a few generations, it rises to a more normal level. Now if that wheat be transplanted to good land, the yield will be enormous, because that harsh, poor land has killed out the weaklings, the un-resistant, and only strong, vigorous stock could survive.

	The planets had concentrated all the weakness of the race on earth. All the weakness of the race had killed itself by its very weakness. Now, in the thirty-fifth century, a tiny population of scarcely two hundred million remained of earth's three billions. But those two hundred million were far above the average of the twentieth century, before the great dividing began.

	Bruce and Don had studied, each finding a vast interest and release in these books. More and more they realized they must keep it secret, lest the Pol-shins find it, and destroy them as possible revolutionists. No other humans knew of these finds.

	And that was why Dot Steel was finally brought Don met her when doing some special work for the Metals Department. They had worked together, talked together—and soon they loved together. Don, twenty-two now, was tall and wirily powerful, his keen, pleasant face framed in golden blond hair. He wore the Blue of a Class A plehb, and, for that matter, so did Dot Steel. There was no law that forced them to marry within their own Plehb-class, but the class A Plehbs, being in similar lines of work, tended to come more together, they lived in the same parts of the city, and there was a natural tendency to intermarry.

	Dot Steel was twenty when they met, five feet two in height, slim, as soft and graceful as a cat. Her hair was black as the Deserted Corridors and shiny as laquer. Her lips were full and red, and her black eyes seemed to challenge Don to love her.

	He did, he loved her whole-heartedly. He'd have gone to the Mating Office with her within a week of the day he met her. but that he was still only a first-grade apprentice. In six months he was to get his Class C Masters' papers, and with them in hand he could petition the local Polshin for a separate apartment, and on mating he would be granted, with his wife, a two-week holiday. So they had not gone at once to the Mating Office.

	Dot Steel wanted to. She cared only for the moment, and she wanted Don, wanted him as only a Plehb, who had little in life to long for, could want anything. She wanted to be with him, and feel him near her. Not Some Time, but Now.

-

	And Don, with the keener, more powerful mind, realized it would be far better if they started their own home, instead Of bringing a wife to live with his own parents. Further, now, as a Class One apprentice, he and his wife were entitled to but one week of vacation.

	Dot began to doubt him, she grew suspicious of his love. And further, she knew when his hours of rest came, she knew he had twelve full hours off every day, yet never did he spend more than three with her, and then only once a week. The other days, he limited himself to one hour—and vanished. Try as she would, coax as she would, she could not learn where he spent the other time.

	So one day when Don Wade called, expecting three hours with his own girl —she was cold and angry, she accused him of spending nearly all his time with another girl.

	"I know—I know. You say you don't —but where do you go? Have you ever told me? Have you ever denied even that you were free those hours? One hour—then you are gone. You do not love—and you do not even play fair with the other girl, the one you must love better, for you spend most of your time with her."

	"Oh, Dot, darling. I don't, I love you, and only you. I—"

	"Then why don't you stay with me? Why do you always leave? You go off with Bruce—and stay away. You have lovers together."

	"Sweetheart, in this town you know that couldn't be true," Don smiled, "you'd have heard the 'Truth' from the neighbors."

	"I have," snapped the girl. "They all know you leave me. That's why it's so unbearable. If you love me, and not some other girl, prove it. Take me where you have been going."

	That was final. Either Dot went where Don spent all his time—or Don could spend ALL his time there so far as she was concerned.

	In despair, Don turned to the telephone system. Bruce, now a Master Mechanician, was necessarily available by phone.

	"We must show her, Bruce. It is your discovery—shall we take her?"

	"Of course, Don, if it means your happiness you need not have asked me. Shall I come along?"

	"Will you? I'm afraid," he laughed ruefully, "she would not believe my word in her present mood."

-

	They started in an hour, Bruce leading the way in his blue Masters' garb with its gold star. Down half-lighted back passages, then through a series of apartments long deserted that stood right on the border line between the deserted and the populated regions, missing the Polshin guards as always. Then down the familiar passages to the Great Cube. It was Laurie Cube as Bruce knew now. As they came to it, the great gas-tubes lighted suddenly. A little scream-of surprise came from Dot. Those miles of black, mysterious corridors, deserted for centuries, had been all she could stand. Only her determination to see where Don was leading her drove her on. As they came on, she became convinced that Don was taking her here that he might scare her, make her afraid to go through with it. Then always he could say when he left her that he was going to the place he would have taken her had she not been afraid.

	As the lights blazed up suddenly, mysteriously, at their approach, her nerves almost gave way altogether.

	"It's all right honey—just an automatic photo-cell device Bruce arranged to light it at our approach."

	"Oh," she gasped, then "oh—how beautiful!"

	In the full light of the light-tubes, the little Greek temple of white silica stone shone like a great jewel, in a dark setting. About it the dark granite absorbed the light, it alone reflected it and seemed to glow of its own light.

	Warm yellowish light shone from the doorway of the library now. Inside was the clean white light of the reading lights, but here the warmth of the yellowish light seemed to welcome them.

	Rapidly they advanced, and Dot Steel entered the library, the third human to enter it since this region had been deserted six centuries before.

	"In-ter-plan-et-ary Li-brar-y Foun-da-ti-on. What's that mean? What is this place?"

	"A library is a place where books are kept, darling. Bruce found this place when he was a small boy, and ever since we have been coming here, studying, reading the books of the Old Days. Darling, we know more about this city here than the Polshins. We know more about the machines than any other man living. These books have kept forever the knowledge that men have forgotten. We have learned it again."

	"Books?" the girl cried, "Just books?"

	She looked into the library now, looked about at the shelves of books, racked in thousands and thousands. The tables were strewn here and there with sheets of paper, pencils, calculating machines.

-

	"Just books," smiled Bruce, his deep voice smiling with him. "But you shouldn't say 'just' books. Books are something you have not learned to understand. Man practically lost books for seven centuries. Why, I don't know. And because he lost Books, he lost everything. He lost freedom, and wisdom and judgment. He lost ease and happiness.

	"The books can teach him to win them back."

	"I tried to read a book once," said Dot, her suspicions returning. "It was very uninteresting. It was so uninteresting I went to sleep, and was nearly late to work. I don't believe you come here. No one could be so interested in books as you pretend."

	"But we are, Dot. That is how we have gotten our advancement so quickly. Don't you remember Bruce got his Master's Papers because he fixed a broken burner that no other Mechanician could fix. He could fix it because he knew how those machines worked. He alone of all men knows why they do what they do. I have gotten my papers rapidly, because I have taken from these books knowledge that has been lost for centuries, and put it to use."

	"But that doesn't make me believe you are so interested you come here day after day and read—read books," she said the last words with Scorn.

	"Sweetheart, you have never read books. You don't know the romance and the mystery that surrounds them, and the things they say. What were the Old Days like—and why did they end? Who are the Polshins? Who are the Plehbs? Do you know that 'Polshin' comes from a corruption of the old word 'Politician,' a man who sought to gain some public office. Oh—but you don't know what a public office is.

	"There are mysteries and wonders in those books."

	"I read one," insisted Dot. "It was very uninteresting."

	"Dot," said Bruce, "there are one hundred and fourteen thousand books in this library. There are one hundred and three thousand different books—no two alike. You read one. You know how you hate Jak Studds. Would you say because Jak Studds was hateful, that all Plehbs are hateful? Be fair. Because one book is uninteresting to one very small, and very pretty little girl, that does not mean that one hundred and three thousand books are all very uninteresting to a man."

	"Well—maybe.

	"But then why is Don so unwilling to go to the Mating Office with me?" she launched her attack suddenly along different lines.

	"Dot, Dot—you know I'm not unwilling to go there with you," Don cried, wrapping her suddenly in his arms, and turning her face up to his. "There's nothing I want more—except perhaps your happiness. And that, I think, I can best assure by waiting a little longer."

	"Ooo—you can't—you can't," she suddenly sobbed, and hugged him harder, burying her face suddenly on his chest. "I—I want you Don—I want you now!"

	Don lifted her face again. "If you want me so much now, as much as I want you maybe, why—I guess we can get to the Mating Office in half an hour."

	But Dot didn't stop crying. She cried harder, and hugged him harder, and began to dance. Let's go—let's go—".

-

CHAPTER III

	There were three couples ahead of them when they reached the Mating Office. All of them were trying to look bored and indifferent. All of them were being very stiff and wooden. The couple in the Blue were being Recorded first. A mixed couple, a man in Blue and a girl of the Greens was next, then a Green pair, and finally a pair of big, powerful-bodied Greys.

	Each couple was accompanied by a Master of his class to act as witness and identifier. The Blues' witness was evidently the girl's father, and he was quite as flustered as the pair themselves. The Plehb clerk behind the bench looked at him with a bit of annoyance, but not too much, for he was a second-class blue, while the Master was, of course a first-class. Finally the pair moved away, to the accompaniment of chuckles and snickers of half-suppressed laughter from the Polshin Guards standing at the door.

	One of the Polshins left his post long enough to press his seal-ring on the wax, and returned, his soft scarlet cloak flapping about his legs.

	This guard-duty was the one task the Polshin men performed in all their lives. For two years they were forced to do the strenuous job of standing or sitting about in the Plehb sections and guarding the Polshin's interests. Usually they went in pairs, for company. Each was armed with a shock-rod, but it meant nothing, for they were seldom needed. Their duty in this office was merely to put a Polshin stamp of approval on the Mating Record—and collect their fees. Two, lest the duty be too boring.

	The mixed couple, accompanied by a Blue Master, was up now. The Master in this case was evidently the young man's Apprentice-master. The records were entered speedily, and the three de-parted. The green couple followed, as another couple came behind Dot and Don. Then—Omallin came in. Omallin's entrance at that precise moment was as mighty a force in the course of human history, as Montgommery's speech on the "Independence of Mars," or that later speech of the later Montgommery on the "Isolation of Earth," Omallin was the local Polshin leader, N'Yak's Polshin Chief. He was round, and short and fat, his face was red and fat, his hair faded, and missing on top altogether, so his pink, shiny skull showed. His fifty-three years of utter unrestraint showed in the bleary, pig-eyes, in the flabby, fat face and the flabby, fat belly. He waddled when he walked, and his voice was high-pitched and unpleasant. But he was followed by a retinue of lesser Polshins, bowing morally, intellectually, and physically to this scarlet-cloaked monstrosity. His once sharp hawk's nose was half buried in the soft fat of his face, and the sharp chin whose evolution marked the evolution of man was lost in rolling, quivering fat.

	Omallin entered, and the Polshin guards sprang to the straightest of attention. The Plehb clerk bowed low, and the other Plehbs in the room inclined their heads.

	Omallin nodded grandly. The Polshin Guards relaxed, the Plehbs straightened again. "Plehb, how many matings this month?" demanded the Polshin Leader.

	"Six thousand four hundred and thirty-nine, Polshin Sir," replied the clerk.

	"The rate is rising?" 

	"Yes, Polshin Sir."

-

	"Hmmm—maybe, Karrody, I will admit your request to open some of the Deserted Passages to Council. Hmmmm—" Omallin looked around him.

	Dot Steel had, with the other Plehbs, sunk back to the less lighted portion of the room, but the softer light merely enhanced and softened her beauty. Omallin's wandering eyes suddenly focussed. A slow smile came across the fat face.

	"By Gah—a beauty. Plehb, come here."

	Dot Steel's richly colored face went white as the clerk's papers. Her body was suddenly trembling, her eyes opened, dilated slowly. But she did not move.

	The Polshin Guard nearest the girl stepped over abruptly. "Plehb, move when you're ordered," he snapped. A touch of the shock-rod and the girl jumped violently. With a little whimper she turned, and started for the door on flying feet. The Polshin guard caught her, just as Bruce Lawry, his cold grey eyes blazing caught Don Wade. "Fool," he whispered, "you cannot help by fighting. It will only be death."

	The Polshin guard brought Dot Steel toward Omallin. Omallin's fat hand reached up, caught the fastener of the girl's suit, a swift crinkle of sound and the single garment fell away, leaving her white body under the lights.

	Omallin's eyes seemed to lose their bleariness for a moment.

	"Ahh—" he said softly. "Send her to Infirmary Five for the treatment then to my place—she is very nice."

	The girl collapsed slowly, gently to the floor, and lay quiet as Omallin walked out of the room. The Plehbs in the room were tensely quiet as the grinning Polshin Guards picked up the girl. Passing his hands over her, one turned to his companion with a broader grin. "Old Omallin—"

	White-faced, frozen Don exploded into life so suddenly that Bruce did not even feel the warning tensing of his muscles. One blow of his fist, backed by the work-hardened muscles of a strong man, sent the Polshin Guard flying half across the room.

	One touch of the other's shock-rod jerked Wade into abrupt unconsciousness. His lax body fell across Dot Steel. Raging, holding his near-broken jaw, the first Polshin started across the room, his shock-rod glowing now with the blue fire that meant death at its touch.

	"Wait, Mark. The poor fool was crazy. He's a Blue, and worth something. Losing his woman made him kind of crazy, don't kill him."

	"Out of the way, that Plehb-spawned maggot struck me! No Plehb can—"

	"Let him live, Mark, let him live. He was crazy. Don't worry. He's paying for it."

-

	It was hours later when Don Wade woke. Bruce was leaning over him. his eyes cold and clear. There was a hypodermic needle in his hand.

	"Dot," groaned Wade. Abruptly he sat up. He stared about him. He was in the Library now, lying on one of the tables.

	"Lie back, Don. You almost died anyway. Believe it or not, the interference of a Polshin saved your life."

	"Where's Dot?"

	"She's gone, Don," replied Bruce steadily. "You know that."

	Don's eyes began to smolder with a colder, saner hate now. "I'm going to get her back. Those maps—the old maps! They will show where Infirmary is, and I'll bring her back!"

	"No, Don. You won't. Listen to me, Don. You aren't prepared to bring her back. You couldn't get to her in the first place. In the second, you would not be able to bring her away now. She has been operated on by now. She will be unable to move for days. If you did reach her, and escape with her, where could you go? I have thought of all this. While I was getting that stuff to revive you from the old Interplanetary Hospital, I thought that out.

	"Don, you will have to lose Dot. I know more of medicine now than do those doctors of Infirmary Five. They are trained only by what is remembered from the Old Days. I know all that is known of the Old Days—more than they do. Listen, I will tell you what will happen. Dot is not like most of the Plehb girls taken. She is not the first but she will be almost the last. Dot will become conscious when the anasthetic wears off about two days from now. Then she will know what has happened. She will be treated. And she will die because she does not want to live. Nothing they knew even in the Old Days would have been able to make her whole again, so even if you could reach her, it would avail you nothing, because Dot would not want to live, and she would die. When a human not only does not fight for life, but seeks death, that human will die, even though they be in sound health. With a wound, death is inevitable. Dot is lost, Don."

	For a long minute Don sat in silent, blank-faced thought. Slowly he sank back. "Yes. She is, I guess. I have read that too. And I know Dot." He smiled faintly at Bruce. "What will work for her, will work for me, Bruce. I do not want to live."

	Bruce's eyes just hardened. "I thought of that, too. I would not have saved you if I had not known you would want very much to live. Don, you want to live because you know more than any other living human. You know the secrets of the old days, and we can learn more. With them—We will not only destroy Omallin, but we will destroy the whole Polshin order: we will bring back the Old Days!"

-

	Slowly Don's eyes lit up again, and again he sat up. "Use these secrets of the Old Days—to end Omallin and the Polshins. Yes, Bruce. I want very much to live."

	His voice was so coldly, precisely deadly, Bruce looked at him sharply. Don spoke again. "It will take years, won't it, Bruce? We cannot do it alone, for then it would not stay done. The other Plehb girls would be seen by other Omallins, and want to not-live. No, it will take years, and we must be very careful. We must make all the Plehbs in N'Yak help us first. Then—I wonder if the old cities still exist, like this one. Shkaga and Washton, San Franco and London. Somehow, Bruce, we must learn, and start in all those cities, so that all the Polshins everywhere are destroyed.

	"And first we must learn all the secrets of the Old Days, and more too, if possible. I think perhaps we can. We will open the old Interplanetary Laboratories. Somehow we must build an atomic cruiser, for I know that while we have seen only the pleasure cruisers of the Polshins, they must have, somewhere, the old atomic cruisers. We will need powerful weapons if we are to regain the surface for the Plehbs."

	"I thought you would agree with me. Don. Yes, it will take years. .And all those years you must keep out of the sight of the Polshin Guards, for one of those two in the Office there will look for you. The one you hit. The other saved your life."

	"For that, perhaps I should thank him. If he did not, I would not have had this opportunity." Don's cold, precise voice seemed with him permanently now.

-

CHAPTER IV

	Don Wade began the study of mass psychology, and the psychology of the individual that day, while Bruce began the study of the maps with more care. The power they were using to light the library and the Laurie Cube outside, they had simply stolen from the old power-lines that had never been torn out. But now, Bruce realized, he would want vastly more power, power to light and operate the buildings. For they had decided that some small part of this deserted section was going to be restored to the beauty it must have had before the Great Catastrophe, as they had come to call that period of sudden fall from earth's greatness, the sudden change from the Old Days.

	Bob Steel, Dot's brother, was their first recruit, and Jon Lawry their second. Bob Steel was a Master of Direction, and a class A Blue. And he hated the Polshins with as deadly a hate as did Don Wade. With Wade he began to read the old books, and to learn what had been before. He quickly appreciated the mystery and romance of them. And—their possibilities for revenge, and for reinstatement of the Old Days. Old Jon read the books, and with ecstatic joy learned again the secrets forgotten by men for more than six centuries. He reveled in knowing. With difficulty he restrained himself from showing his knowledge at every job he was called on, and from calling on Brace's far greater knowledge. Bruce had trained himself through years to study to a point that equalled the learning of any physicist of the Old Days. To him the atomic engines were clear, and straightforward in their action.

	The Polshins had had, years and centuries ago, a spy system. That had been thrown over now, long since. When first the semi-Plehbs, the small property owners and near-genius trade intellects had been suppressed almost immediately after Interplanetary's complete withdrawal, there had been violent, crafty rebellion, led by these intelligent ones. Soon, though, they had been killed off, had died out, or by intermarriage with the weaklings, both in mind and spirit, the last revolutionary tendencies had been stamped out. The far-reaching spy system of those days had died out with it. Gradually the televiso-system fell into decay, and failed utterly. The telephone system was simpler, needed less intelligence for its operation, and was maintained because the Polshins needed rapid communication at times of emergencies. The Masters were connected by telephone system, but that had, at first been watched with the greatest care, lest it be used for plotting. Finally even this had stopped.

	Now, in 3350, there was no check on the Plehbs, because there seemed to be no need for it. The Plehbs had no unification whatever, no common leaders save the Polshins.

	But, unnoted by the Polshins, intelligence had risen again. The dampness of stupidity had dried out of the powder —and Bruce was the fulminate cap that would set it off. Omallin had pounded the cap. Already the trains of fire were streaking out through the loose mass of highly intelligent and explosive men. All they needed was to be shown what could be—and they would demand it.

	In a month, Bruce and Jon, and a dozen other master mechanicians had restored the great power station in the Mahtan section of the city, the long deserted part, that part furthest from the inhabited portion. There were lights there now, the great atomic burners supplying plentiful power. And—the elevators had been restored to operation, the moving walks moved again. There were goods in the show-windows, goods manufactured in the hidden plants in that deserted section by the skilled Plehbs who had been converted to the movement.

-

	The Mahtan section lived and breathed with a surface semblance of the old life. The televiso system was in full operation here, and century-old reels of televiso-plays, stored in the magnetism of thin steel ribbons, were again in action, the theatres were lighted and showing scenes of the Old Days.

	These educated the people to the old life far more quickly than the finest of orators could have educated them. Educational reels showed the whole Solar System, how it was made up, and how it worked. News Reels showed the mighty jungles of Venus, the blazing, smoking rocks of Mercury, the yellow-red deserts of Mars, and their gleaming cities. They saw the ultra-powerful, squat men of Jupiter, and the lean, tall, tanned men of Mars. The mighty glaciers of Athena's frozen airs, and her broad rivers of liquid helium flowed again across Terrestrial screens.

	They rode again in the early rockets, then in the mightiest of the great space-liners of seven centuries before.

	And Don Wade spoke. Don had trained himself with the aid of the old books, and with the patient, deadly precision of a man whose life is directed to one end, the destruction of a hated system. Normally when he spoke now, his voice held only that cold deadliness. But when he spoke to his audiences, it was rich, and strong. It told the men what they could be. Blues and Greens were admitted, but as yet no Greys, for Don Wade had one important message to give, and no Grey would have been intelligent enough to obey.

	"Do not let any Polshin, for whatever reason, even gain suspicion that in the slightest degree, your ideas have been changed."

	There was everything to win. Those Plehbs, seeing the city alive, the walks moving freely once more, the televiso news working, admitted freely now to the half-dozen libraries that had been found, did change. But they were chosen Plehbs, too. Not over a thou-sand at any time were allowed to enter the Deserted Passages. There must be no sudden decrease in the population of the inhabited section.

	And other, side-separated routes were found for entering the deserted section. There were a score or more Plehbs who had permanently left the old section, and lived now as guards and watchmen at the entrances to the new. Televiso systems kept them connected with Janice's headquarters.

	Bruce had established himself. He was one of those who no longer lived in the old section, but on one of the lowest levels of the Mahtan section. Deep down here, two levels below the power plant, was the Interplanetary Research Laboratory. When Interplanetary had maintained its offices on earth, these laboratories had been the finest research organizations on the planet. They had been used for research in physics, in chemistry and biology, and for human research, for testing applicants for em-migration. When Interplanetary had left, that laboratory had been simply closed down. The Polshins had not been interested in research—and they could have found no adequate scientists to populate it, had they been so inclined.

-

	Bruce found it. And Bruce repopulated it. From the Master Kem class, he drew chemists, from the Master Meks, he drew mechanicians and electricians. From the Master Bios, he drew his biologists. Then he set them all, nearly fifty of the most intelligent Plehbs, the most intelligent Terrestrians, working on the books and records he found here; the more advanced books in Physics he read himself, the last records, the reports and scientific publications that had been printed on Mars and Jupiter.

	"For there is one problem that will, when solved, give us the things we need —real power.

	"Remember this. The old revolutions were always stamped out by two methods: shutting off the air flow, and pumping in heat till the Plehbs nearly suffocated. They had to stop. All those controls are still in the hands of the Polshins at the surface. They still know how to use them, I'll bet. Then they turned off all the power, so that darkness and utter lack of energy forced submission and the deliverance of the leaders to them.

	"Our first necessity is independent power. We can't possibly build new atomic burners. Remember the 'infuse' lining  of the burners, and of the stop plates is a substance we cannot make here. We must have the Jovian elements. We must seek a new answer to the old problem of power. Chemical fuels simply won't do. Accumulators, marvelous as they are, aren't enough.

	"Besides, we must have a greater power than the Polshins. And they have the atomic cruisers. Don, the atom contains the secret. That was the one problem that was not fully solved in the Old Days. I think I have a chance, where they failed, because I have learned not at the time, but centuries later, and I have gotten a perspective that they did not have. I have learned across all the centuries. Toward the end of the Old Days they were treating the atom more and more as a particle, but several centuries before that, they had considered it more as a series of waves."

	"The treatment of the atom as a particle, however, brought them the energy of the atom, while the treatment as a wave brought them nothing whatever.

	"The treatment as a particle brought them a particle of the energy. Think of it this way: A thousand tons of water is a mile above you. You can extract the potential energy of that water as it falls, by treating it as a mass. But if you treat it as an enormous number of atoms and take out its atomic energy, you get infinitely more energy.

	"The break-up of an atom in the Burners yields electrical energy as charges. The Burners simply break up the atom the way a man might take apart the plates of an accumulator, and discharge each plate separately. In the burner the atom is exploded, in a tremendous magnetic field. The protons and electrons which composed the atom are hurled apart and scattered like the fragments of a bursting shell. Before that energy can become available as electricity, the particles must be separated into two types, the positive protons going one place and the negative electrons another. The magnetic field does this, it directs the protons one way, because they are moving positive charges, and the electrons the other, because they are moving negative charges. The two streams move in opposite directions around the center of the magnetic field, and strike the 'infuse' collector plates. They build up a charge on these plates, that tends to repel the incoming particles. The charge reaches about a million volts, and then stays there, for at that voltage the repulsion is so great that the incoming protons or electrons are almost stopped before striking. If we draw off power, the voltage falls to just such an extent as will allow such a number of protons and electrons to strike as will maintain the charge.

-

	But—the protons and electrons can't be stopped in practice, but actually strike with about twenty thousand volts velocity. That means that the kinetic impact will heat the 'infuse' plates. That's why the 'infuse' plates are made hollow, and the mercury is circulated through them. The mercury cools them, and helps stop the protons and electrons.

	"Here on earth, of course, we use water-cooling, and just waste the heat-energy. It's so cheap anyway, we don't have to worry about that. But in a space ship, that heat has to be taken care of. Heat is very hard to get rid of, and while the process is 80% efficient, twenty per cent of one hundred million horsepower is twenty million. A space ship, one of the big liners, may easily use two hundred million horsepower in pulling free of Jupiter. That means a constant heat energy of forty million horse. Therefore, on space ships, to cool them, they carry mercury cooling, use the mercury vapour so created to run turbines, and cool and recondense the mercury vapor in water turbine boilers.

	"That system of atomic-electricity—-mercury turbines-—water turbines will take care of the normal, constant production of heat energy. By converting it to electrical energy they can use and thus get rid of it. For the short period of two hundred million horsepower used in leaving a planet, they used heat-reservoirs, tanks of liquid hydrogen, the substance which holds the most heat, weight for weight, then they could get rid of the heat slowly. As it was, however, even the atomic cruisers had to stop at the Jovian satellites to cool off between jumps. In space, only radiation will carry away the heat you see, and radiation at any normal temperature isn't very rapid.

	"Now the atomic cruisers for battle, were normally in a pretty bad way if the thing went on very long, because they'd overheat. Atomic power engines would permit of about two billion horsepower in a moderate sized battle cruiser —but if they ever tried to use that, they'd have four hundred million horsepower of heat to get rid of.

	"That doesn't satisfy me at all. In the first place, you are just using the potential energy of the water falling downhill. I want to find a way to use all the energy of the atom. Destroy even the remnants, so that I don't have even a hydrogen gas exhaust as the atomic engines do. I think I can see some way toward doing it. That's the goal I am heading toward now."

	"What progress?" asked Don.

	"Whoa—not so fast. I haven't even set up the apparatus yet. Lora Wayne is helping with it. She's a bright girl.

	"You go back to your work—and I to mine. Remember, even when we have this whole city ready, we will still have to wait till we can convert the others around us."

-

CHAPTER V

	Bruce smiled up in triumph to Lora. "That prove? it, I think, doesn't it?" 

	"It certainly looks to me like the answer Bruce," she replied, her eyes glowing with excitement. "Can you try it out someway practically? What will it do— can you limit its action?"

	"I'm sure I can. Those old mathematicians were right, when they made their calculations, but wrong when they passed on unheeding. I think this is infinitely more important than anything else we have done. The Old Days had anti-gravity, and we have it again." He nodded toward a large metal ball, floating unsupported in the air, a small string holding it down, and against its tendency to be thrown because of earth's centrifugal force. "Now we have anti-reaction, you might say."

	"Those waves of force though must act against something," objected Lora. "When I made the apparatus for you, I didn't see what that was going to react against."

	"They don't react against something, they react against everything. They are of such incomprehensible fineness that they slip through what we call matter, and space, and react against the stuff out of which our curved space is cut. They pull on all space. They push the earth, and the Sun, on Jupiter, Mars and the Magellenic Clouds equally.

	"Practically—they mean a ship without the tell-tale streams of atomic fire pushing it along. Atomic rockets are visible. These momentum waves aren't."

	"It seems strange that the wave theory of atoms should lead to a means of generating momentum directly in space."

	"Any correct theory of the atom must delve far deeper than surface manifestation of force we know as matter. It must take into account the real nature of space. Atoms aren't things—they're symptoms of space. We detect magnetic fields by their action on steel, or on an electric particle. We detect space by the existence of atoms—but atoms are merely symptoms of space as the movement of the compass needle is a symptom. The wave theory asserts, remember, that every electron, every proton, every tiniest particle is actually a series of complex waves spread through all infinite space. Over all space, these waves cancel out, the trough of one wave-system coming on the crest of another wave-set of that same electron, except in only that tiny bit of space where we can detect its effects, where the waves are not visible, and we say the electron or proton is.

	"That involves space. If it described the property of space known as 'atoms' correctly, then it should describe that property of space known as 'momentum' and 'kinetic energy' correctly. Through perfectly logical derivation on the mathematics of the wave-atom, you can derive this formula of momentum, and this kinetic energy.

-

	"They seemed to me the simplest means of proving or disproving the theory. Though worked out nearly fourteen hundred years ago, way back in the twentieth century, they were never tested. If a theory is good, it will predict, and its predictions come true. Here is a prediction that has come true. By these momentum waves we can drive a ship silently, invisibly and almost in-detectably. We are one step toward the defeat of the Polshins."

	"Are you going to make a ship now?" asked Lora eagerly.

	"Not yet. We have not enough men in our movement yet. Remember, we must have workers enough to operate the deserted machines here to make the vast number of things we will need. Only one hundred of us are living here permanently, and nearly a third of that number must spend the major portion of its time in services, making food on the machines, and clothing and other necessities. Another portion must spend some time on the generators, and other apparatus. Scarcely a score of us is engaged in advance work.

	"Besides—-I have another thing I want to work out. It may be even more important!"

	"What Bruce?"

	Bruce turned to his laboratory assistant with a smile. These members of the new movement were not clad in blue, or green. They wore costumes of pure white, trimmed with whatever color they fancied—save only scarlet. That was Don's idea. The Scarlet would merely have broken the law. It would not have been a choice.

	Lora was dressed in the white costume, trimmed with gold, as was Bruce. Her jet-black hair and dark eyes made a striking contrast to it, A contrast she hoped that some day Bruce would notice-But Bruce turned to his laboratory assistant with a smile. "The solution to another problem the men of the Old Pays never solved. Television without a sending device."

	"But didn't they say in the Old Days that that was impossible?"

	"They did, but they also said, before it had been done, that making a mar chine that would fly was impossible, and that making a ship to cross space was impossible and finally that overcoming gravity was impossible. But they didn't after it had been done.

	"The trouble is that you have to pick up some form of energy coming from the scene in question before you can view it Light won't do, because bodies in between will stop it. No wave will do that is short enough to be effective in delineating the object. Radio waves will penetrate, but they are so long that they will also penetrate the body to be viewed."

	"Then haven't you yourself said it was impossible?"

-

	"Watch. I have been working on this while you were making up that apparatus for me. It isn't fully completed. I will need a better tie-in, than I have now, between the two focusing devices."

	Bruce walked over to a piece of apparatus he had set up on one of the insulated benches. There were two devices, about ten feet apart, and directly between them a third. This third was flat-topped, some two feet square and six inches thick. One by one Bruce turned them on. Tubes began to glow, and the recording meters mounted as the heaters began to throw out their electrons.

	"She's hot. Now watch." Slowly he began turning a control dial on one of his machines. Abruptly something snapped softly into existence on the top of the little, flat, cubical box. Carefully Bruce focussed it. A loud speaker began to chatter meaninglessly. As abruptly as the cloudiness had appeared, it solidified, and the speaker began to talk intelligibly.

	Three men bent over their work. They were clad in the white of the Freedom Party. The delicate apparatus they were working on was taking shape. The scene was scarcely twelve inches high, but the coloring, the detail, the weave of the cloth even, was in such absolute perfection that Lora gasped—ten-inch-tall men. working on inch-long apparatus, their tiny hands functioning with perfect precision.

	"What will it be when we get through, Jon? This looks to me like the old radio-receiving set circuit? Do you suppose he's going to start a radio-broad-east station again?"

	"I doubt it. The Polshins might pick it up. That would be bad. It is probably something quite different. Remember that radio-frequency currents were used for thousands of purposes, from sterilizing foods under super-sonic waves, to aiding medical healing and causing artificial fevers."

	"Oh, Bruce! It's Jon, and Mark and Ted! They're six blocks away through granite walls!"

	"Not all of them, Lora, not all of them. Touch one of those images there."

	Timidly Lora advanced her hand and, half-frightened, touched the image of Jon's head, Her finger passed easily through it—but there was a slight resistance, just the barest feeling of pressure. "Why—they're sort of solid!"

	"They are. They are real images, they are part-formed electrons and protons. This device here, perfected, will mean more than anything we have ever dreamed of. It will surpass a million-fold the televiso system of the Old Days.

	"Every proton and every electron exists through all space. Part of the protons and electrons that compose Jon exist in this space where we are—and where the machine is. That machine cancels out part of the electron-wave, so that the rest, no longer mutually canceling, become real in our space. Those images are one one-hundred-thousandth real. I have condensed them for greater solidity. The microphone I have just turned off, picks up the tiny voices of those images, and amplifies them so that we can actually hear them.

	"So far as I know—the device has no distance limits!"

	"Bruce—you mean we could pick up even the planets!"

	"We can. When we've built the big apparatus, and at that it is to be our first step. Because—I can reverse the process, and make myself appear. But there I am limited. I cannot appear further than one thousand miles away with any practical apparatus, and at that distance I must make myself a ghostly image fifty feet tall."

-

	Under Bruce's direction, the apparatus was begun within a week. They, who made it, did not know why he installed all the elaborate timing devices, the careful clock-work. And Bruce appeared only occasionally, because most of the time he left the work to Lora.

	Week after week passed. The apparatus neared completion, the Freedom movement spread through all N'Yak, till more than half the Plehbs were enrolled in it, and had seen the City of the Old Days that had been gradually built up in the old Mahtan district. Still the Polshins, fat and comfortable in their assurance of power, not imagining such a movement after centuries of peace, did not feel the growing tension.

	The Plehbs swung more briskly through Center Cube now, but still the Polshin guards loitered aimlessly, laughing, grinning—and occasionally still a Plehb girl disappeared as she attracted the attention of one of those guards.

	Then Bruce and Don and the leaders of the movement would have their hands full, suppressing the tendency for an untimely explosion. With a realization that this was NOT just the normal course of events, came a new feeling of rebellion. Before it had seemed as inevitable as death. Now it was not.

	Silently, the Freedom scientists were working. Bruce was not alone now; he was the director of a competent and growing force of scientists. One man was studying the problem of insulation against the shock-rods of the Polshins, another that of the problem of hand-weapons for the Plehbs. Others were aiding Bruce in his studies of the atom. More and more Bruce was realizing that he studied not the atom, but the properties of space. The gravity-field was one of his greatest aids, the magnetic field second, yet both of these had to be handled cautiously—for their effects reached out to infinity, and powerfully to the Surface, where some Polshin might wonder at them.

	Three months were needed to construct the timing devices of the great projector. Two months more saw the two focusing machines set up. A full eight months passed all together before the apparatus was ready for its first trial. All the staff that had worked on it, and many of the elected leaders of the Freedom Party were present. Based now on the Planetary Socialistic Government, elected leaders ruled the party. These, elected delegates gathered with the scientists and Bruce and Don arrived.

	Briefly, to the leaders, Don Wade described the intended functions of the machine. With it, they hoped first of all to see the other cities of earth. To see whether there, too, the same system of Polshin and Plehb existed. Then, they hoped to turn their giant eye out to Mars and Venus, to see what had happened to the civilization of the Planets.

	"Does it require so huge a machine for shorter ranges, such as looking at earth-scenes?" asked one of the delegates.

-

	"No," Bruce replied. "I can, and will, make much smaller replicas of the important parts of this machine for that purpose. But this machine is intended for viewing the planets. To make that possible, I had to mount an enormously complex clock-work devise to follow the planetary motions. For instance, to view a city such as Thanton on Callisto, I have first to neutralize earth's daily rotational movement, than to neutralize the effects to Callisto's daily rotation, her orbital rotation around Jupiter, and Jupiter's orbital motion around the Sun. All of this requires an exceedingly complex apparatus. And already now, sets similar to the primary view-apparatus are in machine-production. We had to cut dies for that, and that is what took so long. That, and the development work. But the technicians are now working on a similar device which will have an illimitable theoretical range, and a practical range that would permit glimpses of life on Athena. However, this device will be but two feet square, and three inches thick. For viewing scenes on earth, it will be fully capable of anything we need.

	"The big apparatus is ready. That stage there is ten by ten, and I will put on it life-size human images, with one ten thousandth real .solidity. The subjects which are viewed will feel a slight electrical tensity, but absolutely nothing that will disturb them in the least.

	"I have adjusted the controls to view the old city of Shkaga. This should be the Center Loop Cube, at the ground level."

	Bruce walked to the main controls, and started them. This was, actually and really, the first time the machine as a whole had been tested. The tubes warmed, a low humming echoed momentarily from the speakers. Then—abruptly, solidification was complete. On the stage there was a portion of a building, fading off into misty unreality at the edges of the focus. Dark rubbish lay at its base, and on the pavement. There were no people on the stage; all was dark, apparently.

	Bruce rapidly condensed the image. The building shrank, and the whole of the great Cube was visible, dark, and rubbish-heaped. "There are no men in this section. It is dark here, evidently. The image is lighted by our lights here. In reality, it is utterly dark. I will shift the focus." The setting blurred, seemed to shimmer and change, flashes of solid rock obscured everything, then suddenly for an instant a flashing human figure appeared and was gone. Instantly Bruce changed the setting back.

	It was a passage, lighted evidently. Half a dozen human figures in grey garb slunk disconsolately down the rocky corridor; at its end was a Polshin guard, in the deep orange the Polshins of Shkaga wore. Bruce raced down the corridor with his settings, branched to a larger one, down that, and finally reached a small Cube. There were more people here, Plehbs in grey, and dark red and dark blue. The Red here was evidently highest, But the men recognized again the Plehb and the Polshin.

-

	In swift succession, Bruce brought in scenes from San Franco, Washton, and a dozen other cities.

	Then, in Londn, he found again the Polshin and the Plehb in Berlin and in Paris. In Tokyo and Peiping. In every major city. Only three cities he tried showed no human life, deserted and utterly dead. Barcelona, Munich and Lyons.

	"Show us what the Polshins are doing above us!" called a delegate.

	Bruce smiled grimly. Don Steel had prepared for this request. Not for nothing had he studied mass psychology, and he had searched for many minutes on Bruce's original model of the machine before finding the scene he knew would most quickly and effectively rouse the people. Suddenly the stage was a garden, a magnificent garden of flowers and shrubs. It was night, but soft lights made a dim illumination. In the garden were scarcely a dozen figures. Two young Polshin men, an older Polshin, and three Plehb girls in a group. The older Polshin was bleeding freely from five long gashes across his fat cheek. One of the Plehb girls was bound to a pair of young, stout trees. The Polshin had a heavy whip, and was beating at her body with all his fat strength. Her whole raiment was colored by crisscross streaks of blood, she hung loose in her bounds, perking feebly to each stroke of the whip. Low moans came from the speaker, and soft cries from the two other Plehb girls, held by the two young men, watching the scene.

	Abruptly Bruce cut the dials sharply across. A rumbling roar sounded from the speaker as there were flashed on the stage masses of tumbled, jagged rock, green trees and solid mountains. An angry cry mounting up from the audience drowned out the sound, as the scene was established at last in a swaying forest of pines. A ruined bridge hung its broken members across a quiet stream.

	"I think that will be enough of that," Bruce decided harshly. "I did not pick up the Polshins at first, because I feared some such scene. We did not have to see in order to know. We have heard all this. I think it would be best if we used now the more complex features, and viewed Mars. That is the great problem really. Have the planets suffered a like fate? Has their civilization fallen so far as has ours? Remember, we never did have anything but a straight democratic government, with no proper controls. Mars started differently. Perhaps they have not fallen quite so low."

	Carefully he was setting his apparatus now, with the aid of two other trained mathematicians, one in training now to be an astronomer.

	The clockwork began to hum softly, then was silenced to a barely audible purr as it got into action.

	"I think we are ready. We should be within five thousand miles of the planet. You see—we do not know the exact time, we are not absolutely certain, even, that we know the exact day. The old calendar was known to have defects, and we may be wrong. However—"

	The lights had been turned off in the main part of the room now, and only some very carefully designed reflectors lighted the scene. Abruptly-—on the stage appeared a floating ball, some five feet in diameter. Just Within the limits of the machine's observation, was another ball, a tiny ball scarcely larger than a golf ball, jagged and ruggedly shadowed in the light of the spotlight flooding it. The larger ball was edged with a thin, shining belt of light, bright in the powerful spotlight.

-

	"Mars," said Bruce, "and even in the 'Old Days' they had nothing to equal that! We will win out, I am sure."

	The planet expanded swiftly, the tiny satellite became hazy, ghostly, and vanished at the edge of the scene. Tiny spots appeared on the very slowly turning globe, spots of black and glowing light. "Those are lights on Mars," Bruce said, his voice tense. "Lights shine as lights, even in this device." The surface came nearer, toward one of those shining clumps of light. It grew, and, as it grew, the rotation of Mars became evident. The scene was turning past them. Bruce centered it again, and engaged another piece of clockwork. The scene steadied — and expanded abruptly.

	They were hanging, it seemed, some ten thousand feet above the city. It was a great city of black and gold and silver and colors. The buildings towered slim and graceful, ships flew through the air around them, and into them. Only here there was no perspective. Bruce altered the setting, and the whole city, in miniature, was on the stage. Now the ships flew across the stage, and tiny, crawling dots moved in streams below.

	Abruptly there appeared a section perhaps two blocks square. Only half the buildings were visible, the upper halves soaring off into the upper air. People, thousands of gaily dressed people it seemed, flowed along on the moving ways. They were smiling, laughing, happy. A scene such as no Plehb had ever seen. Brisk, clear sounds came through the speaker, the sounds of voices mingled faintly, the hum and rush of vast business.

	"Civilization didn't fall there!" gasped Don. "They have all the civilization they ever had! They must have ships, space ships—"

	Bruce twisted the settings, until the scene on the stage shrunk, and grew tiny, the buildings reappeared, diminished, the city became small and the curve of the planet showed itself again. The ships sailing about the city seemed concentrated near a great open square. Bruce re-expanded the scene, entering on this view. The square was huge, so great that the great ships even seemed small. It was fully three miles on a side, the city, actually, built around it. And as they watched, they saw something dart into being on the screen, a huge something that settled on the field, and occupied a space half a mile long. A titanic space freighter.

	"A space ship!" Bruce exclaimed. "Why do they never come here if they have them? Let's look at Callisto— Venus—"

	The stage grew blank with the night of space. In seconds, the giant of the Solar System appeared, mighty Jupiter, a six-foot ball, with smaller balls moving slowly about him, planetary in size themselves. Callisto—it separated, centered on the stage, then abruptly clicked into immobility as the clockwork was thrown in. In moments Bruce had located Thantor.

	Thantor was a mass of moving, happy people. Small transplanetary ships moved about. Slightly larger inter-moon ships and gigantic interplanetary ships circled and moved freely.

-

	VENUS—more ships, moving freely. Space seemed full of them. Only on the Moon and earth were there no great space ships.

	"Why?" asked every man of himself. "Why is earth alone deserted thus? Why was earth left to a savage, feudal system in an ultra-machine age?"

	Muttering, stupefied men left the hall.

	Back to their jobs, arid to the men who had sent them. Back to tell of other earths-cities under the Crushing rule of the Polshins. Back to tell of Plehb girls bound and beaten to death by heavy whips in gardens of beautiful flowers and tinkling fountains. Of hundreds of millions of happy people on the other planets. Happy people from Mercury to far out Athena. And misery, and terror and hate only on earth. No brutal Polshins, taking Plehbs as mere animals living solely for their amusement, save on earth.

-

	And in the hall, furious work was going forward. Nearly twenty of the electron-Wave visors were set up within three days, the stamped parts coming out in a steady stream now. The force of permanent dwellers in Mahtan increased now to nearly two hundred and fifty, even the Polshins beginning to notice a slight difference in the city, were working at furious speed. Smaller, simpler clock-drives worked nine of these wave-visors. Nine of these machines were in constant operation observing on the nine planets, and the great machine was examining the satellite worlds which it alone could follow. Recording cameras took down everything seen. The other machines, operated constantly day and night, were observing things on earth. Five of them observed in N'Yak, the other six were trained on Shkaga, San Franco, Washton, Felfya, St. Loui.

	Swiftly now the campaign with the city was gaining. And now new dies were being cut, dies to make the projection apparatus Bruce had mentioned. In every city men were being chosen, without their even being aware of the examinations, for the local leaders.

	Bosn, Felfya, Shkaga, and Washton would be the cities where the first starts would be made. These cities were within the possible range of Bruce's projector, here he would be able to reach out and speak to the men, the personnel, which directors chose.

	And Bruce worked constantly at his other problems. Still he had merely begun. They had communication—but not material communication. Time and time again he had tried to make the apparatus transmit the entire piece of matter it viewed. Time and time again—on the tiniest particles—he had failed. When he reached the half-transmitted point, instantaneously some terrific force seemed to wrench all space with unutterable violence. Terrific flaming arcs played momentarily over his apparatus—and it fused in ruins.

	So Bruce worked on something else.

-

CHAPTER VI

	"I am going to try the new device, Lora. You have taken all those notes, and have them in a safe place?"

	"Yes, but oh, Bruce, why can't I try that for you? You know what has happened even with the little transportation devices. If that succeeds too well-— the earth needs you Bruce, as she never before needed any man."

	"And I need my self-respect," Bruce replied grimly, "Just as much as any man ever needed it. The Polshins let others suffer pain and death for their amusement or advantage. I'm not a Pol-shin. I'd never be able to look a man in the eye if I were afraid to do this, and delegated the danger to someone else."

	"Can't you make a robot do the thing for you?"

	"Again? Can't I convince you that the difference between a man and an intelligent machine is that a man can do what he wasn't designed to—that a machine, no matter how perfect, can't handle an emergency I haven't prepared it for. And since I've done everything in such a way, I don't expect any emergency; that means that if there is one, any machine I designed would be unable to handle it because it was an unexpected emergency. Now you do as I said, Lora. Take the notes and your own small self to a safe place. Go back to the lab."

	Lora turned abruptly and raced away. Bruce grinned after her. He looked again at the apparatus she had helped him build and set up. She was an excellent assistant. She would know what to do if this did blow up. Bruce chuckled at the thought. If it did, working with a one hundredth milligram charge of lithium metal as he was, it would cause a bit of confusion among the Polshins. Lora did not know why he had picked this particular room on the highest level. That he had gone as far as possible up and away from the Mahtan section of the city, she understood. But why this particular room—?

	Omallin's fine palace was directly above this room. If Bruce's experiment was unsuccessful, he would remove Omallin, and half the neighboring territory.

	Bruce watched the tubes carefully as they heated, and looked again at his stack of accumulators. The power was not on in this distant section, so he had brought his stored power with him. Under the present current drain they'd give out in about three minutes more. Be embarrassing to go back to Lora and tell her he hadn't even been able to try the thing because he hadn't calculated the power factors right. She'd never trust him after!

	Bruce jumped as a meter needle rose suddenly and steadily. The electron current had started.

	"Well— it's been a nice time, anyway," he laughed. He pushed the control over steadily. Something strained violently. Abruptly, from the small open coil on the table before him, something beautiful and violet and shining sprang like a burning globe. For a billionth part of a second it lasted, perhaps, then it relapsed suddenly as a mighty tongue of lightning struck down from the granite rock. It struck with a terrible roar, and the apparatus fused in a blinding, incandescent mass, beneath the terrific assault. A roar of awful sound crashed out. Then instantly from the fused apparatus another mighty tongue of electric flame smashed out with equal and opposite titanic power. The rock wall fused, and a great soft drop of liquid rock slipped silently down upon the floor. A cavity two feet deep remained.

	But Bruce did not see it. He was motionless and unconscious on the rocky floor.

-

	It was some fifteen minutes later that Lora and the rescuing men reached him. They were breathless and panting from much running. One of the medically trained men was first to reach him. In an instant he had an electro-stethoscope microphone on his chest. The room echoed abruptly to the powerful, even thump-thump-thump-thump of Bruce's heart. There was a soft, gentle swish of breathing.

	"Ah—" Lora darted forward, took a single glance at the wrecked apparatus, a second glance at the recording instruments that had been put on the other side of the room. "Momentary, very short waves. He may be badly burned by them. Now hurry. Jak, Mark, Bob and Pol, take him, and hurry away. Tom and Ban, you take these instruments, and be careful with them. Mai, you take the asbestos things, and scoop up that mess. Now sharp, the Polshins will be here in a moment. I know why he took this room now—it's right under Omallin's place. I'll bet that electric field turned Omallin inside out when it hit him. He'll be searching down here in half an hour."

	Three minutes later, the room was bare. Only the red-hot glowing stone attested to the sudden release of energies stolen from the heart of a sun.

	Bruce came-to in the laboratory. On the bench was the fused apparatus, cool now. Lora was bending over it, making notes. A tube of liquid carbon dioxide told how she had cooled it, without damaging the sensitive bits that might remain.

	"Lora—you watched—the telectroscope?"

	"Naturally, Bruce," she snapped. She was still tense, and her nerves unsteady. She had watched, and her heart had contracted once, and stayed just that way, a tense hard lump in her chest till she heard the thump-thump-thump in the doctor's electro-stethescope. She was still nervous—and angry in consequence. "You passed out, and I thought you were dead. Did you see it?"

	"No," replied Bruce ruefully. "Only the violet glow."

	"That was cosmic ray energy. Lucky it was so hard a radiation. It passed through you like light through glass. Went through so easily, it didn't burn you much. Lasted an infinitesimal time, anyway. But immediately after that, the lightning started. First one bolt from the wall to the apparatus, then the wrecked apparatus replied in kind."

	"Kind of it," smiled the scientist. "It let out all that energy in two doses instead of one."

	"Think again, Bruce. Wait till you come around. And tell me what you expected, anyway?"

	"I wasn't sure, but sort of had a hunch it would be electricity."

	"It was. An electric field. It was positive, under the conditions you set up, and it built up to about a million volts instantaneously. Then the wall sent a collection of electrons to neutralize it. They did, and when the last of the matter was used, they were left as a negative charge of a million volts—and went home again."

	Bruce sat up slowly. "Why Lora—I didn't think it of you! You are hereby graduated to a first-class independent experimenter. I had no idea you'd found time for so much studying."

	Lora felt her heart sink gradually downward, till the touch at the soles of her shoes arrested its progress. Bruce meant it. She Would be promoted to an independent investigator's rank. No more work with Bruce. No more even touching his hands at work. No more—"

	"I couldn't help it with you giving me lectures every time you dropped a bolt.

	"Anyway, you need a nurse. If you expected an electric field, oh Bruce, why didn't you use those brains of yours and put in a discharge point?"

	"Unexpected emergency," grinned Bruce. "I had a number four-ought conductor. I expected currents, not lightning bolts."

	"A machine could have done a lot better than you did," scolded the girl. Her face was beginning to feel warm again, so she knew the blood must have come back now. She turned from the apparatus, and looked toward Bruce once more.

	"All right, girl. I'm clear licked. You can start right now investigating machines to test machines if you want to."

	"I'll finish this job first," she said. She'd meant to speak firmly, and a bit sarcastically, but she realized as it sounded, it was more like a plea.

-

	"All good. Then we'll start right now making another one—because, Lora, that machine successfully released all the energy of the matter it worked on!"

	They started another machine, but Bruce realized now what sort of thing he had to deal with. Unlike atomic burners, with their constant streams of electrons at one plate, and protons at the other, uniting to produce tremendous currents of electric power and hydrogen gas, he would get from his machine all the energy of the destroyed matter.

	"The waves of the atoms—they aren't real waves—just something that can be expressed by the same sort of formula a wave is expressed by—are all turned one way or the other, with the result that a space-curvature results. I expected a positive electric field then. I could as easily have gotten any of the other space-strain energy fields either magnetic, north or south, or gravitational, plus or minus. In the new machine, I'm going to use a powerful accumulator-device. The positive field will be created momentarily by the release of a tiny bit of energy. This will draw a tremendous negative charge. Then the field will collapse, and the result is a free negative charge which will seek neutralization. It will yield directly an alternating current of whatever frequency I want. And whatever power I want.

	"I can even use this to create directly the momentum waves we discovered.

	"And Lora—Lora, with this I can build a tiny hundred-man scout-ship that can yield a hundred billion horsepower— and never overheat because an electric field is one hundred per cent efficient!"

	Bruce was overconfident. He built his apparatus. He tested it, and the tiny thing, no more than three by three by two feet, yielded three million horsepower—and fused the conductors that conducted the current. His electric fields were one hundred percent efficient, but his conductors weren't. Never before had conductors been called on to handle such powers, and still be small conductors. Somehow he must find a conductor that was as efficient as his material-energy engine.

-

	So Lora was given the job of investigation, while Bruce began work on some small ships. Two-man ships. They were powered by small models of the material-energy device. Four by four by three they Were, because no smaller machine could contain the huge conductors he needed to carry the power. But there were two other material-energy engines aboard. One created the momentum wave, releasing its energy directly, without conductors, in this way. It could have generated at nearly fifty billion horsepower. The other created the anti-gravity field.

	The work was needed now. N'Yak was nearly unified in the Freedom movement Slowly the Polshins were becoming aware of something unusual. More and more the Polshins guards really looked around, as they wandered through the streets, really noticed the sullen looks they received. This must have been strange to them. Before, they had been as inevitable as death or taxes in the Old Days. They had been accepted in much the same spirit as those two visitations.

	Their shock-rods came more and more into evidence. Strangely the Mating Office was almost deserted now. Only greys, and an occasional green couple wandered in.

	All the Blues, and most of the Greens had joined the Freedom movement, and 'there was a tense air of waiting among them. By cosmetics and skillful stage-tricks learned in books, the beautiful women were making themselves ugly. By tricks they made themselves inconspicuous, and with the new, slightly worried air of the Polshins, no more Plehb girls disappeared from their homes.

	Just as the new scout-machines, the fleet of six, reached half completion, Don Wade called Bruce. The secret of the isolation of earth had been learned. Interplanetary Union Hall at Mars Center had been located. It had been explored, the nine rooms of the Nine planets investigated. A tenth room, with a great seal across it stood in its place. The door was marked "Earth" and below it was the legend:

	"I, John Montgomery, have sealed this door in the year 2654. It is not to be opened save by the combined order of the Ten Planets, and then only when earth, the third planet, shall have again won her place among the Councils of the Planets, and shall have redeemed herself by the re-arising of intelligence among her people."

	Don Wade directed the focus to the room within. It was a great room, with a board, long table, and large comfortable chairs. There were books and maps lining the walls. And dust covering all. Dust a quarter of an inch thick lay undisturbed everywhere. At one end of the room, carved in heavy, thick gold, was a great metal plaque. A bas-relief of earth, with a tiny space-ship leaving her at the top, and below a graven inscription. It was the full text of John Montgomery's farewell to earth.

	Slowly Bruce read it over. Then he nodded slowly. "He was right, Don. That John Montgomery, speaking just about seven centuries ago saw what was coming. The Polshins must have overcome those semi-Plehbs soon after. That is why the libraries were closed, all civilization seemed to stop suddenly. For the last two centuries earth's civilization had really been maintained by the work of the Planets. Without them dragging her up, earth fell back instantly to this savage feudalism of vicious pleasure for the Polshins and victims' toil for the stupid, brainless Plehbs.

	"Intelligence has arisen again, Don. And today we could go to Mars and redeem earth. We have the ship—or will have it—within two weeks. The electrovisor here alone would fulfill Montgommery's condition and with material energy—"

-

	"Then we shall!" Don cried! "With the Interplanetary forces behind us, we can wipe out the Polshins in a day!"

	"That is not what John Montgommery meant," said Bruce shaking his head gravely. "He meant that all the people of earth should be rejuvenated. We must break the bonds ourselves. We have done only half the work so far.

	"We will not go until we can lay down as our claim to redemption, both the inventions and the overthrow of the vicious order that exists. What would Mars reply to such frightful scenes as we picked up that first night we demonstrated the machine? While our women are still being beaten to death by Polshins, we cannot claim redemption.

	"This offers only one hope. When we have done this, and have overthrown the Polshins, we will have redeemed the pledge. Then we can have competent teachers from the Planets. In a day we will have the benefits of a civilization we would be able to gain only through many years of teaching and working.

	"Until then—we have a titanic task to work out. Your staff has selected the leaders in the other cities?"

	"Yes," Don nodded. "I see you're right. And we have the men selected. When will you begin projections?"

	"I will begin the day the ships are finished. I think our best plan will be to reach these men by projection, warn them of what we have, and then lead them to some spot in their own Deserted Corridors, and arrange to meet them there."

	"We should have more men working here with us permanently. This tiny force is hard put to do more than maintain themselves, let alone all the construction work we require."

	"Not another man may we take. Already the Polshin Guards are so suspicious that we cannot afford it. And you know it."

	"I have been distributing those little sets you designed," Don sighed. "The men have been able to take them home and conceal them. I have given all the delegates sets, and some of the best of the other men and women. They are holding small meetings in homes now and watching us, and people in other cities with them. Particularly are they showing scenes in Old Mahtan where we have the Old Days living again. That naturally interests them most." Don smiled slightly. "But some of them have begun asking if there is any way to stop these machines. They fear for their privacy eventually."

	Bruce burst out laughing. "A thought —a thought the scientist had overlooked. Yes—privacy. I can stop them. A small machine something of the same nature as the projector will instantly warn of the thing, but it will take a bit of work to design a machine to stop it altogether. I think I can do it though, eventually."

-

CHAPTER VII

	"That will do," said Bruce. A tall, straight man, with just a touch of , gray sat in a sturdy comfortable chair on the stage of the big machine. He seemed unaware of them, bent in deep concentration over his book.

	"This is Wil Carny, of Boston. He is a Class A Plehb, a first degree Master of Meks. He is thirty-two years old, a man well liked, and in every way a fine man for the purpose he is to serve," explained Don Wade to the audience grouped about. "He is mated, and has a son, twelve years of age, already a class C apprentice of Meks. Bruce Lawry is to be projected. His voice will be sent first."

	Bruce stepped forward. "Wil Carney," he said softly. The seated man started slightly. "Wil Carny, Master of Meks, listen carefully to me. In a moment I will make myself visible. I was a Class A Plehb of the city of N'Yak, a master of Meks myself. Now I am a scientist of the Freedom League of N'Yak." Carny had risen, and was looking intently, half fearfully about him. "I need your help, Carny. You are a Mek. You were reading, I see. Have you read of the televiso system that was used in the Old Days?"

	"Yes—" said the man. "Where are you?"

	"I am in N'Yak now. I am using such a televiso system. I can see you—and now, you can see me."

	Suddenly there was an image of Bruce standing beside the image of Carny. Carny started back, and looked sharply at the white-clad figure.

	"At least you look no Polshin," he smiled at length. "Can one so immaterial ' be seated? If so,—" he waved at the chair.

	Bruce smiled. "My advisers have chosen well. You are a man, Wil Carny. Surely I would have been worried by so inexplicable an appearance. I cannot sit in your chair—for I am two hundred miles away. Do you know of the Old Days when men knew more? When they knew why atomic burners worked, and could design them? Do you know of the days when there were no Polshins? I have, with my vision machine, watched your Polshins there in Bosn. They are no worse, nor better than ours in N'Yak. They have taken your women. Our machines have shown us what treatment they have received from those Polshins.

	"In N'Yak we have sought, and found a way to freedom. Not only for us, but for the Plehbs of every city.

	"You have visited the Deserted Corridors of your cities have you not? Go to them, and I or my friend will lead you. In half an hour, I will join you there in the body. And I will bring you to N'Yak here for a short time. You have still eleven hours of freedom. Will you come?"

	"I will come," nodded the older man. Brace's image faded away. The stage cleared.

	It was night, dark on the Surface they knew. But never had one of the ships been tried outside, only in the corridors and Cubes below, and then cautiously. Now Bruce entered the tiny fifteen-foot metal thing, and placed himself at the controls. Gently it lifted. Four hundred men and women waved silently to him as the tiny ship turned, and sped down the corridor, and out of sight. A rim of light preceded it down the dim rocky walls. It disappeared.

	Cautiously Bruce drove on. He rose vertically toward the Surface. The tube ended, he knew, in a great metal lock. For centuries these locks had been untouched. But just that day a crew of men had gone there, tested them, oiled them—but not opened them. Bruce sent a brilliant pencil of light on the photo-cell and waited breathlessly. Outside he knew the Polshins had left them unattended till dirt and rubbish had overgrown them. A crew of men would visit them after he was through for the last time, and cover them again with dirt and rubbish. Later they would make their own smaller lock—a hidden one.

	The lock groaned — and opened. Brace's tiny ship darted up straight into the sky, lightless, soundless. At an altitude of ten miles he leveled off, and shot toward Bosn. Over dark terrain, lighted only by the faint stars, and a crescent moon, the ship sped northward. At a speed of nearly a thousand miles an hour, he hovered over Bosn in fifteen minutes. There were lights below, the great illuminated pleasure 'pal-aces of the Polshins. Skillfully, as noiseless as a bat, the ship dropped. Here Nature had favored the Plehbs. The lock was in exposed, rocky land, the bare metal showing. No crew need recover it. That was one reason Bosn had been chosen for the first contact.

-

	At Bruce's signal, the great metal disc swung aside, its century-old bearings groaning faintly. They had built well, when seven centuries before, that lock-door had been made.

	The ship dropped through the opening. Starlight sifted down the tube lightless for ages. The ship turned at the third level, and traveled for nearly three miles horizontally. Then, in a great, rained Cube it halted.

	A Cube lightless, and rubbish-floored. Bruce turned to his telectroscope, and sought Wil Carny. He was not in his room, but Bruce quickly located the field of another telectroscope, and found Carny half-way to the Cube already. Patiently he waited.

	Half an hour later Wil Carny was shaking hands with him. His eyes were deep and intent as he gazed at the man and the ship. "In this we go to N'Yak?" he asked.

	"Right," Bruce nodded. "There you will meet the others, and see the machines—and see what earth was in the Old Days."

	In silence disturbed only by the soft, faint whispering of rushing air, the ship slipped down the corridors, and up the tube, out the lock and into the clear, starlit night. Carny gasped at the beauty of the scene. Never had this man been on the surface at night before, never had he seen the beauty of a star-strewn sky, or the silvery moon. Below, endless, broad gardens stretched, soft-lighted with the silver-rose of the glow-tubes. Myriad lights twinkled in the wavelets of Charles River basin on little pleasure boats from fairyland. Two miles below the hovering ship, the whole scene seemed an artist's epitomisation of beauty.

	Bruce started the telectroscope, and figures of men and women moved on its stage. A boat with colored lights moved slowly across the tiny pool of the stage, then a pier, then a flower-filled garden.

	Then another scene. Polshins, and a plehb slave-girl. One of the Polshins was holding a robe, the others short whips. In vain the girl was trying to reach that robe, the whips cutting at her when she paused, or when she came near the robe—

	Carny's face went white and tense. His eyes flamed with sudden anger. Gradually his face relaxed as Bruce cut the scene. Knowing where to look, they could see the circle and the figures on a flower-bordered lawn, two miles below. Wistfully Carny looked down.

	"Your freedom movement is needed Bruce Lawry. I suppose—" he looked at Bruce thoughtfully.

	"No," said Bruce. "Nothing. It is not the first time I have seen such things. I have had to console myself with the poor thought, that shortly it will be ended. I fear only one thing in our movement, Carny. The Plehbs will have a very strong, and very natural tendency to do just such things to Polshins, as Polshins have done to them.

-

	"That is what happened in old Russia. The Nobles, some of them, ground down the peasants as cruelly as the Polshins have treated us. When the peasants rose—it was quite natural that they should treat the Nobles so. You have not read of that, probably. The peasants were strange, yet human. They rose, because the Nobles had judged not the man, but his ancestors, and then the peasants gained power and they judged not the man, but the man's ancestors. I fear this freedom movement may tend to the same thing, later.

	"You do not know of the Pledge of the Planets. If we institute a system as brutal, as vicious as the present one, merely reversed, earth will no more have redeemed the Pledge, than she has now.

	"You must remember this in the things you will see. It will be very hard, it is hard for us, even the leaders who should be better. You will meet Don Wade." Briefly Bruce outlined the story of Dot Steel, and Don Wade.

	"The ancients said of Helen of Troy, that hers was the face that launched a thousand ships. Dot Steel's was the face that launched a million men. Don Wade is bitter. You will, we hope, lead Bosn to the new Freedom, but you must remember always that it is to be a new freedom for all—Polshin and Plehb alike. That is a task harder than gaining freedom. We will not, I know, gain it at once. Interplanetary has pledged to help earth in finishing the settlement of her problems, and we will have to call on them for that. But even so, that the Polshins will suffer during those first few years an oppression nearly as severe as that we suffer now, will perhaps be best for all. For they must learn that others have rights and powers, and the Plehbs must learn to aid his fallen enemy to rise.

	"You will soon be there. We are within miles of the lock now, in a few minutes we will enter. Remember this, when you see what you shall see."

	The crowd was waiting in the hall as silently patient as when Bruce had left. Wade was the first to shake Carny's hand. "This means more to earth than you yet know, Carny," he said. "For the first time in seven centuries, the peoples of two cities are in direct communication. Not the Polshins, but the people."

	Slowly the crowd moved away toward the restored section of Mahtan. In wonderment Carny looked about him. The crowd had been well disciplined for this occasion, there was no grouping, but free movement along the moving walks, through the lighted shops, and into the theaters. Despite their strong desire to crowd about this man, this man from a city as distant to them as Mars had been to Caesar, they spread out, and brought to Mahtan again that semblance of life. People moved along, passed lighted shop-windows that displayed goods and advertisements of products that had not been manufactured for seven hundred years. The whole section had been made up from photographs seven centuries old.

-

	In Freedom Hall Carny saw the great telectroscope that had been set up.

	"First," said Wade, "we want you to see the Pledge of the Planets." Bruce began operating the machine, and as Mars appeared as a great ball, slowly turning, slowly growing larger, Wade told Carny briefly and concisely what the situation had been seven hundred years before—and since.

	Interplanetary Hall appeared, grew, and they were inside it. Swiftly Wade finished his explanation as the great golden Plaque appeared. The hall was utterly silent as Carny read the words of Montgommery on the Metal Surface.

	"The man was a prophet," he sighed at length. "Earth is ready again, I think, to ask the help of the Planets. But as Bruce has said, first we must free ourselves. I will do what I can. It will take a long time."

	"Not so long, Carny. We have done a great deal of preliminary work for you, by telectroscope. We have found libraries, and laboratories, hospitals and universities, meeting places and machine-shops. We will give you electroscopes, smaller than this machine, but capable of seeing anything on any primary satellite. Fifty of our trained men and women will go to Bosn with you tonight, and by tomorrow night you can have the Bosn organization started, for, by telelectroscope and your personal contacts, we can cover fully a hundred before tomorrow night. And already we have investigated in that way over a half-thousand of the Class A Plehbs in Bosn. They will be the nucleus of your organization.

	"We must act rapidly, for, when we strike, we must strike over all the country, and already the Polshins here are beginning to feel the tension. We can spare you no more than fifty of our people, for there is much work to be done here, and of our city of three hundred and fifty thousand, not more than three hundred and fifty can be permanently on our staff here without the Polshins missing them. You, with your three hundred thousand people, must develop an equal staff. To help you, we suggest that many of your people be brought here where our facilities are better, where they can work beside our trained men and learn. But—it is an enormous task. Will you undertake it?"

	Carny's face crinkled slowly into a smile. "You investigated men, you said? Your judgment is good, I think, Don Wade. You know what my answer must be. I will. I will, and I will do my best."

-

CHAPTER VIII

	A fleet of twelve tiny ships made the trip to Bosn. Then they returned, for more people, more goods, and more machines. Swiftly, they shuttled back and forth through the black of night, and when dawn at last came on the world of the Surface, material energy engines, telectroscopes, foods had been carried. And most of all, a staff of fifty trained workers. Technicians had connected in the long-deserted circuits of the corridor lights the tiny but powerful material energy power-plants. Lights glowed brightly, and the whole section was lighted again. All the day men and women labored, labored as only a lifetime of labor can teach men to work. When night came again the Chosen section of Bosn, the Bluill district, was cleared of rubbish. Windows were lighted again, a theater was open for the reel-plays, shop windows displayed goods, bright, attractive goods. The moving ways moved again, men and women rode on them. The Bluill district seemed again to live. And the Bluill Central Hall was clean and lighted, and on its stage was one of the big telectroscopes, mounted and ready for operation.

	The manufactories weren't opened here yet, but foods, goods, a thousand things the luxury-starved Plehbs wanted had been brought from N'Yak. Wade had learned well his psychology.

	Nearly a hundred men and women of Bosn came that first night. Men and women known personally to every one of the fifty technicians from N'Yak, for they had met them, lived with them, by telectroscope. Carny led the first group, and even he halted in amazement as he reached the rejuvenated district. Last night he had passed this way—a dark, rubbish-heaped area. And now—

	Eagerly the hundred were taken in charge. They looked, they wondered. They listened, and began to understand. Then the telectroscope functioned and first they saw Mars—Mars, of the smiling, care-free crowds. Thick crowds of gayly dressed men and women were there in the bright, golden sunlight. It was Mars of the towering graceful, air-washed buildings, glistening multicolored in the sunlight.

	Then they saw beautiful sun-lit gardens of the Polshins in San Francisco.

	They saw the soft-lighted gardens above Bosn. But another operator had been searching; the machine on the stage picked up what he had found—Polshins being amused, a Plehb-slave girl moaning on the ground. A low muttering ripple of sound ran through the audience.

	The scene faded, and N'Yak appeared on the stage, a scene in Freedom Hall. The audience was gathered there, and on the Freedom Hall stage appeared the scene in this very Hall in Bosn. The six thousand gathered in N'Yak rose suddenly, a roaring cheer rang out from the speaker, a hand waved—Spontaneously, the Bosn people responded.

	In that instant the friendship, the solidified feeling of real, close kinship with those people they had never seen, those people in the far, far distant city of N'Yak, sprang up full grown.

	Hours later the Bosn crowd spread out, seeking their ways homeward. Everyone was a missionary now, the New Freedom, conditions were so vastly different. The leaders were so different. There was an Ams, a Lozh and a Kabt listed on the rolls of the Polshins—contractions, modifications of names that had stood for the finest things in the Old Freedom.

-

	In N'Yak work went on, harder than ever before. There were fewer trained hands now, and more unskilled workers from Bosn. But it was easier too, for the giant of Material Energy stood at their shoulders, pushing as they willed, lifting at their gesture. And Bruce had found the disintegrating machine. Tiny, ultra-microscopic bombs, scarcely more than large ions, were shot out against the rock or metal to be destroyed, and those particles released their energy of existence as an electric field of such unimaginable density, that mere atoms caught up in them were strained beyond the strength of any possible electric structure. Abruptly, they collapsed, collapsed to electron and proton, to neutron and positron. No nucleus was left even, the very heart of the atoms was ripped to shreds. Free hydrogen was left over, the atoms themselves were decomposed. Free hydrogen gas rose from the working machine, and burned blue and pale in the glow of the lights. Otherwise there was little display, no more sound than a strange, eerie whispering of atomic death. All the energy was absorbed in breaking the atoms, the machine was efficient to almost complete silence.

	Modified atomic burners had been able to transmute certain elements partly into certain other elements under certain conditions. This machine disintegrated the "certains" as completely as the rock. In a day, a score of men were released from the transmutation work, for a single material energy disintegrator could first shatter the atoms to gas, then whirl the shattered parts into whatever figuration was desired. The raw materials, iron and aluminum, carbon and sulphur, for foods and machines, became plentiful. And now the building of the greater ships, the battleships of the Freedom Movement, was undertaken. The "Freedom" ships were started before their plans were finished.

	Three weeks after the first crew went to Bosn, they returned, and in their stead went the men who had been trained in N'Yak. Bosn had established her own government. A second group was sent out, not technicians now, but teachers, a bare half-dozen men and women. The libraries scattered about Bosn had been moved bodily to the Bluill Central, and day and night three hundred studied as intently as it was possible for humans to study, humans trained to work. By night, a thousand more were added to the roll of students. And regular meetings were being held, constantly growing meetings. Telectroscope theaters showed the planets and earth as they were at the moment; reel-theaters showed earth as it had been in the Old Days.

	The day the Bosn crew returned to N'Yak, the first contact was made with Felfya, Jon Roger had been chosen here, and entrance was effected by means of the disintegrator working under complete coverage. All one night a crew of fifty men had to work, and half the next night before the necessary locks had been bored, and carefully hidden. Then Jon Roger was contacted, and brought to N'Yak, saw the scenes the telectroscope displayed, scenes from Mars, and from Bosn. And scenes in a Polshin garden above Felfya itself.

	When he went back a crew of fifty technicians went with him. Two weeks later there was a crew of thirty Bosn men and women working in Felfya to hasten the work.

	Meetings in N'Yak were restricted, now that nearly all the members had the tiny telectroscopes. N'Yak's main section must be given some air of normalcy. The Polshins were beginning to conduct occasional searches. Half-hearted—inexpert—but searches. More and more the crew in the Mahtan section saw the true size of their task. Yet Bosn and Felfya were barely able to maintain themselves, so much of their energies were spent in learning, desperately trying to catch up with N'Yak, and pull their own share of the load.

	A steady traffic of noiseless, lightless, black ships was maintained, carrying load after load of machines, mainly material energy engines, and small telectroscopes. And now loads were being sent to Felfya. For the party had caught, and spread as swiftly here as in Bosn.

	Faster and faster the pace must be. For the Polshins, cruel as they might be by simple inconsideration of any save themselves, were not unintelligent. In N'Yak they had begun to re-awaken to the possibility of trouble. Soon there would be troubles at home. The movement must be well rooted elsewhere before this began.

-

	In three weeks more, Washton was contacted. And a week later, Bosn herself sent out an expedition, for what they may have lacked in training there, they made up for in enthusiasm, determination, and plain human knowledge. It took no skill or technique to interest men in such an obvious cause. The Plehbs were intelligent once more, only the spark of hope, only some indication that the thing existed, was needed to start them trying. N'Yak contacted Shkaga for the Bosn crew that went out to take over. And they went in Bosn-made ships. The men of Bosn were skilled workers, the Mek Plehbs there had done the same sort of work the Meks of N'Yak had done. They needed only to be shown how. Now Bosn was beginning to manufacture machines. Month succeeded month in bewildering, fast-spreading action. Nearly the entire Blue and Green classes of N'Yak had been enrolled, most of Bosn, and Felfya, Shkaga and all three were producing now.

	There were other inventors. But none equaled Bruce. Bruce was the one super-genius that must inevitably have arisen, as John Montgommery had predicted.

	But Bruce had been able to devote little of his time to his real work. Too much had to be done in the building of the new Freedom. There were elected officers from every city in the Union now, and officers were elected who represented the Union Government. And Bruce had been made President.

	It was too great an honor for him to refuse. His personality meant too much to the people. But he had done almost nothing, it seemed to him. Still the "Freedom" remained incomplete.

	Finally, he resigned his office. It was a difficult step, one that he thought over for hours before taking. But on the second anniversary of the first beginnings of the Freedom movement, the second anniversary of Dot Steel's loss, he resigned.

-

CHAPTER IX

	"You have carried on my work, Lora. I feel proud of myself. I never knew I was such a good judge of people," he smiled at her. "I am afraid I hadn't thought of this possibility. Do you think it can be done?"

	Lora laughed merrily at his smiling face. Bruce was back in the laboratory again. And she was a full-fledged investigator, associated with him as an equal now—anyway, she was not a laboratory assistant. "What do you think I spent my time on it for, Bruce? Certainly it can be done. You tried the directed electric field, and got a 'little where' with it. But your 'columns of strained space' lacked electrons. Pure space-fields won't do some of the things you need, so I tried combining the best features of the two. I think that by putting your column of space through a silver bar conductor, you will get the effect of perfectly free electrons. Since your generator will give only alternating current, this will do as well. For some smaller apparatus, you will still have to use straight metal conductors, but you will need heavy currents for only two things—deflecting the enemy weapons and running certain of your own weapons.

	"Most of the enemy weapons are electric in nature—accumulator shells, ball-lightning, ion-streams. I think a straight magnetic field generated by the material engine will stop that."

	Rapidly she outlined her plan, watching eagerly the looks of approval Bruce gave to her calculations. Perhaps after all, this was the way. Bruce was not like other men.

	But it also was the way to the completion of the "Freedom."

	In two weeks of research, Bruce began to see the way to do what they needed, and in a month, the last stage had been reached. The apparatus was being installed in the "Freedom."

	Other "Freedom" ships were being built now, in the other cities. The blow would have to come soon. The Polshins of all cities were beginning to worry. The Polshins Council at Washton had discussed the problem with gravity and real thought. The usual amusements were rather half-hearted, for this actual problem to solve—a real decision to make —made the usual social meeting unhappy—and troubled. The tension among the Plehbs had first been noticed in N'Yak. Omallin it was, who suggested that he conduct a search, and find out if there were any such thing as a revolution in the air. He couldn't exactly imagine what a revolution might be, but it worried him. It might upset production seriously, a thing that had never happened in his life, nor in the lives of his forefathers for fifteen generations back.

	The call went out from N'Yak headquarters, and every member of the Movement hid his telectroscope more carefully. Not yet were the conditions right. San Francisco had been added to the Union so recently—it was not at all properly equipped. Perhaps, if this search were passed successfully, the pleasure-loving, thoughtless Polshins would decide that it was nothing, and another year even might be gained. Across the deserted belt of the Tropics somewhere were other cities they had not been able to contact, because of the difficulties of projecting images more than 1000 miles. Nor had they reached Europe or Asia. Many cities in North America were still unprepared.

	Hurriedly arrangements were made by the N'Yakers. This search was to be something such as they had never experienced. The Meks of the city were almost called in to fix up the old televiso system where possible, but Omallin was actually studying the problem. He had found a Plehb girl who could read, and she was reading to him out of the old books and papers of his forefathers. They told of earlier revolutions and precautions taken. Secrecy—thoroughness —those seemed to be the keynotes. So he did not warn the Plehbs by having the televiso system restored. That the Plehbs should know, he realized was a bad move.

	The audience of two thousand Plehbs in N'Yak Freedom Hall laughed at his decision, and a half million Plehbs, gathered in Freedom Halls over the greater part of the continent, laughed with them, as they watched the scene of Omallin's conference.

	But they didn't laugh at a point Omallin had dug out and decided on. The records! The records were to be used to check up! Those deadly records— they, despite all else were accurate as a stock inventory ever had been, for to the Polshins the Plehbs were stock, stock for their use, and these deadly records always had been used. Every Plehb must be in his place, when the check-up was made, every absence accounted for.

-

	Hastily a council was called. Men and women from Bosn, from Shkaga and from Felfya came in to help, to maintain the Mahtan district. To fill vacancies. For since the Freedom movement started, the Plehbs had not obeyed all the laws. Nearly a score had died, and their deaths had not been properly reported to the Polshin medical officers. For the Freedom doctors were infinitely better. The telectroscope was a diagnostic instrument such as even the men of the Old Days had never had— when the organs of the patient could be examined in action with precision and ease by the doctor. And these doctors had trained themselves from the old, accurate books.

	Further, there were three hundred and sixty-two adult members of the permanent staff—and over half had married. Few of these were married according to the records of the Mating Office. They were married here in Mahtan, married, not mated according to the laws of the Polshins. And there were forty-five children.

	Hastily men from the other cities took the places of the dead, where needed, women took charge of the children, the couples parted, and went back to the homes of their parents.

	The search day found everything normal on the surface—and a terrific tension beneath the surface. A tension far greater than there ever had been before. Polshin guards appeared everywhere, Polshins from other cities. At that Bruce and Don felt their hearts drop. Polshin Guards from other cities, Polshins from Bosn, from Felfya, from Shkaga! There were men and women, who came from those cities, here taking the places of dead. The chance was slight—but it existed.

	Restlessly Bruce paced the stonewalled, bare apartment of his father. A tiny signal hidden in a button of his blue and gold Master Mek suit glowed dully twice. The Polshin squad was coming down this corridor now. The men in Mahtan were warning him. There would be no telectroscopes to find. They were all back in Mahtan now. But nearly every member wore one of the tiny detector buttons that would warn him when the Polshins approached .

	There was a rapid winking of his button, then it went out all together. The voices of Polshins, sharp and domineering, came up the stair-tube from below as it winked out.

	"Apartments A, B, and C, Landun. D, E, and F, Morly, and—"

	Bruce seated himself stolidly in his chair. His father came in from the other room, and seated himself. He had a tattered, broken book, and slowly, his finger on the page, he began to read it.

	He raised his keen eyes slowly to his son. "Bruce," he said, "we are frightened. Badly so. But we must do something, and we are stupid. So I read. And you sit there very stupidly. Your face is tense and white. There is anger and intelligence in your eyes. There is pride and self-respect in your shoulders, and the set of your head. Take them out, Bruce."

	Softly Bruce laughed. A Polshin threw open the door almost simultaneously. Bruce looked up at him sullenly, his rounded shoulders slightly drawn away.

-

	"Up, Plehbs," snapped the Polshin.

	Slowly the two men rose, and faced the young Polshin. He came over to them, while a companion stood in the doorway. The second man held a sheaf of records.

	"Name, Plehb?" the first demanded sharply, looking at Bruce.

	"Bruce Lawry, Polshin Sir."

	"Age, and status."

	"Thirty-one, and I am a Class A Master Mek, Polshin Sir."

	"Check," said the man in the doorway.

	"You?" snapped the inquisitor turning to old Jon.

	Briefly, obediently, Jon Lawry answered his questions.

	"Check," said the man in the door. They entered then, and with quick, but thorough methods, searched the entire bare stone room. There was little chance of concealment here, it seemed. In two minutes they were satisfied, and moved on.

	A minute later Bruce's mother came in quietly and sat down. "They were very hurried, and quite bearable," she said quietly. Bruce's button winked twice. The Polshins had left the building.

	"Voice—softly," said he quietly into the air.

	"Ready, Lawry," answered a soft voice from the air.

	"How has the search gone so far?"

	"They have found nothing whatsoever. One of the Bosn men was examined by a Bosn Polshin—but the Pol-shin examining him did not know it. He was not expected a Bosn Plehb here.

	"Observer fifty-three reports that Don Wade is being examined. A Shkaga Polshin. Another pair has finished and is coming—God—" suddenly the voice was tense with horror, "they're fighting! Don attacked the new Polshin instantly. Don Wade—is dead. Shock-rod. He attacked the Polshin with a chair. His brains are spattered all over the room. I can't understand—I can't understand—"

	"Pick up that scene and project it here, instantly," snapped Bruce, something tight in his throat.

	"Right, Lawry. A moment."

	Abruptly, in mid-air, the scene appeared, then sound. A dozen Polshin guards had come at the call. On the floor lay a sprawled, bleeding figure, the scarlet cloak spotted horribly with a greyish-red substance. Beside him lay another inert figure, its fingers clasped tightly about the metal bars of a chair, a chair covered with the stain that spotted the dead Polshin's cloak.

	There was not enough of the Polshin's face left to recognize. An angry, snarling grumble of conversation drowned out individual voices. "Which," demanded Bruce, "was the second of the pair that came in together?"

	An enormous finger touched one of the miniature figures in the scene, and the figure swayed. "This," replied the voice of the operator.

	"It is the second of the Polshin Guards in the Mating Office that day," said Bruce softly. "It is the man who saved Don's life that day. The dead Polshin is the one Don struck, I am sure."

	"I've seen him—I've seen him before," said a voice from the tiny scene. The Polshin the finger had pointed out was speaking. The others stared at him. "I know! I saw him in the Mating Office two years and more ago. His woman was taken just as he was about to mate with her—Omallin. We were ordered to take her out, this Plehb struck Tom-sun then. He must have remembered— killed him today."

-

	"He couldn't stand the sight of that man, I guess," said Bruce softly. "He should not have done that—not only for himself, but for Freedom. We needed him too badly."

	But Bruce wondered as he said it, if, perhaps, it were not best thus. Don would not have been contented merely with freedom for the Plehbs. And Don had won, for what he had started, lived, though he died. The Freedom Movement would go on. He had endangered it by that act, though, for the Polshins were angry now, furious. They would be harsh—but put it down largely to a two-year-old grievance.

	In the end it might even aid in discouraging further searches.

	"How are they treating our women?" Bruce asked at last.

	"Fairly well. The prettiest have used all their art to make themselves unattractive. And the Polshins are very intent. They feel the seriousness of this. They will come back though—at least some have promised themselves they would."

	"That is what I fear most," admitted Bruce. "Get in touch now with Maning. He will be president now that Wade is dead. Tell him what has happened, do as he says, of course. And let me know from time to time how things are going.

	"It's hard to realize—Wade dead."

-

CHAPTER X

	"Mary has been reading some of the old records to me," said Omallin pompously to his council, "and in the Old Days, my forefathers got some aid from certain of the Plehbs. He picked certain of those who seemed to have sense, or the dim beginnings of it, and found that by offering them certain advantages, they would furnish him with information regarding the activities of the other Plehbs.

	"I wonder if we might not try the same system."

	The members of the council looked disgusted. Have dealings with a Plehb— offer something in return for a favor from a Plehb!

	Bruce, watching the images in the telectroscope, was not so disgusted with this plan. There were still certain Plehbs who had not been invited to join the Freedom party, either because of their stupidity, as in the case of most of those who had risen no higher than the Grey class, or because of their characters. And those refused because of their characters, were just the ones the Polshins would want. There were some seven thousand of them—and the permanent crew could not possibly keep so many under constant supervision by telectroscope. It was a physical impossibility—.

	"The idea," said Vanilt, "is preposterous. Associating with and asking favors of Plehbs."

	"Our forefathers did it," Omallin replied. "Besides, it might furnish us much amusement, listening to the tales of the Plehbs."

	"What reward can we offer them?" asked Morn unpleasantly.

	Omallin laughed. "Our fathers solved that! Plehb girls. They chose the ones who could not win wives—and it worked very well."

	"Hmmm—but there seems to be a great dearth of Plehb women as it is. I have not seen a really beautiful one in two years."

	But before the council broke up, the thing had been decided on. The Polshin Guard members were to select the ones needed. They were to do it secretly. And the system to be used was one so cleverly worked out, that not even with the aid of the telectroscope would all the members of the Polshin spy-ring be detected at once. Many of course, would be actual members of the Freedom movement, for they now numbered two hundred and eighty thousand in a city of three hundred and fifty thousand. Inevitably, the Polshin Guards would choose many of these.

	That night in the Meeting Hall, Bruce and other officials of the Movement spoke, spoke to an audience of, apparently, less than four hundred, actually to all the Freedom members of the city, watching with their tiny telectroscope machines. Carefully Bruce outlined the dangers, and carefully those who followed him, outlined the defense. Those chosen were invariably to accept. They were to do their best to learn what non-members of the Freedom party belonged to the ring.

	In a week, the ring began to grow. That week saw the inclusion of Sattl and Dllas into the ring of Union cities. The system of choosing the spies, that the Polshins had gotten from the old records, was simple—simply choose enormous numbers of spies, choose so many at once that no counter-spy system could follow all. Many, they realized, would be members of any movement there might be toward revolt, but no two chosen saw each other. They were not visited in offices, but Polshin guards spoke a word or two on the Corridor. And Guards were everywhere since the search and the murder of a Polshin. Over two thousand guards stood about everywhere. During the rest-hours, every single member was watched, but the night hours were rest hours for the Polshins too, and no business was transacted. No clues were dropped, no hints released. The spy ring was completed —and made tight.

-

	And—the first arrest was made within two weeks. A genuine Freedom Delegate from the fifty-second section. How the spy had learned, how he had communicated his information, even who he was remained an utter mystery. But Mark Rainy was the first victim, and he set the example for others of those who were to be captured. He was arrested at his work, while repairing a slight break in a food-machine. Four Polshin Guards took him, whisked him swiftly to an office somewhere in the Polshin section. It was ten minutes before this could be picked up, and followed, for a messenger had to make his way to the nearest communication station in the outlying Deserted Corridors to signal the information.

	They located him finally by following Omallin. Omallin came to that first inquisition, to learn what truth there was in the story a hundred spies had brought in, that there was some movement toward revolt. Rainy was bound now, and as Omallin entered, the questioning began. Not a word would Rainy speak.

	With a delicate precision, the Polshins applied their shock-rods. Terrible, nerve-wrenching shocks were sent through his body. Rainy said nothing, save to deny that such a movement existed. He was humbly pleading at first. Then stubbornly angry, persisting in his declaration that there was no such movement. Admitted that he went out secretly many nights—could he not visit a friend secretly. Who was the friend? A Plehb did not explain such things.

	Then he somehow loosened one of the inexpertly tied bonds. With a grim determination, a stolid decision, he attacked Omallin and before a dozen shock-rods coagulated his nerves into death, he had battered Omallin's fat-swathed hook nose into a bleeding, pulpy spread.

	Bruce smiled grimly as the last act of the strange drama on the Freedom Hall stage came to its end. "I am glad to think the Polshins have no Plastic Surgeons such as ours. Omallin will resent that more than any other thing."

	A new tenseness and hatred developed . among the Plehbs, more virulent even than their hate of the Polshins, and one even harder to express. Somewhere in this city were Plehbs, their own people, who had turned against them.

	And with the building up of the spy ring, came a still greater threat. Omallin had to build up another force. He had to gather means of keeping his promise to Plehb spies. A horrible terror gripped the heart of every girl, every mother and every father, every brother or sweetheart.

	Swiftly the tenseness was building up. Bruce knew that every day brought the inevitable climax nearer. As yet no more girls had been taken, for Omallin was still testing his spies, still uncertain. He believed largely what he wanted to believe, and he did not want to believe and could not believe that actual danger of revolution threatened him.

	A second arrest was made, Jim Brady, a member of the Freedom movement. And Jim Brady killed the Polshin who arrested him with his great, work-hardened hands. His powerful fingers fastened on his throat with a grip that drove them through the flesh, and the shock-rod currents only served to bring a rigor mortis that locked the dead fingers more tightly yet. The two dead bodies were carried away together, that a surgeon might separate the Plehb and his Polshin victim.

-

	That night there was a tenseness among the Polshins as great as among the Plehbs. A Polshin had died, died horribly. There were no skilled morticians to hide the horrible, torn throat, and the Polshins who had neither suffered injury, nor been called on for the least display of courage in generations, wilted spiritually before that wound. The council was more serious than ever it had been before. And there was little amusement in the gardens of the Polshins that night. Polshins looked on their Plehb slave-girls and saw burning in their eyes a deep, smouldering hate. There was a new suppleness in them, the soft suppleness of a snake as it creeps upon its victim, for every one of those Plehb girls knew now of the Freedom movement, and every one knew that a Plehb had torn the throat out of a Polshin.

	By dawn the Polshins were inspecting old atomic cruisers, looking again at the old ion-guns that had swept death through a thousand corridors in past years. And by dawn they knew that a half-dozen Plehb girls had died, died attacking the Polshins that came to them. One had swung a chair, the heaviest her muscles could wield, and sent the man to the hospital with a fractured skull. He was dead by noon. Two had tried to emulate Jim Brady, and left deep scars on the throats of the men they attacked. Only their lack of strength had made the wound painful instead of fatal. And one, swimming in a pool, had wrapped her arms around a Polshin, and drowned with him. Two more had been stopped in time. There was no doubt about the Freedom movement now. Every Plehb knew it, and every Polshin. All N'Yak stirred restlessly with it, and Polshins in every other city of the country were suddenly aware of the danger. They too were thinking of making searches.

	Omallin ordered another. Bosn and Felfya sent a few Polshin guards. Every Polshin in N'Yak would engage in this search. And the spies were contacted throughout the city. In haste, it was done—hurriedly. By noon the search would begin. And the first search party found twenty-three corpses in the first sector they investigated. Spies—spies burned with curious round wounds that had let out life instantly.

	The Freedom scientists had found their hand-weapons. Twin pistols, one shooting a stream of electrons, the other a stream of protons. Effective up to fifteen feet, no Polshin would get near enough to use his shock-rod when a man carried these. They had heavier weapons, too, weapons being groomed all that night, great tubes five feet long, mounted on little trucks. In the base was a material-energy engine, an engine that released the colossal energy of matter as an inconceivable, positive electric field. Like the disintegrator, it would tear any atom to sub-atomic fragments—and hurl the protons out with a velocity to two thousand million volts! No insulation would have resisted such a potential, but insulation capable of handling a hundred thousand surrounded the tube, and a smaller projector within the projector shot out a preliminary stream of protons that broke down the air ahead to form a leading path that the titanic discharge followed. First the bolt of protons, then the electrons were released and shot out to follow. What this weapon directed its forces against dissolved into hydrogen gas. No complex, balanced atomic structure could resist that bombardment.

	Bosn was starting its search, so they planned at least, in two days. Meanwhile their Guards were loaned to N'Yak. N'Yak would reciprocate, of course, when their search came about.

-

	At noon the groups started out. They had spy's directions now. And every squad carried cosmetic-removing materials. The Mahtan section, in charge of Bosn and Shkaga men and women, watched every step of the progress, while Bruce, in his home, watched what he wanted. The big telectroscope projector would allow two-way communication when needed, and this time every Freedom member had kept, in secret compartments, both their telectroscope apparatus, and the hand-weapons the Freedom scientists had distributed. The compartments hollowed out of the solid rock with disintegrators, in most cases, and hidden behind steel doors, faced with granite.

	"They have found the corpses," said a soft voice in Bruce's ear. "They are reporting to Omallin and the Council. Omallin is greatly perturbed." The voice allowed itself a chuckle. "He has ordered that spies be questioned carefully when visited, for any more recent information."

	Bruce watched the tiny stage of his own telectroscope. A party of Polshins was investigating Hal Powr, Vice-president of the Union. He smiled as the Polshin guards left Powr and his "mother," a high-ranking Bosn woman who had taken the place of the gentle old lady who had died seven months ago in Mahtan Hospital.

	Steadily, and with grim determination the search went on. It was, a colossal job to search the one hundred and eight thousand apartments of N'Yak. And three guards, the shock-rods at the ready, made each search. Carefully they looked this time. And Bruce trembled at the possibilities, the almost positive certainties that must come of this search. He had hoped for more time. They needed it so vitally. Yet all over the city now, Polshin Guards were looking, and wondering. Girls, beautiful, fair-complexioned, slim, graceful girls were blossoming out suddenly now, whereas in the search made a few short weeks ago, there had been none. Cosmetic trickery would have been a signed admission of membership in the Union, padding that had distorted lithe figures before would have been as bad, for cosmetic removers were being plied with a will, dozens of girls had been forced to prove their clothes had no padding. And Polshins were making mental notes.

	"This search makes things impossible, Bruce," said the Voice worriedly. "The Polshins will be back, individually, to demand those girls now. For two years they have found almost none, and the spies—they must be satisfied."

	"You may as well send out the word to prepare for the final rebellion," assented Bruce sadly. "We will be hard-pressed. We have four Freedom ships ready here, four in Bosn, three in Felfya, three in Shkaga, and two in each of several other cities. But so many of the new member cities have none, and no proton guns. This night we must distribute the proton-tubes. You will get an immediate vote on this from the other members of the—my button flashes." Abruptly Bruce swung shut the granite-sheathed door of his telectroscope machine's hide-away. He straightened, and turned to the doorway. Polshin voices were snapping tensely below. Bruce waited patiently, humbly aid correctly he answered their questions as they were asked, as did his father.

	In five minutes they left his apartment again.

	And almost instantly, before the door had more than closed, the Voice was back, softly, but infinitely tense. "Bruce —emergency. A spy has reported, and the report was carried directly by telephone, to Omallin. A spy living next to Lora has reported her definitely as a member of the Union, and as one high in the organization. A Polshin party arrested her while you were being examined, and took her away, immediately. She is bound and bound expertly. They are entering Omallin's inquisition room now."

-

	"God!" said Bruce. Instantly he snapped open the little door, and brought out the telectroscope. In a moment his flying fingers had trained it on Omallin's office. Lora, her hands bound tightly behind her, was being held by two Polshins. She was smiling slightly.

	"I've heard you were fat," she said calmly to Omallin, "But I didn't know a human could be so hideous. And that nose!"

	Omallin's red face went purple. Then it went white. "Plehb, that being your opinion, I shall make you my slave for a time, after we have learned what we will from you, and then you shall amuse our spies. And then you shall finish paying for that very slowly."

	"All three wrong, Omallin. Long before that, someone will finish what Mark Rainy started."

	"Hold her," snapped the Polshin, "and no matter what she tries, do not kill her. Tie her to the frame over there." Omallin took off his cloak, and picked up a pliable wire cable, its ends frayed as the two Guards swiftly and efficiently did as he had ordered.

	"I will start with ten blows," said Omallin, "and after that, anything you may want to say, I will be glad to listen to." He drew back his arm, and slashed viciously at her. A livid streak came, running across her back, and half way around her body. She jerked convulsively.

	"You—know the Freedom movement has started, Omallin," she said in a deadly calm voice. "That is all that matters. That, and the fact that you will die inevitably: You, personally, Omallin." You yourself will be killed. Not someone else. You will probably kill me here to-day—but someone else will kill you, Omallin. And—do you know? Probably a hundred thousand eyes are watching every move you make. And a hundred thousand ears hearing every word you say. And what I say."

	"Quiet, lying Plehb." The girl's body jerked to another blow.

	"Lying—am I? Then Tom, show them —it does not matter now, for there is nothing they can do! Show them!"

	Bruce did not see this. In fact, he had stopped watching almost immediately after the first blow. But Tom Philips did, and Tom Philips at the telectroscope projector spoke into Omallin's ears.

	"She might have added, Omallin, that fifty thousand Plehbs are promising themselves individually to kill you."

	Omallin's face went whiter than ever before. Furiously he spun around, seeking the source of that voice. But only the white startled faces of the other Polshins greeted him. Suddenly he regained his courage. The ghost voice— but they could do nothing! They had done nothing, that was the proof of it!

	"Then if all those miserable Plehbs are watching—let them see! And let them remember that I promise this to every Plehb who dares to think of harming a Polshin." Viciously he spun back to Lora. His arm swung up and down. Again. It rose again—and stopped abruptly in mid swing as a giant ten feet tall loomed suddenly, solidly before him. A giant in loose, white clothes trimmed with gold and bright blue.

-

	"Stop," roared the giant, his eyes lambent with anger and hate. "Stop, and out of this room!"

	Precipitately the Polshins fled the room, fled it in terror. Only the bound girl remained in the rock-walled room. "Thanks—Tom," she replied. Her head fell forward loosely as, the white-clad giant vanished. He had other work. The Polshins would be back in minutes.

	Bruce had left his electroscope when the first blow fell. He had slammed the little door shut, and burst out of the apartment on swift feet. In his two hands were the twin bearers of death, which the Freedom scientists had designed, and in his heart was a sudden understanding for Don Wade and his mad murder of the Polshin Guard. Something hot and driving had clutched him, something that seemed to distort everything he saw, that made the Polshin Guard suddenly before him a monster, leering with devil-eyes at him, rather than a semi-stupified young man. The Polshin fell silently as twin, ravening beams tore into his chest.

	That something had made him see more clearly though. He saw Lora's keen, laughing eyes different, and more clearly. He saw suddenly that she was Lora, not his keenest, quickest, wisest helper.

	He saw a squad of Polshin Guards fall suddenly as the two beams bit into them, and heard the shrilling of their warning whistles stilled as suddenly as they fell. He caught glimpses of the corridors as he raced through them. But most of the time the windows and lighted passages were clouded over by a great fat Polshin in a scarlet suit, his angry white face, and a white back with an angry scarlet stripe.

	He realized suddenly that a voice was calling him, the voice. "Bruce—Bruce, for God's sake listen!" He halted suddenly, sliding to an abrupt stop. "Bruce, they stopped. I used the projector at Lora's authority to frighten the coward's away. What shall I do now?"

	Suddenly Bruce was cold and sane. Only his viewpoint was changed, all life seemed to have different ends and aims. "Right, Tom. Thanks. Get observers to watch around me for Polshins. I can handle them, but I want to know."

	"We've done that. Followed you all the way."

	"Good. Send warnings to the other cities with the smaller projectors, at once. This search will end here in short order now, and then use the projectors to gather the people here. Now, send the small ship we have armed with the proton-tubes to me here, at once. Brady's the very best pilot. Send Grant along, we'll need him to treat Lora."

-

	Bruce—they came back for Lora just now. The big projector's on them. I'm going over." Another voice came on suddenly. "I'm using the secondary projector. Tom Philips is trying to drive off the Polshins. They've touched his image with shock-rods, and the opposing field shorted the rod so it fused in the Guard's hand. There's a dozen guards, and they won't leave. They've cut Lora down, and are taking her. She's unconscious now, it seems.

	"They've got an atomic pleasure-ship in the Corridor, and they're in it now. Taking Lora—Down Corridor F and now—up tube 36 In the open now, above the surface. Taking her—they're taking her to the N'Yak Fortress! All the Polshin families are moving in there hurriedly! They're really frightened— Omallin's gone there already, with his crew—Taking Lora into one of the cells —Put her on a couch—Surgeon has been called—Omallin must have different plans now.

	"The surgeon's working. Lora's come to her senses. Philips is talking to her now. The surgeon's backed out, scared. The Polshin guards have come back, and they've tied Lora down. Lora says she's all right."

	A ship, sixty feet long and ten in diameter appeared just above Bruce. There was a strange quiet in this part of the city, near the Deserted Passages now. The ship dropped lightly, and Bruce jumped in at once. On the stage of the electroscope of the ship was the scene in the cell in the N'Yak fortress. Four Polshin guards were binding down Lora with a careful efficiency, paying no attention to the ten foot figure of Tom Philips standing beside her. Lora was talking.

	"—Bruce to start things, I'm afraid, but tell him that if he is going to go anywhere, be sure he can land before he jumps off."

	Tom Philips spoke. "Bruce has started things, Lora. She's just been picked up by one of our ships in Corridor F-R. He's watching now on the ship electro-scope."

	The Polshin guards had finished, and were standing about helplessly now, the scene wavering slightly due to the motion of the ship as it returned to the berth in the Deserted Corridors. Lora smiled faintly.

	"That's better—then I can talk to you, Bruce. Remember that for months you have been working out a plan, and that plan is the best that human ingenuity has been able to evolve. Go to it."

-

	A Polshin messenger appeared suddenly, and spoke sharply to the leader of the guards in the room. A moment later a second doctor appeared, evidently the first would not come back. This man at once shooed the Polshin Guards out of the room, clapped his palm under Lora's chin, and then put a piece of adhesive across her mouth. Swiftly the doctor set to work, inspecting her wounds and putting theta-paste over them. In thirty seconds the theta-paste had hardened, and contracted, pulling the edges of the cuts together, meanwhile disinfecting them. He cut the wire bonds the Polshin guard had placed on her, and looked up at the towering figure of Tom Philips.

	"Really, you disconcert a worker. Can you see anywhere with that device?"

	"From Mercury to Athena. Or don't you know them?"

	"I know them," the surgeon nodded. "The Planets. You can actually see so far?"

	"Further. We have never really tested it out."

	"Through rock and metal. Hmmm— wonderful diagnostic instrument, isn't it. You have surgeons, I suppose,"

	"Better than any of the Polshins know. We have all the books of the Old Days at our disposal—and our surgeons study at the Interplanetary Center on Mars."

	The Polshin smiled deprecatingly. "Really, I'm ashamed of my profession here. What must one do to join your new school of medicine?"

	"Be a man, a Plehb," snapped Tom Philips.

	Bruce, in the ship, called out now. "No, Philips. Listen to me. The first is right. The second is not indispensable. Tell him that."

	"Bruce, our leader," said Philips more calmly, "says that only the first is indispensable."

	"Then, perhaps I might learn to qualify. I have often wondered whether some of the people I have met were truly human. Omallin for instance. I'd classify him as belonging to the pig family." The man had turned back to his work now, and had injected something into Lora's arm. "Omallin had some pleasant plans for this young woman. He will be interested when I make my report. That was a fifty milligram injection of delta-morphium. Do your men know it?"

	"It will put her to sleep, and keep her unconscious for two full days," said Dr. Grant in Bruce's ear. "Nothing will waken her save certain of the new drugs developed in Mars Central. They do not have any."

	Philips relayed Grant's report. "Ah, you are indeed ahead of us. Unfortunately—or should I say fortunately— we know of nothing which will disturb the slumbers of the patient. She ought to drop off in five minutes—"

-

	A squadron of Polshin Guards came down the corridor, with Omallin fearfully following behind. The doctor looked out at them annoyed. "I'm working with my patient," he said, "and it isn't necessary for you to disturb her now, is it?"

	"Yes," Omallin growled. "It is. I wish you'd get that thing"—pointing to the looming Philips—"out of the way."

	"He's quite harmless, so far as I can see. But can't you wait a few minutes? I have given the girl some injections."

	"No. We have to find out where that thing is operating from. A Plehb in the city ran wild and killed no less than eleven Polshins. He simply disappeared—at least we can find no one who admits seeing him go anywhere."

	Tom Philips suddenly vanished from the room, and Bruce Lawry's image appeared. "He's here, Polshin Coward," said Bruce gently. "Quite safe, thank you. Much safer than you are."

	Omallin spun sharply to look at the new image. Angrily he roared at it. "Before I'm through with you and your ilk, you'll learn better than to insult a Polshin!"

	"Before I'm through with you and your ilk," replied Bruce, "you'll learn better than to beat women." Bruce noticed the doctor looking at his watch. A slight smile crossed his face. "Three" his lips formed.

	Omallin's face turned red with anger. He raved and he shouted at the taunting image. He tore a shock-rod from a Guard's hand, only to remember in time that it would fuse and hurt him.

	Finally he quieted. "Stay there then, and watch. Watch what happens to this animal that insulted me. Barnes, give me that grid!"

	A Polshin advanced with a broad flat disc of metal, perhaps a half-inch thick. A wire with a small plug trailed from it. Omallin grasped it, and shoved the plug into an accumulator pack he carried. He carried the heating grid over toward Lora. The doctor stepped in front of him.

	"Please—you know the girl is sick. I think it would wait."

	"Get out of the way, Manning. I don't care what you think. We need that information, and I want to teach that—"

	"But—the girl's asleep," said Manning.

	"She will wake quick enough."

	"Oh, no, really, I'm afraid not. It's delta-morphium. Nothing can wake her within two days, you know. I thought it would hasten her recovery—"

	Slowly Omallin's face went white with anger. His body quivered and wavelets dashed up his fat neck to break on the out-jutting reef of his chin. But there was nothing that would disturb Lora.

-

	Bruce turned to Philips. "Tom they're sending out the general call? Everyone knows the plan?"

	"Yes, Bruce. They are beginning now, I think." He turned around and looked at the long row of electroscopes. Fifty men, seated before fifty sets of apparatus, were watching fifty different scenes. These fifty were all equipped with small projectors, capable of throwing voice, and, if necessary, a small scene. Quietly, low voices were speaking into the projector transmitters. "All of the Freedom Members will begin at once to carry out their parts under the General Plan—" Name after name was read out. All over the city the leaders were sending out their signals. The search of the city was barely well under way, it had not been called off by any means. But now—it ended abruptly. From eighty thousand apartments two hundred thousand people began to mill outward. In a moment, the Polshin guards were surrounded by masses of men, moving with such a deceptive air of slow determination, that the Polshins, who had never seen a planned, directed resistance, did not comprehend. Then they tried to use the tactics that had always served against the few half-hysterical attacks they had witnessed. Their shock-rods glowing, they advanced on the nearest of the Plehbs, ordering them angrily back. Around each Polshin six or eight Plehb men appeared, young, powerful Plehb men. Calmly they walked up to the Polshin guards. Crackling discharges of electricity sprang from the shock-rods—and rolled harmlessly off of the blue suits of the Plehbs. The Freedom Scientists had fulfilled their promise. Insulated suits had been distributed. Helpless, the Polshins were disarmed by men twice as strong as they were individually and numerically a hundred times as strong.

	It was a wonderfully well-organized movement. Of the three thousand seven hundred and forty-two Polshin Guards, in that city that day, only three hundred and eleven were killed. Sometimes —hate was too strong. And every Plehb of the Freedom movement was equipped with death-dealing weapons now. Sometimes a Plehb would recognize in a captured Polshin the man who took away his mate, or his daughter. Took her into the horrible slavery which every one of them had witnessed time and again on their telectroscopes. And from the least, lowest vertebrate, through all history, every male has fought hardest and most savagely for three things: life, his mate, and his offspring. And of those, perhaps his mate should come first. Never would so unified a movement have been possible without the telectroscope to show what happened to those poor creatures who were taken by the Polshins. It was a wonder so few were killed. Perhaps more would have been murdered had it not been that most of these Polshins were young men, some from foreign cities, and nearly all as yet unmarked by any Plehb as his own prey. And Bruce and his companions had worked hard, had taught and lectured, sought to prevent the venting of vengeance as cruel as anything the Polshins did. In some degree this had been effective, too. But most of all, many and many a Plehb had but a few minutes before seen that a Polshin need not necessarily mean an utterly cruel beast. That day Carl Manning saved a thousand lives.

-

	But in half an hour, N'Yak was in the hands of the Plehbs, utterly and completely. N'Yak underground, that is. For above ground, the Polshins were prepared. With the first sign of the active rising, the Polshins had set up their defenses according to the rules their forefathers had lain down. Great ion guns were mounted before the mouth of every surface tube. The power-controls had been cut—but the Plehb mechanics this time had destroyed the effect to be brought about by this move before it was made. Five material energy generators, each no larger than a man, had been set up, and were supplying all N'Yak with abundant power. They had been set up and connected in, before the Polshins had cut the power controls.

	Anxiously Bruce conferred with the men in other cities. In not every city had the rising occurred, only in those which felt certain of success. Eight of the cities of the Union were still under the rule of Polshins, Polshins patrolling in squads, with light ion guns under their arms.

	But Bosn, Shkaga, Felfya, all the cities which had been in the Union for any length of time, and possessed any number of proton-guns had revolted. The proton-guns were trained on the surface tubes by Plehbs, where they were not ready to drive out the Polshins unaided, and ion guns covered the tubes in cities where the Plehbs had the balance of power. In some places, both forces protected the tubes.

	N'Yak was ready for the next step. Overhead, the telectroscope showed atomic cruisers roaming ceaselessly, watching for any sign of attack. On the ground the surface crews in the gun-tanks, their mighty mounts crawling over the gardens and crushing ornamental bridges, prepared to aid the defense, to keep the rebel Plehbs below.

	Bruce piloted the "Freedom I" as she sailed up through the hidden, unsuspected lock the Plehbs had built. Instantly, two huge atomic cruisers bore down on her. Their mighty ion-guns flaming destruction, the stone of the lock crackled in terrific heat, and the ground seemed to burst into flame. But the "Freedom" rode calmly nearer, the ion-flame splitting widely and washing off of her magnetic shield. A rain of the accumulator shells burst in intolerable flame on the outer surface of her momentum-wave driving field.

	No material thing could reach the Freedom ships. One, two, finally four of the fighting ships of the N'Yak Union had appeared. A dozen great atomic cruisers clustered and now their heavy radio-frequency beams began to bore in.

	Effortlessly, the slumberous giant of material energy smashed the ten million horsepower beams of the atomic cruisers to flaming static discharges.

	Bruce moved. Slowly his fingers closed on the proton gun release. From the nose of his ship a blue-green tongue of energy, so stupendous as to be beyond measuring, drove out. Five hundred feet through the air the first discharge crashed its way, the two billion volt protons crushing the molecules of the air to hydrogen and sweeping them along. The electron discharge smashed out, then swiftly the alternations built up. Like a slow-licking solar prominence the unbelievable flame reached out —so slow seeming, yet so swift, the fleeing atomic cruiser vanished suddenly with but a slight alteration in the awful flame. Her magnetic shield was not built to resist two billion volt protons, nor the nearly two billion horsepower that drove them.

-

	With a long-drawn roar of thunder, the column, the beam had built up for itself in the air, clapped shut, as Bruce cut off his proton tube. There was not so much as dust to fall back when it died. And now the flame licked out again, stretched, and another cruiser puffed into pure, blazing hydrogen gas. And Mother Earth sent up a great tongue of her own lightning in protest, a tongue of power, feeble and unreal in the frightful glare of the released giant of matter.

	The atomic cruisers were fleeing toward the N'Yak fortress now. After them the Freedom ships sent a flight of tiny bullets, bullets that glowed strangely as they tore along at speeds greater than meteors, leaving only the smashed ions of air to mark their tail. Driven from momentum-wave guns, they overtook the flying cruisers as readily as on old time rifle bullet overtook an airplane.

	One touched a cruiser. Instantly, without sound save the soft puff of a rising tongue of blue flame, the tail of the cruiser seemed to condense, collapse upon itself, then melt away. Disintegrator bullets had destroyed it—bullets that released electrostatic fields of such unimaginable intensity that the matter near them was torn to atoms. Not noisily and flashily, for noise and light are escaping energy, but so efficiently that they were quiet. Only the gaping hole in the tail of the cruiser told the story.

	Slowly the five hundred foot ship halted as the air resistance stopped her. Slowly her nose pointed downward, while a dim red glow rose to incandescence, telling of broken power-leads. She vanished altogether in five more sections as other bullets struck her.

	And Bruce turned, and looked in vain for another enemy. Four Freedom ships rode unharmed in the air. The Polshin atomic cruisers were gone. No wreckage, no broken bodies remained. Only clear air.

	And that day, at Mars Center, a scientist with a peculiarly fresh, youthful face, and deep age-old eyes, smiled as he told the president of the Martian State what he observed. "Earth will redeem your pledge to her soon, John. The seven centuries you mentioned have passed. Today, my instruments were upset badly. At first I thought a solar disturbance had done it. It came from the direction of earth. It was an electric field—a field of an intensity we have never produced. Whatever caused it, anything within its influence must have been reduced to sub-atomic particles."

	Bruce Lawry looked down at the fortress. The ten-foot tungsto-iridium walls loomed grey and stolid in the sunlight. A thousand feet in diameter, four hundred high, the fortress was scarred here and there by the wars of the Old Days.

	But nothing had ever bitten deeply into her layers of magnetic and radio-frequency screening. No shell had pierced her. No heating ray reached through her screen. A ship, loaded with ultra-powerful explosive had driven at her in suicidal death. But the explosive had not reached her, only flying fragments of the ship.

-

	The N'Yak fortress was the most powerful in the world. Out of the range of its ion guns, Bruce was watching thoughtfully. Heavy rifles, hurling atomic explosives were firing angrily at him. A solid sheet of rippling flame roared around him, and despite its automatic balances, the "Freedom" wavered in their concussions. Bruce needed no telectroscope to see inside that metal walled fortress., Here was a steel-barred cell, a white bed, and a mass of dark, wavy hair, and a face with closed eyes, and warm, half-smiling lips. Smiling still in sleep over the joke played on Omallin, the joke in which she was the pawn. Behind those metal walls—.

	And Bruce could see also the dark-haired slim doctor with a blank look of stupidity on his face, and a deep, human twinkle in his dark eyes. Also behind those metal walls, Manning deserved Bruce's deepest consideration. But more still, by the side of Manning, Bruce seemed to see dozens, scores of Polshin figures, stalwart men—men for all that they were Polshins. Bruce had preached a doctrine and believed it. Despite what had happened, he could still believe it. Some of the Polshins in there were as truly victims of the system as was he, and any Plehb. Victims of a system that taught them utter inconsideration for Plehbs.

	And that fort was not like the atomic cruisers. The fort was practically unlimited in its power, even though dependent on atomic rather than material energy. The fort could draw tremendous volumes of the cold, clear water from the broad river flowing near by, volumes great enough to carry away even the millions of horse power that would be lost through the inefficiency of the atomic engines. Then—there was no reason why that fort should not develop two billion or two hundred billion horse power, at least for a short period. True, they used metallic conductors, unaided by the space-columns of the "Freedom" ships—but they used the ten-foot metal wall as a conductor for one polarity as Bruce knew. The other was led through silver pillars ten feet thick. Bruce felt sure he could have reduced it with a few hours struggle. Eventually, even those mighty metal conductors would have given way, for when atoms fight against energy conducted by space, the warp and woof of the universe, the outcome is foredoomed. His four cruisers could have arranged themselves broadside to the fort, allowing both stern and bow proton-tubes to come into action. Each ship turning the full power of those frightful ultra-atomic beams, driven by forces that made and broke suns, eight colossal tongues of energy, then the magnetic deflectors of the fort would have been loaded to the uttermost. And Bruce had still an untried weapon—the magnetic field with these raised also to their maximum, draining and weakening the field of the fort—.

	Bruce frowned. Earth would tremble to her core under the opposing stresses of those titanic engines. Her metal heart would strain upward and twist convulsively. N'Yak, Felfya, Bosn, even Piz-bur and Shkaga would be endangered by the upheavals resulting. N'Yak, founded on a rock though she was, would slip slowly into the sea, for below, far below, the deepest level of the city, was the great geological fault line.

	Yes—Bruce knew he could crack open that fort. Two things would happen. N'Yak, and the territory for at least five hundred miles around it, would writhe and strain under the pulls of those struggling Titans. And—when finally the magnetic and electric defenses of the fort fell, they would inevitably fall abruptly, like an electric light bulb when the fuse blows out. And as quickly, the hundreds of billions of horsepower, struggling to break down those invisible walls of force, would wash in —and through. Beneath them, the ten-foot walls of practically infusible metal would vanish as a single magnificent tongue of burning hydrogen gas. The walls—and Lora. Lora, and every human thing within it.

-

	Slowly Bruce looked at the men quietly waiting for his word. Without speaking, he tuned in the stage at Freedom Hall. Philips, Powr, a half-hundred others were looking at him, watching him.

	"I can break open the fort in either a thousandth part of a billionth of a second—or within six hours. In either case, no single thing within that fort will continue to exist for even the briefest part of a second after the walls fall. And—N'Yak will slide into the sea, and Mother Earth will strain and heave with the forces I must use. But—I could do it. What are we to do?"

	"We cannot say," replied Powr. "You are in complete command of all fighting. Bosn has reached the same position. Shkaga and Felfya. They are waiting for your lead."

	"I will come there," decided Bruce. Three ships remained circling the fort. Steadily the fort was sending out streams of every form of destruction they knew. Effortlessly the matter-giant brushed them aside. A tractor beam designed in the old days to pull down a full-fledged atomic battleship reached out, and tugged at one of the Freedom ships till the rocks of N'Yak ground protestingly on each other. Effortlessly the material energies neutralized the pull with the greater power of the momentum waves.

	Bruce returned slowly to Freedom Hall. They had won—and not won. It was stalemate now. What solution could they reach? The plan Lora had mentioned? Somehow that did not cover the conditions. It had seemed so simple and right to call down two ships from Felfya, to from Bosn and two from Shkaga, and combine to destroy the fort in that thousand billionth part of a second Bruce had mentioned. Now—new understanding, new contacts had changed the conditions.

	Slowly Bruce stepped down from the hundred and fifty foot ship as it landed in its berth.

-

CHAPTER XII

	"I suppose," Omallin's image on the Freedom Hall stage was saying irritably, "those animals are observing us. Have we no privacy whatever left?"

	Bruce could not resist the temptation. His image appeared on Omallin's right hand. But now he reduced his image to a foot-high figure. "No, Omallin. You have "nothing any more. Neither privacy, nor power."

	Omallin started violently, and pulled his hand away hastily. Then he swatted heavily at the foot-high image—and his hand passed through it unhindered. "Furthermore," Bruce continued, "we can crack that fort of yours like a rotten egg any time we want to."

	"Hah," Omallin snorted angrily. "I didn't notice that you did it. A fort is a very different thing from a light atomic cruiser."

	"Our Freedom ships are also very different. Your stupidity is too great for me to convince you short of actually destroying it. And then, of course, you would no longer exist. I may truly say that in all probability you will die unconvinced."

	"Animal! For centuries we have proven our superiority, and when, for five minutes, you gain some slight advantage, you presume to claim the control."

	Bruce shook his head slowly. "Animals—human beings. You are an animal also, Omallin. A swine I think. We are not only five minutes ahead of you. We are five thousand years ahead. We have all the civilization earth ever had at our disposal, and with this very machine I have seen the face of the men living on the planets, from Mercury to Jupiter's moons.

	"We have all you ever had, all we ourselves have developed—and all the things that the Planets have developed through the seven long centuries, while earth slipped back and back to the vicious feudal system that produced you. Do you know that your Polshin President Mukarty in Washun is also in the great metal fortress , there—surrounded by circling ships just like those over your heads? Your Polshin power has fallen. In some places advance is slower, since bur organization is so new. Therefore we are waiting yet a little."

	"The planets! The planets! Impossible," roared a Polshin councillor. "I have read the science of the Old Days and I know that no possible telescope could show such scenes."

	Bruce laughed gently. "The latest record you have is surely seven centuries old. Look—and decide. This is Mars Center." In the place of Bruce's image, on the table in the N'Yak fortress appeared a ten-inch globe of Mars, a globe that revolved with a majestic slowness that lent even this tiny image a mighty grandeur. The globe expanded till it was five feet through, then slowly the edges faded, till only one city, Mars Center, with its looming, stately towers, showed.

	Then this vanished, and Jupiter with his nine moons, great and small, appeared, grew, and the great, sprawling city, Jove, centered on the table.

	And Bruce reappeared. "Seven centuries the Planets have advanced—and we have done a bit ourselves.

	"I am troubling to speak to you only because certain of the Polshins within your walls are fit to live. We can of course destroy that fort—but we would destroy some worthwhile lives. Even a few of our own.

	"If you will lower your magnetic shields, we can promise life to some of you. And all of your people will be tried justly before a court of the men from the Planets. Do you know the Pledge of the Planets? Did your ancestors take down the words of John Montgomery that day when Interplanetary left Earth? They have waited, and they will help earth now. Take down your walls, and accept trial. Otherwise—"

	"Otherwise?" snorted Omallin, "your bluff will fail. In all the wars of earth, wars that would make your puny rebellion laughable, this fort was never so much as endangered.

	"And—otherwise you will have to kill nearly three hundred of your own animal species. Including this Lora, who seems to be one of your leaders."

	"I have a proposition in return," Omallin's fat lips smiled. "We can exist here forever, as you know. We like the gardens, however, so I will make this proposition. We will begin at once, and for nearly a whole year we can keep on, killing one of your animals each day— and all day long. The third one can be this Lora, for she will awake then. If you gain wisdom, you can turn over to us one of your ships, your leaders, and these seeing machines. In return we will consider giving you certain privileges."

-

	From beyond Bruce in the Freedom Hall came a mighty, angry roar of sound. It echoed through the transmitter, and into the metal-walled room where Omallin sat. A Plehb jumped up beside Bruce, and furiously he denounced the Polshins. "For every Plehb you harm—ten of the Polshins we have captured shall die as they die!"

	Omallin shrugged. "It is not I," he replied. "That is the difference between such animals as you and a Polshin."

	"Your stupidity is too great," sighed Bruce, returning to his position as the furious man was drawn away. "I was afraid you would believe nothing. However, I will give you two days to consider it. Also, we will communicate with others of the people within your fort."

	"The first Plehb shall begin to die now," roared Omallin, rising to his feet, and shaking his fat fist at Bruce's figure, "and she shall pay for those repeated insults."

	Bruce cut off the switch slowly, his face grey. He turned to the Freedom audience, and spoke slowly. "There seems to be nothing we can do. There is only one hope and a faint one. But I will try it. I have been studying at the University on Mars Central these past months—perhaps I have gained a new viewpoint that may help. Otherwise—there is nothing I can do. Since that is so—perhaps—it would be better —if we did not watch Omallin for a while."

	Bruce left the platform, and hurried away to his laboratory. His fellow scientists were arriving rapidly now, returning to their work. Bruce called them to him, and rapidly gave to each of them an experiment to perform—all directed toward one end. And he himself worked at the one, determining, key experiment.

	Each faint sound in the laboratory, each hum of apparatus and sound of low voices seemed to ring shrill in his ears. Shrill—shrill as a tortured woman's scream heard through echoing corridors.

	Bruce shook his head, and concentrated on the delicate task before him. Presently lathes began to turn, and the cry of the cut metal brought back the shrill ringing. Impatiently Bruce tossed his head, then bent lower, closer to his work.

	Hours passed swiftly. Reports came in from outside, reports of progress in Bosn and Shkaga, in cities from San Friso to Myami. Everywhere Polshins were bottled up in fortresses, cut off from communication with the rest of the world by the washing, roaring static that the material energy engines were setting up now. No radio waves could penetrate it, and frightened Polshins conferred and trembled. But land-lines, deep buried and protected, some secret and hidden, maintained communication between cities on the continent. All were waiting for the N'Yak decision. Some had decided to try similar tactics. Bruce thought of that with an infinite pain. With freedom so near for those victims —this!

-

	And reports were coming from the scientists of the Freedom laboratories. In other cities, Freedom men were working, though here in N'Yak the best were gathered under Bruce. Working, seeking to do what they had never been able hitherto to accomplish.

	The first day passed. And now the second dawned, and ceaselessly Bruce worked on. He would not sleep. Around him other men drove themselves on. But one by one they were forced to drop out as unsteady hands, weighted by fatigue, jarred delicate experiments into oblivion.

	Bruce would not stop. But Dr. Grant finally stopped him with a bit of drug in the food Bruce allowed himself. For five hours Bruce would sleep, sleeping so intensively he would wake refreshed, as from twelve hours of sleep. His assistant Director carried on the work, glimpsing vaguely the trend Bruce had established.

	It was late in the second day when Bruce woke, furiously angry at first. Then he realized Dr. Grant's wisdom, and slipped back into his place.

	First the reports of outside affairs came in. Half the Polshins in the N'Yak fortress were nearly ready to believe the Plehbs could do as they claimed. The rest were utterly unconvinced. There would be no yielding on their part. Plehbs were animals.

	A large Polshin audience had dropped in from time to time to witness Omallin's—resistance. Manning had risked his life for the Plehbs, and one hundred and three Plehbs slept now under delta-morphium for the full three days it allowed. But Manning was in a cell himself, awaiting action on Omallin's part.

	A second victim was the object of Omallin's resistance now: he was adhering faithfully to his program. His first victim had died for twelve and a half hours.

	Hurriedly Bruce turned to the Laboratory reports. He thought of Lora, not of the one assistant he needed most now, but of Lora, faintly stirring to wakefulness now, as the drug in her veins was gradually absorbed.

	The laboratory reports were good— but somehow something seemed lacking. Rapidly his mind ran over every possible item that could help. It was a clearer, refreshed mind.

	And then, in the way of man's mind, it functioned. A dog learns a trick slowly, by elimination of those moves which produce no results. A man does not do the thing at all—or suddenly knows the whole secret, and the direct way to its accomplishment. Bruce saw.

	With a sudden shout that stopped work over all the Laboratory he sprang to his feet. "Buck—Hal—Will—and Brady. Come here." In syllables so swift his hearers could scarcely follow, he told them what he wanted. Instantly he turned to his task. The problem that had baffled them seemed solved!

	In two hours, the first of the apparatus began to arrive, the new devices. Instantly Bruce and his assistants began setting it up, attaching it to the great telectroscope in Freedom Hall. In three hours, half the work was done, in four, it was completed. New apparatus, untried in connection, was ready. The transfer of ALL the electron waves was to be attempted! The transfer of not merely one ten-thousandth part of the whole—but All of it.

	"I don't want to try it on a human —even yet—"

	"Yes, you do, Bruce. There is one human—" interrupted Powers. "And we may hope by this time—that it fails in her case."

-

	Slowly Bruce's .color drained from his cheeks. With a steady hand he adjusted the great machine, focussed it, and turned it on. A room appeared in the N'Yak fortress. A bare metal room, with a half-dozen scarlet figures. Five of them were Polshins, scarlet because of their clothing. The sixth—

	Bruce worked with all the rapidity he could muster. One of the Polshins was wrapping electric resistance wire around the sixth figure, a bound, softly moaning figure. Cautiously Bruce advanced a control, and a light, hazy outline surrounded the sixth figure on the Freedom Hall stage. Under Bruce's manipulation the haze condensed, and only the additional solidification told of the added apparatus's work. Abruptly Bruce drove home a plunger switch. A mighty humming roar echoed through the great auditorium, the straining pull of the matter-giant, as the entire structure of the Universe was altered by one small fraction.

	Then it died, died as abruptly as it had come. On the stage the sixth form crumpled slowly to the floor. The five others started back in amazement and terror—then rushed forward to pass their hands through the spot where the material, physical body now lay. Bruce had set up a new electron-wave pattern, and instantaneously the electrons, the protons, then atoms that had made up that girl's body, simply WEREN'T where they had been, but in a new position—on Freedom Hall stage.

	Dr. Grant was kneeling over the blood stained figure. She was moaning no longer. Bruce joined him, tense and white. Slowly, the doctor turned his face up to Bruce. "I'm sorry Bruce— life is too marvelously delicate a balance for the titanic forces you need to hurl matter out of existence, and back into existence elsewhere. It was not her condition. The vitameter shows that every individual cell is dead, even the lowest types, the hair cells and finger nail cells—though that may be because of what they did to her.

	"I think that you have set yourself an impossible task, Bruce. How much power did you use in doing this?"

	"Three and one-half hundred billion horsepower hours. I killed her."

	"She would thank you Bruce, you know that. But don't you see that such a titanic power—more than even this whole city uses in a year—is too much for life to be associated with?"

	"When will Lora wake, Grant?" asked Bruce softly.

	Grant looked at his wristwatch. "She should wake about now or soon, Bruce."

	"I will bring her—when she wakes." Slowly Bruce sat down. He looked at the great machine with dull eyes. Utter quiet reigned in Freedom Hall. A pair of soft-shod hospital attendants came, and covered the body on the stage. Softly they carried it away.

	Every eye seemed turned on them as they walked unhindered through the immaterial images that were dashing madly about on the stage, noiseless, unreal.

	Then Bruce began to laugh, softly and with such genuine merriment, that Dr. Grant turned to him with a face suddenly whiter and more drawn than before. Bruce looked up at him with a smiling, teasing face. There was nothing insane in that face.

	"No, I'm all right Grant. Everything's all right! You see, just for a moment I wasn't thinking, because everything was so concentrated on that hope of bringing Lora out of the fortress that way. But just think—look."

-

	Again Bruce was at the controls. A In an instant the scene had shifted, it was Lora's cell now, the girl stirring slowly to consciousness on her bed. Bruce projected himself, and his image bent over by the side of Lora's bed.

	"Lora," he said, "Lora dear—it's Bruce." Slowly the lids raised, the long lashes curved upward.

	"Bruce—the joke worked, didn't it?" She paused, suddenly fuller consciousness returned, and the laughing glint in her eyes changed. They were suddenly very intent and thoughtful. "Bruce, what did you call me?"

	"I called you Lora—Lora, dear. Do 1 you mind?"

	"Oh—," sudden animation came to her. She sat up abruptly, clutching the blanket to her. "Then—then I'm not—■ your laboratory assistant."

	Bruce laughed softly. "I suppose you are—but that's not all, you see."

	With that point settled, other things could reach Lora's consciousness. She saw for the first time the steel bars that had been there when she dropped off into the long sleep. "Bruce—where am I? In the same place?" There was fright in her voice now. "I've been here two days? You couldn't get in?"

	"Not till five minutes ago, Lora. I have now, though. I can transport matter entire by the process, transport it as far as I can project an image of normal size."

	"Then you can get me out?"

	A cloud came over his face. "No, Lora, I have tried it, and it won't transport life. Dr. Grant says the forces involved are too mighty for life to endure. I tried once, but—but the experiment failed. It's all right though, because you see, dear, no substance in all the Universe can endure these forces. See, your bars." Bruce's image vanished from the cell, but there was a sudden enormous tension, a tension that seemed to draw at her very soul. Quietly, without a sound, the great steel door dissolved away—quietly as the noiseless ships of the Freedom Union—the quietness of the Matter Giant at work.

	Bruce reappeared. "I have other work to do with this now. Omallin wouldn't surrender. I couldn't break down his magnetic defenses without rocking earth to her heart. So now I must leave you for a brief while, dear, while I finish the work. I will bring you a white robe of the Freedom Union, and a telectroscope, and the twin tubes before I go through."

	He melted away again, and where he had been, a white robe, a small telectroscope, and the twin pistols of the Freedom Union came gently into existence. Laughing in her heart, Lora rose, and went to them.

	Fat Omallin was quivering and ordering and shrieking threats and vengeance. Two score Polshins, most of them young Polshin Guardsmen, were watching the performance with growing signs of disgust. The more Omallin realized their feelings, the more their barbs penetrated his thick intellectual hide, the more he disintegrated. His eyes were wide and frightened in their folds.

	Gradually a cold silence fell about him, and his voice died slowly into silence too. Steady, hard-eyed gazes were bent on him. These young men saw in him for the first time the weakness and degeneracy that he represented.

	A low voice spoke. Spoke from the air. "Disgusting performance, Omallin. It won't do you any good anyway. I told you I could crack that nut-shell of yours anytime I wanted to. Omallin, will you come down to the power-room with me?"

-

	Omallin shrieked as a solid something pushed him gently. Fast as his fat legs could carry him he ran for his own private room. A solid something turned him aside at the doorway, pushed him, forced him toward the power room. Whimpering, his face glazed with a cold sweat, he was forced along. There was solidity in the image now, not absolute solidity, but enough to force him.

	Behind him trailed some forty-five Polshin Guardsmen. Down the corridor they went, then down an elevator that mysteriously took on volition of its own, down to the depths beneath the ground level, into the lowest level of the N'Yak Fortress. There was a great, smooth, humming roar here. Rivers of cold water, nearly five million gallons a minute, were rushing through the huge pumps. The great atomic generators hummed and chuckled softly to themselves, the half-dozen Polshin Wartechs, who ran them, seeming tiny among their grey bulks. Long silver columns led across the vast cavern to apparatus on the same Titan's scale.

	"I didn't want to do it," said the voice calmly," because we would have wracked old Mother Earth in the doing. So I'll do it this way. I'll take Burner I of bank, A first, I think—"

	Bruce wasn't gentle this time, and besides, instead of merely bringing it back to the N'Yak Hall, he was throwing it away, out in space a hundred thousand miles from earth. The soul-wrenching tension built up, and suddenly there was a terrible, ear-tearing scream, the scream as of a living animal in pain, almost—

	The outlines of the first of the great generators faded away, in its deep interior they could see the burning fires. Then—the fires blossomed in a sudden explosion of heat and light for the billionth part of a second, a vast flower of blue-violet flame.

	Then there was nothing. Only the thunderous roar of the air rushing in to fill a sudden vacuum.

	There were ten of those thunderous roars. Ten times the whole vast N'Yak Fortress shuddered to them and in her cell fifteen floors above, Lora smiled as she heard them. Bruce was not being gentle, as he tore the living heart out of the N'Yak Fortress.

	"I think you'd better start back," said Bruce. "I'm going to take two of the pump battery now." Omallin realized suddenly that the solid thing had released him. His legs pumped desperately up the ramp to the elevator. It would still work, as the lights still worked, for the accumulators remained, intact and charged. Behind him he heard again two roaring blasts—and a new sound. The sound of thundering, rushing water. Water draining in the opened forty-foot ducts from the Hudson and the Atlantic.

	Presently, as the elevator, loaded to capacity, began its slow rise, Omallin heard the crackle and spit of shorted electrical circuits.

	His face was pasty when he stepped from the elevator at his own level. The Polshin Guardsmen were still with him.

	And—the voice was still with him. It was hard now. Hard and grim and stern. "Omallin, I wanted you to see that, and to know your power was definitely crushed. Omallin, you are something so savagely, horribly monstrous, so utterly inhuman and beyond human consideration, so far gone in the depths of the degeneracy, the worlds need you. You should be preserved for all time, so that men may know what they can fall to."

-

	Omallin didn't get the sense of what Bruce said. He only heard "the worlds need you" and "preserved for all time," and a look of cunning hope spread over his face. The eyes slitted once more—perhaps a bargain remained to him—life and Plehb girls too, perhaps—

	His face remained that way. Bruce saw it, and realized that never again could he hope for so perfect an expression. A terrible tension built up in the room, a tension that leapt and crackled in static discharges like miniature lightning, roaring and snapping, driving back the Polshin Guardsmen from about Omallin. And Omallin remained rigid, the same expression fixed on his face. But slowly, something was happening to him as the Matter Giant tore and strained and pushed at the atoms that made him. He was shrinking, and his color was fading. Slowly he shrank, and slowly the color faded, and a strange luster came, a dull silvery luster—

	Three minutes passed before the tension vanished, and the shrinking stopped. Then—Omallin stood on the floor.

	On his face was the same expression of leering, cunning lust, the same fat jowls and pouched eyes. But there was no color in the face, and it was a face gleaming with a dull, smooth metallic luster. And Omallin stood only some few inches tall, but he was really quite valuable, even in those days, for he was solid iridium, every atom of him, and he weighed two hundred and ninety pounds, just as he had before.

	Forty-five Polshin Guardsmen, their faces as white as the metal face of the statuette that would endure for untold millenia unchanged, uncorroded, stormed down the wide hallway—anywhere away—

-

Epilogue

	John Montgommery's age-old eyes, in their setting in his fresh, youthful face, were burning with a light of happiness. Bruce La wry and Lora stood before him on the platform of Interplanetary Hall at Mars Center. Beside them stood a telectroscope, and on its stage was an image of Freedom Hall in N'Yak, one hundred and thirty-seven million, five hundred thousand miles away.

	"You, Bruce Lawry, can have no conception of my feelings in greeting you officially here. You have not lived through my more than seven hundred years, you have not waited while thirty generations of men came and went about you, waited through decades and through centuries hoping always to hear from the planet it has been your duty to isolate from all contact with her sister worlds, waited and wondered what things were going on.

	"Six months ago our scientists first announced that they had detected across all the gulf of space the tremendous force-fields you were using, and for the first time the centuries of waiting seemed insupportable.

	"In the Pledge of the Planets, seven centuries ago I promised that the planets would help earth in settling her problems. I said you must come with a new ship, bringing a new invention. You have come bringing such gifts as we have never imagined possible. You have shown us exact images of planets circling a star three hundred and fifty-seven light-years distant. You have shown us matter at the heart of the sun, and matter in the very nebulae.

	"And unaided, earth has all but settled her own problems.

	"It is earth who should welcome us back into the intercourse of Planets," Montgommery paused. Then from the table he took a small metal key. For long seconds he looked at it, then slowly raised his face to Bruce Lawry.

	"Seven centuries ago I watched while this key was cut. I wondered then how long it would lie in our vaults.

	"Today I brought it out. You cannot know my happiness in giving to you this key to the Sealed Chamber. Never again will I have to pass that closed door with the memories and thoughts I have endured."

The End

The Escape
Astounding Science Fiction – May 1935
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

The story of two human beings in a world of walking machines.

	Aies Marlan permitted a slight scowl to creep across her face as she straightened from her posed attitude for a moment. Across the grass court she could see her father's laboratory and that most unwelcome adjunct, that behemoth of tactics condescension, the unbearable, insufferable Bruce Randall. Bruce was looking out of his window toward her with his usual, idiotic grin, that condescending grin with which he watched all her work.

	Aies looked across the studio toward Paul Treray. He had not noticed her looking up. He was very busy with his little knives and inductance softeners, working at the silver plastium he was so deftly shaping. The scowl relaxed to a little tonic. Paul was so busy with his work, modeling her and the little laboratory bench she had set up, as a scientist at work. Paul had made second place in the competition in 2017; this year he might get the coveted first with one of his little figures—

	Abruptly a gesture and a deep scowl of anger caste over his clean-lined face.

	"What's the matter. Paul?" she asked.

	"It—it just won't be you. It's still—metal I can't make it you—human."

	Aies straightened her back and stretched. "Well. I'm not sorry. That means no more to-day, and, frankly, my back is beginning to say the same thing." She smiled teasingly at him "I wish you'd start working on seated figures at ease. Do you enjoy breaking my back?

	"At any rate—I do want to finish that projector. Besides modeling as a scientist. I like to try to be one."

	"You are. Aies." said Paul, his face changing to a sunny smile as quickly as it had scowled before. "You are, but you are so much more interesting as a human—but the metal just won't see it. It wants to be atoms and protons and molecules, I suppose you'd say.

	"I still don't see how any one as thoroughly and abstractedly a physicist as your father, and a woman as completely and distractedly a chemist as your mother could have had a daughter so different."

	"Paul, you are prejudiced. And remember, please. I am very much interested in science, myself." She laughed at them as she took his hands in hers, "Besides—they didn't spend most of their thoughtless youth with one so foolishly unscientific as you. Perhaps you acted as a sort of balance to me."

	"Bah—trying to analyze the situation? Foolish. Results are all that count. I do not know how to model a figure: I cannot give you the angles, the degree of sphericity of the human head—the radius of curvature of a forearm. Only one man ever attempted to reduce art to mathematics—and that was Leonardo da Vinci He thought he did. But his own students said he didn't, because his formulas didn't work. Results are all—"

	"Bah." he said abruptly. Aies was looking with a long face at the little figure which Treray declared "would not be human."

	"Results." whispered Aies softly to herself almost as she walked slowly, apparently thoughtful, out of the door. "I should say the main trouble was that the ratio between the size of the bead to the over-all height of the body was slightly too great."

	"Get out!" cried Treray in mock anger. But partly real anger, because he suddenly realized that that ratio was not quite what it should be. But he didn't like to call it a "ratio;" he didn't like the word.

	Aies walked toward her father's laboratory, smiling to herself. Gradually the smile departed to be replaced by a look of determination and coldly repellent dignity. Bruce Randall would be in the way. Aies made up her-mind to dislike him the day he came to the house, though not consciously, because she had a pretty good idea why he bad been sent to "assist" her father in his research on the new accumulator.

	Aies was twenty sears, twelve months, and twenty-seven days on the final and thirteenth month of her twenty-first year now. Automatically at twenty-one she knew the Population Control Commission would call her in to "decide" what type of man she should marry. And Aies had not the slightest desire to have it decided for her. What she disliked most was that when they had decided they would, with the aid of the conditioning and control division make her decide the same thing. They'd make her like their decision.

-

	That was the rankling thing. She wouldn't have will power enough to disagree with them. They'd make her actually like whoever they picked by their conditioning and control.

	It was bad enough to have some one else make your decisions for you—but to be psychologically manipulated to like it!

	And she knew blamed well that they'd already just about decided. Bruce Randall was the decision. Well, they'd find she'd take a good bit of conditioning to like him. His face was wrinkled like an old man's; he thought at the rate of about two inches a year, and he spent ten minutes thinking up the answer to a simple question; and that grin, that insufferable, unbearable, awful, condescending grin!

	She walked briskly into the laboratory. Her father, she knew, was down at the physics conference this afternoon, seeking some hints on the accumulator connections for use in the plane he had designed. He needed aerodynamic aid for maximum efficiency of weight distribution, the accumulator was perfected; Aies herself was using it in a little device she had perfected.

	But Bruce wasn't out. He looked up with his slow smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Little glints of humor tacked in his eyes. "Hello. Aies, Paul's chisel slip? He looked peeved when you left." he said in his slow, deep voice.

	"No. Paul gets along quite nicely, thank you. Have you finished that accumulator bank dad told you to hook up?"

	"NI 3? I guess I haven't. I've been making a cape for myself.'

	Aies was piqued. She didn't recognize that NI 3 formula. "I didn't know you were a tailor," she said, going on toward her bench.

	Aies was an excellent mechanician and on a miniature lathe she was spinning out an aluminum tube. She paid no attention to Bruce's smiling work and his occasional glances. In some half hour, she had the little tube finished, and fitted into her apparatus. Then she started on some delicate wiring, her attention so concentrated on it she did not notice as Brace left the laboratory, and scarcely noticed as night fell outside.

	There was a grim little smile on her face as she finished, and held in her hand a device the size of an overgrown .45 revolver, connected with a long, flexible lead to an accumulator on the bench. With a quick tread she went to the next room where she had been keeping some pets—ten guinea pigs and a monkey.

	She brought the monkey into the laboratory on a leash, the chattering little animal hopping and running about her, squealing and scolding. She released him as she picked up her newly-made device. The monkey dashed off across the room turning half a dozen somersaults as he went—and fell fiat on his little pot-belly, and skidded ten feet across the floor as a single blue-green glow surrounded the weapon for an instant: His miniature hands lay limp and bedraggled, the prehensile, looped tail dragged mournfully.

	"But under the bright gas-glow lights his bright, beady eyes flickered and wabbled about, terror in them. His breath came regularly and evenly. His lips curled back, his mouth and tongue shaped for a scream—and no sound came!

	Aies smiled softly to herself as she gathered up the relaxed little figure and carried him to his cage. Then she sat down beside it with a notebook and a stop watch. Presently the little primate gave a hoarse, gasping gurgle. Instantly some of the terror in his eyes fled, and excitement took its place. Aies smiled at him, spoke to him, and patted his furry back. Then a shoulder twitched. Aies made another note. In forty-five minutes a tremendously scared and immensely excited monkey chattered and threw himself about his cage.

	There was a very decided look of determination and decision about Aies' face as she turned out the laboratory lights. She went down to the kitchenette and prepared a little something to ea.t Then she went across to her father's laboratory. There was a ship there, a beautiful thing, with every tiniest brace and protuberance faired into the streamlined hull. The wings were of the newest, variable-pitch design. The propeller of the noiseless type, more highly efficient because it wasted no energy in useless sound.

	It was so simple in line and form it was a frozen symphony of speed. To look at it brought the whistle of extreme speed in one's ears. To see it made one rise on one's toes as though to fly. Aies looked at it with a smile and a nod.

	Then she went over to Treray's studio. He was reading and sketching on a sheet of paper, a picture of the character described in the book, his favorite pastime.

	"Ah, hello. Aies." He rose and went toward her as she looked around the-door at him. "Come in. I thought you were working to-night."

	"I did, too. But I finished what I had on hand. And I'm feeling jangled. Bruce Randall sticks in my teeth."

	Paul laughed. "What's he done now?"

	"Nothing." said Aies explosively. "He wouldn't do anything but grin anyway. It's what the commission may do. I know that geologic cross section has been stuck there by the commission. I hate him."

	Paul smiled at her. "Now—but how about later?"

	"Then I'll hate myself. They'll change me—and that will make life more miserable. You have to live with yourself every second of the day, of the month, of your whole life. And—it makes me crawl to think of it! Loving somebody—and knowing that they decided coldly and scientifically that A and B were a desirable combination, so they took A and made A and B combine. Knowing that somebody decided it was desirable—and made you like it—decided and made you—oh—I can't say what I mean. Two parts of you—one hopelessly and helplessly doing what was scientifically decided you should, and knowing with the rest of you that you didn't decide that at all.

	"It makes me crawl. And I'll have to be with myself forever—so far as I know, forever. And know that.

	"Well—I won't."

	Paul's smooth face looked up suddenly, startled. "Won't! But what can you—"

	Her voice was intense. "I won't. And I think I know how I won't, too. Dot Walden is in the statistics and records office, and I'll be able to know—I'll know—and I'll—-

	"I won't, anyway." She sat silent and tense.

	Paul walked over to her, and took her hands in his. "Aies, can I help you any? I think it is hopeless. You can't go elsewhere than in this country without a passport, and in this country the commission's ratings and classifications board would simply act to find you.

	"But if I can help you—"

	Aies looked at him. A queer little timid look. "You can. Paul—but why, or why, in the name of Heaven did our forefathers ever permit this awful system to start? Why? Why?"

	"They were practical—they were scientific!" exploded Paul There were more people in insane asylums than in schools. The average man had the intelligence of a good thirteen-year-old. So they turned scientific, and eliminated nature's system of normal choosing—and decided to choose scientifically." He put bitterness and sarcasm into his words.

	"They rearranged the world to suit themselves. And they doomed some to live and their children to be the 'hewers of wood and bearers of water' for the rest of the world, with never a chance of having children better than they, because they were scientifically, correctly mated. And they doomed every one to live and marry as was decided for them. I—I must presently marry some woman I have never seen, never known, Some one who is no more to me than that tree out there. But that is scientific. That is correct. Because I am an artist, and she will be an artist, so our children must be artists.

	"Bah—their science will breed art out of the world. Their science has no conception of humanity. It sees it all in terms of A's and B's that will make Cs or—"

	"Hell. Hell on earth. Art is not science. It is above science; it is comprehension without knowing. It is a true result without the logic, the barren, stupid logic.

	"Look how stupid those scientists were. We, we of art, drew beautiful forms, forms beautiful in simplicity, and right, eminently right in beauty of line and mass and form. Now, now at last the scientists make similar forms and cackle forth to the world. 'See—see what we have done. We have found the perfect streamline shape.' Years, centuries before them, we knew those forms were perfect.

	"Do you know the Golden Mean? It is the ratio of two to three. That is the shape, the ratio for most perfect beauty. Now they have discovered that it the ratio of diameter to length for high-flying, swift ships.

	"And they, they try to tell art how to mate for art's best good.

	"Aies—Aies—they do not know. Art is above science; it is the comprehension of the whole without the knowing of the parts; it has results, ends without means." His heat of passionate denunciation cooled suddenly to a tenderness, his voice fell to softer tones.

	"Aies I love you—I know you—you are the one for me. They cannot know. They would make you marry some scientist, some heavy, thick-headed, slow-moving scientist. They cannot see the light and the air in you—the swift race of your very thoughts. 

	"Aies—they are so stupid. They mean so well, and they are so pitiful in their stupidity. Playing with lives, with loves and hates, with things they do not know. Only love can know what love is for.

	"Why was I made so to love you, were I not meant to? They are so—" His voice trailed off, his head sank. "So inexorable. I—I am sorry. Aies. I should not say that."

	A small, cool hand lifted his face. Aies was smiling down at him, her eyes dear and bright with something that perhaps art comprehended, but it could not find the means to put on canvas, where atoms and protons and strange chromatic groupings must be given the impossible task of translating a radiation to a mere bit of oil.

	"I don't want any slow-witted scientist, Paul." said Aies very, very softly. "I don't want any great elephant with a face like the crinkled hide of a hippopotamus, and a grin like a jackal. I want you. Paul.  I want you."

-

	Slowly Paul rose to his feet. Slowly Aies rose not quite as far—but far enough. He felt solid and hard and supple against her as he held her to him. And Aies was quite sure her plans were right, right in every possible way.

	She told him her plan then. It was simple. It was—scientific. It was based on one of the rules science itself laid down. "When theory meets with fact contrary to the theory, then the theory is wrong, not the fact." It was very simple. The theory of eugenic mating could not, by the law, controvert the fact of a marriage already existent.

	"We could not hide forever. We could not escape permanently for their board would find us. But that is not necessary. Just a month—two—three. Theory—their theory, of eugenics—can not break fact. The fact of our love, Paul." she said. "I will hear from Dot Walden hours before they make any active move. And then—dad's plane, so new even the patrol hasn't one—will be able to leave anything and everything. Lost—somewhere among the one hundred and forty-seven millions of people of the United States. They will find us—but not soon." She paused. "And I hate one other thing, too." There was a steel of determination in her voice as she said it.

	She left soon, for it was growing late. And she went home determined.

	She saw Dot Walden that day, and spoke to her, and she did a number of other errands. She was quite busy, and away from the house all that day. And that evening she spent talking and planning with Paul Treray. It was ten thirty when she returned home. And found that Dot Walden was calling her.

	"You are right," said Dot's image on the screen. "They decided and sent the official decision through this evening. I've been trying to get you since five thirty. By the way—there's something special about it. It's Bruce Randall all right—and congratulations—he certainly is a fine man—but it's special some way. I haven't been in this office very long, and Miss Cartwright was out when it came through. It's on a blue form, instead of the usual white. I don't know what that means—"

	Neither did Aies, but she had some faint suspicion. She knew that her father had been questioned by one of the commissioners while he was at the physics association the day before—and she had a suspicion. The suspicion was right. The blue forms meant action.

	Aies acted, too. She called Paul Treray at once. Her voice was calm,  tense actually, and her brain was clear and determined. Treray was ready. In ten minutes his things were ready, in five she joined him, and together, with their light packs, they went toward the shop where the new plane rested. Aies opened the door as Paul stumbled in the darkness. Automatically the gas tubes glowed into light as he crossed the capacitance plate.

	Aies' things slipped to the floor in dull surprise. The plane was half dismantled. The powerful motor hung with dangling cables from a crane. The propeller lay on the floor to one side. The accumulator stacks were racked in the storage shelves. Her father had spent the day installing the improvement he intended!

	Aies' body whipped erect abruptly, her voice suddenly hard and sharp. "By all the laws m existence, and out of existence. I'll break that law if I die trying. Come on!"

	In an instant her hat was off, her coat flying, loose and floppy, and grimly she set to work.

	It was surprising how much such a really trained woman could accomplish in an hour. By eleven forty-five she had the motor back in place, the prop stepped, and the racks replaced. The accumulators were going in. The plane still looked half dismantled, but actually lacked only the fairing and the Venturi cowlings, and a little tuning and rebalancing of circuits. Three quarters of an hour would see that done—"

	"We'd be farther away if we'd taken the standard plane you have." said Paul uncertainly. "There is still so much to be done—"

	"We'd have been grounded before we left town." snapped Aies. "Give me that secondary accumulator bank there." She snapped it into place, put the nut on the bolt, and over the whir of the electric wrench added. "I'll bet dollars to a stripped bolt they've got a blanket order out to the patrol to ground me. And probably that darned Bruce Randall, too. I just know I'm right in guessing what the blue form means and—"

-

	The whir of the wrench stopped. Bet the whirring sound didn't; it kept on, slightly heavier in tone, and growing loader. Aies snapped erect, brushed a streak of grease across her forehead, and a stray hair out of her eyes.

	"Paul—the patrol Yes, we'd have been grounded." She was busy wiping face and hands on clean waste. Then she slipped the accumulator block of her new projector into her pocket, slipped the lead up her sleeve, and a rubber band held it in place. The projector was almost hidden in her folded hand as she stepped to the door. The patrol plane was just settling softly to the grass court. Paul stepped back out of sight into the shop.

	"Hello—what of interest brings you here?" asked Aies as she stepped out, smiling.

	A broadly smiling patrolman leaned out of his window. "You an' Dan Cupid. I guess, sweetheart. With the sanction and suggestion of the commission. Will you take a bit of a ride along with me?"

	Aies started back a step. "The commission—to-night? There—there must be some mistake. Why—I haven't received any notice—I—I'm not ready at all—I can't go to-night!"

	The patrolman looked puzzled, looked at his order form, then smiled at her again. "It does sound screwy, but unless you have somebody else's face by mistake. I guess I'll have to take you along back. The order's kinda plain, honey."

	"But—but I just can't—"

	"Well, why not come along and tell 'em about it I just ain't a commissioner and I can't do a darned thing about orders except carry them through. Step in and come along, won't you?" The patrolman was getting confused and worried.

	Aies wasn't. She stepped into the plane. "Oh, Paul!" she called a moment later. "Paul, come and help me get them out, will you?" Paul stepped into the plane, and lifted the first of the two men out, grinning down at him.

	"So." he laughed, "and are you comfortable?" He laid the patrolman out on the lawn, carefully. The man's angry, startled eyes followed them. Faint twitchings of jaw and lips told of his efforts to speak. But only a low, gurgling sound came from his throat. A moment later the second man joined the first, and thirty seconds later they watched as the SPX-254 rose gently from the field and started up. It hung for a moment, and Aies leaned out, smiling.

	"Sorry, fellows—It's just a paralyzer, and you ought to be quite O. K. in about ten minutes. I'll have to be going along now." She turned back to her companion, and faintly the man on the ground heard her ask: "You've got the Boston charts. Paul?"

	Then the ship rose out of sight and drifted off at the leisurely fifty miles an hour of the patrol ships in a city area.

	"She mis—cal—culated." said a jerky, rasping, almost unintelligible voice from Patrolman Larry Mallory. "I can—wiggle my toe." His voice cleared up rapidly, and in scarcely three minutes he was able to roll a little, and he started for the still-lighted shop. There would be a communicator there. Halfway there he got to his hands and knees, and weakly crawled a few feet, then staggered to his feet, and as though thoroughly drunk, rolled and swayed to the telephone in the shop.

	"Ptrool 'edquart, quick." he said as the hum of the operator's 'connection came on. Ten seconds later the desk captain responded.

	. "Ptrolman Mulry." he said thickly. "Th gurl—Merlin—gadget knocked us—stiff. Tooka shup—oo-tree-fir—spota numbers easy."

	"Mallory? Mallory! You're drunk. Report here at once!" snapped the captain. "Where's O'Halley?"

	"Cap;n, rrrn't 'runk—paralyzed. Grl 'da wepon. Somepin knocked us stiff. Olley's cumin. She stole the ship, sir. Thank goodness I can talk again. The girl had something or other that knocked us stiff—a ray of some kind—couldn't wiggle a toe for a while, then slowly recovered. Honest, captain, we're not drunk, and she's got our ship."

	"You're soused." stopped the captain. "I'm sending a man out there at once. Stay where you are, and consider yourselves under arrest."

	"Yes, sir." said Mallory, dolefully. "He don't believe us, O'Halley." he said, turning to his companion. "He thinks we're drunk."

	"Well, we ain't. But the damn girl got the ship."

	A patrol ship, siren screaming, settled swiftly down one minute later, and picked them up. They were bundled unceremoniously into the back, with the evident anger of the two patrolmen in the ship, ashamed that a brother patrolman should get drunk on duty.

	Five minutes later, the ship landed on the headquarters' roof and the two men were taken below. "Take them in to Commissioner Stracey." ordered the desk captain. "He wants to interview them."

-

	The two men were escorted down the corridor, through the connecting bridge to the conditioning building. Commissioner Stracey's office was somewhat crowded. Dr. Harrison, head of the department, and a young, powerfully-built man with an unusually blank face already filled the small office.

	"What's this you reported about Miss Marlan?" demanded Stracey, as they entered.

	"She had some kind of a weapon, sir, that throws a paralyzing beam. It made us helpless instantly—conscious, but unable to move or even speak."

	"The paralyzer—I thought she'd use it." said the young man, chuckling.

	"They haven't any defense, and I'll bet she gets away."

	Stracey looked at him, sharply. Then he looked at Harrison. "What's this?" he demanded.

	"Primary state." smiled Harrison. "I brought him in here as I said because he confirmed the Primary statements of her father and added some interesting statements. He mentioned the paralyzer."

	"Just what is the Primary state? How much can it be trusted? Is his mind clear?"

	"In the Primary state he merely thinks out load. His mind is perfectly clear, and normal, save that the censor of the brain is out of the circuit, and the memory tracks are out. He cannot censor his thoughts, and he cannot remember what he says. It corresponds to the Secondary state used in criminal proceedings. There the suspects speaks his thoughts, but memory is associated so that he remembers and knows, when waked, that he has convicted or freed himself.

	"Here, while his mental processes are normal, he can neither remember nor censor his thoughts."

	"Then Miss Marian had a paralyzer?"

	"Had a paralyzer?" Bruce Randall chuckled. To him, it seemed he was chuckling and thinking to himself. "Oh. She had one—a little honey. Only she didn't develop any protection. She'll have lots of fun when she tries it on me."

	"Why?" 

	"Because I did develop protection. I know just how delightfully mad she'll be when she tries to paralyze me and the cloak stops the rays. Then—I think my tube will be powerful enough—probably more powerful than hers."

	"She definitely has a paralyzer?"

	"She certainly has! She's been playing with it for months. It's a great invention—extremely useful for the patrol when they finally get it—quell disturbances instantly. Harmless, but effective. They'll have a fine time catching her. They won't believe she can do it. They'll think the men are drunk."

	"She said she had one, sir, and the captain did think we were drunk.'" interrupted Mallory. "And she said she was headed north. You'd better have the patrol strengthened there—said to the man with her: 'Have you got the Boston charts?" I think she didn't know we could hear."

	"Probably thought she was out of ear-shot—maybe realized—no, she intended him to hear her. She knew her weapon." said Bruce. He chuckled. "She'll probably—hmmm." Bruce fell silent.

	"Send orders to withdraw three of the ships from the north sector and re-enforce the west and south sectors." ordered the commissioner after a few seconds. The little fox."

	"Where is this protection you have?" he asked, turning to Bruce.

	The cloak." said Bruce. The cloak in my laboratory. They'll probably never catch her. If she can make it—let her. I won't interfere, and the patrol probably won't get her."

	Stracey looked at him in puzzlement, then smiled. "Peculiar statement, eh, doctor. I wonder why he doesn't want to help? Doesn't he like the girl?"

	"She's wonderful." said Bruce softly. "She's as clever as any woman that ever lived, and the way she looks at me—I love her. The way she turns her back—that's almost all that I have seen—most of the time." He smiled tenderly.

	"There's your answer to the last question, commissioner." smiled the doctor. "He wants to play fair. I suspect. Feels it isn't right to aid in hunting her down."

	"It wouldn't be fair; she's fighting enough already—it's her fight, and the little thing may win, too." sighed Bruce.

	"Mallory. I guess you're right. Release him, men I think you two can realize that we did have reason to think you drunk. You really can't blame us for the mistake. But now, the pair of you go up to that laboratory and see if you can find those cloaks.:

	"Silvery-gray cloaks—in the cabinet—I hope they don't find them." said Randall. "I have the key—they won't want to break in."

	Stracey looked from Bruce to the doctor. "Harrison, do you think he will give us-the key?"

	Harrison looked at the powerful young man and smiled. "You might get a half dozen good husky patrolmen in here, and possibly they could get it. But just because he must speak the thoughts doesn't mean he'll give up those keys at all. He thinks he's sitting here silently."

	"Then take some pick locks and open it. I wonder if it will be safe—or will they ran into some dangerous stuff?"

	"There's nothing dangerous—they'll probably forget the accumulators—the whole secret—"

	"Don't." smiled Stracey, looking at Mallory. Mallory was looking at Randall uneasily, shifting his weight on his feet.

	"No, sir." replied the patrolman. "Shall we go?"

	"Yes, go ahead."

-

	"She's going to Boston." said Randall, suddenly. "She meant the patrolman to hear her, knew that they'd expect her to go anywhere but to Boston, since they knew she knew they had heard. So she would go to Boston, because the patrol would not expect her there."

	"What?" gasped Stracey. "Whew—do you think she—I mean—is he right?" asked Stracey, looking at Harrison.

	"She's a very clever girl, evidently." said the doctor, thoughtfully, "and just an abstruse line of reasoning might occur to her."

	"I know her. I know she won’t do that. They will probably miss her, unless by blind chance she runs into the few planes in that sector."

	"Commissioner—" the desk captain's voice came from the small speaker under the table. "We've just gotten a report from the north field that ship XP-47 came in on automatic controls, with the two pilots completely drunk. I think the girl was paralyzing them. They—further report. They say that they saw the 234 and were suddenly knocked out, made helpless, while their ship went into a power dive, exceeded the 500-mile limit, and the automatics took over and landed them safely."

	"She went toward Boston." nodded Randall. "Tough luck. She hit one of the planes. I wonder what she’ll do now. She's beyond any of the planes of the New York patrol now, and her ship was just as speedy as any other patrol plane. Dr. Marlan's plane was disassembled, of course, so no one can catch her. Ah—the accumulators. Patrol planes have undersize accumulator banks to make them theft of them difficult. I wonder if the banks were well charged?"

	"They were half full," said O'Halley, goggling at the young physicist.

	"Then they carried a charge good for only 150 miles or so at cruising speed, not more than 200 absolute maximum, and 100 at high speed. She'll have to rent a plane. But if she .goes into the city, she'll be spotted because of the patrol plane. If she lands outside, it will take hours to get in a large city, and—she'll go to a medium-sized city. Too small—they'd notice and report. There wouldn't be a plane-rental agency.

	"Too big—the patrol would be too active."

	"What city will she stop at? New Haven—New London?" asked Stracey tensely. It was like asking a thinking machine. Immediately the mechanism started  on the new problem.

	"No. By no means. Shell circle New York and head south now, because she's beyond the reach of the New York patrol and free to go in any direction. They'll expect her to put the most possible distance between herself and New York. That would be by going due north. So she'll circle to an unexpected quadrant. Probably due south. Newark—too large. Suburbs are solid clear out, too. She won't go there. Elizabeth—too large. Too much part of Newark. Ah—Amboy—one of the Amboys. Perth Amboy—South Amboy—"

	"Commissioner—Mallory reports he can't find the cloaks Randall described. Are you sure he isn't bats? Mallory claims his laboratory has no cabinet or locker of any kind that isn't open and, full of just plain junk. He's afraid to paw around much."

	They can't find the cabinet." Randall chuckled. "It's hidden. He mustn't paw around. A worried frown came over Randall's face, and for a moment a different, intelligent look appeared on his face; the lines about his eyes and mouth, the lines of character and thought and intelligence, grew firm again.

	He spoke with a deeper, more pleasant voice. "Commissioner Stracey. I'd advise that any one looking about in our laboratories be very careful as there it a great deal of dangerously charged apparatus." Then as suddenly as it had come, his face lapsed again into placid thought.

	"He meant that, commissioner. It probably is dangerous." said Harrison. Stracey spoke into his communicator, and relayed the warning to Mallory.

	"But how are we to find the hidden cabinet?"

	Harrison chuckled. "That's locked up in memory. It's probably between memory and censor sections. We can't, that's all. He'll have to hunt. Get some of the patrol technicians out there with apparatus. If we wake him, so that memory it available he won't want to tell us, and the censor is on the job.  Too bad—but we can't do it with him. A low-class or unbalanced mind we could handle, but remember, it was only with his consent and aid that I was able to get him to the Primary state. He would object a second time, right now—and that would be that.

	"Hmmm—that will take time. Then you'd better order the patrol in the Amboy region to picket all rental-plane agencies, and watch out for her paralysis device."

	"They won't believe it, although it comes as an order, so that's all right." said Randall complacently. Stracey turned red, then roared in laughter.

	"By gosh, he's right? They won't. They'll get knocked over like a row of tin soldiers. But it's all we can do. What will they do then?"

	"It depends on the color of the plane they take." said Bruce thoughtfully. If it's gray, or black, or dark brown, that's one thing. But if it's bright red or bright blue or a bright color of any sort, why that will mean something else."

-

	Aies looked at the lights below, and pondered Then she looked back at the chart. That's Perth Amboy, all right, Paul," she sighed at length. "The motors are getting weak, so we'll have to land pretty quickly. It's 1 a.m. so we'd better land away from houses. It'll be a two-mile hike. But then—walking is good for one." She laughed softly. "I'll bet they're burning up the night between New York and Boston about now."

	They left their things in the plane, when it grounded gently with almost, the last gasp of the accumulators, and walked. It had started to fog over, a heavy wet fog, and Airs feared for her not-too-perfect little weapon's insulation They walked rapidly toward the outskirts of the city and stopped at a lighted drug store. In a classified directory they located the largest plane-renting establishment in town, took the tube to the nearest station, and walked to the office. White light made a vague, slanting, rectangular shaft in the mist at they turned in.

	Aies stopped in dismay. Four large patrolmen started up at her entrance; two more appeared just outside the door almost instantly.

	Six large patrolmen and two company clerks sat sleeping in their chairs two minutes later when a customer walked in. Thirty seconds later he, too, was sleeping in a chair. Aies passed the beam over her nine victims once more for surety, and then carefully tilled out a rental blank, but the deposit on the table, and wrote "Boston" as her destination. Then she and Paul walked back into the hangar. "The red one there, Paul, she said thoughtfully. "It's a Crossing—fast."

	"But Aies—it's red—so conspicuous." objected Treray.

	"That's what I want." laughed the girl. They'll look hard for it. Come one, and I'll explain, sweetheart."

	The plane rose gracefully as Aies made sure the accumulators were fully charged. Then laughingly the explained her plan. The plane had scarcely left the city when Patrolman Sargeant knocked the telephone off the table with a slightly mobile hand. "Rud." he croaked. " 'edquart—'ell 'em—rud. 'rite rud."

	"Bright red." said Aies, looking at the plane. They'll be looking all over for it, and stopping all the bright-red planes in the air to-night with a man and a girl in them. While this particular bright-red plane rests peacefully in a deserted shack some three and a half miles from its starting point. Now for the rest of the hike." The heavy, wet mist still hung low, scarcely ten feet deep. It was clear here, but half a mile away it hung like a fleecy blanket. "It'll be wet. Brr—"

	It was near dawn when they reached the Elizabeth tube entrance. Five minutes later they alighted at 200 Street, in upper New York. "Naturally." Aies had said, "they don't expect to find us in the heart of things after that escape."

	They took the moving walk on the second level downtown, then shuttled across town, and took a subway to the 33rd-Street terminal. The crowds were getting thicker once more, and they melted into it, then the most exposed part of the trip began. They took the moving walk over to Brooklyn. The other walk was crowded, but very few people were going this way. Aies saw soddenly in the dim, cold dawn light two patrolmen in the familiar capes. Paul felt her stiffen against him and looked at the pair himself, wide-eyed.

	The patrolmen cast a casual glance at the pair and turned away. "Uhmmm—Aies sighed in relief. Her voice was somewhat shaken as she went on. "That's one difficulty—every blue uniform will mean a man staring at us. It won't be much fun for the next few months."

	The walk carried them on, off the bridge and to the Brooklyn terminal. They were nearing it when Aies saw two rather peculiar figures. They wore their blue uniforms, but over their uniforms they wore a nonstandard cape. Aies frowned in puzzlement. Somewhere she had seen that dirty-gray cloth—stiffish cloth.

	Suddenly she stiffened The two were looking directly at them, two elderly men with kindly, paternal smiles. They looked at her reprovingly. Jerkily. Aies raised her arm. In the dim light the little tube glowed brightly, a faint beam reached out.

	They did not fall. Their cloaks were washed with a softly wavering light, violet, and their expressions were as a father might look down at the angry child pounding at his legs. Aies felt the little tube grow hot in her hand; it began to sputter. With a soft fowf it collapsed into darkness.

	"Wide-eyed. Aies looked down at it, then in wonder, hurt surprise she looked up at the two men. One raised his hand, and something glowed softly. A greenish-blue light. Aies felt a sudden tingling through her muscles, a rapid weakening. And suddenly she recognized the material. "Bruce—stuff he—worked—"

	She'd remembered that peculiar gray stuff, hard to recognize under this light. Then her lips wouldn't work any more, and she was picked up gently by two of the men as two more appeared to pick up Paul. She saw quite clearly that Bruce had been watching her experiment rather quietly and had not only duplicated her paralyzing device—but had gone her just one, slight step better. He'd rigged a protective device.

	And she was quite furious that Bruce had spied on her, and beaten her, and helped catch her. But she couldn't wiggle her little finger when they brought her into the conditioning laboratory.

-

	Bruce looked across at Stracey, half embarrassed, half annoyed. "It wasn't exactly fair, sit. It isn't usual to make a man help as I did."

	"Help capture his runaway fiancée?-chuckled Stracey. "Well, nowadays we aren't used to chasing the aforementioned fiancée. And I don't know that we could have kept ahead of her without your very valuable assistance. The bit of reasoning on the color of the plane was most interesting."

	"Thanks—I don't remember it." said Randall sourly. "Tell me so I can enjoy my brilliance."

	Stracey laughed. Try going up to room 73. That may be more enjoyable." He handed Bruce a pass, and Randall rose hastily.

	"Thank you, sir." he said and was gone.

-

	Aies rose with a smile as Bruce came into her room. There was a half-pout half-smile on her lips and a golden-red halo of sunlight shining through the window that formed a frame for her head.

	"Hell. Bruce. I hear you helped capture me?" she stated.

	"So I heard—when they were quite through with me." answered Bruce. His eyes crinkled very slowly, and the crinkles spread down his cheeks till the corners of his mouth twitched.

	Aies looked at him for a moment, and slowly a little smile of surprise and tenderness came over her face. "Funny, I never liked the way you smiled—-but now—I think it's—awfully nice to have around."

	"It isn't funny." said Bruce, tenderly. "It's natural. They changed you a little, dear girl You're supposed to love me now, you know."

	She looked up at him slowly. "It is funny—because I think I do, In fact—I'm sure I do. Bruce." She came toward him slowly, and he put his arms around her very gently.

	"You'll break. I know you'll break in two. You're very small"

	"Uhmmm—" said Aies. "I'm not—but you are nicely large." She looked up at him. Her eyes changed for a moment; a doubt seemed to creep into them. "I suppose they made me feel that way. I suppose I don't really do—"

	Bruce looked down into her eyes. "Does it matter, dear? Does it matter in the least? All we seek in life is happiness. Happiness—peace—and it matters not one iota how we reach them. Love is the greatest happiness in the world—isn't it, little sweetheart?—and so if it is, does it matter whence it comes or why? Does it matter if it is because some one else thought it wise or because we developed it by association and contacts that were pleasant?"

	"Perhaps—perhaps it does. Because love can be real—and not last. It must wear, and only similar characters, similar ideals, similar ideas can make it. And wisdom can help there, when the heart is not very wise. Unfortunately, till men learned the secret of conditioning, the head could not rule the heart. Does it matter, now that the love is, when it came?"

	"No." said Aies, and stopped further discussion.

The End

Night
Astounding Stories – October 1935
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

	CONDON was staring through the glasses with a face tense and drawn, all his attention utterly concentrated on that one almost invisible speck infinitely far up in the blue sky, and saying over and over again in the most horribly absent-minded way, "My Lord—my Lord—"

	Suddenly he shivered and looked down at me, sheer agony in his face. "He's never coming down. Don, he's never coming down—"

	I knew it, too—knew it as solidly as I knew the knowledge was impossible. But I smiled and said: "Oh, I wouldn't say that. If anything, I'd fear his coming down. What goes up comes down."

	Major Condon trembled all over. His mouth worked horribly for a moment before he could speak. "Talbot—I'm scared—I'm horribly scared. You know—you're his assistant—you know he's trying to defeat gravity. Men aren't meant to—it's wrong—wrong—"

	His eyes were glued on those binoculars again, with the same terrible tensity, and now he was saying over and over in that absent-minded way, "wrong—wrong—wrong—"

	Simultaneously he stiffened, and stopped. The dozen or so other men standing on that lonely little emergency field stiffened; then the major crumpled to the ground. I've never before seen a man faint, let alone an army officer with a D.S. medal. I didn't stop to help him, because I knew something had happened. I grabbed the glasses.

	Far, far up in the sky was that little orange speck—far, where there is almost no air, and he had been forced to wear a stratosphere suit with a little alcohol heater. The broad, orange wings were overlaid now with a faint-glowing, pearl-gray light. And it was falling. Slowly, at first, circling aimlessly downward. Then it dipped, rose, and somehow went into a tail spin.

	It was horrible. I know I must have breathed, but it didn't seem so. It took minutes for it to fall those miles, despite the speed. Eventually it whipped out of that tail spin—through sheer speed, whipped out and into a power dive. It was a ghastly, flying coffin, hurtling at more than half a thousand miles an hour when it reached the Earth, some fifteen miles away.

	The ground trembled, and the air shook with the crash of it. We were in the cars and roaring across the ground long before it hit. I was in Bob's car, with Jeff, his laboratory technician—Bob's little roadster he'd never need again. The engine picked up quickly, and we were going seventy before we left the field, jumped a shallow ditch and hit the road—the deserted, concrete road that led off toward where he must be. The engine roared as Jeff clamped down on the accelerator. Dimly, I heard the major's big car coming along behind us.

	Jeff drove like a maniac, but I didn't notice. I knew the thing had done ninety-five but I think we must have done more. The wind whipped tears in my eyes so I couldn't be sure whether I saw mounting smoke and flame or not. With Diesel fuel there shouldn't be—but that plane had been doing things it shouldn't. It had been trying out Carter's antigravity coil.

	We shot up the flat, straight road across wide, level country, the wind moaning a requiem about the car. Far ahead I saw the side road that must lead off toward where Bob should be, and lurched to the braking of the car, the whine and sing of violently shrieking tires, then to the skidding corner. It was a sand road; we slithered down it and for all the lightness and power, we slowed to sixty-five, clinging to the seat as the soft sand gripped and clung.

	Violently Jeff twisted into a branching cow path, and somehow the springs took it. We braked to a stop a quarter of a mile from the plane.

-

	IT WAS in a fenced field of pasture and wood lot. We leaped the fence, and raced toward it: Jeff got there first, just as the major's car shrieked to a stop behind ours.

	The major was cold and pale when he reached us. "Dead," he stated.

	And I was very much colder and probably several times as pale. "I don't know!" I moaned. "He isn't there!"

	"Not there!" The major almost screamed it. "He must be—he has to be. He has no parachute—wouldn't take one. They say he didn't jump—"

	I pointed to the plane, and wiped a little cold sweat from my forehead. I felt clammy all over, and my spine prickled. The solid steel of the huge Diesel engine was driven through the stump of a tree, down into the ground perhaps eight or nine feet, and the dirt and rock had splashed under that blow like wet mud.

	The wings were on the other side of the field, flattened, twisted straws of dural alloy. The fuselage of the ship was a perfect silhouette—a longitudinal projection that had flattened in on itself, each separate section stopping only as it hit the ground.

	The great torus coil with its strangely twined wrappings of hair-fine bismuth wire was intact! And bent over it, twisted, utterly wrecked by the impact, was the main-wing stringer—the great dural-alloy beam that supported most of the ship's weight in the air. It was battered, crushed on those hair-fine, fragile bismuth wires—and not one of them was twisted or misplaced or so much as skinned. The back frame of the ponderous Diesel engine—the heavy supercharger was the anvil of that combination—was cracked and splintered. And not one wire of the hellish bismuth coil was strained or skinned or displaced.

	And the red pulp that should have been there—the red pulp that had been a man—wasn't. It simply wasn't there at all. He hadn't left the plane. In the clear, cloudless air, we could see that. He was gone.

	We examined it, of course. A farmer came, and another, and looked, and talked. Then several farmers came in old, dilapidated cars with their wives and families, and watched.

	We set the owner of the property on watch and went away—went back to the city for workmen and a truck with a derrick. Dusk was falling. It would be morning before we could do anything, so we went away.

	Five of us—the major of the army air force, Jeff Rodney, the two Douglass Co. men whose names I never remembered and I—sat in my—our—room. Bob's and Jeff's and mine. We'd been sitting there for hours trying to talk, trying to think, trying to remember every little detail, and trying to forget every ghastly detail. We couldn't remember the detail that explained it, nor forget the details that rode and harried us.

	And the telephone rang. I started. Then slowly got up and answered. A strange voice, flat and rather unpleasant, said: "Mr. Talbot?"

	"Yes."

	It was Sam Gantry, the farmer we'd left on watch. "There's a man here."

	"Yes? What does he want?"

	"I dunno. I dunno where he came from. He's either dead or out cold. Gotta funny kind of an aviator suit on, with a glass face on it. He looks all blue, so I guess he's dead."

	"Lord! Bob! Did you take the helmet off?" I roared.

	"No, sir, no—no, sir. We just left him the way he was."

	"His tanks have run out. Listen. Take a hammer, a wrench, anything, and break that glass faceplate! Quick! We'll be there."

	Jeff was moving. The major was, too, and the others. I made a grab for the half-empty bottle of Scotch, started out, and ducked back into the closet. With the oxygen bottle under my arm I jumped into the crowded little roadster just as Jeff started it moving. He turned on the horn, and left it that way.

	We dodged, twisted, jumped and stopped with jerks in traffic, then leaped into smooth, roaring speed out toward the farmer's field. The turns were familiar now; we scarcely slowed for them, sluing around them. This time Jeff charged through the wire fence. A headlight popped; there was a shrill scream of wire, the wicked zing of wire scratching across the hood and mud guards, and we were bouncing across the field.

-

	THERE WERE two lanterns on the ground; three men carried others; more men squatted down beside a still figure garbed in a fantastic, bulging, airproof stratosphere suit. They looked at us, open-mouthed as we skidded to a halt, moving aside as the major leaped out and dashed over with the Scotch. I followed close behind with the oxygen bottle.

	Bob's faceplate was shattered, his face blue, his lips blue and flecked with froth. A long gash across his cheek from the shattered glass bled slowly. The major lifted his head without a word, and glass tinkled inside the helmet as he tried to force a little whisky down his throat.

	"Wait!" I called. "Major, give him artificial respiration, and this will bring him around quicker—better." The major nodded, and rose, rubbing his arm with a peculiar expression.

	"That's cold!" he said, as he flipped Bob over, and straddled his back. I held the oxygen bottle under Bob's nose as the major swung back in his arc, and let the raw, cold oxygen gas flow into his nostrils.

	In ten seconds Bob coughed, gurgled, coughed violently, and took a deep shuddering breath. His face turned pink almost instantly under that lungful of oxygen, and I noticed with some surprise that he seemed to exhale almost nothing, his body absorbing the oxygen rapidly.

	He coughed again; then: "I could breathe a heck of a sight better if you'd get off my back," he said. The major jumped up, and Bob turned over and sat up. He waved me aside, and spat. "I'm—all right," he said softly.

	"Lord, man, what happened?" demanded the major.

	Bob sat silent for a minute. His eyes had the strangest look—a hungry look—as he gazed about him. He looked at the trees beyond and at the silent, watching men in the light of the lanterns; then up, up to where a myriad stars gleamed and danced and flickered in the clear night sky.

	"I'm back," he said softly. Then suddenly he shivered, and looked horribly afraid. "But—I'll have to be—then—too."

	He looked at the major for a minute, and smiled faintly. And at the two Douglass Co. men. "Your plane was all right. I started up on the wings, as arranged, went way up, till I thought surely I was at a safe height, where the air wasn't too dense and the field surely wouldn't reach to Earth—Lord!—reach to Earth! I didn't guess how far that field extended. It touched Earth—twice.

	"I was at forty-five thousand when I decided it was safe, and cut the engine. It died, and the stillness shocked me. It was so quiet. So quiet.

	"I turned on the coil circuit, and the dynamotor began to hum as the tubes warmed up. And then—the field hit me. It paralyzed me in an instant. I never had a chance to break the circuit, though I knew instantly something was wrong—terribly wrong. But the very first thing it did was to paralyze me, and I had to sit there and watch the instruments climb to positions and meanings they were never meant for.

	"I realized I alone was being affected by that coil—I alone, sitting directly over it. I stared at the meters and they began to fade, began to seem transparent, unreal. And as they faded into blankness I saw clear sky beyond them; then for a hundredth of a second, like some effect of persistence of vision, I thought I saw the plane falling, twisting down at incredible speed, and the light faded as the Sun seemed to rocket suddenly across the sky and vanish.

	"I don't know how long I was in that paralyzed condition, where there was only blankness—neither dark nor light, nor time nor any form—but I breathed many times. Finally, form crawled and writhed into the blankness, and seemed to solidify beneath me as, abruptly, the blankness gave way to a dull red light. I was falling.

	"I thought instantly of the forty-five thousand feet that lay between me and the solid Earth, and stiffened automatically in terror. And in the same instant I landed in a deep blanket of white snow, stained by the red light that lighted the world.

-

	"COLD. Cold—it tore into me like the fang of a savage animal. What cold! The cold of ultimate death. It ripped through that thick, insulated suit and slashed at me viciously, as though there were no insulation there. I shivered so violently I could scarcely turn up the alcohol valves. You know I carried alcohol tanks and catalyst grids for heating, because the only electric fields I wanted were those of the apparatus. Even used a Diesel instead of gas engine.

	"I thanked the Lord for that then. I realized that whatever had happened I was in a spot indescribably cold and desolate. And in the same instant, realized that the sky was black. Blacker than the blackest night, and yet before me the snow field stretched to infinity, tainted by the blood-red light, and my shadow crawled in darker red at my feet.

	"I turned around. As far as the eye could see in three directions the land swept off in very low, very slightly rolling hills, almost plains—red plains of snow dyed with the dripping light of sunset, I thought.

	"In the fourth direction, a wall—a wall that put the Great Wall of China to shame—loomed up half a mile—a blood-red wall that had the luster of metal. It stretched across the horizon, and looked a scant hundred yards away, for the air was utterly clear. I turned up my alcohol burners a bit more and felt a little better.

	"Something jerked my head around like a giant hand—a sudden thought. I stared at the Sun and gulped. It was four times—six times—the size of the Sun I knew. And it wasn't setting. It was forty-five degrees from the horizon. It was red. Blood-red. And there wasn't the slightest bit of radiant heat reaching my face from it. That Sun was cold.

	"I'd just automatically assumed I was still on Earth, whatever else might have happened, but now I knew I couldn't be. It must be another planet of another sun—a frozen planet—for that snow was frozen air. I knew it absolutely. A frozen planet of a dead sun.

	"And then I changed even that. I looked up at the black sky above me, and in all the vast black bowl of the heavens, not three-score stars were visible. Dim, red stars, with one single sun that stood out for its brilliance—a yellowish-red sun perhaps a tenth as bright as our Sun, but a monster here. It was another—a dead—space. For if that snow was frozen air, the only atmosphere must have been neon and helium. There wasn't any hazy air to stop the light of the stars, and that dim, red sun didn't obscure them with its light. The stars were gone.

	"In that glimpse, my mind began working by itself; I was scared.

	"Scared? I was so scared I was afraid I was going to be sick. Because right then I knew I was never coming back. When I felt that cold, I'd wondered when my oxygen bottles would give out, if I'd get back before they did. Now it was not a worry. It was simply the limiting factor on an already-determined thing, the setting on the time bomb. I had just so much more time before I died right there.

	"My mind was working out things, working them out all by itself, and giving answers I didn't want, didn't want to know about. For some reason it persisted in considering this was Earth, and the conviction became more: and more fixed. It was right. That was Earth. And it was old Sol. Old—old Sol. It was the time axis that coil distorted—not gravity at all. My mind worked that out with a logic; as cold as that planet.

	"If it was time it had distorted, and this was Earth, then it had distorted time beyond imagining to an extent as meaningless to our minds as the distance a hundred million light years is. It was simply vast—incalculable. The Sun was dead. The Earth was dead. And Earth was already, in our time, two billion years old, and in all that geological time, the Sun had not changed measurably. Then how long was it since my time? The Sun was dead. The very stars were dead. It must have been, I thought even then, billions on billions of years. And I grossly underestimated it.

	"The world was old—old—old. The very rocks and ground radiated a crushing aura of incredible age. It was old, older than—but what is there? Older than the hills? Hills? Gosh, they'd been born and died and been born and worn away again, a million, a score of million times! Old as the stars? No, that wouldn't do. The stars were dead—then.

	"I looked again at the metal wall, and set out for it, and the aura of age washed up at me, and dragged at me, and tried to stop this motion when all motion should have ceased. And the thin, unutterably cold wind whined in dead protest at me, and pulled at me with the ghost hands of the million million million that had been born and lived and died in the countless ages before I was born.

	"I wondered as I went. I didn't think clearly; for the dead aura of the dead planet pulled at me. Age. The stars were dying, dead. They were huddled there in space, like decrepit old men, huddling for warmth. The galaxy was shrunk. So tiny, it wasn't a thousand light years across, the stars were separated by miles where there had been light years. The magnificent, proudly sprawling universe I had known, that flung itself across a million million light years, that flung radiant energy through space by the millions of millions of tons was—gone.

	"It was dying—a dying miser that hoarded its last broken dregs of energy in a tiny cramped space. It was broken and shattered. A thousand billion years before the cosmical constant had been dropped from that broken universe. The cosmical constant that flung giant galaxies whirling apart with ever greater speed had no place here: It had hurled the universe in broken fragments, till each spattered bit felt the chill of loneliness, and wrapped space about itself, to become a universe in itself while the flaming galaxies vanished.

-

	"THAT had happened so long ago that the writing it had left in the fabric of space itself had worn away. Only the gravity constant remained, the hoarding constant, that drew things together, and slowly the galaxy collapsed, shrunken and old, a withered mummy.

	"The very atoms were dead. The light was cold; even the red light made things look older, colder. There was no youth in the universe. I didn't belong, and the faint protesting rustle of the infinitely cold wind about me moved the snow in muted, futile protest, resenting my intrusion from a time when things were young. It whinnied at me feebly, and chilled the youth of me.

	"I plodded on and on, and always the metal wall retreated, like one of those desert mirages. I was too stupefied by the age of the thing to wonder; I just walked on.

	"I was getting nearer, though. The wall was real; it was fixed. As I drew slowly nearer, the polished sheen of the wall died and the last dregs of hope died. I'd thought there might be some one still living behind that wall. Beings who could build such a thing might be able to live even here. But I couldn't stop then; I just went on. The wall was broken and cracked. It wasn't a wall I'd seen; it was a series of broken walls, knitted by distance to a smooth front.

	"There was no weather to age them, only the faintest stirring of faint, dead winds—winds of neon and helium, inert and uncorroding—as dead and inert as the universe. The city had been dead a score of billions of years. That city was dead for a time ten times longer than the age of oar planet to-day. But nothing destroyed it. Earth was dead—too dead to suffer the racking pains of life. The air was dead, too dead to scrape away metal.

	"But the universe itself was dead. There was no cosmic radiation then to finally level the walls by atomic disintegration. There had been a wall—a single metal wall. Something—perhaps a last wandering meteor—had chanced on it in a time incalculably remote, and broken it. I entered through the great gap. Snow covered the city—soft, white snow. The great red sun stood still just where it was. Earth's restless rotation had long since been stilled—long, long since.

	"There were dead gardens above, and I wandered up to them. That was really what convinced me it was a human city, on Earth. There were frozen, huddled heaps that might once have been men. Little fellows with fear forever frozen on their faces huddled helplessly over something that must once have been a heating device. Dead perhaps, since the last storm old Earth had known, tens of billions of years before.

	"I went down. There were vastnesses in that city. It was huge. It stretched forever, it seemed, on and on, in its dead-ness. Machines, machines everywhere. And the machines were dead, too. I went down, down where I thought a bit of light and heat might linger. I didn't know then how long death had been there; those corpses looked so fresh, preserved by the eternal cold.

	"It grew dark down below, and only through rents and breaks did that bloody light seep in. Down and down, till I was below the level of the dead surface. The white snow persisted, and then I came to the cause of that final, sudden death. I could understand then. More and more I had puzzled, for those machines I'd seen I knew were far and beyond anything we ever conceived—machines of perfection, self-repairing, and self-energizing, self-perpetuating. They could make duplicates of themselves, and duplicate other, needed machines; they were intended to be eternal, everlasting.

	"But the designers couldn't cope with some things that were beyond even their majestic imaginations—the imaginations that conceived these cities that had lived beyond—a million times beyond—what they had dreamed. They must have conceived some vague future. But not a future when the Earth died, and the Sun died, and even the universe itself died.

	"Cold had killed them. They had heating arrangements, devices intended to maintain forever the normal temperature despite the wildest variations of the weather. But in every electrical machine, resistances, balance resistances, and induction coils, balance condensers, and other inductances. And cold, stark, spatial cold, through ages, threw them off. Despite the heaters, cold crept in colder—cold that made their resistance balances and their induction coils superconductors! That destroyed the city, Superconduction—like the elimination of friction, on which all things must rest. It is a drag and a thing engineers fight forever. Resistance and friction must finally be the rest and the base of all things, the force that holds the great bed bolts firm and the brakes that stop the machines when needed.

	"Electrical resistance died in the cold and the wonderful machines stopped for the replacement of defective parts. And when they were replaced, they, too, were defective. For what months must that constant stop—replacement—start—stop—replacement have gone on before, at last defeated forever, those vast machines must bow in surrender to the inevitable? Cold had defeated them by defeating and removing the greatest obstacle of the engineers that built them—resistance.

	"They must have struggled forever—as we would say—through a hundred billion years against encroaching harshness of nature, forever replacing worn, defective parts. At last, defeated forever, the great power plants, fed by dying atoms, had been forced into eternal idleness and cold. Cold conquered them at last.

	"They didn't blow up. Nowhere did I see a wrecked machine; always they had stopped automatically when the defective resistances made it impossible to continue. The stored energy that was meant to re-start those machines after repairs had been made had long since leaked out. Never again could they move, I knew.

-

	"I WONDERED how long they had been, how long they had gone on and on, long after the human need of them had vanished. For that vast city contained only a very few humans at the end. What untold ages of lonely functioning perfection had stretched behind those at-last-defeated mechanisms?

	"I wandered out, to see perhaps more, before the necessary end came to me, too. Through the city of death. Everywhere little self-contained machines, cleaning machines that had kept that perfect city orderly and neat stood helpless and crushed by eternity and cold. They must have continued functioning for years after the great central power stations failed, for each contained its own store of energy, needing only occasional recharge from the central stations.

	"I could see where breaks had occurred in the city, and, clustered about those breaks were motionless repair machines, their mechanisms in positions of work, the debris cleared away and carefully stacked on motionless trucks. The new beams and plates were partly attached, partly fixed and left, as the last dregs of their energy were fruitlessly expended in the last, dying attempts of that great body to repair itself. The death wounds lay unmended.

	"I started back up. Up to the top of the city. It was a long climb, an infinite, weary climb, up half a mile of winding ramps, past deserted, dead homes; past, hen; and there, shops and restaurants; past motionless little automative passenger cars.

	"Up and up, to the crowning gardens that lay stiff and brittle and frozen. The breaking of the roof must have caused a sudden chill, for their leaves lay green in sheaths of white, frozen air. Brittle glass, green and perfect to the touch. Flowers, blooming in wonderful perfection showed still; they didn't seem dead, but it didn't seem they could be otherwise under the blanket of cold.

	"Did you ever sit up with a corpse?" Bob looked up at us—through us. "I had to once, in my little home town where they always did that. I sat with a few neighbors while the man died before my eyes. I knew he must die when I came there. He died—and I sat there all night while the neighbors filed out, one by one, and the quiet settled. The quiet of the dead.

	"I had to again. I was sitting with a corpse then. The corpse of a dead world in a dead universe, and the quiet didn't have to settle there; it had settled a billion years ago, and only my coming had stirred those feeble, protesting ghosts of eon-dead hopes of that planet to softly whining protest—protest the wind tried to sob to me, the dead wind of the dead gases. I'll never be able to call them inert gases again. I know. I know they are dead gases, the dead gases of dead worlds.

	"And above, through the cracked crystal of the roof, the dying suns looked down on the dead city. I couldn't stay there. I went down. Down under layer after layer of buildings, buildings of gleaming metal that reflected the dim, blood light of the Sun outside in carmine stains. I went down and down, down to the machines again. But even there hopelessness seemed more intense. Again I saw that agonizing struggle of the eternally faithful machines trying to repair themselves once more to serve the masters who were dead a million million years. I could see it again in the frozen, exhausted postures of the repair machines, still forever in their hopeless endeavors, the last poor dregs of energy spilled in fruitless conflict with time.

	"It mattered little. Time himself was dying now, dying with the city and the planet and the universe he had killed.

	"But those machines had tried hard to serve again—and failed. Now they could never try again. Even they—the deathless machines—were dead.

	"I went out again, away from those machines, out into the illimitable corridors, on the edge of the city. I could not penetrate far before the darkness became as absolute as the cold. I passed the shops where goods, untouched by time in this cold, still beckoned those strange humans, but humans for all that; beckoned the masters of the machines that were no more. I vaguely entered one to see what manner of things they used in that time.

	"I nearly screamed at the motion of the thing in there, heard dimly through my suit the strangely softened sounds it made in the thin air. I watched it stagger twice—and topple. I cannot guess what manner of storage cells they had—save that they were marvelous beyond imagination. That stored energy that somehow I had released by entering was some last dreg that had remained through a time as old as our planet now. Its voice was stilled forever. But it drove me out—on.

	"It had died while I watched. But somehow it made me more curious. I wondered again, less oppressed by utter death. Still, some untapped energy remained in this place, stored unimaginably. I looked more keenly, watched more closely. And when I saw a screen in one office, I wondered. It was a screen. I could see readily it was television of some type. Exploratively, I touched a stud. Sound! A humming, soft sound!

	"To my mind leaped a picture of a system of these devices. There must be—interconnected—a vast central with vaster accumulator cells, so huge, so tremendous in their power once, that even the little microfraction that remained was great. A storage system untouchable to the repair machines—the helpless, hopeless power machines.

-

	"IN AN INSTANT I was alive again with hope. There was a strange series of studs and dials, unknown devices. I pulled back on the stud I had pressed, and stood trembling, wondering. Was there hope?

	"Then the thought died. What hope? The city was dead. Not merely that. It had been dead, dead for untold time. Then the whole planet was dead. With whom might I connect? There were none on the whole planet, so what mattered it that there was a communication system.

	"I looked at the thing more blankly. Had there been—how could I interpret its multitudinous devices? There was a thing on one side that made me think of a telephone dial for some reason. A pointer over a metal sheet engraved with nine symbols in a circle under the arrow of the pointer. Now the pointer was over what was either the first or the last of these.

	"Clumsily, in these gloves, I fingered one of the little symbol buttons inlaid in the metal. There was an unexpected click, a light glowed on the screen, a lighted image! It was a simple projection—but what a projection! A three-dimensional sphere floated, turning slowly before my eyes, turning majestically. And I nearly fell as understanding flooded me abruptly. The pointer was a selector! The studs beneath the pointer I understood! Nine of them. One after the other I pressed, and nine spheres—each different—swam before me.

	"And right there I stopped and did some hard thinking. Nine spheres. Nine planets. Earth was shown first—a strange planet to me, but one I knew from the relative size and the position of the pointer must be Earth—then, in order, the other eight.

	"Now—might there be life? Yes. In those nine worlds there might be, somewhere.

	"Where? Mercury—nearest the Sun? No, the Sun was too dead, too cold, even for warmth there. And Mercury was too small. I knew, even as I thought, that I'd have one good chance because whatever means they had for communication wouldn't work without tremendous power. If those incredible storage cells had the power for even one shot, they had no more. Somehow I guessed that this apparatus might incorporate no resistance whatever. Here would be only very high frequency alternating current, and only condensers and inductances would be used in it. Super-cooling didn't bother them any. It improved them. Not like the immense direct-current power machinery.

	"But where to try? Jupiter? That was big. And then I saw what the solution must be. Cold had ruined these machines, thrown them off by making them too-perfect conductors. Because they weren't designed to defend themselves against spatial cold. But the machines—if there were any—on Pluto for instance, must originally have been designed for just such conditions! There it had always been cold. There it always would be cold.

	"I looked at that thing with an intensity that should have driven my bare eyesight to Pluto. It was a hope. My only hope. But—how to signal Pluto? They could not understand! If there were any 'they.'

	"So I had to guess—and hope. Somehow, I knew, there must be some means of calling the intelligent attendant, that the user might get aid. There was a bank of little studs—twelve of them—with twelve symbols, each different, in the center of the panel, grouped in four rows of three. I guessed. Duodecimal system.

	"Talk of the problems of interplanetary communication! Was there ever such a one? The problem of an anachronism in the city of the dead on a dead planet, seeking life somewhere, somehow.

	"There were two studs, off by themselves, separate from the twelve—one green, one red. Again I guessed. Each of these had a complex series of symbols on it, so I turned the pointer on the right to Pluto, wavered, and turned it to Neptune. Pluto was farther. Neptune had been cold enough; the machines would still be working there, and it would be, perhaps, less of a strain on the dregs of energy that might remain.

	"I depressed the green symbol hoping I had guessed truly, that red still meant danger, trouble and wrongness to men when that was built—that it meant release and cancellation for a wrongly pressed key. That left green to be an operative call signal.

	"Nothing happened. The green key alone was not enough. I looked again, pressed the green key and that stud I had first pressed.

	"The thing hummed again. But it was a deeper note now, an entirely different sound, and there was a frenzied clicking inside. Then the green stud kicked back at me. The Neptune key under the pointer glowed softly; the screen began to shimmer with a grayish light. And, abruptly, the humming groaned as though at a terrific overload; the screen turned dull; the little signal light under Neptune's key grew dim. The signal was being sent—hurled out.

	"Minute after minute I stood there, staring. The screen grew very slowly, very gently duller, duller. The energy was fading. The last stored driblet was being hurled away—away into space. 'Oh,' I groaned, 'it's hopeless—hopeless to—'

	"I'd realized the thing would take hours to get to that distant planet, traveling at the speed of light, even if it had been correctly aligned. But the machinery that should have done that through the years probably had long since failed for lack of power.

	"But I stood there till the groaning motors ceased altogether, and the screen was as dark as I'd found it, the signal light black. I released the stud then, and backed away, dazed by the utter collapse of an insane hope. Experimentally I pressed the Neptune symbol again. So little power was left now, that only the faintest wash of murky light projected the Neptune image, little energy as that would have consumed.

	"I went out. Bitter. Hopeless. Earth's last picture was long, long since painted—and mine had been the hand that spent Earth's last poor resource. To its utter exhaustion, the eternal city had strived to serve the race that created it, and I, from the dawn of time had, at the end of time, drained its last poor atom of life. The thing was a thing done."

-

	"Slowly I went back to the roof and the dying suns. Up the miles of winding ramp that climbed a half mile straight up. I went slowly—only life knows haste—and I was of the dead.

	"I found a bench up there—a carved bench of metal in the midst of a riot of colorful, frozen towers. I sat down, and looked out across the frozen city to the frozen world beyond, and the freezing red Sun.

	"I do not know how long I sat there. And then something whispered in my mind.

	"'We sought you at the television machine."

	"I leaped from the bench and stared wildly about me.

	"It was floating in the air—a shining dirigible of metal, ruby-red in that light, twenty feet long, perhaps ten in diameter, bright, warm orange light gleaming from its ports. I stared at it in amazement.

	"'It—it worked!' I gasped.

	" 'The beam carried barely enough energy to energize the amplifiers when it reached Neptune, however,' replied the creature in the machine.

	"I couldn't see him—I knew I wasn't hearing him, but somehow that didn't surprise me.

	" 'Your oxygen has almost entirely given out, and I believe your mind is suffering from lack of oxygen. I would suggest you enter the lock; there is air in here.'

	"I don't know how he knew, but the gauges confirmed his statement. The oxygen was pretty nearly gone. I had perhaps another hour's supply if I opened the valves wide—but it was a most uncomfortably near thing, even so.

	"I got in. I was beaming, joyous. There was life. This universe was not so dead as I had supposed. Not on Earth, perhaps, but only because they did not choose! They had space ships! Eagerly I climbed in, a strange thrill running through my body as I crossed the threshold of the lock. The door closed behind me with a soft shush on its soft gaskets, locked, and a pump whined somewhere for a moment; then the inner door opened. I stepped in—and instantly turned off my alcohol burners. There was heat—heat and light and air!

	"In a moment I had the outer lacings loose, and the inner zipper down. Thirty seconds later I stepped out of the suit, and took a deep breath. The air was clean and sweet and warm, invigorating, fresh-smelling, as though it had blown over miles of green, Sun-warmed fields. It smelled alive, and young.

	"Then I looked for the man who had come for me. There was none. In the nose of the ship, by the controls, floated a four-foot globe of metal, softly glowing with a warm, golden light. The light pulsed slowly or swiftly with the rhythm of his thoughts, and I knew that this was the one who had spoken to me.

	" 'You had expected a human?' he thought to me. 'There are no more. There have been none for a time I cannot express in your mind. Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago.'

	"I looked at him and wondered. Where was he from? Who—what—what manner of thing? Was it an armor-incased living creature or another of the perfect machines?

	"I felt him watching my mind operate, pulsing softly in his golden light. And suddenly I thought to look out of the ports. The dim red suns were wheeling across those ports at an unbelievable rate. Earth was long since gone. As I looked, a dim, incredibly dim, red disk suddenly appeared, expanded—and I looked in awe at Neptune.

	"The planet was scarcely visible when we were already within a dozen millions of miles. It was a jeweled world. Cities—the great, perfect cities—still glowed. They glowed in soft, golden light above, and below, the harsher, brighter blue of mercury vapor lighted them.

	"He was speaking again. 'We are machines—the ultimate development of man's machines. Man was almost gone when we came.

	" 'With what we have learned in the uncounted dusty megayears since, we might have been able to save him. We could not then. It was better, wiser, that man end than that he sink down so low as he must, eventually. Evolution is the rise under pressure. Devolution is the gradual sinking that comes when there is no pressure—and there is no end to it. Life vanished from this system—a dusty infinity I cannot sort in my memory—my type memory, truly, for I have complete all the memories of those that went before me that I replace. But my memory cannot stretch back to that time you think of—a time when the constellations—

	" 'It is useless to try. Those memories are buried under others, and those still buried under the weight of a billion centuries.

	" 'We enter'—he named a city; I cannot reproduce that name—'now. You must return to Earth though in some seven and a quarter of your days, for the magnetic axis stretches back in collapsing field strains. I will be able to inject you into it, I believe.'

	"So I entered that city, the living city of machines, that had been when time and the universe were young.

	"I did not know then that, when all this universe had dissolved away, when the last sun was black and cold, scattered dust in a fragment of a scattered universe, this planet with its machine cities would go on—a last speck of warm light in a long-dead universe. I did not know then.

	" 'You still wonder that we let man die out?' asked the machine. 'It was best. In another brief million years he would have lost his high estate. It was best.'

	" 'Now we go on. We cannot end, as he did. It is automatic with us.'

	"I felt it then, somehow. The blind, purposeless continuance of the machine cities I could understand. They had no intelligence, only functions. These machines—these living, thinking, reasoning investigators—had only one function, too. Their function was slightly different—they were designed to be eternally curious, eternally investigating. And their striving was the more purposeless of the two, for theirs could reach no end. The cities fought eternally only the blind destructiveness of nature; wear, decay, erosion.

	"But their struggle had an opponent forever, so long as they existed. The intelligent—no, not quite intelligent, but something else—curious machines were without opponents. They had to be curious. They had to go on investigating. And they had been going on in just this way for such incomprehensible ages that there was no longer anything to be curious about. Whoever, whatever designed them gave them function and forgot purpose. Their only curiosity was the wonder if there might, somewhere, be one more thing to learn.

	"That—and the problem they did not want to solve, but must try to solve, because of the blind functioning of their very structure.

	"Those eternal cities were limited. The machines saw now the limit, and saw the hope of final surcease in it. They worked on the energy of the atom. But the masses of the suns were yet tremendous. They were dead for want of energy. The masses of the planets were still enormous. But they, too, were dead for want of energy.

-

	"THE MACHINES THERE on Neptune gave me food and drink—strange, synthetic foods and drinks. There had been none on all the planet. They, perforce, started a machine, unused in a billion years and more, that I might eat. Perhaps they were glad to do so. It brought the end appreciably nearer, that vast consumption of mine.

	"They used so very, very little, for they were so perfectly efficient. The only possible fuel in all the universe is one—hydrogen. From hydrogen, the lightest of elements, the heaviest can be built up, and energy released. They knew how to destroy matter utterly to energy, and could do it.

	"But while the energy release of hydrogen compounding to the heavy elements is controllable, the destruction of matter to energy is a self-regenerative process. Started once, it spreads while matter lies within its direct, contiguous; reach. It is wild, uncontrollable. It is impossible to utilize the full energy of matter.

	"The suns had found that. They had burned their hydrogen until it was a remnant so small the action could not go on.

	"On all Earth there was not an atom of hydrogen—nor was there on any planet, save Neptune. And there the store was not great. I used an appreciable fraction while I was there. That is their last hope. They can see the end now.

	"I stayed those few days, and the machine's came and went. Always investigating, always curious. But there is in all that universe nothing to investigate save the one problem they are sure they cannot solve.

	"The machine took me back to Earth, set up something near me that glowed with a peculiar, steady, gray light. It would fix the magnetic axis on me, on my location, within a few hours. He could not stay near when the axis touched again. He went back to Neptune, but a few millions of miles distant, in this shrunken mummy of the solar system.

	"I stood alone on the roof of the city, in the frozen garden with its deceptive look of life.

	"And I thought of that night I had spent, sitting up with the dead man. I had come and watched him die. And I sat up with him in the quiet. I had wanted some one, any one to talk to.

	"I did then. Overpoweringly it came to me I was sitting up in the night of the universe, in the night and quiet of the universe, with a dead planet's body, with the dead, ashen hopes of countless, nameless generations of men and women. The universe was dead, and I sat up alone—alone in the dead hush.

	"Out beyond, a last flicker of life was dying on the planet Neptune—a last, false flicker of aimless life, but not life. Life was dead. The world was dead.

	"I knew there would never be another sound here. For all the little remainder of time. For this was the dark and the night of time and the universe. It was inevitable, the inevitable end that had been simply more distant in my day—in the long, long-gone time when the stars were mighty lighthouses of a mighty space, not the dying, flickering candles at the head of a dead planet.

	"It had been inevitable then; the candles must burn out for all their brave show. But now I could see them guttering low, the last, fruitless dregs of energy expiring as the machines below had spent their last dregs of energy in that hopeless, utterly faithful gesture—to attempt the repair of the city already dead.

	"The universe had been dead a billion years. It had been. This, I saw, was the last radiation of the heat of life from an already-dead body—the feel of life and warmth imitation of life by a corpse. Those suns had long and long since ceased to generate energy. They were dead, and their corpses were giving off the last, lingering life heat before they cooled.

	"I ran. I think I ran—down away from the flickering, red suns in the sky. Down to the shrouding blackness of the dead city below, where neither light, nor heat, nor life, nor imitation of life bothered me.

	"The utter blackness quieted me somewhat. So I turned off my oxygen valves, because I wanted to die sane, even here, and I knew I'd never come back.

	"The impossible happened! I came to with that raw oxygen in my face. I don't know how I came—only that here is warmth and life.

	"Somewhere, on the far side of that bismuth coil, inevitable still, is the dead planet and the flickering, guttering candles that light the death watch I must keep at the end of time."

The End

Elimination
Astounding Stories – May 1936
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

	JOHN GRANTLAND looked across at his old friend's son intently and unhappily. Finally he sighed heavily and leaned back in his swivel chair. He lighted his pipe thoughtfully. Two slow puffs of smoke rose before he spoke.

	"I'm a patent attorney, Dwight Edwards, and I'm at your disposal, as such, to do your bidding and help you to secure that patent you want. As you know, I'm also a civil-and-commercial-law expert of some standing in connection with that work. I can get that patent; I know it is patentable and unpatented as yet. But before I start proceedings, I have to tell you something, Dwight.

	"You have enough to live on the rest of your life, a brilliant mind to increase it, a scientific ability to keep you occupied and useful to the world. This invention is not useful to the world. If you were a poor man, I would not hesitate in making the patent applications, because some wiser men, with more money, would buy it up and destroy the thing. But you aren't poor, and you would hold out till the thing was developed and going."

	"But—but Mr. Grantland, it's a thing the world needs! We have a fast-vanishing gasoline reserve—a coal supply being drawn on endlessly and recklessly. We need a new source of power, something to make the immense water-power supplies in inaccessible regions available. The system would do that, and conserve those vanishing resources, run automobiles, planes, even small factories and homes—"

	"It would destroy our greatest resource, the financial structure of the nation. A resource is not a resource unless it is available, and only the system makes it available. The system is more valuable, more important to human happiness than any other resource, because it makes all others available.

	"I know your natural desire, to develop and spread that system for canning and distributing electricity. It's a great invention. But—"

	"But," the younger man said somewhat bitterly, "you feel that any really great, any important invention should be destroyed. There must be, you are saying, no real improvement, only little gadgets. There must be no Faradays who discover principles, only Sam Browns who invent new can openers and better mousetraps."

	Grantland laid down his pipe and leaned back in his chair silently.

	Bitterly, the younger man was gathering his papers.

	"Dwight," said Grantland at length, "I think I'll do best if I tell you of one invention that I have in my files here. I have shown these papers to just one other man than the men who made them. Curiously, he was your father. He—"

	"My father? But he was not an inventor—he was a psychiatrist, utterly uninterested—"

	"He was vitally interested in this. He saw the apparatus they made, and he helped me dismantle it, secretly, and destroy the tube Hugh Kerry and Robert Darnell made. That was twenty-two years ago, and it was something of a miracle I had, at the age of thirty-six, the sense to do that.

	Tin going to tell you mighty vague things and mighty vague principles, because you're too keen. It isn't very safe to tell you this, but I believe you will keep a promise. You must swear two things before I tell you the story: First, that you will not put that surprisingly acute mind of yours to work on what I say, because I cannot tell what clues I may give. I understand too little to know how much I understood; second, of course, that you will not spread this unpleasant story."

-

	THE YOUNG MAN put down his papers, looked curiously at John Grantland. "I agree to that, Mr. Grantland."

	Grantland stuffed his pipe thoughtfully in silence. "Hugh Kerry and Bob Darnell were one of those fortuitous miracles, where the right combination came together. Hugh Kerry was the greatest mathematician the world has seen, at thirty-two."

	"I have heard of him; I've used his analytical methods. He died at thirty-three, didn't he?"

	"I know," said Grantland. "The point is—so did Bob Darnell. Bob Darnell was something like Edison, on a higher level. Edison could translate theory into metal and glass and matter. Darnell could do that, but he didn't work with steel and copper and glass. He worked with atoms and electrons and radiation as familiarly as Edison worked with metal. And Darnell didn't work from theory; he worked from mathematics that no theory could be defined for.

	"That was the pair the shifting probabilities of space time brought together—and separated. You've never heard of Darnell, because he did only one thing, and that one thing is on paper there, in that steel vault. In the first place, it is in a code that is burned into my memory, and not on paper. In the second place, it is safe because every equation in it is wrong, because we couldn't code equations easily, and the book that gave them right is out of print, forgotten.

	"They came into my office first because they lived nearby, and I'd gone to the same school. I hadn't much of a reputation then, of course. That was when you were just about getting into the sixth grade, Dwight—a good number of years ago.

	"They had the tube then. They called it the PTW tube-Probability Time Wave. They'd been trying to make a television set that would see through walls—a device that would send out its own signals and receive them back as images.

	"They went wrong, something about trying for the fourth-dimensional approach and slipping into a higher dimension. They said that Einstein's curved space theory was wrong, and it was the ten-dimensional multiple theory that was right.

	"But you said something about Faradays and Sam Browns. That invention I suppressed was something so enormous, Dwight, that anything that ever has or ever will be invented is picayunish squabbling beside it. It was the greatest tower looming on the road of progress. It loomed above all other things as the sun looms greater than earth. It was the greatest thing that ever was or will be, because it necessarily incorporated the discovery of everything that ever will be or can be."

	"What—what could be so great? The power of the atom—"

	"That was one of the lesser things it incorporated, Dwight. It would have meant that, in a year or so, and the secret of gravity, of interplanetary, interstellar flight, the conquest of age, and eternal life. Everything you can dream of, John, and all the things that any man ever will dream of.

	"They knew all that when they came to me. They explained it all, and because I couldn't believe—they showed me. You cannot conceive of such a thing—anything—so inconceivably far-reaching in scope? I'm not surprised. They told me what I have told you, and but that they said it all in such quiet, assured voices, with such perfect and absolute confidence, I'd have called them liars and put it down to the vain boasting of the Sam Brown you mentioned, with his mighty new mousetrap and his miraculous can opener—the invention of the ages.

	"It's simple when you know the answer, to see how true was their every claim. Their television slipped. It slipped aside, into some higher dimension, they guessed, and instead of penetrating the walls and the buildings through that fourth dimension they sought, they decided it had slipped out and beyond space and time, and looked back to review it, a mighty pageant of incredible history—the history that was to be.

-

	"YOU SEE, in that was the incredible and infinite scope of the thing, because it showed, in the past, all that had been, the infinite sweep and march of all time from the creation to the present.

	"But then the ordered ranks broke, for, from the present to the other end of infinity, no single thing or any circumstance is immutably fixed. Their PTW tube caught and displayed every possibility that was ever to exist. And somewhere in that vast sweep of probability, every possible thing existed. Somewhere, the wildest dream of the wildest optimist was, and became fact.

	"On that screen tube I saw the sun born, and on it I saw the sun die a million deaths. I saw them move planets, and I saw the planets moving in birth. I saw life created, and I saw it created again in test tubes and laboratories. I saw man arise—and I saw men and women more perfect in body and mind than the dream of Praxiteles created from acetylene and ammonia. Because somewhere in the realms of possibility, remote or so near as to be probable, those dreams of every scientist came true, and with them, the unguessed dreams of unguessable intellects.

	"Hugh Kerry and Bob Darnell came to me when the thing was new, and they faintly conceived of its possibilities. That was in 1950. And in five days the world would have known and been at their feet—but for two things—three, really. First, because the thing, they knew, was imperfect, and, what they didn't know, was severely limited. Second, because they had begun to trace their own life tracks, and were worried, even then. I caught some of that worry from them and held back. I never let them cast for my life tracks. Today I do not know what will come tomorrow. Third, and what was perhaps the determining reason, they were still poor, but growing rich rapidly by the information that machine brought them of the little, everyday things that were to be two days ahead.

	"You could pile up an enormous fortune, Dwight, if you just knew with a probability of eighty-five on their scale of a hundred, what tomorrow and tomorrow would bring. They did, and first the number pool hated them and refused their business, then the betting rings refused their bets, and finally, even the stock market began to act unfavorably. Because they won, of course.

	"But before then, they had begun to forget that, and concentrated on the life tracks the machine showed them.

	"I said the machine was limited. It was limited by two factors: one was the obvious difficulty of seeing the forest and the shape of the forest when in the middle of it. They were in the middle of the parade, and there they must stay. They could not see the near future clearly, for the near forest was hidden by the trees. The far future they could see like a vast marching column that split and diverged slowly. They saw no individual figure, only the blended mass of the march to infinity.

	"At a year, the parade began to blend, and the features were lost by the establishment of the trend. But, at two days, two weeks, their screen showed a figure blurred and broken by the splitting images that broke away, each following its own line of possible development.

	"Look. A vision of me in the future by only ten minutes will show me in a thousand lifecourses. Primarily, there are two; I may live, or die. But even those two instantly became a thousand, for I may die now, or at any later instant. I may die by the falling of the building or the stoppage of my heart, by an assassin's bullet, by the knife of a disgrunted inventor. They are improbable, and their future images would, on Bob Darnell's screen, have been dim, and ghostly. The world might end in that ten minutes, so destroy me. That must be there, for it is possible, a very faint image, so shadowy it is scarcely visible.

	"If I live, a thousand courses are open: I may sit here, smoking peacefully; the telephone may ring; a fire may break out. Probably I shall continue to sit, and smoke—so strong and solid on the screen is an image of myself sitting, smoking. But shading from it ever lighter, black and gray to faintest haziness, is each of those other possibilities.

-

	"THAT confused them, made exact work difficult. To get their reports of the markets, they had to determine with an absolute rigor that the next day's paper should be put on a certain stand, spread to the page they wanted, and, come hell or high water, they would yet put that paper there, and not move it so much as a hairbreadth. The image became probable, highly probable. Its ghost images faded. They read it.

	"And there's one other fault. I know the reason I'd rather not give it. Just take this for one of the facts of that invention that by the very stuff of space, time shall never be overcome. The place they might determine, or the time, with absolute exactitude, but never would they ever know both for any given event.

	"And the third day they cast for their future tracks. The near future was a confused haze, but I was with them when they sought in the future far enough for the haze to go. Laughing, elated, they cast a hundred years ahead, when, Bob Darnell said, 'I'll be a man with my long white beard looped through my trousers and over my shoulders for suspenders!'

	"They started their machine, and set the control for probabilities in a very low range, for the chance of Bob Darnell's living to one hundred and thirty-three years of age was remote. They had a device on their machine that would automatically sweep the future, till it found a lane that was occupied, a track that was not dead, in which Bob Darnell still lived. It was limited in speed—but not greatly, for each second it looked down five hundred thousand tracks."

	"Reaction speed of a photocell," said the young man slowly. "I know."

	"Dwight, try not to know," pleaded Grantland. "I mean to give no such hints—but only what is needed to understand."

	"If you say two times two—can you expect me to omit a mental four?" asked the young man. "Five hundred thousand a second is the reaction of a photocell. What is there in this invention that demands its suppression?"

	"That is part of it. Five hundred thousand tracks a second it swept, and an hour passed, and another, and Darnell laughed at it.

	" 'I guess I'm not due for a long, full life,' he said.

	"And just then the machine clicked his answer. When we saw the image on the screen, we thought the range was wrong, for the Bob Darnell on the screen was a healthier, stronger, sounder man than the Bob Darnell beside me.

	"He was tanned and lean and muscular; his hair was black as night, and his hands were muscular and firm-fleshed. He looked thirty, not a hundred and thirty. But his eyes were old, they were old as the hills, and keen with a burning vigor as they seemed to concentrate on us. Slowly he smiled, and firm, even teeth appeared between his lips.

	"Darnell whistled softly. 'They've licked old age,' he almost whispered.

	"Evidently they had. Hugh spoke. 'They probably found it in some future age with this machine,' he whispered tensely. 'You're one keen old gentleman, Bob.'

	" 'But that's not a good chance for life apparently,' Damell said. 'I wonder how I can choose the course that leads me there?'

	" 'Live a clean life, drink nothing but water.' Kerry said. 'Turn on, O time, in your flight. Let's see what else we have.'

-

	"DARNELL started the machine again—and it stopped almost instantly. One of Darnell's other tracks appeared. He'd gotten there that time with no outside aid, and he was horrible. 'Ah-h-h—' said Bob distastefully. 'I like the other way better. That face—turn it along, Hugh.'

	The mean, rheumy-eyed, incredibly seamed face disappeared; the screen went blank. And it stayed blank. Those were Bob's only tracks at that age. 'Not too bad,' he said, though, I didn't think I had a chance in the world.'

	" 'Let's see what we get at ten years,' Hugh suggested. 'That's more to the point.'

	" 'We'll wait all night getting through them,' objected Bob. 'But , well take a few. Better start with about seventy probability. Ten years is long enough for me to die in, perhaps, so that ought to be fairly high.'

	"They started again. And it ran for an hour—two hours. Bob Darnell had stopped laughing now, because he didn't like that blank and stubborn assurance that he had a mighty slim chance of living ten years more. Two hours and a half and it was beginning to tell on Darnell. 'Looks like I guessed too high,' was all he said.

	"Then we got a track. It was Bob Darnell, all right, but his face was round and soft and flatulent, and he lay on a soft rubber floor on his back, with a little pair of trunks on, and he was grinning senselessly with a blank, stupid face at a male nurse who was feeding him some kind of gruel that he slobbered and spilled down his fat, soft cheeks. There wasn't any mind at all behind the full, round eyes.

	"It took us about ten seconds to take in that scene that was something like ten years in the future. Then Bob spoke, and his voice was flat and strained. 'I'd say that was dementia praecox, and I'd say that damned machine was wrong, because I'm not going to be that way. I'm going to be dead first. It's the nastiest form of insanity I can think of offhand. Start that thing up, Hugh.'

	"The trails got closer together there. We got another one in half an hour, and all that half hour we stood in absolute silence in the dim laboratory, while the machine clicked and hummed, and the screen writhed and flickered with blankness, because neither of us could think of anything to say to Bob, and Bob was too busy thinking to say anything.

-

	"THEN the machine stopped again. It didn't take so long to understand that scene. Hugh started it on again. It found seven trails like that in the next hour. Then it found a sane trail, more or less, but it was a Bob Darnell who had gone through insanity. He wasn't actually insane, but his nervous system was broken.

	" 'Evidently you recover,' I said, trying to be hopeful.

	"Bob grinned—unpleasantly. He shook his head. 'You don't recover. If you do—it wasn't dementia praecox. Praecox is an insanity that is simply a slow disintegration of the mind; it gets tired of worry and trouble, and decides the easiest way out is to go back to childhood, when there weren't any worries or troubles. But it goes back and discovers again the worries children have, and keeps going back and back, seeking the time when there were no troubles—and generally is stopped by pneumonia or tuberculosis or hemorrhage of the atrophied brain.

	" 'But it never recovers, and it's the most ghastly form of insanity there is, because it is hopeless. It turns a strong, sound man into a helpless, mindless infant. It's not like idiocy, because an idiot never grew up. This grows up, all right—and then grows down, lower than anything normal could be.

	" "That's just one path where I had a nervous breakdown and got over it. That one—why it might lead to the one-hundred-and-thirty-four-year-old track. But just—go on, Hugh.'

	"Hugh went on—on and on, and we found three sound, sane tracks.

	"I don't have to go into more detail. I think you can understand Darnell's feelings. We tried at five years, and a few more tracks showed up. At two years, that first night, we found eighteen tracks, and eleven of them were insane, and seven sane. We named the two-year tracks with the Greek alphabet.

	"The track Bob wanted, the long track that took him to a hundred and thirty-four, and beyond, clear out to a point where he merged in the march of the infinite future, was his tau track. The alpha, beta, gamma, delta—all those were quite insane, and quite horrible. That meant that, by far, the greater probability led to the unpleasant tracks.

	" 'Hugh, I guess, it's your turn, if you want to try,' said Bob finally. 'We'll have to check these more carefully later.'

	" 'I think I do want to know,' Hugh said. 'But maybe Grantland would like to go now. He can't be here all the time.'

	" 'No, thank Heaven,' I said, 'I can't, and I don't want to know my tracks. Bob, I think one of the best ways to strike that tau track is to destroy this machine now.'

	"Bob stared at me, then grinned lopsidedly. 'I can't now, John. For one thing, I have no right to; it means too much to the world. For another, I've got to find what decisions will put me on that long track. I made this thing because I knew I couldn't live to see that long march we've already seen, leading on to the infinity even this can't reach. Now, by all that is to be, I've got to find how I can reach that time!'

	" 'By all that is to be, Bob, I know in my bones you won't, if this machine endures.'

	"Bob grinned and shook his head at me.

	" 'I can't, John,' he said.

	"And Hugh started the machine down his trails. He'd set it for a hundred years, like Darnell, at a slightly higher figure than had disclosed the far end of Bob's tau track. We picked up Hugh's pretty quickly, and he, too, looked sound and healthy. But he had no second trail—one chance to live to be a hundred and thirty-three.

	" 'I'm about as good on long life as you, Bob,' he said, 'if somebody helps me, but I guess I can't make it alone.'

	" 'Well, I'm not interested in going it alone myself,' Bob replied. 'It's not a hell of a lot better than some of those other things we've seen. Let's get closer home.'

-

	"THEY tried the ten-year track. And on Hugh Kerry's trails, the machine clicked and hummed for a long, long time, and Kerry began to look paler and paler in the light from that wavering screen, because he didn't even have a chance of insane life.

	""Let's leave it for the night,' said Hugh finally. 'Its eight o'clock, and I'm hungry as a wolf. We can leave it running on the recorder, and come back after supper, maybe.'

	"We came back after supper. It was ten, then. And the machine was still clicking and humming.

	"We went home for the night. You see, reasonably enough, Hugh had assumed that he had a fair chance of living ten years, but he didn't, of course. The machine was examining nearly two billion chances every hour it ran—and finding them blank.

	"Hugh was down at seven the next morning. I got there at ten and found Bob and Hugh sitting very quiet, trying to smoke. The machine was still humming and clicking, and there wasn't a thing at all on the recorder.

	" 'Looks like I'm not slated for a long life,' Hugh greeted me unhappily, trying to grin. 'It hasn't found—thank Heaven!' The machine stopped suddenly.

	"It was Hugh, quite hale and sound, his hair a bit gray, his eyes a bit sunken, his face a bit lined, but sane—and sound.

	" 'That's what we called the tau track,' said Bob after a minute of examination. 'You make a hundred-year mark on the first try.'

	" 'In other words,' said Kerry softly, 'I've got about as much chance of living ten years as I have of living a hundred. Yes. That's a good way to put it. A hell of a chance. What does it say at two years?'

	"It took a long time, because we didn't want to start on the low probabilities, of course, and there just weren't any good ones. We didn't find anything very quickly. Eventually we knew he had three sane and one insane at ten years, and eleven altogether at two years—three insane. And they were all of them so far down in probability, they started working right away.

	"But the thing that brought home the need of haste was that when we looked, just for a moment, at Bob's two-year trails—two of the sane, and five insane trails had vanished! They had been eliminated by decisions made since the previous evening. I knew, Bob and Hugh knew, what the decision was, but we didn't say anything. He had decided to look at Hugh's trails in that time, and found those few trails. They cut off at one year, we found, so they had to work on them. That, you see, reduced Bob Darnell's chances of finding the right trail—the tau trail that wasn't in tau position any more, but, thank Heaven, still existed.

	" 'It's not so hard, though,' said Kerry. 'We need only look to see what developments we make tomorrow, and tomorrow's tomorrow, to find how to perfect this machine, to eliminate the near-future images. We'll get it.'

	"I had my business that I was trying to build up, so I had to leave them. I couldn't see them for five days, because I had to appear out in St. Louis, and stop over in Washington.

-

	"WHEN I got back I went around to see them, though it was nearly eleven o'clock. They were at it.

	" 'We've made some progress,' Hugh said. 'We've both mapped our trails carefully till they vanish in the near-future mists. We'll be able to hit that long trail for Bob fairly easily, but—I'm afraid I'll have to give mine up,' he said, his face twitching just a little.

	" 'H-Has your long trail been eliminated by a decision?' I asked.

	" 'Hm-m-m—in a sense. I located one of its decision points by luck. It's only about a month away, apparently. It is less, I believe, but we can't tell. I took a snap view of the trail, and hit what is evidently a decision point on it. What you didn't know is that twenty-seven years of that long trail is hopeless paralysis in pain. I apply for euthanasia four times unsuccessfully. Since I know where that trail leads, and still apply for that—why, I think I don't want it, anyway. But the trouble is, really, that the decision point I snapped, by sheer luck, is an automobile accident.

	" We've been trying to take instantaneous exposures of the trails, in the near future, to eliminate the blurring. We can do it by using a blurred image to get space coordinates and snapping the controls into lock position. The time register is automatically thrown out of gear, so we have only a vague idea of time. We know it's this year—but whether it's late this month, or early next, I don't know. We can't know.'

	""But the accident—'

	" 'I'd go through with it, perhaps—if I had some control. But Tom Phillips is driving. If I drive, of course, that's a different track altogether. He has my fate in his hands—and I can't bring myself to take it.'

	" 'Have you told Tom?' I asked.

	" 'Not yet, but I'm expecting him over. I sent a note around that he ought to get today or tomorrow, I—'

	"The telephone rang, Hugh answered it. Tom Phillips was on the other end. He had the note, luckily, as he was packing then to drive up to Boston. He wanted Hugh to come over and tell him the story, or whatever it was Hugh wanted him for. Naturally, it would do no good if Tom couldn't see the machine; so, by dint of nearly fifteen minutes arguing, Hugh got him to come over.

	" 'Whew—if I hadn't been so afraid of riding with Tom, I would have gone over, at that,' said Hugh, mopping his head. 'He's a stubborn cuss when he gets an idea. I hope I can—eh? What, Bob?'

	"Bob Darnell, in the laboratory, had called something.

	" 'What is it, Bob?" Hugh asked, going over.

	"I went over, too. 'Oh, hello, John. I didn't know you were back. Patent go through all OK?'

	" 'Fine,' I answered, 'Everything's in order. What was it you wanted to tell Hugh?'

	" 'Yes—just told me. He had just finished calling Tom Phillips when you called him.'

	" 'What! My heaven! I called him—because his long track vanished while I was looking at it then! That was a decision point!'

	"We looked eagerly. It was gone, all right. And suddenly Hugh stiffened. 'Bob,' he said, 'I'm afraid; I'm scared as hell—because maybe that was a decision point, because I didn't go over for Tom. I'm going to—'

-

	"HE WENT, too—to call up Tom Phillips. But he was too late then, and he never got him. Tom hadn't seen a gravel truck smashing down a side street, hidden from him by a stopped trolley car.

	" 'I was supposed to go over for him,' was all Hugh could say. 'But how was I to know? We didn't know the time accurately. We couldn't, could we, Bob? I didn't know—I didn't know—'

	"But to the day of his death, he could not shake the feeling that he had brought Tom Phillips out to be killed, almost deliberately. It meant nothing that he had called him to warn him. He had called him out to death. He had been slow in his warning.

	"A week later they had mapped their future trails; they had every decision point mapped, and noted; they knew every move that they must make to take them down those trails that led to that maximum of life each was granted. Every decision, every turn and branch of the road that led to happiness, success—except those they must make in the next ten months.

	"From a high peak they could see the road that led off across the broad fields of the open country to the distant city of life they sought. But the tangled, snarled traffic of the nearby city where they were, obscured the little alleys and twisting, crooked streets of the near future in an inextricable maze.

	" 'We'll get it, though,' Hugh said confidently. 'We're getting it better and better now. We've found a system that will work, we think. You see, if today we can see what we will develop tomorrow, we will be a day ahead, and then if we see what comes the day after, we'll be two days. In a week we should have the thing solved. It is only that it becomes so annoying to remember—this may be the decision day, and I do not know it. And Bob is working hard to find my decisions, because I have so few lines beyond this December, apparently. He has plenty of sound lines leading on through next year.

	" 'That seems to make my case the more imperative, for I do not want to die when life is so near. Yet we cannot know even this, for the paths twine and twist, and it may be that my decision point to the long trail I seek is in December. And, similarly, it may be that the decision point Bob seeks—is tomorrow. We cannot guess, we cannot know, who is in the more desperate position, the more immediately threatened state.

	" 'But tomorrow we will advance faster, because we have determined as inflexibly as our determination to place that newspaper on the stand, that we shall hereafter, invariably, put on the blackboard there the discoveries of the day, and the progress made. That, we think, will clear up the images.'

	" 'Will clear up the images?' I asked in some surprise. Because, you remember, Dwight, that it instantly cleared up the newspaper images.

	"Hugh looked a little worried.

	" 'Will,' he replied. 'You see, it didn't so very much at first, for some reason. I can't quite—But at any rate, by watching our progress that we are to make, we will make swift advance to the discovery of the secret, and long life.'

	"It seemed so clear, so true, so logical. If they could steal the inventions of a million years in the future, could they not spy on their own progress of the next day and the next? So simple, so logical an advance.

	"But they missed one thing. There were many, many things they could try, and though they inflexibly determined that they would write on the blackboard the progress of the day, and did, the blackboard was blurred white and gray on the screen. For each of the thousand things they might try was there, you see, and from the first day two probabilities entered; that they deciphered, and tried one of those courses, and that they did not decipher the next day's work, and had to develop it directly.

-

	"THREE TIMES they read that blackboard. Each time the next day's blackboard read: 'Did work shown by future image yesterday.' So, when they did read it, remember, they saw only a day's work done, and the day's work was yet to be done, though they knew what it must be. If you are a repairman and know that tomorrow you must change the clutch plates and put in new transmission gears, that knowledge does not eliminate the operation.

	"They thought it might spare them the blind alleys. But one of those days' work was a blind alley that they were forced to rip out the next.

	"I was called over one day, the third time they read that blackboard, and they showed it to me. There were many, many images on it, and only one was legible, because it was very, very brief, and written very large.

	"Hugh smiled lopsidedly at me when I came in. 'Well, John, I think we've found one of my decision points,' he said.

	"What! Got those near futures cleared up?" I was immensely pleased. They'd advanced a lot, you know, since I first saw the instrument. Their near-future images were sometimes quite readable; their selectivity had been increased a thousandfold. But there was still a mistiness, a sort of basic mistiness.

	" 'No,' Darnell interrupted. 'We read the blackboard. Come—you can see it.'

	"I did. It was quite easy to read, because Hugh had always been the one to write on the board, and his writing was cramped and neat. On many of those images the writing was cramped and neat. But on many others it was a broad, looping scrawl—Darnell's hand. It said simply: 'Hugh Kerry killed today. May God have mercy on me.'

	"I swallowed hard before I spoke. 'There's a lot of images there, Hugh.'

	" 'Yes, but it's a decision point. Bob has sworn, and determined by all that's holy, he'll write the full facts on the case tomorrow, and not that message. The message still sticks, and none other has appeared. It's a decision point—and may God have mercy on me, too, for I don't know what that decision must be. It won't even tell me whether to stay indoors here or stay out of here.'

	"Dwight, that is the thing that pressed and pressed on them. It was like the old Chinese water torture, and each day was a drop of water that fell, and they were bound to the wheel of time that cannot stop or be stopped. They had now the vision to see across that wheel to another day and another age—but they could not slow that progress through time, nor speed it by a whit.

	"The days must come, and they must go, for all their knowledge of time. And the sun that day sank, as it had a thousand thousand thousand times before, and would a thousand thousand thousand times again, and it rose on a new day. No force, nor will, nor wish could stay that progress; the day must come. And Hugh could not know, because the message was so stubborn, whether his decision lay in that laboratory or out in the open.

	"I could not leave them. Yet I had to, because time still went on, and the courts went on. I left, on a case I know not the faintest detail of, save that I fought it with a bitter determination to win, and somehow won it.

-

	"IT WAS four thirty when I got back to the laboratory. Bob Darnell met me, and his face was white and tense. 'Hugh?' I asked.

	" 'He's gone over to Teckno Products for some apparatus.' said Darnell quietly. 'He wouldn't let me go. He ought to be back. Come into the laboratory. I've been watching his trails.'

	"I went with him into the laboratory where the rustle and hum of the machine, and the flickering, greenish light of the screen made it seem a sorcerer's lair of necromancy. Bob looked at the screen, then he turned to me with an unpleasant grin. 'It's blank, John. Those are Hugh Kerry's trails one year from today,' he said. He walked over to the blackboard very slowly, like an automaton, and picked up a piece of chalk. Slowly he erased the words on the slate, and in a round, broad scrawl he wrote: 'Hugh Kerry killed today. May God have mercy on me.'

	" 'Bob,' I said, 'Bob—that's the message you swore you wouldn't write. Erase it—wait till we know, till we know what happened to him so we can write the details. That may—'

	" 'Save him?' asked Bob bitterly. 'What matter now? He's dead now. But if you like, we can find the details. But nothing will do any good at all, because he's dead now, anyway. What good will it do to change that message? He's already taken the wrong trail, and reached the end, John. But I'll find out—'

	"He called up the police. He asked if they knew what had happened to Hugh Kerry, how he had been killed.

	"The telephone was a noisy one, always had been, and I heard the answer where I stood. 'Hugh Kerry, eh? I have no report on anyone by that name. What makes you think he's been killed, and how?'

	" 'He must be dead by this time,' said Bob. 'Ask your men, please. I—what?'

	" 'The other desk man,' said the man on the telephone, 'just got a call, and he says if you're looking for a guy named Hugh Kerry, he was just killed by a girl driver at Fourteenth and Seventh. He stepped out from behind a parked car right—Say, who's calling?'

	" 'Thanks, officer. Robert Darnell calling, from One Forty-three East Eighty-seventh. I'm going right over to the scene—'

	"We went over in my car, got there pretty quickly, but the ambulance had already taken Hugh Kerry and the girl driver away. We heard from her later. Hugh had simply walked right into the side of her car, practically tripped over her running board. She was in the hospital with hysterics then. She kept saying he looked so surprised—as though somebody had suddenly explained something to him. Somebody had, you see—a surprisingly easy answer to a complex problem.

	"Bob Darnell tried to get his car, that Hugh had driven over to Teckno Products in, but the police picked him up. I wasn't a criminal lawyer, and I had to go downtown and get Bill Poole, a classmate of mine, to come and help him out.

	"It was a bad problem, too, we found out. Three weeks before, Hugh Kerry had taken out a one-year-term insurance policy for a hundred thousand dollars. And it had a double-indemnity clause in case of accidental death. The insurance company was fighting for their two hundred thousand dollars, and the police were fighting for a murder charge. Because, you remember, Bob Darnell had said over the telephone: 'He must be dead by this time.'

	"The time machine was too wild. We couldn't get any clear images to show them anything to speak of. But, finally, they had to let Bob go, because it's awfully difficult to prove murder when a man is killed in an automobile accident at one end of town, and a man you're accusing is calling the police station from the other. And they never tried to involve the poor girl who was the direct instrument of death.

	"I went back with Bob Darnell, when they released him. I was with him when he started up the machine, and looked at his trails. There were only five left, because Hugh Kerry's trails were gone, now, and they had crossed and intertwined with Bob Darnell's, of course. The long trail was there, and one other sane trail—that ended in three years. The other three were all insane trails.

-

	"BOB went to work harder than ever, and because I'd gotten behind in my work while Bob was tied up, I, too, had to go to work harder than ever. It was three weeks before I could even get around to the laboratory.

	"Bob Darnell greeted me at the door when I came. He had one of those slip chains on the door, and opened it only a crack when he let me in. 'Those insurance people kept bothering me,' he explained. 'They want to see what I'm doing all the time. They aren't going to, though.'

	"I looked at him, and his eyes and forehead were screwed up in worry and concentration.

	" 'John,' he said finally, 'you know it's too bad Hugh went after that apparatus Teckno was making. I got it and put it in, and they didn't make it right at all. I think maybe they're trying to make me order more so they can see how this works. I shouldn't have told the police about my chronoscope. But I put the apparatus in, and I think I got it in right, and, John, it makes the near-future images better, but what do you think—it cuts out some of the long-range tracks. It won't show them all now.'

	"His voice seemed quite annoyed, and rather petulant, I thought.

	" 'It won't?' I said, quite softly, I think. 'Let me see.'

	" 'No. It won't show them right. There are five. I saw 'em myself. But this thing won't work right. It cuts out four of them, and only shows one little short one. There's something wrong with it. I figured out what once, but I can't seem to remember any more. But I don't like Teckno any more, and I won't buy anything from 'em any more. I'm going to make 'em take this back.

	" 'Help me disconnect it, John? You remember how the chronoscope works; I can't seem to find the connections since I put in the wrong stuff Teckno made. I've been so worried, John, with the insurance company bothering me, and this not working right.'

	"It isn't working right, eh?' I asked. 'There's only one trail left? Well, you know, Bob, they change.'

	" 'No. There ought to be five trails. I know, 'cause I saw 'em,' he said decisively.

	"So I went into the laboratory with him, and I looked at the screen, and there was only one trail, as he had said. It was as I had expected since I entered the house that day. I told Bob then that I couldn't help him any more, but that I had a friend who might be able to, though I wasn't sure. So I went away and brought your father, Dwight, who was, as I told you, the only other man who ever saw the chronoscope or the drawings of it.

	"He helped me take it apart and break up the parts that might have been revealing."

	John Grantland paused a long minute, his head sunk forward on his chest. He raised it slowly and added, as though an afterthought: "We were glad it was a very short track. It could have been so long—"

-

	DWIGHT EDWARDS rose slowly, dropping his papers on Grantland's desk. He sighed as he turned away. "The world doesn't need all its Faradays, does it?" And as he walked through the door, "You'll take care of those papers for me—"

The End

Frictional Losses
Astounding Stories – July 1936
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

I.

	"But why, Hugh, do you insist on exploring always in these worst of the ruins for what you want?" asked Ban wearily. "These sharp-edged glass fragments, and the thick ashes—surely there are other parts of this junk heap that would satisfy you. I can see little difference, save that some parts are churned more than others, and this is one of the worst places."

	Hugh Thompson shook his heavy, gray head slowly and straightened his aching back very slowly, for he was getting old now, and the living conditions he endured were very hard for him. His back felt fragile, breakable. "No. Tom. You are only thirty-two; you do not remember. New York was divided into many districts. Perhaps you can remember that they used to dig here for the food supplies? That was became this was a food-market district, too. But right in this section once was a great number of stores devoted to radio and electrical equipment. It is not as badly churned as you think. And here is our best hope, though faint enough it is.

	Ban Norman looked about doubtfully. Great mounds and heaps of semifused and disintegrated rock and metal sprawled as far as the eye could reach in one direction, to the river's edge in the other. Here and there a crumbling remnant of a tower remained, balanced by an occasional hundred-foot pock mark that, walled with glassy, fused granite, was floored now with a thin layer of muddy water and scum. The white masses of tracked stone were streaked with dark red, like the dried blood of the buildings they had been, from the slowly melting iron skeletons.

	"The Granthee treated this section to an exceptionally heavy lashing. Why expect anything so delicate as the radio tubes you seek to survive?"

	"Became we can do nothing else, Ban." said the old man patiently. "I was no older than you are when this happened, and I first attempted to do what we have done for these thirty years now. Oar little station has failed again, and all the people that have so faithfully sought to keep this thin thread of civilization are wondering again if the final break is the thread has come for us. Boston is gone now, has been for three months. Cincinnati is lost, we know, because Randolph Balling could get no man or woman to learn from him before he died.

	"We are losing. Ban. and I hate it so. Man tried so hard, for so long—and, now, in three decades—oh, it is so wrong to give up hope."

	Ban sighed, and moved toward the shade of some great, tumbled blocks. "Let us eat while we rest and talk. What was this building?"

	Hugh looked about him at the great Works, thrown down in a moment of petulance like a scattered child's toy. He tried to determine his location by the rotting remains of the docks, the tumbled heaps behind, the Jersey shore across the river. Slowly he shook his head. "It is thirty years, Ban." he said, seating himself gingerly, and pulling the hard, blackish bread from the bag of woven reeds he carried. "I am forgetting how old New York looked. It has been so long I have seen it thus, it seems it was never otherwise. But there were few high buildings here, and this was evidently a very large one. It may have been the New York Telephone Co. building.

	Ban looked about the ruins and shrugged. "I see no cables, or wires."

	"No. But this was an executive building, and the central offices represented little of the equipment. It would be lost in this jumble. Besides, when the class formed, they stripped every fragment of copper they could find from every building, to make pans. They could work copper more readily than any other metal, and all exposed cables were taken. There was lead, too, for the sling shots. We are fortunate, really, so much of the radio equipment was deeply buried for that would have been destroyed in those first years."

	"But the buried equipment was ruined so that was no gain."

	"It was not all ruined. And we can be thankful that much of the equipment had been refined to a ruggedness that resisted the strains. The metal tubes, for instance. They were but a few years old when the Granthee came. Had the old glass tubes been all we had, it would have been few, indeed, we could have salvaged."

-

	Ban looked about sourly. "I can believe that. What was it that destroyed this section so thoroughly?"

	"The atomic bombs. Some few of our own. That great crater I have shown you in the old park was one of our own, set off when the Granthee ship landed there You cannot find even a fragment of that ship; even the metal of which is was made was ruined in that flare. The atomic bombs flared rather than exploded."

	"If we had the atomic power they had, why was it that they, with their little force of a hundred ships came so near to conquering the whole world of man?"

	"We did not have atomic power. We developed, toward the end, atomic explosives, which are very different. Grant Hubert has shown you explosives, and you know how different they are from fuels. We had explosives, but before we could learn to use atomic fuels, it was too late. The men and the laboratories and the machine shops were, it seems, gone.

	"The Granthee ships appeared in April, over Russia. Chicago. Brazil and Central Africa. In July the thing was a thing done. They attacked, with their fever ray—an intense radio beam—that heated men like an intense fever, till they died in seconds. They wiped out life in Africa in a few days, and they wiped out all life in Asia, nearly a billion humans, within two weeks. Japan was armed as a modern nation, and withstood the attack for a week, and destroyed seven of the Granthee ships. She might have done more, but for the Japan Deep."

	"The Japan Deep—?"

	"Yes. Japan was an island empire, of men somewhat similar to John Lun, yellowish. small men. But they had learned the ways of the whites, and fought snore stubbornly, more heroically, really, than any others. They were a fatalistic race. They conceived the idea, and used it first, of the torpedo ships. I have shown you the wrecked airplane near Newark. They had many, smaller, but far swifter—little planes that could make three hundred miles an hour.

	"They took those, and put heavy metal around the engine, and many, many pounds of explosive in them, and they filled the fuel tank with a substance known as picric acid in the gasoline. Their engines could not withstand that treatment for more than ten minutes, but for those minutes they were terribly powerful.

	"So those planes took off from the ground, and flew like great birds into the air. at a speed that would cover the distance from here to the clan in the Orange Mountains in less than three minutes—four hundred miles an hour.

-

	The Granthee ships were fast, but they were very, very large, nearly a thousand feet long. They turned their radio beams on the planes, and the engines sometimes stopped, and sometimes didn't, and the pilots always died, but not before they had lined the ship on its destination. So, several hundred ships that flew thus—great three-ton explosive shells moving as fast as the bullet of that short gun I showed you, the automatic—one might strike and penetrate and destroy the Granthee ship.

	"Not all the Granthee would die then, but, of course, on the ground, without their ships, they were helpless against the many men and women, despite their poison fangs. They could run very swiftly on their six legs, but it is impossible to run far, or swiftly, when you are enveloped in men who do not in the least mind dying, if only you die, too.

	"And. of course, there were guns. The Japanese had some ships, they were called battleships, made of steel, very thick and very tough, so thick and strong that the radio beam could not penetrate, so big that any beam the Granthee could throw would not seriously heat them.

	"These ships carried guns, not like the automatic I showed you. but tubes two feet thick, and fifty feet long, and their shells weighed tons. Those great shells, when they succeeded in hitting a Granthee ship, caused serious damage, and sometimes brought one down. The Japanese brought down two of the seven they destroyed in this way, and, as they landed, peasants with scythes and sticks and stones attacked them.

	The Japanese were a peculiar race, but they fought as all men fought in that day, with far inferior weapons—but enormous reserves. In the taking of one ship, with its load of a thousand Granthee, which fell near Tokyo, one of their great cities, approximately one million of the Japanese died. That is what was meant by the thousand-to-one ratio. Of course, not all that million ever got a chance to attack the ship, or tried to, but that number died in Tokyo because of the Granthee ship. Perhaps seven thousand actually took part in the attack.

	"But had it gone thus, it would not have been too terrible for man's civilization, because there were only one hundred thousand of the Granthee. Had we lost only one thousand for each of the Granthee we destroyed, it would have been scarcely a serious loss. One hundred millions, of humanity—and in that day we had two thousand millions. But the ratio was fifteen thousand to one."

	"And that would be endurable, were it not that, sooner or later, the second Granthee expedition will come and destroy the rest of us."

	"Man fought on capital then. For a thousand years the world bad been building, and for a hundred thousand man had been spreading. In three months we spent all we owned, in defeating the invasion. Japan lost everything because the vast atomic bombs of the Granthee loosened the islands, and they slipped into the Japan Deep, a hole in the ocean floor where water went down, down, for five miles, a deep that could swallow the greatest mountain of Earth, and remain unfilled.

	"And Japan was gone.

	"But the Granthee had flown west, too They attacked Europe, which was a very densely settled region of high culture and civilization. But the Eurasian Granthee fleet had concentrated on Japan, and the even more populous China.

	"In China, one Granthee ship fell, and six hundred million men died. India brought down two ships, because of the British defenses there, and Australia, we know, must have brought down eight, though there never was any message heard. But Australia had few cities, and vast country, so it may be that thousands roam about, unable to communicate with us. The thread of radio is so thin, so fragile.

-

	"Europe fought and destroyed the Granthee ships, all that had come over her, and her cities vanished in the purple-red atomic flares and her people died in the fever beams. But there were many, many forts, and armored vehicles and battleships. These fought. and the fever beams could not reach the men and the atomic bombs could not be dropped, since even to the Granthee ships, a sixteen-inch armor-piercing projectile loaded with half a ton of high explosive was no futile pebble. The Granthee shot their bombs as shells, but they could not hit the small fleet tanks, and even their might could not beat to the forts buried hundreds of feet beneath rock and soil.

	"Oh, they killed the men gradually, because they turned the whole region of the forts into a lava pool, bubbling thickly like a great pot of candy cooking, so the men died. But the ships died, too. The battleships resisted them, one, even two bombs sometimes, and they were mobile and hard to hit, and even the Granthee could not boil an ocean. They hid the warships in clouds of smoke so they could not be seen, while airplanes that flew like darting midges against the sun told them where the Granthee hovered.

	"So, finally, was the last Granthee ship over Europe destroyed And nearly five million people still lived to rejoice. They started quickly though to work, the munitions factories starting again, the hidden, buried plants.

	"The Granthee fleet over Africa came, and joined with what was left of the fleet that had destroyed Australia.

	"Europe fought again. They had vast reserves in that day, because a war was forever hanging over their heads, and their armies were trained and their guns were made, and their piles of ammunition.

	"They did as the Japanese had. Their men died in destroying Granthee ships with their little planes—and some new ones, rockets they called them They were hollow metal shells packed with explosive—save for the guiding man and the fuel that drove them on wings of flame instead of metal. The Granthee could not avoid them, for even swifter and more mobile than the interstellar cruisers were these tiny things. Frequently they moved to swiftly the screaming metal shell did not explode till it was half through the Granthee ship.

	"There were not so many men, then, nor women. The Granthee ships brought down were not always totally destroyed. Some Granthee lived to fight on Earth, and because even on the ground they were deadly, trained troops advanced cautiously and destroyed them carefully. No Granthee lived long, you understand.

	"And. finally, as you know, the last Granthee ships landed, only three still in navigable condition, but they landed in England, which was an island off the coast of Europe. They had battered its every weapon of destruction. Now they set out to capture its humans, and did, for there were very few and no weapons whatever. The last three ships were destroyed by humans who let themselves be captured, together with packs of high explosives, or poisonous gas bombs.

	"And in America here, the cities had all been battered as have these humbled blocks. There were no more cities, nor any government, but men needed no government to fight now. The first fleet that reached the United States we destroyed, as they had destroyed the fleet in Europe. More came from South America.

	"This country is very large, so large you cannot understand. There is so much land the Grantee could not cover it all with their few ships, and everywhere there were humans who hated them. A man in New York discovered one way to release the energy of the atoms, and he made a great many bombs that would do what the Grantee bombs would do. He couldn't shoot them in guns, and they required a great deal of apparatus to set them off. But four Granthee ships were destroyed by them when enslaved humans carrying food to the Grantee, carried those bombs instead. 

-

	In three months the Granthee were all destroyed, the last few who were captured were tortured horribly. The few scientists among as who still lived, after the destruction of the laboratories where they had been working, tried to question the Granthee, but the people hated them too much. They heard only the defiance that the Granthee screamed at men—that the second expedition would follow.

	"Man had fought, and defeated the first expedition because though his weapons were far less powerful, he had so many of them, so much material, such immense odds in his favor so far as manpower went. And such colossal hatred that suicide was nothing to him. Willingly a thousand, two thousand humans would die if only they could take a single Granthee with them.

	"It actually averaged about fifteen thousand humans for each Granthee, and still all the Granthee died, and there were humans left."

	"But there are only about two million humans in all the world now." said Ban. The second expedition will find that the first has done its work. Mankind is reduced to an easily conquered remnant. So what have we gained?"

	Old Hugh shook his head. "That is not the philosophy of mankind in the past. Not what have we gained—but what can we do to that second expedition to defeat them."

	"Yes." said Ban bitterly, "but you accent it wrongly. What can we do to the second expedition?"

	"The scientists who survived have been working steadily They have the secret of the Granthee radio fever beam, and they have atomic bombs, if they can only get a suitable source of power."

	"If!" said Baa. "If—and we use an old Diesel automobile engine and a converted electric motor for our source of power. We burn weird fuels like the wood gas we used last spring, and we chortle oar triumph of getting a staggering, weak signal into the air.

	"There are no repair shops, no tools, no machines. There a nothing. We are still living on the capital mankind built up before the Granthee. We paw now in the ruins for strayed bits of that capital, helpless without the stored labor of men long dead. Only the things those dead hands reach out to give us give as this false flicker of civilization, a dying candle flame that splatters up once in extinction. We live because life is an automatic process. We have children because that is an automatic process we cannot halt. We grow food because we suffer hunger if we do not. and we fear the face of Death.

	"It is false to delude ourselves we accomplish anything. What good is that triumph of the mind that we can imitate the fever beam of the Granthee? Stolen idea from dead Granthee, made from stolen apparatus from dead cities. And even so the fever beam is useless when the enemy is behind a metal wall, and when does a Granthee come out to fight? What have we?

	"Why grub in fallen ruins to communicate to people in no better state than yourself? Why try to build anything that the Granthee may tear it down? Men built a city here, a great city of steel and stone and beauty. They were far greater than we, they had a skill that is dead with them, a power that is vanished, too. And with all their weapons, with all their vast capital to expend—they are dead. We have not the skill, nor the capital nor the weapons. And the second expedition comes; they have told us that much.

	"You old men who saw that civilization cannot forget it. You go on dreaming your dreams of rebuilding it. But we who have grown up since have no false hopes. We never saw it, and we know we never will.

	"Man's capital is spent, his income is spent, he is pawning his last proud possession. Man's civilization is done. He may still have pride enough and power enough in his shrunken body to destroy himself before the Granthee come to capture him. Man is the only large animal remaining on all Earth, and the Granthee must capture him. Then you know what his fate will be. Man will be the horse to labor, and his child the chicken to ear. And it is sure for many live now who have not the wit to see it, nor the will to escape it."

-

	Old Hugh sighed. "I know, Ban. I know," he said softly. "I have felt it, and feared it, and understood that. And for two reasons I go on living and working: The first is that there are those who have not the wit nor the will, and for the sake of those who would become the horse and the chicken, we must try. There is a third reason, too, so I will say that my second is that the Granthee did not know when the second expedition would come. It was only a promise when they started—and empty promise. 

	"The greatest reason is that other men go on working still, with man's old courage and his old skill. You know that in Schenectady there are men who are not stealing apparatus from dead cities, but making new. And in Detroit they are making engines again—engines that burn wood and do not wear swiftly nor easily, with bearings that are lubricated as we are lubricating ours, with oil pressed from castor oil beans we can grow here."

	"Do they make guns that can blow apart Granthee ships? Do they make swift rocket ships to drive a trail of destruction through—"

	"Not yet. I know, Ban, but—"

	"But the second expedition will put a stop to that. Old Hugh. I love you. love you as the only father I've known; but you struggle against impossibles. The castor beans you mentioned—You know we will have oil but a little longer, since the frost destroyed last year's crop. Then our paltry little machines will slide and grate to a stop. as frictional losses destroy their efficiency and their metal. Friction has stopped man always."

	"Not friction, but inertia has stopped mankind, Ban "

	"Aye, the momentum dies, and the race glides to a halt as friction slows it. But come, old Hugh. I will help you, for I know the work is dear to you. What you are attempting now I do not understand, but I know you want more tubes, more apparatus, so we will grub among the rums, you and I."

	Ban rose slowly, and picked his way over the tumbled stones and rotting wooden beams, charred and blackened by fires the atomic bombs had started and angered Nature drowned in ton on countless ton of outraged rain.
 
	Wearily the old man picked his way along, head bent, sorrowful. He knew the truth of what Ban said. But Hugh was of a generation that had known and yielded to hope. His generation would always yield to it. 

-

II.

	The sun was sinking into long summer twilight as they made their way down to the rotting dock. They were heavy laden and old Hugh was happy, picking his way along among the tumbled blocks. Cautiously they lowered themselves to the little rowboat, looking anxiously at the sullen flow of the river, a clean, clear river now, with sunken rusty hulls visible beneath its surface.

	The tide was turning soon, and the water moved slowly, gurgling very softly round the piles of the pier. Gulls swung lazily on the little choppy waves, watching the men with keen, bright eyes. Men were a source of danger to gulls; to men gulls were a source of food—a rather strong-flavored soup, but nourishing.

	"Lower them gently. Ban." said Hugh. "I'm afraid we'll have to go farther afield next time. The instruments, thank Heaven, were in working order. Here's the receiver—and that other one. It's heavy, so be careful. Look, here's something we can use that I found just as we left."

	"What is it? It looks like a small motor or generator, but has no power shaft to take hold of."

	"It is both, a rotary converter. They used to use these on automobiles to run radio sets, it has a 6-volt motor and a 110-volt alternator wound on one armature. so that it produces 110 A. C. from 6 volts D. C. We have lots of powerful storage batteries from old automobiles, and this is a 500-watt converter, so we have something very useful."

	"Hm-m-m—it may be. I've never seen one before. Well, are we ready?"

	"I'm afraid that's all. I wish I'd been able to find that roll of copper tubing the old invoice listed. He must have sold it—"

	Silently they rowed across the water as the long twilight settled. Stars came out, and the moon, as they plodded along, the little child's wagon behind them. They went over the rough cobblestones of the old Meadows road till they passed the torn section, then on their bicycles to the Orange Mountains.

	The moon, was high when they reached the lighted buildings of the clan. Ban's wife greeted them, slightly curious, as they returned. The neighbors came in, a few at a time, to look incuriously at the treasures Hugh had collected, and to ask news of the road, for few and seldom were the trips so far-from the clan. They slouched out presently, only old George staying to help them, an automobile mechanic once, venting his love of machinery on their decrepit old engines

	"They were calling you to-day, Hugh." he said. "I couldn't do anything, and they couldn't seem to make it with the telephone thing." He shook his head sadly. "I never could understand those buzzes and clicks. I wish they'd talk language."

	"They can't always, George. Code will get through with less power, and we all have so little power. I'll send out a call and see if I can find who called me."

	The little Diesel pounded presently, with gnarled old George soothing its heavy knocks as best he could, and the transmitter, patched and jury-rigged, began to operate. But no answer came to their call from the silent ether—only the soft wash of static. Hugh shook his head and shut it off. "No response, George. They'll call again. They always do. They always have time. I'm going to start working on that fever beam, I think "

	"Fever beam." Ban said. "You might give a mouse a dangerous fever and—"

	"No, you don't understand. Fevers can cure, too. I'm going to build a curative fever apparatus, one with power enough to heal, though it cannot hurt. And that metal tube you asked about is no weakling, Ban. It will handle five hundred watts, and we have six. If they are all in operable condition, as I believe they are, that is not insignificant power. It is more than we have had before, for a long time." Hugh gently reproved him.

	Ban snorted again, "More than we have had for a long time—and enough to cure, but not harm anything, even a large mouse!"

	"But I will learn. I will learn how to construct the beam. And you will learn. That is important, Ban; we must remember that. So help me now, while I test these tubes. Remember that they use four thousand volts, and be careful please." 

-

	In two days they had finished the things, and set up makeshift apparatus. There had been a thyratron tube there, too, a thing that old Hugh brought along out of interest, and a collector's acquisitiveness, for it was not a radio tube, capable of control, simply a type of switch capable of operating at near radio frequency in effect. 

	It was set up un a panel of well-dried, seasoned hardwood, for there was no more bakelite or hard rubber to be used, and slat was hard to get. And the wires were never insulated, merely spaced, because insulation had rotted and fallen off in the years since wire was made.

	But they tried it, and it worked to some extent. Not as well at old Hugh had hoped, but nothing ever did, for his apparatus could never be quite the right apparatus, but the nearest equivalent to hand. By radio he held long conferences with those men in Schenectady who had not forgotten their craft, and developed ways and means to measure what he no instrument for measuring—wave lengths and frequencies, wave forms even, after great difficulty, from an old television tube that had somehow maintained its vacuum. Television they could have no more, for television required waves so short they could be sent only with horizon distances But the old cathode-ray television tube became an oscillograph.

	Old Hugh looked at the result in dismay. "Ban. I'm afraid our apparatus is very faulty. That's not a sine wave, but a wave form for which man has never invented a name. Well, it can't be helped. We must do what we can with what we have. The men in Schenectady have sent one of their young clansmen on foot and in canoe clear out to Detroit to help the men there.

	"Presently, radio equipment will be made there, too, where they have production machinery still—and again, and vast cargoes of raw materials. Maybe then we will get new and good equipment, tubes that always have their vacuum, and haven't gone "soft." They will make caterpillar tractors that burn wood gases, and have castor-oil beans for lubricant. Then they can break through, and start commerce again. They are going to make big boats again, and try to ship things on the Great lakes, and finally, even, a huge Diesel of hundreds of horse power to the men in Schenectady."

	"Huge!" said Ban. "Hundreds of horse power! The locomotive those men at Schenectady once made stalled outside of Montclair, and it used fifty thousand horse power, a mere fraction of the load of one substation!"

	"It is huge," old Hugh maintained, hurt somewhat by the tone of Ban's voice. "We are rebuilding with a very little start. We have a great task, and that will be a huge accomplishment, Ban. Man will try very hard for that, and work with a great love and pride and an honest effort that man never exceeded. It will represent the hopes and thoughts and labors of many men, an accomplishment they can be as proud of as any ever done.

	"The giant machines are gone, and man labors again with the sweat of his brow and the craft of his hand. That engine will release many hands and many brows to greater, better efforts. Did I not know it useless, I would urge you again to go to Schenectady, that you may get real training and do your part in this greater labor ahead."

	"The labor ahead is useless. The second expedition is ahead." 

-

	"I know, Ban; I know your answer. But come, I want to show you something of interest. You remember that neon bulb I brought? Take this terminal of the new power set in one hand, and the bulb in the other. So I will turn it—no, do not lose your grip, hold tightly and remain on that insulated plate. Do not touch the ground, though that would probably harm you little, but stay there and hold the tube So—and see."

	"Eh—it lights!" Ban stared at the brilliantly glowing tube. "With but one connection—through my body. How can it be so? My body has very great resistance, you have schooled me, and for power to flow, always there must be two connections."

	Old Hugh chuckled '"I shall show you something perhaps yet more remarkable. See, here is that coil I wound yesterday. I told you it was a furnace, and you looked at me askance. So now will you hold this metal cylinder, and I leas the wire here, to the coil, and again to the set here. You are I the circuit, see?" 

	"Aye. I'm in the circuit right enough, and I like if very little. Old Hugh, are you sure of yourself?" Ban asked dubiously.

	"We shall see. Now the furnace is set on this table, and in my hand I hold a bit of asbestos, hollowed to hold a few scraps of aluminum metal. Now—I turn on the power set, and thrust my hand in the furnace—"

	"By the gods of time! It's melting! Your hand—"

	"As cool as you please, my son." Quickly the old man shut off the set, and tossed aside the molten metal "The radio frequency currents play strange tricks, for they run not through your body, but across it, like water These extreme frequencies cannot go through any conductor, but always across its surface. It is called the skin effect. When it passes as a flow of current in a wire, or any conductor, it is only on the surface, yet when acting through an insulator, it acts all through it. In the furnace, it attacks the metal, but not my hand, for my hand is a very poor conductor, and a hard path, while the metal is a very good conductor, and an easy path.

	"It is very interesting, but not useful I am afraid," he said. "Come, we must see what we can do to correct the fever -beam hook-up, to get better efficiency, and the correct wave form I wonder if the wave form can have any peculiar effects—something unusual I wonder perhaps—"

	"What' What might it do?"

	"I was thinking—thinking of the time I worked with a quartz-crystal oscillator, and built up the frequency till it exactly corresponded with the crystal's natural note and—the crystal was white dust. Maybe I could develops a wave form that would pulverize even hard steel that way—

	"Maybe. Then you could break all Joan's sewing needles, and maybe even get enough power to crack one of her knitting needles. There are many things you might do—if you had power.

	"Old Hugh. I do not like to see you spend your time uselessly."

	"I have nothing else to spend, Ban. Let me work. Who knows—but let me try, it costs little, and might be worth much."

	"It costs a mouth to feed, and work to gather oil for the engine, and wear on the engine and tubes. It does cost us time." Ban looked at the old man sorrowfully. "The others complain. I do not; I know what you are attempting. But it is they who must work to feed you, and, as yet, the communication they have maintained all these years has brought them little good. Twice only it has warned them of a killing frost, once of the great storm. Beyond that—since the bandits have all been destroyed, it has done them little good. They grow restless, Hugh."

	Slowly old Hugh looked away, out through the window toward the hard-working men in the fields, women weaving again on hand looms. It had been a fad once, in the world he had known, before the Granthee. It was no fad now; it was protection against the winter, and, because the wool was never cleaned completely free of its grease, against the rains. 

	"I know, Ban. I told Dr. Ponting. I would call him at noon to-day. I must call."

	"And I must go," said Ban. "I will be back this evening."

-

III.

	Old Hugh sat silent, fingering slowly the crude key of his transmitter, a bit of brass spring he had cut himself, mounted with a scrap of a platinum wedding ring above and below the contact points. The platinum wedding ring had been found on a slender, bleached bone protruding from beneath a great tumbled block of stone in the city. His tired old face grew more and more sorrowful. Finally he buried his face in his gnarled old hands, and his body rocked slowly.

	"Three groups," he muttered, ""three groups in all the world. So far as we know. Never have we roused Europe, never Australia. Three little groups against the vast inertia of two millions. The first expedition was destroyed, and utterly defeated—yet it has won. Ah-h-h if only—" 

	Hours later he fussed with his apparatus, setting up the parabolic netting of wires he had contrived after Dr. Ponting's radioed directions that noon. He was working over it carefully to align exactly the bit of copper tubing a few inches long that was its aerial, designed to radiate those ultra-short waves. Multiplex ultra-frequency they called it in Schenectady. It was ingenious, perhaps too much so for him, his wave form was so poor.

	Carefully, because he had much time, and no real aim, he checked his work by the plans he had copied down from the messages over the radio. The triple generating oscillator set, the power set, the mixing oscillator, the phase indicators were all in order. But somehow they did not combine properly.

	Then, quite by accident, he noticed that he had connected one of the tubes slightly more than 185 degrees out of phase, instead of slightly more than 5! And a screwed connection near it had come loose. No wonder his wave form was peculiar, his efficiency low; one tube fighting the other two!

	Muttering to himself in vexation he brought a screw driver and tightened the connection down firmly, solidly. Then, just to test it really, he turned on the set. The oscillograph began to move as heaters warmed up, then abruptly struck a weirdly shaped wave, and broke again, abruptly, into the peculiar wave he had been getting just as there sounded in the quiet little room a very sharp ping. 

	Hugh looked curiously, and shut off his set hastily. The loose connection was not merely loos now. The screw had vanished!

	Vaguely worried and surprised, old Hugh replaced it, and turned on the set. This time he watched that screw. The tubes were warmer now, heated more quickly. Ping! Very sharp. And the screw was gone.
 
	Old Hugh brought the soldering iron and soldered that connection in place, and wondered. Again the set started. There were five distinct pings this time—and a little tinny clatter of falling metal parts. The beautifully constructed little paraboloid director lay in disassembled parts on the table, quite scattered and crumpled—not harmed, merely taken nearly apart in a hundredth of a second, with a little stinging ping of metal. 

-

	A man trained in research through a lifetime would have stopped there, and worked very hard with his mind, and sought some explanation, some theory, then devised a theory-testing experiment to prove or disprove that theory. Old Hugh had not done research work, real research, for thirty years. He had simply tried to make delicate mechanisms work with defective apparatus. To him, this was simply more defective apparatus. With the patience a generations of troubles had taught him, he kneeled down on the floor and hunted about the little shack till he had found five bolts, four nuts and two tiny screws.

	These were precious things, these little screws, because they couldn't be made any more, and they were so hard to get—such little things—they sifted down among the debris to unattainable depths. One nut was missing and he had to replace it from his hoarded stock. Then, patiently, his stiffened fingers assembled again the little thing that had fallen apart, and bolted it firmly.

	Then he started his apparatus again. But he made sure this time that the thing would not be so defective. He wired the little nuts in place. And now in all his circuit there were only soldered joints or bolts with nuts wired solidly in place. And he turned his projector where it would send its beam harmlessly into the mountainside a half a mile away, and so started the set. 

	He watched his set, and it worked, so he did not look through the window where, half a mile away, a mighty mass of rock and earth and giant trees began to move in a ghastly silence down the hill. For seconds the thing moved in majestic silence, a whole section of the hill gliding downward, swifter and more swiftly. Then it broke in flying, smoking rock, crashing and roaring in monstrous shock. The shouts of men, the screams of women made him rise suddenly and step hastily across the room, not even pausing to shut off his machine.

	He fell with a sickening jar, heard the dull snap, felt the meteoring pain that shot up his leg to become a vast, unbearable ache. He tried to rise, and fell back whimpering softly, calling bewilderedly, mercifully numbed, as yet.

-

	It was hours before Ban found him there, in the dark little room, with only the faint glow of the heater tubes shining in the dark. The steady pounding of the Diesel had attracted him from the mystery there on the hillside that the men were looking at in awe and vague fear They wanted old Hugh, suddenly wondering where he was, who might explain this to them.

	Gently they lifted him up, unconscious now, and the old doctor showed them how to set the bone again, giving in words the skill his hands possessed to hands that had the strength his no longer held. Then they bound the leg, and straightened it, and beside him two women watched They fed him when he woke, feverish, mumbling.

	Ban shut off the experimental set, and started the transmitter. Through space his message leaped to other sets and found them deaf. This was not communication time.

	Morning came, and again Ban tried, but now the men came in. The mystery had vanished in the night. The rock was there, and the more distant, strangely truncated slope was visible beyond it, raw and harsh. But the strange thing had vanished. 

	Ban called again Schenectady answered finally, and to them Ban poured out the message: Hugh Thompson feverish and sick with a broken leg; the mountains moving and stirring, strange rocks down which Jeff Hurley shot, slipping without resistance till he brought up a hull on a great boulder outside the area of damage, damaged himself beyond repair—dead; the broken mountains—"

	And no mention of the set. For the men of that later day, even when trained somewhat did not so rapidly connect cause and effect. And in every mind, anyway, lurked the thought: the second expedition.

	Old Hugh woke later that afternoon, and they told him of the mystery, at his insistence carried him to the little room and his key. And from that position he saw the meaning of the thing.

	"Ban." he said suddenly, quite softly, "Ban, look along the axis of the paraboloid there, and tell me—"

	"Eh." said Ban, "the slippage is along that line. What do you suppose made that paraboloid line up with that damage? Some magnetism—"

	Old Hugh groaned softly. "Oh. Ban, can you believe nothing you see, either? Move that paraboloid one degree further toward the mountain, making sure no man is in its path—" 

	"But no, there will be half a hundred out there now. Never mind. I must think why. But first—start the transmitter."

	At the key he called, vainly for a long time. Schenectady answered after a while, and rapidly he told them of his mistake on the connection, and the damage involved. They would try in on a barren mountainside.

	His description was too accurate. Old Hugh said "Right through the wall." 

	They did not hear from Schenectady that day, or the next, as old Hugh grew more feverish, became delirious. Ban caught the weak, broken signals the third day. "—building as—gested. Something—ent wrong, for the entire bulding—apsed. Transmitter ruined, as—ell—set we—ade up. No power. Will—d more later. Greatest—cover—as ever made in hist—" And no more could he catch; so he put down what he got, and turned back to old Hugh, uncomprehending.

-

IV.

	Thirty years of harsh, rugged life lay behind old Hugh Somehow the fever abated, the pain lessoned as his sturdy old body rallied in defense. Slowly, he began to recover, and still no message came through from Schenectady, though two weeks passed. The women who cared for him had cleaned the room, and Ban told old Hugh, negligently, that the message he'd been unable to clear up had been thrown out.

	Old Hugh was busy thinking. But the problem eluded him Somehow, he was sure, he had destroyed some of the rock crystals to powder as he had hoped, yet he could not understand, it was beyond his belief that so tiny a power, a bare three horse power, could do so much damage. Surely, it seemed, it would have taken vastly more. But, perhaps it was some really rare constituent of the rock, rare but vastly important that held the secret, some unconsidered crystal that was the key log in the jam that made rock solid, vibrating in chance tune to his set, and vibrated to powder.

	He cursed that lost nut he knew must be guilty for his fall. A little rolling nut—but the feeling as he fell had been so strange—

	He didn't see his ragged, raveled clothes. When the women brought them back to him they had been carefully repaired, so all things must be where are all things are worked for and made by the sweat of man's brow and the craft of his hand. Perhaps they would have given him some little hint.

	But he itched to be at it again, determined now that, pointed to the skies, the thing must be safe. So he had the men bring in samples of every rock they could find at the great slide, and, when he could hobble again on his crutch with Ban's aid, he set the paraboloid on its back, and the rock specimens about it on wooden shelves, turning the power to a very low degree. Then he turned on the set that had not operated since he had fallen there by the window, and broken his leg as the mountain slid down.

	Slowly the tubes warmed up. He watched with interest and care the little stones on the little platform just under the low roof of the little wooden shack.

	Then the tubes were warm, and there were a great many slight pings of sound, and a very quiet, swift slip of the roof and the sodden heavy thrashing as the roof fell in. It was fortunate that the device was so effective, for the roof came in as separate shingles and boards.

	Old Hugh groaned as they dug him out, and reached a hand to feel the device that had done this. His leg hurt, his head ached abominably, his laboratory was a ruin, evidently, but he was not seriously hurt, nor was Ban. Ban's wife was crying and dabbing at his bleeding face, questioning frantically and tongue lashing old Hugh simultaneously. She was pale, and very scared, for the shack looked as though a monstrous giant had stepped heedlessly on it.

	Ban stared dazedly and bewilderedly at the wrecked laboratory. "I know," he said suddenly, looking owlishly at old Hugh. "What they said was 'building collapsed'. That was it." 

	Old Hugh laughed shakily. "A fine time to remember it, my boy. We can confirm their report."

	"And they said it was the greatest discovery in history. I'll bet that was it. Yes. I know it was. You've got the disintegration ray, Hugh!"

	Old Hugh shook his head. "It doesn't fit. Ban. It does the job, but I don't know why, nor how. That's never really safe. We must find out why."

	"Why ? We can work it."

	"Eh? How well? How much? I'm going back in there."

-

	Silently, other men began to clear the wreckage away, and with their efficient taciturn movements, more and more apparatus began to appear. Old Hugh interfered with them as he brought forth coils and condensers and little metal tubes, his soldering iron and the precious little alcohol soldering torch, a piece of dry, seasoned wood, a few condensers, the rotary converter. Miraculously, from the ruins, Ban brought the oscillograph.

	With gnarled, skilled fingers old Hugh built up the thing on his bit of board, a foot square with one-inch tubes and a gently hammered piece of annealed copper in the form of a bowl. They brought him, silently, the things he asked for, and silently stood watching.

	It formed under his fingers. At his command, Ban brought the storage battery they had built up from the sound parts of a dozen decrepit wrecks. Hugh attached his terminals, and the little converter whined. The tiny tubes grew warm and a wave from built up in the oscillograph.

	"A good research student would know just what to do. I think I know just what happened now, Ban, and the way to test it is to see if my theory will produce results. I have aimed this at the horizon. Ban, will you catch that little kid over then and place him on that bare patch?"

	Ban tried, and with the aid of three other men the struggling kid was brought and placed on the bald knoll. "He won't stay, Hugh."

	"Leave him and run at right angles to the beam, Ban. You others step away now." In a moment Ban ran—and old Hugh pressed his key. The running goat bleated suddenly, tumbled and slid along the ground, his feet threshing and struggling, bleating louder now, mortally terrified. For half a minute he struggled, flashing legs flying without result—then he was up and bouncing away like a thrown rubber ball. In moments the kid was nibbling grass, tossing his head back toward them, bleating defiantly.

	"Yes." said Hugh eyes flashing. "I was right."

	Open-mouthed, Ban stared at the little animal. The lean, silent men moved restlessly. "What did it, Hugh?" asked one at length. "That goat acted like he got on a cake of ice, and even then I never saw one of them surefooted little beasts slip like that."

	Old Hugh was disconnecting the battery. The rotary converter slowed from a whine to a drone, and stopped. He looked lovingly at the foot square board and the copper bowl and the little black tubes, like dull metal acorns, less than an inch high. "Yes, that's what broke my leg that day. I know now. Old Jim Duncan, you've been wanting to tear down the old wooden house there and haven't had the time to do it right and save the nails. Well—Ban, you pack the battery, will you?"

	Hugh set off down the grassy lane that was all the main street the clan had. At the end of the row was the old, rotting house, deserted, broken, preserved only so long by the original sound construction, and the fact that men who grubbed for every grain of food they ate had no time yet to tear it down carefully and pull the nails out straight and usable, keeping the boards, most of them, unbroken and sound.

-

	They followed him silently. Talking was not a highly developed art among these people, not as it had been when old Hugh was young Hugh. Ban set down the battery at Hugh's gesture and the old man laboriously set himself on the ground, his game leg sticking out before him. He connected the set, and the converter whined again. Old Hugh lined the copper bowl on the tumble-down house and pressed the key. A thousand thousand sharp pings, a sudden settling, a clamorous rattling of boards—the building was down, and dust swirled slowly.

	"Great heaven!" gasped Ban. Suddenly he was running forward toward the house and—through the beam. In an instant he was down, skittering along the ground, threshing arms and legs. Quite unhurt, evidently, but surprised, and suddenly embarrassed.

	Old Hugh cut off the key. Slowly, flushing. Ban rose to his feet, absolutely nude save for his leather belt, his leather shoes, a mass of thread and lint that reduced itself, as he moved, to individual hairs, all that remained of his clothes. A slow roll of laughter welled from the people. Then his wife was running forward, her face crimson, her eyes blazing wickedly at old Hugh as she glanced toward him in her swift passage.

	"What happened?" asked the unhappy Ban Norman.

	"I sort of think you better get dressed again, Ban, before you start gettin' questy," said a laconic, faintly humorous voice. "Looks like you wore out them clothes in a hell of a hurry."

	Ten minutes later Ban was back, his angry wife bustling at his side. A soft murmur of chuckles ran through the folk as they straightened from their work of gathering nails and screws and useful bits of metal from the old house. Long, straight boards, mostly unharmed, were being stacked to one side.

	Old Hugh looked at Ban with twinkling gray eyes "Maybe my puttering will be some use, yet. See?"

	On the ground before the humming little set a pile of lint was accumulating. The women were at work. Every old, worn-out bit of clothing in the clan had been brought and reduced to its original fibers in moments. "They can reweave them now, into new and useful material. And Ban, they are beginning to feel something else. Do you see all this little, little thing means?"

	"I see something it means, you old fool!" snapped diminutive, peppery Joan Norman. "It means I have to weave Ban Norman a new suit! First you tear down the house about Ban's ears, then you tear the clothes off his very back. I had to make that, and those you're wearing too, you muddle-witted ingrate. You have less sense than two-year-old Junior and don't use what you have! You and your messy batteries and coils and wires. Every day Ban comes home with holes in his things, and now—now you're not content with just making holes in them, you tear them all to pieces, right back to lint, and make a spectacle out of my Ban. And will you—"

-

	Gently, Ban picked up his wife and carried her back to the house. Ten minutes more and he was back, grinning. "She's peeved. But Hugh, what in the name of heavens have you got? I don't—"

	"It's the skin effect. Ban. I've figured it out now. That's why so little power does so much, so very much. Look, it induces those extreme frequencies in any conductor and almost anything is more or less of a conductor because of moisture in it, and those frequencies go, of course, to the surface. How they do it, I cannot guess. Yet, somehow, they rearrange the molecules that they become perfectly fluid, there just on the very surface, and absolutely destroy all friction."

	"Friction! But—" Ban gasped, and fell silent for a second. "But I do not understand—friction—"

	"Man has always thought of friction as his worst enemy, yet he cannot do without it. Look, your clothes fell apart in a moment, because the woven strands were held together by their friction. Even the knots were held by friction. The shed fell on us, as the house fell, because the friction that held the nails in was gone, and the nails, of course, sprang out. I was vastly tempted to turn it on the Diesel, and get along with oil, till I remembered—every bolt and nut would fly off as though a charge of explosive lay beneath it, for each bolt and each nut is held in place only by friction. In a hundredth of a second the Diesel would have become a mass of disassembled, oil-splattered parts. 

	"They know it over there, I think. We have lost some of our fear now, Ban, because—"

	"Then—then that little set there could tear down a small mountain! It needs no power, the weight and force of the mountain would do it all!"

	"This needs no power," said old Hugh, brushing about his head at the dull hum and buzz he took to be a fly.

	Only the low cries of the men over by the fallen house made him look up some five miles away, two or three miles up, hung two great, blackened, pointed cylinders. They buzzed like vast, angry insects, and pale, lambent flame rippled and played about their atomic exhausts.

	They seemed to move slowly, so far and so high there, as they drifted across country. Then one twisted and dipped in its course. A landing wave of warmth seemed to reach down to them; the men by the house dropped their tools and the lumber they carried. They ran to their homes. Already women and children were coming out, joining their men and vanishing in the greed depths of the wood.

	Old Hugh's eyes were keen and bright as be looked up into Ban's dull, racked face. "Oh Lord." said Ban, and turned suddenly toward the clan center, toward his home. His wife was coming out, crying for him, little Junior in her arms. Ban ran swiftly to them The feeling of warmth and heat made him sluggish, he realized suddenly as he ran to them.

	Old Hugh looked after him, and turned back, a lone little figure squatted awkwardly with his broken leg stretched out before him. From the wood came softly muffled cries. Only two words seemed to filter through—"second expedition."

	Old Hugh stirred beside his softly humming little board; the old, patched battery; six little metal acorns, warm to the touch; a little copper bowl. Old Hugh's eyes were bleak and dark as he looked along the edge of the board and wondered what power he actually had in his tiny, futilely whining bit of wood and metal and insulation.

	An unbearable violet flame leaped suddenly in the skies, shrieking a thousand feet in the air. A rain of black metal separated from a solid clump to spread in a long, stretching line that reached down and down in masses to the waiting earth. It settled at the base of a giant rock, finally, as a second long rain of metal reached down and down.

	Somehow, miraculously, living, moving parts separated themselves and stood a moment, bewildered by sudden helplessness, perhaps, pawing at the broken wreckage, glinting peculiarly like an iridescent metal in the afternoon sun. The old man hobbled to a higher knoll, dragging the heavy battery and the little bit of wood and metal and insulation.

	The great cliff stirred, moved. The afternoon quiet exploded to the vast, angry mutter of the mountain. Annoyed, it seemed to settle more comfortably over the spot where, iridescently, purple things had moved.

-

V.

	Ban looked at the doorway of the wrecked shed cautiously. The Diesel was humming rhythmically, and the whine of the generator sounded sharply on the quiet, late-afternoon air of the deserted little settlement. Old Hugh was propped up on three broken boards; his game leg tenderly rested on a fourth. On the bench beside him was the rough, dry board, and on the floor the old decrepit storage battery. There were soft, quick hisses and buzzes, coming from the loud-speakers on the table—a rather dented and battered loud-speaker, but functioning.

	Ban listened to the familiar code, "—already," it spelled out to him. "There were eight here, thirty more came this morning. Detroit has sent three of the rocket machines, and five of the frictionless, welded tank machines have crossed the country. They left an anti-friction projector set in each clan village they passed.

	"We believe those two ships you destroyed were the last of the American fleet. Our new set though, caught a European station never before heard. We cannot get through to them apparently, till the new transmitter is finished to-morrow, because they have no receivers as sensitive as ours. But one of the Detroit rockets is making the one-way crossing to-night, though unable to return till fuel is developed there.

	"Undoubtedly, however, our strong point of resistance here will protect Europe by drawing all the Granthee fire. The tank machines ring up at a distance of thirty miles, and the rockets are waiting.

	"Detroit is preparing thirty-five more now, for production has been vastly speeded since the frictionless machine tools went into operation. Have your clansmen returned?"

-

	The speaker fell silent. Old Hugh reached out a firm hand to the key, and Ban listened to his swift keying. "One so far, at any rate. They will drift in now, for their fear is gone. He has brought in a sample of the Granthee hand weapon, powered by atomic energy, I see. He is beside me now—Ban Norman—so, if your rocket will come for me, I can join you in three hours. Ban Norman knows the language of the key; he can teach it to others."

	"You said no others would learn, and Norman was weakening." sputtered the little dented speaker.

	"Others will learn now. Another has come, and is watching through the broken window. He is trying to understand now. In six months we will have fifty trained operators, and perhaps ten men who can hook up apparatus."

	"That is good. Hugh Thompson Detroit just sent word that the rocket has taken off to pick you up. We will deliver the tank machine and the medicines you asked for in three days or so, the gang plow in two weeks. Can Ban Norman take the key now?"

	"Yes," said Ban Norman softly. "Going to—Schenectady—Detroit—in three hours, Old Hugh—"

	"What—what does it say?" asked the keen-eyed face at the window.

	"It says, young Jim Duncan," old Hugh replied slowly, as Ban Norman slipped eagerly over to the key, "that the Granthee have suffered severe frictional losses, and—that man's hesitation is over, and not his civilization."

The End

Uncertainty
(aka The Ultimate Weapon)
Amazing Stories – October & December 1936

CHAPTER I

	PATROL Cruiser "I. P.-T 247" circling out toward Pluto on leisurely inspection tour to visit the outpost miners there, was in no hurry at all as she loafed along. Her six-man crew was taking it very easy, and easy meant two-man watches, and low speed, to watch for the instrument panel and attend ship into the bargain.

	She was about thirty million miles off Pluto, just beginning to get in touch with some of the larger mining stations out there, when Buck Kendall's turn at the controls came along. Buck Kendall was one of life's little jokes. When nature made him, she was absent minded. Buck stood six feet two in his stocking feet, with his usual slight stoop in operation. When he forgot, and stood up straight, he loomed about two inches higher. He had the body and muscles of a dock navvy, which Nature started out to make. Then she forgot and added something of the same stuff she put in Sir Francis Drake. Maybe that made Old Nature nervous, and she started adding different things. At any rate, Kendall, as finally turned out, had a brain that put him in the first rank of scientists—when he felt like it—the general constitution of an ostrich and a flair for gambling.

	The present position was due to such a gamble. An IP man, a friend of his, had made the mistake of betting him a thousand dollars he wouldn't get beyond a Captain's bars in the Patrol. Kendall had liked the idea anyway, and adding a bit of a bet to it made it irresistible. So, being a very particular kind of a fool, the glorious kind which old Nature turns out now and then, he left a five million dollar estate on Long Island, Terra, that same evening, and joined up in .the Patrol. The Sir Francis Drake strain had immediately come forth—and Kendall was having the tame of his life. In a six-man cruiser, his real work in the Interplanetary Patrol had started. He was still in it—but it was his command now, and a blue circle on his left sleeve gave his lieutenant's rank.

-

	BUCK KENDALL had immediate-ly proceeded to enlist in his command the IP man who had made the mistaken bet, and Rad Cole was on duty with him now. Cole was the technician of the T-247. His rank as Technical Engineer was practically equivalent to Kendall's circle-rank, which made the two more comfortable together.

	Cole was listening carefully to the signals coming through from Pluto. "That," he decided, "sounds like Tad Nichols' fist. You can recognize that broken down truck-horse trot of his on the key as far away as you can hear it.

	"Is that what it is?" sighed Buck. "I thought it was static mushing him at first. What's he like?"

	"Like all the other damn fools who come out two billion miles to scratch rock, as if there weren't enough already on the inner planets. He's got a rich platinum property. Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for his clothes and food."

	"He must be an efficient miner," suggested Kendal, "to maintain 101% production like that."

	"No, but his bank account is. He's figured out that's the most economic level of production. If he produces less, he won't be able to pay for his heating power, and if he produces more, his operation power will burn up his bank account too fast."

	"Hmmm—sensible way to figure. A man after my own heart. How does he plan to restock his bank account?"

	"By mining on Mercury. He does it regularly—sort of a commuter. Out here his power bills eat it up. On Mercury he goes in for potassium, and sells the power he collects in cooling his dome, of course. He's a good miner, and the old fool can make money down there." Like any really skilled operator, Cole had been sending Morse messages while he talked. Now he sat quiet waiting for the reply, glancing at the chronometer.

	"I take it he's not after money—just after fun," suggested Buck.

	"Oh, no. He's after money," replied Cole gravely. "You ask him—he's going to make his eternal fortune yet by striking a real bed of jovium, and then he'll retire."

	"Oh, one of that kind."

	"They all are," laughed Cole—"Eternal hope, and the rest of it." He listened a moment and went on. "But old Nichols is a first-grade engineer. He wouldn't be able to remake that bankroll every time if he wasn't. You'll see his Dome out there on Pluto—it's always the best on the planet. Tip-top shape. And he's a bit of an experimenter too. Ah—he's with us."

	Nichol's ragged signals were coming through—or pounding through. They were worse than usual, and at first Kendall and Cole couldn't make them out. Then finally they got them in bursts. The man was excited, and his bad key-work made it worse. "—Randing stopped. They got him I think. He said—th—ship as big—a—nsport. Said it wa—eaded my—ay. Neutrons—on instruments—he's coming over the horizon—it's huge—war ship I think—register—instru—neutrons—." Abruptly the signals were blanked out completely.

-

	COLE and Kendall sat frozen and stiff. Each looked at the other abruptly, then Kendall moved. From the receiver, he ripped out the recording coil, and instantly jammed it into the analyzer. He started it through once, then again, then again, at different tone settings, till he found a very shrill whine that seemed to clear up most of Nichols' bad key work. "T-247—T-247—Emergency. Emergency. Randing reports the—over his horizon. Huge—ip—reign manufacture. Almost spherical. Randing's stopped. They got him I think. He said the ship was as big as a transport. Said it was headed my way. Neutrons—ont—gister—instruments. I think—is h—he's coming over the horizon. It's huge, and a war ship I think—register—instruments—neutrons."

	Kendall's finger stabbed out at a button. Instantly the noise of the other men, wakened abruptly by the mild shocks, came from behind. Kendall swung to the controls, and Cole raced back to the engine room. The hundred foot ship shot suddenly forward under the thrust of her tail ion-rockets. A blue-red cloud formed slowly behind her and expanded. Talbot appeared, .and silently took her over from Kendall. "Stations, men," snapped Kendall. "Emergency call from a miner of Pluto reporting a large armed vessel which attacked them." Kendall swung back, and eased himself against the thrusting acceleration of the overpowered little ship, toward the engine room. Cole was bending over his apparatus, making careful check-ups, closing weapon-circuits. No window gave view of space here, on the left was the tiny tender's pocket, on the right, above and below the great water tanks that fed the ion rockets, behind the rockets themselves. The tungsten metal walls were cold and grey under the sharp lights, the hunched bulks of the apparatus crowded the tiny room. Gigantic racked accumulators huddled in the corners. Martin and Garnet swung into position in the fighting-tanks just ahead of the power rooms, Canning slid rapidly through the engine room, oozed through a tiny door, and took up his position in the stern-chamber, seated half-over the great ion-rocket sheath.

	"Ready in positions, Captain Kendall," called the war-pilot as the little green lights appeared on his board.

	"Test discharges on maximum," ordered Kendall. He turned to Cole. "You start the automatic key?"

	"Right, Captain."

	"All ship-shape?"

	"Right as can be. Accumulators at thirty-seven per cent, thanks to the loaf out here. They ought to pick up our signal back on Jupiter, he's nearest now. The station on Europa will get it."

	"Talbot—we are only to investigate, if the ship is as reported. Have you seen any signs of her?"

	"No sir, and the signals are blank."

	"I'll work from here." Kendall took his position at the commanding control. Cole made way for him, and moved to the power board. One by one he tested the automatic doors, the pressure bulkheads. Kendall watched the instruments as one after another of the weapons were tested on momentary full discharge—titantic flames of five million volt protons. Then the ship thudded to the chatter of the Garnell rifles.

-

	TENSELY the men watched the planet ahead, whiter yet barely visible in the weak sunlight so far out. It was swimming slowly nearer as the tiny ship gathered speed.

	Kendall cast a glance over his detector-instruments. The radio network was undisturbed, the magnetic and electric fields recognized only the slight disturbances occasioned by the planet itself. There was nothing, noth—

	Five hundred miles away, a gigantic ship came into instantaneous being. Simultaneously, and instantaneously, the various detector systems howled their warnings. Kendall gasped as the thing appeared on his view screen, with the scale-lines below. The scale must be cock-eyed. They said the ship was fifteen hundred feet in diameter, and two thousand long!

	"Retreat," ordered Kendall "at maximum acceleration."

	Talbot was already acting. The gyroscopes hummed in their castings, and the motors creaked. The T-247 spun on her axis, and abruptly the acceleration built up as the ion-rockets began to shudder. A faint smell of "heat" began to creep out of the converter. Immense "weight" built up, and pressed the men into their specially designed seats—

	The gigantic ship across the way turned slowly, and seemed to stare at the T-247. Then it darted toward them at incredible speed till the poor little T-247 seemed to be standing still, as sailors say. The stranger was so gigantic now, the screens could not show all of him.

	"God, Buck—he's going to take us!"

	Simultaneously, the T-247 rolled, and from her broke every possible stream of destruction. The ion-rocket flames swirled abruptly toward her, the proton-guns whined their song of death in their housings, and the heavy pounding shudder of the Garnell guns racked the ship.

	Strangely, Kendall suddenly noticed, there was a stillness in the ship. The guns and the rays were still going—but the little human sounds seemed abruptly gone.

	"Talbot,—Garnet—" Only silence answered him. Cole looked across at him in sudden white-faced amazement.

	"They're gone—" gasped Cole.

	Kendall stood paralyzed for thirty seconds. Then suddenly he seemed to come to life. "Neutrons! Neutrons—and water tanks! Old Nichols was right—. "He turned to his friend. "Cole—the tender—quick." He darted a glance at the screen. The giant ship still lay alongside. A wash of ions was curling around her, splitting, and passing on. The pin-prick explosions of the

	Garnell shells dotted space around her—but never on her.

	Cole was already racing for the tender lock. In an instant Kendall piled in after him. The tiny ship, scarcely ten feet long, was powered for flights of only two hours acceleration, and had oxygen for but twenty-four hours for six men, seventy two hours for two men—maybe. The heavy door was slammed shut behind them, as Cole seated himself at the panel. He depressed a lever, and a sudden smooth push shot them away from the T-247.

	"DON'T r called Kendall sharply as Cole reached for the ion-rocket control. "Douse those lights!" The ship was dark in dark space. The lighted hull of the T-247 drifted away from the little tender—further and further till the giant ship on the far side became visible.

	"Not a light;—not a sign of fields in operation." Kendall said, unconsciously speaking softly. "This thing is so tiny, that it may escape their observation in the fields of the T-247 and Pluto down there. It's our only hope."

	"What happened? How in the name of the planets did they kill those men without a sound, without a flash, and without even warning us, or injuring us?"

	"Neutrons—don't you see?"

	"Frankly, I don't. I'm no scientist—merely a technician. Neutrons aren't used in any process I've run across."

	"Well, remember they're uncharged, tiny things. Small as protons, but without electric field. The result is they pass right through an ordinary atom without being stopped unless they make a direct hit. Tungsten, while it has a beautifully high melting point, is mostly open space, and a neutron just sails right through it, or any heavy atom. Light atoms stop neutrons better—there's less open space in 'em. Hydrogen is best. Well—a man is made up mostly of light elements, and a man stops those neutrons—it isn't surprising it killed those other fellows invisibly, and without a sound."

	"You mean they bathed that ship in neutrons?"

	"Shot it full of 'em. Just like our proton guns, only sending neutrons."

	"Well, why weren't we killed too?"

	"Water stops neutrons," I said. Figure it out."

	"The rocket-water tanks—all around us! Great masses of water—" gasped Cole. "That saved us?"

	"Right. I wonder if they've spotted

-

	THE stranger ship was moving slowly in relation to the T-247. Suddenly the motion changed, the stranger spun—and a giant lock appeared in her side, opened. The T-247 began to move, floated more and more rapidly straight for the lock. Her various weapons had stopped operating now, the hoppers of the Garnell guns exhausted, the charge of the accumulators aboard the ship down so low the proton guns had died out.

	"Lord—they're taking the whole ship!"

	"Say—Cole, is that any ship you ever heard of before? I don't think that's just a pirate!"

	"Not a pirate—what then?"

	"How'd he get inside our detector screens so fast? Watch—he'll either leave, or come after us—" The T-247 had settled inside the lock now, and the great metal door closed after it. The whole patrol ship had been swallowed by a giant. Kendall was sketching swiftly on a note-book, watching the vast ship closely, putting down a record of its lines, and formation. He glanced up at it, and then down for a few more lines, and up at it—

	The stranger ship abruptly dwindled. It dwindled with incredible speed, rushing off along the line of sight at an impossible velocity, and abruptly clicking out of sight, like an image on a movie-film that has been cut, and repaired after the scene that showed the final disappearance.

	"Cole—Cole—did you get that? Did you see—do you understand what happened?" Kendall was excitedly shouting now.

	"He missed us," Cole sighed. "It's a wonder—hanging out here in space, with the protector of the T-247's fields gone."

	"No, no, you asteroid—that's not it. He went off faster than light itself!"

	"Eh—what? Faster than light? That can't be done—"

	"He did it, I know he did. That's how he got inside our screens. He came inside faster than the warning message could relay back the information. * Didn't you see him accelerate to an impossible speed in an impossible time? Didn't you see how he just vanished as he exceeded the speed of light, and stopped reflecting it? That ship was no ship of this solar system!"

	"Where did he come from then?"

	"God only knows, but it's a long, long way off."

-

CHAPTER II

	THE IP-M-122 picked them up. 

	The M-122 got out there two days later, in response to the calls the T-247 had sent out. As soon as she got within ten million miles of the little tender, she began getting Cole's signals, and within twelve hours had reached the tiny thing, located it, and picked it up.

	Captain Jim Warren was in command, one of the old school commanders of the IP. He listened to Kendall's report, listened to Cole's tale—and radioed back a report of his own. Space pirates in a large ship had attacked the T-247, he said, and carried it away. He advised a close watch. On Pluto, his investigations disclosed nothing more than the fact that three mines had been raided, all platinum supplies taken, and the records and machinery removed.

	The M-122 was a fifty man patrol cruiser, and Warren felt sure he could handle the menace alone, and hung around for over two weeks looking for it. He saw nothing, and no further reports came of attack. Again and again, Kendall tried to convince him this ship he was hunting was no mere space pirate, and again and again Warren grunted, and went on his way. He would not send in any report Kendall made out, because to do so would add his indorsement to that report. He would not take Kendall back, though that was well within his authority.

	In fact, it was a full month before Kendall again set foot on any of the Minor Planets, and then it was Mars, the base of the M-122. Kendall, and Cole took passage immediately on an IP supply ship, and landed in New York six days later. At once, Kendall headed for Commander McLaurin's office. Buck Kendall, lieutenant of the IP, found he would have to make regular application to see McLaurin through a dozen intermediate officers.

	By this time, Kendall was savagely determined to see McLaurin himself, and see him in the least possible time. Cole, too was beginning to believe in Kendall's assertion of the stranger ship's extra-systemic origin. As yet neither could understand the strange! actions of the machine, its attack on the Pluto mines, and the capture and theft of a patrol ship.

	"There is," said Kendall angrily, "just one way to see McLaurin and see him quick. And, by God, I'm going to. Will you resign with me, Cole? I'll see him within a week then, I'll bet."

	For a minute, Cole hesitated. Then he shook hands with his friend. "Today!" And that day it was. They resigned, together. Immediately, Buck Kendall got the machinery in motion for an interview, working now from the outside, pulling the strings with the weight of a hundred million dollar fortune. Even the IP officers had to pay a bit of attention when Bernard Kendall, multi-millionaire began talking and demanding things. Within a week, Kendall did see McLaurin.

	At that time, McLaurin was fifty-three years old, his crisp hair still black as space, with scarcely a touch of the grey that appears in his more recent photographs. He stood six feet tall, a broad-shouldered, powerful man, his face grave with lines of intelligence and character. There was also a permanent narrowing of the eyes, from years under the blazing sun of space. But most of all, while those years in space had narrowed and set his eyes, they had not narrowed and set his mind. An infinitely finer character than old Jim Warren, his experience in space had taught him always to expect the unexpected, to understand the incomprehensible as being part of the unknown and incalculable properties of space and the worlds that swam in it. Besides the fine technical education he had started with, he had acquired a liberal education in mankind. When Buck Kendall, straight and powerful, came into his office with Cole, he recognized in him a character that would drive steadily and straight for its goal. Also, he recognized behind the millionaire that had succeeded in pulling wires enough to see him, the scientist who had had more than one paper published "in an amateur way".

	"Dr. Bernard Kendall?" he asked rising.

	"Yes, sir. Late Buck Kendall, lieutenant of the IP. I quit and got Cole here to quit with me, so we could see you."

	"Unusual tactics. I've had several men join up to get an interview with me," smiled McLaurin.

	"Yes, I can imagine that, but we had to see you in a hurry. A hidebound old rapscallion by the name of Jim Warren picked us up out by Pluto, floating around in a six-man tender. We made some reports to him, but he wouldn't believe, and he wouldn't send them through—so we had to send ourselves through. Sir, this system is about to be attacked by some extra-systemic race. The IP-T-247 was so attacked, her crew killed off, and the ship itself carried away."

	"I got the report Captain Jim Warren sent through, stating it was a gang of space pirates. Now what makes you believe otherwise?"

	"That ship that attacked us, attacked with a neutron gun, a gun that shot neutrons through the hull of our ship as easily as protons pass through open space. Those neutrons killed off four of the crew, and spared us only because we happened to be behind the water tanks. Masses of hydrogen will stop neutrons, so we lived, and escaped in the tender. The little tender, light-less, escaped their observation, and we were picked up. Now, when the 247 had been picked up, and locked into their ship, that ship started accelerating. It accelerated so fast along my line of sight that it just dwindled, and—vanished. It didn't vanish in distance, it vanished became it exceeded the speed of light."

	"Isn't that impossible?"

	"Not at all. It can be done—if you can find some way of escaping from this space to do it. Now if you could cut across through a higher dimension, your projection in this dimension might easily exceed the speed of light. For instance, if I could cut directly through the earth, at a speed of one thousand miles an hour, my projection on the surface would go twelve thousand miles while I was going eight. Similarly, if you could cut through the four dimensional space instead of following its surface, you'd attain a speed greater than light."

	"Might it not still be a space pirate? That's a lot easier to believe, even allowing your statement that he exceeded the speed of light."

	"If you invented a neutron gun which could kill through tungsten walls without injuring anything within, a system of accelerating a ship that didn't affect the inhabitants of that ship, and a means of exceeding the speed of light, all within a few months of each other, would you become a pirate? I wouldn't, and I don't think any one else would. A pirate is a man who seeks adventure and relief from work. Given a means of exceeding the speed of light, I'd get all the adventure I wanted investigating other planets. If I didn't have a cent before, I'd have relief from work by selling it for a few hundred millions—and I'd sell it mighty easily too, for an invention like that is worth an incalculable sum. Tie to that the value of compensated acceleration, and no man's going to turn pirate. He can make more millions selling his inventions than he can make thousands turning pirate with them. So who'd turn pirate?"

	"Right," nodded McLaurin. "I see your point. Now before I'd accept your statements in re the 'speed of light' thing, I'd want opinions from some IP physicists."

	"Then let's have a conference, because something's got to be done soon. I don't know why we haven't heard further from that fellow."

	"Privately—we have," McLaurin said in a slightly worried tone. "He was detected by the instruments of every IP observatory I suspect. We got the reports but didn't know what to make of them. They indicated so many funny things, they were sent in as accidental misreadings of the instruments. But since all the observatories reported them, similar misreadings, at about the same times, that is with variations of only a few hours, we thought something must have been up. The only thing was the phenomena were reported progressively from Pluto to Neptune, clear across the solar system, in a definite progression, but at a velocity of crossing that didn't tie in with any conceivable force. They crossed faster than the velocity of light. That ship must have spent about half an hour off each planet before passing on to the next. And, accepting your faster-than-light explanation, we can understand it."

	"Then I think you have proof."

	"If we have, what would you do about it?"

	"Get to work on those 'misreadings' of the instruments for one thing, and for a second, and more important, line every IP ship with paraffine blocks six inches thick."

	"Paraffine—why?"

	'The easiest form of hydrogen to get. You can't use solid hydrogen, because that melts too easily. Water can be turned into steam too easily, and requires more work. Paraffine is a solid that's largely hydrogen. That's what they've always used on neutrons since they discovered them. Confine your paraffine between tungsten walls, and you'll stop the secondary protons as well as the neutrons."

	"Hmmm—I suppose so. How about seeing those physicists?"

	"I'd like to see them to-day, sir. The sooner you get started on this work, the better it will be for the IP."

	"Having seen me, will you join up in the IP again?" asked McLaurin.

	"No, sir, I don't think I will. I have another field you know, in which I may be more useful. Cole here's a better technician than fighter—and a darned good fighter too—and I think that an inexperienced space-captain is a lot less useful than a second rate physicist at work in a laboratory. If we hope to get anywhere, or for that matter, I suspect, stay anywhere, we'll have to do a lot of research pretty promptly."

	"What's your explanation of that ship?"

	"One of two things: an inventor of some other system trying out his latest toy, or an expedition sent out by a planetary government for exploration. I favor the latter for two reasons: that ship was big. No inventor would build a thing that size, requiring a crew of several hundred men to try out his invention. A government would build just about that if they wanted to send out an expedition. If it were an inventor, he'd be interested in meeting other people, to see what they had in the way of science, and probably he'd want to do it in a peaceable way. That fellow wasn't interested in peace, by any means. So I think it's a government ship, and an unfriendly government. They sent that ship out either for scientific research, for trade research and exploration, or for acquisitive exploration. If they were out for scientific research, they'd proceed as would the inventor, to establish friendly communication. If they were out for trade, the same would apply. If they were out for acquisitive exploration, they'd investigate the planets, the sun, the people, only to the extent of learning how best to overcome them. They'd want to get a sample of our people, and a sample of our weapons. They'd want samples of our machinery, our literature and our technology. That's exactly what that ship got.

	"Somebody, somewhere out there in space, either doesn't like their home, or wants more home. They've been out looking for one. I'll bet they sent out hundreds of expeditions to thousands of near by stars, gradually going further and further, seeking a planetary system. This is probably the one and only one they found. It's a good one too. It has planets at all temperatures, of all sizes. It is a fairly compact one, it has a stable sun that will last far longer than any race can hope to."

	"Hmm—how can there be good and bad planetary systems?" asked McLaurin. "I'd never thought of that."

	Kendall laughed. "Mighty easy. How'd you like to live on a planet of a Cephid Variable? Pleasant situation, with the radiation flaring up and down. How'd you like to live on a planet of Antares. That blasted sun is so big, to have a comfortable planet you'd have to be at least ten billion miles out. Then if you had an interplanetary commerce, you'd have to struggle with orbits tens of billions of miles across instead of mere millions. Further, you'd have a sun so blasted big, it would take an impossible amount of energy to lift the ship up from one planet to another. If your trip was, say, twenty billions of miles to the next planet, you'd be fighting a gravity as bad as the solar gravity at earth here all the way—no decline with a little distance like that."

	"H-m-m-m—quite true. Then I should say that Mira would take the prize. It's a red giant, and it's an irregular variable. The sunlight there would be as unstable as the weather in New England. It's almost as big as Antares, and it won't hold still. Now that would make a bad planetary system."

	"It would!" laughed Kendall. But as we know—he laughed too soon, and he shouldn't have used the conditional. He should have said, "It does!"

-

CHAPTER III

	GRESTH GKAE, Commander of Expeditionary Force 93, of the Planet Sthor, was returning homeward with joyful mind. In the lock of his great ship, lay the T-247. In her cargo holds lay various items of machinery, mining supplies, foods, and records. And in her log books lay the records of many readings on the nine larger planets of a highly satisfactory planetary system.

	Gresth Gkae had spent no less than three ultra-wearing years going from one sun to another in a definitely mapped out section of space. He had investigated only eleven stars in that time, eleven stars, progressively further from the titanic red-flaming sun he knew as "the" sun. He knew it as "the" sun, and had several other appellations for it. Mira was so-named by earth-men because it was indeed a "wonder" star, in Latin, mirare means "to wonder." Irregularly, and for no apparent reason it would change its rate of radiation. So far as those inhabitants of Sthor and her sister world Asthor knew, there was no reason. It just did it. Perhaps with malicious intent to be annoying. If so, it was exceptionally successful. Sthor and Asthor experienced, periodically, a young ice age. When Mira decided to take a rest, Sthor and Asthor froze up, from the poles most of the way to the equators. Then Mira would stretch herself a little, move about restlessly and Sthor and Asthor would become uninhabitably hot, anywhere within twenty degrees of the equator.

	Those Sthorian people had evolved in a way that made the conditions endurable for savage or uncivilized people, but when a scientific civilization with a well-ordered mode of existence tried to establish itself, Mira was all sorts of a nuisance.

	Gresth Gkae was a peculiar individual to human ways of thinking. He stood some seven feet tall, on his strange, double-kneed legs and his four toed feet. His body was covered with little, short feather-like things that moved now with a volition of their own. They were moving very slowly and regularly. The space-ship was heated to a comfortable temperature, and the little fans were helping to cool Gresth Gkae. Had it been cold, every little feather would have lain down close against its neighbors, forming an admirable, wind-proof and cold-proof blanket.

	Nature, on Sthor, had original ideas of arrangement too. Sthorians possessed two eyes—one directly above the other, in the center of their faces. The face was so long, and narrow, it resembled a blunt hatchet, with the two eyes on the edge. To counter-balance this vertical arrangement of the eyes, the nostrils had been separated some four inches, with one on each of the sloping cheeks. His ears were little pink-flesh cups on short, muscular stems. His mouth was narrow, and small, but armed with quite solid teeth adapted to his diet, a diet consisting of almost anything any creature had ever considered edible. Like most successful forms of intelligent life, Gresth Gkae was omnivorous. An intelligent form of life is necessarily adaptable, and adaptation meant being able to eat what was at hand.

	One of his eyes, the upper one, was fully twice the size of the lower one. This was his telescopic eye. The lower, or microscopic eye was adapted to work for which a human being would have required a low power microscope, the upper eye possessed a more normal power of vision, plus considerable telescopic powers.

	Gresth Gkae was using it now to look ahead in the blank of space to where gigantic Mira appeared. On his screens now, Mira appeared deep violet, for he was approaching at a speed greater than that of light, and even this projected light of Mira was badly distorted.

	"The distance is half a light year now, sir," reported the navigation officer.

	"Reduce the speed, then, to normal velocity for these ranges. What reserve of fuel have we?"

	"Less than one thousand pounds. We will barely be able to stop. We were too free in the use of our weapons, I fear," replied the Chief Technician.

	"Well, what would you? We needed those things in our reports. Besides, we could extract fuel from that ore we took on at Planet Nine of Phahlo. It is merely that I wish speed in the return."

	"As we all do. How soon do you believe the Council will proceed against the new system?"

	"It will be fully a year, I fear. They must gather the expeditions together, and re-equip the ships. It will be a long time before all will have come in."

	"Could they not send fast ships after them to recall them?"

	"Could they have traced us as we wove our way from Thart to Karst to Raloork to Phahlo? It would be impossible."

-

	STEADILY the great ship had been boring on her way. Mira had been a disc for nearly two days, gigantic, two-hundred-and-fifty million mile Mira took a great deal of dwarfing by distance to lose her disc. Even at the Twin Planets, eight thousand two hundred and fifty millions of miles out, Mira covered half the sky, it seemed, red and angry. Sometimes, though, to the disgust of the Sthorians it was just red-faced and lazy. Then Sthor froze.

	"Grih is in a descendent stage," said the navigation officer presently. "Sthor will be cold when we arrive."

	"It will warm quickly enough with our news!" Gresth laughed. "A system—a delightful system—discovered. A system of many close-grouped planets. Why think—from one side of that system to the other is less of a distance than from Ansthat, our first planet's orbit, to Insthor's orbit! That sun, as we know, is steady and warm. All will be well, when we have eliminated that rather peculiar race. Odd, that they should, in some ways, be so nearly like us! Nearly Sthorian in build. I would not have expected it. Though they did have some amazing peculiarities! Imagine—two eyes just alike, and in a horizontal row. And that flat face. They looked as though they had suffered some accident that smashed the front of the face in. And also the peculiar beak-like projection. Why should a race ever develop so amazing a projection in so peculiar and exposed a position? It sticks out inviting attack and injury. Right in the middle of the face. And to make it worse, there is the air-channel, and the only air channel. Why, one minor injury to the throat would be certain to damage that passage beyond repair, and bring death. Yet such relatively unimportant things as ears, and eyes are doubled. Surely you would expect that so important a member as the air-passage would be doubled for safety.

	"Those strange, awkward arms and legs were what puzzled me. I have been attempting to manipulate myself as they must be forced to, and I cannot see how delicate or accurate manual manipulation would be possible with those rigid, inflexible arms. In some ways I feel they must have had clever minds to overcome so great a handicap to constructive work. But I suppose single joints in the arms become as natural to them as our own more mobile two.

	"I wonder if life in any intelligent form wouldn't develop somewhat similar formations, though. Think, in all parts of Sthor, before men became civilized and developed communication, even so much as twenty thousand years ago, our records show that seats and chairs were much as they are today, and much as they are, in all places among all groups. Then too, the eye has developed in many different species, and always reached much the same structure. When a thing is intended and developed to serve a given purpose, no matter who develops it, or where or how, is it not apt to have similar shapes and parts? A chair must have legs, and a seat and arm-rests and a back. You may vary their nature and their shape, but not widely, and they must be there. An eye must, anywhere, have a sensitive retina, an adjustable lens, and an adjustable device for controlling the entrance of light. Similarly there are certain functions that the body of an intelligent creature must serve which naturally tend to make intelligent creatures similar. He must have a tool—the hand—"

	"Yes, yes—I see your point. It must be so, for surely these creatures out there are strange enough in other ways.

	"But tell me, have you calculated when we shall land?"

	"In twelve hours, thirty-three minutes, Sir."

	Eleven hours later, the expedition ship had slowed to a normal space-speed. On her left hung the giant globe of Asthor, rotating slowly, moving slowly in her orbit. Directly ahead, Sthor loomed even greater. Tiny Teelan, the thousand-mile diameter moon of the Insthor system shone dull red in the reflected light of gigantic Mira. Mira herself was gigantic, red and menacing across eight and a quarter billions of miles of space.

	One hundred thousand miles apart, the twin worlds Sthor and Asthor rotated about their common center of gravity, eternally facing each other. Ten million miles from their common center of gravity, Teelan rotated in a vast orbit.

	Sthor and Asthor were capped at each pole now by gigantic white icecaps. Mira was sulking, and as a consequence the planets were freezing.

	The expedition ship sank slowly toward Sthor. A swarm of smaller craft had flown up at its approach to meet it. A gayly-colored, small ship marked the official greeting-ship. Gresth had withheld his news purposely. Now suddenly he began broadcasting it from the powerful transmitter on his ship. As the words came through on a thousand sets, all the little ships began to whirl, dance and break out into glowing, sparkling lights. On Sthor and Asthor even commotions began to be visible. A new planetary system had been found—They could move! Their overflowing populations could be spread out!

	The whole Insthor system went mad with delight as the great Expeditionary Ship settled downward.

-

CHAPTER IV

	THERE was a glint of humor in Buck Kendall's eyes as he passed the sheet over to McLaurin. Commander McLaurin looked down the columns with twinkling eyes.

	" 'Petition to establish the Lunar Mining Bank'," he read. "What-a bank! Officers: President, General James Logan, late of the IP; Vice-president, Colonel Warren Gerardhi, also late of the IP; Staff, consists of 90% ex-IP men, and a few scattered accountants. Designed by the well-known designer of IP stations, Colonel Richard Murray." Commander McLaurin looked up at Kendall with a broad grin. "And you actually got Interplanetary Life to give you a mortgage on the structure?"

	"Why not? It'll cost fifty-eight millions, with its twelve-foot tungston-beryllium walls and the heavy defense weapons against those terrible pirates. You know we must defend our property."

	"With the thing you're setting up out there on Luna, you could more readily wipe out the IP than anything else I know of. Any new defense ideas?"

	"Plenty. Did you get any further appropriations from the IP Appropriations Board?"

	McLaurin looked sour. "No. The dear taxpayers might object, and those thick-headed, clogged rockets on the Board can't see your data on the Stranger. They gave me just ten millions, and that only because you demonstrated you could shoot every living thing out of the latest IP cruiser with that neutron gun of yours. By the way, they may kick when I don't install more than a few of those."

	"Let 'em. You can stall for a few months. You'll need that money more for other purposes. You've installed that paraffine lining?"

	"Yes—I got a report on that of 'finished' last week. How have you made out?"

	Buck Kendall's face fell. "Not so hot. Devin's been the biggest help—he did most of the work on that neutron gun really—"

	"After," McLaurin interrupted, "you told him how."

	"—but we're pretty well stuck now, it seems. You'll be off duty tomorrow evening, can't you drop around to the lab.? We're going to try out a new system for releasing atomic energy."

	"Isn't that a pretty faint hope? We've been trying to get it for three centuries now, and haven't yet. What chance at it within a year or so?—which is the time you allow yourself before the Stranger returns."

	"It is, I'll admit that. But there's another factor, not to be forgotten. The data we got from correlating those 'misreadings' from the various IP posts mean a lot. We are working on an entirely different trail now. You come on out, and you can see our new apparatus. They are working on tremendous voltages, and hoping to smash the thing by a brutal bombardment of terrific voltage. We're trying, thanks to the results of those instruments, to get results with small, terrifically intense fields."

	"How do you know that's their general system?"

	"They left traces on the records of the post instruments. These records show such intensities as we never got. They have atomic energy, necessarily, and they might have had material energy, actual destruction of matter, but apparently, from the field readings it's the former. To be able to make those tremendous hops, light-years in length, they needed a real store of energy. They have accumulators, of course, but I don't think they could store enough power by the system they use to do it."

	"Well, how's your trick 'bank' out on Luna, despite its twelve-foot walls, going to stand an atomic explosion?"

	"More protective devices to come is our only hope. I'm working on three trails: atomic energy, some type of magnetic shield that will stop any moving material particle, and their faster-than-light thing. Also, that fortress—I mean, of course bank—is going to have a lot of lead-lined rooms."

	"I wish I could use the remaining money the Board gave me to lead-line a lot of those IP ships," said McLaurin wistfully. "Can't you make a gamma-ray bomb of some sort."

	"Not without their atomic energy release. With it of course, it's easy to flood a region with rays. It'll be a million times worse than radium 'C' which is bad enough."

	"Well, I'll send through this petition for armaments. They'll pass it all right, I think. They may get some kicks from old Jacob Ezra Stubbs. Jacob Ezra doesn't believe in anything war-like. I wish they'd find some way to keep him off of the Arms Petition Board. He might just as well stay home and let 'em vote his ticket uniformly 'nay.'" Buck Kendall left with a laugh.

-

	BUCK KENDALL had his troubles though. When he had reached earth again, he found that his properties totaled one hundred and three million dollars, roughly. One doesn't sell properties of that magnitude, one borrows against them. But to all intents and purposes, Buck Kendall owned two half-completed ship's hulls in the Baldwin Spaceship Yards, a great deal of massive metal work on its way to Luna, and contracts for some very extensive work on a "bank." Beyond that, about eleven millions was left.

	A large portion of the money had been invested in a laboratory, the like of which the world had never seen. It was devoted exclusively to physics, and principally the physics of destruction. Dr. Paul Devin was the Director, Cole was in charge of the technical work, and Buck Kendall was free to do all the work he thought needed doing.

	Returned to his laboratory, he looked sourly at the bench on which seven mechanicians were working. The ninth successive experiment on the release of atomic energy had failed. The tenth was in process of construction. A heavy pure tungsten dome, three feet in diameter, three inches thick, was being lowered over a clear insulum dome, a foot smaller. Inside, the real apparatus was arranged around the little pool of mercury. From it, two massive tungsten-copper alloy conductors led through the insulum housing, and outside. These, so Kendall had hoped, would surge with the power of broken atoms, but he was beginning to believe rather bitterly, they would never do so.

	Buck went on to his offices, and the main calculator room. There were ten calculator tables here, two of them in operation now.

	"Hello, Devin. Getting on?"

	"No," said Devin bitterly, "I'm getting off. Look at these results." He brought over a sheaf of graphs, with explanatory tables attached. Rapidly Buck ran through them with him. Most of them were graphs of functions of light, considered as a wave in these experiments.

	"H-m-m-m—not very encouraging. Looks like you've got the field—but it just snaps shut on itself and won't work. The lack of volume makes it break down, if you establish it, and makes it impossible to establish in the first place without the energy of matter. Not so hot. That's certainly cockeyed somewhere."

	"I'm not. The math may be."

	"Well," grinned Kendall , "it amounts to the same thing. The point is, light doesn't. Let's run over that theory again. Light is not only magnetic, but electric. Somehow it transforms electric fields cyclically into magnetic fields and back again. Now what we want to do is to transform an electric into a magnetic field and have it stay there. That's the first step. The second thing, is to have the lines of magnetic force you develop, lie down like a sheath around the ship, instead of standing out like the hairs on an angry cat, the way they want to. That means turning them ninety degrees, and turning an electric into a magnetic field means turning the space-strain ninety degrees.

	Light evidently forms a magnetic field whose lines of force reach along its direction of motion, so that's your starting point."

	"Yes, and that," growled Devin, "seems to be the finishing point. Quite definitely and clearly, the graph looped down to zero. In other words, the field closed in on itself, and destroyed itself."

	"Light doesn't vanish."

	"I'll make you all the lights you want."

	"I simply mean there must be something that will stop it."

	"Certainly. Transform it back to electric field before it gets a chance to close in, then repeat the process—the way light does."

	"That wouldn't make such a good magnetic shield. Every time that field started pulsing out through the walls of the ship it would generate heat. We want a permanent field that will stay on the job out there. I wonder if you couldn't make a conductor device that would open that field out—some special type of oscillating field that would keep it open."

	"H-m-m-m—that's an angle I might try. Any suggestions?"

	Kendall had suggestions, and rapidly he outlined a development that appeared from some of the earlier mathematics on light, and might be what they wanted.

-

	KENDALL, however, had problems of his own to work on. The question of atomic energy he was leaving alone, till the present experiment either succeeded, or, as he rather suspected, failed as had its predecessors. His present problem was to develop more fully some interesting lines of research he had run across in investigating mathematically the trick of turning electric to magnetic fields and then turning them back again. It might be that along this line he would find the answer to the speed greater than that of light. At any rate, he was interested.

	He worked the rest of that day, and' most of the next on that line—till he ran it into the ground with a pair of equations that ended with the expression: dx.dv=h/(4πm). Then Kendall looked at them for a long moment, then he sighed gently and threw them into a file cabinet. Heisenberg's Uncertainty. He'd reduced the thing to a form that simply told him it was beyond the limits of certainty and he ran it into the normal, natural uncertainty inevitable in Nature.

	Anyway he had real work to do now. The machine was about ready for his attention. The mechanicians had finished putting it in shape for demonstration and trial. He himself would have to test it over the rest of the afternoon and arrange for power and so forth.

	By evening, when Commander McLaurin called around with some of the other investors in Kendall's "bank" on Luna the thing was already started, warming up. The fields were being fed and the various scientists of the group were watching with interest. Power was flowing in already at a rate of nearly one hundred thousand horsepower per minute, thanks to a special line given them by New York Power (a Kendall property). At ten o'clock they were beginning to expect the reaction to start. By this time the fields weren't gaining in intensity very rapidly, a maximum intensity had been reached that should, they felt, break the atoms soon.

	At eleven-thirty, through the little view window, Buck Kendall saw something that made him cry out in amazement. The mercury metal in the receiver, behind its layers of screening was beginning to glow, with a dull reddish light, and little solidifications were appearing in it! Eagerly the men looked, as the solidifications spread slowly, like crystals growing in an evaporating solution.

	Twelve o'clock came and went, and one o'clock and two o'clock. Still the slow crystallization went on. Buck Kendall was casting furtive glances at the kilowatt-hour meter. It stood at a figure that represented twenty-seven thousand dollars' worth of power. Long since the power rate had been increased to the maximum available, as the power plant's normal load reduced as the morning hours came. Surely, this time something would start, but Buck had two worries. If all the enormous amount of energy they had poured in there decided to release itself at once—

	And at any rate, Buck saw they'd never dare to let a generator stop, once it was started!

	The men were a tense group around the machine at three-fifteen A. M. There remained only a tiny, dancing globule of silvery mercury skittering around on the sharp, needle-like crystals of the dull red metal that had resulted. Slowly that skittering drop was shrinking—

	Three twenty-two and a half A. M. saw the last fraction of it vanish. Tensely the men stared into the machine—backing off slowly—watching the meters on the board—. At nearly eighty thousand volts the power had been fed into it—.

	The power continued to flow, and a growing halo of intense violet light appeared suddenly on those red, needle-like crystals, a swiftly expanding halo—

	Without a sound, without the slightest disturbance, the halo vanished, and softly, gently, the needlelike crystals relapsed, melted away, and a dull pool of metallic mercury rested in the receiver.

	At eighty thousand volts, power was flowing in—

	And it didn't even sparkle.

-

CHAPTER V

	THE apparatus of the magnetic shield had been completed two days later, and set up in Buck's own laboratory. On the bench was the powerful, but small, little projector of the straight magnetic field, simply a specially designed accumulator, a super-condenser, and the peculiar apparatus Devin had designed to distort the electric field through ninety degrees to a magnetic field. Behind this was a curious, paraboloid projector made up of hundreds of tiny, carefully orientated coils. This was Buck's own contribution. They were ready for the tests.

	"I would invite McLaurin in to see this," said Kendall looking at them, and then across the room bitterly toward the alleged atomic power apparatus on the opposite bench. "I think it will work. But after that—" He stared, glaring, at the heavy tungsten dome with its heavy tungsten contacts, across which the flame of released atomic energy was supposed to have leapt. 'That was probably the flattest flop any experiment ever flopped."

	"Well—it didn't blow up. That's one comfort," suggested Devin.

	"I wish it had. Then at least it would have shown some response. The only response shown, actually, was shown on the power meter. It damn near wore out the bearings turning so fast."

	"Personally, I prefer the lack of action," laughed Devin. "Have you got that circuit hooked up?"

	"Right," sighed Kendall turning back to the work in hand. "Is Douglass in on this?"

	"Yes—in the next room. He'll let us know when he's ready. He's setting up those instruments."

	Douglass, a young junior physicist, late of the IP Physics Department, stuck his head in the door and announced his instruments were all set up.

	"Keep an eye on them. They'll move somehow, at any rate. This thing couldn't go as flat as that atom-buster of mine."

	Carefully Kendall made a few last-minute adjustments on the limiting relays, and took up his position at the power board. Devin took his place near the apparatus, with another series of instruments, similar to those Douglass was now watching in the next room, some thirty feet away, through the two-inch metal wall. "Ready," called Kendall.

	The switch shot home. Instantly Kendall, Devin, and all the men in the building jumped some six feet from their former positions. A monstrous roar of sound crashed out in that laboratory that thundered from one wall to the other, and bellowed in a Titan's fury. It thundered and growled, it bellowed and howled, the walls shook with the march and counter-march of crashing waves of sound.

	And a ten-foot wavering flame of blue-white, bellying electric fire shuddered up to the ceiling from the contact points of the alleged atomic generator. The heat, pouring out from the flashing, roaring arc sent prickles of aching burns over Kendall's skin. For ten seconds he stood in utter, paralyzed surprise as his flop of flops bellowed its anger at his disdain. Then he leapt to the power board and shut off the roaring thing, by cutting the switch that had started it.

	"Spirits of Space! Did that come to life!*

	"Atomic Energy!" Devin cried.

	"Atomic energy, hell. That's my thirty thousand dollars' worth of power breaking loose again," chortled Kendall. "We missed the atomic energy, but, sweet boy, what an accumulator we stubbed our toes on! I wondered where in blazes all that power went to. That's the answer. I'll bet I can tell you right now what happened. We built that mercury up to a new level, and that transitional stage was the red, crystalline metal. When it reached the higher stage, it was temporarily stable—but that projector over there that we designed for the purpose of holding open electric and magnetic fields just opened the door and let all that power right out again."

	"But why isn't it atomic energy? How do you know that no more than your power that you put in is coming out?" demanded Devin.

	"The arc, man, the arc. That was a high-current, and low-voltage arc. Couldn't you tell by the sound that no great voltage—as atomic voltages go—was smashing across there? If we were getting atomic voltage—and power—there'd have been a different tone to it, high and shriller.

	"Now, did you take any readings?"

	"What do you think, man? I'm human. Do you think I got any readings with that thing bellowing and shrieking in my ears, and burning my skin with ultra-violet? It itches now."

	Kendall laughed. "You know what to do for an itch. Now, I'm going to make a bet. We had those points separated for a half-million volts discharge, but there was a dust-cover thrown over them just now. That, you notice, is missing. I'll bet that served as a starter lead for the main arc. Now I'm going to start that projector thing again, and move the points there through about six inches, and that thing probably won't start itself."

-

	MOST of the laboratory staff had collected at the doorway, looking in at the white-hot tungsten discharge points, and the now silent "atomic engine." Kendall turned to them and said: "The flop picked itself up. You go on back, we seem to be all in one piece yet. Douglass, you didn't get any readings did you?"

	Sheepishly, Douglass grinned at him. "Eh—er—no—but I tore my pants. The magnetic field grabbed me and I jumped. They had some steel buttons, and a lot of steel keys—they're kinda' hard to keep on now."

	The laboratory staff broke into a roar of laughter, as Douglass, holding up his trousers with both hands was beheld. 

	"I guess the field worked," he said. 

	"I guess maybe it did," adjudged Kendall solemnly. "We have some rope here if you need it—"

	Douglass returned to his post. 

	Swiftly, Kendall altered the atomic distortion storage apparatus, and returned to the power-board. "Ready?" 

	"Check."

	Kendall shoved home the switch. The storage device was silent. Only a slight feeling of strain made itself felt, and the sudden noisy hum of a small transformer nearby. "She works, Buck!" Devin called. "The readings check almost exactly."

	"All good then. Now I want to get to that atomic thing. We can let that slide for a little bit—I'll answer it."

	The telephone had rung noisily. "Kendall Labs—Foster speaking."

	"This is Superintendent Foster, of the New York Power, Mr. Kendall. We have some trouble just now that we think your operations may be responsible for. The sub-station at North Beaumont blew all the fuses, and threw the breakers at the main station. The men out there said the transformers began howling—"

	"Right you are—I'm afraid I did do that. I had no idea that it would reach so far. How far is that from my place here?"

	"It's about a thousand yards, according to the survey maps."

	"Thanks—and I'll be careful about it. Any damage, I am responsible for? All okay?"

	"Yes, Sir, Mr. Kendall." Kendall hung up. "We stirred up a lot more dust than we expected, Devin. Now let's start seeing if we can keep track of it, Douglass, how did your readings show?"

	"I took them at the ten stations, and here they are. The stations are two feet apart."

	"H-m-m—.5—.55—.6—.7—20—198—5950—6010—6012—5920. Very, very nice—only the darned thing's got an arm as long as the law. Your readings were about .2, Devin?"

	"That's right."

	"Then these little readings are just leakage. What's our normal intensity here?"

	"About .19. Just a very small fraction less than the readings."

	"Perfect—we have what amounts to a hollow shell of magnetic force—we can move inside, and you can move outside—far enough. But you can't get a conductor or a magnetic field through it." He put the readings on the bench, and looked at the apparatus across the room. "Now I want to start right on that other. Douglass, you move that magnetostat apparatus out of the way, and leave just the 'can-opener' of ours—the projector. I'm pretty sure that's what does the deed. Devin, see if you can hunt up some electro-static voltmeters with a range in the neighborhood of—I think it'll be about eighty thousand."

-

	RAPIDLY, Douglass was dismounting the apparatus, as Devin started for the stock room. Kendall started making some new connections, reconnecting the apparatus they had intended using on the "atomic engine," largely high-capacity resistances. He seemed to perform this work mechanically, his mind definitely on something else. Suddenly he stopped, and looked carefully into the receiver of the machine. The metal in it was silvery, liquid, and here and there a floating crystal of the dull red metal. Slowly a smile spread across his face. He turned to Douglass.

	"Douglass—ah, you're through. Get on the trail of MacBride, and get him and his crew to work making half a dozen smaller things like this. Tell 'em they can leave off the tungsten shield. I want different metals in the receiver of each. Use—hmmm—sodium—copper—magnesium—aluminum, iron and chromium. Got it?"

	"Yes, sir." He left, just as Devin returned with a large electro-static voltmeter.

	"I'd like," said he, "to know how you know the voltage will range around eighty thousand."

	"K-ring excitation potential for mercury. I'm willing to bet that thing simply shoved the whole electron system of the mercury out a notch—that it simply hasn't any K-ring of electrons now. I'm trying some other metals. Douglass is going to have MacBride make up half a dozen more machines. Machines—they need a name. This—ah—this is an 'atostor'. MacBride's going to make up half a dozen of 'em, and try half a dozen metals. I'm almost certain that's not mercury in there now, at all. It's probably element 99 or something like it."

	"It looks like mercury—"

	"Certainly. So would 99. Following the periodic table, 99 would probably have an even lower melting point than mercury, be silvery, dense and heavy—and perhaps slightly radioactive. The series under the B family of Group II is Magnesium, Zinc, Cadmium, Mercury—and 99. The melting point is going down all the way, and they're all silvery metals. I'm going to try copper, and I fully expect it to turn silvery—in fact, to become silver."

	"Then let's see." Swiftly they hooked up the apparatus, realigned the projector, and again Kendall took his place at the power-board. As he closed the switch, on no-load, the electrostatic voltmeter flopped over instantly, and steadied at just over 80,000 volts.

	"I hate to say 'I told you so'," said Kendall. "But let's hook in a load. Try it on about 100 amps first."

	Devin began cutting in load. The resistors began heating up swiftly as more and more current flowed through them. By not so much as by a vibration of the voltmeter needle, did the apparatus betray any strain as the load mounted swiftly. 100—200—500—1000 amperes. Still, that needle held steady. Finally, with a drain of ten thousand amperes, all the equipment available could handle, the needle was steady as a rock, though the tremendous load of 800,-000,000 watts was cut in and out. That, to atoms, atoms by the novillions, was no appreciable load at all. There was no internal resistance whatever. The perfect accumulator had certainly been discovered.

	"I'll have to call McLaurin—" Kendall hurried away with a broad, broad smile.

-

CHAPTER VI

	"HELLO, Tom?"

	The telephone rattled in a peeved sort of way. "Yes, it is. What now? And when am I going to see you in a social sort of way again?"

	"Not for a long, long time, I'm busy. I'm busy right now as a matter of fact. I'm calling up the Vice-president of Faragaut Interplanetary Lines, and I want to place an order."

	"Why bother me? We have clerks, you know, for that sort of thing," suggested Faragaut in a pained voice.

	"Tom, do you know how much I'm worth now?"

	"Not much," replied Faragaut promptly. "What of it? I hear, as a matter of fact that you're worth even less in a business way. They're talking quite a lot down this way about an alleged bank you're setting up on Luna. I hear it's got more protective devices, and armour than any IP station in the System, that you even had it designed by an IP designer, and have a gang of Colonels and Generals in charge. J also hear that you've succeeded in getting rid of money at about one million dollars a day—just slightly shy of that."

	"You overestimate me, my friend. Much of that is merely contracted for. Actually it'll take me nearly nine months to get rid of it. And by that time I'll have more. Anyway, I think I have something like ten millions left. And remember that way back in the twentieth century some old fellow beat my record. Armour I think it was, lost a million dollars a day for a couple of months running.

	"Anyway, what I called you up for was to say I'd like to order five hundred thousand tons of mercury, for delivery as soon as possible."

	"What! Oh, say, I thought you were going in for business." Faragaut gave a slight laugh of relief.

	"Tom, I am. I mean exactly what I say. I want five—hundred—thousand—tons of metallic mercury, and just as soon as you can get it."

	"Man, there isn't that much in the system."

	"I know it. Get all there is on the market for me, and contract to take all the 'Jupiter Heavy-Metals' can turn out. You send those orders through, and clean out the market completely. Somebody's about to pay for the work I've been doing, and boy, they're going to pay through the nose. After you've got that order launched, and don't make a christening party of the launching either, why just drop out here, and I'll show you why the value of mercury is going so high you won't be able to follow it in a space ship."

	"The cost of that," said Faragaut, seriously now, "will be about—fifty-three millions at the market price. You'd have to put up twenty-six cash, and I don't believe you've got it."

	Buck laughed. "Tom, loan me a dozen millions, will you? You send that order through, and then come see what I've got. I've got a break, too! Mercury's the best metal for this use—and it'll stop gamma rays too!"

	"So it will—but for the love of the system, what of it?"

	"Come and see—tonight. Will you send that order through?"

	"I will, Buck. I hope you're right. Cash is tight, now and I'll probably have to put up nearer twenty millions, when all that buying goes through. How long will it be tied up in that deal, do you think?"

	"Not over three weeks. And I'll guarantee you three hundred percent—if you'll stay in with me after you start. Otherwise—I don't think making this money would be fair just now."

	"I'll be out to see you in about two hours, Buck. Where are you? At the estate?" asked Faragaut seriously.

	"In my lab out there. Thanks, Tom."

-

	McLAURIN was there when Tom Faragaut arrived. And General Logan, and Colonel Gerardhi. There was a restrained air of gratefulness about all of them, that Tom Faragaut couldn't quite understand. He had been looking up Buck Kendall's famous bank, and more and more he had began to wonder just what was up. The list of stockholders had read like a list of IP heroes and executives. The staff had been a list of IP men with a slender sprinkling of accountants. And the sixty-million dollar structure was to be a bank without advertising of any sort! Usually such a venture is planned and published months in advance. This had sprung up suddenly, with a strange quietness.

	Almost silently, Buck Kendall led the way to the laboratory. A small metal tank was supported in a peculiar piece of apparatus, and from it lead a small platinum pipe to a domed apparatus made largely of insulum. A little pool of mercury, with small red crystals floating in it rested in a shallow hollow surrounded by heavy conductors.

	"That's it, Tom. I wanted to show you first what we have, and why I wanted all that mercury. Within three weeks, every man woman and child in the system will be clamoring for mercury metal. That's the perfect accumulator." Quickly he demonstrated the machine, charging it, and then discharging it. It was better than 99.95% efficient on the charge, and was 100% efficient on the discharge.

	"Physically, any metal will do. Technically, mercury is best for a number of reasons. It's a liquid. I can, and do it in this, charge a certain quantity, and then move it up to the storage tank. Charge another pool, and move it up. In discharge, I can let a stream flow in continuously if I required a steady, terrific drain of power without interruption. If I wanted it for more normal service, I'd discharge a pool, drain it, refill the receiver, and discharge a second pool. Thus, mercury is the metal to use."

	"Do you see why I wanted all that metal?"

	"I do, Buck—Lord, I do," gasped Faragaut. "That is the perfect power supply."

	"No, confound it, it isn't It's a secondary source. It isn't primary. We're just as limited in the supply of power as ever—only we have increased our distribution of power. Lord knows, we're going to need a power supply badly enough before long—" Buck relapsed into moody silence.

	"What," asked Faragaut looking around him, "does that mean?"

	It was McLaurin who told him of the stranger ship, and Kendall's interpretation of its meaning. Slowly Faragaut grasped the meaning behind Buck's strange actions of the past months.

	"The Lunar Bank," he said slowly, half to himself. "Staffed by trained IP men, experts in expert destruction. Buck, you said something about the profits of this venture. What did you mean?"

	Buck smiled. "We're going to stick up IP to the extent necessary to pay for that fort—er—bank—on Luna. We'll also boost the price so that we'll make enough to pay for those ships I'm having made. The public will pay for that."

	"I see. And we aren't to stick the price too high, and just make money?"

	"That's the general idea."

	"The IP Appropriations Board won't give you what you need, Commander, for real improvements on the IP ships?"

	"They won't believe Kendall. Therefore they won't."

	"What did you mean about gamma rays, Buck?"

	"Mercury will stop them and the Commander here intends to have the refitted ships built so that the engine room and control room are one, and completely surrounded by the mercury tanks. The men will be protected against the gamma rays."

	"Won't the rays affect the power stored in the mercury—perhaps release it?"

	"We tried it out, of course, and while we can't get the intensities we expect, and can't really make any measurements of the gamma-ray energy impinging on the mercury—it seems to absorb, and store that energy!"

	"What's next on the program, Buck?"

	"Finish those ships I have building. And I want to do some more development work. The Stranger will return within six months now, I believe. It will take all that time, and more for real refitting of the IP ships."

	"How about more forts—or banks, whichever you want to call them. Mars isn't protected."

	"Mars is abandoned," replied General Logan seriously. "We haven't any too much to protect old earth, and she must come first. Mars will, of course be protected as best the IP ships can. But—we're expecting defeat. This isn't a case of glorious victory. It will be a case of hard won survival. We don't know anything about the enemy—except that they are capable of interstellar flights, and have atomic energy. They are evidently far ahead of us. Our battle is to survive till we learn how to conquer. For a time, at least, the Strangers will have possession of most of the planets of the system. We do not think they will be able to reach earth, because Commander McLaurin here will withdraw his ships to earth to protect the planet—and the great 'Lunar Bank' will display its true character."

-

CHAPTER VII

	FARAGAUT looked unsympathetically at Buck Kendall, as he stood glaring perplexedly at the apparatus he had been working on.

	"What's the matter, Buck, won't she perk?"

	"No, damn it, and it should."

	"That," pointed out Faragaut, "is just what you think. Nature thinks otherwise. We generally have to abide by her opinions. What is it—or what is it meant to be?"

	"Perfect reflector."

	"Make a nice mirror. What else, and how come?"

	"A mirror is just what I want. I want something that will reflect all the radiation that falls on it. No metal will, even in its range of maximum reflectivity. Aluminum goes pretty high, silver, on some ranges, a bit higher. But none of them reaches 99%. I want a perfect reflector that I can put behind a source of wild, radiant energy so I can focus it, and put it where it will do the most good."

	"Ninety-nine per cent, sounds pretty good. That's better efficiency than most anything else we have, isn't it?"

	"No, it isn't. The accumulator is 100% efficient on the discharge, and a good transformer, even before that, ran as high as 99.8 sometimes. They had to. If you have a transformer handling 1,000,000 horsepower, and it's even 1% inefficient, you have a heat loss of nearly 10,000 horsepower to handle. I want to use this as a destructive weapon, and if I hand the other fellow energy in distressing amounts, it's even worse at my end, because no matter how perfect a beam I work out, there will still be some spread. I can make it mighty tight though, if I make my surface a perfect parabola. But if I send a million horse, I have to handle it, and a ship can't stand several hundred thousand horsepower roaming around loose as heat, let alone the weapon itself. The thing will be worse to me than to him.

	"I figured there was something worth investigating in those fields we developed on our magnetic shield work. They had to do, you know, with light, and radiant energy. There must be some reason why a metal reflects. Further, though we can't get down to the basic root of matter, the atom, yet, we can play around just about as we please with molecules and molecular forces. But it is molecular force that determines whether light and radiant energy of that caliber shall be reflected or transmitted. Take aluminum as an example. In the metallic molecule state, the metal will reflect pretty well. But volatize it, and it becomes transparent. All gases are transparent, all metals reflective. Then the secret of perfect reflection lies at a molecular level in the organization of matter, and is within our reach. Well—this thing was supposed to make that piece of silver reflective. I missed it that time." He sighed. "I suppose I'll have to try again."

	"I should think you'd use tungsten for that. If you do have a slight leak, that would handle the heat."

	"No, it would hold it. Silver is a better conductor of heat. But the darned thing won't work."

	"Your other scheme has," laughed Faragaut. "I came out principally for some signatures. IP wants one hundred thousand tons of mercury. I've sold most of mine already, in the open market. You want to sell?"

	"Certainly. And I told you my price."

	"I know," sighed Faragaut. "It seems a shame though. Those IP board men would pay higher. And they're so damn tight it seems a crime not to make 'em pay up when they have to."

	"The IP will need the money worse elsewhere. Where do I—oh, here?"

	"Right. I'll be out again this evening. The regular group will be here?" 

	Kendall nodded as he signed in triplicate.

-

	THAT evening, Buck had found the trouble in his apparatus, for as he well knew, the theory was right, only the practical apparatus needed changing. Before the group composed of Faragaut, McLaurin and the members of Kendall's "bank," he demonstrated it.

	It was merely a small, model apparatus, with a mirror of space-strained silver that was an absolutely perfect reflector. The mirror had been ground out of a block of silver one foot deep, by four inches square, carefully annealed, and the work had all been done in a cooling bath. The result was a mirror that was so nearly a perfect paraboloid that the beam held sharp and absolutely tight for the half-mile range they tested it on. At the projector it was three and one-half inches in diameter. At the target, it was three and fifty-two one hundredths inches in diameter.

	"Well, you've got the mirror, what are you going to reflect with it now?" asked McLaurin. "The greatest problem is getting a radiant source isn't it? You can't get a temperature above about ten thousand degrees, and maintain it very long can you?"

	"Why not?" smiled Kendall.

	"It'll volatilize and leave the scene of action, won't it?"

	"What if it's a gaseous source already?"

	"What? Just a gas flame? That won't give you the point source you need. You're using just a spot-light here, with a Moregan Point-light. That won't give you energy, and if you use a gas-flame, the spread will be so great, that no matter how perfectly you figure your mirror it won't beam."

	"The answer is easy. Not an ordinary gas flame—a very extra-special kind of gas-flame. Know anything about Renwright's ionization-work?"

	"Renwright—he's an IP man isn't he?"

	"Right. He's developed a system, which, thanks to the power we can get in that atoster, will sextuply ionize oxygen gas. Now: what does that mean?"

	"Spirits of space! Concentrated essence of energy!"

	"Right. And in preparation, Cole here had one made up for me. That—and something else. We'll just hook it up—"

	With Devin's aid, Kendall attached the second apparatus, a larger device into which the silver block with its mirror surface fitted. With the uttermost care, the two physicists lined it up. Two projectors pointed toward each other at an angle, the base angles of a triangle, whose apex was the center of the mirror. On very low power, a soft, glowing violet light filtered out through the opening of the one, and a slight green light came from the other. But where the two streams met, an intense, violet glare built up. The center of action was not at the focus, and slowly this was lined up, till a sharp, violet beam of light reached out across the open yard to the target set up.

	Buck Kendall cut off the power, and slowly got into position. "Now. Keep out from in front of that thing. Put on these glasses—and watch out." Heavy, thick-lensed orange-brown goggles were passed out, and Kendall took his place. Before him, a thick window of the same glass had been arranged, so that he might see uninterruptedly the controls at hand, and yet watch unblinded, the action of the beam.

	Dully the mirror-force relay clicked. A hazy glow ran over the silver block, and died. Then—simultaneously the power was thrown from two small, compact atostors into the twin projectors. Instantly—a titanic eruption of light almost invisibly violet, spurted out in a solid, compact stream. With a roar and crash, it battered its way through the thick air, and crashed into the heavy target plate. A stream of flame and scintillating sparks erupted from the armor plate—and died as Kendall cut the beam. A white-hot area a foot across leaked down the face of the metal.

	"That," said Faragaut gently, removing his goggles. "That's not a spotlight, and it's not exactly a gas-flame. But I still don't know what that blue-hot needle of destruction is. Just what do you call that tame stellar furnace of yours?"

	"Not so far off, Tom," said Kendall happily, "except that even S Doradus is cold compared to that. That sends almost pure ultra-violet light—which, by the way, it is almost impossible to reflect successfully, and represents a temperature to be expressed not in thousands of degrees, nor yet in tens of thousands. I calculated the temperature would be about 750,000 degrees. What is happening is that a stream of low-voltage electrons—cathode rays—in great quantity are meeting great quantities of sextuply ionized oxygen. That means that a nucleus used to having two electrons in the K-ring, and six in the next, has had that outer six knocked off, and then has been hurled violently into free air.

	"All by themselves, those sextuply ionized oxygen atoms would have a good bit to say, but they don't really begin to talk till they start roaring for those electrons I'm feeding them. At the meeting point, they grab up all they can get—probably about five—before the competition and the fierce release of energy drives them out, part-satisfied. I lose a little energy there, but not a real fraction. It's the howl they put up for the first four that counts. The electron-feed is necessary, because otherwise they'd smash on and ruin that mirror. They work practically in a perfect vacuum. That beam smashes the air out of the way. Of course, in space it would work better."

	"How could it?" asked Faragaut, faintly.

	"Kendall," asked McLaurin, "can we install that in the IP ships?"

	"You can start," shrugged Kendall. "There isn't a lot of apparatus. I'm going to install them in my ships, and in the—bank. I suspect—we haven't a lot of time left."

	"How near ready are those ships?"

	"About. That's all I can say. They've been torn up a bit for installation of the atostor apparatus. Now they'll have to be changed again."

	"Anything more coming?"

	Buck smiled slowly. He turned directly to McLaurin and replied: "Yes—the Strangers. As to developments—I can't tell naturally. But if they do, it will be something entirely unexpected now. You see, given one new discovery, a half-dozen will follow immediately from it. When we announced that atostor, look what happened. Renwright must have thought it was God's gift to suffering physicists. He stuck some oxygen in the thing, added some of his own stuff—and behold. The magnetic apparatus gave us directly the shield, and indirectly this mirror. Now, I seem to have reached the end for the time. I'm still trying to get that space-release for high speed—speed greater than light, that is. So far," he added bitterly, "all I've gotten as an answer is a single expression that simply means practical zero—Heisenberg's Uncertainty Expression."

	"I'm uncertain as to your meaning," smiled McLaurin, "but I take it that's nothing new."

	"No. Nearly four centuries old—twentieth century physics. I'll have to try some other line of attack, I guess, but that did seem so darned right. It just sounded right. Something ought to happen—and it just keeps saying 'nothing more except the natural uncertainty of nature.'"

	"Try it out, your math might be wrong somewhere."

	Kendall laughed. "If it was—I'd hate to try it out. If it wasn't I'd have no reason to. And there's plenty of other work to do. For one thing, getting that apparatus in production. The IP board won't like me." Kendall smiled.

	"They don't," replied McLaurin. "They're getting more and more worried—but they've got to keep the IP fleet in such condition that it can at least catch an up-to-date freighter."

-

	GRESTH GKAE looked back at Sthor rapidly dropping behind, and across at her sister world, Asthor, circling a bare 100,000 miles away. Behind his great interstellar cruiser came a long line of similar ships. Each was loaded now not with instruments and pure scientists, but with weapons, fuel and warriors. Colonists too, came in the last ships. One hundred and fifty giant ships. All the wealth of Sthor and Asthor had been concentrated in producing those great machines. Every one represented nearly the equivalent of thirty million earth-dollars. Four and a half billions of dollars for mere materials.

	Gresth Gkae had the honor of lead position, for he had discovered the planets and their stable, though tiny, sun. Still, Gresth Gkae knew his own giant Mira was a super-giant sun—and a curse and a menace to any rational society. Our yellow-white sun (to his eyes, an almost invisible color, similar to our blue) was small, but stable, and warm enough.

	In half an hour, all the ships were in space, and at a given signal, at ten second intervals, they sprang into the superspeed, faster than light. For an instant, giant Mira ran and seemed distorted, as though seen through a port hole covered with running water, then steadied, curiously distorted. Faster than light, they raced across the galaxy.

	Even in their super-fast ships, nearly three and a half weeks passed before the sun they sought, singled itself from the star-field as an extra bright point. Two days more, and the sun was within planetary distance. They came at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic, but they leveled down to it now, and slanted toward giant Jupiter and Jovian worlds. Ten worlds, in one sweep, it was—four habitable worlds. The nine satellites would be converted into forts at once, nine space-sweeping forts guarding the approaches to the planet. Gresth Gkae had made a fairly good search of the worlds, and knew that earth was the main home of civilization in this system. Mars was second, and Venus third. But Jupiter offered the greatest possibilities for quick settlement, a base from which they could more easily operate, a base for fuels, for the heavy elements they would need—

	Fifteen million miles from Jupiter they slowed below the speed of light—and the IP stations observed them. Instantly, according to instructions issued by Commander McLaurin, a fleet of ten of the tiniest, fastest scouts darted out. As soon as possible, a group of three heavy cruisers, armed with all the inventions that had been discovered, the atostor power system, perfectly conducting power leads, the terrible UV ray, started out.

	The scouts got there first. Cameras were grinding steadily, with long range telescopic lenses, delicate instruments probed and felt and caught their fingers in the fields of the giant fleet.

	At ten second intervals, giant ships popped into being, and glided smoothly toward Jupiter.

	Then the cruisers arrived. They halted at a respectful distance, and waited. The Miran ships plowed on undisturbed. Simultaneously, from the three leaders, terrific neutron rays shot out. The paraffine-block walls stopped those—and the cruisers started to explain their feelings on the subject. They were the IP-J-37, 39, and 42. The 37 turned up the full power of the UV ray. The terrific beam of ultra-violet energy struck the second Miran ship, and the spot it touched exploded into incandescence, burned white-hot—and puffed out abruptly as the air pressure within blew the molten metal away.

	The Mirans were startled. This was not the type of thing Gresth Gkae had warned them of. Gresth Gkae himself frowned as the sudden roar of the machines of his ship rose in the metal walls. A stream of ten-inch atomic bombs shrieked out of their tubes, dully glowing green things floated out more slowly, and immediately waxed brilliant. Gamma ray bombs—but they could be guarded against—

	The three Solarian cruisers were washed in such frightful flame as they had never imagined. Streams of atomic bombs were exploding soundlessly, ineffectively in space, not thirty feet from them as they felt the sudden resistance of the magnetic shields. Hopefully, the 39 probed with her neutron gun. Nothing happened save that several gamma ray bombs went off explosively, and all the atomic bombs in its path exploded at once.

-

	GRESTH GKAE knew what that meant. Neutron beam guns. Then this race was more intelligent than he had believed. They had not had them before. Had he perhaps given them too much warning and information?

	There was a sudden, deeper note in the thrumming roar of the great ship. Eagerly Gresth Gkae watched—and sighed in relief. The nearer of the three enemy ships was crumbling to dust. Now the other two were beginning to become blurred of outline. They were fleeing—but oh, so slowly. Easily the greater ship chased them down, till only floating dust, and a few small pieces of—

	Gresth Gkae shrieked in pain, and horror. The destroyed ships had fought in dying. All space seemed to blossom out with a terrible light, a light that wrapped around them, and burned into him, and through him. His eyes were dark and burning lumps in his head, his flesh seemed crawling, stinging—he was being flayed alive—in shrieking agony he crumpled to the floor.

	Hospital attachés came to him, and injected drugs. Slowly torturing consciousness left him. The doctors began working over his horribly burned body, shuddering inwardly as the protective, feather-like covering of his skin loosened, and dropped from his body. Tenderly they lowered him into a bath of chemicals—

	"The terrible light which caused so much damage to our men," reported a physicist, "was analyzed, and found to have some extraordinary lines. It was largely mercury-vapor spectrum, but the spectrum of mercury-atoms in an impossibly strained condition. I would suggest that great care be used hereafter, and all men be equipped with protective masks when observations are needed. This sun is very rich in the infra-X-rays and ultra-visible light. The explosion of light, we witnessed, was dangerous in its consisting almost wholly of very short and hard infra-X-rays."

	The physicist had a special term for what we know as ultra-violet light. To him, blue was ultra-violet, and exceedingly dangerous to red-sensitive eyes. To him, our ultraviolet was a long X-ray, and was designated by a special term. And to him—the explosion of the atostor reservoirs was a terrible and mystifying calamity.

	To the men in the five tiny scout-ships, it was also a surprise, and a painful one. Even space-hardened humans were burned by the terrifically hard ultra-violet from the explosion. But they got some hint of what it had meant to the Mirans from the confusion that resulted in the fleet. Several of the nearer ships spun, twisted, and went erratically off their courses. All seemed uncontrolled momentarily.

	The five scouts, following orders, darted instantly toward the Lunar Bank. Why, they did not know. But those were orders. They were to land there.

	The reason was that, faster than any solarian ship, radio signals had reached McLaurin, and he, and most of the staff of the IP service had been moved to the Lunar Bank. Buck Kendall had extended an invitation in this "unexpected emergency." It so happened that Buck Kendall's invitation got there before any description of the strangers, or their actions had arrived. The staff was somewhat puzzled as to how this happened—

	And now for the satellites of great Jupiter.

	One hundred and fifty giant interstellar cruisers advanced on Callisto. They didn't pause to investigate the mines and scattered farms of the satellite, but ten great ships settled, and a horde of warriors began pouring out.

	One hundred and forty ships reached Ganymede. One hundred and thirty sailed on. One hundred and thirty ships reached Europa—and they sailed on hurriedly, one hundred and twenty-nine of them. Gresth Gkae did not know it then, but the fleet had lost its first ship. The IP station on Europa had spoken back.

	They sailed in, a mighty armada, and the first dropped through Europa's thin, frozen atmosphere. They spotted the dome of the station, and a neutron ray lashed out at it. On the other, undefended worlds, this had been effective. Here—it was answered by ten five-foot UV rays. Further, these men had learned something from the destruction of the cruisers, and ten torpedos had been unloaded, reloaded with atostor mercury, and sent out bravely.

	Easily the Mirans wiped out the first torpedo—

	Shrieking, the Miran pilots clawed their way from the controls as the fearful flood of ultra-violet light struck their unaccustomed skins. Others too felt that burning flood.

	The second torpedo they caught and deflected on a beam of alternating-current magnetism that repelled it. It did not come nearer than half a mile to the ship. The third they turned their deflecting beam on—and something went strangely wrong with the beam. It pulled that torpedo toward the ship with a sickening acceleration—and the torpedo exploded in that frightful violet flame.

-

	FIVE-FOOT diameter UV beams are nothing to play with. The Mirans were dodging these now as they loosed atomic bombs, only to see them exploded harmlessly by neutron guns, or caught in the magnetic screen. Gamma ray bombs were as useless. Again the beam of disintegrating force was turned on—

	The present opponent was not a ship. It was an IP defense station, equipped with everything Solarian science knew, and the dome was an eight foot wall of tungsto-beryllium. The eight feet of solid, ultra-resistant alloy drank up that crumbling beam, and liked it. The wall did not fail. The men inside the fort jerked and quivered as the strange beam, a small, small fraction of it, penetrated the eight feet of outer wall, the six feet or so of intervening walls, and the mercury atostor reserves.

	"Concentrate all those UV beams on one spot, and see if you can blast a hole in him before he shakes it loose," ordered the ray technician. "He'll wiggle if you start off with the beam. Train your sights on the nose of that first ship—when you're ready, call out."

	"Ready—ready—" Ten men replied. "Fire!" roared the technician. Ten titanic swords of pure ultraviolet energy, energy that practically no unconditioned metal will reflect to more than fifty per cent, emerged.

	There was a single spot of intense incandescence for a single hundredth of a second—and then the energy was burning its way through the inner, thinner skins with such rapidity that they sputtered and flickered like a broken televisor.

	One hundred and twenty-nine ships retreated hastily for conference, leaving a gutted, wrecked hull, broken by its fall, on Europa. Triumphantly, the Europa IP station hurled out its radio message of the first encounter between a fort and the Miran forces.

	Most important of all, it sent a great deal of badly wanted information regarding the Miran weapons. Particularly interesting was the fact that it had withstood the impact of that disintegrating ray.

-

CHAPTER VIII

	GRIMLY Buck Kendall looked at the reports. McLaurin stood beside him, Devin sat across the table from him. "What do you make of it, Buck?" asked the Commander.

	"That we have just one island of resistance left on the Jovian worlds. And that will, I fear vanish. They haven't finished with their arsenal by any means."

	"But what was it, man, what was it that ruined those ships?"

	"Vibration. Somehow—Lord only knows how it's done—they can project electric fields. These projected fields are oscillated, and they are tuned in with some parts of the ship. I suspect they are crystals of the metals. If they can start a vibration in the crystals of the metal—that's fatigue, metal fatigue enormously speeded. You know how a quartz crystal oscillator in a radio-control apparatus will break, if you work it on a very heavy load at the peak? They simply smash the crystals of metal in the same way. Only they project their field."

	"Then our toughest metals are useless? Can't something tough, rather than hard, like copper or even silver for instance, stand it."

	"Calcium metal's the toughest going—and even that would break under the beating those ships give it. The only way to withstand it is to have such a mass of metal that the oscillations are damped out. But—"

	The set tuned in on the IP station on Europa was speaking again. "The ships are returning. There are one hundred and twenty-nine by accurate count. Jorgsen reports that telescopic observation of the dead on the fallen cruiser show them to be a completely un-human race! They are of mottled coloring, predominately greyish brown. The ships are returning. They have divided into ten groups, nine groups of two each, and a main body of the rest of the fleet. The group of eighteen is descending within range, and we are focusing our beams on them—"

	Out by Europa, ten great UV beams were stabbing angrily toward ten great interstellar ships. The metal of the hulls glowed brilliant, and distorted slowly as the thick walls softened under the heat, and the air behind pressed against it. Grimly the ten ships came on. Torpedoes were being launched, and exploded, and now they had no effect, for the Mirans within were protected.

	The eighteen grouped ships separated, and arranged themselves in a circle around the fort. Suddenly one staggered as a great puff of gas shot out through the thin atmosphere of Europa to flare brilliantly in the lash of the stabbing UV beam. Instantly the ship righted itself, and laboured upward. Another dropped to take its place—

	And the great walls of the IP fort suddenly groaned and started in their welded joints. The faint, whispering rustle of the crumbling beam was murmuring through the station. Engineers shouted suddenly as meters leapt the length of their scales, and the needles clicked softly on the stop-pins. A thin rustle came from the atostors grouped in the great power room. "Spirits of Space—a revolving magnetic field!" roared the Chief Technician. "They're making this whole blasted station a squirrel-cage!"

	The mighty walls of eight-foot metal shuddered and trembled. The UV beams lashed out from the fort in quivering arcs now, they did not hold their aim steady, and the magnetic shield that protected them from atomic bombs was working and straining wildly. Eighteen great ships quivered and tugged outside there now, straining with all their power to remain in the same spot, as they passed on from one to another the magnetic impulses that were now creating a titanic magnetic vortex about the fort.

	"The atostors will be exhausted in another fifteen minutes," the Chief Technician roared into his transmitter. "Can the signals get through those fields, Commander?"

	"No, Mac. They've been stopped, Sparks tells me. We're here—and let's hope we stay. What's happening?"

	"They've got a revolving magnetic field out there that would spin a minor planet. The whole blasted fort is acting like the squirrel cage in an induction motor! They've made us the armature in a five hundred million horsepower electric motor."

	'They can't tear this place loose can they?"

	"I don't know—it was never—" The Chief stopped. Outside a terrific roar and crash had built up. White darts of flame leapt a thousand feet into the air, hurling terrific masses of shattered rock and soil.

	"I was going to say," the Chief went on, "this place wasn't designed for that sort of a strain. Our own magnetic field is supporting us now, preventing their magnetic field from getting its teeth on metal. When the strain comes—well, they're cutting loose our foundation with atomic bombs!"

-

	FIVE UV beams were combined on one interstellar ship. Instantly the great machine retreated, and another dropped in to take its place while the magnetic field spun on, uninterruptedly.

	"Can they keep that up long?"

	"God knows—but they have a hundred and more ships to send in when the power of one gives out, remember."

	"What's our reserve now?"

	The Chief paused a moment to look at the meters. "Half what it was ten minutes ago!"

	Commander Wallace sent some other orders. Every torpedo tube of the station suddenly belched forth deadly, fifteen-foot torpedoes, most of them mud-torpedoes, torpedoes loaded with high explosive in the nose, a delayed fuse, and a load of soft clinging mud in the rear. The mud would flow down over the nose and offer a resistance foot-hold for the explosive which empty space would not. Four hundred and three torpedoes, equipped with anti-magnetic apparatus darted out. One hundred and four passed the struggling fields. One found lodgement on a Miran ship, and crushed in a metal wall, to be stopped by a bulkhead.

	The Chief engineer watched his power declining. All ten UV beams were united in one now, driving a terrible sword of energy that made the attacked ship skip for safety instantly, yet the beams were all but useless. For the Miran reserves filled the gap, and the magnetic tornado continued.

	For seventeen long minutes the station resisted the attack. Then the last of the strained mercury flowed into the receivers, and the vast power of the atostors was exhausted. Slowly the magnetic fields declined. The great walls of the station felt the clutching lines of force—they began to heat and to strain. A low, harsh grinding became audible over the roar of the atomic bombs. The whole structure trembled, and jumped slightly. The roar of bombs ceased suddenly, as the station jerked again, more violently. Then it turned a bit, rolled clumsily. Abruptly it began to spin violently, more and more rapidly. It started rolling clumsily across the plateau—

	A rain of atomic bombs struck the unprotected metal, and the eighth breached the walls. The twentieth was the last. There was no longer an IP station on Europa.

	"The difference," said Buck Kendall slowly, when the reports came in from scout-ships in space that had witnessed the last struggle, "between an atomic generator and an atomic powerstore, or accumulator, is clearly shown. We haven't an adequate source of power."

	McLaurin sighed slowly, and rose to his feet. "What can we do?"

	"Thank our lucky stars that Faragaut here, and I, bought up all the mercury in the system, and had it brought to earth. We at least have a supply of materials for the atostors.

	"They don't seem to do much good."

	"They're the best we've got. All the photocells on earth and Venus and Mercury are at present busy storing the sun's power in atostors. I have two thousand tons of charged mercury in our tanks here in the 'Lunar Bank'."

	"Much good that will do—they can just pull and pull and pull till it's all gone. A star-fish isn't strong, but he can open the strongest oyster just because he can pull from now on. You may have a lot of power—but."

	"But—we also have those new fifteen-foot UV beams. And one fifteen-foot UV beam is worth, theoretically, nine five-foot beams, and practically, a dozen. We have a dozen of them. Remember, this place was designed not only to protect itself, but earth too."

	"They can still pull, can't they?"

	"They'll stop pulling when they get their fingers burned. In the meantime, why not use some of those IP ships to bring in a few more cargoes of charged mercury?'

	"They aren't good for much else, are they? I wonder if those fellows have anything more we don't know?"

	"Oh, probably. I'm going to work on that crumbler thing. That's the first consideration now."

	"Why?"

	"So we can move a ship. As it is, even those two we built aren't any good."

	"Would they be anyway?"

	"Well—I think I might disturb those gentlemen slightly. Remember, they each have a nose-beam eighteen feet across. Exceedingly unpleasant customers."

	"Score: Strangers; magnetic field, atomic bombs, atomic power, crumbler ray. Home team; UV beams."

	Kendall grinned. "I'd heard you were a pessimistic cuss when battle started—"

	"Pessimistic, hell, I'm merely counting things up."

	"McClellan had all the odds on Lee back in the Civil War of the States—but Lee sent him home faster than he came."

	"But Lee lost in the end."

	"Why bring that up? I've got work to do." Still smiling, Kendall went to the laboratory he had built up in the "Lunar Bank." Devin was already there, calculating. He looked unhappy.

	"We can't do anything, as far as I can see. They're using an electric field all right, and projecting it: I can't see how we can do that."

	"Neither can I," agreed Kendall, "so we can't use that weapon. I really didn't want to anyway. Like the neutron gun which I told Commander McLaurin would be useless as a weapon, they'd be prepared for it you can be sure. All I want to do is fight it, and make their projection useless."

	"Well, we have to know how they project it before we can break up the projection, don't we?"

	"Not at all. They're using an electric field of very high frequency, but variable frequency. As far as I can see, all we need is a similar variable electric field of a slightly different frequency to heterodyne theirs into something quite harmless."

	"Oh," said Devin. "We could, couldn't we? But how are you going to do that?"

	"We'll have to learn, that's all."

-

	BUCK KENDALL started trying to learn. In the meantime, the Mirans were taking over Jupiter. There were three IP stations on the planet itself, but they were vastly hindered by the thick, almost ultra violet proof atmosphere of Jupiter. Their rays were weak. And the magnetic fields of the Mirans were unaffected. Only their atomic bombs were hindered by the heavier gravity that pulled the rocks back in place faster than the bombs could throw them out. Still—a few hours of work, and the IP stations on Jupiter had rolled wildly across the flat plains of the planet like dented cans, to end in utter destruction.

	The Mirans had paid no attention to the fleeing passenger and freighter ships that left the planet, loaded to the utmost with human cargo, and absolutely no freight. The IP fleet had to go to their rescue with oxygen tanks to take care of the extra humans, but nearly three-quarters of the population of Jupiter, a newly-established population, and hence a readily mobile one, was saved. The others, the Mirans did not bother with particularly except when they happened to be near where the Mirans wanted to work. Then they were instantly destroyed by atomic bombing, or gamma rays.

	The Mirans settled almost at once, and began their work of finding on Jupiter the badly needed atomic fuels. Machines were set up, and work begun, Mirans laboring under the gravity of the heavy planet. Then, fifty ships swam up again, reloaded with fuel, and with crews consisting solely of uninjured warriors, and started for Mars.

	Mars was half way between her near conjunction and her maximum elongation with respect to Jupiter at that time. The Mirans knew their business though, for they started in on the IP station on Phobos. They were practiced by this time, and this IP station had only seven five-foot beams. In half an hour that station fell, and its sister station on Diemos followed. Three wounded ships returned to Jupiter, and ten new ships came out. The attack on Mars itself was started.

	Mars was a different proposition. There were thirty-two IP stations here, one of them nearly as powerful as the Lunar Bank station. It was equipped with four of the huge fifteen-foot beams. And it had fifteen tons of mercury, more than seven-eighths charged. The Mars Center Station was located a short ten miles from the Mars Center City, and under the immediate orders of the IP heads, Mars Center City had been vacated.

	For two days the Mirans hung off Mars, solidifying their positions on Phobos and Diemos. Then, with sixty-two ships, they attacked. They had made some very astute observations, and they started on the smaller stations just beyond the range of the Mars Center Station. Naturally, near so powerful a center, these stations had never been strong. They fell rapidly. But they had been counted on by Mars Center as auxiliary supports. McLaurin had sent very definite orders to Mars Center forbidding any action on their part, save gathering of power-supplies.

	At last the direct attack on Mars Center was launched. For the first time, the Mirans saw one of the fifteen-foot beams. Mars' atmosphere is thin, and there is little ozone. The ultra violet beams were nearly as effective as in empty space. When the Mirans dropped their ships, a full thirty of them, into the circle formation, Mars Center answered at once. All four beams started.

	Those fifteen-foot beams, connected directly to huge atostor release apparatus, delivered a maximum power of two and three-quarter billion horsepower, each. The first Miran ship struck, sparkled magnificently, and a terrific cascade of white-hot metal rolled down from its nose. The great ship nosed down and to the left abruptly, accelerated swiftly—and crashed with tremendous energy on the plain outside of Mars Center City. White, unwavering flames licked up suddenly, and made a column five hundred feet high against the dark sky. Then the wreck exploded with a violence that left a crater half a mile across.

	Three other ships had been struck, and were rapidly retreating. Another try was made for the ring formation, and four more ships were wounded, and replaced. The ring did not retreat, but the great magnetic field started. Atomic and gamma ray bombs started now, flashing sometimes dangerously close to the station as its magnetic field battled the rotating field of the ships. The four greater beams, and many smaller ones were in swift and angry action. Not more than a ten second exposure could be endured by any one ship, before it must retreat.

-

	FOR five minutes the Mirans hung : doggedly at their task. Then, wisely, they retreated. Of the fleet, not more than seven ships remained untouched. Mars Center Station had held—at what cost only they knew. Five hundred tons of their mercury had been exhausted in that brief five minutes. One hundred tons a minute had flowed into and out of the atostor apparatus. Mars Center radioed for help, when the fleet lifted.

	There was one other station on Mars that stood a good chance of survival, Deenmor Station, with three of the big beams installed, and apparatus for their fourth was in the station, and being rapidly worked over, McLaurin did a wise and courageous thing, at which every man on Mars cursed. He ordered that all IP stations save these two be deserted, and all mercury fuel reserves be moved to Deenmor and Mars Center.

	The Mirans could not land on the North Western section of Mars, nor in the South Central region. Therefore Mars was not exactly habitable to Miran ships, because the great beams had been so perfectly figured that they were effective at a range of nearly twelve hundred miles.

	Deenmor station was attacked—but it was a half-hearted attack, for Mirans were becoming distinctly skittish about fifteen foot UV beams. Two badly blistered ships—and the Mirans retreated to Jupiter. But Mira held Phobos and Diemos. In two weeks, they had set up cannon there, and proved themselves accurate long-range gunners. Against the feeble attraction of Diemos, and with Mars' gravity to help them, they began bombarding the two stations, and anything that attempted to approach them, with gamma and atomic explosive bombs. Meanwhile they amused themselves occasionally by planting a gamma-ray bomb in each of Mars' major cities. They made Mars uninhabitable for Solarians as well as for Mirans, at least until the deadly slow-action atomic explosives wore off, or were removed.

	Then the Mirans, after a lapse of three weeks while they dug in their toes on Jupiter, prepared to leap. Earth was the next goal. Miran scout-ships had been sent out before this—and severely handled by the concentrated fleets of the IP that hung grimly off Earth and Luna now. But the scouts had learned one thing. Mirans could never hope to attain a firm grasp on earth while terribly armed Luna hung like a Sword of Damocles over their heads. Further, attack on earth directly would be next to impossible, for, thanks to Faragaut's Interplanetary Company, nearly all the Mercury metal in the system was safely lodged on earth, and saturated with power. Every major city had been equipped with great UV apparatus. And neutron guns in plenty waited on small ships just outside the atmosphere to explode harmlessly any atomic or gamma bombs Miran ships might attempt to deposit.

	An attack on Luna was the first step. But that terrible, gigantic fort on Luna worried them. Yet while that fort existed, earth ships were free to come and go, for Mirans could not afford to stand near. At a distance of twenty thousand miles, small Miran ships had felt the touch of those great UV beams.

	Finally, a brief test-attack was made, with an entire fleet of one hundred ships. They drew almost into position, faster than light, faster than the signaling warnings could send their messages. In position, all those great ships strained and heaved at the mighty magnetic vortex that twisted at the field of the fort. Instantly, twelve of the fifteen-foot UV beams replied. And—two great UV beams of a size the Mirans had never seen before, beams from the two ships, "S Doradus" and "Cephid."

	The test-attack dissolved as suddenly as it had come. The Mirans returned to Jupiter, and to the outer planets where they had further established themselves. Most of the Solar System was theirs. But the Solarians still held the choicest planets—and kept the Mirans from using the mild-temperatured Mars.

-

CHAPTER IX

	"THEY can't take this, at least," sighed McLaurin as they retreated from Luna.

	"I didn't think they could—right away. I'm wondering though if they haven't something we haven't seen yet. Besides which—give them time, give them time."

	"Well, give us time, too," snapped McLaurin. "How are you coming?"

	Buck smiled. "I'm sure I don't know. I have a machine but I haven't the slightest idea of whether or not it's any good."

	"Why not?"

	"I can destroy—I hope—but I can't build up their ray. I can't test the machine because I haven't their ray to test it against."

	"What can we do to test it?"

	"The only thing I can see is to call for volunteers—and send out a six-man cruiser. If the ship's too small, they may not destroy it with the big crumbler rays. If it's too large—and the machine didn't work—we'd lose too much."

	Twelve hours later, the IP men at the Lunar Bank fort were lined up. McLaurin stepped up on the platform, and addressed the men briefly, told them what was needed. Six volunteers were selected by a process of elimination, those who were married, had dependents, officers, and others were refused. Finally, six men of the IP were chosen, neither rookies nor veterans, six average men. And one average six-man cruiser, one hundred and eleven feet long, twenty-two in diameter. It was the T-208, a sister ship of the T-247, the first ship to be destroyed.

	The T-208 started out from Luna, and with full acceleration, sped out toward Phobos. Slowly she circled the satellite, while distant scouts kept her under view. Lazily, the Miran patrol on Phobos watched the T-208, indifferent to her. The T-208 dove suddenly, after five fruitless circles of the tiny world, and with her four-foot UV beam flaming, stabbed angrily at a flight of Miran scouts berthed in the very shadow of a great battle cruiser, one of the interstellar ships stationed here on Phobos.

	Four of the little ships slumped in incandescence. Angrily the terrific sword of energy slashed at the frail little scouts.

	Angrily the Miran interstellar ship shook herself abruptly into action against this insolent cruiser. The cruiser launched a flight of the mercury-torpedoes. Flashing, burning, ultra-violet energy flooded the great ship, harmlessly, for the men were, as usual protected. The Miran answered with the neutron beam, atomic and gamma bombs—and the crumbler ray.

	Gently, softly a halo of shimmering violet luminescence built up about the T-208. The UV beam continued to flare, wavering slightly in its aim—then fell way off to one side. The T-208 staggered suddenly, wandered from her course—whole, but uncontrolled. For the men within the ship were dead.

	Majestically the Miran swung along beside the dead ship, a great magnetic tow-cable shot out toward it, to shy off at first, then slowly to be adjusted, and take hold in the magnetic shield of the T-208. The pilots of the watching scout-ships turned away. They knew what would happen.

	It did. Five—ten—twenty seconds passed. Then the "dead-man" took over the ship—and the stored power in the atostor tanks blasted in a terrible flame that shattered the metal hull to molecular fragments. The interstellar cruiser shuddered, and rolled half over at the blasting pressure. Leaking seams appeared in her plates.

	The scouts raced back to Luna as the Miran settled heavily, and a trifle clumsily to Phobos. Miran radio-beams were forcing their way out toward the Miran station on Europa, to be relayed to the headquarters on Jupiter, just as Solarian radio beams were thrusting through space toward Luna. Said the Miran messages: "Their ships no longer crumble," Said the Solarian messages: "The ships no longer crumble—but the men die."

-

	HIS deep eyes burning tensely, Buck Kendall heard the messages coming in, and rose slowly from his seat to pace the floor. "I think I know why," he said at last. "I should have thought. For that too can be prevented."

	"Why—what in the name of the Planets?" asked McLaurin. "It didn't kill the men in the forts—why does it kill the men in the ships, when the ships are protected?"

	"The protection kills them."

	"But—but they had the protective oscillations on all the way out!" protested the Commander.

	"Think how it works though. Think, man. The Enemy's field is an electric-field oscillation. We combat it by setting up a similar oscillating field in the metal of the hull ourselves. Because the metal conducts the strains, they meet, and oppose. It is not a shield—a shield is impossible, as I have said, because of energy concentration factors. If their beam carried a hundred thousand horsepower in a ten-foot square beam, in every ten square feet of our shield, we'd have to have one hundred thousand horsepower. In other words, hundreds of times as much energy would be needed in the shield, as they used in their beam. We can't afford that. We have to let the beams oppose our oscillations in the metal, where, because the metal conducts, they meet on an equal basis. But—when two oscillations of slightly different frequency meet, what is the result?"

	"In this case, a heterodyne frequency of a lower, and harmless frequency."

	"So I thought. I was partly right. It does not harm the metal. But it kills the men. It is super-sonic. The terrible, shrill sounds destroy the cells of the men's bodies. Then, when their dead hands release the controls, the automatic switches blow up the ship."

	"God! We stop one menace—and it is like the Hydra. For every head we lop off, two spring up."

	"Ah—but they are lesser heads. Look, what is the fundamental difference between sound and light?"

	"One is a vibration of matter and the—ah—eliminate the material contact!"

	"Exactly! All we need to do is to let the ships operate airless, the men in space suits. Then the air cannot carry the sounds to them. And by putting special damping materials in their suits, we can stop the vibrations that would reach them through their feet and hands. Another six-man ship must go out—but this ship will come back!"

	And with the order for another experimental ship, went the orders for commercial supplies of this new apparatus. Every IP ship must be equipped to resist it.

	Buck Kendall sailed on the six-man scout that went out this time. Again they swooped once at Phobos, again Miran scout-ships crumbled under the attack of the vicious UV beams. The Mirans were not waiting contemptuously this time. In an instant the great interstellar ship rose from its berth, its weapons working angrily. The crumbler ray snapped out at the T-253.

	Kendall stared into the periscope visor intently. Clumsily his padded hands worked at the specially adapted controls. The soft hiss of the oxygen release into his suit disturbed him slightly. The radio-phones in his helmet carried all the conversations in the ship to him with equal clarity. He watched as the great ship angled angrily up—

	His vision was momentarily obscured by a violet glow that built up and reached out gently from every point of metal in the ship. The instant Kendall saw that, the T-253 was fleeing under his hands. The test had been made. Now all he desired was safety again. The ion-rockets flared recklessly as, crushed under an acceleration of four earth-gravities, he sank heavily into his seat. Grimly the Miran ship was pursuing them, easily keeping up with the fleeing midget. The crumbler became more intense, the violet glow more vivid.

	The UV beam was reaching out directly behind now. The—

	With a cry of agony, Kendall ripped the radio-phone connection out of his suit. A soft hiss of leaking air warned him of too great violence only minutes later. For his ears had been deafened by the sudden shriek of a tremendous signal from outside!

	Instantly Kendall knew what that meant. And he could not communicate with his men! There was no metal in these special suits, even the oxygen tanks were made of synthetic plastics of tremendous strength. No scrap of vibrating metal was permissible. The padded gloves and boots protected him—but there was a new and different type of crackle and haze from the metal points now. It was almost invisible in the practically airless ship, but Kendall saw it.

	Presently he felt it, as he desperately increased his acceleration. Slow creeping heat was attacking him. The heat was increasing rapidly now. Desperately he was working at the crumbler-protection controls—but immediately set them back as they were. He had to have the crumbler protection as well—!

-

	GRIMLY the great Miran ship hung right beside them. Angrily the two four-foot UV beams flashed back—seeking some weak spot. There were none. At her absolute maximum of acceleration the little ship plunged on. Gamma and atomic bombs were washing her in flame. The heavy blocks of paraffine between her walls were long since melted, retained only by the presence of the metal walls. Smoke was beginning to filter out now, and Kendall recognized a new, and deadlier menace! Heat—quantities of heat were being poured into the little ship, and the neutron guns were doing their best to add to it. The paraffine was confined in there—and like any substance, it could be volitalized, and as a vapor, develop pressure—explosive pressure!

	The Miran seemed satisfied in his tactics so far—and changed them.

	Forty-seven million miles from earth, the Miran simply accelerated a bit more, and crowded the Solarite ship a bit. White faced, Buck Kendall was forced to turn a bit aside. The Miran turned also. Kendall turned a bit more—

	Flashing across his range of vision at an incredible speed, a tiny thing, no more than twenty feet long and five in diameter, a scout-ship appeared. Its tiny nose ultra violet beam was blasting a solid cylinder of violet incandescence a foot across in the hull of the Miran—and, to the Miran, angling swiftly across his range of vision. Its magnetic field clashed for a thousandth of a second with the T-253, instantly meeting, and absorbing the fringing edges. Then—it swept through the Miran's magnetic shield as easily. The delicate instruments of the scout instantaneously adjusted its own magnetic field as much as possible. There was resistance, enormous resistance—the ship crumpled in on itself, the tail vanished in dust as a sweeping crumbler beam caught it at last—and the remaining portion of the ship plowed into the nose of the Miran.

	The Miran's force-control-room was wrecked. For perhaps a minute and a half, the ship was without control, then the control was re-established—and in vain the telescopes and instruments searched for the T-253. Lightless, her rockets out now, her fields damped down to extinction, the T-253 was lost in the pulsing, gyrating fields of half a dozen scout-ships.

	Kendall looked grimly at the crushed spot on the nose of the Miran. His ship was drifting slowly away from the greater ship. Presently, however, the Miran put on speed in the direction of earth, and the T-253 fell far behind. The Miran was not seriously injured. But that scout pilot, in sacrificing life, had thrown dust in their eyes for just those few moments Kendall had needed to lose a lightless ship in lightless space—lightless—for the Mirans at any rate. The IP ships had been covered with a black paint, and in no time at all, Kendall had gotten his ship into a position where the energy radiations of the sun made him indetectable from the Miran's position, since the radiation of his own ship, even in the heat range, was mingled with the direct radiation of the sun. The sun was in the Miran's "eyes," both actual and instrumental.

	An hour later the Miran returned, passed the still-lightness ship at a distance of five million miles, and settled to Phobos for the slight repairs needed.

	Twelve hours later, the T-253 settled to Luna, for the many rearrangements she would need. "I rather knew it was coming," Kendall admitted sadly, "but danged if I didn't forget all about it. And—cost the life of one of the finest men in the system. Jehnson's family get a permanent pension just twice his salary, McLaurin. In the meantime—"

	"What was it? Pure heat, but how?"

	"Pure radio. Nothing but shortwave radio directed at us. They probably had the apparatus, knew how to make it, but that's not a good type of heat ray, because a radio tube is generally less than eighty percent efficient, which is a whale of a loss when you're working in a battle, and a whale of an inconvenience. We were heated only four times as much as the Miran. He had to pump that heat into a heat-reservoir—a water tank probably—to protect himself. Highly in-efficient and ineffective against a large ship. Also, he had to hold his beam on us nearly ten minutes before it would have become unbearable. He was again, trying to kill the men, and not the ship. The men are the weakest point, obviously."

	"Can you overcome that?"

	"Obviously, no. The thing works on pure energy. I'd have to match his energy to neutralize it. You know it's an old proposition, that if you could take a beam of pure, monochromatic light and divide it exactly in half, and then recombine it in perfect interference, you'd have annihilation of energy. Cancellation to extinction. The trouble is, you never do get that. You can't get monochromatic light, because light can't be monochromatic. That's due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty—my pet bug-bear. The atom that radiates the light, must be moving. If it isn't, the emission of the light itself gives it a kick that moves it. Now, no matter what the quantum might have been, it loses energy in kicking the atom. That changes the situation instantly, and incidentally the 'color' of the light. Then, since all the radiating atoms won't be moving alike, etc., the mass of light can't be monochromatic. Therefore perfect interference is impossible.

	"The way that relates to the problem in hand, is that we can't possibly destroy his energy. We can, as we do in the crumbler stunt, change it. He can't, I suspect, put too much power behind his crumbler, or he'd have crumbling going on at home. We get a slight heating from it, anyway. Into the bargain, his radio was after us, and his neutrons naturally carried energy. Now, no matter what we do, we've got that to handle. When we fight his crumbler, we actually add heat-energy to it, ourselves, and make the heating effect just twice as bad. If we try to heterodyne his radio—presto—it has twice the heat energy anyway, though we might reduce it to a frequency that penetrated the ship instead of all staying in it. But by the proposition, we have to use as much energy, and in fact, remember the 80% rule. We've got to take it and like it."

	"But," objected McLaurin, "we don't like it"

	"Then build ships as big as his, and he'll quit trying to roast you. Particularly if the inner walls are synthetic plastics. Did you know I used them in the 'S Doradus' and 'Cephid'?"

	"Yes. Were you thinking of that?"

	"No—just luck—and the fact that they're light, strong as steel almost, and can be manufactured in forms much more quickly. Only the outer hull is tungsto-beryllium. The advantage in this will be that nearly all the energy will be absorbed outside, and we'll radiate pretty fast, particularly as that tungsto-beryllium has a high radiation-factor in the long heat range."

	"What does that mean?"

	"Well, ordinary polished silver is a mighty poor radiator. Homely example: Try waiting for your coffee to cool if it's in a polished silver pot. Then try it in a tungsto-beryllium pot. No matter how you polish that tungsto-beryllium, the stuff WILL radiate heat. That's why an IP ship is always so blamed cold. You know the passenger ships use polished aluminum outer walls. The big help is, that the tungsto-beryllium will throw off the energy pretty fast, and in a big ship, with a whale of a lot of matter to heat, the Strangers will simply give up the idea."

	"Yes, but only two ships in the system compare with them in size."

	"Sorry—but I didn't build the IP fleet, and there are lots of tungsten and beryllium on earth. Enough anyway."

	"Will they use that beam on the fort? And can't we use the thing on them?"

	"They won't and we won't—though we could. A bank of those new million watt tubes—perhaps a hundred of them—and we'd have a pretty effective heater—but an awful waste of power. I've got something better."

	"New?"

	"Somewhat. I've found out how to make the mirror field in a plate of metal, instead of a block. Come on to the lab, and I'll show you."

	"What's the advantage? Oh—weight saved, and silver metal saved."

	"A lot more than that, Mac. Watch."

-

	AT the laboratory, the new apparatus looked immensely lighter and simpler than the old. The atostor, the ionizer, and the twin ion-projectors were as before, great, rigid, metal structures that would maintain the meeting point of the ions with inflexible exactitude under any acceleration strains. But now, instead of the heavy silver block in which a mirror was figured, the mirror consisted of a polished silver plate, parabolic to be sure, but little more than a half-inch in thickness. It was mounted in a framework of complex, stout metal braces.

	Kendall started the ion-flame at low intensity, so the UV beam was little more than a spotlight.

	"You missed the point, Mac. Now—watch that tungsto-beryllium plate. I'll hold the power steady. It's an eighteen inch beam—and now the energy is just sufficient to heat that tungsten plate to bright red. But—" Kendall turned over a small rheostat control—and abruptly the eighteen inch diameter spot on the tungsto-beryllium plate began contracting, it contracted till it was a blazing, sparkling spot of molten incandescence less than an inch across!

	"That's the advantage of focus. At this distance of a few hundred feet with a small beam I can do that. With a twenty-foot beam, I can get a two-foot spot at a distance of nearly ten miles! That means that the receiving end will have the pleasure of handling one hundred times the energy concentration. That would punch a hole through most anything. All you have to do is focus it. The trouble being, if it's out of focus the advantage is more than lost. So if there's any question about getting the focus, we'll get along without it."

	"A real help, if you do. That would punch a hole before the Stranger ship could turn away as they do now."

	Kendall nodded. "That's what I was after. It is mainly for the forts though. We'll have to signal the dope to the Mars Center and Deenmor stations. They can fix it up, themselves. In the meantime—all we can do is hold on and hunt, and let's hope better than the Strangers do."

-

CHAPTER X

	SADLY the convalescent Gresth Gkae listened to the reports of his lieutenants. More and more disgraced he felt as he realized how badly he had blundered in reporting the people of this system unable to cope with the attackers' weapons. Gresth Gkae looked up at his old friend and physician, Merth Skahl.

	He shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid, Merth Skahl. I am afraid. We have, perhaps, made a mistake. The better and the stronger alone should rule. Aye, but is the stronger always the better?I am afraid we have mistaken the Truth in assuming this. If we have—then may Jarth, Lord of Truth and Wisdom punish us. Mighty Jarth, if I have mistaken in following my judgments, it is not from disobedience, it is lack of Thy knowledge. The strongest—they are not always the better, are they?"

	Merth Skahl bent sharply over his friend. "Quiet thyself, Gresth Gkae. You know, and I know, you have done only your best, and surely Jarth himself can ask no better of any one. You must rest, for only by rest can those terrible burns be healed. All your stheen over half the body-area was burned off. You have been delirious for many days."

	"But Merth Skahl, think—have we disobeyed Jarth's will? It is, we know, his will that only the best and the strongest shall rule—but are the best always the strongest? An imbecile adult could destroy the life of a genius-grade child. The strongest wins, but not the best. Such would not be the will of Jarth. If we be the stronger, and the best, then it is right and just that these strange creatures should be destroyed that we may have a stable world of stable light and heat. But look and see, with what terrible swiftness these strange creatures have learned! May it not be they are the better race—that it is we who are the weaker and the poorer? Can it be that Jarth has brought us together that these people might learn—and destroy us? If they be the stronger, and the better—then may Jarth's will be done. But we must test our strength to the utmost. I must rise, and go to my laboratory soon. They have set it up?"

	"Aye, they have, Gresth Gkae. But remember, the weak and the sick make faults the strong and the well do not. Better that you rest yourself. There is little you can do while your body seeks to recover from these terrible burns."

	"You are wrong, my friend, wrong. Don't you see that my mind is clear—that it is the mind which must fight in these battles, for surely the man is weak against such things as this infra-X-radiation? Why, I am better able to fight now than are you, for I am a trained fighter of the mind, while you are a trained healer of the body. These strange beings with their stiff arms and legs, their tender skins, and—and their swift minds have fought us all too well. If we must test, let it be a test. I have heard how they so quickly solved the riddle of the crumbling field. That took us longer, and we designed it. The Counsel of Worlds put me in command—let me up, Merth Skahl, I must work."

	Concerned, the physician looked down at him. Finally he spoke again. "No, I will not permit you to leave the hospital-ship. You must stay here, but if, as you have said, the mind is what must fight, then surely you can fight well from here, for your mind is here."

	"No, I cannot, and you well know it. I may shorten my life, but what matter. 'Death is the end toward which the chemical reaction, Life, tends.' " quoted the scientist. "You know I have left my children—my immortality is assured through them. I can afford to die in peace, if it assures their welfare. Time is precious, and while my mind might work from here, it must have data on which to work. For that, I must go to the laboratories. Help me, Merth Skahl."

	Reluctantly the physician granted the request, but begged of Gresth Gkae a promise of at least six hours rest in every fifteen, and a good sleep of at least twenty-seven hours every "night." Gresth Gkae agreed, and from a wheel-chair, conducted his work, began a new line of experimentation he hoped would yield them the weapon they needed. Under him, the staff of scientists worked, aiding and advising and suggesting. The apparatus was built, tested, and found wanting. Time and again as the days passed they watched Gresth Gkae, gaining strength very, very slowly, taken away despondent at the end of his forty hours of work.

	A dozen expeditions were sent to Jupiter's poles to watch and measure and study the tremendous auroral displays there, where Jupiter's vast magnetic field sucked in countless quintillions of the flying electrons from the sun, and brought them circling in, in a vast, magnificent display of auroral ionization.

-

	"EXPEDITIONS went to the great Southern Plateau, the Plateau of Storms, where the titanic air currents resulted in an everlasting display of terrific lightnings, great burning balls of electric force floating dangerous and deadly across the frozen, ultra-cold plain.

	And the expeditions brought back data. Yet still Gresth Gkae could not sleep soundly, his thoughts intruding constantly. Hours Merth Skahl spent with him, calming him to sleep.

	"But what is this constant search? It is little enough I know of science, but why do you send our men to these spots of wonderfully beautiful, but useless natural forces. Can we somehow, do you think, turn them against the people of these worlds?"

	Softly the old Miran smiled. "Yes, you might say so. For look, it is the strange balls of electric force I want to know about. Sthor had few, but occasionally we saw them. Never were they properly investigated. I want to know their secret, for I am sure they are balls of electric forces not vastly dissimilar from the nucleus of the atom. Always we have known that no system of purely electrical forces could remain stable. Yet these strange balls of energy do. How is it? I am sure it will be of vast importance. But the direct secret I hope to learn is in this: What can be done with electric fields can nearly always be duplicated, or paralleled in magnetic fields. If I can learn how to make these electric balls of energy, can I not hope to make similar magnetic balls of energy?"

	"Yes, I see—that would seem true. But what benefit would you derive from that? You have magnetic beams now, and yet they are useless because you can get nowhere near the forts, and destroy them. How then would these benefit you?"

	"We can do nothing to those forts, because of that magnetic shield. Could we once break it down, then the fort is helpless, and one or two small atomic bombs destroy it. But—we cannot stay near, for the terrible infra-X-rays of theirs burn holes in our ships, and—in our men."

	"But look you, I can drop many atomic bombs from a distance where their beams are ineffective. Suppose I do make a magnetic ball of energy, a magnetic bomb. Then—I can drop it from a distance! We have learned that the power supply of these forts is very great—but not endless, as is ours now, thanks the vast supplies of power metal on this heavy planet. Then all we need do is stay at a distance where they cannot reach us—and drop magnetic bombs. Ah, they will be stopped, and their energy absorbed. But we can keep it up, day after day, and slowly drain out their power. Then—then our atomic bombs can destroy those forts, and we can move on!" But suddenly the animation and strength left his voice. He turned a sad, downcast face to his friend. "But Merth Skahl, we can't do it," he complained.

	"Ah—now I can see why you so want to continue this wearing and worrying work. You need time, Gresth Gkae, only time for success. Tomorrow it may be that you will see the first hint that will lead you to success."

	"Ah—I only hope it, Merth Skahl, I only hope it."

	But it was the next day that they saw the first glimpse of the secret, and saw the path that might lead to hope and success. In a week they were sending electric bombs across the laboratory. And in three days more, a magnetic bomb streaked dully across the laboratory to a magnetic shield they had set up, and buried itself in it, to explode in brilliant light and heat.

-

	FROM that day Gresth Gkae began to mend. In the three weeks that were needed to build the apparatus into ships, he regained strength so that when the first flight of five great interstellar ships rose from Jupiter, he was on the flagship.

	To Phobos they went first, to the little inner satellite of Mars, scarcely eight miles in diameter, a tiny bit of broken metal and rock, utterly airless, but scarcely more than 3700 miles from the surface of Mars below. The

	Mars Center and Deenmor forts were wasting no power raying a ship at that distance. They could, of course, have damaged it, but not severely enough to make up for the loss of their strictly limited power. The photo-cells had been working overtime, every minute of available light had been used, and still scarcely 2100 tons of charged mercury remained in the tanks of Mars Center and 1950 in the tanks at Deenmor.

	The flight of five ships settled comfortably upon Phobos, while the three relieved of duty started back to Jupiter. Immediately work was begun on the attack. The ships were first landed on the near side, while the apparatus of the projectors was unloaded, then the great ships moved around to the far side. Phobos of course rotated with one face fixed irrevocably toward Mars itself, the other always to the cold of space. Great power leads trailed beneath the ships, and to the dark side. Then there were huge water lines for cooling. On this almost weightless world, where the great ships weighing hundreds of thousands of tons on a planet, weighed so little they were frequently moved about by a single man, the laying of five miles of water conduit was no impossibility.

	Then they were ready. Mars Center came first. Automatic devices kept the aim exact, as the first of the magnetic bombs started down. At five second intervals they were projected outward, invisible globes of concentrated magnetic energy, indetectable in space. Seven seconds passed before the first became dimly visible in the thin air of Mars. It floated down, it would miss the fort it seemed—so far to one side—. Abruptly it turned, and darted with tremendously accelerating speed for the great magnetic field of the fort. With a vast blast of light, it exploded. Five seconds later a second exploded. And a third.

	Mars Center signaled scoffingly that the bombs were all being stopped dead in the magnetic atmosphere, after the bombardment had been witnessed from earth and Luna. An hour later they gave a report that they were concentrated magnetic fields of energy that would be rather dangerous—if it weren't that they couldn't even stand into the magnetic atmosphere. Three hours later Mars Center reported that they contained considerably more energy than had at first been thought. Further, which they had not carefully considered at first, they were taking energy with them! They were taking away about an equal amount of energy as each blew up.

	It was only a half hour after that that the men at Mars Center realized perfectly what it meant. Their power was being drained just a little bit better than twice as fast as they generated during the day—and since Phobos spun so swiftly across the sky.

	Deenmor got the attack just about the time Mars Center was released. Deenmor immediately began seeking for the source of it. Somewhere on Phobos—but where?

	The Mirans were experts at camouflage. Deenmor Station, realizing the menace, immediately rayed the "projector." They tore up a great deal of harmless rock with their huge UV rays. But the bomb device continued to throw one bomb each five seconds.

	When Deenmor operated from Phobos' position, Mars Center was exposed to the deadly, constant drain. A day or two later, the bombs were coming one each second and a half, for more ships had joined in the work on Phobos.

	Gresth Gkae saw the work was going nicely. He knew that now it was only a question of time before those magnetic shields would fail—and then the whole fort would be powerless. Maybe—it might be a good idea, when the forts were powerless to investigate instead of blowing them up. There might be many interesting and worthwhile pieces of apparatus—particularly the UV beams apparatus.

-

CHAPTER XI

	BUCK KENDALL entered the Communications room rather furtively. He hated the place. Cole was there, and McLaurin. Mac was looking tired and drawn, Cole not so tired, but equally drawn. The signals were coming through fairly well, because most of the disturbance was rising where the signals rose, and all the disturbance, practically, was magnetic rather than electric.

	"Deware is sending, Buck," McLaurin said as he entered. "They're down to the last fifty-five tons. They'll have more time now—a rest while Phobos sinks. Mars Center has another 250 tons, but—it's just a question of time. Have you any hope to offer?"

	"No," said Kendall in a strained voice. "But, Mac, I don't think men like those are afraid to die. It's dying uselessly they fear. Tell 'em—tell 'em they've defended not alone Mars, but all the system, in holding up the Strangers on Mars. We here on Luna have been safer because of them. And tell—Mac, tell them that in the meantime, while they defended us, and gave us time to work, we have begun to see the trail that will lead to victory/'

	"You have!" gasped McLaurin.

	"No—but they will never know!" Kendall left hastily. He went and stood moodily looking at the calculator machines—the calculator machines that refused to give the answers he sought. No matter how he might modify that original idea of his, no matter what different line of attack he might try in solving the problems of Space and Matter, while he used the system he knew was right—the answer came down to that deadly, hope-blasting expression that meant only "uncertain."

	Even Buck was beginning to feel uncertain under that constant crushing of hope. Uncertainty—uncertainty was eating into him, and destroying—

	From the Communications room came the hum and drive of the great sender flashing its message across seventy-two millions of miles of nothing. "B-u-c-k K-e-n-d-a-1-1 s-a-y-s h-e h-a-s 1-e-a-r-n-e-d s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g t-h-a-t w-i-1-1 1-e-a-d t-o v-i-c-t-o-r-y w-h-i-l-e y-o-u h-e-l-d b-a-c-k t-h-e—"

	Kendall switched on a noisy, humming fan viciously. The too-intelligible signals were drowned in its sound.

	"And—tell them to—destroy the apparatus before the last of the power is gone," McLaurin ordered softly.

	The men in Deenmor station did slightly better than that. Gradually they cut down their magnetic shield, and some of the magnetic bombs tore and twisted viciously at the heavy metal walls. The thin atmosphere of Mars leaked in. Grimly the men waited. Atomic bombs—or ships to investigate? It did not matter much to them personally—

	Gresth Gkae smiled with his old vigor as he ordered one of the great interstellar ships to land beside the powerless station, approaching from such an angle that the still-active Mars-center station could not attack. One of the fleet of Phobos rose, and circled about the planet, and settled gracefully beside the station. For half an hour it lay there quietly, waiting and watching. Then a crew of two dozen Mirans started across the dry, crumbly powder of Mars' sands, toward the fort. Simultaneously almost, three things happened. A three-foot UV beam wiped out the advancing party. A pair of fifteen foot beams cut a great gaping hole in the wall of the interstellar ship, as it darted up, like a startled quail, its weapons roaring defiance, only to fall back, severely wounded.

	And the radio messages pounded out to earth the first description of the Miran people. Methodically the men in Deenmor station used all but one ton of their power to completely and forever wreck and destroy the interstellar cripple that floundered for a few moments on the sands a bare mile away. Presently, before Deenmor was through with it, the atomic bombs stopped coming, and the atomic shells. The magnetic shield that had been reestablished for the few minutes of this last, dying sting, fell.

	Deenmor station vanished in a sudden, colossal tongue of blue-green light as the ton of atomically distorted mercury was exploded by a projector beam turned on the tank.

-

	IT was long gone, when the first atomic bombs and magnetic bombs dropped from Phobos reached the spot, and only hot rock and broken metal remained.

	Mars Center failed in fact the next time Phobos rode high over it. The apparatus here had been carefully destroyed by technicians with a view of making it indecipherable, but the Mirans made it even more certain, for no ship settled here to investigate, but a stream of atomic bombs that lasted for over an hour, and churned the rock to dust, and the dust to molten lava, in which pools of fused tungsto-beryllium alloy bubbled slowly and sank.

	"Ah, Jarth—they are a brave race, whatever we may say of their queer shape," sighed Gresth Gkae as the last of Mars Center sank in bubbling lava. "They stung as they died." For some minutes he was silent.

	"We must move on," he said at length. "I have been thinking, and it seems best that a few ships land here, and establish a fort, while some twenty move on to the satellite of the third planet and destroy the fort there. We cannot operate against the planet while that hangs above us."

	Seven ships settled to Mars, while the fleet came up from Jupiter to join with Gresth Kkae's flight of ships on its way to Luna.

	An automatically controlled ship was sent ahead, and began the bombardment. It approached slowly, and was not destroyed by the UV beams till it had come to within 40,000 miles of the fort. At 60,000 Gresth Gkae stationed his fleet—and returned to 150,000 immediately as the titanic UV beams of the Lunar Fort stretched out to their maximum range. The focus made a difference. One ship started limping back to Jupiter, in tow of a second, while the rest began the slow, methodical work of wearing down the defenses of the Lunar Fort.

	Kendall looked out at the magnificent display of clashing, warring energies, the great, whirling spheres and discs of opalescent flame, and turned away sadly. "The men at Deenmor must have watched that for days. And at Mars Center."

	"How long can we hold out?" asked McLaurin.

	"Three weeks or so, at the present rate. That's a long time, really. And we can escape if we want to. The UV beams here have a greater range than any weapon the Strangers have, and with earth so near—oh we could escape. Little good."

	"What are you going to do?"

	"I," said Buck Kendall, suddenly savage, "am going to consign all the math, machines in the universe to eternal damnation—and go ahead and build a machine anyway. I know that thing ought to be right. The math's wrong."

	"There is no other thing to try?"

	"A billion others. I don't know how many others. We ought to get atomic energy somehow. But that thing infuriates me. A hundred things that math, has predicted, that I have checked by experiment, simple little things. But—when I carry it through to the point where I can get something useful—it wriggles off into—uncertainty."

	Kendall stalked off to the laboratory. Devin was there working over the calculus machines, and Kendall called him angrily. Then more apologetic, he explained it was anger at himself. "Devin, I'm going to make that thing, if it blows up and kills me. I'm going to make that thing if this whole fort blows up and kills me. That math, has blown up in my face for four solid months, and half killed me, so I'm going to kill it. Come on, we'll make that damned junk."

	Angrily, furiously, Kendall drove his helpers to the task. He had worked out the apparatus in plan a dozen times, and now he had the plans turned into patterns, the patterns into metal.

-

	SAUCILY, the "S Doradus" made the trip to and from earth with patterns, and with metal, with supplies and with apparatus. But she had to dodge and fight every inch of the way as the Miran ships swooped down angrily at her. A swift, fighting craft could get through when the Miran fleet was withdrawn to some distance, but the Mirans were careful that no heavy-loaded freighter bearing power supply should get through.

	And Gresth Gkae waited off Luna in his great ship, and watched the steady streams of magnetic bombs exploding on the magnetic shield of the Lunar Fort. Presently more ships came up, and added their power to the attack, for here, the photo-cell banks could gather tremendous energy, and Gresth Gkae knew he would need to overcome this, and drain the accumulated power.

	Gresth Gkae felt certain if he could once crack this nut, break down earth, he would have the system. This was the home planet. If this fell, then the two others would follow easily, despite the fact that the few forts on the innermost planet, Mercury, could gather energy from the sun at a rate greater than their ships could generate.

	It took Kendall two weeks and three days to set up his preliminary apparatus. They had power for perhaps four days more, thanks to the fact that the long Lunar day had begun shortly after Gresth Gkae's impatient attack had started. Also, the "S Doradus" had brought in several hundred tons of charged mercury on each trip, though this was no great quantity individually, it had mounted up in the ten trips she had made. The "Cephid," her sister ship, had gone along on seven of the trips, and added to the total.

	But at length the apparatus was set up. It was peculiar looking, and it employed a great deal of power, nearly as much as a UV beam in fact. McLaurin looked at it sceptically toward the last, and asked Buck: "What do you expect it to do?"

	"I am," said Kendall sourly, "uncertain. The result will be uncertainty itself."

	Which, considering things, was a surprisingly accurate statement. Kendall gave the exact answer. He meant to give an ironic comment. For the mathematics had been perfectly correct, only Buck Kendall misinterpreted the answer.

	"I've followed the math, with mechanism all the way through," he explained, "and I'm putting power into it. That's all I know. Somewhere, by the laws of cause and effect, this power must show itself again—despite what the damn math, says."

	And in that of course, Kendall was wrong. Because the laws of cause and effect didn't hold in what he was doing now.

	"Do you want to watch?" he asked at length. "I'm all set to try it."

	"I suppose I may as well," smiled McLaurin. "In our close-knit little community the fate of one is of interest to all. If it's going to blow up, I might as well be here, and if it isn't I want to be."

	Kendall smiled appreciatively and replied: "Let it be on thy own head. Here she goes."

	He walked over to the power board, and took command. Devin, and a squad of other scientists were seated about the room with every conceivable type and combination of apparatus. Kendall wanted to see what this was doing. "Tubes," he called. "Circuits A and D. Tie-ins," he stopped, the preliminary switches in. "Main circuit coming." With a jerk he threw over the last contact. A heavy relay thudded solidly. The hum of a straining atostor. Then—

	An electric motor, humming smoothly stopped with a jerk. "This," it remarked in a deep throaty voice, "is probably the last stand of humanity."

	The galvanometer before which Devin was seated apparently agreed. In a rather high pitched voice it pointed out that: "If the Lunar Fort falls, the earth—" it stopped abruptly, and an electroscope beside Douglass took up the thread in a high, shrill voice, rather slurred. "—will be directly attacked."

	"This," resumed the motor in a hoarse voice, "will certainly mean the end of humanity." The motor gave up the discourse and hummed violently into action—in reverse!

	"My God!" Kendall pulled the switch open with a sagging jaw and staring eyes.

-

	THE men in the room burst into sudden startled exclamations. Kendall didn't give them time. His jaw snapped shut, and a blazing light of wonderous joy shone in his eyes. He instantly threw the switch in again. Again the humming atostor, the strain—

	Slowly Devin lifted from his seat. With thrashing arms and startled, staring eyes, he drifted gently across the room. Abruptly he fell to the floor, unhurt by the light Lunar gravity.

	"I advise," said the motor in its grumbling voice, "an immediate exodus." It stopped speaking, and practiced what it preached. It was a fifty-horse moto-generator, on a five-ton tungsto-beryllium, base, but it rose abruptly, spun rapidly about an axis at right angles to the axis of its armature, and stopped as suddenly. In mid air it continued its interrupted lecture. "Mercury therefore is the destination I would advise. There power is sufficient for—all machines." Gently it inverted itself and settled to the middle of the floor. Kendall instantly cut the switch. The relay did not chunk open. It refused to obey. Settled in the middle of the floor now, torn loose from its power leads, the moto-generator began turning. It turned faster and faster. It was shrilling in a thin scream of terrific speed, a speed that should have torn its windings to fragments under the lash of centrifugal force. Contentedly it said throatily. "Settled."

	The galvanometer spoke again in its peculiar harsh voice. "Therefore, move." Abruptly, without apparent reason, the stubborn relay clicked open. The shrilly screaming motor stopped dead instantly, as though it had had no real momentum, or had been inertialess.

	Startled, white-faced men looked at Kendall. Buck's eyes were shining with an unholy glee.

	"Uncertainty!" he shouted. "Uncertainty—uncertainty—uncertainty, you fools! Don't you see it? All the math—it said uncertainty—man, man—we've got just that—uncertainty!"

	"You're crazy," gasped McLaurin. "I'm crazy, everything's gone crazy."

	Kendall roared with sudden, joyous laughter. "Absolutely. Everything goes crazy—the laws of nature break down! Heisenberg's principle showed that the law of cause and effect weren't absolute. We've made them absolutely uncertain!"

	"But—but motors talking, instruments giving lectures—"

	"Certainly—or rather uncertainly—anything, absolutely anything. The destruction of the laws of gravity, freedom from inertia—why merely picking up a radio lecture is nothing!"

	Suddenly, abruptly, a thousand questions poured in on him. Jubilantly he answered what he could, told what he thought—and then brought order. "The battle's still on, men—we've still got to find out how to use this, now we've got it. I have an idea—that there's a lot more. I know what I'll get this time. Now help me remake this apparatus so we don't broadcast the thing."

	At once, ten times the former pace, work was done. On the radio, news was sent out that Kendall was on the right track after all. In two hours the apparatus had been vastly altered, it was in the final stage, and an entirely different sort of field set up. Again they watched as Buck applied the power.

	The atostor hummed—but no strange tricks of matter happened this time. The more concentrated, altered field was, as Buck was to find out later, "Uncertainty of the Second Degree." It was molecular uncertainty. In a field a foot and a half in diameter, Buck saw the thing created—and suddenly a brilliant green-blue flame shot up, and a great dark cloud of terrible, red-brown deadly vapor. Then an instant later, Kendall had opened the relay. Gasping, the men ran from the laboratory, shutting the deadly fumes in. "N2O4" gasped Morton, the chemist, as they reached safety. "It's exorthermic—but it formed there!"

-

	IN that instant, Kendall grasped the meaning of the choking fumes carried. "Molecular uncertainty!" he decided. "We're going back—we're getting there—"

	He altered the apparatus again, added another atostor in series, reduced the size of his sphere of forces—of strange chaos of uncertainty. Within—little was certain. Without—the laws of nature applied as ever.

	Again the apparatus was started, cautiously this time. Only a strange jumbled ionization appeared this time, then a slow, rising blue flame began to creep up, and burn hot and blue. Buck looked at it for a moment, then his face grew tense and thoughtful. "Devin—give me a half-dollar." Blankly, Devin reached in his pocket, and handed over the metal disc. Cautiously Buck Kendall tossed it toward the sphere of force. Instantly there was a flash of flame, soundless and soft-colored. Then the silver disc was outlined in light, and swiftly, inevitably crumbling into dust so fine only a blue haze appeared. In less than two seconds, the metal was gone. Only the dense blue fog remained. Then this began to go, and the leaping blue flame grew taller, and stronger.

	"We're on the track—I'm going to stop here, and calculate. Bring the data—"

	Kendall shut off the machine, and went to the calculation room. Swiftly he selected already prepared graphs, graphs of the math, he had worked on. Devin came soon, and others. They assembled the data and with tables and arithmetical machines turned it into graphs.

	Then all these graphs were fed into the machine. There were curves, and sine-curves, abrupt breaking lines—but the answer that came but when all were compounded was a perfect diagram of a flight of four steps, decending in unequal treads to zero.

	Kendall looked at it for long minutes. "That," he said at length, "is what I expected. There are four degrees of uncertainty, we generated 'Uncertainty of the First Degree', 'Mass Uncertainty' when we started. That, as here shown, takes little energy concentration. Then we increased the energy concentration and got 'Uncertainty of the Second Degree', 'Molecular Uncertainty.' Then I added more power, and reduced the field, and got 'Uncertainty of the Third Degree'—'Atomic Uncertainty.' There is 'Uncertainty of the Fourth Degree' It is barely attainable with our atostors. It is—utter uncertainty."

	"In the First Degree, the laws of mass action fail, the great broad-reaching laws. In the Second Degree, the laws of the molecules, a finer organization, break down, and anything can happen in chemistry. In the Third Degree, the laws of atomic physics break down slowly. The atom is tough. It is very compact, and we just barely attained the concentration needed with that apparatus. But—in the Third Degree, when the Atomic Laws break down into utter uncertainty, the atoms break, and only hydrogen can exist. That was the blue flame."

	"But the Fourth Degree—there is no law whatsoever, nothing in all the Universe can exist. It means—the utter destruction and release of the energy of matter!" Kendall paused for a moment. "We have won, with this. We need only make up this apparatus—and maybe make it into a weapon. You know, in the Fourth Degree, nothing in all the Universe could resist, deflect, or control it, if launched freely, and self-maintaining. I think that might be done. You see, no law affects it, for it breaks down the law. Magnetism cannot attract or repel it because magnetic fields cannot exist; there is no law of magnetic force, where this field is.

	"And you know, Devin, how I have analyzed and duplicated their magnetic ball-fields. This should be capable of formation into a ball-field.

	"We need only make it up now. We will install it in the 'S Doradus' and the 'Cephid' as a weapon. We need only install it as an energy source here. Let us start."

-

CHAPTER XII

	BUCK KENDALL with a slow smile, looked out of the port in the thick metal wall. The magnetic shield of the Lunar Fort was washed constantly with the fires of exploding magnetic bombs. The smile spread broader. "My friends," he said softly, "you can pull from now till doomsday as far as I'm concerned, and you won't even disturb us now." He looked back over his shoulder into the power room. A hunched bulk, beautifully designed and carefully finished, the apparatus that created 'Uncertainty of the Fourth Degree' was destroying matter, and creating by its destruction terrific electric fields. These fields were feeding the magnetic shield now. Under the present drain, the machine was not noticeably working. In fact, Kendall was a bit annoyed. He had tested out the energy generating properties of this machine, trying to find a limit. He had found there was no limit. The great copper conductors, charged with the same atostor force that was used in the mercury fuel, were perfect conductors, they had not heated. But the eleven thousand tons of discharged mercury metal had been completely charged in just a bit better than eleven minutes. The pumps wouldn't force it through the charging apparatus any faster than that.

	Two weeks more had passed, while the "S Doradus" and the "Cephid" were fitted out with the new apparatus Buck had designed. They were almost ready to start now.

	McLaurin came down the corridor, and stopped near Kendall. He too smiled at the Miran's attempts. "They've got a long way to go, Buck."

	"They're going a long way. Clear back home—and we'll be right along. I don't think they can outdistance us."

	"I still don't see why you couldn't use one of those Uncertainty conditions—the First Degree perhaps, and annihilate our inertia."

	"You can't control Uncertainty. By its essential character it's beyond control."

	"What's that Fourth Degree machine of yours—the material energy—if it isn't controlled and utilized Uncertainty?"

	"It's utter and utterly uncontrolled Uncertainty. The matter within that field breaks down to absolutely nothing. Within, no law whatsoever applies, but fortunately, outside the old laws of physics apply—and we can gather and use the energy which is released outside, though nothing can be done inside. Why, think man, if I could control that Uncertainty, I could do anything at all, absolutely anything. It would be a world &s unreasonable as a bad dream. Think how unreasonable those manifestations we first got were!"

	"But can't you get any control at all?"

	"Very little. Anyway, if I could get inertialess conditions at will, I'd be afraid of them. They'd make chemical reactions impossible in all probability—and life is chemical. Two atoms must come into more or less violent contact before a union takes place, and cannot if they have neither momentum nor inertia."

	"Anyway—why worry. I can't do it, because I can't control this thing. And we have the extra-space drive."

	"How does that darned thing work? Can't you drop the math, and tell me about it?"

	Kendall smiled. "Not too readily. Remember first, as to the driving system, that it works on the fabric of space. Space is, in the physical sense, a fabric woven of the threads of lines of force from every body in the universe, made up of fields and forces. It is elastic, and can transmit strains. But anything that can transmit strains, can be strained against. With the tremendous field intensities available by the material engines, I can get such fields as will 'dig their toes' into space and push.

	"That's the drive itself. It is accelerationless, because it enfolds us, and acts equally on every atom of us. By maintaining in addition a slight artificial gravity—thanks also to the intensity of those material engine fields—we can be comfortable, while we accelerate at tremendous rates."

	"That is, I think, at least allied to the Stranger's system. For the high speed drive, I do in fact use the Uncertainty. I can control it in a certain sense by determining its powers, and the limits of uncertainty, whether First, Second, Third or Fourth Degree. It advances in jumps—but on a finer plotting of the curve, you can see that each jump represents a vast series of smaller jumps. That is there is Class A, B, C, D, and so forth Uncertainty of the First Degree. Now Class A First Degree Uncertainty involves only the deepest, broadest principles. Only they break down. One of these is the law of the speed of light.

	"I'm sure that isn't the system the Strangers use, but I'm also sure there's no limit to the speed we can get."

	"Doesn't that wreck your drive system?"

	"No, because gravity and the fields I use in driving are First Degree Uncertainties of the higher classes.

	"But at any rate, it will work. And—I suspect you came to say you were ready to go."

	"I did," nodded McLaurin.

	"Still stick to your original plan?"

	McLaurin nodded. "I think it's best. You follow those fellows back to their system in the 'S Doradus' and I'll stay here in the 'Cephid' to protect the system. They may need some time to get out of the place here. And remember, we ought to be as decent as they were. They didn't bother the transports leaving Jupiter when they came in, only attacked the warships. We're bound to do the same, but we'll have to keep a watch on them none the less. So you go on ahead."

	They started down the corridor, and came presently to the huge locks where the "S Doradus" and the "Cephid" were berthed. The super-ships lay cold and grey now, men swarming in and out with last-minute supplies. Air, water, spare parts, bedding and personal equipment. Douglass, Cole, and most of the laboratory staff would go with Kendall when he followed the Strangers home. Devin and a few of the most advanced physicists would stay with McLaurin in case of need.

-

	AN hour later the "S Doradus" rose gently, soundlessly from her berth, and floated out of the opened lock-door. The "Cephid" followed her in five seconds. Still under the great screen of the fort, the lashing, corruscating colors of the magnetic bombs and the magnetic screen flashed and was iridescent. The "S Doradus" poked her great nose gently through the screen, and an instant later her titanically powerful, material-engine effortlessly discharged a great magnetic bomb, sent with the combined power of five atomic powered interstellar ships. The two ships separated now, the "Cephid" under McLaurin flashing ahead with sudden, terrific acceleration toward Mars, whispering through space at a speed that made it indetectable, faster than light. The "S Doradus" journeyed out leisurely toward the fleet of forty-seven Miran ships.

	Gresth Gkae saw the "S Doradus" and as he watched the steady progress, felt sudden fear at his heart. The ship seemed so certain—

	At a distance of thirty thousand miles, Kendall stopped. Magnetic bombs were washing his screen continuously now, seeking to exhaust the ship as all the great ships beyond poured their energy against it. A slow smile spread over Kendall's mouth as he heard the gentle hum of the barely working material engine. Carefully he aligned the nose UV beam of the "S Doradue" on the nearest of the Miran ships. Then he depressed a switch.

	There was no ion-release before the force-mirror now. Just a jet of gas whirling into a half-inch field of 'Uncertainty of the Fourth Degree.' The matter vanished instantly in released energy so stupendous that the greatest previous UV beams had been harmless things by comparison. Material energy maintained the mirror forces. Material energy gave the power that was released. And only material energy could have stood up before it. Thirty thousand miles away, a Miran ship flamed instantaneously into inconceivable incandescence, vanishing almost in blue-violet light of terrific intensity. The ship reeled away, a half-molten wreck.

	The beam spotted two more ships before it winked out. Then Kendall began sending bombs. He moved up to within 2000 miles that his aim might be accurate. They were bombs of 'Uncertainty of the Third Degree,' the Uncertainty of atomic law in bomb form. One hit the nose of the nearest ship, and a sphere five feet in diameter glowed mistly blue for a moment. Then very easily, the matter that formed the wall of the cruiser began to run and change, and presently there was only a hole, and an expanding cloud of gas. Three more flowed toward it—and the hole enlarged, and another hole appeared in a bulkhead behind.

	Kendall made a change. For the first time there came the staccato bark of the material engine under strain, as it fashioned the terrific fields of 'Uncertainty of the Ultimate Degree.' Abruptly they leapt out, invisible till they entered a magnetic screen, then run over with opalescent light as the energy of the field was sucked into them and released.

	It struck the nose of a ship—a field no larger than an apple—

	A titanic gout of energy burst out that was soundless in space. The ship suddenly opened back, opened like the peel of a banana, till a little nub remained at the further end, and the metal flaps dropped back across and behind it dejectedly. A second ship was struck, and it was struck on one side, so that it was shattered like a spent firecracker.

	Then the Miran fleet vanished in speed.

	Kendall followed them. "I think," he said with a grin, "they tried to use their radio beam, but it spread too much to do anything at that distance. And they used their rotating magnetic field, which we couldn't feel. And their crumbler ray too, of course. I wonder—are they headed only for Jupiter? No—no, they've passed him!"

	Faster than light, faster than energy could follow through space, or Uncertainty Bombs pursue, the Mirans were fleeing for home. They knew now that only in speed lay safety. Already they knew that a similar ship had appeared off Jupiter, and, after wiping out the Phobos and Mars stations with one bomb each, had cleared the Jovian Satellites with equal terrible efficiency.

	In one of the fleeing ships was a broken, tired old man, and his staff. Gresth Gkae looked back at the blank, distorted space behind them, at the swiftly dwindling sun, and spoke. "I was at fault, my friends. Jarth has spoken. They are the stronger and the wiser race. Farth Skalt has shown you—they use space fields of intensity 100. That means the energy of the ultimate destruction. Jarth used us as his instrument of testing, only to drive and stimulate that race. I do not—nay. There is no doubt now, for look."

	Plainly visible, rapidly overtaking them, the "S Doradus" appeared sharp, and luminous on the jet of distorted space.

	"We cannot escape, my friends. Shall we return to Sthor or remain in space, lost?"

	"Let us deflect our course—at least he may not know our destination." The interstellar ship turned very slightly in her course. Plainly, they saw the "S Doradus" flash on, in a straight line, headed for distant, red-glowing Mira. Gresth Gkae watched, and shrugged. Silently he put the ship back on its course, at its utmost speed. Parallel with them, near to them, the "S Doradus" flashed on. Day after day, the two hurled through space faster than light. Gradually Mira brightened, and at last became a disc.

-

	GRESTH GKAE slowed his ships, and Kendall, watching, slowed to match his speed. Five billion miles from Sthor, they had reached normal space speeds. Viciously the Miran fleet attacked the lone ship from earth. Their rays, their bombs, their every weapon was flaming. Great interstellar ships flashed suddenly into speeds greater than that of light, seeking to ram and destroy the smaller ship. The "S Doradus" flashed into equal or greater speed, and eluded them.

	Kendall had determined now, which was the leader's ship.

	Gresth Gkae watched dully as his ships attempted to destroy the single, small ship. He sighed in resignation, and turned to walk back to the chapel aboard the ship. One last prayer to Jarth—

	Gresth Gkae stopped abruptly. The great ship was lurching strangely. Men shouted sudden, frightened cries.

	The clanking and thud of relays sounded, the shrill of alarms. Then the alarms stopped, and suddenly the whole great ship vibrated to an infinitely deep voice speaking in perfect Sthorian. The voice remarked solemnly, in great, vibrant tones, that they would certainly receive news presently from the Expeditions. It went on for some seconds to discuss the conditions as reported in the new system. Then it stopped abruptly. An electric motor just above Gresth Gkae's head suddenly hummed into action without reason or power connection. Almost simultaneously he heard the shouts of startled men as the great lock doors began to open into space of their own accord, bulkhead doors slipped shut as the roar of escaping air echoed in the ship.

	Then it was all over. Gresth Gkae ran to the control room. The Mirans there looked up at him with drawn faces.

	"The instruments—Gresth Gkae—the instruments. The instruments read impossible things, the motors worked without reason, the fields fluctuated—the atomic engines stopped and the magnetic shield broke down and gripped part of the ship instead!" reported the bewildered pilot.

	"I do not know—some strange weapon of—" began the old scientist. Something luminous and huge twisted suddenly through space toward them, a bomb of "Uncertainty of the First Degree." It wrapped the ship silently—and again strange, things happened. Abruptly the ship started whirling violently, yet without centrifugal force. The heavens wheeled crazily, and turned about three axes simultaneously. There was no gyroscopic effect to hold them!

	Gradually the thing died out. Then a great field seemed to catch the ship, and hurl it away from its companions. Abruptly the pilot applied all his power to pull free. In vain.

	Gresth Gkae shook his head slowly, and raised the pilot's hands from the board. "Let them do as they will. I think they mean us no real harm, Thart Kralt. They can, we know, destroy us in an instant. Perhaps he wants us to go somewhere with him—" Gresth Gkae smiled sadly, "and anyway, we can do nothing."

	For nearly a billion miles the great ship was hurled through space at tremendous normal-space velocity. Then abruptly it was halted, without a sign of strain or hurt. The great twenty-foot UV beam on the nose of the "S Doradus" broke into glowing gentle red light. It flashed twice. There was a pause. Then it flashed four times. A long wait. Then three times, a pause and nine times. A wait. Four times, a pause, sixteen times. Then it stopped.

	A slow smile of ineffable joy spread over Gresth Gkae's face. "Jarth Be Praised. He can destroy, but does not wish to. Ah, Thart Kralt, turn your spotlight toward him, and flash it five times, then pause, and flash it twenty-five times, for he is trying to start communications with us. Jarth is wise beyond all understanding. They were the weaker race, and they are the stronger. But also they are the better, for they could destroy, and they do not, but seek only to communicate."

-

EPILOGUE

	THE interstellar liner "Mirasol" settled gently to Sthor, having circled wide of Asthor, and from her hold a cargo of the heavy Jovian elements was discharged, while a mixed stream of Solarians and Mirans came from her passenger quarters.

	A delegation of Mirans met the new Ambassador from Sol, Commander McLaurin, and conducted him joyfully to the Central Government Group. Beside the great buildings, a battered, scarred interstellar ship lay, her rear section a mass of great patches, rudely applied, and rudely made, mere cast metal plates.

	Gresth Gkae welcomed Commander McLaurin to the Government Hall. "Your arrival today, Commander McLaurin, was most fortunate/' he said in the interstellar language that had been developed, "for but yesterday Gresth Talak, my brother, arrived in his ship. Before we made that fortunate-unfortunate expedition against your system, we waited for him, and he did not come, so we knew his ship had, like others, been lost."

	"He arrived only yesterday, some seventy hours ago, and explained how it had come about. He too found a solar system. But he was less fortunate than I, and while exploring this uninhabited system, far out still from the central sun, where there should have been no masses of matter, one of those rare things, a giant stony meteor that even a magnetic shield will not stop careened into the rear of his ship. Damaged badly, barely able to move, they settled to a planet. The atmosphere was breathable, the temperature mild. But while they could navigate planetary distances, they could not return, so for nearly four and a half of your years they remained there, working, working to repair their ship.

	"They have done it at last. And they have returned. And best of all, after a four-year stay there, they know all they need know about that system of eleven planets. It is compact as yours, with an ultra-light sun such as yours, and four of the planets are habitable. Together we can colonize that system! It is a system of stable heat and stable light. And it is small, yet large enough. And with the devices such as your new energy has permitted, we need never fear the stony meteors again." Gresth Gkae smiled happily. "Still better—it is inhabited only by the lowest forms of life. It is too costly to both races when Jarth sees fit to stimulate them by throwing one against the other, despite the good things that may come later."

The End

The Planeteers
(1936-39)*

Contents

THE BRAIN STEALERS OF MARS
THE DOUBLE MINDS
THE IMMORTALITY SEEKERS
THE TENTH WORLD
THE BRAIN PIRATES

-

THE BRAIN STEALERS OF MARS
I - Imitation of Life

	ROD BLAKE looked up with a deep chuckle. The sky of Mars was almost black, despite the small, brilliant sun, and the brighter stars and planets that shone visibly, Earth most brilliant of all, scarcely sixty million miles away.

	"They'll have a fine time chasing us, back there, Ted." He nodded toward the brilliant planet.

	Ted Penton smiled beatifically.

	"They're probably investigating all our known haunts. It's their own fault if they can't find us—outlawing research on atomic power."

	"They had some provocation, you must admit. Koelenberg should have been more careful. When a man takes off some three hundred square miles of territory spang in the center of Europe in an atomic explosion, you can't blame the rest of the world for being a bit skittish about atomic power research."

	"But they might have had the wit to see that anybody that did get the secret would not wait around for the Atomic Power Research Death Penalty, but would light out for parts and planets quite unknown and leave the mess in the hands of a lawyer till the fireworks quieted down. It was obvious that when we developed atomic power we'd be the first men to reach Mars, and nobody could follow to bring us back unless they accepted the hated atomic power and used it," argued Blake.

	"Wonder how old Jamison Montgomery Palborough made out with our claims," mused Penton. "He said he'd have it right in three months, and this is the third month and the third planet. We'll let the government stew, and sail on, fair friend, sail on. I still say that was a ruined city we saw as we landed."

	"I think it was, myself, but I remember the way you did that kangaroo leap on your neck the first time you stepped out on the moon. You certainly saw stars."

	"We're professionals at walking under cockeyed gravities now. Moon—Venus—"

	"Yes, but I'm still not risking my neck on the attitude of a strange planet and a strange race at the same time. We'll investigate the planet a bit first, and yonder mudhole is the first stop. Come on."

	They reached the top of one of the long rolling sand dunes and the country was spread out below them. It looked exactly as it had been from the last dune that they had struggled up, just as utterly barren, utterly bleak, and unendingly red. Like an iron planet, badly neglected and rusted.

	The mudhole was directly beneath them, an expanse of red and brown slime, dotted here and there with clumps of dark red foliage.

	"The stuff looks like Japanese maple," said Blake.

	"Evidently doesn't use chlorophyll to get the sun's energy. Let's collect a few samples. You have your violet-gun and I have mine. I guess it's safe to split. There's a large group of things down on the left that look a little different. I'll take them while you go straight ahead. Gather any flowers, fruits, berries or seeds you see. Few leaves—oh, you know. What we got on Venus. General junk. If you find a small plant, put on your gloves and yank it out. If you see a big one, steer clear. Venus had some peculiarly unpleasant specimens."

	Blake groaned. "You telling me. I'm the bright boy that fell for that pretty fruit and climbed right up between the stems of a scissor tree. Uhuh. I shoot 'em down. Go ahead, and good luck."

	Penton swung off to the left, while Blake slogged ahead to a group of weird-looking plants. They were dome-shaped things, three feet high, with a dozen long, drooping, sword-shaped leaves.

	Cautiously Blake tossed a bit of stone into the center of one. It gave off a mournful, drumming boom, but the leaves didn't budge. He tried a rope on one leaf but the leaf neither stabbed, grabbed, nor jerked away, as he had half expected after his lesson with the ferocious plants of Venus. Blake pulled a leaf off, then a few more. The plant acted quite plant-like, which pleasantly surprised him.

	The whole region seemed seeded with a number of the things, nearly all about the same size. A few, sprinkled here and there, were in various stages of development, from a few protruding sword-leaves, to little three-inch domes on up to the full-grown plant. Carefully avoiding the larger ones, Rod plucked two small ones and thrust them into his specimen bag. Then he stood off and looked at one of the domes that squatted so dejectedly in the thick, gummy mud.

	"I suppose you have some reason for being like that, but a good solid tree would put you all in the shade, and collect all the sunlight going. Which is little enough." He looked at them for some seconds picturing a stout Japanese maple in this outlandish red-brown gum.

	He shrugged, and wandered on, seeking some other plant. There were few others. Apparently this particular species throttled out other varieties very thoroughly. He wasn't very anxious anyway; he was much more interested in the ruined city they had seen from the ship. Ted Penton was cautious.

	Eventually Blake followed his winding footsteps back toward the ship, and about where his footsteps showed he'd gathered his first samples, he stopped. There was a Japanese maple there. It stood some fifteen feet tall, and the bark was beautifully regular in appearance. The leaves were nearly a quarter of an inch thick, and arranged with a peculiar regularity, as were the branches. But it was very definitely a Japanese maple.

	Rod Blake's jaw put a severe strain on the hinges thereof. It dropped some three inches, and Blake stared. He stared with steady, blank gaze at that perfectly impossible Japanese maple. He gawked dumbly. Then his jaw snapped shut abruptly, and he cursed softly. The leaves were stirring gently, and they were not a quarter of an inch thick. They were paper thin, and delicately veined. Further, the tree was visibly taller, and three new branches had started to sprout, irregularly now. They sprouted as he watched, growing not as twigs but as fully formed branches extending themselves gradually. As he stared harder at them they dwindled rapidly to longer twigs, and grew normally.

	Rod let out a loud yip, and made tracks rapidly extending themselves toward the point where he'd last seen Ted Penton. Penton's tracks curved off, and Rod steamed down as fast as Mars' light gravity permitted, to pull up short as he rounded a corner of another sword-leaf dome clump. "Ted," he panted, "come over here. There's a—a—weird thing. A—it looks like a Japanese maple, but it doesn't. Because when you look at it, it changes."

	Rod stopped, and started back, beckoning Ted.

	Ted didn't move.

	"I don't know what to say," he said quite clearly, rather panting, and sounding excited, though it was a quite unexciting remark, except for one thing. He said it in Rod Blake's voice! 

	Rod stiffened. Then he backed away hurriedly, stumbled over his feet and sat down heavily in the sand.

	"For the love of—Ted—Ted, wh-what did you s-s-say?"

	"I don't know wh-what to s-s-say."

	Rod groaned. It started out exactly like his own voice, changed rapidly while it spoke, and wound up a fair imitation of Ted's. "Oh, Lord," he groaned, "I'm going back to the ship. In a hurry."

	He started away, then looked back over his shoulder. Ted Penton was moving now, swaying on his feet peculiarly. Delicately he picked up his left foot, shook it gently, like a man trying to separate himself from a piece of flypaper. Rod moved even more rapidly than he had before. Long, but rapidly shrinking roots dangled from the foot, gooey mud dropping from them as they shrank into the foot. Rod turned again with the violet-gun in his hand. It thrummed to blasting atomic energy, and a pencil beam of ravening ultra-violet fury shot out and a hazy bail of light surrounded it.

	The figure of Ted Penton smoked suddenly, and a hole the size of a golf ball drove abruptly through the center of the head, to the accompaniment of a harsh whine of steam and spurts of oily smoke. The figure did not fall. It slumped. It melted rapidly, like a snow-man in a furnace, the fingers ran together, the remainder of the face dropped, contracted, and became horrible. It was suddenly the face of a man whose pouched and dulled eyes had witnessed and enjoyed every evil the worlds knew, weirdly glowing eyes that danced and flamed for a moment in screaming fury of deadly hate—and dissolved with the last dissolution of the writhing face.

	And the arms grew long, very long and much wider. Rod stood frozen while the very wide and rapidly widening arms beat up and down. The thing took off and flapped awkwardly away, and for an instant the last trace of the hate-filled eyes glittered again in the sun.

	Rod Blake sat down and laughed. He laughed, and laughed again at the very funny sight of the melting face on the bat-bodied thing that had flown away with a charred hole in the middle of its grape-fruit-sized head. He laughed even louder when another Ted-Penton-thing came around the corner of the vegetable clump, on the run. He aimed at the center of its head. "Fly away!" he yelled as he pressed the little button down.

	This one was cleverer. It ducked. "Rod—for the love of—Rod, shut up," it spoke.

	Rod stopped, and considered slowly. This one talked with Ted Penton's voice. As it got up again he aimed more carefully and flashed again. He wanted it to fly away too. It ducked again, in another direction this time, and ran in rapidly. Rod got up hastily and ran. He fell suddenly as some fibrous thing lashed out from behind and wrapped itself unbreakably about his arms and body, binding him helplessly.

	Penton looked down at him, panting heavily.

	"What's the trouble, Rod; and why in blazes were you shooting your gun at me?"

	Rod heard himself laugh again, uncontrollably. The sight of Ted's worried face reminded him of the flying thing, with the melted face. Like an overheated wax figure. Penton reached out a deliberate hand and cracked him over the face, hard. In a moment Rod steadied, and Penton removed the noose from his arms and body. Blake sighed with relief.

	"Thank God, it's you, Ted," he said. "Listen, I saw you—you—not thirty seconds ago. You stood over there, and I spoke to you. You answered in my voice. I started off, and your feet came up out of the ground with roots on them, like a plant's. I shot you through the forehead, and you melted down like a wax doll to a bat-thing that sprouted wings and flew away."

	"Uhh—" said Penton soothingly. "Funny, at that. Why were you looking for me?"

	"Because there's a Japanese maple where I was that grew while my back was turned, and changed its leaves while I looked at it."

	"Oh, Lord," said Penton unhappily, looking at Rod. Then more soothingly, "I think we'd better look at it."

	Rod led the way back on his tracks. When the maple should have been in sight, it wasn't at all. When they reached the spot where Rod's tracks showed it should have been, it wasn't there. There was only a somewhat wilted sword-bush. Rod stared blankly at it, then he went over and felt it cautiously. It remained placidly squatted, a slightly bedraggled lump of vegetation.

	"That's where it was," said Blake dully. "But it isn't there any more. I know it was there."

	"It must have been an—er—mirage," decided Penton. "Let's get back to the ship. We've had enough walking practice."

	Rod followed him, wonderingly shaking his head. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts, that he nearly fell over Penton, when Ted stopped with a soft, unhappy, gurgling noise. Ted turned around and looked at Rod carefully. Then he looked ahead again.

	"Which," he asked at length, "is you?"

	Rod looked ahead of Penton, over his shoulder. Another Rod was also standing in front of Penton. "My God," said Rod, "it's me this time!"

	"I am, of course," said the one in front. It said it in Rod Blake's voice.

	Ted looked at it, and finally shut his eyes.

	"I don't believe it. Not at all. Wo bist du gewesen, mein Freund?"

	"Was sagst du?" said the one in front. "But why the Deutsch?"

	Ted Penton sat down slowly and thoughtfully. Rod Blake stared at Rod Blake blankly, slightly indignant.

	"Let me think," said Penton unhappily. "There must be some way to tell. Rod went away from me, and then I come around the corner and find him laughing insanely. He takes a shot at me. But it looks, and talks like Rod. But he says crazy things. Then I go for a walk with him—or it—and meet another one that at least seems less insane than the first one. Well, well. I know German of course, and so does Rod. Evidently this thing can read minds. Must be like a chameleon, only more so."

	"What do you mean?" asked Rod Blake. It doesn't particularly matter which one.

	"A chameleon can assume any color it wants to at will. Lots of animals have learned to imitate other animals for safety, but it takes them generations to do it. This thing, apparently, can assume any shape or color at will. A minute ago it decided the best form for the locality was a swordbush. Some of these things must be real plants then. Rod thought of a maple tree, thought of the advantages of a maple tree, so it decided to try that, having read his mind. That was why it was wilted-looking; this isn't the right kind of country for maple trees. It lost water too fast. So it went back to the sword-bush.

	"Now this one has decided to try being Rod Blake, clothes and all. But I haven't the foggiest notion which one is Rod Blake. It won't do a bit of good to try him on languages we know, because he can read our minds. I know there must be some way. There must—there must—Oh yes. It's simple. Rod, just burn me a hole in that thing with your violet-gun."

	Rod reached for his gun at once with a sigh of relief and triggered quickly. The phoney Rod melted hastily. About half of it got down into the boiling mud before Rod incinerated the rest with the intense ultraviolet flare of the pistol. Rod sighed. "Thank the Lord it was me. I wasn't sure for a while, myself."

	Ted shook himself, put his head in his hands, and rocked slowly. "By the Nine Gods of the Nine Planets, what a world! Rod, for the love of heaven, stay with me hereafter. Permanently. And whatever you do, don't lose that pistol. They can't grow a real violet-gun, but if they pick one up, may God help us. Let's get back to the ship, and away from this damned place. I thought you were mad. My error. It's just the whole bloody planet that's mad."

	"I was—for a while. Let's move."

	They moved. They moved hastily back across the sand dunes to the ship.

-

II - The Secret of the Thushol

	"They're centaurs," gasped Blake. "Will you look at that one over there—a nice little calico. There's a beautiful little strawberry roan. What people! Wonder why the city is so dilapidated, if the people are still here in some numbers. Set 'er down, will you, Ted. They haven't anything dangerous, or they'd have a better city."

	"Uhmmm—I suppose that's right. But I'd hate to have one of those fellows nudge me. They must weigh something noticeable, even here—about twelve hundred pounds back on Earth. I'm setting down in that square. You keep your hand on that ten-inch ion-gun while I step out."

	The ship settled with a soft thumpf in the deep sandy dust of the ruined city square. Half a hundred of the centaurs were trotting leisurely up, with a grizzled old Martian in the lead, his mane sparse and coarse.

	Ted Penton stepped out of the lock.

	"Pholshth," the Martian said after a moment's inspection. He extended his hands out horizontally from his shoulders, palms upward and empty.

	"Friends," said Ted, extending his arms in a similar gesture, "I am Penton."

	"Fasthun Loshthu," explained the centaur, indicating himself. "Penshun."

	"He sounds like an ex-soldier," came Blake's voice softly. "Pension. Is he O.K.?"

	"I think so. You can leave that post anyway, and shut off the main atomics, start auxiliary B, and close the rooms. Lock the controls with the combination and come on out. Bring your ion-gun as well as your ultraviolet. Lock the lock doors."

	"Blazes. I want to come out this afternoon. Oh well, O.K." Blake went to work hurriedly and efficiently. It was some thirty seconds before he was through in the power room. He stepped eagerly into the lock.

	He stopped dead. Penton was on his back, moving feebly, the old centaur bent over him, with his long, powerful fingers fixed around the man's throat. Penton's head was shaking slowly back and forth on the end of his neck, in a loose, rather detached-looking way.

	Blake roared and charged out of the lock, his two powerful pistols hastily restored to his holsters. He charged out—and sailed neatly over the centaur's back, underestimating Mars' feeble grip. In an instant he was on his feet again, and returning toward his friend when a skillful left forefoot caught his legs, and sent him tumbling as the heavy bulk of an agile young centaur landed on his back. Blake turned; a smaller, lighter body far more powerfully muscled. In a moment the Earthman broke the centaurs' grip and started through the six or seven others that surrounded him.

	A grunted word of command dissolved the mêlée, and Blake stood up, leaping toward Penton.

	Penton sat on the ground, rocking slowly back and forth, his head between his hands. "Oh, Lord, they all do it here."

	"Ted—are you all right?"

	"Do I sound it?" Penton asked unhappily. "That old bird just opened up my skull and poured a new set of brains in. Hypnotic teaching—a complete university education in thirty seconds—all done with hypnotism and no mirrors used. They have the finest education system. God preserve us from it."

	"Shthuntho ishthu thiu lomal?" asked the old Martian pleasantly.

	"Ishthu psoth lonthul timul," groaned Penton. "The worst of it is, it works. I know his language as well as I know English." Suddenly he managed a slight grin. He pointed to Blake and said: "Blake amo phusthu ptsoth."

	The old centaur's lined, sparsely bearded face smiled like a pleased child's. Blake looked at him uneasily.

	"I don't like that fellow's fa—" He stopped, hypnotized. He walked toward the old Martian with blank eyes and the grace of an animated tailor's dummy. He lay down in sections, and the old Martian's long, supple fingers circled his neck. Gently they massaged the back of his spine up to the base of his skull.

	Penton smiled sourly from where he sat. "Oh, you don't like his face, eh? Wait and see how you like his system."

	The centaur straightened. Slowly Blake sat up. His head continued to nod and weave in a detached sort of way, till he gingerly reached up, felt around for it and took it firmly in his hands. He rested his elbows on his knees.

	"We didn't both have to know his blasted language," he managed bitterly at last. "Languages always did give me headaches anyway."

	Penton watched him unsympathetically.

	"I hate repeating things, and you'll find it useful, anyway."

	"You are from the third planet," the Martian stated politely.

	Penton looked at him in surprise, started up, then rose to his feet gingerly.

	"Get up slowly, Blake, I advise you for your own good." Then to the Martian: 'Why, yes. But you knew! How?"

	"My great-great grandfather told me of this trip to the third planet before he died. He was one of those that returned."

	"Returned? You Martians have been to Earth?" gasped Blake.

	"I guessed that," said Penton softly. "They're evidently the centaurs of legend. And I think they didn't go alone from this planet."

	"Our people tried to establish a colony there, many, many years ago. It didn't succeed. They died of lung diseases faster than they could cross space. The main reason they went in the first place was to get away from the thushol. But the thushol simply imitated local Earth-animals and thrived. So the people came back. We built many ships, hoping that since we couldn't go, the thushol would. But they didn't like Earth." He shook his head sorrowfully.

	"The thushol. So that's what you call 'em." Blake sighed. "They must be a pest."

	"They were then. They aren't much any more."

	"Oh, they don't bother you any more?" asked Penton.

	"No," said the old centaur apathetically. "We're so used to them."

	"How do you tell them from the thing they're imitating?" Penton asked grimly. "That's what I need to know."

	"It used to bother us because we couldn't," Loshthu sighed. "But it doesn't any more."

	"I know—but how do you tell them apart? Do you do it by mindreading?"

	"Oh, no. We don't try to tell them apart. That way they don't bother us any more."

	Penton looked at Loshthu thoughtfully for some time. Blake rose gingerly, and joined Penton in his enwrapped contemplation of the grizzled Martian. "Uhmmmm," said Penton at last, "I suppose that is one way of looking at it. I should think it would make business rather difficult though. Also social relations, not knowing whether it was your wife or just a real good imitation."

	"I know. We found it so for many years," Loshthu agreed. "That was why our people wanted to move to Earth. But later they found that three of the ship commanders were thushol, so the people came back to Mars where they could live at least as easily as the thushol."

	Penton mentally digested this for some moments, while the half hundred centaurs about stood patiently, apathetically motionless.

	"We have myths on Earth of centaurs, people like you, and of magic creatures who seemed one thing, but when captured became snakes or tigers or other unpleasant beasts, but if held long enough reverted to human shape and would then grant a wish. Yes, the thushol are intelligent; they could have granted a simple Earth barbarian's wish."

	Loshthu shook his head slowly.

	"They are not intelligent, I believe. Maybe they are. But they have perfect memories for detail. They would imitate one of our number, attend our schools, and so learn all we knew. They never invented anything for themselves."

	"What brought about the tremendous decline in your civilization? The thushol?"

	The centaur nodded.

	"We forgot how to make space ships and great cities. We hoped that would discourage the thushol so they would leave us. But they forgot too, so it didn't help."

	"Good Lord," Blake sighed, "how in the name of the Nine Planets do you live with a bunch like that?"

	Loshthu looked at Blake slowly.

	"Ten," he said. "Ten planets. You can't see the tenth with any practicable instrument till you get out beyond Jupiter. Our people discovered it from Pluto."

	Blake stared at him owlishly. "But how can you live with this gang? With a civilization like that—I should think you'd have found some means of destroying them."

	"We did. We destroyed all the thushol. Some of the thushol helped us, but we thought that they were our own people. It happened because a very wise, but very foolish philosopher calculated how many thushol could live parasitically on our people. Naturally the thushol took his calculations to heart. Thirty-one percent of us are thushol."

	Blake looked around with a swiftly unhappy eye.

	"You mean—some of these here are thushol?" he asked.

	Loshthu nodded.

	"Always. They reproduced very slowly at first, in the form of an animal that was normally something like us, and reproduced as did other animals. But then they learned to imitate the amoebae when they studied in our laboratories. Now they simply split. One big one will split into several small ones, and each small one will eat one of the young of our people, and take its place. So we never know which is which. It used to worry us." Loshthu shook his head slowly.

	Blake's hair rose slightly away from his head, and his jaw dropped away. "My God," he gasped. "Why didn't you do something?"

	"If we killed one we suspected, we might be wrong, which would kill our own child. If we didn't, and just believe it our own child anyway, it at least gave us the comfort of believing it. And if the imitation is so perfect one can't tell the difference, what is the difference?"

	Blake sat down again, quietly.

	"Penton," he sighed, at length, "those three months are up, let's get back to Earth—fast."

	Penton looked at him. "I wanted to a long time back. Only I thought of something else. Sooner or later, some other man is going to come here with atomic power, and if he brings some of those thushol back to Earth with him, accidentally, thinking it's his best friend—well, I'd rather kill my own child than live with one of those, but I'd rather not do either. They can reproduce as fast as they can eat, and if they eat like an amoeba—God help us. If you maroon one on a desert island, it will turn into a fish, and swim home. If you put it in jail it will turn into a snake and go down the drain pipe. If you dump it in the desert it will turn into a cactus and get along real nice, thank you."

	"Good God."

	"And they won't believe us, of course. I'm sure as blazes not going to take one back to prove it. I'll just have to get some kind of proof from this Loshthu."

	"I hadn't thought of that. What can we get?"

	"All I can think of is to see what they can let us have, then take all we can, and make a return trip with reputable and widely believed zoologists and biologists to look into this thing. Evolution has produced some weird freaks, but this is a freakier weirdness than has ever been conceived."

	"I still don't really believe it," Blake said. "The only thing I am firmly convinced of is my headache."

	"It's real enough and logical enough. Logical as hell. And hell on Earth if they ever get there. Evolution is always trying to produce an animal that can survive anywhere, conquer all enemies, the fittest of, the surviving fit. All life is based on one thing: protoplasm. Basically, it's the same in every creature, every living thing, plant and animal, amoeba and man. It is just modified slightly, hooked together in slightly different ways. The thushol are built of protoplasm—but infinitely more adaptable protoplasm. They can do something about it, make it take the form of a bone cell and be part of a thigh bone, or be a nerve cell in a brain. From some of that ten-second-college-course Loshthu poured into me, I gather that at first the thushol were good imitations outside, but if you cut into one, you could see that the organs weren't there. Now they have everything. They went through Martian medical colleges, of course, and know all about what makes a centaur tick, and so they make themselves with the same kind of tickers. Oh, very nice."

	"They don't know much about us. Maybe with the X-ray fluoroscope screen we could have told those imitations of us," suggested Blake.

	"Oh, no, by no means. If we knew the right form, they'd read it in our minds, and have it. Adaptive protoplasm. Just think, you couldn't kill it in an African jungle, because when a lion came along, it would be a little, lady lion, and when an elephant showed up, it would be a helpless baby elephant. If a snake bit it, I suppose the damned thing would turn into something immune to snake bites—a tree, or something like that. I just wonder where it keeps the very excellent brain it evidently has."

	"Well, let's find out what Loshthu can offer us by way of proofs."

-

III - Mind-Readers and Company

	It developed that the Martians had once had museums. They still had them, because nobody was sufficiently interested to disturb their age-long quiet. Martians lived centuries, and their memories were long; but once or twice in a lifetime did a Martian enter the ancient museums.

	Penton and Blake spent hours in them, intensive hours under Loshthu's guidance. Loshthu had nothing but time, and Penton and Blake didn't want to linger. They worked rapidly, collecting thin metal sheaves of documents, ancient mechanisms, a thousand things. They baled them with rope that they had brought from the ship when they moved it nearer the museum. Finally, after hours of labor, bleary-eyed from want of sleep, they started out again to the ship.

	They stepped out of the gloomy dusk of the museum into the sun-lit entranceway. Immediately, from behind a dozen pillars, a leaping, flashing group of men descended upon them, tore the books, the instruments, the data sheaves from their hands. They were upset, slugged, trampled on and spun around. There were shouts and cries and curses.

	Then there was silence. Twelve Pentons and thirteen Blakes sat, lay or stood about on the stone stairway. Their clothes were torn, their faces and bodies bruised, there was even one black eye, and another developing swiftly. But twelve Pentons looked exactly alike, each clasping a bit of data material.

	Thirteen Blakes were identical, each carrying a bit of factual mustiness under his arm or in his hand.

	Loshthu looked at them, and his lined, old face broke into a pleased smile. "Ah," he said. "There are more of you. Perhaps some can stay with us to talk now."

	Penton looked up at Loshthu, all the Pentons did. Penton was quite sure he was the Penton, but he couldn't think of any way to prove it. It was fairly evident that thushol had decided to try Earth again. He began to wonder just—"

	"Loshthu, just why," asked one of the Pentons in Penton's voice, "did the thushol not stay on Earth if they could live there?"

	Penton was quite sure he had been the one to think of that panic—

	"Pardon me, but wasn't that the question I was going to ask?" said another Penton in well-controlled fury. Penton smiled gently. It seemed evident that—

	"I can apparently be spared the trouble of doing my own talking. You all help so," said one of the numerous Pentons angrily.

	"Say, how in hell are we going to tell who's who?" demanded one of the Blakes abruptly.

	"That damned mind-thief stole my question before I had a chance—"

	"Why you—you—you talking! I was just about—"

	"I think," said one of the Pentons wearily, "you might as well stop getting peeved, Blake, because they'll all act peeved when you do. What do you know. I beat all my imitators to the draw on that remark. A noble achievement, you'll find, Rod. But you might just as well pipe down, and I'll pipe down, and we'll see what our good friend, Loshthu, has to say."

	"Eh," sighed Loshthu. "You mean about the thushol leaving Earth? They did not like it. Earth is a poor planet, and the people were barbarians. Evidently they are not so now. But the thushol do not like work, and they found richer sustenance on Mars."

	"I thought so," said Penton. (Does it matter which one?) "They've decided that Earth is richer than Mars now, and want a new host. Don't draw that pistol, Blake! Unfortunately, my friend, we had twenty-five ion-guns and twenty-five violet-guns made up. If we'd had more we would have more companions. We were exceedingly unfortunate in equipping ourselves so well in the matter of clothing, and being so thoughtful as to plan all of it right, so we carried a lot of each of the few kinds. Exceedingly. However, I think we can improve things a little bit. I happen to remember that one ion-gun is out of commission, and I had the coils out of two of the violet-guns to repair them. That makes three guns out of service. We will each stand up and fire, one at a time, at the sand in front there. The line forms on the right."

	The line formed. "Now," continued that particular Penton, "we will each fire, beginning with myself, one at a time. First ion, then violet. When one of us evidences lack of a serviceable gun, the others will join in removing him rapidly but carefully. Are we ready? Yes?" That Penton held up his ion-gun, and pushed the button.

	It didn't fire, and immediately the portico stank with his smoke.

	"That's one," said the next Penton. He raised his ion-gun and fired.. Then his violet-gun. Then he raised it and fired again, at a rapidly dissolving Blake. "That makes two. That one evidently found, when we fired at the first one, that his didn't work. We have one more to eliminate. Next?"

	Presently another Blake vanished. "Well, well," said Penton pleasantly, "the Blake-Penton odds are even. Any suggestions?"

	"Yes," said Blake tensely. "I've been thinking of a patch I put in one suit that I ripped on Venus."

	Another Blake vanished under the mutual fire.

	"There's one more thing I want to know. Why in blazes are those phonies so blasted willing to kill each other, and though they know which is which, don't kill us? And how did they enter the ship?" Rod demanded. Or at least a Rod.

	"They," said two Pentons at once. Another one looked at them. "Bad timing, boys. Rodney, my son, we used a combination lock. These gentlemen are professional mind-readers. Does that explain their possession of the guns? I've been thinking right along of one way to eliminate these excessive excrescences, consisting of you going into a huddle with your tribe, and eliminating all but the one you know to be yourself, and I doing the same. Unfortunately, while they're perfectly willing to kill each other so long as they don't die, they will prevent their own deaths by adequate, unfortunately adequate defense.

	"Now since these little gun tests and others have been made I think it fairly evident that we are not going to leave this planet until the two right men are chosen and only two go into that ship with us. Fortunately they can't go without us, because while they can read minds, it takes more than knowledge to navigate a space ship, at least such knowledge as they can get from us. It takes understanding, which mere memory will not supply. They need us.

	"We will, therefore, march dutifully to the ship, and each of us will replace his guns carefully in the prepared racks. I know that I'm the right Penton—but you don't. So no movement will be made without the unanimous agreement of all Pentons and Blakes."

	Blake looked up, white-faced.

	"If this wasn't so world-shakingly serious, it would be the damnedest comic opera that ever happened. I'm afraid to give up my gun."

	"If we all give them up, I think it puts us even. We have some advantage in that they don't want to kill us, and if worst comes to worst, we could take them to Earth, making damned sure that they didn't get away. On Earth we could have protoplasmic tests made that would tell the story. By the way, that suggests something. Yes indeed, I think we can make tests here. Let us repair to this ship."

-

IV - Penton's Strategy

	The Blakes sat down and stayed down. "Ted, what in blazes can we do?" His voice was almost tearful. "You can't tell one of these ghastly things from another. You can't tell one from me. We can't—"

	"Oh, God," said another Blake, "that's not me. That's just another one of those damned mind stealers."

	Another one groaned hopelessly.

	"That wasn't either." They all looked helplessly at the line of Pentons. "I don't even know who's my friend."

	Penton nodded. All the Pentons nodded, like a grotesquely solemn chorus preparing to recite some blessing. They smiled in superhuman unity. "That's all right," they said in perfect harmony. "Well, well. A new stunt. Now we all talk together. That makes things easier. I think there may be a way to tell the difference. But you must absolutely trust me, Blake. You must give up your guns, putting all faith in my ability to detect the right one, and if I'm wrong, realize that I will not know. We can try such simple tests as alcohol, whiskey, to see if it makes them drunk, and pepper to see if it bums their tongues—"

	"It won't work," said Blake tensely. "Lord, Penton, I can't give up my guns—I won't—"

	Penton, all the Pentons smiled gently. "I'm half again as fast as you are, Blake, and no Martian-born imitation of you is going to be faster. Maybe these Martian imitations of me are as fast as I am. But you know perfectly well that I could ray the whole gang of you, all ten of you, out of existence before any one of you could move a finger. You know that, don't you, Rod?"

	"Lord, yes, but Ted, Ted, don't do that—don't make me give up my guns—I've got to keep them. Why should I give up mine, if you keep yours?"

	"That probably was not you speaking, Rod, but it doesn't matter. If it wasn't what you thought, we could do something about it. Therefore, that is what you wanted to say, just as this is what I wanted to say, whether I said it or not. Oh, Lord preserve us. It talks with my voice! But anyway, the situation is this; one of us has to have unquestioned superiority over the other gang. Then, the one with the whip hand can develop proof of identity, and enforce his decisions. As it is, we can't."

	"Let me be that one, then," snapped one Blake.

	"I didn't mean that," sighed another. "That wasn't me."

	"Yes it was," said the first. "I spoke without thinking. Go ahead. But how are you going to make the others give up their guns? I'm willing. You can't make them?"

	"Oh, yes I can. I have my faithful friends, here," said Penton grimly, his eleven hands waving to his eleven counterparts. "They agree with me this far, being quite utterly selfish."

	"But what's your system. Before I put my neck in the noose, I have to know that noose isn't going to tighten on it."

	"If I had a sound system in mind—I'm carefully refraining from developing one—they'd read it, weigh it, and wouldn't agree at all. They still have hopes. You see that pepper and alcohol system won't work perfectly because they can read in my mind the proper reaction, and be drunk, or have an inflamed tongue at will, being perfect actors. I'm going to try just the same. Rod, if you ever trusted me, trust me now."

	"All right, come on. We'll go to the ship, and any one of these things that doesn't part with its gun is not me. Ray it."

	Blake rose jerkily, all ten of him, and went down to the ship.

	The Pentons followed faithfully after. Abruptly Penton rayed one Blake. His shoulder blades had humped curiously and swiftly. Wings were developing. "That helps," said Penton, holstering his guns.

	The Blakes went on, white-faced. They put the weapons in the racks in the lock stoically. The Martians had seen the, to them, inconceivably swift movements of Penton's gun hands, and Penton knew that he, himself, had done the raying that time. But he still didn't know a way to prove it without causing a general mêlée which would bring about their own deaths. That wasn't so important. The trouble was that given fifty years, the rest of the world would descend on this planet unwarned. Then all Earth would be destroyed. Not with flame and sword and horrible casualty lists, but silently and undetectably.

	The Blakes came out, unarmed. They shuffled and moved about uneasily, tensely, under the watchful eyes of eleven Pentons armed with terrifically deadly weapons.

	Several Pentons went into the ship, to come out bearing pepper, saccharine tablets, alcohol, the medicine chest. One of them gathered them together and looked them over. "We'll try pepper," he said, rather unhappily. "Line up!"

	The Blakes lined up, hesitantly. "I'm putting my life in your hands, Ted," said two of them in identical, plaintive tones.

	Four Pentons laughed shortly. "I know it. Line up. Come and get it."

	"First," he sighed, after a moment, "stick out the tongue, patient."

	With unsteady hands he put a bit of pepper from the shaker on the fellow's tongue. The tongue snapped in instantly, the Blake clapped his hands to his mouth, gurgling unpleasantly. "Waaaar!" he gasped. "Waar—achooo—damnt!"

	With hands like flashing light, Penton pulled his own, and a neighbor's ion-gun. In a fiftieth of a second all but the single gagging, choking, coughing Blake were stinking, smoking, swiftly dissolving and flowing rubbish. The other Penton methodically helped destroy them.

	Blake stopped gagging in surprise.

	"My God, it might not have been the right one!" he gasped.

	The ten Pentons sighed softly. "That finally proves it. Thank God. Definitely. That leaves me to find. And it won't work again, because while you can't read my mind to find the trick that told, these brothers of mine have. The very fact that you don't know how I knew, proves that I was right."

	Blake stared at him dumbly. "I was the first one—" he managed between a cough and a sneeze.

	"Exactly. Go on inside. Do something intelligent. Use your head. See what you can think of to locate me. You have to use your head in some such way that they don't mind-read it first, though. Go ahead."

	Blake went, slow-footed. The first thing he did was to close the lockdoor, so that he was safely alone in the ship. Blake went into the control room, donned an air-suit complete with helmet, and pushed a control handle over. Then a second. Presently he heard curious bumpings and thumpings, and strange floppings and whimperings. He went back rapidly, and rayed a supply chest and two crates of Venusian specimens that had sprouted legs and were rapidly growing arms to grasp ray pistols. The air in the ship began to look thick and greenish; it was colder.

	Contentedly Blake watched, and opened all the room doors. Another slithering, thumping noise attracted him, and with careful violet-gun work he removed an unnoticed, extra pipe that was crawling from the crossbrace hangers. It broke up into lengths that rolled about unpleasantly. Rod rayed them till the smallest only, the size of golf balls with curious blue-veined legs, staggered about uncertainly. Finally even they stopped wriggling.

	Half an hour Rod waited, while the air grew very green and thick. Finally, to make sure, he started some other apparatus, and watched the thermometer go down, down till moisture grew on the walls and became frost, and no more changes took place. Then he went around with an opened ion-gun with a needle beam and poked everything visible with it.

	The suction fans cleared out the chlorine-fouled atmosphere in two minutes, and Blake sat down wearily. He flipped over the microphone switch and spoke into the little disc. "I've got my hand on the main ion-gun control. Penton, I love you like a brother, but I love Earth more. If you can induce your boy friends to drop their guns in a neat pile and retire—O.K. If not, and I mean if not within thirty seconds, this ion-gun is going into action and there won't be any more Pentons. Now, drop!"

	Grinning broadly, with evident satisfaction, ten Pentons deposited twenty heart-cores of ultra-essence of destruction, and moved off. "Way off," said Blake grimly. They moved.

	Blake collected twenty guns. Then he went back into the ship. There was a fine laboratory at one end, and with grim satisfaction, he took down three cotton-stoppered tubes, being very careful to handle them with rubber gloves. "You never did man a good turn before, tetanus, but I hope you spread high, wide and handsome here—"

	He dumped them into a beaker of water, and took beaker and glass down to the lock and out. The ten waited at a distance.

	"All right, Penton. I happen to know you took a shot of tetanus antivaccine some while ago, and are immune. Let's see if those blasted brain stealers can steal the secret of something we know how to make, but don't know anything about. They can gain safety by turning into a chicken, which is immune, but not as human creatures. That's a concentrated dose of tetanus. Go drink it. We can wait ten days if we have to."

	Ten Pentons marched boldly up to the beaker, resting beside the ship. One stepped forward to the glass—and nine kept right on stepping. They stepped into the lee of the ship where the ion-gun could not reach.

	Blake helped Penton into the ship with a broad grin.

	"Am I right?"

	"You're right," sighed Penton, "but God knows why. You can't get tetanus by swallowing it, and lockjaw doesn't develop so quickly as ten days."

	"I didn't know for sure," grinned Blake. "They were too busy trying to find out what I was doing to follow your mind. Ah—there they go. Will you ray them or shall I?" asked Blake politely, sighting the ion-gun at the nine flapping, rapidly vanishing things scuttling across the red, rusty planet. The ship dipped sharply in pursuit. "There's one thing—ahhh—" he straightened as the incredible glare died in thin air. "I want to know. How in blazes did you pick me out?"

	"To do what you did requires some five hundred different sets of muscles in a beautifully coordinated neuromuscular hookup, which I didn't believe those things could imitate without a complete dissection. I took the chance it was you."

	"Five hundred sets of muscles! What the heck did I do?"

	"You sneezed."

	Rod Blake blinked slowly, and slowly his jaw tested again its supports and their flexibility.

-

THE DOUBLE MINDS
I. - Prisoners on Ganymede

	"P'HOLKUUN'S coming back," Ted Penton sighed. "Maybe he meant it."

	Rod Blake stirred restlessly on the bunk.

	"Will you make your news reports more explicit? You have your mug against the only clear spot on the damn glass door. Which one of those animated beanpoles is P'holkuun?"

	"How can I describe him? He's a Ganymedian jailer, to you. They all look alike. Since we are the first human beings ever to see Ganymedians—or Ganymede itself—there aren't any words in the language to describe him. He is seven feet three inches tall, weighs about one hundred and fifty—or he would on Earth.

	He has that attractive green hair they all have, and he is wearing a Shaloor guard's uniform. He is shooing away our other guard."

	"I guess he is as good an orator as you were," Blake grunted. "In five minutes you learned their language, found his political opinions, and had him sold on you to start a revolution. Man, you are political dynamite!"

	"Political atomic power," Penton replied sourly. "I got us kicked out of Earth first for experimenting with the stuff. Kick number one; we get in the soup on Mars. Head for home, and all Earth turns out a great welcome for us—twenty-one gun salutes. Only they forgot to take out the sixteen-inch shells. They still don't want us. It was easier here. P'holkuun's a member of the rebel party, and the mind-reading stunt I learned from the Martians helped me make friends with him," "Penton," suddenly whispered the thin, squeaky voice of the friendly jailer outside, "the Shaloor have investigated your spaceship again. They are afraid."

	"They are wise," replied Penton grimly. "If they disturb the atomic balances I have established in the engines, they'll blow this whole satellite clear out of Jupiter's system. They haven't a glimmering of an idea what forces I use."

	"They don't believe you. They say you are a liar." The jailer, a Lanoor, sounded doubtful himself.

	"They wanted me to take them in it out into space," went on Penton. "If they know more about my machine than I do, why don't they build one like it, and go out in their own machine? You don't even have the words atomic power and electricity in your language." 

	P'holkuun shook his head slowly.

	"You do not understand. Ten years ago, the first Shaloor was made. He was a Lanoor, but he invented an operation, and tried it on a friend, then the friend did it to him. The brain is divided into two halves, only one of which ever works in thinking. If, however, a man is injured so the half he is using is destroyed, then the other half works. The Shaloor found out how to make both halves work at once. The brain is made up of thousands and thousands of individual cells, each one helping to think. When the Shaloor doubled the number of thinking cells that work, he became, not twice as brilliant, but over ten thousand times as keen-minded. With two factors, A and B, you can make only two combinations: AB and BA. With twice as many factors, you can make far more than twice as many combinations.

	"In ten short years the Shaloor overthrew our rulers, developed a new civilization. They invented the shleath, and a thousand new vegetables and new animal foods. They will be able to learn your secret shortly. Some day our rebellion may succeed."

	"The Shaloor are not omniscient. You are needlessly afraid of them." Penton snapped.

	The Lanoor's big, broad face split in a slow grin.

	"You are in jail, Urd-mahn, thanks to the Shaloor."

	"They trapped us by treachery—"

	"The Shaloor are always treacherous. It is intelligent they say."

	"They will find it most unintelligent when my people come ten months from now with ships that can wipe out this city in a moment's time. We will so disturb the Shaloor that your waiting rebellion can succeed."

	Their jailer did not know that they had been exiled from Earth.

	"Their gas—their gas always stops us. And the shleath. No man can face that—" The guard's ruddy face went pale at the thought, and Penton cursed silently that his very fear made his mind unreadable, even to the ancient method the Martians had learned and recorded ten thousand years ago in the ancient museums he had recently plundered. He could only catch vague, formless jellies wavering in a cloudiness of fear as the mental image.

	"We have an older knowledge," Penton said shortly. "But do as you will. We will be out in a day's time, if the Shaloor have not first released the frightful energies of our ship in their blunderings."

	"I—I will talk with my comrades tonight," P'holkuun said, and moved down the corridor uneasily. Penton turned away from the little window in the frosted glass of the door. Though his Earth-bred strength was five times that of a Ganymedian, it was still far less than was needed to break down the thick, tough glass. Penton looked at it disgustedly.

	"Damn," he complained mournfully.

	"I take it he said, 'No'." Blake looked morosely at the door. "Nice birds they have here. You greet 'em friendly, they wave and grin, and beckon from airplanes while you come down out of space. You step out—and plunko—they trap you with glass bombs of sleep-gas. Ah, well—I can't sleep, I can't smoke, and I can't move. I—"

	"Oh, shut up. Here, I'll make you sleep. Hypnotism."

	"Can you? Say—that's right, you learned a lot of dope from those Martian records. Go ahead." Blake lay back thankfully. Ten seconds later he realized his error. He was helplessly hypnotized, and already he recognized the flood of strange thoughts pouring into his mind, other-worldly ideas. Penton was giving him knowledge of the Lanoorian language by the technique the Martians had developed ten thousand years ago: hypnotic teaching.

	Blake was about to acquire a complete understanding of Lanoor, in about five minutes. Also, all the headaches that he would normally have had learning a language would be equally concentrated into one great-granddaddy of all headaches. He struggled to free his will—

-

	The sun was shining in through the whole rear wall of the cell, which meant that it was day again, and he had slept for hours.

	"No," said Penton's voice. But it was Lanoor he was speaking, and Blake moved his head gingerly and groaned audibly. Yes, the headache was there.

	"No, I'll have to make the medicine myself. Tell them Blake is dying, that the air does not suit him. Hear him moan? Tell the Shaloor that I must have that stuff."

	Blake saw a shadow, distorted by the uneven glass of the prison wall, move off. Penton turned toward him.

	"Excellent, Rod, excellent. Nothing could have been better timed. I didn't know you were awake; and your help was really welcome."

	"Help? Help, you cosmic blight! My head."

	"I know. But we needed the stuff. Now he'll get it for us. You know their language now—we'll get the stuff I want." 

	"I've got a headache. Go away and shut up. Oh-h-h."

-

	He dozed, for when he opened his eyes again, his head pained less, and Penton was hard at work with some glass flasks, pungently odorous liquids, and various powders.

	"Will you groan?" asked Penton pleasantly. "The guard is watching and listening."

	Blake obliged. "Oh-h-h—what in double blazes—ah-h-h-h—are you stewing? It smells like fury!"

	"I'm too busy trying to figure out something. Keep groaning, by the way. This is medicine for you. You're suffering because the atmosphere doesn't suit you. I can stand it, because I've had a dose of this atmospheric-cosmic-telluric acclimatizer."

	"Groan? Great God, if it's anything you cooked up, I'm going to recover right here and now. You're no medicine man!"

	"I am now. The stuff is now prepared. Hm-m-m—" he passed it under his nose. A mixture of pleasant, fruity smells, and peculiarly rank, acrid odors pervaded the room. From a bottle he measured out a number of gritty crystals, then from a second bottle of green glass, a few more. He sniffed the results, tasted it.

	"Try a bit." He grinned at last, and passed it over. "Guaranteed to make you lick tigers like lollypops."

	Blake took it at arm's length, and sniffed. His eyes widened. He tasted it. His mouth widened in a grin.

	"What stuff! Happy days will come again." A considerable portion of the potent brew went down. Blake relinquished it only under protest. "All right, but explain the ingredients."

	Penton helped himself to a bit, and nodded.

	"Citric acid—crystallized acid of lemon. Sucrose—commonly sold under the name of sugar. Ethanol—otherwise ethyl alcohol. Carbonic acid—in no way related to the one with an 'l' in it—better liked as soda water. I thought the combine might strike you where you needed it, and anyway, I needed the rest of the brew."

	Penton looked at, but did not handle, a large flask in which a watery liquid was stirring slowly about a white powder. Fully a gallon of the stuff was there already, and he cautiously added more from a large beaker, and more powder from a glass bottle. 

	"And that?" asked Blake.

	"The universal solvent. Anyway, it should get us out of here, I believe. I—"

	With a soft clank, the large glass block disintegrated, and its contents spewed out over the metal table, and down the glass wall of the cell. The table had been in a corner, and the adjacent walls and floor were liberally flooded with the deluge. An intense, suffocating odor sprang up at once. Blake pulled his feet off the floor hastily, and looked in dismay at Penton.

	"I thought it would," Penton sighed. "It does that." 

	"What?"

	"Be patient and we'll see. You are supposed to be recovering from a fatal illness. I've got to tell the guard it's according to plan."

	The guard was already unlocking the door, for he had seen the deluge. Penton waved his hands.

	"Keep out—the vapors—Blake must breathe the vapors!" 

	The unsuspecting guard had the door somewhat open, but getting the said vapors himself, he promptly decided that Blake was welcome to them and departed.

	"Look, Rod, they have just turned on the corridor lights!" explained Penton.

	"Which reminds me to ask why you said even before we landed, that they didn't have electricity. Those may not be electric gas-glow tubes, but they're certainly one swell imitation."

	Penton laughed. "Wrong, two out of two. I said they didn't have electricity before we landed because the instruments on the ship indicated no sign of electric or electromagnetic energy of any sort produced by man on the whole planet. As for the lamps, electric gas-glow tubes are a poor imitation of them. Those are biological lamps. They use some kind of a bacterial ferment, and they turn them on by letting air into them. Notice how dark it is already? Small world turning rapidly on its axis, with a thin atmosphere. It will be dark in another quarter hour. Better pack your belongings, because, m' lad, we are going out."

	"How? Did P'holkuun finally decide to throw in with us?"

	"No, not yet, anyway. I didn't think he would until we got out of here on our own legs. P'holkuun isn't going to ask help from somebody who is tied worse than he is. But—he'll help plenty once we get out of here."

	"Yes—but how? Don't tell me we can go out through those solid walls!"

	"Yes, through the walls. It's dark enough now, I suppose. Rod, will you wield that hefty hoof of yours against the wall in the neighborhood of that table, while I obscure the window in the door? I would have a chat with our jailer. Don't shake the building, though. You should go right through the wall. Easy."

	Blake moved the table. Penton's argument with the jailer was about something impossible, and very loud, but Blake paid little attention because of the way the wall was acting. The clear, hard glass was crumbling under his foot into sand. It broke out in great chunks, and crumbled as though his foot were a pile-driver. In utter surprise he felt his boot sink into the stuff—and through it! In almost no time, Penton had so annoyed the jailer that the man walked down the corridor to avoid Penton's voice, and Penton walked with Blake through the wall of the prison.

	"Jupiter will rise in about two hours. When he comes up you won't need to be told, but you will need to be hidden," said Penton. "We appear to the local populace as inconspicuous as a pair of orangutans walking down Fifth Avenue arm in arm. And slightly less harmless. To them our build is the quintessence of horrible, brute strength.

	"So when Jupiter's great bulk comes over the horizon, the reflected light is going to make us conspicuous, and not a sight to calm the nerves of nice, old Lanoorian ladies. Further, thanks to P'holkuun's thoughts, I know that our ship is somewhere on the far side of the city. So come on. First we have to get away from this neighborhood."

-

II. - The Doughballs

	TED PENTON SAILED over a twenty-foot wall surrounding the jail, and Blake found it easy to follow because of the satellite's low gravity.

	"What"—he panted after a moment—"is the secret—of the wall—stop running—you fool—I'm winded."

	"The air's too thin—to keep—it up," agreed Penton. In the darkness of a tiny alleyway they stopped. "The stuff I used was crotonaldehyde—an organic liquid—derivable from—alcohol. Works on the fact—that glass is not a true—solid."

	Blake stared at him, panting.

	"Yeah. Stone walls do—not a prison make—nor iron bars a cage. So what is it? That glass wall looked solid enough—it had me bluffed."

	"Puffed, did you say? Glass is a liquid. Liquid got so cold it has turned stiff—past the gooey stage. Crotonaldehyde has the curious property of turning it solid. Long heating and cooling does it too, that's why kerosene lamp-chimneys used to get so fragile. Solid glass is extremely brittle and as strong as so much sand. When that stuff turned it solid it took all the strength out of it. We have to steal a car. Damn. No running or we will pant so loud they'll hear us a block away. They have cars. There ought to be one around here somewhere, and let us pray they haven't invented locks for 'em."

	They covered six blocks before they saw a rounded, bulky lump in the road that was evidently an automobile.

	"You drive, Rod," Penton said softly. "You are a better driver than I, and a better mechanic. Can you figure it out?"

	"Lord, help us, no! Is it electric? No. Steam? Compressed air? Gasoline? Diesel? How in blazes should I know? Where's the engine? Both ends look alike. I have never seen anybody drive one, and I don't even know which end is front. Is this one a steering lever, and—well, what's that other one back there? I—" the car jerked ahead suddenly.

	"Oh," said Penton, "you do know how to start it."

	Blake was too busy hanging on. He held the lever grimly in his hand, and pulled.

	"What do I do to stop it?" He tried pushing the lever. The car showed capabilities of speed. He pressed in a different direction. The car stopped accelerating but by no means slowed down. The quite accidental fact that the road was straight helped. His foot felt feverishly for a brake pedal—and the car swerved aside into a pole.

	"I think," said Penton, bending the door frame out of his way, "that they probably have a more comfortable, if no more effective means of stopping them. They can't have light poles everywhere. We had better hurry elsewhere. Someone will certainly investigate that crash. Anyway, the next car we try, you'll know they steer with their feet, and not try to jam on the brakes with the steering gear."

	"The next one," said Blake clearly, "you will know they steer with their feet. And I'm going to take time out to find out how in blazes they work. I just took hold of that handle and away she went. No starter—nothing!"

	Six blocks away they found another car, not exactly like the first, but similar, seven seats instead of five. Blake looked at Penton.

	Penton hesitated, and looked about him. Surrounding warehouses loomed, dark masses against a star-studded sky. A tiny, bright moon rode high in the sky, and lower was another, even smaller. Giant worlds, as large as the planet they rode, but millions of miles distant in Jupiter's titanic gravity field. But their light was enough to show dim alleyways and fences made of wire and some woven, fibrous stuff.

	"Right, Rod. Check the control system and let it go," Penton said softly.

	Five seconds later Blake was in and after a few more moments of swift examination he started from the curb. The machine started with a swift, smooth rush, and the soft whirr of the blowers and pumps was the only sound from the engine. Rapidly Blake got the feel of the apparatus, the two steering pedals, the lever that controlled its speed by increase or relaxation of pressure on the grip. Relaxed, it became a brake of fair power; squeezed, the car shot forward with amazing acceleration.

	"All right. I have it now. We need lights, and I didn't figure them out. They must be in the dash control."

	Penton worked swiftly over the dash with the aid of the hand flash he carried. Suddenly lights blazed on, and Blake sped on his way with more assurance.

	Blake squeezed harder on the control, and the silent engine behind drove the car forward with a powerful, steady push. Rapidly, fully forty miles an hour, they cruised through the deserted district. The street that had led them straight toward their goal came to an end, and Blake hesitated at the curve, muttering at the inefficient brake system. Then he went right. Presently, on a more traveled street, he went left. More cars were about them.

	As they headed toward the city, traffic became heavier, and Blake anxiously watched the system, trying to learn the rules of the road. They drove on the left, moving at a lively clip.

	"They have traffic lights," said Penton quietly. "I just spotted the damn things. It's a block system, like New York's. See—way up ahead you can see that yellow light. That's stop. Red is go. We'll have to stop at this next block."

	But traffic became heavier. Lights became confusing. And suddenly a bright flush crept over the sky, and almost immediately Jupiter loomed on the skyline. Five blocks later they were hopelessly caught in a traffic jam in the heart of the city. Drivers near them looked—and left. Beside them they had seen, driving a car, two monstrous, squat beings, with great ropes and bundles of inhuman muscles. To them they appeared like horrible animals incredibly become intelligent.

	Blake opened his door.

	"All off here. Transfer. Last stop. We can't drive through those stalled cars, and somehow I don't think the drivers are coming back." Penton got out the other side, and silently they walked up the line of traffic. Behind them doors opened hastily, and feet scuttled away. Blake crept up beside the leading car, a gleaming, seven-passenger sedan, and rose abruptly at the driver's window. He looked quietly at the occupant. A gray-haired Lanoor stared back, and slowly his eyes closed. He shook his head and opened them very wide, then beat it.

	Penton climbed in first, and Blake took the late occupant's seat.

	"The lights have changed," Penton said. They made nearly fifteen blocks. Then they changed cars again, taking the first car in line—and a dozen glass bubbles of sleep-gas crackled around them. Blake leapt upward, to the top of a car, and crashed through into the seat. He settled back in sleep before he could extricate himself.

	Penton, who had started down the road in great leaps, looked back—and leaped faster. A two-foot thick, doughy mass was rolling of its own volition in his direction. He turned down a side street and increased his pace. He began to jump from side to side but it caught up with him.

	It was soft, and squashy, but rubbery. It simply clung about his feet, and crept slowly up and over his legs, up his body, while he tore great holes in the doughiness that persistently grew together again.

	Desperately he drove his hand into his pocket while the Lanoor police ran toward him with their slow, exaggerated strides, gas bombs in hands. A glass bulb arched forward, but fell short of him.

	Then his hand came free with the flashlight, as the crawling, doughy stuff crept about his other arm. An instant later the thing was bouncing and bounding down the street madly, from side to side, throwing itself in all directions, smashing down the rapidly approaching Lanoor, and rebounding with evident terror. Somehow the flashlight had driven it away.

	Penton loped easily into an alley, and after several blocks of leaping fences, circled back. A crowd of Lanoor guardsmen were carefully roping Blake. The Earthmen lay inert in the roadway with his head thrown back, heavy snores gurgling forth. Penton walked as near as he felt was reasonably safe, and looked. An empty car stood nearby. He headed for it. It was a light roadster, and after some calculations he started it in the direction of Blake. The Lanoor guardsmen peppered it with glass bubbles; two doughy things tried to mesh its powerful wheels and were torn up, only to reform accidentally as one large one. The guardsmen scattered as the car rolled quietly forward and coasted to a stop.

	Blake had already begun to stir, and Penton stopped. Evidently his previous exposure to the gas seemed to confer a semi-immunity. Methodically he released his friend. "I think," said Penton, thoughtfully, "that it is time to seek lodging for the day. This looks like a pleasantly dilapidated section."

-

III. - The Shleath

	PENTON LOOKED down the shabby street. His view was restricted somewhat, because even though it was the widest of numerous sad cracks in the even sadder wreck that had once been a house and now sheltered them, it was narrow. A Lanoor was walking down the far side, stumbling through a series of dreary mud puddles in a peculiarly automatonlike way. Abruptly he halted stock still in the center of an unusually well developed puddle and shook his head slowly. It weaved about dangerously on the pipe-stem neck, and the shabbily dressed giant looked dazedly about him. After a while he started on vaguely, a gradual deepening of purpose putting increasing firmness in his gangling walk.

	Penton sighed and turned away. He nodded to Blake and sat down.

	"He's started. He did just what I ordered him to. Unless some Shaloor for some impossible reason picks that one man out of all the city to practice hypnotism on, those hypnotic orders I gave him are going to work, and he will bring P'holkuun here. It ought not to take more than an hour."

	"But will he come? And will it do any good, if he does? He didn't help us before," protested Blake.

	"He will for two reasons. The chances are the Shaloor won't know that trick about crotonaldehyde—I used something else, a catalyst that intensified the action—and they are going to be mighty mystified as to how in Nine Planets and Great Spaces we took the starch out of that wall. They'll be even more worried about the way that doughball they sicced on me backfired when I used the flashlight. He'll come, and he will probably help, now that we have shown him we can do something the Shaloor can't. I think we have an hour to wait."

	They actually had less than an hour. A small roadster came slowly up the street, and stopped four or five doors away. The tall Lanoor got out. With some trepidation, evidently, he came over and cautiously opened the door.

	"Come in, P'holkuun. You are a welcome sight."

	"You've caused a great deal of trouble," the Lanoor greeted them. "The Shaloor have posted many guards about the palace; it has made any hope of a revolution useless for some time. They have taken the sleep-gas throwers away from the Lanoor guards, leaving them only swords. And the shleath are all locked up."

	"Is a shleath," asked Penton thoughtfully, "a doughy thing without any legs, but possessed of a peculiarly unpleasant odor, and a miraculous slime?"

	"No," the Lanoor sighed. "You have no idea of what shleath are. Those were grethlanth they turned on you last night. The shleath are fifty feet in diameter, but otherwise much like those things. The Shaloor are still very much puzzled by the way the grethlanth ran away from you. They are fearless, and never before have they run from a prisoner."

	Penton smiled, grimly.

	"That, my friend, was electricity. It was one of the forces the Shaloor have not guessed. Here, moisten your two fingers like this, and touch this little metal piece." Penton illustrated the action, and the Lanoor hesitatingly touched the terminals of the flash. Instantly he jumped three feet backward and fell to the floor.

	Slowly he sat up, shaking his head, while Penton and Blake looked at each other curiously.

	"That—that is horrible! Put it away!" gasped the Lanoor. "It made all my muscles writhe into knots. It made my heart contract as though a giant had squeezed it. It is horrible!"

	"It is electricity," said Penton slowly, "and you seem to be very sensitive to it, much more so than we are. Now, what did you say a shleath was?"

	"It is a great mass of protoplasm jelly which obeys readily the will of its controller," replied P'holkuun, rubbing his arm, and eyeing the flash uneasily. "It cannot be killed, because if part is poisoned that part is split off. If it is shot or cut, that does no harm. It is not affected by sleep-gas. It is immensely strong, and can assume any form. The Shaloor conquered the Lanoor rulers originally by sending shleath up a small drain pipe in the form of a thread of protoplasm, and having it assume the form of a roller in the barred and defended fortress where the Lanoor rulers were. The shleath digest anything the Shaloor want them to. They can dissolve even metal. Only glass is impervious to them. If there is even a ventilation hole, the shleath can seep through."

	"How many are there?"

	"Thousands. They use them as work animals when need be, because they can seep under a heavy stone, girder, or mass of metal, and gradually all come under it so that the mass is lifted. Or they can hang down as a sticky cable from a high place, wrap around the stone, and contract to lift it. If an ordinary shleath is not strong enough, four or a hundred devour each other and form one big one, and that does the work.

	In the last revolt, a thousand shleath made a ring around the whole Lanoor army, and contracted till they were just one large lump. The army was then part of the shleath."

	Blake looked fixedly at Penton.

	"I think," he said in English, "we'd best find the shortest route for another planet. I don't like the sound of these over-stuffed amoebas. But I'd love to stack them up against the Martian thushol. Couldn't that pair have a time?"

	"We'll have to get to the ship, P'holkuun. Then we can use its power to defeat your enemies."

	The Lanoor shifted his feet, and looked across the room.

	"The ship," he said finally, "has been moved to the palace. Twenty shleath did that last night. The Shaloor knew that you would make for the ship, so they put it where they could make sure you didn't get it. They are all in the palace, and they have the ship in the inner courtyard. That is the place we call the court of the shleath. I do not know how you will get your ship. Maybe you could make magic on a Shaloor as you did with the strange man you sent to me. The Shaloor are working to make defenses, because they are afraid of you. They are even more afraid of the ship, so they have not touched it. If you can make a Shaloor do as the Lanoor you sent to me did, perhaps you can get the shleath out of the way. But no Lanoor can move them; they cannot be imprisoned; they never die."

	"Can you feed them until they are groggy?"

	"No, they just break up into more shleath, so there are twice as many and twice as hungry."

	Penton looked slowly at Blake. "If you don't like the shleath, maybe we better decide to stay here for a while," he sighed at length. "You are sure there were not any leftover thushol on the ship? One of those Martian beasts might seriously distract the Shaloor just now."

	"When Greek meets Greek," sighed Blake. "I'd love to see what would happen if an angry shleath met a Martian thushol. Would the thushol turn into an indigestible rock, or would he imitate a bigger shleath and eat the one that had attacked him? It is a beautiful, theosophical problem as to why the Lord ever let anything like that exist—"

	"He didn't. The Shaloor invented the shleath and from what the Martians told us, the thushol invented themselves. You know, Ted, back on Mars old Loshthu told us all about the thushol. Rearrange the letters in his name and they practically spell thushol! I'll bet he really was one of them, and was laughing up his sleeve at us all the while! But that's not the point. The idea is to get inside the ship without getting inside a shleath." He turned to the Ganymedian. "P'holkuun, can you start the rebellion?"

	"Not until you can stop the shleath," answered the Lanoor firmly. "The rest of my people won't even talk rebellion until they are sure they won't be used for tidbits. You have never had a fifty-foot glob of jelly scrunch down on your best friend, and watched the expression of horror fade from his face because his face was dissolving out from under the expression."

	"P'holkuun, sit down a minute. I want to think," said Penton gustily, as he squatted cross-legged on the floor. "I have to find out what part of our science will beat your science. I know there is some item. Tell me things. Can you or your men get access to a metal-worker's shop? A place where there are all kinds of metals? And can you make there for me, many hundreds of small, metal machines? They will be simple, but I know a thing of science that will, I think, save you from further trouble with the shleath."

	"We can get some metals. Not the yellow metal, or the heavy, kingly metals. Only Lanoor work in the metal shops, so we can make machines, if they are simple enough, and small enough to conceal."

	"Good. Bring me, as soon as possible, a sample of all the different metals you can find. And—one of those doughy things—a grethlanth—that the police set on me the other night. Can you do it?"

	"Yes," said P'holkuun, somewhat doubtfully. "But can you do anything?"

	Penton smiled. "Friend, when I get into that sacred court of theirs, the Shaloor are going to come out of the palace faster than they have ever before moved. I shall want only about a dozen courageous Lanoor; all the rest of the rebels will stay well outside the palace and catch the Shaloor as they come out. They will come out very rapidly. And I would not advise any of your people to remain within six blocks of the palace."

	"They couldn't anyway. The Shaloor live all about the palace. If you are sure—"

	Blake lay down gently in the corner after P'holkuun went. He was tired. The atmosphere of the little planet was enervating. Furthermore, he only half believed in Penton, and Penton became as communicative as the surrounding walls.

-

	Blake slept. He slept quite peacefully until he was startled from his sleep by queer chirpings, cracklings, and loud bumpings. He sat up, only to be knocked flat by a massive, doughy affair that smacked into him, and swooshily dropped over his shoulder. Laboriously he struggled up again and looked at the dirty-gray mass that was cavorting crazily about the floor in the dim light of dusk.

	Evidently P'holkuun had come and gone, and had supplied Blake with a grethlanth.

	Penton was dashing madly about the floor picking up something, while the unspeakable dirty-whiteness was dashing about twice as madly—and abruptly dashed out of the window shrieking and gurgling unhappily.

	"Well—maybe it's—all for the—best. That's hard work—here. Bending like that."

	"What in the name of the Nine Wavering Worlds got into that thing?" asked Blake. "It acted as though the floor were red hot, and every time it hit it jumped higher."

	"Copper," said Penton, "and magnesium. I wondered what pH value their metabolism used. Evidently it's greater than seven rather than less. But zinc does well enough, and they can get that. Copper though is expensive."

	"It may make sense, but I don't see it. Where's P'holkuun?"

	"Coming back now. His men were stationed outside to catch that thing when it got loose. I—here he is."

	P'holkuun stuck his great head in. He looked about the very dimly lighted room.

	"It went out very quickly. I thought it might have broken away and succeeded in attacking you as we had ordered it. The men have chased it two blocks now, and it is still going very rapidly. It refuses to obey at all."

	"That's fine." Penton smiled. "Did it attack anyone?"

	"The first one who tried to stop it. It simply rolled over him, and hastened away. What is this weapon?"

	"Make me as many hundreds of these machines as you possibly can, P'holkuun, and I will take the palace with a dozen Lanoor."

	Penton held out a web of wiring, a pancake of interwoven coppery and silvery wires nearly eighteen inches across. The intricate hookup of wires led into a small, solid, egg-shaped mass at the heart of the network, an ovoid of black, plastic material.

	"You can make a great many, I think. And remember to make that whole device exactly as I have, changing no slightest detail, particularly as to the constitution of the central mass. Is it understood?"

	"I will." P'holkuun looked somewhat wide-eyed at the savage little device that had sent the utterly fearless, nerveless defender of the Lanoorian peace scuttling out the window in such terror that it absolutely refused to obey orders.

-

IV. - The White Flowers

	P'HOLKUUN HALTED. Ahead, the narrow corridor cut through the solid rock turned, and beyond the turn it was a passageway lined with cut stone mortared in place.

	"We enter the palace soon. No Lanoor is supposed to know of this corridor, as I say, and to prevent suspicion, the Shaloor station no Lanoor guards, and do not so much as guard it themselves. But they have men watching this night beyond that wall. They are suspicious—almost know that rebellion is starting. For four days now, you have been free, and they have not heard from you, have seen no sign of your existence. They believe you have obtained help, but they have received no word of a general uprising. And"—he looked at Penton from the corner of his eyes, rather doubtfully—"they know that no dozen men can take their palace, or menace them."

	"Yes. They also know that no man can stand against a shleath, or any save a Shaloor order him. They know a great many things. A most surprising number of those things are all wrong. Is there a door ahead?"

	"Yes. Locked, with a heavy steel bolt. But—you said you could open that."

	Penton smiled and nodded to Blake. Blake shifted two dozen of the flat, woven webs he carried to the dozen or so Lanoor who had accompanied them, each man rearranging the webs he already carried to take on the extra. Then the Earthman went forward.

	The door was a secret panel on the other side, but from here it was obvious enough. A panel of thick, dense wood, a dark green, no doubt polished beautifully on the other side that opened into the main hall of the palace.

	But from this side it was rough, and studded with locking mechanisms. Two heavy steel hinges supported it, and a series of three steel bars a half inch thick, operated by levers in the manner of a bank-vault lock, held it in place with all the rigidity of the surrounding wall. No careless hand could detect it from the far side.

	Blake wrapped his fingers about the bars, braced his feet solidly, and pulled slowly, with greater and greater force. The mild steel gave under the strain, and slowly the bar backed out of the socket that held it.

	Just before it was free, Blake transferred his attention to the second, and then to the third. The Lanoorians listened to his panting breath, and watched the writhing muscles in silent awe. The Earthman was to them as unnatural as a superintelligent gorilla would be to Earthmen.

	Blake backed off and rested, till his heavy panting in the thin air of the little planet quieted. Finally he stood up again, and nodded.

	"Ready, I guess. Now, once more, what will we have to look out for, P'holkuun?"

	"They have guns, mostly air-powered guns. They are almost noiseless, there is no smoke, the source of the shot cannot be detected. But they will not shoot through heavy cloth. The explosion guns do. First they will try the sleep-gas, until they see that we are immune, thanks to your discovery that a series of five doses made a man safe. Then—the White Flowers."

	"Just what are the White Flowers?" asked Penton.

	P'holkuun shrugged his shoulders.

	"They used it only once. They are afraid of it themselves, so they will be reluctant to try it. It is a mold that turns a healthy man into a moldering, putrescent corpse in thirty seconds. The flesh falls from his bones in white lumps. And anything that touches him, or passes near, within thirty hours—follows him! So, if you see a man turn white, and hear his scream—there is no need to help such a one. Leave him quickly.

	And we must go quickly now. I know the way we are to go, all my men here do. You must stay with us; if you cannot, seek the innermost court."

	"Good. Go ahead, Blake," said Penton. "I'll take the lower half." Together, the two Earthmen approached the door, and took hold. The steel bars popped from their sockets with a vast droning clatter, to vibrate like plucked reeds. Immediately the two men jumped through the opened door, the Lanoorians behind them. The great central hall was bright with the glow-lights, and a half-dozen Shaloor were streaking across the room toward them, drawing their gas-guns as they came.

	A shrill cry was spreading through the palace, echoing from room to room. Feet began running in unseen passages, and somewhere women's shriller voices called out. Two Lanoor servants appeared momentarily, their eyes opening in surprise at the sight, then narrowing in sudden concentration as they vanished into familiar passages.

	Blake's arm flung back. A rounded, nicely weighted stone flew from it with the super Lanoorian force a Terrestrial could give it. An attacking Shaloor doubled with a howl of pain and an instant later another fell with a little groan, the side of his head crushed in. Gas bombs fell about them as P'holkuun led the way to a branching, wood-paneled corridor on the far side of the room.

	"They will concentrate to defend the inner court, since it is known that you have come," P'holkuun called back. "Hurry."

	A pair of Lanoorians had spread out behind them, and their swords were flashing in efficient butchery. The Shaloor were vanishing now, into the various rabbit-warren passages.

	P'holkuun led them at a sharp run down the passage, past a dozen intersecting warrens and into a smaller passage.

	"P'holkuun!" a strange low voice warned softly. "Not that way, the gates will close. Turn aside. The third—right." Feet vanished. P'holkuun halted in indecision.

	"I wonder if that was a Shaloor?" he asked unhappily.

	"It was my cousin!" exclaimed one of the Lanoor. "He is a secretary—"

	They took the third to the right.

	"But I am lost now," P'holkuun muttered. "I do not know this route. Why didn't he join us to help—"

	From a room on one side a Lanoor stepped out.

	"You'd probably have shot me by mistake. Come." The man had two of the air-guns, and a blood-stained sword. "They are gathered to defend the great inner court. They have closed all entrances with steel grills, save the one that they want you to take, the S'logth gate. That is open—open for the shleath. What do you hope to do?"

	"Lead us there." Penton smiled. "The sooner we reach the shleath, the better. What weapons have they?"

	The Lanoor shifted his slight weight to his right foot.

	"Some strange things they found on the ship of the strangers. A little thing, like a pistol, or sleep-gas thrower. But it throws nothing, only light, and not bright light at that. A Shaloor died handling it, and they made two Lanoor find out the secret. Now they have twenty. There is another thing they will use if they must, but they fear it, for none of us have been able to make it work without terrific explosions. But the explosions destroy what they hit, so they may use it even so."

	"Damn," said Penton softly. "They can stop the shleath with the ultra-violet pistols. And the atomic bullet guns. They might go so far as to attack the ship with them. Not even the ship could stand one of those atomic bullets. Thank God they're still more afraid of them than we are. All we can do is try. They won't know just what they are doing, and we may still get away with it.

	"Lead the way, man."

	Again they started, through more devious, involved passages than they had taken before. Through rooms where Lanoor servants looked, saw them, and looked blindly away, through rooms where startled Lanoor women rose angrily from sleep, and quieted with a grim smile as they saw who invaded their rooms. Down narrow corridors, through smoking kitchens. Down a long corridor—

	"No, I tell you, no!" a Lanoor's voice shouted in exasperation. "They have not come this way. Why should they? They will go some other way if they have a particle of sense, and they will go entirely away if they know what I know." And then came the angry curses of a Shaloor. Abruptly they dived into a side lane, and P'holkuun grinned.

	"The Shaloor cannot hear well. Nor see, for all of that. But the Lanoor hear us."

	"P'holkuun! Who-ah, it is you," the Lanoor's voice continued. "They are waiting for you at the gate now with three shleath in hiding. Go back. You must try at some other time. The city has heard, and it is roaring with rebellion. The Shaloor are preparing to bring out the shleath as the crowd grows outside the palace. But go back. They are ready for you, and they have a new weapon."

	P'holkuun looked at the new Lanoor recruit uneasily.

	"Did you hear that, Earthman?" he asked Penton.

	"Did you hear of the new weapon, Lanoor?" returned Penton. "Do you think they will ever know less than they know now? Be less ready to meet you with strange weapons? Do you think you can ever have a better chance than with the men who invented the weapons you fear? And know more about them than all the Shaloor on the planet? If ever in time you have had a breath of hope, you have it now. Come on before that breath expires." Penton started on down the corridor. "And you don't have to worry about the shleath. They will be more worry to the Shaloor than to you."

	"Then stop. That is the door that leads to the hall of the S'logth gate. If you open the door, the shleath will be in here at once."

	"What is out there, then?" Blake demanded.

	"There are, apparently, three shleath, and the Lord of Worlds only knows how many Shaloor, waiting to shoot, gas, bomb, and kill us in every other conceivable way." 

	"Where are the Shaloor?"

	"They will be in the high gallery. The S'logth gate goes up three stories, but we are on the first, since only thus can one enter the inner courtyard. They will be on the second and third galleries, and they will be watching for us. We cannot enter here until, somehow, the Shaloor are driven out."

	"How do we get to the third floor gallery, then?"

	P'holkuun looked to the Lanoor secretary who had joined them, Tathuol. The man shook his head.

	"I can try. But it will do little good, since there we will be unable to reach and enter" the gate we should pass through, because we can't reach the floor. And the Shaloor may have the steel grills in the way."

	"If I once get my hands on one of the weapons they Stole from our ship," said Blake grimly, "all the Shaloor on the planet, and all the shleath, steel grills, stone walls and assorted animals and plants won't stop me. Just get me near one of those Shaloor."

	The way was a winding, climbing corridor, and it led them through back rooms and twisting flights of stairs. It led them up trap-doors in closets, and in impossible ways. Finally Tathuol halted.

	"That is the door. There will be half a hundred Shaloor waiting for us out there."

	"Don't disappoint them, then. Come on!" Penton yanked open the door, and jumped out, low. Fully the promised fifty Shaloor turned toward him, raising their guns. Instantly the walls were peppered with shot, and, with a queer hissing, droning hum, a beam of pale, deepest violet stabbed through the air. Not toward Penton, but across the great hallway to a hanging balcony on the far side! Someone howled in agony there, and together, Blake and Penton charged down the hundred foot length of the balcony.

	It was only some twenty feet wide, and between them, with P'holkuun in effective action, the balcony was cleared in less than fifteen seconds. Cleared, for the Shaloor jerked and moved on the courtyard floor, eighty feet below.

	Penton stared about him. Across the courtyard, four similar balconies hung at the same level, and four more below. On his right, on this same side, another balcony clung to the dark stone wall, and two more on the left. Four below him. The great ceiling arched low above his head, studded with hundreds of glowing lights. And in the great hall below, three monstrous things pulsed and staggered, three things like green, gold and purple amoebas fifty feet in diameter.

	They were surging and wavering madly, and then suddenly they stopped and ran together. Horribly they merged into a single, frightful mass of pulsing, nauseous flesh. An oozing, angry mass of protoplasm, it charged for the wall, and miraculously sent a vast finger of jelly-stuff sprouting swiftly upward, past the balcony, toward them!

	Abruptly, Penton heard the clanking sounds of dropped metal, soft moans of terror, and scampering feet. The Lanoor were leaving. Only P'holkuun and a half dozen others stood, white-faced, beside the Earthmen. "The shleath—coming—" said P'holkuun stiffly.

	Penton crouched. The wall of the balcony, some four feet high, was carved with an intricate design of flowers and trees, and intricate spaces cut through the stone. There was an angry silence in the court. Only the soft, horrible shluffing, slobbering sounds of that vast monstrosity climbing the wall. It had dwindled to a twenty foot thing of green jelly with a purple, angry bruiselike knot in its middle, with golden thread shot through it. But up the stone wall, to within a few feet of the balcony, the questing mustard-green, pseudopodal arm clung tenaciously to the minute grips it found. Penton crouched and waited, peering through the tiny holes.

	"Pick up three of those webs, Blake," said Penton, softly. "And wait until that thing reaches up here."

	Somehow P'holkuun made himself move. He handed Penton a half-dozen of the flimsy, interwoven webs of silver and copper wires. They looked like metal spider webs with black, rubbery spiders clumped at their centers.

	Then the vast arm reached up to the balcony. Thick fingers of slime reached through the openings of the balcony wall, and waved with a horrible suggestion of individual, hateful life. The great, green wave curled smoothly over the wall, and sprouted thick tentacles that stabbed out toward the Earthman as he rose. In his hand the flash, with its projecting, copper terminals, blackened by the burning arc that had fused the lock, gleamed dimly.

	He thrust his hand toward one of those jelly-ropes, and braced as the thing clamped visciously about him. Then he pressed the .button that shot fifty volts of powerful current into the vast mass of protoplasm.

	Somehow it screamed. The city quieted to that ineffable shriek. An unspeakable hatred was in it, and an indescribable terror. The rope turned livid yellow, and contracted so swiftly that the mass on the floor jerked halfway up the wall to meet it, and fell with a liquid splashing plop. The mass heaved; it split into three separate pieces, then half a dozen, and they all howled.

	Accurately, Penton tossed one of the metal webs so that it fell onto the center of one of the pulsing, writhing things on the floor. The shleath shrieked with the same unspeakable, evil hatred, and the same awful terror, but somehow it whined; it begged. It scuttled into a corner and cowered there.

	And another one of the blind, terror-stricken things touched the spider of black, and gold, and silver. It leaped five feet into the air, and splintered on the floor. The great shleath split into a hundred tiny things that rolled and scuttled and bounded with little evil squeaks of terror as they accidentally touched the black spider.

	The larger ones were coming under control. Reluctantly, angrily they moved about, incorporating the smaller ones into their vast bulks. They joined again to two vast masses that charged for the wall. Penton dropped another of the webs. Then, in swift succession, two more.

	There was point to their anger now. They howled, but they howled with directed anger. From the horribly stinging balcony they turned to the masters that drove them on. A wave of slime engulfed the lower balcony directly below the Earthmen. Penton watched the struggling Shaloor turn horribly red as their mouths gaped open in the thick, transparent jelly. They turned red, and stained the green about them, and struggled jerkily, then feebly; and through the clouding redness that grew in the green jelly, vague, shadowy things that might have been white bone here, or bared vital organs there, began to show.

	Penton turned away. The shleath was stretching out an arm toward the nearby balcony below, where milling Shaloor shot hissing pistols at it, and finally—something white blossomed in the greenness. The shleath seemed to suck in the whiteness and engulf it, but the white splotch grew, and spread with an awesome rapidity. The shleath writhed and spewed out the mass of white and green life stuff. Then the rope looped out again.

	Softly violet, softly humming, the beam of one of the stolen pistols stabbed from the balcony. It struck the courtyard below, and wandered wildly, erratically about while the wave of green washed over the balcony.

	Again a white splotch blossomed, and again. Twice the thing spit them forth with masses of its own stuff.

	Then the white blossomed on an infected Shaloor, and he fell screaming, tearing at his leg, as the stuff whirled through his veins. He writhed over the edge of the balcony, and lay beside the white tufts of ejected tissue from the shleath, white as they, and growing soft and downy.

-

V. - Bifocal Vision

	ABRUPTLY THE wildly wavering beam of the UV pistol snapped out. Tensely Penton watched as a pseudopod of the shleath lapped up a Shaloor. The one with the stolen weapon seemed to be concentrating, his brows wrinkled in fear-filled thought. With both hands, he held the pistol, and abruptly swept it around the shleath. It exploded into flare, and the shleath howled in agony again. Dense, nauseous smoke welled up from the flaring spot where the ultra-violet beam tore into it, bubbling horribly.

	The thing dropped from the balcony, splitting into a hundred parts as it fell.

	Blake spoke softly.

	"I've been usefully engaged. There are about fifty less Shaloor. They have been too busy to watch, and these guns work. There was only one UV pistol here, and that went over the edge with one of the Shaloor."

	"P'holkuun, you said they couldn't see?" Penton asked softly. "What do you mean?"

	"They can see. But they don't point right. They never drive, they never fly planes. They seldom write, or do experiments themselves. We do not understand fully. But there is something the matter with their eyes."

	"Thank God for that," said Penton. "I think I know what it is. They've joined the two halves of the brain, and are far more brilliant than any creature has a right to be, but they pay for it. Only one half the brain does all the thinking. That's true enough. But both halves see, and both halves hear. Both halves help with moving the body about. Somehow, when they cross those two halves of the brain for greater keenness, they see double. They probably hear double, too. They can't coordinate arm and eye well. They forced themselves to learn to move a bit, but they can't make themselves see straight.

	"They are more intelligent, no doubt of that, for they have more UV guns than we made. They figured out that unknown system to that extent in one week's time. But they not only see double, but by some psychological trick, they see the wrong image best! They missed us when we appeared suddenly. That Shaloor that tried to kill the shleath with the UV gun shot up all the court but for the spot where the creature was. They can't move quickly, and they can't see straight. That gives us a far better chance, and changes my plans a bit. P'holkuun, can we get somewhere where we can throw the webs into the inner court? Let's finish the job."

	Tathuol nodded.

	"Yes. Come." He led them back, through twisting corridors, through rooms where terrified Lanoor whispered and asked questions. They had heard the screams of the maddened shleath. The news was spreading. Then they reached a barred gate, a grillwork of locked bars that closed off the corridor.

	Beyond it they looked into a great courtyard a quarter of a mile across. The vast ramifications of the palace surrounded it on every side. And in it half a hundred of the giant shleath wavered and stirred uneasily, crowding down at the gate beyond which they had heard the strange shrieks of their fellows.

	Somehow those giant masses of jelly had a brain and understanding. And they were restless. The glow-lamps cast only dim sparkles of light on hulking masses of greenish jelly. And, out in the middle of the court, silver metal on the Ion, the ship that had brought Penton and Blake to this world, glistened faintly.

	"Oh, for the wings of an angel! How in blazes are we going to get there?" Blake mourned.

	Penton began tossing the black and silver and gold of the spiders methodically through the bars. One—five—a dozen. Some fell short, some long of their mark. It was hard to aim at an angle on a light world of unfamiliar gravity. Then two in quick succession landed.

	"Back—back to the entranceway where we can get into the courtyard," Penton yelled over the shrieks of the two monsters. A giant began stamping. The whole palace shook to the thud of his tread. Then it stopped. Human feet began running somewhere, and the shouts of the Shaloor pierced the roaring that came from the inner court. Penton hesitated. Then he gathered all the spider webs, and threw them into the yard below, spinning them all over the court. Dozens of them skimmered into the night to fall with soft, clinking rustles. Three times he scored hits. But now restless, wandering shleath were accidentally touching the stinging electric traps.

	The radiating copper and zinc wires reaching out from the rubber egg at the center were charged by the little battery protected in the black, elastic shell. The first electric batteries on this world! And these shleath, the mighty, indestructible shleath howled in malignant terror. They had no true skin, they were vast masses of naked, unprotected protoplasm. Each touch of those charged wires sent a minute electric current charging through their vast masses—torturing, unbearable current.

	It was happening there in the courtyard as Penton had known it would. The vast yard was boiling with the protoplasmic Titans, their weird, gold-shot bulks glistening in the dim lights, their weird, anguished cries shrilling in the night. Outside the palace a vast echo was rolling back, the vast angry roar of the aroused Lanoor rebels. Here below, as the elephantine bulks of the restlessly moving shleath touched one of the electrically charged webs, the shocking current made it writhe and heave. Frantically they sought escape, escape that was barred by the glass walls, by the special doors.

	Shaloor were appearing at the lower gates, ordering them, directing them. Abruptly a mighty, shining bulk rolled down to the pompous midget, and whipped him into extinction with its glistening pseudopod.

	And the Thing howled. A shock-disc touched it. Every move of its sprawled bulk touched one of the scattered shock-discs. From other gratings about the great court P'holkuun's reinforcements were tossing in the webs now; the court was paved with them.

	The shleath found only one escape. They were dividing now, splitting and dwindling, splitting till their jellied bulks covered more, but smaller areas. Smaller, smaller they became as more and more of the webs fell. They could slip between them now, find some surcease from the unknown horror of electric currents whose tiniest trickle made them writhe in agony.

	Penton watched in silence. The fifty, and seventy-five-foot Titans had dwindled, screaming. None was larger than a two-foot globe of jelly!

	"Put on those boots," said Penton softly, "and come on." From his waist, he himself unstrapped the network of charged wires, and wrapped them about his legs. From his belt two sets of wires dangled, connecting the leggings to five tiny cells. "Now, P'holkuun, where is the man with the rope? We can go down there now, if we can open this grill. No shleath will dare to touch us now. This grill is bolted in two places, and I think the atomic flash has still power enough to burn two."

	The atomic flashlight was changed now; two heavy copper leads had been soldered to its terminals. As they touched the steel bolts, the hissing green flame of the copper arc shrilled into the metal, twice. The flash tube, its storage device of twisted atoms intended only for the light task of providing illumination, hummed and grew warm. The bolt sputtered suddenly and fell molten. The lurid green flare ate at another bar.

	It glowed red, then white—and parted. Another—and Penton dropped the flash tube with a curse. It glowed for a moment, and died, its last dregs of energy exhausted. Together the Earthmen heaved at the weakened grill. The grating moved a fraction of an inch protestingly, and held. Again and again the two men heaved; finally all the Lanoor who could reach it added their strength.

	Then, from a distant grating, a violet beam of death reached out, and crackled the stone twenty feet from them.

	Penton ran. "Damn," he groaned. "They've spotted that grating, and they won't let us near it now. We've got to try some other way. I wonder—"

	He started down the corridor, turned back to the next grating, and tried it. It was locked as solidly.

	"Tathuol, can you lead me to a grating where there are some Shaloor posted, at least one of whom has one of our weapons?"

	The Lanoor thought a moment. "I can lead you to the one from which they fired just a while ago."

	"Good. P'holkuun, if you have a brave man, tell him to stay at that grate we left, and test it every few minutes until we give him the signal to stop. He has to keep out of the way of the beam, but he has to keep the man who is running it interested. Anybody want the job?" 

	P'holkuun laughed mirthlessly.

	"I doubt it. Go ahead, I will take care of it. If my luck is bad, remember your promise to free my people."

	"Right, my friend." Penton nodded slowly. "They will be, before the sun rises. But—be spry." Penton took the Lanoor's hand in a firm grasp for a moment, then followed Tathuol. Through the rabbit-warren palace they dodged. Once they met a searching party of half a dozen Shaloor armed with the little yellow tubes that carried the deadly White Flower and had kept out of sight. But Tathuol knew the maze-like routes of the building far better than did those lords by proxy, for their strange, crossed vision made walking difficult, and they hated it.

	"Beyond that turn," the Lanoor said at last, "is the grating we saw the Shaloor fire from. I cannot guarantee that he is still there."

	"Let us just hope so, then. We—ah, he is." A brief, soft glare of violet shot out from the corridor's end.

	Noiselessly Penton rounded the corner, Blake close behind him. Four Shaloor stood watching, looking out across the courtyard to a distant gateway where metal bars shone dully red. Cracked, blistered stone told of the violence of the pistol they used.

	"He is trying to get us to melt that gate away," said one of the Shaloor uneasily.

	"Much good may it do him. I'll get him the next time he shows, because I haven't changed the direction since the last shot. I—"

	Penton's powerful arms wrapped two of the bean-stalk giants while Blake caught the others. Instantly six of the Lanoor who had followed them descended and in the space of seconds, the Shaloor glared in anger from their bonds.

-

	Penton examined the gun he held.

	"It's one of ours. Needs a new charge, too; not more than ten second's life left. This one is set for steel, too, and we haven't any. Well—"

	With a knife for a screwdriver, and two bits of metal in pinching fingers for a wrench, Penton opened the butt of the weapon, and pulled out the tiny reel that carried the iron-wire fuel. Then he adjusted four tiny screws and tore a strip of the copper wire from his protective leggings. With Blake's aid he stretched it cautiously. It was good copper, and it fined down several gauges before it broke. Then he inserted that into the reel, and clamped the gun together.

	"Now, if my memory is good, and I have the right constants for the slow release of the copper's energy, we'll get out in fine style. And if it isn't—we'll go out in fine style," he added grimly.

	Penton aimed the gun at the grate, and pulled the trigger. Instantly the beam shot forth, a blazing inferno of light that volatilized the grating almost instantly, speared through to the courtyard below, and sent up bubbling smoke. The squealing anger of the shleath changed to a vast shrieking. Penton hurled the weapon to the floor. Slowly a glow built up in it, a glow that spread from the tip of the barrel to the breech, and the smoke of the wiring rose from it.

	Blake and Penton were two hundred feet down the corridor when the incredible sharpness of the explosion wave hurled them along for twenty feet, like peas from a peashooter. The clatter of falling masonry grumbled behind them, and even the steady wail of the shleath quieted momentarily.

	Penton picked himself up gingerly.

	"Not bad," he said judicially, "not perfect, but not bad. It might have been, to put it mildly, somewhat worse. We're lucky the town's still here."

	Over tumbled blocks of stone that made a perfect ladder, the two men scrambled down to the courtyard. Undamaged, the Ion lay some fifty feet from the end of the slide that had crumbled half one wall of the yard.

	It was not a path of roses. The Shaloor were on the job, and only their incredibly confused eyesight made it possible. Consistently, half the beams and bullets tore into the enraged shleath behind them, and half spattered before them. None came near them.

	Ten feet from the entrance Penton gasped, and fell. His unprotected hand was grabbed instantly by a shleath, before Blake could lift him to his feet again. The touch of Blake's boot drove it away as Penton spoke: "They have the range. Get in that ship, you fool—they got my leg with a bullet."

	"Uh-huh," said Blake. "You talk funny. Hold on. Even on a light world you are heavy—"

	From a height of some five hundred feet, Blake looked down. Then he turned on the spotlight, and looked at the courtyard below. He adjusted some controls, and when the spotlight exactly covered that yard, he pulled a small tumbler. The light turned violet, and the heaving, greenish floor turned brown and became quiescent. The light went out. Blake pulled the microphone near him, and spoke softly, words that roared from the loudspeaker in the outer skin of the ship.

	"P'holkuun, if you will come up alone in a plane tomorrow at dawn, we'll meet you. I could take that palace apart, but most of the inhabitants seem to be your folk. In the meantime, I have to pull a bullet out of Penton's leg. Tomorrow at dawn, in a plane from the local port."

-

THE IMMORTALITY SEEKERS
I. - The Second Metal

	TED PENTON, of the team of Penton and Blake, regarded his companion, Rod Blake, and grinned. In the great audience hall below, twelve hundred of Callisto's scientists were assembling to hear the message of the visitors from space.

	"Plenty has happened to us since Earth kicked us out for taking off some of the three hundred square miles of territory spang in the center of Europe in an atomic explosion. It's their own fault if they can't find us—outlawing research on atomic power. It was obvious when we developed atomic power that we'd be the first men to reach the other planets. And nobody can follow to bring us back unless they accepted the hated atomic power and used it."

	"One," interrupted Rod Blake, ticking it off on his finger. "I learned the Martian language under the able, if painful, hypnotic teaching of a Martian master, old Loshtu. Two,"—a second finger—"I learned the Lanoor language on Ganymede by your hypnotic teaching. 	You are not a master of Martian telepathy, and it was more racking. There, we are now on Callisto and I may be blowed to the nine planets and twenty-odd moons of the Solar System before I let you teach me this language that way.

	"Look at the scraps we've picked up for ourselves so far: an hour after we landed on Mars we were trying desperately to get away from Mars and their damned inhabitants, the thushol. Then we went to Ganymede, battled their glorious shleath and Lanoor, and got evicted. I won't go through that headache I always collect from learning a language via your hypnotism system if we are going to be here on Callisto a year or so. I can pick up the language normally in that time; so no hypnotism. Got it?"

	Penton smiled beatifically.

	"The Callistans will want a speech from you at that conference that is so swiftly assembling. Just because we've had bad luck on those last two trips—"

	"If you think those Lanoor that were chasing us meant no more than bad luck when we left Ganymede, why did you exhibit such surprising speed? Me, with two sound legs, and I had all that I could do to keep up with a wounded one. They weren't wishing us bad luck; they were wishing to elongate the vertebrae connecting my cranium with the rest of me, or I'm badly mistaken. Very peevish about it, too."

	"H-m-m, mildly so. But then, you must admit those shleath were enough to make anyone peevish," Penton pointed out judicially.

	"No fault of ours. We were asked to overthrow the Shaloor overlords, which we did. They should have had sense enough to keep those fifty-foot amoebas in check after that I'd have suggested turning that courtyard where they were into a sulphuric acid swimming pool, myself."

	"No fault of ours, perhaps, but they wanted someone to blame, and we were handy. If the shleath had had the decency to stay fifty-foot size something could be done. But now they are peeping their particularly unpleasant slime out of every rat-hole, crack and crevice in the whole city. Personally, I don't see what the Lanoor are going to do about it. The only cure I could see was to burn down the whole city—ray it out of existence. The damned things can go anywhere, through the tiniest crack; worst of all, no animal can fight them, they Just digest it."

	Blake was staring down through the ornamental grille that separated their room from the great audience hall below. It was almost filled up.

	"By the way, Penton, what are you going to tell that Callistan assembly?"

	"Various things," Penton sighed. "I'll have to figure it out as I go along. I had a chance to talk with Tha Lagth, the old commander who brought us here, for only about five minutes. They have automobiles—we rode in one; wing-flapping, flying machines—we watched them as we came down in our spaceship. But what else they have, I can't make out. I know they don't have fire, since no normal fuel will burn in this atmosphere, so I brought some things to amuse them." Penton pulled some loose, metal scraps from a pouch he wore, and a small bottle filled with sticks of yellowish wax and a watery liquid.

	"White phosphorous for one," guessed Blake, "but the metal has me stopped. Oh—magnesium. Yes, that would burn anywhere."

	"Some of them may have seen a flame in a laboratory, under special lab conditions, but I don't think they saw any in open air. They do have ships—we saw them in the harbor down there—can see them now for that matter. Say, they must all be motor ships, but I wonder what kind of motors they use? This air wouldn't let even a Diesel engine run. Electric—but how do they generate power?

	"Anyway, that's the trouble. I want to find out what they know before I go spreading all my cards.

	Somehow, we have to stay here long enough to get a stock of edible food. I wish we hadn't been so bright, moving all the stuff from the ship into that apartment our friend P'holkuun gave us back on Ganymede."

	"Yes," Blake said ironically, "oh Ambassador Plenipotentiary of Earth. How in the name of the wavering worlds will you support that claim?"

	"Well"—his friend grinned—"Earth gave us a royal send-off the last time we visited—all the big guns firing in our honor."

	"Probably it was an accident they left the shells in when they fired 'em," Blake grunted. "I suppose you are playing on the fact that they can't check up on you?"

	"But more immediately important, how about these Callistans? You swore up and down that they were an honest, gentlemanly race. But how sure are you?"

	Penton nodded toward the closet on one side of the room, where the shimmery bulk of his spacesuit hung.

	"I discarded that suit. They don't understand mental telepathy any more than we did before the Martians gave us practical lessons—even if unpleasant ones. They can't mask their thoughts, therefore, and I know what sort of ideas old Tha Lagth had while meeting us and bringing us here. He's a nice, old fellow, and all that brusque, efficient, military air of his was due to the fact that he was half scared of doing the wrong thing.

	"What is the proper formula for greeting the first ambassador of an alien planet? Who should attend to it? Using uncommon good sense, the old fellow figured visitors from a foreign world called for the whole constellation of scientists instead of politicians. More power to him. The premier will undoubtedly horn in, but I thank Tha Lagth for his kindly thoughts."

	"I don't mind your discarding the spacesuits," Blake objected, "half so much as I regret that the only holsters we had for the UV guns and the disintegrator pistols were part of the spacesuits. I just like that nice, rhythmic, bump-bump-bump of a dis gun when I am on planets unknown. It makes me feel very much as though I really owned the place. Which isn't so far from the truth when you have one of those ray guns on tap."

	Penton shrugged.

	"A dis gun puts that potential ownership In the realm of academic questions. If you have to prove it, there is nothing but dust left to own when you reach the Q.E.D. stage. Anyway, prepare to meet the assembled bright-lights of the Callistans intellectual world. Here comes Tha Lagth."

	Blake turned with a sigh.

	"I'm glad you'll have to do all the talking as Earth's ambassador. But look, can't you do that thought-projecting stunt so I can follow, even if—"

	"Even if you won't take the trouble to learn the language?" Penton grinned. "I suppose I'll have to."

	"Welcome, Tha Lagth," said Penton, smoothly shifting into Callistan. "The scientists are assembled?"

	"Yes, Earthmen. If you are ready—" The old warrior looked at them with friendly dignity.

-

	Seated before that audience of twelve hundred Callistans, they found Penton's guess confirmed. The premier was an unusually tall man, even among the eight-foot Callistans, with gray-white hair and a jet-black beard clipped in a style strongly reminiscent of the ancient Assyrian custom.

	He was pointing out the immense importance of this occasion—historic moment—two world's civilizations—the benefits of both. The director of the Sharl Technical University rose and explained the historic moment—two world's sciences—the benefits of both. Starn Druth, the most eminent scientist of Callisto, walked slowly up to the platform, an old, shaky man, his skin wrinkled with advanced age. But his speech was sharp, clever, and avoided the obvious. Penton listened with interest, and realized that the old body carried a keen, youthful mind.

	Starn Druth remarked that inevitably the available supplies of chemical elements on two worlds would differ in important, perhaps vital, ways.

	"There is," he pointed out, "an element which theory has shown to be of immense importance. It exists in small quantities in the sun, but has never been found here, to our regret. Our planet is light, and has lost nearly all the hydrogen, the helium and the other light atoms it originally had when the worlds cooled from creation. The heavier worlds may well have retained these elements in small but available quantities. This—"

	At the back of the huge hall, a man stumbled in, a man in the green-blue uniform of the Air Force. He was panting for breath, wildly excited. Despite the efforts of the attendants who rose to stop him, he ran down the aisle shouting.

	Tha Lagth rose to his feet and stepped forward sharply.

	"Halt!" he roared. "What is the reason for this intrusion?"

	"Commander—Commander—the ship. Their ship is made of the Second Metal!"

	With a single, mighty roar, the assembly came to its feet. Tha Lagth stopped abruptly, and looked to old Starn Druth. The scientist stared in sudden triumph at his colleagues.

	"I said it! The heavy world retained the Second Metal!" But no one heard his voice in the clamorous shouting. Tha Lagth had taken up the gavel, and was pounding vigorously at the resonator on his desk. Slowly its sharp, piercing note struck out through the babble to quiet the hundreds of Callistans. Gradually they relaxed in their seats.

	"Now, messenger," said Tha Lagth at length, "what was found?"

	"A micro-sample was scraped from the hull of the stranger's ship, and analysis performed. The chief components detected were copper, cobalt, aluminum and magnesium. The bulk of the material definitely did not answer to any known test. The analysts took a second specimen and made spectroscopic tests. The scientists reported that it was definitely identified as the Second Metal. Eighty percent of the metal of the ship's hull—hundreds of tons—is the nonexistent metal!"

	Starn Druth muttered something under his breath, his bright old eyes fixed on Tha Lagth. Then he spoke.

	"I suggest that I explain to these strangers the importance of this Second Metal to us." He looked toward Penton eagerly.

	"Most of our industry and science has been based on the study of life, bio-chemistry. Within recent years, we have learned to synthesize life-forms from inorganic elements; we make living cells, and design them for certain functions. Gradually we have developed many different types of synthetic life-forms that supply us with food, and do our .work.

	"But by theoretical calculations it has been shown that the greatest triumph of all, intelligent micro-life, can be produced in only one way; we know the needed combinations of elements, of amino acids and carbohydrates. Marry times we have gathered these things and put them together in the proper way, but the stimulating spark has not appeared. We lack the one thing which will start that life working.

	"The lower forms of lie we have used have been stirred from inorganic immobility to life by the flashing of the rays of radium. To procure more intelligent forms, even more powerful rays are needed, and some of our best results have been attained by the aid of immense X-ray tubes operating at nearly ten million volts. But to create the ultimate ideal, intelligent, obedient, microscopic life, we must have rays emanating from a fifteen billion volt source! Rays of a particular type.

	"Our atomic theorists have proven that in all Universe, only one thing can supply just that ray; the disintegration of the atoms of the Second Metal."

	Penton nodded slowly. "Huh. Beryllium. And we made the ship out of that. It's such a light element it probably all boiled away while your planet was cooling. It's enormously rare, even on Earth."

	"We need it," Starn Druth explained softly, "because with intelligent, obedient life-forms of microscopic size, we can become immortal."

	Penton started. "Immortality—how?"

	"By directing those life-forms to make the repairs our bodies need, by ordering them to destroy malignant growths, by injecting billions of obedient defenders when infection threatens. Our bodies naturally have certain forms of defending cells, but they act instinctively. Malignant tumors—cancer—they do not attack, because that is a growth of the body they defend. No instinct warns them. We cannot summon them to the attack when infection begins but must wait until their sluggish instinct at last warns them. With the synthetic life we know how to make, we can guarantee ourselves immunity to all disease, injury, or senile decline."

	Penton looked at Starn Druth thoughtfully a moment. His racing thoughts sized up a situation that was rapidly becoming more than warm; the only beryllium on the planet was their ship. Penton and Blake were not wanted back on Earth, where further beryllium could be obtained.

	It might be two years before their friends on Earth finally succeeded in convincing the government of Earth that the outlawed and vastly feared atomic motor would not blow up to destroy the planet—

	"There are scattered, minute amounts of beryllium on Earth. In return for the knowledge of your technique of creating these intelligent forms of micro-life, I am sure that Earth can supply you with sufficient beryllium within one year."

	Starn Druth looked toward him quizzically.

	"We need beryllium within one month. Your ship could make the round trip very readily in that time."

	"But beryllium is excessively rare—you know that. So finely scattered among so much rock—"

	A scientist rose haltingly from the floor of the assembly.

	"The beryllium atom, according to our calculations," he said, "would not blend in with ordinary rocks.

	Even when very rare, it should occur in small, but concentrated deposits. It is insoluble, and hence would not disperse."

	Penton looked at him unhappily. Callistan science was most unfortunately advanced; the man was 100 percent right. "The ore is so rare," lied Penton, "that some of our most precious jewels are made of it. Emeralds—sapphires. It was only because the metal has the property of stopping certain rays in space that we were forced to use the extremely expensive material—" Penton suggested hopefully.

	It didn't go over. They might never have seen the metal, but they evidently knew plenty about its properties.

	"Diamond is a rare form of a common element; certain of our jewels are a rare crystalline of aluminum oxide, a common material," said Starn Druth uneasily. "Beryllium is opaque to no known radiation, save ordinary light. What are these space-rays?" He looked toward Penton with an evident feeling that something was being concealed.

	"If we return at once," said Penton finally, "I can assure you a sufficient supply, a ton or more, of beryllium within one year of my planet."

	"If we use the metal of your spaceship," suggested Starn Druth softly, "we could arrange to have certain of the intelligent micro-life cells made to suit your body-chemistry. Both of you would be assured immortality. There would be much for you to learn here, and eventually we could duplicate your ship."

-

II. - Impermanent Residence

	"THAT," explained Penton ironically, nodding toward the four, eight-foot Callistans pacing the corridors from their room, "is a guard of honor. By no means let it be thought that they are warders of our confinement."

	Blake looked at them morosely. "Shut up! This is one world we haven't been kicked out of yet. And is our ship guarded! Tha Lagth ordered only four rows of guards to surround it, while the scientists worked out refining methods. I wish they had put us back in that room where we first were. Our spacesuits are there."

	"Man, those Callistans have heads on them. They knew more about a metal they had never seen than I, who had built a ship of it. There was not a chance that they would forget and put us in with those suits again."

	"When does it get dark here?" asked Blake suddenly. "From the looks of those shadows on the orange lawn out there, the sun hasn't moved an inch since we arrived here six hours ago."

	"An inch, maybe. But not much more," Penton sighed. "This satellite always faces Jupiter with the same side, like Luna facing Earth. It takes sixteen days to go around, so it will be sixteen days before that blasted sun sets. No chance of waiting for night."

	"Sixteen days? It wasn't dawn when we landed," Blake protested.

	"Oh, bother, you figure it out. I count on my fingers and when I have rheumatism I make mistakes," Penton growled. "Man, next time when somebody wants something I say, "Yes, sir. Right away, sir. You want the sun on your front steps? Oh, certainly. Just a moment.' I might have known that they wouldn't be in the mood for waiting. Reasonable enough. Old Starn Druth doesn't consider it advisable to wait a year or so while we get beryllium, and six months while they make and test that life-cell.

	"Their president is just as old, and naturally most of the people that run the place are getting old, so it's not really remarkable that they want that beryllium in a hurry. If they can hold off for six months they live centuries more. If they die within that time—they lose immortality!"

	"Somehow you don't seem interested in their offer of immortality yourself."

	Penton looked at his friend.

	"Do you think that anybody can figure out the entire life chemistry of a foreign life-form in a year, or ten years? They've studied their own for centuries, and now they don't know enough to control it, without invoking trick life forms. They don't know their own chemistry, and with no experimental animals to work on, they wouldn't know ours in less time than it took them to learn their own. They know damn well we are here to stay, because they can't do large-scale metal work. I learned that from Starn Druth while he was thinking the problem over. All their major works are stone or wood, or plastics like bakelite.

	"No fire except in laboratory lots; their electricity is derived from some sort of primary battery, since they don't have fires or steam engines, and their gravity is too light for hydro power in quantity. It'd take them fifty years, under our direction, to build up a smelting and refining industry even based on atomic power. They'd have to start from scratch."

	"I have an overwhelming desire to go home," Blake commented. "How are we going to do it, though?"

	"There is no use waiting for night. They have their guards planted, but not thoroughly worked out yet, so I've sort of an idea that if we just bounce out faster than they put us in, we'll catch them unprepared. Also, if we wait a few days here, there won't be enough of our ship left to worry about. Did you get the layout of the city?"

	"Yes. It's a harbor city on an inland sea, more of a huge salt lake. The harbor is something like San Francisco on a miniature scale. Shaped like a Greek capital omego. We're on the left headland, in the governmental buildings, surrounded by nice, broad, orange parks. We'd be as conspicuous as a pair of zebras walking down Fifth Avenue arm in arm. The ship's at the airport on the opposite headland. The only way I can see to get there is to cross those parks, with their bright orange grass, in full daylight, and somehow get among those warehouses and docks along the waterfront.

	"From there, we'd have to steal a car, and somehow get over to the port. Then we have to convince four lines of guardsmen that it's either bedtime, and they are sound asleep, or that we are just part of the scenery."

	"It would help if their grass weren't quite such a vivid shade, or if we had orange clothes."

	"God forbid; me in orange pants!"

	"It's a good plan, Blake, only you need some details. Also, those swords the guards are wearing have such unpleasant waves in the edge. They look as though the genius who designed 'em had an evil disposition."

	"Huh. They have compressed air guns, too."

	Penton looked thoughtfully down the hallway. Two guards cluttered up the doorway, conversing interestedly. Beryllium was big news, of course. Further down the corridor, two more were equally interested in the possibility of immortality. But they were very much awake.

	"You know, my friend, I wonder what these birds would do if—" Penton went through his pockets and the pouch he was still wearing. He felt his flashlight, powered by a miniature atomic disintegrator. Too miniature to do any real damage. Two packs of cigarettes that wouldn't burn in this atmosphere, which was rich in carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but too poor in oxygen to support combustion came into view. Soap, water softener, odds and ends, some pieces of magnesium scrap, and finally a small bottle of waxy, white phosphorus. "We can but try," he sighed at last.

	In full view of the guards, he sat down in the middle of the room. From the flashlight, he removed the lens, the bulb, and the reflector, baring the copper contacts. From the bottle of phosphorus he removed three white sticks. Then he built up a little pile of magnesium metal on the stone flooring.

	The guards had stopped talking, and were watching him uneasily. Penton had found a length of copper wire in his pocket and Blake produced another. Rapidly Penton attached them to the contacts of the flashlight, so that they extended out about three feet, a supply wand of insulated copper wire, ending in two bare bits of metal. These he wrapped around two magnesium metal nuts he found. Briefly he pressed the button of the flashlight. The magnesium nuts flared magnificently for an instant, then died as the current was broken.

	The guards were drawing closer, their swords unsheathed, but looking uncertain of themselves. "Huh." Penton nodded slowly. "They are trying to make it out. Never saw an electric arc, or fire. This, I think, will be fun." He wrapped a bit of the phosphorus in a scrap of copper wire. Again the atomic flash sent a burst of flame between the contacts. This time the phosphorus came away flaring red, while an enormous cloud of dense, dirty-white smoke rolled out.

	Penton and Blake slapped handkerchiefs across their noses, and ran to the water-jar on one side of the room. In a moment the room was filled with one of the most impenetrably dense, white clouds known to man.

	Penton stumbled his way through the whiteness, with the protecting mask across his mouth. Outside the room,. the guards were calling; inside, one was choking, coughing, and upsetting the furniture. Penton bent over his pile of magnesium metal, and a moment later a terrific flare of blue-white light glared through the enveloping pall of phosphorus pentoxide smoke. The magnesium was burning beautifully. It made a perfect camouflage.

	Sixty seconds later they moved rapidly down the silent corridor; far away, around many bends, they heard the shouts of alarmed guards.

	"How the blazes do you fire these pop-guns?" demanded Blake, inspecting hastily his captured weapon.

	"That stud there—it isn't a nut; it's a trigger." Penton coughed and swore. "That nose mask wasn't any too effective. And my mouth is beginning to itch from the acid."

	They dodged down side corridors, past doors from which bewildered Callistans appeared, to be hurled out of the path of the two Terrestrials, muscled for a far heavier world. A door appeared at the side of a corridor, and Penton halted abruptly. He caught Blake, and looked at the lettering on the door a moment.

	"Damn. Wish I'd learned their writing more consciously—I think that means exit." They tried it. At their feet, a corridor slanted downward, spiraling off to the right, and down. The steep slant made running dangerous; the thin air made running difficult.

	Spaced lights gave the only illumination, doors appearing occasionally gave the only indication of altitude. Down—down till one of the doors burst open, and a troop of guardsmen faced them in blank surprise. The flashlight suddenly flared with the incredible brilliance of burning magnesium, and Penton charged at the group. Blake's air gun soughed softly three times, then failed as the supply of compressed air gave out.

	Stumbling over each other, the guards retreated from the weirdly flaming death Penton so evidently carried; some deadly radiation known only to these beings of another world,—no doubt—The Terrestrials followed their fleeing footsteps, but turned aside at the first window. Eighty feet beneath the aperture the orange lawn swaled off toward the shabby docks and warehouses.

	"Let's go," said Penton. "We can stand an eighty foot drop—I hope."

-

III. - Pipeline

	THEY STOOD STILL, panting, two minutes later, lost in a maze of crated, baled goods, as the platoon of guards thundered across the broad lawn after them, running in great strides behind the Earthmen's crazy leaps. The masses of goods imported from unknown ports of this strange sea piled about them in an ordered confusion. Somewhere workmen were shouting, calling to the guards as Blake scurried around a great heap of crated fruit of some kind. Each crate was fully six feet square, and he halted abruptly.

	"Penton, we need a residence. Catch hold." Blake swung at one of the bulky crates; it lifted easily to his Earth-strength. Five minutes later the guards deployed through the building, seeking, shouting, ordering.

	In a four-foot by six closet, completely surrounded by the friendly and uncommunicative fruit, Penton grinned thoughtfully.

	"Here we are, hidden in this crate, walled in on every side by provisions, and with somewhat collapsed gastric regions, yet not taking advantage of the situation. Shall we eat?"

	Blake looked at the fruit in the surrounding crates. They were about the size of lemons, with a horny-looking shell of bright purple with yellow-green spots.

	"I don't know. I'm sensitive to color, and if they taste anything like they look, we'll be most remarkably ill."

	"I'm not affected by color, but I am affected by food. They smell good, so I'll experiment. The soldiers seem to have missed us." Penton opened his pouch, and pawed through its contents. "Soap—I'm a cleanly individual but—say, it will grease the knife, though, when we cut this wood. Borax water softener—no help. Another scrap of magnesium—ah, here we are. The knife."

	Carefully soaping the blade, he cut at the soft wood of the crate. Presently he had an opening large enough to admit his fingers, and a moment later gently extracted one of the weird looking things. Cautiously he wiped the remaining soap from the knife blade, and attacked the horny coating. It was thin, and almost at once gave way, to allow a dark, purplish jelly to ooze forth. Skeptically Penton tested a bit of it on the point of his knife, tasted a larger amount, and smiled approval.

	"Hm-m," said Blake, sampling Penton's offering. "Quite fairish. Have you any knowledge, plucked from Tha Lagth's mind as to—"

	Abruptly there was a frantic scratching at the case near them, and a thunderbolt of peculiarly active flesh forced its way inward. Frantically Penton and Blake backed away in their tiny closet, beating at the furry thing half seen in the dimness. The creature, whatever it was, made a terrific leap at Penton, gripped, and sank its teeth with an unpleasant grating sound of power into the folds of the pouch he was carrying, tearing the tough fabric open instantly, to release a tinkling deluge of miscellaneous items onto the floor.

	Instantly it forgot all about the men to paw frantically, with little whimpering sounds, among the wreckage. With an air of supreme triumph it came up with a small, square package, which it immediately crushed between its teeth, to consume with every evidence of the most complete satisfaction.

	"My god—that was borax!" gasped Penton. "That's going to be one sick animal in a sweet short time."

	Paper and package vanished as the animal gulped heavily once. Its dimly seen head turned, and gleaming, violet eyes looked up at Penton.

	"Borax," it remarked pleasantly, very happily in fact. The word echoed clearly, precisely in Penton's mind, in Blake's mind, too.

	Penton sat down heavily. Blake looked blankly at the animal, now sufficiently motionless for observation. It was long, two feet long. It was low, not more than six inches at the shoulder, and it had a doglike head, with rather friendly, violet eyes. But it had six short, stubby legs, each armed with four sharp claws. It was smiling, more or less, in a friendly sort of way, and displaying a set of teeth that started with glistening, grayish fangs, almost metallic in their luster, and ranged backward to a group of opposed molars as broad as a man's thumb-nail. It had a soft, gray-brown coat of fur, and a long, gently wagging tail.

	"More borax?" it amended.

	"I think," said Blake faintly, "that it likes borax, hard as that may be to believe. In fact, I think it's a mind-reading, broadcasting pooch that came because it smelled our borax."

	"Like borax," mentally agreed the animal, wagging a friendly tail.

	"It looks like the result of mixing a d.t.'s nightmare with a dachshund," Penton decided. "I'm glad, at least, that it doesn't like me."

	"Like you," insisted the animal. "Gkrthps likes you ... More borax?" The mental impressions were somewhat slurred, accented, so to speak, as the utterances of a parrot are accented by the peculiar limitations of the parrot's anatomy.

	"Gk—anyway, that must be its name," Blake said. "I think we had better call it Pipeline. With all those legs, tails and heads sticking out of that unnecessarily elongated body, I think it resembles a complete network of pipes," Penton sighed. "I think—and hope—that it means it approves of me in a personal way; that is, that its liking for me and its appreciation of borax differ fundamentally. Anyway, it looks friendly."

	"More borax?" telepathized the animal plaintively.

	"No, Pipeline, not here. You'll have to visit us some day when we get back to the ship. There is about fifty pounds of it there."

	Pipeline almost danced.

	"Visit the ship ... Go back to the ship."

	"Hm-m, we'd like to, too, but can't just now. Say, Penton, how far do you think this creature's mental impressions reach out? Is he broadcasting our conferences here like an animated telepathic microphone? Did the Callistans send him here for that purpose?"

	"Not far. I was just becoming aware of a sensation of a pleasant odor, which must have been, actually, my picking up his thoughts as he caught the scent of borax-sweet satellites, what a delicacy for any animal—when he burst in here. It doesn't radiate far. But—I have a suspicion it has a memory."

	"Memory," agreed Pipeline proudly. "Remember, they must be in here ... Watch the exits ... No, guard the ship ... You're a fool, watch the exits ... You're an infernal, insubordinate, unripe idiot ... You're a blistering under-captain, trying to tell a general his duty ... Get out of here before I stamp my initials permanently in your liver ... Watch the ship, you blithering, blasting, blowing, brainless aberration! What did they escape for? ... They want the ship ... Go to the ship, visit the ship. Borax—more borax—visit the ship ... They went to the ship, so why hunt the city—they'll go to the ship ... Watch the ship."

	Blake sighed.

	"Disconnected, perhaps," he said, leaning back against a crate, "but intelligent. Highly intelligent. You are a remarkable animal, Pipeline, and you get a full pound of borax for that, the minute we reach the ship, though what you want it for, and how you live on it beats me. You seem to have a remarkable faculty for phonographic—or telepathic—recording."

	He turned aside to Penton.

	"I think I know how Pipeline works. His mind, I mean. Whenever we think of something, he broadcasts all he has ever heard pertaining to that subject. He's like an intelligent phonograph record—doesn't know where to stop or begin."

	"Live on borax," chortled Pipeline pleasantly. "Borax necessary for this peculiar form of life ... This specimen I have obtained from the watchman of a local warehouse, who reports that it was given to him, together with its mate, by a sailor returning from Stakquerl ... The dissections have demonstrated the remarkable anatomy of this beast, which, unlike other life-forms, bases its fundamental life chemistry on fifty pounds of borax in the ship.

	"This type of life occurs in only that one region of our planet, and is quite common there, being represented by a complete type of evolution. This is its highest representative, capable of receiving telepathic impressions direct from the mind of one man, and regenerating those thoughts in the mind of another, while only to a very limited extent understanding the material so repeated ... It's a mind-reading, broadcasting pooch that came because it smelled borax ... More borax?"

	"Man, what a college education you got somewhere, even if you did get it a little mixed up. So you have a girlfriend, eh?"

	"Girlfriend of my own." Pipeline sat down suddenly with the last two sets of legs, and stood up in front. Then lugubriously the animal lay down with the front legs, and stood up in back, while remaining seated in the middle. "No girlfriend of my own ... But I have Thkrub ..."

	"Oh, I begin to understand. I suspect you have it the wrong way around, Ted. This is the female of the species," Blake derided.

	"Female of the species bears from fifteen to fifty young at a time; the mating season is practically continuous ... The male and female mate for life, and at practically any time that fifty pounds of borax in the ship is available young are produced ... The lack of more borax alone prevents this extremely fecund species from overrunning the planet ... They have, you observe, a series of exceedingly powerful molars, capable, in fact, of crushing minerals for digestion ... The animal is capable of ingesting and utilizing inorganic boron ... Let's visit the ship ... They supply their energy needs, however, from the combustion of carbon compounds, as we do, being omnivorous in this respect ... They make highly entertaining pets where the owner can find or procure the expensive boron compounds necessary for their life."

	"Brief Me history. I bet Pipeline—or is it Pipeliness—has heard that lecture a dozen times. Can you suggest a way of turning her off?"

	"Turn me off, that's it ... After all these years I've slaved to help you, slaved for your children, scrimped and saved so that you could have a good time, you brute ... Now you turn me off for some flighty, giddy-headed—more borax?"

	"No, Pipeliness, no family quarrels. You'll get borax when we get to the ship. And then only if you stay quiet until we arrive, or we ask questions. Where's your mate, Pipeliness?"

	For an animal born of a small world, Pipeliness could develop speed. Penton thought this time of a male mate, and Pipeliness went to fetch him. Before either Blake or Penton could move, the animal had vanished with a soft scurry of claws.

-

IV - Stragath

	"I'D NEVER HAVE suspected speed like that in such short legs," said Blake softly. "Do you think she'll be back?"

	"More borax," sighed Penton. "Fifty pounds of borax in the ship. Man, you couldn't lose that critter now to save you. All the repressed mother-love of the last five years or so is probably welling up in her under-slung bosom. I image, from the lecture she just delivered, that friend watchman of the domestic difficulties can't feed her the boron she wants, and evidently she needs a sufficient supply of boron to have young. At any rate I need a supply of carbon compounds. She interrupted my eating rather abruptly."

	"There seems to be enough jellyfruit here to keep any two people going. Tastes funny, doesn't it? Rather like a cross between orange juice and beef gravy, unpleasant as that sounds."

	"It sounds omnivorous, but isn't," Penton objected. "I have a curious desire to consume some sort of meat food. They must have some kind of—what ho! They have. Or at least that certainly looks like a local substitute for the old, familiar of seashore, quick lunches."

	Blake looked at the contents of the case Penton indicated. Like the one they had first raided, it was addressed to a wholesale grocer, but this contained some item that closely resembled a seven-inch hot dog.

	"Even their hot dogs are skinny. Sort of in proportion," Blake pointed out. "The thing's only half as thick as it should be, and half again as long."

	Penton was quietly carving at the boards of the case. Delicately he reached in, and pulled out one of the things. His brow furrowed in deep thought.

	"I know what these darned things are, but for the life of me, I can't recall the name, nor the properties. I wasn't trying to learn foods when I read Tha Lagth's mind. Yes—they're food, all right. I remember that much—seems I remember eating them as is. Well here goes!"

	Penton put a very small portion of the Callistan delicacy in his mouth, and bit on it gently. Blake stared. Abruptly, Penton's face froze in an expression of horrified surprise, his eyebrows climbed frantically to join his hair, then his eyes popped very wide open. He sat in frozen astonishment, while the right eyebrow slid slowly downward, and a slow, dawning comprehension spread over him. His hand, gripping the strange food, gripped tighter, and he swallowed, while his eyes closed desperately. Very slowly his Adam's apple crawled: up, took hold, and slid down his windpipe with a special delivery package for his stomach.

	His eyes opened, and he looked at Blake. A beatific smile spread over his face. The remainder of the thing vanished in three large gulps. Penton sat very still for a moment, as though concentrating on inner voices of surpassing beauty. Finally he looked again at Blake.

	"Remarkable," he said in a falsetto voice. "Er-eh, I mean remarkable. You must try one." He pulled forth another and handed it to Blake.

	Rod Blake looked at him with deep suspicion. 

	"Judging from the struggle you went through," he said at length, "I don't know that I'm so keen on it. Just what, my friend, was the matter with you?"

	"I—I was trying to remember it. For a moment I thought I had. You see, there's a thing called stragth that is a kind of red sea worm, very poisonous; it stings. These are stragath, popularly so-called because they somewhat resemble that worm. Oh, they aren't, of course, but that's what had me scared. Try it—it's really delicious."

	Blake took the thing in two fingers, very cautiously. Very cautiously, he put his teeth to a minute scrap and bit—

	Instantly he dropped .the thing, and jumped up. It curled violently in his grip; a thin, squealing wail of anger chattered from it through his teeth. Violently the far end of it curled up to swipe forcefully against his nose. Squealing angrily, it flopped about on the floor as Blake looked at it in undisguised horror.

	Smilingly, Penton reached out and pinched the far end. It lay still—and almost simultaneously disappeared as Pipeliness darted through the crack by which she had entered before, to gobble it down in a single motion.

	"More stragath?" she asked brightly. "More stragath for Thkrub?"

	Behind her a somewhat larger edition scurried in, to sniff in a friendly fashion at Penton, with a wagging, silky tail.

	Violet eyes in a broad, mahogany-brown head looked up at him.

	"Borax," said the newcomer.

	Penton fished another stragath out of the crate, and tossed it toward the animal. "I take it you are—well, Pipeline. We won't attempt that name of yours." The bit of food was caught expertly, and vanished instantly.

	"Fifty pounds of borax in the ship ... Let's visit the ship," suggested Pipeline, not to be swayed from an important purpose.

	"Let's change the tune, Pipeline. We have about ten kilograms of boric acid, too."

	"Ten kilograms of boric acid. Let's visit the ship." Pipeliness danced happily. Abruptly her nose went up, and she trotted over to the case.

	"I wondered how she made those six legs work together," Blake sighed. "Every time she's moved before, she's gone so fast they just blurred. I'm beginning to get it."

	"This animal," Pipeline stated, dogmatically, following his mate, "is as are all members of this system of evolution, equipped with six pedal members ... These six limbs are normally operated in the manner of a pacer, those on one side moving in unison ... However, some members of the species vary this gait in almost any possible combination ... Very good stragath."

	Pipeliness sat down on her rearmost legs, on her middle legs stood up, and reached up the case with her forelegs. Long, retractile claws reached out and with an expert flip she snared a stragath. The thing shot through the air to be snapped up instantly by her mate. Five more followed in machine gun-like succession before she sent a stream toward her own swift-acting jaws.

	"Efficient, Pipeliness, efficient. Gould you send some our way?" suggested Penton. The animal glanced at him, her tail wagged briefly, and almost immediately Penton was bombarded by a rapid-fire stream of arriving stragath. Not quite as quick as the animals, he failed to catch all of them, and several fell to the floor. They squeaked instantly, doubled themselves the instant they hit the ground with an amazing vigor. They bounced into the air to strike hollowly against the crates above. Long before they hit the floor again, Pipeline solved the difficulty by consuming them.

	Pipeliness turned violet eyes on Penton.

	"Penton want stragath?" she asked. There was a distinct note of reproach in her communication. Penton juggled frantically with suddenly animated stragath, while Blake grappled with two he had caught.

	"What in blazes are these? Are they food or are they animals?" The angry squawling squeak of the things was mounting rapidly as they became thoroughly aroused. Blake dropped his load to the silencing, and waiting Pipeline.

	"Stragath," Pipeline said, "the latest triumph of modern science ... These remarkable growths are developed by the magnificent cooperation of thousands of research workers ... I'll bet they ain't got a dozen and the damn things probably aren't fit to eat ... Research workers combine in the ultimately perfect proportions every item of diet needed by man ... Most important of all, the stragath soon to be marketed by Thrail Stran and Company will bring to you in delicious form these important elements in living, vital form ... These advertising humbugs make me sick. ... I hear the damn things are alive enough so that when you jar them too much they start moving ... Swell time I'll have with them chasing all around that blasted blistering warehouse ... May be eaten as they naturally occur. ... At low temperatures they may be kept indefinitely without spoilage since they are living and hence destroy all destructive molds or bacteria ... They won't smell anyway, maybe; well, you won't bring any of those things into my house, Grag Kuolp."

	Penton sighed and sat down. He had finally succeeded in pulling Pipeliness away from the hole in the crate and had seated himself in front of it. The last of the visible stragath had been consumed, but still there was a persistent, faint squawling.

	"Damn squealing, squawling brutes getting ready to pop ... you clumsy oaf, pick up that crate," Pipeliness commented, licking a scrap of meat from her paw.

	"So that's what they are," Blake said angrily. "You might have had the decency to warn me they'd kick my nose."

	Penton started. "They're moving in the crate now." The squealing grew suddenly louder, much louder. It became a rapidly rising howl that, they realized, must be echoing through the whole, vast warehouse.

	"They're over here." Somewhere outside a voice shouted. The heavy rhythmic tread of running guards drew nearer. Blake rose, looking at Penton.

	"I think we'll have to go somewhere else."

	Penton rose with his hands above his head. The crate overhead balanced on his hands, he suddenly heaved with all his power. The crate, bulky as it was, flew into the air to land with a tremendous crash somewhere beyond. Instantly, a terrific howling, squealing riot of sound started. Blake followed the crate with another, full of the quiescent stragath. The shock of landing broke the crate and aroused the contents.

	The two Callistan dogs were incredibly active, but the stragath were ten thousand to one. In rapid succession, Penton crashed open four more crates.

	"That may divert them," he said mildly, watching the results take form.

	Penton and Blake set out hastily, entirely obscured from the sight of approaching guards by a mad, inverted snowstorm of tens of thousands of bouncing, bounding, madly cavorting stragath. Behind them, guards stepping on the weird things were falling in the resultant slippery mess. Blithely, the Terrestrials dodged through mountainous heaps of goods, down a long lane, finally to a small locked door. In unison, they charged it, their Earth-born strength proving too great for the frame of the exit.

-

	"They don't look as though they could possibly carry that load," said Penton, nodding toward the great lumbering trucks rolling down the broad traffic-choked artery that paralleled the harbor and docks. Immense trucks, almost lost under the vast heaps of merchandise loading them, rumbled by on wheels seemingly impossibly fragile. "That light gravity makes heavy loads light, and hence bulky. Bulky loads, my friend, suggest loads on which we can hide remarkably well. Won't you join me?"

	A huge truckload of bagged goods of some type paused momentarily in the exigencies of traffic. A moment later it started on again. Penton and Blake pulled the huge bags of some granular, sticky substance over them.

	"Must you pick sticky stuff?" grunted Blake. "Wonder how—hey, for the—hey, Ted—"

	"Sh-h—" his friend clapped a restraining hand over his mouth. "I told you they wouldn't be lost easily. They just jumped on the—hey, stop it, Pipeline. My face is clean—at any rate cleaner than your tongue. What happened, couldn't you hold any more stragath?"

	"More borax," suggested Pipeline. "More borax for Pipeliness."

	For half an hour the truck rumbled on slowly, stopped and started in the slow-moving, choked traffic. Finally the truck turned, stopped a moment while something rattled noisily near them, then started again with a smooth, soundless pull of acceleration. Abruptly, the traffic noises changed, and echoing reverberations surrounded them. A Callistan called cheerily outside, and another answered him from the truck.

	"It's all out," said Penton hastily. "This is the delivery point, I imagine. We'll have to put these fellows to sleep for a while, and go on—we're inside a building of some kind—phew! Must be some sort of chemical plant." Penton stirred, the sticky bag that had covered him moved, and he stood upright. Beside him, Blake rose simultaneously, and together they leaped to the ground. Four Callistans started at them in startled amazement—and slumped soundlessly to the ground after none-too-gentle taps.

	They stood on the floor of an immense single room. Reaching up a hundred feet above them, and spread out three hundred feet in each direction, it was as large as three football fields, under one roof. But huge as it was, it was filled with enormous wooden tanks coated inside and out with some dark plastic material.

	From the tanks, thick silvery metal pipes reached up, interconnecting in a network of conduits leading across the room. Other pipes of plastic material led to each tank from a single huge reservoir at one end of the room. Somewhere, huge blowers were whistling softly.

	"Where do we go from here?" asked Blake.

	"Mind your step, you blithering idiot ... Grag Kuolp, some day you'll learn what I mean. ... Touch one of those conduits, and by the Gods of Space, electricity will tie you in knots of a hundred unpleasant varieties. ... Mind your step," chanted Pipeliness. "Mind your step, visit us at the fifty pounds of borax and ten kilograms of boric acid."

	Penton whistled and looked into the animal's violet eyes.

	"You can repeat only thoughts thunk near you, Pipeliness, but I take it you have an editorial ability—you repeat appropriate ones that make sense. You mean, I take it, that if we don't watch our steps, we won't visit the ship. Yes, you may be—Wavering Worlds, Blake—keep away from those metal things!" Penton was suddenly leaping up the wooden stairs that climbed the side of the nearest of the tanks.

	Blake followed him swiftly, to pause as he neared the top. An overpowering odor of rank animal life assailed his nostrils; an odor, he realized suddenly, the great blowers had been dissipating near the lower levels. Faltering, he reached the edge of the tank and, not breathing the foul odor, looked down.

	A titanic mass of warm, steaming flesh lay there, an immense, quivering vat of raw meat. Into it the silvery pipes plunged, dividing into ten thousand tendrils. Into it, the plastic tube fed a constant stream of frothy, bubbling liquid. From that another plastic tube drew a constant stream of putrid-smelling fluid.

	Nauseated, Blake stumbled away, down the wooden steps. A moment later, Penton, his face greenish in hue, followed him. But the latter immediately started off across the great room to a small space on one side, where men had evidently been intended to work.

	Blake found him staring at a clear, glassy panel, some ten by ten feet, connected with the silvery tubes and the maze of plastic tubes, fitted with dials, valves, gauges, and wheel-controls.

	"By the Nine Gods of the Nine Worlds, and the multiple deities of space!" Penton breathed. "These men—Blake, my lad, do you know what that is?" Penton bent forward, looked at bars, pipes, instruments and sighed. He turned around, gaping in awe. "That, my boy, is a power house. It generates power at about 1000 volts D.C."

	"Which can, of course, be raised by the addition of further cells in series," interrupted the beast at their side. "The greatest difficulty is the size required to obtain practical amperages ... This can be done, however ... Take that animal out, if you will, Purthal ... That's the third time it's wandered in here ... It belongs in Farg Thorun's lecture room ... This can be done, as I was saying, now blast you, stay where you belong before I throttle you," Pipeline concluded.

	Blake stared. "Electric eels—they have 'em trained!"

	"No, those aren't animals—they're synthetic life made to serve the function. This is where they get the power for the electric mechanism of half the city. I imagine, for such services as electric controls, telephones, radio, telegraph.

	"But look, Blake. The operator of this plant must be a well paid technician, and should, I imagine, have a private car. It must be in the building somewhere. I'll look down near the door the truck came in; you see if it's toward the back." Penton started toward the doorway as Blake trotted toward the dim-lit rear of the huge room. Pipeline and his mate looked at them uncertainly, then split, each following one of the two men.

	Penton found the vehicle, a small, smooth-lined sedan-type car, parked between two of the giant, wooden tanks.

	"Blake—" he called out. Faintly, from the far end of the room he heard his friend's answer.

	"Rod, look over that switchboard, and figure out which are the mains lending the power out to the city, and open those switches. I wouldn't cut off the blowers, or the circulating pumps. That electric-flesh stuff might get peeved and climb out. I'll look over the car."

-

V. - Musclemobile

	FIVE MINUTES LATER Blake found him sitting on the door ledge of the car with Pipeline before him.

	He looked up at Blake and shook his head. "These Callistans are the super-past-masters of the grand craft of life-molding. Take a look at the engine." Blake glanced at the car, and noted that it was evidently rear-engined. A moment later he had the hood up and was looking at the mass of mechanism.

	"Looks like a six-cylinder radial type, equipped with a supercharger—but it's made out of plastics. Something like the one we rode in—and wrecked—on Ganymede."

	"Huh," grunted Penton. "Almost the whole car is. It's got a metal frame, but on a fireless world metal is costly. Plastics, weight for weight, are nearly as strong. This isn't painted blue; it is blue."

	"The engine isn't. It looks like green glass."

	"I think I pointed out that even a Diesel couldn't work in this air? That, my boy, is not an engine. That is an animal, a nice, synthetic animal."

	"Animal! A six-cylinder animal? With a gear-box and ignition system?" _

	"No, six-muscled animal. The supercharger is not a supercharger; it's a blower, a mechanical lung. The fuel tank contains not gasoline, but a sugar solution. I tasted it. The ignition system, on the other hand, is made up of synthetic nervous tissue, and a few, miniature electric cells for stimulation. Muscles, my friend, don't need a high oxygen concentration; they repair themselves, renew themselves, and grow stronger with use.

	"I didn't have time to look, but I suspect that the animal engine also has a series of synthetic kidneys to remove waste products, and probably some oil-secreting cells, like the oil glands in your elbow, to supply lubrication. Six muscles pulling on tendons connected to a slip-ring—probably made of non-poisoning silver—a metal crankshaft geared direct to the wheels. The speedometer reads to the equivalent of eighty miles an hour; about the speed of a greyhound in good training."

	Blake looked thoughtfully at the streamlined vehicle.

	"I wonder, would it answer to the name of Rover, do you suppose?"

	"No, but it would answer to the controls, which consist of nerve tissue stimulated by small levers. The steering mechanism consists of four muscles working the front wheels." Penton sighed. "Rod, we Terrestrials never began to guess what life could be made to do. A muscle is three times as efficient as a gas engine, and so far as weight per horsepower goes—your thigh muscle weighs ten pounds, works at the wrong end of a 10 to 1 lever, and can still lift three hundred pounds. I've seen you do it. That's a pull of 3000 pounds from a ten-pound lump of watery, almost substance-less jelly."

	"But, oh, my friend, how tired that muscle can get. And it doesn't move me any eighty miles an hour—even when P'holkuun and his whole tribe were after me, and I was entreating it to do so," Blake pointed out.

	"What you need is a mechanical lung with plenty of capacity, like that blower, and a plastic heart, like that centrifugal pump I noticed. The muscles of your heart work indefinitely without stopping because their blood supply is adequate. Even a gasoline engine gets tired if you stick a potato in the exhaust pipe and clog it up with waste products.

	"But the important point is this: If you feel convinced you can walk faster than this thing can go, walk—I'm riding. You can, however, do the driving, if you like. Your legs are longer, and I must admit that this was designed for an eight-footer. I'll show you the system." Penton paused a moment. Sounds were floating through the still-open door through which the truck had brought them. "Hm-m-m-I think you must have upset the traffic light system from the sound."

	"There did seem to be an argument among the truck drivers as I came over here. I wondered about that. Of course, we don't mind an accident or two, but even this muscle-bound leaping Lena won't crawl over those trucks. Just how did you plan to help us make speed across the city by plugging traffic hopelessly?"

	"Get in, and we'll start. I'll show you what I had in mind." Penton grinned. Pipeline and Pipeliness tumbled over Penton as he climbed in after Blake. Cautiously Blake tested the controls, a little lever running back and forth in a slot, a transverse bar that controlled direction, a single foot pedal that applied a friction brake. The car moved forward with a steady, smooth thrust as he advanced the lever in the slot.

	The wheels turned, and they were driving out through the great door. Trucks, blocks of huge trucks stood in the street, bleating feebly on high-pitched horns that echoed unhappily in the thin air. The soft whine of the blower under them was scarcely audible.

	"You can get through with this small car where those bulky things can't—er, wiggle a muscle. Turn right when you get out of this drive, and make time."

	Five small cars loaded with uniformed guards were weaving through the lines of stalled trucks, sirens howling angrily. A path was opening up slowly, with much backing, twisting and turning on the part of the trucks.

	"I think I'll park," suggested Blake, pulling to the curb.

	The guards rushed by them, heading, very evidently, for the power house. More guards were rushing up from the opposite direction. Several more carloads, in fact.

	"Nice of them." Blake grinned, putting the car in motion again with a smooth, soundless rush. "They've opened a path for us."

	"I hoped they would." Penton nodded. "Keep—"

	"Hey—Ted—" Blake slowed the car savagely, cursing bitterly. "You back-handed idiot, we're headed the wrong way. That's the Assembly Building we just got out of up there."

	"I was worried for a minute. Get going. Naturally it is; how did you hope to get through four successive lines of guardsmen? Four, very alert, very thoroughly organized lines? This place here, I hope, and suspect, is not guarded. Did you happen to recall that this is the one place on the planet where they know they won't find us? And that the failure of the power plant called all the guards available at headquarters for soothing innumerable traffic snarls, and other duties.

	"And do you suppose they stopped to remember that we had two ultra-violet guns and two dis-guns in those space-suits? Not so, my lad. And forty lines of alert guardsmen won't argue with four weapons like that.

	"You may drop me at the window there. Sure—the fence is ornamental and made of wood—I know. I haven't yet had a chance to get out all the splinters that remind me that I didn't quite jump over it."

	Blake, smiling broadly, swung the car. The light wooden fence surrounding the broad, parked lawn dissolved in a hail of flying splinters as the car shot up the rise to the white stone building, its wheels skidding on slippery, crushed grass. It paused a moment under the huge windows, twenty feet from the ground, while Penton stepped out.

	Four guardsmen stepped out of a door two hundred feet away, to see Penton flying upward in a leap that brought him to the window ledge. The guards retreated before the angry charge of a half ton of automobile. Their compressed air guns sent slugs that rebounded uselessly from the tough, thick plastic of its windows.

	"The most recent weapon of civil defense," stated Pipeline dogmatically, "is expected to end the reign of automobile bandits. This vehicle, made entirely of hard metals instead of plastics, is mounted on six wheels, each individually powered by its own motor of nine muscles ... Capable of a speed of nearly one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour it won't do any good ... Those bandits haven't got any respect for life at all and they'll probably hold up your warehouse one of these days ... Get up. ... I have to—"

	Blake noted the cause of these remarks. It was made of metal, gray, hard metal. It had six smaller thick windows, and six large heavy wheels, under humped, bulging motors. Muscles or not, they drove the thing at a crazy pace, straight for the little car. Blake dodged desperately. The charging behemoth swerved angrily, its heavy, protruding ram held toward him steadily.

	Six nine-muscled motors gave it acceleration almost equal to that of the light vehicle; a Callistan driver in a Callistan vehicle gave it the needed edge. Desperately Blake streaked along the wall of the building, almost in front of the heavy, armored car. Avoiding the dangerous, direct attack that Blake had hoped would pile it against the stout, stone wall, it paralleled his track, to squeeze him against the wall. Desperately he braked, hoping it would overshoot. 

	The light car swerved, wagged almost, on slippery grass, front wheels locked far to the right. The heavier car tore through the slippery surface to gravel beneath; it held parallel to him exactly. Brakes off, and with the control at full speed ahead, the blower whined in sudden speed. The wheels slipped, gripped, and Blake's car leaped forward. Six-wheel drive gave the heavier car the edge, and only Earth-trained quickness of perception enabled Blake to reverse, slew completely around, and start madly back from the trap before the other was after him. Desperately he tore off across the lawn, glancing at the rear-vision mirror. Speed—perhaps in speed—

	There was an enormous black mushroom sprouting there on the lawn. Blake slowed gently and turned around. An enormous mushroom of impalpable dust, settling very slowly in even this thin air. And a huge cavity, twenty feet across and unguessably deep where the armored car had been. Slowly Blake drove back toward the neat, round hole that had appeared in the wall of the Assembly Building. Penton climbed into the car.

	"They have the telephones working again," he said cheerfully. "I don't think you did a very good job on the power plant. Here are your guns." Penton adjusted his somewhat, and put the blunt, heavily insulated muzzle against the windshield. A neat, round hole appeared, large enough to allow the gun's passage.

	Presently a duplicate port graced the side window. "But it's not all to the bad. As it is the airport officials will know what the disintegrator did to that armored car. I don't think they'll argue."

	"The telephones working, eh?"

	"Yes, somebody in a pink jacket with pale blue pants was yelling into one that all the guards were blind. I gave 'em a light dose of UV. They'll be all right in an hour. He was getting an answer, too."

-

	Blake looked down. Callistans were slowly filtering back to the airport they had so recently and hastily deserted. The vast traffic snarl of the city was slowly straightening out as the power plant went back into operation, and signal lights, telephones and radios went back to work.

	"They've formed what guards can still see around that ' metal you left," he reported. "I hope they are grateful."

	"I know. We didn't have to leave it, but on the other hand, why not? We had those spare plates, about five hundred pounds of beryllium. They can get started, and treat older people, the sick, with the life-cells they can create with that. And—somehow, Rod, I want to keep friendly with those people. When we do get back to Earth, the things they can teach us will be worth knowing, and they are, fundamentally, a pretty decent bunch."

	"Pretty decent bunch," agreed Pipeline, very proudly.

	Only Blake could turn around; Penton was busy at the controls. He was silent for some seconds, then he spoke softly.

	"Ted, my friend, we better make time for Ganymede."

	"Ganymede? P'holkuun—" Penton started.

	"And the shleath. No, we weren't popular. But we will be, we will be. Did you happen to think that no shleath could possibly digest Pipeline? Pipeline is made of boron. But Pipeline, on the other hand, would probably enjoy a meal of—"

	"More borax?" hopefully suggested Pipeline.

	"God forbid!" said Blake hastily. "Shleath, lots more shleath."

	Penton looked up at Blake suddenly, and grinned.

	"You are right, by Jupiter, they can! A shleath can't digest boron, of course, and they can destroy the shleath—but they can't! There are thousands of shleath, more—"

	"Borax," pleaded Pipeliness. Somehow it sounded weak, and very satisfied.

	"You," said Blake very softly, "don't know. The prof on Callisto said they were a very fecund race. If I had known, had I guessed what he meant, they would have got no borax on this ship. As it is—all I can suggest is that we hurry. Two Pipelines in this ship are pleasant, but—"

	Slowly Penton looked down. Pipeliness was sitting proudly, if somewhat crampedly among some fifty, three-inch-long, six-legged, furry animals.

	Fifty minute, friendly tails waved in pleasure.

	"Borax?" suggested fifty small, very friendly, mental voices.

	"No," said Penton softly, but very definitely. "Not, my friends, by a damn sight. Not until we hit Ganymede."

-

THE TENTH WORLD
I. - Shleath vs. Pipeline

	CAUTIOUSLY, Penton looked around the corner of the building. In the west, Jupiter was setting; here, on Ganymede, complete darkness would come in a few moments.

	"No one in sight," he whispered. "For God's sake, don't start concentrating, Blake. Those boys are catching on to telepathy too fast. If they don't hear us, they may telepath us if you think so blasted hard. Hurry up."

	Blake hitched his pack into a more comfortable position, and the two set off hurriedly, noiselessly down the broad, deserted avenue. Two blocks they passed silently, to turn down a narrow, rubbish-choked alley. Jupiter's light faded altogether, and they had to pick their way with utmost care. Six blocks they traversed without disturbance—then abruptly a squeaking flurry of shuffling, running steps darted out from under some rubbish. Dim light reflected from the clouded sky overhead showed a two-foot, glistening mass of evilly furious protoplasm racing down the alley toward them, squealing in helpless fury.

	Behind it, silent as death, but with a broad grin of eagerness on its homely face, came a six-legged creature built on the general lines of a dachshund. The protoplasm darted under some rubbish; the six-legged dog clawed after it, the piled boards exploding in a dozen directions, to fall with a furious clatter.

	There was a moment of savage squalling, and sodden gulping sounds, while the two men shrank back into protecting shadows. Somewhere a window went up, and a Lanoor's voice shrilled curses into the silence of the night.

-

	The six-legged animal came out from the mass of rubbish presently, its head high, walking with a slow, rather labored step. Its belly had expanded miraculously, until the six short legs barely held it from the ground. Its keen nose detected the man, and, for a moment, it sniffed at them briefly, tail wagging, before it went on about its business. Two more of the animals trotted down the alley alertly, paused a moment to watch the first, and turned away disappointed.

	"One of Pipeline's innumerable progeny can make more noise chasing down a shleath, than any single animal I ever before encountered," Blake said with intent bitterness. "Can we move now, do you think?"

	"It isn't the hexapods, it's the shleath that do the squalling." Penton reproved him.

	"It wasn't the shleath's idea to throw that lumber around. From what I saw, its primary interest was getting under there and staying, very quiet and peaceable."

	"Shut up and move. Somebody may come to see if the shleath were all eaten, or only part. We have to get out of here while we can—" Penton turned down the next intersecting street; together they dodged through the sleeping city. Half a mile they went, then gradually, as they neared the airport, more life appeared. Ships from cities half around the world, and still in daylight, were active, and the air-force crew had to be up.

	"Man, what I'd give for some of those sleep-gas bombs they used on us the first time we landed," sighed Penton. "There's a dozen Civil Guards standing about our spaceship."

	"You said you'd get through somehow." Blake shrugged. "Get going. It's almost light."

	Penton glowered at him, and sat down in the shadow of a low, spreading, bushlike tree. From the knapsack he carried, he pulled a number of small metal chips and cuttings, piled them on the sidewalk before him, and added a handful of filings. Then two waxy white cylinders half an inch through and three inches long. He rose to his feet and nodded toward Blake.

	"All right, guy, get moving."

	A flash of electric current snapped from an atomic flashlight in his hand, touched the metal chips, and they burst into sudden, intense flame. Penton ran hastily into deeper shadows in the direction of the airport. The flare built up to a colossal, intolerable glare; voices over at the airport shouted, and gangling, seven-and-a-half-foot Lanoor Civil Guardsmen were racing toward the strange beacon.

	Penton and Blake raced in the opposite direction. Every eye was focused on the weirdly brilliant flare Penton had just made. Windows were clattering open in nearby houses, curious voices calling out. The Earthmen slipped down the side of the huge hangar, rounded a turn, and jumped to their ship. In an instant, Penton had the lockdoor open, and was struggling at the inner door.

	The combination dial delayed him, slow turns that must be accurate.

	"The flare's burned out," Blake said softly. "They—" A sudden new shout went up, and the Civil Guards were Streaming back across the field toward them, their arms waving frantically. From the nearer barracks, a score of Guardsmen burst out, half-dressed and holding up dragging clothes with one hand, blunt weapons waving in the other.

	A monstrous eye winked lazily, redly, across the field at them, then opened fully in a blinding pencil of light that pinned them like insect specimens on the broad, blue-green turf of the flying field.

	The inner door opened as Penton threw a lever. Simultaneously the outer door swung shut on rubber grommets. A score of men shouting outside were suddenly silenced. Penton dived through the widening crack, twisted up the main corridor to the control room.

	A moment later the atomic engines tchked twice in gentle reproof as relays closed, and began to sing softly of empty spaces. The ship trembled slightly, and when Blake reached the window, a patchwork field was dwindling swiftly below. A dozen, then a score of great beams of light laced across the city, swinging back and forth in slow majesty.

-

	Penton settled back in the pilot seat comfortably, with a deep sigh. He snapped on the automatic controls, and hauled the knapsack off his back.

	"Was I mistaken, or did I see Pipeline making a mad dash to join us just before we left?"

	Blake chuckled.

	"You weren't mistaken, but I guess the borax did the trick. The greedy little hog couldn't leave to follow us until he had eaten it all. But I told you he'd find where we were going."

	Penton smiled. "Maybe," he punned, "a hexapod can trail a man by his sense, the way a bloodhound trails a man by his scents. They have telepathic power."

	Blake looked at him sourly.

	"Lousy, if I may say so. Are any planes trying to follow us?"

	Penton shook his head.

	"Not now. We're about fifty miles up, and going farther rapidly—ah, there's the sun." A burst of light struck through the control window as the spaceship shot out of the shadow of Ganymede. "Poor P'holkuun. In some ways it seems like a sort of dirty trick. The poor guy's been sweating for three days over that speech thanking us for exterminating the shleath."

	Blake groaned.

	" 'Farewell—come again—we've been glad to see you.' That's all right. But when an orator works himself into a foaming frenzy and calls us the 'saviours of our civilization' and 'the destroyers of the tyrannous Shaloor overlords,' to wind up in a burst of rhetorical glory on 'the greatest, the final blessing, the gift of the hexapods which have freed us from the terrible menace of the shleath'—I quit. Personally, I'll bet P'holkuun was glad to be quit, too. I like that guy, blue-haired beanpole or not, and I'll bet he was no happier trying to prepare that speech than we were trying to work up nerve enough to sit through it. I—hey—we're on the daylight side of Ganymede."

	Penton rose a bit in his seat, and looked down through the window, thoughtfully.

	"So we are. Also, if you observe carefully, getting further toward that side. I'm going to step up to a full Earth-normal acceleration, so grab hold."

	The ship was suddenly pulling harder, as the acceleration increased from only slightly more than the equal of Ganymedian gravity to equal Earth's gravitational acceleration. 

	"My Lord, I'm heavy," Blake grunted. His feet seemed strangely stuck to the floor, and as he walked across the room, his motions were curiously jerky. "Three months on that light world plays hell with your sense of timing.

	"But look—we're on the daylight side of Ganymede. And Jupiter off there, and there's Callisto and the rest—well, for where are we bound?"

	Penton looked at him for a moment, frowning, then a light seemed to dawn. His expression showed only annoyed disgust.

	"For the love of space. Now I get it. The Tenth World, of course."

	"Which," Blake pointed out, "is outside of Pluto's orbit—further from the Sun. Since we started from the night side of Ganymede, and are now on the day side, we're heading toward the sun, not away from it. Or, to bring up an old stickler, was Loshthu a thushol, not a real Martian—"

	"In either case he'd be a real Martian, since a thushol is just as truly a Martian animal as is the centaur," Penton pointed out, Taut you are just slightly off the track. We are headed toward the sun. Jupiter and the Tenth World are on opposite sides of the sun at the particular moment, if those Martian records weren't wrong, and I haven't made too many slips covering the transformations."

	"Oh," said Blake softly. "Did you find out just where and what it was? You didn't tell me much."

	"You were too busy playing with the food for the ship. The Martian expedition to Pluto first spotted it—the two planets happened to be nearly in conjunction then, and they have a good orbit calculation. It's in terms of Martian days, hours, minutes, and years, though. I don't know what day, hour and minute it is on Mars. I made rough calculations, and know about where the planet is, which is what we will have to go on. It was never visited, but it's five and two-thirds billions of miles out."

	Blake whistled.

	"I'm gonna get out my asbestos pants—and not because I am afraid of heat. What will the temperature be?"

	"The Martians figured it to be about ten to twelve degrees above zero."

	"Above zero?" Blake exclaimed. "What is it, radioactive heat, or what?"

	"No, solar heat. The zero, however, is zero absolute. Minus which there is no minus, which is why that planet's not minus."

	"I like swimming, so maybe an asbestos bathing suit for swimming in liquid hydrogen is called for." Blake grinned.

	"You'll need something more than asbestos; you'll need an anti-gravity swimming suit. Liquid hydrogen is so light a liquid that nothing either solid or liquid will float in it, and even some gases would sink."

	"Say, I just thought—if it's the far side of the sun we are headed for, how long is it going to take? Half a billion miles from Jupiter's satellites to the sun, and then ten times farther out to Ten."

	"Not long. Sixty days or so. We'll be busy, I think, making over the spacesuits for atomic heating and so forth, checking over the ship, which hasn't had an overhaul since we started out, and so on. Also—"

	"At Earth-gravity acceleration, make it in sixty 'days? When will we stop moving, though?"

	"That includes stopping. Thirty days or so accelerating, thirty slowing. If you use Earth-acceleration for thirty days, my lad, you build up a most unholy velocity. If it weren't that we'll be well out in the edges of the Solar System when we hit our top, I wouldn't dare.

	"But you go on and take an off-shift now. I'll wake you in eight hours, and you can take over. I want to check my lines and accelerations, anyway."

	Blake rose with a sigh.

	"O.K., Ted. Nothing I can do for you now? Want some coffee—sandwiches—something like that?"

	"Thanks, no. Go ahead, sleep."

-

II. - The Tenth Planet

	BLAKE LOOKED at the gadget doubtfully.

	"Proton projector—so that's what you were trying to do? But what in blazes do you want it for now that you've made it? It kicks like a steer."

	Penton nodded, ruefully rubbing a sore wrist.

	"It isn't quite that bad. I just forgot—it's easy to think a ray-gun won't kick."

	"It's a wonder to me that you didn't electrocute yourself. I still don't see why you don't wind up with an electron charge that'd be enough to make a lightning bolt say 'please/ "

	Blake raised the clumsy-looking weapon, pointed it toward the heavy steel target place and pressed the discharge button skeptically. The air cleft opened before the mad flight of the protons driven forth, glowing in a path reaching toward the heavy steel target plate and pressed the discharge weapon kicked back under the drive that shot forth the massive protons at close to 100,000 miles a second.

	Abruptly, the steel plate glowed with a hazy, violet light. Ripping static discharges smashed down from it, and the metal hissed like water suddenly touched by a red-hot iron. The steel vaporized into gas, glowing with an intolerable light that faded away gradually.

	Blake lowered the weapon.

	"Not too bad. Knowing the kick was coming, it didn't bother much more than an extra-heavy .45, but I still don't see the advantage. Half a mile range in air, while the UV pistol doesn't kick, fires continuously, and has a five mile range. The dis gun has a seven mile range, doesn't kick, and allows no argument—anything that tries to argue simply ceases to exist. Why this?"

	Penton grinned.

	"In about two hours we are going to land on Planet Ten. First men to do so, and we ought to learn a little about its rocks, etc. What strange minerals form at -265deg. C.? What elements are available? 

	"Do you remember, my lad, the famous analytical work you pulled on Venus? We'd used up most of our salt, because I forgot to pack that fifty pound bag before we started. And so we were going to collect some on Venus.

	"And you announced that the salt of the sea water contained no poisonous elements, but was nearly all sodium chloride. Bright lad. We used some, innocently, and by good luck used it while in the ship. How many hours was it we spent in dreamland? And oh, man, were you utterly soused when you did wake up! Staggered like a rundown gyroscope, talked like a guy who'd lost his false teeth. Sodium chloride, you said. No poisonous elements. And treated us to a quintuple dose of sodium bromide!"

	"Well, damn it, bromide and chloride act so darned much alike, I wasn't the first man to get fooled. I said it was only qualitative—answered all those tests—"

	"Sure it did. Except it put us in dreamland for thirty-six hours straight. And we wound up with bromide intoxication, it took us four days more to get over. It was lucky we had some salt left.

	"I'm not blaming you," Penton disclaimed. "I'm just explaining. It wasn't until we tried the spectroscope that we caught on to just what was the matter. As chemists and geologists, we're hams, but, by the gods, we can read a spectrum. You can't analyze with a UV gun because it messes all the lines hopelessly. You can't analyze with a disintegrator, because it doesn't leave anything to analyze. Hence, this gadget; the iron vapor it raised just then was swell material for a spectroscope.

	"But look; this planet's about 15,000 miles in diameter, I believe. We're headed now for the equatorial, the hot zone. It must be all of 5deg. above absolute zero there. Helium may be a gas, but everything else in the Universe is a solid at that temperature. Suppose you start your breakfast, and my lunch, and I'll finish checking the decelerations. We seem to be heading for an immense plain, which may make landing easier. Did you notice this planet had a moon? It's 1,000,000 miles out, and 2,000 miles in diameter."

	Blake turned for the galley as Penton put a few last touches on the proton gun, and put away the tools.

	Three times, while Blake was trying to get the meal, Penton sounded the acceleration change warning, and Blake had to cram things hastily into the non-spilling acceleration containers. Once however, he chased a fried egg about the galley with a frying pan for half a minute before a violent acceleration brought it to roost. In bitter silence, he removed it from his chest, and opened another into the pan.

	Beyond the lockdoor lay the utterly bleak surface of the Tenth World. A dim, frozen plain stretched out to a far horizon lost in the pressing darkness of this far, raveling edge of the Solar System. Low in the east, the rising sun was a brighter star, an intolerably brilliant, dimensionless point of light, casting a light that seemed little brighter than moonlight on Earth. But it was bleak, utterly cheerless light. And it was cold, cold.

	Barely visible to one side was a lake of clear, sparkling, slightly bluish liquid. Tiny, starlit waves danced and glittered on its surface, moved by some thin, cold wind of this frozen outcast world.

	A chill finger from Death's homeland reached into the lock, and Blake shivered violently. He advanced the heat control at his belt.

	"Great God, it's cold!" he exclaimed, teeth chattering.

	Penton's laughter ticked metallically in his radio receiver.

	"Step out, brother Blake, step out into the breeze. Into the warm sunlight and the bright and warm starlight."

	Blake rounded the hull of the ship, resting on a smooth patch of sparse, blue sand over black, angular pebbles. There was an end to the plain here. The lake nestled almost at the foot of an immense, chalky cliff that towered into starlit dimness overhead. Off to the north, and vanished, heading, as they knew, to a greater river, part of a yet greater one that emptied finally into a huge, inland sea.

	Around the curve of the ship, from the peak of the chalky cliff, a stream of liquid was arching downward, spraying, breaking into flying droplets in the thin air of the frozen world, an air consisting only of helium, and the vapors of this liquid-hydrogen. Nearly a thousand feet it hurled itself down, to smash in glittering foam on broken debris fallen from the huge cliff.

	Off to the right, a vein of dark rock shot up at an angle through the cliff, and broke off sharply. A thinner vein of a gray stone lay beneath it. Near the base of the cliff in that direction, the tumbled debris lay on the bluish, sandy beach, jumbled, rounded rock, jet black in the light of a five-and-three-quarters-billion-mile distant sun.

	The great cliff stretched off, off to the right for unending distances, lost in the dimness that shrouded forever the far reaches of this dead world.

	"Magnificent," sighed Penton, "but not beautiful. Let's go over toward that dark part of the cliff."

	Two miles they followed the little lake's shore, then a quarter of a mile down the meandering stream that led from it. The little stream split, and split again in passing a group of tiny islands of the gritty, blue sand, subdivided in a series of streams less than three feet wide. Cautiously Penton tested the solidity of the sandy stuff under his booted foot. Then he stepped across, stepped again, and once more.

	"Come ahead, Blake. It's easy enough."

	"Catch," called Blake, and heaved the camera across to Penton. He followed Penton's cautious steps.

	"Hey, what in blazes is this sand? It doesn't feel right." Safely on the other side, he bent to pick up a handful in his thick gloves. Slowly, as he watched, it vanished.

	"That," said Penton, "is solid oxygen, I believe. Just what that chalky cliff is, I am not sure, but nitrogen is my guess. Glaciers of it. The sand out across the way is also, I suspect, solid oxygen. The darker rock under it is just plain, ordinary rock."

	The black rock glinted under the faint silver light of an immensely distant, heatless sun.

	"That light is just strong enough to show how bleak this place is. There isn't even snow to cover its bare bones."

	Penton nodded.

	"It rains quite frequently, I imagine. Rains liquid hydrogen. In the course of ages, that rain has washed all the snow into the rivers and oceans, and now it's piled up in mountain ranges. Like that." His head nodded grotesquely in his transparent helmet, bowing toward the chalky cliff of frozen nitrogen. "I'm going to test that black rock."

	Penton set up the camera with Blake's help, then leveled the proton gun and fired at the huge vein of black rock that jutted up. The rock flamed into an inferno of heat, swirled madly in tornadoes of protons, and relapsed into scintillating vapor. Penton pressed the trigger of the camera with a clumsy, gloved finger.

	"Now, the greenish-gray—"

	"Penton," said Blake faintly, "did you notice those rounded rocks?"

	Ted Penton turned his eyes toward his friend.

	"Yes, there are hundreds of 'em—all over. I'm going to test—"

	"They moved," stated Blake. "I saw 'em."

	Penton looked at him thoughtfully.

	"You saw shadows. That swirling gas—"

	"They," said Blake pointedly, "are moving."

	Penton looked closely toward one of the ten-foot, irregularly rounded boulders. Very, very slowly it was changing its shape. A dozen near it were changing shape. As they changed, they rolled slowly, irregularly toward the dying glow in the rocky cliff-face.

	"Great guns!" gasped Penton. "They—they're alive!"

	Blake yelled and jumped clumsily under the heavier gravity. Penton turned with leveled proton gun, then lowered it slowly. Blake was heading rapidly toward a narrow, deep crevice in the wall of the cliff, a fault between two immense masses of the solid, black rock. Behind him, rolling very slowly over the spot where he had stood, a ten-foot "boulder" stopped indecisively, changed shape slowly, flattening into stability.

	"If you must yell, Rod," said Penton sharply, "disconnect your transceiver first. They can't move fast enough to catch anything, so come out of hiding."

	Blake came out of the deep crevice sheepishly. "It startled me, damn it. Hell, it's enough of a shock to see a boulder start walking, but when the darned thing suddenly touches you from behind—"

	He stopped, then turned and raced madly for the little series of islands giving access to the far side of the stream and lake, where the ship rested. Penton stared, then followed the direction of Blake's eyes.

	From out of the dimness beyond the horizon of the vast plain, something was coming. Dozens of Things. No creeping slowness, but a savage, swift motion. Immense Things in incredible action on an impossible world. From dimness that stretched to unseen horizons, they rolled up. Already Blake had fled halfway to the tiny islands that served as stepping stones.

	"Blake, stop, you won't make it," he warned. "Come back." Blake's labored running slowed to a halt. Then his instinctive, quick-calculating mind summed up the situation. With equal speed he rejoined Penton.

	"From the looks of things, let's head for the crevice there." He panted. "And pray God they go for us instead of the ship."

	"We're all right, I think. We can wait on this side of the lake. What in God's name are they—I never saw a vehicle like that before."

	The vast Things were slowing down somewhat and came into clearer focus now. Sunlight showed them only vaguely, huge things, a hundred feet long and thirty in diameter, immense cylinders of utter, jet black rolling swiftly across the level plain. Their very blackness made them almost invisible against the dark plain. They were black with the blackness of space itself; an utter, total absorption of every ray of light that struck them.

	The first rolled up, hitching itself strangely to curve its path.

	"The ship," said Penton tensely. "They're after the ship. I wonder—" He leveled the proton projector, and pressed the button. A slim, solid line of glowing light lanced out across the tiny lake, and struck the vast thing of blackness. Instantly it recoiled. A spot of furious incandescence boiled on its side, a spot twenty feet across. It quivered into motionlessness.

	A strange limpness came over it, and simultaneously the jet blackness left it, replaced by a slate-blue color. It deflated like a balloon just needled, flattening out until one edge touched the lake of hydrogen.

	The liquid boiled furiously, hissing violently. Clouds of vapor rolled up, to be whipped away by the thin, keen wind.

	The second and third and fourth changed their courses and rolled swiftly, not toward the ship, but toward the slate-blue hulk that slumped like a dropped cylinder of putty on the shore. Black bulks squirmed over it, hiding it.

	Half a dozen others had arrived. They squirmed vainly for a place beside the dead thing, and rolled on away toward the ship. Penton's proton gun lanced out again, again—five times. Five huge things writhed, then slumped in death, steaming faintly. Others piled on them. Frantically, Blake joined in the slaughter.

	Scores, hundreds of the beasts rolled up from dimness, sailing madly, blithely into death and destruction.

	Wildly they piled against the dead bulks of their brothers, hiding the slaty carcasses under heaving, whale-like masses of jet flesh.

	Penton sighed at last and lowered his gun.

	"Stop, Blake," he said. "It's useless. There are hundreds more coming and our guns are about exhausted. I get it now. They'll just come from all over that plain. It's heat."

	"Heat?"

	"They're living animals and they live on it." Penton nodded wearily. Just pray that the ship's up to it. We built her with a powerful frame, and there's only a certain number of those brutes can touch her at once."

	"But—why? They're utterly unafraid—"

	"They have nothing to be afraid of—or never have had. They don't understand fear. Look. Ten of them on the ship now. Will it take it—"

	The huge bulks squirmed and writhed their way over each other, over the ship. Others pushed and squirmed in faintly audible squealings and gruntings, seeking to reach the warm metal sides of the ship.

	"Heat," Penton sighed. "They must live on it. They're warm-blooded—boiling-blooded, you might almost say. Somehow, that black hide of theirs is heat-proof while they're alive but releases its heat when they die. Look, they're leaving that first one we killed. It's frozen solid."

-

III. - Mind Over Matter

	BLAKE LOOKED thoughtfully toward the huge, shapeless mound that surmounted their little spaceship.

	"You know, we made that ship strong as blazes. It'll stand an awful strain, but I don't know that it will stand that strain when the metal's been made brittle by this temperature. And—if that ship is broken down—Well, the Martians were the last people even to see this planet, let alone visit it!"

	"It won't break," Penton said decisively. "The atomic engines are fueled for about twelve months, and until their power gives out, the currents we established in the walls will prevent it from cooling. That's not what's bothering me, though. What I want to know is how we are going to get in. Just go over and nudge one of those little land whales and say, "Would you step aside for a moment, sir, while we move in?"

	"We're hot," said Blake, "and I don't mean we're good. If we get anywhere near them, they'll probably start trying to cuddle with us. They—"

	"Will," said Penton, looking behind him. "They've spotted us."

	A half-dozen of the bulks stirred uneasily, switching, and moving clumsily. Then, broadside on, they started rolling toward the two men on the most direct line—through the lake of liquid hydrogen.

	"They'll drown in that," pronounced Blake.

	"Or freeze. I—" Penton stopped. The first one had rolled into the liquid, sending it splashing in rainbow showers of ultra-cold. It rolled smoothly on into the lake, going deeper and deeper, until it was fully twenty feet deep in the stuff. Then, it stopped. Blake stared open-mouthed as the huge, blunt end of the vast cylinder of apparently brainless flesh split. As though hinged, an immense, thick flap of black, leathery hide rolled down, and instead of the leathery, featureless cylinder-end, a whole assortment of organs appeared.

	First was a tube, fully two feet in diameter, that shot out like an elephant's trunk, to dip into that inconceivably frigid lake. The mobile liquid swirled and bubbled, twisting in vortices. With a tremendous smack, audible in even that thin, chill air, the tube broke contact with the surface of the liquid.

	"Drinking," gargled Penton, "drinking liquid hydrogen. By the Nine-Ten Tumbling Worlds! It drinks the stuff!"

	"Did you," asked Blake softly, "say it would freeze?"

	The tube dipped again, another monstrous beast joined the first. Two tremendous smacks resounded, bounced against the cliff behind them, and floated off. The first coiled up its huge, sucking tube again, and rolled blithely out of the lake towards the two men.

	Blake ran clumsily, Penton close behind him. The huge cylinder chased down toward them at a speed of fully forty miles an hour, rolling like a mad barrel down hill. Madly, the two explorers raced for the deep, narrow crevice in the cliff wall, dived into it as the whole rocky wall jarred to the impact of the rolling brute.

	Penton looked back. The crevice was stopped by a jetty flank, jammed against the rocky wall to a height of thirty feet.

	"It can't get in, that's sure," he panted.

	The flank retreated, jerking, heaving clumsily. It twisted, turned, scraped and bumped. Another huge cylinder came slamming along and bounced against it. Laboriously, the first continued its bouncing movements, now end on to the crevice. The great, blunt end plugged the tiny crevice that sheltered the men.

	Penton grunted.

	"One at a time, gentlemen, one at a time," he said. "It won't do you any—for—jump!" The black leathery end split; the coiled, trunklike member was exposed, also a dozen twenty-foot long tentacular things that whipped out toward them. Penton jumped, Blake before him, back toward the dwindling, narrow end of the crevice. Too slow, the lashing tentacle caught Penton in a thrown noose of leathery strength; an immensely powerful, living rope snapped around his leg, tripped him, and yanked him back.

	Jerked through the air helplessly, upside down, he was slammed against the black, wrinkled hide of the huge thing. Instantly, half a dozen tentacles snapped around and against him, forcing him against the black surface.

	Supernal, dredging cold sucked the heat from his body. It was a numbing pressure that paralyzed him, forced him into the rubbery, yielding leather of the vast beast. His heat-pack could not offset the awful, unutterable chill of the vast bulk that had pressed him against itself. The blood roared in his ears as he struggled madly to free his arm, to get a chance to try the proton gun.

	A flame of intolerable light burst abruptly somewhere near, a wash of momentary heat, gratefully warming. The huge, living ropes contracted spasmodically against him, but as he was already nearly buried in the blubbery monster's side, little added strain pressed against him. A vast ripple of muscles somewhere beneath the thick hide tossed him suddenly away from the body.

	He stumbled dazedly to his feet. A slate-blue mass loomed near him. The ground beneath his feet was rumbling to the charge of half a dozen monsters rolling down toward the warm carcass. Staggering, the man rounded the flattening, squashing bulk, climbed over a nest of still-twitching ropes, and almost fell into the tiny crevice beyond.

	"You're tougher than I thought." Blake grinned at his friend. "For a while I thought you were due for permanent residence here."

	The dim light of the crevice faded yet further. A black hulk heaved and moved about on top of the cooling corpse at the mouth of the crevice. Penton looked up at it sadly.

	"You might go get a dis gun, if you thought you could run fast, and throw those things out of your way. How were we to expect life here? It isn't reasonable. Damn, brainless, mindless things that can't even be frightened."

	"Not," said a very peculiar voice in his ears, "brainless. Merely that we have lost control," it added with a distinct note of sadness.

	Blake looked slowly toward Penton. "Did you—"

	Penton looked at Blake.

	"Please," he asked softly, "don't be that way. You said that—"

	"No," said the voice, "I did. I. I'm lying on top of Grugth here—the one you just killed."

	Penton crawled farther back into the crevice, and looked back toward the mouth. Very dim against a black sky, the black beast bounced its way awkwardly over the hardening, slate-blue carcass.

	"I'm sorry, you know," said the voice, plaintively, "but I can't help it. We evolved too far," it added in explanation.

	"I hope you hear it, too," said Blake.

	"Why? Misery loves company, or do you just want to make sure we're both crazy?" Penton looked unhappily at his friend. "I hear it, and I know I am. It comes right through the radio, and speaks English, which proves it."

	"No, not at all. We can't speak by sound here; the air's too thin. On Earth, of course, animals developed sound-signaling. We developed radio, as you call it. I'm sorry if I disturb you. Would you rather I didn't speak? I would like to explain though, that it isn't maliciousness."

	"Much," shuddered Blake. "Much rather you didn't speak. I'd rather die sane."

	"No," said Penton. "You speak by radio, I can see how that might be, but how do you speak English?"

	"Perhaps," said the voice apologetically, "Blake could shut off his receiver, if I disturb him. I hear you speaking, you see, and read minds, too, to a certain extent. I can't broadcast telepathy, but I do receive."

	The black bulk heaved, and started to move uneasily.

	"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm afraid I'm going away. Maybe one of the others will—"

	The black wall of blubbery flesh heaved, humped, and rolled rapidly down. It vanished from their sight behind the other. They heard a new voice.

	"Grugth," it said, "is cooling rapidly. I'm afraid I shan't be able to stay much longer. I'd like to, of course, but—" The voice faded as another creature rolled leisurely away.

	"Are they, or are we nuts? We must be," stated Blake.

	"I don't know," Penton replied hopelessly. "They've all gone away. Suppose we try sneaking over toward the ship."

	Carefully Penton climbed over the frozen, dead thing. Fully two thousand of the immense things were grouped about the lake. Most of them were working at the bluish sand that circled the little pool. At one end the blunt cylinder had opened, and the familiar two-foot tube was sucking and smacking at the surface of the lake, drinking deep of the frightfully cold liquid.

	The other end of each had also opened. A great, dark cavern had opened inside the protective outer covering of the blunt end, and a dozen ropy tentacles ending in broad, spatulate tips were busy shoveling the bluish, gritty, solid oxygen into the cavern.

	"Maybe," said Penton thoughtfully, "we aren't crazy. I can see that, and that's no more possible than a brainless hulk like that learning English in about five minutes. It's eating solid oxygen at one end as fast as it can go, and drinking liquid hydrogen at the other, and with lamentable table manners, too. And except for those doing the same, or playing cuddle-pup with our ship, the whole blasted gang is lying out there sunning themselves in that ultra-dilute sunlight. They're all hanging around the ship, though."

	"Sorry," interrupted a soft, slightly accented voice. "I'm afraid I'm coming. You'd better get back in the crevice."

	Ted Penton looked and jumped. For all their immense bulk, their softness permitted them to move absolutely soundlessly. A hundred feet away, and coming rapidly, a huge bulk rolled along the cliff toward them. Together the two men jumped back into the cliff. The ground jarred to the impact of the thing as it smashed against the rock. By momentum it mounted its frozen brother.

	"Ah," it remarked pleasantly, "I think I am going to stay—yes, yes, I am. But you had better move back a bit to safety." The thing was heaving and bouncing with an incredible awkwardness, trying to turn end on.

	"Apparently I am going to turn with my tentacles to reach you. If you will get well back, though, you'll be all right. There, I'm sure I'll stay a long time. This is fine."

	The thing turned. Awkwardly, heavily, but it turned. Long, ropy tentacles reached vainly as the two men retreated as far as the dwindling crevice permitted.

	"Fine," groaned Blake. "We want to get out of here."

	"I know," sighed the creature. "But I really am as helpless as you are. I'd suggest you destroy me as you did Grugth, but it would do no good. The rest of them would come then."

	"What," asked Penton, exasperation in his voice, "are you anyway? You are a brainless, awkward, sluggish bulk. You are the ultimate of mindless matter. But you learn English in minutes, you read minds, you sound intelligent.

	"It is bewildering, isn't it? I'd like very much to help you, but I don't know just how. You see, originally we were intelligent creatures, well adapted to this inhospitable world."

	"Inhospitable," groaned Blake, "is not an adequate word."

	"But we're really very well adapted." The huge bulk heaved and struggled to drive itself into the impossibly narrow crevice. "I seem to be injuring myself trying to crawl in there. Really no sense at all, you see, in this stupid flesh. But it's a very cleverly designed body. The plains, you know. They stretch out for thousands of miles. These are practically the only mountains on the planet, as you may know—I see you do. And there is so little heat. Therefore, to a compact form like a cylinder, with no heat dissipating, narrow legs are advantageous. And, of course, the more bulk, the more volume in proportion to surface.

	That's why we are so big. Clumsy, of course, terribly awkward things. But we get along nicely on the plains. I do wish I'd stop trying to squeeze in there. I'm just injuring myself."

	"Well, why in the name of space don't you?" Blake exploded.

	"I can't, you see. I've evolved too much."

-

IV. - Evolution

	PENTON STARED.

	"Evolved too much?"

	"Yes. Originally, as I say, we were fairly intelligent animals. This black skin, as you see, passes heat only one way, so we are not cold. We eat oxygen and drink hydrogen, and eat a few other things.

	Occasionally a drutheg. That's one of those round things you thought were boulders. And we sun ourselves."

	"What is a drutheg?"

	"It's—let me see—oh, yes. A sort of plant. It moves around very, very slowly, staying near streams and lakes. Most of them live in streams. They consume water, and nitrogen, and some other things, and sun themselves, and throw out oxygen and hydrogen. There is practically no water on this entire planet; the drutheg break it all down to hydrogen and oxygen. All the water there is, is in our bodies; we make it, you understand, from the food we eat."

	"But," protested Blake, "that doesn't explain how you come to say you wish you'd stop trying to get in here, but go right on trying."

	"As I say, we started as fairly intelligent animals, living on heat and oxygen and hydrogen, but we had to spend all our time, practically, seeking those things. So gradually we developed the ability to think our thoughts while the body took care of itself. You—yes, I see you can walk along while reading a magazine or book. Your mind sort of leaves the body to look after itself for a while. We developed the trick. It took me nearly two hundred years practice—our years—"

	"Two hundred of your years! That's over 80,000 Earth-years!"

	"Yes. Those inner planets do go around the sun at a crazy pace, don't they? As I say—oh, length of life? Well, practically nothing can kill us here on this world and nothing bothers us. We live very peaceful lives, normally. In fact, it is terribly hard to get rid of one's self. We normally live about three thousand years, about a million and a quarter of your years. I'm about a million."

	Blake looked at the creature. Black, blunt-ended cylinder, squirming tentacles stretched out to reach them. A million years—

	"But I learned the trick, and learned it so well that I spent years on end without paying the slightest attention to my body. Of course, in that time we had developed our language to a considerable extent, and our thoughts. We had deduced nearly all the basic facts concerning space, and began to see the advantages of mechanisms. We were drawing up plans to build a spaceship to visit other worlds in person."

	The voice sighed, very sorrowfully. "Then we found our bodies had learned a trick, too. It had been nearly a thousand years since any of us had paid any attention to our bodies. Occasionally it had been annoying to have our bodies roll away from someone we were talking to in order to find food. But now we decided to go to work again. And then we made the sad discovery."

	The voice deepened mournfully.

	"We had forgotten our bodies so long that they had been forced to develop a certain amount of mental equipment. A sort of secondary mind. They had minds of their own, and we can't control them any more."

	Blake gasped. "Can't—control—them—any more?"

	"No. Apparently the nerve-channels connecting the intellectual portion of our minds with the purely physical parts have atrophied. Not one of us has the slightest control. I couldn't be staying here if it weren't that my body feels the heat you radiate and stupidly keeps trying to reach it."

	"How," asked Penton, "does that one-way heat transfer of yours work? I'd like to have something like that."

	"It works only at low temperatures, with living tissue," the voice explained. "And I can't tell you in your language, and you haven't time to learn mine. We can't control our bodies, but I notice you can't control all your minds either."

	"Huh? What do you mean?" asked Blake in surprise.

	"Part of your mind is very worried, and very busy trying to find a way to get out of that crack in the cliff. It is particularly worried since it took note of a small click that represented the change from the first to the spare oxygen tank. But you don't seem to be aware of it with your conscious mind."

	Blake glanced down. A small gauge in his helmet definitely agreed with the creature. Tank 2 was being exhausted slowly but steadily. Simultaneously, almost, Penton did hear, consciously, the click that meant his tank-mechanism had switched. One oxygen bottle was exhausted.

	"Were those full?" Penton asked Blake quizzically.

	Blake nodded dumbly. "Two hours—"

	"They should have gone three," Penton pointed out.

	"May I help? Your subconscious has already figured it out. This world is heavier, you've been working unusually hard, and all your muscles have to maintain a higher tonic property. They are consuming an unusually large quantity of oxygen. You timed those bottles, I take it, on your moon? Gravity was light there, and your requirements much lower."

	"That is the answer, but it doesn't get us more oxygen."

	"You have also been wondering about that solid oxygen on the floor. You might try it," the voice suggested.

	Blake looked down. Bluish, sandy crystals of oxygen swept in by faint winds littered the floor, mingled with tiny particles of rock dust and nitrogen.

	"We can try."

	Penton unstrapped Blake's tank. Together they swept up the oxygen crystals and poured them into the cylinder's mouth. Nearly five minutes were required to warm them through liquid to gas; then the tank mechanism in Blake's helmet snapped.

	Instantly his hands clawed at the valves, turning them down, switching back to the original. "Phew—it smells. You can't breathe that frightful stuff."

	"Oxygen," said the voice sadly, "used to have a very pleasant and distinctive flavor, varying with the type of drutheg that produced it. We never taste it any more. We don't even feel the pleasantness of heat any more. And heat was a very pleasant sensation."

	"So," sighed Penton, "I notice. That gang around out ship—"

	"They are very sorry, but there's nothing at all they can do. They don't have control, you see. Ah—look. I do believe I've seriously injured myself at last."

	The tentacles writhed back, the leathery protective membrane snapped back over the cylinder's blunt end, but not completely. The monstrous thing had succeeded in jamming itself into the crevice to a considerable extent, and a sudden wriggle had brought an abrupt collapse of one side of the thing.

	A thick, gummy substance was spurting out, to harden instantly as it touched the frightfully chilled rock. "I think," said the voice with an air of pleased surprise, "that I've finally succeeded in killing myself."

	"Succeeded—you sound pleased!" Penton stared at the huge thing, flopping erratically now, struggling to get free once more.

	"Naturally—oh yes. The bone was broken and it's pierced a main blood vessel. That should take about ten minutes. Wouldn't you be pleased to get free of this stupid, useless lump of awkward flesh? Naturally I'm pleased. I know Grugth was immensely satisfied when he succeeded in setting up his force-pattern, after nearly twenty-seven hundred years."

	"What," asked Blake, "is a force pattern?"

	"I can't quite explain," the voice said rather hurriedly. "I haven't much time. I'll have to start setting up mine. And anyway, your language is strictly limited. I have been working out the basic structure of my pattern for nearly 1,000,000 of your years. Do not mistake; my mentality compares with yours only when speaking your language. I have spent over one million of your years in unending thought and study. I could solve any problem for you—instruct you in making the weapon you need, or in generating pure force-fields to return you to your home planet, had either your language or your brain the necessary capacity.

	"But I must leave you, for this flesh of mine is going rapidly. Good-bye. I believe your subconscious has a solution to—no—water—water—" The voice stopped. A slate-blue tinge crept out from the wounded side of the monster. Slowly, the immense bulk flattened down, the muscular tension that had held it in a round, powerful figure was dying, Loggedly it rolled off the cold, dead thing beneath it. The ground shook faintly with the hurried coming of others of the Titan beasts. Coming to feast on the heat escaping from the carcass.

	"I think," said Penton softly, "I begin to get it. Mindless flesh, and super-minds, super-minds imprisoned in stupid things. Stupid bodies, however, cleverly designed by the neverending plans of Nature to survive on this incredibly inhospitable world. Their leathery hide is black because it absorbs all light, all energy that strikes it, and converts it to heat. There's darned little heat, but what there is they absorb, and won't let out. By accumulation, they end up with a very considerable supply. With death, that membrane passes heat both ways, that is, the stored heat escapes. They are, by purely involuntary reaction, attracted toward any source of heat, of course, so they absorb the heat of the dead bulk, as they seek our heat, and the heat of the ship. Quite involuntarily."

	"Quite, I assure you," added a new voice. "I'm sorry your weapon is so nearly exhausted. The fuel-wires are almost spent?"

	"About three shots left in each, I guess." Blake agreed sorrowfully. "They weren't intended as weapons. We didn't expect any life here."

	"There's life on every planet of the System," the speaker assured them. "You will meet most of the important forms."

	"Could you tell me how to fix these proton projectors so they'll fire a few more shots? That might give us a better chance to see those other forms of life," Blake suggested bitterly.

	"Sorry. Your language isn't up to it. If I could control your bodies, or my own, I might be able to do it. But if I could control my body, you wouldn't need them fixed, and I'd have made up my force-pattern ages ago."

	"What is this force-pattern?" Penton demanded. "The last one of you who spoke to us mentioned it."

	"At the instant of death, the mind, the pure mentality is released. Thought has power: the fact that one mind can influence another indicates that. If properly managed at the moment of death, a vortex in space can be made, and the vortex is stable through eternity, unless the mind desires to break it down. It is utterly free to propel itself where it wills. Stray energies of space give it power if it chooses to increase its intensity. But it can be achieved only by the dissolution of the physical brain.

	"And," the voice was bitterly sorrowful, "I can't control this stupid bulk long enough to destroy it. Any of us would gladly aid you back to your ship if only you would destroy these masses of flesh and release us."

	"The only masses of flesh that stand any chance of destruction," Penton pointed out, "are our own. And we are not at all anxious to lose them."

	"I know. I am sorry. I'm afraid—I am going." The ground shook slightly. Three immense cylinders rolled awkwardly away across the plain, to feed at the margin of the little lake.

	Faintly, a warning came back.

	"If you step out, I'll have to come back. I—" The voice faded beyond the power of the transceivers.

-

V. - Example

	"WHAT IN BLAZES are we going to do?" Blake demanded. "They are friendly, they're brilliant, no doubt, but they're still stupid, brainless, annihilating Juggernauts."

	"Blazes," said Penton softly. "What in blazes. In blazes, of course." He laughed. "Stupid of me. Remarkably."

	Blake looked at him silently. Then: "I'm stupider. What about blazes?"

	"Hydrogen," said Penton, "a river and a lake of hydrogen. A lake of hydrogen with a beach of solid oxygen. 'Water' was what the one called just before he set up his force-pattern. They want to die; well, by the gods of space, they will. They have to go toward heat, whether they like it or not. Hydrogen and oxygen make water—and a hell of a lot of heat."

	"Oh," said Blake softly. "So they do." He looked out of their little crevice. Thirty feet away the little stream of liquid hydrogen crept through little islands of solid oxygen.

	Penton climbed up on the bulk of the dead, frozen monsters, leveled his proton projector at the rim of the little stream, and pressed the button. A fierce, flaming spot of incandescence exploded both into their primal gases, swirled them violently. Licking lightnings spun and shattered on other crystals and liquid drops.

	And the heat died. Two huge cylinders started rolling, but stopped as the last trace of heat vanished.

	Liquid hydrogen rained back from the air, solid oxygen snowed down.

	Penton stared.

	"Blake, it didn't burn!"

	Blake looked blankly at his friend.

	"It just has to. The laws of chemistry can't be that different. That must have been a freak—a chance, because the stuff is so cold out here. Try again."

	And, Penton shot the flaming energy of the protons crashing into the margin, where hydrogen lapped against the solid oxygen. Again, the explosive rush of solid and liquid abruptly converted into gas—and again it settled as liquid rain and solid snow.

	Penton looked at his friend, and shrugged his shoulders. "New laws of chemistry, I guess. They won't burn. That's out."

	Blake sighed.

	"My oxygen tank is getting low. And the .valves aren't working right. I had to fuss with them several times. Guess I jammed them when I tried to turn off that damned odor. Maybe that smelly stuff is some kind of catalyst that prevents combustion."

	Slowly he turned up the oxygen valve, cursing fluently. "The valve stuck again, and I nearly passed out. It would have made a lot of difference, wouldn't it?"

	"Not much that I can see," admitted Penton. "No weapons. No way to hide. We can't wait until they just wander away. No way of restoring our oxygen. No way of reaching the ship."

	Blake only growled and turned up his oxygen a bit. Slowly he got to his feet, his panting stopped by the renewal of the oxygen supply. He walked over toward the dead things, climbed up on the lower one to look across the plain. Near at hand, the stubborn stream of hydrogen twisted through new channels between the blasted pits where Penton's protons had exploded shore and stream alike into gas. 

	Blake reeled slightly.

	"Stupid," he muttered. "Shtupid beassh. Stupid hydru-shen, stupid oxyshen. Won' burn. Here, shtupid, water. Make thish shtuff." Blake was gloriously drunk; his oxygen control was stuck again, wide open, and he was thoroughly intoxicated by the excess oxygen. Penton looked up and climbed hastily toward him as he unscrewed the water bottle from his spacesuit, and hurled it out toward the stream. "There, shtupid hydroshen, make 'at shtuff." He raised his proton gun waveringly, and pressed the button.

	The explosion sent him flying backward, crashed him into. Penton, and sent both tumbling back into the crevice. An immense, mile-high jet of blue flame licked roaring into the black sky, a finger of fire that reached to the stars. The tiny stream of hydrogen vanished in the fiery heat, the oxygen melted, boiled, hissed into shrilling flame. A darting line of flame licked along the brink of the lake, consuming oxygen sand and hydrogen water alike, shouting and howling. In seventeen seconds the lake was ringed by flame, the hydrogen-fall was a cloud of ascending gas.

	Two thousand bulks were joyfully, thunderously flinging themselves into the mighty pyre, to explode in sudden death as their tissues boiled. Thundering down slopes to that heat, the brainless bodies reacted only to an instinctive search for heat; never had they met killing heat.

	Penton clamped down Blake's oxygen valve, and heaved him to his feet, starting him running. The flames were half a mile away now, a vast circle of fire reaching to the skies. There was neither oxygen sand, nor hydrogen stream here. At the point it left the lake, the stream was flowing upward as flaming gas. Only bare, faintly warm rock lay exposed. Blake straightened before they had gone a hundred feet, shook his head and opened his valve slightly.

	"Oxy-drunk. My God, what happened?"

	"Shut up and move," Penton grunted. "Turn the oxygen a little high, but don't get drunk again. We have to get to the ship before that fire goes out completely. It's almost a mile."

	Burdened by their greater weight, they plugged along as best they could. Presently, they arrived at the ship. Penton carried him into the lock, and slammed the great door shut.

	"What happened?" gasped Blake weakly, as he opened his eyes.

	"Water." Penton grinned. "Water—just as we were warned. It needed a sample, just as you gave it.

	Hydrogen and oxygen will not unite in the total absence of water. It's old, but I never thought of it. And all those drutheg working and reworking that stuff for that last, ultimate trace of water. It wouldn't burn until your water bottle supplied that trace it needed to start. Let's move into the ship, and clear out for warmer planets."

-

THE BRAIN PIRATES
I. - Double Gravity

	THE Ion propelled itself powerfully through the void. Inside the craft, Rodney Blake's arm reached out in a dramatic gesture of disclosure. Half a hundred thousand miles away hung a dusty, underripe peach. It was dim and hard to see, here, where the sun's light was diluted by five billion miles of space.

	"There she is, skipper," he told his permanent partner, Ted Penton. "The only satellite of the Tenth World! Are we still going to investigate it?"

	"We sure are. As long as we are this far out from the sun, we may as well see what's seeable," Penton answered firmly. "We have those new suits rigged with atomic-powered lifting gadgets, so that'll protect us from the weight, if what our instruments say about that world's true. I still don't see how any member of this System could be so confoundedly dense. This satellite has a diameter of thirty-four hundred miles, yet the surface gravity is double that of Earth!"

	Blake whistled softly.

	"Incidentally," he said, "we ought to land in about half an hour. Any suggestions as to where to go? Try your telescope."

	Penton disappeared into the observatory booth and came back presently with a rough-sketch map.

	"I was up there just before I slept. That was nine hours ago, and this place here on the sketch was in the nightshade then, glowing faintly. I think it may be a highly radioactive section. Looking through the 'scope just now, I see it has moved into daylight, and the glow is hidden by the sunlight, weak as it is out here, but there is some funny, rainbow colored mineral formation there. Let's land there. I'll go check up on those suits, and make some adjustments. I hadn't thought they'd have to handle any double-gravity worlds."

	"That's a swell map," complained Blake. "You've drawn the thing from the image in an astronomical 'scope. It's inverted. I'm going to be too busy to figure out mirror images. And may I suggest that you make sure you don't get those drive-units in the suits backward? I'd hate to have them sit on me as well as a doubled gravity."

	Penton grinned and went down the corridor toward the airlock, picking up a kit of tools from the machine-shop bench as he passed. Presently he was deeply engrossed in the delicate task of readjusting the tiny atomic-power drive units he had fixed in the spacesuits. The mobility these would furnish would have been highly welcome at the time they had been visiting the Tenth World.

	"Oh, Ted!" Penton raised his head abruptly from the work of fastening down the cover plate that engaged his attention for the past twenty minutes. The slightly metallic voice had issued from the airlock speaker over his head.

	"Yes?"

	"We're about to land," said Blake's voice. "Help^ take over. Throw the switch. And I hope those suits suit us!"

-

	Penton and Blake stared fretfully through the windows of the Ion. The inhabitants of the satellite were regarding the explorers with a mild curiosity.

	"Those birds are waiting with remarkable patience," Penton said, somewhat annoyed. "And this seems to be the local Central Park, wherefore our landing may have annoyed them. Come on, you have a UV gun on one hip, and a disintegrator on the other, and—"

	"Lead in both legs. Did you notice that local yokel to the left of us make a slow, stately bow? He snapped like a flag in the wind. I'll bet they can move five times as fast as we can—or at least two times as fast. This gravity's faster."

	"Not faster than 186,000 miles a second," Penton declared firmly. "Did you observe them closely? Mount one olive on one grapefruit. Two fat sausages protruding from the opposite sides of said grapefruit just below the olive, two fatter frankfurters at the nether end, all add up to equal one—Tenthworldsatelliteian."

	"They do have a chubby air"—Blake grinned—"but I don't claim to move 186,000 miles a second. And these boys do move fast."

	"They're patient anyway, much more so than I am. Lift your blasted carcass and come on. They're a pretty human looking gang, even if they do look like prize-winners in the Fat Men's Club. Besides, fat men are always jolly. You know as well as I do that you're coming in the end, so let's go—"

	Reluctantly Blake heaved. He heaved harder, remaining curiously fixed to his seat.

	"Boy, am I agile," he grunted softly, and gave in. Slowly he turned up the lift-control at his belt. A slow creaking of straps and an unhappy wriggling on Blake's part attested to die increasing power of the atomic drive mounted on the suit. Blake rose. "I can't even stand up without the aid of this thing. Let's go."

	Penton opened the outer lock door. Blake stepped down, or better, floated down behind Penton. The gravity-equalizer made him feel as if he were riding on a parachute. Penton faced the strange inhabitants and slowly raised both hands above his head in gesture of friendship.

	He'd intended to hold them out horizontally in front of him, but the effort, under that gravity, was distinctly uncomfortable.

	"From a much lighter world, aren't you?" suggested a rather philosophically friendly telepathic voice.

	"From an inner planet? Well—I have always been convinced there were more than five inner planets."

	"Ten," said Penton automatically. "We're from the third."

	One of the immensely rounded inhabitants of this world nodded in pleased acknowledgement.

	"Ah, interesting. Very, The third world, then, and there are twelve."

	"Twelve?"

	Blake stared at the moon-faced spokesman.

	"Oh, so, so. Ah, yes. Two more. That makes twelve. That's even more interesting. There are two worlds further out. Remarkably small eyes you have, if I may say so. The bright light near the sun, I suppose."

	Blake nodded vaguely. The moon-faced inhabitant did have large eyes; it was only the immense roundness of his face that made them appear small. Now at the ground level, Blake could better judge their height and size. About five feet tall, each was, and approximately six feet in circumference at the equator—which was quite marked. They resembled diminutive, but well inflated carnival balloons made in caricature shapes.

	"It looks," said Penton softly, "as though we'll have to go way out before we go back toward the sun. We'll have to see those two worlds."

	"Yes, see them. Interesting ship you have. We've been trying for some time to make one like it—atomic power, eh? Yes. Will you accompany us? ... I, by the way, am Terruns, associated with the Power and Mechanisms Department of Runal City. Oh, this world? We call our primary, Turlun, and our satellite here is called Pornan.

	"But I think we may go to the city. The members of the Power and Mechanisms Department have been very anxious to speak with you since your ship was first sighted. There was rather a flurry there as to where you would land. Very proud to have you in our city. You will come? Our cars are ahead."

	"Why—yes," said Penton, slightly bewildered. Then, more firmly, "Yes, we will be very interested to see more of your civilization on this world so far from the sun. Our lives, our civilization, you understand, are all based on the movements or apparent movements of the sun."

	Terruns waved briskly in a vertical plane. His remarkably rotund body did not crease, so far as Blake's closely watching, interested eye could determine, but simply contracted vertically, and spread laterally in front, with a reversal of this process in back. The queerly hectic bowing of the comically grapefruitish body fascinated Blake, with the same childish wonder that the incomprehensible leg-work of the millipede inspires.

	Terruns straightened abruptly and regarded Penton closely with large, dark eyes.

	"The ship, by the way. It does not move in your absence?" he asked somewhat anxiously.

	Penton looked at him somewhat blankly.

	"No, it is manually controlled—it will stay where it is."

	The round face parted in a somewhat fatuous smile of satisfaction.

	"Ah, excellent. Yes, if it stays there, that will be well. You will know it is here. Come with us. Yes, a lighter world. The supports in the suits—very ingenious, very—" His mental speech faded off gradually. Blake and Penton watched with interest as the dozen or so Pornans set off in perfect unison across the close-cropped turf. Each was dressed in a precisely uniform outfit of apparently skin-tight elastic fabric, of a rather pleasing, greenish hue in itself, but covered with a repetitive and complex pattern of spirals and sharp-angled zigzags.

	The Pornans' legs were rather short, and distinctly over the "stout" classification. But they worked like frantic pumps, bouncing up and down at a flurried pace, while the associated body rocked and rolled in a manner curiously reminiscent of a round-bodied bell-buoy in a choppy sea. But they made progress, such progress, considering their girth, that for a moment, Blake and Penton stood in astonished surprise, while their guides almost disappeared over a little pink swale of land.

	"Did you notice the turf?" Penton asked Blake as they followed behind. "It's apparently a sort of moss, and a remarkably pink one at that. But then, the trees are, too. Incidentally, they don't use sunlight as a source of energy, of course. Look, our hosts seem to have arrived at their car."

	A moment later, Penton and Blake had arrived also. There were, accurately, three cars. They were very commodious cars, until the Pornans climbed in. They accomplished that act with a surprising ease and actual grace, despite their immense girth. The cars themselves were merely open platforms, in effect, seating six Pornans in three cross seats, two to a seat. Each place was equipped with a very solidly made rail, on which the passengers immediately placed both feet. Their hands settled comfortably, and firmly into handgrips in their seat-arms.

	Four wheels, scarcely eighteen inches in diameter, and consisting exclusively of pneumatic tires supported the vehicle. A small square case behind the rear-most seat, contained the engine; from the size of its case, it was a wholly inadequate engine. But the two explorers clambered in.

	"Hold fast," said Terruns cheerily. "It's only about a fifteen minute ride." Curiously, the time-designation was quite clear to the Terrestrials.

-

II. - The Invisible Car

	TERRUNS STABBED viciously at a red button on the panel that formed the front of the car. Something in the box at the rear muttered faintly, and began throbbing furiously. Rapidly, from the sides, a pinkish mass protruded, until, inside of ten seconds, a pneumatic bumper fully two feet thick had pushed out all about, front, side and rear.

	"We're going," said their guide cheerfully, "to the center of the city. Power and Mechanisms Building, where all our broadcast energy is developed."

	Blake understood suddenly the purpose of the rails and handgrips. The motor, whatever it was, was far from inadequate. The car moved to speed with a rush that snapped his head back viciously.

	"We power nearly everything," continued Terruns, "by broadcast energy. Source of energy's the trouble. Very troublesome, because it's a frightful job concentrating the radioactive ores. Lasts a good while, but power demands growing faster than ore-concentrate available. Perhaps—"

	Blake closed his eyes and held on as Terruns sailed blithely toward the side of another car coming out of a side street. Abruptly he was hurled from his seat, and draped over Terruns' immense shoulders. The Pornan yielded softly under him, but' not sufficiently to cushion the violent shock. Blake opened his eyes to observe the details of the collision, and saw Terruns' head turned completely around on an amazingly flexible neck, regarding him in faint surprise.

	"Ah, yes, light worlds. So. So sorry. I'll slow down more gentry." The head pivoted outrageously, and the car jerked forward, depositing Blake in his seat once more.

	"Penton," said Blake softly, bracing himself solidly, "can you find the way back? I want to walk." He closed his eyes again, for they had left the roadways of the park and entered the heavy, city traffic. It was, quite evidently, suicidally inclined, or else controlled solely by inspired maniacs.

	Somewhere in the depths of his mind, the thought popped that here, evidently, the movies got those impossible scenes of a mad ride through New York traffic at impossible speed. Not that the cars moved rapidly. At their best, in fact, Terruns had maintained no better than twenty miles an hour; but the utter indifference to safety, the half-inch margins gleefully accepted by the drivers made that insane recklessness.

	The purpose of the huge bumpers inflated about them seeped into Blake's mind. His eyes refused to close again, because he wanted to know which way to jump. A brilliantly green vehicle tore down from a side street, swinging toward their rear as it appeared that they were to escape, then-braked violently to permit them to move out of the way by a fraction of an inch.

	"Traffic," said Terruns somewhat annoyedly, "always disturbs me. How do they control traffic in your world?"

	"The problem is worse," said Penton through clenched teeth, "though less disturbing to us." He paused to grip violently and brace himself as Terruns braked the car to a dead stop in a distance that did not exist. "Traffic lights—not so disturbing to us, because braking—"

	"Ah, yes. Very difficult on light world." Traffic moved again, jumping forward as though seen on a broken film, inexpertly patched. They were in motion. "The traction is much less, on a lighter world, is it not? The inertia to mass to weight ratio—"

	Blake looked around with a sudden relief. He had been too startled and frightened to think. On this world, where great weight forced their tires solidly into the greenish glasslike pavement, brakes were infinitely more efficient, and—

	They took a right-angle corner with an abruptness that had him half out of the car, his feet on the thick, pneumatic bumper before he gripped the rail and pulled himself in again. And cars gripped better on turns. The mad driving was comparatively sane on that basis.

	"I have no patience with some drivers we have," Terruns told them. "Reckless. Use no judgment, and show no respect for other people." No sooner had he said this when he halted his vehicle a sickening half an inch from the bumper of the car ahead.

	"Relative," said Penton softly. "All things are relative—especially speed and acceleration," and he gripped the rail in preparation for the next start.

	The road narrowed, became a two-lane street. Blake was recovering, as the better understanding of local conditions penetrated. Suddenly there was a violent explosion from the empty air directly ahead of them, a flash of violet flame, and white smoke. Instantly Terruns jammed on the brakes, and a violent thud of pneumatic bumpers crashed the car to a halt so short that Penton and Blake both sailed into the air.

	They sailed along for some hundreds of feet through the air before descending, their lifting units now advanced to support them entirely. A series of popping explosions like a string of firecrackers sounded behind them, and a howl like a dog whose paw has been stepped on followed and accompanied.

	Together the Terrestrials looked back. Terruns and his followers were looking at them in mild bewilderment. Its great bumper hard against that of the machine they had so recently quitted, a similar vehicle carrying two Pornans occupied the formerly vacant volume of air. These also were watching the Terrestrials with interest.

	"I think I know," said Penton in slow disgust, "why they go only twenty miles an hour. Will you tell me what in hell is the idea of driving around in an invisible car? Or is that the police system here? If it is, I consider it notably screwier than even this wabble-eyed planet. Great Wavering Worlds!"

	Terruns nodded toward them with evident relief on his face.

	"Remarkable—very remarkable, your flight. For a moment I feared you might land rather heavily—but why didn't you just hold on? We usually do." For a man of his girth, he displayed a surprising ease in the agile jump that carried him over the enormous bumper to the roadway. The driver of the other car jumped down to meet him, and the two bowed jerkily in perfect unison. Together they walked to the point of collision.

	The two cars nuzzled each other like amorous hippopotamuses. Terruns inspected the front of his machine as Penton and Blake approached, Penton's mouth somewhat angular.

	"No damage?" suggested the driver of the second car.

	Terruns beamed cheerfully.

	"No damage," he agreed.

	The second driver swung nimbly into his seat, nodded good-bye. His car swerved violently backward, braked, then, swung forward and away with a savage acceleration.

	"Is it customary to drive around in invisible cars?" interrupted Penton plaintively. "I should think it would make traffic more than a little confusing."

	"Sorry, my friend. Very unusual now. But no damage, no damage at all. In the last six months, but two people have been killed in such collisions." Terruns looked rather proudly at the enormous inflated sausage that circled the car. "Some of my men developed that. Very effective—very simple."

	"Excellent, no doubt. But why have invisible cars in the first place? You were, I assure you, no less surprised than we that we did not land heavily. And how do you accomplish that invisibility?"

	Terruns sighed.

	"Not by choice. We don't accomplish it. Look. Come—" Terruns started forward to meet the slowly approaching Terrestrials. Suddenly his immense body seemed to tangle in his feet, and he fell with a resounding crash. The force of the impact dented his pudgy body by several inches, and for a moment he lay there, rather startled eyes slowly winking. A queerly mischievous, chuckling gurgle came from the empty air beside him, and it seemed to Penton that a sort of vertical heat wave in the air danced down the street, to vanish as suddenly as it had come into being.

	Terruns' large eyes blinked once more, and he shook his head. He rose to his feet with a sigh of annoyance, just as one of the hurrying Pornans from the rear of the car reached him.

	"Damn krull," he exclaimed. The frown faded from his moon face and his usual good-natured philosophy seemed to rule again. "Unusually persistent, wasn't he? I suppose he has gone. Ah, well. I could smell singed hair. I hope he learned something."

	Blake stared at him in considerable wonder.

	"What is a krull?" he asked.

	For once, Terruns did not reply immediately. He looked thoughtfully at Blake, and even more thoughtfully at Penton.

	"Monkey," he said at length. "Ape—no, monkey." Then he nodded, smiling somewhat vaguely. "A krull is somewhat like your monkey. A higher species. Quite intelligent. Delights in mischief. Smaller than we are, and very bony. Oh, very." Terruns rubbed his pudgy leg vigorously, the soft flesh denting deeply under his fingers.

	"Are they—invisible?" Blake looked about him vaguely. "I gathered you had tripped over one, but unless they are a good deal smaller than you, I don't see how I missed it."

	Terruns nodded sadly.

	"They disrupt economic life. Mischievous, just mischievous. And they love excitement. When we first started using automobiles they caused no end of excitement. All our higher species have telepathic powers. Krulls, very sad, have great powers. Not intelligent, not quite reasoning, perhaps, but almost. And remarkable vision. Eyes unlike ours. One on each side of the head like—oh, your rabbit? Rabbits see in all directions also? Yes, so do krulls. And telepathic, marvelously so. That makes them invisible."

	Penton looked at the Pornan thoughtfully for a moment. "Sorry, my friend, you have skipped a step somewhere. How does that make them invisible?"

	"Well, now see. You see me. Now—" Terruns grinned and wasn't there.

-

III. - The Stolen Ship

	PENTON WIGGLED his head slowly, and looked more carefully. Definitely there was a large, and conspicuous hole in the landscape, a large, grayish mist that swirled and seethed with a curious riot of colors and angles and impossibly shaped buildings.

	Abruptly Terruns was back. Blake looked at him with considerable distaste.

	"Can all of you do that?"

	"It's very simple," nodded Terruns. "But we can't see a krull. I merely telepathized the idea that I wasn't there. Momentarily you were deceived, but quickly reasoned that I must be there, because of the hole in the landscape. Therefore you saw me again. A krull, of course, sees in all directions, and therefore can fill the hole in the landscape by telepathizing two things. He isn't there. You see the landscape. Very simple."

	Blake looked at Penton from the side of his eyes.

	"Ted, shall we go for a walk? Back to the ship, maybe. Somehow telepathizing imps don't promise well."

	"They make themselves completely invisible in that way?" asked Penton.

	"Quite," Terruns replied. A more serious expression crossed his face as he explained further the troubles of his people. "And worse, as you saw. They make automobiles invisible. Sit on the bumper in front. They like excitement and that sometimes makes a lot of excitement." His face lighted a bit as he nodded toward the car. "But not so much since the fire-vents were installed."

	"Oh. Explosives?"

	"Yes. Serves two purposes. First, if I see a car coming toward me that doesn't seem to see me, I know a krull is riding in front. I press a button on the panel. Explosions warn the other driver, and we both brake sharply. Also explosions immediately under krull usually induce them to move. Frequently the krull gets caught between cars, which is very good. Usually," he sighed, "they escape, merely somewhat singed. But they are intelligent. They learn."

	"Why the devil don't you drive them away?"

	Terruns smiled sadly.

	"How? We would very much like to. Oh, no end. But no results. They steal our food, they steal anything that will move. Don't attack us, because we are very much stronger. Very hard to shoot what you can't see."

	"Great Worlds, Terruns, can't you get rid of the creatures somehow? Use colored glasses so you see differently than they, and make them visible. Any trick like that?"

	"Trick? Oh, my dear friend, the mind is tricked. It does no good to trick our eyes, when our minds are tricked. We have tried a truly remarkable assortment of mechanisms," Terruns sighed, "but none of them work."

	"From your fall, I should think people would be very badly injured tripping over the blamed things," Blake suggested.

	"That's why we wear these suits," Terruns replied.

	"Suits?"

	The moon face split in a good-natured grin.

	"I'm not quite as large as this. It's the protective suit. It bounces." The Pornan touched something somewhere in his Suit. Rapidly the seemingly skin-tight suit shrank. It hung in folds, disconsolate droops and lumps all over him. Then the elasticity of the suit began to work, and slowly it crawled back to a skin-tight fit in fact.

-

	An utterly different Terruns emerged. His body was squat and enormously powerful, the huge chest heavily banded with thick sheets and cords of muscle, great rippling cords of it flowing into thick, muscle-ridged arms. His torso tapered to a narrow waist, then expanded into blocky, corded legs. Far from pudgy, there was not an ounce of fat on that perfect specimen of the powerfully muscled denizen of this heavy-gravity world.

	And with that alteration, his face seemed now subtly changed. The roundness was not the fullness of fat, but a roundness of differently shaped bones, and differently placed muscle-cords. The roundness differed from a human face as a bulldog's round face from the lean jaws of the wolfhound.

	Blake whistled softly.

	The Pornan's good-natured smile reappeared.

	"Different worlds—different people."

	"Different worlds," repeated Penton with a gentle moan, "different people. I, Blake, am different for life."

	"Do you still remember that—six long hours ago? Old Elephant Penton. Can you remember anything else that was said?"

	"Little." Penton moved gingerly. The motion, inasmuch as he was floating in Terruns' saltwater-filled swimming pool, sent his nose under the surface. He straightened out with hasty caution and a soft, but heartfelt remark. "Damn little. Six hours under doubled gravity and—" He stopped and looked up. Terruns was standing on the edge of the pool looking down at them with sad reproof.

	"I asked you," their host said reproachfully, "I asked you particularly, but you said the ship would not move if you weren't there."

	"Right," agreed Penton, paddling gently to bring himself to a vertical position. "You asked, and it won't."

	"Sorry." Terruns shook his head. "Report from the Park Department. They can't find it. They didn't expect to see it. We never see things like that, but they can't feel it. Very unusual, if it can't be moved."

	"What? Can't find our ship?"

	"You said," Terruns began. He stopped abruptly as he leaped violently and awkwardly into the air, to land in the pool with a mighty thunder, and a tidal wave that all but swamped the Terrestrials.

	Immediately, the inflated suit brought him bobbing to the surface, lying on his stomach, his arms moving uselessly because of the airtight suit. They would not grip the water. Simultaneously there was a chuckling chatter and a loud thump. 

	Terruns released a mighty "oof" and sank six inches into the water. The chattering went on excitedly from empty air, while a mad splashing began on both sides of the balloon-clad Pornan, as though an invisible side-wheeler in a frightful hurry had gone slightly askew. Terruns was gasping heavily, half stunned, while his body began to move in hurried circles to the accompaniment of much chattering.

	Blake and Penton stared in paralyzed astonishment. Terruns recovered his wind, reached the tab on his suit, and Pornan and invisible rider plunged into the water. Instantly both struck out for the shore, and the krull, too busy otherwise to remain invisible, appeared.

	A rabbit-eared, rabbit-faced, four-limbed creature the size of a ten-year-old child, it had a surprisingly chunky body. Details of arms and legs were rather blurred, as both were working with a truly amazing determination and efficiency. For a moment Terruns was handicapped as his suit shrank back to fit; then he too got into action. Arms churning like twin propellers and both feet going in a white froth of water, he overhauled the shrieking krull, a six-inch bow wave curling about his ears.

	The little creature bounced out of the water when it reached the pool edge, and disappeared the instant it hit the tiled floor. Immediately behind it, Terruns swarmed up the lip of the pool and set off down the tile like a bloodhound on the trail. The wet animal was dripping revealingly. Halfway to the arched door at the far end, he skidded to a halt, and grabbed at the air. A yowling shriek greeted his move, and triumphantly he raised his arm. The shrieks continued but nothing appeared as a source.

	Terruns walked back toward the pool more leisurely.

	"You said," went on the Pornan calmly, "that it couldn't be moved, but it was. It isn't there." He reached the edge of the pool, and bent down. The shrieking chatter mounted; as he lowered his hand a hole appeared in the water, then a white froth. "Presently, my friends, I shall show you a krull. Very reckless fellow. They love to go paddling, though." The shrieking chatter had changed to an unhappy glubbing and a thunder of splashing water. Slowly the glubbing and splashing reached a climax and died away. The pool-edge, the water, and even Terruns wavered and twisted crazily in appearance.

	Then a wet, feebly kicking, half-drowned creature appeared, about six inches below the surface of the water.

	"Oh," said Penton distastefully, "we have 'em on our world, too. They appear and disappear, and sometimes only one person can see them."

	"Sure," said Penton. "We have a drug that makes them visible. Alcohol. We call them D.T.'s."

	"Deetees," said Terruns mildly, looking down at the wet, slowly reviving creature. "Curious." The krull's rabbit ears drooped dejectedly, bright green rabbit ears drooping over a bright red face. The red faded gradually into a handsome purple body, marked by a large and unnaturally brilliant orange stripe down the middle of the back. Constant wear had removed all hair from feet, hands, and other parts frequently in contact with the ground, exposing the bright red skin.

	"Maybe," said Blake, "you should leave it alone so it will recover rapidly. They really are more pleasant to look at when they are invisible."

	"Could you tie that thing up somehow, Terruns, so we can experiment on it?" asked Penton wearily. "I have an idea that we'll have to hunt for our ship."

	"Oh, yes. The medical staff is here, by the way. I'll tie it up, you can get out of the water, and they will strap you up more comfortably."

	"You're sure that ship is gone? I don't see how a krull could move it."

	"Not one krull. A troop of krull. We always fasten down anything movable. Even stones. They love to put them in the street, and sit on them. Very exciting crashes. A troop of krull, I'm afraid—but they won't carry it more than five miles or so. They lose interest quickly."

	"Penton," said Blake softly, "you know, I left the lift-drive on seven-eighths, so the ship wouldn't mar the turf. I'll bet we are here three months looking for that blasted thing. Five miles and an invisible ship. More fun—"

	"I'd take you up on that bet, Blake, but for one thing. I know we won't be here three months looking for it."

	"Why?"

	"Because we have emergency rations in the suits for only one week, and they use a mixture of copper selenate and potassium arsenate for fertilizer on the local crops. Laugh that off."

	"You left out potassium cyanide," Blake groaned.

	"I didn't leave out cyanide; that's about the only poison they don't use. All their plants want nice heavy metals like lead and copper and mercury. For non-metals they prefer the heavy ones like selenium and telurium and arsenic. This world, it would seem, is lousy with heavy metals, and so are the plants. And due to a sad neglect in my education, I never learned to digest those compounds."

-

IV. - End of the Krull

	BLAKE LOOKED down at himself thoughtfully. Elastic bandages wound in puttee fashion about each leg joined and wound up on his abdomen to his chest. He squeaked faintly when he moved.

	"Did they give you the oil can, Ted?"

	"No. But this should make a good shock-absorber. Step on it, will you? There's a chauffeur waiting to take us down to the Powers and Mechanisms Building again. Terruns said he'd meet us there."

	"The bird that wrapped me ought to make a living as a mummy-maker. Did Terruns say how they go about looking for lost things?"

	"Their search methods are simple and ineffective; gang of men with a long rope between them. Hurry up; I'll wait outside."

	Half an hour later they joined Terruns at his office, slightly jittery, but somewhat to their own surprise, in one piece. Terruns, they had learned during this last ride, was a careful driver, indeed, for a Pornan.

	"Ah. The Terrestrials," he greeted them. "Sit down." Terruns waved them to a seat with one hand. Thoughtfully, Penton noticed that Terruns' desk was of a rich, red wood finished with brightly chromium plated fixtures of quite familiar design.

	"If," said Penton softly, "we don't find that ship in about three weeks we'll be gone, because we use food faster here. I've already eaten twice of those emergency rations."

	"Feeding," acknowledged Blake unhappily, "but not filling. If you hear me grumble, it's my stomach, over which I'm losing all control. It is distinctly annoyed at what it righteously considers my perfidy. That one-inch lump of extinct sawdust, labeled 'one sirloin steak, 350 cal.', didn't fool it a bit. It's just as hungry as ever."

	Penton nodded at a luscious-looking dark violet fruit that Terruns was toying with.

	"If you ate that, Blake, your stomach would quiet down almost at once. Certainly within two hours. On Earth we mine ore that doesn't assay as high a mercury content as that thing has. Shut up and let me think."

	"Why don't you rig up a radio doodle-bug?" suggested Blake. "The inductance of the ship should be darned easy to spot, and working the way they do with those—"

	"Doodle-bugs are out," sighed Penton, "I thought of that. They're fine for finding buried metal, but they have two troubles here. Pornans broadcast power, which I have studied carefully while you were studying their ore-handling machinery. But they do not use radio methods. I gave Terruns complete data on radio. In six months or a year he'll make an effective radio tube, I'll bet.

	"If you want to wait for that—in the meantime all our tools are in the ship. The electrical field method doesn't work because that requires an amplifier. The magnetic induction won't work till we are already so near you'd find it quicker with the rope method they use."

	"Yes," sighed Penton, "but no ship." Blake turned to Terruns.

	"How long will it take them to run that search out to that five mile circle?" he asked.

	"Ah," said Terruns hesitantly, glancing at some sheets in front of him, "two months and three days, the last time. But more men this time. A month, perhaps? Not quick enough—I'm truly sorry, but you have no idea how annoying these creatures are to a decent, civilized—"

	"Stomach," suggested Blake unhappily. "We're rapidly finding out. You've no idea how annoyed we'll be as we slowly starve to death. Oh, no idea."

	Penton interrupted.

	"Listen," he begged Blake, "will you eat that fruit over there and shut up one way or another? I'm trying to think. There must be some way—this thing's gone on too damned long now."

	"Oh, yes, much," agreed Terruns. "We're doing all we can—"

	"I know. We're not blaming you or your people." Penton grinned. "You are doing your damnedest, I realize, but the thing's senseless. There must be some way to stop them. This world of yours is too monotonous for your own good. Always warm, everywhere. Always light, every—yeah. So it is. Sweet—Terruns!"

	Suddenly Penton jumped out of his seat with all the speed of a Pornan, his hand flashing back to his pack. Abruptly his hand was leveling a short, leased tube at Terruns' startled face. The Pornan first bent back in his chair hastily in startled amazement, then, thinking the tube a weapon, his hand darted out like a striking snake to twist the cold, crystalline eye of the tube away from him.

	Penton dropped his tube with a howl of pain and leaped back, shaking his hand, but grinning sheepishly.

	"Sorry, Terruns, must have startled you," he apologized. "Look—it's harmless—just a light." Again he picked up the tube, in his left hand this time, and turned it on Blake. The brilliant light beam of his atomic flashlight stabbed sharply into Blake's face forcing him to blink, squinting until his eyes became adjusted.

	"Yes," said Terruns, uncertainly. "Most—er—confusing. Your thoughts are not at all clear."

	Penton turned the beam of light into Terruns' face. The Pornan shut his eyes at once, throwing a hand up to his face.

	"It's very brilliant, uncomfortably so. Could you turn—turn it somewhere else—oh. Yes, turn it away."

	Penton turned away the light with a sigh of relief.

	"That, Terruns, is all I want to know. Look, take these, and make 'em fit somehow. And come on, we're due for some good hunting." Penton passed over a pair of space goggles, and reluctantly Terruns adjusted them to his face.

	"It's an unpleasant sensation," he told the explorers. "But, yes, I think, my friend, that you have solved, with your other-world mind a long outstanding problem. Just one moment and we will be on our way. Oh, do you have another pair for my friend, Drunath, a very excellent gentleman? Spent his life finding quicker ways to kill krull. Just down the hall—"

	Blake passed over his set of space goggles in blank wonderment. Presently the four started down, and out of the building, into a side street that Terruns recommended for a test. The test was wholly inconclusive.

	"The park," said Drunath slowly, "is always infested with krull. There is a wood, a group of trees, that has not been properly searched in fifty years. Ropes cannot be used. Shall we go there?"

	Half an hour later, cars had deposited them, together with a troop of Drunath's extermination squad. Penton and Blake, for the first time, had an opportunity to walk through the spot where the ship should have been, a remembered swale between a little hillock of pink turf and a vine-covered out-thrust of black, glistening rock. It rose some hundred feet to a huge, rugged boulder that looked strangely like a lop-eared krull with an ugly, grinning face.

	"Krull Rock," explained Drunath. "Always search it first for anything smaller than an automobile. If there aren't any krull there, there aren't any in town."

	Blake looked up. Black rock, jumbled boulders, and creeping vines. Bright metal testified to a complete ring of steel traps, all unoccupied. Penton was working with his flash, adjusting the tiny atomic generator it contained to maximum power. Then he pressed the little button.

	A low hum came from the instrument, then a shaft of light unbearable, corruscating brilliance. It shimmered from the black rocks in a scintillating, twinkling rain—and vanished as Penton released the flash. Slowly, Blake's eyes adjusted themselves. Then again the flash, and again, till it was on full, and Blake's eyes had readjusted to its light.

	Penton was chuckling softly. The air was full of soft whimpers, and little screeches. They turned to howls of dismay as Penton and Blake, unsteady for laughter, picked off dozens of the crazy-quilt krull. Their UV pistols working methodically, they cleaned out the entire colony of the beasts perched on the rock.

	Slowly, unsteadily, Terruns and Drunath were firing.

	"Curse all Gods, destroy all devils, and particular maledictions of krull," Drunath exclaimed. "Your goggles are inadequate. I can hardly see through them. For the first time in my life I can dimly see a colony, a whole troop of krull, and I cannot shoot straight!" Drunath threw down his weapon in disgust. "Can you," asked Blake, "see what is on top of that blasted rock?"

	"Fire. It looks like fire to us."

	"Not fire. Metal. A whole metal ship. Your idiotic krull didn't carry it two hundred yards, but just up above where your search methods weren't worth a damn. We will move it."

	"You are leaving?" asked Terruns sadly.

	"Not," Penton assured him, "by six planets and a dozen moons. We're staying for the shooting. And, oh, my friends, what royal and unadulterated joy I'll take in running the last of those krull out of this town." Penton and Blake lifted simultaneously into the air, and within a few seconds into the ship.

	Alone in their spaceship a day later, Blake puffed complacently at a cigarette.

	"I would still like to know just how you thought of it. It's an excellent way, I don't dispute, but how did you figure it out, Ted?"

	Penton smiled affably.

	"What big eyes you have, Terruns. The better to see with five billion miles from the sun. Look, Rod, though their eyes are extremely sensitive, they are powerfully weak in accommodation. The inhabitants on this satellite never have any real light out here. I was using a light so powerful that these unadapted fellows just couldn't see in it at all; we could, after a moment. But the krull were totally blinded by it, and suffered acute pain in the bargain. It's not surprising that an animal that depends so on its eyes should be paralyzed when its eyes won't work. When I flashed the light they could not wiggle a muscle, they were so scared. And they couldn't keep the ship invisible, either!"

	"Nor," said Blake comfortably, "our food supply."

The End

Forgetfulness
Astounding Stories – June 1937
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

I.

	RON THULE, the astronomer stood in the lock gate and looked down across the sweep of gently rolling land. Slowly, he breathed in the strange, tangy odors of this planet. There was something of a vast triumph in his eyes, and something of sorrow. They had been here now scarcely five hours, and the sun was still low in the east, rising slowly. Out beyond, above the western horizon, a pale ghost of the strange twin world of this planet, less than a third of a million miles distant, seemed a faint, luminous cloud in the deep, serene blue of the sky.

	It was triumph, for six long years of travel, at a speed close to that of light, lay behind them; three and a half light years distant was Pareeth, and the crowding people who had built and launched the mighty two-thousand five-hundred foot, interstellar cruiser that had brought this little band of one hundred. Launched in hope and striving, seeking a new sun with new planets, new worlds to colonize. More than that, even, for this new-found planet was a stepping stone to other infinities beyond. Ten years of unbroken travel was the maximum any ship they could build would endure. They had found a planet, in fact, nine planets. Now, the range they might explore for new worlds was extended by four light years.
 
	And there was sorrow there, too, for there was a race here now. Ron Thule turned his eyes toward the little clustering village nestled in the swale of the hills, a village of simple, rounded domes of some opalescent, glassy material. A score of them straggled irregularly around the mighty, deep-green trees that shaded them from the morning sun, twenty-foot domes of pearl and rose and blue. The deep green of the trees and the soft green of the mosslike grass that covered all the low, rounded hills gave it a certain beauty; the sparkling colors of the little gardens about the domes added color and further beauty. It was a lovely spot, a spot where space-wearied, interstellar wanderers might rest in delight. A village, indeed, where any one might rest in ease and enjoyment, after long, long labors.

	Such it was. There was a race on this planet the men of Pareeth had found after six long years of space, six years of purring, humming atomic engines and echoing gray, steel fabric that carried and protected them. Harsh utility of giant girders and rubbery flooring, the snoring drone of forty quadrillion horse power of atomic engines. It was replaced now by the soft coolness of the grassy land; the curving steel of the girders gave way to the brown of arching trees; the stern ceiling of steel plates gave way to the vast, blue arch of a planet's atmosphere. Sounds died away in infinitudes where there was no steel to echo them back; the unending drone of the mighty engines had become breezes stirring, rustling leaves—an invitation to rest.

	The race that lived here had long since found it such, it seemed Ron Thule looked across the little village of domes to the largest of them, perhaps thirty feet across. Commander Shor Nun was there with his anthropologist—and a half score men of this planet. Rhth, the called it.

	The conference was breaking up now. Shor Nun appeared, tall and powerful, his muscular figure in trim Interstellar Expedition uniform of utilitarian, silvery gray. Behind him came the other two in uniform—young, powerful men of Pareeth, selected for this expedition because of physical and mental perfection, as was every man of them.

	Then came Seun, the man of Rhth. He was taller, slimmer, an almost willowy figure. His lean body was clothed in an elastic, close-fitting suit of golden stuff, while over his shoulders a glowing, magnificently shimmering cape of rich blue was thrown. Five more of these men came out, each in a golden suit, but the draped capes glowed in deep reds, and rich greens, blues and violets. They walked leisurely beside the men of Pareeth. An unconscious force made those trimly uniformed men walk in step between the great, arching trees.

-

	THEY CAME NEAR, and Shoe Nan called out. "Is the expedition ready?"

	From the forward lock, Toth Mour replied. "Aye. commander. Twenty-two men. What do these people say?"

	Shor Nun shook his head slightly. "That we may look as we wish. The city is deserted. I cannot understand them. What arrangements have you made?"

	The men you mentioned are coming. Each, had of department, save Ron Thule. There will be no work for the astronomer."

	"I will come, Shor Nun," called out the astronomer, softly. "I can sketch; I would be interested."

	"Well enough, as you like. Toth Mour, call the men into formation; we will start at once. The day varies in length. but is some thirteen hours long at this season, I am told."

	Ron Thule leaped down to the soft turf and walked over toward the group. Seun looked at him slowly and smiled. The man of Rhth looked taller from this distance, nearly six and a third feet in height. His face was tanned to a golden color that came near to matching the gold of his clothing. His eyes were blue and very deep. They seemed uncertain—a little puzzled, curious about these men, curious about the vast, gray bulk that had settled like a grim shadow over the low hill. Half a mile in length, four hundred feet in diameter, it loomed nearly as large as the age-old, eroded hills it had berthed on. He ran a slim-fingered hand through the glinting golden hair that curled in unruly locks above a broad, smooth brow.

	"There is something for an astronomer in all this world, I think." He smiled at Ron Thule. "Are not climate and soils and atmospheres the province of astronomy, too?"

	"The chemists know it better," Ron Thule replied, and wondered slightly at his replying. He knew that the man of Rhth had not spoken, simply that the thought had come to be in his mind. "Each will have his special work, save for me. I will look at the city. They will look at the buildings and girders and the carvings or mechanisms, as is their choice. I will look at the city."

-

	UNEASILY, he mowed away from the group, started alone across the field. Uneasiness settled on him when he was near this Seun, this descendant of a race that had been great ten millions of years before his own first sprang from the swamps. Cheated heir to a glory five million years lost.

	The low, green roll of the hill fell behind him as he climbed the grassy flank. Very slowly before his eyes, the city lifted into view. Where the swelling curve of the hill faded softly into the infinite blue of the sky, first one little point, then a score, then hundreds appeared, as he walked up the crest—the city.

	Then he stood on the crest. The city towered before him—five miles away across the gently rolling green swale. Titan city of a Titan race! The towers glowed with a sun-fired opalescence in the golden light of the sun. How long, great gods of this strange world, how long had they stood thus? Three thousand feet they rose from the level of age-sifted soil at their bases, three thousand feet of might mass, stupendous buildings of the giants long dead.

	The strange little man from a strange little world circling a dim, forgotten star looked up at them, and they did not know, or care. He walked toward them, watched them climb into the blue of the sky. He crossed the broad green of the land, and they grew in their uncaring majesty.

	Sheer, colossal mass, immeasurable weights and loading they were—and they seemed to float there on the grace of a line and a curve, half in the deep blue of the sky, half touching the warm, bright green of the land. They floated still on the strength of a dream dreamed by a man dead these millions of years. A brain had dreamed in terms of lines and curves and sweeping places, and the brain had built in terms of opal crystal and vast masses. The mortal mind was buried under unknown ages, but an immortal idea had swept life into the dead masses it molded—they lived and floated still on the memory of a mighty glory. The glory of the race—

	The race that lived in twenty-foot, rounded domes.

	The astronomer turned. Hidden now by the rise of the verdant land was one of the villages that race built to-day. Low, rounded things, built, perhaps of this same, strange, gleaming crystal, a secret half remembered from a day that much have been—

	The city flamed before him. Across ten—or was it twenty-thousand millenniums, the thought of the builders reached to this man of another race. A builder who thought and dreamed of a mighty future, marching on, on forever in the aisles of time. He must have looked from some high, wind-swept balcony of the city to a star-sprinkled sky—and seen the argosies of space: mighty treasure ships that swept back to this remembered home, coming in from the legion worlds of space, from far stars and unknown, clustered suns; Titan ships, burdened with strange cargoes of unguessed things.

	And the city peopled itself before him; the skies stirred in a moment's flash. It was the day of Rhth's glory then! Mile-long ships hovered in the blue, settling, slow, slow, home from worlds they'd circled. Familiar sights, familiar sounds, greeting their men again. Flashing darts of silver that twisted through mazes of the upper air, the soft, vast music of the mighty city. The builder lived, and looked out across his dreams—

	But perhaps, from his height in the looming towers he could see across the swelling ground to the low, rounded domes of his people, his far descendants seeking the friendly shelter of the shading trees—"

-

	RON THULE stood among the buildings of the city. He trod a pavement of soft, green moss, and looked behind to the swell of the land. The wind had laid this pavement. The moving air was the only force that maintained the city's walks. A thousand thousand years it has swept its gatherings across the plain, and deposited them as an offering at the base of these calm towers. The land had built up slowly, age on age, till it was five hundred feet higher than the land the builder had seen.

	But his dream was too well built for time to melt away. Slowly time was burying it, even as long since, time had buried him. The towers took no notice. They dreamed up to the blue of the skies and waited. They were patient; they had waited now a million, or was it ten million years? Some day, some year, the builders must return, dropping in their remembered argosies from the far, dim reaches of space, as they had once these ages gone. The towers waited; they were faithful to their trust. They had their memories, memories of a mighty age, when giants walked and worlds beyond the stars paid tribute to the city. Their builders would come again. Till then—naught bothered them in their silence.

	And the builders walked in the shade of the trees, and built rounded domes. And a new race of builders was come, a race the city did not notice in its age-long quiet. Ron Thule looked up to them and wondered if it were to be that his people should carry on the dream begun so long ago.

	Softened by the silence, voices from the expedition reached him. "—diamond won't scratch it, Shor Nun—more elastic than beryl steel. Tough—" That was Dee Lun, the metallurgist. He would learn that secret somehow. They would all learn. And Shor Nun, commander, executive, atomic engineer, would learn the secrets that their power plants must hold. The dream—the city's life—would go on!

	Ron Thule wandered on. No duty his, to-day, no responsibility to study carefully the form and turn of sweeping line, the hidden art that floated ten millions of tons of mass on the grace of a line. That for the archaeologist and the engineer. Nor his to study the cunning form of brace and girder, the making of the pearly walls. That for metallurgist and chemist.

-

	SEUN was beside him, looking slowly about the great avenues that swept away into slim canyons in the distance.

	"Your people visited ours, once," said Ron Thule softly. "There are legends, the golden gods that came to Pareeth, bringing gifts of fire and the bow and the hammer. The myths have endured through two millions of our years—four and a half millions of yours. With fire and bow and hammer my people climbed to civilization. With atomic power they blasted themselves back to the swamps. Four times they climbed, discovered the secret of the atom, and blasted themselves back to the swamps. Yet all the changes could not efface the thankfulness to the golden gods, who came when Pareeth was young."

	Seun nodded slowly. His unspoken thoughts formed clear and sharp in the astronomer's mind. "Yes, I know. The city builders, it was. Once, your sun and ours circled in a system as a double star. A wandering star crashed through that system, breaking it, and in the breaking making planets. Your sun circled away, the new-formed planets cooling; our Sun remained, these worlds cooling till the day life appeared. We are twin races, born of the same stellar birth. The city builders found that, and sought your worlds. They were a hundred thousand light years distant, in that time, across all the width of the galaxy, as the two suns circled in separate orbits about the mass of the galaxy.

	The city builders went to see your race but one; they had meant to return, but before the return was made they had interfered in the history of another race, helping them. For their reward the city builders were attacked by their own weapons, by their own pupils. Never again have we disturbed another race."

	"Across the galaxy, though. The Great Year—how could they—so many stars—"

	"The problem of multiple bodies? The city builders solved it; they traced the orbits of all the suns of all space; they knew then what sun must once have circled with ours. The mathematics of it—I have forgotten—I cannot develop it. I am afraid I cannot answer your thoughts. My people have forgotten so many things the city builders knew.

	"But your people seek entrance to the buildings. I know the city, all its ways and entrances. The drifting soil has covered every doorway, save those that once were used for the great airships. They are still unblocked. I know of one at this level, I think. Perhaps—"

-

II.

	RON THULE walked slowly back toward the group. Seun was speaking with Shor Nun, and now they angled off across the city. Their voices hushed; their footfalls were lost in the silence that brooded forever over the towers. Down timeless avenues they marched, a tiny band in the valley of the Titans. The towers marched on and on, on either side, up over low hills, beyond the horizon. Then, before them, in the side of one of the milky walls a great opening showed. Some five feet above the level of the drifted soil, it led into the vast, black maw of the building. The little party grouped at the base, then, laboriously, one of the engineers boosted and climbed his way to the threshold and dropped a rope to a companion.

	Seun stood a bit apart, till Shor Nun lifted himself up to the higher level and stood on the milky floor. Then the man of Rhth seemed to glow slightly; a golden haze surrounded him and he floated effortlessly up from the ground and into the doorway.

	The engineers, Shor Nun, all stood frozen, watching him. Seun stopped, turned, half smiling. "How? It is the lathan, the suit I wear."

	"It defies gravity?" asked Shor Nun, his dark eyes narrowing in keenest interest.

	"Defies gravity? No, it does not defy, for gravity is a natural law. The city builders knew that. They made these suits shortly before they left the city. The lathan simply bends gravity to will. The mechanism is in the filaments of the back, servant to a wish. Its operation—I know only vague principles. I—I have forgotten so much. I will try to explain—"

	Ron Thule felt the thoughts parading through his mind: Nodes and vibrations, atoms and less than atoms, a strange, invisible fabric of woven strains that were not there. His mind rebelled. Vague, inchoate stirrings of ideas that had no clarity; the thoughts were formless and indistinct, uncertain of themselves. They broke off.

	"We have forgotten so much of the things the city builders knew, their arts and techniques," Seun explained. "They built things and labored that things might surround and protect them, as they thought. They labored generations that this city might be. They strove and thought and worked, and built fleets that sailed beyond the farthest star the clearest night reveals. They brought here their gains, their hard-won treasures—that they might build and make to protect these things.

	"They were impermanent things, at best. How little is left of their five-million-year striving. We have no things to-day, nor any protecting of things. And we have forgotten the arts they developed to protect and understand these things. And with them, I am sorry, I have forgotten the thoughts that make the lathan understandable."

	Shor Nun nodded slowly, turned to his party. Ron Thule looked back from this slight elevation, down the long avenue. And his eyes wandered aside to this descendant of the mighty dreamers, who dreamed no more.

	"Seek passages to lower levels," said Shor Nun's voice. "Their records, their main interest must have centered near the ancient ground level. The engineers—we will seek the lowest, subsurface levels, where the powers and the forces of the city must have been generated. Come."

-

	THE opalescent light that filtered through the walls of the building faded to a rose dusk as they burrowed deeper into the vast pile. Corridors branched and turned; rooms and offices dust-littered and barren opened from them. Down the great two-hundred-foot corridor by which they had entered, ships had once floated and at the heart of the building was a cavernous place where these ships had once rested—and rested still! Great, dim shapes, half see in the misted light that filtered through wall on translucent wall.

	The room blazed suddenly with the white light of half a dozen atomic torches, and the opalescent walls of the room reflected the flare across the flat, dusty sweep of the great floor. Two-score smooth shapes of flowing lines clustered on the floor, a forgotten company of travelers that had stopped here, once, when the city roared in triumphant life. A powdery, gray dust covered their crystal hulls.

	Slowly, Shor Nun walked toward the nearest of them, a slim, thirty-foot-long private ship, waiting through eternity for a forgotten hand. The open lock at the side lighted suddenly at the touch of his foot, and soft lights appeared throughout the ship. Somewhere a soft, low humming began, and faded into silence in a moment. "Drus Nol—come with me. Seun, do you know the mechanism of these ships?"

	The man of Rhth hesitated and then shook his head slowly, "I cannot explain it." He sighed. "They will not function now; they drew their power from the central plant of the city and that has ceased operation. The last of the city builders shut it down as they left."

	The men of Pareeth entered the ship hesitantly. and even while they walked toward the central control cabin at the nose, the white lighting dimmed through yellow, and faded out. Only their own torches remained. The stored power that had lain hidden in some cells aboard this craft was gone in a last, fitful glow. Somewhere soft, muffled thuds of relays acted, switching vainly to seek charged, emergency cells. The lights flared and died, flared and vanished. The questing relays relaxed with a tired click.

	Dust-shrouded mechanism, etched in the light of flaring torches, greeted their eyes, hunched bulks, and gleaming tubes of glassy stuff that, by its sparkling, fiery life much be other than glass they knew, more nearly kin to the brilliant refraction of the diamond.

	The power plant," said Shor Nun softly, "I think we had best look at that fast. These are probably decayed; there might still be some stored power in the central plant they could pick up and give us a fatal shock. The insulation here—"

	But the city builders had built well. There was no sign of frayed and age-rotted insulation. Only slight gray dust lay in torn blankets, tender fabric their movements had disturbed.

-

	SEUN waked down toward the far end of the room, rounding the silent, lightless bulks of the ancient ships. The dust of forgotten ages stirred softly in his wake, settled behind him. The men of Pareeth gathered in his steps, followed him toward the far wall.

	A doorway opened there, and they entered a small room. The archaeologist's breath whistled; the four walls were decorated with friezes of the history of the race that had built, conquered and sailed a universe—and lived in domes under sheltering trees.

	Sean saw his interest, touched a panel at his side. Soundlessly. a door slid from the wall, clicked softly, and completed the frieze on that wall. The archaeologist was sketching swiftly, speaking to the chemist and the photographer as he worked. The torches flared higher for a moment, and the men moved about in the twenty-foot room, making way for the remembering eye of the little camera.

	As Seun touched another stud, the door slid back into the wall. The room of the ships was gone. Hastily, the men of Pareeth turned to Seun.

	"Will that elevator work safely to raise us again? You said the power was cut off—"

	There is stored power. Nearly all had leaked away, but it was designed to be sufficient to run all this city and all its ships, wherever they might be, for seven days. There is power enough. And there are foot passages if you fear the power will not be sufficient. This is the lowest level; this is the level of the machines, the heart of the city—nearly one thousand feet below the level at which we entered."

	"Are the machines, the power plant, in this building?"

	"There is only one building, here beneath the ground. It is the city, but it has many heads. The power plant is all here, I think. It has been a long time since I came this way. I was young then, and the city builders fascinated me. Their story is interesting and—"

	"Interesting—" the thought seemed to echo in Ron Thule's mind. The story of the conquest of a universe, the story of achievement such as his race dreamed of now. They had dreamed—and done. And that, to their descendants, that was—interesting. Interesting to this dark, strange labyrinth of branching corridors, and the strange, hooded bulks. Production machines, he knew, somehow, production machinery that forgotten workmen had hooded as they stepped away temporarily—for a year or two, perhaps till the waning population should increase again and make new demands on it. Then great storerooms, bundled things that might be needed, spare parts, and stored records and deeds. Libraries of dull metal under gray dust. The unneeded efforts of a thousand generations, rotting in this quiet dark that he, Ron Thule, and his companions had disturbed with the moment's rush of atomic flame.

	Then the tortuous corridor branched, joined others, became suddenly a great avenue descending into the power room, the heart of the city and all that it had meant. They waited still, the mighty engines the last of the builders had shut down as he left, waited to start again the work they had dropped for the moment, taking a well-earned rest. But they must have grown tired in that rest, that waiting for the resurgence of their masters. They glowed dimly under the thin blankets of grayed dust, reflecting the clear brilliance of the prying light.

-

	SHOR NUN halted at the gate, his engineer beside him. Slowly, Seun of Rhth paced into the great chamber. "By the golden gods of Pareeth, Drus Nol, do you seen that insulation—those buss-bars!"

	"Five million volts, if it's no better than we build," the engineer said, "and I suppose they must be busses, though, by the stars of space, they look like columns! They're twenty-five feet through. But, man, man, the generator—for it must be a generator—it's no longer than the busses it energizes."

	"When the generator operated, Seun's thoughts came, "the field it created ran through the bars, so that they, too, became nearly perfect conductors. The generator supplied the city, and its ships, wherever in all space they might be." And the further thought came into their minds, "It was the finest thing the city builders had."

	Shor Nun stepped over the threshold. His eyes followed the immense busses, across in a great loop to a dimly sparkling switch panel, then across, and down to a thing in the center of the hall, a thing—"

	Shor Nun cried out, laughed and sobbed all at one moment. His hands clawed at his eyes; he fell to his knees, groaning. "Don't look—by the gods, don't look—" he gasped.

	Drus Nol leaped forward, bent at his side. Shor Nun's feet moved in slow arcs through the dust of the floor, and his hands covered his face.

	Seun of Rhth stepped over to him with a strange deliberation that yet was speed. "Shor Nun," came his thought, and the men of Pareeth straightened under it, "stand up."

	Slowly, like an automaton, the commander of the expedition rose, twitching, his hands falling to his sides. His eyes were blank, white things in their sockets, and horrible to look at.

	"Shor Nun, look at me, turn your eyes on me," said Seun. He stood half a head taller than the man of Pareeth, very slim and straight, and his eyes seemed to glow in the light that surrounded him.

	As though pulled by a greater force, Shor Nun's eyes turned slowly, and first their brown edges, then the pupils showed again. The frozen madness in his face relaxed; he slumped softly into a more natural position—and Seun looked away.

	Unsteadily, Shor Nun sat down on a great angling beam. "Don't look for the end of those busses, Drus Nol—it is not good. They knew all the universe, and the ends of it, long before they built this city. The things these men have forgotten embrace all the knowledge our race has, and a thousand thousand times more, and yet they have the ancient characteristics that made certain things possible to the city builders. I do not know what that thing may be, but my eyes had to follow it, and it went into another dimension. Seun, what is that thing?"

	"The generator supplied the power for the city, and for the ships of the city, wherever they might be in space. In all the universe they could draw on the power of that generator, through that sorgan unit. That was the master unit; from it flowed the power of the generator, instantaneously, to any ship in all space, so long as its corresponding unit was tuned. It created a field rotating"—and the minds of his hearers refused the term—"which involves, as well, time.

	"In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built. And in all that sweep, every sorgan unit tuned to it must follow. The power that drove it died when the city was deserted, but it is still making the first revolution, which it made and completed in the first hundredth of a second it existed.

	"Because it circled to the end of time, it passed this moment in its swing, and every other moment that ever is to be. Were you to wipe it out with your mightiest atomic blast, it would not be disturbed, for it is in the next instant, as it was when it was built. And so it is at the end of time, unchanged. Nothing in space or time can alter that, for it has already been at the end of time. That is why it rotates still, and will rotate when this world dissolves, and the stars die out and scatter as dust in space. Only when the ultimate equality is established, when no more change is, or can be will it be at rest—for then other things will be equal to it, all space equated to it, because space, too, will be unchanged through time.

	"Since, in its first swing, it turned to that time, and back to the day it was built, it radiated its power to the end of space and back. Anywhere, it might be drawn on, and was drawn on by the ships that sailed to other stars."

	Ron Thule glanced very quickly toward and away from the sorgan unit. It rotated motionlessly, twinkling and winking in swift immobility. It was ten feet in diameter, a round spheroid of rigidly fixed coils that slipped away and away in flashing speed. His eyes twisted and his thoughts seemed to freeze as he looked at it. Then he seemed to see beyond and through it, as though it were an infinite window, to then thousand other immobile, swiftly spinning coils revolving in perfect harmony, and beyond them to strange stars and worlds beyond the suns—a thousand cities such as this on a thousand planets; the empire of the city builders!

	And the dream faded—faded as that dream in stone and crystal and metal, everlasting reality, had faded in the softness of human tissue.

-

III.

	THE SHIP hung motionless over the towers for a long moment. Sunlight, reddened as the stars sank behind the far hills, flushed their opalescent beauty with a soft tint, softened even the harsh, utilitarian gray of the great, interstellar cruiser above them into an idle, rosy dream. A dream, perhaps, such as the towers had dreamed ten thousand times ten thousand times these long eons they had waited?

	Ron Thule looked down at them, and a feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment came to him. Pareeth would send her children. A colony here, on this ancient world would bring a new, stronger blood to wash up in a great tide, to carry the ideals this race had forgotten to new heights, new achievements. Over the low hills, visible from this elevation, lay the simple, rounded domes of the people of Rhth—Seun and his little clan of half a hundred—the dwindling representatives of a once-great race.

	It would mean death to these people—these last descendants. A new world, busy with a great work of reconquering this system, then all space! They would have to time to protect and care for these forgetful ones; these people of Rhth inevitably would dwindle swiftly in a strange, busy world. They who had forgotten progress five millions of years before; they who had been untrue to the dream of the city builders.

	It was for Pareeth, and the sons of Pareeth to carry on the abandoned path again—"

-

CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT
TO THE COMMITTEE OF
PAREETH
SUBMITTED BY SHOR NUN,
COMMANDER OF THE FIRST
INTERSTELLAR EXPEDITION

-

	—thus it seemed wise to me that we leave at the end of a single week, despite the objections of those members of the expedition personnel who had had no opportunity to see this world. It was better not to disturb the decadent inhabitants of Rhth in any further degree and better that we return to Pareeth with these reports as soon as might be, since building operations would soon commence on the twelve new ships.

	I suggest that these new ships be built of the new material rhthite, superior to our best previous materials. As has been shown by the incredible endurance of the buildings of the city, this material is exceedingly stable, and we have found it may be synthesized from the cheapest materials, saving many millions in the construction work to be undertaken.

	It has been suggested by a certain member of the expedition, notable Thon Raul, the anthropologist, that we may underestimate the degree of civilization actually retained by the people of Rhth, specifically that it is possible that a type of civilization exists so radically divergent from our own, that it is to us unrecognizable as civilization. His suggestion of a purely mental civilization of a high order seems untenable in the face of the fact that Seun, a man well respected by his fellows, was unable to project his thoughts clearly at any time, nor was there any evidence that any large proportion of his thoughts were to himself of a high order of clarity. His answers were typified by "I have forgotten the development—" or "It is difficult for me to explain—" or "The exact mechanism is not understood by all of us—a few historians—"

	It is, of course, impossible to disprove the assertion that such a civilization is possible, but there arises in any mind the question of advantage gained, it being a maxim of any evolutionary or advancing process that the change so made is, in some manner, beneficial to the modified organism of society. Evidently, on the statements made by Seun of Rhth, they have forgotten the knowledge once held by the mighty race that built the cities, and have receded to a state of repose without labor or progress of any kind.

	Thon Raul has mentioned the effect produced on me by close observation of the sorgan mechanism, and further stated that Seun was able to watch this same mechanism without trouble, and able to benefit me after my unfortunate experience. I would point out that mental potentialities decline extremely slowly; it is possible that the present, decadent people have the mental potentialities, still inherent in them, that permitted the immense civilization of the city builders.

	It lies there, dormant. They are lost for lack of the driving will that makes it effective. The Pareeth, the greatest ship our race has ever built, is powered, fueled, potentially mighty now—and inert for lack of a man's driving will, since no one is at her helm.

	So it is with them. Still, the mental capacity of the race overshadows us. But the divine fire of ambition has died. They rely wholly on materials and tools given them by a long-dead people, using even these in an automatic and uncomprehending way, as they do their curious flying suits.

	Finally, it is our conclusion that the twelve ships under consideration should be completed with all possible speed, and the program as at present outlines carried out in full; i.e. seven thousand, six hundred and thirty-eight men and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight will be selected on a basis of health, previous family history, personal character and ability as determined by psychological tests. These will be transported, together with a basic list of necessities, to the new planet, leaving in the early months of the coming year.

	Six years will be required for this trip. At the end of the first year on the new planet, when some degree of organization has been attained, one ship, refueled, will return to Pareeth. At the end of the second year two ships will return from Rhth with all data accumulated in that period. Thereafter, two will sail each year.

	On Pareeth, new ships will be manufactured at whatever rate seems practicable, that more colonists may be sent as swiftly as they desire. It is suggested, however, that, in view of the immense scientific advancements already seen in the cities of Rhth, no new ships be made until a ship returns with the reports of the first year's studies, in order than any resultant scientific advances may be incorporated.

	The present crew of the Pareeth have proven themselves in every way competent, courageous and cooperative. As trained and experienced interstellar operators, it is further suggested that the one hundred men be divided among the thirteen ships to sail, the Pareeth retaining at least fifty of her present crew and acting as guide to the remainder of the fleet. Ron Thule, it is specifically requested, shall be astronomical commander of the fleet aboard the flagship. His astronomical work in positioning and calculating the new system has been of the highest order, and his presence is vitally needed.
Signed by me, SHOR NUN,
this thirty-second day after landing.

UNANIMOUS REPORT OF THE
COMMITTEE OF PAREETH ON
THE FIRST EXPEDITION TO
THE PLANET RHTH

	The Committee of Pareeth, after due consideration of the reports of Folder RI27-s5-Il, entitled "Interstellar Exploration Reports, Expedition 1" do send to commander of said expedition Shor Nun, greetings.

	The committee finds the reports highly satisfying, both in view of the successful nature of the expedition, and in that they represent an almost unanimous opinion.

	In consequence, it is ordered that the ships designated by the department of engineering plan as numbers 18834-18846 be constructed with such expedition as is possible.

	It is ordered that the seven thousand six hundred and thirty-eight young people be chosen in the manner prescribed in the attached docket of details.

	It is ordered that in the event of the successful termination of the new colonizing expedition, such arrangements shall be made that the present, decadent inhabitants of the planet Rhth shall be allowed free and plentiful land; that they shall be in no way molested or attached. It is the policy of this committee of Pareeth that this race shall be wards of the newly founded Rhth State, to be protected and in all ways aided in their life.

	We feel, further, a deep obligation to this race in that the archaeologist and anthropological reports clearly indicate that it was the race known to them as the city builders who first brought fire, the bow and the hammer to our race in mythological times. Once their race gave ours a foothold on the climb to civilization. It is our firm policy that these last, decadent members of that great race shall be given all protection, assistance and encouragement possible to tread again the climbing path.

	It is ordered that the first colony city on Rhth shall be established at the spot represented on the accompanying aps as N'yor as called in the language of the Rhth people, near the point of landing of the first expedition. The near-by settlement of the Rhth people is not to be molested in any way, unless military action is forced upon the colonists.

	It is ordered that if this condition shall arise, if the Rhth people object to the proposed settlement a the spot designated as N'yor, arbitration be attempted. Should this measure prove unsuccessful, military penalties shall be exacted, but only to the extent found necessary for effective action. The colonists shall aid in the moving of the settlement of the Rhth people, if the Rhth people do not desire to be near the city of the colonists.

	In any case, it is ordered that the colonists shall, in every way within their aid, advance and inspire the remaining people of Rhth.

	It is further ordered that Shor Nun, commander, shall be plenipotentiary representative of the committee of Pareeth, with all powers of a discretionary nature, his command to be military and of unquestioned authority until such time as the colony shall have been established for a period of two years. There shall than have been established a representative government of such nature and powers as the colonists themselves find suitable.

	It is then suggested that this government, the State of Rhth, shall exchange such representatives with the committee of Pareeth as are suitable in the dealings of two sovereign powers.

	Until the establishment of the State of Rhth, it is further ordered that—

-

IV.

	THE GRASSLAND rolled away very softly among the brown boles of scattered trees. It seemed unchanged. The city seemed unchanged, floating as it had a thousand thousand years halfway between the blue of the sky and the green of the planet. Only it was not alone in its opalescent beauty now; twelve great ships floated serene, motionless, above its towers, matching them in glowing color. And on the low roll of the hill, a thirteenth ship, gray and grim and scarred with eighteen years of nearly continuous space travel, rested. The locks moved; men stepped forth into the light of the low, afternoon sun.

	To their right, the mighty monument of the city builders; to their left, the low, rounded domes of the great races descendants. Ron Thule stepped down from the lock to join the eight, department commanders who stood looking across toward the village among the trees.

	Shor Nun turned slowly to the men with him, shook he head, smiling. "I did not think to ask. I have no idea what their life span may be. Perhaps the man we knew as Seun has died. When I first landed here, I was a young man. I am middle-aged now. That time may be an old age and extinction to these people."

	"There is one man coming toward us now, Shor Nun," said Ron Thule softly. "He is floating on his—what was that name?—it is a long time since I heard it."

	The man came nearer leisurely; time seemed to mean little to these people. The soft, blue glow of his suit grew, and he moved a bit more rapidly, as though conscious of their importance. "I—I think that is Seun," said the archaeologist. "I have seen those pictures so many times—"

	Seun stood before them again, smiling the slow, easy smile they had known twelve years before. Still he stood slim and straight, his face lined only with the easy gravings of humor and kindliness. He was as unchanged as the grassland, as the eternal city. The glow faded as he settled before them, noiselessly. "You have come back to Rhth, Shor Nun?"

	"Yes, Seun. We promised you that when we left. And with some of our people as well. We hope to establish a colony here, near the ancient city; hope some day to learn again the secrets of the city builders, to roam space as they once did. Perhaps we will be able to occupy some of the long-deserted buildings of the city and bring life to it again."

	"A permanent colony?" asked Seun thoughtfully.

	"Yes, Seun."

	"There are many other cities here, on this planet, nearly as large, equipped with all the things that made this city. To my race the quiet of the unstirred air is very dear; could you not as easily establish your colony in Shao—or Loun—any of the other places?"

	Shor Nun shook his head slowly. "I am sorry, Seun. We had hoped to live near you, that we might both discover again those forgotten secrets. We must stay here, for this was the last city your people deserted; here in it are all the things they ever built, the last achievements of the city builders. We will aid you in moving your colony if you wish, to some other meadowland near the sea. All the world is the same to your people; only this city was built in this way; it was the last to be deserted."

-

	SEUN exhaled softly, looked at the ten men of Pareeth. His mind seemed groping, feeling for something. His deep blue eyes misted in thought, then cleared slowly as Ron Thule watched. Slowly, they moved from man to man of the group, pausing a moment at the anthropologist, catching Shor Nun's gaze for an instant, centering slowly on Ron Thule.

	Ron Thule looked into the deep eyes for a moment, for a long eternity—deep, clear eyes, like mountain lakes. Subtly, the Rhthman's face seemed to change as he watched the eyes. The languor there changed, became a sense of timelessness, of limitlessness. The pleasant, carefree air became, somehow—different. It was the same, but as the astronomer looked into those eyes, a new interpretation came to him. A sudden, vast fear welled up in him, so that his heart contracted, and a sudden tremor came to his hands. "You have forgotten—" he mumbled unsteadily. "Yes—but you—"

	Seun smiled, the firm mouth relaxing in approval. "Yes, Ron Thule. That is enough. I sought your mind. Some one must understand. Remember that only twice in the history of our race have we attempted to alter the course of another's history, for by that you will understand what I must do."

	Seun's eyes turned away. Shor Nun was looking at him, and Ron Thule realized, without quite understanding his knowledge, that no time had elapsed for these others. Now he stood motionless, paralyzed with a new understanding.

	"We much stay here," Seun's mind voice spoke softly. "I, too, had hoped we might live on this world together, but we are too different. We are too far apart to be so near."

	"You do not wish to move?" asked Shor Nun sorrowfully.

	Sean looked up. The twelve great interstellar cruisers hovered closer now, forming, almost, a roof over this conference ground. "That would before the council to say, I know. But I think they would agree with me, Shor Nun."

	Vague pictures and ideas moved through their minds, thoughts emanating from Seun's mind. Slowly, his eyes dropped from the twelve opalescent cruisers to the outstretched palm of his hand. His eyes grew bright, and the lines of his face deepened in concentration. The air seemed to stir and move; a tenseness of inaction came over the ten men of Pareeth and they moved restlessly.

-

	QUITE ABRUPTLY, a dazzling light appeared over Seun's hand, sparkling, myriad colors—and died with a tiny, crystalline clatter. Something lay in his upturned palm; a round, small thing of aquamarine crystal, shot through with veins and arteries of softly pulsing, silver light. It moved and altered as they watched, fading in color, changing the form and outline of light.

	Again the tinkling, crystalline clatter came, and some rearrangement had taken place. There lay in his hand a tiny globe of ultimate night, an essence of darkness that no light could illumine, cased in a crystal surface. Stars shone in it, from the heart, from the borders, stars that moved and turned in majestic splendor in infinite smallness. Then faded.

	Seun raised his eyes. The darkness faded from the crystal in his hand, and pulsing, little veins of light appeared in it. He raised it in his fingers, and nine of Pareeth's men fell back. Ron Thule looked on with frozen, wooden face.

	A wave of blue haze washed out, caught and lifted the men and carried them effortlessly, intangibly back to the lock, through the lock. From the quiet of the grassland they were suddenly in the steel of the ship that clanged and howled with alarms. Great engines bellowed suddenly to life.

	Ron Thule stood at the great, clear port light of the lock. Outside, Seun, in his softly glowing suit, floated a few feet from the ground. Abruptly, the great atomic engines of the Pareeth shrilled a chorus of ravening hate, and from the three great projectors the annihilating beams tore out, shrieking destruction through the air—and vanished. Seun stood at the junction of death, and his crystal glowed softly. Twelve floating ships screamed to the tortured shriek of overloaded atomics, and the planet below cursed back with quarter-mile-long tongues of lightning.

	Somewhere, everywhere, the universe thrummed to a vast, crystalline note, and hummed softly. In that instant, the green meadowland of Rhth vanished; the eternal city dissolved into blackness. Only blackness, starless, lightless shone outside the lock port light. The soft, clear note of the crystal hummed and beat and surged. The atomic engine's cry died full-throated. An utter, paralyzed quiet descended on the ship, so that the cry of a child somewhere echoed and reverberated noisily down the steel corridors.

	The crystal in Seun's hand beat and hummed its note. The blackness beyond the port became gray. One by one, six opalescent ships shifted into view in the blackness beyond, moving with a slow deliberation, as though forced by some infinite power into a certain, predetermined configuration. Like atoms in a crystal lattice they shifted, seemed to click into place and held steady—nearly, geometrically arranged.

-

	THEN NOISE came back to the ship, sounds that crept in, afraid of themselves, grew courageous and clamored; pounding feet of men, and women's screams.

	"We're out of space," gasped Shor Nun. "That crystal—that thing in his hand—"

	"In a space of our own," said Ron Thule. "Wait till the note of the crystal dies down. It is weakening, weakening slowly, to us, but it will be gone, and then—"

	Shor Nun turned to him, his dark eyes shadowed, his face pale, and drawn. "What do you know—how—"

	Ron Thule stood silent. He did not know. Somewhere, a crystal echoed for a moment in rearrangement and tinkling sound; the universe echoed to it softly, as the last, faint tone died away.

	"Shor Nun—Shor Nun—" a slow, wailing cry was building up in the ship. Scampering feet on metal floors became a Search.

	Shor Nun sobbed once. "That crystal—they had not lost the weapons of the city builders. Space of our own? No—it is like the sorgan: It rotates us to the end of time! This is the space we knew—when all time has died, and the stars are gone and the worlds are dust. This is the end of the nothingness. The city builders destroyed their enemies thus—by dumping them at the end of time and space. I know. They must have. And Seun had the ancient weapon. When the humming note of the crystal dies—the lingering force of translation—

	"Then we shall die, too. Die in the death of death. Oh, gods—Sulon—Sulon, my dear—our son—" Shor Nun, commander, seemed to slump from his frozen rigidity. He turned abruptly away from the port light toward the inner lock door. It opened before him suddenly, and a technician stumbled down, white-faced and trembling.

	"Commander—Shor Nun—the engines are stopped. The atoms will not explode; no power can be generated. The power cells are supplying emergency power, but the full strength of the drive does not move nor shake the ship! What—what is this?"

	Shor Nun stood silent. The ship thrummed and beat with the softening, dying note of the universe-distant crystal that held all the beginnings and the endings of time and space in a man's hand. The note was fading; very soft and sweet, it was. Through the ship the hysterical cry of voices had changed; it was softening with the thrum, softening, listening to the dying thread of infinitely sweet sound.

	Shor Nun shrugged his shoulders, turned away. "It does not matter. The force is fading. Across ten million ears the city builders have reached to protect their descendants."

	The note was very low—very faint; a quivering hush bound the ship. Beyond the port light, the six sister ships began to move again, very stealthily away, retreating toward the positions they had held when this force first seized them. Then—

	Shor Nun's choked cry was drowned in the cries of the others in the lock. Blinding white light stabbed through the port like a solid, incandescent bar. Their eyes were hot and burning.

	Ron Thule, his astronomer's eyes accustomed to rapid, extreme changes of light, recovered first. His word was indistinct, a cross between a sob and a chuckle.

	Shor Nun stood beside him, winking tortured eyes. The ship was waking, howling into a mad, frightened life; the children screamed in sympathetic comprehension of their elder's terror.

	White, blazing sunlight on green grass and brown dirt. The weathered gray of concrete, and the angular harshness of great building cradles. A sky line of white-tipped, blue mountains, broken by nearer, less-majestic structures of steel and stone and glass, glinting in the rays of a strong, warm sun with a commonness, a familiarity that hurt. A vast nostalgia welled up in them at the sight—

	And died before another wave of terror. "Darun Tara," said Shor Nun. "Darun Tara, on Pareeth. I am mad—this is mad. A crazy vision in a crazy instant as the translating force collapses. Darun Tara as it was when we left it six long years ago. Changed—that half-finished shed is still only three-quarters finished. I can see Thio Roul, the portmaster there, coming toward us. I am mad. I am five light years away—"

	"It is Darun Tara, Shor Nun," Ron Thule whispered. "And the city builders could never have done this. I understand now. I—"

	He stopped. The whole, great ship vibrated suddenly to thwang like the plucked, bass string of a Titan's harp. Creaks and squeals, and little grunting readjustments, the fabric of the cruiser protested.

	"My telescope—" cried Ron Thule. He was running toward the inner lock door, into the dark mouth of the corridor.

	Again the ship thrummed to a vibrant stroke. The creaking of the girders and strakes protested bitterly; stressed rivets grunted angrily.

	Men pounded on the lock door from without. Thio Raul, Ton Gareth, Hol Brawn—familiar faces staring anxiously in. Shor Nun moved dully toward the gate controls—

-

V.

	SHOR NUN knocked gently at the closed, metal door of the ship's observatory. Ron Thule's voice answered, muffled, vague, from beyond.

	The commander opened the door; his breath sucked in sibilantly. "Space!" he gasped.

	"Come and see, come and see," the astronomer called softly.

	Shor Nun instinctively felt his way forward on tiptoe. The great observatory room was space; it was utter blackness, and the corridor lights were swallowed in it the instant the man crossed the threshold. Blackness, starred by tiny, brilliant points, scattered very sparsely, in every direction.

	"Seun took the telescope, but he left me this, instead. I understand now; he said that only twice had they attempted to alter a race's history.

	"This is space, and that is Troth, our own star. Watch—"

	The star expanded; the whole of this imageless space exploded outward and vanished through the unseen walls of the observatory. Troth floated alone, centered in the invisible room. Seven, tiny dots of light hung near it, glowing in its reflected light.

	"And that is our system. Now this is the star of Rhth—"

	Space contracted, shifted and exploded, leaving one shining, yellowish star, attended by five brightly visible worlds.

	"The other planets are too small or too dimly illumined to see. When I came there was a new system displayed. This one."

	Another planetary system appeared.

	"That is the system of Prothor."

	"Prothor!" Shor Nun stared. "Five and a half light years away—and planets?"

	"Planets. Uninhabited, for I can bring each planet as near as I will. But, Shor Nun"—sorrow crept into the astronomer's voice—"though I can see every detail of each planet of that system, though I can see each outline of the planets of Rhth's system—only those three stars can I see, close by."

	"No other planetary systems!"

	"No other planetary system that Seun will reveal to us. I understand. One we won on the right of our own minds, our own knowledge; we reached his worlds. We had won a secret from nature by our own powers; it was part of the history of our race. They do not want to molest, or in any way influence the history of a race—so they permitted us to return, if only we did not disturb them. They could not refuse us that, a breach in their feelings of justice.

-

	"BUT they felt it needful to dispossess us, Shor Nun, and this Seun did. But had he done no more, our history was altered, changed vitally. So—this he gave us; he has shown us another, equally near planetary system that we may use. We have not lost vitally. This is his justice."

	"His justice. Yes, I came to you, Ron Thule, because you seemed to know somewhat of the things that happened." Shor Nun's voice was low in the dark of the observatory. He looked at the floating planets of Prothor. "What is—Seun? How has this happened? Do you know? You know that we were greeted by our friends—and they turned away from us.

	"Six years have passed for us. They wanted to know what misfortune made us return at the end—of a single year. One year has passed here on Pareeth. My son was born, there in space, and he has passed his fourth birthday. My daughter is two. Yet these things have not happened, for we were gone a single year. Seun has done it, but it cannot be; Seun, the decadent son of the city builders; Seun, who has forgotten the secrets of the ships that sailed beyond the stars and the building of the Titan Towers, opalescent in the sun; Seun, whose people live in a tiny village sheltered from the rains and the sun by a few green trees.

	"What are these people of Rhth?"

	Ron Thule's voice was a whisper from the darkness. "I come from a far world, by what strange freak we will not say. I am a savage, a rising race that has not learned the secret of fire, nor bow, nor hammer. Tell me, Shor Nun, what is the nature of the two dry sticks I must rub, that fire may be born? Must they be hard, tough oak, or should one be a soft, resinous bit of pine? Tell me how I may make fire."

	"Why—with matches or a heat ra—No Ron Thule. Vague thoughts, meaningless ideas and unclear. I—I have forgotten the ten thousand generations of development. I cannot retreat to a level you, savage of an untrained world, would understand. I—I have forgotten."

	"Then tell me, how must I hold the flint, and where must I press with a bit of deer horn that the chips shall fly small and even, so that the knife will be sharp and kill my prey for me? And how shall I rub and wash and treat the wood of the bow, or the skin of the slain animal that I may have a coat that will not be stiff, but soft and pliable?"

	"Those, too, I have forgotten. Those are unnecessary things. I cannot help you, savage. I would greet you, and show the relics of our deserted past in museums. I might conduct you through ancient caves, where mighty rock walls defended my ancestors against the wild things they could not control.

	"Yes, Ron Thule. I have forgotten the development."

-

	"ONCE"—Ron Thule's voice was tense—"the city builder made atomic generators to release the energy bound in that violent twist of space called an atom. He made the sorgan to distribute its power to his clumsy shells of metal and crystal—the caves that protected him from the wild things of space.

	"Seun has forgotten the atom; he thinks in terms of space. The powers of space are at his direct command. He created the crystal that brought us here from the energy of space, because it made easy a task his mind alone could have done. It was no more needful than is an adding machine. His people have no ships; they are anywhere in space they will without such things. Seun is not a decadent son of the city builders. His people never forgot the dream that built the city. But it was a dream of childhood, and his people were children then. Like a child with his broomstick horse, the mind alone was not enough for thought; the city builders, just as ourselves, needed something of a solid metal and crystal, to make their dreams tangible."

	"My son was born in space, and is four. Yet we were gone a single year from Pareeth." Shor Nun sighed.

	"Our fleet took six years to cross the gulf of five light years. In thirty seconds, infinitely faster than light, Seun returned us, that there might be the minimum change in our racial history. Time is a function of the velocity of light, and five light years of distance is precisely equal to five years of time multiplied by the square root of minus one. When we traversed five light years of space in no appreciable time, we dropped back, also, through five years of time.

	"You and I have spent eighteen years of effort in this exploration. Shor Nun—eighteen years of our manhood. By this hurling us back Seun has forever denied us the planets we earned by those long years of effort. But now he does not deny us wholly.

	"They gave us this, and by it another sun, with other planets. This Seun gave not to me, as an astronomer; it is his gift to the race. Now it is beyond us ever to make another. And this which projects this space around us will cease to be, I think, on the day we land on those other planets of that other sun, where Seun will be to watch us—as he may be here now, to see that we understand his meanings.

	"I know only this—that sun I can see, and the planets circling it. The sun of Rhth I can see, and those planets, and our own. But—though these others came so near at the impulse of my thoughts, no other sun in all space can I see so near.

	"That, I think is the wish of Seun and his race."

	The astronomer stiffened suddenly.

	Shor Nun stood straight and tense.

	"Yes," whispered Seun, very softly, in their minds.

	Ron Thule sighed.

The End

Out of Night
Sarn-01
Astounding Stories – October 1937
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

I.

	THE SARN MOTHER looked down at Grayth with unblinking, golden eyes. "You administer the laws under the Sarn," she clicked waspishly. "The Sarn makes the laws. Men obey them. That was settled once and for all time four thousand years ago. The Sarn-Mother has determined that this thing is the way of progress that is most desirable. It is clear?"

	Grayth looked up at her, his slow-moving eyes following from the toe pads, up the strange, rope-flexible legs, up the rounded, golden body to the four twined arms, his lips silent. His steel-gray eyes alone conveyed his thought complete. The Sarn-Mother, on her inlaid throne of state, clicked softly in annoyance.

	"Aye, different races we are; the Sarn are the ruling race. The Sarn-Mother will be obeyed by the slaves of her people no less than by her people. For many centuries the crazy patchwork has persisted—that the men have had freedoms that the masters have denied themselves. Henceforth men shall be ruled as the Sarn. The Sarn have been just masters; this is no more than justice. But be warned, you will see that this thing is administered at once—or the Sarn will administer it themselves."

	Grayth spoke for the first time, his voice deep and powerful. "Four thousand years ago your people came to Earth and conquered our people, enslaved them, destroyed all our leaders, setting up a rabble of unintelligent slaves. Since your atomic energy, your synthetic foods, your automatic production machinery, and the enormous decrease in human population you had brought about made more of goods for each man, it worked no great hardship.

	"Before ever the Sarn came to this world, your race was ruled by a matriarchy, as it is today, and must always be. To your people it is natural, for among you the females born in a generation outnumber the males five to one. You stand near seven feet tall, while the Sarn Father—as the other males of your race—is but four feet tall, but a quarter as powerful physically. Matriarchy is the inevitable heritage of your race.

	"You differ from us in this fundamental of sex distribution. By pure chance our two races resemble each other superficially—two eyes, two ears, rounded heads. Your race has two, wide-separated nostrils, four arms in place of two. But internally there is no resemblance. No bone of your body is three inches long; your arms, your legs are made as a human spine, of many small bones. Your copper-bearing foods are deadly poison to us. Your strath, though it seems like human hair, is a sensory organ sensitive to radio waves, and a radiator of those waves. We are two races apart, fundamentally different.

	"Now, like your own matriarchy, you wish to establish upon us a matriarchal government; for this reason alone, you state, the number of males to be allowed in succeeding generations is to be reduced.

	"What is natural for your race is an unnatural crime upon ours. Would you insist that we should eat no better food than you eat, as we should obey no different laws? Would you legislate that we should eat your foods, as we should obey your laws? Equally, in either case you destroy us. It is to the advantage of neither race."

	"GRAYTH, you seek to tell the Sarn-Mother her mind? What is best for her good? Perhaps I have been foolish to allow such freedom to your kind, allowing this 'election' of human administrators. You, Grayth, will be replaced within this week, and not by election. The laws of the Sarn will be applied at once!"

-

	Grayth looked at her steadily, deep-set iron-gray eyes unwavering on jewel-flecked golden ones. He sighed softly. "Your race does not know of the ancient powers of man; you are a race of people knowing and recognising only the might of the atomic generator, the flare of the atomic-blast as power. The power of the mind is great. For ten thousand years before your coming men thought, and united in their thoughts of the unseen powers. In a hectic week your ancestors destroyed all of man's chaotic civilization, clamped on him suddenly a new world state. Before a union of thought could be attained, the thing was done, and as slow crystallization of feeling came, the poor survivors found that the conditions were not impossible. Our very difference of race protected them, to an extent, against mistreatment.

	"But a crystallization has taken place during these forty centuries, a slow uniformity has built up. The mighty, chaotic thought wills of five hundred million men during three thousand generations were striving, building toward a mighty reservoir of powers, but their very disordered strivings prevented ordered formation.

	"During a hundred centuries of chaotic thought, turbulent desire, those vast reservoirs of eternal, indestructible thought energies have circled space, unable to unite. During these last four millenniums those age-old forces have slowly united on a single, common thought that men destroyed by your race during the conquest have sent out.

	"We of our race have felt that thing in these last years, that slowly accreting oneness of age-old will and thought, developing reality and power by the gathering of forces generated by minds released by death during ten thousand years. He is growing, a one from many, the combined thought and wisdom and power of the fifteen hundred billions of men who have lived on Earth. Aesir, he is, black as the spaces in which he formed.

	"We are a different race. As you have your strath sensitive to radio, we have yet a more subtle sense, a sense reacting to the very essence of thought. That, too, has grown with the passing years. Over there by the wall an electrotechnician follows conduits, and his thoughts are clear to my mind, as the communications of the Sarn are to each other."

	The Sarn-Mother's lips twitched. "He pays no attention to us," she said very low, so that, in the huge room, only those within a few feet of her could hear. "I doubt this power you claim. Make him come here and bow down before me—and say no word."

	Across the room, the human electrotechnician, clad in the stout, ungraceful clothes of his trade, the lightning emblem emblazoned on his back, looked up with a start. "Before the Sarn-Mother?" his voice echoed his surprise that he, an undistinguished workman, should be called thus before the ruler of Earth. "Aye, I—" He looked about him suddenly, his face blanking in surprise as he saw no one nearer him than the gathering two hundred feet away across the black basalt floor. A red flush of confusion spread over his face, and he turned back to his task with awkward nervousness, sure that the voice from empty air, issuing an impossible summons, had been a figment of his own imagination—

	The Sarn-Mother looked with unwinking golden eyes at Grayth. "You may go," she said at last. "But the Law of the Sarn, that there shall be five of females and one of males, is the law of the planet."

	Grayth turned slowly, his head bowed momentarily in parting salute. His body erect, and his tread firm, he walked down the lane of the gathered Sarn. Behind him, the six humans who had accompanied him fell into step. Silently, the little procession passed between the gleaming bronze of the great entrance doors and down the broad steps to the parked lawns beyond.

-

	BARTEL hastened his steps and fell in beside Grayth. "Do you think she will enforce that law? What can we do? Will she believe in this mind force, this myth from the childhood of a race?"

	Grayth's eyes darkened a little. He nodded slowly. "We will go to my house. The Sarn-Mother is not given to idle gestures, and she cannot lay down laws and revoke them aimlessly. But—we can talk when we reach my house." Grayth strode on thoughtfully. Sunlight lay across the lawns—sunlight and green shadows under trees. They saw the occasional darting shadow of vague huge things, high in the air, smooth-lined shapes that floated wingless and soundless far above them. Then down a long avenue paved with a gray cement that would glow with soft light when night fell, they went. The broad park lands, with their jewel-like palaces of the Sarn, fell behind them, then the low wall that divided the city of the Sarn from the city of men.

	The broad avenue shrank abruptly, changed from the gray, night-glowing cement to a cobbled walk. The jewel-like palaces and the sprawling parks of the Sarn gave way to neat, small houses of white-washed cement, crusted with layer on ancient layer of soft-tinted wash. For these homes nearest the Sarn City had been built after the coming of the Sarn, when the ruins of man's cities still smoldered with destruction.

	The very atomic bombs that had brought that ruin to man's cities were dead now. The last traces of the cities being succumbing to the returning thrust of green, burying life. The Sarn were old on Earth and this city they had caused to be about them was old, the hard granite cobbles of the walk worn smooth and polished with the soft tread of ages.

	The Sarn-Mother had sat on her golden throne and watched the rains of summers smooth them, and the tread of generations of men polish them. The Sarn-Mother had been old when the Sarn landed; she was unchanged now, after the passage of more than a hundred generations of men, after ten generations of the rest of her people. She was eternal.

	The neat, vine-clad houses of the city of men slipped back, and the easy bustle of the square came before them, the ancient shops where a hundred and twenty generations had bought and sold and carried on their lives. He nodded absently, smiled to friends and well-wishers, noted unchanging the sullen looks of those who wore the small green shield emblem of Drunnel's faction.

	Bartel's voice spoke again at his shoulder. "Drunnel's friend, Varthil, seems less sullen today. Did you notice?" Bartel nodded faintly toward the powerful figure clad in the balance-emblemed tunic of a legal administrator. "He went so far as to smile slightly. I am undecided between two meanings."

	"There is only one possible." Grayth sighed. "He has more sense than to try to make me believe he begins to regard me as a friend; therefore, he smiles not at me but to himself. You sent Thera as I suggested—"

	Bartel nodded in puzzlement. "I did, Grayth, but—I cannot see the need of that. The Sarn will—"

	"The Sarn-Mother will do nothing. Wait till we reach the house." The square fell behind; the houses grew less ancient, subtly so, for the style of building remained unchanged, and the building had been good. There were no signs of decay in even the oldest. The lands around each house grew larger, too. There were more children in these cobbled lanes.

	Grayth turned off, Bartel and three of the others with him; two, with a few words of parting, went on. Silently, they continued to the low, rambling house of faintly tinted cement that was Grayth's residence and office.

-

	HERE in this low, millennium-old building, the pyramided, loosely-knit government of the humans of Earth was concentrated. A structure based on town delegates from every human settlement of Earth, men who reported to district speakers who carried their messages to continental spokesmen and finally to the Spokesman of Mankind, and this was the spokesman's official residence. Six months ago old Tranmath, Spokesman of Mankind for twenty-two years, had died in this old building, and Grayth had been elected his successor, to "deal justly, and honorably and to the utmost of my ability so long as I may live, or until my body fails." Death or dishonesty alone could remove him from his position. Death, dishonesty, or—now—Drunnel, who for the moment represented both. 

	Responsible to the Sarn, responsible to the humans as well, Grayth's actual powers were limited purely to advisory capacities; he advised the Sarn, though they disregarded his suggestions as they liked. He advised the legion commanders, the police of the human towns, and they, likewise, could disregard his suggestions. The Sarn-Mother knew as well as he did that he could not enforce those laws of the matriarchy, even had he desired to; the Sarn-Mother did not like Grayth.

	A dozen secretaries and clerks looked up as the small party entered, and looked back to their work. Enamel-and-silver disks on their headbands, the design worked into their sleeves, showed their status in society—the book and the lamp of administrators.

	Grayth nodded briefly and continued across the rubberlike floor to the low door of his inner conference room. The feet of thirty generations of spokesmen had carved into that tough, rubbery stuff a channel that circled here to avoid a column, turned back to avoid a desk that had sat just so, it or its precursors, for one thousand years. Finally, it tunneled a bit under the door, and into the low-ceilinged office. It split, as the entering parties had split those thousand years, to the nine seats about the conference table, a great six-inch slab of time-stained mahogany.

	Grayth seated himself at the end of the table, Bartel, the American spokesman at his right, beside him Carron, commander of the legion of peace, Darak and Holmun, Grayth's subspokesmen. And on their heels the gray-clad electrotechnician came quietly into the room. Silently, the five men nodded greeting, while the technician placed his kit on the age-worn table. He lifted from it a shelf layer of jumbled tools, exposing tiny, banked instruments, and a thin, insulated metal rod that popped up as a spring extended it.

	Skilled fingers made adjustments as tiny needles swayed delicately and came to rest. His fingers touched small controls and the flexible metal aerial nodded and bowed and danced, bowing to every side of the room, halting suddenly as needles lifted and quivered. The technician lined it carefully, then looked along its pointing finger toward the atom-flame projector, throwing dying stars of light that settled and vanished in twinkling illumination in the air. The tiny rod glowed with bluish light as he threw a tiny stud on his instrument panel.

	"That makes twelve different listeners," he grunted. '1 told you the Sarn had had time to install more than one."

	"And the spokesmen wondered, in years gone by, that the Sarn seemed to know their very thoughts." Grayth smiled bitterly. "We may be able to advance. I am the first spokesman in ten centuries who can hold a conference without the invisible presence of the Sarn-Mother."

	Carron looked angrily toward the atom-flame projector. "It's in that thing? Why don't you rip it out?"

	The technician grinned. "The Sarn can hear radio waves as you hear sound. To them, that listener—a tiny radio transmitter powered probably by the atomic power of the projector—emits a clear, low hum. When we speak, the crystal modulates the radio hum with our voice frequencies. My little aerial there simply transmits a wave which, without stopping the transmitter's radio frequency carrier, strips off the modulation. If I tear out the transmitter—the hum would vanish, and the Sarn would become—curious, shall I say?"

	"Furious," grunted Bartel. "Why won't they switch to another while we're in the room? They switch from one to another of those listeners irregularly."

	"Ware's instrument would still work, whichever they used," Grayth explained. "He was merely curious as to which and how many they were using. There was no need to locate the listener." The technician nodded in confirmation.

	Darak turned to Grayth with a sigh. "That being settled, tell me, 4 Grayth, why does the Sarn-Mother ask you to do—command you to do something she knows you have no power to accomplish?"

	"Because the Sarn-Mother knows I will not do it," answered the spokesman sourly, "but that Drunnel would."

	"Drunnel—could he influence the Sarn-Mother? I never believed she would side in human quarrels unless she was directly affected— always felt she considered them beneath her notice." Carron looked to Grayth in surprise.

-

	GRAYTH settled back slowly in his great, worn chair. He lighted his pipe and began to puff, looking lazily at the gushing, soundless stars of the atom flame. "Four thousand years ago the Sarn-Mother landed, and only she herself knows how many ages she had lived before that. The Sarn are long lived—some live as long as a thousand years. But the Sarn-Mother is the matriarch, immortal. Even her people have forgotten her age. The Sarn landed, and in the Battles of Conquest ninety-nine percent of mankind on Earth was destroyed. The remainder were made slaves, and they, our forefathers, were the meanest, sniveling scum of humanity."

	Carron moved restlessly; his face flushed slowly and words growled in his throat. Grayth looked at him, his lean, rugged face smiling ironically. "Ifs true enough, Carron. Those noble forefathers of ours were no great men; the great died killing Sarn, rebelling, fighting. The unconquerable spirits died because they could not be conquered—and could die.

	"Four thousand years the Sarn-Mother has sat on her throne and watched mankind—listened, it would seem"—Grayth nodded toward the glowing aerial of the demodulator apparatus—"to its most secret councils. She knows man with the knowledge of one hundred and twenty generations. Unfortunately, man evolves, and being a short-lived animal, evolves more rapidly than do the Sarn. The weakness that made him submit to slavery has died out in four thousand years. For a millennium the Mother has seen man rapidly becoming man again.

	"Bartel—Carron—what is that you wear on your forehead, that medallion of silver and enamel? The thing they placed on your forehead when they said you were 'called to manhood.' The Mother believes, in her mind, that it is the badge of your slavery, and your rank in her hierarchy of slavedom.

	"But Ware has hollowed the solid silver of the Sarn-Mother's slave badge to contain the telepath instrument. That she does not guess. She does guess, though, that man's slavery is being hollowed, a shell that may break soon. My announcement of the telepathic power troubled her more than we had guessed. We did not know, but she did. The ancients, before the Conquest, had begun to discover telepathy. Where we hoped a myth might impress her, she knew the fact already! By my telepath I followed her mind as she listened.

	"That she learned from forgotten records, but this she has learned from watching one hundred and twenty generations of us. Man will fight and die for what he has not; woman will fight and die for what she has. Man will sacrifice everything he has for something he hopes for, an ideal; but while woman will fight for an ideal, she will not give up the good she has to gain it.

	"The Sarn-Mother knows that man is thinking again, after four thousand years, of the freedom he has not."

	"The Mother, then—means to enforce the matriarchy laws on humanity!" Bartel exclaimed. "But—that will merely inflame the revolution, not stamp it out."

	Grayth shook his head. "The Mother is not so direct. She has lived four thousand years; to her a century is a passing year, and three generations of misery to humanity is a bad year in her life. She knows rebellion might flare, but she plans not for a century, but for a millennium. Her will will be done—and the survivors will bless the beneficent Mother and her justness. What things must she do that the matriarchy laws may be applied to humanity?"

	"Kill four out of every five men! She can't! Better she would kill the last of humanity trying that, for every woman will fight for her man—and be killed with him!" Carron snorted. "Before she accomplished any such slaughter, half her Sarn would have been throttled, and all humans, man and woman alike. To bring to effect the law of one and five, so many women would die defending their men that none would survive. And surely they would never serve the butcher."

	"Drunnel," said Grayth bitterly. "Drunnel is her cat's-paw. Women will hate the butcher, true enough, so Drunnel she's groomed for the role. No hatred of Sarn, no danger to Sarn. But civil war—and Drunnel. Drunnel—and not rebellion, but rebellious energies diverted against themselves. Let men loll men, and fewer women die. Let men kill men, till the beneficent Mother steps in with her hallowed legion of Sarn and stops the slaughter—when the law of one and five is reached.

	"Half the survivors will hate Drunnel for his destruction and half will love the leader of their lost men. But all will praise the Mother * who stopped the bloody war. The Sarn-Mother plans with the wisdom of four thousand years, and not the hot temper of forty."

-

	CARRON opened his mouth to growl something, stopped, and closed it with a snap. Til throttle Drunnel this afternoon," he finally vowed.

	"Rendan is his lieutenant, and will take over. After Rendan is Grasun—and others follow." Bartel sighed.

	"And I don't think you will throttle Drunnel this afternoon anyway," Ware said softly. "Unless he is late for his hour with the Mother, he is before her now, bargaining and discussing weapons."

	"We haven't any weapons save those air guns Ware and others have made for us—and clubs," Carron groaned. "The Mother, I suppose, will give him some of the deadly weapons by which the Sarn destroyed the ancients."

	Ware shook his head. "By no means; you forget her purpose. She does not want Drunnel to win. She wants him to bring about a decimating strife. If she gives him powerful weapons and easy conquest, the war is done before it is begun. No, she will give him weak weapons, and few of them, so that he will win only after long, deadly struggle. Why, she would probably supply us with weapons, if Drunnel should get too easy a victory."

	Carron threw his great body back in his chair so viciously the old wood creaked in protest. The room thundered to his curses. "I'll move my blistering legion of peace this very hour, by—by Aesir! I'll throttle Drunnel with my own hands, and I'll see that every sneaking, slinking Sarn-fathered maggot of his evil crew squirms beside him!"

	"We can't. Drunnel has as many men as we—and it would not be done in an hour. We must wait till Ware's work is done, and Aesir is ready to aid us," Grayth said sharply. 'If we can hold off this struggle till we are ready to help ourselves, the Aesir will be strong enough to help us."

	"What does Drunnel hope to gain from this?" asked Holmun. "He is spreading his organization to Europe, to Asia, as I know. Everywhere you sent me these last two months, I have found him working, promising a firmer stand against the Sarn, more freedom for humanity. Those are campaign promises, to be rejected. But if he knows this is coming—what does he hope to gain by it, knowing, as he must, that the Sarn-Mother is inciting this thing to cause slaughter, not to give him power."

	Grayth's lean, tanned face hardened and the iron-gray eyes flashed. "Power, yes, but more than that; every move Drunnel has ever made, he has found me across his path. He sought the district delegateship; I won it. He had to content himself with that of city spokesman. He sought the American spokesmanship; I won it. He hated me. Six months ago we sought the spokesmanship; I won again, while Bartel here won the American spokesmanship over Rendan, his friend. That might be enough—but he wants Deya, and Deya chose me. To him it was the finishing blow. I think the man is mad. Power and the girl he wanted—and he has been blocked in every move.

	"If he must, he is not averse to destroying all mankind to destroy me, and to destroy Bartel, too. If he wins, he does that—destroys us —and he believes he will then have Deya and Thera as well.

	"If he wins, he destroys me, and Bartel, the men he hates. For a time at least, he will have the power he wants and the women he wants, not for themselves now, but because they refused him. He fights for those reasons. His followers—"

-

	GRAYTH looked at none of them, his whole concentration turned on an inner consideration of the problem. His voice was almost a monotone, the voice of a man thinking out loud. "There will be civil war," he said softly, "because mankind is slowly growing aware of slavery and restriction. The whole race is stirring with a slow realization of confinement. But as yet, the mass of men have not realized what it is they want. The rule of the Sarn is so deep in their minds that the idea of rebellion against the Sarn-Mother cannot rise to conscious levels. Mankind needs, in its restlessness demands, as never before, a leader about whom it can crystallize to express this restlessness in action. Drunnel's followers that will rebel against us are rebelling, symbolically, one might say, against the Sarn, since we represent the government the Sarn allowed.

	"Drunnel has found, ready to hand, a mass of men who will act as he wants, to place him in the place of the men he hates. This is a fight between leaders, solely that. Only the leaders know why they are fighting. The people who will follow Drunnel against us will fight only because of a vague discontent that Drunnel has enlisted to aid him. Only Drunnel knows what it is he wants; power and Deya.

	"Then he hopes to win the Mother to a new plan, not matriarchy, but a rule by men of a world of women. He knows the Mother's feelings, her realization of mankind's discontent, I believe. He hopes to compromise with her."

	"He won't," said Ware softly. "I've spent hours near the Mother as the electrotechnician of the city of the Sarn. She has her plans, and they are as Grayth said. But she plans further. For a year or two Drunnel will have power and hatred, but she will protect him. He will have near him—his wives—the best minds of the women, and she knows them: Deya, Thera, Coson—you all know them. Then the Mother will withdraw her protection, and the hate he will have stirred will kill him. Some woman will avenge her man. Deya will be Spokeswoman of Human Women. For a day in her life, the Mother will suffer Drunnel and his annoyances, that the long-time plan may be carried out."

	Carron stood up abruptly. The massive old chair crashed over backward as he strode the length of the room, trembling, his great arms knotted with angry muscles, his three hundred pounds of bone and sinew quivering with wordless anger.

-

II.

	WARE lingered a moment after the others had left Grayth. Slowly, he prepared to pack away his small kit of tools and apparatus. "Aesir, our black lord, seems no nearer." He sighed.

	Grayth nodded silently. Then he said, "Can you give me one of those demodulators, Ware? You are the only hope of success mankind can have, you and your discovery. You must not be seen visiting the spokesman too frequently, attending the executive conferences. As an electrotechnician you are part of the gray background of the Sarn City; we want no spotlights turned on you. By the telepath you can follow every conference, and if you can teach me to operate that demodulator—"

	Ware's usual slight stoop, the gray monotony of his work seemed to slip from him for a second as he stood erect, suddenly a powerful figure of a man, six feet tall, dark eyes set far under heavy brows, searching out with vibrant intelligence. The easy lines of his face straightened and deepened as he gazed steadily at Grayth for a long, silent moment. Slowly, he ran his lean-fingered hand across his head, taking the telepath band from his forehead.

	"I think that we will both be busy tonight, Grayth. You with the men whom you can handle, I—I have an appointment with Aesir, whom I cannot handle." A slow smile spread across the lean, tanned cheeks. "If, in the morning, the problem is still pressing—come to my house. I will probably be behind the stone."

	"There is tonight," Grayth acknowledged sadly. "Let's pray that tomorrow the problem will still be pressing. Thank—er—Aesir, you have never appeared, that even Drunnel does not see you when you walk by with that kit of tools. If things so come that we—Bartel, Carron and I—are not here to press the problem tomorrow, I have this hope: that neither Sarn nor Drunnel realize their true source of danger.

	"But do not come here again, please, Ware."

	"Maybe that would be best," the electrotechnician agreed. He bent over to pack his apparatus, his tools once more.

-

III.

	Drunnel looked up to the Mother's slitted, vertical-pupiled eyes. Behind his own keen, dark eyes a swift, agile brain was weighing-guessing—planning. "But they are not so helpless; they have a weapon designed by one of their own men—a hand weapon that projects small slugs of metal. An air gun."

	The Mother's expressionless eyes continued to stare at him, unwinking, the smooth, coppery skin of her face unmoving, the delicate, barely unhuman face hiding the thoughts of more than four thousand years. "I do not mix with human quarrels, save when they affect my Sarn," she said softly. "If this quarrel of yours gets out of hand, I will send my legion to stop it. But Grayth does not please me, and he has no desire to enforce my laws. I will give you those things I mentioned, no more—the crown and the glow beam. You will have one thousand of each; the rest of your forces will have to fight on terms equal with theirs.

	"Sthek Tharg, take them to the hall of arms and let them have those things." The Sarn-Mother's eyes closed behind opaque, coppery sheaths; she sat motionlessly as the Sarn she had called uncoiled his arms and rose slowly from his padded chair. On noiseless, padded feet he stalked off across the great hall of assembly. Behind him, Drunnel and his six companions followed.

	"Call others," Sthek Tharg snapped.

	"Rendan," Drunnel spoke softly, "tell Sarson we will need seventy-five men, preferably discreet men, at the gate just after dusk. That will be in two hours now. I will send someone else to lead them when we are ready."

	Rendan dropped from the group and hurried through the labyrinthine corridors to the outer park, down to the human city. Drunnel followed his silent guide through unfamiliar passages, to an elevator that dropped them one thousand feet to a dank, cold corridor that led off to unfathomed reaches of dimness, a corridor lighted only sparsely by far-scattered atom-flame projectors burning at an absolute minimum.

	The Sarn started off firmly toward the left. Doors opened from the corridor at long intervals—doorways opening into dim-lighted halls burned by atomic-blasts in native, sparkling granite. Something of the crystalline fury of the blasts lingered yet in their glittering, scintillating walls. Under dim lights, vague, vast structures of crystal and metal and plastic loomed in indeterminate dusk. The feeble, dying sparks of atom stars served only to make horrific outlines discernible. Vast, many-legged things of metal, built with huge ropy things that dropped dejected near them—ropy things of glinting metal ending in things strangely like Sarn hands, with their many-boned flexibility.

	Other rooms were filled, cabinet above cabinet, with boxed devices—things that might, of course, be no more than searchlights. The armory of the Sarn! Unused these four thousand years.

	Drunnel looked at the shrouded things with keen, dark eyes. His lean, muscular body never slowed in its step; the thin, almost ascetic face never turned. Only the dark eyes darted from dark doorway to huddled, half-glimpsed mass—the doorless doorways, without bar, or light-beam interceptor. The elevator answered to any being's control.

-

	THE SARN turned his head, rotated it till his slitted eyes stared straight to Drunnel's, while he walked steadily forward. The line-thin gash of his mouth opened in what might have been a smile. "I will get the crown and the weapon. It is not—advisable that humans cross the threshold of these doors."

	He paused a moment, and the body and head rotated in opposite directions till, alike, they faced a dark doorway. He walked toward it, and as he crossed, a spark of the atom flame in the dim room's ceiling floated down, living strangely long, to burst abruptly before him. It burned for perhaps ten seconds, dying with a shrill, clear, tinkling note during all those seconds, fading into dimness as the thin, keen note died with it.

	Drunnel, twenty feet away, relaxed slowly, his knees bending under his weight, till he crouched on the floor, his powerful, six-foot body crumpled under its own weight till he was on hands and knees, his head dangling in limp agony, all his muscles quivering, jerking, dancing madly under his skin.

	The thin, sweet note died. Drunnel raised his head slowly, white as chalk in the light of the corridor, streaked with sudden, clammy sweat. His dark eyes, bloodshot and wide now, stared into the slitted ruby eyes of the Sarn in the doorway. The Sam's thin mouth twitched slightly as he moved into the room. The atom flame in the roof leaped up with his moving, and the cabinets of the rooms stood out in clear relief.

	Drunnel climbed slowly to his feet, dark, bloodshot eyes snapping with an inexpressible hatred that tugged at him like a living thing. One shaky, trembling step he made toward that doorway, insane anger flooding him. Then, slowly, his mind regained control as the agony washed from him, and he stood, trembling half from weakness, half from a mad desire to crush the thin-lipped mouth of Sthek Tharg. "Drunnel"—he turned, to see Grasun, an unsteady hand stretched toward his leader, staring up into his face with tortured, worried eyes—"don't—stay here."

	Drunnel snapped the hand from his sleeve. "I'll stay," he said softly. He glanced at the others: Farnos, leaning dazed against the wall, blood trickling from his nostrils; Tomus working himself to his feet with the aid of the rough wall; Blyson swaying unsteadily on his feet. The others were still helpless on the floor. "He might have told us what was coming."

	"He wanted to warn us—against entering the rooms—and didn't, perhaps, realize how strongly it affected us," Farnos said.

	Drunnel looked at him silently. Farnos dropped his eyes uneasily and struggled to his feet, one hand steadying him. The effects were passing swiftly. Inside the room rumbling wheels echoed softly; the Sarn was pulling a little four-wheeled truck loaded with a hundred or more small gray cases, perhaps four by twelve .by three inches, and a dozen or so round cases four inches thick and a foot in diameter.

-

	STHEK THARG stopped, just inside the door, and eyed them. "Perhaps," he said ironically, "you would be more comfortable farther from that doorway as I pass through." He started forward. The humans scrambled away from him. They were fifty feet away when the thin, sweet note of a dying star of light thrilled through them, jerking, straining, quivering. Drunnel stood his ground, leaning slightly against the wall. The Sarn moved toward them, the low rumble of the rubber-shod wheels changing its note as the cart rolled into the corridor.

	"Come here and take the crowns. They will protect you against the crystals—if you are not too close." Drunnel came toward him, took one of the round boxes, and from it the curious crown. It was a band of metal that circled his head, padded with rubber on the inner side, eight erect, outward-slanting metal rods, ending in dull-golden globes, perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter. Nested in the center, above the curve of his skull, a tiny mechanism was inclosed in golden metal.

	"It will throw a sheath of energy about you which is proof against any material thing, and deadly to any being wielding a metal object against you. It holds in near stasis the molecules of the air, so that the sound of the crystals will not reach you—if you remain at a little distance. And it is defense against the glow-beam."

	Drunnel mounted the thing on his head, slipping his headband of silver and enamel into his cloak pocket. He touched a tiny stud at his brow, and a slight shock of energy lanced him momentarily. The Sam's voice was softened, muffled by its action, and he snapped it off.

	"The glow-beam"—Sthek Tharg opened one of the flat boxes to disclose an object fashioned of black plastic, dully lustrous metal, and one single crystal—"carries a charge sufficient to paralyze, for a day, five hundred men, paralyze for a moment nearly one thousand, or paralyze forever two hundred. This slide controls the action—this stud the discharge."

	He raised it in flexible, many-boned fingers, his almost tentaclelike arm looping up with it. It pointed down the corridor, and as he touched the stud briefly, a clear, sweet note seemed to dart down the faintly luminous beam that shot forth, to vanish in unseen reaches of the corridor. "Its range is about a third of a mile."

	Drunnel took another from its flat case, examined it, and put it quietly in his cloak. The others were fitting the curious crowns to their heads, and, a moment later, unloading the little truck.

	Sthek Tharg returned to the dim room. Again the dying star shot toward him, and the atom flame leaped up. Drunnel touched the stud at his brow, and heard very dimly, as though far off, the sweet, torturing note of the crystal. It made his teeth hurt, as though an unseen drill were working in their depths. He took five cautious steps toward the doorway, till sweat started from his face and his limbs began to tremble. He snapped off the stud and walked toward his men. They, too, were snapping off the energies—

	"Grasun, turn yours on." Drunnel watched; there was an instant of wavering energy, as though a sheath of heat waves had risen suddenly about the man—then nothing—nothing save the slightest of distortions that only his expectant eye could detect; that, and the slightly duller appearance of the eight metal globes on the crown's eight points. "Can you understand me readily?" Drunnel spoke in an ordinary tone.

	"Perfectly," Grasun replied, nodding in confirmation.

	"Good. Turn it off. We will have to move these things to the elevator, then again to the gate of the Sarn City. And—there is something I want to find out—"

	The Sarn returned with the small truck. Drunnel stood alone, watching his men carrying the last of the boxed weapons to the elevator. He started in surprise at the first note of the dying crystal, snapped the little stud as he turned to watch Sthek Tharg. The Sarn stepped through expressionlessly, the little truck behind him. Drunnel walked toward him as the notes died in the air, his hands reaching toward the piled boxes—

	"Stop!" snapped the Sarn. He fell back a hasty step, slitted ruby eyes blazing angrily. "You have a sheath of energy around you, fool. Turn off that crown."

	Drunnel looked at him, mumbled a vague apology as he turned the stud. Rapidly, he lifted the boxes from the truck; he had learned what he sought to know. The Sarn were not immune to the sheath of the crown.

-

IV.

	Deya opened the door at his knock, and Grayth stepped in with a backward glance at the dimly seen groups in the tree-shaded street. The last colors of sunset were fading from the sky, and the darkness slowly saturated the clear, cooling air. The spring nights were not yet hot as they would be in another two weeks. A near-full moon hung halfway up the eastern sky, its light not yet appreciably affecting the dimness of the scene.

	Deya looked over his shoulder, and motioned him in. "They look more restless than ever, Grayth. Thera came this afternoon—she is fixing supper now—and told me that Bartel believed the explosion would come soon."

	Grayth nodded slowly and shut the door behind his back. He looked unhappily into the clear, calm blue eyes raised to his, eyes like bits of cobalt glass in a delicately molded, determined face. Six feet two Grayth stood, but Deya was a resurgence of a four-thousand-year-forgotten blood, a clear, Norse strain. Her eyes were not three inches below his, her red-gold hair, her clean-lined body the living remembrance of a race human minds had forgotten.

	Grayth sighed, took her in his arms. "The explosion will come tonight, dear girl. In three weeks—or never—we will be able to end this indeterminacy."

	Deya's hands rested lightly on his shoulders as she leaned backward slightly to see him more clearly. His lean, strong face was set and serious, the etched-iron eyes worried. "The Mother has helped Drunnel as you feared?"

	Grayth nodded. His finger touched the telepath disk at his brow. "Have you tried to follow any of his men's thoughts today?"

	Deya smiled. "No, I tried to follow yours. I could not for some reason, only occasional snatches of ideas. You were very angry about four o'clock this afternoon."

	Grayth nodded. "We had a conference. Drunnel has gotten weapons, and though I cannot follow his mind, as you know, I did follow that of Rendan. But Rendan was sent to gather men to carry away the weapons the Mother gave, and did not follow everything that happened. By Aesir, I wish I could follow Drunnel. That he should be one of those rare, complete nontelepaths!"

	"What are the weapons?" Deya asked.

	Grayth shrugged. "Rendan did not know—nor, I believe, did Drunnel. But you know what I have said; the Mother will not give him either a hopelessly powerful, or hopelessly numerous stock of weapons. I suspect a weak weapon of attack, and a powerful weapon of defense for a few."

	"Let's go out to the kitchen." Deya moved in his arms, and started away. "Thera hopes Bartel will be able to come." For a moment the cobalt-blue eyes clouded in inner concentration, as did Grayth's. They nodded together as Bartel's thoughts reached them, weak and unclear with distance. He was coming.

	For a moment more Grayth caught the strong, lithe body in his arms, then they moved on to the kitchen. Thera had placed a table on the stone-flagged terrace behind the kitchen, under the trellis-work of dark-leaved climbing roses. A few first buds were opening in the cool night air. The last washing colors of sunset had faded from the sky and the shadows now were those cast by the moon, and by the silently flaring atom-flame projector.

	The table was set and the food being brought when Bartel knocked. Thera went to admit him, and as she passed Grayth he suggested softly that she bolt the door when Bartel had entered.

-

	A MOMENT LATER the two returned. "They are standing around in groups," Bartel said, seating himself wearily. "I got a number of hate thoughts, and a number of friendly thoughts as I passed them. The groups seem about equally distributed as to sympathy, and I think that is one reason why I was not bothered at all on my way here. Perhaps we had best eat quickly. We may be—called out later."

	Three-quarters of an hour later, Grayth and Bartel sat in the moon dusk, puffing slowly at their pipes. Deya and Thera moved quietly, stacking and washing utensils. Grayth pulled a small, flat jar from his cloak and put it on the table, looking questioningly toward Bartel. "Perhaps we might apply a little now."

	Bartel grunted. "Moon cream. Does it work as well as Ware thought it might?"

	Grayth smiled. "Better. I see you are wearing your official crimson and blue. Mine are about the same. With this—" Grayth rubbed the paste over his hands and arms to the elbows, then over his face and neck. It vanished on his skin, colorless and invisible, in the light of the atomic flame. He rose and walked the length of the terrace, down into the garden, where only the pale moonlight reached him. As he stepped into the shadow of a gnarled, spreading apple tree—he vanished, a black shadow in blackness. As he stepped out into the moonlight again, crimson cloak, dark-blue jacket and trousers, face and hands alike were jet black. Slowly, he rejoined Bartel.

	"It works," agreed Bartel, smearing the colorless stuff into his skin. "I hope it's harmless."

	"It is. A harmless substance that will not reflect polarized light. You know the moonlight will not show colors—though the eye and the brain are tricked by it. Tonight it will serve both to make us invisible in shadow, and as a badge; Drunnel does not have it. All our men do."

	"Carron was gathering the men and distributing these things when I left him." Bartel looked out over the moon-lighted town. "He was still busy. Listen!"

	A voice cried out somewhere in the direction of the square, the center of the human town—a dim, unrecognizable voice, crying out a blurred word time and again. Other voices joined. It grew and washed across the city, a many-times-repeated chant that grew with its moving, washing toward them in unrecognizable syllables, till a half-dozen voices two hundred feet away took it up with a gleeful howl: "Drunnel—Drunnel!" Feet pounded with a muffled beat across lawns, hardening momentarily as they traversed stone-flagged walks, dying in the distance.

	"He was busy, but the human town is annular, with the huge area of the Sarn City in the middle. Many men from the far sections had not been able to reach him yet. We were not able to use the vision instruments to spread our messages—Drunnel, since he has the Mother's help, did," Bartel finished hurriedly.

	"He has another swift method of communication," Grayth pointed out. "It has rolled around the city in less than a minute and a half. They will be pouring into the square."

	Somewhere outside a man shouted, screamed a curse as a muffled thonk cut it off abruptly. A bedlam was loosed, a score of cursing voices, a great bull-roaring voice giving orders, scurrying feet and the clang of metal on metal—and on flesh. It stopped with a long-drawn, thin scream that died away in gurgling bubbles of sound. The door of the cottage trembled to heavy blows.

-

	GRAYTH was halfway through the house before the second blow sounded, moving in slow-seeming strides that propelled him as though half-floating through kitchen and hallway. In his hand a bluely lustrous bit of metal gleamed. "Who's there?" he demanded.

	"Carron, you fool. Let me in. There's more coming down the street, and there's no need for arguing with them."

	Carron burst in, an immense figure in torn greenish cloak of the legion of peace, a dozen men at his heels. In his immense hand a three-inch-thick table leg, nicked deeply in three places, and smeared with blood, seemed a thin wand. The door bellowed like a sail in the wind, as his huge hand cuffed it shut. "Bars," he grunted. Two of his men slammed over the heavy metal, locking bolts.

	"They've started, Grayth, and my men are gathering. They put their messages out faster, since they could use the vision—and we couldn't. Damn the Sarn! But we'll be evenly matched in the square, if the Mother didn't give Drunnel half her armory."

	"She didn't," Grayth answered positively. "I told you she wants us matched—with Drunnel having a bit of an edge."

	"Why couldn't we use the vision?" asked Thera, looking into the crowded room.

	"Perhaps you had best lower those shutters," said Deya softly, "or turn out the lights. You are conspicuous and crowded in that window."

	Carron smiled broadly at her, ducking his head to pass under the door beam six and a half feet from the floor. "I should have thought of that." He reached for the control rope, and the thin metal vanes of the shutter slipped almost noiselessly into place over the windows.

	"The vision central offices are in Sarn City," Deya explained to Thera. 'The Sarn watch them; they offer no chance to send through messages we would want and the Sarn did not. Coded messages might work, if every man knew the code, but if every man knew, the Sarn would also know soon enough."

	"The rest of the speakers are coming here later," Grayth said to Carron. "We must get them here safely—"

	"I sent three strong detachments to gather them in," Carron grunted. "And I came here myself. I'm going to get the whole lot of you in here and throw one good guard ring about the place. That'll save me men and allow a better guard. I've got men in every house about here; not a man of Drunnel's could weave his way through without alarm being sent in. The moonlight is tricky, a crawling man seems a bit of a shrub, but these men are in their own houses. By Aesir, they know what shrubs they have—and Drunnel's men have no face-blackening moon cream."

	"They have lamp black," said Deya. "They may use that."

	"If they think of it. It makes them conspicuous then when they are in the light." Carron nodded. "What plans have you made, Grayth?"

	"No detailed plans, for we are not ready. Had we had another month—even a week, perhaps—we might have learned then to summon Aesir to our aid, and we had plans for that. But now—we must do as we can. Look; first the leaders, the speakers, must be concentrated and guarded here. Then, to stop this battle, we must somehow destroy three men: Drunnel, Rendan and Grasun. Beyond that succession the power of the leadership is not determined among them, and they'd fight among themselves. If that could be done this night, the month we need would be gained. The Mother would see that one of the others took up the fight, but not immediately; time would elapse. Drunnel, Rendan and Grasun."

	"Right." Carron nodded. "But they'll be at the square, in the center of their men. They'll be hard men to catch, and quick-footed men."

	Grayth touched his headband fleetingly, his eyes intent on Carron. "We may be able to outguess them." Carron's eyes lighted with understanding.

	"Aye—we might. We can try."

	"The speakers with their escorts are almost here," Deya said, her eyes clearing from an effort of concentration. "Perhaps the door—"

-

	A MAN sprang to draw the bolts as a knock sounded outside. A moment later ten men in the crimson cloaks of the speakers entered, crowding about in the tiny room. Fifty men in the dark green of the legion of peace, and a score in civilian motley waited outside. Carron stepped to the door. "A line of you—about the cottage and move outward till you surround the block. Make sure there's no man of Drunnel's within your line."

	The men faded into nothingness under the shadowed trees, vanishing in silence and darkness under the deceptive moonlight, seeming so bright, yet actually colorless and dim. Carron closed and barred the door behind him.

	"We'll take those men and join at the square. I haven't heard a sound since the call of Drunnel's men," Grayth said. "I'll go with you, Carron, and we'll start at once. Somehow we must get Drunnel, Rendan and Grasun."

	"They won't agree with us," said Bartel sourly. "They no doubt have similar plans on you. It seems to me that you would be much better off staying here and letting us do that, for just as surely as Drunnel's forces collapse with his disappearance, ours collapse if you are taken. The battle would be over, right enough—with Drunnel in power."

	Grayth shook his head. "The speakers are here; they will be goal for many of Drunnel's men, but Drunnel will not want them," he said softly. "Drunnel wants me, and you. Therefore, we will go where he cannot find us. If we stay, he can lay plans to attack us. If we are somewhere in the city, our group can lay plans of defense, knowing where we are, while Drunnel, not knowing, cannot plan attack. And—we have work."

	Bartel stepped through the door after him. As the three faded into the shadows, the dry grating of the bolts rattled the door behind them. In a moment their eyes became accustomed to the moonlight, the dimness seemed to roll back, and the silvery light grew stronger. Presently it seemed that it was illumination as effective, as strong as daylight. Then, abruptly, a shadowy being emerged from the darkness under a tree, appearing as though from thin air. "There's no one between the cottage here and the ring of watchers," he murmured.

	Carron nodded. "Gather the men near Phalun's cottage. We'll make for the square." Carron hefted the table leg in his hand, and slipped into the shadow with the others. Grayth halted him, took the heavy weapon from him.

	"Whatever the Mother has given them, it will more than likely be electric in nature," he said after a moment. "Discard metal and take wooden weapons. Warn your men against metal things."

	At the corner of a tree-shadowed cottage they met the troop of men, and Carron passed the warning along. The soft clink and thud of metal followed slowly, reluctantly. The force dispersed quietly, groups of two and three wandering off to return moments later, silent, drifting shadows in the moonlight, carrying faintly lustrous table legs and chair legs of nonconducting, plastic material, one with a five-foot, pointed plastic rod ripped from an atom flame projector. And at the hip of each swung the blued-metal air guns.

-

	SILENT, drifting ghosts, they passed down the streets, scattered under clumps of moon shadow, following the lawns and dust-muffled roads. Slow accretions joined the party as the stragglers from outlying districts appeared. Three times there were brief scufflings and cries that were silenced under dull, muffled blows. White faces in the moonlight looked up sightlessly as they passed on—white faces, the badge of Drunnel's men.

	There were lights in the square ahead, far down the street. Early arrivals stood about in tense idleness, awaiting the coming of reinforcements for both sides. Grayth turned down a side street, crossing at right angles toward the sound of a compact body of men advancing on a parallel street. A moment later they saw them, dark figures with white faces marching toward the square, a group of half a dozen in the lead, wearing curious gemmed crowns and carrying foot-long instruments in their hands.

	The drifting shadows in the deeper shadow of trees dispersed, vanished save for little wraiths of blackness moving behind cottages, in absolute silence. The troop of Drunnel's men moved on alertly, eyes darting about, clubs and knives ready. A dense mass of three great trees darkened the road ahead, and they marched into it.

	A dozen were down before they fully realized the assault. Carron's great voice boomed out in exaltation as he recognized the leader. "Grasun, by Aesir, Grasun!" A roar went up from the compact group of Grasun's companions.

	And through it came the sweet, thrilling, killing note of the glow-beam Grasun carried in his hand. Its faint light shot out straight for the black shadow of a charging man bearing the mace of a bulky table leg in his upraised hands. The beam touched him, sang through him, and roared in sweet, chilling vibrations as though his twisting, tortured body were a sounding board. The men near him writhed and fell, twisting, helpless, their weapons dropping from numbed, paralyzed hands. Drunnel's men charged forward with a cry of triumph as the beam of the glow-tube swerved. Again the thin, shrill note stabbed out toward a darkened figure. For a moment he glowed, writhing, falling, his joints cracking suddenly as maddened muscles distorted him impossibly, his dying body a sounding resonator that paralyzed those near him.

	Another glow-beam came into action as Carron's great figure lunged forward, the table leg upraised in huge arms. Leaping Drunnelians tumbled from the mighty, charging body; for a fraction of a second he loomed over Grasun.

	Grasun stared up, his white face lifted to the moonlight, a smile of pure joy in it as he turned his weapon slowly toward the colossus towering six inches above him, three hundred pounds of bone and sinew. The table leg crashed down toward what Grasun knew was an impenetrable, invisible, shielding force. He pressed the stud of his gun as the mace contacted his shield, with all the force and momentum Carron's shoulders could give it.

	Grasun fell to the ground, while the pale beam of his ray shrieked its way through the treetops. Carron dropped his splintered club from numbed fingers. The sheer momentum of the blow, unable to crack the shield though it may have been, served to stun the man inside by the vicious jerking it imparted to him. Carron saw the strange, glowing rod wavering toward him again, felt the stunning impact of another attacker's club on his shoulder, and spun with a roar of rage. His immense hands closed on the attacker, the giant arms lifted him like a squalling child above Carron's shoulders, to crash him on the force shield of the fallen man. A high, thin wail of terror escaped him as the arcing energies of the field crashed through him. He fell, a smoldering, quivering thing, at the feet of Grasun.

	"Rocks!" roared Carron, leaping from the scene of battle. "Rocks for those with the crowns! Bombard 'em!"

-

	OTHERS of Grayth's men had not leaped so hastily to close contact. The soft coughing air guns were bringing down many of the Drunnelians, groaning as heavy slugs broke bones, silent when they struck an instantly vital spot. The bullets fell away from those who wore the crowns, who stood unscathed, their whining weapons of the Sarn-Mother stabbing at vague shadows retreated now into the greater shadows of the trees.

	A cobble of granite the size of a man's head hurtled out of the darkness toward Grasun as he staggered uncertainly to his feet—a cobble hurled by an unseen giant. The shield deflected it, stopped it, but the meshed forces transmitted shattering momentum to the man who wore the crown. Grasun huddled on his knees, shaking his head, his weapon fallen to the ground beside him.

	"Rocks!" Carron roared. "Rocks—big rocks, you blasted, withering idiots! Not pebbles, you howling fools, rocks! They have a shield—a shield of force. But it shakes 'em when the rocks hit 'em—"

	"Throw at Grasun." Grayth's voice snapped out of the night, low and tensely clear. "A dozen of you—heavy stuff."

	A rain of granite cobbles, unearthed from a forgotten pile, stormed out of the night. Half a dozen struck the fallen man's shield with a blasting force. From barely within the protective shadow of the tree, Carron's huge arms heaved a boulder of eighty pounds weight. The deadly thing crashed down on the straining shield with a snapping of energies, held for a moment as though bouncing on unseen rubber, and fell to one side. Grasun rolled end over end under the impact, struggling dazedly to rise. His voice called out in muffled syllables to the milling men around him, but they dared not help him; the shield was death to touch.

	"Carron—Carron—think!" Grayth's clear, sharp voice penetrated the roar of fighting men. Carron stopped bewildered for a moment, then strong in the telepath came his orders. Immediately his great hands swept a dozen others of his men into formation about him, each with a boulder in his hands. They burst from the shadows, and heavy rocks flew. The crowned men fell, staggered aside at the heavy burst of ammunition. The giant charged in at the head of his men, two great table legs flailing in his hands. The disorganized mob of Drunnelians parted as he charged toward the groggy Grasun. But before he came too near the invisible death of the shield, he bent and picked up the glow-beam projector Grasun had dropped. Carron fled again to the protective trees.

	Boulders were effective on crowned and unshielded alike. The steady rain of deadly ammunition was disrupting the aim of the glow-beam wielders. The apologetic little cough of the air guns in the hands of practiced men were making the Drunnelians fall like blighted grain.

	The last of Drunnel's unshielded men were down, or gone. Half a dozen wearers of the crowns stood in a tight circle firing their strange death into the shadows. Grayth joined Carron beneath a great tree, and took from him the slim, warm tube of the weapon taken from the fallen Grasun. "A man you can trust," he snapped. "Send it to Ware; we must get others. Don't let those men escape; we must get Grasun."

	"Tarnor—take this. You know the house of Ware. Take it to him. Run." The man was a crawling figure, sprinting across a lawn, then gone from sight. "Now"—Carron turned to Grayth—"we can keep their fire ineffective so long as the rocks hold out, but how can we crush those shields? It is death to touch them, it seems. I saw eight of their own men die when they stumbled into them."

	A man materialized out of shadow beside Carron, a great wooden bucket in his hands, his invisible face split by a toothy grin. Carron took the thing in huge hands, and stepped forward; his huge arms creaked to the strain as it leaped into the air, to fall in a silver rain over the shielded men, running, trickling, wetting the ground at their feet. From another side another bucket leaped into the air, to drop over them, some few drops resting for a moment on the invisible sheath in darting, arcing energies. Another and another—

	Grasun howled—a shrill scream of terror and agony. Water had short-circuited the thing on his head; it was smoking; as he tore it from him it grew red-hot—white; it exploded with a roar of sound a burst of incandescent energy that limned attackers and attacked alike in glaring light. Grasun fell to the ground twitching, rolling— and suddenly stilled as he touched the hem of another's shield. A roar of triumph went up from every tree, every cottage corner.

-

V.

	The pistoled legion of peace had been driven into the buildings surrounding the square. In the center of the square, surrounded by two-score figures, Drunnel and Rendan directed the battle.

	Grayth waited in the darkness just beyond, while Carron closed up his communications. Darting runners brought messages. Eyes dulled with an inner concentration, Grayth sat motionless, gathering information by telepath from a hundred hidden points, from men in the cottage they had left, from Deya, from Ware in his underground workshop. The secret of the glow-beam—

	"The shield muffled voices," Grayth said to Carron. "They also stop the glow-beam then, for Ware says it projects a beam that carries an ultrasonic vibration that is death to man—and probably harmless to Sam."

	Carron grunted. "The men in the buildings had already found the danger of metal, but they hadn't learned the trick of the rocks. I—"

	Somewhere in a building, lightless and darkened, a sudden, terrific glare appeared. The windows were solid squares of thrusting radiance, spotlight beams that shot their brilliant knives through weak moonlight to limn for an instant the crouching figures in the center of the square. Drunnel stood up, badly outlined against a fierce beam of light, his face surprised, startled.

	"Water." Grayth smiled. "I got the message through to Paultur. One of Drunnel's shielded men was trying to drive them out of the building. I wonder—" His eyes closed for a moment. "No, the weapon was destroyed, too."

	Another virulent flash burned through the windows of a nearby house; in the first a duller, redder light was growing. Men were darting out of the place, smoke trailing behind them. The exploding crown had set fire to the age-dried woodwork.

	Men were filtering out of the shadows, dim clots of a more solid black in the blackness under the tree. A fitful redness was growing in the moon-drenched square as the ancient woodwork of the ignited house yielded to the growing flame. The dimly seen messengers came near to Carron, speaking in low voices, Carron's deep bass growling in reply, till they vanished again on some mission of communication.

	"Grayth," the giant's voice rumbled in its softest tones, "the men in the buildings can't get near enough to Drunnel's group to throw the heavy rocks. The glow-beams make it impossible, and until they get near they can't disturb the aim. Is there any way we can shield our men against the beams?"

	Grayth was silent, but in his telepath Carron could feel the tenuous thread of mind energies reaching out to Ware, to others of their group. And dimly, he could feel Ware's answering thought. Screening—each man wrapped in sheet metal carefully grounded, worn over a thick padding of cotton, or quilting.

	Carron muttered disgustedly. Grayth looked up at him, nodding. "Impossible, I know."

	Shielded men were leaking away from the group in the center of the square, darting down narrow side streets before the rocks hurled from nearby buildings could knock them from their feet. Other shielded men were coming toward the square from every direction, men from more distant sections of the annular city. They were waiting in the back streets outside the square, moving in restless circles.

-

	CARRON touched Grayth's sleeve. "We can't do it in this try, Grayth," he growled. 'The shielded ones with their weapons are surrounding the square. We'll be caught helplessly if we don't retreat. I've sent word to those others that—"

	"If we don't reach Drunnel tonight, we'll never be able to," Grayth groaned. "The Sarn-Mother will give him better weapons, and waverers who had joined us will transfer to him when they see us in retreat"

	"We must retreat at once," insisted Carron unhappily. "If we only had some means of swift communication—if we had only been * able to map out a plan, and put it across to all our scattered people. We didn't have time; we didn't know what weapons Drunnel would have until too late. I know now what we should have done. Perhaps it is not too late, if we can once join our forces. Because all meetings have always been held in the square, all our men are rushing toward it. I'll call the men out of those buildings at—"

	A wild rush of feet sounded down the great, radial artery. A hundred men with the darkened faces of Grayth's supporters swept down the street, half a dozen glow-tubes in then: hands, and many empty water pails among them. The hidden men in the buildings of the square cheered them on, and a fusillade of air-gun pellets rattled on the stone flags. The mass of men broke up, scattering before they came in range of the pale beams of death. Long before Car-ron's messenger reached them their compact formation was gone; they were filtering through back streets into every building of the square.

	But Carron's runner brought back a new interpretation of this reinforcement; they were not running to the charge, but falling back before more than fifty armed, shielded Drunnelians. Another band of Grayth's men rushed in from another artery, vanishing like smoke in shadows and shadowed buildings. The torch lighted by an exploding crown was growing; the red flare of a burning building was rapidly making the moonlight unimportant, the moon cream useless. The fire was spreading.

	Two score of Drunnel's fighters appeared down the street that had recently brought Carron's green-cloaked legionnaires. Carron settled back under the tree in helpless rage. "We won't retreat, Grayth. We can't now, for Drunnel has driven half our men into this square, between his central, unassailable group and the ring of other men, and the buildings sheltering them are burning. I haven't seen a score of Drunnel's unshielded fighters; they're probably in the outskirts, keeping the rest of our men from relieving those inside the ring."

	Grayth looked at the spreading flames consuming the buildings. Stone for the most part, they were roofed with metal or slate, but the floors, walls and supporting beams were of wood. These were burning furiously. A burning house collapsed as he watched, the fierce heat of the internal furnace crumbling age-hardened mortar, loosening the aged stone.

	Drunnel stood in the light of the fire, watching his circling fighters on the outskirts. His arms moved, giving orders, pointing out directions of movement. A messenger ran toward a broad artery, down which a score of weaponed men were moving. A rain of half a hundred great stones crushed him to the ground and a stream of water drowned his screen into exploding fire as he passed too near a house. Another messenger started after him, dodging, running in irregular movements. A well-thrown rock knocked him from his feet, and a steady rain of them held him helpless till water drowned his screen in turn. A roar of angry triumph went up.

	Drunnel's arm stayed another man who started toward a broader road. Drunnel shook his head, shrugged his shoulders as the man motioned violently, attempted to pull away.

	"They can't enter the buildings," Carron growled. "The water and rocks stop that. But they don't have to. The fire is already there." He nodded toward a group of men working on a rooftop with a garden hose, their dark-green cloaks flapping in the faint wind. A glow-beam reached up from somewhere beyond the square, and a man crumpled in death. Three near him stiffened and jerked, one to slide from his position into the growing furnace.

-

	A MESSENGER panted up from the shadows, the glow of the flames giving color to his cloak, washing the blackness of the moonlight from his face. In his hand he held three of the crowns. His face split in a grin. 'They don't have—them—turned—on—all the time."

	Grayth stepped forward eagerly. "Three of them. How did you get them intact?"

	"A dozen of us—we saw them coming down the road, and hid in the shadows. They did not have their shields turned on, and three fell in the first volley of the air guns. The others we washed out with water, but these we saved."

	"Well," Carron pointed out bitterly, "that improves the odds. We now have three effective men who can stand up against their near thousand—maybe. Your technician friend may be able to duplicate them, though—in a month."

	"Tarnsun," Grayth called softly to the figure half visible in the light of the flames, "take this to Ware. You can penetrate the lines Drunnel is drawing about us by wearing this, turned on full. If— Never mind, just go back and wait." Grayth had caught the weary denial Ware had sent. Grayth's thought had reached Ware at once, reached a tired, immensely busy technician, struggling with things of more immediate consequence.

	Grayth turned the things in his hand, gave one to Carron. The giant spoke suddenly, pointing toward the square. One of the shielded men had stepped from the group, carrying a blazing ball ' of cotton on the end of a bit of wire. It sailed out from his arm to land on the roof of the building near the artery down which their messengers had attempted to go. It blazed feebly for a moment and went out. But a dozen more followed it, glazing, oil-soaked cotton wrapped around a stone. Light things that could be hurled a distance the heavy rocks Carron's men had used could not cover. Three crashed through windows. The feeble blazes grew stronger. Water hissed viciously; for a moment the flame wavered, then grew swiftly brilliant.

	Dark figures dropped from windows to dart toward nearby buildings. Four stopped halfway, never to reach their goal, as glow-beams found them. The red flower of the flames spread slowly at first; then windows burst in the heat and they grew swiftly. The house on the opposite corner was burning now.

	A messenger walked down the alley between the flames to a group of shielded men beyond. They moved away in planned unison when he reached them, the band splitting in two, marching in opposite directions about the square.

	Carron stiffened suddenly; his eyes darted sideward toward Grayth's shadowed figure. Grayth, too, was stiffened, tense. A soft, unreal voice whispered in their minds, a voice and more than a voice, for with it whispered sights and sounds and odors: soft odors of a garden under moonlight, the sounds of men crashing through ruined flower beds, and the thrilling, keening wail of the glow-beams. A garden in black and white, scattered with darting figures hurling water pails and rocks at an advancing troop of thirty shielded figures. Deya was watching through a window, with a score of the divisional speakers about her. The troop of Carron's legionnaires were falling back before the concerted assault of a mass of shielded, armed Drunnelians.

	"They can't stop them," Grayth muttered.

	Carron's voice rumbled unintelligibly. "We didn't."

	"Another month—even a week, perhaps—and we might have learned to summon Aesir to aid us. Do you think the Mother knew —that she did this just early enough to prevent us—"

	"What can we do now?" Carron demanded. "We might try a mass attack—all of the men swarming at once down on Drunnel and Rendan there——"

	"Rendan isn't there." Grayth sighed. "It was he who went to the outer ring to order them. A mass attack would only lead to a thousand deaths for everyone we have had tonight. There are nearly five thousand of our friends in those buildings. Somehow they must be released."

-

	SLOWLY, Grayth got to his feet. Deya's thought pictures came so clear to his mind that it seemed almost that he must avoid the old oak which stood by the flagged terrace where he had eaten dinner, and the charging Drunnelians behind their shields. The last of Carron's green-cloaked legionnaires was down. They would not use their glow-beams on the speakers; Grayth knew with a terrible certainty that they would not use them on Deya and Thera.

	Grayth reached to his forehead and touched the little stud of the crown he had donned. Carron watched him in surprise, started after him as he walked out of the shadow of the tree into the full light of the flames. "Stay there, Carron," Grayth called. Then he was striding across the last of the lawn onto the flagged pavement of the square. He stood still for a moment, as a half-dozen glowing beams lanced toward him, to die soundlessly against the invisible sheath of his crown. The beams stopped. Drunnel stepped toward him, till he stood in the forefront of his little force.

	"What terms, Drunnel?" Grayth called. The sheath seemed to drink in his voice, but somehow Drunnel had heard.

	Drunnel laughed softly. "And may I ask, why terms? Why should I want terms from you?"

	"Because you have no real desire to destroy these men in the buildings." Grayth nodded to the silent watchers in the windows facing the square. "Because you only want to make sure that I do not escape—and because you cannot hold me. We have captured a score or so of these crowns the Mother gave you. With them I, a score or so of my men, Deya, Thera—and a few others—can leave you. We will have time and opportunity then to do something more, perhaps. But certainly I can find my way to safety on this world you cannot ever hope to search, though the Sarn-Mother herself should aid you."

	Grayth looked at Drunnel steadily, wondering if Drunnel had, of course, any way of knowing how many crowns had been captured intact. One, at least, he knew. And he had no way of knowing that Deya and Thera were even then arguing with a group of shielded men led by Barthun.

	"What do you want?" Drunnel spoke after a moment's silence, broken only by the crackling lap of the flames, the restless creak of ancient houses crowded now with men.

	"The men that fought for me go free, every man or woman or child you have surrounded, captured or blockaded. I will surrender to you."

	"I do not like your terms." Drunnel laughed. "You cannot escape from this point now; the outer ring of my men would stop you."

	Grayth shook his head. "You know better than that. What offer will you make?"

	"I will release these men and women of no importance; but I will demand your surrender, and that of Bartel, Carron, and the spokesmen of the districts." Drunnel stood out before his men, his dark eyes flashing, a smile of sweeping satisfaction on his face. "And that is concession enough for what I hold in my hand this night. What fight have you, Grayth? Your men are bottled between my inner center here, and my outer ring. And the fire spreads in between.

	"A clever trick your water was, and clever enough that hurling of rocks, but it gains you nothing. I have more sense of realities than you, Grayth. I don't lay humanity open to the anger of the Sarn-Mother, and she is just. She appreciates and aids those who aid her.

	"Your futile air guns have merely tempted your men into a closing trap. You, who have never seen a book on military strategy, never practiced warfare, hoping to defeat one tutored by the generals of the Sarn! You may be wise enough in working the minds of cattle such as these in my burning pens—but for practical matters your knowledge is nothing.

	"Well, what do you say, Grayth? I'll release these men, these stupid followers of a stupid leader—but the leaders must face the Mother."

-

	Grayth shook his head. "We are not caught. We are quicksilver under your fingers, escaping as you try to hold us. Bartel you want for personal reasons, personal hatred, as you want me. I will surrender to you if you will swear by the name of the Mother, by Kathal Sargthan herself, that my people, including all others save only myself and Bartel, shall be free and undisturbed. Bartel, I except with his consent—and catch him if you may! You claim your ring tight—"

	Drunnel stared at the tall figure of his enemy. Quicksilver under his fingers, to slip through the teeth of his closing trap. Bartel—

	"Let Bartel join you, then," he called carelessly. "The sheep will fall apart in squabbles when the goats are gone."

	"You swear by the name of the Mother, by Kathal Sargthan, that those who have fought for me shall be free and unmolested, on equal grounds with those who have fought with you and with those who have not fought?"

	"By Kathal Sargthan, I swear that." Drunnel nodded.

	"By Kathal Sargthan you swear that we shall have trial before the Mother, as the law of the Sarn demands?"

	Drunnel laughed, eyes flashing in the light of the flames. "Aye—if you want that so badly, Grayth, you and Bartel shall surrender to me, and together you shall appear before the Mother. And by the Mother's name, I'll have you there at the morning audience, too!"

	Bartel's figure merged from the dark entranceway of a building, striding forward to join Grayth. Grayth snapped off the tiny stud of his crown as Drunnel came forward, took it from his head and restored the silver-and-enamel disk of the Mother's slaves. Drunnel took it from his hands, eyes bright, white teeth flashing in an almost friendly smile of triumph. The game was played out; Grayth and Bartel were no longer obstacles in his path to power.

-

VI.

	The Sarn stood in solidly massed ranks leading up to the high, golden throne of the Sarn-Mother. The great hall of audience was quiet, a hush so deep the faint rustle of the atom-flame projectors far above in the lofty dome trickled down to them like the rustle of autumn's falling leaves. Grayth and Bartel stood side by side before the Mother, their official crimson cloaks stripped from them, draped instead over the tall forms of Drunnel and Rendan standing close behind. A long, slanting ray of morning sunlight stabbed through a window to wash on the crimson cloth, rebounding in reddening glare.

	For long minutes the motionless, slitted eyes of the Mother looked into Grayth's calm face. Her line-thin mouth seemed scarcely to move as she spoke. "You told us that the law of the Sarn could not be enforced, and that you were unable to enforce it. Therefore, Grayth, it was my desire that you be removed.

	"By the Law of the Sarn, the inefficient administrator is worthy of removal, and the rebellious administrator is worthy of death.

	"By the common law of the humans, the inefficient are removed, and the treasonous are worthy of death.

	"By the Law of the Sarn and the law of man, you have earned no appeal to me. Why then do you protest your ancient privilege of appeal to the Mother of laws and justice?"

	"By the Law of Sarn and humans, the inefficient should be removed and the rebellious or treasonous destroyed," Grayth acknowledged. His voice was low and clear, its tones dying slowly in the vast hall. "If these things are proved against me, I am guilty. But no man has accused me of inefficiency, for I am not inefficient in failing to do that which the law forbids me to do. The Law of the Sarn forbids that the spokesman of man be also the commander of the legion, or that he raise a police power for his office. The law of the humans forbids the spokesman of men doing other than offer advice. I have given the Mother advice, as the laws require; the laws of the Sarn cannot be forced onto humanity without destruction. You ordered that I enforce them, yet the Law of Sarn and of man forbids my raising the power I must have to do this. Had I done so, I would have rebelled against the Law of the Sarn and been traitorous to human law. I did not do so; therein I am not traitorous, nor am I inefficient."

	"The word of the Mother is the Law of the Sarn." The Sarn-Mother's masking, translucent lids slid across her eyes for a moment. "There is no law above it. The decisions of the Mother are the law of the Earth; there is no law above them. You have acted inefficiently, or rebelliously. I find your actions rebellious. The law defines the manner of your death.

	"So, also, I find Bartel rebellious. The law defines the manner of your death." The unwinking eyes swung slowly to Bartel and held him for a moment. Then, suddenly, they moved from his face, to look down the long hall of audiences to the great entranceway. The expressionless face remained unchanged, the line-thin slit of her lips did not move. But in the silence the breath whistled softly into her nostrils. Grayth turned slowly to follow the unmoving stare of the Sarn-Mother.

-

	IN THE bright radiance of the atom flames, across lancing beams of early sunlight, a vague, amorphous thing moved, a thing of utter blackness. Shifting suggestions of blocky, heavy legs moved it forward. Slowly, in the sunlight and the radiance of the projectors, it seemed to solidify, condensing upon itself. A gigantic, manlike figure looming twelve feet—a figure not in black, but of blackness, a sheer absence of all vision, a solid shadow of utter night.

	As it moved closer in ponderous, soundless strides, the condensation and solidification went on, more clearly the arms, the great legs became visible. A great, featureless head of jet surmounted the heroic figure, a face of eyeless, mouthless, noseless blackness, swirling, moving unsteadily.

	And behind it on the great floor, where the formless feet touched, white sprang out, white flowers of frost. Slowly, the figure moved forward, an aura of cold, a faint, whispering wind from unguessed, icy spaces drawing about it, behind it. A stabbing beam of brilliant sunlight struck down from a high window, lanced into it like a great shaft—and vanished. It did not illuminate nor reflect from that figure of blackness.

	"Aesir—" Grayth gasped the name, falling back a step.

	Thirty feet from the Mother the figure halted, the mighty arms at rest by its sides. The paralyzed Sarn began to stir, a voice broke out in hissing syllables—and quieted. The blackness spoke, spoke not in words, but in thoughts, thoughts that danced and lanced through every mind, human and Sarn alike.

	"There is neither justice nor right in your ruling, daughter of the Sarn. Your race and the race of my people are different. You must change that ruling, in the name of the justice you invoke."

	The Sarn-Mother's hand moved like a flashing serpent's tongue to a tiny stud set in her throne. A pencil of ravening, intolerable fury burst from the carven mouth of the crouching metal beast at her side, a pencil of inconceivable energies that reft the air in its path in screaming, shattered atoms—and died soundless, lightless on the breast of the lord of blackness. From her massed guards a thousand tongues of death shrieked out, ravening rods of annihilation—that died unseen in his blackness. From the plaque above the throne of the Sarn-Mother a roaring column of the atomic-blast, a force designed to wash down mountains, vomited forth, drowning in colossal thunders the pricking bubbles of the lesser rays. No spark of light, no faintest sight of illumination appeared on the motionless giant.

-

	THE shouting voice of the rays died out, stopped, and their echoes wandered lonely in the vast silence of the hall. The blackness spoke again, in a soundless voice that seemed to echo like a vast organ's song, yet lacked all quality of sound.

	"I am not matter, nor of forces such as your beams, your rays can touch, daughter of the Sarn. Your wisdom, the ancient powers of your race are useless. You are still but one; I am all of mankind that has ever been, the fifteen hundred billions who have died since the first man. I am the billions you slaughtered at the Conquest. Ten thousand generations of mankind have willed, dreamed and struggled for success and freedom. I am the crystallization of those wills, those dreams. I am mankind, an incarnate ideal half formed. No force, no ray, no thing of matter can influence my being.

	"All space was saturated with the deathless energies of forgotten strivers, the eternal wills of all man's myriads since the lost beginning of time. In glacial epoch I died under rending tiger's claws, yet lived in the child protected by that sacrifice. I died while the world was young—and I died last night under the rays you gave these men, and with the leaden shot of the air guns in me.

	"I am the wills of mankind, raised into substance by your own acts, daughter of the Sarn. Three billions died at the Conquest, and their wills released to eternal space carried one single thought: to save Earth from your slavery. They were the crystallizing point, on that heart and nucleus the space-ranging wills of unremembered generations have united into me. Four thousand years have passed, and slowly I have grown, till my powers made contact with Earth's space and time last night, when once again wills and minds went from Earth in striving for freedom.

	"I am Aesir, the pantheon of mankind, and mankind itself. All that ever died, under blazing desert sun or in freezing arctic waste, when the first dim stirrings of mind arose and struggled with a tool, and through all time to the will that became of me while I spoke here—the will of one wounded last night and dying this morning.

	"For whatever cause they strove and died, they are of me, daughter of the Sarn. Mankind must have justice, for each of those who died sought in his own way for what his mind believed was truth. Grayth and Bartel have striven that justice might be, and they shall go on with their works.

	"Drunnel and Rendan have sought to sell mankind for their own ends. They, too, shall have justice."

	The vast blackness of his arm reached out and a formless finger of jet touched once on Drunnel's forehead for a fraction of a second, before it passed to Rendan's terror-frozen countenance. Slowly, Drunnel swayed, his legs loosened and he fell to the floor as a soft, white blanket spread over his face. His head clicked like brittle metal on the black basalt of the floor. Like dropped ice it shivered in a dozen fragments. Kindly, swift-spreading, white frost crystals softened and concealed it, and the broken skull of Rendan.

-

	AESIR TURNED. Before him a lane opened as the Sarn stumbled back, making a way that led him straight to the vast gold-flecked wall of the hall of audiences, polished slabs of jade-green stone. Silently, Aesir stepped into it; the solid matter misted and vanished at his touch, opening to the empty corridor beyond. For a moment it remained so, the vast, black figure striding soundless down the deserted corridor beyond the wall—then the wall closed in behind him. But it was black, black with the blackness of Aesir himself.

	A guard turned on it a stabbing beam that crushed the atoms of a rising column into sparkling dust. But the blackness of the wall remained, untouched, unlighted. The beam died, and very slowly, before their eyes, the blackness faded from the wall, evaporating in little curling wisps of jet fog. For a moment, a distorted profile remained, a vast, black shadow of a man thrown on green stone.

	Then only green polished stone glowed in the warm light of the rising sun.

	The Mother's expressionless eyes looked into Grayth's for long, silent seconds. The Sarn shifted restlessly, little whisperings of a rising sound. "You shall both go, Grayth and Bartel, and see that order is restored in the human city. The Sarn-Mother's voice halted for a moment, then continued, "At the hour of sunset of this day all the weapons and crowns I allowed to leave my arsenal will be returned to me.

	"The law of the one and the five shall not apply to humans."

	The Mother's eyes closed. Grayth and Bartel turned and walked silently down the long aisle between ranks of silent Sarn. Behind them followed the six, silent men who had come that morning with Drunnel and Rendan. Outside the great entranceway, the six went hastily away across the green lawn. For a moment Grayth and Bartel stood alone.

	An electrotechnician, a man so commonly seen working about the Sarn City that few noticed him, joined them there. In one hand he carried a large, snap-locked bag, a somewhat large kit, containing, no doubt, the tools, the instruments and delicate bits of apparatus of his trade. In the other hand he carried a pair of stiltlike things of light metal tubing, things that ended with a curious webbing that resembled broad, splayed feet.

	"I had the luck of the gods," said Ware softly. "It was perfectly impossible to complete the thing in the time that—"

	"Yes," said Grayth with a chuckle that was half a sigh, "we had the luck of the gods, too."

The End

Cloak Of Aesir
Sarn-02
Astounding Science Fiction – March 1939
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

I.

	The Sarn-Mother's tiny, almost-human face was lined with the fatigue of forty hours of continued strain. Now, she feared greatly, a new and greater tension was ahead. For the eight City-Mothers, taking their places about the Conference Hall of the Sarn, were not going to be sympathetic to the Mother's story.

	To them, the ancient Sarn-Mother well knew, the humans of Earth were slaves. Slaves bred for work, of little mentality and no importance. Earth was the planet of the Sarn, the planet the Sarn had taken, some four thousand years before, from the race of small-bodied, small-minded weaklings called Man that had originally inhabited it.

	And that idea was going to be extremely hard to change. Particularly, it would be hard for the Sarn-Mother to change that idea, for she was somewhat—not of them. The Sarn-Mother was the Immortal. She was, therefore, disliked.

	These eight, these Mothers of Cities, were the matriarchic governors of Earth under the Sarn. Each had risen to overlordship of a continent, or near-continental area, by competitive brilliance among all their people. They had won their places, merited them, they felt.

	But the Sarn-Mother? The ultimate ruler of all Earth, all Sarn and humans alike? She had not inherited her position exactly—she had simply been there forever. Her winning of it was forgotten in the mists of antiquity. The Sarn were a long-lived people—some lived a thousand years—but the Sarn-Mother was immortal; she had lived in the mythical days of the Forgotten Planet, before the home world of the Sarn had disrupted in cosmic catastrophe, forcing the race to seek new worlds.

	The Sarn-Mother had won this world for them, but that— and all others who had fought mankind in that four-thousand-years-gone time—was forgotten. The Sarn-Mother was simply a hang-over from an era that should have died. So felt the Mothers of Cities, ambitious Sarn who saw a place above them that—because of the Mother's cursed immortality—they could never hope to reach.

	The Old Sarn-Mother knew that, and knew, too, that only her own possession of secret science those millenniums of her life had given her, made her place safe. The City-Mothers feared two things: that well-held secret science, and the jealousy of their sisters.

	The old Sarn was tired with mental struggle, and she knew, as soundly as she knew the City-Mothers hated her, that she was facing another struggle. The humans of Earth were rising in a slow, half-understood revolt. She and these eight City-Mothers knew that.

	But the City-Mothers did not, and would not, admit that those humans were capable of revolt. For all their lives humans have been slaves, pets, a sort of domesticated animal. That they or the similarly domesticated cows might attempt to set up a civilization—

	For the Sarn-Mother alone had been alive the four thousand years that had passed since mankind's defense of Earth all but succeeded in defeating the invading Sarn. The City-Mothers could not understand. Subconsciously they had no intention of understanding anything so unpleasant.

-

	THE SARN-MOTHER'S pointed, elfin face smiled weary greeting. Her fluting, many-toned speech betrayed her fatigue as she spoke to them. "I call you together, daughters, because something of grave importance has arisen. You have heard, perhaps, of the judging of Grayth and Bartel?"

	"Rumors," said the Mother of Targlan, the city perched high in the crystal clarity of the mighty Himalaya Mountains. "You reversed your judgment, I heard." Her voice was silky smooth—and bitter.

	The Sarn-Mother's small, pointed face did not change. The trouble, definitely, was beginning. "I told you at the last Council that the human stock was rebuilding, that the submerged intelligence and will that built, before our invasion of this planet, a high civilization, were mounting again. It is, I believe, equal in power to that before the Conquest. And, under our rule, it has been purified in some respects. There is less violence, and more determination.

	"It is somewhat hard for you to appreciate that, for you do not remember human beings as other than slaves.

	"I recognize a certain growing restlessness at restraint. The majority of those humans do not yet know—understand—the reason for a vague restlessness that they feel. Their leaders do. They are restless of government and restraint, and I hoped to use that vagueness of feeling to destroy the tendency toward rebellion. I thought the rebellion might be turned against their own, proxy government. Therefore, I caused the humans to revolt against their government under us, instead of against the Sarn.

	"Even I had underestimated them. Grayth and Bartel, the leaders of mankind, appeared before me accompanied by Drunnel, the rival leader. I will not detail their quarrel, save to say that Drunnel was my tool. I sentenced Grayth and Bartel.

	"Then—Aesir, he called himself—appeared. He was a blackness—a three-dimensional shadow. He stood some four feet taller than I, nearly twelve feet tall, twice the height of humans. But he was shaped like a human in bulk, though the vague blackness made any feature impossible. He claimed that he was not made of any form of matter, but was the crystallization of the wills of all humans who have died in any age, while seeking freedom.

	"Aesir spoke by telepathy. Mind to mind. We know the humans had been near that before the Conquest, and that our own minds are not so adapted to that as are the humans'. Aesir used that method.

	"He stood before me, and made these statements that were clear to the minds of all humans and Sarn in the Hall of Judgment. His hand of blackness reached out and touched Drunnel, and the man fell to the floor and broke apart like a fragile vase. The corpse was frozen glass-hard in an instant of time.

	"Therefore, I released Grayth and Bartel. But I turned on Aesir's blackness the forces of certain protective devices I have built. There is an atomic blast of one-sixteenth aperture. It is, at maximum, capable of disintegrating half a cubic mile of matter per minute. There was also a focused atomic flame of two-inch aperture, sufficient to fuse about twenty-two tons of steel per second.

	"These were my first tests. At maximum aperture the blackness absorbed both without sound or static discharge, or any lightening of that three-dimensional shadow."

	The Sarn-Mother's mouth moved in a faint, ironic smile. "There are," she went on softly, "certain other weapons there. The Death of the Mother, which I employed once on a rebellious City-Mother, some thirteen hundred years gone. Tathan Shoal, she was, of Bish-Waln." The Sarn-Mother's slitted eyes lit amusedly on the present Mother of Bish-Waln, capital city of the continent of Africa.

	"Tathan Shoal had the mistaken idea that she might gain by attacking me. She came with many devices, including a screen capable of turning all the weapons she knew. It cost me the South Wall of the Hall of Judgment and an effective and efficient administrator to convince her. For she had been effective and efficient.

	"Daughter of Targlan, it is best for the Race that we share knowledge. Tell your sister of Bish-Waln the remarkable progress your physicist has made with the field she knows as R-439-K."

-

	THE Mother of Targlan's face remained unchanged, save for a faint golden flush that spread over it, and the sudden angry fire of her eyes. Field R-439-K—her most treasured secret——

	"It is a field," she said in a pleasant, friendly tone, "which causes the collapse of atoms within it, bringing about a spreading disruption that continues so long as the generator is activated. It is necessarily spherical in shape, destroying the generator very quickly, however. It would be excellent as a sort of bomb." She added that last as a sort of afterthought, a hazy, bitter dream in her voice.

	The Sarn-Mother smiled and nodded toward the Mother of Bish-Waln. That City Ruler's eyes were angry as had been her predecessor's as she responded to the unspoken command. But her voice betrayed no emotion.

	"No, sister, it can be projected to some extent. The generator need not be destroyed, though the projector is, if you employ a field of ellipsoidal form."

	The Mother of Uhrnol smiled, but her smile was only half amusement. "The projector can be saved, too. It is too bad I could not have known of your efforts. I could have saved you considerable work."

	The three smiled at each other in seeming friendliness. Each felt slightly relieved; she stood alone neither in her chastisement nor in the loss of treasured secrets.

	"The point of interest," the Sarn-Mother pointed out softly, "is that none of you can stop that field. There is no protection. Some twenty-two centuries ago I discovered that interesting modification of the atomic-blast field, and within a century I had projected it. Ten centuries ago I had it tamed to the extent of a cylindrical tube of force of controllable dimensions. If Tathan Shoal had waited another five centuries before attacking me, she would not have cost me the South Wall. It still does not match perfectly the other three. But I cannot screen that force."

	"Nor I," admitted the three City-Mothers, in turn. There was a hint of bitter defeat in their tones, for each had hoped that field that could not be screened might make them safe in disposing of the old harridan, the Immortal Sarn-Mother, who ruled them from a forgotten generation. She was a bitter, anachronistic hangover from a forgotten time, from even the Forgotten Planet, and should have been forgotten with it.

	"Aesir," said the Sarn-Mother softly, "took the Death of the Mother into his blackness, and seemingly drew strength from it. At any rate, both the apparatus and the atomic generator which fed it were blown out from sudden overload.

	"It might be wise to cooperate more closely than in the past. Once, remember, our race had a very bitter struggle with this race. What do you Mothers of Cities believe this Aesir to me?"

	The Mother of Targlan stirred angrily. "There are clowns among the humans of my district who amuse their fellows by trickery. Humans have stiff legs, bending only in certain, few joints. That lack of flexibility gives them amusing powers. They can, for instance, advance the stiffness by the use of poles of light metal, representing longer, artificial bones. I have seen such clowns walk on legs that made them not twelve, but seventeen feet high."

	"Yes," said the Sarn-Mother sweetly, "the clowns of my North America are of a very inferior brand. They can appear but twelve feet tall. But—"

	"Many," said the Mother of Bish-Waln, "of my humans have shown they can talk mind to mind among themselves. If it is new among your people here, it is—"

	"Yes," said the Sarn-Mother sweetly, "the humans of my North America are of an inferior brand, evidently. But—I am curious of these clowns and mind-talkers. Do they, perhaps, absorb atomic-blast beams for nourishment, and warm themselves at a focused flame? Do they so overload your atomic-collapse field generators as to bum them in molten rubbish?

	"Or do they, perhaps, unlike yourselves, remember that the Sarn-Mother has watched humans, and the minds and tricks of humans, for some eight times your not-inconsequential five hundred years?

	"There were, in the Hall, humans, Sarn, and myself. By telepathy, Aesir spoke to us all, telling a myth of his origin among immaterial wills. He was, in his way, quite noisy, and quite conspicuous. Also, he was an excellent psychologist. Had I been warned—had I known beforehand and had time to think—I would not have turned the blast, the focused flame, nor, certainly, the Death of the Mother against him.

	"Now do any of you, who see so clearly through the trickery of my poor little, twelve-foot clown, and the trickery of my slow-developing telepathist—do any of you see through to the message Aesir meant for my intellect, and not my mind? A message he did not speak, but acted?" The Sarn-Mother's elfin face looked down the Council table, and there was nothing of laughter in it.

-

	The City-Mothers moved uneasily under the lash of biting scorn. The Sarn-Mother's voice dropped, softer still, till the tinklings of the atom flame above muffled her words.

	"Mummery for fools, my daughters. I am interested that you are so attracted by the mummery as to forget the purpose, and so pleased with your cleverness that saw the human behind it.

	"But I am—irritated that you underestimate, not merely of the mind of a human of deadly, blazingly brilliant intellect, but, even more, my own mind.

	"Humans are a smaller people, better adapted to this somewhat heavier planet than we are. But we are no longer on the Forgotten World. The humans have learned to respect height; the ruling Race is tall.

	"Is Aesir a fool, then, to make himself yet taller, and to fill out his slenderness with vague blackness?

	"We have no hair on our skulls, as have humans, but the more useful sterthan which seems, to humans, practical telepathy, since we can talk among ourselves by what they know only through microwave radio sets.

	"Is Aesir a fool, then, to use telepathy himself, talking truly mind to mind? Men know the limitations of microwave radio, that it ends at the horizon. But they do not know what vague limits telepathy may or may not have, and it is very wonderful, therefore.

	"That mummery, my daughters, was intended only for humans, that mass of restless humans who do not know what they want. That was not meant for me—save that he wanted me to know what others heard.

	"I am proud of my humans, daughters. But I am afraid, for you. You have not shown the intelligence that that man expected. That mind telepathy he used was not the message he meant for me. To me he said: 'Mother, a new balance must be reached. You are the ruler of Earth—but for me. I challenge you to try your weapons—which I know, as does everyone on Earth, you have in your throne—and see if you can destroy me.' And when I, not thinking, but reacting spontaneously to the evident menace of his blackness, did just this, he said more. He touched Drunnel, and Drunnel fell dead. 'I have an impregnable shield' his actions spoke, 'and it is more; a weapon. You cannot destroy me, Mother of the Sarn—but I can destroy you.

	"Therefore, we seek a new balance. You could destroy all my people—but not destroy me. And I could destroy you, or any of your people.

	" 'Release these two, Grayth and Bartel, and we will think again. This is not the time for hasty action.'

	"Aesir, daughters, is no fool. He is no trickster—save for his own sound purposes—but a mind of astounding brilliance. He has discovered a principle, a weapon, unknown to us and of immense power.

	"And, my daughters, I respect him. I released Grayth and Bartel, since they are, evidently, pawns in this game. Or, at least, they are two of the few humans on Earth I know are not—Aesir.

	"And I have more liking"—the Sarn-Mother's voice was bitter and ironic—"for one who expects my mind to see beyond mummery to a deep and important sincerity, than for those who explain trickery and point out the inferiority of my humans."

	"You are reading words that are not written," said the Mother of Targlan flatly.

	For an instant the eyes of the Sarn-Mother burned with a white anger, a blazing intolerance of such sheer stupidity. Then it faded to a look of deep concern.

-

	THE SARN-MOTHER was unhuman, unhuman in the same way her elfin face was. It was very wrong, taken as a human face, with its pointed chin and tiny mouth, the slit-pupiled, golden eyes, and peaked hairline that was not hair. But there was the fundamental parallelism of two eyes, a mouth, a high, rounded forehead. Her body was grotesquely unhuman, but again there was a parallelism of articulated arms carried high on a strong torso and legs, though her arms were like four powerful snakes.

	And—she was un-Sarn. The Mother was immortal, an unchanging intellect in a world that waxed and waned and changed about her. She had living memories of a world crashed in cosmic dust. She had memories of great Sara who had dared and won a world, of a human civilization of magnitude near equal to this present Sarn world.

	And the process that had made her immortal, had made her unable to have descendants. There was no direct link from her to this newer generation. Her only link was through a planet wiped from the face of time.

	Four thousand years she had ruled this planet. Two thousand more she'd lived on the Forgotten World before the desperate colonization attempt had been conceived. These creatures—these Sarn—were ephemeral things about her, for all their five hundred years.

	Sixty centuries are long, for any intellect. All things exhaust themselves in that long time, save one: the curiosity of the mind, the play and counterplay of intellect. The Mother was the perfect seeker after knowledge, for no other thoughts could ponderably intrude. Those others she had met long ago.

	She was un-Sarn by her immortality, by her separation of six thousand years from all direct contact with her equals.

	She was unhuman only by a different in body. And the body is wearied and forgotten in that time. Only the intellect, the mind, remains of interest, expanding and changing forever.

	The intellect behind Aesir's cloak of blackness was the keenest, the finest, this planet had ever seen. And—that human appreciated that she, the Sarn-Mother, was a keen intelligence.

	The City-Mothers did not.

	The Sarn-Mother turned her eyes slowly from the Mother of Targlan. "The words that spell the secret of that blackness are not written," she said mildly. (These were the daughters of her race. These were the descendants of Sarn she had known and worked with and liked during six thousand years. These were—)

	"I must see more of that cloak, and investigate it more adequately." She sighed. "And you, my daughters, must not underestimate an enemy. And the humans are, I fear—or will be soon.

	"They have been slaves for many generations—very short generations—and they have evolved. They evolve more swiftly than we, because of that short life span. And, remember this: at least one of them is sufficiently brilliant, of sufficient mental caliber, to develop a screen weapon superior to anything we know of. That alone makes him, potentially, extremely dangerous."

-

II.

	The City-Mothers sat silent for long seconds. The thought was, as the Mother had known, extremely upsetting. Their matriarchic minds rebelled at the thought that there was a human—and a male human, at that—who was capable of developing something scientifically superior to anything in their possession.

	"If," said the Mother of Targlan, "he has this remarkable weapon—proof against all ours, and deadly to us—I am extremely thankful that he has shown such kindliness toward our race." Her fluting voice was sugary. "He has not equipped any of his compatriots nor attacked us in any way."

	The seven other City-Mothers twitched slightly straighter in their chairs and looked with pleased smiles at the Sarn-Mother's fine, small face.

	The Mother smiled bitterly. "Undoubtedly that would be your own reaction were you possessed of such a weapon," she admitted. The Mother of Targlan stolidly continued to look into the Mother's half-angry, half-annoyed eyes.

	"But you," the Mother explained, "have never done more than to say 'a thousand pounds of tungsten' when you had need of it. Or order fifty No. 27-R-29 oscillator tubes, when you hoped to make a satisfactory lie detector. Incidentally, daughter, I have an effective invisibility generator. And your lie detector will not operate. You'd do far better to use common sense and simplicity instead of outrageously expensive mummery that doesn't work. That spy you sent to—one of the other cities—last week had a very slipshod invisibility. I watched her a whole afternoon from here. She set off seven different alarms, and finally was caught in a delightful booby trap. Your sister believes in simplicity instead of gadgets."

	The Mother of Targlan sat silent and stony. Her slitted eyes contracted slowly in flaming hatred. The old harridan was becoming cattish.

	The old harridan was tired. She was wearied to death of the bickerings and annoyances of these City-Mothers with too little to do to occupy their time. Furthermore, she hadn't slept in forty hours, and knew it. And the Mother of Targlan was being unbearably stupid.

	The Mother of Bish-Waln was interested. So—that was the source of that spy. And the old Mother, for all her foolishness about these humans, had some sense. The secret of success is simplicity. Though that Targlan spy had had a fearful and wonderful array of apparatus strapped about her, it also had made her—even when dead—remarkably hard to see. She'd sounded like a collapse in a glass factory when she fell, though.

-

	"TO GET back to my remarks," said the Sarn-Mother abruptly, "you have never had to want something without getting it. Except," she added with a flash of tiny, pointed, green-white teeth, "understanding. If you want materials, they are brought.

	"If a human wants materials, he steals them. And I will say this for you: you have all been remarkable organizers. The anti-theft measures you have developed are outstanding. But I should think that the fact that humans still succeed in thieving would convince you they are clever."

	"So," snapped the Mother of Targlan, "are rats. But they aren't intelligent."

	"Quite true," admitted the Mother. The Mother of Targlan was becoming annoyed, which vaguely pleased the old Sara Mother, who was very annoyed. "But humans are both. It took me twelve years to find exactly how it was approximately thirty ounces of platinum disappeared each month, despite my electrostatic balance detectors. Now I make all workers clip their fingernails and hair. It was truly startling how much dust they could carry that way.

	"To acquire materials, humans must steal them. And they must find it extremely difficult to gather such things as metallic caesium, gaseous fluorine, and rare gases like helium and neon. Unfortunately, I believe a considerable quantity of material is obtained from ingeniously acquired atom-flame lamps." The Mother nodded toward the softly rustling lamps overhead.

	"So your workers secrete complete atom-flame lamps under their nails?" said the Mother of Targlan. "Your theft measures are indeed remarkable. The atom destructor of one atom lamp would power a dangerous weapon. They will stand a load of nearly ten thousand horsepower."

	The Sarn-Mother smiled. "How many atom-flame lamps have you lost through theft, daughter?"

	"None. Not one!" snapped the Mother of Targlan. "And what," asked the Mother kindly, "of lamps destroyed in burning human homes?" 

	"Perhaps ten a year." 

	"I'd say five a year, then, are acquired by humans. I've proven two homes were burned to the ground to secure the atom lamps the occupants wanted."

	"We," said the City-Mother loftily, "require that the wreckage be produced."

	"Excellent," sighed the Mother. "An excellent provision. Do you have a chemist analyze the molten waste? The humans generally find it very difficult to obtain scandium, and the analyses usually skimp badly on that. But the other elements you'll find. They smelt up a careful mixture of all the proper elements, with the exception of gallium. But they can always claim that boiled away."

	The Mother of Targlan looked startled. The Sarn-Mother's eyes twinkled slightly in satisfaction. She had discovered that trick only four days before, herself.

	"As I said, the humans find it hard to get materials and apparatus. But they are really ingenious, and I rather respect them for it. If you wish to assure yourselves of your cities," she added, looking about the table, "I'd advise you to acknowledge the power of your opponents.

	"That is the reason this human, Aesir, has not done more. He has a weapon and a protection—for one. So long as he cannot obtain material, he cannot do more.

	"But he will obtain materials." The Mother's annoyed air was dropped now. This, she knew, meant the safety of the Sarn race. "If he obtains sufficient materials before we learn the secret of that cloak, the Sarn will not rule this planet."

	THE MOTHER of Bish-Waln looked at the Immortal steadily. Suddenly she spoke. "I have always considered the humans stupid. That they had the cleverness of other lower animals, in greater degree, I realized. But we, Mother, have no memories of their civilization before we came. How far advanced was it, actually?"

	The Sarn-Mother looked at the City-Mother keenly for a moment. It was anomalous; this City-Mother, less than one twentieth the Immortal's age, looked far older. Her face, pointed in the manner typical of her race, was graven with fine lines. There was a power and strength of purpose in its deeply tanned, leathery molding. Ruler of a tropical continent, her city centered in the warmth and cloudless air of the Sahara, she was one of the most active of the City-Mothers.

	The old Sarn-Mother smiled slightly and nodded. "I can tell you very little now. But call in your archeologist. She is a brilliant and learned Sarn. Briefly, when we landed, the humans had had civilization for some fifteen thousand years. It was, by their calendar, 1977. They had recently developed atomic power of the first order, involving vapor turbines heated by atomic combustion, driving electromagnetic generators. They mined the world, their transportation systems were heavily interlinked and efficient.

	"And—of our fifty-two ships, we lost thirty-nine during the Conquest. They were intelligent, efficient and deadly fighters. We captured and enslaved only the scum of the race; the best of humankind died fighting with a grim tenacity that appalled us. They were a fighting breed, slightly given to attack, but utterly and insanely given to defense.

	"It is worth nothing in this case. If they once attack us, then we will, of course, attack, in reply. Whereupon their inherited defensiveness will come into play. If it does, I seriously assure you that, whether they have weapons or not, even if they fight with their bare hands, you will find the human race a perfectly deadly thing to tangle with. They have no conception of when to stop. It is good military tactics to stop, if any reasonably equitable settlement can be reached, after losing ten percent of your forces. The human race does not know that, and never will. They stop when, and only when, they are convinced they have won their point. They simply do not show good sense.

	"But they are extremely deadly.

	"That is true of the mass of humanity. They have leaders now, and Aesir is the principal leader. We can, and must, control them through him. He knows, instinctively, the attitude of his people, and will try, therefore, to prevent suicidal war.

	"Wherefore, if we obtain the secret of his cloak of blackness, we can proceed."

	"I will ask my archeologist, Mother," said the Mother of Bish-Waln.

	"Whatever you may say of the dreadful, deadly, human race," said the Mother of Targlan ironically, "it would be interesting to know the mechanism of that shield. But—maybe he will not explain. And it would be extremely difficult to force him to, if what you say of it is true."

	"We shall have to analyze it, of course," said the Mother wearily. There were many more hours of work and sleeplessness ahead. "Some hours ago I instructed my physicists to set up all the instruments they thought might be useful in the House of the Rocks."

	The Mother of Targlan stared blankly; then, acidly, commented: "Of all places in the Sarn City here, I should say that that would show the absolute minimum of probability for an appearance of Aesir."

	"And," continued the Mother, wearied of interruptions, "they will be ready for him in about an hour and a half. It is evident that Aesir will come to the aid of Grayth, if we capture him. To make assurance doubly sure—since Grayth is not, actually, absolutely necessary to them—we will take also Deya, Spokeswoman of Human Women. Grayth plans to marry her, and I am sure that Aesir will aid in releasing her."

	The Mother of Bish-Waln frowned slightly. "Is it not bad policy, Mother, to arrest, and then release this man again? And—again at the insistence of Aesir."

	"Therefore, the House of the Rocks. No human can approach. No human will know of the actual escape—save those humans already closely associated with Grayth, and, therefore, Aesir. Those humans already know what powers Aesir has, even better than we, and they will recognize this maneuver not as an arrest that failed, but as a test that did not fail. Our policy will be good, not bad, to those who know. The mass of humans simply will not know."

	"They will not, I suppose," said the Mother of Drulon, at the far, stormy tip of South America, "notice that Grayth, their spokesman, is being taken in Sarn custody—and returns?"

	"They will not," smiled the Mother. With an uncoiled finger, she pressed a tiny button.

-

	AT THE FAR end of the long Council room, a silver door opened in the jet black of the wall. The heavy metal portal swung aside, and a guard snapped to attention in its opening, a giant Sarn standing over eight feet tall. Her powerful, supple arms were corded with the smooth-flowing muscles of a boa constrictor. Vaguely, her trappings indicated the rank of a Decalon—a commander of a Ten. Her cloak, though, with a deep, rich maroon, and in the center the gold, silver, and bright-purple metal threads wove a pattern that was the Mother's personal symbol.

	And her face—to one who knew Sarn physiognomy—was not that of a mere Decalon. The slitted eyes were deep-set and widely separated. Her mouth was firm, and the face, small and pointed to human experience, was square and powerful in a Sarn. The golden skin had been tanned to a leathery, weather-beaten brown, crossed by a myriad of fine lines of character. This was no mere commander over ten guards.

	"Decalon," said the Mother softly, "bring the Cloaks of the Mother, and your command. There is an errand."

	The Decalon turned sharply, noiselessly, closing the metal door.

	"Once," explained the Mother, "Darath Toplar was Commander-in-chief of the Guard of the Sarn City. She is now a Decalon. That is because there are but ten in my personal guard.

	"Now this is a time of emergency. I have revealed to each of you something of the things each thought a secret, and some of the things that I held secret. I am showing you the Cloaks of the Mother. That they existed, rumors have stated. They do. They have the properties the rumors suggest. Because it is necessary, they will be used."

	The Decalon was back, behind her ten guards dressed in the same type of maroon uniform. Ten powerful, eight-foot Sarn warriors. On the face of each was stamped a keen, loyal intelligence. In the arms of the Decalon was a case of dark hardwood, inlaid with heavy, silvery metal straps. She put it down at the end of the great Council table, and the Mother's hand flicked out as her supple arm uncoiled to shoot a scrap of carefully cut metal the length of the polished table. The Decalon fitted it into a concealed lock with a motion of familiar dexterity.

	The case, opened, revealed a space two by three by one-half foot. In it, racked neatly along one side, were twenty little battery cases, with coiled, flexible cables attached, and twenty headsets, bearing curiously complex goggles. The case was practically empty.

	The Decalon reached in, and with practiced movements passed to her command the goggles and battery cases. Then she reached more carefully into the body of the case. The reaching hand vanished. Presently, queerly section by section, the Decalon was wiped out, till only a pair of feet remained, dwindling off into space. These vanished as some unseen boots were pulled over them.

	In a moment, only the City-Mothers and the Mother of the Sarn remained in the room—seemingly. The City-Mothers stirred uneasily. The eyes of the Mother of Targlan were golden fires of anger and chagrin. These—these picked eleven of the Mother's personal guard and spy force—knew every secret of her laboratories. 

	And the old immortal harridan knew them, too. Her cracking laughter must have been spurred a thousand times by the futile attempts and doomed plans the Mother of Targlan had made and thought over. The Mother of Targlan felt a rising pressure of helpless anger well up, an anger that was suppressed by its very helplessness. Even the satisfaction that the Mother was old, a cackling hag, was denied. For—salt on her wounded pride—the Mother had done, seemingly centuries ago, what the Mother of Targlan struggled with vainly! The Mother was a far better scientist.

-

III.

	It was a very different Council room, this chamber where the Spokesmen of Man had met—an inner office of the elected representative of mankind, the Spokesman of Mankind. It was a warm room, mellowed by a thousand years of time; ancient woods, waxed and cared for for ten centuries and more, had taken on a fine, soft patina. Long-slanting fingers of afternoon sunlight did not glare on cold jet stone here; it was softened by the richness of the panels. Each was of a different wood; one from each of the continents, and one for each continental spokesman.

	The great table in the center was worn in soft hummocks and swales by the arms of forty generations of Spokesmen, the thick rubberlike floor carven by their feet.

	But as in the great Council room of the Hall of the Sarn in nearby Sarn City, here, too, atom-flame lamps rustled softly with dying atoms, whitening the light of the setting sun. Four men only were at this Council table, four who sat motioning, gesturing with a curious alertness, their faces intent. Yet— utterly silent.

	Grayth, tall, lean, keen-faced Spokesman of Mankind, an elected representative who had won his honor by a keen understanding of the practical psychology of the men he represented before the Sarn-Mother, political leader of mankind. Bartel, shorter, more solidly built Spokesman of North America, close friend of Grayth, who had stood beside him before the Sarn-Mother, when—Aesir—had come.

	And Carron, the gigantic commander of the legion of peace, the only semblance of an army allowed humans. A police force armed with tiny gas throwers capable of a single, stupefying shot, and rubber truncheons.

	Also, one more. Darak, Grayth's subspokesman. He sat silent now, making occasional pothooks on the pad of paper, his round, uninteresting face bored and boring. Darak's office was appointive, given him at Grayth's order for the blankly unimpressive face and uninteresting character of the man made him few friends—as he had found by many years of careful study of the subject. Few friends, and few who paid him any attention whatever.

	Darak had no need of the Cloak of the Mother; his own, based not on laws of physics but of psychology, was nearly as effective. People did not see Darak. He wasn't worth seeing.

	Four humans at the ancient Council table, four men as free as possible in this day of the Sarn, each wearing on his cloak the symbol of his rank in human society. Each wearing on a band round his forehead the medallion given every human at the age of eighteen. The band of Manhood or Womanhood, the Sarn informed them. The mark of Mankind's submission to the Sarn.

	Or was, till Ware made certain slight alterations, alterations that hollowed out the solid three-inch disk of silver to contain a minute thing of spider-web coils and microscopic crystal oscillators. The first of the telepaths that rendered this soundless Council meaningful.

	And rendered quite useless the listening devices that had followed every Council of Mankind for a thousand years. Grayth smiled upward to the swell of the atom-flame lamp. In the mechanism of that device, in a dozen other places in the room, the Sarn had long ago hidden radio transmitters. For a millennium, every Council of Mankind had been directly open to the strange radio-sense of the Mother and her advisers. For the hairlike growth on the Sam's skulls were the sense organ of a type Man did not have, directly sensitive to radio.

	"Four men in here," Grayth thought to his companions, "four men rustling papers. But the Sarn must be very curious as to the silence."

	Carron's broad, tanned face broke into a wide grin. "After a thousand years, a bit of silence from this room is due. The Mother knows well enough we aren't minding her business. But I don't think she'll be anxious to investigate after—Aesir."

	"The Sarn-Mother," the thought whispered in their minds from a more distant telepath, "is busy holding a conference of her own. I've been trying for weeks to get the pattern of Sarn thoughts. I get annoying flashes, but no more. The Mother is tired, and the City-Mothers are being stubborn, I gather. But the thought patterns are just enough different from human thought to make the telepaths ineffective at more than about one hundred feet. And the most assiduous electrotechnician can't spend all his time tracing conduits in the Sarn Palace."

	"I'd suggest you do absolutely nothing that an ordinary electrotechnician wouldn't do, Ware," Grayth hurriedly advised. "And for Aesir's sake, stay home when you're supposed to have off hours."

-

	"HAVE YOU reached any conclusions? I've been sleeping, and woke only a few minutes ago." Ware's mental voice seemed to yawn. "I've been trying to think of some way to get more metal. Ye gods, if I could just get into one of the Sarn electrical plants for a day, I'd have a dozen things I need fixed up. The math was none too simple, but I've gotten it, I think." He chuckled. "Thanks, in fact, to a very wise old Sarn.

	"Just below conscious level, a thought came to him, a bothersome equation. While a certain electrotechnician fussed with conduits fifty feet away, he fussed with the equation. The Sarn have some mathematical methods our ancestors never developed, and that I haven't had a chance to learn. Carron, if you ever feel urged to crack the skull of old Rath Largun, spare him for that."

	"Can you use him again?" asked Carron amusedly.

	"Oh, I have. He's old, and his mind wanders. Nearly a thousand years old, I think, which is exceptionally old for even a Sarn male. Since he is a male, he gets less credit among his people than he deserves, but he's the most brilliant mathematician the Sarn have. Because his mind wanders—he believes he thinks up the equations."

	"Might they give him a clue later?" asked Grayth sharply.

	"T ... P ..." said Ware easily. "What word am I spelling? When you have correctly answered that, the Sarn may get that clue."

	"Good." Grayth nodded silently. "Ware, Carron has seven technicians in his legion of peace who will procure some of those things you need. They have volunteered."

	"I have not said what I wanted, nor will I," Ware answered instantly. "Every technician caught stealing metal now will be destroyed by the Sarn instantly. No man is going to lose his life on something I wouldn't attempt myself. Further, we need two classes of men now more vitally than ever before: technicians and fighters. Humans haven't fought and are not fighters. Carron's legionnaires are the only trained, experienced fighters—with the will and emotion needed for fighting—that we have. And when they are also technicians, we can't spare them.

	"Have you told Darak what's to be done, and given him the disks?" Ware changed the subject abruptly, with an air of "that's that." It was because Carron didn't know what metals Ware wanted; had he, he would have gotten them somehow, anyway.

	Darak replied softly: "I have been told, and I have the disks. Twenty-five telepaths, each equipped with destroying apparatus reacting to one key thought. I know how the destroying mechanism is to be disconnected if successful delivery is made. Grayth has supplied me with sufficient official dispatches for both Durban City and Targlan. I am starting in twenty-two minutes."

	'Then—good luck, Darak."

	"Thank you. The wish is, perhaps, the luck of the gods?"

	"Yes. The luck of Aesir—very appropriate." Ware chuckled. "You will lose contact with me, except when I use the large telepath here in the laboratory. You know the schedule hours for that?"

	"Yes, thanks."

	"We will be going, too, I think." Carron rose ponderously. His huge form dwarfed even the great Council table. And, since he spoke for the first time, his heavy voice seemed to explode in the room. "I'll see you to the Sarn City gates, Darak."

-

	HE GLANCED down at the subspokesman's busy fingers. They were chubby, soft-looking fingers, rather thick and clumsy. An ink bottle flickered and wavered in and out of existence under the flicking, incredibly deft fingers. Then it flickered, without seeming to move under his caressing, chubby hand, from a round, red ink bottle to a square black one. "Thank you, Carron. The dispatches, Grayth?" Darak's voice was rather high for a man, quite undistinguished. Darak was, next to Ware, the cleverest human on Earth in that era. But his mentality was as utterly different as was Grayth's. Grayth was a practical psychologist, the only living man capable of unifying and moving the masses of mankind. Ware was the scientist, the epitomization of centuries of the Sarn efforts to develop capable human technicians. And Darak?

	Darak had the curiosity of the scientist in Ware, the psychological sense of Grayth, and the love of action that made giant Carron what he was.

	Grayth tossed a mass of papers toward the subspokesman, a mass that bulged and crinkled. Darak leafed them swiftly into a brief case that he carried. "One thing I will have to remedy," he telepathed silently. "The metal gleams." Twenty-five silvery disks flickered momentarily among the rapidly leafed papers, and vanished as his thick fingers passed them. "All here," he said aloud. "Good-by. I should be back in about four days."

	His feet made no noticeable noise on the floor—an accomplishment far more difficult than a soundless tread. An unnoticeable step involves exactly sufficient sound to satisfy the ear, without enough to attract it. A soundless tread is very startling, particularly in a rather stout, heavily built man.

	He walked through the outer office, past a battery of secretaries and clerks working over statistics from all the human world, correlating and arranging them for Grayth and the human government. Two looked up as he passed, but neither saw him. They missed him as completely as they missed the passing of eleven eight-foot Sarn guards walking past in the opposite direction on the soundless toe pads nature had given them. For neither party wished to be seen, and each had its own unseen cloak wrapping it.

	The door stood open a moment as giant Carron and Grayth spoke a few last words. Bartel stepped out, and then Carron, holding the door wide for his own exit, lingered a moment longer. Soundless feet carried the three Sarn, larger even than Carron's six feet six, through the door.

	The door closed behind the commander of the legion of peace, and Grayth stood alone, silent. "Aesir—Aesir—Aesir—" his telepath was sending out.

	"Yes?" snapped Ware.

	"Three Sarn are standing in the room, invisible to me. Eight more are in the outer office. Both Carron and Bartel are trying to call you—they stood in the door delaying the entrance of the invisible three. All are invisible. Their thoughts I can detect, but not decipher."

	"I know. I've learned to 'hear' their thoughts. It takes a little adjusting, due to the different patterns. I'm trying to get them now. Too distant. I don't like it."

	"Grayth, Spokesman of Mankind." The Decalon spoke from the air in the curious accents of the Sarn, speaking the tongue common to humans and Sarn.

	Grayth started, looked about him, shook his head violently, and reached for a call button with a look of unhappy doubt.

	"Stop," snapped the Sara. Grayth's hand halted in midair. "The Sarn-Mother sent us for you. Stand up."

	"Wh-where are you? Are you—"

-

	Grayth stopped abruptly. A Sam's powerful, muscle-corded arms gripped him suddenly, and simultaneously an intense blackness fell over him. A blackness more utterly complete than could have been produced by any substance thin enough and flexible enough to give the clothlike sensations that accompanied it. A very faint, rubbery rustling sound came to his ears, and simultaneously the jerking and pulling of the Sarn guard adjusting the cloak.

	"We wear the Cloak of the Mother," the guard fluted sharply. "You will be quiet. You will make no sound, say no word. It is understood?"

	"Yes," sighed Grayth. Then silently: "You've caught my impressions, Ware?"

	"Yes." It whispered in his mind, the reassuring solidity of another human in close contact. The blackness, the utter blackness, baffled and brought a welling of panic. The huge corded arms of the Sarn, the secrecy of this invisible arrest, all brought a feeling of irrepressible panic.

	Then Ware's calm mind obtruded powerfully, silently. "The blackness is not related to mine. It is caused, I suspect, by the complete refraction of light about your body. To be invisible, you must be rendered blind to visible light, since any organ capable of seeing must, by its nature, intercept light. Struggle slightly. Strike the face of one of the Guard."

	Grayth shuddered. A guard was working swiftly at his feet. A tremor passed through him, and for a moment he fought off the powerful arms, surprising their grip by a sudden thrust and a gasp of panic. His arm flailed out gropingly. Then with a second gasp, half-sob, he quieted at the soft, tensely sharp command of the Decalon.

	"Goggles," said Ware softly. "Transformers, probably, operating on ultravisible light, thus making vision possible with invisibility."

	Tensely, in Grayth's mind came the impression of half a hundred other human minds attending this exchange, half a hundred humans throughout this central city, the Sarn City, capital alike of human and Sarn affairs.

	"You must stop them," Grayth felt a mind whisper urgently. "Ware—you must release him. Secret capture—they hope to loose him where Aesir cannot find him to release him." Deya's mind, turbulent and fearful, now. Leader of human women, determined and ready to defy the age-long, mind-burdening hold of the Sarn, this sudden, half-magic descent of the invisible guards terrified her for the sake of the man she loved.

	"Stay where you are, Ware," Grayth rapped out mentally. "They're moving me now—leading—no, carrying me out through my office. In thirty seconds, I'll be lost utterly; the darkness is totally blinding and bewildering." Grayth felt solid ground under his feet suddenly, then he was' standing, and spinning in the four cable arms of the giant Sarn. The darkness spun madly about him for a moment, then he stood waveringly on his feet, without the faintest idea of position as powerful arms urged him forward. "Stay where you are. I don't know where I am, anyway, and I'm convinced this is intended as a trap to bring you where the Mother's prepared weapons can destroy you and all hope of the revolution. She wants me only as bait for you. Stay!"

	Softly in Grayth's mind came Ware's easy chuckle. "If I knew where you were, my friend, I would come. I will know soon enough. In good time, the Mother will see that you—and hence I—know. She realizes you have telepathic communication with me. Never, to my knowledge, has she revealed these invisible cloaks—"

	"There have been other unexplained disappearances; this is the first time a telepath has been available to carry word," Deya snapped out.

	"No matter. In good time, for no force, no power, no weapon or ray, no bomb or any other thing can serve to disrupt the—Cloak of Aesir. No energy, however great, can break down that shield. That is not the Mother's hope, for this morning in the Hall of Judgment she tested that cloak to all her powers—and one or two, Grayth, no other Sarn of all Earth knows, save the Mother alone. It did not fail then, nor can it. She makes no further trial of it, but wants an analysis of its forces." Ware's easy jubilance rode through to Grayth, lessening the tension.

	"She will not learn one iota of that, Grayth. No, she wants a demonstration, a demonstration on her own terms, at her own time, in her chosen place. By Aesir and all the gods of Earth, Grayth, we'll give her the demonstration she seeks. By every god from Mithra to Thor, we'll give her one, I'll chill her prized palace there on the Sarn Hill till her old bones ache. No Sarn yet ever had rheumatism, but, by Earth and man, we'll find out this night whether a Sarn's thousand bones can't breed a mighty case!"

-

	"You'll stay where you are, you braggart fool," Grayth howled through his telepath. "You are the revolution, not I. Bartell's an abler man, if he does lack a bit in fine words and simple phrases. The Sarn-Mother's lived five centuries to your year; she has studied space and time and all of energy with tools and instruments you never guessed, or will guess. You are a child, a prattling fool of a child, to her, Ware. Stay where you are! You may not know of any way to analyze or defeat that shield of yours, but what do you know of the Sarn's ten-thousand-year-old science?"

	Ware's bubbling laughter echoed queerly in telepathy. "All Sarn science, Grayth, that has been published. The telepath, my friend, is not without its powers as an educator, tuned inward to catch, amplify and reflect each thought to a solid impression. And all human science, Grayth. Under my house—when I was trying to make a lab the Sarn wouldn't find—I found an ancient subway and a buried lab some striving humans had contrived in the last days before explosives and gas killed them. Books and periodicals, tons of them, heaped clumsily. A forgotten legacy."

	Grayth groaned. The skin of his back seemed suddenly oppressed in the queer manner a telepath contrives when absolute rapport is established between two powerful minds. A heavy pack strapped on Ware's back. The screaming hiss of an atom-flame-lamp unit readjusted, rebuilt to carry a million times the load it had been designed for, a scream that vanished in inaudible shrillness. Sketchily, waveringly, the rock-walled, hidden laboratory of Ware's contriving stood out before Grayth's eyes, lighted against the utter blackness that shrouded bin. Then that, too, became a blackness, a stranger, straining blackness and chill as Ware pressed a contact at his belt.

	"Ware," pleaded Grayth, "I don't know where I am. If you don't promise now to stop this expedition at least until I give further intelligent information, I'll grind the Mother's medallion under my heel, and by the gods, you'll never know."

	"I'll wait," sighed Ware.

	"But—you'll go later, Ware—you'll go?" demanded Deya.

	"I'll promise that, too, Deya." Ware's mind smiled to her.

	"Grayth, I shall continue." Darak's thoughts, faint with distance, came in.

	"Right," replied Grayth. "Bartel!"

	"Yes."

	"And Carron and Oburn, Tharnot, Barlmew, Todd—all of you, continue your duties, without any change or shift. Do not hint you know of my disappearance till the appropriate time. Todd, you take charge of that outer office; you did a good job, apparently, when you knew I was being carried by, invisible, ten feet from you. You are in charge there. Keep the girls out of my inner office, for any reason, until I can give some idea of what is to take place. Got it?"

	"Right."

	"Deya," said Ware, "has stopped sending. Further, she does not answer; she's blanked her mind."

	"We've been walking—stopped now!" Grayth's mind raced. "Deya ... Deya, answer me!"

-

	THERE WAS a tense silence of mind; only the low, multitudinous mutter of a thousand human minds in normal thought about him.

	"Oburn, where are you?" snapped Ware.

	"At home."

	"Stroll out in front; you live within three doors of Deya. Grayth, stumble in the dust—do you feel dust under your feet?"

	"Yes." Grayth stumbled awkwardly against a giant Sarn guard, dragging his foot sharply across a dusty walk, unseen.

	"Dust rose," said Oburn softly. "Deya, will you answer me?"

	"Yes." Her telepath thoughts were half angry, half miserable. We're moving again, though, so—they spun me. I don't know which way."

	"You will stop dragging your foot." A Sarn voice low and tense in Grayth's ear warned him.

	"Ware, I ... I don't like this." Grayth's thought was tense and very worried.

	Deya's was bitter. "It was well enough when you were the one; now you are not so anxious that Ware stay back, I take it. Ware, you stay right where you are, because if that was wise for Grayth, the only one of us who can really move the men of his following, it is a hundred times wiser so far as I am concerned."

	"I think," said Ware, annoyed, "that I had better start designing a telepath locating device. It should be relatively simple, and if this continues, we'll need one. I'll join you as soon as I know where you are. In the meantime, I have a little work to do preparing. Please stop ordering and counterordering. We need you both; the Mother wants to study this apparatus, and she won't stop taking people until she gets the chance. It won't do her any good whatever, so she'll get that chance."

	"I fear you're right," Grayth agreed. "It should be getting dark now."

	"It is. The moon rises at 1:45, so we have plenty of time. I think ... I think it is going to be heavily overcast," predicted Ware suddenly. A chaos of thoughts raced suddenly through his mind, thoughts too lightly touched for others to follow.

-

IV.

	Utter jet, and the sound of people moving, voices and low laughter. Hasty side steps to avoid unseen passers that brushed by, feet sounding softly on the dusty walks or grassy lanes. Then rough cobbles under their feet, rounded by the tread of more than a hundred generations of mankind, and behind them, the low murmur of the square fading away.

	The rough cobbles gave way, suddenly, to the smooth, glassy pavement of the roads of the Sarn City. They had passed the low, ancient wall that marked the boundaries where men might walk unchallenged. Only low, sleepy cheeps of birds in nearby parklike gardens now, and the shrill notes of crickets and night insects tuning up.

	The pace of the Sarn guards accelerated, their long legs, and the curious manner in which they retracted them with each step, making a pace swift for the humans to match. Grayth heard Deya's soft breathing accelerate as they moved at a near trot up the low rise that led to the Sarn Palace.

	Then steps under his feet, strong Sarn arms guiding him upward, steadying stumbling feet. The echo of corridors answered to his tread, and for an instant he knew where he was; this was no unfamiliar walk to him now, and he was mentally readjusted. To the right, and a half-dozen turns, and he was beyond any area of the vast, sprawling Sarn Palace that he knew.

	An arm detained him; he stood motionless in utter darkness, while, beyond, something hummed for an instant, then a soft shuffling of a sliding door, two steps forward, and the soft clang of the door's return. The sensation of a sudden drop in a swift elevator was nerve tearing in this darkness, this total unknowingness of place, time or intent of captors. Grayth stiffened, heard Deya's soft gasps as the floor seemed cut from beneath her. Then the steadiness of the floor returned, and only the soft humming of the gravity controls told of their movement downward. Time became confused, there was no clue to their speed, yet Grayth was certain that they dropped many thousands of feet. The air pressure mounted till swallowing had relieved it so many times he lost track of that crude barometric method. More than five thousand feet, though—

	More than a mile! No human had ever guessed at the depths of the Sarn Palace. Only once had humans ever been permitted to see those depths, and then it was the upper caverns only, when Drunnel and his men had been given a few feeble weapons by the Mother's orders. Weapons to overcome Grayth and Ware.

	"More than a mile—we're slowing, Ware. The air is thick; it must be nearly two miles down. The ah- itself seems denser and richer in my lungs. Unless we are brought upward again—"

	"I'll come down to you," Ware's calm mind replied. "Can you receive there clearly?"

	"Perfectly," Grayth acknowledged.

	"Two facts I wanted; antigravity units of the cars do not disturb the reception. Two miles of solid rock do not disturb it. Thought waves are a level below all known radiations, a force unto themselves. The Cloak of Aesir stops all other things."

	"We are walking down a corridor, wide, rock floored and walled, low ceilinged. There are columns," said Deya. "Ahead, I hear Sarn."

-

	THEY HALTED, and the echoes of their feet died away slowly, the curious zing-zing-zing of sound reflected from rows of columns disappeared in unknown, unseeing distances.

	"Mother of Sarn! Decalon Toplar reports with her Ten, and the two humans for whom she was sent," the Decalon's fluting voice called out.

	"Remove the Cloak of the Mother, Decalon. Place all of the cloaks in this case, and with them the visors."

	A giant Sarn tugged at Grayth, the curious rustle of the cloak rose about him, then abruptly he was blinded by a flood of intolerably brilliant light. Gradually his eyes adjusted themselves; it was no more than normal illumination from a score of giant atom-flame lamps set high above in the arched and groined stone of the ceiling. Black, glittering, granitic rock, studded with two huge plaques on opposite sides. A twenty-foot disk of gold mapping Earth, a twenty-foot golden disk mapping the Forgotten Planet. From a concealed atom-flame lamp in the lofty dome, two projectors shot stabbing rays against the golden disks. On Earth's, a ray of brilliant yellow-white; on the other, a ray of dim, chill blue.

	The Mother sat on a chair of state, about her the eight Mothers of the Cities and a score of giant Sarn guards. From air, eleven more were emerging, as Deya emerged piecemeal, while goggled Sarn packed into the silver and hardwood case on the long table something unseen and tenderly treated. The Decalon stood by the case, tucking unseen folds carefully into its corners, taking goggles and batteries from the guards to place on tiny pins.

	"It is the Given Law that no being, human or Sarn, shall twice be accused of a single thing," said Grayth. "Yesterday in the Hall of Judgment I was tried and acquitted. It is the Given Law that no being, human or Sarn, shall be brought for judging without an opportunity of defense, save he waive that right.

	"Neither I nor this woman, Deya, has committed any offense against any being, human or Sarn. As is our right, we ask our accuser to appear and explain before us and the Mother the reason for this arrest."

	The Mother's slitted eyes closed slowly and opened sleepily. Her powerful body remained as motionless as the stone of the Hall; the Mothers of the Cities neither moved nor seemed so much as to breathe.

	The Mother spoke in the fluting tongue of the Sarn. "The Given Law is the Law of the Mother; by it I have promised to abide, save in time of emergency. This, Grayth, is such a time. You, this woman, and perhaps certain others have sought to plot against the Sarn and the Sarn-Mother. That is the accusation; I am the accuser. What answer do you make?"

	"If one be brought before the Mother, and faced with his accuser, he has then twenty-four hours to consider his reply. The accusation must have evidence enough to make it seem just in the Mother's eyes that an answer be made, and complete enough that the accused know why this thing is charged.

	"The Mother is the accuser, but I may ask—by the Given Law—what reasoned facts bring forth this accusation?"

-

	THE MOTHER'S eyes sparkled. Almost, a smile touched her tiny lips as she looked at Grayth's keen, gray eyes. The Sarn were proud that never in the millenniums of man's enslavement had cruelty been applied, nor intentional injustice. Where the Law of the Sarn could apply logically to humans, both races worked under the same law; where—as in the nature of two races such things must be—the laws could not apply identically, justice had been applied.

	The Sarn were just; no human could say otherwise. The Sarn-Mother's age covered six-score generations of mankind, and to some extent her immortality removed her alike from human and Sarn. Wherefore, it was easier for her, who had known man's greatness, to appreciate the keenness and strength that lay in Grayth's stubborn face. And,' knowing mankind, to appreciate the steadfastness with which he would fight by every law or trick of law to win freedom back for Deya.

	And—she appreciated the searching quickness with which Grayth had forced her once again on the defensive. Her case was true and solid—but made of ten thousand thousand little things, of things that had not happened as well as of things that had. Of subtle, reasoned psychology—and not half a dozen solid facts. Of those few, three were ruled out of this consideration, because they had been dealt with in that earlier trial, when Grayth was released.

	She had no time to argue now with a mind that she knew was fully as keen as that of her own City-Mothers. There were other, more important things afoot, as that gray-eyed man well knew. And he knew as well as she that her case was not a thing to be stated and in a dozen sentences. And also that it was a perfectly just, though improvable, accusation.

	"This is a time of emergency, Grayth," said the Mother softly. "I will give you the twenty-four hours you demand, however. And your companion, Deya.

	"Decalon, let these two be taken to the fifteenth cell in the House of the Rocks."

	The Decalon and her squad of ten moved forward. Grayth turned to Deya, a slight smile on his lips, as the Ten surrounded them. Back toward the great pillared corridor leading off into unseen distances, lighted by dwindling atom flames, the guards led them.

	"The House of the Rocks. This, then, is the rumored prison of the Sam. Ware ... Ware—" Grayth called mentally.

	"I am coming, Grayth. I will join you in an hour. You need not call continuously as I have made rapport with you and can follow your normal thoughts. The sky, as I suggested, is becoming overcast. It will be a very dark night"

	"We could not leave unaided," sighed Deya. 

	"I do not believe it would be probable." Grayth laughed uneasily.

-

	Grayth moved about the cell restlessly. The Decalon and her squadron were gone, down that tube that had brought them. The single huge old Sarn that served as warden, turnkey and guard had set the tumblers on the steel door, and left with soft, shuffling toe pads.

	Grayth stopped in the center of the room, his head high and tense, furrows of concentration on his forehead. Deya, in her chair, sat motionless, her deep-blue eyes clouded in sudden thought. She rose slowly, a magnificent throwback to a race five thousand years forgotten, a viking's daughter, bearing a golden tan of the more southern sun of this region, but golden haired and blue eyed, tall and powerful.

	Slowly her eyes cleared, and a slight frown of understanding met Grayth's eyes. "There are Sarn close by. At least a dozen. And if those Sarn are prisoners here, then all the Mother's laboratories have been stripped of talent," she said softly.

	"Echoes," thought Grayth sharply. "Do not use voice."

	Deya smiled. "They do, and yet no intelligible word is audible. The echoes do not carry words; they carry sounds, confusing, blended, intermingled sound. And concentration on telepaths might make impressions on instruments, where normal thought did not. Perhaps speech is better."

	Grayth nodded. "There are a dozen Sarn, at least, all scientists. They are in the cell above, the cell below, the cells on each side. And the only clear things of their thoughts that I can make is—Aesir—and instruments."

	"I've found that shaft," came Ware's thoughts. "I haven't traced every circuit of the palace for nothing, and as the palace electrotechnician, I've found many that were not on my charts. The sky is becoming heavily overcast. It will be very dark indeed. I will join you shortly."

-

V.

	The Mother pointed silently. Across the room, a section of rock had swung aside, and a broad signal board was revealed. A green light blinked irregularly, then went out. A blue bulb winked for a moment, and died in turn, as a yellow bulb glowed steadily. "By the shaft, then. The air is not open to him." 

	The Mothers of the Cities stirred restlessly. A second yellow light flashed. "If he goes below the sixth level—" suggested the Mother of Durban.

	"The cage will remain down there, but probably he will not. He walked through a solid wall once; he may walk through solid rock." A third and fourth bulb flashed. The Mother watched quietly. The Mothers of Cities tensed as the fifth lighted. Abruptly it was out, and in sudden succession the blue and green bulbs winked.

	"He knew," said the Mother, almost approvingly. "The car did not fall. Go."

	A section of rock wall swung open. Silently the Mothers of Cities vanished behind it, and with them went the tall figures of the guards. The rock swung to. The Mother, alone on her tall throne, saw a darkening of the farther lights of the long corridor.

	Aesir stood again before the Mother, a blackness, a thing that was not black, but was blackness incarnate. A thing some seven feet in height, vaguely manlike in form.

	The Mother's thin lips smiled. "You have shrunk, Aesir. Have some of those billions of wills you mentioned left you, then?"

	A voice stirred in her mind, a respecting, yet laughing voice. "Perhaps that may be it; a few wills more of cold metal than warm human flesh. But for the good of my race, two wills you hold captive must be freed. For this I have come again. And—perhaps that you and those who wait in five adjoining cells may know me somewhat better.

	"I am the crystallization of a billion, and more than a billion wills, Mother of the Sarn."

	"There are no humans here; the Sarn need no such tales." The Mother moved annoyedly.

	"It is no tale; it is pure fact. This blackness is their product, not as, perhaps, I might explain to humans, but still their product." The voice that stirred soundless in the Mother's mind smiled.

-

	THE MOTHER nodded slowly in comprehension. "Wills and knowledge. That may be. We seek a new balance, you and I."

	"We seek a new balance, your race and mine," corrected that blackness. "You and I might reach a balance in this minute, if it were we two alone. The balance would be—that your plan went down to a depth that none, neither Sarn nor human, knows, while I remained." 

	"Yes," acknowledged the Mother. "I might be wiped out, and you remain. But your race would go, and mine remain, save that you alone continued."

	"There is no need to exchange these thoughts; each knows the other to that extent. Man has one great advantage over Sarn; that, as a race, man is more nearly developed to universal telepathy. A few of my people can already talk among themselves; I have learned the different pattern that is Sarn telepathy. I can speak with you as Grayth cannot."

	"Though he appears aware of Sarn thoughts when near us," sighed the Mother, "I had not thought of that."

	"We make an exchange now," Aesir's thoughts laughed. "You wanted observations of my ... my body stuff. I will give you that, and in exchange—"

	Aesir stepped forward, and swept from the long table the silver case that contained the cloaks of the Mother and the goggles. Simultaneously, the Mother's finger moved, and a carven bit of her high throne sank under it. From unseen projectors, a shrieking hell of flame screamed out, intolerable—blasting—The rocky floor of the great chamber screamed and puffed out in incandescent fury. The great table boomed dully in the corridors, a sudden, expanding blot of livid gas. The mad shrieking screamed and thundered down the corridors, the floor of the vast cavern slumped in annihilation that speared down through a hundred feet of rock in a single second of cosmic fury—

	And died in silence. The Mother dropped three curled arms before her face, blinking tear-blurred eyes. Aesir stood, blackness against fiery incandescence of the cooling rocks, unsupported in the air. His form was altered, a clumsy thing with a strange, angular belly. An almost rectangular protuberance. But the thing was not rectangular; one corner was twisted and bitten away.

	"I never knew," said Aesir softly, "but I am certain now; the world of the Sarn was not so heavy as Earth. You move slowly, Mother."

	Silently the blackness glided down the corridor, dwindling from the Mother's sight. Furious golden eyes glittered after the hunched, disfigured mass. Slowly the glitter faded from her eyes, and a concentration of thought appeared, perhaps even a mischievous twinkle of approbation.

	The Mother's finger touched another button, and instantly a score of tense-faced guards leaped through the door, clumsy seeming, funnel mouthed, hand weapons ready. They stopped at the door, staring at the fiery incandescence in the floor.

	The Mothers of Cities crowded through their ranks, a slow, dawning smile of satisfaction on their thin lips as they looked into the glow. The Mother of Targlan took her seat slowly. "Then the revolution is ended," she said with soft satisfaction.

	The Mother turned angry eyes on her. "Daughter," she asked bitterly, "do you think I mount here weapons of the power I have in the Hall of Judgment? I did not turn that weapon on him—but on the cloaks. No more than a corner of them did I get; he moved too swiftly. My thoughts have been disturbed in this emergency, and I have not rested in fifty hours, or I would never have left that case where he might reach it.

	"Aesir must win on this exchange, for he will know what makes the Cloak of the Mother, while I may know what makes the Cloak of Aesir." The Mother looked calmly down the long corridor, where a figure of hunched blackness turned into a narrow cleft in the great wall of the rocky tunnel.

-

VI.

	The old Sarn warder of the House of Rocks had been instructed. The Sarn-Mother had no desire to lose Sarn lives—and she wanted Aesir in that grim citadel. The warder, as Aesir appeared, turned away and left the passages open to him. The invisible guards at the narrow cleft that led into the impregnable citadel remained inactive, wrapped in invisibility.

	Up the stairways carved in the glinting rock the Blackness strode. Down the corridor to the gray steel door behind which Grayth's and Deya's minds acted as directive calls.

	And—between ranks and files of recording instruments set in every wall, in every doorway he passed. Tiny atom flames finer than the slimmest wire reached out to touch and feel at the black texture of his cloak. Unseen force fields caressed delicately at the fringes of blackness. Bolometers and thermometers felt and sampled the chill that poured from the blackness. Frigid air, like chilled puddles, flowed from that blackness and trickled across the stone floor behind him. White of frost coated the corridor pavement as he, in his dead blackness, passed.

	"Grayth—Deya—stand back from the door. The door will fade to a vague transparency. Step through it instantly." Through the impenetrable blackness, the subtle mystery of thought reached out to contact and explain to the imprisoned humans.

	The formless blackness of Aesir's hand waved stubbily over the gray metal of the door. As though that hand were a wet cloth, the door a chalked picture on slate, it vanished. Where the hand had passed in quick circles, the grim metal roiled and twisted—and vanished.

	Deya's hand reached out uncertainly, touched the space where the door had been to feel a vague opposition, as though a thick and incredibly viscous gassy stuff remained. It was utterly without temperature sensation. She lunged through it sharply, overcome by an instant's strangling suffocation, then stood beside Aesir in the corridor. Grayth joined them silently.

	"The Cloaks?" he asked.

	"They are useless save for information. The Mother's rays cut through the corner of the case, and cut strange patterns in them, no doubt. You could not use them. We'll have to go out as we are. Now come, and stay close behind me. We must put walls behind us, and that won't be easy."

	"Can we go into the rock—or would that be impossible?" Deya asked.

	Aesir's misshapen hand pointed. Behind them, the door of the cell was blackness similar to Aesir's own, a blackness rapidly congealing about two bent shadows overlapping on the surface. Two shadows where Deya and Grayth had passed through. A deadly chill was radiating from the door, a growing chill that sucked the light of the atom-flame lamps in the ceiling, and ice from the air.

	"You felt that momentary suffocation. You can't breathe inside that steel, or inside rock. And that condition of interpenetrability is both temporary and frightfully treacherous. We'll have to go."

	Ware went ahead, and now, as he passed the hair-fine atom flames that had probed for his cloak, a finger pointed and shape cracklings of lightning snapped where the jet beam of blackness struck the probing beams. Harmless to Aesir's blackness, they were hairlines of death to unshielded humans.

	The flames ahead on their course abruptly sputtered and went out. The Sarn saw no reason to lose good instruments.

	Down the stair, and out into the glare of the great atom flames lighting the House of Rocks. "There are invisible guards," said Aesir. "The Mother, I take it, warned them to let me pass in unhindered. They may seek to stop you—"

-

	IT WAS against the Mother's orders. But those Sarn guards, in their eight-foot power, in their contempt for humans, in the pride they held that never had any being imprisoned in the House of the Rocks escaped, raised unseen weapons toward Grayth and Deya.

	A long, stretching finger of jet shot out from Aesir's stubby hand. Something cracked in the air, darting lightnings and a wild, many-toned shriek of agony chopped off abruptly. A Sarn figure black as Aesir's jet stumbled from nothingness and faded behind a swiftly formed white curtain of frost crystals. The black finger swept around, and the Sarn guards died in blue lightnings and blackness.

	"Run," commanded Ware. The three started down the straight narrow cleft that led to the outer corridor. Aesir turned right, then right again, into a low-roofed tunnel. Another elevator bank, the cars undamaged. The heavy, locked metal door faded under his hand to disclose a black shaft leading down and up in emptiness to unseen depths and heights. Another door—and another—

	Then a car was found, and the three hastened through. Behind them in the main corridor a heavy pounding of running feet and clanking accouterments sounded. The blunt, dull-glossed nose of a war-blast swerved clumsily round the corridor with half a dozen giant Sarn tugging at it. Degravitized, it floated free, but its tons of mass were clumsy and hard to manage there in narrow rock corridors. Shouting, musical commands twisted it into place, settled it, and it thudded to the floor as the degravitizer was cut. Two Sarn swung the trajectory controls, and a third held the lanyard ready.

	Aesir reached for the controls of the elevator cab as the blast roared in throaty fury at dissolving, flaming walls. The rock walls to the left and right flared into deadly flame of dying atoms. And the view was lost as the translucency of the metal door snapped instantly into blackness, a blackness that licked up the furious energy greedily and pulled with freezing fingers at the heat of the two human bodies within.

	"That button, Grayth. Quickly. I cannot touch it through this cloak," Ware snapped.

	Grayth pushed the thing, one among a bank of hundreds. The floor of the cab pushed against them momentarily, then a sense of weightless falling gripped them as Ware's black finger pointed at something in the control mechanism. Blackness and frightful cold drained every trace of warmth from a resistor in the controls, and the full current drove through the degravitator control. The car shot madly upward.

	"The Mother has many of these cars wired with power cut-offs. If this is one—as it probably is—and she learns in time which car we took, she may cut out our circuit. If so— we still have one chance, though I have never dared try it."

	"Better cut that resistance back in," said Grayth quietly. "Listen to the howl of the air above."

	The shriek was mounting. Far above in the closed tube, compressed by the upward plunge of the tube-fitting car, the air was howling through some vent. It was a vast organ pipe that changed its tune upward, upward—more and more swiftly as the tube length shortened and the pressure mounted—

	"I can't." Ware's hidden head shook. "The air pressure must stop us. But not until we reach the top of the building and the automatic safeguards go into action. They'll cut the current in the car and apply brakes as we pass the topmost floor. If the Mother hasn't already—"

-

	THE SHRIEK mounted. Abruptly the drive of the car vanished. Grayth, already firmly gripping the carved cage walls, flung a protecting arm about Deya and gripped more tightly. Aesir tumbled upward toward the roof of the cab, inverted himself somehow in midflight, and hung poised.

	"Don't touch me," snapped Ware's thoughts in their minds. "It would be death—"

	A new sibilant hiss cut through the roar of the air in the tube above, and Ware sighed in relief. "The Mother was too late. She cut the power—but not before we had come so high, and so fast that the automatic safeguards tripped. The emergency brakes have gone on."

	The deceleration died, and Ware floated back to the floor. The car was stopped, was sinking slowly. It clicked again, and a ratchet locked somewhere beneath their feet. The door of the car opened with a rumble, and an outer door slipped aside. The three stepped out into a corridor, a corridor lighted by the atom-flame lamps of the Sarn, lamps carved in alabaster and golden amber stone. They were in the uppermost floor of the Palace of the Sarn.

	Far below, the Sarn-Mother looked thoughtfully at the little lighted column of signal lamps. The City-Mothers followed her gaze, furious as they saw the double red bulbs of the safety guard signals go on. "I am curious," said the Sarn-Mother softly. "He froze the resistor in the degravitizer circuit with his blackness, surely, to get any such mad climb rate. But I have a thought that Aesir does nothing that he does not know some remedy for, nor attempt anything that he does not have some second, saving escape. What would he have done had I been able to cut his power before he could reach the safety trips?"

	The City-Mothers were not curious. They waited impatiently as the Mother let seconds slip away without flinging a rank of guards about that upper floor.

	The Mother made no move. She saw no gain in throwing her guards against the blackness, that, so far as she could see, had no weakness. She saw, rather, that her best policy was to wait the report of her scientists. Knowledge was the power she needed now. That, and the power she already had; control over all sources of the materials whose lack rendered Aesir harmless—so far as revolution went.

-

VII.

	Aesir stood in the entranceway of the Hall of Judgment. Behind, through the ever-open doors, the Gardens of the Sarn were visible. Aesir—Ware—smiled. "I said it might be an overcast night," his thought whispered softly.

	Grayth and Deya shivered. The gardens knelt before a wind that howled in maniac fury. In the reflected light that shone against the low-pressed sky, a wrack of storm boiled overhead. And it was cold. The wind that shrieked across the gardens was a breath of savage winter cutting through this summer night.

	"I think," said Ware, "that it will rain." 

	As he spoke the sky burst into flame. Vast tongues of lightning ripped across the sky, stabbing down to Earth in a mighty network of electric fire. The air exploded with a blast of thunder that rattled the mighty fabric of the Sarn Palace to its bones. Instantly the floodgates opened. The clouds split up and tumbled down in liquid streams. The shouting wind lashed the water droplets before it in a horizontal spray that was half falling water, half water slashed from the ground that was suddenly a pond. The twinkling lights of the human city beyond the Sarn City walls were suddenly gone. 

	"Perhaps," said Ware pleasedly, "I used too much." 

	"You?" gasped Grayth. "You did this?" 

	"The Sarn hate cold, and they hate the wet more than any cat ever did. You'll find no Sarn loose in the gardens tonight. Our way should be clear to the gates."

	Deya shuddered and looked at Aesir's blackness. "That wind is cold; that rain must be near sleet And I am dressed for June—not a February night."

	"I used too much power," Ware shrugged. "I never did this thing before. Put it down to inexperience."

	"Experimental error," Grayth sighed. "Gods, man, you've washed the city away. Come, let's start before we have to swim."

	"Not yet," said Ware. "I've something else to do. The Mother wanted to study this blackness of mine. Well, by all the gods there are, I'll give her all she wants. I'll make her think again before she summons Aesir for her pleasure!"

	He turned about and faced into the great Hall of Judgment. It was magnificent beneath the dim light of a few big lamps. It was jet stone and chrome, gold and sparkling, inlaid crystal. Aesir's arm became a funnel of blackness that pointed in slow circles around the room. Where that arm passed, the sparkle of polished stone and shining metal or gem vanished. It became a dead blackness. The walls ceased to have the appearance of walls, but became empty spaces that stretched off to some eternity of night.

	The glint and whisper of the atom flames died away; their strong light dulled to something somber and depressing.

	And cold—cold welled out of the place in a tangible flood. The humans shivered violently and fled from the doorway that dripped, suddenly, with frozen mist. Puddled air, chilled near its freezing point, it seemed, flowed down the walls and out the door. A breeze sprang up, a throaty gurgle of air rushing into the room at the top of the great door to rush out at the bottom in a freezing, unseen torrent.

	Grayth and Deya hurried aside, shivering in unbearable chill. The torrent of air poured out, across the vestibule to the entranceway of the palace. It flowed down the steps, and as they watched, the howling rain turned to snow and froze as sleet on the stone.

	"Yes," said Ware in satisfaction, "the Sarn hate cold. It will be a month before that room is habitable again. Now come."

-

	HE WALKED through the flood, and down the steps toward the windlashed gardens. The wind howled by him, swirled around his cloak of blackness, and the figure was outlined in white that swirled and glinted in the faint light radiated from the building. Behind him, Grayth and Deya made their way, white figures against the blackness. In a moment they were lost behind driving, glistening curtains of rain.

	They were soaked and freezing in an instant. In his arms Grayth felt Deya shivering violently. "Ware," he called abruptly. "Ware—go on; we will meet you. We can follow that blackness only by the snow that forms around you, and on a night like this, may I be cursed if I follow a walking snowstorm. I'm freezing now, and Deya, too."

	"Frozen," the girl chattered.

	"I can't cut off this shield," Ware answered. 'The instruments aren't insulated well enough. If water touches them— there'll be neither Sarn nor human city to squabble over. Meet me at my house. You can find your way?"

	"I think so," nodded Grayth, shivering.

	"Strike for the road. It will glow tonight, as usual. And there will be no Sarn upon it, with this liquid blizzard howling."

	"Good." Grayth and Deya set out half-running. Black wind and water thundered through the gardens. The sky exploded once more in blinding light, the waves of sound rocking the ground beneath their feet so that even half-frozen as they were, they felt its shaking.

-

VIII.

	IN THE RUCK of that wild night, no eyes saw Grayth and Deya reach their goal. Rain in solid, blinding sheets hid them as they slipped between wind-bowed trees to Ware's small stone cottage, into its unlighted doorway. Ware's hand found Grayth's, and led the shivering, dripping pair through the tiny room, abruptly brilliant in the explosion of another lightning flash. At the far wall, Ware fumbled at a stone that grated and moved. Silently he led them down to a yet smaller room lined with rough granite. The stone above them swung back, and a light sprang up. But again Ware was fumbling, and again he led them down, down to a musty cavernous place, walled with age-rusted steel, supported by rusted columns of steel hidden at the heart of thicker columns—stalagmites and stalactites formed about and buttressing the corroded metal.

	"The old subway," Ware explained. "It goes for a quarter of a mile in that direction and nearly a mile in the other before cave-ins block it. All, you see, beneath the human city—and most at a depth of more than one hundred and twenty feet. My lab's over here." It was set up on the concrete platform of a forgotten station.

	"But here—strip off those wet things and stand before these heaters." Ware turned to a crude control panel, and a network of iron bars grew warm, hot, then faintly red as a welcome heat poured out.

	"Do we hide," asked Deya softly, "or frankly return?"

	"If," said Ware sadly, "I knew how much longer this queer status of half-revealed half-concealed revolt was going to continue before I could get somewhere, we might be in a better position to know what to do."

	"Which makes me wonder, Ware. Half-concealed half-revealed, I mean. The Mother's Cloaks have the goggles to make vision possible. I don't know what that blackness of yours is—beyond that it is infernally cold; I'm still congealed—but if no ray can pierce it, pray tell me how you see where you are going."

	Ware looked up, laughing. "I don't. Yet I found my way across that swamp called the Garden of the Sarn more easily than you, tonight. The telepath is the answer—I see through others' eyes. The Mother told me where the cloaks were hidden." He nodded toward the truncated case. "Without her eyes—I'd never have seen to reach them."

	"Perhaps," said Deya, "if we knew better what you have, and what you lack, we could help more efficiently."

	"Perhaps," suggested Grayth grimly, "you can wash the blasted Sarn out of their city. Another such 'overcast night' and you may do it."

	"The Sarn City's higher than we are." Ware smiled. "But our people do stand cold and wet better than theirs."

	"But," said Deya, "it isn't practical—nor fast enough. What have you there? My slowly thawing bones give me a very personal interest in that cloak of yours."

-

	WARE SIGHED gustily, "It's hard to explain. About ninety percent of it isn't in words, or explainable in words. It's a mathematical concept that has reality.

	"Wherefore I will now give you a typical pre-Sarn analogy, because neither you nor Grayth can get pictures from mathematics. It's a language, you know—as much a language as the one we normally speak, or the Sarn language. Some terms you can translate, and some can't be. For instance x2+y2=c2 in mathematics language for 'circle.' I will give you analogies which I guarantee are not sound, and neatly conceal the truth. But I can't do any better.

	"Dirac, a physicist of the pre-Sarn days, explained the positron as a whole in a continuum of electrons in negative energy states. Space, he said, was completely filled with electrons possessed of negative energies. It was full to the brim, and overflowed into the electrons we can detect—ordinary matter electrons.

	"Shortly before the Sarn came, men were developing hints that there might be more to that. There was. Electrons in positive energy states, when vibrated, gave off radiation—light, heat, and so on. If you use energy concentrated enough, you can vibrate electrons in negative energy states. You might say they give off negative energy radiation. They produce photons of energy in negative energy states.

	"As I said, it's an analogy that I can't honestly describe, but the effect is radiated negative energy. Radiant cold or radiant darkness or radiant lack-of-X-rays—whatever you want.

	"Energy being conserved, of course, the result is that the source of that radiation, instead of consuming energy; gives it off. My pack does not radiate negative energy; it sets up a condition in the air about me that makes the air atoms radiate negative energy.

	"The atomic flame the Mother turned on me satisfied, to some extent, the ravening demand for energy that negative energy setup caused. The force that makes the air atoms radiate in that way makes them unstable—sort of splits them into two parts, two half-formed atoms of matter. In that state, neither half is real, but each has a terrible demand for sufficient mass—in the form of energy—to raise it to reality. In that median state, matter is interpenetrable. We walk through steel doors and stone floors, for instance. It will hang on that unstable point of half-and-half momentarily, before reforming to matter. It's as dependable as a rattlesnake or a 'tame' tiger. While we're interpenetrating, it may fall off that delicate balance and consume our mass-energy in reforming. When Sarn guards send atomic flames after us, the unstable matter greedily drinks in the energy, and starts definitely toward reforming with the air of that energy. If left alone, one-half of the semiatoms absorbs the other half, and it's normal again. In the meantime, it's black. And cold—like the Mother's Hall of Judgment right now.

	"When the Mother's beams were tearing at me, the energy was actively making extra atoms of air. It didn't make any difference what kind of beam she used—the energy was consumed. Her atomic flame had lots of power—and made a lot of air. Her curious atom-disruption beam didn't carry much energy, but the particular form of the beam was most deadly. The form passed through my shield quite unchanged, theoretically. But the energy had been removed from it.

	"Naturally, the Mother's physicists are badly puzzled now by a completely unanimous report of 'nothing' on the part of then- instruments. None of them, of course, read below absolute zero. That shield has a temperature of -55,000° Absolute—or thereabouts.

	"I could wipe out the Sarn very readily. But"—Ware shrugged his shoulders—"they'd wipe out all humans while I was at it."

	"What do you need?"

	"An hour," Ware sighed. "One hour—in the Sarn workshops. A few pounds of molybdenum, some wire-drawing apparatus, a few ounces of scandium and special glass-blowing machinery. Then I'd have a duplicate of this toy of mine that would protect this whole city for fifty miles about"

	"In other words," said Grayth, smiling slightly, "if you could drive the Sarn out, you could drive them away."

	"Precisely," acknowledged Ware. "Which is comforting, if useless."

-

	DEYA RUBBED her left arm with her right hand thoughtfully, and turned sideways to the heater. "How far," she asked, "will your present apparatus reach?"

	"That, too, is helpful." Ware grinned. "Just about far enough to blanket completely the Sarn City. I could protect that against any attack. But not, by any means, the human city."

	"That might help, though." Deya nodded. "I have something in mind. My dress is dry, if somewhat crumpled. Could you get us something to eat, Ware? My chill had left me hungry." "What's your thought?" asked Ware eagerly, half annoyedly. The telepaths did not carry thoughts the wearer wished to conceal.

	"I ... I'd rather talk with Grayth first." Deya shook her head slowly. "I may be wrong."

	Resignedly, Ware went up the crude stairway, up to the kitchen of his cottage one hundred and fifty feet above. Deya looked at Grayth as each in turn pulled off the telepath.

	Deya pulled on her dress, smoothing the still slightly damp crinkles down. "How is Simons, Grayth?"

	Grayth looked at her in slight puzzlement, his shirt half on. "Hopeless, as you know—but why do you ask now? He could not help us, anyway."

	Deya's lips set in a slight, tight smile, her eyes bright and thoughtful. "I'm not so sure, Grayth. Not ... so ... sure. Ware has said that anything that he can run through an amplifier can be recorded, hasn't he? And if it can be recorded, it could be rebroadcast on a different wavelength, perhaps—"

	Grayth started, went rigid. "By Aesir and all the gods of Earth! Deya! What fantastic idea have you now? That man is mad, horribly, loathsomely mad—"

	"Negative energy," said Deya shortly, deft fingers arranging her hair. "If we could make the Sarn give up without fighting—in despair and hopelessness— And there are energies other than those purely physical ones that the Sarn are so thoroughly equipped to resist."

	Grayth stood silent for a moment, his swift-working mind forgetting for the moment the task of driving his tired body. "You've talked with Dr. Wesson?" he asked intently.

	Deya nodded slowly, "Yes—just this morning," then thought a moment before going on. "Or rather yesterday. It will be drawn in about three hours, if the storm has stopped. We should bring him here before then. You see what I have in mind?"

	"Yes! I'll have Carron—"

	Ware came down the steps, slowly, bearing two trays with bread and cheese and cold meat, some cups, cream and coffee. "If you will use those beakers for the water, the laboratory hot plates for a stove, Deya, I'd prefer your coffee to mine." 

	"Ware," asked Grayth tensely, "can you record a thought—a telepath thought?"

	Ware stopped, brows suddenly furrowed. "Record it? Why? I've never tried—it's easier to think it again." 

	"Could it be done?" 

	"Hm-m-m ... yes. I think so."

	"How long to make the apparatus?" Grayth asked anxiously.

	Ware hesitated. Shrugged. "A few hours. I can make that Telepath apparatus, because of its very nature, has to be tiny. A few grains of the hard-to-get elements go a long way when the whole apparatus is less than a cubic millimeter in volume. But it takes time. A recorder and reproducer—say, two days, once I get the design. I think... yes, I know I can do it."

	Grayth swept the telepath back to his head. Rapidly his thoughts drove out. "Carron—Carron—" 

	"Yes?" Sleepily Carron responded to the call. 

	"It's three hours to dawn. Carron—this must be done before the first people stir. Get Ohrman, the instrument maker, to Ware's at once. There are telepaths to be made. Get Dr. Wesson and tell him to call at Ware's. Then rouse one of the other men to receive and transmit my orders and get some sleep yourself.

	"Now, Ware, draw out the plans for the parts you'll need for that apparatus, so Ohrman can start while you get some sleep. Oh ... you can, I assume, make some translator arrangement that will twist human thought to Sarn telepath levels?"

	"Eh? Human to Sarn levels—I don't know about that. I've been working on that problem on and off for weeks."

	"Good—it'll be on, and not off, now. If you can do that, Ware, we win Earth again!"

-

IX.

	The thing was incredibly tiny. It lay in Ware's palm, two small, inclosed reels connected by a bridge of bulging metal, the size, perhaps of a half peanut, between two slices of inch-thick steel rod. But the workmanship was wonderfully fine.

	"This is only the reproducer," Ware sighed. His eyes were red and weary. "The recorder is there. You said that needn't be portable. And it records, as you wanted, in Sarn-type bands from the human thoughts, on a silver ribbon. The ribbon is endless, and repeats as long as this little spring is wound.

	"Now, may I ask what you want of it? I've concentrated so on this that no question could enter my mind, I think. How is recorded thought to dislodge the Sarn? By repeating, 'Go away—go away.' Endlessly? Telepathic commands have no more force than words, you know."

	"Not if they are resisted," Deya acknowledged. "But they can enter below conscious strength level. Do you want to see who—why—"

	The stone above moved. Grayth and Deya and Ware looked up. Only the heavily sleeping, exhausted Ohrman remained unconscious of the intruder.

	"Down, Simons," said Dr. Wesson's voice. There was a gentle urgency in it, a pitying yet firm tenderness. A pair of feet appeared, slowly, wearily, with an air of terrible, unending exhaustion—tired beyond all rest, misery and hopelessness subtly expressed in the dull, shambling descent of those heavy feet.

	Loosely, miserably they came down the long flight, their mechanical, rhythmic drumming a muffled beat of defeat. The man came into view. His figure was lax, powerfully muscled arms and shoulders bent under a soul-deadening weight of overwhelming despair. Down—down—

	"Down, Simons." The doctor's voice was weary with a queer despair caught somehow from that doom-weighted figure.

	Ware turned slowly to look at Deya, at Grayth. "Who is he—Simons?"

-

	THEY DID NOT answer, and he turned back to look at the figure that stood unmoving now beneath the powerful lights of this buried laboratory. His face was pale and lined, powerful with the strength drained from it, set in a dead mask of uncaring despair. His eyes were black, black pits that looked without hope, or hope of hope, into the keen gray eyes of Aesir.

	Ware felt something within him chill under the gaze of those eyes that no longer cared or hoped. The soul beyond them was not dead and longed for death. The lights of the bright room seemed cold and drear. Fatigue and hopelessness of the endless struggle against the overwhelming Sarn surged up in Ware, hopelessness and despair so deep he did not mind that the cause was lost before—

	He tore his eyes away. "Deya—hi the name of the gods, what—who—what is this thing!" he gasped.

	"That is negative energy, Ware. That is the negative energy of the mind, the blackness of Aesir applied to all hope, all ambition. He is mad; he is a manic depressive. He has no hope, no thought of escape from that negative hell of despair that is beyond despair. He is mad, for no sane mind could conceive that awful blackness, the hopelessness that is a positive, devouring force that infests his being.

	"If ever his mind should start to mend, he will become a suicidal maniac, driven to kill himself in any way he can, at any horrible expense. He cannot think of that escape now. That is struggle, that is in itself a hope—and he has none. To conceive of death as an escape is to hope, to believe that something better can be.

	"That is beyond him now, for hope—struggle—effort to escape—all involve a will that mind has lost.

	"He is mad, Ware, because no mind can hold the terrible despair his thoughts now know and remain sane.

	"Record his thoughts. Record them there on that silver ribbon. Record that hopelessness that knows no resistance, no will to struggle. Record it, and broadcast that through the Sarn City!"

-

X.

	The Sarn-Mother sat motionless at the high window of her tower, dull eyes looking out over the Gardens of the Sarn. Rich cloaks and heavy blankets wrapped her—useless things. The cold seeped through to her bones and drank her warmth. The great chamber, windowed on every side, was darkened by a heavy gloom, chilled by a cold that had grown slowly through the hours and the days she had sat here, almost unmoving. The bleak, cold stone of the walls was damp with a cold sweat of moisture. Great heaters in the walls ran at red heat and the dark air drank their warmth. Magnificent atom-flame lamps rustled softly in the high ceiling; their faint, silken whisper mumbled meaningless in her ears, and their strong light had lost its sparkle. Some subtle change in the air made it seem gray and very cold.

	The sun did not shine here. A cold, steady rain beat down on the gardens below, ran endlessly over the clear window-panes, stirring under vague, listless winds. The sun did not shine here. Through the fog of slowly dripping rain, beyond the limits of her gardens, the sun shone. It was brilliant there, she knew, a bright, hot sun sparkling in the bright clean air. It was June out there. The year was dead here, dead in a creeping, growing chill that burdened the land. The creeping, growing chill of—

	That hellish thing of blackness. Almost, she felt angered at it, squatting there, dejected, black, unutterably woeful in the center of her gardens. Or what had been her gardens. R was a ravaged place now, plowed and harrowed by howling beams of atomic death, a shrieking incandescent effort to move that crouched thing of blackness. It had meant only the destruction of one slight spot of beauty in a dreary, cold world.

	But that meant little, for there was no beauty now, or ever would be again. Only the chill that stole the heat from the air, the walls, her tired old body and the subtle darkness that cut through the brilliance of the atom flames and left light without sparkle, colors that all tinged gray.

	A finger stirred listlessly and pressed a control. No, it was over. Full heat. She had known that; what sense to try again what she had tried a thousand times before during these endless, sleepless days that changed only from one shade of gray to a deeper black.

	Dull eyes looked at the sweating walls. Cold, stone walls. When had it ever been that she had ordered stone? Warm marbles of rose and green. Warm? The rose of dying day before night's chill. The green of endless arctic ice. It mocked her and drove its chill to her age-old body.

	Age-old. Unending years that had wheeled and rolled while she waited, useless. Waited for the coming of her people, or when she might again seek in space. Useless years of fruitless attempts to learn that one, lost secret of speed bettering light's swift flight. Lost—lost with the ten trained Sarn that died those four thousand years gone in the blasting of this city once called New York. Too much else she'd had to do then to learn that secret.

	Time she had now; four thousand wheeling years. But now she could not learn; it eluded her dulled mind, and the weakened minds of the decadent race.

	As Aesir eluded her, and squatted miserable in the midst of misery his works had brought.

	She stirred. The cold worked through. Hot food, hot drinks—they warmed a moment, then added dead, cold mass to the chill within her. A deadness that, she knew now, had been within her before this glooming chill had made her more aware. Her Sarn were weak; the soft product of an easy world, too sanely organized to require of them sharp, sharpening competition in endeavor.

	And she was old. Immortality she had, and everlasting youth of tissue. But the mind grew old and dull, the courses of its thoughts narrowed and chilled with years and millenniums that passed. She was never to recall that exact age—but what matter? A stupid thing. What mattered that she thought of it or not; the years had passed, they'd graved their mark and narrowing on her. And on her race.

	They had weakened. Humankind had strengthened, grown with the years that sapped the Sarn. Now, in her gardens, that hunched figure of dejection squatted, chilling all her city, defying the minds of all the Sarn. It had been a matter of time, inevitable as the fated motion of the planets. And the time had come. The humans were the stronger.

-

	THE DOOR behind her opened slowly, but her brooding eyes remained fixed on the far wall till the intruder moved before her gaze. Barken Thil. Once, the Mother had thought her brilliant, hoped this physicist might find the forgotten secret of the speed drive. Now her eight-foot figure was shrunken, dimmed by the fog and gloom that curdled the air about them. "Yes?" The Mother spoke wearily.

	"Nothing." The physicist shook her head. "It's useless, Mother of the Sarn. The blackness is there. No screen, no substance shuts it off. It registers no more than the cold we feel on our instruments; they tell us only what we know, that the air transmits less light, less heat. It is absorbed somehow, and yet does not warm thereby. A vacuum transmits energy as before—but we cannot live in vacuum.

	"Thard Nilo has gone mad. She sits on her stool and stares at the wall, saying: 'The sun is warm ... the sun is bright. The sun is warm ... the sun is bright!' She will not move save when we lead her. She does not resist—but she does not act."

	"The sun—is warm," the Mother said softly. "The sun—is bright. The sun—never shines here now. But the sun is bright and hot and the air is clean and dry in Bish-Waln."

	The tired eyes looked up slowly toward the lax figure of the physicist. "I ... I think I will visit. Bish-Waln. Where the sun is hot and bright and the air—

	"I have never been there; never in all the time Earth became ours, four thousand years ago, have I left Sarn City. I have never seen Targlan of the ever-blue skies and the ever-white mountains. I have never seen Bish-Waln in the golden sands ... the hot sands.

	"I think that now, before humanity rises finally, I should like to see it. I think ... yes, perhaps I will go."

-

	TWO HOURS later, she roused herself to give orders, vaguely, and hours later to enter her ship. The chill leaked out of metal and crystal as from the cold, green stone. She stared blankly through the rain-washed windows as the gloom-crowned gardens and the Sara City dropped behind. One more ship rose slowly, listlessly behind her. Vaguely, she wondered that so few Sarn had been still there that these two ships could carry all.

	For the first time in four thousand years she was leaving her city. For the first time in four thousand years no Sarn remained in Sarn City.

	The clouds and gloom were suddenly below, a dull grayness that heaved and writhed like a living dome over Sarn City. June sunlight angled from the setting redness in the west across the human city stirring vaguely there below. A warmth she had not known in six unending days shot through her ancient body, and a blissfulness of sleep lapped her as the ship accelerated strongly, confidently, toward the sparkling waters beyond, toward Bish-Waln, bright and hot in the golden Sahara.

	Her eyes closed, and she did not see through the dissolving clouds to the black figure that slowly rose erect, nor to the ordered division of the legion of peace that marched toward the blank, silent windows of the Sarn Palace. Behind them came a loose group of work-clad men to disperse among the dead, lightless shops of this, the city that had marked the landing of the Sarn.

The End

Dead Knowledge
Astounding Stories – January 1938
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

Dead minds and unknown hieroglyphs alone held that Death-knowledge

-

	The sun was a red ball sinking at the end of the broad, paved avenue that ran straight to the east. Its long rays slanted down across the city, across the towers, gilding their clean-lined, hulks with a parting gold. An absolute silence wrapped the whole majestic city, a silence that had settled on, and into the three men standing immobile on the short, green grass of the Circle that was the city's center. In a dozen directions great arteries radiated .through vast chasms between artificial cliffs that lifted a hundred stories, a thousand feet into the dark blue of the sky.

	A restless breeze, stirred by the approaching chill of twilight, soughed softly down the street, around the immense bulks of towering buildings leaping upward, sweep on sweep of fine-drawn graceful line. Bar Young stirred restlessly, obliquely eyed his companions with an uneasy tensity. "That—that's why nobody noticed us."

	"There were lights in this city last night," Hall said in a voice lowered unconsciously by the pressing weight of silence. "It can't—can't be deserted."

	"I thought for a while that the people might be a race of day-sleepers;—an owl people—but even at 4 a. m. no Earth-city could be this quiet, so motionless. And however alien these people of a strange solar system may be, they must be in many ways similar to man. Those buildings—this park—all their works might be those of some city of Earth. It's a ghost-city, a deserted place like the abandoned mining camps." Ross looked about with a vast unease.

	"We could try one of the other cities—" suggested Young. "We have to find them—the people—somehow. Twenty-seven light years—three years of traveling—to reach this system, to find five dead worlds, and only this one habitable. And inhabited; such cities as this cannot be simply—abandoned. There was no place for the people to go, no other planet they might have migrated to. And no signs of space-travel or space-ports that might accommodate spaceships, even such small ones as ours." Over his shoulder he glanced back toward the 300-foot bubble of steel and quartz that had brought them across vast gulfs of emptiness.

	The swift-sinking sun shrank below the eastern horizon, its beams lifting from the level of the park, climbing slowly up the sides of the towers, painting green and blue and pale-yellow stone to red. Polished metal reflected its brilliance in .flashing gleams from the curving, rising buildings that towered about them, a ring of 1000-foot giants dwarfing the low trees of the park, and the 100-foot sapphire needle of crystalline light at the center of the circle. Slowly, the lifting light left the feet of the buildings, the deep blue of the sky overhead darkened with a fast-running twilight.

	Still darkness crept into replace the silent daylight, welling up from the pavements into the shadows. The thin, clear air of the planet, utterly quiet and dustless, held no light within it; the shadows became black and sharp. The deserted city of daylight began to people itself with unseen things that moved soundless in the silence, pressing the lengthening shadows toward the three men with a soundless, eager menace.

	Ross shook his head slowly. "We've got to find out what happened here—why this city was deserted. There is something—wrong. A ghost town is something understandable—a town, built by a lode of mineral, that ceases to be when the mineral is gone. But a city—a magnificent city of 1000-foot towers and ten million homes stretched over fifty miles of meadowland cannot be deserted. It's impossible. Even—and I thought of this for a moment—even a plague could not drive out every man, every woman and child. There would be watchmen, caretakers, there would be sanitation corps men to work and rehabilitate the city. It is too much, too much of labor and thought and effort to be neglected utterly, however fearful the plague might be.

	"There is something wrong." He watched the uneasy shadows creep across the pavements toward them, engulfing them as the light of the city faded, the last faint sun-rays touched the tips of the highest towers for a lingering instant—and vanished. The night-wind grew, murmurous and mumbling behind the buildings, freighted with the communications of the unknown rising on the flowing tide of dark.

-

	He turned abruptly; a soft, blue light was growing on the building walls—something behind them— At his start the others turned, nervous hands grappling suddenly to heat-guns. The sapphire needle behind them was a crystal of living fire that wavered, grew m a rising rush, and retreated for a moment to gather strength for another upward rush in the dusk. Waves of shadows forced back by it seemed to gather denser in the buildings' outskirts, spreading invaders hurled back by the light.

	With a rush the light mounted suddenly to a needle beam that stabbed into the dark sky, to winking, unfamiliar stars, in strange constellations. Simultaneously with the jetting light beam, a low, sweet hum built up, up to a ringing music that floated out across the silent, darkening bulks about the park. It rose and fell and rose again in sweet cadences, to fade away in plaintive notes. As it faded, light, a million lights on a thousand streets grew, a vast lighting system coming to life to drive back again the shadows crouching angrily at the feet of the towers.

	Swift darkness fell with the sun's disappearance, a darkness that made the unlighted buildings vanish in black needles against the black, star-flecked sky. Only their lowermost levels were clear in the soft rays of the street lights, fading into rising dimness of black, lightless eyes—polished glass that gleamed dimly without being illuminated, unexpected winkings of light from ranges far above the effective limits of the lamps.

	Bar Young's breath sucked softly. "Automatic—automatic lights controlled by the coming of night. No light—no window shows a trace of illumination within. Only the city's mechanical watchman functioning to turn on the lights of a deserted waste. That was the light we saw last night from space, as we came in. Those were the lights we saw in the western cities already in night when we were landing.

	"They are gone—gone, it must be, forever, and gone not hurriedly, but calmly, putting away all cars, all traces of their occupancy in neat order. But why, why have they left this place?"

	Hall moved forward into the light of the crystal and out of the lean shadow of their cruiser. "I don't like this city—particularly at night. There is something wrong with it, the same thing that made the people leave. It was the city, I feel somehow, not the people that made this desertion necessary."

	Ross moved his head in a vague gesture, half agreement, half negation. "The city—well—I have the feeling you do, the oppression of the silence and the dusk. Those buildings stand there, crouching in the darkness, half-seen things that have a suggestion, in this city of deserted mystery, of some menacing thing. But isn't it more our own vague feelings—strangers from an alien world and solar system, who have stumbled on this cosmic mystery as the quick dusk of this planet set in—that are to blame?"

	Young looked at him under frowning brows, a wry grimace twisting his mouth. "The original builders deserted it. Something, human or inhuman, forced them to a course unbelievably extreme. Yet—there is no sign of wreckage, of invasion, of trouble. The city is clean, so clean that even the normal litter of a great city does not appear. We have to investigate, but—I don't like this city of night. We can go to one of the daylight cities."

	"This is one deserted city," said Ross abruptly stubborn. "I feel I'm fooling myself with man's instinctive, age-old fear of darkness, and unknown things. The others probably aren't deserted, and this is our opportunity to study the race unhampered. Their language, perhaps, from books and pictures. I say we should investigate, visit some of the homes we saw on the outskirts. Our ship is slim enough to move down that main artery without striking anything, and in a few moments we can get some indication of what the people who deserted this place were. Therein may lie the whole answer, a vagrant, migratory people descended, perhaps, from birds, who move en masse from city to city as the seasons—"

-

	Young looked at him keenly, and his voice trailed off apologetically. "You know as well as I that no civilization of 1000-foot towers would rise from a race of migratory habits. No, the people who labored for this city intended to remain, generation after generation, and they built with lofty permanence in mind. Hall, what about that language? I think—but you're the expert."

	"You saw what I did—you're probably right. As a guess—the signs, that posted notice on the tree, looked to me like an ideographic writing."

	"Ideograph—" Ross repeated vaguely.

	"Picture writing, like Chinese or ancient Egyptian. It is a sort of completely conventionalized rebus writing. In a civilization such as this, it must be highly idiomatic, impossible to decipher without a hundred years of study."

	Ross shook his head stubbornly. "Then we'll have to investigate. We can go down that main avenue, out toward the suburban districts, and stop at some apartment house." He pointed down the great avenue that stretched out straight toward the east. A faint lingering of lighter sky gave substance to the vast, hunched shadows that waited down the long passage. The night pressed down on the thin line of lights, crushing their illumination to the ground, obscuring the unseen things that went on in the higher, darker silence. The silence of the city brooded again, unbroken. The dusk-wind died away as night gained full sway. A moonless sky—sprinkled with the myriad bright, blind eyes of the stars looked down sightlessly.

	The silence held them in its grasp, froze them for long seconds before Ross moved, half-angrily. "Let's go down there." He spoke in a voice that echoed in startled protest against the blind, high walls. "This silence gets you." His voice was suddenly softened. He turned and walked to the open lock of the ship, his rubber-soled feet seeming noisy in the ringing corridor.

	A silent ghost, the ship lifted on her antigravity field arid drifted down the broad avenue, the space-fields meshing in the soundless structure of space to pull it forward, as noiseless as the city itself. Only the soft purr of the atomics, the familiar whine of the circulators, changed the soundless menace of the city to a world of reality, of living things moving in the light.

	The hot, white beams of the forward landing light swept brilliance down the avenue ahead as the silent, waiting towers moved by in stately procession—broad, brown-paved streets, gray concrete sidewalks, a thousand shops, their broad windows sparkling in the light of the ship. Goods of strange pattern and unguessed purposes lay still behind the windows of the locked, dark stores. "They did not take their possessions," Young said softly.

	Ross' fingers flickered over the controls, his iron-gray eyes level and intent on the avenue before him, his powerful, stocky body hunched over the controls in self-determined blindness to the dark mystery beyond the windows. Hall's lean face looked strained and tense; to him the presence of the goods seemed no surprise, nor would its absence have changed his opinion one iota. His dark, keen eyes followed the moving windows silently, watching them slip behind.

	The towers shortened, pulled down from the skies to become squatter, smaller buildings as they left the city's heart. Swift miles fled behind the cruiser's sleek, bright-metal form. Ten times the speed of light lay within the powers of her fields; she idled now, and the wind of her passage chuckled meaningful laughter in her wake. The shops gave way to blank-walled business houses, then again as five-story apartment houses, set back from the avenue, spaced by green, tree-dotted lawns, appeared.

	The cruiser slowed, halted in the street. The burbling of the wind died away and the silence of the city wrapped it again. No cheep of insect or ruffled piping of birds disturbed the utter quiet as the purr of the atomics died away. Ross rose, his feet scraping noisily. "Bring your camera, Hall, and let's see what we can get. There must be some indication in there—some reason for this desertion." His voice echoed pleasantly in the ship, breaking the pressing silence in rolling sounds that continued, gave life to his voice. The vast-ness of the city's ways drank in the sound, made voices flat and as unnatural as the city.

-

	There was no door, but a grilled gateway that led into a courtyard open to the still night sky. A dozen doors opened from that; a fountain pool lay with unruffled waters, reflecting the starlight save where the smooth surface was broken by the spider-web fronds of some water plant showing minute red flowers in the light of their atom flares. The three floors of the building were terraced back from the courtyard, so that each story had a small, railed terrace running entirely round the court. Onto these the doors of the apartments opened. Pale-blue wash of some sort laid over a plasterlike material reflected the light of their flares, limning each detail of the patio clearly—the winding stairs that led up from terrace to terrace, the bright blue and white tiles of the fountain pool—"

	"They knew how to live," said Young softly. "Three years in that metal bubble and this place, even in the silence, looks attractive. Why—why—why should any being, who loved life and beauty as the creators of this must have, leave this building, neat and ordered, a perfect home?"

	"Try that first door, Hall," said Ross steadily. "I'll try the one on this side. Young, you want to take the second one?" Ross reached his goal first, studied the knob of the portal of golden metal for a moment, pulled at it gently. The door opened toward him, and his call brought the others.

	Curiously familiar the furnishings seemed, chairs of gracefully curved, glowing metal—an aluminum bronze with a matte, golden glow—upholstered in bright blue and white, a studio couch in similar materials, a desk in a dully glowing, dark-red wood. The silence of the city seemed to leak into the place with the opening of the door, making these ultimately human things more deserted, more poignantly alone, than had been the vast masses of the City, towering into the black hush of the night skies.

	The room was lived in, the desk un-tidied by a torn bit of paper, scattered sheets of faintly yellowish parchmentlike material, a few scattered instruments evidently—humanly—pens. Hall moved toward the desk soundlessly, on rubber-soled feet over a carpet of bright, dark blue. A dozen lines of characters ran smoothly across the exposed sheet, from right to left, many-dotted, rounded characters, curiously like Arabic script; unfamiliarly dissimilar to Hall who read half Earth's polyglot tongues with ease.

	Ross turned his head slowly, seeing the lattice-fronted cabinet faced with meters and three small knobs, the well-stocked bookcase, scattered pictures on walls, small tables. Discarded a moment before, it seemed, a newspaper in the strangely curved, many-dotted characters slashed a message across all its front page. The entire page seemed devoted to that one item—the secret?

	Hall looked up at Ross' low word and followed his pointing finger. Slowly he shrugged and shook his head. "It's ideographic. I'm sure. The secret lies there, all right, open to be read. In full detail, no doubt, the story of the silence—the dark city under dark skies.

	"We'll never know. These people, when they left, did not prepare for visitors. Why should they? They alone on the only habitable planet of their system, alone in a gulf of space we never would have guessed could be crossed by living intelligence, but for Hargreave's Accident and its consequence, the speed-drive.

	"They left no primers for those to come, in their ordered—ordered? Why this paper dropped so carelessly, as though suddenly?"

	"There is a door there," pointed out Young, quietly,

-

	Ross strode forward, his square, blocky body determined in its movements. Slowly he opened the door, letting the strong white light of his atomic flare reach in. Abruptly he stiffened, his breath sucked in sharply, then slowly he relaxed. His head lifted slightly, and he seemed to look without seeing at the ceiling of the room beyond, his body curiously half-tense, half-loosened. "They were very human," he said softly. "But for that bright blue hair, she would seem a girl of Earth.

	"Hall—Young, they did not leave. Here, here everywhere in their homes throughout the city they wait in silence. They are here, forever—everywhere, all about us, the ten millions of them who loved life and beauty."

	Silently, slowly, as though reluctant minds dragged on by bodies captured by an alien will, the two moved toward him. Over his shoulder they saw the little room, the low, broad bed, two figures seeming asleep only now that dusk had fallen, wrapping the city in its silent cloak. A girl—twenty, she might have been if of Earth—slim and young, her smooth, warm face still now, with a look of tired unhappiness half smoothed away. From beneath the white, closed lids, tears had trickled and dried long, long since. The arms of the man who held her close were stiffened forever, yet so quiet, so easy had been their passing that no sign of death save their soft, gray blankets indicated more than a nighttime's sleep. Soft, gray fabric of dust lay deep over them, as it lay over all the furniture in this place.

	Something gleamed with a brilliant ruby light on the bed beside the girl, dropped from her relaxed hand. Softly, on tiptoe as though to save disturbing this sleeping pair, Ross plucked it from its place, and brushed the dust from, its surface—deep-cut sparkling red glass, formed in a graceful bottle, labeled in bright green characters on whitish background on an inlet smooth surface of the bottle. Enigmatic, rounded characters, made plain by the blurred thing below—a rounded, evident skull, framed by a pair of fleshless hands.

	Softly the three left the room, went out to the courtyard of pale, pleasant blue under the sparkling night sky. Far off, the mighty tower of a building rose a dark finger against the pattern of the stars. Silently, Young lifted a pointing finger toward a strange constellation, a leering devil's head, with crooked, twisted mouth, and one winked eye. A bright star, and a lesser one for eyes; blind eyes, of which Sol, the ruler of a certain planetary system 27 light-years distant, was the lesser.

	"Three years," said Ross dully. "Let's try these other doors."

	Hall moved slowly toward another golden panel and opened it. The glare of the atomic flames lanced in. As the others came up behind his motionless figure, their eyes, too, saw into this room—this once lived-in room.

-

	A child—a boy ten years old?—slept in a chair, sprawled carelessly. Slowly Ross led the way in. Not till they rounded him did they see the dark hole in his temple. The door of the room beyond stood open. And as their lights moved, beams reached into the space beyond. Another child, a girl perhaps two, lay in the lap of a hunched woman's figure. Each was marked with the dark hole of a bullet wound; Hall saw the other marks first, small pricks in blanched, whitened areas—one in the child's thigh, one in the mother's throat. Only when they entered the room did they see the twisted, contorted body of the man, his lips drawn back in a toothy, hideous grin, his arm swollen, enpurpled still, clasped in the death-loosened grip of the other hand.

	"Preservative," said Young softly. "Effective, a poison that killed in agony. He shot the others and protected them; himself he could only protect. That other couple—that poison must have had the same effect.

	"Need we see more apartments—more of the tens of millions who built and labored and loved this city—and left, to go beyond the stars in the only way they knew?"

	"No," said Ross softly. Then his voice became sharply agonized, "But why—why? No sign of danger, no sign of damage. What struck at them, forced them to this? A foreign state of this world? But what could war, or attack of any sort, offer that made this preferable? And this is the greatest city, by far, on this planet. It would have a greater backing of man power and machines than any other, if there are those silly artificial boundaries no visitor from space could see.

	"No unproven threat could do this; no threat of death can make ten million people seek death.

	"I know—we do not know that they have all killed themselves, but—" He stopped, and the silence of the city poured in, drinking the little sounds they made and washing them away.

	"There could be no invasion from the other worlds of this system. We know them—and they're dead rocks. Two blistered in unbearable heat, one an airless boulder too small for atmosphere, and two frozen utterly. No alien race could menace them from their own system.

	"Is there some other ranging race in space, some stock of slavers perhaps, working on a cosmic scale? No race that fought its way from mud to magnificence as these people did would kill themselves without fight. And fight of the magnitude that must result—they have atomic power, I'm pretty sure, for the city power is still functioning and gray dust gathering half-inch coats over the people—that fight would leave scars we couldn't miss.

	"Why? What deadly thing could drive them to this, a century or ten centuries ago?"

	"That long?" asked Hall softly.

	Ross gestured, and again the silence welled in. "No sounds, no action. This is a cloudless, almost rainless worlds the temperature so constant, the air so clear, only a few light showers can have fallen. There are no seasons, and no winds or living animals to damage buildings. The grass grows on, the trees we saw seem long-lived. I don't know.

	"But we must—we must—" He looked about him jerkily, his face whitened by three years of sunless spaces, whiter still in the flame of the atom-flares. "The menace cannot be from this system. It must have come from outer space, a power that wanders from star to star—a power that could wander to Earth.

	"That may have wandered to Earth—	" He stopped aghast, looking at the other two. "Three years—and it will be six years before we get a word of news from Earth."

	Earth—a planet of silent cities, its wandering ships stilled once, forever, the soughing wind alone whispering through crumbling cities—

	"No." Young spoke sharply. His voice bombarded back from the shocked, protesting silence. "Let's go out—go to the ship," he muttered, turning sharply. The room fell dark behind them, a quiet, dark hush that was accustomed here stealing back as the flares passed out.

	"We can try other cities. Somehow, crazily, I had not thought of nationalism. I had more the idea of a world state, such as Earth has now. But ours is only half a century old—long to us, but not to history. Other cities here may have different languages, as different nations on Earth did have. Those other languages might be such that we could translate them in time, and a lot shorter time. Primers not, perhaps, for people of other worlds, but for people new to this world, learning the story of its development from as little background as we have. Children come with no more language than we."

	"No." Hall shook his head. "That isn't true altogether. For a phonetic language a child's primer might serve, but not for an ideograph. An ideograph is a rebus, a symbolized, conventionalized puzzle, from which all trace of origin has fallen away, tacked onto a highly modern idiom. That is not for unlearned children, but for those who know already the spoken language from which the thing takes start.

	"We can try those other cities, there might be a living people—incredible—but if there is another language, a phonetic one, we have some hope of gaming essentials in a city where books for children might exist." The silent ship gained life and sound as the lock took them in. A circulator whined into soft sound near them and the silence of the city rested, knitting up its briefly tattered fabric as the shining metal bubble leapt away in startled, frantic flight. For an instant, the delicate fernlike fronds of the trees waved in the vacuum of its passage. Then the stillness and dark crept in and regained a long-held sway. Vague things stirred busily in the shadows that reached out again with the vanishment of the white, clear atom-flames.

-

	The silent world fled beneath' the slanted rise of the ship, darkness giving way to a swift-returning twilight as the rise and movement brought the sun again above the horizon. Wordlessly, the three watched mist-shrouded hills rise from the plains, climb, and fall behind in diminishing foothills. A vast river-valley opened out, shadowed at one edge 100 miles beneath, sunlit at the far side.

	The ship angled down again toward the soundless planet. The patchwork of farmed land mottled the green-brown of the ancient river-system's valley. Where two tributaries joined the stream a many-colored blot of steel and stone shadowed the land. The ship slanted down and the city below gained reality and a third dimension as their altitude diminished from miles to feet.

	Slow as a settling dust-grain, the interstellar cruiser drifted down on her antigravity fields, down toward a parkland in the city's heart. Dense, dark-green trees around a small lake, fed by a tiny meandering stream. Flowers had run riot, spreading in the unattended years back from the stream, around the borders of the lake.

	No sun-tipped 1000-foot towers ringed this park; the buildings were broad and low, colonnaded structures of white and green and pale-blue stone. Glinting walls of glass brick poured the rays of the setting sun into the buildings to escape again through other glass walls as a mockery of internal illumination shining out into the evening sky.

	Slowly the ship settled while Ross' gray eyes tightened. This park was not deserted. On smooth lawns, under clear waters of the pond, at ease in a hundred places, sleeping figures lay. Tiny, graceful cockle-shell boats lay upturned beneath the waters, beside their spilled occupants. On the lawns couples, trios, lay in an eternal sleep. The warm, strong rays of the sun, heat, the soft rains had bleached away the bright colors of the clothes they wore. Slow oxidation and time had embrittled them and the stirring breezes had torn the fabric to broken tatters.

	Young moved toward the lock, out onto the soft turf, yielding under his feet. A group of four lay beneath a grotesquely gnarled, gracefully twisted tree. Two elderly people, man and wife, and a younger couple, the girl's bright blue silkens faded now to a color as soft as the wall of the building that rose two hundred feet away, beyond the brown-paved highway. Long rays of the setting sun reached down to illuminate her body, bent forward ever the head of the man in her lap. Nestling beside it lay a ruby crystal, green labeled flask.

	Hall walked past them and automatically Young and Ross fell into step behind him. "That building," said Hall slowly, "must have been an office building, or a public building. There must be written material there, and we can find in five minutes whether there is any need to stay in this city. These people took their poison—the same one apparently—in the parks, in many places. Look—parked cars. Their psychology was, in that degree, different. Their language may have been."

	"If it is—the menace was not national, but planetary," Ross added.

	Broad doors stood open, a layer of sifting dust laid down in the farther passages where the other breezes had not stirred it. On one white-stoned wall, between a series of small bronze doors, an inset panel of dark stuff behind glass covering, showed the curved, many-dotted characters of the strange, yet familiar language. Hall sighed. "The language is the same. We could try once more, say half around this world."

	Silently, the three walked back, the smooth carpet of dust tearing beneath their feet. The quick dusk was setting in once more, the sun's last rays lighting the sky, but lifted already above the city's streets. Moments later the slender ship lifted once more into the light, and rose beyond the atmosphere's dim carpet to race around the world.

	Shallow inland seas, their smooth waters darkened under night skies fell behind; the glowing patches of great cities operating long after their creators had given way to death and some unknown that hovered still about this dark world. Great cities, like mouldering patches of phosphorescent decay on the dark trunk of a fallen tree, and lesser towns that sparkled only faintly.

	"This is a temperate zone," Ross said suddenly. "I'll head for the tropics. If there were two races on this planet, the difference in climate would be the most probable dividing factor, and this our test opportunity to find a second language and a clue."

-

	The sun rose again with the fleeting ship's motion, rose and held as they cruised a thousand miles round the bulge of the planet, to slant down once more as the dark green of temperate foliage gave way to the brilliant colors of a tropical jungle. The ship slowed over a broken patch in the spreading jungle growth, a city whose buildings lay in broken ruins beneath the thrust of climbing plant-life. Shattered stone and glass half-hid, half-revealed the crushed bodies of the people who had built and died here. Broken rubbery pavements twisted and writhed over thrusting roots of giant trees towering half a thousand feet above the low white buildings. There was sound here, the faint rustle of a billion leaves in the slow-stirring morning air, and sharp tinkle and crack of masonry disturbed by a life that thrust out blindly, voraciously for more, and yet more room.

	Hall pointed silently to a broken, tumbled wall of glass bricks, fallen to jagged splinters in the sunlight, half obscuring the metal shelving it had protected. A crumbled, sodden mass of books bleached under the hot sun—the color and printed symbols lost under soft tropic rains and harsh, white sunlight. "The same language," said Hall briefly. "It was the universal language of this planet. We will find no comparative tongues to give clues and hints. There can be no Rosetta Stone in three languages. Everywhere here must lie a thousand, written, complete accounts—a million notes of explanation, a thousand printed accounts complete and exact, written by dead scientists.

	"The answer of a million eye witnesses from the views of every type and class of man or woman. Why it was that parents murdered children, and then themselves."

	"Why it was," added Ross thoughtfully, "they all, each one took such precautions their bodies should not decay. There is that which puzzles me. They went out of their way—the one we saw who shot those he'd tend to protect and injected some preservative, but poisoned himself—unpleasantly."

	Hall shook his head uncertainly. "I don't know; a lot of races make a fetish of preserving the body, for rehabilitation in another time, a reincarnation in that flesh." Hall looked about him. A thousand bodies, some crushed, but none, never, a skeleton. "The red-flask poison must have been rare and hard to obtain, the injected stuff a common substance any one could get."

	Ross shook his head with an air of ending the subject, "There is more to it than that. These people died, a world of them, by their own hands. Why, in a world without war, without threat of damage? And why in a world of scientific achievement should this fetish of body preservation have survived, and it alone, in the face of acts that denied every other custom, even the law of self-preservation?"

	Hall shrugged wearily. "Let's go out to space. We are tired now, and in the atmosphere of this world our; thoughts are mixed. Perhaps after rest, we'll understand it better—perhaps not. But we'll have to make a thousand photographs and ten thousand reports. There must be samples of soil and air, water and minerals.

	"We aren't through. We'll have to study this morgue world for three months at least. Come on."

-

	The ship floated up as silent as the world it left, the antigravity field increasing, and the slow throw of the planet's spin sending it again into space. The drive-fields gripped, and the cool and dark of space received it. The spinning world shrank away in distance, the vastness of its puzzle contracting in their minds as the planetary ship with its cargo of death, stilled happiness, and unguessed mystery shrank in size.

	Young and Hall sat beside Ross, watching with unseeing concentration the skilled manipulations of his fingers, lulled by the soft purr of the atomics aft. Slowly Hall rose to his feet and turned down the corridor toward his room.

	Young shook himself, the dark horror in his eyes fading suddenly, his tense mouth relaxing in a startled, half-sheepish grin. "Ye gods, that world gets you! I'll start the galley; they may be dead, but we're still living."

	Ross nodded wearily, then nodded again abruptly as his eyes, too, cleared. "Gets you, is right!" he exploded. "Yes—go ahead. I suppose I do have an appetite, but—" He shook his head with the jerkiness of a boxer trying to clear away the fog of a blow. He looked up with dazed eyes, a new intentness and questioning in them.

	"Back there, it's a dream. It's been three years since we saw a living soul, Bar, and something of the wear we've had on each other in this damned tin bubble eats down your resistance and appreciation of reality. Already that whole thing back there is beginning to seem a dream, another of those damnable nightmares you get from sleeping while the speed-drive is on. A world—cities, their millions dead by suicide, without a sign, an indication of the slightest trouble that might have affected them to make them do it. And—Lord, the silence! That silence is as unnatural as those almost-living corpses. Weren't there ever any birds to sing, no insects at all?

	"That great dead city was too unreal to make the thing comprehensible; it seemed more like a posed question visualized with a ghastly accuracy."

	"That was no vision, or if it was, we have to live and labor in it for three months or more. And think it over for three years going back." Young stared down from the port toward the slowly turning, mottled world, now 50,000 miles away. The faint blue haze of its atmosphere drew a blurring veil over its features, disclosing the gross outlines of land-locked seas and mountain ranges. The great river valleys showed as wide depressions, while the mantling, faint haze of blue light reflected from the atmosphere veiled the thin silver threads of rivers that had caused them.

-

	Young turned sharply and strode back to the galley. Presently he heard the strains of one of their stock of records grow in the ship as one of the others—probably Ross, he thought—started the amplifier. The lifting, quick-paced song caught him for a moment, and speeded his movements. The mystery floating there in space contracted into unreality; the strong, deep channels of familiarity and accustomed work diverted his conscious mind. Somewhere deep beneath the surface a vast weight of impending trouble stirred, and rose to bother him into uneasiness and haste as the record stopped and another started—a faint-toned plaintive song of the Martian colonists composed of the thin whine of Martian dust-winds and the sough of compressors. Surely, the composer had woven into it the same sphinx-mystery of the Martian sands, the scattered, cut blocks that never could have been assembled to form anything, but were shaped and cut on a world that never, in all its history, could have supported intelligent life—

	His mind stirred uneasily. "Hey, pilot! Hall! Come and feed."

	The song died jerkily as the needle-light died and the record-reel rewound automatically. Ross' heavy feet came down the corridor, and his stocky body swung round the corner. With half-unconscious eagerness, Young found himself watching him vaguely; he sighed gustily, familiarly, as he seated himself and Young turned away, vaguely satisfied. Three years of familiarity in the cramped "tin bubble"—that unimportant thing, the invariable sigh as he seated himself. Always, Young caught himself watching for it; always it came. His eyes swung to watch for Hall. He would pause in the doorway, lift his head just—so and sniff. As unconscious as Ross' sigh. Then he would enter.

	"Hey, Hall—come on," Ross called. Leisurely Young slid the metal plates across the table, pans of food. In a momentary pause, the ship was suddenly silent, the air mechanism off, the atomics cut down to soundless idle.

	"Hall—" Young stepped into the corridor doorway. The vague unease welled up in him as the silence of the ship stirred strong memories that bad seemed to fade into the limbo of nightmares and things of unreality. "Hall—" He walked with spaced, hesitant steps toward the closed door of Hall's cabin, threw it open and grunted in disgust. "He's asleep," he threw over his shoulder to Ross, peering round the corridor. "I don't see—how he could have—"	

	"Ross," Young's voice was very low and still in the corridor, "he's got—"

	Ross' bulk edged by him somehow, darting into the little room. For an instant his great, thick-fingered hand clutched the green-labeled ruby bit of glass, then dropped it to crashing fragments on the metal floor-plates. Roughly he turned Hall's quiet figure to the light. It moved with a curious solidity, as though in one stiff, solid piece—legs, arms and head in the same rigid position. Ross jerked back, rubbing his fingers stiffly on the tough fabric of his trousers, darkened eyes tense on the face before him.

-

	They of the planet had died, always, with closed eyes. Yet Hall lay with eyes wide-opened. Jerkily, Young snatched a carelessly dropped shirt, and threw it over the white, staring face, over the black misery of horror in the eyes.

	"It got him," Ross gurgled unpleasantly. "Hall—it got Hall. Hall's a man—-—"

	"Notes"—Young clawed frantically at the little desk let into the metal wall. "This thing's locked—get his keys. Notes—"

	"No." Ross shook his head groggily. "No notes—if he wrote a note it'd be out—open for us."

	"If it got him he must have known why—why they died, why he was dying," Young pleaded. "He must have. Lord, Ross, he didn't lie down and drink that to see what it was."

	"Maybe he did!" Ross straightened slightly, then slumped again. "No. He's the chemist. He knew. He knew what it was and why—why they died, why—we—will—die."

	"He couldn't have! No, we won't die. We have to find out."

	"So did he. He didn't even tell us. Didn't tell us to warn us. Why? That's another why." Ross looked at the still, frozen figure. A queer hatred was growing in his eyes, bitterness and horror, hatred and a bit of madness. Suddenly all the weight of oppression that had ridden them in the city rose again and crushed him. The comforting, shock-proof feeling of unreality was rent and cast aside. Hall did that; Hall laid his mind open to that deadly pressure of realization and reality. His lip lifted slowly, lifted and snapped down.

	"Will you stop that," snapped Young. "Stop grinning, you crack-headed ape."

	Ross glowered at him. "It's damned unfair of Hall. If he knew—he must have known. Why didn't he tell us? Why did he make another 'why' to bother us? Why—why——"

	Young shook himself, and looked down at the figure under the shirt. It looked contorted, agonized now, because it was rigid and stiff. It should be lying on its other side, so he grasped it abruptly and heaved it back.

	Ross stalked out of the doorway. Suddenly the amplifier began to roar out a recorded storm of music, blaring forth an echoing shock of sound that shattered silence.

	Young joined him in the control room. "What do we do?"

	For answer, Ross' fingers flew over the controls. Behind them the slumberous atomics woke to a straining throb that drowned the roar of the speaker for a moment, then died away as vast potentials built up. A dark mantle, a trickery of unseen lenses had acted. The sphere of space about them rushed in suddenly and contracted close to them. From the port, in one single direction, Young saw the planet that had been below them, the sun that had been ahead, and all the field of stars that had been on every side. Yet they did not overlap. From every other port, he knew, he would see the same. Abruptly, the planet puffed, and vanished. The nearby sun puffed and snapped down to dwindle at crazy speed.

-

	Tense eyes in white face, Ross labored over his controls. The calculators hummed and clicked softly under the protecting screen of sound that kept out the clawing silence that struggled to reach them, gnawing at the walls of the ship, pressing savagely—

	"We're headed back," said Ross. Slowly he straightened, then slumped forward to look at his work. Minutes passed; the record ran out, stuttered, and a new one fed itself in. White-faced, Ross looked up again, a saner terror in his eyes. Slowly that submerged as reason and courage came back. "I guess that's best, at that," he said quietly.

	Young nodded vaguely. "We need help. I wouldn't stay there. That planet is wrong—and Hall knew why."

	A light of bitterness blazed in Ross' eyes, his face set angrily. "No matter what the thing might be, he should have told."

	"I wonder if it could have been a thing—that isn't tellable. An explanation that does not exist, without the lack of explanation."

	Ross glared up at him. "Talk sense; stop words and make sentences."

	"I mean—an hysteria. It nearly caught us. Hall was a more sensitive man than you and I; we know that. We lived with him—damn near inside his skin—in this bubble for three years. It might have been an hysteria that, mounting and growing, swept round that world and destroyed them all. Made it a morgue world without reason or sense."

	Ross muttered vaguely. "It isn't sensible. Some few in any race are too utterly selfish to permit the thought of possessing all the world to be overcome by an hysteria of death. No. The misers and the antisocial would be dancing in joy. No, it doesn't explain. Hall knew. Hall knew the secret, the answer to all those 'why's', damn him. He died as all those millions did—sealing the secret forever." Ross swung abruptly, a sudden fierce flame in his face. "And listen, if you get it—get a hint of it—and don't tell me before attempting suicide— If I find you still alive, I'll roast you slowly. I'll tear each separate nerve out of your carcass one by one. I'll—"

	"Hell. You tell me. That's all."

	Stubbornly, Ross turned back to his controls and pecked at them as a small blue light gleamed. The light winked out. A green one lit, faded, and finally a white one lit and burned steady on the board. "We still have to eat."

-

	Only the tinyness of the star they had left indicated the motion at ten times light's speed, hours later. The stars from every port appeared the same; there was no shifting of position, no changing in constellations of the vastly distant suns. The ship plunged on, a silent, darkened metal bubble in a silent immensity of space. The atomics were silent now, the speed-fields built to saturation. Ross stood at the port-light motionless, his eyes unseeingly staring into the strange, twisted maze of stars compressed in unnatural clarity to any line of sight.

	"It must have been hysteria. It must have been. Hall would have spoken. He'd have told us, sure, if he knew and realized what struck him." Ross blurted out the words, swinging to Young.

	Young looked up from his lab bench, fragments of ruby glass and a dozen drops of liquid beside his microscope. "Nothing I recognize." He shrugged morosely. "I'm no chemist, just an inept physicist out of his field. I wouldn't know anything more complex than a few muscarine derivatives—and this is complex and new to man, I suspect. Surely we know of no such precipitation. One fragment of a drop of it solidified an egg like white lightning.

	"And—it may have been hysteria. Hall was 50,000 miles in space when it got him. How many millions—" He stopped and looked at Ross with a twisted grin. "One of us will fail to reach Earth, in all probability. Stop to think of that?"

	Ross looked at him in sudden suspicion. "Listen, if you get some idea of what this is all about—"

	"No, damn it. But why were there three of us sent in the first place?"

	"The energy concentrations needed by a larger ship couldn't be built up by known means. The atomics couldn't handle the potentials. They couldn't carry food, air, supplies for more than three men."

	"Why not two men?" suggested Young smoothly.

	"Why, two men—" said Ross blankly, and stopped. "Because," he went on in a suddenly tense, hard voice, "two men for three years, in a tin can, makes one man. Nerve friction, as they call it."

	"Two men in a sealed tube for three years. Two men, one corpse, and one—vast—mystery. The mystery of a dead planet and a dead man. The cargo of this ship won't stay that way." Young rose and went abruptly to his room. The air recirculator cut off with a soft pop as though to emphasize his words.

	For a long time Ross sat silent, listening to the creak of Young's feet on the floorplates. He began to move restlessly, his fingers twitching slightly; then his arm. A vague uneasiness seemed to stir him. Then the unseeing lethargy seemed to drain from his eyes, a sharpening, widening horror flooding in—

	He rose to his feet, and on soundless toes moved past the laboratory bench, toward the corridor leading to the rooms.

-

	Hours later, Young looked down into his face with a look of frozen bitterness. Ross stared back at him, his face relaxed in a gentle smile of complete satisfaction. "You damned, sneaking rat. You rotten louse. One man to operate this ship for three years—and you knew, you unutterable skunk, you knew. You, you shouting about knowing and telling, and then ducking like that—"

	The cold smile on Ross' lips remained unchanged; growing wildness in Young's eyes matched the tic that formed in his cheek, jerking the muscles in little, rhythmic twitches.

	He straightened slowly from the cooling corpse, and slunk down the echoing corridor of the ship, a dull hatred and hopelessness in his mind. Nightmares—nightmares of a horror planet riding in a death ship with the speed-fields up. He wouldn't dare to lower them for three full years, until they cut off of themselves. Ross and Hall were the pilots, the ones who knew the manipulations of the speed-field finders. They had escaped, had escaped with the infinite velocity of death.

	And Ross had known. Somehow, he'd guessed the secret of the planet and its dead millions, guessed it as Hall had. But what clue, what unremembered thing, had given them the path that led to understanding? And what was that understanding that drove these men, sound and safe, already trillions of miles from that world, to follow the builders of the ghost cities?

	Young started at the tinkling of a falling water drop, and jabbed at the tap angrily. A sudden tinkling stream of water bubbled down and stopped. They had known—and said nothing.

	And more than that—knowing, realizing that some menace hung there still, a menace they escaped by death, and death alone—Ross had taken the last few drops of that sudden poison of the death world, leaving none if he—

	A cold fury settled on Young, a seething anger that cleared his mind and filled him with a determination to bring this ship, bring it back to Earth, and know the full story of the planet before he did. If, somewhere, both Hall and Ross had picked up the clue that gave them understanding, then he, too—by the gods—he, too, would find that clue!

	Some understanding of possibilities came to him slowly. He moved with a swift surety to his room and gathered a few things he needed. Then, to the pilot's bench and the ship's log. Swiftly he wrote into it the account of what had passed since Ross' last entry after Hall had died. Then laboriously, he calculated many things—the exact specific heat of the ship as a whole, the energy content of the ship at 700° absolute, and studied all the ship to determine what might and might not happen.

	He was a physicist and atomic engineer. Piloting this ship from the closed space of the speed-drive was beyond him; a practical knowledge he didn't have. But not the designing and building of the controls he wanted or the construction of the cylinder he would need—if things happened.

	He made his connections, pressed a small switch. A tiny synchronous motor turned slowly to the low, smooth hum of a tuning fork; a slow creep of the rotary switch assured him. In twelve hours that must be reversed to halt its action.

	Then he went again to the pilot room and stared unseeing at the queerly clustered stars. Slowly, every item that they had seen, had touched, went through his mind. The cold hatred for the two blankly unspeaking, yet informative corpses he suppressed; they told him only this—that it could be known. It could be, knowing the why of those dead millions the reason for that suicide, the nature of the cosmic menace that had overcome them so utterly that they, the supreme fighting type of their world, had gone down unresisting. And that, somehow, that knowledge impelled a bond of final secrecy.

-

	It came to him with sudden surprise, the numbness of his hand. The faint ticking of his finger nails in the startled silence of the ship brought a slow fading of that intense concentration. Idly at first he rubbed the numbed hand to restore circulation—and paused.

	A tremor shook him, and a shocked horror flooded his mind. A million voices shouted and commanded deep within him, a growing clamor that was, somehow, united and fiercely determined. A conscious force growing discoverable abruptly, noticed for the first time—

	It seemed, then, to take long minutes of slow growth, yet in the confusion he knew simultaneously that it was like the time-rate of a dream, started by the slam of a door, ending with the slam of the door as the closing sequence of the dream. A flash of mental action of incredible rapidity vouchsafed him in the infinitesimal instant of time between his awareness of attack, and his defeat.

	In that atom of time, he saw through other minds, a million billion other minds, and yet thought with his own. He lived in another universe, a universe of infinitesimals, thinking, conscious, intelligent molecules. Single molecules of a vast complexity driving forward to a racial goal through the medium of countless billions of keen-thinking units—units that were single, conscious molecules. What body cells were to Young, single atoms were to them. Their thought was a swift shifting of atomic strains within their molecule-bodies; their senses not sight, nor sound, nor any thing humans might know, but finer, subtler things of electric, magnetic, gravitic strains. A fineness that made chemical action a stupendous, gross thing.

	Light came to them as great blundering, fuzzy balls of energy which they absorbed as food. Their thought processes flashing with the speed of electric stress, outstripped man's clumsy mechanism a million times. Yet one great thing they lacked; they could have no control of gross matter, their very minuteness made that thing to them unthinkable. A hundred million atoms composed each molecule-body. A vastly swollen, intelligent molecule—yet withal so minute that a hundred millions of them were indetectable to man.

-

	Intelligence, swift, keen intelligence—unable to control their own environment by the handicap of size. Yet, eating the hurtling quanta of light and radiant heat as food, they could ride the streaming light-currents of space from world to world. For temperature was unknown to them, light, food enough. Only the extreme battering of high-temperature molecules could destroy them. Beyond that one thing, their conscious control of their own molecular forces made them immune, eternal.

	But the delicate, immensely organized chemistry of intelligent beings like man were susceptible to the race control of billions of them. Immense organizations of them, working in planned unison, could affect the delicate chemistry of nerves and brain to give orders, relayed by the grosser, greater organism into action that could control that physical environment beyond their own control.

	And, like many high protein molecules, they had this other attribute; they were, chemically, enzymatic. They could force lesser, unconscious proteins that to them appeared as lesser animals, to shape and form themselves into replicas of the Intelligences. Man would serve them both as breeding ground, and relay control, subjected utterly to the unseen will of beings whose smallness put them beyond the greatest microscope.

	An understanding that swept up and through Young's mind in that last instant of consciousness, before his mind fell before their final comprehension of the intricate network of nerve cells that long study, since first they entered his body on the dead world, had brought.

	And Young understood, too, the suicides, the preservation that Ross had puzzled at. The red-flask poison the Intelligences knew, and hated. A lesser, swifter enzyme protein that shook down the proteins of man, or any protenious material to its own form. One that destroyed equally the protein molecule that had gained intelligence. The injected stuff, a simple chemical poison, that, like formaldehyde, precipitated and hardened any protein, rendering the dead flesh forever useless to the Intelligences.

	His body surged up from its chair as a last fierce urge whipped through him before the rising tide of molecules destroyed his last conscious will. The familiar control room, the lab bench, reeled and faded behind red mist in the same instant that he rose. His mind had fallen to the planned attack of a billion unseen enemies, seeking through him to gain control of all space, for all time—

	The dark mist faded very slowly from his eyes. Before he could see, even, he knew where he would find himself. His eyes opened on the metal walls of his own cabin, familiar things seen through a slow growing haze. A warm lethargy that had crept into legs and arms, was creeping inward to this last core that was himself. Fading memory and knowledge gained from the attackers made it clear; their greater, more complex molecules fell easier prey to the enzyme poison of the Planet of Death. For this last, brief second of time before it finally overcame him, too, in its warm lethargy, he understood.

	Already the warm paralysis had reached, and stopped his motor nerves; he could not speak, or write, or signal now, just as before him Hall and then Ross had been helpless to warn, or explain.

-

	The last brief flash of action though, had gone unstayed, for the yet more complex paths of his subconscious mind had not so easily been traced. Unhampered, it had carried out his last strong will. The last drop of poison Ross had taken, but the egg—Dimly he saw it, half eaten, beyond the growing haze of warm grey before his closing eyes.

	And memory satisfied him of other things. The log, with a scrawled warning "Intelligent molecules—" that he had thrust in self-hypnosis in the prepared, heat-proof cylinder. The synchronous motor turning slow before the drive of a humming tuning fork that molecules could not halt.

	The circuit would close, the automatic controls would bring the ship to Earth's system, and halt it as the speed-fields collapsed. And slowly, because of that closed circuit, the atomics would labor and build up a temperature of 700° absolute, where metal glowed dull and warning red—

	And destroyed any molecule save only the very simplest, even those that might be partly sheltered in the asbestos cylinder, where even paper would be somewhat scorched—

The End

Who Goes There?
Astounding Science Fiction – August 1938
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

Who—is that your closest friend—or a monstrous imitation, breed of an alien, deadly world? WHO GOES THERE—?

-

I.

	THE place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.

	Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their associates—dogs, machines and cooking—came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.

	Blair, the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously at the wrappings, exposing clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the tarpaulin back into place restlessly. His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy gray underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial fringe of stiff, graying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow's head.

	Commander Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped toward the table. Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into the Administration Building. His tall, stiff body straightened finally, and he nodded. "Thirty-seven. All here." His voice was low, yet carried the clear authority of the commander by nature, as well as by title.

	"You know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole Expedition. I have been conferring with Second-in-Command McReady, and Norris, as well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There is a difference of opinion, and because it involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire Expedition personnel act on it.

	"I am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each of you has been too busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of the others. McReady?"

	Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood as he halted beside the table, and, with a characteristic glance upward to assure himself of room under the low ceiling beams, straightened. His rough, clashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet on his huge frame it did not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned across the Antarctic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent leaked in, and gave meaning to the harshness of the man. And he was bronze—his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing, gripping and relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.

	Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his face, and the mellow tones of the heavy voice. "Norris and Blair agree on one thing; that animal we found was not—terrestrial in origin. Norris fears there may be danger in that; Blair says there is none.

-

	"BUT I'LL go back to how, and why, we found it. To all that was known before we came here, it appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic Pole of Earth. The compass does point straight down here, as you all know. The more delicate instruments of the physicists, instruments especially designed for this expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a secondary effect, a secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about 80 miles southwest of here.

	"The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so—and certain special steels even more magnetic. From the surface indications, the secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect.

	Soundings through the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier surface.

	"I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary station, Van Wall says. He didn't have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has dammed back the ice creeping from the south.

	"And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you know. As a meteorologist I'd have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees—that no more than a 5-mile wind could blow at -50—without causing warming due to friction with ground, snow and ice and the air itself.

	"We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We dug our camp into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped most of it. But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as high as 48, and fell to 41 at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose to -60 and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.

	"Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of South Polar Plateau slides down from that 18,000-foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts north. There must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the secondary pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antarctic Ocean.

	"It's been frozen there since Antarctica froze twenty million years ago. There never has been a thaw there.

	"Twenty million years ago Antarctica was beginning to freeze. We've investigated, thought and built speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.

	"Something came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet long and 45 feet in diameter at its thickest.

	"Eh, Van Wall? Space? Yes, but I'll explain that better later." McReady's steady voice went on.

	"It came down from space, driven and lifted by forces men haven't discovered yet, and somehow—perhaps something went wrong then—it tangled with Earth's magnetic field. It came south here, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That's a savage country there, but when Antarctica was still freezing it must have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been blizzard snow, as well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there must have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over the lip of that now-buried mountain.

-

	"THE SHIP struck solid granite head-on, and cracked up. Not every one of the passengers in it was killed, but the ship must have been ruined, her driving mechanism locked. It tangled with Earth's field, Norris believes. No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet's natural forces and survive.

	"One of its passengers stepped out. The wind we saw there never fell below 41, and the temperature never rose above -60. Then—the wind must have been stronger. And there was drift falling in a solid sheet. The thing was lost completely in ten paces." He paused for a moment, the deep, steady voice giving way to the drone of wind overhead, and the uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove.

	Drift—a drift-wind was sweeping by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp. If a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each of the camp buildings beneath the surface, he'd be lost in ten paces. Out there, the slim, black finger of the radio mast lifted 300 feet into the air, and at its peak was the clear night sky. A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily from beyond to another beyond under the licking, curling mantle of the aurora. And off north, the horizon flamed with queer, angry colors of the midnight twilight. That was spring 300 feet above Antarctica.

	At the surface—it was white death. Death of a needle-fingered cold driven before the wind, sucking heat from any warm thing. Cold—and white mist of endless, everlasting drift, the fine, fine particles of licking snow that obscured all things.

	Kinner, the little, scar-faced cook, winced. Five days ago he had stepped out to the surface to reach a cache of frozen beef. He had reached it, started back—and the drift-wind leapt out of the south. Cold, white death that streamed across the ground blinded him in twenty seconds. He stumbled on wildly in circles. It was half an hour before rope-guided men from below found him in the impenetrable murk.

	It was easy for man—or thing—to get lost in ten paces.

	"And the drift-wind then was probably more impenetrable than we know." McReady's voice snapped Kinner's mind back. Back to welcome, dank warmth of the Ad Building. "The passenger of the ship wasn't prepared either, it appears. It froze within ten feet of the ship.

	'We dug down to find the ship, and our tunnel happened to find the frozen—animal. Barclay's ice-ax struck its skull.

	"When we saw what it was, Barclay went back to the tractor, started the fire up and when the steam pressure built, sent a call for Blair and Dr. Copper. Barclay himself was sick then. Stayed sick for three days, as a matter of fact.

	"When Blair and Copper came, we cut out the animal in a block of ice, as you see, wrapped it and loaded it on the tractor for return here. We wanted to get into that ship.

	"We reached the side and found the metal was something we didn't know. Our beryllium-bronze, non-magnetic tools wouldn't touch it. Barclay had some tool-steel on the tractor, and that wouldn't scratch it either. We made reasonable tests—even tried some acid from the batteries with no results.

	"They must have had a passivating process to make magnesium metal resist acid that way, and the alloy must have been at least 95 per cent magnesium. But we had no way of guessing that, so when we spotted the barely opened lock door, we cut around it. There was clear, hard ice inside the lock, where we couldn't reach it. Through the little crack we could look in and see that only metal and tools were in there, so we decided to loosen the ice with a bomb.

-

	"WE HAD decanite bombs and thermite. Thermite is the ice-softener; decanite might have shattered valuable things, where the thermite's heat would just loosen the ice. Dr. Copper, Norris and I placed a 25-pound thermite bomb, wired it, and took the connector up the tunnel to the surface, where Blair had the steam tractor waiting. A hundred yards the other side of that granite wall we set off the thermite bomb.

	"The magnesium metal of the ship caught, of course. The glow of the bomb flared and died, then it began to flare again. We ran back to the tractor, and gradually the glare built up. From where we were we could see the whole ice-field illuminated from beneath with an unbearable light; the ship's shadow was a great, dark cone reaching off toward the north, where the twilight was just about gone. For a moment it lasted, and we counted three other shadow-things that might have been other—passengers—frozen there. Then the ice was crashing down and against the ship.

	"That's why I told you about that place. The wind sweeping down from the Pole was at our backs. Steam and hydrogen flame were torn away in white ice-fog; the flaming heat under the ice there was yanked away toward the Antarctic Ocean before it touched us. Otherwise we wouldn't have come back, even with the shelter of that granite ridge that stopped the light.

	"Somehow in the blinding inferno we could see great hunched things, black bulks glowing, even so. They shed even the furious incandescence of the magnesium for a time. Those must have been the engines, we knew. Secrets going in blazing glory—secrets that might have given Man the planets. Mysterious things that could lift and hurl that ship—and had soaked in the force of the Earth's magnetic field. I saw Norris' mouth move, and ducked. I couldn't hear him.

	"Insulation—something—gave way. All Earth's field they'd soaked up twenty million years before broke loose. The aurora in the sky above licked down, and the whole plateau there was bathed in cold fire that blanketed vision. The ice-ax in my hand got red hot, and hissed on the ice. Metal buttons on my clothes burned into me. And a flash of electric blue seared upward from beyond the granite wall.

	"Then the walls of ice crashed down on it. For an instant it squealed the way dry-ice does when it's pressed between metal.

	"We were blind and groping in the dark for hours while our eyes recovered. We found every coil within a mile was fused rubbish, the dynamo and every radio set, the earphones and speakers. If we hadn't had the steam tractor, we wouldn't have gotten over to the Secondary Camp.

	"Van Wall flew in from Big Magnet at sun-up, as you know. We came home as soon as possible. That is the history of—that." McReady's great bronze beard gestured toward the thing on the table.

-

II.

	BLAIR stirred uneasily, his little, bony fingers wriggling under the harsh light. Little brown freckles on his knuckles slid back and forth as the tendons under the skin twitched. He pulled aside a bit of the tarpaulin and looked impatiently at the dark ice-bound thing inside.

	McReady's big body straightened somewhat. He'd ridden the rocking, jarring steam tractor forty miles that day, pushing on to Big Magnet here. Even his calm will had been pressed by the anxiety to mix again with humans. It was lone and quiet out there in Secondary Camp, where a wolf-wind howled down from the Pole. Wolf-wind howling in his sleep—winds droning and the evil, unspeakable face of that monster leering up as he'd first seen it through clear, blue ice, with a bronze ice-ax buried in its skull.

	The giant meteorologist spoke again. "The problem is this. Blair wants to examine the thing. Thaw it out and make micro slides of its tissues and so forth. Norris doesn't believe that is safe, and Blair does. Dr. Copper agrees pretty much with Blair. Norris is a physicist, of course, not a biologist. But he makes a point I think we should all hear. Blair has described the microscopic life-forms biologists find living, even in this cold and inhospitable place. They freeze every winter, and thaw every summer—for three months—and live.

	"The point Norris makes is—they thaw, and live again. There must have been microscopic life associated with this creature. There is with every living thing we know. And Norris is afraid that we may release a plague—some germ disease unknown to Earth—if we thaw those microscopic things that have been frozen there for twenty million years.

	"Blair admits that such micro-life might retain the power of living. Such unorganized things as individual cells can retain life for unknown periods, when solidly frozen. The beast itself is as dead as those frozen mammoths they find in Siberia. Organized, highly developed life-forms can't stand that treatment.

	"But micro-life could. Norris suggests that we may release some disease-form that man, never having met it before, will be utterly defenseless against.

	"Blair's answer is that there may be such still-living germs, but that Norris has the case reversed. They are utterly non-immune to man. Our life-chemistry probably—"

	"Probably!" The little biologist's head lifted in a quick, birdlike motion. The halo of gray hair about his bald head ruffled as though angry. "Heh. One look—"

	"I know," McReady acknowledged. "The thing is not Earthly. It does not seem likely that it can have a life-chemistry sufficiently like ours to make cross-infection remotely possible. I would say that there is no danger."

	McReady looked toward Dr. Copper. The physician shook his head slowly. "None whatever," he asserted confidently. "Man cannot infect or be infected by germs that live in such comparatively close relatives as the snakes. And they are, I assure you," his clean-shaven face grimaced uneasily, "much nearer to us than—that."

-

	VANCE NORRIS moved angrily. He was comparatively short in this gathering of big men, some five-feet-eight, and his stocky, powerful build tended to make him seem shorter. His black hair was crisp and hard, like short, steel wires, and his eyes were the gray of fractured steel. If McReady was a man of bronze, Norris was all steel. His movements, his thoughts, his whole bearing had the quick, hard impulse of steel spring. His nerves were steel—hard, quick-acting—swift corroding.

	He was decided on his point now, and he lashed out in its defense with a characteristic quick, clipped flow of words. "Different chemistry be damned. That thing may be dead—or, by God, it may not—but I don't like it. Damn it, Blair, let them see the monstrosity you are petting over there. Let them see the foul thing and decide for themselves whether they want that thing thawed out in this camp.

	"Thawed out, by the way. That's got to be thawed out in one of the shacks tonight, if it is thawed out. Somebody—who's watchman tonight? Magnetic—oh, Connant. Cosmic rays tonight. Well, you get to sit up with that twenty-million-year-old mummy of his.

	"Unwrap it, Blair. How the hell can they tell what they are buying if they can't see it? It may have a different chemistry. I don't know what else it has, but I know it has something I don't want. If you can judge by the look on its face—it isn't human so maybe you can't—it was annoyed when it froze. Annoyed, in fact, is just about as close an approximation of the way it felt as crazy, mad, insane hatred. Neither one touches the subject.

	"How the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven't seen those three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling—damn, it's crawling there in the ice right now!

	"Nothing Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that thing let loose in its face when it looked around this frozen desolation twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through—searing, blistering mad!

	 "Hell, I've had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life—that it wasn't dead, or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed, waiting—waiting. You'll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth wouldn't own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.

	"And, Connant," Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, "won't you have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above—and that thing dripping—" He stopped for a moment, and looked around.

	"I know. That's not science. But this is, it's psychology. You'll have nightmares for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I've had 'em. That's why I hate it—sure I do—and don't want it around. Put it back where it came from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell nightmares—that it wasn't made like we are—which is obvious—but of a different kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its shape, and look like a man—and wait to kill and eat—

	"That's not a logical argument. I know it isn't. The thing isn't Earth-logic anyway.

	"Maybe it has an alien body-chemistry, and maybe its bugs do have a different body-chemistry. A germ might not stand that, but, Blair and Copper, how about a virus? That's just an enzyme molecule, you've said. That wouldn't need anything but a protein molecule of any body to work on.

	"And how are you so sure that, of the million varieties of microscopic life it may have, none of them are dangerous? How about diseases like hydrophobia—rabies—that attacks any warm-blooded creature, whatever its body-chemistry may be? And parrot fever? Have you a body like a parrot, Blair? And plain rot—gangrene—necrosis, do you want? That isn't choosy about body-chemistry!"

-

	Blair looked up from his puttering long enough to meet Norris' angry, gray eyes for an instant. "So far the only thing you have said this thing gave off that was catching was dreams. I'll go so far as to admit that." An impish, slightly malignant grin crossed the little man's seamed face. "I had some, too. So. It's dream-infectious. No doubt an exceedingly dangerous malady.

	"So far as your other things go, you have a badly mistaken idea about viruses. In the first place, nobody has shown that the enzyme-molecule theory, and that alone, explains them. And in the second place, when you catch tobacco mosaic or wheat rust, let me know. A wheat plant is a lot nearer your body-chemistry than this other-world creature is.

	"And your rabies is limited, strictly limited. You can't get it from, nor give it to, a wheat plant or a fish—which is a collateral descendant of a common ancestor of yours. Which this, Norris, is not." Blair nodded pleasantly toward the tarpaulined bulk on the table.

	"Well, thaw the damned thing in a tub of formalin if you must thaw it. I've suggested that—"

	"And I've said there would be no sense in it. You can't compromise. Why did you and Commander Garry come down here to study magnetism? Why weren't you content to stay at home? There's magnetic force enough in New York. I could no more study the life this thing once had from a formalin-pickled sample than you could get the information you wanted back in New York. And—if this one is so treated, never in all time to come can there be a duplicate! The race it came from must have passed away in the twenty million years it lay frozen, so that even if it came from Mars then, we'd never find its like. And—the ship is gone.

	"There's only one way to do this—and that is the best possible way. It must be thawed slowly, carefully, and not in formalin."

	Commander Garry stood forward again, and Norris stepped back muttering angrily. "I think Blair is right, gentlemen. What do you say?"

	Connant grunted. "It sounds right to us, I think—only perhaps he ought to stand watch over it while it's thawing." He grinned ruefully, brushing a stray lock of ripe-cherry hair back from his forehead. "Swell idea, in fact—if he sits up with his jolly little corpse."

	Garry smiled slightly. A general chuckle of agreement rippled over the group. "I should think any ghost it may have had would have starved to death if it hung around here that long, Connant," Garry suggested. "And you look capable of taking care of it. 'Ironman' Connant ought to be able to take out any opposing players, still."

	Connant shook himself uneasily. "I'm not worrying about ghosts. Let's see that thing. I—"

	Eagerly Blair was stripping back the ropes. A single throw of the tarpaulin revealed the thing. The ice had melted somewhat in the heat of the room, and it was clear and blue as thick, good glass. It shone wet and sleek under the harsh light of the unshielded globe above.

	The room stiffened abruptly. It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of the table. The broken half of the bronze ice-ax was still buried in the queer skull. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow—Van Wall, six feet and 200 pounds of ice-nerved pilot, gave a queer, strangled gasp and butted, stumbled his way out to the corridor. Half the company broke for the doors. The others stumbled away from the table.

	McReady stood at one end of the table watching them, his great body planted solid on his powerful legs. Norris from the opposite end glowered at the thing with smouldering hate. Outside the door, Garry was talking with half a dozen of the men at once.

	Blair had a tack hammer. The ice that cased the thing schluffed crisply under its steel claw as it peeled from the thing it had cased for twenty thousand thousand years—

-

III.

	"I know you don't like the thing, Connant, but it just has to be thawed out right. You say leave it as it is till we get back to civilization. All right, I'll admit your argument that we could do a better and more complete job there is sound. But—how are we going to get this across the Line? We have to take this through one temperate zone, the equatorial zone, and half way through the other temperate zone before we get it to New York. You don't want to sit with it one night, but you suggest, then, that I hang its corpse in the freezer with the beef?" Blair looked up from his cautious chipping, his bald, freckled skull nodding triumphantly.

	Kinner, the stocky, scar-faced cook, saved Connant the trouble of answering. "Hey, you listen, mister. You put that thing in the box with the meat, and by all the gods there ever were, I'll put you in to keep it company. You birds have brought everything movable in this camp in onto my mess tables here already, and I had to stand for that. But you go putting things like that in my meat box or even my meat cache here, and you cook your own damn grub."

	"But, Kinner, this is the only table in Big Magnet that's big enough to work on," Blair objected. "Everybody's explained that."

	"Yeah, and everybody's brought everything in here. Clark brings his dogs every time there's a fight and sews them up on that table.

	Ralsen brings in his sledges. Hell, the only thing you haven't had on that table is the Boeing. And you'd 'a' had that in if you coulda figured a way to get it through the tunnels."

	Commander Garry chuckled and grinned at Van Wall, the huge Chief Pilot. Van Wall's great blond beard twitched suspiciously as he nodded gravely to Kinner. "You're right, Kinner. The aviation department is the only one that treats you right."

	"It does get crowded, Kinner," Garry acknowledged. "But I'm afraid we all find it that way at times. Not much privacy in an Antarctic camp."

	"Privacy? What the hell's that? You know, the thing that really made me weep, was when I saw Barclay marchin' through here chantin' 'The last lumber in the camp! The last lumber in the camp!' and carryin' it out to build that house on his tractor. Damn it, I missed that moon cut in the door he carried out more'n I missed the sun when it set. That wasn't just the last lumber Barclay was walkin' off with. He was carryin' off the last bit of privacy in this blasted place."

	A grin rode even on Connant's heavy face as Kinner's perennial good-natured grouch came up again. But it died away quickly as his dark, deep-set eyes turned again to the red-eyed thing Blair was chipping from its cocoon of ice. A big hand ruffed his shoulder-length hair, and tugged at a twisted lock that fell behind his ear in a familiar gesture. "I know that cosmic ray shack's going to be too crowded if I have to sit up with that thing," he growled. "Why can't you go on chipping the ice away from around it—you can do that without anybody butting in, I assure you—and then hang the thing up over the power-plant boiler? That's warm enough. It'll thaw out a chicken, even a whole side of beef, in a few hours."

	"I know." Blair protested, dropping the tack hammer to gesture more effectively with his bony, freckled fingers, his small body tense with eagerness, "but this is too important to take any chances. There never was a find like this; there never can be again. It's the only chance men will ever have, and it has to be done exactly right.

-

	"LOOK, you know how the fish we caught down near the Ross Sea would freeze almost as soon as we got them on deck, and come to life again if we thawed them gently? Low forms of life aren't killed by quick freezing and slow thawing. We have—"

	"Hey, for the love of Heaven—you mean that damned thing will come to life!" Connant yelled. "You get the damned thing—Let me at it! That's going to be in so many pieces—"

	"NO! No, you fool—" Blair jumped in front of Connant to protect his precious find. "No. Just low forms of life. For Pete's sake let me finish. You can't thaw higher forms of life and have them come to. Wait a moment now—hold it! A fish can come to after freezing because it's so low a form of life that the individual cells of its body can revive, and that alone is enough to re-establish life. Any higher forms thawed out that way are dead. Though the individual cells revive, they die because there must be organization and cooperative effort to live. That cooperation cannot be re-established. There is a sort of potential life in any uninjured, quick-frozen animal. But it can't—can't under any circumstances—become active life in higher animals. The higher animals are too complex, too delicate. This is an intelligent creature as high in its evolution as we are in ours. Perhaps higher. It is as dead as a frozen man would be."

	"How do you know?" demanded Connant, hefting the ice-ax he had seized a moment before.

	Commander Garry laid a restraining hand on his heavy shoulder. "Wait a minute, Connant. I want to get this straight. I agree that there is going to be no thawing of this thing if there is the remotest chance of its revival. I quite agree it is much too unpleasant to have alive, but I had no idea there was the remotest possibility."

	Dr. Copper pulled his pipe from between his teeth and heaved his stocky, dark body from the bunk he had been sitting in. "Blair's being technical. That's dead. As dead as the mammoths they find frozen in Siberia. Potential life is like atomic energy—there, but nobody can get it out, and it certainly won't release itself except in rare cases, as rare as radium in the chemical analogy. We have all sorts of proof that things don't live after being frozen—not even fish, generally speaking—and no proof that higher animal life can under any circumstances. What's the point, Blair?"

	The little biologist shook himself. The little ruff of hair standing out around his bald pate waved in righteous anger. "The point is," he said in an injured tone, "that the individual cells might show the characteristics they had in life, if it is properly thawed. A man's muscle cells live many hours after he has died. Just because they live, and a few things like hair and fingernail cells still live, you wouldn't accuse a corpse of being a Zombie, or something.

	"Now if I thaw this right, I may have a chance to determine what sort of world it's native to. We don't, and can't know by any other means, whether it came from Earth or Mars or Venus or from beyond the stars.

	"And just because it looks unlike men, you don't have to accuse it of being evil, or vicious or something. Maybe that expression on its face is its equivalent to a resignation to fate. White is the color of mourning to the Chinese. If men can have different customs, why can't a so-different race have different understandings of facial expressions?"

-

	CONNANT laughed softly, mirthlessly. "Peaceful resignation! If that is the best it could do in the way of resignation, I should, exceedingly dislike seeing it when it was looking mad. That face was never designed to express peace. It just didn't have any philosophical thoughts like peace in its make-up.

	"I know it's your pet—but be sane about it. That thing grew up on evil, adolesced slowly roasting alive the local equivalent of kittens, and amused itself through maturity on new and ingenious torture."

	"You haven't the slightest right to say that," snapped Blair. "How do you know the first thing about the meaning of a facial expression inherently inhuman? It may well have no human equivalent whatever. That is just a different development of Nature, another example of Nature's wonderful adaptability. Growing on another, perhaps harsher world, it has different form and features. But it is just as much a legitimate child of Nature as you are. You are displaying the childish human weakness of hating the different. On its own world it would probably class you as a fish-belly, white monstrosity with an insufficient number of eyes and a fungoid body pale and bloated with gas.

	"Just because its nature is different, you haven't any right to say it's necessarily evil."

	Norris burst out a single, explosive, "Haw!" He looked down at the thing. "May be that things from other worlds don't have to be evil just because they're different. But that thing was! Child of Nature, eh? Well, it was a hell of an evil Nature."

	"Aw, will you mugs cut crabbing at each other and get the damned thing off my table?" Kinner growled. "And put a canvas over it. It looks indecent."

	"Kinner's gone modest," jeered Connant.

	Kinner slanted his eyes up to the big physicist. The scarred cheek twisted to join the line of his tight lips in a twisted grin. "All right, big boy, and what were you grousing about a minute ago? We can set the thing in a chair next to you tonight, if you want."

	"I'm not afraid of its face," Connant snapped. "I don't like keeping a wake over its corpse particularly, but I'm going to do it."

	Kinner's grin spread. "Uh-huh." He went off to the galley stove and shook down ashes vigorously, drowning the brittle chipping of the ice as Blair fell to work again.

-

IV.

	"CLUCK," reported the cosmic ray counter, "cluck-brrrp-cluck." Connant started and dropped his pencil.

	"Damnation." The physicist looked toward the far corner, back at the Geiger counter on the table near that corner, and crawled under the desk at which he had been working to retrieve the pencil. He sat down at his work again, trying to make his writing more even. It tended to have jerks and quavers in it, in time with the abrupt proud-hen noises of the Geiger counter. The muted whoosh of the pressure lamp he was using for illumination, the mingled gargles and bugle calls of a dozen men sleeping down the corridor in Paradise House formed the background sounds for the irregular, clucking noises of the counter, the occasional rustle of faffing coal in the copper-bellied stove. And a soft, steady drip-drip-drip from the thing in the corner.

	Connant jerked a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, snapped it so that a cigarette protruded and jabbed the cylinder into his mouth. The lighter failed to function, and he pawed angrily through the pile of papers in search of a match. He scratched the wheel of the lighter several times, dropped it with a curse and got up to pluck a hot coal from the stove with the coal tongs.

	The lighter functioned instantly when he tried it on returning to the desk. The counter ripped out a series of chucking guffaws as a burst of cosmic rays struck through to it. Connant turned to glower at it, and tried to concentrate on the interpretation of data collected during the past week. The weekly summary—

	He gave up and yielded to curiosity, or nervousness. He lifted the pressure lamp from the desk and carried it over to the table in the corner. Then he returned to the stove and picked up the coal tongs. The beast had been thawing for nearly 18 hours now. He poked at it with an unconscious caution; the flesh was no longer hard as armor plate, but had assumed a rubbery texture. It looked like wet, blue rubber glistening under droplets of water like little round jewels in the glare of the gasoline pressure lantern. Connant felt an unreasoning desire to pour the contents of the lamp's reservoir over the thing in its box and drop the cigarette into it. The three red eyes glared up at him sightlessly, the ruby eyeballs reflecting murky, smoky rays of light.

	He realized vaguely that he had been looking at them for a very long time, even vaguely understood that they were no longer sightless. But it did not seem of importance, of no more importance than the labored, slow motion of the tentacular things that sprouted from the base of the scrawny, slowly pulsing neck.

	Connant picked up the pressure lamp and returned to his chair. He sat down, staring at the pages of mathematics before him. The clucking of the counter was strangely less disturbing, the rustle of the coals in the stove no longer distracting.

	The creak of the floorboards behind him didn't interrupt his thoughts as he went about his weekly report in an automatic manner, filling in columns of data and making brief, summarizing notes.

	The creak of the floorboards sounded nearer.

-

V.

	BLAIR came up from the nightmare-haunted depths of sleep abruptly. Connant's face floated vaguely above him; for a moment it seemed a continuance of the wild horror of the dream. But Connant's face was angry, and a little frightened. "Blair—Blair you damned log, wake up."

	"Uh—eh?" The little biologist rubbed his eyes, his bony, freckled fingers crooked to a mutilated child-fist. From surrounding bunks other faces lifted to stare down at them.

	Connant straightened up. "Get up—and get a lift on. Your damned animal's escaped."

	"Escaped—what!" Chief Pilot Van Wall's bull voice roared out with a volume that shook the walls. Down the communication tunnels other voices yelled suddenly. The dozen inhabitants of Paradise House tumbled in abruptly, Barclay, stocky and bulbous in long woolen underwear, carrying a fire extinguisher.

	"What the hell's the matter?" Barclay demanded.

	"Your damned beast got loose. I fell asleep about twenty minutes ago, and when I woke up, the thing was gone. Hey, Doc, the hell you say those things can't come to life. Blair's blasted potential life developed a hell of a lot of potential and walked out on us."

	Copper stared blankly. "It wasn't—Earthly," he sighed suddenly. "I—I guess Earthly laws don't apply."

	"Well, it applied for leave of absence and took it. We've got to find it and capture it somehow." Connant swore bitterly, his deep-set black eyes sullen and angry. "It's a wonder the hellish creature didn't eat me in my sleep."

	Blair stared back, his pale eyes suddenly fear-struck. "Maybe it di—er—nh—we'll have to find it."

	"You find it. It's your pet. I've had all I want to do with it, sitting there for seven hours with the counter clucking every few seconds, and you birds in here singing night-music. It's a wonder I got to sleep. I'm going through to the Ad Building."

	Commander Garry ducked through the doorway, puffing his belt tight. "You won't have to. Van's roar sounded like the Boeing taking off down wind. So it wasn't dead?"

	"I didn't carry it off in my arms, I assure you," Connant snapped. "The last I saw, that split skull was oozing green goo, like a squashed caterpillar. Doc just said our laws don't work—it's unearthly. Well, it's an unearthly monster, with an unearthly disposition, judging by the face, wandering around with a split skull and brains oozing out."

	Norris and McReady appeared in the doorway, a doorway filling with other shivering men. "Has anybody seen it coming over here?" Norris asked innocently. "About four feet tall—three red eyes—brains oozing—Hey, has anybody checked to make sure this isn't a cracked idea of humor? If it is, I think we'll unite in tying Blair's pet around Connant's neck like the Ancient Mariner's albatross."

	"It's no humor," Connant shivered. "Lord, I wish it were. I'd rather wear—" He stopped. A wild, weird howl shrieked through the corridors. The men stiffened abruptly, and half turned.

-

	"I THINK it's been located," Connant finished. His dark eyes shifted with a queer unease. He darted back to his bunk in Paradise House, to return almost immediately with a heavy .45 revolver and an ice-ax. He hefted both gently as he started for the corridor toward Dogtown. "It blundered down the wrong corridor—and landed among the huskies. Listen—the dogs have broken their chains—"

	The half-terrorized howl of the dog pack changed to a wild hunting melee. The voices of the dogs thundered in the narrow corridors, and through them came a low rippling snarl of distilled hate. A shrill of pain, a dozen snarling yelps.

	Connant broke for the door. Close behind him, McReady, then Barclay and Commander Garry came. Other men broke for the Ad Building, and weapons—the sledge house. Pomroy, in charge of Big Magnet's five cows, started down the corridor in the opposite direction—he had a six-foot-handled, long-tined pitchfork in mind.

	Barclay slid to a halt, as McReady's giant bulk turned abruptly away from the tunnel leading to Dogtown, and vanished off at an angle. Uncertainly, the mechanician wavered a moment, the fire extinguisher in his hands, hesitating from one side to the other. Then he was racing after Connant's broad back. Whatever McReady had in mind, he could be trusted to make it work.

	Connant stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his throat. "Great God—" The revolver exploded thunderously; three numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw the ice-ax shift into defensive position. Connant's powerful body blocked his vision, but beyond he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned feet scratched at hard-packed snow, broken chains were clinking and tangling.

	Connant shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse. The Thing launched itself at Connant, the powerful arms of the man swung the ice-ax flatside first at what might have been a hand. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.

	Barclay turned the fire extinguisher on it; the blinding, blistering stream of chemical spray confused it, baffled it, together with the savage attacks of the huskies, not for long afraid of anything that did, or could live, held it at bay.

	McReady wedged men out of his way and drove down the narrow corridor packed with men unable to reach the scene. There was a sure fore-planned drive to McReady's attack. One of the giant blowtorches used in warming the plane's engines was in his bronzed hands. It roared gustily as he turned the corner and opened the valve. The mad mewing hissed louder. The dogs scrambled back from the three-foot lance of blue-hot flame.

	"Bar, get a power cable, run it in somehow. And a handle. We can electrocute this—monster, if I don't incinerate it." McReady spoke with an authority of planned action. Barclay turned down the long corridor to the power plant, but already before him Norris and Van Wall were racing down.

-

	BARCLAY found the cable in the electrical cache in the tunnel wall. In a half minute he was hacking at it, walking back. Van Wall's voice rang out in a warning shout of "Power!" as the emergency gasoline-powered dynamo thudded into action. Half a dozen other men were down there now; the coal, kindling were going into the firebox of the steam power plant. Norris, cursing in a low, deadly monotone, was working with quick, sure fingers on the other end of Barclay's cable, splicing in a contactor in one of the power leads.

	The dogs had fallen back when Barclay reached the corridor bend, fallen back before a furious monstrosity that glared from baleful red eyes, mewing in trapped hatred. The dogs were a semi-circle of red-dipped muzzles with a fringe of glistening white teeth, whining with a vicious eagerness that near matched the fury of the red eyes. McReady stood confidently alert at the corridor bend, the gustily muttering torch held loose and ready for action in his hands. He stepped aside without moving his eyes from the beast as Barclay came up. There was a slight, tight smile on his lean, bronzed face.

	Norris' voice called down the corridor, and Barclay stepped forward. The cable was taped to the long handle of a snow-shovel, the two conductors split, and held 18 inches apart by a scrap of lumber lashed at right angles across the far end of the handle. Bare copper conductors, charged with 220 volts, glinted in the light of pressure lamps. The Thing mewed and halted and dodged. McReady advanced to Barclay's side. The dogs beyond sensed the plan with the almost-telepathic intelligence of trained huskies. Their whimpering grew shriller, softer, their mincing steps carried them nearer. Abruptly a huge, night-black Alaskan leapt onto the trapped thing. It turned squalling, saber-clawed feet slashing.

	Barclay leapt forward and jabbed. A weird, shrill scream rose and choked out. The smell of burnt flesh in the corridor intensified; greasy smoke curled up. The echoing pound of the gas-electric dynamo down the corridor became a slogging thud.

	The red eyes clouded over in a stiffening, jerking travesty of a face. Armlike, leglike members quivered and jerked. The dogs leapt forward, and Barclay yanked back his shovel-handled weapon. The thing on the snow did not move as gleaming teeth ripped it open.

-

VI.

	Garry looked about the crowded room. Thirty-two men, some tensed nervously standing against the wall, some uneasily relaxed, some sitting, most perforce standing, as intimate as sardines. Thirty-two, plus the five engaged in sewing up wounded dogs, made thirty-seven, the total personnel.

	Garry started speaking. "All right, I guess we're here. Some of you—three or four at most—saw what happened. All of you have seen that thing on the table, and can get a general idea. Anyone hasn't, I'll lift—" His hand strayed to the tarpaulin bulking over the thing on the table. There was an acrid odor of singed flesh seeping out of it. The men stirred restlessly, hasty denials.

	"It looks rather as though Charnauk isn't going to lead any more teams," Garry went on. "Blair wants to get at this thing, and make some more detailed examination. We want to know what happened, and make sure right now that this is permanently, totally dead. Right?"

	Connant grinned. "Anybody that doesn't agree can sit up with it tonight."

	"All right then, Blair, what can you say about it? What was it?" Garry turned to the little biologist.

	"I wonder if we ever saw its natural form." Blair looked at the covered mass. "It may have been imitating the beings that built that ship—but I don't think it was. I think that was its true form. Those of us who were up near the bend saw the thing in action; the thing on the table is the result. When it got loose, apparently, it started looking around. Antarctica still frozen as it was ages ago when the creature first saw it—and froze. From my observations while it was thawing out, and the bits of tissue I cut and hardened then, I think it was native to a hotter planet than Earth. It couldn't, in its natural form, stand the temperature. There is no life-form on Earth that can live in Antarctica during the winter, but the best compromise is the dog. It found the dogs, and somehow got near enough to Charnauk to get him. The others smelled it—heard it—I don't know—anyway they went wild, and broke chains, and attacked it before it was finished. The thing we found was part Charnauk, queerly only half-dead, part Charnauk half-digested by the jellylike protoplasm of that creature, and part the remains of the thing we originally found, sort of melted down to the basic protoplasm.

	"When the dogs attacked it, it turned into the best fighting thing it could think of. Some other-world beast apparently."

	"Turned," snapped Garry. "How?"

	"Every living thing is made up of jelly—protoplasm and minute, submicroscopic things called nuclei, which control the bulk, the protoplasm. This thing was just a modification of that same worldwide plan of Nature; cells made up of protoplasm, controlled by infinitely tinier nuclei. You physicists might compare it—an individual cell of any living thing—with an atom; the bulk of the atom, the space-filling part, is made up of the electron orbits, but the character of the thing is determined by the atomic nucleus.

	"This isn't wildly beyond what we already know. It's just a modification we haven't seen before. It's as natural, as logical, as any other manifestation of life. It obeys exactly the same laws. The cells are made of protoplasm, their character determined by the nucleus.

-

	"ONLY in this creature, the cell-nuclei can control those cells at will. It digested Charnauk, and as it digested, studied every cell of his tissue, and shaped its own cells to imitate them exactly. Parts of it—parts that had time to finish changing—are dog-cells. But they don't have dog-cell nuclei." Blair lifted a fraction of the tarpaulin. A torn dog's leg with stiff gray fur protruded. "That, for instance, isn't dog at all; it's imitation. Some parts I'm uncertain about; the nucleus was hiding itself, covering up with dog-cell imitation nucleus. In time, not even a microscope would have shown the difference."

	"Suppose," asked Norris bitterly, "it had had lots of time?"

	"Then it would have been a dog. The other dogs would have accepted it. We would have accepted it. I don't think anything would have distinguished it, not microscope, nor X-ray, nor any other means. This is a member of a supremely intelligent race, a race that has learned the deepest secrets of biology, and turned them to its use."

	"What was it planning to do?" Barclay looked at the humped tarpaulin.

	Blair grinned unpleasantly. The wavering halo of thin hair round his bald pate wavered in the stir of air. "Take over the world, I imagine."

	"Take over the world! Just it, all by itself?" Connant gasped. "Set itself up as a lone dictator?"

	"No," Blair shook his head. The scalpel he had been fumbling in his bony fingers dropped; he bent to pick it up, so that his face was hidden as he spoke. "It would become the population of the world."

	"Become—populate the world? Does it reproduce asexually?"

	Blair shook his head and gulped. "It's—it doesn't have to. It weighed 85 pounds. Charnauk weighed about 90. It would have become Charnauk, and had 85 pounds left, to become—oh, Jack for instance, or Chinook. It can imitate anything—that is, become anything. If it had reached the Antarctic Sea, it would have become a seal, maybe two seals. They might have attacked a killer whale, and become either killers, or a herd of seals. Or maybe it would have caught an albatross, or a skua gull, and flown to South America."

	Norris cursed softly. "And every time it digested something, and imitated it—"

	"It would have had its original bulk left, to start again," Blair finished. "Nothing would kill it. It has no natural enemies, because it becomes whatever it wants to. If a killer whale attacked it, it would become a killer whale. If it was an albatross, and an eagle attacked it, it would become an eagle. Lord, it might become a female eagle. Go back—build a nest and lay eggs!"

	"Are you sure that thing from hell is dead?" Dr. Copper asked softly.

	"Yes, thank Heaven," the little biologist gasped. "After they drove the dogs off, I stood there poking Bar's electrocution thing into it for five minutes. It's dead and—cooked."

	"Then we can only give thanks that this is Antarctica, where there is not one, single, solitary, living thing for it to imitate, except these animals in camp."

	"Us," Blair giggled. "It can imitate us. Dogs can't make 400 miles to the sea; there's no food. There aren't any skua gulls to imitate at this season. There aren't any penguins this far inland. There's nothing that can reach the sea from this point—except us. We've got brains. We can do it. Don't you see—it's got to imitate us—it's got to be one of us—that's the only way it can fly an airplane—fly a plane for two hours, and rule—be—all Earth's inhabitants. A world for the taking—if it imitates us!

	"It didn't know yet. It hadn't had a chance to learn. It was rushed—hurried—took the thing nearest its own size. Look—I'm Pandora! I opened the box! And the only hope that can come out is—that nothing can come out. You didn't see me. I did it. I fixed it. I smashed every magneto. Not a plane can fly. Nothing can fly." Blair giggled and lay down on the floor crying.

-

	CHIEF PILOT Van Wall made a dive for the door. His feet were fading echoes in the corridors as Dr. Copper bent unhurriedly over the little man on the floor. From his office at the end of the room he brought something, and injected a solution into Blair's arm. "He might come out of it when he wakes up," he sighed rising. McReady helped him lift the biologist onto a near-by bunk. "It all depends on whether we can convince him that thing is dead."

	Van Wall ducked into the shack brushing his heavy blond beard absently. "I didn't think a biologist would do a thing like that up thoroughly. He missed the spares in the second cache. It's all right. I smashed them."

	Commander Garry nodded. "I was wondering about the radio."

	Dr. Copper snorted. "You don't think it can leak out on a radio wave, do you? You'd have five rescue attempts in the next three months if you stop the broadcasts. The thing to do is talk loud and not make a sound. Now I wonder—"

	McReady looked speculatively at the doctor. "It might be like an infectious disease. Everything that drank any of its blood—"

	Copper shook his head. "Blair missed something. Imitate it may, but it has, to a certain extent, its own body-chemistry, its own metabolism. If it didn't, it would become a dog—and be a dog and nothing more. It has to be an imitation dog. Therefore you can detect it by serum tests. And its chemistry, since it comes from another world, must be so wholly, radically different that a few cells, such as gained by drops of blood, would be treated as disease germs by the dog, or human body."

	"Blood—would one of those imitations bleed?" Norris demanded.

	"Surely. Nothing mystic about blood. Muscle is about 90 per cent water; blood differs only in having a couple per cent more water, and less connective tissue. They'd bleed all right," Copper assured him.

	Blair sat up in his bunk suddenly. "Connant—where's Connant?"

	The physicist moved over toward the little biologist. "Here I am. What do you want?"

	"Are you?" giggled Blair. He lapsed back into the bunk contorted with silent laughter.

	Connant looked at him blankly. "Huh? Am I what?"

	"Are you there?" Blair burst into gales of laughter. "Are you Connant? The beast wanted to be a man—not a dog—"

-

VII.

	Dr. Copper rose wearily from the bunk, and washed the hypodermic carefully. The little tinkles it made seemed loud in the packed room, now that Blair's gurgling laughter had finally quieted. Copper looked toward Garry and shook his head slowly. "Hopeless, I'm afraid. I don't think we can ever convince him the thing is dead now."

	Norris laughed uncertainly. "I'm not sure you can convince me. Oh, damn you, McReady."

	"McReady?" Commander Garry turned to look from Norris to McReady curiously.

	"The nightmares," Norris explained. "He had a theory about the nightmares we had at the Secondary Station after finding that thing."

	"And that was?" Garry looked at McReady levelly.

	Norris answered for him, jerkily, uneasily. "That the creature wasn't dead, had a sort of enormously slowed existence, an existence that permitted it, none the less, to be vaguely aware of the passing of time, of our coming, after endless years. I had a dream it could imitate things."

	"Well," Copper grunted, "it can."

	"Don't be an ass," Norris snapped. "That's not what's bothering me. In the dream it could read minds, read thoughts and ideas and mannerisms."

	"What's so bad about that? It seems to be worrying you more than the thought of the joy we're going to have with a mad man in an Antarctic camp." Copper nodded toward Blair's sleeping form.

	McReady shook his great head slowly. "You know that Connant is Connant, because he not merely looks like Connant—which we're beginning to believe that beast might be able to do—but he thinks like Connant, talks like Connant, moves himself around as Connant does. That takes more than merely a body that looks like him; that takes Connant's own mind, and thoughts and mannerisms. Therefore, though you know that the thing might make itself look like Connant, you aren't much bothered, because you know it has a mind from another world, a totally unhuman mind, that couldn't possibly react and think and talk like a man we know, and do it so well as to fool us for a moment. The idea of the creature imitating one of us is fascinating, but unreal because it is too completely unhuman to deceive us. It doesn't have a human mind."

	"As I said before," Norris repeated, looking steadily at McReady, "you can say the damnedest things at the damnedest times. Will you be so good as to finish that thought—one way or the other?"

	Kinner, the scar-faced expedition cook, had been standing near Connant. Suddenly he moved down the length of the crowded room toward his familiar galley. He shook the ashes from the galley stove noisily.

	"It would do it no good," said Dr. Copper, softly as though thinking out loud, "to merely look like something it was trying to imitate; it would have to understand its feelings, its reaction. It is unhuman; it has powers of imitation beyond any conception of man. A good actor, by training himself, can imitate another man, another man's mannerisms, well enough to fool most people. Of course no actor could imitate so perfectly as to deceive men who had been living with the imitated one in the complete lack of privacy of an Antarctic camp. That would take a super-human skill."

	"Oh, you've got the bug too?" Norris cursed softly.

-

	CONNANT, standing alone at one end of the room, looked about him wildly, his face white. A gentle eddying of the men had crowded them slowly down toward the other end of the room, so that he stood quite alone. "My God, will you two Jeremiahs shut up?" Connant's voice shook. "What am I? Some kind of a microscopic specimen you're dissecting? Some unpleasant worm you're discussing in the third person?"

	McReady looked up at him; his slowly twisting hands stopped for a moment. "Having a lovely time. Wish you were here. Signed: Everybody.

	"Connant, if you think you're having a hell of a time, just move over on the other end for a while. You've got one thing we haven't; you know what the answer is. I'll tell you this, right now you're the most feared and respected man in Big Magnet."

	"Lord, I wish you could see your eyes," Connant gasped. "Stop staring, will you! What the hell are you going to do?"

	"Have you any suggestions, Dr. Copper?" Commander Garry asked steadily. "The present situation is impossible."

	"Oh, is it?" Connant snapped. "Come over here and look at that crowd. By Heaven, they look exactly like that gang of huskies around the corridor bend. Benning, will you stop hefting that damned ice-ax?"

	The coppery blade rang on the floor as the aviation mechanic nervously dropped it. He bent over and picked it up instantly, hefting it slowly, turning it in his hands, his brown eyes moving jerkily about the room.

	Copper sat down on the bunk beside Blair. The wood creaked noisily in the room. Far down a corridor, a dog yelped in pain, and the dog-drivers' tense voices floated softly back. "Microscopic examination," said the doctor thoughtfully; "would be useless, as Blair pointed out. Considerable time has passed. However, serum tests would be definitive."

	"Serum tests? What do you mean exactly?" Commander Garry asked.

	"If I had a rabbit that had been injected with human blood—a poison to rabbits, of course, as is the blood of any animal save that of another rabbit—and the injections continued in increasing doses for some time, the rabbit would be human-immune. If a small quantity of its blood were drawn off, allowed to separate in a test-tube, and to the clear serum, a bit of human blood were added, there would be a visible reaction, proving the blood was human. If cow, or dog blood were added—or any protein material other than that one thing, human blood—no reaction would take place. That would prove definitely."

	"Can you suggest where I might catch a rabbit for you, Doc?" Norris asked. "That is, nearer than Australia; we don't want to waste time going that far."

	"I know there aren't any rabbits in Antarctica," Copper nodded, "but that is simply the usual animal. Any animal except man will do. A dog for instance. But it will take several days, and due to the greater size of the animal, considerable blood. Two of us will have to contribute."

	"Would I do?" Garry asked.

	"That will make two," Copper nodded. "I'll get to work on it right away."

	"What about Connant in the meantime?" Khmer demanded. "I'm going out that door and head off for the Ross Sea before I cook for him."

	"He may be human—" Copper started.

	Connant burst out in a flood of curses. "Human! May be human, you damned saw-bones! What in hell do you think I am?"

	"A monster," Copper snapped sharply. "Now shut up and listen." Connant's face drained of color and he sat down heavily as the indictment was put in words. "Until we know—you know as well as we do that we have reason to question the fact, and only you know how that question is to be answered—we may reasonably be expected to lock you up. If you are—unhuman—you're a lot more dangerous than poor Blair there, and I'm going to see that he's locked up thoroughly. I expect that his next stage will be a violent desire to kill you, all the dogs, and probably all of us. When he wakes, he will be convinced we're all unhuman, and nothing on the planet will ever change his conviction. It would be kinder to let him die, but we can't do that, of course. He's going in one shack, and you can stay in Cosmos House with your cosmic ray apparatus. Which is about what you'd do anyway. I've got to fix up a couple of dogs."

	Connant nodded bitterly. "I'm human. Hurry that test. Your eyes—Lord, I wish you could see your eyes staring—"

-

	COMMANDER Garry watched anxiously as Clark, the dog-handler, held the big brown Alaskan husky, while Copper began the injection treatment. The dog was not anxious to cooperate; the needle was painful, and already he'd experienced considerable needle work that morning. Five stitches held closed a slash that ran from his shoulder across the ribs half way down his body. One long fang was broken off short; the missing part was to be found half-buried in the shoulder bone of the monstrous thing on the table in the Ad Building.

	"How long will that take?" Garry asked, pressing his arm gently. It was sore from the prick of the needle Dr. Copper had used to with-draw blood.

	Copper shrugged. "I don't know, to be frank. I know the general method, I've used it on rabbits. But I haven't experimented with dogs. They're big, clumsy animals to work with; naturally rabbits are preferable, and serve ordinarily. In civilized places you can buy a stock of human-immune rabbits from suppliers, and not many investigators take the trouble to prepare their own."

	"What do they want with them back there?" Clark asked.

	"Criminology is one large field. A says he didn't murder B, but that the blood on his shirt came from killing a chicken. The State makes a test, then it's up to A to explain how it is the blood reacts on human-immune rabbits, but not on chicken-immunes."

	"What are we going to do with Blair in the meantime?" Garry asked wearily. "It's all right to let him sleep where he is for a while, but when he wakes up—"

	"Barclay and Benning are fitting some bolts on the door of Cosmos House," Copper replied grimly. "Connant's acting like a gentleman. I think perhaps the way the other men look at him makes him rather want privacy. Lord knows, heretofore we've all of us individually prayed for a little privacy."

	Clark laughed bitterly. "Not any more, thank you. The more the merrier."

	"Blair," Copper went on, "will also have to have privacy—and locks. He's going to have a pretty definite plan in mind when he wakes up. Ever hear the old story of how to stop hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle?

	"If there isn't any hoof-and-mouth disease, there won't be any hoof-and-mouth disease," Copper explained. "You get rid of it by killing every animal that exhibits it, and every animal that's been near the diseased animal. Blair's a biologist, and knows that story. He's afraid of this thing we loosed. The answer is probably pretty clear in his mind now. Kill everybody and everything in this camp before a skua gull or a wandering albatross coming in with the spring chances out this way and-catches the disease."

	Clark's lips curled in a twisted grin. "Sounds logical to me. If things get too bad—maybe we'd better let Blair get loose. It would save us committing suicide. We might also make something of a vow that if things get bad, we see that that does happen."

-

	COPPER laughed softly. "The last man alive in Big Magnet—wouldn't be a man," he pointed out. "Somebody's got to kill those—creatures that don't desire to kill themselves, you know. We don't have enough thermite to do it all at once, and the decanite explosive wouldn't help much. I have an idea that even small pieces of one of those beings would be self-sufficient."

	"If," said Garry thoughtfully, "they can modify their protoplasm at will, won't they simply modify themselves to birds and fly away? They can read all about birds, and imitate their structure without even meeting them. Or imitate, perhaps, birds of their home planet."

	Copper shook his head, and helped Clark to free the dog. "Man studied birds for centuries, trying to learn how to make a machine to fly like them. He never did do the trick; his final success came when he broke away entirely and tried new methods. Knowing the general idea, and knowing the detailed structure of wing and bone and nerve-tissue is something far, far different. And as for other-world birds, perhaps, in fact very probably, the atmospheric conditions here are so vastly different that their birds couldn't fly. Perhaps, even, the being came from a planet like Mars with such a thin atmosphere that there were no birds."

	Barclay came into the building, trailing a length of airplane control cable. "It's finished, Doc. Cosmos House can't be opened from the inside. Now where do we put Blair?"

	Copper looked toward Garry. "There wasn't any biology building. I don't know where we can isolate him."

	"How about East Cache?" Garry said after a moment's thought. "Will Blair be able to look after himself—or need attention?"

	"He'll be capable enough. We'll be the ones to watch out," Copper assured him grimly. "Take a stove, a couple of bags of coal, necessary supplies and a few tools to fix it up. Nobody's been out there since last fall, have they?"

	Garry shook his head. "If he gets noisy—I thought that might be a good idea."

	Barclay hefted the tools he was carrying and looked up at Garry. "If the muttering he's doing now is any sign, he's going to sing away the night hours. And we won't like his song."

	"What's he saying?" Copper asked.

	Barclay shook his head. "I didn't care to listen much. You can if you want to. But I gathered that the blasted idiot had all the dreams McReady had, and a few more. He slept beside the thing when we stopped on the trail coming in from Secondary Magnetic, remember. He dreamt the thing was alive, and dreamt more details. And—damn his soul—knew it wasn't all dream, or had reason to. He knew it had telepathic powers that were stirring vaguely, and that it could not only read minds, but project thoughts. They weren't dreams, you see. They were stray thoughts that thing was broadcasting, the way Blair's broadcasting his thoughts now—a sort of telepathic muttering in its sleep. That's why he knew so much about its powers. I guess you and I, Doc, weren't so sensitive—if you want to believe in telepathy."

	"I have to," Copper sighed. "Dr. Rhine of Duke University has shown that it exists, shown that some are much more sensitive than others."

	"Well, if you want to learn a lot of details, go listen in on Blair's broadcast. He's driven most of the boys out of the Ad Building; Kinner's rattling pans like coal going down a chute. When he can't rattle a pan, he shakes ashes.

	"By the way, Commander, what are we going to do this spring, now the planes are out of it?"

	Garry sighed. "I'm afraid our expedition is going to be a loss. We cannot divide our strength now."

	"It won't be a loss—if we continue to live, and come out of this," Copper promised him. "The find we've made, if we can get it under control, is important enough. The cosmic ray data, magnetic work, and atmospheric work won't be greatly hindered."

-

	Garry laughed mirthlessly. "I was just thinking of the radio broadcasts. Telling half the world about the wonderful results of our exploration flights, trying to fool men like Byrd and Ellsworth back home there that we're doing something."

	Copper nodded gravely. "They'll know something's wrong. But men like that have judgment enough to know we wouldn't do tricks without some sort of reason, and will wait for our return to judge us. I think it comes to this: men who know enough to recognize our deception will wait for our return. Men who haven't discretion and faith enough to wait will not have the experience to detect any fraud. We know enough of the conditions here to put through a good bluff."

	"Just so they don't send 'rescue' expeditions," Garry prayed. "When—if—we're ever ready to come out, we'll have to send word to Captain Forsythe to bring a stock of magnetos with him when he comes down. But—never mind that."

	"You mean if we don't come out?" asked Barclay. "I was wondering if a nice running account of an eruption or an earthquake via radio—with a swell windup by using a stick of decanite under the microphone—would help. Nothing, of course, will entirely keep people out. One of those swell, melodramatic 'last-man-alive-scenes' might make 'em go easy though."

	Garry smiled with genuine humor. "Is everybody in camp trying to figure that out too?"

	Copper laughed. "What do you think, Garry? We're confident we can win out. But not too easy about it, I guess."

	Clark grinned up from the dog he was petting into calmness. "Confident, did you say, Doc?"

-

VIII.

	Blair moved restlessly around the small shack. His eyes jerked and quivered in vague, fleeting glances at the four men with him; Barclay, six feet tall and weighing over 190 pounds; McReady, a bronze giant of a man; Dr. Copper, short, squatly powerful; and Benning, five-feet-ten of wiry strength.

	Blair was huddled up against the far wall of the East Cache cabin, his gear piled in the middle of the floor beside the heating stove, forming an island between him and the four men. His bony hands clenched and fluttered, terrified. His pale eyes wavered uneasily as his bald, freckled head darted about in birdlike motion.

	"I don't want anybody coming here. I'll cook my own food," he snapped nervously. "Kinner may be human now, but I don't believe it. I'm going to get out of here, but I'm not going to eat any food you send me. I want cans. Sealed cans."

	"O.K., Blair, we'll bring 'em tonight," Barclay promised. "You've got coal, and the fire's started. I'll make a last—" Barclay started forward.

	Blair instantly scurried to the farthest corner. "Get out! Keep away from me, you monster!" the little biologist shrieked, and tried to claw his way through the wall of the shack. "Keep away from me—keep away—I won't be absorbed—I won't be—"

	Barclay relaxed and moved back. Dr. Copper shook his head. "Leave him alone, Bar. It's easier for him to fix the thing himself. We'll have to fix the door, I think—"

	The four men let themselves out. Efficiently, Benning and Barclay fell to work. There were no locks in Antarctica; there wasn't enough privacy to make them needed. But powerful screws had been driven in each side of the door frame, and the spare aviation control cable, immensely strong, woven steel wire, was rapidly caught between them and drawn taut. Barclay went to work with a drill and a keyhole saw. Presently he had a trap cut in the door through which goods could be passed without unlashing the entrance. Three powerful hinges from a stock-crate, two hasps and a pair of three-inch cotter-pins made it proof against opening from the other side.

	Blair moved about restlessly inside. He was dragging something over to the door with panting gasps and muttering, frantic curses. Barclay opened the hatch and glanced in, Dr. Copper peering over his shoulder. Blair had moved the heavy bunk against the door. It could not be opened without his cooperation now.

	"Don't know but what the poor man's right at that," McReady sighed. "If he gets loose, it is his avowed intention to kill each and all of us as quickly as possible, which is something we don't agree with. But we've something on our side of that door that is worse than a homicidal maniac. If one or the other has to get loose, I think I'll come up and undo those lashings here."

	Barclay grinned. "You let me know, and I'll show you how to get these off fast. Let's go back."

	The sun was painting the northern horizon in multi-colored rainbows still, though it was two hours below the horizon. The field of drift swept off to the north, sparkling under its flaming colors in a million reflected glories. Low mounds of rounded white on the northern horizon showed the Magnet Range was barely awash above the sweeping drift. Little eddies of wind-lifted snow swirled away from their skis as they set out toward the main encampment two miles away. The spidery finger of the broadcast radiator lifted a gaunt black needle against the white of the Antarctic continent. The snow under their skis was like fine sand, hard and gritty.

-

	"SPRING," said Benning bitterly, "is come. Ain't we got fun! I've been looking forward to getting away from this blasted hole in the ice."

	"I wouldn't try it now, if I were you." Barclay grunted. "Guys that set out from here in the next few days are going to be marvelously unpopular."

	"How is your dog getting along, Dr. Copper?" McReady asked. "Any results yet?"

	"In 30 hours? I wish there were. I gave him an injection of my blood today. But I imagine another five days will be needed. I don't know certainly enough to stop sooner."

	"I've been wondering—if Connant were—changed, would he have warned us so soon after the animal escaped? Wouldn't he have waited long enough for it to have a real chance to fix itself? Until we woke up naturally?" McReady asked slowly.

	"The thing is selfish. You didn't think it looked as though it were possessed of a store of the higher justices, did you?" Dr. Copper pointed out. "Every part of it is all of it, every part of it is all for itself, I imagine. If Connant were changed, to save his skin, he'd have to—but Connant's feelings aren't changed; they're imitated perfectly, or they're his own. Naturally, the imitation, imitating perfectly Connant's feelings, would do exactly what Connant would do."

	"Say, couldn't Norris or Van give Connant some kind of a test? If the thing is brighter than men, it might know more physics than Connant should, and they'd catch it out," Barclay suggested.

	Copper shook his head wearily. "Not if it reads minds. You can't plan a trap for it. Van suggested that last night. He hoped it would answer some of the questions of physics he'd like to know answers to."

	"This expedition-of-four idea is going to make life happy." Benning looked at his companions. "Each of us with an eye on the others to make sure he doesn't do something—peculiar. Man, aren't we going to be a trusting bunch! Each man eyeing his neighbors with the grandest exhibition of faith and trust—I'm beginning to know what Connant meant by 'I wish you could see your eyes.' Every now and then we all have it, I guess. One of you looks around with a sort of 'I-wonder-if-the-other-three-are-look.' Incidentally, I'm not excepting myself."

	"So far as we know, the animal is dead, with a slight question as to Connant. No other is suspected," McReady stated slowly. "The 'always-four' order is merely a precautionary measure."

	"I'm waiting for Garry to make it four-in-a-bunk," Barclay sighed. "I thought I didn't have any privacy before, but since that order—"

-

	NONE WATCHED more tensely than Connant. A little sterile glass test-tube, half-filled with straw-colored fluid. One—two—three—four—five drops of the clear solution Dr. Copper had prepared from the drops of blood from Connant's arm. The tube was shaken carefully, then set in a beaker of clear, warm water. The thermometer read blood heat, a little thermostat clicked noisily, and the electric hotplate began to glow as the lights flickered slightly.

	Then—little white flecks of precipitation were forming, snowing down in the clear straw-colored fluid. "Lord," said Connant. He dropped heavily into a bunk, crying like a baby. "Six days—" Connant sobbed, "six days in there—wondering if that damned test would lie—"

	Garry moved over silently, and slipped his arm across the physicist's back.

	"It couldn't lie," Dr. Copper said. "The dog was human-immune—and the serum reacted."

	"He's—all right?" Norris gasped. "Then—the animal is dead—dead forever?"

	"He is human," Copper spoke definitely, "and the animal is dead."

	Kinner burst out laughing, laughing hysterically. McReady turned toward him and slapped his face with a methodical one-two, one-two action. The cook laughed, gulped, cried a moment, and sat up rubbing his cheeks, mumbling his thanks vaguely. "I was scared. Lord, I was scared—"

	Norris laughed brittlely. "You think we weren't, you ape? You think maybe Connant wasn't?"

	The Ad Building stirred with a sudden rejuvenation. Voices laughed, the men clustering around Connant spoke with unnecessarily loud voices, jittery, nervous voices relievedly friendly again. Somebody called out a suggestion, and a dozen started for their skis. Blair. Blair might recover—Dr. Copper fussed with his test-tubes in nervous relief, trying solutions. The party of relief for Blair's shack started out the door, skis clapping noisily. Down the corridor, the dogs set up a quick yelping howl as the air of excited relief reached them.

	Dr. Copper fussed with his tubes. McReady noticed him first, sitting on the edge of the bunk, with two precipitin-whitened test-tubes of straw-colored fluid, his face whiter than the stuff in the tubes, silent tears slipping down from horror-widened eyes.

	McReady felt a cold knife of fear pierce through his heart and freeze in his breast. Dr. Copper looked up.

	"Garry," he called hoarsely. "Garry, for God's sake, come here."

	Commander Garry walked toward him sharply. Silence clapped down on the Ad Building. Connant looked up, rose stiffly from his seat.

	"Garry—tissue from the monster—precipitates too. It proves nothing. Nothing but—but the dog was monster-immune too. That one of the two contributing blood—one of us two, you and I, Garry—one of us is a monster."

-

IX.

	"Bar, call back those men before they tell Blair," McReady said quietly. Barclay went to the door; faintly his shouts came back to the tensely silent men in the room. Then he was back.

	"They're coming," he said. "I didn't tell them why. Just that Dr. Copper said not to go."

	"McReady," Garry sighed, "you're in command now. May God help you. I cannot."

	The bronzed giant nodded slowly, his deep eyes on Commander Garry.

	"I may be the one," Garry added. "I know I'm not, but I cannot prove it to you in any way. Dr. Copper's test has broken down. The fact that he showed it was useless, when it was to the advantage of the monster to have that uselessness not known, would seem to prove he was human."

	Copper rocked back and forth slowly on the bunk. "I know I'm human. I can't prove it either. One of us two is a liar, for that test cannot lie, and it says one of us is. I gave proof that the test was wrong, which seems to prove I'm human, and now Garry has given that argument which proves me human—which he, as the monster, should not do. Round and round and round and round and—"

	Dr. Copper's head, then his neck and shoulders began circling slowly in time to the words. Suddenly he was lying back on the bunk, roaring with laughter. "It doesn't have to prove one of us is a monster! It doesn't have to prove that at all! Ho-ho. If we're all monsters it works the same! We're all monsters—all of us—Connant and Garry and I—and all of you."

	"McReady," Van Wall, the blond-bearded Chief Pilot, called softly, "you were on the way to an M.D. when you took up meteorology, weren't you? Can you make some kind of test?"

	McReady went over to Copper slowly, took the hypodermic from his hand, and washed it carefully in 95 per cent alcohol. Garry sat on the bunk-edge with wooden face, watching Copper and McReady expressionlessly. "What Copper said is possible," McReady sighed. "Van, will you help here? Thanks." The filled needle jabbed into Copper's thigh. The man's laughter did not stop, but slowly faded into sobs, then sound sleep as the morphia took hold.

	McReady turned again. The men who had started for Blair stood at the far end of the room, skis dripping snow, their faces as white as their skis. Connant had a lighted cigarette in each hand; one he was puffing absently, and staring at the floor. The heat of the one in his left hand attracted him and he stared at it, and the one in the other hand stupidly for a moment. He dropped one and crushed it under his heel slowly.

	"Dr. Copper," McReady repeated, "could be right. I know I'm human—but of course can't prove it. I'll repeat the test for my own information. Any of you others who wish to may do the same."

	Two minutes later, McReady held a test-tube with white precipitin settling slowly from straw-colored serum. "It reacts to human blood too, so they aren't both monsters."

	"I didn't think they were," Van Wall sighed. "That wouldn't suit the monster either; we could have destroyed them if we knew. Why hasn't the monster destroyed us, do you suppose? It seems to be loose."

	McReady snorted. Then laughed softly. "Elementary, my dear Watson. The monster wants to have life-forms available. It cannot animate a dead body, apparently. It is just waiting—waiting until the best opportunities come. We who remain human, it is holding in reserve."

	Kinner shuddered violently. "Hey. Hey, Mac. Mac, would I know if I was a monster? Would I know if the monster had already got me? Oh Lord, I may be a monster already."

	"You'd know," McReady answered.

	"But we wouldn't," Norris laughed shortly, half-hysterically.

	McReady looked at the vial of serum remaining. "There's one thing this damned stuff is good for, at that," he said thoughtfully. "Clark, will you and Van help me? The rest of the gang better stick together here. Keep an eye on each other," he said bitterly. "See that you don't get into mischief, shall we say?"

	McReady started down the tunnel toward Dogtown, with Clark and Van Wall behind him. "You need more serum?" Clark asked.

	McReady shook his head. "Tests. There's four cows and a bull, and nearly seventy dogs down there. This stuff reacts only to human blood and—monsters."

-

	McREADY came back to the Ad Building and went silently to the wash stand. Clark and Van Wall joined him a moment later. Clark's lips had developed a tic, jerking into sudden, unexpected sneers.

	"What did you do?" Connant exploded suddenly. "More immunizing?"

	Clark snickered, and stopped with a hiccough. "Immunizing. Haw! Immune all right."

	"That monster," said Van Wall steadily, "is quite logical. Our immune dog was quite all right, and we drew a little more serum for the tests. But we won't make any more."

	"Can't—can't you use one man's blood on another dog—" Norris began.

	"There aren't," said McReady softly, "any more dogs. Nor cattle, I might add."

	"No more dogs?" Benning sat down slowly.

	"They're very nasty when they start changing," Van Wall said precisely, "but slow. That electrocution iron you made up, Barclay, is very fast. There is only one dog left-our immune. The monster left that for us, so we could play with our little test. The rest—" He shrugged and dried his hands.

	"The cattle—" gulped Kinner.

	"Also. Reacted very nicely. They look funny as hell when they start melting. The beast hasn't any quick escape, when it's tied in dog chains, or halters, and it had to be to imitate."

	Kinner stood up slowly. His eyes darted around the room, and came to rest horribly quivering on a tin bucket in the galley. Slowly, step by step, he retreated toward the door, his mouth opening and closing silently, like a fish out of water.

	"The milk—" he gasped. "I milked 'em an hour ago—" His voice broke into a scream as he dived through the door. He was out on the ice cap without windproof or heavy clothing.

	Van Wall looked after him for a moment thoughtfully. "He's probably hopelessly mad," he said at length, "but he might be a monster escaping. He hasn't skis. Take a blow-torch—in case."

	The physical motion of the chase helped them; something that needed doing. Three of the other men were quietly being sick. Norris was lying flat on his back, his face greenish, looking steadily at the bottom of the bunk above him.

	"Mac, how long have the—cows been not-cows—"

	McReady shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. He went over to the milk bucket, and with his little tube of serum went to work on it. The milk clouded it, making certainty difficult. Finally he dropped the test-tube in the stand and shook his head. "It tests negatively. Which means either they were cows then, or that, being perfect imitations, they gave perfectly good milk."

	Copper stirred restlessly in his sleep and gave a gurgling cross between a snore and a laugh. Silent eyes fastened on him. "Would morphia—a monster—" somebody started to ask.

	"Lord knows," McReady shrugged. "It affects every Earthly animal I know of."

	Connant suddenly raised his head. "Mac! The dogs must have swallowed pieces of the monster, and the pieces destroyed them! The dogs were where the monster resided. I was locked up. Doesn't that prove—"

	Van Wall shook his head. "Sorry. Proves nothing about what you are, only proves what you didn't do."

	"It doesn't do that," McReady sighed. "We are helpless. Because we don't know enough, and so jittery we don't think straight. Locked up! Ever watch a white corpuscle of the blood go through the wall of a blood vessel? No? It sticks out a pseudopod. And there it is—on the far side of the wall."

	"Oh," said Van Wall unhappily. "The cattle tried to melt down, didn't they? They could have melted down—become just a thread of stuff and leaked under a door to re-collect on the other side. Ropes—no—no, that wouldn't do it. They couldn't live in a sealed tank or—"

	"If," said McReady, "you shoot it through the heart, and it doesn't die, it's a monster. That's the best test I can think of, offhand."

	"No dogs," said Garry quietly, "and no cattle. It has to imitate men now. And locking up doesn't do any good. Your test might work, Mac, but I'm afraid it would be hard on the men."

-

X.

	Clark looked up from the galley stove as Van Wall, Barclay, McReady and Benning came in, brushing the drift from their clothes. The other men jammed into the Ad Building continued studiously to do as they were doing, playing chess, poker, reading. Ralsen was fixing a sledge on the table; Van and Norris had their heads together over magnetic data, while Harvey read tables in a low voice.

	Dr. Copper snored softly on the bunk. Garry was working with Dutton over a sheaf of radio messages on the corner of Dutton's bunk and a small fraction of the radio table. Connant was using most of the table for Cosmic Ray sheets.

	Quite plainly through the corridor, despite two closed doors, they could hear Kinner's voice. Clark banged a kettle onto the galley stove and beckoned McReady silently. The meteorologist went over to him.

	"I don't mind the cooking so damn much," Clark said nervously, "but isn't there some way to stop that bird? We all agreed that it would be safe to move him into Cosmos House."

	"Kinner?" McReady nodded toward the door. "I'm afraid not. I can dope him, I suppose, but we don't have an unlimited supply of morphia, and he's not in danger of losing his mind. Just hysterical."

	"Well, we're in danger of losing ours. You've been out for an hour and a half. That's been going on steadily ever since, and it was going for two hours before. There's a limit, you know."

	Garry wandered over slowly, apologetically. For an instant, Mc-Ready caught the feral spark of fear—horror—in Clark's eyes, and knew at the same instant it was in his own. Garry—Garry or Copper—was certainly a monster.

	"If you could stop that, I think it would be a sound policy, Mac," Garry spoke quietly. "There are—tensions enough in this room. We agreed that it would be safe for Kinner in there, because everyone else in camp is under constant eyeing." Garry shivered slightly. "And try, try in God's name, to find some test that will work."

	McReady sighed. "Watched or unwatched, everyone's tense. Blair's jammed the trap so it won't open now. Says he's got food enough, and keeps screaming 'Go away, go away—you're monsters. I won't be absorbed. I won't. I'll tell men when they come. Go away.' So—we went away."

	"There's no other test?" Garry pleaded.

	McReady shrugged his shoulders. "Copper was perfectly right. The serum test could be absolutely definitive if it hadn't been—contaminated. But that's the only dog left, and he's fixed now."

	"Chemicals? Chemical tests?"

	McReady shook his head. "Our chemistry isn't that good. I tried the microscope, you know."

	Garry nodded. "Monster-dog and real dog were identical. But—you've got to go on. What are we going to do after dinner?"

-

	VAN WALL had joined them quietly. "Rotation sleeping. Half the crowd asleep; half awake. I wonder how many of us are monsters? All the dogs were. We thought we were safe, but somehow it got Copper-or you." Van Wall's eyes flashed uneasily. "It may have gotten every one of you—all of you but myself may be wondering, looking. No, that's not possible. You'd just spring then. I'd be helpless. We humans must somehow have the greater numbers now. But—" he stopped.

	McReady laughed shortly. "You're doing what Norris complained of in me. Leaving it hanging. 'But if one more is changed—that may shift the balance of power.' It doesn't fight. I don't think it ever fights. It must be a peaceable thing, in its own—inimitable—way. It never had to, because it always gained its end—otherwise."

	Van Wall's mouth twisted in a sickly grin. "You're suggesting then, that perhaps it already has the greater numbers, but is just waiting—waiting, all of them—all of you, for all I know—waiting till I, the last human, drop my wariness in sleep. Mac, did you notice their eyes, all looking at us?"

	Garry sighed. "You haven't been sitting here for four straight hours, while all their eyes silently weighed the information that one of us two, Copper or I, is a monster certainly—perhaps both of us."

	Clark repeated his request. "Will you stop that bird's noise? He's driving me nuts. Make him tone down, anyway."

	"Still praying?" McReady asked.

	"Still praying," Clark groaned. "He hasn't stopped for a second. I don't mind his praying if it relieves him, but he yells, he sings psalms and hymns and shouts prayers. He thinks God can't hear well way down here."

	"Maybe He can't," Barclay grunted. "Or He'd have done something about this thing loosed from hell."

	"Somebody's going to try that test you mentioned, if you don't stop him," Clark stated grimly. "I think a cleaver in the head would be as positive a test as a bullet in the heart."

	"Go ahead with the food. I'll see what I can do. There may be something in the cabinets." McReady moved wearily toward the corner Copper had used as his dispensary. Three tall cabinets of rough boards, two locked, were the repositories of the camp's medical supplies. Twelve years ago McReady had graduated, had started for an internship, and been diverted to meteorology. Copper was a picked man, a man who knew his profession thoroughly and modernly. More than half the drugs available were totally unfamiliar to McReady; many of the others he had forgotten. There was no huge medical library here, no series of journals available to learn the things he had forgotten, the elementary, simple things to Copper, things that did not merit inclusion in the small library he had been forced to content himself with. Books are heavy, and every ounce of supplies had been freighted in by air.

	McReady picked a barbiturate hopefully. Barclay and Van Wall went with him. One man never went anywhere alone in Big Magnet.

	Ralsen had his sledge put away, and the physicists had moved off the table, the poker game broken up when they got back. Clark was putting out the food. The click of spoons and the muffled sounds of eating were the only sign of life in the room. There were no words spoken as the three returned; simply all eyes focused on them questioningly, while the jaws moved methodically.

	McReady stiffened suddenly. Kinner was screeching out a hymn in a hoarse, cracked voice. He looked wearily at Van Wall with a twisted grin and shook his head. "Hu-uh."

-

	VAN WALL cursed bitterly, and sat down at the table. 'We'll just plumb have to take that till his voice wears out. He can't yell like that forever."

	"He's got a brass throat and a cast-iron larynx," Norris declared savagely. "Then we could be hopeful, and suggest he's one of our friends. In that case he could go on renewing his throat till doomsday."

	Silence clamped down. For twenty minutes they ate without a word. Then Connant jumped up with an angry violence. "You sit as still as a bunch of graven images. You don't say a word, but oh, Lord, what expressive eyes you've got. They roll around like a bunch of glass marbles spilling down a table. They wink and blink and stare—and whisper things. Can you guys look somewhere else for a change, please?

	"Listen, Mac, you're in charge here. Let's run movies for the rest of the night. We've been saving those reels to make 'em last. Last for what? Who is it's going to see those last reels, eh? Let's see 'em while we can, and look at something other than each other."

	"Sound idea, Connant. I, for one, am quite willing to change this in any way I can."

	"Turn the sound up loud, Dutton. Maybe you can drown out the hymns," Clark suggested.

	"But don't," Norris said softly, "don't turn off the lights altogether."

	"The lights will be out." McReady shook his head. "We'll show all the cartoon movies we have. You won't mind seeing the old cartoons, will you?"

	"Goody, goody—a moom pitcher show. I'm just in the mood." McReady turned to look at the speaker, a lean, lanky New Englander, by the name of Caldwell. Caldwell was stuffing his pipe slowly, a sour eye cocked up to McReady.

	The bronze giant was forced to laugh. "O.K., Bart, you win. Maybe we aren't quite in the mood for Popeye and trick ducks, but it's something."

	"Let's play Classifications," Caldwell suggested slowly. "Or maybe you call it Guggenheim. You draw lines on a piece of paper, and put down classes of things—like animals, you know. One for 'H' and one for 'U' and so on. Like 'Human' and 'Unknown' for instance. I think that would be a hell of a lot better game. Classification, I sort of figure is what we need right now a lot more than movies. Maybe somebody's got a pencil that he can draw lines with, draw lines between the 'U' animals and the 'H' animals for instance."

	"McReady's trying to find that kind of a pencil," Van Wall answered quietly, "but we've got three kinds of animals here, you know. One that begins with 'M'. We don't want any more."

	"Mad ones, you mean. Uh-huh. Clark, I'll help you with those pots so we can get our little peep-show going." Caldwell got up slowly.

-

	DUTTON and Barclay and Benning, in charge of the projector and sound mechanism arrangements, went about their job silently, while the Ad Building was cleared and the dishes and pans disposed of. McReady drifted over toward Van Wall slowly, and leaned back in the bunk beside him. "I've been wondering, Van," he said with a wry grin, "whether or not to report my ideas in advance. I forgot the 'U animals' as Caldwell named it, could read minds. I've a vague idea of something that might work. It's too vague to bother with though. Go ahead with your show, while I try to figure out the logic of the thing. I'll take this bunk."

	Van Wall glanced up, and nodded. The movie screen would be practically on a line with his bunk, hence making the pictures least distracting here, because least intelligible. "Perhaps you should tell us what you have in mind. As it is, only the unknowns know what you plan. You might be—unknown before you got it into operation."

	"Won't take long, if I get it figured out right. But I don't want any more all-but-the-test-dog-monsters things. We better move Copper into this bunk directly above me. He won't be watching the screen either." McReady nodded toward Copper's gently snoring bulk. Garry helped them lift and move the doctor.

	McReady leaned back against the bunk, and sank into a trance, almost, of concentration, trying to calculate chances, operations, methods. He was scarcely aware as the others distributed themselves silently, and the screen lit up. Vaguely Kinner's hectic, shouted prayers and his rasping hymn-singing annoyed him till the sound accompaniment started. The lights were turned out, but the large, light-colored areas of the screen reflected enough light for ready visibility. It made men's eyes sparkle as they moved restlessly. Kinner was still praying, shouting, his voice a raucous accompaniment to the mechanical sound. Dutton stepped up the amplification.

	So long had the voice been going on, that only vaguely at first was McReady aware that something seemed missing. Lying as he was, just across the narrow room from the corridor leading to Cosmos House, Kinner's voice had reached him fairly clearly, despite the sound accompaniment of the pictures. It struck him abruptly that it had stopped.

	"Dutton, cut that sound," McReady called as he sat up abruptly. The pictures flickered a moment, soundless and strangely futile in the sudden, deep silence. The rising wind on the surface above bubbled melancholy tears of sound down the stove pipes. "Kinner's stopped," McReady said softly.

	"For God's sake start that sound then, he may have stopped to listen," Norris snapped.

	McReady rose and went down the corridor. Barclay and Van Wall left their places at the far end of the room to follow him. The flickers bulged and twisted on the back of Barclay's gray underwear as he crossed the still-functioning beam of the projector. Dutton snapped on the lights, and the pictures vanished.

	Norris stood at the door as McReady had asked. Garry sat down quietly in the bunk nearest the door, forcing Clark to make room for him. Most of the others had stayed exactly where they were. Only Connant walked slowly up and down the room, in steady, unvarying rhythm.

	"If you're going to do that, Connant," Clark spat, "we can get along without you altogether, whether you're human or not. Will you stop that damned rhythm?"

	"Sorry." The physicist sat down in a bunk, and watched his toes thoughtfully. It was almost five minutes, five ages while the wind made the only sound, before McReady appeared at the door.

	"We," he announced, "haven't got enough grief here already. Somebody's tried to help us out. Kinner has a knife in his throat, which was why he stopped singing, probably. We've got monsters, madmen and murderers. Any more 'M's' you can think of, Caldwell? If there are, we'll probably have 'em before long."

-

XI.

	"Is Blair loose?" someone asked.

	"Blair is not loose. Or he flew in. If there's any doubt about where our gentle helper came from—this may clear it up." Van Wall held a foot-long, thin-bladed knife in a cloth. The wooden handle was halfburnt, charred with the peculiar pattern of the top of the galley stove.

	Clark stared at it. "I did that this afternoon. I forgot the damn thing and left it on the stove."

	Van Wall nodded. "I smelled it, if you remember. I knew the knife came from the galley."

	"I wonder," said Benning, looking around at the party warily, "how many more monsters have we? If somebody could slip out of his place, go back of the screen to the galley and then down to the Cosmos House and back—he did come back, didn't he? Yes—everybody's here. Well, if one of the gang could do all that—"

	"Maybe a monster did it," Garry suggested quietly. "There's that possibility."

	"The monster, as you pointed out today, has only men left to imitate. Would he decrease his—supply, shall we say?" Van Wall pointed out. "No, we just have a plain, ordinary louse, a murderer to deal with. Ordinarily we'd call him an 'inhuman murderer' I suppose, but we have to distinguish now. We have inhuman murderers, and now we have human murderers. Or one at least."

	"There's one less human," Norris said softly. "Maybe the monsters have the balance of power now."

	"Never mind that," McReady sighed and turned to Barclay. "Bar, will you get your electric gadget? I'm going to make certain—"

	Barclay turned down the corridor to get the pronged electrocuter, while McReady and Van Wall went back toward Cosmos House. Barclay followed them in some thirty seconds.

	The corridor to Cosmos House twisted, as did nearly all corridors in Big Magnet, and Norris stood at the entrance again. But they heard, rather muffled, McReady's sudden shout. There was a savage scurry of blows, dull ch-thunk, shiuff sounds. "Bar—Bar——" And a curious, savage mewing scream, silenced before even quick-moving Norris had reached the bend.

	Kinner—or what had been Kinner—lay on the floor, cut half in two by the great knife McReady had had. The meteorologist stood against the wall, the knife dripping red in his hand. Van Wall was stirring vaguely on the floor, moaning, his hand half-consciously rubbing at his jaw. Barclay, an unutterably savage gleam in his eyes, was methodically leaning on the pronged weapon in his hand, jabbing—jabbing, jabbing.

	Kinner's arms had developed a queer, scaly fur, and the flesh had twisted. The fingers had shortened, the hand rounded, the fingernails become three-inch long things of dull red horn, keened to steel-hard razor-sharp talons.

	McReady raised his head, looked at the knife in his hand and dropped it. "Well, whoever did it can speak up now. He was an inhuman murderer at that—in that he murdered an inhuman. I swear by all that's holy, Kinner was a lifeless corpse on the floor here when we arrived. But when it found we were going to jab it with the power—It changed."

-

	NORRIS stared unsteadily. "Oh, Lord, those things can act. Ye gods—sitting in here for hours, mouthing prayers to a God it hated! Shouting hymns in a cracked voice—hymns about a Church it never knew. Driving us mad with its ceaseless howling—"Well. Speak up, whoever did it. You didn't know it, but you did the camp a favor. And I want to know how in blazes you got out of that room without anyone seeing you. It might help in guarding ourselves."

	"His screaming—his singing. Even the sound projector couldn't drown it." Clark shivered. "It was a monster."

	"Oh," said Van Wall in sudden comprehension. "You were sitting right next to the door, weren't you! And almost behind the projection screen already."

	Clark nodded dumbly. "He—it's quiet now. It's a dead—Mac, your test's no damn good. It was dead anyway, monster or man, it was dead."

	McReady chuckled softly. "Boys, meet Clark, the only one we know is human! Meet Clark, the one who proves he's human by trying to commit murder—and failing. Will the rest of you please refrain from trying to prove you're human for a while? I think we may have another test."

	"A test!" Connant snapped joyfully, then his face sagged in disappointment. "I suppose it's another either-way-you-want-it."

	"No," said McReady steadily. "Look sharp and be careful. Come into the Ad Building. Barclay, bring your electrocuter. And somebody—Dutton—stand with Barclay to make sure he does it. Watch every neighbor, for by the Hell these monsters came from, I've got something, and they know it. They're going to get dangerous!"

	The group tensed abruptly. An air of crushing menace entered into every man's body, sharply they looked at each other. More keenly than ever before—is that man next to me an inhuman monster?

	"What is it?" Garry asked, as they stood again in the main room. "How long will it take?"

	"I don't know, exactly," said McReady, his voice brittle with angry determination. "But I know it will work, and no two ways about it. It depends on a basic quality of the monsters, not on us. 'Kinner' just convinced me." He stood heavy and solid in bronzed immobility, completely sure of himself again at last.

	"This," said Barclay, hefting the wooden-handled weapon, tipped with its two sharp-pointed, charged conductors, "is going to be rather necessary, I take it. Is the power plant assured?"

	Dutton nodded sharply. "The automatic stoker bin is full. The gas power plant is on stand-by. Van Wall and I set it for the movie operation and—we've checked it over rather carefully several times, you know. Anything those wires touch, dies," he assured them grimly. "I know that."

	Dr. Copper stirred vaguely in his bunk, rubbed his eyes with fumbling hand. He sat up slowly, blinked his eyes blurred with sleep and drugs, widened with an unutterable horror of drug-ridden nightmares. "Garry," he mumbled, "Garry—listen. Selfish—from hell they came, and hellish shellfish—I mean self— Do I? What do I mean?" he sank back in his bunk, and snored softly.

-

	McREADY looked at him thoughtfully. "We'll know presently," he nodded slowly. "But selfish is what you mean all right. You may have thought of that, half-sleeping, dreaming there. I didn't stop to think what dreams you might be having. But that's all right. Selfish is the word. They must be, you see." He turned to the men in the cabin, tense, silent men staring with wolfish eyes each at his neighbor. "Selfish, and as Dr. Copper said every part is a whole. Every piece is self-sufficient, an animal in itself.

	"That, and one other thing, tell the story. There's nothing mysterious about blood; it's just as normal a body tissue as a piece of muscle, or a piece of liver. But it hasn't so much connective tissue, though it has millions, billions of life-cells."

	McReady's great bronze beard ruffled in a grim smile. "This is satisfying, in a way. I'm pretty sure we humans still outnumber you—others. Others standing here. And we have what you, your other-world race, evidently doesn't. Not an imitated, but a bred-in-the-bone instinct, a driving, unquenchable fire that's genuine. We'll fight, fight with a ferocity you may attempt to imitate, but you'll never equal! We're human. We're real. You're imitations, false to the core of your every cell."

	"All right. It's a showdown now. You know. You, with your mind reading. You've lifted the idea from my brain. You can't do a thing about it.

	"Standing here—"Let it pass. Blood is tissue. They have to bleed, if they don't bleed when cut, then, by Heaven, they're phony! Phony from hell! If they bleed—then that blood, separated from them, is an individual—a newly formed individual in its own right, just as they, split, all of them, from one original, are individuals!

	"Get it, Van? See the answer, Bar?"

	Van Wall laughed very softly. "The blood—the blood will not obey. It's a new individual, with all the desire to protect its own life that the original—the main mass from which it was split—has. The blood will live—and try to crawl away from a hot needle, say!"

	McReady picked up the scalpel from the table. From the cabinet, he took a rack of test-tubes, a tiny alcohol lamp, and a length of platinum wire set in a little glass rod. A smile of grim satisfaction rode his lips. For a moment he glanced up at those around him. Barclay and Dutton moved toward him slowly, the wooden-handled electric instrument alert.

	"Dutton," said McReady, "suppose you stand over by the splice there where you've connected that in. Just make sure no—thing pulls it loose."

	Dutton moved away. "Now, Van, suppose you be first on this."

	White-faced, Van Wall stepped forward. With a delicate precision, McReady cut a vein in the base of his thumb. Van Wall winced slightly, then held steady as a half inch of bright blood collected in the tube. McReady put the tube in the rack, gave Van Wall a bit of alum, and indicated the iodine bottle.

	Van Wall stood motionlessly watching. McReady heated the platinum wire in the alcohol lamp flame, then dipped it into the tube. It hissed softly. Five times he repeated the test. "Human, I'd say." McReady sighed, and straightened. "As yet, my theory hasn't been actually proven—but I have hopes. I have hopes.

	"Don't, by the way, get too interested in this. We have with us some unwelcome ones, no doubt. Van, will you relieve Barclay at the switch? Thanks. O.K., Barclay, and may I say I hope you stay with us? You're a damned good guy."

	Barclay grinned uncertainly; winced under the keen edge of the scalpel. Presently, smiling widely, he retrieved his long-handled weapon.

	"Mr. Samuel Dutt—Bar!"

-

	The tensity was released in that second. Whatever of hell the monsters may have had within them, the men in that instant matched it. Barclay had no chance to move his weapon as a score of men poured down on that thing that had seemed Dutton. It mewed, and spat, and tried to grow fangs—and was a hundred broken, torn pieces. Without knives, or any weapon save the brute-given strength of a staff of picked men, the thing was crushed, rent.

	Slowly they picked themselves up, their eyes smouldering, very quiet in their emotions. A curious wrinkling of their lips betrayed a species of nervousness.

	Barclay went over with the electric weapon. Things smouldered and stank. The caustic acid Van Wall dropped on each spilled drop of blood gave off tickling, cough-provoking fumes.

	McReady grinned, his deep-set eyes alight and dancing. "Maybe," he said softly, "I underrated man's abilities when I said nothing human could have the ferocity in the eyes of that thing we found. I wish we could have the opportunity to treat in a more befitting manner these things. Something with boiling oil, or melted lead in it, or maybe slow roasting in the power boiler. When I think what a man Dutton was—-.

	"Never mind. My theory is confirmed by—by one who knew? Well, Van Wall and Barclay are proven. I think, then, that I'll try to show you what I already know. That I too am human." McReady swished the scalpel in absolute alcohol, burned it off the metal blade, and cut the base of his thumb expertly.

	Twenty seconds later he looked up from the desk at the waiting men. There were more grins out there now, friendly grins, yet withal, something else in the eyes.

	"Connant," McReady laughed softly, "was right. The huskies watching that thing in the corridor bend had nothing on you. Wonder why we think only the wolf blood has the right to ferocity? Maybe on spontaneous viciousness a wolf takes tops, but after these seven days—abandon all hope, ye wolves who enter here!

	"Maybe we can save time. Connant, would you step for—"

	Again Barclay was too slow. There were more grins, less tensity still, when Barclay and Van Wall finished their work.

	Garry spoke in a low, bitter voice. "Connant was one of the finest men we had here—and five minutes ago I'd have sworn he was a man. Those damnable things are more than imitation." Garry shuddered and sat back in his bunk.

	And thirty seconds later, Garry's blood shrank from the hot platinum wire, and struggled to escape the tube, struggled as frantically as a suddenly feral, red-eyed, dissolving imitation of Garry struggled to dodge the snake-tongue weapon Barclay advanced at him, white faced and sweating. The Thing in the test-tube screamed with a tiny, tinny voice as McReady dropped it into the glowing coal of the galley stove.

-

XII.

	"THE LAST OF IT?" Dr. Copper looked down from his bunk with bloodshot, saddened eyes. "Fourteen of them—"

	McReady nodded shortly. "In some ways—if only we could have permanently prevented their spreading—I'd like to have even the imitations back. Commander Garry—Connant—Dutton—Clark—"

	"Where are they taking those things?" Copper nodded to the stretcher Barclay and Norris were carrying out.

	"Outside. Outside on the ice, where they've got fifteen smashed crates, half a ton of coal, and presently will add ten gallons of kerosene. We've dumped acid on every spilled drop, every torn fragment. We're going to incinerate those."

	"Sounds like a good plan." Copper nodded wearily. "I wonder, you haven't said whether Blair—"

	McReady started. "We forgot him! We had so much else! I wonder—do you suppose we can cure him now?"

	"If—" began Dr. Copper, and stopped meaningly.

	McReady started a second time. "Even a madman. It imitated Kinner and his praying hysteria—" McReady turned toward Van Wall at the long table. "Van, we've got to make an expedition to Blair's shack."

	Van looked up sharply, the frown of worry faded for an instant in surprised remembrance. Then he rose, nodded. "Barclay better go along. He applied the lashings, and may figure how to get in without frightening Blair too much."

	Three quarters of an hour, through -37° cold, while the Aurora curtain bellied overhead. The twilight was nearly 12 hours long, flaming in the north on snow like white, crystalline sand under their skis. A 5-mile wind piled it in drift-lines pointing off to the northwest. Three quarters of an hour to reach the snow-buried shack. No smoke came from the little shack, and the men hastened.

	"Blair!" Barclay roared into the wind when he was still a hundred yards away. "Blair!"

	"Shut up," said McReady softly. "And hurry. He may be trying a long hike. If we have to go after him—no planes, the tractors disabled—"

	"Would a monster have the stamina a man has?"

	"A broken leg wouldn't stop it for more than a minute," McReady pointed out.

-

	Barclay gasped suddenly and pointed aloft. Dim in the twilit sky, a winged thing circled in curves of indescribable grace and ease. Great white wings tipped gently, and the bird swept over them in silent curiosity. "Albatross—" Barclay said softly. "First of the season, and wandering way inland for some reason. If a monster's loose—"

	Norris bent down on the ice, and tore hurriedly at his heavy, windproof clothing. He straightened, his coat flapping open, a grim blue-metaled weapon in his hand. It roared a challenge to the white silence of Antarctica.

	The thing in the air screamed hoarsely. Its great wings worked frantically as a dozen feathers floated down from its tail. Norris fired again. The bird was moving swiftly now, but in an almost straight line of retreat. It screamed again, more feathers dropped and with beating wings it soared behind a ridge of pressure ice, to vanish.

	Norris hurried after the others. "It won't come back," he panted. Barclay cautioned him to silence, pointing. A curiously, fiercely blue light beat out from the cracks of the shack's door. A very low, soft humming sounded inside, a low, soft humming and a clink and clank of tools, the very sounds somehow bearing a message of frantic haste.

	McReady's face paled. "Lord help us if that thing has—" He grabbed Barclay's shoulder, and made snipping motions with his fingers, pointing toward the lacing of control-cables that held the door.

	Barclay drew the wire-cutters from his pocket, and kneeled soundlessly at the door. The snap and twang of cut wires made an unbearable racket in the utter quiet of the Antarctic hush. There was only that strange, sweetly soft hum from within the shack, and the queerly, hecticly clipped clicking and rattling of tools to drown their noises.

	McReady peered through a crack in the door. His breath sucked in huskily and his great fingers clamped cruelly on Barclay's shoulder. The meteorologist backed down. "It isn't," he explained very softly, "Blair. It's kneeling on something on the bunk—something that keeps lifting. Whatever it's working on is a thing like a knapsack—and it lifts."

	"All at once," Barclay said grimly. "No. Norris, hang back, and get that iron of yours out. It may have—weapons."

	Together, Barclay's powerful body and McReady's giant strength struck the door. Inside, the bunk jammed against the door screeched madly and crackled into kindling. The door flung down from broken hinges, the patched lumber of the doorpost dropping inward.

	Like a blue-rubber ball, a Thing bounced up. One of its four tentaclelike arms looped out like a striking snake. In a seven-tentacled hand a six-inch pencil of winking, shining metal glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin lips twitched back from snakefangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing.

	Norris' revolver thundered in the confined space. The hate-washed face twitched in agony, the looping tentacle snatched back. The silvery thing in its hand a smashed ruin of metal, the seven-tentacled hand became a mass of mangled flesh oozing greenish-yellow ichor. The revolver thundered three times more. Dark holes drilled each of the three eyes before Norris hurled the empty weapon against its face.

-

	THE THING screamed in feral hate, a lashing tentacle wiping at blinded eyes. For a moment it crawled on the floor, savage tentacles lashing out, the body twitching. Then it staggered up again, blinded eyes working, boiling hideously, the crushed flesh sloughing away in sodden gobbets.

	Barclay lurched to his feet and dove forward with an ice-ax. The flat of the weighty thing crushed against the side of the head. Again the unkillable monster went down. The tentacles lashed out, and suddenly Barclay fell to his feet in the grip of a living, livid rope. The Thing dissolved as he held it, a white-hot band that ate into the flesh of his hands like living fire. Frantically he tore the stuff from him, held his hands where they could not be reached. The blind Thing felt and ripped at the tough, heavy, windproof cloth, seeking flesh—flesh it could convert—

	The huge blow-torch McReady had brought coughed solemnly. Abruptly it rumbled disapproval throatily. Then it laughed gurglingly, and thrust out a blue-white, three-foot tongue. The Thing on the floor shrieked, flailed out blindly with tentacles that writhed and withered in the bubbling wrath of the blow-torch. It crawled and turned on the floor, it shrieked and hobbled madly, but always McReady held the blow-torch on the face, the dead eyes burning and bubbling uselessly. Frantically the Thing crawled and howled.

	A tentacle sprouted a savage talon—and crisped in the flame. Steadily McReady moved with a planned, grim campaign. Helpless, maddened, the Thing retreated from the grunting torch, the caressing, licking tongue. For a moment it rebelled, squalling in inhuman hatred at the touch of icy snow. Then it fell back before the charring breath of the torch, the stench of its flesh bathing it. Hopelessly it retreated—on and on across the Antarctic snow. The bitter wind swept over it twisting the torch-tongue; vainly it flopped, a trail of oily, stinking smoke bubbling away from it—

	McReady walked back toward the shack silently. Barclay met him at the door. "No more?" the giant meteorologist asked grimly. Barclay shook his head. "No more. It didn't split?"

	 "It had other things to think about," McReady assured him. "When I left it, it was a glowing coal. What was it doing?"

	Norris laughed shortly. "Wise boys, we are. Smash magnetos, so planes won't work. Rip the boiler tubing out of the tractors. And leave that Thing alone for a week in this shack. Alone and undisturbed."

	McReady looked in at the shack more carefully. The air, despite the ripped door, was hot and humid. On a table at the far end of the room rested a thing of coiled wires and small magnets, glass tubing and radio tubes. At the center a block of rough stone rested. From the center of the block came the light that flooded the place, the fiercely blue light bluer than the glare of an electric arc, and from it came the sweetly soft hum. Off to one side was another mechanism of crystal glass, blown with an incredible neatness and delicacy, metal plates and a queer, shimmery sphere of insubstantiality.

	"What is that?" McReady moved nearer.

-

	NORRIS grunted. "Leave it for investigation. But I can guess pretty well. That's atomic power. That stuff to the left—that's a neat little thing for doing what men have been trying to do with 100-ton cyclotrons and so forth. It separates neutrons from heavy water, which he was getting from the surrounding ice."

	"Where did he get all—oh. Of course. A monster couldn't be locked in—or out. He's been through the apparatus caches." McReady stared at the apparatus. "Lord, what minds that race must have—"

	"The shimmery sphere—I think it's a sphere of pure force. Neutrons can pass through any matter, and he wanted a supply reservoir of neutrons. Just project neutrons against silica—calcium—beryllium—almost anything, and the atomic energy is released. That thing is the atomic generator."

	McReady plucked a thermometer from his coat. "It's 120° in here, despite the open door. Our clothes have kept the heat out to an extent, but I'm sweating now."

	Norris nodded. "The light's cold. I found that. But it gives off heat to warm the place through that coil. He had all the power in the world. He could keep it warm and pleasant, as his race thought of warmth and pleasantness. Did you notice the light, the color of it?"

	McReady nodded. "Beyond the stars is the answer. From beyond the stars. From a hotter planet that circled a brighter, bluer sun they came."

	McReady glanced out the door toward the blasted, smoke-stained trail that flopped and wandered blindly off across the drift. "There won't be any more coming, I guess. Sheer accident it landed here, and that was twenty million years ago. What did it do all that for?" He nodded toward the apparatus.

	Barclay laughed softly. "Did you notice what it was working on when we came? Look." He pointed toward the ceiling of the shack.

	Like a knapsack made of flattened coffee-tins, with dangling cloth straps and leather belts, the mechanism clung to the ceiling. A tiny, glaring heart of supernal flame burned in it, yet burned through the ceiling's wood without scorching it. Barclay walked over to it, grasped two of the dangling straps in his hands, and pulled it down with an effort. He strapped it about his body. A slight jump carried him in a weirdly slow arc across the room.

	"Anti-gravity," said McReady softly.

	"Anti-gravity," Norris nodded. "Yes, we had 'em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The birds hadn't come—but they had coffee-tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week—a whole week—all to itself. America in a single jump—with anti-gravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.

	"We had 'em stopped. Another half hour—it was just tightening these straps on the device so it could wear it—and we'd have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down any moving thing that came from the rest of the world."

	"The albatross—" McReady said softly. "Do you suppose—"

	"With this thing almost finished? With that death weapon it held in its hand?

	"No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars. They came from a world with a bluer sun."

The End

The Elder Gods
Unknown Worlds – October 1939
 (as by Don A. Stuart)

I

	LORD NAZUN, chief of the Elder Gods, looked down at the city of Tordu, and sighed softly. Beside him, Taltm snorted angrily, a pleasant dilute odor of drying kelp and salt sea eddying about him in the soft breeze. Lady Tammar chuckled and spoke softly. "It oppresses you more than usual tonight, Talun?"

	"It's sure we'll gain nothing in this way. Nazun, tell me, what was in the minds of men when we appeared first?"

	Nazun stirred uneasily, a vague, lean bulk against the midnight blue of the sky. "I know, my friend—but there was a certain fear, too, that we would not change with the changing times. Perhaps that is our flaw."

	"And the greater flaw," the sea lord growled, "is standing by in idleness and watching the destruction of our people. The Invisible Ones are death—death not of the body, but of the spirit and mind. Where are my sea rovers gone? Dead and decayed. Fisherman—good, stout workmen though they be—lack the spark that makes the sea rover."

	"We cannot attack the Invisible Ones by attacking, by taking over the minds of our people; that is the First Law," Nazun pointed out.

	"No—and ye need a solid right arm to attack the Invisible Ones, which none of us possesses. But, on the same, we possess neither a solid thing that keeps us subject to material weapons such as a solid right arm may wield!"

	"You'll turn no man of Tordu against the Invisible Ones. The pattern and movement of every Azuni is so set and known to the Invisible Ones, as to us, that he would be dead at the hands of the priests of the Invisible Ones before he moved half across Tordu," Lord Martal pointed out. "There are chances in the lives of men—but not when the Invisible Ones have time to plot out those chances first!"

	"No stranger has reached these islands in five centuries," Nazu sighed. "Your sea rovers, Talun, rove as close by the shore as a chick by the old hen's feet. While they rove the shorelines of the continents, they'll never find Azun ... and without wider knowledge of the pointing needle, no seaman ventures far. It will be a century yet before men wander the oceans freely once more."

	Talun's sea-squinted eyes narrowed farther. "They wander," he said explosively, "where the will of the winds drive them, my friend. Now if ye want a stranger here on these islands, we'll see what the winds and my seas can do!"

	Nazun stood silent, squinting thoughtfully at the sea beyond, and the town below. "One stranger, Talun—only one. One stranger, without background known to us or the Invisible Ones, is beyond calculation and the prophecy of the gods; half a dozen strangers, and there would be more factors on which to base foreknowledge—and defeat!"

	"One then," growled Talun. "One good sea rover, with a spark and flame within him that these damned Invisible Ones can't read or quench!"

-

	LORD NAZUN looked down at the wilted form on the pebbled beach with a wry, dry smile on his lips, and a twinkle of amusement in his narrowed gray eyes. "A sorry specimen you've fished up for us, Talun. And did you need to cause so violent a storm as the recent one to capture this bit of drift?"

	Talun's dark face knotted in a grimace of anger, then smoothed in resignation. His roaring voice cut through the dying whine of winds and the broom of surf on the beach below. "I never know, Nazun, whether you mean your words. The scholars that fathered you forgot me, and forgot to give me wisdom—a sad lack in this day. That washed-up thing may be a bit bedewed, a bit softened by immersion in good brine, but he'll dry out again. And he's a man, a real man! There's more than mush in his back, and more than jelly in his heart. These Azuni men that sail by the bark of a dog and the twitter of a bird will be the vanishment of me!

	"By the sea, I'd say such a storm as that last was needed to net that man! There was courage in him to build his ship on the edge of the brine, and sail straight out from land! A man who uses land as a guide only to show him how to get farthest from it quickest has my liking, and my protection."

	Talun's heavy brows pulled down belligerently as he looked Nazun in the eye defiantly. Then his gaze shifted back to the man uneasily. Nazun's deep-set, narrow gray eyes were friendly, twinkling with pleasant good humor, but there was in them a depth beyond depths that left Talun, for all his own powers, ill at ease and unsettled.

	Lady Tammar laughed softly. "And while you argue, he dries out. Now, good Nazun, you have netted your fish, or Talun has netted him for you and brought him to this beach. What plans have you for him next?"

	"He's been well stripped," Lord Martal grunted. He waved a muscle-knotted, stout-fingered hand at the man who was beginning to stir again on the lumpy mattress of hard quartz. "He has neither gold, nor sword to carve it out with, nor any other thing. I'd say he was fitted to take advice for his next move. He could have used a sword for defense, Talun. You might have left him that. By the cut of his figure, I'd say he would sooner fight than ask for help, weapon or no."

	Talun scratched his bearded chin uneasily and snorted. The dying wind permitted the faint aroma of fish to cling about the bulky figure once again in a not unpleasant intensity. More a signature or card of identity than an offense. "Your favorite irons don't float," he said, half annoyed. "The man showed sense when he parted with that when his cockleshell went down. Now leave my works alone, and let me worry about my sea. I've done my task—a man, such as you asked, at your feet, stripped as you asked, but sound. You can find him swords and breastplates enough in the junk shops of Tordu, where your ex-friends have left them, Martal. My fishermen are still with me."

	Lord Martal laughed. "Good enough, friend, and right enough. We'll equip him once again. There's a house, a small temple where men worship chance and probabilities, where I may find a way to help our new-found friend. Ah, he's getting up."

-

	WEAKLY, Daron pushed his elbows under him, sneezed vigorously, and gasped. He looked about him at the empty beach. The pebbles that had left a faithful imprint on every aching muscle of his back and shoulders gave way to broken rock a hundred feet away, and that in turn became a rocky cliff. Daron turned his head wearily, heaved himself erect, and dragged himself over to the nearest good-sized boulder. He held his head firmly in place till the dizziness left, then looked about. The wind was dying away but the surf still made hungry, disappointed noises on the beach as it tried to reach him.

	He looked at it resentfully. "You took my ship, and you took my crew, which seems enough. Also you took from me all sense of where I am, which was more than enough to rob me of. May the gods give that there are men somewhere near—though it seems unlikely. No men of sense would inhabit so unpleasant a coast."

	He looked up the beach, which curved away somewhere beyond the rain mists into a gray, formless blank. Down the beach, the high rocky cliff dwindled away just before it, too, was swallowed by the gray, wind-driven mists. Overhead, the dull gray was darkened to night, and the dull gray of his spirits darkened with it.

	He followed the line of the cliff speculatively, and looked at the smug, uplifted brow of it near him. There was no sense struggling up here if it fell away to an easy slope half a mile down the beach. He heaved himself up from the boulder and started, annoyed that he had not the faintest idea whether he was moving south, east, north or west. To his sea rover's mind it was a feeling of nakedness equal to the undressed feeling the lack of his sword gave him.

	Half a mile and the cliff did give way to a cragged set of natural steps. Above, he found his dizziness returned by the effort of climbing, and the beginnings of a mist-obscured meadow of some wiry grass that thrived on salt-spray. He set off across it doggedly as the gray of the skies gave way to almost total blackness. The wiry grass clutched at his toes, and he felt too weary to lift his feet above it.

	Resignedly, he lay down to wait for daylight. Half an hour later, the chilling, dying wind induced him to change "his mind. He stood up again and started on. The wind had swept away the last of the rain mist, and presently he made out a gleam of light that came and went erratically. He stood still, squinting his eyes, and watched.

	"It may be like the pools I saw in the Dryland, a dream of something I want, but again, it may merely be that trees are blowing in front of the light. In any case, it's something other than gray mist to walk toward."

	He stopped a hundred yards from the little building and watched more carefully. Strangers were not welcome in most of the world he'd known, but a rough gauge of the way an unknown people received a stranger lay in their buildings. Sticks and wattles—the stranger was apt to be the dinner. Good timber and thatch—the stranger was welcomed to dinner, usually roast sheep or lamb. Crude stone—the stranger was allowed to enter, if he could pay for his dinner. Finished stone—the stranger was shown the way to the public house.

	It augured ill. The house was built of fieldstone, well mortared. But still—they'd be less likely to make dinner of him, even though they might not make dinner for him.

-

	HE KNOCKED, noting, for all his weariness, that the door was singularly ill-kept. It opened, and Daron paused in measurement of the man who faced him. Six feet and more, Daron stood, but the man before him was four inches more, built long and supple, with an ease and grace of movement that spoke of well-ordered muscles.

	But the face eased the sea rover's mind. It was high and narrow but broad above the eyes—strange eyes—gray and deep, almost black as they looked out from the warm firelight of the room beyond. The rugged strongly hewn features were keen with intelligence; the eyes and the tiny wrinkles around them deep with a queerly eternal wisdom.

	"Your coast, yonder," said Daron, his mouth twisted in a grim smile, "offers poor bedding for a man whose ship is gone, and the grass of your meadows seem wiry for human gullets. I've naught but my gratitude left to buy me a meal and a night away from the wind, but if that be good value in your land—"

	The cragged face of the native wrinkled in good-humored acquiescence as he opened the door more fully. "It is a depreciated currency, much debased with counterfeit, a strange trouble of our land. But come in, we'll try the worth of yours."

	Daron stepped in, and passed his host. Rather quickly he sought a chair made of X members supporting leather bands. It creaked under his weight as he looked up at his host. "My knees have yet to learn their manners, friend, and they seemed unwilling to wait your invitation."

	"Sit then. How long have you been without food?"

	"Some twenty hours—since the storm came up. It's not the lack of food, I think, but the too-free drinking of the last five of those hours. Wine has made my knees as unsteady, but I liked the process better."

	"I have little here to offer you—a shepherd's fare. Tordu is some two days' journey away, beyond the Chinur Mountains."

	"Hm-m-m ... then this is some expansive land I've reached. Friend ... but stay, if I may eat, the questions and the answers both will boil more freely. If you have the bread and cheese of the shepherds I know, they'll serve most excellently to sop this water I've imbibed."

	"Sit here and rest, or warm yourself nearer the fire. The wind is dying, but turning colder, too." The tall man moved away,-through a doorway at the far side of the stonewalled room, and Daron's eyes roved over the furnishings.

	There were simple things, chairs—stools of leather straps and wooden X's, some simple, wooden slabs—a table of darkened, well-worn oak. Some sense of unease haunted Daron's mind, a feeling of decay about the smoke-grimed stone of the walls not matched by the simple furnishings.

	Then his host was back with a stone jug, an oval loaf of bread, and a crumbling mass of well-ripened cheese on an earthenware plate. He set them on the table, as Daron moved over, for the first time observing closely the dress of his host. His clothes were of some blue-green stuff, loosely draped to fall nearly to his leather-sandaled feet, bunched behind his head in a hooded cowl thrown back between the shoulders now.

	Daron's quick eyes studied the fingers that set out the food, even as he reached toward it. They were long, slim, supple fingers, and the forearm that stretched from the loose sleeve of the blue-green cloak was muscled magnificently with the ropey, slim, deceptive cords of the swift-actioned man's strength.

-

	DARON'S eyes raised to the face of his host. The level, gray eyes looked down into his for a long moment, and Daron shrugged easily and turned back to his food. The eyes had regarded him with honesty of good intent—and the green-robed man was his host. If he chose to call himself a shepherd within his own house, to a stranger he befriended, that, then was his business.

	"I am called Nazun," his host said presently. His voice was deep and resonant, friendly, yet holding within it an air of certainty and power that the sea rover had heard in few men before. One had been his friend, and had carved out an empire. None of them had been shepherds—for long.

	"I am Daron, of Kyprost—which I think you may not know. I am afflicted with a strange curse—like quicksilver, I cannot long remain in any place, yet in all my wanderings I've never heard of land that lay halfway from Western world to Eastern. And—unless I swam back in five hours over the course my vessel spent twelve days laying—this is a land I never knew existed."

	"This is the island Ator, of the Azun islands. Some few of our people have sailed eastward to the borders of the great continent from which you came, but not in many generations have the Azuni been the sea rovers they once were. They wandered here from the lands you know, long ago, but now they see no joy in roving. Azun is very pleasant; they forget the old ways and the old gods, and worship new ideas and new gods."

	Daron grinned. "Pleasant, is it? It was a hard, gray place I found. But for your light, it seemed I might find no more of it, for that the wind was cooling, I found for myself before I found your door."

	Daron looked up again into Nazun's eyes, his blue eyes drawn to the gray. For an instant the firelight fell strong and clear on the sun-tanned face of the giant before him. The deep-sunk gray eyes looked into his levelly, from a face set for an instant in thought, a face of undeterminable age, as such strongly hewn faces of men may be. There was kindliness about it, but in that instant kindliness was hidden by overwhelming power. Daron's careless smile dropped away so that his own strongly chiseled face was serious and intent.

	The gray eyes, he suddenly saw, were old. They were very, very old, and something of the chill of the dying wind outside leaked into Daron from those eyes.

	The sea rover dropped his eyes to his food, broke a bit of bread and some cheese, ate it, and washed it down with the full-bodied wine from the stone jug.

	The room was quiet, strangely quiet, with only the rustle of the fire to move the drapes of silence. Daron did not look up as he spoke, slowly, thoughtfully. His easy, laughing voice was deeper, more serious. "I am a stranger to this section of the world—friend. I ... I think I would do better if you would give me some advice as to how I might repay you for this meal, which, at this time, is life."

-

	NAZUN'S voice was soft against the silence, and Daron listened without looking up. "Yes, it is a strange corner of the world, Daron. Many generations ago the Azuni came, sea rovers such as you, and settled here. They found rich land, good temperatures, a good life. For a long time they roved the sea, but Azun was home. They built a peaceful country—there were no other sea rovers then to menace them—and prospered here.

	"It was a peaceful home—they stayed by it more and more. Why wander in harsher lands? The Azuni have not wandered now in many generations. There is no need. And with peace, comes wisdom. They grew too wise to worship the old gods, and found new gods—you'll learn of them, the Invisible Ones, in Tordu, the capital of Azun—in new ways.

	"But you will learn of this. Primarily, for safety and for pleasure here, remember this: the Azuni know more of minds and the works of the power of mind than any people of the Earth. This power may make things uncertain for you ... but only some of the Azuni have the full knowledge now.

	"For certain reasons, friend, I cannot have you here the night. Go from the door straight out. There is a broken wall of stone some two hundred paces out, which you will see by the light of the moon—the clouds are broken to a scudding wrack, now—and beyond it is a cart road. Turn right on this, and follow it along. You'll find a public house along the road within the hour. And—if someone offers you a game, accept and you may have luck. Take this—it's a small coin, but planted well, it may grow a large crop."

	Daron rose from the table. Turning as he rose so that his eyes sought the glowing fire. He slipped the small silver coin into his palm, tapped his hand, and the coin spun neatly in the air to slip, edge on, between his fingers and be caught. "Aye, friend. To the right. And—I will learn later, I think, how I may return this favor. Tordu would seem to be the goal of a sound man on this island of yours."

	"To the right," Nazun nodded.

	Daron stepped to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the night. The moon shone through rents in the shattered cloud veil. He went on steadily to the broken wall, crossed over, and turned right. He flipped the silver coin in his fingers and noticed to himself that the bright fire in the stone house no longer shone through the windows. For that matter, the moonlight shone through the ruined roof to make a patch of light in the room beyond the shattered, unhinged door.

	Daron shrugged uneasily, and remembered the friendly creases about the deep-set gray eyes and tossed the coin into a pocket with an expert flip. He swung easily down the rutted cart road.

	"Nazun," he said, and cocked an eye at the scudding cloud wrack. "Now the local people might know that name—and there are other ways than asking questions to learn an answer."

-

II

	THE WIRY GRASS gave way to scrub, and the stunted brush to patches of trees. The stone inn house nestled in a group of the trees, half hidden by them, but a signpost hung out over the road to rectify that flaw; the traveler "would not miss it. Daron fingered his single coin and squinted at the signboard as the moonlight flickered across it like the glow of a draft-stirred candle.

	"That," said Daron softly, "means 'The Dolphin,' which would be a right goodly name for such a place, so near the sea; but that lettering is like to none I've seen before!" He let it go at that, and went on toward the door, with a clearer idea in mind as to the meaning' of the name of Nazun. He had, seemingly, acquired a new fund of wisdom, a new language!

	The voices of men and the laughter of a girl came through the heavy oaken panels of the door as he raised the knocker; and he heard the heavy, rolling tread of the host as he dropped it down again. The man who faced the sea rover now was no giant, but a short, round-bellied little man with a face all creases, sprouting seedling whiskers of a red beard as the only clue to what his vanished hair might once have been.

	"Aye, and come in, for though the night is bettering, it's foul enough yet, my friend."

	Daron smiled .in answer to the infectious good humor of the innkeeper. "And who knows better than I? Pray your drinks are better than brine, for I've had my fill of that, and your beds are better than the quartz the waves laid me out on. I've lost a ship, a crew, a sword, and all but one silver coin." Daron looped it upward so it glinted in the light of a hanging lamp and the glow of the fire.

	The innkeeper's smile-creased mouth pursed worriedly. "Your luck seems bad, and ... and your coin small," he said doubtfully.

	"Ah, but you think too quickly, friend," laughed Daron. "Look, out of a crew of a dozen stout lads, I lived. You say my luck is bad? Out of all that I possessed, this bit of silver stayed with me like a true friend and you think it will leave me now?

	"Now let us test this thing. Look; I want a bit of meat, a bit of bread, and perhaps some wine. You want my coin. Fair enough, but you say my luck is bad, which is a curse on any seaman. Let's see, then; we'll try this coin. If it falls against me, it is yours, and I seek another place for food. If it is the friend I say—"

	The innkeeper shrugged. "I am no worshipper of Lord Martal, and I've no faith in the luck he rules. Go back through yonder door, and you'll find his truest worshipers in all Ator, I swear. They gamble away two fortunes in an evening, and gambit it back between 'em. But they gamble away my wine, and pay for that, wherefore they're welcome. Perhaps I should thank Lord Martal at that."

	Daron chuckled. "By all means, man! He smiles on you, and the old gods are good protectors, I feel." The seaman swung across the little entrance room toward the curtained entrance to the main dining hall beyond. The smoke-stained oaken beams hung low enough to make him stoop his head as he pushed the curtain aside and looked beyond. A dozen men, some in well-worn, stout clothing bearing the faintly sour, wholly pleasant odor of the sea, some with the heavier smells of earth and horses, clustered about a table where five men in finer clothes were seated. Three girls, in tight-bodiced, wide-skirted costumes watched and moved about to fill the orders of the men.

	None saw him at first, as they watched the play of the dice that leaped and danced on the dark wood of the table top. Daron moved over, and some of the outer fringe looked up at him, their boisterous voices quieting for an instant, then resuming at his easy grin and nod. The ring of farming people and the fishermen made way a bit, uncertain by his dress, for, sea-stained and flavored, it showed fine-woven cloth of good linen, worked in an unfamiliar pattern with bits of gold and silver wire.

	The seated men looked up at him, and back at the dice, and rolled again. Daron leaned forward, putting his widespread hands on the table. "My friends," he said seriously, "I have an unpleasant mission here. My ship is lost, my crew is gone, and all possessions left me save this coin." The single silver bit clinked down. "Our good host has said my luck is foul; I feel that it is good. Wherein does this concern you? It is this; if I would sleep softer than the stones outside, and eat fare tenderer than twigs, I must plant this seedling coin and reap a harvest. I fear it is from your pockets, then, the harvest must come."

	The nearest of the player's laughed, spun Daron's coin, and nodded. "One stake, friend, and we'll finish the work the seas began! A man with such a thing is hard put—it would buy a bit of food, or a bed, but not both, and the decision would be hard. We shall relieve you!"

	"Now, by Nazun, you won't, I feel!" Daron laughed—and watched their eyes.

	The player shook his head and laughed. "Now by the Invisible Ones, I know we shall. If you still put your faith in outworn gods, it is small surprise they stripped you thus."

	Daron relaxed, and nodded to himself. "We shall see."

	"And," said the holder of the dice, passing them to Daron, "this is no field for Nazun, for there's no wisdom in these bits of bone. If the old gods appeal to you, why then Martal, I'd say, would be the one you'd swear by here."

	"No wisdom in the dice—no, that may be. But wisdom may reside in fingers, thus?" Daron spun out the three polished cubes, and saw them turn a five, a five and a six. "What would you have me throw?"

	"I'll take your stake," said the hawk-nosed player to Daron's right. "Better this." His fingers caressed the dice, spun them, and shot them forth. They settled for a total of twelve.

	"With two dice, I'd match it, with three—" Daron's roll produced fourteen. "But even so," as he picked up two silver coins, "we need some further crops. A bed and board I have, but Tordu is farther than a seaman walks. A horse, I think—Will some one match me more?"

-

	A SWORD filled the scabbard at his thigh, and a good dirk was thrust in his belt, a horse was his, and money for a day or two when he sought his bed that night. He whistled a bit of a tune as he laid aside his things, dropped the thick oak bar across the door, and settled for sleep. "I'll say this for this land," he muttered, "very practical gods they have. Unique in my experience. They do a man very material good turns. Wisdom, it is, eh? I thought as much—"

	The sun was bright, the air warm, but not uncomfortable, and the horse better even than the lamp's weak light had suggested in the night, when Daron started off. The cart road had broadened to a highway, and this to one well-traveled within a pair of hours. The scrub bush and sheep-dotted meadows gave way to farmlands bordered with fences growing neatly from the ground, well-barbed fences of some cactus bush for which the sheep, showed sound respect.

	There was little timber here, but under the clear sun, the meadowlands and farms stretched off into pleasantly blue-hazed distance, where the banking of the haze seemed to indicate a mountain range stretching off from east to west. The road led south, but like most farmland roads, seemed unconcerned with haste and directness. It visited from door to door and rolled aside when some small swale of land suggested climbing hills. The horse was sound and strong, seeming to have a nature as blithe as Daron's own, with little mind to bother a fair day about a change in masters.

	Toward noon, the rising ground began to show some signs of timber, and the stone-walled farm cottages began to trail attendants in wooden walls, and sheep appeared again more frequently. The haze rolled up by the rising sun still banked to the south, but the shining gleam above it indicated that the haze had retreated to solid mountain fastnesses, with a snow-crowned peak above.

	The sun was warmer now, and where a small stream trickled through a woodpatch, Daron dismounted, tethered his mount to a bush near the stream, and spread his food. He ate, and leaned back in easy contemplation and thought. The wandering breeze brought some faint hint to him of a visitor, and his swift thoughts placed his line of action before the odor was more than identifiable to him. He looked up with a smile as the footsteps of the newcomer crunched on the twigs nearby.

	He saw a wind-blown, sun-tanned man, rather stocky and heavily muscled, with eyes squinting permanently from the glare of the sun on water. A sailor's cap perched solidly on his round, dark-haired head. A black stubble of beard showed on his heavy jowls and on his thick, muscular arms, and an impudent tuft thrust out from each ear.

	"My friend," said Daron, "you're a way from the sea, which, by your gait, would be more homelike to you."

	The stocky one seated himself with a grunt. "Aye, and the same to you. Those linens were never stained in a brook, and, unless you ride yon horse lying on your back, it's not the sweat of your beast.

	"Bound for Tordu?"

	"One I met last night named such a city. I am not familiar with this country—a remarkable land I find it—and it seemed the part of wisdom to seek the center of the place. And, by the bye, men call me Daron."

	"Talun," grunted the stocky one, seemingly annoyed. "Tordu's a foul place for an honest seaman, though seamen of that ilk seem fewer with every season. The whole race of Azuni have grown soft and stupid, and the stupidest have gathered in Tordu to admire their overweening stupidity. They have no sense or judgment, and they shun the sea like the plague. Time was when the Bay of Tor was a harbor." Talun snorted disgustedly. "They've got it cluttered so with fancy barges now no merchant ship can enter, and they've set a temple to those precious Invisible Ones of theirs across the mouth of the bay—they call it Temple Isle now; it used to be the finest shipyard in Azun—and their slinking Invisible Ones hang over the bay mouth till the good clean sea stays out in disgust."

-

	"INVISIBLE ONES? Hm-m-m. I'm somewhat unacquainted here, though I've heard a dozen times of these Invisible Ones—not including several references to them, both prayerful and annoyed last night, from certain gentlemen of the countryside I gamed with—but little explanation of them. Gods, are they?"

	"Gods?" Talun snorted angrily. "They pray to them as to gods, and say they are not gods. The people of Tordu are fools and crazed ones at that. 'No gods,' they say. They scorn the old gods of their fathers, for say they, the old gods are foolishness—made in the image of men, and hence no more than projected men and the power of men's minds. The true god-being, these wise thinkers say, is certainly no man, a thing of force in form mere mortal mind cannot conceive. So they build themselves these Invisible Ones, and give them power, and curse the old gods.

	"They're fools, and have no wisdom, and admire each other's mighty thoughts."

	"The wise thinkers, eh?" mused Daron. "We have such thinkers in my land, and we have certain other thinkers who have one certain trait that sets them off—a remarkable thing. They think long, study much, and confess to those who ask that they learn steadily that they know little. Some think that a crabwise way to knowledge—but I am prejudiced; I learned from such a man."

	Talun stirred uneasily, and his squinted eyes turned upward to the clear blue bowl of the sky. The blistering sun was burning down from it to his face, but as he stared upward a fleecy cloud formed, rolled, expanded and hid the sun. Talun settled back comfortably.

	"Learning never appealed much to me. One of my friends—but not to me. The wisdom of the fools appeals not so strongly to the countrymen, nor to the sailors, and on that alone these Invisible Ones would gain no strength, for these thinkers are few, if noisy with their thoughts.

	"But another thing has influenced them," continued Talun. "The gods, these deep thinkers say, should know the future—else what's the use of consulting gods? Now the old gods did not know—or did not explain, at least."

	Daron sat more upright, looked harder at this stocky, hairy figure, the very image of a sailor or fisherman, from whom the shifting breezes brought a gentle tang of salt and fish and drying kelp. "Your gods, in this land, are most unique to me," said Daron softly. "Perhaps men have a certain reservation in their thoughts of gods in other lands—a thought that a god is some vague thing, whose statue man may carve, and to whom offerings may be made, but a remote being who does strangely little manifest for his worshipers ... Now the gods of this country, I find, are most substantial beings—and most helpful. The Lord of Chance, of Contests, let us say: he wished me well last night, I think." Daron nodded toward the browsing horse. "Now if a people blessed by gods who have such usefulness complain, it would seem they set hard standards indeed."

	Talun grumbled and rolled over. Daron cast an eye upward; alone in the blue vault of the sky the single white fleece of cloud remained motionless between them and the sun, casting a pleasant tempering shade. "Men want more than they have—and that, my friends tell me, is good, and the reason seems enough," answered Talun. "If a man be satisfied with what he has, why surely, he will get no more. If a man catch a dozen fish, which is enough to feed his wife and a child, and fish no more, I'd think little of his courage, or his sense.

	"But now this knowing the future. It is not always good. These wise thinkers of Tordu, they put it that the gods should know, and the gods should tell men—and their Invisible Ones do. But the priests of the Lord of Wisdom, the wisest of the old gods, say gods should know—but should not explain all things."

	"Why not?" asked Daron.

	"If a god should tell you that this night you would wager your horse against a slave girl, and lose both girl and horse on a toss of the dice what would you do?"

	"Why, sure I'd be a fool indeed to wager then!"

-

	"WHEREBY, if you do not, you make a liar of the god," said Talun with a snort. "The god's prophecy of the future was not accurate, for you did not. Now such a prophecy the old gods made. If might the priest report, 'you cast your nets at Seven-Fathom Bank, you'll snare a swordfish and spend three days mending nets.' Now the fishermen would not, but would lose a good day's fishing, and rumble that the prophecies were vague.

	"But these Invisible Ones; they have no vagueness. They tell a man, 'As you walk home this night a horse shall kick and break your skull. Farewell, worshiper!" And, that night the man is dead. He swears no horse shall come near him—they did at first—but the prophecy is right, of course. If the Invisible Ones read future right, then that must be his fate. If he has wit to escape that end, why then he's made a liar of the gods." Talun dropped one heavy lid, and his dark-blue eye speared Daron sharply. "And, young friend, old gods or new, no mortal man makes a liar of the gods!"

	"That calls for thought," sighed Daron. "I see no joy in knowing my end if I have no hope of changing it."

	Talun grunted and stretched himself up. "Nor did the country folk or fishermen at first. But try a human with that thought for long, and not even the gods will make him stand firm. Live a year beside a temple of these Invisible Ones, knowing every day that there you can find sure and absolute the day and manner of your death-No. Men are mortal, and they fear old Barak, the dread god of their mortality, but the sharp, itching bite of curiosity will drive them on. You've seen the countryman twist the ox's tail to drive it in the pen in which the ox can smell death? So curiosity sends men into that temple which they know means loss of hope."

	Talun shrugged. "Once there—what man has courage and will to walk away? They sink like wine sots, drunk with future knowledge, giving up all strength and drive of spirit, for the Invisible Ones tell them what is coming—and they know it will come, try how they may, so you may be sure they do not try.

	"Go your way, friend. I have business at times in Tordu, too, so I may see you again." Talun wandered off through the woodpatch and vanished behind a tree.

	Daron lay back to stare at the cloud. It hung still precisely between the sun and the spot where Talun had sat. But it was evaporating rapidly now, and presently the blue vault of sky was clear. Daron chuckled as he untethered his horse and swung onto his back. Convenient, that trick.

	His horse trotted on easily across the plain, passing a farm wagon here, neighing to a browsing horse along the way, and Daron sat straight and thought. A notion formed at the back of his mind that Talun had not altogether been a friend. That storm that took his ship and crew-

	But—gods were gods. There was no sense to cavil at their decisions; they did as they choose—and there's an end to it.

	Well, it was evident he had a mission here, and surely no higher adventure had he sought than this! With gods like those this land boasted—they did not seem a stingy lot!

	The day passed, and he stopped that night in another inn, the Sheath and Scythe, it was, and the men who drank the lank, cadaverous host's wine had no smell of sea or fish about them. The heavy, earthy smell that permeated the inn was thick to Daron's sea-trained nostrils. 

	Experimentally, he tossed the dice again this night. He lost three throws, won two, and knew his answer. What he needed, seemingly was his—but these gods did not take the spice of gambling from him by constant winning. He settled down then, and what Martal's help did not bring him a certain deftness of fingering did. The night grew fatter then, when he found that, somehow, this land had never learned the mighty magic of the three snail shells and the pebble.

	Content, and more than warmed by good wine—his shells had betrayed him with clumsiness, else he'd have stayed longer—he went to sleep.

-

III

	WITH A SAILOR'S instinct, for all his hoofed carrier, Daron found his way to the docks of Tordu straightway—and snorted as he saw them. No smell of good fish and bad, no circling, wide-winged argosies of gulls. The broad, V-shaped Bay of Tor spread out, its mouth plugged by the Temple Isle, its waves showering familiar gold and diamond back to the blue skies and the sun. But the clean, salt-and-fish smell of any coastal sea was gone, buried, drowned away in a scent that reeked in the sea rover's nostrils. Incense! The bay was dotted with hoggish, bloat-belly barges, with white canvas mocked in pretty silks, good yellow cordage tinseled with golden threads.

	The final insult to the sea was the crews. Girls! Golden-tanned pink skins, and dainty figures playing seamen! Slave girls with beribboned chains of gold pulling at the oars that drifted the silly barges out.

	Daron groaned. The sailor's eye roved around the harbor, and his sea rover's soul writhed in anguish. High, granite-glinting cliffs, impregnable to any storm, formed a solid wall broken in two deep, sharp clefts, the twin mouths of the bay. Set like a grim, squat fort across it was the island, a grim, stanch island of black, pinnacled basalt bedecked with carved and spidery-lined temples, be-flowered with beds of plants in artificial soil.

	Here was a harbor the gods had made impregnable! They'd set across its mouth such harsh defenses as no sea could smash, nor any force of men invade, for but a few score of good catapults could make those deep-cloven channels—wide enough for peaceful shipping—invulnerable to all assault.

	Yet the great walls of granite fell away in rapid slopes so that the city of Tordu, at the head of the bay, straddling the Tor River, was on a level beach-front.

	And barges—pretty barges mocking galleys with their silly, slim slave girls—monopolized this port!

	Daron clunked his heels disgustedly against the stout ribs of his horse, and turned his back on the place. The horse plop-plopped away in an easy trot, while Daron's ire mounted within him. The horse, not Daron, avoided the rumbling carriages of gaily decked men and women, skirted the shoreside area of marble-fronted shops selling things for temple decorations and offerings.

	Even the sound of this section of the city was unlike any Daron had known before. It rang with the voices of men and women, as any good town must, and the creak and plop of harness and horses' hoofs. But the ringing jingle of good steel swords, the strong, hard ring of vital, active voices was gone. The calls were vague, unimportant, even to themselves; the faces of the men were interested, but more from seeking interest than because they found interest in each small thing of life.

	Daron drove westward across the city, away from the bay. The level of the ground swelled upward gently, and the street was bordered by high, plastered walls, tinted white and pale blues and greens and pinks, as pale as the life force of this silly city.

	Then the ground dropped down again; and as it fell, the view of the bay was lost behind, and the large estates that hid behind those plastered walls shrank quickly. The broad street split, and narrowed—and Daron began to look about more keenly. The pale color of the walls gave way, the pale, soft voices changed, the timbre of the city's sounds changed, and the smoky, spicy scent of incense gave way with it. From the east a breeze was sweeping the smell of a true city, the odor of foods and men and the green of growing things.

-

	A GOOD two miles back from the bay he found the sector he sought. The men were taller, heavier; two women leaned from nearby windows listening with hand-cupped ears to the angry voices floating from a neighboring house. The sweetly sour smell of wine floated out of a white-washed inn, and the smell of hay turned the horse's nose to the stable yard as easily as the other turned his master's course.

	Daron dropped the reins into the hand of the boy that roused himself from whistling lethargy to split his freckled face in a friendly grin. "You've seen a man become a fool with the aid of wine?" said Daron gruffly.

	The boy's eyes rounded. "My ... my father runs the inn—"

	"A horse may do the same with food and water. Feed the beast, but mind he's no more sense than you, so feed him light, and water him gently." Daron grinned, and a coin flashed suddenly in the air and winked into nothingness as the boy's hand moved.

	Daron swung from the courtyard to the street, and filled his lungs with a grunt of satisfaction. The air had not the tang of clean sea sweeps but the insult of the incense was out of his nostrils. He blinked his eyes and entered the inn.

	A half dozen townsmen, in loose armless cotton shirts that slipped on over their heads, and woolen breeches falling loose to their knees, contracting sharply to mold the shins, looked at his different garb. The shirts were blue or green or yellow, but all the breeches were brown.

	Daron grinned. "You've a good eye for color, lads, but tell me this; is it good brown earth or dye that makes your breeches match?"

	One of the townsmen looked casually round the room and chewed on something slowly before replying. "And where would you be from, stranger? It's clear you never heard of the Elder Vows."

	"That might be, and that might be an answer. What is this Elder Vow? And is it the custom here, too, that the host so hides himself a guest goes thirsty?"

	"No guest goes thirsty, but the host wears no more badge than does the guest." The man rose slowly, unfolding from behind his table like an endless python pouring from his hole. Lank as a ship's mainmast, he towered over Daron, his long arms dangling downward like wet rags hung out to dry.

	Daron stepped back and eyed him up and down. "By Talun, now, you'd serve as jury-rig in any tall-sparred ship! If your drinks be as long as you, then there's good value for the money here! Give me something cool and wet that has less of the vinegar than the wine I've had since I landed on this shore."

	The innkeeper grinned, leaned slightly, and plucked a cobwebbed bottle from a little door that sprung open at his touch, put it on the table and gestured broadly. "You've learned the trouble of the wines here quick enough.

	"Now as to the color of our breeches; it seems small account of yours, but a long morning makes for easy talk, so sit. The answer's short enough, but there's little joy in short answers."

	Daron smacked his lips and sighed contentedly. "Hm-m-m ... a drink at last that wouldn't eat its way through marble stones! Let's hear this answer then, be it long or short. I'll leave when my business presses."

	"I'm a fool," said the innkeeper sadly. "My friends"—he waved his queerly flexible long arm—"are fools. My foolishness—our foolishness—lies in this; we like to think that what we strive for we get, and what we get we get by striving for."

	"A sound-seeming thought. Wherein lies the foolishness?"

	The lanky one waved his arm again. "The street is full of those who will tell you. The temples on the isle are full of Invisible Ones and priests who will prove it for you.

	"We go to the Older Gods. We wear these breeches to save us headaches."

-

	DARON cocked his head. "A curious custom. In the Dryland, where once I was, there was a race of men who wrapped a white cloth about their heads to keep it cool and save them headaches, but this trick of wrapping the nether end seems somewhat strange. Still, one cannot tell. It seemed insane enough—that wrapping up the head to keep it cool—until I tried it, after twice finding that the sun was no puny light for man's convenience there. So I suppose you have some logic in your acts."

	The man on the innkeeper's left blinked his eyes slowly, combed a full, spade-shaped beard of curly hairs, and patted a pate as bald as an empty seascape. "We tried wrapping our ears. The worshipers of the Invisible Ones still argued. So we wore the brown breeches and simply knocked down those who argued with us. A year or so—and they stopped arguing."

	"By Nazun, that's wisdom!" Daron laughed. "But still I seek the explanation of the foolishness of striving for your wants."

	"I," said the innkeeper, "am Shorhun." He stopped and chewed thoughtfully, looking at his sandaled foot.

	"Daron, I'm called."

	"If I go to the Temple Isle, the Invisible Ones will tell me whether or not the landlord of this place—who believes that I am a fool because I do not go—is going to throw me forth into the street. Incidentally, I'd be a fool in truth to seek an answer from the Invisible Ones on that; I know he is. But they might also tell me where I next will go, and, whether I will prosper. Say that they say I will. The Invisible Ones prophesy always what will happen. Wherefore, if they say f will prosper, it will mean little to me what I do. It seems no prize of my good effort. If, through carelessness, I crack my pate on yonder doorframe, even that I prefer to think of as my own, my personally blundering act. If the Invisible Ones prophesy it—why, I have yet to crack my pate, and lack the satisfaction of cursing myself for a blind and imbecilic nitwit in the doing of it.

	"Wherefore it is foolishness. I should go and learn my fate and then sit back to live it, like a twice-told tale, mumbling in my teeth as my pre-known date of death draws near.

	"No, I prefer old Nazun. He deals in warning of things he well knows will not happen, I suppose—things I am warned against and, by avoiding, avoid trouble. Things—so the Invisible Ones say—I was not fated to meet in any case." Shorhun shrugged, a mighty thing that started like a tidal wave running up a narrow bay to crash in final jerkings at his head.

	"I had thought," said Daron slowly, "to see the temples of the Old Gods. I saw none near the bay front."

	Shorhun barked, a laugh that seemed half cadaverous cough. "Talun's Temple moved first. It fell to pieces one night with a mighty roaring and cursing, a sound that satisfied my feelings in its depth and originality, if it did disturb me next day in seeing his retreat."

	"Eh? Talun was driven from his temple?"

	"Aye. The old sea lord brought down a storm that ripped up every tree and all the nearly planted gardens of the Temple Isle, but that stubborn basalt was a bit too much for him. The isle stood."

	"But what drove him out?" Daron asked intently.

	Shorhun barked—or coughed—again. "Incense," he said lugubriously. "Before Tan Lormus, High Priest of the Invisible Ones invented that, old Talun came near to driving out the pretty barges of the rich devotees of the Invisible Ones. Talun, like the true Old God he is, was using only natural things—though the number of fish that died on the beach that year was natural only by a wide stretch of allowance."

	Daron burst into a roar of laughter till the tears rolled down his leathery cheeks. "Praise be Talun! Now that was an idea well worthy of the sea rover's god, and may this Tan Lormus live again in a fish's body for his rupture of so fine a plan!"

-

	"BUT Talun moved," sighed Shorhun. "And the others moved after him, one by one, till last of all sweet Lady Tammar moved. She lacked not for worshipers, even with the Invisible Ones, for, Invisible Ones or not, men and women yet must have love, and no fine thoughts or wise prophecy can satisfy in place of that."

	"But—she moved? The bay, foul as it may be for a sailor's eye, might still, with a good round moon, be a goodly place in a lover's eye," said Daron.

	"It was ... it was. But Lady Tammar is strangest of the gods in many ways. Lady of Love, she is all loves, all things to all men. She is the strong adventurer's companion mate, as strong as he, and as faithful. She is the young man's first love, very young, and never wise. She is the mature man's wife—his ideal of her, understanding, wise, forever ready to aid him in his troubles. But—she is, too, the fop's simpering coquette, for she is the ideal of every man, however weak that ideal may be.

	"So she moved back, back from the bay and its lack of common men in honest need. Lady Tammar had no joy in appearing thus to any man."

	Daron sipped quietly at his wine. "I think," he said softly, "that I must see the new temple of Tammar."

	Shorhun shook his great head slowly, and a little smile touched his face, changing it from the harsh look of weather-slit granite. "You can go—but Lady Tammar is wise. She does not appear to every man—for every man cannot find his perfect ideal, save in Tammar herself. And she is for no man. Once each month I go to her temple; three times she has appeared to me, and I go always in hopes. My wife is dead, and Tammar—

	"But you can go."

	"Are all the temples of the Old Gods near together?" asked Daron.

	"Near together, yes. But some six miles beyond Tordu, six miles up the slopes of Mt. Kalun, looking out across the city to the sea."

	"I think that I shall go there, then. There are inns near-by."

	Shorhun shook his head slowly. "None nearer than Tordu. The Old Ones ruled it thus. Only the priests and priestesses and the temple people live on Mt. Kalun."

	"Then this shall be my home. And—you have a tailor who could produce such fine brown breeches for me, perhaps?"

-

IV

	DARON sniffed, and his head nodded approval to the easy motion of the horse. There was incense here, on this road up Mt. Kalun, to the temples of the Old Gods—but incense he liked. The smell of spicy pine tar, baked from the tall, straight trees in the hot sun. The high air here was clear and crisp as a sea breeze, cleared by the luminous green masses of the trees.

	The horse stopped abruptly, blew through his nostrils vigorously, and looked back at his rider. Daron laughed and patted the arching, sweaty neck. "Enough, my friend? A bit of climb it is. Good, then, it's near high noon, for all we started early. Tammar's temple has stood these good few years, and will, I think, wait while we rest. And Tammar ... well, Lady Tammar has lasted longer still. We'll stop—and there's a nicely sheltered place." Daron slid off his mount, threw the reins over the animal's head, and led him off the trail. A hundred yards to the right, the pine-needle carpet of soft brown gave way to a little clearing, green with grass.

	From the saddlebags, Daron lifted a flask of wine, wrapped in a dozen layers of crushed green leaves, wilted now and somewhat dried. But the wine within was pleasantly cooled. A loaf of bread, and a cut of meat was food enough, and Daron settled comfortably. The horse was browsing at the grass, and blowing annoyedly. He was a lowland horse, it seemed, and the effects of some seven thousand feet of altitude were puzzling to him.

	Hidden beyond the stand of straight-trunked pines, the road that led up to the temples carried a sprinkling of other visitors—hardy countrymen and tough-muscled seamen, the common men who had the will and muscle, too, to climb that narrow track.

	No carriage road—those who came this way did not so from indolence and lack of other occupation, but because their minds and spirits drove them on. Daron, himself unseen, watched the steady, strong-backed walk of a man browned with the sun, hands dark with rich brown soil, bearing an offering of ripe, round melons slung in twin sacks across his shoulders.

	"Now there," said Daron, his eyes closed down to slits of concentration, "goes a man who knows his mind. No fine-tongued orator would quickly move him to war—but, I would be loath to meet his kind as an enemy."

	A pair of sailors, the breeze bringing even here the good, round talisman of their calling and proof of the god they'd worship, went noisily up the trail, blowing, laughing, rolling slightly in their walk, spurring each the other with insults of his weakness. Blowing like a hard north gale on this small slope? The wine had washed away his strength!

	"Gods," said Daron to himself, "have little need of help in working miracles—but these gods of Azun be strange gods. Why might a god call on a man for help? Why, to lead and work with other men. A god is no doubt a mighty leader—but men and gods are different things. I'd fight for a god in whom I found just cause—but not behind such a one. There would seem to me a certain delicacy in the question. A man who leads against the enemy is credited not perhaps with skill, but in any case with more than jelly up his spine.

	"But a god? An immortal god? Is courage needed for one who cannot die to face a deadly foe? And would such anomalous courage hearten those strong, if odorous, fishers? Why, the god might be courage itself—but still lack proof, where he cannot die or feel steel cutting!

	"So—perhaps this is a certain question of leading men against those foppish ones that rule Tordu. Foppish—but from the nice-kept stable yards I saw, well mounted. And your mounted cavalry is a savage thing for simple farming men to face, no matter how ill-trained the mounted man may be."

	Daron looked out and down. Two giant old pines, their trunks scaled like yellow-brown bodies of gigantic, up-rearing serpents, had throttled out lesser competition to the northeast. Between their mighty boles, Tordu was visible, a sprawl of white and green and pastel blues against the green-brown farming land. The sparkling blue of the bay, with the white-crowned Temple Isle across its mouth mocked up at him with tiny, bright-ribboned barges plying slowly back and forth on languid oars, like water beetles crawling across a puddle.

	Daron fingered a single coin tucked well down in one pocket, and looked out across the town. "Tammar I'll see—I think—for this bit of silver should be more than coin, keeping in mind its source. And gods do not favor mortals for naught, and if this Nazun, chief of Azuni's gods, sees fit to speak to me, why Tammar—"

	He paused, his slit-narrow, night-blue eyes widening and easing away the straight furrows of concentration. Mixed visions swam before his mind—oval faces framed in spun-golden hair, with wide-opened eyes like sapphires staring out in seeming wonder, and black-haired heads, round and olive-skinned, with black-jet eyes. Tall bodies willowy slim, and lithe as temple dancers, figures strong and tall and fine, free-swinging, life-loving—

	He shook his head and laughed. "No one—but part of all, perhaps. But Lady Tammar will know—and be, if Shorhun tells me right." He leaned back, eyes rising to the vaulted roof of interlacing, dark-green boughs.

-

	A FOOTSTEP near brought his eyes down, and his hand shifted half an inch to reach in one flashing drive, if need should be, the long, well-balanced weapon at his side. His hand fell away, his eyes narrowed, then widened slowly as a smile overspread his tanned face.

	"You are too late, good friend. My wine is gone, my meat and bread consumed—and I cannot repay a meal of some few evenings gone. But my accommodations here are good in many ways. The seats are soft, the needles pad them well, and keep away the ground's damp chill. Would you be seated?"

	Nazun's gray eyes smiled, and his head nodded easily. His lean, muscular body folded gracefully, till he was seated at the base of a mighty pine, facing Daron's curious eyes. Nazun's eyes flickered swiftly over horse, silver-mounted saddle, Daron's good and well-stitched clothing, and the jewel-hilted sword he carried. "A single coin has seeded well, since last we met."

	Daron laughed easily. "One crop it raised—but the next night I found a planted pebble—planted beneath the shelter of three small snail shells—grew better still in the good soil of Azun."

	Nazun's eyes laughed, and he nodded gravely. "Strange plants flourish well where the ground has not been sowed before. Yet the thing is very old."

	"Perhaps," said Daron, "you could tell me its age?" He looked at Nazun's grave, unchanging face through narrowed eyes.

	Nazun shook his head. "I've seen this earth somewhat longer than you, Daron, but this is older still. What legends of antiquity do your people know, Daron?"

	Daron's eyes swung up to watch the bowing, swaying, stately dance of dark green boughs against a clear blue sky. His long, powerfully muscled figure looked relaxed and easy, his dark-green jacket blending here, and his gray-blue woolen breeches loose and floppy about well-corded legs. His face looked blankly easy—save for the eyes, where fine networks of tiny creases gathered about the night-blue eyes peering upward at the moon-blue heavens.

	"Legends? Legends—and this Nazun is no mortal man, but Lord of Wisdom. Now legends are for children's ears, it seemed to me, but—but I am not Lord of Wisdom." Daron's thoughts flashed swiftly over years and nations—and legends. A pattern formed abruptly in his mind, a pattern he'd never seen before, and with his understanding, he started so he moved and looked deep in Nazun's eyes.

	"Now by the gods!" said Daron, soft-voiced. "I've seen a hundred nations, and heard a hundred tales, and spent long nights around the fires to the music of the ballads and the thrill of long-drawn legends. I've heard how Bummeur of the Tutz nations defeated Lacoor of the Parrys from the Tutz balladeers. And, two nights later, heard how, in that self-same battle, Lacoor of the Parrys drew Bummeur of the Tutz to follow his retreat, and trapped him—from a balladeer in Par.

	"But in the Tutz ballads, and in those of the Parrys, in those of every nation I have met, there is one common basis of ancient, ancient legend, stories older than the histories of nations. Once men were gods—and flew in air. And men were gods, to ride on fire, beyond the air, and spoke with the voices of gods, heard across all Earth, from nation to nation, and they had thunderbolts of gods.

	"But men were men—not gods. They flew on their wings, and loosed their thunderbolts at one another, till each had stripped all godhood from the other. And—men were men, and grubbed in ground again, and rode the air no more, but plodded earth on old Shank's mare.

	"Now a man may lie, and having taken council afore-hand, a dozen men may lie, and lie alike. But when a hundred men, in a hundred nations, men who have never met, lie the same fine tale—there's more than lying there!"

-

	NAZUN'S gray eyes twinkled, deep beneath their shadowing brows, and his head nodded lazily. "I've heard such legends among the peoples of Azuni—and one legend heard only here. That, when man stripped man of god-like powers, and the world rocked and heaved in torture to their thrusts, lands sank and new lands rose from the sea-beds. The island group that is Azun rose from the seas then, and some hundred peaceful men, who had certain wisdom of those things that made for god-hood, took council. Now tell me, friend, if the nations tore like mad dogs at each other's throats and every nation was embroiled, and new lands rose from the sea—"

	"I," said Daron, "would found a new nation on that untainted land."

	Nazun nodded slowly, settled back against the tree and looked up to where a scarlet-breasted bird cocked wary eyes downward before he drew back his head to rap a resounding tattoo on the great trunk. "Now," said Nazun, looking upward, "let us think what wise men might do—in days when the world was mad with bloodlust and mighty powers. Say you were such a refugee that settled here on Ator, largest of this Azun group."

	His eyes wandered down again to rest on a hopping bird fighting with a stubborn worm. "That bird there walks, but he can fly, thanks to a certain mechanism—a sort of machine that he was gifted with. Pity we have not that machine."

	Daron cocked a squinted eye, and watched the triumphant bird gobble quickly, ruffle his feathers, crouch and leap into the air. "I've tried a thousand times to do the same," the sea rover sighed. "I've seen coasts no ship could reach, and no walking man could find. And the bird flew where I could not." He shrugged. "I could not make such mechanism."

	"But once—men were, the legends say, near godlike-men might have had the wit for that, perhaps," suggested Nazun.

	"Ah," said Daron softly, and watched the bowing, dancing, swirling limbs above his head. Thoughts flashed through his mind such as he'd never contemplated. Gods, or godlike, the legends said. But—if their godhood had rested in mechanisms, in cleverness of tool and trickery—that was a sort of godhood one could well strip away, as one force took the catapults of another, to leave them helpless, wandering in rout.

	"They'd need," said Nazun's soft, almost dreaming voice, "most wonderful tools for that, no doubt. Better, finer tools than we. Springs, perhaps, of a steel better than we know, and mighty forges to make the steel."

	The picture roiled and cleared in Daron's mind. That was the source of legend, then! They had been godlike, those men of old! But their godhood had rested in machines—and the tools to make the machines. Once smash those tools—and machines wore out, with no more tools to replace them—

	"They," said Daron slowly, "had wit, perhaps, but, it seems, more trickery than godhood. Wit, knowledge—but no judgment, and wisdom is also judgment."

	"Men's minds are strange, are they not, my friend? And little known. Had such ones, as these ancient legends speak of, known more of themselves, perhaps their godlike knowledge of the things they bent to toys might have made them gods indeed."

	Daron looked closely at the pine-needle-strewn ground on which he sat, and thought. There was a story here—a further story. Gods did not speak to men to while away the time. There would be reward, perhaps, but also—when the affairs of gods were concerned, and mortal men were brought to enter—danger, adventure! "Had I escaped," said Daron softly, "from a world, and founded on an island, unmolested, a new city, a new nation, having some remnant of that godlike knowledge—I think I would forget it. I think, perhaps, more knowledge of myself would make life "worthier to myself. How does man think—and how go mad? Some say a demon enters the spirit of the mad, and some say only that his mind is sick, like the belly with a colic. And some are only queer, and growing somewhat queerer, we say are mad.

	"I know the thousand riggings of a hundred nations' ships—and know not how that knowledge lodges in my skull. I think, were I to build a new nation on the wreckage of that old, I'd learn myself a bit, before I tried the rebuilding of such powers as once destroyed men."

	"And wait, before you learned again those things, till every man in all the race had judgment enough to carry burning brands through the granary of man without setting fire? Wait, as the ages passed, till there was not, and never would be again, a madman to loose the spark? Yes," said Nazun softly, "that would be—safe, at least."

	Daron laughed, and nodded slowly. "Safe," he chuckled, "and stupid, as the turtle in his shell. We need—Oh!" said Daron suddenly, and looked at Nazun with a sudden, overwhelming understanding. "Man needs a., god, or godlike guide who acts, who interferes to direct man upward as he longs, and halt the downward settling of his urge!"

	Nazun moved easily, his long, blue-green-clad body rippling blithely to whipcord muscles under tanned and healthy skin. "Man needs his ideals personified, made real and given power. Given power enough, indeed, to stop the individual man who errs, but judgment enough to spare the man who sees ahead. One who is not man—for man is jealous of man, and unyielding to man's suggestions."

-

	DARON sat very still, and concentrated on the soft brown mass of needles at his feet. "A mighty plan," he sighed. "And if man, through centuries, learned once to rule the rest of the world with godlike powers, perhaps through other centuries he might learn to rule himself. But how, I wonder, might it be?"

	"The compass needle points to north, drawn by a thread of force unseen, unfelt by men. The brain of man is made of many tiny parts, working one against the other, millions on millions of them, by threads of force like the force that moves the compass needle, perhaps. A somewhat different force, more akin to the sparks that come from combing hair on cold, dry nights, it might be. If these small parts—these cells—act thus against each other, and it is their interaction, not the cells themselves, that is thought, then it is the force the cells generate, and not the cells themselves, which is thought."

	"Yes," said Daron, his eyes narrowed and alert on those bottomless gray wells of Nazun's eyes. "And—the force that is the interaction is not material, as invisible as the fine thread of pull that turns the compass needle."

	Nazun relaxed, and his eyes wandered from Daron's, as though the important story were told. "If these things were true, men might then learn to make those interactions that are thought self-existent, apart from the materials of the cells. A group of many men, wise and learned, might cause a concentration of such forces to take an independent existence, a self-thinking, immaterial thought. It would be—almost godlike."

	"It would be the essence of man—his ideas, without his needs, his heights, without his weakness."

	"And the minds of many men might mold and build it better, nearer to human kind, while yet it had the power to reject the wrong in men.

	"With such—man might go onward safely, for such a guardian of man could guide and aid men."

	"Why"—Daron halted, licked his lips with tip of tongue, and rephrased his thought. If Nazun wished indirection, there might be reason, must be reason here—"if such a thing should be attained, say—five centuries ago—"

	"Perhaps seven and a half," suggested Nazun.

	"—or so long as seven and a half centuries ago, then men so protected might advance that knowledge of material things once more in safety. It seems to me, they would."

	"But if," said Nazun, "some twelve long centuries had passed since Azun first was settled, and twelve long centuries of vilifying those studies had established strong tradition—And does the young man choose the stony hillside, though it have rich and virgin soil beneath the rocks, when the proven, fertile soil of the valley is there?

	"Daron, where would you start the search for facts that lead to knowledge that might make men fly again?"

	"Why ... with birds."

	"There is a tradition, I have heard, handed down from the days of legends. It is very strong, and probably true. The way to flight is not the way of birds. The wings men fly upon must not move."

	"I'd like," said Daron dryly, "to study this science of the mind."

	"So many did. But that is gone—since the Invisible Ones came."

	"These thought-force things might be invisible, might they not?"

	"But, being thought," Nazun said, lazily turning to shade from the shifting sun, "might make themselves have form in man's mind."

	"But any form!" said Daron softly, thinking suddenly of Lady Tammar, who was, so Shorhun said, every man's ideal, but not for any man.

	"But why should they? These gods—men are men; they are limited as men, and cannot truly conceive of a god, can they? It is not logic. To imbue a god with human qualities is basic contradiction. They are more than human, and hence, by definition, not human. A human, then, could not conceive them. A god should see the future, and be possessed of absolute logic."

	"The logic is sound," Daron nodded, eyes narrowed, "but the logic of a wise man of Tharsun, in the Tutz nation, was sound, too. It was logic that a heavy rock should drop much faster than a light one. It doesn't, incidentally. I had him show me, by test, the soundness of his proof.

	"A god such as you describe might be a god! I could not know. But he'd be a poor neighbor, with his absolutes. The laws of nature are absolute, and logical. But I've seen a small child thrust its hand into the pretty glow of molten brass—and be punished with the absolutes of nature's laws."

-

	NAZUN shrugged. "I repeat the logic of the priests of the Invisible Ones. They have no root in human brain-though they draw their powers from the tiny generators of the force of thought that make up human brains. They live by the energies of the thoughts their worshipers give. But their root and existence lies within a ... crystal ball, a thing some three feet through."

	Daron stiffened where he lay. "That is material?"

	"It is material, and may be crushed by a blow."

	Daron knew, that instant, what his task must be. "Where might this crystal be?"

	"On the Temple Isle—but no one knows. The Invisible Ones guard that knowledge—with certain reason. But it is not readily seen, nor wisely seen. The priests of the Invisible Ones, the Invisible Ones themselves—and the sphere itself. Three defenses makes it safe."

	Daron nodded, and shivered slightly.

	"I ... I saw a thing of similar nature. And thereby came near to being no more! A certain wizard of the Tahly folk showed me it, and, but for a friend, I'd be standing paralyzed before him yet! He learned, though, and taught me certain things. Hypnotism, where the mind is slaved!"

	Nazun nodded. "Its strong defense, a final barrier. It was not meant so originally, but meant only as the basis of the Invisible Ones, its weaving lights their patterned thoughts, and, being mechanism, they are uninfluenced by anything but logic."

	Daron snorted softly. "Cold comfort in such gods as that!"

	"No comfort—but knowledge."

	"Useless knowledge, if what I hear be truth."

	"Useless—but satisfying, at times. To know the result of tomorrow's deeds. The Invisible Ones are there, that knowledge can be had. No good it can do, for, being truth, it can't be changed. But—a young man's wife is suffering in labor—and he can know the true result, two lives—or none! Or a child is sick, and the father sleepless with prodding fear, which might—and the Invisible Ones know—be needless.

	"A day, you'll stay away, not caring greatly for that ultimate knowledge what day and hour Lord Barak has closed your book—but a month, a year, a dozen years. The knowledge is there—"

	Daron nodded. "No man has will to fight such steady pull forever. And once indulged—the man's mind and will is trapped. Aye—that is logic, but lacks ideals. But—I wonder if the Invisible Ones"—Daron looked at Nazun's rugged face through narrowed lids—"could tell me when I shall die? Or—when they shall die?"

	"They cannot. The course of a man is straight through time, from past to future, basing actions of the present on the memories and knowledge gained in the past. But a god acts on his knowledge of the past and future! That is chaos—and cannot be predicted. And those of men who associate themselves with gods—cannot be predicted."

	Daron's eyes looked upward again. The lowering sun was casting longer rays, and the zenith sky was dark, deep blue, with the clarity of high mountain air. The darkening branches wove across the spot of sky, and whispered soft accompaniment to eager, anxious birds. A three-foot crystal ball with moving, weaving, hypnotic lights. A material thing that a blow could smash—but which, because it was material, no immaterial thing could harm!

	Daron's eyes swept down—and widened sharply. The tree across the way swayed gently to the breeze, but Nazun was gone. There was a helmet where he had sat, a thing of woven wires of silver and gold, wires fine and soft as young lamb's wool, and five strange jewels. A blue-green, queerly luminous bit of stuff lodged at the front, a bit of stone that matched in color Nazun's garb. A bit of stone like agate, red-streaked and white, above the right ear, a bit of rose quartz above the left, and a sea-green crystal at the rear.

	At the peak, a blob of utter night made solid was fixed in the fabric of the weave. "Barak, Lord of Fate and Death," said Daron softly. "And the others—Talun's sea-green, my Lady Tammar's rose, and Martal's streaked stone, Lord Martal's Stone of Chance."

	Abruptly, as he settled it upon his head, it occurred to him that immaterial forces such as thought did not ordinarily move weighty gold and silver.

	Slowly he caught up the reins of his browsing horse and mounted. Lost in thought, he nodded gently to the motion of the animal, and wondered further how it might be that clouds should form, and a howling storm move up at the behest of a wholly immaterial Talun. And puzzled at how much of a full, round truth Nazun had seen fit to gift him with.

	A good hour later he roused, and looked about—and cursed himself for a fool. The horse, in natural course, had found the going easier down the mountainside. The temples, and Lady Tammar, were far above, and for this day, he must wait.

-

V

	THE SUN WAS SET, and the moon well up, a round, pale lantern of lies, pretending to light the city of Tordu, when Daron turned down the cobbled street toward Shorhun's inn. The moon's light was a snare and a deception, as Daron well new; it lied about the colors of the walls, saying that dirt-streaked muddy yard wall there was touched with silver paint, and that yonder wall was built of glinting gold. Daron well knew it was blue-tinged plaster, and the black tiled roof was bright green by day.

	And the shadows, where only low voices and soft laughter originated, were people—though the' moon would not reveal it. Deceptive. The glow of light on walls and streets, smelling with the faint and blended odors over which prevailed the queer, wet scent of water poured on hot stone cobbles and lawns at sunset. The little trees and sunken entrances casting shadows sharp and black, the narrow, canyon alleyways black gouges through the twisting buildings of the section.

	Daron was deep in thought—but Daron had visited more nations than one, and in most, he'd found an eye that didn't sleep of more than slight aid for long and healthy life. The black shadow of an entrance arch, cut through a high plastered garden wall, spouted figures, two clumps of shadow that ran, topped with white blobs of faces, and lightening with moon-glimmer on steel.

	The horse reared and screamed and twisted round in panic as Daron's sharp spurs raked his sides in a way he'd not known since this new master mounted him. He lurched and pawed forward—and the two shadows ducked aside from the sharp shod hoofs. Daron was off on the far side of the horse. The animal snorted once, and felt his rider gone. Startled, hurt, he clattered away. Daron was on his feet, balancing lightly in the shadow of the wall, while the two shadows turned to face him. Full moonlight struck at them now, while the wall's high shadow engulfed and blotted out clear sight of Daron's figure.

	"Right!" said a low voice, and one of the pair leaped to Daron's right, the other to his left. They wore cloaks of some dark stuff, and cowls that snugged about their heads. The cloaks hung close about them, no hindrance now as they came on mincing, dancing feet, and lunged, a trained chorus that attacked from two sides at once.

	Daron blotted out in shadow, and was behind the one as he spun on his heel. His cloak swirled loose at the hem, and the moon-glimmer of his sword reached up—and fouled in it. Moonlight silvered on his face, a lean, bony face with hollow, blackened eyes and line-thin lips that" writhed in blazing anger. Daron's sword licked out, twisted neatly round the fouled weapon, and sent it flying, a glinting fragment of light, across the garden wall. Somewhere beyond, it landed with a ringing clang. 

	"Hold!" said Daron sharply. "I have no enemies here." 

	The second man danced forward, his face lifting in a smile of keenest pleasure as his blade darted under Daron's momentarily lifted sword. Daron's body shifted slightly at the final instant—and the blade bent double as it scraped on the thin steel plate beneath the sea rover's jacket at the breast.

	The cowled man danced back as Daron's blade came down, a soft-voiced vicious snarl on his lips. The second man was circling, his cloak stripped off in an instant's time and wrapped about his left arm, the glint of a dirk in his right hand .

	"So be it, then!" Daron snapped. "I had no enemies here!"

	"And," the sword bearer whispered, "you will have none—for the dead have neither friend nor foe!"

-

	DARON slipped aside, backed toward the wall as he caught the other's sword on his own, the swift wrist play making the steel thrum and sing, and the close, keen following of blade on blade making scarce a click of contact. Daron danced and moved and wove, and watched the moon-whitened faces of his attackers. They twins, twin meal-white faces with twin sooted, shadowed eyes. But one stood forth in lighter clothing, loose trousers gathered at the calf to tight stocking breeches, loose jacket hanging below the waist. But each arm carried an armlet of jewel-glinted metal, and across the breast was woven a pattern of spheres and many jewels.

	Daron danced back and back, feeling out the swordsman, and knowing in the spring and slash of the blade he faced that this was one who'd handled weapons before and handled them well. He moved and danced and backed away, and the dirkman, short of reach with his small blade, circled helplessly.

	Daron moved forward in a deceptive glide that scarcely seemed motion, and twisted as he moved. The long, thin blade lunged out, flicked once, and laid open his opponent's arm from wrist to elbow. A soft, thick inhalation of pain, and whispered curse; the cloaked one held his blade in his left hand, and charged in for revenge. Daron backed, circled left to avoid the lunge of the dirk. His twisting, glimmering blade lunged out once more and buried in the swordsman's throat. An instant's scream was throttled in a rush of blood, and the sword dropped down to ring on cobbled pavement.

	Simultaneously, as Daron freed his blade, the dirk rang on the street, and the second man had swept up the fallen sword. Daron leaped forward, and in the engagement wrapped his blade about the base of the other's, and sent it flying. His own straightened out, and hovered near the jewel-sprinkled breast.

	"Now how is this, my jeweled dandy, that you seek strangers for your murdering? Would not wisdom suggest you know your victim and his capabilities before you practice up on assassination? I have no knowledge of your laws here, but there is one of mine I think good. Who attacks me is an enemy—or gives good account of why he sought me out. Speak, and speak truth'/'

	The moon-whitened face was motionless, the thin, straight lips held shut. He faced the moon now, and the shadowed eyes were lighted, gleaming fish-belly white against the face. They shifted minutely—and Daron leaped aside and whirled.

	The sword he had just thrown with his blade licked past his shoulder like metal lightning. The man whose throat Daron had spitted whirled, and leveled the blade for a second attack as the other swooped to retrieve the dirk, glowing like molten silver on the cobbles.

	Daron fell back in clumsy coverage, and stared at the throat of the man that faced him. It bubbled blood, and the loose-hung mouth worked and dribbled blood that looked like ink under the moon's rays.

	Daron cursed softly, and engaged the dead man's blade. It swept and swung and danced to meet every move. It glinted like a sweep of sunlit rain, a thousand lines of steel in place of one. Daron danced back, drew back his arm as the dead man lurched forward clumsily, blood bubbling through slow-formed words. "Stand still, fool; you die!"

	Daron's arm swept downward, and his sword flew hilt-foremost toward the dead, white face. The dead man's sword swept up too slow, and the heavy hilt crashed true across his eyes, with all the strength of Daron's arm behind it.

-

	THE SECOND attacker lunged in, grasped Daron's sword before it fell, and reached out for Daron's dancing form. The dead thing squalled, raked at blinded eyes, and twisted vainly. Barely, Daron retrieved the blind thing's sword and danced away with skin still whole.

	"Men," said Daron tensely, "I'll fight fair—but when the fairly killed come back again—why, there's an end to fairness!"

	"You'll die," the rustling, laughing whisper of the other assured him. His cloaked arm reached, and suddenly, as the two blades engaged, grasped Daron's sword. Daron released the blade, dropped his hand to his dirk before the other, expecting a frantic pull, recovered balance. The dagger flashed, spun through the air, and buried in the bejeweled man's face. He screamed and stumbled forward, dropping the two blades he held to claw at the dagger.

	Daron whipped up his own blade from the street, and slashed coldly at the fallen man's throat. The watchful sword rang against it, and sent it dancing down the street.

	The thing stood up and stared at him with blank, dead eyes.

	"You die," it said. "You must—for I cannot!" The words were whistling, nasal, but half formed. The slashed throat whistled and moaned as air sucked in and out.

	"You cannot die," Daron agreed with cold, live things squirming in his belly, "but blind, you cannot see!" The sword he held danced out again, swept, parried, darted in—and in a second time. Daron stepped back, his blade lowered, to watch the blinded thing—and almost died on the lunging blade!

	Desperately, the sea rover met the blade that danced and lunged and parried at his own, a dead, blind thing seeking out his every move and driving him back—back—with tireless speed, while lead flowed down Daron's veins and settled in his wrist. "Nazun—Lord Nazun," Daron whispered softly, "I ask no help in things I know, I ask no help in doing—but give me knowledge to stop this thing!"

	The swords sang and danced and winked, and soft leather sandals scraped on cobblestones—and Daron felt the blade come nearer. Air whistled in the dead throat, and in his own dry throat, and he glanced sharply at the corpse that lay outstretched beside the dirk—and wondered when it would again rise!

	Daron's breath sucked in in sudden understanding. For an instant, the leaden load of tiring muscles lightened with glimpse of relief. His defense grew bolder, then an attack that wrapped the dead thing's blade gave him the chance he sought. His own blade lunged forward again as he twisted—and laid open the dead thing's arm from wrist to elbow. The severed tendons dropped the blade, and as the other arm swept down, a slashing cut at the left wrist left it with useless fingers.

	"You may not die, you may not blind," Daron panted hoarsely, "but those hands will grip no more!"

	The dead man dropped like an emptied sack, lay limp an instant in the street and, as Daron watched, the limbs stiffened in rigor.

-

	COLD gnawed at the sea rover's brain as he walked silently down the street, rubbing the tired muscles of his forearm. This section of the city was quiet as those men had at last become, the silvering of the moon alone remaining. The low voices and the laughter had vanished. Only far away across the still rustle of trees in the night wind came sounds of a city's movement, the restless, rustling tone that rises and falls and never dies while a city lives. The smell of flower gardens and fresh salt air swept from the bay on the wings of the inshore breeze. But no sound nearby.

	Then, a block away, he heard the hesitating clop-clop of a shod horse's hoofs, the irregular rhythm of an un-ridden horse, uncertain of its way, feeling the weight of loneliness, lacking human guidance. Daron started toward the sound, loping silently, his mind skipping agilely, yet numbed withal, and bewildered mightily. His enemy was clear—for none but a god could make those dead things dance to their strings. But his friends—

	Or had he thought that solution for himself? Had his own mind seen clear the ripped arm of the abandoned corpse, and the reason for its desertion? It was no more than he had done before—save that that dead, blind face opposing him with inhuman skill had frozen and numbed his thoughts beyond any experience he had ever known. 

	He thrust the thing to the back of his mind, and turned down a narrow street. His gray stallion tossed its head uneasily, and faced him, whickering uncertainly. "So, boy, it's easy now. I raked you then to save you from being spitted. Come, now—it hurt, I know, but a foot man does not fight a mounted man, but first his horse. Come—ah!" Daron swung up, and soothed the uncertain animal to an easy walk, and guided him once more toward the inn. But the sea rover's eyes kept sharper watch than ever they had at a good ship's bow.

-

VI

	THE HANGING lamp was dark, with charred and smoking wick, and Shorhun's lanky figure draped uneasily in the fireside chair, asleep and snoring gently. His long, lean arms, like knotted ropes, hung loose beside the chair, his fingers half opened to the glow of the dying fire. Across the room, the boy was curled upon a bench, head pillowed on an elbow, and one long arm, a small duplicate of Shorhun's knotted cables, reached down to grip in lax fingers a dog's collar.

	The dog looked up abruptly, with wide-opened eyes as Daron's horse clapped softly in the courtyard, and the creak and grunt of leather harness attested to the stabling of the animal. His quick eyes watched Daron enter the room. He snorted softly, and lowered his massive head upon his paws, eyes watchfully awake.

	Daron rubbed his arm and smiled. Softly he stepped over to Shorhun and laid a friendly hand upon his arm. The lanky innkeeper moved and raised his head.

	"Daron?" he said, his voice mechanical and toneless with broken sleep.

	"Aye, Daron—and with a throat as dry as Fraka's plains. And—But get me wine, my friend."

	Shorhun heaved up, and ambled toward his supply, to return with a bottle and a glass on a small tray. He set the lot before Daron, and slumped into his chair, resting his head within his palms.

	"Ho, am I to drink alone? Come, Shorhun, another glass, and join me in it. And tell me, is it customary for this town that men should seek to murder strangers on sight?"

	Shorhun raised himself, and fetched another glass. "No," he said tonelessly, pouring wine into the two.

	Daron looked up into the lank, tired man's eyes. He was quiet for a moment as he watched the eyes, and watched Shorhun pick up the glass. Then his strong, brown fingers gripped Shorhun's wrist and stayed the hand. "Wait, friend. I think—I think your lamp needs oil, and I need light, I know. I would not drink until I see the color of my wine."

	Shorhun moved wordlessly to the task, pulling down the counter-weighted lamp, filling the reservoir, trimming the wick and lighting it so that the room was warm with yellow light.

	Daron's fingers were busy then with an aimless spinning of a bit of polished metal on a cord, a polished metal mirror that spun first one way, then the other. "Sit here," said Daron, as the innkeeper finished, "and listen, friend. I have a tale to tell."

	Wearily, Shorhun sat down across the table and Daron began. His voice was low and soft, and he described his start that morning, following Shorhun's directions, and Shorhun's sleepy eyes were watching the dancing, spinning mirror on the cord, and the swirling reflections of the lamp that danced with it.

	"Once before," said Daron softly, in a sleepy voice, "I traveled such a hill-climbing road, to the dwelling of a wizard of the Ind people. I was tired as you are tired, and wanted sleep—as you want sleep—the rest and ease of sleep—sleep—sleep—"

	Daron's voice was toneless, sleepy—but his eyes were bright and hard, and the mirror in the lamplight spun and spun, and hesitated to spin the other way at the end of its cord. "Sleep you need—sleep—" Shorhun's sleepy eyes sank lower, then abruptly tried to rise, his body seemed to struggle to rise, his head to turn from the mirror. "You hear only my voice, as you sleep—sleep—and forget all other things, but see the mirror that tires your eyes and makes you sleep. Shorhun, you hear only your friend, Daron, Daron who, like you, seeks only the Old Gods. You hear no voice but mine, and obey me in all things. You obey me, and only me, Shorhun!"

-

	THE tonelessness was gone, and there was the whip of sharp command in Daron's tone—and the mirror spun. "You will and must answer any question I ask. That is true!"

	"Y-yes," said Shorhun.

	"I am your friend, and friend to your friends."

	"Yes," said Shorhun promptly.

	Daron's eyes were tense and dark. Very softly to himself, he whistled a little tune, and thought. "Now this is clear; someone has been here and worked upon this man, and thanks be to old white-headed Barhamu for what he taught me in the hills of Ind! But what is the purpose? No god did this, for the look of his eyes in good close view was clumsy revelation. But a man—if Barhamu knew enough to match at all these god-making wizards of Azun—cannot make another do what that other would object to—such as murdering his friends!"

	Daron thought deeply, then; "Shorhun," he snapped, "is this wine good?"

	"Y-yes," said Shorhun, and stirred uneasily, his forehead careworn and weather-browned, wrinkling in a frown of childish puzzlement.

	"Shorhun, there was a stranger here who laid commands on you?"

	Shorhun's face worked, his mouth moved and knotted and fell still. Daron nodded grimly. "But that stranger, while no god, knew this mind art well. Now how to break that spell-"

	A thought came to him, and he rose. "Shorhun," he snapped, "sit there, and do not move until I return." Then, thinking of certain things that lay upon a cobbled street—"Or," he added—"until the sun rises and the day is here."

	Daron strode out the door, and sought down the road. It was half an hour before he returned, swearing softly, with a mewing cat in his arms. His clothes were torn somewhat, and stained with varicolored plaster dust from climbing many walls.

	He set the cat upon the table stroking it. "Shorhun," he said softly, "I know. You can tell me, because I know these things already. The stranger came and talked with you, and laid command on you to forget. But you were to give me this wine, and do whatever was needed that I might drink it."

	"Yes," said Shorhun, uneasily. "It is good wine. The flavor is better than my own."

	"Watch," commanded Daron. He spilled a bit of wine, and forced some down the cat's unwilling throat. The cat mewed and spit and scratched, and, relaxed, sat down and cleaned its fur. Daron waited patiently. Abruptly the cat jumped, doubled up, screeched in agony—then straightened down with ruffled fur to lick itself clean. Two minutes later it doubled up again, screeched louder, and writhed unhappily. The spasm stopped, to resume again within a minute more.

	Within five minutes the cat was dead, in one last spasm wherein its cries were choked in a muscle-knotted throat, and its muscles convulsed so violently the broad abdominal muscles ripped themselves across in frightful spasm, and every muscle tore, so that the carcass was a loose bag of death wrapped up in skin.

	Softly Daron spoke. "That is the wine you would have fed your friend, Shorhun. That is the wine you would have drunk with me! That is murder in its foulest form!"

	Shorhun shuddered, his face worked in knotted muscles, and his staring eyes twitched and danced. Abruptly he shook himself, and stumbled erect, "Eh? Daron! You here? Eh-it's night!"

	Daron leaned up and looked and nodded, smiling. "Aye, it's night, my friend, and you may thank a man you never knew, one Barhamu, that you and I live now, and are not—that!"

	Shorhun looked at the body of the cat, then picked it up and dropped it sharply in disgust, rubbing his hands as though they were contaminated by the contact. "What ... what is this? And where is that dandied priest of the Invisible Ones that visited me here?"

	"Ah, now the tale appears! I thought it might. Now listen to me, friend, and in the future look not so keenly at spinning mirrors, glittering jewels, or other tricks of wizards. I'll tell you something of a tale to straighten up that knotted hair of yours, but first bring me some wine—some wine of your own, and no more of this hell's brew. In the meantime, I sense a bit of trickery in your son's sleep."

-

	AN HOUR later, Daron was dreaming. Now even one with the easygoing conscience and the tough stomach that Daron had, dreams now and then, but no such dream as this. He dreamed, and, moreover, knew he was dreaming.

	For that last hour before he went to bed, the helmet of woven gold-and-silver wire beside him, he had been thinking as he talked with lanky, grimly boiling Shorhun. With half his mind he'd told his tale, and explained many things to Shorhun that he had learned in a high, dry old building far up the slopes of the shattered mountains of the Ind. And with the other, deeper half of his mind, he had been thinking, stewing about one problem; the problem of the sphere.

	The menace of iron and flesh and blood that was the priests of the Invisible Ones, he set aside. That sort of menace he had known before, and would know again—with luck! But the Invisible Ones themselves? That, it seemed, was in the immaterial, potent province of the Lord Nazun. But the sphere—

	A single strong blow could smash it—but to see it was to be paralyzed. His keen, smoothly working mind was baffled, brought solid and firm against a thing that, he knew, was the one thing in all the world against which it could not fight effectively: itself. Too long and well had old Barhamu taught him for self-deception here. The trick of the Spinning Mirror and the Trick of the Winking Light were, alike, tricks that no mind could well resist—for they were tricks that turned that mind upon itself. 

	And then the dream had come, as he sought sleep. He stood before an altar of blue-green beryl, a mighty, perfect gem four feet high, by three feet square, his head bowed down in prayer. Behind the altar stood Nazun, his gray eyes deep as night, with unplumbed depths so vast that the lack of bottom made them black. The eyes drew up his bowed head, till his own blue eyes looked into them, and through them, swallowed by them—and saw with the eyes of Nazun!

	His sight hurled out across the night, driving through walls of blue-green stone, through the dark, whispering forests of the mountain, across the city, where Tordu lay dark beneath the setting moon, with only here and there some late light gleaming. The world was a painted map, luminous with moon-glow and the Bay of Tordu was a lake of quicksilver, marred .by the black gash of the Temple Isle. For half an instant the world held in suspense; then, as though his point of sight had plunged like a falling meteor, the Temple Isle exploded upward, turned black and silver as buildings appeared, exploded outward, and his sight penetrated through. For an instant of time he was deep, deep within the heart of one, deep in a room whose black walls, carved from the living basalt of the isle's foundations, were lighted with a glow that seemed pure white.

	A circle of warrior guards stood round the sphere, the three-foot sphere of crystal, like a fragile bubble floating in a three-clawed rest of gold. Uncounted myriads of pin-point lights circled in darting, swooping, patterned orbits, a mathematically precise involvement of inextricable cycles and epicycles, progressions and ordered, intricate orbits. The row of warrior guards stood firm about the sphere—but every back was toward it, and every guard stood with hand on sword and metal shield.

	In a fraction of a second—then the vision was gone, chopped off with a hollow sensation of frightful fall that gripped and wrenched at Daron's mind and soul.

	His mind retched and quivered in terror—then quieted as some vast thing of calm touched it, soothing, stilling. And Daron stood again before, the blue-green altar gem , f of beryl. Lord Nazun stood behind it, and his gray eyes were tensed and tired; his strong-muscled hands leaned on the altar top, gripping it, it seemed, for support. The tanned, rough-hewn face of the Lord of Wisdom was white with strain and very tired.

	Lord Nazun's voice was vastly weary as it whispered in the dream. "The Invisible Ones are wary; they cut off the vision soon. No further sight of that can I afford, for the cost is more than human mind could understand. But you have seen. Now—sleep again, and think!"

-

VII

	DARON SIPPED fragrant feya, and with drowsy eyes watched the sun shadows play in the courtyard. The sounds of Tordu City were waking round him; the cries of women, the shrill voice of a small boy carrying on conversation with some friend two blocks away, the heavy creak of a laden ox-cart plodding toward the market, bearing round, green melons and green-wrapped ears of corn.

	Behind the drowsing eyes, the vision of the sphere danced and spun and moved, the myriad lights flashed in their orbit there, and, despite the strong protection of Nazun's mighty will, half hypnotized him still. Slowly to Daron's inward gaze, one fact was forming from the vision. Those myriad points of light moved not aimlessly, but with an order more precise than the swing, ticking pendulum of the clock upon the wall. They looped and moved and danced—in ordered, plotted curves.

	And abruptly Daron started. The drowsing eyes became alive, and the immobile face moved in a sudden, grim smile. He laughed softly, and swung to his feet. Shorhun, sitting silent at his table looked up, and opened sleepy eyes.

	"Ten minutes more, my friend," the lanky innkeeper sighed, "and for all your concentration I'd have broken in. I have a question of some small moment I would ask."

	Daron laughed, and swung his sword belt round to a position of greater comfort. "Then ask away, Shorhun, for one cactus-spined and triply damned question that's festered in my mind is solved. Perhaps I can solve yours."

	The innkeeper unfolded upward and shrugged. ''It was merely this. I live today, because your eyes do more than see, and your brain holds more than most. But—I know not your plans, of course, but if they do not include your death within some three hours, I'd advise you seek some other seat."

	"Hm-m-m. My plans did not include quite that," Daron nodded. He cocked a half-closed eye at Shorhun's ugly, solemn face. "But why should this seat—a very comfortable one seeming—be so sadly dangerous?"

	"The priests of the Invisible Ones know it's here. If half your tale of last evening be true, then you murdered one priest. If it be wholly true, then you did murder enough to bring down the wrath of all the Invisible Ones on a dozen men."

	Daron grunted softly. "They are slow to anger, then. I'd act without thinking over the problem a whole night through."

	Shorhun nodded. "They would. But King Elmanus wouldn't. And it's King Elmanus' word that's needed. He wakes at eight, has breakfast at eight and a half, and holds no audience before nine and a half. It's nine and a quarter now."

	Daron looked up at Shorhun with interest. "Now if this King Elmanus has these haughty priests of the Invisible Ones trained so well to leave his sleep alone, he holds my strong respect. He is unique among the monarchs of the world I've seen; he can make a high priest wait as high priests should, until he's had his breakfast. What potent secret does he hold for this?"

-

	SHORHUN sighed. "Old Elmanus is near eighty years old now, and he's reigned for fifty-five. For fifty-five long years, the Old God's priests have howled in his left ear, and for fifty-five long years the priests of the Invisible Ones have shrieked into his right.

	"It's reached a sorry state, where now he can hear very little in either ear, and not at all when he is sleeping. But he has curiously sensitive hearing to the wail of countrymen and seamen both. His nobles he hears continuously, wherefore he need not listen hard to them."

	"I'd think," said Daron shrewdly, "the priests would have found another king."

	Shorhun chuckled. "Old Elmanus has not the slightest fear of death. He's lived too long, and during that life the two sets of gods have grown apart and hatred grown between. Now each fears a new king more than they loathe the old."

	"Has neither worked on the will of Elmanus' successor?"

	"Elmanus has no son, and his daughter is a priestess of Lady Tammar—but no woman may hold the throne. His successor must be elected."

	"He'd be a noble, and the nobles—so you say—are all ' besotted with the future knowledge of the Invisible Ones."

	"He'd be no noble/' said Shorhun sourly, "The nobles all know well that several hundred exceedingly tough seamen loathe their blood and bones and several thousand countrymen obey old Elmanus blindly because he's just."

	"Hm-m-m. ... it would make a throne as hot as the Sun's own fires! But—perhaps I'd best be on my way. ' Where would you suggest?"

	"It depends upon your plans," said Shorhun, shrugging like a beaching wave. "If you intend permanent escape from Elmanus' guard I'd say your own land would be a sound place to seek. If for a day—start west, and I'll say north. They'll find you, though."

	Daron rose, stretched mightily, and started through the door. "Call up that imp you name your son, and have him fix my horse. I saw a watchmaker's place two blocks away, and I have business there."

	"I'll call my son, but my memory is short. He may remember long enough to bring the horse to Granner's place." Shorhun vanished through the kitchen door.

-

	THE SUN was warm and the breeze that slid joyously down the moutainside was fresh with pine-laden scent, and the smell of many breakfasts pleasant to the nostrils. The cobbles, round beneath the feet, were easy walking, and Daron's eyes alert as he swung down the street. Two blocks away he came upon the little doorway that he sought, signed without by a huge wooden cog bearing the symbols "WATCHMAKING."

	The place was dark, and still cool with last night's air, and the watchmaker who looked up at him a half-seen figure in the gloom. His head was bald and polished as the faces of his products, but fringed around with a halo of white hair so fine it floated in the air. His face was a wizened, dried up apple, split by a smiling mouth, and sharp blue eyes as old as the skies, and laughing with them.

	"And what is time and a timepiece to one as young as ye?" he snapped as Daron entered.

	"Father, I am touched by a strange malady. The malady is never fatal, I am told, but long enduring," Daron said solemnly. "The malady some call inventor's itch."

	The bright-blue eyes speared up at him. "Huy-hu, now. Unless this thing you have invented is the size and crudeness of an ox cart, those fingers of yours will never make it."

	"Alas, father, they won't," Daron sighed. "Yours will, though, I suspect."

	"I've work enough with things I know, and things that work, without befuddling my old head with foolishness. What have you in mind?"

	"A thing about the size of a pocket watch, but of special and strange making. Now look you here, for all my handling of ships cordage, still my fingers have certain skill at drawing things, and this is what I'd need. I'll pay you for it with twice its weight in gold, and add another weight if it is done by the third hour of the afternoon."

	Rapidly Daron sketched, and the old watchmaker's keen eyes followed him. A dozen sketches, and many special strictures and explanations were demanded, but at last the old man snorted understanding.

	"That malady you call inventor's itch, we call more often madness. The thing is mad, and has no use, but I shall make it as you say. You'll have it by the second hour after noon." \

	"Good," said Daron. "Now here is proof of my madness, for I'll give you now the gold." Four round, hard coins he laid on the old man's desk and stepped outside, where Shorhun's freckled son lounged by his horse.

	"My father says," the boy whispered softly, giving him the reins, "that guards are popping out of ash receivers, and springing up among the flowers. I'm going to the house of my grandmother for a week or so. Good-bye."

	Daron stood an instant in thought, then stepped around the corner of the building where the lad had vanished to take him on his way. Two legs scrambling over a roof top disappeared as Daron turned the corner, and the lad was lost.

-

	SHRUGGING, Daron set off across the town, his mind busy with his plans. Deeper and deeper into the city he went, stopping once at an inn where he was not known. Two hours later—the loungers there had learned a certain respect for three snail shells and a pebble that made longer stay imprudent—Daron sought out a small tailor's shop, and took off his hands some misfit clothes that reeked in Daron's nostrils of earthy sweat. But, at least, they did not betray the seaman's origin.

	For three long hours more he visited in armorer's shops, obscure secondhand places, seeking a shield. It was well afternoon before he found the place he sought, a tiny cubbyhole left when two haughty buildings had not quite met, a mere alleyway between them roofed over by some sad-faced individual with the salesmanship of Jeremiah.

	"A shield," he sighed, and sat firm on the broken chair before his door, "I don't think I have many. What kind?"

	Daron looked at him sourly. His beard was of the sort that prolonged and persistent laziness, not art, produces, and his hands stained not with the grime of toil but, it seemed to the sea rover, the dust that settles on anything long motionless. "A round shield," said Daron carefully. "A round, flat shield of good steel or of silver-plated bronze."

	"Silver-plated bronze? I had one such—I think it's gone—but they are not practical, I'm told," he added hastily. "A shield of hard-tanned hide will turn an arrow, or stop a blade, and is far lighter. Tharmun's shop, two blocks from here, specializes in them."

	"Aye, so?" said Daron patiently. "That's what I learned some five minutes past. Now look you, friend, your aura is that of a wild goat, increased in strength by your advanced age and greater size. The spiders have spun their webs between your feet, and how one so immobile has escaped a load of flowing fat surprises me. Or can it be that your colossal lethargy forbids you rising to seek food?

	"Be that as it may, I'll see your shields, my friends if I must prick your dusted hide to make you seek them in defense. Now move!" Daron's sword left its scabbard of its own volition, seemingly, and pricked the cadaverous, sad-faced one.

	With a howl of anguish he bounced within his shop, with Daron at his heels.

	The sea rover halted. The place was dark as the maw of some deep cave, and rank with lack of cleaning. Very slowly Daron's eyes made out its contents, while the whine of the proprietor sought to convince him he wanted none of the merchandise.

	"Be quiet, or by Martal, I'll let that noise out through your throat," snapped Daron. "Now bring me that bronze shield you have. Is it not clear to you that I am mad, and not to be reasoned with?"

	The shield was brought. It was bronze, a well-made shield that some craftsman had labored over, and in seeing it, Daron knew that chance had favored him. Unlike any shield he'd seen before, its face was absolutely flat and plain, without decoration save a very chaste and simple geometric pattern that inscribed a circle round the edge. The face was bronze, very thin, for lightness, but by its ring a hard, true melt. The back was crossed with a patterned grid of bars that made it strong enough to turn a broadax swing.

	"Now by Martal, chance is behind me this day indeed," said Daron with satisfaction. "What price do you want, Goaty One?"

	"Ten thords I paid for it and less than twenty I cannot take and stay in business," the merchant whined.

	"Ten thords it is then," said Daron, dropping two golden coins, "and good day."

	"No, no! Twenty, I said!"

-

	DARON swung on his horse, and started down the street Behind him he heard a long, sad sigh, and the heavy creak of the broken chair. The shield, he saw, was bronze, plated well with silver, and the price was fair. The silver was black as night with lack of care, and a dark, old bronze patina had coated over the gridwork at the back.

	Daron rode directly to the watchmaker's shop, and entered. The old man looked up from his work and nodded. "Ten minutes more, son, and your madness will spin as gaily as you like. You are early."

	"No," said Daron wearily. "I'm late. I needs must polish my shield."

	The old man's sharp eyes turned on the metal shield and narrowed down. "Now, by Nazun, I know your wits have left you, or you've more strength than even those none-too-puny arms suggest. That thing may make a fine display—old Elmanus' guards once carried those, I think—but as protection, they're as light and dainty as a good stone wall."

	Daron laughed. "I'm vain as the peacock of Ind, and must make a flashing display, father. Give me polish, then, and a bit of cloth, that I may dazzle those who look at me.

	The old man bent, and drew out soft rags, and a cake of black-streaked rouge, and some white, moist paste. "Damp the rag at the pump yonder, rub on the rouge and mix the white paste with it. If there's any silver left, that thing should shine."

	For half an hour more, Daron rubbed till his back and shoulders ached, and his new-old garments were stained with a dozen shades of red and black and green from the bronze. But when he finished, the old shield's face shone like the sun, with scarce a dozen bad scratches.

	"So it's old Elmanus I've to thank for finding this shield, eh? I knew it was made to hope to find so useless a thing, but this thing was what I needed, none the less." 

	"King Elmanus it was. He had a special guard of twenty men, who used those things. Elmanus found that a good spot of sunlight cast back by twenty mirror shields would stop men quicker, and with less stain of blood, than twenty swords. With those twenty shields, the guard could blind a man for half a week.

	"Wherefore all Elmanus' enemies came at him after dusk, and found, of course, his twenty guards as well protected by those heavy shields as though they each were weighted down with chains. Elmanus lost three full complements of guards before he gave up those shields. 

	"You being only one, I'd think you had poor chance to learn wisdom—but that, my son, is your own task. It is your skin that shield is supposed to defend."

	"Ah, yes, and so it is. Now tell me, is that thing finished?" Daron asked.

	"Done. And here it is. I owe you also a coin, for, having an affection for those who are mad, I made it very light. Undoubtedly, it shows I am a kindred spirit, and mad as you."

	"Mm-m-m," said Daron, holding the tiny thing, "it seems good enough indeed. I know good workmanship, and that is here. Keep the extra coin. Good day, father."

	"Good day, and if you now seek Nazun's temple, he will cure your madness."

	"I have no time. I have another appointment. Elmanus' guards are seeking me for certain questions involving the death of two priests, and I must find them."

	Whistling, Daron went out, and the old man looked after him with shrewd, hard eyes. With sudden decision, brought on by overpowering itch of curiosity, the old man swung heavy shutters across his tiny window, barred them, barred the door, and hobbled off across the town. On his weak legs, it would take him some time to reach Elmanus' court.

-

VIII

	ON THE HIGHEST crest of the rolling land that fronted on the bay, the palace of Elmanus set, overlooking the estates of the nobles. The avenue here was broad, and paved with bricks of well-baked, hard, red clay. Daron's horse trotted along easily and turned into the broad way that led up to the gate. A half dozen uniformed guards, in bright blue-and-white foppish cut, barred his way with neat precision. Daron stopped at their hail and demand of identity, and looked them up and down.

	"Now, lads, for all that foppish rig, you've bone and muscle underneath, I do swear! Now let me—Officer, I should say by your stance, and the broadness of your palm, you've walked behind a plow and seen a furrow turn. And a good half of you knows the smell of drying kelp."

	"Enough of that!" snapped the officer. "I ask no guesses as to whence we come, but whence you come. In the name of the king, answer, or you'll find time to answer in the keep."

	"Now that, my friend, is no threat at all, for there be few places safer in this land. Further, your good king would favor seeing me. I understand certain of your brother guards have marched hot streets the whole day through seeking me. Men call me Daron, and my origin is something even I am not too certain of."

	"Daron! Ho, forward, round!" The guardsmen moved with perfect military precision, and with a smoothness Daron admired. He was instantly the center of a small circle hedged with good steel lance points.

	"Daron, dismount, in the name of King Elmanus."

	"Now softly, friend. What other purpose, think you, brings me here? Take down that hedge, and ease your nervousness. Good. Now, you of the infant mustache, take .the horse, and feed him well. I'll want him back. Take sound advice, too. When your friends tell you that is not a mustache, but merely evidence of laziness, believe them. Either shave it off, or dye it dark. On your tanned face, the blond hair seems somewhat weakened, and like drought-burned grain."

	The mustached guardsman's face turned red, and his eyes dropped, but he took the horse's reins, his young face sullen. The officer's eyes were lighting with a suppressed amusement and liking.

	"Enough, Daron; I give the orders here. But take his horse, Kahlmur—and, by Nazun, his advice! Now forward. Elmanus has ordered your .arrest."

	"Your statement, officer—very incourteous officer, too, it seems. I know not your name, though you know mine—is exact. He has ordered my arrest; he does not want to see me."

	"Pordan Holum, Daron. Holum, Pordan of the Outer Guards. Maybe his majesty does not desire to see you, but you may rest assured the priests of the Invisible Ones do."

	The Inner Guards they passed, and to the doors of King Elmanus' Hall of Justice they were passed. Abruptly, there was an eruption of activity about Daron, and shouting officers. Priests began to appear from a dozen ways, priests in the flaming orange-scarlet of the Invisible Ones, and in the blue-green of Nazun, the deep, sea-green of Talun's temple, and the red-streaked white of Martal's retinue.

	A tall, gray-eyed priest of Nazun first approached Daron, where he waited easily among the group of Holum's men. The priest was as tall as Daron, lean and thoughtful of mein, but there seemed some lack of fire in his eyes and face, a worried, tired and strained appearance round his mouth, and a crease between his brows.

	"In the name of my lord, Nazun, I appear for you, Daron. The adepts of the Invisible Ones accuse you of murdering two of their neophytes within the streets of Tordu." There was a hasty, uneasy pressure to his words, and a curiously worried, uncertain tone in his voice. And, withal, a look of deep respect with which he regarded Daron. Very softly, so that only Daron himself could hear, he added: "Lord Nazun himself has ordered this appearance—but I fear their case is strong!"

	Daron laughed. "I have no knowledge of the laws and rulings of this land, wherein your kindly aid is much to be desired, but none save Nazun himself and, perhaps, the Invisible Ones, knows more of this case than I. I think we may manage, and—if Nazun has given you some charge regarding me, perhaps he gave a charge to follow somewhat as I lead in my argument."

	"Aye," said the priest uneasily. "He—Lord Nazun—takes interest in few men."

-

	A PRIEST in scarlet-orange, bedecked with gold and flaming jewels hurried up, a fat, round man waddling busily, with sweat-bedewed pate glistening in the light. "Pordan," he howled, "this man is armed. What manner of arrest is this! Take that shield, that sword and dirk from him. The man is a murderer; would you have an armed killer brought before our king!"

	Daron turned to him, and bent a steady, hard-eyed gaze upon his fat, sweaty face. "Now by Nazun, my fat friend, you'll need no murdering. Have not your Formless Ones told you you'll die of bursted veins? And would you make a liar out of them by dying before your time?"

	The fat-faced priest paled, and panted heavily. "You have no knowledge of that!" he gasped.

	"So, I have not. I know nothing of what they say? But yet I do, it seems. Now, be that as it may, remember this. This is the house of King Elmanus, and your orders here are wanted no more than mine; in fact, I think, some several degrees less. I came to this place seeking justice, and of my own free will. Wherefore, my friend, Pordan Holum shows more courtesy than you.

	"Now, Pordan Holum," said Daron, turning to the officer, "I give my sword and dirk and shield into your keeping, as an officer of the sea to an officer of the king's guard, to hold and protect with honor, till I may call for them."

	"I take them as an officer, to hold and protect," replied Pordan Holum formally—with a gleam of satisfaction directed at the fat priest.

	The great oaken doors, bound with mighty hinges of black wrought iron, before which they stood, swung slowly open, and a herald spoke. "In the name of King Elmanus, in the name of Ator, and the people of Azun, the Hall of Justice opens. Bring in those who seek justice before the king."

	The crowd surged forward, and it was a growing crowd. A half score of priests in scarlet-orange, and a score in the assorted colors of the Old Gods flanked the little group of Holum's guards that marched with Daron toward the throne.

	The room was vast and cool after the heat of outside, the light softened and dimmed. Great slabs of translucent milky quartz made the roof, pouring in the sun's light diluted and cooled. The walls were made of cool, green stone, and the floor was black basalt, soft and soothing to the eye. Great pillars of sea-green stone reached up, carved in intricate and graceful geometric designs.

	At the far end of the long, high room sat King Elmanus, on a throne that narrowed Daron's eyes. There was a dais of red granite, and a backdrop of night-blue velvet behind. A ring of guards in that same night-blue velvet faded into it almost unseen, save for the flicker of their unsheathed swords, and their faces. Those faces were tanned and strong, and the men were big, broad-shouldered men with tapering build of speed and stamina. These were no city breed, but strong countrymen and seamen, every one.

	But the throne itself! It was a chair of good blue leather, and deeply padded, without hint of gold or jewel, or any frippery. It was a broad, deep seat, with broad, comfortable arms, and the man that sat in it was broad and comfortable.

	Daron's narrowed eyes slanted in a smile. Now here was a king who knew his dignity was beyond reproach, and sought the comfort aging bones enjoyed! Two slim, and pretty girls stood beside and slightly behind the throne, and Daron's respect increased. They were dressed in simple, easy-falling robes of some light linen stuff, and in the very simplicity of their garments Daron saw more the character of their master.

	With neat precision the guards drew up and halted before Elmanus' throne, and behind them stood the fat priest of the Invisible Ones, and the lean and worried priest of Nazun. Directly before Elmanus, Daron halted.

-

	ELMANUS was old, his head crowned with a wealth of white hair that gleamed and shone against the backing of the night-blue velvet drape. He wore a simple jacket of white silk, on which was embroidered in golden threads and scarlet, a crest and coat of arms. And, beneath it, in the oldest language known to man, a brief motto. His breeches were night-blue linen, with gold thread tracery, and in his hand he carried a staff of pure gold, chased with a deep-cut formal design. At the peak of the staff there gleamed a single, monster sapphire, as deep as skies, and large as a man's two fists.

	Elmanus' face was tired, the dark eyes sunken in old and leathery skin, his mouth creased about with the graven lines of many years of struggle, but over all lay lines of easy humor, and his eyes twinkled with good humor as they looked back into Daron's steady gaze.

	"And this is the man you bring me, Tor Lamon, as double murderer? I say with satisfaction, you are a liar or mistaken." Elmanus snorted gently, and nodded to himself. "What is your case?"

	The fat priest quivered angrily. "The Invisible Ones, your majesty, have stated that this is the man."

	"Well, what say you for yourself ... er ... Daron, isn't it?"

	Daron shrugged, and smiled. "It is a matter of temperament. These two annoyed me. I was forced to remove them."

	Elmanus' jetting brows of white, stiff hairs drew down. "Annoyed you, eh? Are you given to these mad tempers, then?"

	"Aye, in case of such annoyance. One sought to spit me on his blade, and the other tried hard with dirk and cloak."

	Elmanus snorted and leaned back. "Annoyance enough. What said the Invisible Ones of that, priest?"

	"If this man's words be true, then why is it that, not content with killing them, he coldly mutilated their corpses so? One, Rehsal, a neophyte of two years' practice, was run through the throat, and blinded too. Now if the man be blinded, what need to run him through, and if he be run through, why blind a corpse, save out of coldly murderous temperament?

	"And the other was yet more fiendishly mutilated! Shulthas was with us on the Temple Isle seven years, and was a man of good and even temper, yet his body we found run through the throat, blinded, and with the hands cut off.

	"This Daron, I say, is a madman, a fiendish maniac. Give him to us, before this voyager from other, barbaric lands destroys more. He must be done away with."

	Elmanus looked at Daron with lowered brows. "Your temper seems extreme, for even such provocation. What brought this thing about?"

	"The power of the Invisible Ones, your majesty. These things I did; I ran the one attacker through the throat and he died as any good man should. I turned to face his companion—and the dead man rose and attacked me with a dirk. I blinded him—and he fought me with a skill he had not shown alive I Now such things I do not like, and it seemed the best thing was to make those hands incapable of grasping blade, and only then did that dead thing lie down as a dead man should!"

	"Eh?" Elmanus gasped. "The dead fought!"

	"The man lies to save his skin! The dead cannot move!" Tor Lamon roared.

	Daron turned to the priest, and regarded him through narrowed eyes. "Now tell me this, priest, your gods can predict the future, can they not?"

	"As every Azuni knows."

	"And you can tell me the exact and final end to each and every power these gods of yours possess?"

	"No, for they are gods, and no true god can be envisaged by a man," the priest replied haughtily, looking pointedly at the lean and worried priest of Nazun. "Their powers are unknown, and unknowable."

	"Then," said Daron with finality, "they can raise their dead neophytes to fight again. That may be unknown and unknowable to you; I saw them, you did not."

-

	ELMANUS leaned back, his old eyes brightening.

	Tor Lamon sputtered. "The dead cannot rise!" he snapped. "It is preposterous, insane! No—"

	"Man," said Daron firmly, "can envisage the powers of a god. So. I saw your Invisible Ones bring the dead to Me. Go back to your temples now, and learn more about your gods."

	"I think," said Elmanus, with a chuckle in his voice, "his point is very sound. Now on his testimony alone, I would not ordinarily have ruled that he was attacked, but since his arguments are so sound and his logic good enough to meet that of Tor Lamon, who seems sane enough, he must be sane. And if he is sane, he would not make an insane defense. The defense he has presented is insane, or true. If not instance, then it is true. We have shown him sane—sane at least as Tor Lamon—and therefore we must accept his statement and defense as true."

	Elmanus leaned back with satisfaction in his sparkling old eyes, and watched the empurpling countenance of Tor Lamon. "I dismiss the charge. Daron is free."

	"Your majesty," said Tor Lamon with difficulty, "there is a further vital point. I must accept your ruling that this outlander can murder—"

	Elmanus' heavy brows shot down, and his finger shot out to stab at the fat priest violently. "I said the charge was dismissed!" he roared, in a voice that blasted at the great room's roof, and set Tor Lamon back in shock. "You deny my ruling by that statement."

	"I ... I retract my words. I ... I spoke without due thought. But, your majesty, there is a further trouble this outlander brings."

	"Speak then," snapped the old king, his deep eyes sparkling.

	"The predictions of the future that our whole country depends upon today—"

	"And more fools they," said Daron softly. Elmanus' lips twitched.

	"—are upset by this outlander. These predictions are based on a knowledge of all things that enter into life upon this empire you rule. Now this outlander has appeared, and injected a new and disturbing element, an element not in the orbits of the peoples of Azun, and upsets the prediction of the longer range."

	"Your gods are strong," said Daron softly. "They are mighty, beyond the understanding of man. One man upsets their powers, which is, indeed, beyond the understanding of man, as far beyond his understanding as that a heavy ox cart be upset by a single grain of dust. Strange are the ways of the Invisible Ones."

	Tor Lamon purpled with rage. "As much," he ground out, "as the power to predict the future is beyond your comprehension."

	"The man's point," said Elmanus mildly, "is well made. It does seem strange." Elmanus relaxed back into his chair with a deep satisfaction. This was, beyond doubt, one of the most excellent examples of priest-baiting he had seen in fifty-five years of weary tending to dry and wordy cases: This Daron was a man to have around!

	Tor Lamon's cheeks paled from their fat-bleached dusky red to a cold, white rage. "If a man have two children, and each of these children have but two, and these in turn have no more than two, there will be sixteen then, in the course of one man's lifetime. Now if the man—and his children like him-be an active man, given to killing neighbors who annoy him, at the rate of two in four days, such a family may have profound effect. In fact, it would appear, but some four generations of such men and we would have no more Azuni left in our empire!"

	"That sounds somewhat improbable, but still seems a point possible of argument," said Elmanus weightily.

	"Surely you have asked the Invisible Ones when this man shall die?"

	Tor Lamon writhed, and Daron, who had studied more than one useful art, spoke softly. "The Invisible Ones could not give him that answer, for their powers are strangely limited, but they could, and did, tell him this; Tor Lamon dies here, this day!"

-

	THE paleness of Tor Lamon's face became ghastly, his lips and eyelids became blued and purpled slowly as he stood, and stark fear shone in his eyes, all rage dying out. "You . .. you cannot know!" he gasped—and screamed as he said it, doubling up and clutching at his heart. He rolled, and fell at Elmanus' feet, dead.

	A dozen lesser priests sprang forward, and knelt by the fallen Tor Lamon's side. Slowly they straightened. "Tor Lamon knew that he would die here," they acknowledged.

	"How," asked Elmanus uneasily, "did you know this? Are you some newer god still, another god to plague my people here with death?"

	Daron shook his head slowly. "There is a vein in the neck, even so fat a neck, and a swelling at the base of his neck, even beyond his fat, and many other small signs that the skilled may learn. I learned those signs. If the man's brain be exposed, there may be found a small but fatal leakage of blood. It may be, though, that the bursting of the great vein of the heart did this. The man was doomed, and being given to anger, doomed him doubly."

	"Your majesty," a scarlet-orange robed priest said, "we ask one thing. This man should die; his very presence has, now, three times taken Azuni lives."

	"Through defense against attack, twice, and only by the over-weening anger of Tor Lamon, the third time. The man lives," said Elmanus decisively.

	"Then, in the name of the Invisible Ones, let this man be taken for study to the Temple Isle, that he may be fitted into the pattern, that the knowledge of the future may not be disrupted."

	"With the proviso that one month hence, the man be returned to me, healthy, whole, and sane as he is now, that seems a fair request." Elmanus looked at Daron.

	"With that proviso," said Daron distastefully. " and the additional one that I be given time to see the sun and breathe the air, I suppose I must agree."

	"So be it then," Elmanus nodded. "Take him and all his possessions with him, save his horse, to be returned to him when, one month hence, he returns here before me."

	Daron looked slowly at the silent priest of Nazun. The man looked worried, tired, and wearied by his worry. He looked baffled, too, as he looked into Daron's eyes and saw therein a deep total satisfaction!

-

IX

	DARON stood motionless, weaponless, helmetless, before the scarlet-orange robed high priest of the Invisible Ones. This temple room was small, its walls pure white marble, their decorations, a bas-relief of symbolic scenes in the creation of the Invisible Ones. Behind the high priest stood a block of basalt as black as the pit, streaked and grained with flaming scarlet-orange veins in lighting darts of brilliant color.

	There was no other thing in the room, and light that entered came through plates of pure white marble shaved thin as heavy paper, diffused and softened, shadowless. But above that altar there remained a feel of vast and angry tension, a straining, malignant drive that sought to reach and tear at the mind of the sea rover standing between four heavy-thewed and brawny priest guards.

	Priests those four might be, but by the ripple of their scarlet-orange cloaks across their broad and heavy shoulders, their training had come in larger degree from the hilt of a sword and the grip of a shield than from the pages of a book. They gripped their silvery needle swords now with an easy sureness that spoke conclusively of confidence in handling them.

	But confidence was gone now from the face of the high priest; his brows were contracted in a frown of futile anger, his eyes blazing with rage, and his lips strangely tense with fear and lack of surety.

	"Who are you, outlander? Was that aged fool, Elmanus, right in naming you some new and potent god, a god both material and of force, too? The Invisible Ones shy off from you, cannot reach and touch your brain. Speak, what are you—man or god?"

	A slow, easy smile of complete and easy satisfaction touched Daron's lips. "Now that, friend priest, it seems to me, is the purpose of my being here; you seek to find that answer. Sure it seems, Elmanus gave you thirty days to learn, and me no orders to inform you.

	"This I will say; you'll know before the thirty days are gone—but not from my lips." Daron's smile changed to a solemn frown of thought. "But hold. You and your priests have maintained that no true god can appear as a man. A god, you say, by very definition is non-human, beyond conception of a human mind. Now that is a point I would not agree upon, but your own definition shows you, it would seem, that I must be a man, and no god."

	"Why do you dispute that definition?" snapped the priest. "It is clear that a man-thing is no god, for, by very definition, a god is superhuman."

	Daron laughed. "True enough, and sound logic that may be. But you have lost, here, it seems, the principles of logic. Have you heard, perhaps, of the 'undistributed middle'? Look you, a fish swims in the sea."

	"Aye."

	"I swim in the sea. Therefore I am a fish."

	"And of what importance is your false and silly sophistry?"

	"A god is more than man," said Daron pointedly.

	"By definition, that is so."

	"And more than man's conception can hold. Wherefore you limit his powers stringently in one thing; whatever he may be, it must be unfamiliar, he cannot appear a man. So—and, swimming in the sea, I am a fish."

	The high priest cursed softly to himself, and glared at Daron's mocking eyes, and cursed again at old—but potent!—King Elmanus.

	"Your mind is a maze of silly, tricking traps and nonsense thoughts. The Invisible Ones appear in any form they choose; watch now the altar top, watch closely, see the darkening there—the slow darkening and condensation—see it grow, grow darker, more solid, a vague cloud at first—solidifying, strengthening—forming to no normal man but a winged being of luminosity—a glowing, slowly forming thing—"

	Daron smiled and nodded to himself, and stole a sideward glance at the four priest guards who stood beside him. Awe and fear were growing on their faces; and in Daron's mind a dry old voice repeated an old refrain in the liquid, fluent syllables of the Ind: "No mind but yours can rule your thoughts, no mind but yours can control your inner self. But your mind will, if you permit it, follow after any other mind, and see and feel and be as that other mind desires—if you will let it! I can make you see the flower or the tiger, smell the perfume or the acrid breath, but it is your mind, not mine, that does that thing."

	And Daron looked at the empty altar and smiled at the futile mouthings of the fat and sweating priest. His hands moved and waved in futile gropings, and Daron let his mind laugh at the futility and pay no heed at all to all the high priest's exhortations.

	"Your men," said Daron softly, "see wondrous things. I see an empty altar. Cease your foolish mouthings, and get on with what you seek to do."

	The high priest's eyes blazed in exasperation, and he collapsed from mighty dignity like a pricked bladder of air. "Wake!" he snapped fretfully. "You see no more."

	Four priest guards started, their eyes blinked rapidly, and their mouths gaped foolishly at empty air. With the white calm of incandescent fury, the high priest spoke again. "Take this accursed outlander to the South Wing of cells, and keep him there. I'll search him later."

	Angrily the high priest turned away, and vanished through a door that seemed a part of the marble wall. Daron turned to the awed guards, and looked at them through lowered lids a broad grin splitting his face. "Remarkable! These Invisible Ones are invisible indeed. You seemed to see something there?"

	"Quiet!" snapped the leader of the four. "March, and step along."

	Daron followed easily, his mind busy with his thoughts. For one thing old Barhamu had said was true; no mind but his could touch his inner self. And one thing he had said was not true of these Azuni—they could trick the minds of many men, a mass of worshipers!

-

	DOWN from the upper levels of the temple they went, and through corridors hollowed out in black basalt that formed the foundations of the isle, then across half the width of the isle it seemed, to rise again into a building of gray, hard granite, and huge oaken, iron-bound doors. A guard in dull-blue cloak and well-worn leather turned a huge iron lock and passed them through, accompanying them, to use his key again upon another door.

	The passageway before them now—walked and floored and ceiled with hard gray stone—was lined with heavy doors, iron bound and locked. It was a narrow passageway, so that but two men could walk abreast, and at the far end an open door opened into a guard room where four blue-caped and well-weaponed guards lounged at their ease, to straighten into interest as the men came up the hill.

	"In the name of the high priest, Shor Lang, we bring this prisoner. By King Elmanus' given order, one month he stays, to be guarded, fed and kept in health. And these are the orders of Shor Lang," said the scarlet-orange garbed leader of the priest guards formally.

	One of the blue-caped prison guards, his head covered by a good steel helmet, worn at a jaunty, carefree angle, nodded, grunted, and tossed a heavy iron key to the priest guard. "Number three, down the way. If he's the howling menace to peace of mind that stinking fisherman we just threw out of there has been, you can have him back and welcome."

	Daron's swift eyes took in the room. Two benches, two chairs, all hard and made of slabbed wood. One table, with a good and comfortable chair. A paneled case on one wall filled with bound volumes with a thousand titles-all religious. The table was littered with a dozen stacks of a dozen different forms, ink and pens, and odds and ends. As Daron turned away, the captain of the guards was filling in one of the forms.

	"Where's his equipment, or does he walk the streets as naked of blade as he is now?" he asked.

	"His materials will be brought to you for storing in the locker room. Elmanus ordered all returned to him one month hence. A shield—and it's one of those mirror things old Elmanus finally got sense to dispense with—a sword, a dirk, and a helmet of gold and silver wire and phony jewels."

	"Wire?" The captain of the guards looked up, and then looked toward Daron's retreating back. "A fool. If he had gold and silver, he could get good steel and leather. I'll hold this form till the things arrive. Here's receipt for your man. Hm-m-m, he rolls like a seaman but his garb stinks of earth."

	Daron stepped through the oaken door to his cell. The walls were gray granite, too tough it seemed for even prisoners' patient scratching of names and decorations. One cot, one chair of hard oak slabs, and little other furnishing. The door closed behind him with a thunk of very sound and solid oak, and the lock turned with an oily grate of heavy steel.

	Daron paced the room with eyes keen in observation. The door was no flimsy thing, but it was pierced by a spy-hole with a little sliding plate that let the guards look in whenever they might think of it, but left the prisoner blind as to passings in the corridor.

	A window, high on the other side of the tiny cell, was barred with inch-thick wrought iron, blackened by weather, but resistant to rust. They were let into a granite block of size and strength that echoed clearly: "No—not this way, my friend."

	Daron lay down to pass the time and think a bit. A month he had to plan his way—which should be time enough. An hour after he came, a guard came down on feet so soft they made no noise through thick oak panels. Only the sudden clank of the sliding spy-hole plate, and the gleam of a weirdly unsupported eye appraised Daron of his coming. Daron grunted. With that sudden sort of inspection, there'd be no safe working out of tools within this room.

	Restlessly, he went over to the spy-hole again. Six close-spaced bars of metal stopped it from the inner side. Bronze, though, and Daron eyed them speculatively. Daron carried a dirk-blade without handle beneath his clothes, a handy thing, he'd found.

	The light died out of the high window, and the cell was dark. Daron slept.

-

	WITH morning, the door was opened by two guardsmen, accompanying a single small and worried man in a greasy apron. The small and worried man edged nervously into Daron's room, and offered him a tray of wood, bearing two bowls of food.

	The sea rover laughed. "My friend, I eat men only when most direly hungry. Keep me well fed, and your bones are safe enough."

	The little, gray-haired man's lips pulled aside in a mechanical and nervous smile. "Yes. Yes, yes, oh yes. Food. Yes, sir. I—"

	Daron looked at the grinning guards. "Has some one been frowning at him?"

	"There's a fisherman with hair and strength enough to be old Talun himself down the way, and this goat-eared thing that calls itself a cook has been underfeeding him. Drathun, our fishing friend, swears he'll eat him yet," said one of the guards.

	"Why, if I know seamen and their ways, there'd be peace and safety for him if he'd feed him," Daron commented.

	"Eat up yourself, and get ready," said the guard as the little man danced nervously through the closing door. "Old Elmanus, so they tell me, ordered exercise and air. And Shor Lang says the gardens. So ... so you'll learn some gardening in an hour more."

	An hour later, the little man was back to pick up the empty bowls. The food was bad enough, but fairly plentiful, so Daron felt easy as he strolled out to the passageway. Six guards were there now, and the captain of them was going down the hall, opening the great cell doors one at a time, with a huge brass key. A dozen assorted prisoners came out, some seamen, browned and smelling of dried kelp and fish scales, some farming men, with brown-stained hands, and shambling, easy walk, and one man with the mold of lumbering.

	Daron watched the process keenly. The corridor was lined up all one side with cells, and heavy doors that opened outward into the passage. Two cells opened from the other wall. At one end of the passage—the end but two doors from his own cell—there was a heavy oaken door that let out to the main building. At the opposite end was the guardroom's ever-watchful doors.

	As Daron stepped out into the corridor the men from the cells nearest that outer door were already waiting. One, a massive, squat chunk of a man with bearlike arms and legs, and bearlike forward-slanting neck, looked up at him from deep sunken eyes beneath enormous bushy eyebrows, black as charcoal marks. His body, through torn and salt-stained jacket and breeches, was as "hairy as an animal's.

	But the little, far-sunk eyes were twinkling with good humor, and the mouth was wide and strong, the creases round its corners slanting upward.

	"So," he said, in a gentle rumble, like a starting avalanche, "this be the outlander then? I'm Drathun, fisherman because no other of the scum of Nozos have the guts to sail beyond a dog's bark or a birdie's peep. What are these other lands? As big as Azun, then?"

	"Nozos?" said Daron. "Hm-m-m, that's on the Isle of Eran, is it not? Ah yes. As to the outer world. There's more sea than land, man, but there's far more land than ever you've seen. What brings you here?"

	"Catching fishes in the isle's shadow!" he boomed in laughter. "They feared their pretty barges would smell of good, clean food."

	"So they teach you now the beauty of the little pansy and the delicacy of the rose's sweet perfume? A new trade for you then?"

	"Gardening!" Drathun snorted. "And two more months of that. Solmun, my helper—aye, the lad with midget mustache on his lips—goes free in another week."

	"Quiet," roared the guard captain. "Now, march!"

	He led them to the door, worked at the lock with his great key, and the little troop was led outside, down an angling corridor to stop before another oaken door. Three guards remained with them, and three stepped through the doorway as the captain unlocked it with his key. Racked tools occupied one wall, and on the other, Daron's sharpening eyes saw a miscellany of possessions. Nets and clubs and hats and—a silver-plated bronze shield, a long, strong sword, a jewel-hiked dirk, and a familiar helmet of gold and silver wires and curious jewels.

	A heavy mattock in his hands, Daron followed quietly to the gardens outside. A tangled mass of weeds and tough-rooted creepers sprang from an uneven plot of newly imported soil that lay upon the barren basalt rock. Two lanky farming lads, Daron, and Drathun, the chunky fisherman, were set to work, watched by one crossbow-armed guard.

	The sun was hot, the air was still, and the roots were tough. The position of work was one Daron was not accustomed to, and his muscles ached before the day was done. He slept that night with the heavy, solid sleep of exhaustion. And—of contentment. He had a month.

-

X

	DARON SAT DOWN with his back to a tree, and the heavy odor of new turned, sun-baked earth in his nostrils. Only faintly the salt, clear scent of the sea swept in, and he looked with sour eyes at the glint of sun on wind-ruffled waters.

	"Drathun, my friend," he sighed at last, "that, and not this stubborn land, is the place for men. Now a plant belongs in soil, rooted and fixed, unchanging itself in a never-changing stuff. But for a man to grow—and growth is change—he needs must live where change is constant on the sea."

	"Aye—and a month, a week, and two more days before I get back to it." Drathun's deep-buried, twinkling eyes looked saddened. "To turn this filthy dirt, and sit penned in a room, and never smell the sea from week's end to week's end. Ugh."

	"I think," said Daron softly, looking up through the tracery of an ornamental tree, "that we might leave these people here without their full consent. If you don't roar it out like a captain calling the bow-watch in a storm."

	"Eh?" said Drathun sharply, in a much reduced bellow. His powerful, blocky body tensed.

	"Do you," asked Daron, "like our aid and helper there, Tarmun, the farmer?"

	"He's a solid ox, but good enough."

	"Tarmun!" called Daron, turning toward the farmer lolling under a hedge, a floppy hat of straw across his face.

	The gangling farmer raised his head, and the hat fell away. His face was long and sad and brown, and the man himself was long and sad and brown—and only Daron had the strength of arm to equal that of the slow-moving farmer.

	"This shade is cooler here—and our brief hour of rest draws to a close. Come nearer, friend. I want to know that triply distilled essence of vegetable evil the next time I pull its root. That—what is its name?"

	"Snake-bite root," the farmer roused himself gradually, stretched, and ambled over. "You can tell it," he sighed lugubriously, "by the purple veining of the root, and"—his voice fell as he sat near them, and farther from the guard still munching on his lunch in the shade of another tree—"you're a liar, my friend. You know it well after one bite, being above the wit of a hog, which learns likewise, in one good sting. What do you seamen want of me?"

	"You like it here, perhaps, in the Temple of the Invisible Ones, my friend?"

	"I loathe their rotten ways as heartily as you men of Talun do, as you well know."

	"Then, my strong-armed friend," said Daron easily, staring up through the tree to the free blue sky, "do me the favor of tying this lumpy one in a goodly running bowline as the guard puts us in the cells this night. You know perhaps an insult or two to sting a seaman's hide?"

	"Oh, the seaman's good enough in his place, but the place has too much smell. That stinking merchandise that Drathun would have us think is food, makes right good nourishment for plants, when well rotted at their roots."

	Drathun's deep-sunk eyes grew somewhat brighter, and his wide, friendly mouth grew harder. "My oxlike friend, you learn your wit and knowledge from the horses you nurse about your farm. I'll knot those hawser-things that you call arms with greatest joy tonight."

	"Aye, so?" said Tarmun sadly. "But then, Daron perhaps knows better why and when and where this thing should find its working out."

	"In the passage before our cells, when all but we have been locked away. Drathun, your cell is nearest-to the door, on that same side on which my cell is placed. Tarmun, your cell is across from my own. The cell on your side nearest to the outer way is unoccupied. We three will be last to be put away. If you would fight—"

	"Aye," said Drathun. "We will, but, friend-" His brows drew down in puzzled wonder, and his tiny, deep-set eyes looked up at Daron from under paint-brush brows.

	A guard stood up, stretched leisurely, and roared a call to work. The three beneath the tree moved apart reluctantly, Daron's voice rising slowly in "—know the accursed rope next time I spot it, and I'll fry it slow and happily."

	Tarmun yawned. "Do that, seaman, and you'll learn that plants have better protection than your brainless fish. Fry it, and the vapors will give you such an itch on all your body as you've never known, nor ever will forget. Drop that—it's mine. It's lighter."

	"Yours, you mud-footed farmer, that tool is mine!" roared Drathun, grabbing at the mattock angrily, well knowing it was his, and Tarmun knew it, too.

	"Let loose, fish-skin. You'll never swing a mattock like a man, and that will bring more aches than results, with your soft-muscled flesh."

	"Why, you horse-faced flounder of the land! Let go that hold, before I try the mattock blade in that dried clay you call a head! I'll—"

	"You," said a bored guard, "will drop that thing, seaman. If your friend, the ox, wants to play with it, let him. Sure it fits his hand better than yours, but I'll try a rope's end on your back if you prefer to argue."

	Growling, Drathun picked up another mattock, and swung to his work, his brow-hidden eyes darting at the shambling, long-armed farmer.

-

	FROM a dozen ornamental trees about the gardens, Daron collected bits of exuding gum, and chewed them placidly, to moisten his work-dried mouth. The guards sat comfortably in the shade, and joked at the laboring men, and kept the water bottles handy.

	Twice through the long, hot afternoon the stubby, bearlike seaman and the horse-faced farmer came near blows, and twice the bored guard captain stopped their angry voices. With sunset, the dozen men were gathered together, and marched back to their cells, placed before their doors, and one by one locked in.

	The captain locked away the fourth from last, and turned to Daron. In a slow, drawling voice the lanky farmer spoke. "Was it," he asked of Drathun gently, "your mother or your father that was the bear? For surely you cannot be full human with such a pelt as that. You should use a currycomb more frequently, and comb the stink of fish from it."

	From the gray granite floor, Drathun swung a calloused fist toward the farmer's heavy jaw. With the slightest, slowest movement possible, Tarmun moved aside. His long arm reached out, grabbed Drathun's fist, and in an instant the two were rolling, struggling on the floor.

	The captain of the guard looked down with exasperated boredom.

	Daron roared in laughter. "Ho guard, give me that key I They've been wanting to fight this out all day; we'll let 'em try it for a night."

	Grinning, the captain released the key, and Daron, with a mighty heave of his foot, sent both the struggling pair into the vacant cell, and locked the door on them, to toss the key to the captain. He stared through the peephole slot, till the guard captain shoved him aside.

	"Now my fine buckoes, you two can fight the whole night through," said the captain sourly, "if such be your mind, or you can learn the part of men and stand up here. Your supper will be in your cell, but by the Invisible Ones, there'll be no scrap of food in that place you've got now."

	Sullenly, the two men rose, eyeing each other angrily. Equally sullenly, they came out, to be locked in their separate cells, as Daron stepped into his. In Daron's closed palm, however, was an impression on the gums he'd gathered of that master key that turned all locks in this whole wing!

	And in Daron's mind—lest the Invisible Ones be seeking to read his thoughts and plans—was a turmoil that defied their every effort. And that, too, was thanks to the old wizard of the Ind. Daron was trying to remember places, people, and happenings he had forgotten, and since most forgetting is caused by a subconscious barrier to remembrance, both conscious and subconscious minds were in a fine fog.

	Under the tree, the next noon hour, Daron and Drathun sat, and at long and patient calling, Tarmun at last came over, mollified. He sank down beside Daron, well away from Drathun, the half-amused, half-bored guard captain watching Daron's laughing eyes as he smoothed their anger down.

	"And now, since Drathun plays with closed fists, I have an eye two shades darker than the other," sighed Tarmun, "and no good reason for it. I like the man—and he's as slippery as one of his own eels. What was the reason for this?"

	"An impression in a bit of gum. I've a design of that magic bit of metal called a key our guard captain conjures our doors open with. Within another pair of nights, I could carve out a key to do the same—but for that thrice-accursed peephole in my door. But—I've a mind to block it up." 

	"The guard," said Tarmun sourly, "will approve of that."

	"He will," laughed Daron, "when he sees my block! Now Drathun; you say your assistant was held less blameworthy, less punished for the crime of fishing in the bay?"

	"Aye. The Invisible Ones are touchy on the score since old Talun sent droves of dying fish to pollute the bay, and drive the noble pretties on their way."

	"He goes in two days, I think?"

	"Aye."

	"Now if I were a fisherman released from this place, I'd go to Talun's good temple on Mt. Kalun, and give thanks to him. And, if I were released at such a time as this, I'd tell the priests of Talun that the fishing fleets might well be here—following a heavy run, perhaps—when next the moon is dark. Say five days hence."

	"Aye, would you now? Daron, you seem to me a man of sense; I'll tell the boy your good advice." Drathun's deep eyes looked uneasily at Daron's immobile, placid face. "A run of fish, the whole fleet would follow willingly—if Talun would grant such things at any man's request."

	"And were I released, a seaman, now, after seeing Talun's temple, I'd seek the fishing fleet, and tell them of my strong dislike for this prettied isle, and this misused harbor that has beribbon-decked girls for sailors. I'd even try to urge them to sail in here in force."

	"Their reluctance would not be overwhelming—if they saw a reason there,", remarked Drathun.

	"Now," said Daron, "if such things had been suggested to you, as a fisherman, and it had been mentioned that, if Talun approved, a run of fish would come—would you follow such a run, and enter the harbor?"

	"And every man of Nozos, and every other fishing port as well!" Drathun answered.

	"And," said Tarmun lazily, "you might mention that idea to a farmer here and there. Who be ye, Daron? Man or god?"

	"There'll be small loss, however it may fall, if no run of fish appears to tell of Talun's approval," said Daron with finality.

	"None," agreed Drathun, stretching mightily, and standing up. He wandered off to settle heavily beside his young assistant, a hundred yards away.

	Daron was wandering about picking up some bits of wood and twigs. Presently the guard called them to work again.

-

	THE captain of the guard walked down the row of cell doors on soft feet, mechanically slipping open the peepholes of the doors to glance at the men within. He came to No. 3, leaned toward the peephole and slipped the plate aside—and jumped back with a howl of dismay.

	Abruptly from within came a roar of echoing laughter, and the captain of the guard looked again, heard the running feet of the guardsmen down the corridor, and cursed luridly.

	"By the Invisible Ones!" he roared, "that triply-damned slot nipped out a piece of my thumb as neatly as you please. Go on back, ye fools. I'll fix the thing."

	Angrily he unlocked the door and swung it open as his men turned back. He stepped inside the door, and pulled it halfway shut behind him. On the cot, doubled up in the light of his lamp, Daron was laughing soundlessly now.

	He wiped his eyes, and looked up at the furious face of the captain of the guard. "By the gods, captain, do me this small turn; leave up the thing, and let your men bite as hard as you! So it nipped your thumb, eh?"

	The captain glared at him. "Nipped my thumb? Blazes, no, as you well know, fish-skinner! It stuck its leering face out into mine when I slid that peephole cover aside, and I liked to jump out of my sandals with the startlement!"

	Daron laughed silently, and through his laughter managed: "My respects, captain! Ye've a mind that works fast."

	The captain snorted softly and turned toward the door and its peephole. "And have my men make me a laughing stock for crying 'Guard! Guard!' for fright at a silly jack-in-the-box—though, by the god's, a more obscene face my eyes have never laid on before! What is the cursed thing?"

	One of the light bronze bars had been twisted from the peephole grate to make room for the contraption of paper, twigs and strings. A knotty root supplied an evil, tiny face with hideous, wormy beard, held on a springy twig that had been compressed behind the peephole plate to thrust the startling obscenity of the twisted root in the captain's face when the plate was moved. A bit of luridly red paper supplied a body of snakelike form, a wholly startling thing. "A. root!" the captain grated in disgust.

	"A root!" said Daron, shaken with daughter. "Let not this art be sacrificed with but one showing, friend!"

	In silent anger at his own stupidity, the captain closed the door, and slipped the peephole shutter back. He could hear the scratchings as Daron fitted up his contraption again.

	He walked on his rounds, and so did not hear the further scratchings as Daron carved, from the removed bronze rod, a duplicate of the captain's key that had been hidden against his belly when the captain opened the door.

	An hour later, there was another howl of terror, a moment's silence, and a lurid cursing of a nipping slide. Daron, in silent laughter, stared out the hole into the red and foolish face of the guard. In determined silence the guard replaced the trap, and Daron returned to his carving. Slow work, for even good hard steel does not make fast progress on well-tempered bronze. But the key was shaping.

-

XI

	"MAYAN'S a fool—he never brought in more than a thousand pounds of fish at once in his life—but he's agreed to do it tonight. And Tarmun will be ready." Drathun whispered as he passed Daron. The guard snapped something at him, and he turned into the cell.

	Thirty seconds later, Daron was locked in his cell, and within an hour, the last meal of the day was gone, and the little timid man had collected the bowls of their food.

	Then: "Guard! Ho, guard!" Tarmun was roaring.

	The guardsman walked down the corridor lazily. "Aye, what is it?"

	"The captain gave me permission to wash the earth from my jacket this evening. Let me down to the washroom."

	"Captain, Tarmun, the farmer, wants to wash his jacket down the passage."

	"Let him go," called the captain boredly, "but keep an eye on him."

	Daron heard the click and scrape of the heavy key in Tarmun's lock then the heavy tread of the fanner, passing by his door.

	"Hey, guard!"

	"Aye, what now?"

	"I be going mad of sitting here in one small room. In the name of the gods, will you let me get something to read, at least?"

	"Captain! Mayan, the fisherman, wants something to read. Shall I send him down."

	"Now by the Invisible Ones! I didn't think the fool had brains enough! Aye, send him down the hall, and if he must read, he'll read of the true gods."

	Again the great bronze key scraped in a lock, and the heavy hinges creaked as the door was forced open. Mayan's rolling steps echoed down the stone-walled hall.

	Mayan's cell was but one door beyond Daron's and on Daron's side of the corridor. Tarmun's cell was directly across the corridor. With the two men out of their cells, one walking by the guard down to the washroom, the other bound down the long hall to the guardroom—

	With a single flowing motion, Daron was up and at his door. The five remaining bronze bars behind the peephole clinked in Daron's hand, and noiselessly, the peephole plate slid back. Through the hole, Daron saw what he had prayed for. With both men out of their cells, their great oak doors stood open—open into the narrow passageway from opposite sides, completely cutting off the view from the guardroom! And the guard was watching Tarmun wash his jacket.

	Daron's long arm snaked out through the peephole, reached down, and thrust the key he'd carved into the lock of the door. It scraped, stuck a bit, turned—and the door opened. Instantly, Daron's arm was back, the five bronze bars were refixed in the peephole, and the contraption of roots and paper blocked the hole again.

	Daron swung through the door, and as the door closed soundlessly behind him, he stiffened in horror.

	"Ho!" came the roar of Tarmun's great voice down the passageway. Daron had the door half open again, and was darting through as the voice roared on.

-
"—on a fair spring day,
"When the snow's away,
"We'll plant the seed and pull the weed,
"And wait the harvest's sway—ay—"
-

	Daron cursed weakly, and stepped out the door again. The lock clicked to behind him, and the key was in his hand again. Two steps, two motions, and Drathun's door swung open, and the squat, powerful seaman moved soundlessly out. Two steps more, the door was shut and locked behind him, and the outer door swung open. Instantly Drathun was through, then Daron, and that door too, was locked tight behind.

	"Left," whispered Daron, and the two were off on soundless, shoeless feet—each, at Daron's strict order, thinking furiously of things they could not remember! Left, and down, and across a deserted corridor, and the key slipped in another iron-bound oaken door. The un-oiled hinge creaked softly, and Daron cursed beneath his breath, then they were in.

-

	FROM beneath his jacket, Drathun pulled a stub of candle, lit it, and the door was closed behind them. In the light of the candle's glow, the locker room was ghostly with hunched things, unnamable and unrecognizable. Two tense-nerved men danced lightly on their feet as each made his way to his own things.

	Ten seconds later, Daron was out, and Drathun close behind. On Daron's head sat now the gold-and-silver wired cap of Nazun, and in his hand he carried his own good sword. Drathun, behind him, had a helmet of good round steel he'd looted from some temple guard, and bore a sword like a good ship's spar for length and mass. 

	Daron's mind went blank for just an instant's time, as he sent a frantic prayer to Nazun for guidance—then something smashed into his mind, and exploded in his brain. In the instant it came, it died—but left its trace on Daron's mind.

	"Remember forgotten things," Daron whispered to Drathun, and the squat seaman nodded, his deep-set eyes blank with thought. Daron took his arm, and jerked him to motion down a side corridor.

	In that instant's flash of understanding, a map of the entire Temple Isle had been engraved upon his mind—and the room of the sphere he knew! On fleeing, soundless feet he set out, with Drathun's shorter legs rolling fast and noiseless behind. Down long gray corridors of granite he went, then down a stair that led to black basalt corridors.

	The candle flickered in the lightless gloom, and shadows writhed behind them and before. There was an odor of musty dark, and the faintly sour smell of sea-washed rock about them. Through long, long runnels they fled, till they were far beneath the main temple of marble.

	"There's something pricking at my mind," Drathun whispered.

	As he spoke, Daron felt the first strange tingling of the cap he wore, and a soft, dim glow of blush lights like the lights of the winter sky in the far north, played round his head. Simultaneously, Daron was turning off and down, along a horizontal corridor of black basaltic rock, then down a stair. Another corridor branched off, turned, and descended once more. But now the black basalt of the isle was not fine enough. This run was lined with white marble blocks.

	The candle was out, and far ahead Daron heard the stir of men, and excited voices. A light sprang into being ahead, and the two dropped aside in a branching corridor to wait.

	A pair of scarlet-orange cloaked priestly guards ran by, their voices tense and angry, bearing a crystal lamp. Behind them another pair appeared. Then the lights were all upon the way the seamen had come. They started on, had made a hundred yards, when from a black tunnel mouth two guards sprang out with roaring cries that mouthed and mumbled down the bore, and lost all semblance of voices to become vague animal cries.

	"Their hands!" snapped Daron, "Take off their hands—or these things will not die!"

	Drathun snorted, and his broad mouth opened in a grin. The great sword he bore he twirled like a staff of wheat, his great thick wrists untiring in its lightning glimmer. It struck the priest guard's lighter weapon, twisted, flung the thing aside to clatter on the floor—and drank at the man's heart. The figure in scarlet-orange slumped, fell forward, and measured its length on the floor. Drathun turned to find Daron engaged with a left-handed opponent now—and gasped as the man he'd killed stabbed up at him from the floor, dead eyes white and ghastly in the light of the lamp the priests had carried.

	"They can't die!" the fisherman gasped, his blade slowed by his very fear of this unholy thing.

	"No, fool—their hands, take off the hands, and dead or alive, they can't grip blades!"

-

	TWO MINUTES lost, two handless corpses behind, they pressed down the corridor. The men they dodged were ranging back now, their shouts and cries an echoing confusion down the corridors. Daron ran on, eyes grim and determined, Drathun beside him sweating cold with horror. This thing was new, to him, and none too old to Daron.

	"Two turns more, Drathun, and we reach the room. Look not within, or you fall paralyzed. Believe me there, as you did not believe what I said of those undead guards. I'll go within; you guard my back, and look not in the room until I call. Hear?"

	"Aye. I'll wait outside."

	They turned a corner—turned another, and met a dozen guards, looking this way and that to locate the source of echoing calls that resounded endlessly in the halls. The two were in their midst and through them to the doorway before they well knew they'd come.

	And at that doorway, a sheet of livid lightning struck, struck—and held! Blue curling flame, that writhed and danced and shrieked! A scarlet-orange guard backed away in leaping panic of the thing at his back, and Daron tripped him with a flying foot. The man stumbled, twisted, shrieked as he touched the wall of flame.

	Then he fell through, but was not consumed. Instead, he wavered slowly to his feet, as guards and attackers stopped alike in fascination. The man stood up, and his face was blank, his lips lax, his arms helpless, flabby things that swung at his sides. He laughed and chuckled, and the chilling sound rattled loosely in the corridor. He laughed, and the laughter grew in Gargantuan reboundings, thrusting fingers of madness in their brains.

	Then the soldier-priest was dancing, dancing, skipping down the hall, and the men drew back and let him pass.

	Daron stiffened, and his face went white and tense. "Nazun!" he called—and leaped toward that sheet of waving flame.

	He touched it, and the helmet of his head grew warm while icy pricklings tore at his scalp. A shrieking hell of warring forces danced and sang and shattered in crystalline trumpetings about him, his body ran in crimson flame, blue laced, and wrapped in the blue lightnings of the Invisible Ones, a sheath of flickerings that blinded.

	Warring things struggled there, with low mumblings of sound and silent fury that underran the root of their blasting. Then slowly, from the very peak, where the dead, black stone of Barak, Lord of Fate reposed, a veil of black welled out, a heavy, clinging smoke of night that rippled, spread out, and overran, tumbling down about the figure that stood paralyzed, a helpless point on which two unseen forces concentrated.

	The black lapped out, and drank the blue curtain of flame, drank and pulled and grew, and the howling hell of lightning died down, weakened, till only the mad, maddening mutterings remained, and even they grew weak. The icy pricklings left his scalp; the crimson cocoon of fire withdrew—

	Abruptly he was through the doorway, and in the same instant that the cloaking cloud of blackness vanished, Daron pulled from a hidden pocket the little mechanism the watchmaker had made for him, and clamped it in his eye, a monocle of mechanism. He touched a button, and it whirred, softly, swiftly. Behind him he heard the roar of fear-struck guards coming again to life and action, and the clang of Drathun's mighty sword. Before him, in the same instant, he saw the circle of guards.

	A dozen picked fighting men, men in cloaks of pure white wool, with harness of creamy leather, studded heavily with silver fittings, leaping toward him who faced at last the three-foot globe that was the root and being of the Invisible Ones!

	There was fear and stark amazement on the faces of the guards, a fear and unknowingness that hampered their minds, and slowed their movement. This huge and bearded warrior who stood before them, with one blue eye closed and a monocle of whirring mechanism mounted in his other eye, this—man or god—who passed the veil of madness!

	Daron's silver shield swept up, and every warrior of them looked to it, as any trained and instant-reaction warrior must—

	And every man of them slowed, stiffened—and became a rigid, useless thing, eyes fixed and glazed, staring at the image of the thing of mystery that they had never seen! In the polished perfect mirror of the shield, they stared into the mystery of the whirling, circling, patterned lights, the lights that boiled and raved and twisted now, as though some maddening thing was driving, hurrying, forcing them on.

	Daron moved forward, two slow steps. His heavy blade came up—and fell.

-

	A HIGH, clear and piercing note sang out, a sweet, cloying sound of exquisite tone, as from a mighty, perfect bell. Again the heavy blade came up, and fell. Louder rang the note—but perfect still.

	The silver shield moved, streaked forward, and clanged in brazen wrath—and the silver sphere exploded in a mighty blast of light, a shrieking, howling tornado of more-than-sound, a light that seared and darkened eyes.

	The sphere was gone.

	Daron snatched the whirring mechanism from his eye, opened his closed eye—and had by that one eye the advantage of every other. The twelve white-cloaked guards were down, down in limp and broken postures that told the warrior's eye a tale of ultimate defeat.

	These men were corpses—and had been!

	The power that animated them—the Invisible Ones—was gone!

	Daron turned. Drathun was standing, half leaning against the doorway, holding a streaming wound in his left arm. "They fled when that bubble burst—and all shrieking furies of the world fled by me, too! By Talun and Martal, men, what deadly stuff is this we battered.

	"That was the death-howl of the Invisible Ones, my friend," said Daron grimly. "Now we've a rendezvous above, I think."

	"The fishermen's ships!" Drathun gasped. "The Invisible Ones are gone!"

	"Come up—they'll need guidance, they'll need to know!"

	Along the winding passages they ran, passages that seemed like veins of some dead animal now, drawn of all life, dead things that had been living. The guards had fled; they saw no men, but far away they heard the howling, shouting clamor of men in terror and in pursuit.

	They vomited from a sloping ramp, and stood in a garden torn and trampled now, a score of corpses, dead and useless things—with no mark to show their death! Fallen, Daron knew, in the instant that the crystal shell that was the root and basis of the Invisible Ones was shattered. 

	Daron charged across the gardens toward the main entrance to the vast, snowy temple of the Invisible Ones. A line of blue-cloaked guards was fighting, holding back a horde of howling, rough-clad seamen. And at their very head, roaring in a voice of thunder, stood a rough and hairy figure, a very squat giant of a man—

	"Talun!" roared Daron, and charged forward. "By Talun and the Old Gods all, they're gone, ye seamen, they're gone! The Invisible Ones are fallen! Their power is broken for all time to come! Take back your harbor, seamen! Take back your island, too!"

	"Ah, Daron!" the mighty, squat, old figure roared. "Come on, lad—fight, don't waste good breath in idle talk! Drive out these scum! We'll bring the good, clean sea back to Tordu, and drive that stink of incense out forever!"

-

XII

	DARON looked up and ahead, where, in the early sunlight, the topmost parts of Nazun's blue-green temple loomed above the trees. He halted momentarily, and breathed deep of the clear, crisp mountain air.

	Drathun, panting, looked up at him. "Ye be a determined man, Daron. This air is thin. Now while you rest and get a bit of breath, give me one more bit of fact. You drive me mad, friend! What was that whirring thing ye wore in your eye last night as you broke the sphere?"

	Daron laughed, and pulled the little thing from his pocket. "Here, Drathun, look at it. Look through it, and press this button here."

	The seaman did. A hole drilled through front and back, covered by smooth glass surfaces, was darkened suddenly as a plate of metal began to revolve, passing in front of it, then circling back. Swiftly it gained, till the moving metal was but a blur, a haze that slightly dimmed the clear sight through the pierced hole.

	The seaman grunted and passed it back. "A hole, with a bit of metal revolving past so fast it is not seen. A blur-no more. Now what is the magic of this thing?"

	"In the lowlands of Looz Yan, in the land of the West, I saw a similar thing. They have there great windmills, and this thing they call a strobe. Now the magic of the thing is this: if you peer through this at a whirling thing, that thing seems to stand still! When I looked through this at the ordered whirling of the lights of the sphere—the lights moved slow, and lost all order, and made no sense. The magic of their power was broken, just as my view of them was broken by that metal plate. Yet, because they did not whirl in ordered circles, I could see them move in normal lines."

	"Hm-m-m, there's more magic in simple things than I thought. Now, one more thing—"

	"We climb the mountain now," laughed Daron. "And while you go to Talun's temple, I pay respects to good Nazun—and visit Lady Tammar. Up, my friend."

	Drathun grunted. "Aye, up. My bones grow wearied, for I've had no sleep this night, and action enough for a dozen nights. I'm no young man such as you, or those who seem to be following us."

	Daron looked back for the first time. Below them, a rushing crowd of men and women struggled up the path, panting, calling, beckoning. Daron smiled.

	"I think the Old Gods have gained in popularity, with the death of the new."

	"So the wine-sot turns to water his affliction is withdrawn," Drathun growled. "Half those who worshiped at the Temple Isle could not stay away, though they willed it. Well—we have given them sound cure for that! A hundred tons of fish were offered there to Talun this night, on the red-orange altar of the Invisible Ones!"

	Daron walked on, steady and slow, as the mountain man must, who would gain his goal in health. The high hills of-the Ind had taught him that, as well as other things. "The fools will kill themselves in running up that mountain."

	A voice, a shade more piercing than the rest, reached up to them. "Daron—Daron—wait there!"

	"Eh?" Daron turned. "Someone called my name."

	Drathun laughed, a deep roar of amusement. "Are you fool enough to think that name unknown after this night! All Tordu calls your name now!"

	Daron shrugged. Again the call came up, clearer now, and the speaker, a long-legged youth, blowing like a spent horse, shouted out again. "Wait there for us, Daron! We've need of you!"

-

	DARON turned and looked up at the tops of the temples above, clustering in the long-slanting rays of the risen sun. He looked back at the crowd, and the youth, and said to Drathun: "I'll wait, or the young fool will run his heart out."

	"Elmanus"—called the youth. He slowed now; gulping deep breaths of air, and stumbled nearer, to throw himself on the pathside grass. "Elmanus is dead!"

	"Eh?" snapped Drathun. "Old Elmanus gone?"

	"Aye—he died this night."

	A half dozen other men were struggling up, blowing hard. Long-legged farm men, and a seaman with rolling gait. The seaman laughed and panted all at once, and stuttered out the tale.

	"Aye, the good old king is gone—may the gods protect his name—and gone happy, at that."

	"What struck him down?" Daron asked. The king had been old, but seemed strong and well for all that.

	"Joy," panted a horse-faced farmer. "And foolishness."

	"He had a wine bottle in one hand," the youth panted.

	"And a slave-maiden of his on the other," the seaman managed, between a laugh and a gasp for air.

	"And the old fool danced a jig! At his age! He was howling in glee, and dancing round, and the girl had more sense than he!"

	"She tried to stop him," the seaman nodded. "But he was howling praises on your name, and curses on the vanished Invisible Ones, and shrieking—"

	"—that," the farmer interrupted gleefully, "he didn't give a damn what gods were gone, so one set or the other was destroyed."

	"Ah," said Daron, a half-smile tugging at his lips. "Too much release from pressure—and he exploded."

	"Aye, he tried to dance, and tripped and fell. His leg bent under him, and broke his hip. He was old and drunk with wine, and the shock killed him two hours gone."

	"But," the seaman panted, "as he died, he was conscious again, and he said to his ministers, "Bring me that Daron! Bring him here! He's the only one in all this land with force enough to be a king!"

	The crowd was growing, surging, panting all around them now, and shouting out to Daron. Suddenly they parted, and an officer in old Elmanus' livery came up, panting hard, his face red and sweating. "I near killed my horse, I fear, Daron, and these seamen and farmers beat me even so. King Elmanus is gone—gone from joy, and gone demanding that you take his place."

	"I—" said Daron, and looked about the crowd. Every hot and sweating face looked up at him eagerly. Abruptly, he spotted one face that was cool, and slightly smiling, a round, rough-hewn face, with dark and heavy brows, and leathery, tanned skin.

	Old Talun shut one eye slowly and nodded to him. Beyond, behind him, even, Daron saw a tall, lean man in blue-green robes.

	"Now this land," said Daron with a sudden laugh, "is a broad, and right good land, and one thing I like about it. It has good gods, gods who act and do, and fight for what is theirs! And, better, these gods pay those who help them in their own way, and show no stinginess!

	"So be it then; not for King Elmanus alone, but if ye people—fishermen and farmers both—want me there—why there I'll go!"

	There was a roar of cheers that washed up about him like a pounding surf, and a hundred hands laid hold of him. Before he well knew what had happened, he was riding down the mountainside on the shoulders of a howling, cheering crowd.

	His roars and protests went unheard, and, at last, he grinned and accepted it. But, back across his shoulder, he looked toward Tammar's temple, glowing rose-quartz vanishing behind, gleaming in the sun.

	He'd reach that temple yet!

The End

Planet of Eternal Night
Thrilling Wonder Stories – October 1939

CHAPTER I – The Missing Space Ships

	DEAN NORDEN turned restlessly and looked out of the thermalite window, out over Tarragoon. There was an unaccustomed, tense hush over the city, a hush made up of shuffling feet, murmuring voices, and the low, muffling reverberation from the Dome.

	And over all, through all, pierced the keen, high shriek of the wind. The shrieking, dancing, wind, that ruffled the intensely blue Lake Tarragoon and whirled the misty spume from Tarragoon Falls in whipped spray. The Falls that were a tiny trickle now, as every last, available bit was sucked from the tiny stream, the only practicable source of power on the whole planet of Pluto.

	Norden looked at the tiny bright star that was the setting sun, and shivered. It was cold. So cold out there, that the whole System used it as the expression of ultimate cold. Cold as Pluto.

	The murmuring voices of the men in the room interrupted his thoughts. Pilot Commander Horensen was speaking in his heavy, stolid voice, flapping the thick leather gauntlets in his right hand rhythmically against the back of his left.

	"I am not so sure it's a good idea," he said. "I'd hate to leave." He shook his head, dark with the sun the Minor planets knew.

	"We should send word," said President Bankill. "Earth must know what has happened—or what has not happened."

	Horensen looked at him thoughtfully. "Yes. But why send a ship? How do you know anything is wrong, anyway?"

	Bankill gestured despairingly.

	"We know that—know it altogether too well. Five weeks ago, Miller's ship was supposed to have arrived. Three weeks ago, Grant Barren's ship was due. He isn't here yet. One week ago, Dave Garner was due. And he isn't here yet! Three supply ships missing. On Earth trains can be late, freight planes can be late. But in interplanetary schedules they just don't arrive late. They arrive on time or—they don't arrive. You know that better than I.

	"Pluto has missed three, power-supply ships," Bankill repeated. "There's no sense waiting; we must send word to Earth. It will do no real good, to most of us, of course."

	Norden grunted.

	"About one thousand of our two and a half million people could be supported here in Tarragoon Dome by the power from Tarragoon Falls. But we must have power for two and a half million people—for three months. It would take two years for Horensen to reach Earth. He'd have to race some three billion miles at sixty miles a second. Then, four years from now—a ship might get out here!"

	Bankill stood up and looked at Horensen with genuine pain in his eyes.

	"It is our duty, Horensen, to send you and your men back in the rocket. We belong here. We picked this place. We can't ask you to remain here."

	"Damned cold place, this," said Horensen amiably. "It's like Norway in the winter. I like it. You Devil's are a game bunch. We're not walking out—if you don't mind."

	"You and your men belong to Interplanetary Service," Bankill pursued. "We have no right to planet you here, rob you of your chance. And, if you stay longer, we will not be able to let you go. Your reserve power will be too valuable to us."

	"Chief Mate Garrison is pretty good," said Horensen. "He can take my ship back. I'll stay here."

	"You have every right to make your choice, Pilot Horensen," sighed Bankill. "But I fear we can offer you little hospitality. Pluto is rich in human character, but more poverty-stricken in resources than even you can know, Pilot."

	Horensen's gloves flapped dismally as he nodded slowly. "Ja. Ja. Pluto is not so rich in some things. But she has damned good men—real men. I like them."

-

	BANKILL looked at the big-framed Norseman. Slowly a smile spread over his tired face.

	"I thank you, Pilot Horensen. We need such men as you here, in times like these. But even your type can do little when such things as the fixed radiation of the sun and the laws of celestial mechanics decree simply and finally that there cannot be but a trickle of heat on this frozen planet." 

	Bankill bit his lips, went on. 

	"I wonder if you fully realize that however we may fool ourselves, we are inevitably doomed. Life is an impossibility when food, air, and warmth are absolutely dependent on the arrival of no-longer-existent supply ships." 

	The Norseman nodded sagely. 

	"I still stick with you, if you don't mind." 

	"Yes. I suppose we have a reputation on the Minors for toughness in hanging on to life. But we can't do miracles. Three supply ships gone. Only three months power reserve, with every factory and plant shut down. The supply is cut off, and without it —the Lord of this planet of Outer Darkness moat claim us. Inevitably. If you can get around that—we can't."

	"Have you any good rivers?" Horensen asked.

	"Rivers! Rivers of liquid nitrogen. That Tarragoon River is the biggest in all equatorial Pluto. The biggest on the planet is the New Yukon, and even little Caesmatite City can't get enough power out of that flat-country stream to light the dome. You know yourself we've tried. Good Lord, we don't enjoy paying the terrific freight bill for having those thousands of tons of accumulator stacks hauled clear from the Minor planets—Earth, Venus, and Mars—out to here.

	"There simply isn't another source on Pluto. In the polar regions there aren't even 	little streams, for the temperature there is so low that nitrogen freezes, even now, when it is summer. Dean Norden, our foremost engineer-physicist, has just been reporting his findings."

	"The thing is utterly hopeless," said Norden. "This is truly the planet of the Lord of Outer Darkness, Horensen."

	"Yes," grinned the Norseman, "but you're all his little 'Devils.' Look, that wind out there looks strong enough for something."

-

	The wind was ruffling the lake into little, white-capped waves of liquid nitrogen. Norden looked at it sourly.

	"No luck, old man. The atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, nitrogen in slight amount, about like water vapor on Earth, helium and neon. Its pressure is only seven pounds—any wind machine would have to be too big. We can't build machinery now."

	"Yes, I thought so. You're all a bunch of fools to live out here. But I'll stay here. Mighty interesting to an old Norseman."

	Norden laughed in a strained voice.

	"I wish I had your confidence. I'm afraid—

	An official entered.

	"Toggarty, at Number Seven lock, reports a machine from Farnworth, With fifty-seven women and children. They want to enter the Dome," he reported. "Shall we give them permission to bring their men along, too? They want to know."

	Bankill shivered, and put his face in his hands.

	"Good God, I would have to be president right now. Is that all they said?"

	There are fifteen more women coming. In the next machine. They say seven of the older women wouldn't leave Farnworth."

	"What'll we do, Norden?"

	"Passamock is the next largest dome. Big domes are more efficient. You'd better send out orders to all small; domes to ship everybody and all food and power stacks to Passamock or here."

	"Why the big domes? They take a lot of power to heat, too."

	"Big domes have less radiating area for cubic content," replied Norden. "The thermalite domes' material is practically opaque to heat transmission, practically a non-conductor of heat, though transparent to light. But it still radiates. That's my advice, based on radiation physics."

	"Let them in, Martell, and tell them to send for their men. Thank you, Dr. Norden."

-

	PRESIDENT BANKILL clenched his fists.

	"Horensen, what in God's name has happened to those ships?" he cried,

	"I told you, Mr. President, I don't know. We don't ever know in space. The sun-static doesn't let us. Traveling sixty miles a second two weeks apart, we can't communicate very well. Then, it's the sun-spots. Maybe the ships hit an asteroid. Maybe they got wrecked only a few days out from Earth. Maybe it happened two years ago. Maybe a few weeks ago."

	"I rather think it must have been nearly a year ago, or even more," said Norden. "There isn't much after you get past Jupiter. At that time Jupiter was well around in his orbit, too, as he is now. Saturn—Uranus— Neptune, They are nothing—so very far apart. All Majors, too. It happened near the Minors, I think."

	"Then the shadow of Death has been hanging over us for more than a year," said Bankill. "What is the shadow, Norden?"

	"I don't know, Mr. Bankill. I will guess. I think it is conscious, intelligent, whatever it is. Pirates, even. Though I can't conceive of pirates so utterly inhuman as to condemn a planet to death in this way. They would certainly let some ships through."

	"Pirates. Why? What would they pirate beyond a quantity of energy having value only here, because of our location?"

	"Pirates attacking the rich Earth-Mars-lines, perhaps," offered Norden. "They would require energy to operate; which energy, they, as outlaws, could not get on any planet. Parts, machines, all those things."

	"Not all that," objected Bankill. 

	."It is a guess. But I think it intelligent because otherwise one of those ships would
have got through."

	"Perhaps the next has. We can only wait and see. And we must try to find energy, where energy is not. How much chemical energy have we?"

	"About the equivalent of one accumulator bank," answered Norden. "One-tenth of
that is stored in the rocket ship Horensen has put at our disposal. It will all be available energy, however, because it is nearly all in the caesium metal stock. Some in rubidium, though that is practically the same, and rather unimportant. Some energy is in the concentrate of plutium. That's the same as caesium, except that it's slightly more active, slightly heavier, slightly radioactive. We can use it, though, in Passamock Dome. The heat released in getting electric energy will be used also."

	"The Dark-God of this planet must object to our robbing him of his treasures," sighed Bankill. "We are helpless."

	"Probably," agreed Norden, "but not certainly. We can still try. Men who braved the hardships of this utterly desolate world for the scanty return the rare metals yield will at least make helpful, courageous workers, if a way shows itself."

	"Way! Sirius is nearly as hot as the sun is here."

	"We can still try," replied Norden. "I think I will return to my lab now. I am available any time I am needed. Horensen, can I put you up?"

	"Swell. That would be fine." Horensen rose to his feet, a towering giant. "Maybe I am more of a nuisance than a help here. I use a lot of air." He grinned.

-

	DEAN NORDEN walked along the street silently. Horensen had returned to his ship from the Government House; he missed the Norseman now. The street was silent; silent people walked along it, thinking deeply, nodding slowly to friends. The little, thin, metal-walled houses were silent, the laughter and voices of normal times were missing.

	The usual deep throb and roar of the metal plants were gone, too; The works were shut down. They took energy. For the first time Norden heard the thin whine of the ineffably cold wind about the dome, keening mournfully the dirge of a dead planet. He looked, up. He was near the edge of the dome here. The up-flung crystal wall sparkled faintly in the heat-lights of the buildings, and a thousand shining droplets trickled down it.

	It was raining outside, raining liquid nitrogen. Beyond; the Wind-whipped wisps that were Pluto's rain clouds scarcely dimmed the stars that twinkled and danced in the wildly whipped air. This was a violent storm. But it wouldn't work a one-horsepower wind-generator. The atmosphere was too light.

	He turned down the street, then left and went to his own home, set hard against the thermalite dome, with a private, experimental lock in its rear wall. In his laboratory he paused to look about him. There were a thousand pieces of apparatus he didn't dare use, now. Field generators that took a thousand horsepower hours. Current density apparatus, that took even more.

	He'd been working on nuclear bombardment, hoping to get a bombardment process more than one hundred percent efficient. He needed it now—and the best he'd ever done was one ten-thousandth of, one percent efficiency. There was the tantalizing knowledge that the infinitesimal fragment of his bombardment; that was striking true, was yielding something like ten million percent efficiency.

	Atomic power. He could release it all right—when he could ring the bell with his shots. But only one in several thousand billion was doing that. And it was hopeless to try that now.

	Transmutation would be more to the point. Transmutation of anything—gold, for instance, to oxygen. For, with a supply of oxygen, the free hydrogen of this atmosphere would yield them power. 

	Norden walked outside and studied the dim, white expanses, cleft gashes in the dead white flesh of the planet under eternal, winking stars, and a now-rising sun, tiny, lightless, heatless. The eternal mystery of space looked out of that blank, cold sky, mocking him with the mystery of missing ships, a broken chain of supplies that should have reached Pluto. The broken chain, that stretched, at intervals, across the more than three billion miles to the Minor planets, where warmth and heat were natural, not cold and desolation.

	Once each two weeks, for fifteen years, the ships had come, before that once a month, bearing their thousands of tons of supplies across the infinite void. Now—the chain was broken. The power-line that led to Earth—and life. There was no escape, no help, save what they could wrest from the dead world. Power. Power that synthesized their foods, power that warmed them, power that wrested oxygen from the frozen glaciers of ice that separated the rare elements that paid for that power. Without it there was no food, no water, no air, no heat and—no life ...

-

CHAPTER II – The Man Who Couldn't Sleep

	SOME one hundred and four weeks before, No. 376, the Tarragoon City, took off from Earth in a wash of flame, roared out to the Moon in a leisurely way, restocked a bit, and swept on out into space. Her trip had begun. She reacted slowly, her great bellyful of fuel-mass and gigantic accumulator stacks charged. Her power accumulators were feeding intense energy to her rocket chambers that exploded the water to gas instantaneously, and rocketed her ahead.

	Chief Pilot Graham Barren looked sourly out of the port, while Chief Assistant Tom Dugan prepared to turn over to him.

	"She's all set, Gray—don't go to sleep on watch," Dugan said solicitously.

	Graham Barren looked at him with increased acidity.

	"I hope to hell I do. I'd just love to wrap that grinning mug of yours around an asteroid. I'd love that even more than going to sleep."

	Dugan laughed.

	"Well, I won't really worry. You're a handy sort of freak, and I wouldn't mind so much myself being that way. Why, just think of your 'meteoric rise' in the Service. Without your 'rare and interesting' affliction, you wouldn't be half the man you are. Why, I wouldn't know you; if I saw you asleep."

	Gray Barren looked at his chief assistant dourly.

	"I wish you'd get it, too. Or bugs in your bunk. You at least get a rest and a chance to forget where you are."

	"H-m-m—maybe so; But think of all the work such a man as you accomplishes in a lifetime. Why, while I waste a third of my young and useful life, you work on endlessly, always alert—always vigorous."

	Gray snorted.

	Dugan laughed as he swung/himself deftly toward his bunk. The ship was still accelerating toward the sixty-mile-a-second speed she would maintain on her two-year trip to Pluto. Gray Barren settled himself in his bucket seat more comfortably, with wide-open eyes straight ahead. They were still in the Earth's gravity, still in danger from meteors deflected toward Earth by its far-flung attraction. They had to round the sun, a slight and unimportant increase in the three billion mile trip to Pluto, and presently the sun's pull exceeded Earth's.

	The speed mounted swiftly as the ship fell toward the primary. The rockets roared steadily, softly, droning a message that was a snoring lullaby to the cook, the mechanic, the engineer, and the chief assistant, after eighteen hours of steady duty. To Barren, it was simply another sound. He had been on steady duty for thirty-two years. In all his life, Gray Barren had never slept. At three he had been a curiosity of the medical world. At four, when they had learned how to make selective stains for X-ray work, they found the secret. A very minor portion of his brain was missing. The sleep center. He never had slept. He never would sleep.

	Naturally, he had drifted into the transport business, taking two men's jobs that he might find occupation always. Naturally he had been shifted to space-duty, where constant alertness is the price of safety.

	To Barren there was no tiredness, no sleepiness. He made a wonderful space pilot. He rested, when he felt he could spare the time, but he never slept. He could not, and the dreary two-year run to Pluto, the dreary two-year run back, were an eternity of wakeful emptiness to him.

-

	THE seventh day they passed the sun, at some one-hundred and forty miles a second, with all screens up, rocketing by in a parabolic orbit that swept them out toward Pluto. Gradually they slowed under the sun's drag as day after day drifted into weeks and then months. Mars they passed coming slowly around in its orbit, Jupiter one-third of the way around the sun was ahead, and "below" in the plane of the ecliptic. They had swerved up and out of the plane to pass the asteroid belt at a safe distance.

	The Minor Planets were behind now, the asteroids below, and far ahead, the domain of the Majors, the space of mighty distances. The Minor Planets, huddling near the sun, gave way to the majestic Majors spread at enormous distances. Half a billion miles to Jupiter, it was. Their trip would be one-fifth completed, for their speed was higher here, before the drag of the sun slowed them to their base speed.

	Dugan was on duty, Gray Barren sitting beside him, talking and watching with him as they swung far and high toward the orbit of Jupiter. This orbit was as unsafe as the asteroids, for chasing Jupiter round and round eternally, in the same orbit, came the Trojan Planets centering at sixty and one hundred and twenty decrees, from, Jupiter in the orbit, spread out in diminishing numbers all about. The sixty degree Trojans were near now, tiny worlds following in imitation of the giant, in his very footsteps, three years behind him.

	''Funny little worlds. Are any of the other planets tailed that way?" asked Dugan speculatively.

	"Probably riot. Jupiter grabbed those himself from the asteroids, and no other planet could have done it."

	"Hm-m—grabbed 'em how? I wouldn't say he had 'em."

	"You know the why of the breaks in Saturn's Ring System?" asked Barren.

	"You mean why it's striped, instead of a single band? Periodic tidal influence of Saturn's major moons, isn't it?"

	"Yes. The asteroids are the sun's Rings, Jupiter his major moon. The asteroids occur in three main belts, and several minor ones. An asteroid that revolved in exactly one-third the time Jupiter did would get three kicks a year from Jupiter's pull. In exactly half the time, two kicks, two-thirds the time; two kicks every three years. That makes bands where no orbit is stable, and so there aren't any planetoids.

	"These Trojan planets were once in unstable orbits perhaps seven-eighths, and finally got kicked hard enough so that they were forced into an orbit that was stable—here in Jupiter's own, where he has no influence on them. The Major Planets helped, of course, to make it stable, here by their influence on them, and Jupiter still ruled them a bit, so they fell into the sixty and one hundred and twenty positions."

	Dugan scratched his head.

	"Couldn't Saturn collect some that way, too?"

	"Jupiter would grab them and pull them back on the way out. If they went beyond Jupiter, Jupiter's pull would tend to pull them back. Inside, his tidal action pulls them out."

	"Hm-m. Too bad Earth hasn't some. They'd make handy starting stations for Pluto—wouldn't have to—duck—down—"

	Dugan sounded like a phonograph running down. Gray Barren started up instantly, staring at him. Dugan, wide awake, new on his shift, had fallen asleep in the space between three words!

	"Mac!" roared Barren. Simultaneously, as he called for his engineer, he pulled Dugan out of the seat, and slid into his place. "Mac—come here, Dugan's passed out!"

	And then Barren listened. There was not a sound in the ship. It seemed a ship of the dead, until suddenly a soft ripping sound from behind made his face tense even more. That was the utterly unique "cloth-saw" snore of MacMurdy, the engineer! And Mac had just come on shift, too!

-

	BARREN reached over to Dugan suddenly, pulling him easily across the floor of the nearly weightless ship. He shook him until his head seemed about to snap off his neck. He slapped him vigorously, then listened tensely for his heartbeat. His heart was beating strongly, with the deep, regular, easy beat of a sleeping man.

	Gray Barren looked at the man sourly.

	"Methinks something's all-fired wrong," he muttered. He looked out of the great thermalite port, and swung the ship on its gyros through a complete circle, so it was traveling backward, and he could see what had been behind him.

	There was nothing whatsoever to be seen outside. Gray sniffed deeply, testing the air with his nostrils. There was no unfamiliar odor.

	And then he noticed the radio-frequency ozonizer. It was shooting a soundless discharge four feet long into the room, washing its insulated pedestal with an eerie, blue light that was quite unfamiliar.

	Barren reached for a tumbler instantly—and even more rapidly snapped his arm back as a snapping discharge ran up his arm, almost paralyzing it.

	"And that proves my contention," he said aloud. "It isn't in the ship, by Pluto!" Again he swung the ship about its gyros, avoiding the ozonizer tumbler. The flame discharge died momentarily as the ship swung, to increase again as it pointed head on once more. Barren swung the ship back, very slowly, until the flame reached a minimum. He noted the gyro settings, and swung the ship the other way. One hundred arid eighty degrees away, the flame reached another, equal minimum. At ninety degrees it reached a maximum. Barren set it on the maximum, and looked dead ahead. Only blank space showed, and the unwinking stars of space, and, the tiny Trojan Planets.

	Then he saw it! A moving dot of light down there! Another ship in space! And at the same moment, weight, a faint acceleration not produced by rockets, came.

	As quick as thought, Barren's hand darted to the rocket control. The ship leaped straight forward with a roar of the emergency rocket drive. Ten Earth gravities slapped Barren flat in his seat; consciousness nearly gone. Abruptly, the acceleration of the ship dropped, yet the rockets thundered on, loud and harsh!

	Again his hand streaked out, as it was released of the crushing weight by the interfering force. His face went white and tense, and behind the set lines of his lips, his mind was working at lightning speed.

	"Jupiter it is, by the Gods of space! Jupiter, with two and a half Earth gravities as normal. Speed is nothing, nor acceleration!" His hands moved again, with a slower, surer motion. The ship pitched and tossed, rocked to the drive arid counter-drive of emergency flaming rockets. He was shaken in his seat, back and forth, while the strange counter-force again and again partially neutralized his accelerations. 

	Still he persisted, working with a grim, slow determination. His mind calculated constantly, thinking with untiring, swift precision, while the carefully used acceleration thrust the ship first one way, and then another. Each blast sent him slightly ahead; slowly his speed was stepping up.

	It was hard work. Only a freak could have done it.

-

CHAPTER III – The Sleep Ray

	DUGAN woke to a ship that was quiet. Every trace of rocket rumble was gone. He was lying on a temporary bunk in the control room, held down by the rubber restraining sheet that made it possible to lie in a bunk in a weightless ship. Immediately he became aware of two things. Barren was standing over him with a hypodermic needle in one hand, a small tube in the other.

	Dugan was very sorry he had awakened. He ached from head to foot, as though from a terrible beating. His left arm, he realized, was very; very painful, and seemed peculiarly stiff. He groaned, and looked at it. It was neatly splinted and bandaged.

	"Who got mad at me?" he asked, looking out through his left eye at Barren. He realized it wasn't a very good eye, but the right was worse, and sorer.

	"I don't know exactly," replied Barren. "I couldn't catch the name, but that's all right. He didn't catch us. But I think it was either Priam or Hector. Anyway, he came from the Trojan Planets at sixty, fought like a hero, and held on like grim death. He's probably a hell of a good scout when you know him, but I don't want to, so I left."

	"Where's Mac?"

	"Not so lucky," said Barren grimly. "Trailing along behind about half a mile off. He's got company, though. Brady and John are both with him." 

	"Dead?" gasped Dugan softly. "What—" 

	"I stopped to wedge you down between the pilot seat and the wall with my feet after you had taken only a few tumbles. I couldn't leave to strap them down, and, anyway, I think Mac socked his head on the rocket-tube head on the first jump. It's rather messy back there. John was working in the galley, and a cleaver fell off on him under ten g's. It flopped around back there with assorted pans and cutlery for nearly seventy-two hours. It took me several hours to get used to that place. Brady was in the rear end of the ship, got wedged pretty quickly, evidently. So I dropped 'em all out in space."

	Dugan looked at him for a minute, and his face went white, then greenish. When he was through being sick he lay back weakly.

	"What in God's name was it?"

	"A ship from the Trojan Planets." His voice became professorial, reflective. "I've always held that a paralysis ray was impossible because if it acted on muscles it would paralyze the heart, which is another muscle just like the voluntary muscles, and if it acted on nerves, it couldn't find any distinction for the voluntary and involuntary muscles. My error. The gentleman back there had a beautiful solution. It acted on the sleep-center of the brain.

	"Unfortunately, I haven't one. I'm a permanent insomniac, and even the sleep-ray apparently offers no hope. You went out like a light in the space of three words, never knowing what hit you. I didn't either, because I wasn't affected at all. I found out, though.

	"Somebody wanted our ship. I got kind of worried toward the end, because we haven't enough fuel left now to slow for a proper landing at "Pluto. We have an excellent chance of seeing Alpha Centauri at close hand if we don't hit right. Plenty of energy, but no water to throw off."

	"You burned all the water?" gasped Dugan. "There was water enough to stop us
one and a half times."	

	"I used emergency acceleration for nearly seventy-five hours running." 

	"God, man, you're not human. No human being could stand that for seventy-five hours!"

	"That's what I figured. So did Hector. He stopped hectoring me after a while."

-

	BUT what happened—what was it?"

	"A ship from the Trojan Planets. He had a tractor beam of some sort, with a pull like a ten-inch steel hawser. And a sleep ray. He put you out, and I began acting up. Evidently he figured everybody was out cold, the way he was approaching a strange ship, so I tried running. He slapped that beam on me, and came at me so fast I couldn't believe it. Then I remembered he must have come from old Jup originally, and been used to real accelerations. Evidently he was. My ten g's didn't phase him.

	"He pulled up to about a hundred miles of me, and looked me over while I was cavorting. I decided the only hope was to make him think the mechanism had gone wrong, so I played it for all it was worth. And he played the fish at the end of the line for all it was worth. He wanted this ship. I'll bet he wanted the energy we're carrying, and about that time I wondered if it was such a strange ship.

	"Right now I wonder if there are any other ships like this between here and Pluto. Maybe Hector's been making a collection. If so, they'll all be dead out beyond there, from cold and lack of power. The last news we got from them, remember, was two years old. Hector may have been at work for three years or so, now. In which case it won't matter if we miss Pluto.

	"Anyway, I kept trying to shake loose for seventy hours or so, and Hector must have been getting tired by that time. He, too, must have figured no man could stand it that long; it must be crazy machinery. And then came a little blessing. A nice meteor, making about forty miles a second toward a rendezvous with the sun, and going about one hundred miles per with respect to us. I spotted it on the detectors, and started some tricky angling. We're shy the last ten feet of the ship, by the way.

	"That seemed to convince Hector, and I turned a bit of power loose in the leads back there. We've got an awful lot of power on board and I thought it was a good cause. Evidently some of the leads were shorted, as I had hoped. Anyway, the whole rear end started shining. I turned on the rockets for straight acceleration at two gravities and made it wobble. Hector let me go. Most remarkably persistent cuss, though.

	"I had to rest for several hours after that before I set about cleaning up. Your arm ought to be about healed. You've been out a heck of a time. I thought it might be a good idea to start you going again. Those bruises you collected are almost healed now. You should have seen yourself about ten days ago.

	Great God, man. Attacked in space—is there some pirate race in this System? One we've never suspected?

	 "I know it. Hector didn't seem the friendly kind. Maybe he didn't want to be suspected, and we never did poke into Jupiter far, you know. Whatever Hector's made of, it's tough stuff, to live on that place.

	"All our fuel's gone. There's no way to warn Earth. Pluto is probably dead. And—two weeks behind us those other fellows are following blindly into that trap!"

-

	BARREN looked at his companion with a hard eye.

	"You think that I haven't thought of that? Haven't been thinking of it for days, while you slept, thinking of it twenty-four hours every day? There isn't one blessed thing we can do. Radio doesn't work here where there's no Heaviside Layer to protect it from the sun's radiations. Searchlights can't carry the distance from here to the next ship. We can't turn back, for two reasons.  "They may, however, have started that collection only recently, and the devils out there on Pluto may be dying for lack of power, the billions of kilowatt hours we carry. I figured that, with no machinery running, they could heat three domes for nearly a year on the power we carry, and feed their people and heat the place for three months—if we had all our power. As it is, we carry two months', life for them, if we land intact."

	"Yeah—but how can we, with nothing to discharge, nothing to repel us?"

	"We have something to discharge. Not a lot, about enough to slow us by fifteen miles a second. Sun-drag and all will leave us only about twenty miles a second, then. But I'm not going to use it that way. Pluto has some air, and it's awfully cold air. I think we may be able to use that for a brake; if we have some maneuvering power."

	"What! Brake a ship—air-brake it? From twenty miles a second?"

	"No, from thirty. We won't use that fifteen miles a second fuel. We'll need something else than braking—we need maneuverability."

	"It's impossible," said Dugan wearily, settling back.

	"But we may as well try. It'll take us nearly eighteen months now. That's a lot of time to figure."

	Dugan only stared at him.

-

CHAPTER IV – Emergency Landing

	THEY had time to figure. Gray Barren had twenty-four hours a day for eighteen months, and Dugan had eighteen a day for an equal time. First they checked the ship very thoroughly, then they calculated stresses, accelerations, a thousand things. They calculated and discussed very leisurely for six months, with lots of time and nothing to do in the end—but die. And then they rigged up some weird apparatus.

	They put a large bathtub, big enough for the two of them, squarely in front of the control board. Then they insulated the controls extraordinarily, after three months of work and thought, so that they wouldn't get any back-kick from the electric circuits, while trying to control. And they rigged up pulley-controls, so they could control while lying flat in water, the little water left.

	Then they sawed free the broken beryllium plates from the tail of the ship, where the meteor had slapped it, and spot-welded them on very securely as huge fins. They added control surfaces, which made the whole ship look like some madman's dream of an airplane, with fifty stubby wings at wrong angles. 

	The wings, they hoped, would hold the ship, the crazy, broken ship, in a cockeyed parabola around Pluto, and through Pluto's atmosphere, when it reached that planet.

	They had lots of time. And they had space suits to work in, so they worked slowly, calculating much, and they didn't know the viscosity of Pluto's upper atmosphere because nobody had ever thought to measure it, and they didn't know the aerodynamic resistance of that smashed tail, because nobody had ever expected to measure a thing as crazy as that. And, of course, they didn't have fuel enough to make any real corrections, and still land in one piece.

	Gray Barren made some wonderful and fearful extrapolations. He calculated that their crazy ark would ride the thin, cold air of Pluto at an elevation of 15 miles, and at a speed of half a mile a second, on the wings.

	Tom Dugan laughed.

	"If this rolling-pin will float in anything less dense than mercury at less speed than ten miles a second, I'll drink it."

	"You can make a parachute, and jump out, if you wish," suggested Barren.

	"In that air? Parachute descent on Earth—sixteen feet a second. With a half-acre parachute on Pluto you drop forty a second. I'll stick to this old space-hog."

	"Hm-m-m—it's highly probable you'll stick so tight they'll scrape you up with putty knives," agreed Barren. "We can but try, though. I'd rather go out in a nice blaze of glory than starve to death en route to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud."

	"Maybe the guy you land on, on Pluto, wouldn't," ventured Dugan. "What shall we aim for? That's one thing we haven't decided."

	Barren stared at him in mock distaste.

	"These finicky people! We'll aim for Pluto, of course. If we hit it at all, we're damned good. If we happen to hit a city, there's nothing I can do about it. But, remember, the cities don't really cover much territory on the planet."

	"They might not welcome us very heartily if we landed on Tarragoon. That's the only
power source on the planet, which same must be the dearly beloved darling of the people right now."

	"If we land this can successfully, we will be darlings, too. Go on to bed, you lazy hound. You've been rubbing your eyes in a disgusting fashion for two hours. I keep forgetting you have to sleep."

-

	BARREN and Dugan had programmed their work well. It was finished a month out from Pluto, and for a month they had nothing to do but recheck calculations and the crazy patchwork they'd slapped on the outside of the hull. Meanwhile, slowly, slowly Pluto enlarged in the void ahead.

-

	FOUR hours previous to the test, Gray Barren lay down, and rested. Dugan slept the clock around in preparation. They were approaching Pluto at thirty-one point seven miles a second. Months of work had prepared elaborate charts and tables for every conceivable speed and angle.

	When Dugan woke up Barren was already at the controls, carefully checking tiny bursts of the precious rockets, directing them more accurately at the exact angle he wanted. Pluto was a dim, white giant in utter darkness ahead. Already tiny light flecks indicated well-known places. Tarragoon shone dimly, as did Ranatook and Passamock. And, at the point of a triangle from Tarragoon and Ranatook, they saw a new spot, Dugan looked at it silently.

	"They aren't dead yet, thank God," he said at length.

	"I wonder how many ships got nabbed before us," mused Barren. "These may be the last living people down there. They would stay in Passamock and Tarragpon—the biggest cities. Ranatook and that new one I don't understand. Caesmatite City is dark, so are some of the others."

	"There are some, anyway."

	"Yeah. This is Saturday night. Get ready for your bath."

	Dugan stripped off his uniform, ending with a tight-fitting elastic undersuit. He settled himself beside Barren, who was already prepared.

	"I hope you heated that water," Dugan grunted.

	"I did," replied Barren. He turned the faucet. "Look out, here it comes."

	The ship accelerated gently under a droning rocket push, and suddenly, a four-inch pipe spouted water into the "bathtub." Both gasped simultaneously. Barren hadn't exactly heated the water, it was ice-cold. He shut off the stream, shivering.

	"Hell, if your calculations are all that bad, I'm going to walk home/' sputtered Dugan. "Turn on some heat." Dripping, he got out of the pool of icy water hurriedly and stood before the big heater, shaking. Barren was busy. Presently he turned the water on again, and yelped. Now it was a bit too warm.

	"Why didn't we put a bath thermometer in here?" growled Barren. "Come on, Tom, it's getting right now."

	Presently their flotation tank was three-quarters full, and Barren relinquished the controls to Dugan while he put on the oxygen mask he had prepared. Then he took over while Dugan did the same.

	"Our periscope thing is fairly decent, at that," commented Dugan, looking up to the mirror that reflected the scene outside the pilot window. Pluto was growing rapidly, with terrifying speed. The instruments on the control bank registered clearly in a second mirror.

	"Hm-m, But we've got work to do. Look out!" The ship lurched slightly, and the water and men rolled to one side of the tub. Dugan grunted.

	"If you hit any air pockets you're apt to find yourself swimming along the ceiling, and drowning the instrument board."

	"That would be tough," agreed Barren. "Any suggestions?" He worked busily for a moment. "We're headed right. We're going to smack that air like a solid wall, though. Take a deep breath and count—"

	They hit the air. The fringes of Pluto's faint, thin air. Instantly the ship screamed, her whole 200,000 ton mass shrieking in violent protest, and the men sank like leaden masses through the water, water that crushed suddenly on their chests.

-

	HALF conscious, Barren saw a faint glow appearing in the outer wall. The ship was almost red-hot! Then, in an instant, the acceleration was gone. The ship creaked in every giant strut as she resumed equilibrium, and the two men floated upward like corks. "The gravitometer's broken," said Barren painfully. "And that was just the first shock. The seventh is the worst!" In the mirror Dugan could see the gravitometer needle twisted around the "Stop" pin at twenty-two gravities.

	"The flotation method saved us," he said at length. "Normally, the gravity would have made us grease spots without the water. I must have weighed two and a half tons. God—what's the seventh going to be like? You said we'd get only twenty gravities that time!"

	"Huh—I said we'd be going thirty-one miles a second, too. My error. Look out, we're turning." The ship pivoted around, twisted, then the rockets droned emergency acceleration as the ship swung back in a vast circle, to dive through the atmosphere again. The rockets were not being used to stop the ship, only to deflect her, and Pluto was helping, had helped already.

	But it was a day later when they dived into the planet's air again, to be loaded now with nearly three tons of weight, while the ship's weight became nearly six million tons. Only the hundreds of small fins, distributed over all the ship, and the utterly frigid air, thin as the average man-made "perfect vacuum," made it possible.

	But the speed dropped under that harsh treatment. It dropped so they turned back in three-quarters of a day this time, and a third of a day the third time. And each time they underwent the terrific stress of those loads, each one greater than the last. But they were learning, becoming accustomed to impossible accelerations.

	And—the ship was shedding fins like a bird under a cat's claws. It was shedding fins, and plates, and even great, structural members, members that shrieked like meteors through Pluto's thin air, alarming and warning the millions on the planet,

-

	ON PLUTO, five million eyes were watching that mad ship, watching with hearts in throats. Something was wrong, horribly, horribly wrong. But whatever this mad messenger might mean, it had meaning, it had information. As each shattered fin screamed to the planet, the people groaned. Each time as it shot, unchecked, out into space again, they groaned. Each time it returned, mad rockets flaming, they groaned.

	And in it Barren and Dugan groaned under the load. At last the fatal seventh trip came—and passed. Behind them, a third of the fins lay broken, wrested free. But Barren sighed in relief.

	"She's under what you might call control, now, if the rest of the fins stick on. I'd like to plaster on a few more, but I can't now. We'll hit again in half an hour, I guess, and I have to hold her in this time, if I'm going to land without wrecking it. I've just about enough rockets. I'd like to make Desolation Plain."

	"You've eight miles a second to handle; orbital speed is five," said Dugan.

	"Yeah—but at this speed, even with the fins I have left, I have a hell of a lot of lift to hold me down and brake with. Most of the fins that tore off seemed to have been brake-fins rather than lift-fins. They got more strain. Here, take this pump lead, and when I say 'dump,' you pull that. That'll let the water out. If you don't, we'll have that control board swimming, and be minus control altogether."

	"This bathtub would be inconvenient in the switchboard," nodded Dugan. "I never did like taking baths, but this has been the queerest bath I ever took. I'll be glad to get out of it."

	Air shrieked outside. The ship heeled again, the great members groaning under terrific loads. Abruptly the rending cry of torn metal echoed, the pop of exploding rivets and broken welds, the long-drawn howl of stretching members. That didn't bother them any more. They were used, to that. They labored in the water, their breathing a' terrible torture. Barren's face was white and set with intense concentration and pain.'

	"Damn—lift—fin, I'm—afraid we're—slipping," he labored. An unusually loud shriek of parting metal was followed by an abrupt smack and thud throughout' the ship, then a sudden increase in weight. Barren moved instantly, laboriously. The weight decreased, and a tortured smile appeared. "Main—member thirty—seven. Five of the brake—fins. Lots—of—lift."

	The ship howled and shuddered, and the thin, cold air shrieked in torment for half an hour. But the ship was completely under control. Twelve 'times they circled the planet, biting deeper and deeper into the air, before Barren called, "Dump," and the water sucked out of the flotation tank.

	The ship was slowing far more swiftly now. Gray Barren was looking at his charts and tables, calculating swiftly, mentally.

	"We're just about going to make Desolation Plain. Near Tarragoon. Be there in a minute."

	DUGAN made no answer. Barren looked at him and grinned. "The lazy dog—he's gone to sleep!"

	Dugan woke, heavy-eyed, his mouth thick, and tasting like the inside of an old shoe, wakened by the silence. 

	Barren was rising, stretching, rubbing, incredibly stiff muscles. He looked down at Dugan. "Hello. You are a help. We're here!"

	"You landed this impossible can?"

	"Well, it isn't falling any more, and it seems to be standing still. I took a look back-side. The skin's gone halfway, which must have been a big help; it certainly increased air resistance. Landing wasn't bad. I even have three-quarters of a ton of water left."

	Dugan snorted. "Three-quarters of a ton! One gravity for seven hundred seconds!"

	"There's a procession of some kind coming out from Tarragoon. They're comin' hell for leather, too,  I used the telescope, and it looked like old Horensen was riding in the first one with Doc Norden."

	"Old Horensen! The old boy would get through. I wonder if Hector tangled with him at all?"

	"Don't know. But I hope they get here soon. The air tanks went out with that thirty-seven member, and we haven't any air left. I guess they will, though."

-

CHAPTER V – Norden's Experiments

	BARREN looked into Pilot-Commander Horensen's eyes and smiled.

	"And," he finished, "it wasn't much of a trick to land after that. But do you mind my saying that I think the driver of this snow-car is either a homicidal maniac or has no respect for his neck? I worked awfully hard for mine, and I wish he'd either stay at least six inches from the edge of that canyon, or drive slower than seventy miles an hour."

	Horensen chuckled deep in his throat.

	"Don't tell me you're nervous. I saw you land your ship. You were scattering mainframe members all over Pluto, I didn't think there would be so much left."

	"The main question, still unsettled," broke in Norden, "is the amount of energy you have left."

	"Main accumulator banks one through twenty-seven are untouched," Barren answered. "We drained twenty-nine, and thirty, and twenty-eight is about three quarters gone. In other words, about ninety percent delivery left. The same applies to the machinery we were delivering, That was pretty well tied down, and only a few things seem to have broken loose. We have some junk for you; I think."

	Norden shrugged his head. "I wonder what it would be. Oh—I know. And, by Pluto, I can use it, if it's what I think. Hard to remember—I ordered it four years and more ago."

	"I hope it's what you want, then. Because I rather think you won't be getting any more shipments for another four years or so—if at all. What I hate to think of," complained Barren, "is that flock of good guys I know who are plowing blindly into that damned trap one after another, I have an uncomfortable feeling Hector's pals won't know the difference between the larder and the passengers any better than they know the difference between 'meum' and 'teum'."

	Horensen growled deep in his throat and looked away. "Barney O'Malley was following you," he stated gutturally. "He isn't any more," replied Barren concisely. "We were better than twenty miles, under speed for the last two months. He' would have passed us."

	"I think I must learn, how to be without sleep," said Horensen. "You've got to now to survive in space."

	"If," said Norden practically, "we started a ship back now, it would get there in two years. In three years enough of a fleet could be started to do a little investigating. In four years a supply fleet could have been started out toward us, perhaps. That makes six years before effective help could reach us. We aren't a bit better off—because, our supplies can't last even one-twelfth that time. I don't think you saved your neck to much purpose, Gray."

	"Well, maybe not, but anyway I'll have someone to bury me here. I hate floating in space. Mac and Brady and John followed us in sight for six weeks, and I don't like floating like that forever."

	The whine of the air prop and the soft scrunch of the snow under the ski-caterpillar treads were the only sounds for long minutes. Tarragoon Falls was a bare cliff, now. There were no Falls to the left of the winding trail; all the power was being used.

	"We haven't made any progress," sighed Norden, Slowly grim determination came into his face. "Gray, where did you study?"

	Gray Barren looked at him speculatively.

	"I majored in physics at Cal Tech. But I'm a rotten mathematician, I got hooked into Transport and shifted to interplanetary because I didn't sleep. I've kept up on the Journal pretty steadily, except those four-year blanks I hit taking these trips, but you can do a lot of studying when you're alone on watch in space, and never sleep."  

	"I thought you took physics," said Norden quietly. "There isn't a ghost of a show for us Devil's, here, and I guess you're a Devil perforce for the 'duration of the emergency' as they used to say, in any known thing. Do you reason the way I do?"

	"I did an awful lot of reasoning in eighteen months, Dean. I started thinking about this about sixteen months, before you did, and while I had a few other things to worry about, I sort of reached some conclusions, too. I don't want to be discouraging, exactly, but old Pluto can support about one—no, three thousand people, how. And there were two and a third millions here, the last I knew;"

	"And a half, now," said Norden, "Life follows its usual course, even here, displays its characteristic of' multiplication."

	"Well, there's nothing known that'll help you. That leaves a lot, though. 

	Dean Norden answered sourly.

	"Yes. The strange things we don't know about. They're lots bigger than the known, but harder to use, I fear."

	"Oh, well," grinned Barren; "necessity always was fruitful,'"

-

	GRAY BARREN'S and Tom Dugan's luggage had already been transported to Norden's house when they returned from the Government House. Norden looked tired and drawn. Dugan immediately went to bed. Gray looked at Norden quizzically.

	"Ah, there, lazy-bones. Run along to bed. I want to rest a bit myself. I suppose you sat up and watched us cavorting overhead."

	Norden smiled.

	"All Pluto did for the last four days. They knew you were probably bringing power—and news. The people silently hoped the power chain had reknit."

	"Go on and sleep," ordered Barren. "I'm appropriating this couch here."

	Norden followed Dugan into retirement while Barren made himself comfortable on the couch. Half an hour later the musical moans and snorts from Norden's room amused and disturbed him, and he raised his lank form from the couch and started rummaging slowly through the house. Presently he found Norden's library, and ran through, it rapidly. The newest books were two years old; he had newer ones on the ship, and he'd read all these. There were no new reports.

	He walked slowly about, out into the laboratory, snooping, looking, trying. Presently he found Norden's note-cabinet, and started in on it. The sounds from outside disturbed him, the unfamiliar sounds of life after two years of eternal silence. The people were noisy tonight, noisier than they had been for weeks, noisy over the landing of the ship from Earth.

	Barren turned back to the file cabinet, skip-reading through pages and pages of
notes, analyses; test runs. He grunted softly.	

	"This bird Norden man must work day and night to turn out all that stuff. He must have analyzed for every prospector on the planet. The census takers could save a lot of work just using this file. But he doesn't seem to have done—ah, there it is! Good Lord, how did that man get time for all this?"

	Barren had found Norden's private, experimental file. It consisted of two drawers full of carefully typed sheets of experimental data, largely characterized by an ending, "N.G., damn." Gray smiled. He took out both drawers and went back, seating himself comfortably on the couch. Presently he whistled, rose, and returned with two more drawers filled with pages of calculations.

	Barren's respect for Norden grew by leaps and bounds, as he vainly tried to follow the analyses and derivations the man had run off. He got along, fairly well with integrals and differentials, recognized matrix processes, and tensors well enough to follow, though he'd never been able to lead, but he finally ran up against something that stranded him hopelessly. It was a seventeen-page solution of an equation of the order of x9. He looked at the solution, and tested the values by substitution with interest. It rather surprised him to see that they fitted. 

	Then Barren tried again to follow the calculations. Half an hour later he gave up in despair.

	"For the life of me, I can't figure out what he's doing," he muttered, "or what he's doing it to?"

-

	A CHUCKLE startled him. Norden was up again, looking at the sheets Barren had just laid down.

	"Solution of that noventic in Group Theory? You're not alone in that. I didn't know what I was doing or what I was doing it to, either."

	"Well, it's all beyond me," sighed Barren. "What sort of stuff do you eat for breakfast here?"

	Norden's face became grimmer. "We eat as little as we can live on, and we don't cook it. That takes power unnecessarily. Mostly synthite foods, anyway." Barren laughed good-naturedly. "That's no change for me. I've been at it for two years. But I still find it a useful habit. Let's go."

	"I think I'll try that, too," came Dugan's heavy voice. "Have a nice nap, Gray?" he asked chuckling.

	"No, wise guy, while you lazed away the hours, I, with my eternal, springing energy, tried to follow this man's math. He has a trick he calls mathematics. He does something he doesn't know what to something he doesn't know what, mathematically. The only trouble is, he gets the right answer. I still don't believe him, but he's got the answer to an equation he certainly couldn't get any other way." Dugan grinned.

	"Well, my stomach is shouting an equation to me—and I'd like to solve it!" he said. "Let's eat!"

	The food was simple enough, artificially flavored solids, artificially compacted; jellylike proteins held in a mesh-work of woven threads of digestible carbohydrates. Their artificiality was blatant, but they filled lean stomachs, and supplied vital energy in almost totally digestible form. For drinking they had a slightly stimulating, clear-colored liquid, flavored with citric acid, synthetic orange oil and sweetened with glucose.

-

CHAPTER VI – Power for Pluto

	BARREN seemed thoughtful as he ate. 

	Finally he spoke.

	"I raided your files, Dean, and—by the way, I don't' see how you got time to do all that analysis work and experiments, too."

	Norden laughed.

	"I fool 'em. Did you notice that battery of spectroscopes? Most of the analysts here go after the stuff chemically. I put a hunk in an arc, and get a complete analysis record in an hour."

	"You can't read a spectrogram that fast."

	"No—which is why the others don't use that method. I have one of those spectro-analyzers."

	Barren whistled.

	"I didn't know you had that much wealth, Norden. You're a bloated plutocrat, as they used to say. Those things cost about twenty thousand dollars, don't they?" Norden nodded.

	"I sank every penny I could gather in that machine," he answered. "Bought it back on Earth before I came out. It has paid me well, because the men like my quick analyses. For a while they questioned my accuracy, but I offered the sum of one thousand dollars to any one that found my analyses wrong."

	"I thought you had put all you had in that gadget," Barren said, puzzled. "How would you have paid up?"

	Norden smiled.

	"I never make mistakes. They never found out I was broke."

	Gray Barren smiled in admiration.

	"To get back to your notes," he said, "I see you have been playing around with atomic structure, and evidently, from some of your matrix mechanics there, thinking of atomic energy."

	"Yes—condensation of hydrogen to heavier elements. Helium particularly. This world has more hydrogen than needed to balance the oxygen, and no energy. Atomic energy is our only chance." Barren nodded. "Yes. That would be very convenient. Solve all our problems. But the most practical stunt would be to use the energy already freed by the sun. We'd have to perfect a solar energy collector."

	Norden snorted.

	"Where are you going to do that—on Mercury? It is a bit dilute out this way, you know. I don't really see how you could."

	"I've been playing with that problem for the last eighteen months," continued Barren. "Do you know how much energy is available here? It's dilute, all right. But—Pluto has a good bit of collecting surface."

	Heat-energy you mean? I never stopped to calculate the exact power Pluto does absorb from the sun, because that energy is at such a low level of availability. It's only about seventy degrees above absolute zero."

	"Not very hot. But there's more heat in a ton of liquid air than in an ounce of liquid steel. And there's an awful lot of tonnage here."

-

	NORDEN shrugged. "You've got a sort of worm's-eye view of heat, though," he said. "You would have to crawl down awfully low to have that heat fall down on you very effectively. To get the energy loose, you'd have to work from an even lower temperature, and, God knows, this place has low temperatures to start with."

	"There's still about one hundred and, fifty billion horsepower available, though," Barren persisted.

	"That's not a heck of a lot, even so. But do you really think heat energy is the best bet? That's actually the energy received from the sun constantly. But how much sun power does this planet receive?"

	"Astronomically speaking, it's a drop in the bucket, but astronomical drops in astronomical buckets are so terrifically big," Barren pointed out.

	Norden shrugged his head negatively.

	"I'm afraid it's even more hopeless than atomic energy. At least the sun does use atomic energy, but nothing can use an energy of such low availability as this one we have."

	"My good man, your reasoning is cock-eyed," Barren snapped. "What's this city now?" he asked.

	"Tarragoon Falls. You're rights Pluto! That is an indirect means of making heat energy available. The vapor is lifted and carried by heat, isn't it?"

	"Yes, I thought so. But we need something better than that. Look here, when you put an atom in a powerful magnetic field, the electrons rotating about the nucleus act like current-conveying wires in a coil. They're susceptible to action by a magnetic field. If they are lined up right, you can make the electrons move put by the impressed magnetic field, or, if they are going the other way, they move in. Right?'

	"So they told me in school," replied Norden.

	"Well, you're lifting the electrons out in their orbits. That takes energy—heat energy, for instance. Now, if you could make them do that violently enough you might get a real heat absorber. Then, when the magnetic field was released, they'd collapse to normal, and release the energy they absorbed—but at a higher potential!"

	Norden laughed.

	"I give up," he said. "Let's go play with your idea."

-

	HORENSEN walked into the laboratory slowly, a few weeks later. "I just came from Government House. That makes three ships that haven't come after yours, Gray," he reported.

	Barren looked up from his work with a savage face.

	"I know it," he said grimly, his eyes blazing. "And Earth is probably sending those fellows out there—rout to that death trap. Three months of it now. For three months Hector's pals have been sniping off those ships like one-two-three, with never a chance for them to fight backhand never a chance for us out here to live."

	"Have you learned anything? Any chance of discovering some new type of energy?" Horensen said hopefully.

	"Yes. We've learned seven hundred and ninety-three new, blind alleys in mathematics. We've learned seven hundred arid ninety-four new, useless experiments in physics. We're even about ready to try some of Norden's craziest mathematical madness. And we've used power enough to feed ten men doing it. That is the worst." Horensen shook his big head slowly. "Don't get mad, Gray. That won't do any good. That power isn't wasted. It all comes out as heat, anyway, doesn't it?"

	Barren pushed back his hair with one hand, and his taut face relaxed.

	"Attaboy, squarehead, I wish I could sleep once in a while, just so I could forget it. Remember that I have been working at this for nine weeks, steadily, never a minute off for my mind. Norden's done all the math, of course, the real things. I'm just the help, but he does get sleep. And I haven't your f calmness. You Norsemen must pick it up out of the ice you are born ort"

	Horensen's race broke into a slow smile.

	"I hope you win out, Gray," he, said, as he left the room.

	Barren waved good-by, turned, back to his work. He was trying to get spectrograms of hydrogen atoms in peculiar magnetic fields, and the usual multiple difficulties beset him, Half an hour's trying convinced him, and he decided to try a stroboscopy effect. Two hour's work got a slotted disc on a motor arranged in front of his spectroscope slit. Two seconds' operation heaved the slotted disc in fragments all over the room. The slots weakened it so it wouldn't hold together at the speeds he needed.

	Then he tried putting an interrupter in a gas discharge, so that the gas discharge itself was stroboscopic. It took two hours to get a plate, develop it, and run an analysis on it. The analyzer, instead of giving him, as it should, a series of spectrum-line numbers with a wavy line representing line intensity, turned out a motion picture film of a counter in action, with a gray haze overcasting the scene. The discharge in the tube built up so slowly that the magnetic field simply shifted it progressively across the field, changing its character slowly arid uniformly.

-

	WHEN Norden returned, Barren was patiently trying the analyzer on a final result. He'd got a clean plate finally. By scurrying ail over Tarragoon, he'd found a polarimeter in the synthite food mills, borrowed it, and by rotating the polarizer head on a motor, had gotten a fairly decent stroboscope—and lost half the data he wanted because the light was polarized. That was half the problem, anyway.

	Norden looked at the results silently for a moment.

	'Interesting, but unimportant I fear," he announced.

	"You're right, Dean," agreed Barren. "But it took me three days to find that out, though. Well, I'll know how to do it next time, anyway. What do we do next?"

	"I think I'll just go completely nuts," replied Norden, "and set up that apparatus for trying the hydrogen atom expansion." 

	Barren looked at him. "You'll blow your fool head off if it works. Though I think you're still a pretty good risk?'

	"I'm going to work outside the Dome anyway," Norden said. "It won't do any damage out there."

	Barren laughed. "There was a fellow at Cal Tech, Smitty Andrews, working on perchlorates. Somebody in the analytical department asked him what the solubility of lead perchlorate in methyl alcohol was, and the fool decided to try it out for them. He sort of felt it might explode, so he took his mess out in the courtyard, where it could blow up in the open air.

	"He knew his chemistry. It did. It broke every window facing on that, courtyard. About a hundred and fifty of us got down there in a hurry to take the remains over to the infirmary or the morgue, as indicated.

	But Smitty was sitting on a rock, working like fury on his slide rule."

	"I take it you mean I ought to go a long way off," laughed Norden.

	"Or use your head and leave it alone," Barren said coldly. "Smitty knew pretty well the stuff would blow up, and if it was that explosive, what good would it do the analytical department to know it anyway? They couldn't use, it?'

	Norden ignored the ominous warning.

	"You'll help me set up the apparatus, won't you?" he asked blithely.

-

CHAPTER VII – Norden's Machine

	THOUGHTFULLY, Barren surveyed Norden's machine, days later. Pilot Commander Horensen, on a chair in the comer, eyed them curiously. 

	"I wish you'd give up this crazy search for a new power, Dean," Barren pleaded. "I hate picking up the scattered fragments of men. And I got all of that I wanted on the way out here," after Hector got through with us."

	"I'll bet this machine won't blow up," said Norden grimly.

	Barren laughed bent over a lathe.

	"Ha—are you telling me? You're betting your—uh—anatomy on it. I'll bet it won't, too. It probably won't do one blasted thing. You can check that math of yours all you want to," but inasmuch as you're the one who did it in the first place, and there's no one else on the planet that can follow it, that doesn't mean a thing. I've checked my own work too many times to think a man's own check means anything. That's why we have assistant navigators. 

	"Personally I, th—whoa! Hey—come and take it, Dean!"

	Barren left his machine in a hurry, running for an extinguisher and Dean' Norden dropped what he was doing and ran. The slender magnesium bar Gray Barren had been machining was burning, burning with the intense brilliant flame of magnesium metal. Horensen moved with an agility unsuspected from his seat in the corner, bringing into play a liquid carbon dioxide extinguisher. He had it playing on the thing in an instant, filling the area with the CO2.

	"Out of the way, squarehead,'' called Barren cheerfully, staggering up with a massive cylinder of argon. "It takes he-man stuff to put that out." He set the tank down, with a thunk, and opened the valve. Instantly the gas roared out, gushing in a thick, almost visible stream over the flaming magnesium torch. The lathe chuck was melting now in the incredible heat of the magnesium's oxidation, the carbon dioxide having had only the slightest damping effect on it, and producing thick clouds of smoke. Norden arrived with a bucket of water and stood waiting tensely.

	I'm getting it out, I think," Barren cried out. "This stuff is cold. Ouch." A square inch of Barren's skin stuck to the Bitterly cold nozzle of the argon tank, frozen on by the swift expansion of the gas. "Turn off that carbon tank, Horensen. It's just feeding it."

	Horensen backed away, looking on in wonder. In about twenty seconds the fire was over, and several large holes had appeared in the lathe bed, fused through. Barren maintained the stream of gas on the still-white-hot metal, as Norden splashed cold water over it. Clouds of steam shot up, hissing furiously. Pot an instant the magnesium flamed angrily again, then died down as more argon and water copied it.

	"That makes some fire," commented Horensen, moving back with the carbon tank. "Why don't you use sand?"

	"That, my lad, is nasty stuff," Barren replied sourly. "Three hours' work gone up in—well, not smoke, call it powder."

	"What happened?" asked Horensen.

	"Tungsten carbide, hot, will attack magnesium, also hot, in the presence of air and the blasted cement they use. The result is a bit of flame, and when the magnesium starts, it takes a lot of stopping."

	"Ja—that carbon dioxide didn't put it out at all."

	Norden shrugged his shoulders, went back to work as Barren set up his machine again.

-

	IT TOOK a week and a half to finish setting up a new apparatus. Barren looked at it doubtfully, and retired to the couch. Norden and Horensen went to bed. Dugan was already sleeping, as usual.

	About three hours later Barren got up and went out. Tarragoon was a silent city of the dying. People went about in silent groups, or sat, silent, on benches. Barren walked steadily to the South Lock. He returned presently with a truckman and his truck.

	By the time Norden and the others got up, the truck was loaded, and in the lock waiting for them. They ate a hurried meal, and settled themselves in the truck. For half an hour they wound down through the Tarragoon heights, then down and across the Desolation Plains. Forty miles or so out, Norden and Barren set up the delicate apparatus, while Horensen and Dugan unloaded the heavy stuff. Finally Norden ordered the truck away, with Horensen, Barren, Dugan and the truckman.

	As the truck drove away, Barren walked back from the far side, where he had remained hidden.

	"You can't handle all that junk yourself, you asteroid," he announced quietly. "Get down there and take the accumulator controls. I'll take the magnetics."

	"What did you do, get out the other side of the truck?" asked Norden in faint surprise.

	Barren nodded.

	"I know as much about this machine as you do. Get started. If there's any fireworks, I want to be in on it!"

	Norden started making final adjustments, then closed the master control with a faint hesitation. Nothing happened. He closed the subsidiary controls, and a brilliant glow of ionized neon and nitrogen appeared around it.' '

	"If that's the best you can do, I can tell you easier ways of doing it," said Barren sourly. "Do you really think this junk can produce any power?"

	"I'll have to try a bit higher values, maybe, but something ought to happen, anyway," Barren said optimistically. He advanced the controllers, and for a moment the ionization died away, abruptly into darkness. Eagerly Norden halted, reading his instruments, watching. The output instruments remained peaceably at zero, the input instruments reading very high.

	But as the controls advanced, no change was manifest, save the steady climb of the input. Ionization remained dead, until the very limit was reached. But nothing happened.

	"I'm afraid it doesn't work, Dean, Sorry," said Barren more seriously. "Any idea what it might be?"

	Slowly, thoughtfully, Norden shook his head.

	"Not the slightest. You know I checked it, Gray. Well—" he sighed, "that's another for the record. Go call the truck. I'll shut it off."

	He looked once more at the instruments as Gray Barren started foot-slogging up the slope over which the truck had disappeared for safety.

	"I guess the unknown's going to stay unknown, for all of us, Gray. We've only got about a month to work in now, before the real pinch comes. Hector's winning his fight without a struggle. That's what I hate most. That leech, cutting out our main arteries without anybody even slapping him."

	"Well, we'll go back," said Barren disappointingly.

-

	BARREN started off, tramping through the loose drift-snow, toward the little rise, beyond which the truck had been parked, safe in case of an explosion. The winking stars gave faint light, brighter perhaps than the tiny sun, two and a half billion miles distant even now, at its closest.

	His mind was working steadily over the difficulty. Norden's theory had seemed fairly sensible, so far as it went, but the mathematical process that lay between theory and analysis of factors was so vague. It made it—

	Suddenly a colossal hand slapped Barren in the back, boosted him over the ridge, and landed him spinning head over heels in the drift-pack on the other side. He rolled halfway down to the truck. There was a thunderous roar that continued for perhaps half a second, while a frightful blast of energy-light illuminated the, scene for miles. The little valley behind him was suddenly smoking, and a wind, hot for this world, was eating holes in the snow so fast he could see it melt. When he reached the ridge, the truck was whining up behind him, slowed, and let him swing on.

	The valley was now miraculously free of snow. Barren looked with half-blinded eyes into the star-lit dimness below, beyond the range of the truck's lights. The truck swept down. Abruptly their machine stood stark in its glare. The main-frame of the machine was standing at a crooked angle against a pile of accumulator cases, knocked askew and upset. The control panel where Norden had been standing was riven, completely split, apparently by some kind of discharge. And there was no sign of Norden himself.

	"Where is that man?" demanded Dugan hoarsely.

	"Strumming a harp on a golden cloud," snapped Barren. "Let's look for the rest of him. Something hit that control panel like a retrograde asteroid, and he was standing right there. He caught a, bear in his mousetrap, and it got mad when he let go, I guess. And—curse it—he was the only man on the planet who could have tamed it."

	The truck ground to a halt on bare, naked rock, freed of the over-drift of snow that had hidden them for countless ages. Horensen, Dugan and Barren were out instantly. Barren ran to the control panel at full speed, and wondered dimly as Horensen passed him on the way with a peculiar loping bound that left him standing. Abruptly he slowed as he saw Horensen look at something on the far side of the accumulator stack, and freeze abruptly motionless.

	Barren walked slowly up beside him and looked over.

	Slowly the blond giant shook his head.

	"Them Devils are tough people," said Horensen slowly.

	Dean Norden, very much alive, looked up from his seat on an accumulator case, raising his head from his hands, and a slow, broad grin spread across his face.

	"I rather envy that fellow Smitty his slide rule. You don't have one with you, Gray, do you?" he asked.

-

CHAPTER VIII – Preparing for Hector

	VERY slowly, very carefully they unloaded the wrecked apparatus at "Norden's lab. A murmuring crowd of the Devils had collected, and made room for them as they carried it in.

	"I haven't the faintest idea what happened," repeated Norden, "The junk just blew up on me after it was supposed to be shut off. A short circuit probably."

	Norden sat down inside the truck and let Barren apply antiseptic to various scratches.

	"I always said," Barren grunted, "that that math of yours multiplied both sides by something that didn't belong. From the way it looked, I thought it was zero. My mistake. Must have been infinity."

	"The Whole thing Was wrong. I still don't see where, don't know just what happened. I want to look at the apparatus."

	"I've already looked," said Horensen, coming in from the other room. "It looks like Swiss Cheese." 

	Barren laughed. 

	"Full of holes?"

	"Ja—funny holes, and all yellow." 

	"Yellow," exclaimed Norden. "That was steel!"

	"Ja. I know. It was," replied Horensen calmly, "it ain't how.''

	The two men made a concerted rush for the apparatus. Horensen had swung aside the heavy breech-block. The inside wall was yellow, yellow as cheese, and shot full of little and big holes.

	"Now hydrogen," said Barren softly, "being expanded as you suggested, should absorb a lot of energy, and then give it off when it contracts. But heat doesn't do things like that."

	"And heat doesn't send a big purples-red ball of lightning floating up the power leads to a switchboard,"  added Norden. "And heat just isn't that plentiful; out there. There were, thousands and thousands of horsepower up that kick. Most of it was released as radiant energy, and pure heat, in non-explosive forms."

	"My God," said Norden softly, "we're crazy! An expanding hydrogen atom doesn't absorb energy. It releases it! I never thought! We should have seen that. It's a contracting atom that absorbs. Wait a minute; I'll look it up."

	From his filing cabinet Norden yanked two drawers full of data and calculations. He brought four standard tables and books from the library, and settled down to the lab bench. Barren left him and moved the apparatus into the other room for study.

	Hour after hour passed sluggishly. Sometimes Norden called Barren in, gave him big concentrated lumps of pure brain-fatigue in the form of equations that needed solving, while he plowed on through the main derivations.

	But Norden felt elated. For gradually the thing was clarifying in his mind. It was a day and a half later, though, before he comprehended in some major portion the operation he had performed out there/the forces he had released.

-

	THEN Barren was hard at work again, machining, cutting. Norden himself started work on hook-ups of oscillators that seemed impossible. It was the collapse, the first hint of collapse, that started the release, he decided. The complete collapse completed the contraction, and acted to absorb a tremendous amount of energy.

	That was the safety-valve, the brake that would stop the engine. What he needed was an oscillation that would build up his fields to the required value, break a little, and build up again, making an almost steady release of power.

	A week and a half was needed to finish the new apparatus, and even then it was not truly completed.

	"That thing will eat holes in that lining, just" as it did in the steel lining," Norden explained. "I've got something \hat will stop it though, I believe. But I have to ruin one, to make another. "That's why I asked you to make them in triplicate."

	"I wondered how you were going to hold it in." 

	"Watch and learn." 

	"Are you sure it's safe m here, now?" 

	"Pretty much so," Norden replied. "I have fairly good factors, on it now."

	"Go to it," said Barren. "I'm taking the magnetics again." Norden took the accumulator stacks.

	For three seconds the field built up. Then Norden started his oscillator. Instantly the mechanism glowed with a soft blue light, and the room echoed to a tiny crystalline scraping and ringing, like the sound of crystal hammers beating out silver bells. The apparatus seemed to grow translucent; in its heart they could see a softly glowing wash of red-violet flame that flushed and waned at enormous speeds.

	Abruptly the soft, blue light changed to a garish green—and died with a crash of brittle sound. A flash of blue-violet leaped along the cables that strung from it to the second machine, glowed intensely in the heart of the second machine for a hundredth of a second—and died. A biting, reaching cold seemed to radiate from the dark machine they had been operating; it grew more intense. Liquid condensed, froze, then dissolved in more liquid that trickled down the side, to the floor.

	"Relapsed atoms absorb," said Barren softly. "What an ice box that would make!"

	Norden was opening the breech on the second machine. Barren looked with interest, for the inside was coated with something metallically lustrous, intensely, almost radiantly blue, like the wings of tropical butterflies. Barren looked at k silently,

	"Where in blazes did that come from, and what is it?"

	"The other machine. It's the changed lining. It's contracted beryllium. It plated out."

	"Plated out? How in heck did beryllium atoms travel through a wire?"

	"Contracted atoms. I reversed the polarities at the end, feeding on the previously released energies, and the protons and electrons were contracted instead of expanded. Contracted to—neutrons, maybe. At any rate, something incredibly minute, and incredibly dense. The electrons are massive as protons in that, and small as protons. Theoretically I should be able to get pure, safe power from it. Power that we need to 'save Pluto. I'm going to try."

	"How much?"

-

	NORDEN shrugged. "I couldn't tell. But I've got an automatic relay system hooked in to cut it down when the first accumulator bank there is charged, to what should be idling, mere maintenance power. If it is still turning out power, and fills the second bank, it will be shut off. If the relays are slow, it has the third and fourth banks to fill up before anything happens. An oscillograph with a cathode ray working on a megacycle note will time it to a millionth of a second."

	"Hm-m-m," said Barren doubtfully. "How about those leads? All right, go ahead."

	Norden was starting already. The fields built up, and the oscillator cut in. The oscillator relay thudded, and, it seemed, simultaneously a wave of heat, a smell of burning rubber, and a thunking of a pair of relays followed. The machine stopped almost as soon as it started. Norden drew back sharply. "Your relays are as slow as hell," Barren observed. "The fourth bank's half full," he said drily, turning the carbon dioxide extinguisher on the burning rubber of the cable insulation. "These things are red hot, by the way."

	Norden wasn't paying any attention. He was developing the cathode ray plate. The instant it cleared in the solution, he held it up, unfixed. "The first bank filled in seven and a quarter seconds, pal."

	"You mean," corrected Barren, "millionths of a second, I believe. If it filled the banks at the rate of one every second, that meant three hundred and fifty-two horsepower in a tenth of a second. He looked at the little thing in awe. "I wonder why it didn't blow up those cables?"

	"Their heat was taken up in the process," Norden pointed out. "That's one of the
things about it. While they were carrying the greatest current, they were automatically at absolute zero—super-conductors. It was only the residual currents, after the process was stopped, that heated them. And now, let's move down to the Central Plants. I'm beginning to see how we can battle Hector."

-
 
CHAPTER IX – Take-Off

	BARREN mopped his brow. The Dome was altogether too hot. Also, too noisy. Every light in the place was burning, every machine in Tarragoon seemed going. The air, which had been a bit thin because of the lowered oxygen content, was overly rich now, with a heady, exhilarating effect.

	Dugan wore a broad grin. "The people here are happy now, eh!" 

	"To hell with that," retorted. Barren. "They're still sending the boys out from Earth," said Barren grimly. He turned to Horensen. "What I want to know is, will your ship take that stress?"

	"Oh, ja. That's emergency acceleration, and we won't be loaded."

	"How soon are they going to have more of those machines ready, Dean?" Barren asked abruptly.

	"Oh—the machines," Norden repeated, looking up from his work. "Two a day. They're putting four in Horensen's ship for drive, and two more for power. They'll have to make another one for the projector. Those guys in space, whoever they are, will find plenty to wrestle with if they try to stop us!"

	"Did you melt that contracted beryllium?"

	"No. I think it's a gaseous form now, held by pure gravitational attraction so it appears, solid. In that case it wouldn't have a melting point. It will just volatilize slowly at about 75,000 degrees centigrade."

	"Then that other thing will work?"

	"Oh, beautifully."

	"Ah," said Barren delightedly. "Hector's about to catch himself a wooden horse. Come on, Horensen. They're putting in those tubes, and I want to see them do it. Coming, Dean and Tom?"

-

	HORENSEN'S ship was surrounded by a crew of lean, tough hill-devils, working at it with a grimness curiously foreign to the atmosphere of Tarragoon now. Tarragoon was rejoicing, and with her rejoiced all Pluto, save these men, and those who relieved them when they tired. Technicians were obeying blindly the orders Norden had given them in the placing of strange engines, engines they knew nothing about.

	The rocket tubes that had been made of tungsten alloy were being converted now, by a slightly different process, to the contracted state. One after another, they glowed intensely blue, fearfully cold, then relapsed into the next state, impregnable to the vicious assaults the tremendous energy released through the new rockets would subject them to.

	Barren busied himself balancing strange circuits, wiring new controls. He watched with interest while a new type of welding torch flamed viciously blue and fused stubborn beryllium plates and beams instantly, welding a new device to the nose of the ship. It was, something blue and lustrous, with a greenish, scintillating transparency that seemed like a lens at the front of it, an egg-shaped thing two feet in diameter, three feet long.

	But even Barren, tireless giant that he was, had to rest finally. He returned to the laboratory and lay down, closing his mind to thought and action as he had learned to do. But not entirely to thought.

	He thought anxiously of the people on the Trojan Worlds capturing Horensen's ship, dragging home the Wooden Horse in deadly triumph. Well, they would find a surprise waiting for them!

	The ship was quiet when he returned, after seven hours. Only a few things remained to be done. Tons of water were being pumped into the great mass-fuel tanks. In the tail power room, four of the new generators idled in readiness, glowing softly, silently. In the nose rocket room, three generators stood ready, one for the new projector, one for the field projector, one for the nose rockets. The ship blazed with light.

	Horensen saw him poking about the ship, investigating.

	"Gray, I think you should take her home. You know better. You don't sleep."

	Gray Barren shook his head.

	"No, skipper. You're pilot of this ash-can, Horensen. I'll join under you as Chief Assistant, since my own ship is wrecked. But the Line made you pilot, and I can't take that over."

	"Ja. You be Chief Assistant. You'll take that ship home—starting in four hours. Norden and Dugan will come with us."

	"Four hours? Right!"

-

	IT WAS a new kind of take-off. The rocket gases came out invisibly, soundlessly, only forming red flame a thousand feet behind. The shrill scream of the gases did not sound at the ship, but a quarter of a mile, behind her. And the ship leaped into the air and out into space as no ship had ever left Pluto before. The discharge gases were leaving the rocket-nozzles at an average velocity of 10,000 miles a second, as hydrogen and oxygen ions, not molecules.

	Barren, plastered into his seat by an unexpectedly violent acceleration, retarded the controller a fraction of an inch and felt the drive ease perhaps two gravities.

	"Don't be impatient, baby," he murmured, "we have a long way to go yet." 

	He turned to Horensen. 

	"We're free of Pluto now. I'm going to put it on two gravities and just let it roll. No danger of the fuel giving out?" Barren ended.

	"Emphatically, no! The fuel tanks are full, and designed for a mile a second discharge-rate, and we've boosted that ten thousand times."

	"All right She stays there then. How long will it take us?"

	"At two gravities?. It's 2,800,000,000 miles to the sun, less about 500,000,000 for Jupiter's orbit—approximately 550 hours if you accelerated positively all the way—"

	Dugan jerked upright.

	"What? What did you say? Five hundred and fifty hours! It would take two years at sixty miles a second! How is such speed possible?'.'

	"Right! But, Tom, you'd wind up making about six thousand miles a second this way, when you reached Jupiter's orbit. You'd sail past Jupiter so fast you'd have to start using the past tense about it before you really saw it. We'll have to make half the trip—say twelve hundred million miles, accelerating. The other half we'll have to decelerate. That means"—the slide rule worked overtime—"three hundred and ninety hours to mid-point, and another three hundred ninety slowing.

	"Call it eight hundred hours. I'll have to figure it accurately on the charts, but
that gives you an approximation," he said airily.

	Horensen whistled in amazement at the miraculous figures.

	A month would see this trip done! A month, where two years had been needed before. A corps of men worked still inside the ship, and the men practiced their new duties. Furiously Norden spent his time calculating, and some few new minor devices were incorporated in the ship in flight. So many things this promised!

	Barren flung his ship on, faster and faster. For fifteen days, he hurtled the ship through the void at a pace no man had achieved before. The rocket-tubes glowed an incandescent violet, so hot only the weird, contracted tungsten could endure it. Steadily they whispered with a dry, crystalline rustling, like a lizard army on desert sand. Never the full-throated bellow of the baying ships of space of old. This was a ship of the new era, a ship of silence broken only by the crystalline tinklings and dry rustling of inconceivably hot elements in the maws of unnatural element tubes.

	For fifteen days they braked, while the sun expanded "below" them, and the Minors rushed nearer and Jupiter's orbit grew close. High above it, far over the orbital plane, they flung over it, and beyond the asteroid belt. They reached a stop, well inside, out of range of any instruments the Trojans might have. Then they reversed, and the rockets whispered as the ship leaped through space, headed now in the regular rocket route to Pluto, going slowly, as a regular rocket might.

	And the gently operated rockets were flaming now with ordinary hydro-oxygen flames.

	The Wooden Horse was ready, drawn up in line, and waiting to be hauled within the gates of Troy!

-

CHAPTER X – Battle in Space

	HORENSEN, Norden, Dugan, and all the others strapped themselves into bunks. Grimly Barren watched his controls, and the little tell-tale apparatus they had rigged that would announce an attack. The Trojan Worlds appeared dim flecks of dust on an infinity of black velvet flecked with silver and gold of stars.

	Hour after hour Barren sat, quiet and tense. Most of the men had fallen into natural sleep; only Norden and Dugan had stayed awake, talking to him, his living indicators. For when they would fall asleep, suddenly, he would know—

	"Do you suppose they've stopped collecting ships?" asked Norden at length.

	"No, I don't see why they would. For that  matter, why should they?"

	"They might have thought of event—u— al—"

	Barren looked at Norden, closed his left eye, elevated his right eyebrow, and said softly: "Oh, yes?" He looked at the instrument board. The radio-frequency ionizer, was flaming now, long violet flames that made no sound, gave no heat.

	The ship coasted free, inert. Keenly alive, Barren watched. For minutes nothing whatsoever happened. Then a faint, gentle acceleration gripped him, pressed him lightly to his seat. Evidently, the puller was behind him. Cautiously he set the gyroscopes to turning the ship very slowly, very very slowly, so that it might appear to be an accident of mass distribution.

	Far away, dimly visible as minute specks of light, Barren saw two little ships. The acceleration grew, became pronounced. Soon it was a powerful stress throughout the ship, arid the speed was falling rapidly. It was nearly a two gravity pull now. It held constant at that, and slowly the two ships drew nearer, expanded from points of light to two sets of multiple lights, expanded further to dimly visible ships pulling the interplanetary freighter nearer, slowing it for a landing on the Trojan worlds.

	For hours Barren sat grimly motionless, letting his ship be pulled toward the worlds, toward the ships. They came no nearer than a half mile, two two-hundred foot spheres with rockets dimly visible now. They were pounding heavily now; the tremendous tractor beams carried the throb of their rockets to him.

	The Trojan worlds began to approach now, drawing nearer and nearer. It was some time before Gray Barren made out the few dim lights visible on the worlds, toward which they were headed now. They were miniature worlds, from a hundred to one hundred and fifty miles in diameter, rotating slowly about each other. They were nothing but bare, oversized rocks in the void, only vaguely spherical.

	The two towing ships separated, letting the lifeless transport sink down between them, toward the tiny world they approached. Gray Barren sat motionless. Tow beams gripped his ship again, more gently, and very gingerly lowered the vessel down, down to the surface of the tiny planet.

	It landed with scarcely a jar, perhaps half a mile from a dull-gray metal dome set with half a dozen small lighted windows in an expanse that must have covered three square miles. A huge lock faced the ship as it lay inert on the ground, and, from it, a tractor machine advanced silently, into the vacuum of space.

	The tractor beams of the space ships had ceased now. Eagerly, grimly intent, Gray Barren looked at the tractor as it came nearer. There was a housing that evidently concealed its operator, but even that cab was sheathed in dull metal, with a tiny shining window that offered only a trace of vision.

-

	THE Wooden Horse was being moved, moved within the physical gates of this Trojan city, as in the mythological legend. The great lock-doors opened in orange-peel sections. Like an ant lifting some great lump of dead food the little tractor clamped a powerful magnetic grapple to the hull of the ship, heaved mightily, and the two hundred thousand ton mass rode on the twenty ton tractor. Slowly it moved toward the lock, through the gates. Barren watched in his periscope, as the orange peel sections swung to and locked behind him. Still he had seen no member of this race whatever they might be.

	The inner lock, a small door, opened, and a score of machines came in, each a tiny rocket ship in itself, moving easily in this light gravity to a position on the hull of the giant ship. One made directly for the ship's lock as the tractor put the ship down on the dull-gray metal floor with a dull, heavy clang!

	For the first time in hours, Barren shifted. He wondered if Norden or the others had wakened, now that the sleep-beams must be off. He called sharply. The men slumbered heavily, drugged with sleep.

	"The time has come, the walrus said—" quoted Barren from Lewis Carrol. His hand touched a stud, flicked over. A low crystalline murmur started, a control moved under his fingers. There was a sudden fluttering, scurrying of the tiny rockets outside, and a swift general retreat. Barren heard a heavy grinding at the lock, portal, and at the same time pulled down the release of his weapons.

	Red lenses in his goggles protected his eyes. A beam of pure green light, a beam of unimaginable energy, lashed out at the small lock door down there. In an instant the door was smoking, in half a second it glowed red-hot. In two seconds the white-hot metal melted.

	The beam impinged on the further lock door. Something organic flashed in a sudden flare of intense White, then vanished. The inner door hesitated, heated to whiteness, and puffed inward. A roaring of air set up, a roaring as of a mighty organ pipe, and Barren moved his projector. The dense atmosphere of Jupiter was inside there.

	A beam, two feet across, tore at the metal of the outer lock door, to be joined an instant later by a rocket blast from the stern rockets that nosed the ship abruptly against the forward lock wall. The flying ions roared at the lock door, and in three second it exploded outward. Barren opened the nose rockets a bit. The enemy's dome was rising to hectic life. A flashing of moving lights, dimly seen through the murky air within, told of frantic haste.

	The Wooden Horse backed out of the lock, out into open space. A half mile from the lock, two space ships roared down at it, their rockets flaring, and Barren's radio ionizer flamed again with high violet flares. Grimly Barren turned the great ship on its gyros, lined it carefully on the nearest of the ships darting toward him, and pulled back the main release of the field projector.

-

	SUDDENLY the attacking ship exploded in a wash of unbearable flame. The great dome below felt the savage blast of heat. Barren threw his hands across a face seared by vicious ultra-light, flipping a control to "Emergency." The ship leaped up, away from the miniature world. Far faster the desperate Trojan ship leaped after it.

	Barren swung his ship on its axis. Racing backward now, he released the energy of the projector. Dimly he could see the incandescent glow of the contracted-beryllium egg. He saw the enemy ship brilliantly flaming in its heat. Like a dancing mosquito it dodged, swung erratically, wavering away. Presently it came back under control, and little gouts of "flame appeared on its sides. Barren grimaced, and turned his field projector to maximum, the wide-spreading cone like a shield between him and the Trojan guns.

	The Trojan ship seemed diseased. It was wandering erratically, and, as he watched, Barren saw great masses' of the dull-gray metal slough away, like the rotting, flesh of a leper. Bare bones appeared, and white lights that winked once and vanished.

	The derelict rolled trundling on toward the sun as Barren maneuvered his own ship to one side. It was a short-lived derelict, for,' far Below, Sol's quarter-million mile tongues of flame reached out to it.

	Gray Barren's mouth had a curiously set grin on it as, the last of his major enemies removed," he started circling back toward the dim domes on the Trojan Worlds.

-

CHAPTER XI – The Chain Is Welded

	NORDEN muttered sleepily, groggily at Barren's misty face. 

	"Come on, Rip. Breakfast time I think," came Gray's chaffing voice, dimly heard through the cotton of sleep,. "How about some ham and eggs? Or sausage and hot-cakes?"

	"Eh?" snapped Norden sitting up abruptly. "What? Sausage?" Barren roared.

	"Yes, my love. Sausage. Sausage and hot-cakes with maple syrup, and hot coffee. And maybe a thick piece of apple pie. We'll hit Denver Field in about an hour, and I want your help. I can't run this ash-can and pound brass at the same time. Turn to on Horensen and Dugan while I go back to the board. We're moving a bit fast."

	Norden looked out of the window. Blank space. But the periscope screen showed
Earth, great and greenish, streaked with clouds. A vast smooth plain of greenish water, a vast rough corrugated roof of land, it was a heartening sight.

	"Earth!" he gasped. "I haven't seen it in twenty years!" 

	"Seems like twenty centuries since I've seen it last," said Barren. "I'm maintaining a half g for ten minutes. Haul Horensen into the wash room, and dump him in the tub. The water will probably bring him to. Then do the same with Dugan. You had six days, to sleep it off."

	"Six days!" gasped Norden. "I—I just went to sleep."

	"Ask Hector about it. He'd say different. And I ought to know too, for all of that. By the way, I met Glenn Purdy in the 453 on the way in. He's turning back, and ought to land in about three weeks."

	Norden hauled Horensen out of his bunk, and walked to the rear with him. Presently there was an explosive splash, and much explosive language. A minute later a dripping Horensen came in, muttering. But he picked up Dugan with a peculiar look of satisfaction and went back with him.

	"What happened, Gray?" Norden asked. "The last I remember we were talking to you. I said they might have stopped collecting ships, fearing eventual attack."

	"So you were. That was some seven days ago, Dean."

	"It was thirty seconds ago in my mind."

	"They hadn't, needless to say. They collected us, took us right into one of their domes on a Trojan world. I think they originally came from Jupiter. They certainly had thick enough air."

	"What do they look like? Anything like us at all?" questioned Norden.

	Gray Barren shrugged.

	"They don't display themselves. I never saw one of them. They stayed behind metal except when I took the metal away. That's one thing about those toys you gave me. When they remove something, it stays removed, and takes most of the background with it. When I cut open a ship, every creature in it vanished in the cutting process. It's like trying to open an oyster with a two-pound stick of dynamite. It opens the oyster fine, but it's hard to find the oyster afterward. I'm afraid we'll never know what they looked like. Maybe—some day—some year—we'll find out!"

	"How many ships were there?" asked Horensen.

	"Two," answered Barren. "Say, Horensen, suppose you start pounding the wireless over there. You know about what to tell 'em on Earth."

	"Ja. But they won't believe it's me. I'm not supposed to come back for a year and a half yet," he chuckled. Then, more seriously, "Did you ruin those Trojans, boy?"

	"Somewhat. They're tamed for a while. I met Glenn Purdy on the way in, and sent
him back home."

	"Glenn Purdy. Let's see. That's one—two—three—ach, an unlucky number. Thirteen!" 

	"Yes. Unlucky. For them. They got those others though, Horensen. But they're through now. They had domes on seven of those Trojan Planets, staging along the sixty degree group. I haven't gone after the other group yet; I'm saving that. Some of the other boys may want to come along."

	"You're the only one that can do the job, though, Gray," said Norden.

	Barren shook his head and grinned.

	"Snap that lever there, Dean."

	Norden looked from his friend to the little blue stud. He flipped it over for an instant— and slumped heavily in his chair. Barren reached over and snapped it back. He shook Norden vigorously for a moment. The physicist opened his eyes.

	"Whew—it hit me like a sand-bag," he said softly.

	"It's easy now," Barren told him. "I got quite an analysis run on it while one of the domes was trying to lullaby me. Unfortunately I never could tell a lullaby from a waltz, but I did figure out some characteristics. I spent three nights—need I say sleepless nights?—figuring out what it meant, though. They fix those waves beautifully, and they do funny things. One type had me vomiting for fifteen minutes straight. It attacked the olfactory centers in a most ghastly manner. They have some interesting tricks."

	"But what happened?"

	"Plenty, you ought to see that cone of yours in action, Dean. It gives the grandest sort of protection against any type of explosive torpedo, shell or bomb, and at the same time it will give a whole world or a ship leprosy. Those planets got sick and died, and their skin sloughed off and they rotted before my eyes. Disgusting sight. But the Trojans didn't like it, nor the Wooden Horse they'd dragged home. I spent two days trying to find energy releases around there, locating domes and ships and hideaways. They don't like us any more."

	"Did you kill them all?" asked Horensen.

	"All I could find on those planets. Jupiter's pretty big though, and I fear it's crawling with them."

	"Did they try to parley with you?" asked Norden slowly.

	Barren shook his head.

	"That surprised me. They attacked me steadily as long as their planets and their machines held together. They have little, individual rocket ships, and they tried to drive them through the ship. I think they know only one law—might. Force. Battle. They probably feel themselves quite justified in taking those ships, because they could. They probably don't feel annoyed greatly that we wiped out those domes.

	"But I came back to Earth to prevent more men running into that trap, and to have Earth make a fleet of these Wooden Horses. Might may make right—but they won't be easily convinced they still haven't might. Jupiter's the mightiest planet of the system.

-

	"SO we must send several ships like this, and remove the Trojan Planets and send some experts who can confab with them, and show them sense. I think a few of their beams, modified to affect different nerve centers, might help us.

	"But we have power, and we know they want power. So we must have the Might now, thanks to you, Dean."

	"Ja, I think we take them for a ride," Horensen said slowly, quite pleasantly. Horensen's sunny blue eyes somehow, without changing in the least, had become as blue as sapphires.

	"And incidentally, you saved Earth a bit of trouble, as well as Pluto, I suspect, Dean," Barren said sincerely. "They wouldn't have been satisfied with robbing supply ships indefinitely. They'd want the mother lode, eventually. But Pluto, will know better what your work meant, for they saw the sun very far away, and Jupiter very, very close, those fest few months. Now they have the sun at home, on Pluto itself, in neat, little boxes that will warm them forever and power them forever."

	Norden sighed.

	''They won't love me long.. You can transmute with these things—and the Earth won't pay Pluto for its caesium long or its plutonium, or other heavy elements, and Pluto won't be a harsh frontier. Those hill-devils are frontiersmen. They won't appreciate the easement of the last frontier."

	"You're wrong. He who said a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, may or may not have been a god, but he was a psychologist. Those hill-devils are my friends, and I know them. Society has no place for them, save on the frontier. They're useless misfits now."

	Barren cocked an eye at Norden.

	"Yes?" he said slowly. "The last frontier is gone, you say. You don't understand human nature as well as you think. The last frontier is never gone. It's always, by definition, one step farther than society has gone. This ship could operate at two full gravities' acceleration for two years. How far, Norden, would that take you?"

	"Why—nowhere," Norden said casually. "Out of the Solar—" Norden stopped suddenly, and his eyes seemed to gleam to the tiny lights of far-off, challenging stars. For men like Gray Barren and himself would never rest until science had charted the last outpost in the cosmos.

The End

The Moon Is Hell
(1951)*

Contents

PROLOGUE
THE FIGHT FOR AIR
THE FIGHT FOR FOOD
EPILOGUE

-

PROLOGUE

	fifteen men in shining, bulky air-tight suits stood beside the great hull that had brought them across a quarter of a million miles of space, and landed them at last on this airless satellite world. Warm golden light still shone from the windows of the giant machine, the greatest rocket ship Earth had ever produced. Harsh, electric-blue sunlight glinted on the jet-shadowed spires of the crater wall beyond. In the near foreground was the cracked, pitted surface of a crater-bottom, scarred and broken by ages-old moon-quakes, fading into a horizon strangely near, made jagged by incredibly rugged crater walls. And above, in a star studded sky hung a blue-white ball of fire, the unshielded sun. There was no air here; warmth was only where the sun was. Night was everywhere, hidden from the blue light of the sun in every shadow.

	The fifteen men were grouped about a metal structure they were rapidly raising from a barren, level mass of rock. When it was completed, a bedraggled American flag hung limp in the airless space. In forty-eight hours it would be a piece of white bunting, bleached colorless by the violent light of this place. Later they were to replace the limp-hanging cloth with a sheet of painted metal.

	But now they had other work. Dr. James Harwood Garner was the leader of this party of carefully chosen men, and in the name of the United States of America, he claimed the so-called dark half of the moon. Half a world! Millions, tens of millions of square miles of utterly barren surface, surface never seen by Terrestrian eyes, save when, five years before, Capt. Roger Wilson had circumnavigated the moon twice, landing for two brief days on the Earthward side, and had claimed that.

	But unlike the earlier party, these men were here for continuous exploration, and not for two days, but for two full years! Their orders read: "On June 10, the ship will leave from Inyokern, California, Earth, arriving at Lima June 15. One circuit of the satellite will be made, and a landing made as near the center of the "dark side" as possible. Explorations will be conducted and data collected for one year and eleven months. On May 10,1981, a relief ship will take off from Mojave, California, Earth, proceeding directly to the camp on Luna, landing as near to the dome as practicable. For one month both parties will remain on the satellite, then the return shall be made, starting June 15, and arriving at Lake Michigan, Earth, on June 20."

	This first ship came out, loaded with the tons of supplies and instruments that must last the men two full years. So great was the load of oxygen and food, that no fuel for the return could be carried. Hence the need for the relief ship, carrying oxygen and food for but fifteen days for the total crew of both ships, seventeen men in all. The men were to weigh "an average of 153.5 pounds. Two thousand pounds of instruments, samples, photographs, and materials may be returned. Under any circumstances the comparative-reading instruments (instruments whose value was lost if experiments conducted with them on Luna were not repeated with the same instruments on Earth) shall be brought back."

	From the squat, pointed cylinder, heavy leads were run, while other men set up powerful electric winches. Electric wrenches and tools were brought out. Inside the ship motors were pumping the atmosphere back into the tanks from which it came. Presently the trained crew fell to work, and rapidly the entire machine was unbolted, the gaskets between the plates laid to one side, and the numbered pieces piled in order. Only the low, round battery-house remained untouched; this was the base of the original ship, housing the batteries that would supply heat and light during the two-week long lunar nights. Now the winches began work again, and rapidly the pieces from the hull were transformed into a new shape, assembled till they made a huge, polished dome, with five small windows set in it. Within it were the bunks, stove, supplies, tanks of oxygen and water, air purifiers—all the equipment and supplies of the original ship, converted into this more spacious dome.

	Beyond the battery house and the Dome, a series of racks were set up, and on them huge photo-cells that soon began pouring energy from the sun, converted into electricity, into the batteries. Camp was made. Ten hours had elapsed, and now the men retired to the dome, and turned the air from the tanks into it. In another hour the pressure and heat within were normal, and a meal was under way, their first on the Moon.

	Sleep now—then the two years' work was begun. It was during the lunar night that most of the exploration was done. "During the days," wrote Dr. Thomas Ridgely Duncan, "we are constantly oppressed by the monotony. It is a time of rest, and repairing things that need no repairing. The heat from the sun is absolutely unbearable, the rocks are hot enough to melt tin, even lead. The entire world is bathed in burning heat. The suits cannot radiate enough to cool, and perspiration does no good. We are continually subject to sunstroke, and have to remain in the dome.

	"At night the work begins. The sun sinks, and the great barren surface cools. Starlight, far brighter than starlight of earth, gives a slight general illumination while our suit lamps supply more. But little battery heat is needed, and wide exploration is possible. The greatest handicap is the necessity for eating. One cannot eat in a space suit, and one cannot take it off. Oxygen supplies for several days could be carried, but food and particularly water, is the problem."

	But explorations were carried on. During the day the two mineralogists, the two chemists and the photographer were busy. The little astro-physicist, Melville, was busy day and night. The magnification possible on the airless moon threw him into a terrible despondency, because he had only two three inch telescopes, the greatest weight he had been allowed, and their light gathering power did not permit him the magnification he wanted. So Duncan and Bender and Whisler working together, made a twenty-inch reflector of fused quartz, and with this Melville succeeded in getting photographic maps of the famous "canali" of Mars for the first time, maps that proved them not canals, but tidal swamps, caused by the cross drag and pull of the two satellites of the planet and the Sun.

	The others had little to do during the day. Birthdays were celebrated; and the Fourth of July, Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, all were feast days.

	Two light tractor-treaded trucks were included in the equipment. The chassis and treads of the trucks had originally been landing gear for the great rocket, and their engines had served as air pumps and fuel pumps. Every piece of equipment had served dually on the rocket. Assembled on Luna, they carried the men further afield, and did heavy work.

	But "There is little to do. We know all the motion pictures now, every move of every film. Only our own new films are of interest. There is no radio here, since the airless moon has no Heaviside layer to bring the waves about the curve that hides Earth from us. We can neither send nor receive from Earth. It is nearly 1500 miles to the nearest point where earth is visible, and therefore reachable. We are thrown back half a century in time to the period when explorers were cut off from other men.

	"Our little helmet radios work fairly well up to a distance of about five miles, further if we are atop a ridge. The powerful tractruck sets can reach some twenty miles broadcast from a ridge top. But the curve of the Moon's surface makes real ranges impossible—it brings the messages too far underground."

	Cut off from humanity by distance and solid rock as they were, it is no wonder they welcomed the night's work. Most of the exploration was done by foot, rather than tractruck, since men afoot could "make better time over the incredibly jagged rock, and the frequent chasms. We can leap fifty to seventy-five feet easily, and the tractrucks can't. Future expeditions should develop a mechanical grasshopper, perhaps on the order of an inverted catapult with powerful steel springs, cocked and released by an engine. Nothing else can move far here. Airplanes cannot be used, of course, where there is no air. Small rocket ships can't be supplied with fuel."

	Still the tractrucks could carry the men further, as the hard working explorers needed greater oxygen supplies.

	There is little of interest that has not been made public already. Perhaps a few of Duncan's weather reports are most interesting, best give a picture of that cruel, dead world. "The mercury thermometer was left outside accidentally, and has been broken. We were alarmed at breakfast by an inexplicable boom from the Dome walls. We rushed out to see what had caused it, and found that the rising sun had struck the mercury bulb, blackened to register in this airless place, and had quickly raised it to the boiling point. The explosion had caused the sound."

	Again he reports of a lunar pre-dawn. "Winter here now. We hadn't believed it would make any difference, but apparently it does. We cannot notice it; it is always cold or hot. Nothing is moderate. The chasms are terrifically deep, and terrifically abrupt. The craters are gigantic, and their walls miles in height. It is either utterly cold or utterly hot."

	The sensation of constant fall, which Duncan mentions at first, left them as they became accustomed to the lesser gravity. Their muscles did not weaken as had been feared. Instead they grew stronger from the heavy work. Yet the weight charts that Dr. Hughey, the expedition's surgeon, prepared read like kindergarten records. Duncan, in prime condition the beginning of the second year, was recorded as weighing 31 pounds! Dr. Hughey reports he was weighed on a spring balance hooked through his belt, and supported at arms length by one of the men. Yet that means a normal Earth-weight of very nearly 186 pounds. 

	Then late in the second year came the first fatality. Duncan writes, "Today we had our first tragedy. In but two months we will be leaving; and Morrison and Wilcott would have gone with us. They were exploring near North Chasm in tractruck No. 2, and the edge broke away under the weight of the machine. The chasm is over half a mile deep, and they were precipitated to the floor below.

	"The slow fall under lunar gravity was a mockery. Wilcott called the Dome, and told them they were falling! They sent us word where they were, called good-bye— and there was a crash.

	"Efforts to recover the bodies were in vain, though Rice, with the aid of the other tractruck and a long cable, succeeded in reaching, and recovering the machine. He says he will be able to repair it. The two men were hurled free, apparently, and buried under a mass of rubble.

	"North Chasm has been renamed Morcott Chasm."

	As the months passed, the time for their release from voluntary exile came nearer and nearer. As each lunar night passed they watched more anxiously the dark heavens for a moving dot of light. Tremendous work had been done; and now they wanted only to return to the Earth with its soft, natural air, winds and rains. But their release was not to be so soon. Nor for some of them, was it ever to be.

	The remainder of this account is from Dr. Duncan's diary, kept faithfully throughout the two years, and later through the terrible period of waiting for a second relief ship. It was, like all their records and accounts, written in chemical pencil, since ink was either frozen or boiling much of the time. During all the months the expedition spent on the alternately frozen and baked moon, Duncan missed but one entry, the last, when his hands could no longer hold the pencil.

	Throughout the diary he mentions the men by their last names. A list of the men living at the end of the second year is given here.

-

	PERSONNEL OF THE GARNER LUNAR EXPEDITION

	Dr. James Harwood Garner, leader, rocket-ship engineer, astro-physicist, chemical engineer.

	Dr. Thomas Ridgely Duncan, physicist, second in command.

	Dr. Eustace M. Hughey, surgeon of expedition.

	Dr. Robert Kenneth Moore, chemist.

	Dr. Warren P. Tolman, chemist.

	Mr. Arthur W. Kendall, photographer.

	Mr. David H. King, mineralogist.

	Mr. Hampden S. Reed, mineralogist.

	Mr. Anthony T. Melville, astro-physicist.

	Mr. Carl Jewell Long, astronomer, navigator. (Who did much of the work in determining latitude and longitude on the moon, and in navigating the ship, across space. Fort Washington was taken as the zero meridian.)

	Mr. George W. Rice, expert electrician and mechanic. Mr. Joseph T. Whisler, cook, mechanic, lens-grinder.

	Mr. Frederick L. Bender, mountain-climber, adventurer, mechanic, amateur astronomer.

-

THE FIGHT FOR AIR

The Diary of Thomas R. Duncan, Ph.D.

-

	May 16.
	King and Reed returned from a last expedition to the south-west. They report a remarkable find, a bed of silver selenide so enormously rich that they declare it could be profitably worked and the silver carried back to Earth. It is an enormous bed of "jewelry ore."

	The morning is half over now, and tomorrow the relief ship is due. We are awaiting this release with the most intense eagerness. The moon, for all its terrible harshness and cold and heat has become beautiful to us—a frozen hell, but awesome and magnificent for all that. Most of the men spent the day looking for the relief, and little work was done. We know that it is due tomorrow, and a day more or less means that some accident has happened.

	Whisler promises a feast tomorrow. We are all eager for news from home. As we have not even seen Earth in two years, it may have been wiped out for all we know. An all-out atomic war might be in progress, and we would not know.

-

	May 17.
	The relief has not arrived this evening. It was to be here not later than the seventeenth. We have air supplies for two months, food for three, and we are worried. Interplanetary schedules are exact, of necessity. The ship should have started at syzygy.

-

	May 18.
	Outside, the relief ship lies, a crushed, red-hot mass of broken, glowing metal. It arrived this afternoon, twenty-one hours late.

	The meaning of this, to us, is terrible. It will be at least one full month before Earth even knows that the relief expedition has failed. It will take at least another for action to be started. And not less than five months will be necessary to build a new relief ship. This means that not less than seven months must pass before we can hope for relief—and we have oxygen for two months morel Food we can cut down on, but oxygen we cannot reduce.

	This morning Rice caught a glimpse of it as it came above the horizon, sweeping rapidly up till it was 'new' and dark, a tiny satellite of a satellite. We all saw it disappear below the horizon. We were watching for it when it appeared over the horizon again, rising. It was much nearer and larger, and our spirits rose. It was less than 1000 miles away, and the rockets opened just after it crossed the horizon, with the result that it began to fall rapidly toward the surface. A cheer broke out from the men, and Rice, as radio operator, attempted to establish communication. At 10:55 he received a reply; the ship was less than 300 miles away, settling on intermittent rockets, and coming fast.

	We welcomed them, and watched them settle less than a mile from the Dome. They landed with a slight jar at 11:12. Almost immediately the stern rockets broke out, and hurled the ship fully fifty miles straight up, with terrific acceleration. The men were very quiet as we watched. It was easy to understand that the main rockets had in some way been accidentally opened, and could not be shut off.

	The ship was finally driven to a height of half a mile by some of the most skillful management of rockets I can conceive. The servo controls failed suddenly, and under the full drive of the main rockets, and lunar gravity, the ship crashed to the plain, now less than a quarter of a mile from the Dome. It exploded instantly. In fifteen seconds it was a white hot mass in which we know the pilots have lost their lives. We could not investigate today, as the wreck was too hot to approach.

	Dr. Garner called a meeting of the men shortly after that, and briefly pointed out that it would be over a month before Earth would realize the relief ship had crashed, and at least eight months before a second ship could be built. He asked that suggestions be given in the morning.

-

	May 19.
	Temperature: 163 C in rocks.

	The meeting was called this morning after breakfast. Moore, in charge of pure atmosphere, advised permanent discontinuation of all smoking, as it consumes oxygen and fouls the air. He has stated that he may be able to get oxygen from compounds in the rocks, though the process will be difficult.

	As quartermaster I had to state that the rations would have to be greatly cut down.

	Air is evidently the primary problem, as it is impossible to greatly reduce our allowance of oxygen. We will at least have warmth. Water we have for two months, but Moore promised relief on that score.

	Rice reports, however, that the batteries which have served us two years under the most extreme conditions, are in danger of breaking down. Originally built for lightness, they may fail, since they have been run continually on what amounts to an overload.

	The tractruck has a fuel supply for but sixty hours operation; and in hauling the minerals for extraction of oxygen would be exceedingly valuable. Bender objected to its use, saying it required too much oxygen; actually it uses less than men accomplishing the same work.

	King and Reed reported the brightest spot in the meeting. There is a large gypsum field nearby, where water can easily be obtained by roasting the rock. Moore had hoped to find something of the sort. Electrolysis will furnish the needed oxygen. Demand on the batteries will be serious.

	We have spent the day bringing supplies of the gypsum to the camp, while Rice, Whisler and Bender constructed a wheeled trailer. King and Reed, after showing us the location, started work on the electric roasting furnace we will need. Obtaining the gypsum is very trying work, as explosives are useless on this airless world, unless very heavily tamped. We find we have very small supplies of explosives.

	It will be difficult to live off so barren a country. One must work even for the air one breathes.

-

	May 20.
	Temperature: 169 in rocks.

	Afternoon is coming in the lunar day, and Rice warns us we will not be able to use the batteries to produce water during the night, and advises against diverting the power of our photo-cells. The batteries are not fully charged after last night's (lunar-night's) use. I am inclined to agree with him, though Bender does not believe it, and has convinced the others it will be safe, even necessary.

	I have made a trip today to Reed's silver deposit. I think it will be useful.

	Nearly ten tons of gypsum hauled today. King advised construction of roadway, but Tolman, in charge of works, felt it best to get all the gypsum possibly in before night.

	It will be difficult to work then; it will be too dark to handle explosives.

	We are all tired tonight, and feeling the pinch of reduced rations. Whisler has been ordered to cut down the amounts slowly.

-

	May 21.
	At my suggestion, Garner ordered a roadway constructed to the gypsum mine. I feel it wise, as the tractruck will not always be available.

	I have been accused of favoring certain members of the party in the matter of rations. They have been very short and are due to become shorter, and the men's tempers with them. We are working harder than ever before, and with less food.

	The sun is approaching the horizon now, and Reed tried out his still today. The photo-cells would not carry the load, and the batteries had to be drawn on, against Rice's protests.

	The mechanism is not satisfactory, for though the water comes off readily, it will not condense, surrounded as it is by a world all of which is above the boiling point of water, even under atmospheric pressure.

-

	May 22.
	The road has been finished, and late today the tractruck broke down. There is so little fuel left it was decided not to repair it. Another cart was built, and the men are hauling the material. It is fortunate lunar gravity is so weak.

	Reed has, improved his still, and it works. He was forced to build a shelter which cut off the sun's rays. He says it would be impossible to work at night anyway, to which Rice privately gave a sigh. He seems to love that battery set.

	I paid another visit to Reed's silver deposit today, and returned with some samples on a small sledge. I will try to make some photo-cells *(* The photo-cells were made of silver plates, a layer of silver selenide, and a transparent layer of a second metal. Sunlight falling on these generated a quite powerful current. These had been their source of power during all the past two years.) with Moore's aid.

	Food has become a popular subject of conversation. Though they realize the necessity for drastic rationing, and take it in good spirit, all the men are hungry. The tobacco smokers are particularly unhappy. I have taken to chewing a crumb of tobacco occasionally, and find it far from satisfying.

	When the call for meals is broadcast we all come promptly. Whisler is being unmercifully kidded, and tonight a mock trial was held in which he was accused of wasteful use of water. The soup tonight was rather thin.

-

	May 23.
	It is nearing sunset now, and during the sleep-period tonight the sun will probably set.

	A considerable pile of gypsum has been hauled from the mine, and Reed has made a larger oven for use when the sun appears again. He found some large blocks of pumice rock, and has set these up as insulators for his furnace.

	Moore and I have started work on the photo-cells. The silver was refined electrolytically, after we reduced it to a soluble compound. We made a crude, small cell, and were delighted—and, I admit, somewhat surprised—to find it worked. Kendall and Rice have .agreed to help us.

	Pancakes for breakfast, washed down with coffee, at 7:15, and some twelve hours later dinner of vegetable steak and a watery soup. You feel satisfied for the next half hour, till the water is absorbed. There is some complaining from our stomachs, but there is surprisingly little grumbling, though the men are working hard all day, under difficult conditions. Luckily the mine is now under a ledge of rock that shades it, and makes the work endurable. It seems curious to dig ones air from the rocks.

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	May 24.
	Dr. Garner has detailed Moore, Kendall and Rice to assist me in making the photo-cells. Rice however, spends half his time with his beloved batteries. I can understand his worries, after seeing the cells. They were made, I fear, for light weight, rather than long service. The material has been falling from the plates badly. Rice experimented today with the possibility of rebuilding the plates, and had to give it up.

	We are not equipped to resist cold. We have only the thinnest of blankets, for it was not expected that it would ever be cold within the dome.

	My stomach is constantly afflicted with an unpleasant burning feeling, and of course the others feel it too.

	Temperature outside: -143.

-

	May 25.
	Ten large photo-cells completed, and the gypsum pile increased. At my strong recommendation the still will not be used until day. We hope to have a considerable battery of cells by then. Even Rice agrees that the current we are drawing for making the cells is drawn in a good cause.

	Very difficult to work glass for cells without gas flame, but the oxygen cannot be spared.

	Reed, King and Tolman are working on an electrolysis apparatus for use with the still. Some question as to disposition of hydrogen released. We have all too many empty tanks, and I suggested storing it for possible usefulness. Certainly as well as to release it.

	Temperature: -147.

-

	May 26.
	About two o'clock this afternoon Melville was brought in in a horrible condition. There was an accident at the mine today, a rock slide, and Melville was buried. Instinctively his arms protected the faceplate, and it was not broken, but a great rent appeared in the leg of his suit, and the air began to rush out. The others uncovered him in a very short time, and found him clutching his leg tightly to prevent the escape of the remaining air. A rope was tied about the thigh, to cut off the leak, and he was hurried back. He said nothing on the trip, and was unconscious when they arrived. They set him down in the airlock as gently as possible, but when they picked him up to carry him in they discovered his leg, the right leg, had been broken off three inches above the knee. The heater wires had been cut when the suit was torn, and without heat from the battery, and the circulation cut off by the air-stop, his leg had frozen on the way back. It was evidently brittle as glass in the cold of the lunar night. Dr. Hughey tied the veins and arteries, dressed the wound, and hopes for the best. No one has had any experience with such wounds. The stump of the leg was soaked in cold water, which had to be constantly renewed at first, as it froze against the flesh. Aside from the small capillaries, burst in the vacuum of space before freezing, the flesh appears normal.

	Work was stopped at the mine, and tonight Dr. Garner spoke to us briefly on the dangers, but the absolute necessity of mining. We can only continue the work. The men are greatly depressed.

	We have fifteen photocells finished.

-

	May 27.
	Melville is conscious this evening, for the first time since the accident. Dr. Hughey has kept him under soporofin, but his stump is thoroughly thawed, and he was allowed to regain consciousness. For some time as he came to consciousness he complained that his foot itched, and tried to scratch it. When he was fully conscious he quickly understood that it was missing, and heard the whole story. He has been very calm, merely saying that as he is an astro-physicist he will not greatly miss it. He wants to help us with the photo-cells, as he says that is the only work he can do now.

	He suffers no pain, apparently, and Dr. Hughey says the freezing was so rapid that the tissue of the stump is unharmed. If only he had not been laid down there in the air-lock. But then, no one ever had experience with space-freezing before.

	Twenty-five completed photo-cells, now. The work at the mine was resumed today, while Dr. Hughey replaced Rice here on the photo-cell work.

	The rations have been reduced to one and one-half pounds per day per man, which will mean about five months supplies for us, in-so-far as food goes. However, we will certainly not die of starvation. Before that occurs we will be too weak to work the gypsum mine.

-

	May 28.
	Since the sun has long been below the horizon, work at the mine has become hard, for it is cold and dark. The tractruck batteries and lights were dismounted, and set up beside the mine for illumination. There is scarcely a score of steel picks left, and Garner is worried about the situation. The steel picks are invaluable to us; and in the terrible cold of the shadowed space, they are, as I have said, very brittle. Kendall broke one today, as he is inexperienced in their use under these conditions. At my suggestion Reed tried something with the cinnabar we found two miles south-west of Fort Washington. It was difficult work at night, in the cold outside, but we could not refine it inside due to the poisonous fumes. Rice, as usual, complained bitterly at the drain on his batteries, and some of the men complained even more strongly at the use of oxygen, but fortunately the work was successful, and two new picks of solid mercury were made. In this extreme cold they are hard as steel, and no more brittle. Further, should they break, the pieces need only be picked up, and brought back here. They fuse together, and can be returned to service in half an hour. They are much heavier, and are very popular for that reason.

	Melville is improving rapidly, much more rapidly than we had dared hope, and has been helping greatly on the photocells. He is a skilled manipulator.

	In speaking to Dr. Hughey about the chance of stretching our food supplies, he gave as his opinion that it would be impossible to reduce the rations beyond one pound per man per day if mine work were to be maintained, and doubted that they could be done. Privately I agree with the latter reservation. I have been mining the silver only intermittently, but I can readily appreciate the feelings of the miners.

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	May 29.
	Dr. Garner is on the sick list at present, and the men are trying to make his stay there, he claims. Our leader has certainly been leading the men in work, and it has told on him more heavily than we knew. Dr. Hughey has ordered him to rest. Dr. Garner is the oldest of us, and probably would not have been chosen had he not organized the expedition himself.

	Forty photocells completed. Fifteen today, thanks to Melville's aid, and the experience we have gained. Dr. Hughey says it is much better for Melville to do what he is able to, as it improves his mental condition.

-

	May 30.
	Reed is 28 today. I issued a quart of the Scotch whiskey for him, and some of the men froze it into a cake, with "iceing" of pale ginger ale. Reed insisted that it be cut with a knife of mercury to be in keeping. Needless to say, the "cake" was not eaten, though Reed got a few cold-burns from handling his knife and the "cake."

	Work continued as before, however. Another still is being built now, with provisions for continuous process operation. Pumice-like stone cars will be dragged through the kiln, saving the heating and cooling of the furnace between charges. Experiments have to be made, and one mistake almost made was in putting the planned outlet to the condenser at the top. It is hard to remember that such a thing as hot gases rising is unheard of here. ALL gases sink—when they occur. It makes things easier, however. The vapor need only be collected in a funnel-like tray at the bottom.

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	May 31.
	Long has made a proposal. He offers to go to the edge of the portion visible from Earth, set up a heliograph, and signal Mt. Wilson. He feels certain even a small mirror would be visible. He plans to carry a flask of mercury, and freeze his mirror on the spot. Food he says can be carried in the form of canned milk in a rubber bottle, and drunk through a tube. We have all, but Melville and one other, offered to accompany him. Garner has refused his offer, and ours. As the leader he feels responsible, and says the expedition is impossible. He points out the danger of starving and thirsting if the tube is dropped from the mouth while asleep or by accident/ since it would be impossible to restore it.

	But it might well save a month or more of time.

-

	June 1.
	The men are tired nights, and sleep is heavier. In the evenings, however, various amusements are tried. There has been considerable amusement derived from a planetary round-robin story. Melville left the hero stranded on Jupiter, where the gravity was too great for his ship. Long comes next. He will carry on tomorrow night.

	There seems to be a tendency, during the course of the story, for the characters to partake of some very tempting meals. All the frozen fresh meat is gone, and the meat-flour, though nourishing, is not tempting.

	More photocells today. We have now a total of eighty-five cells, or one full bank. We will set them up tomorrow.

-

	June 2.
	Long disappeared during the night. We all volunteered to go after him, but Garner ordered us to stay. It would be impossible to find a man on this dark lunar surface. The entire country is indescribably rough. Every ancient moonquake rift is as sharp as the day it was made. We are all hoping for Long, but as Rice said, "It ain't a Long hope and it's a hell of a Long chance." The great circle distance is 1100 miles, probably 1500 across country. It is not difficult to make 300 miles a day here, and under forced marches he will probably make 500 the first day. He took oxygen for seven days.

	I wish I could foresee my entry for June 9.

	Four new Mercury picks made. They work excellently, but blunt rapidly and have to be re-cast every day.

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	June 3.
	Long evidently took six days' rations of powdered milk chocolate and water, as I miss them from my store. Curiously I thought they were there yesterday, and thought he had merely eaten a heavy meal. We do not begrudge him those supplies.

	The men are greatly excited about Long, and have been trying continuously to reach him by radio, but he is already beyond range. A month's difference in the arrival of the rescue ship may well mean life to us.

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	June 4.
	It is shortly after midnight, and Rice has reported to me privately that the batteries are failing badly. He says that if they are to last till sunrise, we must lower the temperature of the Dome. They are evidently going to pieces even more rapidly than he feared. Ironical, the beauty of our calculations in making the equipment. This was to have been our last Lunar night, and the failure of the batteries would have been a minor nuisance. As they certainly won't last another night, it's hard to know what it does mean now. As I have said, we brought no heavy clothing, the suits being sufficient in empty space. I have stopped working on the photo-cells, as the others are advancing nicely, and have started on a burner.

	The men were told this evening of the probable failure of the batteries. Like good sports they agreed to the change. The Dome will be cold while the men are out working, kept just above the freezing point (we cannot let it fall lower) will be warmed at supper time, cold all night, and wanned in the morning. The saving will really be considerable.

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	June 5.
	Long's birthday. He was 28 today, but not with us to celebrate. We hope he will be here to celebrate Tolman's, the 14th. It will be sunrise, then.

	Burner worked successfully. Too bad we can't use it tonight. It will save us, probably.

-

	June 6.
	Last of canned milk issued. Last sugar gone, also. The supplies look amazingly low, now that we have cleaned out all the empty boxes which had been saved for possible future use.

	I was again accused of favoritism in distribution of food by Bender, today. He is ill-fitted for mining work, and hunger adds to his distaste. I am only surprised none of the others have made accusations, though I deal with all possible fairness.

	Very uncomfortable working in Dome with temperature low. Rice says he prefers the mine. We are using the heater at the laboratory end which makes it slightly better.

-

	June 7.
	Rice claimed he heard signals from Long. I doubt it, as but five days have passed, and he expected to be gone seven.

	There is a great pile of gypsum outside now, and some of the men are saying they can take a rest, since we have enough for now.

	It is very cold in the dome during the day, and it is almost impossible to work. But Rice says the batteries may last till the 14th, when the sun rises.

	Two full banks of photocells completed, increasing our power generating equipment 50%.

-

	June 8.
	Today Rice had to cut out several of the worst cells and cut the heaters in half. They work very poorly, and we freeze all day and all night.

	The round-robin story, which was left off with Long's disappearance was continued. The ship was hurled free by a volcano, and has landed on Mercury. Heat in abundance, and plenty of food, I noticed.

	Melville is almost completely healed, and Rice has made him a sort of push-cart on which he can move readily.

-

	June 9.
	No word from Long, though we have waited till 12 o'clock, New York Midnight. Garner ordered us to rest.

	Two more burners arranged. Rice has made a compact recharging outfit, and Garner has agreed to the plan.

	Some fear today the temperature will fall below freezing and burst the water tanks and food tins. It would be disastrous, for they-would be lost beyond redemption.

-

	June 10.
	Signals from Long! It began at 11:30 p.m., and Rice at once took bearings. The signals were too weak to decipher. At 11:45 they were readable. Long was then twenty-five miles or so from the Dome. He had thrown away everything, except one oxygen tank, almost empty. He hoped to reach the station before it was exhausted.

	Rice wanted to head a relief expedition at once, but was ordered to remain at the radio. Bender is leading an expedition commanded by King, carrying oxygen tanks, and a stretcher.

-

	June 11.
	The sun rises in five hours. Long is freezing. His battery is exhausted, and his oxygen so nearly gone he cannot work to maintain bodily heat. Distance 22 miles. The expedition has covered five.

	Dr. Hughey has made a startling proposal. The expedition cannot reach him in time, and Hughey advises that he allow himself to freeze as quickly as possible! From his experience with Melville's leg he says he feels sure thyradren will restore him to life. If it is possible it will save Long's life.

	Long has assented. He has thrown himself into a position that will be shadowed even after the sun rises, and covered his suit with the emergency radiation paint. He has stopped speaking.

	Later—sunrise. The expedition found Long, and brought him back on the stretcher. He was frozen solid, and the oxygen and gases in his suit are liquid. The photocells are pouring in power, a great relief after nearly freezing to death. It has been hard on us.

	(Equipped as the expedition was with light summer blankets, working on a starvation diet, stating that it was "hard on us" was a fearful understatement of facts.)

	Hughey had Long brought into the Dome, placed inside a huge coil of wire, and from the main radio set, drew radio frequency current at the maximum power. The body was warmed to 99 degrees in less than five minutes. Artificial respiration with pure oxygen mixed with carbon dioxide was started, and heavy injections of thyradren administered directly to the heart.

	The process has been continued for half an hour now, with no results as yet.

	Later. Long is alive! He was badly starved, as well as under-oxygenated, and already he has eaten! He is recovering with unbelievable rapidity. He is apparently wholly unharmed. It seems a miracle to us who saw him brought in, a frozen statue, bathed in liquid air, brittle as glass, and as dead! Kendall, worse than any newspaper photographer, has photographs, he says. Long will be interested!

	Work continued this afternoon, consisting mainly of setting up the photocells, and starting the furnaces. Everything is working smoothly. Long has not been allowed to speak yet.

-

	June 12.
	We were disappointed to hear that Long had been unsuccessful. He stayed twelve hours within sight of the Earth, trying vainly to correspond. Neither heliograph nor radio brought results. Radio, he believes, was interfered with by the tremendous group of sunspots he noticed, and the aurora of Earth was magnificently bright, even from there. He evidently picked an unfortunate moment for his brave attempt.

	It was the twelve hours delay which caused his—death, as a matter of fact, though it seems wrong to say that while he sits watching me.

	Hughey is writing a medical report, which will explain the case more fully than I could.

-

	June 13.
	Work progressing rapidly. Gypsum fed into the furnaces is quickly ejected as de-hydrated CaSO4, the water collected, and taken to the electrolysis apparatus. It is warm and comfortable inside the Dome now, for which we are all thankful, and the work on photocells is progressing rapidly. Another load of silver selenide was hauled over today.

	Rice has repaired the batteries to the best of his ability, and they are being recharged for lighting and laboratory needs during the night. The burner hearing system is being charged and more burners prepared.

	I find in re-reading the diary that I have not described this. Hydrogen and oxygen, derived from water, electrolyzed during the day by our photo-cell power, is stored, and burned together for warmth during the night. The water so formed is collected, condensed, and stored to be re-electrolyzed the next day. It is thus a perfectly reversible action, requiring only the electro-chemical energy from the photo-cells. And our heating plant will be once more free of the batteries' defects.

	Long is feeling well, and worked today on the photocells, though he maintained he was perfectly capable of returning to the heavier mine work. Dr. Hughey says that he is best here.

	Long tells me he took but one day's supply of food with him. Some one else must have rifled the stores. We all feel hungry, save immediately after meals, but I did not expect that, since our company has been so finely uncomplaining.

-

	June 14.
	I made another trip for silver selenide. The lunascape is awesomely wonderful under the early morning sun. Titanic peaks loom up, casting shadows as black and hard as full night. It is a land of blinding light and blinding darkness, with mighty, rugged chasms on every side, and only bare, jagged rock underfoot. The passage from light to shade is accompanied by a sudden fierce chill that seems to bite through in a moment, then the welcome heat of the battery dispels it.

	Returning, dragging the tractor-wheeled sledge loaded with ore, the sheen of the dome is a beacon, the only brilliantly metallic sheen in all this land of rugged, waste rock. Not a spindle of grass, no hint of shrub, nor fallen leaf. Not even sand, only jagged, harsh rock.

	It seemed vicious to us at first. Now, like the desert to its prospectors, it is beautiful for its fierce harshness, clean and naked and unashamed under a blazing, blue-white sun.

	But it is a relief to get back to the Dome. And more of a relief, after remembering the night of chill we have passed, in watching the meters that record the steady, powerful flow of energy coming from the photo-cells.

-

	June 15.
	Today marks our second year on Luna. We had planned to take off today, for the return trip. The crumpled wreck of the relief ship seems to mock us. It has been investigated time and again, and not a vestige of any useful article has been found. The burning fuel destroyed everything.

	We have been forced to look for glass-making materials. Our supply of glass is running low, and we need quartz glass for the photocells. The hydrogen has been helpful in making them, for the flame is easier to work with, and Moore and Tolman have installed a recondensation apparatus which collects water from the air passing through the purifiers. It is electrolyzed for oxygen.

	More food has been stolen from the storehouse. It is curious that no one sees this, as it is light at all times now. But all the men are tired from their work.

-

	June 16.
	Fate has turned ironical. Rice, searching for quartz crystals for the tubes, brought in some magnificent, clear crystals, and said there was a considerable bed of them, enough to last some time. Had it been quartz, we would have been lucky, for the crystals are clear as water. They are diamonds, most of them large as my fist. They are utterly and completely useless to us, as they cannot be worked in any way.

	No suitable quartz supply has been found.

	The gypsum pile is diminishing, despite the continued activity of the miners, and the oxygen pressure in the tanks is rising steadily.

	I have been interested in the psychology of the story tellers of the interplanetary round-robin. The ship has gone to Pluto now, where it is exceedingly cold, but their power is endless. Oxygen is found frozen in glaciers, and may be chopped off with axes or explosives. Kendall, who has been working at the mine told the story tonight. It's Rice's turn tomorrow night. He will spend the day searching for quartz, and I have a half-hope he doesn't find it to see what his story will be.

-

	June 17.
	We should have been sighted from Earth today. Interplanetary schedules are exact, and our non-arrival will probably start discussion.

	Funds for the building of a relief ship will have to be raised by public subscription, to a total of approximately three millions. I fear it will be slow coming in.

	Work continued today hopefully. The oxygen and hydrogen tanks are filling ever more rapidly, for more photocells are constantly being added. Reed is now able to run two furnaces and is electrolyzing faster. The pile of gypsum is nearly gone.

	The hunt for quartz has been unsuccessful. The one thing we need beyond all others, the basic need, is power, and without the quartz we will be helpless to install the proposed electrical machinery at the gypsum mine.

	Rice carried on the round-robin tonight, and the interplanetary travellers landed on the warm-belt of Neptune. Neptune's warm belt is caused by its satellite, which is a solid globe of crystal quartz, and which acts as a burning glass to warm the planet.

-

	June 18.
	Long has made another proposal, which I can back with my full agreement. Money must be raised by public subscription, and a ship built. The building will take at least four months, and Earth knows we have supplies but for one month more at most. That we have a new supply of oxygen and water they do not know. People will hesitate to give money for a cause lost before it begins. If some word is sent, telling that we have oxygen at least, the aid may be hastened.

	His new plan is that twelve men start from the Dome, all but three burdened with oxygen tanks, these three travelling light. At the end of one day, one oxygen-unit's distance, six men will turn back, caching all the oxygen they carried, save one tank apiece for the return. The remaining six will continue, again three heavily loaded, three going light. At the end of that twenty-four hour run, three will turn back, caching all their oxygen save one tank apiece. These will return to the first stop, sleep there for the first time on the trip, then return with one new tank. The remaining three, hitherto unloaded, will sleep at this farthest cache for twelve hours, then carrying four units of oxygen, a small photocell bank for power, a converter-transformer, and a powerful portable radio, will make a dash for the visible border.

	If the whole trip be made by daylight, no batteries need be carried, but a second trip to the first cache could put batteries there for emergencies.

	The men have all volunteered, and even Garner approves of this plan. Long insists he should go, as he knows the way, and the easiest way. The group will carry more powerful apparatus, and have a far better chance of success.

	The second thing of import in today's happenings was the discovery of a great outcropping ledge of crystal quartz. It was discovered by Melville—under the battery house! Rice threatened to tear his hair out by the roots as the Universe's prize ass.

	Actually, the reason it had not been discovered was simple. Since we came, an accumulation of battery sludge had hidden it. Our power worries are ended.

	Almost equally cheering was the discovery that we had forty pounds more protein flour than I had thought. That is three days added to our lives here.

-

	June 19.
	The plan Long outlined has been decided on. At his urgent request, he will guide the party. I have been given command, so I will get my first glimpse of Mother Earth in two years, shortly. Rice will be the third member of the three who make the dash. As he is the radio expert, he is the logical choice. Since all the others want to accompany us, the others are to be chosen by lot. The start will be made the ninth of July, which will give us fourteen days of sunshine, a plentiful margin.

	It was noon of the Lunar day, and terrifically hot today. The storage batteries will take no more charge, and have been disconnected. All new photocells were taken to the mine, along with the batteries and motors from the tractrucks, and several other electric motors taken from the rocket ship. The diamonds have proven useful after all. All the empty cans were collected, and the lead and tin melted off. A diamond toothed saw was achieved with the aid of the old tractor belts from the tractrucks. It cuts the soft gypsum with an enormous saving of labor. Carting it back is not easy, however.

	The mine power station is not yet self-sufficient, and is drawing on the batteries. New photo-cells will help, however.

-

	June 20.
	The long afternoon has begun. Miners are gaining on the furnaces now, and Reed is making a new one, wants new photo-cells.

	Work continued as usual.

-

	June 21.
	New furnace finished, and consuming more power than cells produce, but new cells coming. The complete heating system was tested, and found to function perfectly. So perfectly the Dome was unbearably hot in no time. Oxy-hydrogen flames are hot!

-

	June 22.
	More food stolen from supply house. I will be forced to rig a burglar alarm! It is exceedingly serious, for our supplies are rapidly diminishing, and we are all underweight. (A strong understatement. At the time he wrote this, Dr. Duncan had fallen from a normal 184 pounds of muscle and bone, to 155.)

	Moore is experimenting with what he calls "edible" acids. Most of the men are claiming them "terrible acrid." I doubt that we could eat the substances, though undoubtedly they have food value. He has compounded them directly from water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. He claims they will save our lives.

-

	June 23.
	Afternoon is well advanced now. We have gained considerably over our uses of the last month, and the oxygen tanks are beginning to show pressure. Water has gained even faster, and a new electrolysis apparatus is being set up. Despite the short rations the men are feeling better as they see the power from the sun wresting atmosphere from this frozen, lifeless world.

-

	June 24.
	A two pound can of dried milk is missing today. I cannot understand how these bold thefts are carried out. Nor can I understand how any of the men do it; they are all pitching in and working without grousing. We are all tired though, when we turn in. There is a distinct rivalry now between the furnace gang, those extracting water from the gypsum, and the mine gang, those extracting gypsum from the mine. The mine gang is gaining now, thanks to hard, heavy labor, and the new machines. Reed demands more power, which we are trying to supply.

	Long did the first heavy labor since his death! He went to the silver selenide mine with Rice, and brought back a supply.

	Preparations going on now for the dash to the visible area. Long insists the message will come at the psychological moment.

-

	June 25.
	The sun is very low now. Tomorrow it sets. Reed has had to close down the small furnace, as the. shadow of Garner Crater began to touch the new bank of photocells. We will have to move them "tomorrow," that is, next morning.

	The miners will be sadly handicapped when their power tools fail them, with sunset. There is still a brisk demand for photo cells however, as both mine and furnaces consume power at a fearful rate. Certainly, on earth, with its clouding atmosphere such power would be almost impossible to maintain with so small a bank of cells.

	There has been some discussion of the message we are to send, when we reach the visible zone. Garner points out that possibly only parts of the message will get through. He suggests that it be so worded that even fragments of it will be intelligible and hopeful. It is a wise suggestion, I believe.

-

	June 26.
	It is dark now, outside. Dark and cold. After two years, the transition from day to night is still a startling thing, when in half an hour the rocks, blistering hot but a few minutes before, become so cold that mercury freezes, then carbon dioxide, and within an hour oxygen freezes to a liquid. The rapidity with which first the mercury, then the alcohol, and finally the pentane thermometers freeze up, leaving only the metal thermometers, is still a phenomenon to wonder at.

	And the heavens, studded so thickly with colored stars, not the great, blurry white things of earth, but infinitely minute pinpoints of red and green and blue and orange! It is glorious, and the light from them is incomparably greater than starlight on Earth.

	Our force of photo-cell makers is augmented. Tolman has joined our staff permanently, and is devoting all his time to extracting the chemicals we need. The stocks we used for operations were running low, and now gracious step-mother Moon has provided as liberally as her scant bounty permits, with further supplies. Luna is a single, vast chemical laboratory! The richness of the rocks is beyond belief. Probably the enormous volcanic upheavals of the past brought these substances to the light, and the absolute lack of rainfall has prevented their being buried.

	Further argument over message to be sent tonight I believe it is an important point.

-

	June 27.
	The heaters are working nicely. The temperature stays constant with beautiful precision, the only disturbance being a slight, endless hissing, to which we are growing accustomed. Rice, in further protection of his beloved batteries, has rigged a metal stove, burning hydrogen. Whisler was heard cursing him horribly, told to refrain as he was damaging the precious atmosphere, and requested to explain. Rice was over enthusiastic, and had a regular oxy-hydrogen blow-torch for a burner. Whisler tried it out cautiously, but not cautiously enough. It burned a hole through his heavy aluminum frying pan so quickly he couldn't get it away in time.

	The stove has been tamed, and works nicely. I agree with Rice that the batteries will be important for light; and for the indispensable electrical work at night, and must be preserved. At least five months more—five nights.

	Even cooking might wholly disintegrate them. Without their power, our airlock could not function, and the cost in lost atmosphere, when we could no longer pump the air back to the Dome, would be heart-rending.

-

	June 28.
	The work at night is even heavier than before. During the day the machines lifted a heavy load from the men, but now that it is night there are no electric hoists to lift the blocks of gypsum sawed out by electricity, and the men are complaining of weakness. I fear they are indeed underfed. For some time those working in the mines have been fed more heavily than those who work inside, since their work is so much more strenuous.

	Beginning with tomorrow those who are to make the longest dash to the Earth-side of Luna will be fed more heavily, the three making the full trip getting three-quarters full rations.

-

	June 29.
	No work today. We declared a holiday, not-so-jokingly called Collapse Day! The men spent most of the morning dozing. We needed it badly. Extra rations issued to all.

	I am too sleepy and too contented to write more this night.

-

	June 30.
	Work resumed today.

	Rice has shown himself a genius with tools. He is utterly invaluable now. Today he spent the whole time working on one of the fuel-less tractrucks. This evening to the amazed joy of the miners, it ran down to the mine! He has somehow rigged up a valving system so that it works effectively on hydrogen and oxygen, and the exhaust, pure water, is carefully collected and recondensed to liquid. He arrived at the mine to be greeted with rousing cheers. He dragged behind him two sledges, one loaded with two great fuel tanks full of hydrogen and oxygen, and on the other, one of the large motors converted to a generator. In half an hour he had all the electrical mining apparatus going again. It costs us nothing, for the fuel can be reelectrolysed in the daylight period, and burned again that night. Rice is a popular hero, despite the fact that the machines must be run on more or less reduced load. We will need more photo-cells than ever now, but it is an inestimable boon to the miners.

	Moore has joined the laboratory staff. Reed was sent out on an exploring expedition, seeking certain minerals at the directions of the chemists. King is hunting in the other direction. I heard him order nitrates, so I suspect we are going to have explosives again, which gave out long ago.

-

	July 1.
	The men are glad the hydrogen driven power plant has been built, aiding them so enormously in the hoisting and sawing, even though the saws stop when the hoists start. Rice wanted to fix up the other tractruck, but we need the hydrogen we have for the heating apparatus. The system is working perfectly, keeping us comfortable again, but we cannot spare much hydrogen.

	Output of photo-cells greatly aided by Tolman who showed us how to make the metal much more workable. We are turning out twenty cells a day regularly now, but with the consumption at the mine both day and night now, and the furnaces during the day, we need a lot of power. Power has become our chain to life.

	The message to be sent has been decided upon. It will read: "Relief ship crashed. Oxygen from gypsum by electrolysis assures supply. Food scant. Help." We hope the message will get through successfully.

-

	July 2.
	Evidently the thief is a heavy eater. Despite the large supply already missing, chocolate has been taken.

	Gypsum pile growing rapidly, while Reed and King are back now. The needed nitrogen has been located, and a bed of carbides Moore wanted, as well. The furnace crew is working on new and bigger furnace, still and electrolysis equipment. The Moon's lack of air and water allowed metallic nitrides and carbides to exist in the rocks as stable compounds. They will be a great help.

	The mine crew and the furnace gang have been going about with contracts, attempting to contract for photocells, as a keen rivalry is developing. Reed swears to destroy the gypsum pile when the sun rises. He will have a good chance as practically all the men will be gone two or four days with us to the visible half. Power is badly needed in both camps.

	Electrolysis apparatus has been built beside the mine, for re-converting the fuel for the motor-generator set.

-

	July 3.
	Lunar midnight. The members of the dash party are getting larger portions now, and I for one feel new strength coming. I do not tire so quickly now in carrying the loads of silver selenide from our mine. We are using an incredible amount of that substance now. Three new racks of tubes completed, however.

-

	July 4.
	Another holiday, with extra rations all round. Nevertheless two more tanks of fuel taken out to the mine. That is the last that can be issued them safely, as the hydrogen for heating is getting scarce. And another frame of cells completed today. Moore has been making an unholy stench with his chemicals, and he drew a prodigious amount of electric power yesterday from the batteries.

-

	July 5.
	The packs for the expedition have been made up, and a definite schedule outlined. I will carry the transformer-converter, Long will carry the photo-cell racks, and Rice the set itself. Portable—but not too portable. In the last dash we will each carry four cylinders as well.

	Moore's stenches were worse than usual today. He refuses to reveal his aims.

-

	July 6.
	I was surprised today, and seriously sorry, to see Moore secretly swallowing something. I can scarcely believe that he has been our thief, yet the stores were tampered with last night most ingeniously, despite a trip-wire I had strung.

	We will start in four days now.

-

	July 7.
	I have been watching Moore, and today again he drew a tremendous amount of power to run a small furnace. While it was running he went off and again swallowed something. Tonight he pleaded sick, and did not eat. It attracted some attention, as he did not look sick, and when food is scarce, it is seldom refused.

	Moore presented the miners with several sticks of an explosive he assured them would work, but must be protected from extreme cold. It has resulted in saving fuel, since the saws are no longer needed so much.

-

	July 8.
	The photo-cell frames have been set in place today, five new racks of cells. Three were placed at the mine, and two here. The mine will get one more, and the furnaces one, before leaving. Over 2200 horsepower is available at the mine now, twenty-four hours a day during the daylight period. During the sleeping period all this power will be turned into the electrolyzer.

	Without the machines and explosives, I am afraid little mining could be done, as the men are greatly weakened.

-

	July 9.
	The final selection of the party has been made. Garner, Moore, Whisler, Reed and Bender will turn back after reaching and establishing the first cache, Tolman, Hughey, Kendall, and King will turn back at the second, while Rice, Long and I go on. Only poor Melville will be left behind altogether. We are turning in unusually early, for a long sleep. We start three hours after the sun leaves the horizon. Thermos bottles of hot chocolate have been fixed in the suits of Rice, Long and I. The others must go hungry altogether, though water is the greatest problem.

-

	July 10.
	We have stopped at the first cache. Garner, Moore, Whisler and Reed and Bender will return. The sun is up, casting long shadows over everything. We have covered a considerable distance I feel sure, so far with no accidents. We had to skirt several craters, and finally descended into this one. Tremendously high walls ring it, but Long showed us a pass. A second, smaller crater within it is the marker of our cache. By turns we have roasted and frozen all day, particularly on the pass, as it was largely shaded, which means cold here. The moon is a vast frozen hell. The crater tips flame in all directions like motionless, frozen tongues of fire, jagged and broken, a hell frozen in an awful cold, the very light frozen in the flames, where the sun touches them. We are ready to start.

-

	July 11.
	We are nearly exhausted for want of sleep, and from the continuous labor. It will be worse returning, with four days without sleep, and practically without food. Tolman, Hughey, Kendall and King have it even worse, I fear. They have just left us, to make their way back over all the distance we have come, with scarcely the chance of a rest, no food, and little water. They will not have slept for four days when they reach the Dome. Sleep for us in our suits.

	Later. Twelve hours sleep, a quarter of our chocolate, still warm, and now on our way. It is eternally magnificent, never beautiful. It is as magnificent as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado made six thousand miles wide, six thousand long, and ten miles deep, with ten times the color. But it isn't beautiful, it's stern and harsh, and horribly, bleakly dead. It makes me think of a skeleton lying in a cave, its skull crushed, and a stone ax beside it. It seems to have died violently. We are oppressively alone here.

	Time to go. Four oxygen tanks, besides the load we have carried, which was little. We are fresh from sleep now, to make the attempt!

-

	July 12.
	We have camped. The photo-cells are sending their power to the set correctly, and the converter-transformer is working smoothly. We cannot test the set, as our suit-sets won't pick up its wave. It seems to be okay however. Rice is sending the message. New York now.

	The Earth is immense above us, reddish-green in color, turning slowly, majestically as we watch. It looks wonderfully beautiful and familiar to us, and terribly far away.

	Later. Sending again. Chicago now, with all the power we can get. The aurora is small, so there is hope.

	Still sending. No lack of power, apparently. Let us hope some station receives this.

	Long has contributed a surprise. He produced a can of aluminum paint, and has selected a broad, flat spot on the rocks. He is painting a message in symbols ten feet high. Mt, Palomar could easily read it. But there are some 3,142,000 square miles of rock visible to Mt. Palomar.

	He has finished. "O2 from CaSO4 send food," he has written. No more paint.

	Denver now below—or above us. Telescopes show cities clearly, even some bigger buildings visible. Tremendous magnification possible, but light gathering power of our little telescopes limits it.

	California now. When it passes we can send only to Hawaii, the Philippines and Japan. Opportunities poor. We think it best to start back.

	Rice has produced another triumph. He had an electric clock device rigged that will keep the set transmitting toward Earth as long as the set operates. It is Sun-powered, of course. There is small motion across the skies, so there is no need to aim it carefully! The set, worked automatically, and powered by the photo-cells will continue to send a code message.

	We are leaving. Rice and Long object, but I have ordered them back. We will be exhausted when we get to the first cache, and tired men make for dead men. There are too many opportunities for falls into chasms.

-

	July 13.
	Back at the second cache with a spare tank of oxygen.

	We have decided to carry it; though it increases our load it may save us. We can move more slowly, and not force ourselves so heavily. Leaving at once.

-

	July 14.
	First cache. Exhausted. I wonder that Long ever made it the first time, despite his use of anti-fatigue capsules. Last chocolate gone. Terribly thirsty. Twenty-four hours more. Going on at once.

	Later. More than one hundred miles from the Dome, and Rice has had an accident. Fell into chasm. Miscalculated his leap, fell seventy feet, the rope joining us caught, held for a moment, and sawed through on some outcropping quartz crystals. Irony! Two weeks ago he was searching for them, today quartz hurled him another hundred feet and broke his leg. His arm is badly bruised I believe, but his face plate is unbroken. He has an extra oxygen tank, thank God. He is conscious—communicating by radio. Long will stay here, I am going on to the Dome.

	Reached the Dome. Very tired, but ate, and drank a little water, while Moore, still working with his brews, started out to the mine to get the men. I will have to lead them back. They are coming now. Dr. Hughey will go with us, though he can do little till we bring Rice in, and get his suit off.

	Taking ropes, block and tackle, extra oxygen.

	Five hours to get back to Rice. He is still conscious, but weak. His suit is uninjured. Poor Long had gone to sleep. Rice said he had been unable to keep awake. Too tired to stand, and as soon as he sat down he went to sleep. Rice couldn't sleep. The men have reached him, but cannot move him, as he is in pain. Dr. Hughey going down the ropes. He came prepared—brought a tank of CO2 as anesthetic. Hughey reached him, substituted CO2 for oxygen. His fatigue will keep him asleep now oxygen tank has been reattached.

	Long won't wake—just mutters and tries to brush us away. He will have to be carried. I'm afraid I would too if I hadn't been writing. Starting back at last.

-

	July IS.
	I fell asleep on the way back, and Kendall, King and Reed had to return and hunt for me. Carried .the last ten miles. I've slept nearly twenty hours. Still Sleepy.

-

	July 16.

	Half the day gone, and routine is at last restored. Rice's leg was not badly broken, and has been set and bound up. He is working at the photo-cells with us again, sitting before a low bench rigged on two chairs. Twenty cells turned out today. Gypsum pile diminishing rapidly. The water made by the heaters last "night" has all been broken down, and the fuel for the motor-generator at the mine has been regenerated. Oxygen tanks showing steady pressure gain.

	We wonder what success our trip had.

	(As the world knows, the trip was successful in the extreme. As the men realized, the work of subscribing to an apparently lost cause, that of rescuing men probably dead already, was going very slowly. So many scientists stated positively that it was impossible to secure air on the moon, that the people would not subscribe. The news-bureaus were broadcasting news continually, of the probable plight of the men, and there was much speculation as to whether the ship had crashed before landing, or when starting back to Earth, or whether it had wandered off into fathomless space with all aboard.

	The message did not get through complete, and even the fates seemed to be against the men, for the automatic transmitter failed after but a few hours operation. It was afterwards discovered (by the Thurston Expedition in 1994) that the intense heat of the sun's rays had melted the sealing compound of the transformers and caused a short circuit. The only parts of the message that did get through read: "Relief ——— crashed —— ox—en ——— gyp—m ———— electrolysis assures sup————— food sc— t—— help" As even this came only a few letters at a time, despite the fact that almost every amateur and professional operator was tuned to it after the messages started coming, it is understandable that a terrific debate began. It was almost impossible to determine where, in the message, the letters received belonged. Some maintained that the "ox" was part of some such word as "box", while others declared it was the far more important word "oxygen." For nearly a week the discussion went on as to the placing of the letters. Then finally the claim of James R. Caldwell, an amateur radio operator of Succasunna, N. J. was printed in the New York Herald-Tribune. He had made phonographic records of the messages as they came, and by careful timing, transcribed the words as "Relief (ship) crashed. Ox(yg)en—gyp(su)m (by) electrolysis assures supply. Food sc(an)t. Help."

	Immediately scientists who had stoutly maintained that air could not be obtained on Luna, rushed to his defense with explanations of how oxygen could be obtained from gypsum by baking and electrolysis, and that that would assure a supply.

	But long before this important point was settled, the rush of subscriptions had begun, because the men had sent a message of some sort, proving them alive. The interpretation of the message, and a very fine imaginative account of the hardships the men must have met to send the message, written by Thomas W. Hardy, of the San Francisco Times, and widely re-printed, sent the subscriptions up rapidly. Within two weeks of the receipt of the message, orders that had already been filed, were being filled, workmen donated their time, Universities their instruments and laboratories. The work, terrific though it was, was being rushed ahead at maximum speed.

	A telescope manufacturing corporation in Chicago sent one of the largest donations, explaining that the tremendous increase in sales made them feel it only right. Everyone was watching the moon.

	Then Mount Palomar, Flagstaff, and Sydney Observatories announced the discovery and confirmation of the sign on the moon almost simultaneously. A photograph taken at Mt. Palomar even showed the tiny, square point of the radio set! The oxygen from gypsum was confirmed. The excitement was world-wide, and the works in the Mojave Desert, California, were besieged. Daily bulletins of progress were published in papers. And, more important, the necessary funds were collected. The amount was passed, by thousands of dollars, before the subscriptions could be stopped. These extra funds permitted the building of the famous detachable tanks, the fuel tanks that were dropped shortly after leaving the Earth's atmosphere, or better, blasted away, leaving a great amount of weight behind.)

-

	July 17.
	Moore has been thrown out of the Dome. He has retired in disgrace to the privacy of the battery-house. His fumes became terrible, and tonight the men rebelled, particularly as he will not say what he is doing.

	More cells made today, and another bank installed at the furnaces. The batteries fully recharged now, and the heater-tanks refilled. At the mine, their tanks are full, and they demand more. Two were shipped down, after being cut from the dome. They are being mounted permanently at the mine, and King contributed several hundred gallons of water. Rice is sadly flat on his back, but was finally put in a suit, at his and the miner's insistence, and is directing the work on the second tractruck. Tonight they will have full power, and even search-lights. It is a race against time now. The food supplies are dwindling. Rations are so low now, that it is impossible to cut them while the men work.

	King is running all his furnaces for de-hydrating the gypsum during the work period, and doing very little electrolyzing. During the sleep-period, since the furnaces must be shut down, he turns all the power into several big electrolysis tanks. It means a few hundred pounds of oxygen each lunar day.

	It is surprising the interest we take in these things. Each group inquires at night what progress has been made, and bantering rivalry masks a deep interest and sympathy with the problems arising.

-

	July 18.
	The sun is sinking now, and the cell-frames have been moved so that no shadows will strike them till the last possible minute. Another frame of cells will be filled tomorrow.

	Under Rice's able direction the second tractruck has been converted to hydrogen operation, and a second generator mounted. Trials showed perfect operation.

	The air in the Dome is better since Moore moved out.

	Further inroads on the supplies. The thief must be storing them; no man could eat so much, it seems to me. Nearly three pounds of chocolate gone.

	But I found in reinventory that I had made a mistake. We have fifteen pounds more dried milk somehow mislabeled "soap powder." A very welcome surprise.

-

	July 19.
	Another cell bank mounted at the furnaces, though the miners claimed they needed it to fill their big tanks. They already have enough fuel to operate both engines all night, since the machines were partially shut down most of the lunar morning.

	Rice blasted Moore this evening, with a torrent of anger. Rice's nicely charged cells had been drawn upon again, and had to be re-connected to the charge line. It seems Moore needs more power than the charge-current allows him. He wants some more carbides, and promises explosive in exchange.

-

	July 20.
	Rice's batteries charged again, and King reports great progress. The water tanks are completely filled on the North side. The oxygen tanks on that side are three-quarters full, and the oxygen tanks on the South side, which had been emptied, are now half full of hydrogen.

	Rice has given as his expert opinion that if Moore persists in drawing on the batteries at night, they will be so discharged as to endanger our lighting. Without light we should be distinctly unhappy. Several of the men are studying different lines nights now, to "give their minds some stretching" as they say. Their bodies get sufficient, I imagine. The labor in the mine is lightened, but by no means light for men in their condition of semi-starvation.

-

	July 21.
	Another trip to the silver mine. Also another bank of cells arranged. The furnaces got this, since it is really too late in the day to help the mine any, and their tanks are nearly full anyway.

	Moore turned out a gray powder today. Explosive, he claimed. Finished the process on a rock outside the battery house, after shading and cooling the rock. He carried it to the mine himself. It was super-successful. It pulverized the gypsum for five feet around, and cracked it for many more. Miners say ii is useless to them as it is uncontrollable.

-

	July 22.
	Melville has started a new entertainment for the evenings. He is giving a short course in astro-physics. The sun is exceedingly low now, and tomorrow at about five p.m. sets. The stars are visible now, of course, as they are at all times, but tomorrow he will give demonstrations.

	King will follow his course, with a course on mineralogy and geology. Moore on Chemistry. I on Physics.

	Moore turned out another batch of explosives. Commandeered some of Dr. Hughey's gelatine capsules, and filled them. Detonated electrically they worked fairly well, a super-powerful explosive that works here on the airless moon and cracks the gypsum to fragments. Moorite he calls it, and we agree. Di-nitro-acetalide and a certain catalyst. The catalyst is his secret, and absolutely necessary.

	He will need a power board himself now, to manufacture the stuff! The Lunar Power Company (unofficial title of our group) is being over-worked. The Lunar Mining Company, Satellite Smelting and Reduction and now the newly organized Interplanetary Explosives all demand more and bigger power boards! Temporarily both Smelting and Mining will have to sacrifice power to the explosives. King claims Mining gets the benefits, and should make the sacrifice.

-

	July 23.
	No power now. The burners are on, working effectively. Melville gave an excellent lecture tonight, interesting to all.

	The entire smelting crew will join us tomorrow in making cells.

-

	July 24.
	The two power plants at the mine permit continued work at full force. Fuel will readily last till dawn.

	Moore is working at something else now, he says. Has apparatus to turn out his explosive all set up. Will require 400 horse continuously day and night tomorrow, to make less than one pound of explosive a day!

	Unprecedented number of cells made today, a total of forty-two.

-

	July 25.
	Fifty-four cells today! At the present rate neither mining nor smelling will lose power to the explosives.

	The thief had given us a rest, but last night stole four pounds of fats, principally lard and hydrogenated cottonseed oil. He apparently has hesitated over my arrangements, but figured out a successful system to elude them.

	Conversation tonight centered about the message sent to Earth. We wonder if it was successful?

-

	July 26.
	Fifty-five cells, apparently, is the maximum number we can make. A trip to the selenide mine brought in a considerable quantity of material. The men have settled down, and know the work now.

	Moore demanded a supply of carbides and nitrides and also sulphides if possible. He has been reducing sulphur from the gypsum, a difficult and power-consuming process. King knows of a sulphide bed.

	Moore is working on something other than explosives, but refuses to say what. Admits the malodorous compounds he made were not explosives, but goes no further. Considerable curiosity. A mystery, no matter how slight, is a matter of comment. The food thief has been privately figured out by everyone here, though no accusations have been made, I am thankful to say.

-

	July 27.
	Food stock inventory taken today. The result is rather disappointing. Due to the fact that all of the men are working heavily, an absolute minimum ration was one and one-half pounds of food per day per man. If we could lighten the labor somewhat and make machines, deriving their energy from the sun, do it, we would be able to conserve our food. As it is the men are terribly underfed.

	(Although Duncan does not mention it in his diary, the miners and the smelters, during the daylight periods, received twenty-four ounces of food, while the photo-cell workers, with the exception of Melville and Rice, received but 20 ounces.)

	We have enough food to last till October first at the present rations.

	I am working on the possibility of a cableway. I am afraid it is impossible, though most of the men's work now consists in dragging the heavily loaded carts to the Dome. It was suggested that work might be saved if only the oxygen were carried here instead of the heavy calcium sulphate, that is carry on reduction at the mine. It is not practicable, as the heavy tanks needed to convey the oxygen more than offset the gain.

-

	July 28.
	Moore has been observed by several of the men eating something in a surreptitious manner. They want to accuse him. I am convinced that the thief is storing his stolen food, and Moore, although he does appear to be eating, may merely be chewing something. Bender in particular insists he be accused.

-

	July 29.
	Fifty-six cells. We will have a great increase of power tomorrow.

	The lights failed this evening, and Rice succeeded in repairing them with Bender's help. One cell had gone completely to pieces, and broken the circuit. The sensations of sitting in the eerie dark, lit only by a slight glow from the hydrogen burners convinced us that we cannot get along without our batteries.

	Moore lectured on chemistry tonight. I was greatly interested, particularly on his talk on the chemistry of digestion. It makes me curious, and if my guess is right, I feel heartily ashamed of my suspicions.

-

	July 30.
	The lights failed again tonight. Rice says that next night they will not work. The cells are terribly weakened, and he insists that Moore's work during last day did much to hasten their dissolution. He is working on something to replace them. Making an attempt to construct a steam engine! His only materials are oxygen tanks cut off for cylinders, and food cans, braced with metal for pistons. If it works, Rice is a genius. But I admire the man's determination. He has drawn up, with my help, a diagram of a three cylinder wabble-plate engine. It is a known, but little-used type—but the crank problem, hardest of all, Rice says is eliminated.

-

	July 31.
	Rice working on his engine. Only fifty cells today.

	The lights are yellowish already. I fear that before dawn they will be useless.

	A vial of vitamine concentrate stolen from the food lockers. The man is certainly storing food. Vitamines are being supplied and the concentrate is neither tasty nor filling. The men are distinctly enraged over this systematic thieving.

	Dr. Garner's forty-second birthday, and celebrated with a large issue of alcohol.

-

	August 1.
	Lights failed twice during the day, and once after the miners returned. The filaments are distinctly orange, and the voltage has dropped from 100 to 85. Rice spent the day on his engine, with interruptions to fix the batteries, and install some sort of a circuit breaker, though Lord knows the current the cells will give is little enough. We have to use suit batteries to test the photo-cells now.

	I lectured tonight on modern conceptions of space and time.

-

	August 2.
	I understand now why Rice installed the circuit breakers. Somehow a cell blew up, and short circuited the line. Before Rice could repair it, only twenty-one cells were left in working condition. The others had been wholly destroyed. The filaments will scarcely glow at all. Moore made a gas mantle for us, and with three of these over hydrogen flames, we get some little illumination. Only twenty-two photo-cells today.

	August 3.
	The Dome is very weakly lighted, and practically no work can be accomplished. But twelve cells today, and the men went to work at the mines. I am helping Rice with his engine. My admiration for the man grows! It may work. I only hope so! It was most depressing tonight, in the faint light, the eternal night outside, and that terrible, frozen hell of jagged, black rock under unwinking stars that seem somehow more remote and unfriendly, than Earth's.

	The thief took advantage of the darkness. My new burglar trap was avoided with amazing skill, and ten pounds of protein-flour taken, but five had to be left behind, to avoid the trap. It did some good anyhow.

-

	August 4.
	Dark, flickering shadows. We cannot use more mantles, as they require the oxygen of six men, give little light, and the water is recovered in only a very small proportion.

	No photo-cells today. I sat up and watched the storerooms for three hours, but could not remain awake longer. No food was taken.

-

	August 5.
	The suit batteries are giving out now. The men complain their batteries will not stay charged. They are being used in relays, charged from the generator for half a day, used the other half. Eventually we will be forced to stop work at night.

	No lectures. It is too unpleasant sitting in the dark after all day in the dark. It is amazing the effect light has on us.

-

	August 6.
	Sunlight! The cells are all set up, the various machines humming, and power flowing in. The furnaces are going full force. The sun is life itself to us!

	Rice's engine is progressing. I am becoming more and more hopeful, and the men also, though they still kid Rice about it. It is a sorry looking piece of apparatus, with tin cans and oxygen tanks, pipes for valve cylinders, and welded cables stiffened into a solid framework for support.

	Twenty-three cells made today. Moore is at work on his explosives and has the process almost entirely automatic. King brought nearly three hundred pounds of sulphide ore for him.

-

	August 7.
	I have set a trap that will work eventually. We can wait now for our food thief, inasmuch as he is storing it! I hope he returns!

	Moore's explosive in action. It has doubled the mine production, and King and Reed are hard put to even keep up. They have enlisted Bender to aid them and their crew of two, Tolman and Whisler, to aid in constructing a new furnace. They demand power.

-

	August 8.
	New furnace completed, and power in demand. I have advised storing water, and electrolyzing none till power equipment is made. Moore's explosive wonderfully efficient. We cannot realize its power here. I believe it will astound Earth. A tiny capsule breaks the rock so finely that little or no crushing need be done for the furnaces.

	The thief has returned. He has stolen my bait. We need only wait, and let nature take her well-known course.

	The men have openly accused Moore, Bender making the accusation as spokesman. But four men backed him, however. Moore smiled at the accusation, and refused to explain his eating beyond saying he was chewing some chemicals. I believe him right, and my guess becomes an hypothesis.

-

	August 9. 
	Engine being assembled. It is a weird thing! I wonder if it will work for more than a turn or two, despite the marvelous skill Rice has shown in working with it. He welded a piston ring about each can, after building up the inside with silver plating. The inside of the oxygen tanks were similarly treated.

	Another bank of photo-cells built, and set up. Our clockwork that keeps the cells facing the sun is overloaded. Rice to the rescue—with an electric torque amplifier. I believe that Rice is an assumed name. The man must certainly be an inventor of note, else necessity is a mother like unto a termite queen, laying her egg each second.

-

	August 10.
	Moore deathly sick tonight. He barely succeeded in attracting our attention. Dr. Hughey gave him an emetic, and he seems better. My bait contained an emetic. Now was Moore the thief, and was he made sick by that? I doubt it. My hypothesis advanced to a theory, though hope does not rise.

	Explosive making entirely automatic, and Moore works practically all day on his experiments. But one-half pound of explosive used each day. There will be a generous supply tonight, for one pound a day turned out. It is amazing what man can do in the face of such an environment. Engine largely assembled. Tests tomorrow.

-

	August 11.
	The critics were dumbfounded today. I include myself. Rice's engine was the event of the evening. It is really an internal combustion engine of a sort, as the hydrogen flame which runs it burns in the water of the boiler. It is 100% efficient thus far, and the real test came when the pressure mounted. We all expected a terrible creaking and groaning and hissing of escaping steam. It ran with the smoothness of a sixteen-cylinder automobile, with scarcely a quiver, and without more than a faint hiss of valving steam. It develops nearly twenty horsepower.

	Another cell bank installed, for the furnaces. The mines demand more power, and get the next. Moore now has sufficient power.

-

	August 12.
	Engine placed, and set up complete with dynamo, a converted motor, in the battery house. The batteries will still be used, with some alterations and repairs, to level out line surges, Rice says, as they might well be serious. Also, in case of temporary breakdowns, exceedingly convenient.

	Miners maintain they haven't sufficient power stored to last the night. Reed claims they don't need as much, with Moore's explosive. The explosive is being delivered now in cartridges of lead. It can be pounded, burned, will not explode; will explode when wet, if the proper stimulus is given. Wonderful stuff.

	However, more power for miners tomorrow.

-

	August 13.
	The thief returned, and Moore was subject to another attack, particularly as he has been eating little at the tables recently, saying he is sick, and yet is not losing strength. I am still waiting for the proof I need. I feel convinced Moore is not our thief.

	Power board installed at the mine. New cell bank also, amid rejoicing. Some power is now always going into electrolyzers. A new electrolyzer was needed as well, which Rice made. His generator set is complete, and on a ten hour test today, worked perfectly.

	Another load of silver brought in, three sledges of it. Should last all night. Our photo-cell market is approaching saturation, however. Mine needs no more power, Moore has enough, he says, but may want more later. This interests me.

	Only the furnaces still demand more. The miners, with explosives and machines, are getting well ahead of them.

-

	August 14.
	Miners again complained of suit batteries. Rice has been working on them today, repairing them for the work tonight. They are the Renolds-Wirth type of dry storage battery, most suitable for work where they may be turned upside down. Tremendous hydraulic pressure needed to make them, which Rice cannot supply, and therefore they cannot be duplicated. Night work may have to be stopped. This would be exceedingly serious.

	Oxygen supplies on hand for three months now, water for five (convertible to oxygen, of course) and the oxy-hydrogen supplies for heating and running Rice's engine.

	Moore asks for very large supplies of carbides and nitrides. Also suggests continued building of photo-cells as "power may be needed later for new processes." I become hopeful.

-

	August 15.
	Miners ending open cut work, and constructing a tunnel. Plentiful supplies of cement on hand now. They want to make an airtight tunnel that can be heated at night, avoiding use of defective batteries. Walls of tunnel could be completely coated with cement, and an atmosphere of pure oxygen at three pounds pressure used. Leakage would be small, work faster because of removal of hampering suits. Water needed for making cement, however. Open discussion, all miners in favor, suggest a small furnace and recovery plant at opening of mine, to supply this water, and save double haulage.

	Batteries for suits in hopeless condition, Rice agrees, and votes favorably. I am for it. Garner against, as he says danger of an explosion opening a rift into space, and letting atmosphere escape is too great. Miners promise locks and bulkheads. More argument tomorrow night. It means new demand for power. Miners will have to stop work tonight, due to bad batteries.

-

	August 16.
	Tunneling plan accepted at last. Preparations under way now, with Reed and King working at new furnace and still. Demand for at least 1000 horsepower. Fortunate that we have plenty of metal from the ship!

	Sunset in three days. I made two trips to the silver mine, and returned almost exhausted. Pains and swelling in my limbs. Dr. Hughey diagnosed it as over-exertion and underfeeding. I doubt it, myself, as all of the men are under those conditions continually, particularly the miners.

-

	August 17.
	Furnaces completed at the mine, and cementing begun. Very difficult work under space conditions, but finally a close-grained cement was achieved, and a doorway fashioned. The space-door escape for the ship has been installed at the mouth of the tunnel. Air purifying apparatus is being made by the two mechanics and the two chemists. Other work partially halted. The entire apparatus will be made of silver and fused quartz, as these materials are most easily obtained. It seems peculiar that the vast iron beds we discovered are worthless because of silver beds nearer, which can be worked more readily. Silver is cheaper than iron!

	Three men made the trip with me to the silver mine, and we brought back nearly six tons of "jewelry ore." But fifteen photo-cells made today.

-

	August 18.
	After a series of experiments, Dr. Garner, whose experience with rocket explosives has taught him much, has made a table of strengths for Moore's new explosive under space and air conditions. Exploded in space, it is of course, soundless. In air it's explosion is so infinitely sharp and sudden, that the effect is peculiar, but one explosion wave reaching the ear, and the echoes producing all other sound, the result being a dull rumble that continues for some time in the dome.

	Door set at the mine, electrolysis apparatus and air cleaner arranged, and the first tunnel section charged with air. A heater was also installed, and for the first time the men took off their suits outside the Dome. Air loss trivial, and working conditions highly satisfactory. The tunnel was at once lined with concrete, and a lock built, and pumps installed. Three pounds pressure of oxygen feels just as the Dome atmosphere of fifteen pounds of mixed oxygen and nitrogen, once one is accustomed to it.

-

	August 19.
	Work resumed on routine now, production at the mine slightly increased. Miners feel much better at night, say the work far easier, since their limbs are not hampered by the suits.

	Demanding power for daylight work. They will run on the tanks tonight. They will be handicapped, since one of their oxygen and one hydrogen tank must be used for heating and breathing. "Less power tonight, but the explosive will help.

-

	August 20.
	Night again. This barren world is most awesome at sunrise and sunset. The great globe of the sun is harsh blue, and takes an hour to sink through its own diameter, behind the near horizon. Meanwhile the indescribably jagged, rugged country, with it's million craters, and it's billion spires of rock, is set off like a world made of burning candles. Each spire-peak is blazing in the sunlight, each base is black with the night of space. And frozen, unwinking stars illuminate them dimly.

	Heaters on now. Miners report the mine comfortable still. They are aiming downward, hoping to reach a level of stable temperatures in the rocks, where night and day do not effect it.

	The furnaces are deserted, and their forces have joined the photo-cell makers. Thirty-seven cells today.

-

	August 21.
	Sixty cells today. Miners overjoyed with new conditions, and report rapid progress. A new bulkhead has been erected. A cableway has been installed in the mine, hauling the loaded trucks back and forth, from the working level, to the lock, out to the roadway. The bulkhead doors are plates taken from the ship. There are but five left now.

	Moore extremely, but not dangerously ill. His stomach was terribly upset, and he vomited for several hours intermittently. I feel sure I know what he is doing, and the man is a hero. Unfortunately the moon supplies no guinea Pigs-

-

	August 22.
	Sixty new cells. At this rate we will readily supply the mine.

	The miners are beginning to feel the pinch of the lessened power. It has been decided to take down two of the big tanks from the Dome, and give them the needed power. The men are certainly doing their utmost for the group.

	Rice's engine and generator are working perfectly. It requires some ten minutes to start it in the morning, but in the meantime the batteries can carry the load. One light burns all night, instead of the former eight. I am expecting the thief.

-

	August 23.
	Expectations fulfilled. He stole four pounds of dried egg.

	Another sixty cells. The miners, and everyone else, took the tanks down to the mine today, and both engines are running. The place is well lighted, and the smooth, concrete walls, gentle incline, and mild temperature makes one homesick. It seems so entirely mundane, so like the entrance to a moving walk, that it is almost impossible to realize it is the Moon we are under instead of Earth. The gravity to us seems normal.

	The new mine seems so deserving of a name we have decided to call it Times Square, as Kendall insists the passage exactly resembles that at Times Square.

-

	August 24.
	Times Square's main corridor has-been branched, and while one tube slopes sharply down, and to the right, the other bends left, and continues level. Thus the party is separated into two groups, and a single calamity will not be so apt to kill all. It is safer. A bulkhead was installed in each corridor immediately after the separation.

	Sixty more cells. And Moore came in tonight slightly drunk, and with a breath that almost caused us to put him out. But it didn't smell of alcohol. It smelled like nothing so much as chocolate! Moore does not talk, when drunk it seems. He only repeated, "Jush one li'l glassh." If he's right, and I suspect he is, from the look of wonder on his face as he says it, it's potent I wish he would talk.

-

	August 25.
	Moore presented the camp with a 500 c.c. breaker of a nauseous looking liquid that smelled like chocolate, with something else. He measured out ten c.c. to each of us, and explained it was a concoction that he had stumbled on, and that this was the cause of yesterday's downfall. It tasted horrible, but did not burn the throat. In thirty seconds I felt ready to carry the Dome over to the mine and save the Miners' work. Apparently the others did also.

	I hope Moore discovers a less wonderful but more practical decoction.

	Sixty cells again today. We are all practiced now. Rice's engine working smoothly, and the light makes us much happier. It is very slightly subject to fluctuations, but quite steady.

-

	August 26.
	King and Reed have a new job on hand. They are making an apparatus for constructing bulkhead doors. A regular smelting furnace will be used, and silver metal cast in the needed form. Oxygen consumed in some quantity, but that must be borne, as the bulkheads are needed. Four more, at least. After that, bulkhead doors will be moved from points no longer endangered, to the working zone.

	Sixty-two cells. Half the power banks will be installed at the mine, and half at the furnaces. No smelting can be done before daylight, of course. The selenic acid formed when the silver is reduced is being used in the electrolysis vats as an electrolyte. We use everything now.

	To Whisler's delight, he is permitted to use the electric stove again, which is much more readily controlled, and with which he has worked now for more than two years. Rice's engine gives plenty of power. For our purposes the apparatus is 100% efficient. What energy is not converted to electricity becomes heat, and we use the heaters that much less. 

-

	August 27.
	Sixty-one cells. Rice, Bender and the miners are working to move the mine generator plants, the tractruck engines and dynamos, into the mine. It will conserve fuel. This was my suggestion, after considering that last statement of last night. Heretofore they have been outside, and heat was lost as radiation.

	Gypsum is being brought out at a far greater rate than ever before, for the lighting is less given to black, dangerous shadows and brilliant spots. The explosive too, is more effective in air, and gives off no noxious fumes.

-

	August 28.
	Moore has made a request for Platinum! Poor old Luna is stumped, I fear. She has been unfailingly generous with her scanty wealth, so far, but platinum is so heavy that she is not likely to possess any. King and Reed will be sent out on exploration.

	They were gone all day, with the result that we made only fifty-four cells.

	Whisler's birthday, and Moore turned up tonight with a modification of his famous J.O.L.G. (Just One Li'1 Glass). It was smoky rose colored, with an odor of chocolate, and a strong lemon flavour. It was as stimulating as ever. Moore forbade all alcohol as they would react. Whisler appreciated the honor done him, and received fifteen c.c. of the liquid. Later he must have felt fifteen c.c. too little (it looks so tiny) and had a glass. I had to cook tonight.

-

	August 29.
	Rice's engine shut off for half an hour tonight for an examination for wear. The batteries could not carry the lighting load for even that time, and only one dim light over the engine remained. The machine showed no wear whatsoever, and continued to function smoothly when restarted.

	Our clothes, of which we could not bring an excess, are beginning to wear out. Unfortunately, as I am bigger than any of the other men, I have not been able to get any substitutes.

	Garner has a few things that poor Morrison never got a chance to wear out. No serious problem, however, as we scarcely need clothes, save space suits, and those are equipped with plenty of patching and repairing materials. The miners show most wear.

	No platinum reported. Only fifty-five cells.

-

	August 30.
	I paid a visit to the mine today. I honestly envy the miners. The tunnels are smoothly walled with fine-grained concrete, and now Moore is turning out a rubber-like paint which makes them absolutely air-tight. They are faintly grey-white, and brightly lighted by lights strung along the roof. Little cars, rolling on small wheels, and pulled by cables, run up and down the corridors, dragged by the cable-way. The bulkhead doors work efficiently, and easily. The end of the working, the jagged, grey gypsum, alone leaks air slightly, but only slightly, as it is fairly solid rock. Tiny capsules are used now that merely break off some fifty pounds at a time. They are not dangerous, and the work proceeds rapidly.

	One corridor, as I said, slants down, to the right. The angle is rather steep, and lines in the cement permits easy traction. The other group, working in the left tunnel, have widened their tunnel to a large room, and are putting in concrete pillars. In here the two generators have been installed, and the main powerboard. Several slabs of gypsum have been sawed out to form benches and even chairs, surprisingly comfortable, rounded out by careful sawing. Rice constructed a small stove for them, and they have been getting coffee, and serving hot coffee occasionally. The men are in much better spirits since they went underground.

	Little or no heat is required from the burners now in this section, as the engines supply plenty. The condensers act as mufflers, and there is practically no noise, save a steady hum. The engines have been wiped and polished till they shine, and the rough parts painted. The fuel gas and oxygen tanks have been left above, as they could not be brought through the tunnel, but holes were drilled directly through the rock, to the tanks, and pipes lead down. The electrolyzer for the mines is also down here. I was much interested, and greatly intrigued. Some of the men want to carve the walls, while they are at it. Moore has offered colored paints, instead.

	The room is almost finished, rectangular in shape, and but one corner remains to be completed. When this is done, both gangs will again work on the same tunnel, driving downward. The gypsum mass is immense.

-

	August 31.
	Fifty-two cells today, and King finally found a platinum supply. But it is hard to get, a few small nuggets of platinum, osmium, iridium and paladium combined. He brought back about six pounds (earth pounds) of the nuggets, and Moore will have to separate it. The task is terrific, as the metals are almost absolutely insoluble. Moore and Tolman are both working on it.

-

	September 1.
	Sunlight in two days. Reed says he'll need it, as the gypsum pile is growing apace. Demands two thirds of the power units, on the basis that the miners work twice as long as he can. The miners have a contract from us, however, which they insisted on earlier, and I realize, as does Reed, that their claims are just.

	Sixty-three cells today. Moore working on separation. He has all the acids he needs, fortunately, but the task is not easy. I wonder what he wants the platinum catalyzer for. I noticed that his wedding ring was missing, some days ago. That was platinum. He must consider it important.

-

	September 2. 
	Our thief was at work again, and got away with a supply of coffee extract.

	Sixty-one cells. Sunlight tomorrow, so the morning, before sunrise, will be spent in placing them in banks. Moore has asked for two banks, from the miners. Though the miners need the power he has been given them for his excellent service in their behalf.

-

	September 3.
	Daylight. Both mines and furnaces opened with a roar today. The exhausted fuel tanks at the mines are filling rapidly, and our fuel tanks here are filling. The engine gets a rest, and Rice is going over it carefully. There is a vast supply of gypsum on hand, but a new furnace has been constructed, and the pile is diminishing rapidly.

	But—so is the food. We have enough for only two weeks more at the present level, but the rations are being cut, beginning today. We all feel the familiar burning in our stomachs tonight. But one pound of food per man today.

-

	September 4.
	Power flowing in rapidly now. Men complaining about making more cells, as they say we will no longer have use for greater power. I could only reply that more power meant less work. Moore has privately asked me to supply power in quantity soon. Asked today for more mineral supplies.

	Visited the mine during daylight. Cool and comfortable, particularly in the lower levels. Even the upper, lounging room is cool enough, since it is nearly two hundred feet under the surface, and the surface is largely pumice stone. A steady breeze is maintained from the lower levels.

	Upper room complete now, and lower tunnel nearly five hundred feet below the surface of the cliff, three hundred beneath upper room. It has been driven rapidly, and rather narrow. It descends quite sharply. Today a new branch was started, going toward the heart of the cliff, on a level. A small platform-room, with level floor, was made, and the tunnel turns off, while the main tunnel continues straight. Bulkhead doors rather far between.

-

	September 5.
	Miners in particular complain of growing weakness, and pain in limbs.

	I am working in the mine for a while now, while Kendall takes a rest. It is very heavy labor, particularly moving the stubborn carts back to the Dome. The road is smooth now, but not too level. Fortunately the mine is on a higher level than the Dome, and the downhill track is loaded, the uphill pull, empty.

	The lower branching tunnel is being driven straight in. Long, who has been a civil and mining engineer among other things, is in command of the mining groups. He wanted me to take charge when I came, but he knows the plans, and finally agreed to continue. He explained that he hopes to make a large room so far down here that night and day will make no difference. That heating will be unnecessary. Then he plans to move the engines once more, and bring them down here. He even suggests moving the camp here. But not too hopefully, for the great load of oxygen tanks, water tanks, and other apparatus is beyond our strength. My limbs are very sore tonight.

-

	September 6.
	My theory was right! At last Moore has talked. He presented Whisler with a 500 c.c. beaker of a peculiar smelling liquid, rather thick, and tarry in appearance, and told him to put it, with one can of peas or some similar vegetable, into a pan with sufficient water to make soup for all, and season it heavily. Whisler did as ordered. The odor was rather awful, the taste nothing to boast of. But within ten minutes of eating we seemed to feel new strength coming back. Moore explained that the stuff was a synthetic protein and fat mixture, exceedingly nutritious, mixed with some of the stimulant stuff he compounded before by accident. However, it requires tremendous power to make the stuff, and needs cells. He will be unable to make any at night, for we cannot, supply enough power then.

	He is working on flavor now. Admittedly the flavor is very bad. It has no vitamin content, and our vitamin concentrate is almost exhausted.

	He requires enormous power, since he must use acetylene as the base of his synthesis. This he makes from his natural carbides, but there are a number of complex reactions, all taking power, after that. To get sufficient to make his product for thirteen men, two meals a day, will require far more power than we can readily supply at once, and we have an immediate need for the food. Fortunately we can reduce on the production of water and oxygen temporarily, and turn Reed's power over to Moore and Tolman.

-

	September 7.
	Again today the food supply was generously helped out by a portion of the sticky, tarry liquid Moore is producing. We are all helping Moore set up the complicated apparatus he needs—and also mining our food supplies! Food and air from the rocks! Man has conquered this frozen hell, and is living off the most inhospitable territory ever touched. I believe that with men like these we could have wrested a living from cold, frozen Pluto itself!

	Already we feel new strength. The almost pre-digested protein material that Moore made up flows into the blood stream almost as quickly as water, and the small portion of stimulant added raised our spirits.

	The flavor is still vile. Whisler is cloaking it as best he can with tremendous quantities of clove, onion-flavor extract, pepper and celery-seed. But we who have so recently felt our limbs bloating and aching horribly from over-exertion and under-eating can forgive the flavor as we feel the new strength!

	The mine is at present almost deserted, everyone helping Moore and Tolman. Enormous retorts of fused quartz must be made, and the Dome is stiflingly hot now, for the sun is beating down on it and enormous oxy-hydrogen flames are needed to fuse the refractory quartz. It is fortunate we have so huge a reserve of hydrogen!

-

	September 8.
	Last of Moore's already-prepared supply of food-stuff gone, but the new apparatus has begun functioning, and by the day after tomorrow a plentiful, steady supply will be coming in. Moore has three distinct chains of apparatus: one synthesizes carbohydrates, simple sugars, the second modifies part of this product to proteins, and the third makes fats.

	Photo-cells in even greater demand than before now, and as the construction work has been finished, the men will start work on new cells for the furnaces.

	I have not stated that the food-making apparatus— since the tiny battery-house was too small, and the Dome already crowded—has been set up in the great lounging room, as Long calls his upper cavern. It will be moved later to a deeper level.

-

	September 9.
	Work on photo-cells today, both the furnace crew and our regular crew, and we turned out sixty-nine cells! We are all feeling more cheerful, I believe. The great racks of photo-cells that have stood just beyond the dome, are stripped to a bare few that are used mainly for cooking, and a little electrolyzing. Moore needed nearly all. They have been carried down, and are now set up near the mine.

	Moore brought up some carbohydrate material, already made. Glucose. We had sweetened coffee again, and the glucose was clear, clean, and crystalline. It had no flavor save sweetness. Protein and fat processes are slower; they will be ready tomorrow, however. Our natural food supplies are down to a few pounds of flour, a little bacon, a keg of cottonseed oil, and six tubes of vitamin concentrate. One small can of dried egg, half used, and a third of a can of dried milk also left.

-

	September 10.
	Soup tonight, rich, and highly spiced. Whisler found a can of sage, and that stuff would drown any flavor. This food is certainly highly nourishing. We are all gaining weight again, with astounding rapidity. Dr. Hughey says that is because of the extreme digestibility of the foods.

	Moore has made an astounding proposal. He wants all our old, worn-out clothes! He says he will make them into bread. As they are nearly all cotton or linen, cellulose products, starch will be easy. That is an original use for old clothes. I have heard of men who were forced to eat their clothes, shoes, sleeping bags etc., but not in the form of bread!

	Seventy cells today, and a new power bank!

-

	September 11.
	The food-liquid has been vastly improved. It is a milky fluid now, and almost odorless and tasteless, only a slight acrid taste, something like lemon. The first of our old clothes are back, in the form of a starch that made the soup thicker, and less watery looking. Whisler produced a "vegetable" dye, and colored it red. The menu announced it as puree of tomato! It didn't taste like it, but it was good, we all agreed.

	Plenty to eat again, and we all feel better. The knowledge that we have an inexhaustible supply of food, water and air is tremendously heartening. If it takes a year to build the relief ship, we will be comfortable.

	Seventy-one cells today, and another completed power-bank. The fuel for the light-engine completely hydrolyzed, and the mining engine fuel prepared.

	Moore reports that he will have enough food to carry us over the night.

-

THE FIGHT FOR FOOD

	September 12.
	Another completed bank of cells today, and all the oxygen apparatus operating now. The gypsum pile is getting ahead of the furnace crew. The miners have driven their tunnel in, and are now carving out the great lower chamber. It will be thirty feet high, or I should say, low, since they are cutting downward. It is to be one hundred feet long, and sixty feet wide. A second tunnel is being driven that will meet the floor level of the completed room. A larger reducing furnace has been set up at the mine, to supply them with the oxygen they need to maintain pressure in the constantly enlarging tunnel system. Several empty tanks from the Dome are to be moved up there soon.

	I am beginning to wonder if Long is not insidiously getting his way! The food plant, the mining, the reduction apparatus, tanks—in the end everything may be moved there, and with no loss, either. The temperature in the lower rocks is constant, and about equal to that of Earth. The tremendous influx of heat during the day is about equaled by the efflux at night, and through the many layers of rock becomes equalized.

-

	September 13.
	I am drawing entirely from one oxygen tank, and pouring the incoming gas into another partly filled. Long wants another tank, and it has been decided finally that we will move to the mine! The empty tanks are heavy, but our strength is almost completely returned now, and with winches we can handle them. They are being placed in a pumice-stone house built in the shade of the cliff. Motors, valves, many other things are being moved. A general exodus is in progress. The new photo-cells are being installed above the mine, and Reed has built four new furnaces for reduction of gypsum.

	The great room has not been finished as yet, but thanks to the removal of the necessity for carting the material outside, much faster work is being done.

-

	September 14.
	Another bank of cells, and today the great room was roughly hewn out altogether. The saws are at work, and the concrete pillars, reinforced with silver bars made from our mine, are being put up. The entire surface is to be smoothed over with concrete. Power in plenty now, since no more heating is needed. Rice's engine has been moved up here, ready to be put in place. A second, smaller room will be hollowed out to hold all the engines. Since the mining must be done anyway, a third room will be prepared for the chemical synthesis room.

-

	September 15.
	Last needed batch of photo-cells prepared, and a final bank installed at the mine. The batteries have been left at the Dome, and we are still sleeping there. By night we will move in. Everyone working at the Castle, as we now call it. The room has been cemented, and painted with two heavy coats of Moore's rubbery paint. Lights are in place, and bunks of concrete set up, waiting mattresses and blankets from the Dome.

	A small alcove to one side, with the electric stove, is the kitchen. Greater room and comfort very welcome to us. We are all working hard, and tremendously interested.

	Melville is now working in the Commissary department, since the photo-cells are no longer being manufactured.

-

	September 16.
	The batteries moved today, and all sleeping equipment. The Castle is our home from now on. The old Dome is a deserted ruin. The last air tanks and water tanks have been moved, the water tanks being set "up in a special, hollowed cavern near the surface, with thermo-static devices to keep them at a temperature at or near 35° F.

	I have already gained thirteen pounds! All the other men have gained similarly. And there is plenty of food for tonight. Moore has laid by quite a stock.

	The Castle is complete. A regular elevator service to the opening has been established, and one of the carts will draw us up any time, though, save for the furnace crew, few of us need go.

	Messages have been left at the Dome telling where we are, and how to enter, if the relief ship comes when we are all down under. At night, I suspect, we will scarcely leave the Castle.

-

	September 17.
	Night now—but how different! There is no temperature change. Rice's engine is supplying all the light and power we need now, while tomorrow the big engine will again be started, and the new engine and power room down here will be fixed. The descending passage will be widened, and the big engines brought down. We have plenty of piping to carry the fuel leads down here. Though the engine room will be nearly seventy-five feet higher than we, the power room itself will be right next to us. The entire Castle is well lighted, and the joy of being able to walk about for hundreds of feet without a space suit is absolutely indescribable. Like describing harmony to a deaf mute.

	Kendall, who is something of an artist, has by means of the movie machine, projected a scene taken on the surface, and with colored paints Moore gave him, he is painting it on our wall. It is beginning to shape up excellently. He proposes to do several. It does improve the blank, grayish-white walls.

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	September 18.
	The temperature has not fallen by more than one tenth of one degree; our ordinary thermometers do not register it. It is perfectly comfortable here, with no heating. The work on the power room today required the use of the big engines, and it has been made warm up there too, and the engine room itself is quite warm.

	The new engine room has been almost half completed, as almost everyone was helping in some way, Rice controlling the engine, his leg almost completely healed, Bender working the cable-way for us, and the others blasting, or loading, or installing piping or electric leads.

	Rice's small steam engine runs all the time, and runs perfectly. It supplies light and cooking heat.

	Rice, by the way, has installed a shower bath in a small alcove he demanded for an unrevealed purpose when the Castle was being dug out. The water is collected, filtered through crushed gypsum, and run through the electrolyzer. We bathe in it, then breathe it! But it makes us feel free to use all we wish, since none is lost. After the dusty work, it feels very good.

	Moore has been adding various things to his food-syrup. It has acquired a flavor today. Like his chocolate-smelling stimulant, but it tastes of chocolate, with some vanilla. Not at all unpleasant. He has also added calcium-and-iron containing compounds, and one with some iodine. Magnesium also. And every day we are growing stronger, and eating more of our old clothes as a fairly tasty bread. These will give out soon.

-

	September 19.
	The new engine room complete, with just sufficient room to contain all three engines, and leave room to walk. A small tank has been used as a pressure-reducing valve, and the smoothness of the engines aided. Hitherto the high-pressure gases were admitted to the cylinder, allowed to work the machine half a stroke on their compression, then exploded. The engines ran rather unevenly, with considerable wear. Now the gases are expanded and released to fire at once. The efficiency is actually greater, and the wear reduced.

	Rice's engine and one of the big engines have already been placed. The other engine is still above. The power room is being cut out.

-

	September 20.
	Power room finished today, and the switchboard moved. Lights failed for a period of some five minutes, till the new connections could be made, and our Castle became a thing of gloom and shadows. It became a tunnel in die ground, instead of a home. The absence of light would be worse here than in the Dome.

	But the lights were soon on, and Rice's engine functioning again. The switchboard was re-connected, and the lower engine in the new engine room started. This evening everything has been moved down, all the batteries placed in the power-control room, and the second big engine in place.

	Regular mining will start again tomorrow.

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	September 21.
	The tunnel is being driven downward further, partly out of curiosity as to temperature conditions. With our new feeling of security of food, water and air, our scientific spirit of investigation is returning. The rocks are being watched for possible fossil or bacteriological signs. Only very slight appearances of possible water action noted. We suspect that Luna lost all her atmosphere and all her water long before the present crust was stabilized. With no stripping action of flowing water, and no upheavals, on a perfectly isostatically balanced land, there is little chance for geological exploration, save by tunneling.

	Moore is asking for further platinum supplies for catalysts, as he is making his apparatus 100% automatic. He is working on other elements now. We will need phosphorus and potassium, sodium, other elements than the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen sulphur and nitrogen of his simple food-syrups. He is still working hard at making vitamin concentrates. Hughey is helping him now.

-

	September 22.
	A large pile of gypsum has accumulated outside the entrance, beside the furnaces. A mechanical-electrical device has been rigged now to dump the trucks, so that no one need leave the Castle. We are amazingly comfortable here. Slight cooling felt now, but the heat of the engines working all day dissipates it. The bulkhead doors to the upper lounge and corridors have been shut, and the lights turned off, as it is cold up there now. We can, if need be, heat it, of course.

	We have burned no fuel whatsoever for heating tonight.

	Reed, King, and I made a trip to the phosphate field King found last year, and brought in a load of the material. We are going to make a trip to the platinum field tomorrow, also to the Dome on the way back, and bring in a load of quartz. Kendall is leading some men to the silver field.

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	September 23.
	Four pounds of mixed platinum-iridium-osmium brought in. A fortune on earth, and we shall certainly have to collect these materials when the relief ship comes. Half a ton of silver ore, and several hundred pounds of iron ore. We need new picks for mining. Unfortunately Wilcott was our metallurgist, and King and Tolman will have to do their best to take his place. Tolman advises separating the iron electrolytically, and getting it pure, making the alloys up by percent in that way. We have no chromium and can't make any good rustless steel, but an ordinary carbon-steel will do. We may try alloying some silver for toughness.

	Moore gathered up several reams of old paper, some old books we no longer need, and from the Dome some wooden furnishings. Promises other foods. Hughey says we may be afflicted with serious bowel trouble since our synthetic foods contain no bulk whatsoever. One hundred percent digestible.

-

	September 24.
	More mining. It was quite cool last evening, and during the night, since the engines hadn't been running all day, while we were mineral hunting. Better today.

	Moore wants a larger laboratory, or another one, really, and a separate power board. Rice is aiding him in making his apparatus purely automatic. It is constructed of gleaming silver and quartz; some tubes, handling particularly violent acids or bases, he has made of the osmiridium alloy. Now he need only put his acetylene in one end, and get sugar automatically.

	We are making him a larger room across the way from the main living room, with a considerable tunnel leading into it, so temperature in his room can be controlled separately.

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	September 25.
	Kendall has been at work all along on our walls and has some really excellent scenes done. The room looks amazingly home-like. The rugged lunar peaks, with men in space suits in the foreground, a rising sun tinting the craters, and the dome off to one side. It is very beautiful to see, when in our well-warmed, well-aired Castle.

	He suggests that we use this as the Hall, and have individual rooms below. It is rather wearing on us, to have to turn out the lights and be quiet when the others want it. It removes individual freedom, and has caused some friction. Since we must mine anyway, I think it an excellent idea.

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	September 26.
	Finished Moore's new laboratory in record time. Every one mining, and the machines working splendidly. We have the explosive under such excellent control now that we no longer need do any mechanical crushing of the rock.

	But one man needed now at the Locks, and one at the engines. With plenty of food, and an occasional dash of Moore's stimulant, marvelously effective, yet evidently entirely harmless, and entirely non-habit-forming, we are all well. To people who have not felt the hunger and weakness we did, that means little.

-

	September 27.
	Moore's separate room being prepared first, in honor of his magnificent work for the group. Roughly hollowed today. Finished by tomorrow noon.

	Sunrise in three days, and we will scarcely know it.

-

	September 28.
	Moore's room finished, equipped with bookshelves, bunk, a stone desk, and cabinet or locker, with a blanket for curtain. Kendall is enjoying himself putting pictures on the walls. The room is at the greatest depth we have reached, nearly seven hundred feet, and it is fairly warm even now, but an electric heater, for mild warming, and a powerful gas heater have been installed. Rice has been busy all day making silver tubing for the gases, and silver wire for lighting and power.

-

	September 29.
	Moore has moved in, and is much pleased. The room has been decorated with a very clever symbolic picture of the chemist with test-tube in one hand, and a loaf of bread in the other, and some more conventional lunar scenes on the other walls.

	Tonight finished Long's room. As the author of the idea of living underground I felt he deserved it.

	Kendall busy now. He insists the work is recreation anyway.

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	September 30.
	Sunrise and power flowing in in plenty. The furnace crew busy on the accumulated gypsum, an enormous pile representing the entire Hall excavations, practically, and all the other excavations, but the four new furnaces are making progress. Reed insists we haven't enough tanks to contain it, and I agree, though we may want both the water, the oxygen and the hydrogen. The trouble is that we have two tanks of hydrogen for every one of oxygen.

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	October 1.
	My room completed, supposedly in honor of my leading expedition to earth-side, inventing photo-cells, and half a dozen other things.

	Kendall has presented me with one of the finest pictures he has yet made. He is extraordinarily skillful now. It shows Earth just peeping over the horizon, the sun shining on it, and on Luna, and three men grouped about a radio set, looking at Earth. Another is a scene in the Dome making photo-cells.

	Garner is to have the next room, and should have had one sooner, as the leader of the expedition, but he has insisted that service in time of stress or something like that should determine the order.

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	October 2.
	Reed has asked that after Garner's room is finished, the work of room-making be delayed till night, and immediate work begun on a water tank. He is rapidly filling the tanks now, for he has an unprecedented amount of power. Some of the men, myself included, have been whiling away time evenings, when the work is done, and there is little but talk to do, making photo-cells. Two banks were completed, and with all the other power thrown in, he has far greater power. All needed fuel has been re-electrolyzed, and nearly all tanks completely filled.

	Moore announced making of vitamin A concentrate, an important step. More coming, he says.

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	October 3.
	Garner's room completed, and at a new lower level, a very large room begun. It will be the new water tank, and a swimming pool combined. Water will be electrolyzed frequently to destroy germs. When needed for oxygen it can be electrolyzed, and be perfectly pure. Will be extraordinarily large.

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	October 4.
	Reed crying for room. His furnaces now held up. The gypsum pile has indeed been sadly assaulted. He has emptied two hydrogen tanks, and is filling them with oxygen, releasing into space the hydrogen simultaneously produced. It looks strange, glowing in the brilliant, hard sunlight, and quickly disappearing as it expands infinitely.

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	October 5.
	Reed certainly has a fast working outfit. One of the huge oxygen tanks full already, as most of the power is being turned into his electrolyzers. He is consuming water now.

	The work on the tank room is progressing rapidly, however, as everyone has pitched in. It will be made in two sections, one a shelving section beginning with a depth of three feet, shelving to ten, and a larger section forty feet deep, and thirty wide, fifty long. Around the entire pool will be a shelf, or bathing platform, ten feet wide, with a roof seven feet above it. There has been some discussion as to evaporation under the low air pressure and what swimming will be like in this world.

	The evaporation will not be increased, as air pressure means nothing, of course; only water vapor pressure. Swimming will be curious, though we will sink as far in this water as in any at home. We are lighter, surely, but so is the water.

	The shallow section will be filled first, a dam across it being left that this may be done. It is almost finished now, needing only the rubber paint.

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	October 6.
	The shallow section is being filled, while the work on the deep section is continued. Water coming in at a surprising rate, down the long silver pipe to the surface.

	Temperature down here has risen only half a degree since sunrise. The Hall has had a rise of three-quarters of a degree. Absorption is slower than radiation, or the lag is greater.

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	October 7.
	The men have been split into two mining crews, one continuing work on the water-room, one working on the living quarters. The furnace gang is continuing operations at the surface. The furnaces are almost wholly automatic, save for loading, and Rice has taken one of the plates from the Dome, made it into a scoop, and rigged a loading machine for them which Reed runs. The cement is being stored outside in the sun, to complete drying. It is ground electrically now. Formerly much of the grinding was by hand; most of the time, however, we collected only the dust that had filtered through the piles naturally.

	We are watching anxiously for the relief ship. It should come in about two months now, but there may have been another under construction, Garner insists.

	(As a matter of fact, the relief ship was even then approaching completion, far ahead of the time the men felt they could expect it. Indeed, ahead of the schedule of work laid out. But, like all the efforts to relieve the expedition, it was handled with consummate blundering. When the ship was actually completed, near the end of November, it was suddenly discovered that there were no other trained rocket pilots on all Earth! They had to be trained in the new relief ship! The inevitable result was that in the first week of December, the ship crashed heavily, fifty miles from Mojave. It took nearly two weeks to move equipment to it and set it up, and a month and a half would still be needed to repair it.)

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	October 8.
	The pool room finished, and electric lights strung. Two very powerful bulbs have been fixed in water-proof cases, and sunk at the center of the deepest part of the pool. Kendall is already busy. Bender objects that the little man is wasting energy that should be usefully spent Garner says, and I agree, that the relieving effect of the pictures is well worth his while. The color and knowledge that that barren rocky, jagged world is merely pictured, gives me, at least, a feeling of security.

	The very last scrap of natural food, save spices, and a can of tomato catsup, has been used now. They have been put in with the artificial foods occasionally, and now the last has gone. But barren, alternately baked and frozen Luna is supplying us bountifully from her rocks themselves.

	Moore made vitamin C today, and that has been added. Also, he has made a curious, greyish cake, which he asked us all to try. It was rather tasteless, sweetened, and not unlike an ordinary cake. Evidently some form of baking powder has been used. He advised against chewing it too vigorously, and gave us each but a little.

	Tasteless as it was, it was a welcome relief, as the continual soups, though nourishing, pall. They leave your stomach empty quickly. This stayed with me an amazing, almost annoying length of time. We learned it was made with ground pumice stone, a starch-flour made from paper, wood, and cotton, and his food-syrups. I don't know that I want any more. Reed calls them "stone age cakes."

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	October 9.
	The shallow part of the pool is full, and water is already flowing over the dam, into the deeper part. For the first time since we left Earth, our bodies were immersed completely in water! It was curious. The room has been fitted with an entrance at the top, about fifteen feet above the surface of the water, and a ladder (of silver, by the way!) leading down. Diving from this level, we float down, and strike the water with a curious reluctance. We scarcely sink beneath the surface, and bob up languidly. The rapidity with which we rise or sink is changed due to lesser gravity. Our entire swimming must be altered. The water is salt, that it may be an electrolyte. A current is passed through it at night, and the liberated hydrogen and oxygen collected, and burned back to water. The combustion is underwater, which tends to heat it slightly. It may be an efficient heat reservoir.

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	October 10.

	Vitamin b! announced tonight, in considerable quantity. We will have the entire-group soon, Moore promises.

	We are all working at the rooms, and a considerable number are housed now. Rice has his. I think his should have been third made, myself. His work in making the engines work on hydrogen and oxygen alone made these comfortable tunnels and rooms possible.

	The Hall is largely cleared now that the bunks have been moved out. A great stone table occupies one corner, at which we eat now, instead of the light metal one, which had a tendency to wobble when leaned on.

	The course of lectures is going to be continued soon. Slides and diagrams are being prepared for projection. Kendall left one space on our Hall wall blank, and has painted it with a silver suspension, and it fairly glows under the lights.

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	October 11.
	Another bank of cells installed, and the power going to Moore now. He says he can use any power we can give him, so the pastime of making photo-cells will be taken more earnestly hereafter. Several benches have been made for that purpose, and materials laid out.

	With nightfall, when going is easier, he wants us to bring more limestone. He doesn't need it just now. Rice has made a practical heater for the suits at last. It has a jet of oxygen and hydrogen enclosed completely in a tank of water, within the suit. A double valve maintains the proportions, though the flow of gas can be adjusted. A small crank-magneto device is carried by one of the party going out, and passed around, that connection can be made, and a turn of the crank sets off a spark that ignites the flame. Heavier than the battery, but the best we can do. Our last trip last night was bad, as we returned terribly chilled, with useless batteries. Unfortunately we will have no more radio communication.

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	October 12.
	Night in two days now. Swimming after our work takes away much of the tired feeling that comes to us. The last of the rooms has been "completed, and each with its solid gypsum easy chair, covered with a padding of rubber paint a tenth of an inch thick (which isn't half as uncomfortable as it sounds) its book cases, bunks, wall decorations and small chair for visitors, all well lighted by a roof light, and a floor lamp (a silver tube, set in a block of rubber-paint covered gypsum, with wires running up the shaft) is an exceedingly homelike, and comforting dwelling. I honestly believe we will be sorry to leave this place now! I know I will.

	The deep section of the pool room is acquiring a layer of water at an amazing rate. Garner says no more mining need be done at night, day mining will suffice, and scientific work can be carried on at night. We will be returning to the old work, with the actually welcome variation of something to do by day. And day will no longer be hot and blistering.

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	October 13.
	A shower has been installed in the ante-room to the pool, to wash off rock dust before swimming. The gypsum is not removed by electrolyzing, and has slightly clouded the clear water. That water is more precious than silver or gold to us.

	Three feet deep now in the larger, deep part. Today we mined a new tunnel downwards. It is mainly exploratory. No signs of fossil life. Rice objects to such deep workings, as the engines must be used at night to lift minerals from this depth. He has been reminded we won't work tonight. Wants to make a vehicle now!

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	October 14.
	Night fell late this afternoon. The power has ceased flowing in, and the water has stopped trickling down to the swimming pool. The swimming pool has been decorated with Earth scenes, the only room of the Castle that has earth scenes portrayed, and even here not all scenes are terrestrial. All the rooms are decorated now, to Kendall's annoyance, I suspect.

	Rice's engine can scarcely handle the load now, when all the lights down the long corridors are on, the Hall, the different rooms, and the pool as well. He is increasing the boiler capacity.

	Tomorrow we start exploration again.

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	October 15.
	We worked all day bringing in loads of limestone, carbides, nitrides and phosphates for the foods. Mining our food! Also some more quartz was brought over, and a number of metal plates from the Dome, which is rapidly being dismantled. Moore is extracting sulphur from the gypsum with fair success. Perhaps those compounds have lain there undisturbed for two or three billion years!

	Rice's heater is effective, and not hard to manage, though less convenient than the battery heaters, and tends to localize it's action, making the body part too warm, and the legs and hands cold. It was a comfort to return to the Castle, and relax in our own private rooms, well lighted, and home-like in appearance. We have become so thoroughly accustomed to the three pounds pressure of oxygen we scarcely notice the diminished pressure.

	Rice has asked us to spare temporarily the electric heaters, as his engine cannot carry the load now. We have been extravagant with light, as it improves the place immensely, and the load is far greater than it was at the Dome.

-

	October 16.
	Tired tonight. I, with Reed and Bender, visited Morrcott Cleft today, and descended again to the bottom. We carried the almost useless batteries for lighting, and explored one of the deepest parts. Little of interest, but brought home some specimens Reed believes to be radium salts, or uranium at least. Of little use to us now, but may be of considerable import. It took us nearly all day to descend and climb back out. Very hungry, and Moore's soups and cakes never tasted so good before.

	Rice has disconnected his engine, and is working on it, one of the big power engines working tonight. He is making alterations for higher power and greater pressures.

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	October 17.
	Rice's engine fixed up now, and generating nearly fifty horsepower. He attached a larger dynamo, and his engine, which was, as I have said, far better made than we thought, was strengthened here and there by welding, the boiler capacity increased by inserting another burner, and the pressure rose considerably. Since the burners are inside the boiler, burning in the water itself, there was no question of tube area to consider. The gases have been stored under one ton per square inch pressure, so the fuel enters readily.

	The electric heaters, sending their infra-heat rays, bake out the chill of our legs and arms quickly, and the power is welcome, though we need little extra heat here.

	We have been looking further in the Morrcott Cleft, and the samples Reed brought in were uranium ore, of quite exceptional richness. The deposit seems large, too. Also, a considerable bed of lead was found not far away, alloyed with silver. We will try tomorrow at a different point. It seems that by blind chance we struck an area of Luna that is very heavily mineralized, or else all Luna is a gigantic mine of a thousand ores. Aluminum in abundance, beryllium ores scarce and widely scattered, and plenty of nickel, iron, and cobalt. Certainly, with such living places as our Castle, it would be easy to establish a civilization here, with Luna supplying both food and air!

-

	October 18.
	Further explorations in the depths of the Chasm revealed traces of gold shortly before we left. We did not investigate. I fear that both Reed and I have little respect for gold; here on Luna we have learned to judge metals and rocks by their usefulness, and gold is useless beyond all others. Bender, however, was wildly excited. He wanted to load himself with the heavy stuff.

	We brought back considerable lead, as it may be very valuable to us. We have none here, and with lead, the precious batteries can be replaced with lead-acid type. Bender was finally induced to carry back a load of the highest grade rock, by telling him it was far more valuable than gold. He was wild when, on getting back, he learned the heavy stuff he'd carried was lead!

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	October 19.
	A regular expedition was made to Morrcott Cleft today, with sledges for transportation of rock. Reed and I descended and loaded the lead ore on a net, while the others raised it to the sledges.

	Reed is separating the lead tomorrow. Rice agreed to make batteries, suggesting that we use silver battery cases plated with osmiridium alloy, as they would be stronger, and less subject to breaking than glass or quartz.

	Queer how our ideas are reversed here. Iron is valueless, silver valuable because of its usefulness, availability and workability, osmiridium only because of its resistance to corrosion, lead more valuable than gold!

-

	October 20.
	Further exploration today. Tonight Rice announced the first lead-acid battery was on charge. Unusually tired tonight.

-

	October 21.
	The night is half gone. Moore has introduced Vitamin G and F into the diet, and has at last succeeded in making a solid organic compound, impregnating it with food-syrup and serving it. It was far better than his solid rock cakes of a few days ago. He says it is pure wood soaked with pre-digested meat and sugar. Anyway, it's good, and it's filling.

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	October 22.
	Kendall had developed some pictures taken while the Castle was being made. They were very interesting to us. Also some pictures taken in the Dome, and now we wonder how we got along without the swimming pool, and the free movement we have here.

	Rice working in secret now. He has even made a room for himself to work in, way up near the top of the gypsum cliff. It is entered from outside, through a lock of its own, but draws power and heat and gases from the main Castle. His workshop, private! He's taken a lot of plates from the Dome, by his own efforts, and we all wonder what it is he's doing. He isn't saying. Almost all day we can hear the big power engine running if we happen to come in.

-

	October 23.
	King located a new platinum deposit not far from the old one, probably another branch of it, but much richer. He brought in nearly seven pounds this evening.

	The first of the lead-acid batteries will be tried out tomorrow.

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	October 24.
	King has made another triumphant discovery, a very rich tungsten deposit. He plans to try working it for some metal which Rice wants. This will have to be done by daylight, however.

-

	October 25.
	A trip to King's tungsten mine. No wonder it was called "heavy stone." It is! We brought back nearly a ton of ore however, hand picked, at that. We carried several blasting capsules, and obtained quite a fair collection.

	Reed and I will help King set up a reduction furnace tomorrow.

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	October 26.
	The tungsten furnace was completed, and turned out a small sample piece. It requires a lot of electric power, and we had to use both big motors, and draw on the lighting circuit as well to get the needed power. The metal comes out a small ingot, fused together all ready for shaping.

-

	October 27.
	No new discoveries. The expeditions are filling in the few blank spots on the map of our immediate (two hundred fifty mile radius) vicinity. All very tired at night.

-

	October 28.
	Sunlight! The power is back, and today we rested half the day till the sun actually rose. Then to work, and mining begun. The photo-cell workers stopped today however, for making more cells. The tungsten furnace needs power, and they are never amiss. The mining, at Rice's request, is being done in the form of a tunnel leading from the upper lounge to his workshop, so we will have under-ground communication. He wants a lock installed in the upper end of the tunnel. He is very mysterious. But he has made us a new tool. He did it during the night. It is a huge, round metal frame, spun rapidly by a fairly powerful motor, and set with a number of diamonds. It eats into the rock with amazing speed, as the rock is soft. Then one charge of explosive, and the sawed section comes out, leaving a neat round hole, the size we want the tunnel. The progress is so fast we won't want to make any more rooms, I fear. Kendall suggests, however, that we make a library, as long as we must dig.

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	October 29.
	The tungsten furnace has been at work all day long, and several ingots have been made. The gypsum reduction has been slowed by this new work, but a steady trickle of water has continued to the pool, and nearly all the fuel used during the night has been restored.

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	October 30.
	Rice has revealed his secret to me, for help. I am honored indeed, and have assured the men that photo-cells will be badly needed, so even more work is being done on them. He is making a small rocket car for exploratory work! It is capable of carrying only three passengers, and fuel, with oxygen and hydrogen tanks for breathing, and for running his generator.

	His fuel he says will be oxygen and hydrogen, and he has completed the entire hull. He used girders from the old ship, plates from the Dome, and windows from the Dome. His rockets will be made of tungsten, lined with iridosmium, far better than the tubes of the "Exelsior" that brought us here. They will be infusible and non-corrodable. His combustion chamber will be made of an alloy of tungsten-silver-iridosmium, principally tungsten.

	Most interesting of all, however, is his new motor. It is a turbine type, burning hydrogen and oxygen, and making steam from water simultaneously in the jet chamber. The combination goes to the turbine, and exhausts into a condenser in the ship, which will serve to warm the machine.

	The rocket car will be used first to go to Earth-side of Luna. It is rapidly approaching completion. We have only one draw-back, the use of water, or rather, hydrogen and oxygen with no chance of recovery, since the rockets throw it out, to be lost forever.

	We are designing the controls now. As tungsten is produced the rockets will be installed.

-

	October 31.
	The miners have reached the workshop, and the main driving rockets have been installed, after hours of the hardest work with the tungsten. The furnaces are now ahead of the miners in the gypsum consumption. Water in the pool, four and a half feet deep.

	The miners are starting on the library, which will be quite unnecessarily large, of course. Another group drilling a tunnel back into the wall of the Cliff, and angling downward, starting from the branching point where the corridors part to go to the upper and lower lounges.

	Moore introduced another vitamin today, so that now our diet is practically complete. The last of the woodwork of the Dome and the last spare paper used up, so in the future all our food will be wholly artificial.

-

	November 1.
	A set of heavy tungsten-steel springs was placed on the bottom of the rocket, for landings and take-offs. The take-off will be a vertical rise on the lower rockets, till free of the ground, then a drive forward. Several heavy gyroscopes from the Excelsior placed today as well.

	We estimate a cruising range of several thousand miles, in fact infinite distance, as we can achieve orbital speed about the moon for long distances very readily. But it couldn't make the trip to Earth.

-

	November 2.
	The men have been trying to find out what it is we are doing in the workshop, asking a great many questions. We are filling the fuel tanks now, and Reed wants to know what we are using all the gas for. He is running his electrolysis outfit again, at full capacity, and very little water is going into the pool. The front braking rockets, and the steering rockets have been installed. By night the ship will be finished. We had all the parts, practically, on hand here to begin with, and so made very rapid progress.

	The library has been finished, and Kendall is at work on it. The tunnel leading back into the hillside is being driven on, and a new continuation of the lower mine tunnel, running horizontally however, is plunging parallel with it. In the end of the lower tunnel, a room is going to be made, nearly one hundred feet below anything else, and here will be a food-syrup storage room. We dislike to have aimless tunnel made, as it would bring to our Castle the air of a mine once more, something we have attempted to avoid.

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	November 3.
	Lower rockets completely installed, and electrical ignition system arranged. Fuel pressure up to full value. Little more work to be done.

	A number of frames of photo-cells have been set up, and despite the almost constant use of the tungsten furnace, the power is nearly up to what it was before its installation. The mining machine Rice made has permitted the miners to keep two furnaces going, and the fuel we drew to fill the tanks of the ship, has been replaced. Six feet of water in the deep end of the pool-room.

-

	November 4.
	Rocket complete save for furnishings and paint. Metal chairs with spring seats and backs being made now, spot welded together. A small power board has yet to be installed.

	Tomorrow the ship will be announced. Moore has been taken into the secret.

-

	November 5.
	The ship is completed, and has been announced. The interest shown was amazing. It has been agreed that Rice, Long and I shall make the trip back to the Earth-side, as Rice built it, and I aided, while Long knows the way best, and can locate us. Navigation will be important, I suspect, from a few miles above the surface.

	The food storage room has been begun, and at the end of the upper tunnel leading into the wall of the cliff, a new tank room will be built, with tanks we build ourselves. The great use of gas for power as well as breathing, and the storage of the more voluminous hydrogen has crowded even our great tanks. The tanks will be made of tungsten-steel, with welded seams, tested for one ton to the square inch. There will be two tanks, one twice the size of the other. Our pumps are almost worn out, and Rice will have to build new ones, which he says he can do. He will use the rollator type, as it is easiest to build. This will be the rocket-fuel room, principally.

-

	November 6.
	Rocket completely equipped, and tomorrow a trial will be made. The workshop will be evacuated after the men enter the ship. The Dome radio set has been moved down here, and with spare parts Rice installed a similar set in the ship. I will control, while Rice keeps in touch with the Castle, Melville at the set here.

	Food storage room finished, and equipped with large quartz jars. The food supply has been put in these. A pasty mass which is the wood-like stuff with which Moore makes his famous cakes, has also joined several large jars of peculiarly colored liquids.

	Seven feet of water in the pool tonight.

	The work on the gas-tank room has been started. The method is new, several tunnels close together being bored, and then joined. It will be thirty feet long, thirty wide, and eight high.

-

	November 7.
	Rocket tested! It worked beautifully. The three of us entered, closed the doors, and the hangar was evacuated. The doors opened electrically, and the ship was hauled out on a cable. The rock had been leveled, and just outside the shop, I turned on the lower rockets, very gently. The machine trembled, and seemed to jump slightly on its springs. Then more power, and it rose up, with slight shiftings of the gyroscopes. A tail blast drove us forward, and out over the cliff. With half power on the lower rockets, we soared rapidly, and the tail rockets were turned on one quarter. Quickly we gained great speed, and the Dome flashed back in a moment. We were wearing space suits in case of accident, but we soon took them off. In a minute and a half I cut off the bottom rockets, then some ten miles above the surface. The ship dropped slightly, and yet before we sank to five miles, we reached orbital speed, and I cut off the driving power. We were far beyond our widest exploration range already, and Long was snapping pictures industriously, while Rice talked with the Castle.

	I let the machine coast for several hundred miles, using no power whatever, then finally turned in a great U, and headed back. We had passed into the dawn section, and turned back to the evening region. We will readily reach the Earth-side. It has been decided to wait till the third of December, when Luna will be at last quarter from Earth, and descend. In the meantime Tolman is going to refine several pounds of magnesium, and mix it with a quantity of silver oxide as a flash-light powder to attract attention. He will make nearly fifteen pounds of the mixture.

	We landed safely three hours after starting, and the ship was safely returned to her shed with the cable. Landing is accomplished by vertical descent, somewhat difficult as the ship has a bad tendency to sway, despite the gyroscopes.

	Throughout the trip, the generator set worked perfectly. We used nearly three thousand pounds of water, however. We will use less next time, as I know the ship better. All the men feel it was water well spent. The tanks have been refilled.

-

	November 8.
	All helped make photo-cells today, or set to work in the gas-tank room. Rice and King are working on metal, however, and tomorrow an expedition will be made for iron ore.

	The rocket was carefully gone over, and found in perfect condition, save for slight burning of the landing springs on my slow take-off and landing. The lower rockets, jetting the hot gases, burned them slightly.

-

	November 9.
	Five tons of iron ore brought in. Very heavy labor for all of us. We have been working very hard, and seem to have been losing weight slightly. Moore is increasing the food allowance.

	Reduction will begin tomorrow, and be rushed to completion in two days if possible. We need only a little, really. Several new banks of photo-cells installed, and we have plenty of power.

-

	November 10.
	The tank room is completed, and all hands working at reduction. We will work all 'night' as the sun shifts continuously, and it would mean a delay of two weeks if we waited. One hour rest now for supper.

-

	November 11.
	We are all exhausted. The iron and tungsten have been refined, and alloyed, however. Night. Sleep at last!

-

	November 12.
	Work going on today on the tanks. The tank-room is completely finished, and heavy concrete bases arranged. These tanks will be spherical, and the gases will be stored under a pressure of two tons to the square inch! Rice is working on plans for his new pumps to handle this greater pressure. The tanks are being made in eight orange-peel sections, which can be carried through the corridors, and welded when in place. A temporary crane has been arranged for handling them. For testing, they must resist a pressure of three tons to the square inch. Today Reed and I ran a test on our alloy, made of electrolytically refined iron, tungsten and graphite, fused electrically, and found that the tensile strength was very high, nearly 175,000 pounds.

	Diagonal cross-braces, on all but the bottom and top sections will be installed, slightly reducing the volume, but greatly increasing the bursting strength.

	Four sections were made today.

-

	November 13.
	Six sections made today, and Rice has completed the welding on one tank. He is annealing it now with his torch. The welding was done after the room had been evacuated, working in a space suit, to prevent oxidation of the metal he was working on, and minimize air-bubbles.

	Rice, Long and I leave for the Earth-side tomorrow.

-

	November 14.
	Morning—ready to leave now. The doors into space are open, and I am at the controls, rockets on at very low intensity to warm them slightly. Taking off.

	Circling now at orbital speed. Beyond radio-range of the Castle. Long reports trip more than half completed. No control needed. We will go well beyond the marginal region of the earth-side.

	Earth rising! Great reddish-green sphere, nearly full. Atlantic Ocean and corner of North America visible. Stopping to land.

	Landed. We ate in night region, with earth at half above us. Rice is sending to New York, while Long, in a space suit, is placing the magnesium flash charges. They will burn one minute each, with tremendous intensity. We must cover our eyes while they are being fired.

	Rice has sent now for five minutes. New York in dark or night portion. Long about to start first magnesium flare.

	Light blindingly brilliant while flare burned, which seemed far longer than one minute. Rice sending again. The motor-generator supplying power. Message: "SOS SOS Garner Lunar Expedition. Air supply plentiful. Food supply artificial—synthetic food. No immediate danger. Watch Magnesium Flare."

	Since power is nearly eight times as great as when we made our last attempt, I feel sure the message will get through. Clouds over Chicago. Rice repeating message.

	Denver in view now. We have a receiver aboard that can pick up signals of the same wavelength we are sending, and the ship acts as antenna. Hoping for message. Rice sending with beam on Denver. Second flare to be started soon. Rice sending notice of flare.

	Second flare gone.

	An answer has been received. It is fragmentary, but tremendously encouraging. The first word from Earth in over two years! Message follows: "Signals re - - - ved—not com - lete. Relief ship - uilt but - - - ly damaged in crash to - ay. Repairs being hastened. Watching for f - are." This message was repeated several times, with subsequent filling in of missing letters, and extension. We learn that the relief ship built has crashed due to lack of competent rocket pilots. Kingsbury and Wilkins were both killed recently. This is bad news, as it will be some weeks before the ship can be repaired, and at least a month or more before any man can attempt to cross space in her. We have sent our messages through saying we will be safe until that time. We have also announced that we have built a small rocket ship, and can travel about on the Moon, but cannot leave her, though the trip from Luna to Earth is far easier, due to Luna's lesser gravity. It has been agreed that this spot shall be watched for our return with further messages.

	Rice has set up a powerful spotlight, run by our generator. Mt. Palomar has turned the great 200 inch telescope on us. Light signalling being attempted.

	Signals more legible than our radio! California under perfectly clear skies. Third magnesium flare to be set off now. We will go out while it is burning, and attempts will be made to see us by its light.

	Back in ship. Places were taken.

	We were clearly visible!

	We are returning to the Castle. Long messages have been sent, telling almost the full story of our expedition, the light signals coming through clearly, in even smaller telescopes, many amateurs reporting visibility with reflectors as small as 15 inches. California passing out of sight. Very tired now.

	(The excitement on earth, created by this expedition can be imagined. The news that the marooned mere were living now in a comfortable, well aired tunnel system, with plentiful supplies of artificial food and water and air, with a rocket ship they themselves had built, ad this served to whet the interest of the world.

	The announcement of the discoveries of huge diamonds, platinum deposits, silver and especially uranium convinced thousands on thousands that after all, this expedition had been of more practical value than they had been willing to admit. They could not realize of what enormous value the expedition actually had been, nor that Luna was merely a way-station to Mars, to Venus and the rest of the Solar System. With the Castle as a base, within three years an expedition was to leave for Mars, their rocket refueled on Luna, from the rocks of Luna. Already free of the dragging hand of Earth's heavy gravity it was to establish new history. New history, but even now the Castle was establishing history, and while thousands watched the Moon for further signals, thousands sent in more funds to reconstruct the damaged rocket, and rescue these men. The news of the complete(apparent) triumph of men over the awful desolation of the Moon alone was enough to inspire men of gentle, kindly Earth.)

-

	November 15.
	Landed back at the Castle without the slightest trouble, shortly after midnight. We descended at once to the hall, where the men were all waiting. We had been in wireless communication for more than fifteen minutes, as we decelerated for landing, and they knew most of the story, yet it was after one thirty when we finally went to sleep. We had been gone but one day, instead of the seven that our last trip took, and we had been far more successful. The entire trip consumed but eight thousand pounds of water. Energy means nothing to us, only water.

	The time saved on the trip means little; important are the vastly greater results, and the wonderful ease with which we accomplished the long, long trip. Never again will a Lunar expedition have the troubles of exploration we had. Hereafter, while they cannot bring ships and fuel with them, they will make them here, and explore with ease.

	Today we have worked on the great gas tanks, and the two hydrogen tanks are completed, and ready to be filled. Several sections of the oxygen tank are ready.

	The rocket ship has been completely re-charged.

-

	November 16.
	Dr. Hughey and Moore are both worried. All of us have continued to lose weight gradually but steadily, despite the large quantities of energy we have absorbed in our foods. Though eating over five thousand calories per man per day now, far more than necessary, we continue to lose. All known vitamins have been made, and are being included in the diet. Also we are getting plenty of calcium, magnesium, iron, iodine, aluminum and other metals and non-metals. Moore is really worried. This has not been publicly announced. I have sacrificed one of my few remaining shirts, and Garner, Hughey and Moore as well to make some more of the natural-base starch, as Moore calls it. We will watch results.

	The tanks are completed, and the heavy, hardened silver pipes installed. The pumps are under construction. Despite the numerous electric motors with which we were originally equipped, we are having trouble now to make them go round. The powerful motors in particular are in demand. For these pumps we need plenty of power, and we have had to take one of the cable-way motors for this purpose. The cable-way motor is being replaced by a small steam engine, electrically heated. Rice is making that too.

	Tomorrow an exploration expedition of five men will be crowded into the rocket, which can easily bear this load, and we will visit Long Crater for active research. This is the great crater with a smaller one within, which we passed in our trip to the earth-visible side of Lunar on the first, foot trip. We believe that the great crater, erupting first, hurled material from great depths to the surface, then that the second, smaller crater brought material from still greater depths when it threw up material. I will be in control again. Reed, King, Tolman, and Bender will make up the party.

-

	November 17.
	We started this morning quite early, and reached the crater in less than fifteen minutes. A successful landing was made in the reasonably smooth plateau of the inner crater, and the work begun. It was a typically meteoric action. But it must have taken place untold millions of years ago. When the Moon was young, this crater was formed.

	Mineral hunt highly successful. We brought back a collection of slightly radio-active rocks we found near, hoping to get an age-determination from these samples, by analysis of radium-lead-uranium percentages.

	Sulphur in abundance. Also selenium, tellurium and some phosphorus. Metals seemed scarce, though traces of gold were found.

	The ship was moved about one hundred miles to the wall of the greater crater, and examination here disclosed plentiful minerals, including a wealth of chromium and copper, in different sections. King picked up what he believes is an emerald, but may merely be colored quartz.

	Rice had finished making the parts of his pumps, but wants some mercury for them. We will have to get that tomorrow.

-

	November 18.
	Collected mercury and refined it today. Several pounds, and enough for Rice's purpose. The heaters in the Castle feel good after the cold expedition!

	The pumps were assembled and installed tonight. Other apparatus for tanks not quite complete, but by dawn will be fully prepared for filling.

	The converted shirts were served tonight. We will watch for results. I, and the other men felt unusually lazy after the meal. Going to sleep now.

-

	November 19.
	Exploration work today, as usual. The tank room is fully equipped, and I am helping Rice with his new steam engine. The boiler is amazingly tiny. He already has a condenser and injector attached to his little spherical boiler. A small electrical heating coil rapidly boils the water. He has the boiler wrapped in powdered pumice stone for insulation. A pressure switch turns the heater on or off depending on the steam pressure. As a result he uses a heating coil about five times as powerful as necessary. It is another three-cylinder wabble-plate engine of about forty horsepower. It's starting torque will be very high. He is making the parts for six such engines now!

	I have been immensely surprised, and so have Hughey and Moore, to notice that with a startling rapidity, in a single twenty-four hour period, the men have visibly gained pounds! We are convinced that there is some subtle vitamin-like thing in natural substances, that is, organic substances, that makes it possible for accretion to take place. While it is evident our foods supply fuel for our bodies it is also apparent they can't supply repairing materials without the aid of that mysterious something in organic foods. Even organic foods that have been changed from cotton to starch. Then, like vitamins, this something can force the inorganic foods into the body.

-

	November 20.
	The effect of the starch has worn off, and the men are rapidly losing that gain. Unless a constant supply is kept up they will starve with plenty of food! It has been announced publically, and shirts, trousers, everything have been contributed. We now have one suit of clothes apiece.

	Another trip to the message relay point will be made tomorrow.

	Rice's new engine is complete. He has tested it, and it works perfectly. Several other engines are assembled, and need only boilers to put them in operation.

-

	November 21.
	We left in the rocket early this morning, taking off easily, and landed without trouble at our previous position, as determined by Long. The Atlantic coast of North America was in view, and we commenced simultaneous signals with the spotlight and radio. Soon we were in communication again.

	We sent several straight messages, and finally sent a code message Garner had prepared, directed to his backers. This was repeated to us from Earth, and found correct after some trouble. In English it read: "Artificial food lacks ability to support life. No natural food left. Slow starvation. Appears unknown vitamin-like substance missing. We are using cotton, converted chemically to starch. Supply nearly exhausted. Advise doctor with rescue ship."

	A further message sent advised that the rescue ship be designed for the use of regular rocket fuel on the way here, but equipped to use oxy-hydrogen, since that would supply sufficient power for the return. Thus fuel for the round trip need not be carried. We can supply it!

	But we hope the ship comes soon.

	More cotton starch tonight.

-

	November 22.
	Exploration has been given up finally, and mining will be resumed. We are preparing a great hangar for the rocket ship. This will be built in the face of our gypsum cliff, with two of Rice's engines to haul it in after landing. More photocells being built as well. Today work was begun on the tunnel that will reach down to the new hangar. Our little rocket has been fully recharged, showing a use of 8200 pounds of water. Dawn, day after tomorrow.

-

	November 23.
	Bank of photo-cells completed today. The tunnel is being lead from the swimming pool, and will be ten feet by ten feet. The larger it is, the more gypsum we get.

-

	November 24.
	Dawn this afternoon, and power in plenty flowing in. The furnaces are started, and are roasting the gypsum. The new tanks are getting their first charge, and the gases used for the rocket are being replaced. Despite these drains, the pool is gaining again.

-

	November 25.
	Another bank of cells. Twenty pounds pressure in the new tanks. Eight feet in the pool, and most of the gypsum mined last night gone. The new tunnel is driving on, however, and rapidly enough now to supply the furnaces.

	An addition had to be made to the power board to carry the increased load of new cells. We are making rapid progress now on the tunnel, and the furnaces. At night the electrolyzers work, for it is night with us, but day without. This too is pleasant, to have dark when you want it. The ceaseless glare of lunar day was annoying, nerve-wracking. The pleasant, cool dark makes for better sleep. We are gaining weight once more, but the supply of materials is diminishing. Beyond them there is no more.

-

	November 26.
	Ten and a half feet in pool, and the new tanks now have fifteen hundred pounds pressure. All other tanks full. The regular water tanks have been emptied, and are being filled with hydrogen and oxygen. A small pressure-pool tank alone remains, and that is refilled from the pool when necessary. It is large enough to last all night, however. All four furnaces working. The men have completed the tunnel and are commencing work on the great hangar. New tank room will be hollowed out near it, and the suggestion has been made that the rooms themselves simply be lined with plates of metal, and these welded. The rock could carry the strain instead of the metal. I believe it would work, with some modifications.

-

	November 27.
	Bender was cruel today. He pointed out that the 26th was Thanksgiving. For the first time in three years we overlooked it completely. But Moore says we'll make up on Christmas. He will try to have solids for us then!

	Twelve feet of water in the pool, and the new tanks now have a full ton pressure, half pressure.

	The great room is being done in a new way. A slanting tunnel was drilled upward, till we were at the top of the far side of the room, then turning, tunnels were driven that will be the upper edges of the room. Now we need only cut out the block below, and within, and the ten foot tunnel becomes an entrance to the floor. Often previously we have ended up with an entrance near the roof, since we cut downwards.

-

	November 28.
	Moore has been giving us nearly 7000 calories of food per day, and with the life-vitamin of the converted cotton, we have been putting on weight at a prodigious rate. It does not seem to strain the digestive system, probably because the food is practically all pre-digested. But now the last of the converted clothing has given out. We can spare no more. We have but one blanket apiece, shoes, one pair of socks, one shirt, one pair of heavy trousers, and whatever woolen material we may have had, which was little, most of it being very heavy duck, or broadcloth shirting. Wool, Moore says, does not adapt itself to his processes.

	Tanks have ton and a quarter pressure, pool now up to thirteen and one half feet. All other tanks completely filled. We are trying to have enough hydrogen and oxygen on hand to make the return journey fuel immediately available.

-

	November 29.
	The tank-rooms beside the hangar-room are completed, and work has been begun on the metal inner sheathing. It will be half-inch tungsten-carbon-silver steel, welded.

	Concrete will be poured in all around the tanks in a fluid state, and allowed to harden, filling any small cracks, and perfectly distributing the pressure to the solid rock. The hangar room has been roughly bored out now.

	Fifteen feet of water in the pool, one and a half tons in the new rocket-fuel tanks.

	A great increase in power since this dawn, for photocells have been turned out rapidly. Melville is in charge now.

	Moore and Hughey devoting most of their time to the work on the few scraps of life-materials they have. Attempts were made to ferment or mold some of our artificial food, on the basis that the molds would be life, even though unpleasant. Our Castle is absolutely hygienic, so much so that no trace of any mold has been found! All our food was brought canned, or treated to make it proof against molds and bacteria. None now to be found, save a few disease germs that can be depended on to be present. Apparently these are too high a form of Me, for they will not live in our purely artificial mediums. Even a disease might mean life!

	Another trip to message relay point, soon, with coming of night probably. All too busy now.

-

	November 30.
	Sixteen and a half feet of water, one and three quarter tons of pressure in the tanks.

	Hughey and Moore are preparing a statement of our artificial food supply, and the results observed. This will be sent to Earth when we next go to the message relay point, and fourteen days later we will return, for a statement from the scientists on Earth. Perhaps they will be able to suggest or discover something. Our present situation is rather less pleasant than we had thought. It was hoped that we could live here indefinitely, but unless we can discover the new life-vitamin, it will be impossible. Hughey says that two months is the absolute limit for us now. That allows of only simple starvation, but as many other deficiency diseases, beriberi, scurvy, pellagra and such, do not act as simple starvation, there may be more serious complications. No one knows. Hughey is asking that it be tried on laboratory animals, of which we have none, such as white mice and guinea pigs, which live more rapidly than men.

	The hangar is being finished off. It has been partly cemented. As gypsum is a necessity to us anyway, rooms are being cut for living quarters of the crew of the rescue ship, four rooms, larger than ours, arranged for double bunks in each. But four men are expected, however. These rooms are half way between the Hall and the Hangar, on the same level with ours, but on a different corridor.

-

	December 1.
	Some of my books on Physics, and Melvilles on astrophysics are being sacrificed. A curious dinner! We are becoming bookworms and moths! Moore has promised us some unusual flavours, at any rate.

	The four furnaces are all running at full capacity now, and the cableways are almost over-crowded with cars running up and down, heavily loaded. Rice has made four new ones, despite his many other tasks, using the metals we refined. They are much larger, and barely get through some of the smaller tunnels.

	The pressure in the rocket fuel tanks is up to a full two tons this evening, and Rice reports that the first of the new tank-rooms is completely welded, and the concrete poured. Day after tomorrow gas may be put in it.

	The new quarters are being cut out rapidly, and now Garner has suggested that since this Castle of ours must some day be the base of a greater, and better equipped expedition than ours, we might cut even more rooms to supply them. We must have more gypsum in any case. Two larger store rooms will be cut soon, down near Moore's present store-room.

	It is pleasant to think that we are preparing for the future in our Castle in the rocks. And I believe we will have nothing to be ashamed of in either workmanship or equipment. Rice in particular can point with pride to his engines and his tanks, his silver tubes and power lines.

-

	December 2.
	The hardest job of all was done today. The great Hangar was cut off from the rest of the Castle by the newly installed air-lock, and the passage to the Outside was cut. The passage has been driven half way, and the huge, heavy airlock for the ship placed. This has been made of plates from the dome, brought over recently. The hinges were the greatest trouble, but Rice made them. Moore supplied us with artificial rubber to face the doors for seating. Now they are completely installed, thanks to the numerous winches that Rice set up. They have been tested, and found air-tight. A pump of the rollator type, driven by one of Rice's steam engines, will pump the air back into the hangar from the lock compartment in a very short time. Later, when electric motors are available, the steam engine can be replaced by an electric motor. Power lines have been brought down, of course.

	Tomorrow the remainder of the entrance tunnel must be finished.

-

	Decembers.
	Outside the sun is beating down with tremendous intensity. This evening Kendall projected pictures taken during the entire period, beginning with our take-off from Earth, and ending with some taken this morning, while the tunnel outward was being made.

	The cable-way to haul the rocket into the Hangar has been completed, and a considerable area just outside levelled off with blasting, which churned the rocks into a sort of gravel, and which levelled itself fairly well needing only a little work.

-

	December 4.
	The tank-room near the rocket hangar is being filled for the first time. Only one foot of water into the pool today. The four dormitory rooms have been finished and work now going on in the new store rooms. Kendall has been busy decorating the new dormitories, and the hangar room.

	We gained nearly two pounds apiece on the books. Moore took advantage of the natural starches the sacrificed books provided, to give our weight another boost.

-

	December 5.
	Sun sets tomorrow afternoon, and this afternoon announced that Tankroom No. 1-H had been lined, and was ready for service. The H or hydrogen tank rooms are just twice the size of the O or Oxygen tank rooms. No. l-O is already showing twenty pounds pressure, despite its size. No. 1-H now being filled. Twenty-three feet of water in the pool and the deep, dark water looks good to us as we look down at it. The lights under it, when turned on, make it glow like a huge jewel. It is all that to us! The thought and labor it represents means a great deal.

-

	December 6.
	Kendall has finished decorating one of the dormitories, and the hangar, such parts as he intends to do, are done. One wall has two panels, two scenes, one from space just after leaving Earth, one just before reaching Luna. These are excellently done, but the former looks more interesting to us!

	The two store rooms are finished. Work begins tomorrow on the new series of dormitories and a laboratory, all to be on a newly driven corridor, extending beyond the back wall of the Hall. A new door will be driven, much to Kendall's disgust, through one of his scenes. This will be a ten foot corridor again.

-

	December 7.
	Evening now, and we are back at the Castle. The little rocket functioned perfectly. We landed at the relay point in time to be visible from Eastern Europe this time, and gradually all of Europe and the Atlantic came into view. We left again when California was well visible, and part of the Pacific.

	All signalling done by the new spotlight, much more powerful than our other, but radio was worked in conjunction with it. The long articles were sent twice through, and repeated back for corrections. The greatest difficulty was encountered with some of Moore's complex chemical formulas, particularly as they were necessarily structural formulas, and the empirical formula was useless. My chemical learning was slight, but it helped.

	Hughey's work was not difficult, but remarkably long. Rice's fingers were sore and stiff when the signalling was all done.

	We also sent accurate descriptions of our Castle, and the new Hangar, and instructions on operating all the machines in the Castle. The new relief ship will have spring landing gear like our small ship, and be equipped for landing on its side, instead of the base. It's exact dimensions were sent, it's mass, and it's fuel requirements. There was some question as to the possibility of our obtaining so great a supply of hydrogen and oxygen.

	It will require little more than we now have on hand. It is agreed that we will return in two weeks.

	Williamson, in charge of the relief rocket, reports a minimum of six weeks for repairs and equipment, and the pilots will absolutely have to have a month's training before setting out on their trip. That is two weeks longer than Hughey allows us of life. We will have to live an extra two weeks despite medical knowledge. It would be foolish to leave Earth before the rocket pilots knew the handling of their ship, for it, like the first relief, might be wrecked, and the further wait would certainly be fatal. I have taken the responsibility of assuring them we will be able to survive. Garner approves, though Hughey does not, claiming that it will be impossible. There are four other lives on the rocket to consider, however.

	The rocket while being repaired, is being re-designed in part for the return trip on pure oxygen and hydrogen, a less efficient but more easily obtained fuel than our Garnite.

	Mining was continued, and the work on photo-cells. Another of Rice's engines will have to be installed for the new tunnel cableway, and an automatic switching device would save the time of one man now needed to change the cars from one cable to the other. Rice and Bender are at work. I am sure they will succeed.

	Reed started work on a new furnace.

-

	December 8.
	The new cable-engine installed, and operating. Rice tried out an automatic switcher this evening, just before we quit work, but it failed miserably. He will try again.

	The new tunnel has been driven far enough, and rooms will be cut. Three men on a photo-cell detail now.

-

	December 9.
	The switching device worked this noon, and another man is working on the mining now. Reed has finished his new furnace, and it uses tungsten-steel heating wires, forged at home. It has a much greater capacity than either of the other four.

	The gypsum dump is growing at an astonishing rate. It seems impossible that so little water is obtained from so much gypsum.

	A trip was made today to our diamond mine for more cutting stones, and quite a collection was brought back.

	Rice working on the steel lining of the other tankrooms.

	Kendall decorating tunnel walls now. I am surprised he has any more scenes to show; but he has, a constant variety. They are really helpful, for it makes this Castle of ours seem more of a castle and less a buried dungeon.

	Despite the two powerful tractruck engines, and Rice's original generator engine, the electric power system is sadly over-burdened nights. Rice may work on a turbine generator when his present job is completed. Our main difficulty is that only the two big generators are available, the two used on the rocket coming here, and neither of them will handle much more. Rice is promising to enlist my help.

-

	December 10.
	Rice has finally finished all the welding on the tank-rooms. There are two oxygen tanks and two hydrogen tanks, each of which should resist a pressure of three tons per square inch, or probably better if need be. That will be easy enough however.

	Rice has been talking to me tonight. He suggests we make an electric power plant of our own. I say the labor will be too great, but Rice insists that labor is our best relaxation anyway, and we won't be able to delude ourselves we have any more mining to do soon. We can get pure iron easily, and he can make silver wire to wind it, and with Moore's rubber insulation paint it would be easy. A neat job it won't be, but it will work. It sounds worth while. I agree that our mining is partially in response to the demand for something to do besides sit and think.

-

	December 11.
	The men have agreed. All other work will be suspended to haul the iron, tungsten and silver Rice needs. The old power room will be large enough, but a new casting pit will be needed. I am to work with Rice. We did not mention that this work is merely to keep us occupied.

-

	December 12.
	Very tired tonight. We brought in several tons of iron, other parties bringing in silver and tungsten. Moore had sacrificed several of his books. "The work I'm doing isn't in any of them anyway," he said, as though excusing a fault. We have very few books left now.

-

	December 13.
	Work on new casting pit begun. The turbine housing has been laid out.

	Work progressing rapidly.

-

	December 14.
	We gained half a pound apiece thanks to Moore's books. The converted starch appeared in the form of a mashed potato, or at least it was so labelled.

	Apparatus entirely laid out on paper now, and the turbine castings arranged for, the heavy generator castings are almost cut out in mould form. The hardest work will be making the armature. The field coils will be wound on solid metal, but the armature must be laminated. The laminations will have to be rather thick, but we are using almost chemically pure iron, a thing very seldom obtained on earth. Actually, on thought, I found I had never before seen absolutely chemically pure iron. It always has some carbon, or phosphorus or sulphur or nickel—something with it. We are ready to begin with daylight. Back to mining for now.

-

	December 15.
	Rice and I working on silver drawing. The wire is drawn, then passed through the rubber paint, and reeled on our now empty wire reels. Rice himself was cutting out commutator bars. We have discovered no mica, and the insulation of these will be a problem. Bender is aiding us, and keeps shaking his head at the disgraceful lack of appreciation we show in putting silver to .work. He thinks we should be mining silver and gold bars, I believe. In fact he asked rather disgustedly why we didn't use gold instead, Rice answered smilingly that it wasn't as good a conductor, and too soft anyway.

	The silver, by the way, has been hardened with a small amount of iridium-osmium alloy, which is exceedingly hard, but also hard to get hold of. However, we needed only a little for the commutator bars. All other work had to be stopped while this alloy was fused, as the furnace drew an outrageous amount of current.

-

	December 16.
	Moore has promised us a bakelite for insulating the commutator bars. This solves the last problem. He says that phenol and formaldehyde are easy to make.

	The mining crew has cut several rooms now, and a great mass of gypsum is ready for the furnaces. The photo-cell crew has set up no less than seven new frames.

	Sunrise in three days.

-

	December 17.
	Rice is working hard at an attempt to make good bearings for his machines. He says making the shafts will be the hardest job of all.

	I have returned to the mining crew.

	We are losing weight again, and it has been decided that the last books must go, save the treatises on metallurgy that are left us, since our metallurgists are gone. A last attempt at "weight lifting," as Hughey calls it, will be made.

-

	December 18.
	The converted starches today, and heavy meals. Sunrise tomorrow afternoon, and tomorrow we will again get converted starch. This will be practically the end of our supplies of convertible materials. The sheets even, and towels have been taken, and locked in the food lockers! It reminds me again of the thief who stole such considerable supplies of food last fall. I believed, and still believe he hid them. I wonder where they are, and who he was?

	Moore, by the way, is the one who was stealing soap recently. All the soap mysteriously disappeared. He presented us with some artificial soap, equally effective as a cleanser, and explained what the peculiar flavor in our soup had been.

	Tomorrow we return to the message-relay point, Long, Rice and I. We hope there will be useful information awaiting us. In the meantime the others will begin the reduction of the metal. The ore will be placed in Reed's furnaces, a current of hydrogen passed over it, and the water resulting from the reaction collected.

-

	December 19.
	Midnight. We have returned with rather discouraging news. The scientists of Earth have tried and failed. They said that Moore was a genius—which we knew—and that they had had great difficulty in carrying out some of his reactions. Moore has explained (I should say apologized) that he has space to evacuate into, and can work under conditions they cannot procure.

	But their experimental animals all died. They ask us to report again in two weeks, the 27th. We shall. All the news of Luna and Earth exchanged. Earth interested in our work apparently.

	(A mild statement. Earth was wild, fought for it, demanded it. Inventors were struggling to perfect a radio wave that would go around a corner, and reach the camp itself. Any newspaper would have paid a fortune for it.)

	We returned rather late, with a great bulk of messages, but little help. Dr. Garner's sister sent a long message, and Laura (Dr. Duncan's younger sister) sent me a message. Most of the men have no living relatives.

	Moore said there was little helpful material, and some that he already knew from experience was wrong. Also some brother chemist suggested that we grow mushrooms. I wonder why he didn't make it chickens?

	Very tired now. We all tire easily on these artificial foods.

-

	December 20.
	Tired again, but this time from work in the reduction of the metals for our generator. The metal is all prepared, and the heavy castings have been poured, and are cooling slowly. The men working in shifts, as we want to finish this job before night overtakes us.

-

	December 21.
	The shafts have been cast, and are cooling. Tempering tomorrow. Nearly the whole day purifying the iron for the laminations.

-

	December 22.
	Laminations being cast now. The shafts finished, save for grinding. Rice tempered them by plunging them red hot into the Pool. He rigged a hoist to handle them. He has a lathe, and diamond tools and polishing materials to cut them!

-

	December 23.
	Rice has cut the shafts, and the laminations are completed. The men are now coating them with a first coat of rubber paint, after rough grinding them fairly smooth. The job will not be an easy one. An inverted winch will have to be our press—and not too good a one.

-

	December 24.
	Christmas Eve—but it isn't going to be much of a celebration this year, I fear. There are no normal organic materials left that can help us any.

	The inverted winch press performed as I suspected— lacking any rigidity, the pile of laminations repeatedly slipped. It was luck rather than skill that none of us was hurt when the laminations skidded. Five tries led to no results. Work was knocked off until a suitable jig could be arranged. Having no timber to knock together, we must make a metal frame. Having no supply of bolts handy, it will have to be welded. And the laminations must be aligned accurately—and even so I fear that there will be a wild wobble to the mass when it is rotated.

	Bender decidedly unhappy at the moment. Our soups —may I never have to eat another!—contain some of Moore's stimulant, which he had warned us did not mix with alcohol. Bender felt that Christmas Eve called for a drink. He raided Moore's laboratory supplies for alcohol. The mixture resulted in a violent illness combined with an extreme chill and uncontrollable trembling. He was extremely angry with Moore for making it impossible for him to celebrate Christmas Eve in traditional fashion.

-

	December 25.
	Our third Lunar Christmas.

	The ancient songs sound better in our Castle than they did in the Dome—and Moore achieved the near-impossible. The dessert for Christmas Dinner was a real gelatine-like substance of excellent flavor. The protein material was solid—somewhat more so than necessary or intended, perhaps, but even though it was somewhat rubbery, the presence of solid food gave a festive air to the occasion.

	It was a case of "We shall rest, and faith we need it!" today. Practically nothing was accomplished; the pool was overworked, and the most active group was assembled in front of a board King fixed up out of a mixture of pumice dust and plastic goo, engaged in throwing darts. It is surprisingly tricky; however accustomed we are to lunar gravity in our two-plus years here, we still can't overcome the trajectory habits of the previous years in Earth's heavier field.

	King, naturally, won. He's been throwing darts at that board since he made it a week ago, it seems.

-

	December 26.
	Laminations in place. Winding begins tomorrow. I will be in charge of this, Rice assembling his turbine now, and the compression chamber, as he calls it. It will not be a true boiler. The feed will come from the rocket-ship fuel tanks, as the largest high compression tanks.

	Reed and King back at their furnaces, eating into the great pile of gypsum accumulated, refilling all our gas tanks, and pumping into the huge tank-rooms. No water going to the pool now, as all is needed to fill the tank-rooms.

-

	December 27.
	One coil wound, and our backs, hands, and arms are aching terribly. I thought this silver wire soft till I tried bending it snugly about the armature and field coils! I can scarcely write.

-

	December 28.
	Field done. The work was easier today, as we have learned more. The plastic varnish is drying on it now. It seems an unwieldy piece, but looks efficient. One gang was busy tearing out the tractruck generating system, and this evening we moved the new generator frame in. Rice has placed the bearings, a babbit metal of his own composition. He gathered all the old cans at the Dome to secure the tin and lead. The armature is well underway.

-

	December 29.
	Generator completed save for brush assembly! The turbine case has been placed, and aligned. Rice is so uncertain of his shafts that he has a universal joint between the generator and turbine, both machines mounted on very stiff springs.

	The crew has returned to mining, and I to Rice's workroom, where the turbine is being assembled. We must finish it before the sun sets, or we will be quite literally powerless.

	Tankroom No. 1-H and l-O show 800 pounds each. The full charge will be 6000 pounds, however. It is rising at 600 pounds a day now that the full power is turned into the operations there. Hitherto our operations have consumed a good deal.

-

	December 30.
	Turbine assembly set up in power room, brush assembly placed on generator, and connections to power board bus bars made. Only the compression chamber to be attached. Test tomorrow evening. We are calculating on 2000 horsepower. All apparatus in place this evening, only adjustments to be made. Rice claims less than thirty seconds needed to get up to full pressure in his compression chamber and ten to bring the apparatus to speed.

-

	December 31.
	At eleven o'clock this morning the test was made before the assembled company. It took just twenty-five seconds to get up pressure, and in thirty the speed had mounted to the value we wanted. The voltage was five higher than we had planned, and then the load was put on. The machine slowed, but quickly picked up as Rice's automatic controls increased the fuel. By some freak of good luck, it did not quiver, or move, it was perfectly vibrationless, and remarkably quiet! With our crude equipment, that was necessarily chance.

	The full load was applied gradually, and when a full 2000 horsepower were being generated the voltage was at just the point we wanted with the brushes set as they were. We could still advance these slightly, and finally we got 2300 horsepower without undue heating. The generator is a huge success!

	A fan is attached which maintains a circulation of air through the power room, and carries the heat to the higher passages which tend to grow very cold toward dawn.

-

	January 1,1982.
	New Year's Day.

	In frank assessment, I can't promise myself another. But equally, I can see that the men have accomplished truly worthwhile things here. If only Hughey and Moore had small experimental animals to work with, we might be able to find out something about this mysterious living-matter unknown that we are lacking. But, when we came, we did not foresee the need for biological experiments!

	Today was a semi-holiday; some light work that the men felt had to be done,- or wanted to do, was accomplished, but actually we've been playing the part of kids with a new toy. Every one of us was very directly responsible for the success of the new generator, and none of us quite admits that it was more luck than skill that made the armature balance so perfectly. So today the new turbo-generator system has been working, but we haven't.

	We can't seem to get enough rest to dissipate the feeling of lethargy, however.

-

	January 2.
	Mining resumed. Our production is falling off, as we are growing weaker. The last of the books, the last of the clothes, bedclothes, and towels have gone. We are sleeping on our pneumatic mattresses alone now. There is nothing more we can convert.

	Nevertheless, a considerable amount has been accomplished, and the tank-rooms are up to 2700 pounds now. The pool has not gained more than two feet, as nearly all the water has been converted directly to gas.

-

	January 3.
	Tank rooms now up to 3300 pounds. We have been mining steadily, and making some photo-cells. We are weakening rather rapidly now; most of our fat has gone. Despite the fact that we are consuming more than enough energy, we cannot even retain our weight. Apparently it has never before been known how rapidly the human body wears out.

-

	January 4.
	We go to the message-relay point tomorrow, and I am retiring early. I am exhausted, though I have not worked very heavily today. But 500 pounds gain in the tank-rooms, making a total now of 3800. Still 2200 pounds more to go for No. 1 group.

	My face is hollow, and cheeks sunken, as with all of us, save Bender who seems to be weathering the storm better. He is on the photo-cell detail, though on the 23rd he went after silver ore. Our limbs are all well rounded, heavily flushed. They are swollen, but give a deceptive appearance of health. We are wearing only woolen trousers and woolen socks, with our thick rubber shoes. These cannot be converted anyway. Everything that can be is gone. Cuts and abrasions are curiously slow in healing, frequently tending to grow larger instead of smaller.

-

	January 5.
	We have returned, but our landing this evening was poor. The sun has set, and it may have been shadows from the floodlights, but I think it was principally because I was very tired, and sleepy. The heavy undercarriage springs were broken, and the hull slightly dented. A sharp bit of rock broke a small hole in it. Rice thinks he had best repair it. Bender, who is the strongest of us now, will help him.

	There was no help waiting us. Earth has learned only that the animals all die—and can give us no details of the death. I think they can, but our request for full accounts were answered by saying that the information was not to hand.

	(Duncan was correct in his belief. Dr. Hugh R. Mon-roe who did much of the hurried work was actually with the operators, but refused to send the requested information. )

	The rocket ship is nearing completion of repairs. There was little news.

-

	January 6.
	The power of the new generator is making itself felt. We do not feel comfortable if the temperature falls below 80° F. and we have large heaters set up near our work to keep us warm.

The machines are doing more and more of the work, and we are doing as little as possible now. When the room we are now working on it finished, we will cease work, save during the day of Loon.

	This will be finished tomorrow.

	We have enough water stored in the pools and tanks now to supply the fuel for the rocket's return. The reduction to gas requires no labor.

-

	January 7.
	The mining work is finished. It will furnish a supply for two days at the furnaces. After that only electrolysis will be attempted. There are enough electrolyzers now to consume all the power of our photo-cell banks, and the power needs of the Castle will complete the load.

	Moore says he has enough food-syrup on hand to last the rest of our stay here, but will continue work for a while next lunar day.

	We are starving now, but curiously we don't feel hungry, only very tired, and arms and legs and backs ache. And thanks to Moore's stimulants we feel happy.

-

	January 8.
	Garner, Hughey and Moore and I were called into session today in Garner's office. Did I say that Garner's room had a separate office connecting?

	The discussion concerned Bender. He is as strong and active as ever, his face well filled, his legs and arms are "not swollen, but growing fatty. Hughey and Moore agree that this can only be because he is getting a natural food supply somewhere, which, with the food-syrup he is getting with us, is rapidly increasing his weight. Garner has asked me to watch him for the source of his supply. We are all agreed now that Bender was the food thief.

	Tonight I thought I saw a thoughtful, calculating look about him as he surveyed us one at a time. Poor Melville was lecturing on astro-physics. With least body material to use, he is, I fear, failing rapidly. His leg stump is badly swollen. I wondered what Bender was thinking of. Later he steered the conversation around to the value of the metals we have been using here, and the diamonds. It was agreed among us that diamonds would be worthless, for if such as these were brought to Earth, the entire diamond market would be broken. The osmiridium alloy got the vote as most useful discovery—in financing other expeditions.

-

	January 9.
	1 failed in my watch last night. Bender's room is far away from mine, and I could only see the light shining from his doorway from my room. I was sitting in the dark and fell asleep. I was very tired.

	I have enlisted Rice who rooms next to Bender. We are convinced that Bender brought the stolen food in from the Dome, or wherever he had cached it when he went after the last load of silver. He will be sent after another supply of silver tomorrow, and his room will be searched.

-

	January 10.
	Bender grumbled at the trip, but as the strongest of us had to go. A careful search revealed nothing whatsoever in his room, and it would be impossible to hide it on his person. The room is too bare to allow of any hiding places. Kendall's pictures are intact, and assure us that the walls have not been tampered with. Bender is becoming surly and arrogant.

	Rice reports he saw nothing last night.

-

	January 11.
	Bender was violently sick today, and I told the others of the trap I had set last fall when food was being stolen, a large portion of a sickening compound Hughey gave me. We know it is Bender now, but can do nothing. He is stronger by far than we are. I have a plan I shall suggest tomorrow morning. We must get that food. Bender knows we suspect him now.

	But he is safe in laughing at us. We have no guns, save, a Very rocket pistol for signalling. No weapons whatever.

-

	January 12,10 A.M.
	The plan has been proposed and accepted. Ripe disconnected the lock feed wires, and now entrance cannot be gained from without till we restore this power. Bender is outside with 12 hours oxygen in his tank, so he believes. Actually he has but one hour's supply. Garner, from inside the lock is pushing notes through. We have demanded that he tell us where the stolen food is, and told him of the tampering with his tank.

	He threatens to destroy the photo-cell banks. He hasn't oxygen enough to climb to them and back to a lock.

	10:30 a.m. Bender cursing us, and refuses to tell where it is. Says he's going to keep us from it. He wants enough of us to die off so there'll be load capacity enough on the rocket ship to carry back precious metals. If he is the sole survivor, as he hopes to be, he will claim the mines. At least he can take thousands of dollars worth of osmiridium. Calls us fools and insane to take loads of instruments back when we could take precious metal to outfit half a dozen expeditions. Only reason he joined was to get a share in the mines he had heard would be found, and when he learned we intended to turn all the mines over to our backers and keep nothing for ourselves, he began to steal the food, hoping he could live to file a claim.

	10:45. Oxygen giving out. Bender is weakening.

	10:50. He has told us where the food is, inside his pneumatic mattress, and demands to be let in. Investigating. He told the truth. Almost the whole hour had passed, and Bender was unconscious when brought in. The food has been put in my care, and I have hidden it, telling only Garner and Moore where it is. Moore says by conversion he can get more out of it than nature put in. We don't need it's food value now.

	Bender is raving; he threw us off when he regained consciousness. It seems he intended to come in before he became unconscious, and re-capture the food. Bender must be eliminated. We are not safe.

-

	January 13.
	Moore took but one pound of food, but by conversion made it work wonders. We have each gained half a pound already. Bender is watching me closely. It makes me feel very uncomfortable, as he is much the stronger.

	Garner got some of the food out today while Bender trailed me up to the rocket-hangar. This is unendurable.

-

	January 14.
	Bender has found the food again. Now we do not know where it is, and he refuses to leave the Castle, naturally. He will scarcely leave his room, and forced us to bring him Moore's food syrups as he doesn't feel safe he says when too many of us are around him. If we did not he would naturally take more of the natural food he has. We are desperate.

-

	January 15.
	The suspense and troubles will end tomorrow.

-

	January 16.
	Bender has been executed. Rice re-arranged the switchboard wiring, and inserted a radio interrupter-transformer capable of delivering 5000 volts, in such a way that grasping the main circuit breaker would be fatal. Then he cut the rheostat to dim our lights, cut it up, then down, and gave a scream. The lights remained dim. He lay down on one side, Hughey and Garner pretending to work over him, while I went to call Bender as reserve electrician. He kept his eyes on us and reached for the circuit breaker.

	He has been buried half a mile from the Castle on a low ridge. It was heavy work for four of us to carry him, despite the lunar gravity. We will have to find the food now.

-

	January 17.
	The food was easily found today, and natural rations resumed. We are all much depressed by what has happened.

	Melville does not seem to be recovering properly, and Hughey is much afraid.

-

	January 18.
	Shortly after two o'clock this morning we were wakened by a weak cry from Melville's room. We found his bunk soaked with blood, flowing freely from his stump. Hughey did everything in his power to check it, but tourniquets would check it only temporarily, so long as they were in place. A tourniquet was maintained, but Melville had lost too much blood. He died shortly before seven o'clock. The membrane covering his wound, the new flesh, had been dissolved away during the period of starvation.

	He has been buried on the highest peak of the Cliff above the Castle. Only two days ago we buried another of our party, the man responsible perhaps for Melville's death, and struggled under his weight. Melville was not a heavy load.

-

	January 19.
	Sunrise tomorrow. No more mining will be done. We spend almost all of our time lying on the pneumatic mattresses in our rooms, and bathing in the heat of the electric radiators. We seem to have no energy, but we should improve soon. We have gained over a pound apiece now.

-

	January 20.
	Sunrise this afternoon, and all the electrolyzers were started. Reed, King, Rice, and I worked at the furnaces, and succeeded in getting what gypsum we had mined into them. Now the electrolyzers are drawing solely on the water from the pool. The pressure in the tankrooms is rising steadily.

	The natural food Bender had stolen is almost completely gone, but one more meal can be served, and we have gained back but two pounds.

	Moore has gained four pounds, as I gave him an extra ration of the natural food without his knowledge. We must have his help.

-

	January 21.
	Tankroom No. 1-0 and H are full, and the second group is being charged. All the fuel used during the night has been restored. Moore and Tolman are working together now to make the last steps of the food processes as automatic as possible, and I, with Dr. Hughey and Rice, am learning how to operate the mechanism. It draws an enormous amount of power. Moore says we must get more materials at once, while the new strength we have gained from the natural food is with us.

-

	January 22.
	We made a trip to the carbide mine today, and brought back nearly a ton. It was all the six of us could do to haul it back, yet tomorrow we must get nitrides. I am exhausted, my muscles ache painfully, and a tremendous feeling of lethargy overpowers me. All the men are extremely lethargic.

-

	January 23.
	Only three quarters of a ton of nitride ore could be brought in, as King fell down on the way back, and seemed to hurt himself seriously. He could not walk, and ore was dumped off, while he was put on our sledge.

	Our crew cannot make the trip next time, our legs are painfully swollen, and Dr. Hughey forbids it. King he says is suffering from a torn muscle. It has, apparently torn itself in two. It is extremely painful, but the pain is rapidly diminishing. King is under an hypnotic drug now. His leg, which was injured, seems sunken, and Dr. Hughey is fearful.

-

	January 24.
	A second crew of men went after the nitrides today. Moore and Garner were not permitted to go, and as that left but three, I went with them. Hughey, Rice, Kendall and myself. Little Kendall had a hard time of it, but did his best. We returned safely with a half a ton of limestone, to find King awake and comfortable. On examination Dr. Hughey told us that the torn muscle had been entirely dissolved away! A most horrible form of cannibalism! The body is feeding on itself, any injured member will be removed almost at once by the starving tissues. King says he feels much better. But his leg will be practically useless, as it was the great driving muscle of walking that was torn.

-

	January 25.
	I remained at the Castle today, in charge of power and equipment with Reed. The pool has fallen nearly five feet, but there is a pressure of one and a half tons in the tankroom. The other has a full two tons now.

	The mining group, Rice leading them this time, returned with phosphates and some magnesium. The load was light, but all were exhausted, their legs swollen with the work.

	Dr. Hughey says the great danger of our diet is that while the engine has plenty of fuel, and plenty of steam-pressure, it has lost strength in the pistons and boiler. In other words, while we have energy enough, our bodies are too weak to handle it. He advises reduction in our diet, and this has been done.

-

	January 26.
	Rice has broken his bad leg once more. It suddenly gave way under him while he was going down the corridor, and he fell forward heavily. He caught himself with his hands, and scratched them slightly. Dr. Hughey says this is dangerous. Rice has been put to bed, and his leg is in a cast. It cannot knit till he gets natural food, but it is in the right position.

	Rice has been our mainstay so long we cannot afford to lose so generous and wholly helpful a companion.

	Dr. Hughey is more afraid of the small scratches. He has covered them, after thoroughly washing them with antiseptic, with collodion.

	Garner did not leave his bunk today. As the oldest of us he is suffering most. Hughey says quite seriously this may help him, if he ever gets food in time, because it is dissolving the excessive deposits of lime that age has given him.

	King seems to be getting along all right.

-

	January 27.
	King died early this morning. About three thirty he called to us, and we found him in agony. His injured leg was swollen horribly, and a purplish-red color, the skin distended like a bag. The leg muscle had evidently permitted a hemorrhage, and the blood had filled his leg, draining the body. He was very weak, and there was no way to revive him. A stimulant would simply increase the hemorrhage. Blood poisoning was apt to set in as it was. Dr. Hughey drained the leg, after applying a tourniquet.

	About eight o'clock King died. He has been buried beside Melville.

	We begin to understand what it was the doctors of Earth refused to send us, the information on our probable manner of death.

	Hughey has ordered an absolute minimum of movement, lest more torn muscles result.

-

	January 28.
	Four days to sunset. The rocket ship relief will be due February 19, Long thinks. That is 22 days. Except for injuries we should be able to live until then.

	The tankroom No. 2 registers three quarters full, and some eight feet of water remain in the deep end of the pool.

	We are doing almost nothing, and since our energy-diet has been reduced, the lethargy, when motionless, and the feeling of abundant energy when moving has left us. We are more normally weak.

	The indefatigable Rice, not to be handicapped by the broken leg, has been working several days in his workshop, moving in a wheel chair, and has at last produced a tiny steam driven automobile for himself. He is working on more. Despite Hughey's dire predictions, and thanks to his care, Rice's scratches have not grown, although neither have they diminished in size.

-

	January 29.
	Rice has presented me with one of his little steam driven cars. Moved by a tiny two-cylinder steam engine, carrying oxygen and hydrogen fuel tanks, they save enormous labor in moving about the all too extensive halls of our Castle. Where once we gloried in this freedom of movement, now we curse it, for the journey from the Hall to our rooms is long. The cableway is long since gone, and the car can move up and down easily. It will carry two people, and I act as ferryman frequently in bringing the others up, while Rice does the same. I use two tanks of each fuel (hydrogen and oxygen) a day.

-

	January 30.
	Hughey has asked Rice to stop his efforts. They are too dangerous. He has made three cars in all now, and just before evening finished a trailer one of the cars can draw.

	The tankroom registers nearly full pressure now, and all fuel tanks for tonight are full. The tankrooms represent our homeward trip, and we watch the gauges with anxious hope.

	More and more we appreciate the delicacy of Rice's work, as the invaluable machines continue to function wholly automatically.

-

	January 31.
	Sunset tomorrow, and we believe the tankroom pressure will be nearly up to normal.

	Tolman has fallen into a stupor from which we cannot rouse him. He did not wake this morning, and has not wakened yet. Hughey fears it is the end. He has been injecting glucose and protein solutions directly into the blood, to supply the necessary energy for his heart-beat. He says it may be possible to sustain life even longer in this trance-like state, but he is doubtful.

	Our mattresses have been moved permanently to the Hall that we may be together. No longer does any of us want the solitude of our rooms.

	We have not left the Castle now in six days, save for funerals. All machine controls are inside.

	Moore says he has enough food-syrup to last at least three months on hand.

-

	February 1.
	Tolman is still alive, breathing very slowly, very evenly. Rice is resting quietly on his couch. Whisler was not energetic enough to move today, so wholly lethargic that for the second time in nearly three years he failed to get our meal. Moore has stopped work, but his machines continued functioning until sunset, turning out food that does us no good.

	I acted as cook, to the slight extent of getting supplies from the storeroom on the little steam car. We all feel sharply hungry, as none of us is able to prepare a meal in safety. We are no longer attempting to control the machines, they do much better when left alone. We could hear the turbine start automatically shortly before sunset, and the lights flickered & moment at the change over. The pumps stopped presently, and I went down to see the tankroom gauges. Thirty eight hundred pounds in each of the number two tanks.

	Rice and I have been preparing a written account of everything about the Castle, with detailed instructions on handling it in case of emergency, but with a preface advising that it be left strictly to itself. It is strange to think that these machines we have made with our own hands in our own Castle, wrested from the lifeless surface of the Moon, will continue to maintain the correct oxygen pressure, the correct temperature, keep all the tanks full and the air clean, the passages lighted, long after we are gone!

	Hughey has, with Moore, prepared a report on the probable best treatment for us when relief comes, with instructions as to what will be found in each of the numbered food-syrup jars. These documents will be left in the air-lock chamber. Instructions for operating the lock have been painted on the door. Night has fallen now.

-

	February 2.
	Today was Tolman's last day. He woke this morning about eleven, dazedly. He thought it was the thirtieth, and complained of pains in his abdomen. They got worse presently, and by noon he was writhing horribly. About two o'clock his abdomen collapsed on itself, and he went into a coma, and at 3:45 was dead. I have prepared a cyanide capsule for myself, and several of the others have, after seeing poor Tolman's death.

	We were too weak to transport him to Cemetary Crater, so he was carried on one of the steam cars up to the little rocket hangar, and there we left him, the air being pumped back into the Castle. In the vacuum of space his body will be preserved for burial when the Relief brings help.

	Our hair has been falling out for some days, and now we are all almost entirely bald, even eyebrows have gone. Our fingernails and toenails have also begun to drop out, and the quick of the finger, ordinarily protected by the nail, is exposed, and makes every motion agony.

-

	February 3.
	Our leader is gone. Garner, the originator and inventor of our ship, the man who gathered us together, and who's foresight kept us so comfortable here for the two long years of exploration, died this evening. He did not wake this morning, but about three he woke, complaining of pains in his abdomen as did Tolman. At three thirty-five he took the cyanide capsule, and died almost instantly.

	Our party is dwindling rapidly. Hughey, Rice, Moore, Whisler, Long, Kendall and myself alone remain. We do almost nothing. We have taken to smoking again, occasionally, and get no small comfort from it.

	But with Garner gone, we feel our expedition is doomed. He had cheered us up consistently.

	He has been laid with Tolman in the Rocket hangar.

-

	February 4.
	No food today. We do not need it, really, and we were too weak to get it. Even the operation of the steamcars seems beyond our strength. Hughey says it makes little difference.

	The steady, smooth purr of the dynamo in the power room makes us wish we too, were machines. Its enormous power, and our wholly diminished strength contrast so.

	Very difficult to write. All my finger-nails gone.

-

	February 5.
	Our teeth have been loosening for some days, and two of mine came out today. The gums are bleeding and I cannot stop it. It is slow, but steady. Hughey says it will be fatal, but he cannot reach me as he is across the room.

-

	February 6.
	Long's gums bleeding also. Weak. No more.

-

	Thomas Ridgely Duncan This marks the end of Duncan s diary.

-

EPILOGUE

	on january 30, against all advice, the Relief ship had taken off from Mojave on the long trip, after less than three weeks of training for the pilots. It shot into the heavens with all its power, striving to gather its utmost speed before the detachable fuel-rocket tail was dropped. At a height of one thousand five hundred miles this was blown off, and hurled back. Now the main body of the rocket began to spout flame, and the ship continued on. Straight into space they bored, and five days later they were circling the Moon, in a steadily diminishing orbit, turning and moving with the utmost care as they accustomed themselves to the machine and the lesser gravity. They had located the Dome, and as they flashed around the satellite they sent back word to Earth. Then the door of the famous Castle was discovered, and radio messages sent. This was late evening of February 6,1982. They received no answer, and realized that the men were either dead, or so nearly so as to be unable to reach the apparatus. They strove desperately to reach the surface. Yet it was nearly noon, February 7, that they landed, a mile and three quarters from the Castle, on an open space, the abandoned road to the Dome, actually.

	Hurriedly the men prepared to start, each loaded with his space suit, two tanks of oxygen, batteries for heating and light, and great quantities of food and medicines. They were: Rocket Pilot Donald Murray, Rocket Pilot James R. Montey, Rocket Engineer and Mechanician Bruce MacGregor and Dr. James Caldwell.

	They reached the sealed door of the airlock, hurriedly glanced at the instructions, which they had already memorized from Rice's messages sent over a month ago, and entered. The manuscripts inside were at once picked up, and glanced at before any move was made to enter further.

	Would the inner door open? The outer door was opened by hand, but the inner door operated electrically, and was controlled by the pumps. MacGregor threw the lever. The lights flashed on, and at once air rushed in, their distended suits relaxed somewhat, and the men rapidly released the air in them till they breathed the pure oxygen under three pounds pressure that was the Castle's atmosphere.

	The inner door swung open! A lighted corridor extended before them, branching ahead, bathed in white light from a dozen electric lights fixed in the ceiling. The air was clean and sweet, and from somewhere came a low, smooth drone, a generator, and the soft sugh-chugh-sugh of air purifiers. But no other sound!

	Caldwell halloed. No answer! Their hearts sank, as they ran forward, and turned down the corridor they knew lead to the main Hall and the men's quarters. New tunnels branched, tunnels not mentioned in the message sent, and five precious minutes were wasted when they turned off into a wrong tunnel, lighted like the others, that had thrown Rice's careful directions askew.

	They found the right one, and hurried down. In the Hall they stopped. Seven emaciated caricatures of men lay on seven pneumatic mattresses. A thin trickle of blood seeped from the mouth of each, and from each finger end. Aghast Caldwell went to the nearest, Rice it was, and listened. Living! He called out quick orders, and these men, who, when not learning to subdue the treacherous rocket that had brought them, had been studying the little guinea pigs, starving on artificial foods, set to work. They knew what to do even better than Dr. Hughey had. Since the last message had been exchanged, the hitherto unguessed vitamin-like RB-X had been discovered, in every form of living matter, and now armed with this they fell to. Quickly Caldwell examined. One—two—three—seven! All living now. But would they survive.

	Hughey opened his eyes inside of three hours, Moore responded next. One by one—till only Whisler was left. He never opened his eyes again. Rice was last to revive, Kendall barely pulled through. But at last all were awake.

	Then, with the invaluable RB-X solution, the natural foods not only weren't wanted, but were not as good as those same starving artificial food syrups, for their digestive systems were ruined. In a day they were recovering, in a week they were moving about. When the next lunar noon came around, they were almost wholly recovered; enjoying once more the Castle, and mourning the friends lost. On February 22nd at sunset, the master switches were opened, the photo-cell banks brought in, and the locks closed behind them. The Relief ship, loaded now with the stores of hydrogen and oxygen, with instruments and documents, and the sad cargo of the dead, was ready. As the slow sun disappeared, the ship rose, and started back to Earth, a quarter of a million miles away.

	The Garner expedition was ended. The frozen hell of the Moon was left behind. But an enormous thing had been accomplished. Thirteen men, by the might of their brains, and the work of their hands, had wrested from Luna a living, and more, comfort. Had they but known of RB-X solution, they need never have feared. They had established an outpost! The Castle! What memories of the great and the famous that stirs in our minds today? Duncan—Rice—Johansen—Murgatroyd—

	In five years Luna was thoroughly explored, and the Castle was the base. Mines sprang up, other, and lesser, Castles appeared; and then the Lunar Government set the Castle aside as a National Monument. But before that Johansen had used it as his base for the trip to Mars, Murgatroyd had left there, never to return, but only to send back a ceaseless stream of messages from Venus, where he exiled himself, knowing he could not return.

	Today it is open to the public, with the wonderfully fine murals Kendall left as an enduring monument to the Garner Expedition, with the same crude, but staunch and dependable steam engines Rice made, the same little rocket ship, and the same generator. From the great tankrooms came the fuel that carried Johansen to Mars, and Murgatroyd to Venus.

	Today the Castle is as Duncan and Rice and their friends left it, save for a few more tunnels, a few new rooms. The pool is filled now, the tanks filled with their gases.

	It is an enduring monument to the adaptability, the determined resistance of Man. On the lifeless, barren Moon, they could not find comfort, so they made it.

	And by their example, made men follow!

The End

The Black Star Passes
Arcot, Morey and Wade 01
(Ace Books revision 1953)*

Contents

BOOK ONE - PIRACY PREFERRED
BOOK TWO - SOLARITE
BOOK THREE - THE BLACK STAR PASSES

-

BOOK ONE - PIRACY PREFERRED

PROLOGUE

	HIGH IN THE DEEP BLUE OF THE afternoon sky rode a tiny speck of glistening metal, scarcely visible in the glare of the sun. The workers on the machines below glanced up for a moment, then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators. Even this minor diversion was of interest in the dull monotony of green. These endless fields of castor bean plants had to be cultivated, but with the great machines that did the work it required but a few dozen men to cultivate an entire county.

	The passengers in the huge plane high above them gave little thought to what passed below, engrossed with their papers or books, or engaged in casual conversation. This monotonous trip was boring to most of them. It seemed a waste of time to spend six good hours in a short 3,500 mile trip. There was nothing to do, nothing to see, except a slowly passing landscape ten miles below. No details could be distinguished, and the steady low throb of the engines, the whirring of the giant propellers, the muffled roar of the air, as it rushed by, combined to form a soothing lullaby of power. It was all right for pleasure seekers and vacationists, but business men were in a hurry.

	The pilot of the machine glanced briefly at the instruments, wondered vaguely why he had to be there at all, then turned, and leaving the pilot room in charge of his assistant, went down to talk with the chief engineer.

	His vacation began the first of July, and as this was the last of June, he wondered what would have happened if he had done as he had been half inclined to do—quit the trip and let the assistant take her through. It would have been simple—just a few levers to manipulate, a few controls to set, and the instruments would have taken her up to ten or eleven miles, swung her into the great westward air current, and leveled her off at five hundred and sixty or so an hour toward 'Frisco'. They would hold her on the radio beam better than he ever could. Even the landing would have been easy. The assistant had never landed a big plane, but he knew the routine, and the instruments would have done the work. Even if he hadn't been there, ten minutes after they had reached destination, it would land automatically—if an emergency pilot didn't come up by that time in answer to an automatic signal.

	He yawned and sauntered down the hall. He yawned again, wondering what made him so sleepy.

	He slumped limply to the floor and lay there breathing ever more and more slowly.

-

	The officials of the San Francisco terminus of The Transcontinental Airways company were worried. The great Transcontinental express had come to the field, following the radio beam, and now it was circling the field with its instruments set on the automatic signal for an emergency pilot. They were worried and with good reason, for this flight carried over 900,000 dollar's worth of negotiable securities. But what could attack one of those giant ships? It would take a small army to overcome the crew of seventy and the three thousand passengers!

	The great ship was landing gently now, brought in by the emergency pilot. The small field car sped over to the plane rapidly. Already the elevator was in place beside it, and as the officials in the car drew up under the giant wing, they could see the tiny figure of the emergency pilot beckoning to them. Swiftly the portable elevator carried them up to the fourth level of the ship.

	What a sight met their eyes as they entered the main salon! At first glance it appeared that all the passengers lay sleeping in their chairs. On closer examination it became evident that they were not breathing! The ear could detect no heartbeat. The members of the crew lay at their posts, as inert as the passengers! The assistant pilot sprawled on the floor beside the instrument panel—apparently he had been watching the record of the flight. There was no one conscious—or apparently living—on board!

	“Dead! Over three thousand people!” The field manager's voice was hoarse, incredulous. “It's impossible—how could they have done it? Gas, maybe, drawn in through the ventilator pumps and circulated through the ship. But I can't conceive of any man being willing to kill three thousand people for a mere million! Did you call a doctor by radio, Pilot?”

	“Yes, sir. He is on his way. There's his car now.”

	“Of course they will have opened the safe—but let's check anyway. I can only think some madman has done this—no sane man would be willing to take so many lives for so little.” Wearily the men descended the stairs to the mail room in the hold.

	The door was closed, but the lock of the door was gone, the magnesium-beryllium alloy burned away. They opened the door and entered. The room seemed in perfect order. The guard lay motionless in the steel guard chamber at one side; the thick, bullet-proof glass made his outlines a little blurred, and the color of his face was green—but they knew there too must be that same pallor they had seen on the other faces. The delicate instruments had brought in the great ship perfectly, but it was freighted with a cargo of dead!

	They entered the room and proceeded to the safe, but it was opened as they had expected. The six-inch tungsto-iridium wall had been melted through. Even this unbelievable fact no longer surprised them. They only glanced at the metal, still too hot to touch, and looked about the room. The bonds had been taken. But now they noticed that over the mail-clerk's desk there had been fastened a small envelope. On it was printed:

To the Officials of the San Francisco Airport

	Inside was a short message, printed in the same sharp, black letters:

-
Gentlemen:

	This plane should land safely. If it doesn't, it is your fault, not mine, for the instruments that it carries should permit it. The passengers are NOT dead! They have been put in a temporary state of suspended animation. Any doctor can readily revive them by the injection of seven c.c. of decinormal potassium iodide solution for every 100 pounds of weight. Do NOT use higher concentrations. Lower concentrations will act more slowly.

	You will find that any tendency toward leprosy or cancer will have been destroyed. It will kill any existing cancer, and cure it in about one week. I have not experimented with leprosy beyond knowing that it is cured very quickly.

	This is an outside job. Don't annoy the passengers with questions.

	The gas used cannot be stopped by any material I know of. You can try it with any mask—but don't use the C-32L. It will react with the gas to kill. I would advise that you try it on an animal to convince yourselves.

	I have left stock in my new company to replace the bonds I have taken.

	Piracy Incorporated is incorporated under my own laws.

The Pirate
-

	On the desk beneath the note was a small package which contained a number of stock certificates. They totalled $900,000 face value of “Piracy Preferred”, the preferred stock of a corporation, “Piracy, Inc.”

	“Piracy! Pirates in the air!” The field manager forced an unnatural laugh. “In 2126 we have pirates attacking our air lines. Piracy Preferred! I think I'd prefer the bonds myself. But thank God he did not kill all those people. Doctor, you look worried! Cheer up. If what this pirate says is true, we can resuscitate them, and they'll be better off for the experience!”

	The doctor shook his head. “I've been examining your passengers. I'm afraid that you'll never be able to bring these people back to life again, sir. I can't detect any heart action even with the amplifier. Ordinary heart action sounds like a cataract through this instrument. I can see nothing wrong with the blood; it has not coagulated as I expected, nor is there any pronounced hydrolysis as yet. But I'm afraid I'll have to write out the death warrants for all these men and women. One of the people on that ship was coming to see me. That's how I happened to be on the field. For her, at least, it may be better so. The poor woman was suffering from an incurable cancer.”

	“In this case, Doctor, I hope and believe you are wrong. Read this note!”

-

	It was two hours before the work of reviving the passengers could be started. Despite all the laws of physics, their body temperature had remained constant after it had reached seventy-four, showing that some form of very slow metabolism was going on. One by one they were put into large electric blankets, and each was given the correct dose of the salt. The men waited anxiously for results—and within ten minutes of the injection the first had regained consciousness!

	The work went forward steadily and successfully. Every one of the passengers and crew was revived. And the Pirate had spoken the truth. The woman who had been suffering from cancer was free from pain for the first time in many months. Later, careful examination proved she was cured!

	The papers were issuing extras within five minutes of the time the great plane had landed, and the radio news service was broadcasting the first “break” in a particularly dead month. During all of June the news had been dead, and now July had begun with a bang!

	With time to think and investigate, the airport officials went over the ship with the Air Guard, using a fine-tooth comb. It was soon evident that the job had been done from the outside, as the Pirate had said. The emergency pilot testified that when he entered the ship, he found a small piece of wire securing the air lock from the outside. This had certainly been put on while the ship was in flight, and that meant that whoever had done this, had landed on the great ship with a small plane, had somehow anchored it, then had entered the plane through the air lock at the ten mile height. He had probably flown across the path of the plane, leaving a trail of gas in its way to be drawn in through the ventilator pumps. It had been washed out by the incoming good air later, for the emergency pilot had not been affected.

	Now the investigation led them to the mail-room. Despite the refractory nature of the metal, the door had been opened by melting or burning out the lock. And an opening had been burned into the safe itself! Opened by melting it through!

	A bond shipment was due the next day, and the airline officials planned to be on the watch for it. It would get through safely, they were sure, for men were put on board in steel chambers hermetically welded behind them, with oxygen tanks and automatic apparatus sealed within to supply them with clean air. The front of the tanks were equipped with bullet-proof glass windows, and by means of electrically operated controls the men inside could fire machine guns. Thus they were protected from the Pirate's gas and able to use their weapons.

	The ship was accompanied by a patrol of Air Guardsmen. Yet, despite, this, cancer cases were aboard with the hope of being gassed.

	When the plane reached the neighborhood of San Francisco, there had been no sign of an attack. The Pirate might well retire permanently on a million, if he were alone, as the singular signature indicated; but it seemed much more probable that he would attempt another attack in any case. Well, that just meant watching all the planes from now on, a tremendous job for the Air Guard to handle.

	The leader of the patrol turned in an easy bank to descend the ten miles to Earth, and his planes followed him. Then suddenly through the communicator came an unmistakable sound. The plane automatically signaling for an emergency pilot! That could only mean that the plane had been gassed under the very eyes of his men!

	The bonds were gone and the passengers gassed, and incredibly, the men in the steel tanks were as thoroughly gassed as the rest.

	The note was brief, and as much to the point as was the absence of the bonds.

-
	To the Officials of the Airport:
	Restore as usual. The men in the tanks are asleep also—I said the gas would penetrate any material. It does. A mask obviously won't do any good. Don't try that C-32L mask. I warn you it will be fatal. My gas reacts to produce a virulent poison when in contact with the chemicals in the C-32L.
The Pirate

-

I

	ON THE THIRTY-NINTH FLOOR of a large New York apartment two young men were lounging about after a strenuous game of tennis. The blue tendrils of smoke from their pipes rose slowly, to be drawn away by the efficient ventilating system. The taller of the two seemed to be doing most of the talking. In the positions they had assumed it would have been rather difficult to be sure of which was the taller, but Robert Morey was a good four inches taller than Richard Arcot. Arcot had to suffer under the stigma of “runt” with Morey around—he was only six feet tall.

	The chosen occupation of each was physical research, and in that field Arcot could well have called Morey “runt”, for Arcot had only one competitor—his father. In this case it had been “like father, like son”. For many years Robert Arcot had been known as the greatest American physicist, and probably the world's greatest. More recently he had been known as the father of the world's greatest physicist. Arcot junior was probably one of the most brilliant men the world had ever seen, and he was aided in all his work by two men who could help him in a way that amplified his powers a thousand fold. His father and his best friend, Morey, were the complimentary and balancing minds to his great intelligence. His father had learned through years of work the easiest and best ways of performing the many difficult feats of laboratory experimentation. Morey could develop the mathematical theory of a hypothesis far more readily than Arcot could. Morey's mind was more methodical and exact than Arcot's, but Arcot could grasp the broad details of a problem and get the general method of solution developed with a speed that made it utterly impossible for his friend even to follow the steps he suggested.

	Since Arcot junior's invention of the multiple calculus, many new ramifications of old theories had been attained, and many developments had become possible.

	But the factor that made Arcot so amazingly successful in his line of work was his ability to see practical uses for things, an ability that is unfortunately lacking in so many great physicists. Had he collected the royalties his inventions merited, he would have been a billionaire twice or thrice over. Instead he had made contracts on the basis that the laboratories he owned be kept in condition, and that he be paid a salary that should be whatever he happened to need. Since he had sold all his inventions to Transcontinental Airways, he had been able to devote all his time to science, leaving them to manage his finances. Perhaps it was the fact that he did sell these inventions to Transcontinental that made these lines so successful; but at any rate, President Arthur Morey was duly grateful, and when his son was able to enter the laboratories he was as delighted as Arcot.

	The two had become boon companions. They worked, played, lived, and thought together.

	Just now they were talking about the Pirate. This was the seventh day of his discovery, and he had been growing steadily more menacing. It was the great Transcontinental Airways that had suffered most repeatedly. Sometimes it was the San Francisco Flyer that went on without a pilot, sometimes the New York-St. Louis expresses that would come over the field broadcasting the emergency signal. But always the people were revived with little difficulty, and each time more of the stock of “Piracy, Inc.” was accumulated. The Air Guard seemed helpless. Time and time again the Pirate slipped in undetected. Each time he convinced them that it was an outside job, for the door was always sealed from the outside.

	“Dick, how do you suppose he gets away with the things he does right under the eyes of those Air Guardsmen? He must have some system; he does it every time.”

	“I have a vague idea,” Arcot answered. “I was going to ask you today, if your father would let us take passage on the next liner carrying any money. I understand the insurance rates have been boosted so high that they don't dare to send any cash by air any more. They've resorted to the slow land routes. Is there any money shipment in sight?”

	Morey shook his head. “No, but I have something that's just as good, if not better, for our purpose. The other day several men came into Dad's office, to charter a plane to San Francisco, and Dad naturally wondered why they had been referred to the president of the company. It seems the difficulty was that they wanted to hire the ship so they could be robbed! A large group of medical men and cancer victims were going for the 'treatment'. Each one of the twenty-five hundred going was to bring along one hundred dollars. That meant a total of a quarter of a million dollars, which is to be left on the table. They hoped the Pirate would gas them and thus cure them! Dad couldn't officially do this, but told them that if there were too many people for the San Francisco express, two sections would be necessary. I believe they are going on that second section. Only one hundred dollars! A low price for cancer cure!

	“Another thing: Dad asked me to tell you that he'd appreciate your help in stopping this ultra-modern pirate. If you go down to see him in the morning, you'll doubtless be able to make the necessary arrangements.”

	“I'll do so gladly. I wonder, though, if you know more about this than I do. Did they try that C-32L mask on an animal?”

	“The Pirate was telling the truth. They tried it on a dog and he went to sleep forever. But do you have any idea how that gas does all it does?”

-

	Now Arcot shook his head. “I don't know what the gas is, but have a lead on how it works. You may know that carbon monoxide will seep through a solid plate of red-hot steel. That has been known for some three hundred years now, and I have to hand it to this Pirate for making use of it. Even in the war of 2075 they didn't find any practical application for the principle. He has just found some gas that induces sleep in very low concentrations, and at the same time is able to penetrate to an even greater extent than carbon monoxide.”

	“I was wondering how he stores that stuff,” Morey commented. “But I suppose he makes it as fast as he uses it, by allowing two or more constituents to react. It might well be simple enough to store them separately, and the air-stream blowing past him would carry the gas behind him, permitting him to lay a stream of it in front of the big plane. Is that about it?”

	“That was about what I had figured. One of the things I want to do when I go with that Invalid Special tomorrow is to get some samples for analysis.”

	“That's a pretty big order, isn't it, Dick? How are you going to handle it, or even get it into your apparatus?”

	“Easily enough as far as getting the sample goes. I have already had some sample bottles made. I have one of them in the lab—excuse me a moment.” Arcot left the room, to return a few minutes later with a large aluminum bottle, tightly closed. “This bottle has been pumped out to a very good vacuum. I then swept it out with helium gas. Then it was pumped out again. I hope to take this into some gas-filled region, where the gas will be able to leak in, but the air won't. When it comes to going out again, the gas will have to fight air pressure, and will probably stay in.”

	“Hope it works. It would help if we knew what we were bucking.”

-

	The next morning Arcot had a long conference with President Morey. At the end of it, he left the office, ascended to the roof, and climbed into his small helicopter. He rose to the local traffic level, and waiting his chance, broke into the stream of planes bound for the great airfields over in the Jersey district. A few minutes later he landed on the roof of the Transcontinental Airways shops, entered them, and went to the office of the Designing Engineer, John Fuller, an old schoolmate. They had been able to help each other before, for Fuller had not paid as much attention to theoretical physics as he might have, and though he was probably one of the outstanding aeronautical designers, he often consulted Arcot on the few theoretical details that he needed. Probably it was Arcot who derived the greatest benefit from this association, for the ability of the designer had many times brought his theoretical successes to practical commercial production. Now, however, he was consulting Fuller, because the plane he was to take that afternoon for San Francisco was to be slightly changed for him.

	He stayed in Fuller's office for the better part of an hour, then returned to the roof and thence to his own roof, where Morey junior was waiting for him.

	“Hello, Dick! I heard from Dad that you were going this afternoon, and came over here. I got your note and I have the things fixed up here. The plane leaves at one, and it's ten-thirty now. Let's eat lunch and then start.”

	It was half-past eleven when they reached the flying field. They went directly to the private office which had been assigned to them aboard the huge plane. It was right next to the mail-room, and through the wall between the two a small hole had been cut. Directly beneath this hole was a table, on which the two men now set up a small moving picture camera they had brought with them.

	“How many of the gas sample bottles did you bring, Bob?” asked Arcot.

	“Jackson had only four ready, so I brought those. I think that will be enough. Have we got that camera properly placed?”

	“Everything's O.K., I believe. Nothing to do now but wait.”

	Time passed—then they heard a faint whir; the ventilator machinery had started. This drew air in from outside, and pumped it up to the necessary pressure for breathing in the ship, no matter what the external pressure might be. There was a larger pump attached similarly to each of the engines to supply it with the necessary oxygen. Any loss in power by pumping the air in was made up by the lower back pressure on the exhaust. Now the engines were starting—they could feel the momentary vibration—vibration that would cease as they got under way. They could visualize the airtight door being closed; the portable elevator backing off, returning to the field house.

	Arcot glanced at his watch. “One o'clock. The starting signal is due.”

	Morey sank back into a comfortable chair. “Well, now we have a nice long wait till we get to San Francisco and back, Dick, but you'll have something to talk about then!”

	“I hope so, Bob, and I hope we can return on the midnight plane from San Francisco, which will get us in at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, New York time. I wish you'd go right to your father's office and ask him over to our place for supper, and see if Fuller can come too. I think we'll be able to use that molecular controller on this job; it's almost finished, and with it we'll need a good designing engineer. Then our little movie show will no doubt be of interest!”

	There was a low rumble that quickly mounted to a staccato roar as the great propellers began whirling and the engines took up the load. The ground began to flash behind them; then suddenly, as flying speed was reached, there was a slight start, the roaring bark of the engine took on a deeper tone, the rocking stopped and the ground dropped away. Like some mighty wild bird, the plane was in the air, a graceful, sentient thing, wheeling in a great circle as it headed for San Francisco. Now the plane climbed steadily in a long bank; up, up, up she went, and gradually the terrific roar of the engine died to a low throbbing hum as the low pressure of the air silenced the noise.

	Below them the giant city contracted as the great ship rode higher. The tiny private helicops were darting about below them like streams of nigh invisible individuals, creeping black lines among the buildings of the city. The towering buildings shone in the noon sun in riotous hues as the colored tile facing reflected the brilliant sunlight with glowing warmth of color.

	It was a city of indescribable beauty now. It was one of the things that made this trip worthwhile.

	Now the shining city dropped behind them, and only the soft green of the Jersey hills, and the deep purple-black of the sky above were visible. The sun blazed high in the nigh-black heavens, and in the rarefied air, there was so little diffusion that the corona was readily visible with the aid of a smoked glass. Around the sun, long banners in space, the Zodiacal light gleamed dimly. Here and there some of the brighter stars winked in the dark sky.

	Below them the landscape swung slowly by. Even to these men who had made the trip dozens of times, the sight was fascinating, inspiring. It was a spectacle which had never been visible before the development of these super-planes. Whole flying observatories had been made that had taken photographs at heights of fifteen miles, where the air was so rarefied that the plane had to travel close to eight hundred miles an hour to remain aloft.

	Already ahead of them Arcot and Morey could see the great splotch of color that was Chicago, the mightiest city of Earth. Situated as it was in the heart of the North American continent, with great water and ground landing facilities and broad plains about it, it made a perfect airport. The sea no longer meant much, for it was now only a source of power, recreation and food. Ships were no longer needed. Planes were faster and more economical; hence seacoast cities had declined in importance. With its already great start toward ascendancy, Chicago had rapidly forged ahead, as the air lines developed with the great super-planes. The European planes docked here, and it was the starting point of the South American lines. But now, as they swung high above it, the glistening walls of soft-colored tiles made it a great mass of changing, flashing color beneath them. Now they could see a great air liner, twice the size of their plane, taking off for Japan, its six giant propellers visible only as flashing blurs as it climbed up toward them. Then it was out of sight.

	It was over the green plains of Nebraska that the Pirate usually worked, so there the men became more and more alert, waiting for the first sign of abnormal drowsiness. They sat quietly, not talking, listening intently for some new note, but knowing all the while that any sound the Pirate might make would be concealed by the whirring roar of the air sweeping past the giant airfoils of the plane.

	Suddenly Arcot realized he was unbearably sleepy. He glanced drowsily toward Morey who was already lying down. He found it a tremendous effort of the will to make himself reach up and close the switch that started the little camera whirring almost noiselessly. It seemed he never pulled his arm back—he just—lay there—and—

	A white uniformed man was bending over him as he opened his eyes. To one side of him he saw Morey smiling down at him.

	“You're a fine guard, Arcot. I thought you were going to stay awake and watch them!”

	“Oh, no, I left a much more efficient watchman! It didn't go to sleep—I'm willing to bet!”

	“No, it may not have gone to sleep, but the doctor here tells me it has gone somewhere else. It wasn't found in our room when we woke up. I think the Pirate found it and confiscated it. All our luggage, including the gas sample bottles, is gone.”

	“That's all right. I arranged for that. The ship was brought down by an emergency pilot and he had instructions from father. He took care of the luggage so that no member of the pirate's gang could steal it. There might have been some of them in the ground crew. They'll be turned over to us as soon as we see the emergency man. I don't have to lie here any longer, do I, doctor?”

	“No, Dr. Arcot, you're all right now. I would suggest that for the next hour or so you take it easy to let your heart get used to beating again. It stopped for some two hours, you know. You'll be all right, however.”

-

II

	FIVE MEN WERE SEATED ABOUT the Morey library, discussing the results of the last raid, in particular as related to Arcot and Morey. Fuller, and President Morey, as well as Dr. Arcot, senior, and the two young men themselves, were there. They had consistently refused to tell what their trip had revealed, saying that pictures would speak for them. Now they turned their attention to a motion picture projector and screen that Arcot junior had just set up. At his direction the room was darkened; and he started the projector. At once they were looking at the three dimensional image of the mail-room aboard the air liner.

	Arcot commented: “I have cut out a lot of useless film, and confined the picture to essentials. We will now watch the pirate at work.”

	Even as he spoke they saw the door of the mail-room open a bit, and then, to their intense surprise, it remained open for a few seconds, then closed. It went through all the motions of opening to admit someone, yet no one entered!

	“Your demonstration doesn't seem to show much yet, son. In fact, it shows much less than I had expected,” said the senior Arcot. “But that door seemed to open easily. I thought they locked them!”

	“They did, but the pirate just burned holes in them, so to save property they leave 'em unlocked.”

	Now the scene seemed to swing a bit as the plane hit an unusually bad air bump, and through the window they caught a glimpse of one of the circling Air Guardsmen. Then suddenly there appeared in the air within the room a point of flame. It hung in the air above the safe for an instant, described a strangely complicated set of curves; then, as it hung for an instant in mid-air, it became a great flare. In an instant this condensed to a point of intensely brilliant crimson fire. This described a complex series of curves and touched the top of the safe. In an inconceivably short time, the eight-inch thickness of tungsto-iridium alloy flared incandescently and began to flow sluggishly. A large circle of the red flame sprang out to surround the point of brilliance, and this blew the molten metal to one side, in a cascade of sparks.

	In moments, the torch had cut a large disc of metal nearly free; seemingly on the verge of dropping into the safe. Now the flame left the safe, again retracting itself in that uncanny manner, no force seeming either to supply it with fuel or to support it thus, though it burned steadily, and worked rapidly and efficiently. Now, in mid-air, it hung for a second.

	“I'm going to work the projector for a few moments by hand so that you may see this next bit of film.” Arcot moved a small switch and the machine blinked, giving a strange appearance to the seemingly solid images that were thrown on the screen.

	The pictures seemed to show the flame slowly descending till it again touched the metal. The tungsto-iridium glowed briefly; then, as suddenly as the extinguishing of a light, the safe was gone! It had disappeared into thin air! Only the incandescence of the metal and the flame itself were visible.

	“It seems the pirate has solved the secret of invisibility. No wonder the Air Guardsmen couldn't find him!” exclaimed Arcot, senior.

	The projector had been stopped exactly on the first frame, showing the invisibility of the safe. Then Arcot backed it up.

	“True, Dad,” he said, “but pay special attention to this next frame.”

	Again there appeared a picture of the room, the window beyond, the mail clerk asleep at his desk, everything as before, except that where the safe had been, there was a shadowy, half visible safe, the metal glowing brightly. Beside it there was visible a shadowy man, holding the safe with a shadowy bar of some sort. And through both of them the frame of the window was perfectly visible, and, ironically, an Air Guardsman plane.

	“It seems that for an instant his invisibility failed here. Probably it was the contact with the safe that caused it. What do you think, Dad?” asked Arcot, junior.

	“It does seem reasonable. I can't see off-hand how his invisibility is even theoretically possible. Have you any ideas?”

	“Well, Dad, I have, but I want to wait till tomorrow night to demonstrate them. Let's adjourn this meeting, if you can all come tomorrow.”

-

	The next evening, however, it seemed that it was Arcot himself who could not be there. He asked Morey, junior, to tell them he would be there later, when he had finished in the lab.

	Dinner was over now, and the men were waiting rather impatiently for Arcot to come. They heard some noise in the corridor, and looked up, but no one entered.

	“Morey,” asked Fuller, “what did you learn about that gas the pirate was using? I remember Arcot said he would have some samples to analyze.”

	“As to the gas, Dick found out but little more than we had already known. It is a typical organic compound, one of the metal radical type, and contains one atom of thorium. This is a bit radioactive, as you know, and Dick thinks that this may account in part for its ability to suspend animation. However, since it was impossible to determine the molecular weight, he could not say what the gas was, save that the empirical formula was C62TH H39O27N5. It broke down at a temperature of only 89° centigrade. The gases left consisted largely of methane, nitrogen, and methyl ether. Dick is still in the dark as to what the gas is.” He paused, then exclaimed: “Look over there!”

	The men turned with one accord toward the opposite end of the room, looked, and seeing nothing particularly unusual, glanced back rather puzzled. What they then saw, or better, failed to see, puzzled them still more. Morey had disappeared!

	“Why—why where—ohhh! Quick work, Dick!” The senior Arcot began laughing heartily, and as his astonished and curious companions looked toward him, he stopped and called out, “Come on, Dick! We want to see you now. And tell us how it's done! I rather think Mr. Morey here—I mean the visible one—is still a bit puzzled.”

	There was a short laugh from the air—certainly there could be nothing else there—then a low but distinct click, and both Morey and Arcot were miraculously present, coming instantaneously from nowhere, if one's senses could be relied on. On Arcot's back there was strapped a large and rather hastily wired mechanism—one long wire extending from it out into the laboratory. He was carrying a second piece of apparatus, similarly wired. Morey was touching a short metal bar that Arcot held extended in his hand, using a table knife as a connector, lest they get radio frequency burns on making contact.

	“I've been busy getting the last connection of this portable apparatus rigged up. I have the thing in working order, as you see—or rather, didn't see. This other outfit here is the thing that is more important to us. It's a bit heavy, so if you'll clear a space, I'll set it down. Look out for my power supply there—that wire is carrying a rather dangerously high E.M.F. I had to connect with the lab power supply to do this, and I had no time to rig up a little mechanism like the one the pirate must have.

	“I have duplicated his experiment. He has simply made use of a principle known for some time, but as there was no need for it, it hasn't been used. It was found back in the early days of radio, as early as the first quarter of the twentieth century, that very short wavelengths effected peculiar changes in metals. It was shown that the plates of tubes working on very short waves became nearly transparent. The waves were so short, however, that they were economically useless. They would not travel in usable paths, so they were never developed. Furthermore, existing apparatus could not be made to handle them. In the last war they tried to apply the idea for making airplanes invisible, but they could not get their tubes to handle the power needed, so they had to drop it. However, with the tube I recently got out on the market, it is possible to get down there. Our friend the pirate has developed this thing to a point were he could use it. You can see that invisibility, while interesting, and a good thing for a stage and television entertainment, is not very much of a commercial need. No one wants to be invisible in any honest occupation. Invisibility is a tremendous weapon in war, so the pirate just started a little private war, the only way he could make any money on his invention. His gas, too, made the thing attractive. The two together made a perfect combination for criminal operations.

	“The whole thing looks to me to be the work of a slightly unbalanced mind. He is not violently insane; probably just has this one particular obsession. His scientific bump certainly shows no sign of weakness. He might even be some new type of kleptomaniac. He steals things, and he has already stolen far more than any man could ever have any need of, and he leaves in its place a 'stock' certificate in his own company. He is not violent, for hasn't he carefully warned the men not to use the C-32L mask? You'll remember his careful instructions as to how to revive the people!

	“He has developed this machine for invisibility, and naturally he can fly in and out of the air guard, without their knowing he's there, provided their microphonic detectors don't locate him. I believe he uses some form of glider. He can't use an internal combustion engine, for the explosions in the cylinders would be as visible as though the cylinders were made of clear quartz. He cannot have an electric motor, for the storage cells would weigh too much. Furthermore, if he were using any sort of prop, or a jet engine, the noise would give him away. If he used a glider, the noise of the big plane so near would be more than enough to kill the slight sounds. The glider could hang above the ship, then dive down upon it as it passed beneath. He has a very simple system of anchoring the thing, as I discovered to my sorrow. It's a powerful electro-magnet which he turns on when he lands. The landing deck of the big plane was right above our office aboard, and I found my watch was doing all sorts of antics today. It lost an hour this morning, and this afternoon it gained two. I found it was very highly magnetized—I could pick up needles with the balance wheel. I demagnetized it; now it runs all right.

	“But to get back, he anchors his ship, then, leaving it invisible, he goes to the air lock, and enters. He wears a high altitude suit, and on his back he has a portable invisibility set and the fuel for his torch. The gas has already put everyone to sleep, so he goes into the ship, still invisible, and melts open the safe.

	“His power supply for the invisibility machine seems to be somewhat of a problem, but I think I would use a cylinder of liquid air, and have a small air turbine to run a high voltage generator. He probably uses the same system on a larger scale to run his big machine on the ship. He can't use an engine for that either.

	“That torch of his is interesting, too. We have had atomic hydrogen welding for some time, and atomic hydrogen releases some 100,000 calories per mole of molecular hydrogen; two grains of gas give one hundred thousand calories. Oxygen has not been prepared in any commercial quantity in the atomic state. From watching that man's torch, from the color of the flame and other indications, I gather that he uses a flame of atomic oxygen-atomic hydrogen for melting, and surrounds it with a preheating jacket of atomic hydrogen. The center flame probably develops a temperature of some 4000° centigrade, and will naturally make that tungsten alloy run like water.

	“As to the machine here—it is, as I said, a machine which impresses very high frequencies on the body it is connected with. This puts the molecules in vibration at a frequency approaching that of light, and when the light impinges upon it, it can pass through readily. You know that metals transmit light for short distances, but in order that the light pass, the molecules of metal must be set in harmonic vibration at a rate approaching the frequency of light. If we can impress such a vibration on a piece of matter, it will then transmit light very freely. If we impress this vibration on the matter, say the body, electrically, we get the same effect and the body becomes perfectly transparent. Now, since it is the vibration of the molecules that makes the light pass through the material, it must be stopped if we wish to see the machine. Obviously it is much easier to detect me here among solid surroundings, than in the plane high in the sky. What chance has one to detect a machine that is perfectly transparent when there is nothing but perfectly transparent air around it? It is a curious property of this vibrational system of invisibility that the index of refraction is made very low. It is not the same as that of air, but the difference is so slight that it is practically within the limits of observation error; so small is the difference that there is no 'rainbow' effect. The difference of temperature of the air would give equal effect.

	“Now, since this vibration is induced by radio impulse, is it not possible to impress another, opposing radio impulse, that will overcome this tendency and bring the invisible object into the field of the visible once more? It is; and this machine on the table is designed to do exactly that. It is practically a beam radio set, projecting a beam of a wavelength that alone would tend to produce invisibility. But in this case it will make me visible. I'm going to stand right here, and Bob can operate that set.”

	Arcot strode to the middle of the room, and then Morey turned the reflector of the beam set on him. There was a low snap as Arcot turned on his set, then he was gone, as suddenly as the coming of darkness when a lamp is extinguished. He was there one moment, then they were staring at the chair behind him, knowing that the man was standing between them and it and knowing that they were looking through his body. It gave them a strange feeling, an uncomfortable tingling along the spine. Then the voice—it seemed to come from the air, or some disembodied ghost as the invisible man called to Morey.

	“All right, Bob, turn her on slowly.”

	There was another snap as the switch of the disrupter beam was turned on. At once there was a noticeable fogginess in the air where Arcot had been. As more and more power was turned into the machine, they saw the man materialize out of thin air. First he was a mere shadowy outline that was never fully above the level of conscious vision. Then slowly the outlines of the objects behind became dimmer and dimmer, as the body of the man was slowly darkened, till at last there was only a wavering aura about him. With a snap Morey shut off his machine and Arcot was gone again. A second snap and he was solid before them. He had shut off his apparatus too.

	“You can see now how we intend to locate our invisible pirate. Of course we will depend on directional radio disturbance locating devices to determine the direction for the invisibility disrupter ray. But you are probably marvelling at the greatness of the genius who can design and construct this apparatus all in one day. I will explain the miracle. I have been working on short wave phenomena for some time. In fact, I had actually made an invisibility machine, as Morey will testify, but I realized that it had no commercial benefits, so I didn't experiment with it beyond the laboratory stunt stage. I published some of the theory in the Journal of the International Physical Society—and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the pirate based his discovery on my report.

	“I am still working on a somewhat different piece of apparatus that I believe we will find very relevant to this business. I'll ask you to adjourn after tonight's meeting for another twenty-four hours till I can finish the apparatus I am working on. It is very important that you be here, Fuller. I am going to need you in the work to follow. It will be another problem of design if this works out, as I hope it will.”

	“I'll certainly make every effort to be here, Arcot,” Fuller assured him.

	“I can promise you a tough problem as well as an interesting one.” Arcot smiled. “If the thing works, as I expect it to, you'll have a job that will certainly be a feather for your cap. Also it will be a change.”

	“Well, with that inducement, I'll certainly be here. But I think that pirate could give us some hints on design. How does he get his glider ten miles up? They've done some high-altitude gliding already. The distance record took someone across the Atlantic in 2009, didn't it? But it seems that ten miles straight up is a bit too steep for a glider. There are no vertical air currents at that height.”

	“I meant to say that his machine is not a true glider, but a semi-glider. He probably goes up ten miles or more with the aid of a small engine, one so small it probably takes him half a day to get there. And it would be easy for a plane to pass through the lower traffic lanes, then, being invisible, mount high and wait for the air liner. He can't use a very large engine, for it would drag him down, but one of the new hundred horsepower jobs would weigh only about fifty pounds. I think we can draw a pretty good picture of his plane from scientific logic. It probably has a tremendous wingspread and a very high angle of incidence to make it possible to glide at that height, and the engine and prop will be almost laughably small.”

-

	The next evening the men got together for dinner, and there was considerable speculation as to the nature of the discovery that Arcot was going to announce, for even his father had no knowledge of what it was. The two men worked in separate laboratories, except when either had a particularly difficult problem that might be solved by the other. All knew that the new development lay in the field of short wave research, but they could not find out in what way it concerned the problem in hand.

	At last the meal was over, and Arcot was ready to demonstrate.

	“Dad, I believe that you have been trying to develop a successful solar engine. One that could be placed in the wings of a plane to generate power from the light falling on that surface. In all solar engines what is the greatest problem to be solved?”

	“Well, the more I investigate the thing, the more I wonder which is the greatest. There are a surprising number of annoying problems to be met. I should say, though, that the one big trouble with all solar engines, eliminating the obvious restriction that they decidedly aren't dependable for night work, is the difficulty of getting an area to absorb the energy. If I could get enough area, I could use a very low efficiency and still have cheap power, for the power is absolutely free. The area problem is the greatest difficulty, no doubt.”

	“Well,” Arcot junior said quietly, “I think you have a fairly good area to use, if you can only harness the energy it absorbs. I have really developed a very efficient solar engine. The engine itself requires no absorbing area, as I want to use it; it takes advantage of the fact that the Earth is absorbing quintillions of horsepower. I have merely tapped the power that the Earth has already absorbed for me. Come here.”

	He led the way down the corridor to his laboratory, and switched on the lights. On the main laboratory bench was set up a complicated apparatus of many tubes and heavy bus bar connectors. From the final tube two thin wires ran to a long tubular coil. To the left of this coil was a large relay switch, and a rheostat control.

	“Turn on the relay, Dad, then slowly rotate the controller to the left. And remember that it is rather powerful; I know this doesn't look like a solar engine, and nine o'clock at night seems a peculiar hour to demonstrate such a thing, but I'll guarantee results—probably more than you expect.”

	Dr. Arcot stepped up to the controls and closed the switch. The lights dimmed a bit, but immediately brightened again, and from the other end of the room came a low, steady hum as the big transformer took up the load.

	“Well, from the sound of that ten K.W. transformer there, if this engine is very efficient we ought to get a terrific amount of power out of it.” Dr. Arcot was smiling amusedly at his son. “I can't very well control this except by standing directly in front of it, but I suppose you know what you're doing.”

	“Oh, this is a laboratory model, and I haven't gotten the thing into shape really. Look at the conductors that lead to the coil; they certainly aren't carrying ten K.W.”

	Dr. Arcot slowly rotated the rheostat. There was a faint hum from the coil; then it was gone. There seemed to be no other result. He rotated it a bit more; a slight draught sprang up within the room. He waited, but when nothing more startling occurred, he gave the rheostat a sharp turn. This time there was absolutely no doubt as to the result. There was a roar like a fifty-foot wind tunnel, and a mighty blast of cold air swept out of that coil like a six-inch model of a Kansas cyclone. Every loose piece of paper in the laboratory came suddenly alive and whirled madly before the blast of air that had suddenly leaped out. Dr. Arcot was forced back as by a giant hand; in his backward motion his hand was lifted from the relay switch, and with a thud the circuit opened. In an instant the roar of sound was cut off, and only a soft whisper of air told of the furious blast that had been there a moment before.

	The astonished physicist came forward and looked at the device a moment in silence, while each of the other men watched him. Finally he turned to his son, who was smiling at him with a twinkle in his eye.

	“Dick, I think you have 'loaded the dice' in a way that is even more lucrative than any other method ever invented! If the principle of this machine is what I think it is, you have certainly solved the secret of a sufficiently absorbing area for a solar engine.”

	“Well,” remarked the elderly Morey, shivering a bit in the chill air of the room, “loaded dice have long been noted for their ability to make money, but I don't see how that explains that working model of an Arctic tornado. Burr—it's still too cold in here. I think he'll need considerable area for heat absorption from the sun, for that engine certainly does cool things down! What's the secret?”

	“The principle is easy enough, but I had considerable difficulty with the application. I think it is going to be rather important though—”

	“Rather important,” broke in the inventor's father, with a rare display of excitement. “It will be considerably more than that. It's the biggest thing since the electric dynamo! It puts airplanes in the junk heap! It means a new era in power generation. Why, we'll never have to worry about power! It will make interplanetary travel not only possible, but commercially economical.”

	Arcot junior grinned broadly. “Dad seems to think the machine has possibilities! Seriously, I believe it will antiquate all types of airplanes, prop or jet. It's a direct utilization of the energy that the sun is kindly supplying. For a good many years now men have been trying to find out how to control the energy of atoms for air travel, or to release the energy of the constitution of matter.

	“But why do it at all? The sun is doing it already, and on a scale so gargantuan that we could never hope nor desire to approach it. Three million tons of matter go into that colossal furnace every second of time, and out of that comes two and a half decillion ergs of energy. With a total of two and a half million billion billion billions of ergs to draw on, man will have nothing to worry about for a good many years to come! That represents a flood of power vaster than man could comprehend. Why try to release any more energy? We have more than we can use; we may as well tap that vast ocean of power.

	“There is one thing that prevents us getting it out, the law of probability. That's why Dad mentioned loaded dice, for dice, as you know, are the classical example of probability when they aren't loaded. Once they are loaded, the law still holds, but the conditions are now so changed that it will make the problem quite different.”

	Arcot paused, frowning, then resumed half apologetically, “Excuse the lecture—but I don't know how else to get the thought across. You are familiar with the conditions in a liter of helium gas in a container—a tremendous number of molecules, each dashing along at several miles a second, and an equal number dashing in the opposite direction at an equal speed. They are so thickly packed in there, that none of them can go very far before it runs into another molecule and bounces off in a new direction. How good is the chance that all the molecules should happen to move in the same direction at the same time? One of the old physicists of Einstein's time, a man named Eddington, expressed it very well:

-
'If an army of monkeys were playing on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favorable than the chance that all the molecules in a liter of gas should move in the same direction at the same time.'
-

The very improbability of this chance is the thing that is making our problem appear impossible.

	“But similarly it would be improbable—impossible according to the law of chance—to throw a string of aces indefinitely. It is impossible—unless some other force influences the happening. If the dice have bits of iridium stuck under the six spots, they will throw aces. Chance makes it impossible to have all the molecules of gas move in the same direction at the same time—unless we stack the chances. If we can find some way to influence them, they may do so.

	“What would happen to a metal bar if all the molecules in it decided to move in the same direction at the same time? Their heat motion is normally carrying them about at a rate of several miles a second, and if now we have them all go in one way, the entire bar must move in that direction, and it will start off at a velocity as great as the velocity of the individual molecules. But now, if we attach the bar to a heavy car, it will try to start off, but will be forced to drag the car with it, and so will not be able to have its molecules moving at the same rate. They will be slowed down in starting the mass of the car. But slowly moving molecules have a definite physical significance. Molecules move because of temperature, and lack of motion means lack of heat. These molecules that have been slowed down are then cold; they will absorb heat from the air about them, and since the molecule of hydrogen gas at room temperature is moving at about seven miles a second, when the molecules of the confined gas in our car, or the molecules of the metal bar are slowed down to but a few hundred miles an hour, their temperature drops to some hundreds of degrees below zero, and they absorb energy very rapidly, for the greater the difference in temperature, the greater the rate of heat absorption.

	“I believe we will be able to accelerate the car rapidly to a speed of several miles a second at very high altitudes, and as we will be able to use a perfectly enclosed streamlined car, we should get tremendous speeds. We'll need no wings, of course, for with a small unit pointed vertically, we'll be able to support the car in the air. It will make possible a machine that will be able to fly in reverse and so come to a quick stop. It will steer us or it will supply us with electrical power, for we merely have to put a series of small metal bars about the circumference of the generator, and get a tremendously powerful engine.

	“For our present need, it means a tremendously powerful engine—and one that we can make invisible.

	“I believe you can guess the source of that breeze we had there? It would make a wonderful air-conditioning unit.”

	“Dick Arcot,” began Morey, his voice tight with suppressed excitement, “I would like to be able to use this invention. I know enough of the economics of the thing, if not its science, to know that the apparatus before us is absolutely invaluable. I couldn't afford to buy the rights on it, but I want to use it if you'll let me. It means a new era in transcontinental air travel!”

	He turned sharply to Fuller. “Fuller, I want you to help Arcot with the ship to chase the Pirate. You'll get the contract to design the new airliners. Hang the cost. It'll run into billions—but there will be no more fuel bills, no oil bills, and the cost of operation will be negligible. Nothing but the Arcot short wave tubes to buy—and each one good for twenty-five thousand hours service!”

	“You'll get the rights on this if you want them, of course,” said Arcot quietly. “You're maintaining these laboratories for me, and your son helped me work it out. But if Fuller can move over here tomorrow, it will help things a lot. Also I'd like to have some of your best mechanics to make the necessary machines, and to start the power units.”

	“It's done,” Morey snapped.

-

III

	Early the next morning Fuller moved his equipment over to the laboratory and set up his table for work. There Arcot and Morey joined him, and the designing of the new machine was started.

	“First, let's get some idea of the most advisable shape,” Fuller began methodically. “We'll want it streamlined, of course; roughly speaking, a cylinder modified to fit the special uses to which it will be put. But you probably have a general plan in mind, Arcot. Suppose you sketch it for us.”

	The big physicist frowned thoughtfully. “Well, we don't know much about this yet, so we'll have to work it out. You'll have plenty of fun figuring out strains in this machine, so let's be safe and use a factor of safety of five. Let's see what we'll need.

	“In the first place, our machine must be proof against the Pirate's gas, for we won't be riding a beam with instruments to guide us safely, if we pass out. I've thought that over, and I think that the best system is just what we used in the sample bottles—a vacuum. His gas is stopped by nothing, so to speak, but there is no substance that will stop it! It will no doubt penetrate the outer shell, but on reaching the vacuum, it will tend to stay there, between the inner and outer walls. Here it will collect, since it will be fighting air pressure in going either in or out. The pressure inside will force it back, and the pressure outside will force it in. If we did not pump it out, it would soon build up pressure enough to penetrate the interior wall. Now, since the stuff can leak through any material, what kind of a pump shall we use? It won't be pushed by a piston, for it will leak through either the cylinder walls or the piston. A centrifugal pump would be equally ineffective. A mercury vapor pump will take it out, of course, and keep a high vacuum, but we'd never make any progress.

	“Our new machine gives us the answer. With it we can just have a number of openings in the wall of the outer shell, and set in them one of these molecular motion directors, and direct the molecules into the outside air. They can't come in through it, and they will go out!”

	“But,” Morey objected, “the vacuum that keeps out the gas will also keep out heat, as well! Since our generator is to run on heat energy, it will be rather chilly inside if we don't remedy that. Of course, our power units could be placed outside, where the blast of air will warm them, but we really won't have a very good streamline effect if we hang a big electric generator outside.”

	“I've thought of that too,” Arcot answered. “The solution is obvious—if we can't bring the generator to the air, we must bring the air to it.” He began sketching rapidly on the pad before him, “We'll have all the power equipment in this room here in the back, and the control room up in front, here. The relays for controlling will be back here, so we can control electrically the operation of the power equipment from our warm, gas-tight room. If it gets too warm in there, we can cool it by using a little of the heat to help accelerate the ship. If it is too cold, we can turn on an electric heater run by the generator. The air for the generator can come in through a small sort of scoop on top, and leave through a small opening in the rear. The vacuum at the tail will assure us a very rapid circulation, even if the centrifugal pump action of the enclosed generator isn't enough.”

	His thoughts began moving more rapidly than his words. “We'll want the generator greatly over power to run tests over a greater range. Won't need more than one hundred kilowatts altogether, but should install about a thousand—A.C., of course. Batteries in the keel for starting the generator ... Self-supporting when it's rolling ...

	“But let's set down some actual figures on this.”

	For the rest of the day the three men were working on the general plan of the new ship, calculating the strengths needed, supplementing mathematics with actual experiments with the machines on hand. The calculating machines were busy continuously, for there were few rules that experience could give them. They were developing something entirely new, and though they were a designing staff of three of the foremost mathematicians in the world, it was a problem that tested their ingenuity to the utmost.

	By the evening of the first day, however, they had been able to give the finished designs for the power units to the mechanics who were to make them. The order for the storage battery and the standard electrical equipment had been placed at once. By the time they had completed the drawings for the mail casting, the materials were already being assembled in a little private camp that Morey owned, up in the hills of Vermont. The giant freight helicopters could land readily in the wide field that had been cleared on the small plateau, in the center of which nestled a little blue lake and a winding trout brook.

	The mechanics and electrical engineers had been sent up there already—officially on vacation. The entire program could be carried out without attracting the least attention, for such orders from the great Transcontinental lines were so frequent that no importance was attached to them.

	Four days after the final plans had been completed the last of the supplies were being assembled in the portable metal shed that was to house the completed machine. The shining tungsto-steel alloy frame members were rapidly being welded in place by cathode ray welding torches in the hands of skilled artisans.

	Already at the other end of the shop the generator had been arranged for use with the molecular motion power units. The many power units to drive and support the ship were finished and awaiting installation as the crew quit work on the fourth evening. They would be installed on the frame in the morning, and the generator would be hoisted into place with the small portable crane. The storage batteries were connected, and in place in the hull. The great fused quartz windows rested in their cases along one wall, awaiting the complete application of the steel alloy plates. They were to be over an inch thick, an unnecessary thickness, perhaps, but they had no need to economize weight, as witnessed by their choice of steel instead of light metal alloys throughout the construction.

	The three men had arrived late that afternoon in a small helicopter, and had gone directly to the shops to see what progress had been made. They had been forced to remain in New York to superintend the shipment of the necessary supplies to the camp site, and since no trouble was anticipated in the making of the steel framework, they had not felt it necessary to come. But now they would be needed to superintend the more delicate work.

	“She's shaping up nicely, isn't she?” Arcot gazed at the rapidly rounding frame with a critical eye. Unhindered as they were by the traditional shapes, by wings or other protuberances, they had been able to design a machine of striking beauty. The ship was to retain its natural metallic sheen, the only protection being a coat of “passivity paint”—a liquid chemical that could be brushed or sprayed on iron, chromium, nickel or cobalt alloys, rendering them passive to practically all chemical agents. The new “paint” left the iron or steel as brilliantly glossy as ever, but overcast with a beautiful iridescence, and immune to the most powerful reagents.

	The three men walked around the rapidly growing hull, and looked with excited interest at the heavy welded joints and the great beams. The ship seemed capable of withstanding a fall of several hundred feet with little damage. The location of the power units was plainly visible and easily recognized, for at each point there came together four or five great beams, welded into one great mass of tough metal, and in it there were set heavy tungsten bolts that would hold the units in place.

	They inspected each joint minutely for signs of flaws, using a small portable X-ray fluoroscope to see the interior of the metal. Each joint seemed perfect. They retired, satisfied that everything was ready for the work of the next day.

	The morning began early with a long swim in the lake, and a hearty breakfast of country cured ham and eggs. Then the work on the great framework was continued, and that day saw the power units bolted in place, removable if change was thought advisable. Each power unit was equipped with long streamlined copper fins lying close to the rounded hull, that they might absorb heat more rapidly.

	Day by day the structure drew nearer completion, and, with the large crew of highly skilled workers, the craft was practically complete within a week. Only the instruments remained to be installed. Then at last even these had been put in place, and with the aid of Fuller, Morey junior, and his own father, Arcot had connected their many complicated circuits.

	“Son,” remarked Arcot senior, looking critically at the great switchboard, with its maze of connections, its many rheostats and controls, and its heavy bus bar connectors behind it, “no one man can keep an eye on all those instruments. I certainly hope you have a good-sized crew to operate your controls! We've spent two days getting all those circuits together, and I'll admit that some of them still have me beat. I don't see how you intend to watch all those instruments, and at the same time have any idea what's going on outside.”

	“Oh,” laughed Arcot junior, “these aren't intended for constant watching. They're merely helps in a lot of tests I want to make. I want to use this as a flying laboratory so I can determine the necessary powers and the lowest factor of safety to use in building other machines. The machine is very nearly completed now. All we need is the seats—they are to be special air-inflated gyroscopically controlled seats, to make it impossible for a sudden twist of the ship to put the strain in the wrong direction. Of course the main gyroscopes will balance the ship laterally, horizontally, and vertically, but each chair will have a separate gyroscopic mounting for safety.”

	“When do you expect to start after the Pirate?” Fuller asked.

	“I plan to practice the manipulation of the machine for at least four days,” Arcot replied, “before I try to chase the Pirate. I'd ordinarily recommend the greatest haste, but the man has stolen close to ten million already, and he's still at it. That would not be done by anyone in his right mind. I suppose you've heard, the War Department considers his new gas so important that they've obtained a pardon for him on condition they be permitted to have the secret of it. They demand the return of the money, and I have no doubt he has it. I am firmly convinced that he is a kleptomaniac. I doubt greatly if he will stop taking money before he is caught. Therefore it will be safe to wait until we can be sure of our ability to operate the machine smoothly. Any other course would be suicidal. Also, I am having some of those tool-makers make up a special type of molecular motion machine for use as a machine gun. The bullets are steel, about three inches long, and as thick as my thumb. They will be perfectly streamlined, except for a little stabilizer at the tail, to guide 'em. They won't spin as a rifle bullet does, and so there will be no gyroscopic effect to hold them nose on, but the streamlining and the stabilizer will keep them on their course. I expect them to be able to zip right through many inches of armour plate, since they will have a velocity of over four miles a second.

	“They'll be fed in at the rate of about two hundred a minute—faster if I wish, and started by a small spring. They will instantly come into the field of a powerful molecular motion director, and will be shot out with terrific speed. It will be the first rifle ever made that could shoot bullets absolutely parallel to the ground.

	“But that is all we can do today. The guns will be mounted outside, and controlled electrically, and the charts will be installed tomorrow. By the day after tomorrow at eight A.M. I plan to take off!”

	The work the next day was rushed to completion far earlier than Arcot had dared to hope. All the men had been kept isolated at the farm, lest they accidentally spread the news of the new machine. It was with excited interest that they helped the machine to completion. The guns had not been mounted as yet, but that could wait. Mid-afternoon found the machine resting in the great construction shed, completely equipped and ready to fly!

	“Dick,” said Morey as he strode up to him after testing the last of the gyroscopic seats, “she's ready! I certainly want to get her going—it's only three-thirty, and we can go around to the sunlight part of the world when it gets dark at the speeds we can travel. Let's test her now!”

	“I'm just as anxious to start as you are, Bob. I've sent for a U.S. Air Inspector. As soon as he comes we can start. I'll have to put an 'X' license indication on her now. He'll go with us to test it—I hope. There will be room for three other people aboard, and I think you and Dad and I will be the logical passengers.”

	He pointed excitedly. “Look, there's a government helicopter coming. Tell the men to get the blocks from under her and tow her out. Two power trucks should do it. Get her at least ten feet beyond the end of the hangar. We'll start straight up, and climb to at least a five mile height, where we can make mistakes safely. While you're tending to that, I'll see if I can induce the Air Inspector to take a trip with us.”

	Half an hour later the machine had been rolled entirely out of the shed, on the new concrete runway.

	The great craft was a thing of beauty shimmering in the bright sunlight The four men who were to ride in it on its maiden voyage stood off to one side gazing at the great gleaming metal hull. The long sweeping lines of the sides told a story of perfect streamlining, and implied high speed, even at rest. The bright, slightly iridescent steel hull shone in silvery contrast to the gleaming copper of the power units' heat-absorption fins. The great clear windows in the nose and the low, streamlined air intake for the generator seemed only to accentuate the graceful lines of the machine.

	“Lord, she's a beauty, isn't she, Dick!” exclaimed Morey, a broad smile of pleasure on his face.

	“Well, she did shape up nicely on paper, too, didn't she. Oh, Fuller, congratulations on your masterpiece. It's even better looking than we thought, now the copper has added color to it. Doesn't she look fast? I wish we didn't need physicists so badly on this trip, so you could go on the first ride with us.”

	“Oh, that's all right, Dick, I know the number of instruments in there, and I realize they will mean a lot of work this trip. I wish you all luck. The honor of having designed the first ship like that, the first heavier-than-air ship that ever flew without wings, jets, or props—that is something to remember. And I think it's one of the most beautiful that ever flew, too.”

	“Well, Dick,” said his father quietly, “let's get under way. It should fly—but we don't really know that it will!”

	The four men entered the ship and strapped themselves in the gyroscopic seats. One by one they reported ready.

	“Captain Mason,” Arcot explained to the Air Inspector, “these seats may seem to be a bit more active than one generally expects a seat to be, but in this experimental machine, I have provided all the safety devices I could think of. The ship itself won't fall, of that I am sure, but the power is so great it might well prove fatal to us if we are not in a position to resist the forces. You know all too well the effect of sharp turns at high speed and the results of the centrifugal force. This machine can develop such tremendous power that I have to make provision for it.

	“You notice that my controls and the instruments are mounted on the arm of the chair really; that permits me to maintain complete control of the ship at all times, and still permits my chair to remain perpendicular to the forces. The gyroscopes in the base here cause the entire chair to remain stable if the ship rolls, but the chair can continue to revolve about this bearing here so that we will not be forced out of our seats. I'm confident that you'll find the machine safe enough for a license. Shall we start?”

	“All right, Dr. Arcot,” replied the Air Inspector. “If you and your father are willing to try it, I am.”

	“Ready, Engineer?” asked Arcot.

	“Ready, Pilot!” replied Morey.

	“All right—just keep your eye on the meters, Dad, as I turn on the system. If the instruments back there don't take care of everything, and you see one flash over the red mark—yank open the main circuit. I'll call out what to watch as I turn them on.”

	“Ready son.”

	“Main gyroscopes!” There was a low snap, a clicking of relays in the rear compartment, and then a low hum that quickly ran up the scale. “Main generators!” Again the clicking switch, and the relays thudding into action, again the rising hum. “Seat-gyroscopes.” The low click was succeeded by a quick shrilling sound that rose in moments above the range of hearing as the separate seat-gyroscopes took up their work. “Main power tube bank!” The low hum of the generator changed to a momentary roar as the relays threw on full load. In a moment the automatic controls had brought it up to speed.

	“Everything is working perfectly so far. Are we ready to start now, son?”

	“Main vertical power units!” The great ship trembled throughout its length as the lift of the power units started. A special instrument had been set up on the floor beside Arcot, that he might be able to judge the lift of his power units; it registered the apparent weight of the ship. It had read two hundred tons. Now all eyes were fixed on it, as the pointer dropped quickly to 150-100-75-50-40-20-10—there was a click and the instrument flopped back to 300—it was registering in pounds now! Then the needle moved to zero, and the mighty structure floated into the air, slowly moving down the field as a breeze carried it along the ground.

	The men outside saw it rise swiftly into the sky, straight toward the blue vault of heaven. In two or three minutes it was disappearing. The glistening ship shrank to a tiny point of light; then it was gone! It must have been rising at fully three hundred miles an hour!

	To the men in the car there had been a tremendous increase in weight that had forced them into the air cushions like leaden masses. Then the ground fell away with a speed that made them look in amazement. The house, the construction shed, the lake, all seemed contracting beneath them. So quickly were they rising that they had not time to adjust their mental attitude. To them all the world seemed shrinking about them.

	Now they were at a tremendous height; over twenty miles they had risen into the atmosphere; the air about them was so thin that the sky seemed black, the stars blazed out in cold, unwinking glory, while the great fires of the sun seemed reaching out into space like mighty arms seeking to draw back to the parent body the masses of the wheeling planets. About it, in far flung streamers of cold fire shone the mighty zodiacal light, an Aurora on a titanic scale. For a moment they hung there, while they made readings of the meters.

	Arcot was the first to speak and there was awe in his voice. “I never began to let out the power of this thing! What a ship! When these are made commercially, we'll have to use about one horsepower generators in them, or people will kill themselves trying to see how fast they can go.”

	Methodically the machine was tried out at this height, testing various settings of the instruments. It was definitely proven that the values that Arcot and Morey had assigned from purely theoretical calculations were correct to within one-tenth of one percent. The power absorbed by the machine they knew and had calculated, but the terrific power of the driving units was far beyond their expectations.

	“Well, now we're off for some horizontal maneuvers,” Arcot announced. “I'm sure we agree the machine can climb and can hold itself in the air. The air pressure controls seem to be working perfectly. Now we'll test her speed.”

	Suddenly the seats swung beneath them; then as the ship shot forward with ever greater speed, ever greater acceleration, it seemed that it turned and headed upward, although they knew that the main stabilizing gyroscopes were holding it level. In a moment the ship was headed out over the Atlantic at a speed no rifle bullet had ever known. The radio speedometer needle pushed farther and farther over as the speed increased to unheard of values. Before they left the North American shoreline they were traveling faster than a mile a second. They were in the middle of the Atlantic before Arcot gradually shut off the acceleration, letting the seats drop back into position.

	A hubbub of excited comments rose from the four men. Momentarily, with the full realization of the historical importance of this flight, no one paid any attention to anyone else. Finally a question of the Air Inspector reached Arcot's ears.

	“What speed did we attain, Dr. Arcot? Look—there's the coast of Europe! How fast are we going now?”

	“We were traveling at the rate of three miles a second at the peak.” Arcot answered. “Now it has fallen to two and a half.”

	Again Arcot turned his attention to his controls. “I'm going to try to see what the ultimate ceiling of this machine is. It must have a ceiling, since it depends on the operation of the generator to operate the power-units. This, in turn, depends on the heat of the air, helped somewhat by the sun's rays. Up we go!”

	The ship was put into a vertical climb, and steadily the great machine rose. Soon, however, the generator began to slow down. The readings of the instruments were dropping rapidly. The temperature of the exceedingly tenuous air outside was so close to absolute zero that it provided very little energy.

	“Get up some forward speed,” Morey suggested, “so that you'll have the aid of the air scoop to force the air in faster.”

	“Right, Morey.” Arcot slowly applied the power to the forward propulsion units. As they took hold, the ship began to move forward. The increase in power was apparent at once. The machine started rising again. But at last, at a height of fifty-one miles, her ceiling had been reached.

	The cold of the cabin became unbearable, for every kilowatt of power that the generator could get from the air outside was needed to run the power units. The air, too, became foul and heavy, for the pumps could not replace it with a fresh supply from the near-vacuum outside. Oxygen tanks had not been carried on this trip. As the power of the generator was being used to warm the cabin once more, they began to fall. Though the machine was held stable by the gyroscopes, she was dropping freely; but they had fifty miles to fall, and as the resistance of the denser air mounted, they could begin to feel the sense of weight return.

	“You've passed, but for the maneuvers, Dr. Arcot!” The Air Inspector was decidedly impressed. “The required altitude was passed so long ago—why we are still some miles above it, I guess! How fast are we falling?”

	“I can't tell unless I point the nose of the ship down, for the apparatus works only in the direction in which the ship is pointed. Hold on, everyone, I am going to start using some power to stop us.”

	It was night when they returned to the little field in Vermont. They had established a new record in every form of aeronautical achievement except endurance! The altitude record, the speed record, the speed of climb, the acceleration record—all that Arcot could think of had been passed. Now the ship was coming to dock for the night. In the morning it would be out again. But now Arcot was sufficiently expert with the controls to maneuver the ship safely on the ground. They finally solved the wind difficulty by decreasing the weight of the ship to about fifty pounds, thus enabling the three men to carry it into the hangar!

-

	The next two days were devoted to careful tests of the power factors of the machine, the best operating frequency, the most efficient altitude of operation, and as many other tests as they had time for. Each of the three younger men took turns operating, but so great were the strains of the sudden acceleration, that Arcot senior decided it would be wisest for him to stay on the ground and watch.

	In the meantime reports of the Pirate became fewer and fewer as less and less money was shipped by air.

	Arcot spent four days practicing the manipulation of the machine, for though it handled far more readily than any other craft he had ever controlled, there was always the danger of turning on too much power under the stress of sudden excitement.

	The night before, Arcot had sailed the ship down and alighted on the roof of Morey senior's apartment, leaving enough power on to reduce the weight to but ten tons, lest it fall through the roof, while he went down to see the President of the Lines about some “bait” for the Pirate.

	“Send some cash along,” said Arcot, when he saw Morey senior, “say a quarter of a million. Make it more or less public knowledge, and talk it up so that the Pirate may there's a real haul on board. I am going to accompany the plane at a height of about a quarter of a mile above. I will try to locate him from there by means of radar, and if I have my apparatus on, I naturally can't locate him. I hope he won't be scared away—but I rather believe he won't. At any rate, you won't lose on the try!”

-

IV

	AGAIN MOREY AND ARCOT WERE looking at the great Jersey aerodrome, out on the fields that had been broad marshes centuries before. Now they had been filled in, and stretched for miles, a great landing field, close to the great city across the river.

	The men in the car above were watching the field, hanging inert, a point of glistening metal, high in the deep velvet of the purple sky, for fifteen miles of air separated them from the Transcontinental machine below. Now they saw through their field glasses that the great plane was lumbering slowly across the field, gaining momentum as it headed westward into the breeze. Then it seemed to be barely clearing the great skyscrapers that towered twenty-four hundred feet into the air, arching over four or five city blocks. From this height they were toys made of colored paper, soft colors glistening in the hot noon sunlight, and around and about them wove lines of flashing, moving helicopters, the individual lost in the mass of the million or so swiftly moving machines. Only the higher, steadily moving levels of traffic were visible to them.

	“Just look at that traffic! Thousands and thousands coming back into the city after going home to lunch—and every day the number of helicopters is increasing! If it hadn't been for your invention of this machine, conditions would soon be impossible. The airblast in the cities is unbearable now, and getting worse all the time. Many machines can't get enough power to hold themselves up at the middle levels; there is a down current over one hundred miles an hour at the 400-foot level in downtown New York. It takes a racer to climb fast there!

	“If it were not for gyroscopic stabilizers, they could never live in that huge airpocket. I have to drive in through there. I'm always afraid that somebody with an old worn-out bus will have stabilizer failure and will really smash things.” Morey was a skillful pilot, and realized, as few others did, the dangers of that downward airblast that the countless whirring blades maintained in a constant roar of air. The office buildings now had double walls, with thick layers of sound absorbing materials, to stop the roar of the cyclonic blast that continued almost unabated twelve hours a day.

	“Oh, I don't know about that, Morey,” replied Arcot. “This thing has some drawbacks. Remember that if we had about ten million of these machines hung in the air of New York City, there would be a noticeable drop in the temperature. We'd probably have an Arctic climate year in and year out. You know, though, how unbearably hot it gets in the city by noon, even on the coldest winter days, due to the heating effect of the air friction of all those thousands of blades. I have known the temperature of the air to go up fifty degrees. There probably will have to be a sort of balance between the two types of machines. It will be a terrific economic problem, but at the same time it will solve the difficulties of the great companies who have been fermenting grain residues for alcohol. The castor bean growers are also going to bring down their prices a lot when this machine kills the market. They will also be more anxious to extract the carbon from the cornstalks for reducing ores of iron and of other metals.”

	As the ship flew high above the Transcontinental plane, the men discussed the economic values of the different applications of Arcot's discoveries from the huge power stations they could make, to the cooling and ventilating of houses.

	“Dick, you mentioned the cooling effect on New York City; with the millions on millions of these machines that there will be, with huge power plants, with a thousand other different applications in use, won't the terrific drain of energy from the air cause the whole world to become a little cooler?” asked Fuller.

	“I doubt it, Bob,” said Arcot slowly. “I've thought of that myself. Remember that most of the energy we use eventually ends up as heat anyway. And just remember the decillions of ergs of energy that the sun is giving off! True, we only get an infinitesimal portion of that energy—but what we do get is more than enough for us. Power houses can be established very conveniently in the tropics, where they will cool the air, and the energy can be used to refine metals. That means that the surplus heat of the tropics will find a use. Weather control will also be possible by the direction-control of great winds. We could set huge director tubes on the tops of mountains, and blow the winds in whatever direction best suited us. Not the blown wind itself, but the vast volume of air it carried with it, would be able to cool the temperate zones in the summer from the cold of the poles, and warm it in winter with the heat of the tropics.”

	After a thoughtful silence, Arcot continued, “And there is another thing it may make possible in the future—a thing that may be hard to accept as a commercial proposition. We have a practically inexhaustible source of energy now, but we have no sources of minerals that will last indefinitely. Copper is becoming more and more rare. Had it not been for the discoveries of the great copper fields of the Sahara and in Alaska, we wouldn't have any now. Platinum is exhausted, and even iron is becoming more and more valuable. We are facing a shortage of metals. Do you realize that within the next two centuries we will be unable to maintain this civilization unless we get new sources of certain basic raw materials?

	“But we have one other chance now. The solution is—there are nine planets in this solar system! Neptune and Uranus are each far vaster than Earth; they are utterly impossible for life as we know it, but a small colony might be established there to refine metals for the distant Earth. We might be able to build domed and sealed cities. But first we could try the nearer planets—Mars, Venus, or some satellites such as our Moon. I certainly hope that this machine will make it possible.”

	For some time they sat in silence as they sped along, high above the green plains of Indiana. Chicago lay like some tremendous jewel far off on the horizon to the right and ahead. Five miles below them the huge bulk of the Transcontinental plane seemed a toy as it swung slowly across the fields—actually traveling over six hundred miles an hour. At last Morey spoke.

	“You're right, Arcot. We'll have to think of the interplanetary aspects of this some day. Oh, there's Chicago! We'd better start the vacuum gas protector. And the radar. We may soon see some action.”

	The three men immediately forgot the somewhat distant danger of the metal shortage. There were a number of adjustments to be made, and these were quickly completed, while the machine forged evenly, steadily ahead. The generator was adjusted to maximum efficiency, and the various tubes were tested separately, for though they were all new, and each good for twenty-five thousand hours, it would be inconvenient, to say the least, if one failed while they were in action. Each tested perfect; and they knew from the smooth functioning of the various relays that governed the generator, as the loads on it varied, that it must be working perfectly, at something less than one-half maximum rating.

	Steadily they flew on, waiting tensely for the first sign of a glow from the tiny neon tube indicator on the panel before Morey.

	“This looks familiar, Dick,” said Morey, looking about at the fields and the low line of the blue mountains far off on the western horizon. “I think it was about here that we took our little nap in the 'Flying Wheel chair', as the papers called it. It would be about here th— LOOK! It is about here! Get ready for action, Fuller. You're taking the machine gun, I'll work the invisibility disrupter, and Arcot will run the ship. Let's go!”

	On the board before him the tiny neon tube flickered dully, glowed briefly like a piece of red-hot iron, then went out. In a moment it was glowing again, and then quickly its brilliance mounted till it was a line of crimson. Morey snapped the switch from the general radar to the beam receiver, that he might locate the machine exactly. It was fully a minute before the neon tube flashed into life once more. The pirate was flying just ahead of the big plane, very likely gassing them. All around him were the Air Guardsmen, unaware that the enemy was so near. As the disrupter beam could be projected only about a mile, they would have to dive down on the enemy at once; an instant later the great plane beneath them seemed to be rushing upward at a terrific speed.

	The two radar beams were kept focused constantly on the Pirate's craft. When they were about two miles from the two planes, the neon tube blazed brilliantly with a clash of opposing energy. The Pirate was trying to maintain his invisibility, while the rapidly growing strength of the machine above strove to batter it down. In moments the ammeter connected with the disrupter beam began to rise so rapidly that Morey watched it with some concern. Despite the ten-kilowatt set being used to project the beam, the resistance of the apparatus on board the pirate ship was amazing.

	Abruptly the three became aware of a rapidly solidifying cloud before them. The interference of the beam Morey was sending had begun breaking down the molecular oscillation that permitted the light to pass freely through the pirate's craft. Suddenly there was a circle of blue light about the shadow form, and a moment later the ionized air relapsed into normal condition as the pirate's apparatus broke down under the strain. At once Morey shut off his apparatus, convinced by the sudden change that the pirate's apparatus had blown out. He glanced up quickly as Arcot called to him, “Morey—look at him go!”

	Too late. Already the plane had shot off with terrific speed. It had flashed up and to their left, at a rate of climb that seemed unbelievable—except that the long trail of flaming gas told the story! The plane was propelled by rockets! The terrific acceleration carried it out of their range of vision in an instant, and as Arcot swung the ship to bring him again within sight of the windows, they gasped, for already he was many miles away.

	There was a terrific wrench as Arcot threw on all the power he dared, then quickly leveled the machine, following the pirate at lightning speed. He increased the acceleration further as the men grew accustomed to the force that weighed them down. Ahead of them the pirate was racing along, but quickly now they were overhauling him, for his machine had wings of a sort! They produced a tremendous amount of head resistance at their present velocity, for already the needle of the radio speedometer had moved over to one mile a second. They were following the fleet plane ahead at the rate of 3600 miles an hour. The roar of the air outside was a tremendous wave of sound, yet to them, protected by the vacuum of the double walls, it was detectable only by the vibration of the car.

	Rapidly the pirate's lead was cut down. It seemed but a moment before he would be within range of their machine gun. Suddenly he nosed down and shot for the ground, ten miles below, in a power dive. Instantly Arcot swung his machine in a loop that held him close to the tail of the pirate. The swift maneuvers at this speed were a terrific strain on both men and machines—the acceleration seemed crushing them with the weight of four men, as Arcot followed the pirate in a wide loop to the right that ended in a straight climb, the rocket ship standing on its tail, the rocket blast roaring out behind a stream of fire a half mile long.

	The pirate was climbing at a speed that would have distanced any other machine the world had ever seen, but the tenacious opponent behind him clung ever tighter to the tiny darting thing. He had released great clouds of his animation suspending gas. To his utter surprise, the ship behind him had driven right through it, entirely unaffected! He, who knew most about the gas, had been unable to devise a material to stop it, a mask or a tank to store it, yet in some way these men had succeeded! And that hurtling, bullet-shaped machine behind! Like some miniature airship it was, but with a speed and an acceleration that put even his ship to shame! It could twist, turn, dive, rise and shoot off on the straight-away with more flashing speed than anything aloft. Time and again he tried complicated maneuvers that strained him to the utmost, yet that machine always followed after him!

	There was one more thing to do. In outer space his rockets would support him. In a straight climb he shot up to the blazing sun above, out into space, while the sky around him grew black, and the stars shone in solemn splendor around him. But he had eyes for only one thing, the shining car that was rising with more than equal speed behind him. He knew he must be climbing over two thousand miles an hour, yet the tracker came ever closer. Just out of sighting range for the machine gun now ... in a moment ... but, she was faltering!

	The men in the machine behind sat white-lipped, tense, as the whirling shocks of sudden turns at terrific speed twisted the gyroscopic seats around like peas in a rolling ball. Up, down, left, right, the darting machine ahead was twisting with unbelievable speed. Then suddenly the nose was pointed for the zenith again, and with a great column of flame shooting out behind him, he was heading straight toward space!

	“If he gets there, I lose him, Morey!” said Arcot. The terrific acceleration of the climb seemed to press them to their seats with a deadly weight. It was labor to talk—but still the car ahead shot on—slowly they seemed to be overhauling him. Now that the velocities were perforce lowered by the effects of gravity, and the air resistance of the atmosphere was well nigh gone, only the acceleration that the human body could stand was considered. The man ahead was pushing his plane ahead with an acceleration that would have killed many men!

	Slowly the acceleration of the machine was falling. Arcot pushed the control over to the last ampere, and felt the slight surge, as greater power rushed through the coils momentarily. Soon this was gone too, as the generator behind faltered. The driving power of the atmospheric heat was gone. More than sixty miles below them they could see the Earth as a greenish brown surface, slightly convex, and far to the east they could distinguish a silvery line of water! But they had no eyes but for the column of shooting flame that represented the fleeing raider! Out in airless space now, he was safe from them. They could not follow. Arcot turned the plane once more, parallel to the Earth, watching the plane above through the roof window. Slowly the machine sank to the fifty-mile level, where there was just sufficient air to maintain it in efficient operation.

	“Well, he beat us! But there is only one thing for us, to do. He must hang there on his rockets till we leave, and we can hang here indefinitely, if we can only keep this cabin decently warm. He has no air to cool him, and he has the sun to warm him. The only thing that is worrying him right now is the heat of his rockets. But he can throw most of that out with the gases. Lord, that's some machine! But eventually his rockets will give out, and down he will come, so we'll just hang here beneath him and—whoa—not so fast—he isn't going to stay there, it seems; he is angling his ship off a bit, and shooting along, so that, besides, holding himself up, he is making a little forward progress. We'll have to follow! He's going to do some speeding, it seems! Well, we can keep up with him, at our level.”

	“Dick, no plane ever made before would have stood the terrific pulls and yanks that his plane got. He was steering and twisting on the standard type air rudders, and what strains he had! The unique type of plane must be extremely strong. I never saw one shaped like his before, though—it is the obvious shape at that! It was just a huge triangular arrowhead! Did you ever see one like it?”

	“Something like it, yes, and so have you. Don't you recognize that as the development of the old paper gliders you used to throw around as a kid? It has the same shape, the triangular wings with the point in the lead, except that he undoubtedly had a slight curve to the wings to increase the efficiency. Something like the flying wings of fifty years ago. I hope that man is only a kleptomaniac, because he can be cured of that, and I may then have a new laboratory partner. He has some exceedingly intelligent ideas!

	“He's an ingenious man, but I wish he didn't store quite so much fuel in his rocket tubes! It's unbearably cold in here, and I can't sacrifice any power just for comfort. The rocket ship up there seems to be getting more and more acceleration in the level. He has me dropping steadily to get air to run the generator. He is going fast enough!”

	They followed beneath the pirate, faster and faster as the rockets of the ship began to push it forward more and more.

	“Dick, why is it he didn't use all his rockets at first instead of gradually increasing the power this way?”

	“If you were operating the ship, Morey, you'd understand. Look at the speedometer a moment and see if you can figure it out.”

	“Hmmm—4.5 miles per second—buzzing right along—but I don't see what that—good Lord! We never will get him at this rate! How do you expect to get him?”

	“I have no idea—yet. But you missed the important point. He is going 4.5 miles a second. When he reaches 5 miles a second he will never come down from his hundred and fifty mile high perch! He will establish an orbit! He has so much centrifugal force already that he has very little weight. We are staying right beneath him, so we don't have much either. Well, there he goes in a last spurt. We are falling behind pretty fast—there we are catching up now—no—we are just holding parallel! He's done it! Look!”

	Arcot pulled out his watch and let go of it. It floated motionless in the air for a moment, then slowly drifted back toward the rear of the room. “I am using a bit of acceleration—a bit more than we need to maintain our speed. We are up high enough to make the air resistance almost nothing, even at this velocity, but we still require some power. I don't know—”

	There was a low buzz, repeated twice. Instantly Morey turned the dials of the radio receiving set—again the call signal sounded. In a moment a voice came in—low, but distinct. The power seemed fading rapidly.

	“I'm Wade—the Pirate—help if you can. Can you get outside the atmosphere? Exceed orbital speed and fall out? Am in an orbit and can't get out. Fuel reserve gage stuck, and used all my rockets. No more power. Can not slow down and fall. I am running out of compressed air and the generator for this set is going—will take animation suspending gas—will you be able to reach me before entering night?”

	“Quick, Morey—answer that we will.”

	“We will try, Pirate—think we can make it!”

	“O.K.—power about gone—”

	The last of his power had failed! The pirate was marooned in space! They had seen his rockets go out, leaving the exhaust tube glowing for a moment before it, too, was dark, and only the sun shining on the silvery ship made it visible.

	“We have to hurry if we want to do anything before he reaches night! Radio the San Francisco fields that we will be coming in soon, and we need a large electro-magnet—one designed to work on about 500 volts D.C., and some good sized storage cells; how many will have to be decided later, depending on the room we will have for them. I'll start decelerating now so we can make the turn and circle back. We are somewhere west of Hawaii, I believe, but we ought to be able to do the trick if we use all the power we can.”

	Morey at once set to work with the radio set to raise San Francisco airport. He was soon in communication with them, and told them that he would be there in about an hour. They promised all the necessary materials; also that they would get ready to receive the pirate once he was finally brought in to them.

	It was nearer an hour and a quarter later that the machine fell to the great San Francisco landing field, where the mechanics at once set to work bolting a huge electro-magnet on the landing skids on the bottom of the machine. The most serious problem was connecting the terminals electrically without making holes in the hull of the ship. Finally one terminal was grounded, and the radio aerial used as the other. Fuller was left behind on this trip, and a large number of cells were installed in every possible position. In the power room, a hastily arranged motor generator set was arranged, making it possible to run the entire ship from the batteries. Scarcely had these been battened down to prevent sliding under the accelerations necessary, than Arcot and Morey were off. The entire operation had required but fifteen minutes.

	“How are you going to catch him, Arcot?”

	“I'll overtake him going west. If I went the other way I'd meet him going at over 10 miles a second in relation to his machine. He had the right idea. He told me to fall out to him at a greater than orbital speed. I will go just within the Earth's atmosphere till I get just under him, holding myself in the air by means of a downward acceleration on the part of the regular lifting power units. I am going to try to reach eight miles a second. We will be overhauling him at three a second, and the ship will slow down to the right speed while falling out to him. We must reach him before he gets into the shadow of the Earth, though, for if he reaches 'night' he will be without heat, and he'll die of cold. I think we can reach him, Dick!”

	“I hope so. Those spare cells are all right, aren't they? We'll need them! If they don't function when we get out there, we'll fall clear off into space! At eight miles a second, we would leave Earth forever!”

	The ship was accelerating steadily at the highest value the men aboard could stand. The needle of the speedometer crept steadily across the dial. They were flying at a height of forty miles that they might have enough air and still not be too greatly hindered by air resistance. The black sky above them was spotted with points of glowing light, the blazing stars of space. But as they flew along, the sensation of weight was lost; they had reached orbital speed, and as the car steadily increased its velocity, there came a strange sensation! The Earth loomed gigantic above them! Below them shone the sun! The direction of up and down was changed by the terrific speed! The needle of the speedometer was wavering at 7.8 miles a second. Now it held steady!

	“I thought you were going to take it up to eight miles a second, Dick?”

	“Air resistance is too great! I'll have to go higher!”

	At a height of fifty miles they continued at 8.1 miles a second. It seemed hours before they reached the spot where the pirate's machine should be flying directly above them, and they searched the black sky for some sign of the shining dot of light. With the aid of field glasses they found it, far ahead, and nearly one hundred miles above.

	“Well, here we go! I'm going to fall up the hundred miles or so, till we're right in his path; the work done against gravity will slow us down a little, so I'll have to use the power units somewhat. Did you notice what I did to them?”

	“Yes, they're painted a dull black. What's the idea?”

	“We'll have no air from which to get heat for power out here, so we'll have to depend on the sunlight they can absorb. I'm using it now to slow us down as much as possible.”

	At last the tiny silver dot had grown till it became recognizable as the pirate plane. They were drawing up to it now, slowly, but steadily. At last the little machine was directly beneath them, and a scant hundred yards away. They had long since been forced to run the machine on the storage batteries, and now they applied a little power to the vertical power units. Sluggishly, as they absorbed the sun's heat, the machine was forced lower, nearer to the machine below. At last a scant ten feet separated them.

	“All right, Morey.”

	There was a snap, as the temporary switch was closed, and the current surged into the big magnet on the keel. At once they felt the ship jump a little under the impulse of the magnet's pull on the smaller machine. In a moment the little plane had drifted up to the now idle magnet, touched it and was about to bounce off, when Morey again snapped the switch shut and the two machines were locked firmly together!

	“I've got him, Dick!” Morey exclaimed. “Now slow down till it falls. Then we can go and wait for it. Being a glider, it ought to be quite manageable!”

	Now the energy of the power units on the roof of the machine began to slow down the two machines, the magnet grinding slightly as the momentum of the plane was thrust upon it. They watched the speedometer drop. The speed was sinking very slowly, for the area of the absorbing fins was not designed to absorb the sun's heat directly, and was very inefficient. The sun was indeed sinking below their horizon; they were just beginning to watch that curious phenomenon of seeing dawn backward, when they first struck air dense enough to operate the power units noticeably. Quickly the power was applied till the machines sank rapidly to the warmer levels, the only governing factor being the tendency of the glider to break loose from the grip of the magnet.

	At fifty miles the generator was started, and the heaters in the car at once became more active. There was no heat in the car below, but that was unavoidable. They would try to bring it down to warm levels quickly.

	“Whew, I'm glad we reached the air again, Dick. I didn't tell you sooner, for it wouldn't have done any good, but that battery was about gone! We had something like twenty amp-hours left! I'm giving the recharge generator all she will take. We seem to have plenty of power now.”

	“I knew the cells were low, but I had no idea they were as low as that! I noticed that the magnet was weakening, but thought it was due to the added air strain. I am going to put the thing into a nose dive and let the glider go down itself. I know it would land correctly if it had a chance. I am going to follow it, of course, and since we are over the middle of Siberia we'd better start back.”

	The return trip was necessarily in the lower level of the atmosphere, that the glider might be kept reasonably warm. At a height of but two miles, in the turbulent atmosphere, the glider was brought slowly home. It took them nearly twenty hours to go the short distance of twelve thousand miles to San Francisco, the two men taking turns at the controls. The air resistance of the glider forced them to go slowly; they could not average much better than six hundred an hour despite the fact that the speed of either machine alone was over twelve hundred miles an hour.

	At last the great skyscrapers of San Francisco appeared on their horizon, and thousands of private planes started out to meet them. Frantically Arcot warned them away, lest the air blast from their props tear the glider from the magnet. At last, however, the Air Guard was able to force them to a safe distance and clear a lane through one of the lower levels of the city traffic. The great field of the Transcontinental lines was packed with excited men and women, waiting to catch a glimpse of two of the greatest things the country had heard of in the century—Arcot's molecular motion machine and the Air Pirate!

	The landing was made safely in the circle of Air Guardsmen. There was a small hospital plane standing beside it in a moment, and as Arcot's ship released it, and then hung motionless, soundless above it, the people watched it in wonder and excitement. They wanted to see Arcot perform; they clamored to see the wonderful powers of this ship in operation. Air Guardsmen who had witnessed the flying game of tag between these two super-air machines had told of it through the press and over the radio.

-

	Two weeks later, Arcot stepped into the office of Mr. Morey, senior.

	“Busy?”

	“Come on in; you know I'm busy—but not too busy for you. What's on your mind?”

	“Wade—the pirate.”

	“Oh—hmm. I saw the reports on his lab out on the Rockies, and also the psychomedical reports on him. And most particularly, I saw the request for his employment you sent through channels. What's your opinion on him? You talked with him.”

	Arcot frowned slightly. “When I talked to him he was still two different identities dancing around in one body. Dr. Ridgely says the problem's settling down; I believe him. Ridgely's no more of a fool in his line than you and Dad are in your own lines, and Ridgely's business is healing mental wounds. We agreed some while back that the Pirate must be insane, even before we met him.

	“We also agreed that he had a tremendously competent and creative mind. As a personality in civilization, he'd evidently slipped several cogs. Ridgely says that is reparable.

	“You know, Newton was off the beam for about two years. Faraday was in a complete breakdown for nearly five years—and after his breakdown, came back to do some monumental work.

	“And those men didn't have the help of modern psychomedical techniques.

	“I think we'd be grade A fools ourselves to pass up the chance to get Wade's help. The man—insane or not—figured out a way of stabilizing and storing atomic hydrogen for his rockets. If he could do that in the shape he was then in ...!

	“I'd say we'd be smart to keep the competition in the family.”

	Mr. Morey leaned back in his chair and smiled up at Arcot. “You've got a good case there. I'll buy it. When Dr. Ridgely says Wade's got those slipped cogs replaced—offer him a job in your lab staff.

	“I'm a bit older than you are; you've grown up in a world where the psychomedical techniques really work. When I was growing up, psychomedical techniques were strictly rule of thumb—and the doctors were all thumbs.” Mr. Morey sighed. Then, “In this matter, I think your judgment is better than mine.”

	“I'll see him again, and offer him the job. I'm pretty sure he'll take it, as I said. I have a suspicion that, within six months, he'll be a lot saner than most people around. The ordinary man doesn't realize what a job of rechecking present techniques can do—and Wade is, naturally, getting a very thorough overhaul.

	“Somewhat like a man going in for treatment of a broken arm; in any decent hospital they'll also check for any other medical problems, and he'll come out healthier than if he had never had the broken arm.

	“Wade seems to have had a mind that made friends with molecules, and talked their language. After Ridgely shows him how to make friends with people—I think he'll be quite a man on our team!”

-

BOOK TWO -SOLARITE

I

	THE LIGHTS OF GREAT Transcontinental Airport were blazing in cheering splendor. Out there in the center of the broad field a dozen men were silhouetted in the white brilliance, looking up at the sky, where the stars winked cold and clear on the jet background of the frosty night. A slim crescent of moon gleamed in the west, a sickle of light that in no way dimmed the cold flame of the brilliant stars.

	One point of light now moved across the motionless field of far-off suns, flashing toward the airport in a long, swift curve. The men on the field murmured and pointed up at it as it swept low over the blazing lights of New York. Lower it swooped, the towering city behind it. Half a mile into the air the buildings rose in shining glory of colored tile that shone brightly in the sweeping play of floodlights.

	One of them picked out the descending machine, and it suddenly leaped out of the darkness as a shining, streamlined cylinder, a cylinder with a great halo of blue fire, as the beam of the searchlight set it off from the jet black night.

	In moments the ship was vast before the eyes of the waiting men; it had landed gently on the field, was floating smoothly, gracefully toward them.

	Twenty-four men climbed from the great ship, shivering in the icy blast that swept across the field, spoke a moment with the group awaiting their arrival, then climbed quickly into the grateful warmth of a field car. In a moment they were speeding toward the lights of the field house, half a mile off.

	Behind them the huge ship leaped into the sky, then suddenly pointed its nose up at an angle of thirty degrees and shot high into the air at an unbelievable speed. In an instant it was gone.

	At the field house the party broke up almost immediately.

	“We want to thank you, Mr. Morey, for your demonstration of the new ship tonight, and you, Dr. Arcot, for answering our many questions about it. I am sure we all appreciate the kindness you have shown the press.” The reporters filed out quickly, anxious to get the news into the morning editions, for it was after one o'clock now. Each received a small slip of paper from the attendant standing at the exit, the official statement of the company. At last all had left but the six men who were responsible for the new machine.

	This night had witnessed the official demonstration of the first of the Arcot-Morey molecular motion ships. Small as she was, compared to those that were to come, yet she could carry over three thousand passengers, as many as could any existing winged plane, and her speed was immensely greater. The trip from the west coast to the eastern had been made in less than one hour. At a speed close to one mile a second the great ship had shot through the thin air, twenty-five miles above the Earth.

	In this vessel a huge bar of metal could be affected by an ultra-high-frequency generator. When so affected, its molecules all moved forward, taking the ship with them. Thus, a molecular motion drive vessel could, theoretically, approach the velocity of light as a limit.

	“Arcot,” said Morey, Senior, after the pressmen had left the room, “as president of this company I certainly want to thank you for the tremendous thing you have given us to use. You have 'sold' us this machine—but how can we repay you? Before this, time and time again, you have sold us your inventions, the ideas that have made it possible for Transcontinental to attain its present high position in world transportation. All you have ever accepted is the laboratory you use, its upkeep, and a small annual income. What can we do to show our appreciation this time?”

	“Why,” answered Arcot smiling, “you haven't stated the terms correctly. Actually, I have a fully equipped lab to putter around in, all the time I want for my own amusement, and all the money I want. What more could I ask?”

	“I suppose that's all true—but you draw only about six thousand a year for personal expenses—a good clerk could get that—and you, admittedly the most brilliant physicist of the Earth, are satisfied! I don't feel we're paying you properly!”

	Arcot's expression became suddenly serious. “You can repay me this time,” he said, “for this latest discovery has made a new thing possible. I've always wanted to be able to visit other planets—as has many a scientist for the last three centuries. This machine has made it possible. If you are willing—we could start by the spring of 2117. I'm quite serious about this. With your permission, I want to start work on the first interplanetary ship. I'll need Fuller's help, of course. The proposition will be expensive, and that's where I must ask you to help me. I think, however, that it may be a paying proposition, at that, for there will certainly be something of commercial value on the other planets.”

	They had walked out to the shed where Arcot's private molecular motion car stood, the first machine ever built that used the heat of the sun to drive it. Thoughtfully the president of the great Transcontinental Lines looked at it. It was small compared with the great machine that had just brought them east, but of the same swift type. It was a thing of graceful beauty even on the ground, its long curving streamlines giving it wonderful symmetry. They stood in thoughtful silence for a minute—the young men eager to hear the verdict of their prospective backer. Morey, always rather slow of speech, took an unusually long time to answer.

	“If it were only money you asked for, Arcot, I'd gladly give you double the sum, but that isn't the case. I know perfectly well that if you do go, my son will go with you, and Fuller and Wade will naturally go too.” He looked at each in turn. “Each of you has come to mean a lot to me. You and Fuller have known Bob since college days. I've known Wade only three months, but every day I grow to like him more. There's no denying the fact that any such trip is a terrifically dangerous proposition. But if you were lost, there would be more than my personal loss. We would lose some of the most brilliant men on Earth. You, for instance, are conceded as being the world's most brilliant physicist; Fuller is one of the greatest designing engineers; Wade is rapidly rising into prominence as a chemist and as a physicist; and my son is certainly a good mathematician.”

	He paused, frowning, weighing the situation. “But you men should know how to get out of scrapes just that much better. Certainly there are few men on Earth who would not be willing to back such a group of men—or any one of you, for that matter! I'll back your trip!” His words became more facetious. “I know that Arcot and you, Bob, can handle a gun fairly well, I don't know so much about Wade and Fuller. What experience have you two had?”

	Fuller shook his head. “I think I'll fit best in the galley on the trip, Mr. Morey. I've done the cooking on a number of camping trips, and food is an important factor in the success of any expedition. I can shoot a bit, too.”

	Wade spoke rather hesitantly. “I come from the west, and have had a good bit of fun with a gun in the Rockies; there are still some mountain lions and some deer there, you know. I also have a sneaking acquaintance with the new gun, which Arcot developed in connection with his molecular motion. But there is so little you know about me—and most of it bad—I don't see how I really get in on this opportunity—but,” he added hastily, “I certainly don't intend to keep the old boy knocking—I'm with you, since I'm invited!”

	Arcot smiled. “Then you'll definitely support us?”

	“Yes, I will,” replied Morey, Senior, seriously, “for I think it's worth doing.”

	The four young men climbed into the ship, to start for their apartment. Arcot was piloting, and under his sure touch the ship sped out into the cold night air, then up through the atmosphere, till they hung poised at a height of fifty miles on the upper edge of the airy blanket. They looked out in silent thought at the magnificent blazing stars of space. Here, where the dust-laden air could no longer mask their true colors, the stars shone unwinkingly, steadily, and in a glory that earth-bound men had never seen before. They shone in a wonderous riot of color, as varied and as beautiful as the display of colored floodlights in some great city. They were tiny pinpoints of radiance, red, green, orange, and yellow, shining with intense brilliance.

	Slowly Arcot let the machine settle to the blazing city miles below.

	“I love to come out here and look at those cold, pinpoint lights; they seem to draw me—the lure of other worlds. I've always had a sense of unfulfilled longing—the desire to go out there—and it's always been so hopeless. Now—I'll be out there by next spring!” Arcot paused and looked up at the mighty field of stars that arched over his head to be lost on either horizon. A wonderful night!

	“Where shall we go first, Dick?” asked Wade softly as he gazed out at the far-off suns of space, his voice unconsciously hushed by the grandeur of the spectacle.

	“I've thought of that for the last four months, and now that we are definitely going to go, we'll have to make a decision. Actually, it won't be too hard to decide. Of course we can't leave the solar system. And the outer planets are so far away that I think we had better wait till later trips. That leaves the choice really between Mars, Venus, and Mercury. Mercury isn't practical since it's so close to the sun. We know a fair bit about Mars from telescopic observation, while Venus, wrapped in perpetual cloud, is a mystery. What do you vote?”

	“Well,” said Morey, “it seems to me it's more fun to explore a completely unknown planet than one that can be observed telescopically. I vote Venus.” Each of the others agreed with Morey that Venus was the logical choice.

	By this time the machine had sunk to the roof of their apartment, and the men disembarked and entered. The next day they were to start the actual work of designing the space ship.

II

	“WHEN WE START THIS WORK,” Arcot began next morning, “we obviously want to design the ship for the conditions we expect to meet, and for maximum convenience and safety. I believe I've thought about this trip longer than the rest of you, so I'll present my ideas first.

	“We don't actually know anything about conditions on Venus, since no one has actually been there. Venus is probably a younger planet than Earth. It's far nearer the sun than we are, and it gets twice the heat we do. In the long-gone time when the planets were cooling I believe Venus required far longer than Earth, for the inpouring heat would retard its cooling. The surface temperature is probably about 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

	“There is little land, probably, for with the cloud-mass covering Venus as it does, it's logical to visualize tremendous seas. What life has developed must be largely aquatic, and the land is probably far behind us in evolution. Of course, Venus is the planet of mystery—we don't know; we can only guess. But we do know what things we are going to need to cross space.

	“Obviously, the main driving force will be the power units. These will get their energy from the rays of the sun by absorbing them in copper discs about twelve feet in diameter—the ship will have to be more of a disc than a cylinder. I think a ship a hundred and eighty feet long, fifty feet wide, and twenty feet deep will be about the best dimensions. The power units will be strung along the top of the ship in double rows—one down each side of the hull. In the middle will be a series of fused quartz windows, opening into a large room just under the outer shell. We'll obviously need some source of power to activate the power tubes that run the molecular motion power units. We'll have a generator run by molecular motion power units in here, absorbing its heat from the atmosphere in this room. The air will be heated by the rays of the sun, of course, and in this way we'll get all our power from the sun itself.

	“Since this absorption of energy might result in making the ship too cool, due to the radiation of the side away from the sun, we'll polish it, and thus reduce the unlighted side's radiation.

	“The power units will not be able to steer us in space, due to their position, and those on the sides, which will steer us in the atmosphere by the usual method, will be unable to get the sun's power; they'll be shaded. For steering in space, we'll use atomic hydrogen rockets, storing the atomic gas by the Wade method in tanks in the hold. We'll also have a battery down there for starting the generator and for emergencies.

	“For protection against meteors, we'll use radar. If anything comes within a dozen miles of us, the radar unit covering that sector will at once set automatic machinery in operation, and the rockets will shoot the ship out of the path of the meteor.”

	All that day Arcot and the others discussed the various pieces of apparatus they would need, and toward evening Fuller began to draw rough sketches of the different mechanisms that had been agreed upon.

	The next day, by late afternoon, they had planned the rough details of the ship and had begun the greater task of calculating the stresses and the power factors.

	“We won't need any tremendous strength for the ship while it is in space,” Arcot commented, “for then there will be little strain on it. It will be weightless from the start, and the gentle acceleration will not strain it in the least, but we must have strength, so that it can maneuver in the atmosphere.

	“We'll leave Earth by centrifugal force, for I can make much better speed in the atmosphere where there is plenty of power to draw on; outside I must depend solely on sunlight. We'll circle the Earth, forming an orbit just within the atmosphere, at five miles a second. We'll gradually increase the speed to about ten miles a second, at which point the ship would normally fly off into space under its own centrifugal force. With the power units we'll prevent its release until the proper moment. When we release it, it will be entirely free of Earth, and no more work will be needed to overcome Earth's pull.”

	The planning continued with exasperating slowness. The details of the work were complex, for all the machines were totally new. Several weeks passed before even the power units could be ordered and the first work on the ship started. After that orders for materials left the office daily. Still, it was late in November before the last order was sent out.

	Now they must begin work on other phases of the expedition—food supplies and the standard parts of the equipment.

	In the interval Arcot had decided to make a special ventilated suit for use on Venus. This was to make use of a small molecular motion director apparatus to cool the air, and blow it through the suit. The apparatus consisted of a small compressed air-driven generator and a power tube bank that could be carried on the back.

	“Arcot,” Wade said when he saw the apparatus completed and the testing machine ready, “I've just noticed how similar this is to the portable invisibility apparatus I developed as the Pirate. I wonder if it might not be handy at times to be invisible—we could incorporate that with a slight change. It wouldn't add more than five pounds, and those tubes you are using I'm sure are easily strong enough to carry the extra load.”

	“Great idea, Wade,” said Arcot. “It might be very useful if we met hostile natives. The disappearance stunt might make us gods or something to primitive beings. And now that you mention it, I think we can install the apparatus in the ship. It will require almost no power, and might save our lives some time.”

	The work went forward steadily at the great Transcontinental Shops where the space ship was being built. Its construction was being kept as much of a secret as possible, for Arcot feared the interference of the crowds that would be sure to collect if the facts were known, and since the shops directly joined the airfield, it meant that there would be helicopters buzzing about the Transatlantic and Transcontinental planes.

	The work to be done required the most careful manipulation and workmanship, for one defect could mean death. They calculated six weeks for the trip, and in the time before they could reach either planet, much might happen to a crippled ship.

	To the men who were making the trip, the waiting seemed most exasperating, and they spent the days before they could begin the installation of the electrical apparatus in purchasing the necessary standard equipment; the standard coils, tubes, condensers, the canned food supplies, clothes, everything that they could imagine as of possible utility. They were making the ship with a great deal of empty storage space, for Arcot hoped the trip would be a financial success, particularly supplying much-needed metals. Many vital elements were already excessively scarce, and no satisfactory substitutes had been found.

	On the outward trip some of this space would be filled with the many things they would consume en route. In addition they were carrying a great many spare parts, spare tubes, spare power units, spare condensers—a thousand and one odd parts. Arcot intended that they should be able to make an entire new power switchboard and motion director unit if anything should go wrong, and he certainly had all the apparatus.

	At last came the day when the final connection had been soldered, and the last joint welded. The atomic hydrogen tanks were full, and under the ship's own power the oxygen tanks were filled and the batteries charged. They were ready for a test flight!

	The great ship rested on the floor of the shed now, awaiting the start.

	“Oh fellows—come here a minute!” Arcot called to the other members of the party. “I want to show you something.”

	The three walked quickly to the bow where Arcot stood, and following the line of his vision, looked in wonder to see that everything was right. They watched curiously as he drew from his coat a large glass bottle, tightly sealed.

	“What's that for?” asked Wade curiously.

	“We're about to start on the first cruise, and I've been wondering if it isn't time we gave the ship a name.”

	“Great—I'd been thinking of that too—what are we going to name her?”

	“Well,” said Arcot, “I had been thinking of Alexander—he longed for other worlds to conquer!”

	“Not bad,” Morey commented. “I have been thinking of naming it too—I guess we all have—but I was thinking of Santa Maria—the first ship to discover the New World.”

	“I was think more of its home,” said Wade. “How about calling it Terrestrian?”

	“Well—it's your turn, Fuller—you designed it. What do you suggest for your masterpiece?” asked Arcot.

	“I was thinking also of its home—the home it will never leave. I like to think that we might find people on Venus, and I would like to have a name on it that might be translatable into more friendly and less foreign terms—why not call it Solarite?”

	“Solarite—a member of the solar system—it will be that, always. It will be a world unto itself when it makes its trips—it will take up an orbit about the sun—a true member of the solar system. I like it!” Arcot turned to the others. “How about it?” It was agreed upon unanimously.

	“But I'm still curious about that glass bottle, so carefully sealed.” Morey commented with a puzzled smile. “What's in it? Some kind of gas?”

	“Wrong—no gas—practically nothing at all, in fact. What more appropriate for christening a space ship than a bottle of hard vacuum?

	“We can't have a pretty girl christen this ship, that's sure. A flying bachelor's apartment christened by a mere woman? Never! We will have the foreman of the works here do that. Since we can't have the ship slide down the ways or anything, we will get inside and move it when he smashes the bottle. But in the meantime, let's have a symbol set in contrasting metal on the bow. We can have a blazing sun, with nine planets circling it, the Earth indicated conspicuously; and below it the word SOLARITE.”

-

III

	IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER NOON when the newly christened Solarite left on its first trip into space. The sun was a great ball of fire low in the west when they returned, dropping plummet-like from the depths of space, the rush of the air about the hull, a long scream that mounted from a half-heard sound in the outer limits of the Earth's atmosphere, to a roar of tortured air as the ship dropped swiftly to the field and shot into the hangar. Instantly the crew darted to the side of the great cylinder as the door of the ship opened.

	Fuller appeared in the opening, and at the first glimpse of his face, the hangar crew knew something was wrong. “Hey, Jackson,” Fuller called, “get the field doctor—Arcot had a little accident out there in space!” In moments the man designated returned with the doctor, leading him swiftly down the long metal corridor of the Solarite to Arcot's room aboard.

	There was a mean-looking cut in Arcot's scalp, but a quick, sure examination by the doctor revealed that there appeared to be no serious injury. He had been knocked unconscious by the blow that made the cut, and he had not yet recovered his senses.

	“How did this happen?” asked the doctor as he bathed the cut and deftly bandaged it.

	Morey explained: “There's a device aboard whose job it is to get us out of the way of stray meteors, and it works automatically. Arcot and I were just changing places at the controls. While neither of us was strapped into our seats, a meteor came within range and the rocket tubes shot the car out of the way. We both went tumbling head over heels and Arcot landed on his ear. I was luckier, and was able to break my fall with my hands, but it was a mean fall—at our speed we had about double weight, so, though it was only about seven feet, we might as well have fallen fourteen. We took turns piloting the ship, and Arcot was about to bring us back when that shock just about shook us all over the ship. We will have to make some changes. It does its job—but we need warning enough to grab hold.”

	The doctor was through now, and he began to revive his patient. In a moment he stirred and raised his hand to feel the sore spot. In ten minutes he was conversing with his friends, apparently none the worse except for a very severe headache. The doctor gave him a mild opiate, and sent him to bed to sleep off the effects of the blow.

-

	With the ship fully equipped, tested and checked in every possible way, the time for leaving was set for the following Saturday, three days off. Great supplies of stores had to be carried aboard in the meantime. Care had to be exercised in this work, lest the cargo slip free under varying acceleration of the Solarite, and batter itself to bits, or even wreck some vital part of the ship. At noon on the day chosen, the first ship ever to leave the bounds of the Earth's gravity was ready to start!

	Gently the heavily laden Solarite rose from the hangar floor, and slowly floated out into the bright sunshine of the early February day. Beside it rode the little ship that Arcot had first built, piloted by the father of the inventor. With him rode the elder Morey and a dozen newsmen. The little ship was badly crowded now as they rose slowly, high into the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. The sky about them was growing dark—they were going into space!

	At last they reached the absolute ceiling of the smaller ship, and it hung there while the Solarite went a few miles higher; then slowly, but ever faster and faster they were plunging ahead, gathering speed.

	They watched the radio speedometer creep up—1-2-3-4-5-6—steadily it rose as the acceleration pressed them hard against the back of the seats—8-9—still it rose as the hum of the generator became a low snarl—10-11-12—they were rocketing at twelve miles a second, the tenuous air about the ship shrieking in a thin scream of protest as it parted on the streamlined bow.

	Slowly the speed rose—reached fifteen miles a second. The sun's pull became steadily more powerful; they were falling toward the fiery sphere, away from the Earth. A microphone recessed in the outer wall brought them the fading whisper of air from outside. Arcot shouted a sudden warning:

	“Hold on—we're going to lose all weight—out into space!”

	There was a click, and the angry snarl of the overworked generator died in an instant as the thudding relays cut it out of the circuit. Simultaneously the air scoop which had carried air to the generator switched off, transferring to solar heat as a source of power. They seemed to be falling with terrific and ever-increasing speed. They looked down—saw the Earth shrinking visibly as they shot away at more than five miles a second; they were traveling fifteen miles a second ahead and five a second straight up.

	The men watched with intensest interest as the heavens opened up before them—they could see stars now a scant degree from the sun itself, for no air diffused its blinding glory. The heat of the rays seemed to burn them; there was a prickling pleasantness to it now, as they looked at the mighty sea of flame through smoked glasses. The vast arms of the corona reached out like the tentacles of some fiery octopus through thousands of miles of space—huge arms of flaming gas that writhed out as though to reach and drag back the whirling planets to the parent body. All about the mighty sphere, stretching far into space, a wan glow seemed to ebb and flow, a kaleidoscope of swiftly changing color. It was the zodiacal light, an aurora borealis on a scale inconceivable!

	Arcot worked rapidly with the controls, the absence of weight that gave that continued sense of an unending fall, aiding him and his assistants in their rapid setting of the controls.

	At last the work was done and the ship flashed on its way under the control of the instruments that would guide it across all the millions of miles of space and land it on Venus with unerring certainty. The photo-electric telescopic eye watched the planet constantly, keeping the ship surely and accurately on the course that would get them to the distant planet in the shortest possible time.

	Work thereafter became routine requiring a minimum of effort, and the men could rest and use their time to observe the beauties of the skies as no man had ever seen them during all the billions of years of time that this solar system has existed. The lack of atmosphere made it possible to use a power of magnification that no terrestrial telescope may use. The blurred outlines produced by the shifting air prohibits magnifications of more than a few hundred diameters, but here in space they could use the greatest power of their telescope. With it they could look at Mars and see it more clearly than any other man had ever seen it, despite the fact that it was now over two hundred million miles away.

	But though they spent much time taking photographs of the planets and of the moon, and in making spectrum analyses of the sun, time passed very slowly. Day after day they saw measured on the clocks, but they stayed awake, finding they needed little sleep, for they wasted no physical energy. Their weightlessness eliminated fatigue. However, they determined that during the twelve hours before reaching Venus they must be thoroughly alert, so they tried to sleep in pairs. Arcot and Morey were the first to seek slumber—but Morpheus seemed to be a mundane god, for he did not reward them. At last it became necessary for them to take a mild opiate, for their muscles refused to permit their tired brains to sleep. It was twelve hours later when they awoke, to relieve Wade and Fuller.

	They spent most of the twelve hours of their routine watch in playing games of chess. There was little to be done. The silver globe before them seemed unchanging, for they were still so far away it seemed little larger than the moon does when seen from Earth.

	But at last it was time for the effects of the mild drug to wear off, and for Wade and Fuller to awaken from their sleep.

	“Morey—I've an idea!” There was an expression of perfect innocence on Arcot's face—but a twinkle of humor in his eyes. “I wonder if it might not be interesting to observe the reactions of a man waking suddenly from sleep to find himself alone in space?” He stared thoughtfully at the control that would make the ship perfectly transparent, perfectly invisible.

	“I wonder if it would?” said Morey grasping Arcot's idea. “What do you say we try it?” Arcot turned the little switch—and where there had been the ship, it was no more—it was gone!

	Fuller stirred uneasily in his bed, tightly strapped as he was. The effects of the drug were wearing off. Sleepily he yawned—stretched, and blindly, his heavy eyes still closed, released the straps that held him in bed. Yawning widely he opened his eyes—with a sudden start sat upright—then, with an excellent imitation of an Indian on the warpath, he leaped from his bed, and started to run wildly across the floor. His eyes were raised to the place where the ceiling should have been—he called lustily in alarm—then suddenly he was flying up—and crashed heavily against the invisible ceiling! His face was a picture of utter astonishment as he fell lightly to the floor—then slowly it changed, and took on a chagrined smile—he understood!

	He spun around as loud cries suddenly resounded from Wade's room across the hall—then there was a dull thud, as he too, forgetting the weightlessness, jumped and hit the ceiling. Then the cries were gone, like the snuffing of a candle. From the control room there rose loud laughter—and a moment later they felt more normal, as they again saw the four strong walls about them.

	Wade sighed heavily and shook his head.

	They were approaching the planet visibly now. In the twelve hours that had passed they had covered a million miles, for now they were falling toward the planet under its attraction. It glowed before them now in wonderous splendour, a mighty disc of molten silver.

	For the last twenty-four hours they had been reducing their speed relative to Venus, to insure their forming an orbit about the planet, rather than shoot around it and back into space. Their velocity had been over a hundred miles a second part of the way, but now it had been reduced to ten. The gravity of the planet was urging them forward at ever increasing speed, and their problem became more acute moment by moment.

	“We'll never make it on the power units alone, out here in space,” said Arcot seriously. “We'll just shoot around the planet. I'll tell you how we can do it, though. We'll circle around it, entering its atmosphere on the daylight side, and shoot into the upper limits of its atmosphere. There the power units can find some heat to work on, and we can really slow down. But we'll have to use the rocket tubes to get the acceleration we'll need to drive the ship into the air.”

	There was a sudden clanging of a bell, and everyone dived for a hold, and held on tightly. An instant later there was a terrific wrench as the rocket jets threw the plane out of the way of a meteor.

	“We're getting near a planet. This is the third meteor we've met since we were more than a million miles from Earth. Venus and Earth and all the planets act like giant vacuum cleaners of space, pulling into themselves all the space debris and meteors within millions of miles by their gravitational attraction.”

	Swiftly the planet expanded below them—growing vaster with each passing moment. It had changed from a disc to a globe, and now, as the molten silver of its surface seemed swiftly clouding, it turned grey; then they saw its true appearance, a vast field of rolling, billowing clouds!

	The Solarite was shooting around the planet now at ten miles a second, far more than enough to carry them away from the planet again, out into space once more if their speed was not checked.

	“Hold on everybody,” Arcot called. “We're going to turn toward the planet now!” He depressed a small lever—there was a sudden shock, and all the space about them seemed to burst into huge, deep-red atomic hydrogen flames.

	The Solarite reeled under the sudden pressure, but the heavy gyroscopic stabilizers caught it, held it, and the ship remained on an even keel. Then suddenly there came to the ears of the men a long drawn whine, faint—almost inaudible—and the ship began slowing down. The Solarite had entered the atmosphere of Venus—the first man-made machine to thus penetrate the air of another world!

	Quickly Arcot snapped open the control that had kept the rockets flaming, turning the ship to the planet—driving it into the atmosphere. Now they could get their power from the air that each instant grew more dense about them.

	“Wade—in the power room—emergency control post—Morey—control board there—hang on, for we'll have to use some husky accelerations.”

	Instantly the two men sprang for their posts—literally diving, for they were still almost weightless.

	Arcot pulled another lever—there was a dull snap as a relay in the power room responded—the lights wavered—dimmed—then the generator was once more humming smoothly—working on the atmosphere of Venus! In a moment the power units were again operating, and now as they sucked a plentitude of power from the surrounding air, they produced a force that made the men cling to their holds with almost frantic force. Around them the rapidly increasing density of the air made the whine grow to a roar; the temperature within the ship rose slowly, warmed by friction with the air, despite the extreme cold at this altitude, more than seventy-five miles above the surface of the planet.

	They began dropping rapidly now—their radio-speedometer had fallen from ten to nine—then slowly, but faster and faster as more heat could be extracted from the air, it had fallen 8—7—6—5—4. Now they were well below orbital speed, falling under the influence of the planet. The struggle was over—the men relaxed. The ship ran quietly now, the smooth hum of the air rushing over the great power units coming softly through the speaker to their ears, a humming melody—the song of a new world.

-

IV

	SUDDENLY THE BLAZING SUN was gone and they were floating in a vast world of rolling mists—mists that brushed the car with tiny clicks, which, with the millions of particles that struck simultaneously, merged into a steady roar.

	“Ice—ice clouds!” Morey exclaimed.

	Arcot nodded. “We'll drop below the clouds; they're probably miles deep. Look, already they're changing—snow now—in a moment it will be water—then it'll clear away and we'll actually see Venus!”

	For ten miles—an endless distance it seemed—they dropped through clouds utterly impenetrable to the eye. Then gradually the clouds thinned; there appeared brief clear spots, spots into which they could see short distances—then here and there they caught glimpses of green below. Was it water—or land?

	With a suddenness that startled them, they were out of the clouds, shooting smoothly and swiftly above a broad plain. It seemed to stretch for endless miles across the globe, to be lost in the far distance to east and west; but to the north they saw a low range of hills that rose blue and misty in the distance.

	“Venus! We made it!” Morey cried jubilantly. “The first men ever to leave Earth—I'm going to start the old sender and radio back home! Man—look at that stretch of plain!” He jumped to his feet and started across the control room. “Lord—I feel like a ton of lead now—I sure am out of condition for walking after all that time just floating!”

	Arcot raised a restraining hand. “Whoa—wait a minute there, Morey—you won't get anything through to them now. The Earth is on the other side of Venus—it's on the night side, remember—and we're on the day side. In about twelve hours we'll be able to send a message. In the meantime, take the controls while I make a test of the air here, will you?”

	Relieved of the controls, Arcot rose and walked down the corridor to the power room where the chemical laboratory had been set up. Wade had already collected a dozen samples of air, and was working on them.

	“How is it—what have you tested for so far?” asked Arcot.

	“Oxygen and CO2. The oxygen is about twenty-two per cent, or considering the slightly lower air pressure here, we will have just about the right amount of oxygen. The CO2 is about one-tenth of one per cent. The atmosphere is O.K. for terrestrial life apparently; that mouse there is living quite happily. Whatever the other seventy-five per cent or so of diluting gas is, I don't know, but it isn't nitrogen.”

	Briefly Arcot and Wade discussed the unusual atmosphere, finally deciding that the inert gas was argon.

	“No great amount of nitrogen,” Arcot concluded. “That means that life will have a sweet time extracting it from the air—but wherever there is life, it finds a way to do the impossible. Test it more accurately, will you—you try for nitrogen and I'll try the component inert gasses.”

	They ran the analyses rapidly, and in a very short time—less than an hour—their results stood at 23 per cent oxygen, .1 per cent carbon dioxide, 68 per cent argon, 6 per cent nitrogen, 2 per cent helium, 5 per cent neon, .05 per cent hydrogen, and the rest krypton and xenon apparently. The analyses of these inert gasses had to be done rather roughly in this short time, but it was sufficient to balance fairly accurately.

	The two chemists reported back to the control cabin.

	“Well, we'll be able to breathe the atmosphere of Venus with ease. I believe we can go on now. I have been surprised to see no water in sight, but I think I see my mistake now. You know the Mississippi has its mouth further from the center of the Earth than its source; it flows up hill! The answer is, of course, that the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin impels it to flow that way. Similarly, I am sure now that we will find that Venus has a vast belt of water about the middle, and to the north and south there will be two great caps of dry land. We are on the northern cap.

	“We have the microphone turned way down. Let's step up the power a bit and see if there are any sounds outside,” said Arcot and walked over to the power control switch. An instant later a low hum came from the loudspeaker. There was a light breeze blowing. In the distance, forming a dull background for the hum, there came a low rumbling that seemed punctuated now and then by a greater sound.

	“Must be a long way off,” said Arcot, a puzzled frown on his face. “Swing the ship around so we can see in what direction the sound is loudest,” he suggested.

	Slowly Morey swung the ship around on its vertical axis. Without a doubt, something off in the direction of the hills was making a considerable noise.

	“Arcot, if that's a fight between two animals—two of those giant animals that you said might be here—I don't care to get near them!” Fuller's narrowed eyes strove to penetrate the haze that screened the low hills in the blue distance.

	The microphone was shut off while the Solarite shot swiftly forward toward the source of the sound. Quickly the hills grew, the blue mistiness disappearing, and the jagged mounds revealing themselves as bleak harsh rock. As they drew nearer they saw beyond the hills, intermittent flashes of brilliant light, heard shattering blasts of sound.

	“A thunderstorm!” Wade began, but Arcot interrupted.

	“Not so fast, Wade—Fuller's animal is there—the only animal in all creation that can make a noise like that! Look through the telescope—see those dots wheeling about there above the flashing lights? The only animal that can make that racket is man! There are men over there—and they aren't in a playful mood! Turn on the invisibility while we can, Morey—and let's get nearer!”

	“Look out—here we go!” Morey began to close a tiny switch set in one side of the instrument panel—then, before the relay below could move, he had flipped it back.

	“Here, you take it, Arcot—you always think about two steps ahead of me—you're quicker and know the machine better anyway.”

	Quickly the two men exchanged places.

	“I don't know about that, Morey,” said a voice from vacancy, for Arcot had at once thrown the ship into invisibility. “The longer we're here, the more mistakes I see we made in our calculations. I see what put me off so badly on my estimate of the intelligence of life found here! The sun gives it a double dose of heat—but also a double dose of other radiations—some of which evidently speed up evolution. Anyway, we may be able to find friends here more quickly if we aid one side or the other in the very lively battle going on there. Before we go any further, what's our decision?”

	“I think it is a fine idea,” said Fuller. “But which side are we to aid—and what are the sides? We haven't even seen them yet. Let's go nearer and take a good look.”

	“Yes—but are we going to join either side after looking?”

	“Oh, that's unanimous!” said Wade, excitedly.

	The invisible ship darted forward. They sped past the barrier of low hills, and were again high above a broad plain. With a startled gasp, Arcot cut their speed. There, floating high in the air, above a magnificent city, was a machine such as no man had ever before seen! It was a titanic airplane—monstrous, gargantuan, and every other word that denoted immensity. Fully three-quarters of a mile the huge metal wings stretched out in the dull light of the cloudy Venerian day; a machine that seemed to dwarf even the vast city beneath it. The roar of its mighty propellers was a rumbling thunder to the men in the Solarite. From it came the flashing bursts of flame.

	On closer inspection, the watchers saw what seemed to be a swarm of tiny gnats flying about the mighty plane. They appeared to be attacking the giant as vainly as gnats might attack an eagle, for they could not damage the giant machine. The flashing bombs burst in blasts of yellow flame as harmlessly as so many firecrackers.

	All that mighty plane was covered with heavy metal plates, fully ten inches thick, and of metal so tough that when the powerful bombs hit it they made no impression, though they blasted tremendous craters in the soil below. From it poured a steady stream of bombs that burst with a great flash of heat and light, and in an instant the tiny planes they struck streaked down as incandescent masses of metal.

	Yet the giant seemed unable to approach the city—or was it defending it? No, for it was from the city that the vainly courageous little ships poured out. But certainly it was not these ships that kept the titanic battleship of the air at bay!

	Tensely the men watched the uneven conflict. The rain of bombs continued, though all fell short of the city. But slowly around the metropolis there appeared an area of flaring, molten lava, and steadily this moved toward the beautiful buildings. Suddenly the battleship turned toward the city and made a short dash inward on its circling path. As though awaiting this maneuver, a battery of hissing, flaming swords of white light flashed upward, a few hundred feet from the ring of molten rock. As the titanic plane rolled, side-slipped out of the way, they passed, harmlessly, barely missing a monstrous wing.

	“Which?” Arcot demanded. “I say the city. No one should destroy anything so magnificent.”

	Not a dissenting voice was raised, so Arcot sent the Solarite nearer.

	“But what in the world can we do to that huge thing?” Fuller's voice came eerily out of the emptiness. “It has perfect invulnerability through size alone.”

	There was sudden silence among the Terrestrials as one of the tiny planes darted forward and dove at full speed directly toward one of the giant's propellers. There were fifty of these strung along each great wing. If enough of them could be destroyed, the plane must crash. There came a terrific crash—a flare of light—and splintered fragments of flaming wreckage plummeted down. Yet the mighty blades continued whirling as smoothly as ever!

	What could the Solarite do against the giant monoplane? Evidently Arcot had a plan. Under his touch their machine darted high into the sky above the great plane. There was a full mile between them when he released the sustaining force of the Solarite and let it drop, straight toward the source of the battle—falling freely, ever more and more rapidly. They were rushing at the mighty plane below at a pace that made their hearts seem to pause—then suddenly Arcot cried out, “Hold on—here we stop!”

	They seemed a scant hundred feet from the broad metal wings of the unsuspecting plane, when suddenly there was a tremendous jerk, and each man felt himself pressed to the floor beneath a terrific weight that made their backs crack with the load. Doggedly they fought to retain their senses; the blackness receded.

	Below them they saw only a mighty sea of roaring red flames—a hell of blazing gas that roared like a score of bombs set off at once. The Solarite was sitting down on her rocket jets! All six of the rocket tubes in the base of the ship had been opened wide, and streaming from them in a furious blast of incandescent gas, the atomic hydrogen shot out in a mighty column of gas at 3500 degrees centigrade. Where the gas touched it, the great plane flared to incandescence; and in an immeasurable interval the fall of the Solarite ended, and it rebounded high into the air. Arcot, struggling against the weight of six gravities, pulled shut the little control that had sent those mighty torches blasting out. An instant later they sped away lest the plane shoot toward the gas columns.

	From a safe distance they looked back at their work. No longer was the mighty plane unscathed, invulnerable, for now in its top gaped six great craters of incandescent metal that almost touched and coalesced. The great plane itself reeled, staggering, plunging downward; but long before it reached the hard soil below, it was brought into level flight, and despite many dead engines, it circled and fled toward the south. The horde of small planes followed, dropping a rain of bombs into the glowing pits in the ship, releasing their fury in its interior. In moments the beings manning the marauder had to a large extent recovered from the shock of the attack and were fighting back. In a moment—just before the ship passed over the horizon and out of sight—the Terrestrians saw the great props that had been idle, suddenly leap into motion, and in an instant the giant had left its attackers behind—fleeing from its invisible foe.

	Under Arcot's guidance the ship from Earth, still invisible, returned to the approximate spot where they had destroyed the invulnerability of the Giant. Then suddenly, out of nothing, the Solarite appeared. In an instant a dozen of the tiny two-man planes darted toward it. Just that they might recognize it, Arcot shot it up a bit higher with the aid of the keel rockets at one-third power. The typical reddish flame of atomic hydrogen, he knew, would be instantaneously recognizable.

	Little these planes were, but shaped like darts, and swifter than any plane of Earth. They shot along at 1000 miles an hour readily, as Arcot soon found out. It was not a minute before they had formed a long line that circled the Solarite at minimum speed, then started off in the direction of the city. On impulse Arcot followed after them, and instantly the planes increased their velocity, swiftly reaching 1000 miles per hour.

	The city they were approaching was an inspiring sight. Mighty towers swept graceful lines a half mile in the air, their brightly colored walls gleaming in rainbow hues, giving the entire city the aspect of a gigantic jewel—a single architectural unit. Here was symmetry and order, with every unit in the city built around the gigantic central edifice that rose, a tremendous tower of black and gold, a full half mile in the air.

	The outer parts of the city were evidently the residential districts, the low buildings and the wide streets with the little green lawns showing the care of the individual owner. Then came the apartment houses and the small stores; these rose in gentle slopes, higher and higher, merging at last with the mighty central pinnacle of beauty. The city was designed as a whole, not in a multitude of individually beautiful, but inharmonious units, like some wild mixture of melodies, each in itself beautiful, but mutually discordant.

-

V

	THE TERRESTRIANS FOLLOWED their escort high above these great buildings, heading toward the great central tower. In a moment they were above it, and in perfect order the ships of the Venerians shot down to land smoothly, but at high speed. On the roof of the building they slowed with startling rapidity, held back by electromagnets under the top dressing of the roof landing, as Arcot learned later.

	“We can't land on that—this thing weighs too much—we'd probably sink right through it! The street looks wide enough for us to land there.” Arcot maneuvered the Solarite over the edge of the roof, and dropped it swiftly down the half mile to the ground below. Just above the street, he leveled off, and descended slowly, giving the hurrying crowds plenty of time to get from beneath it.

	Landing finally, he looked curiously at the mass of Venerians who had gathered in the busy street, coming out of buildings where they evidently had sought shelter during the raid. The crowd grew rapidly as the Terrestrians watched them—people of a new world.

	“Why,” exclaimed Fuller in startled surprise, “they look almost like us!”

	“Why not?” laughed Arcot. “Is there any particular reason why they shouldn't look like us? Venus and Earth are very nearly the same size, and are planets of the same parent sun. Physical conditions here appear to be very similar to conditions back home, and if there's anything to Svend Arrehenius' theory of life spores being sent from world to world by sunlight, there's no reason why humanoid races cannot be found throughout the universe. On worlds, that is, suitable for the development of such life forms.”

	“Look at the size of 'em,” Fuller commented.

	Their size was certainly worth noting, for in all that crowd only the obviously young were less than six feet tall. The average seemed to be seven feet—well-built men and women with unusually large chests, who would have seemed very human indeed, but for a ghastly, death-like blue tinge to their skin. Even their lips were as bright a blue as man's lips are red. The teeth seemed to be as white as any human's, but their mouths were blue.

	“They look as if they'd all been eating blueberries!” laughed Wade. “I wonder what makes their blood blue? I've heard of blue-blooded families, but these are the first I've ever seen!”

	“I think I can answer that,” said Morey slowly. “It seems odd to us—but those people evidently have their blood based on hemocyanin. In us, the oxygen is carried to the tissues, and the carbon dioxide carried away by an iron compound, hemoglobin, but in many animals of Earth, the same function is performed by a copper compound, hemocyanin, which is an intense blue. I am sure that that is the explanation for these strange people. By the way, did you notice their hands?”

	“Yes, I had. They strike me as having one too many fingers—look there—that fellow is pointing—why—his hand hasn't too many fingers, but too many thumbs! He has one on each side of his palm! Say, that would be handy in placing nuts and bolts, and such fine work, wouldn't it?”

	Suddenly a lane opened in the crowd, and from the great black and gold building there came a file of men in tight-fitting green uniforms; a file of seven-foot giants. Obviously they were soldiers of some particular branch, for in the crowd there were a number of men dressed in similar uniforms of deep blue.

	“I think they want one or more of us to accompany them,” Arcot said. “Let's flip a coin to decide who goes—two better stay here, and two go. If we don't come back inside of a reasonable period of time, one of you might start making inquiries; the other can send a message to Earth, and get out of harm's way till help can come. I imagine these people are friendly now, however—else I wouldn't go.”

	The leader of the troop stepped up to the door of the Solarite, and coming to what was obviously a position of attention, put his left hand over his right breast in an equally obvious salute, and waited.

	The coin was flipped with due ceremony—it would decide which of them were to have the distinction of being the first Terrestrians to set foot on Venus. Arcot and Morey won, and they quickly put on the loose-fitting ventilated cooling suits that they might live comfortably in the hot air outside—for the thermometer registered 150°!

	The two men quickly walked over to the airlock, entered, closed it behind them, and opened the outer door. There was a slight rush of air, as the pressure outside was a bit lower than that inside. There was a singing in their ears, and they had to swallow several times to equalize the pressure.

	The guards at once fell into a double row on either side of them, and the young officer strode ahead. He himself had curbed his curiosity after the single startled glance he had given these strange men. Only their hands were visible, for the cooling suits covered them almost completely, but the strange pink color must indeed have been startling to the eyes; also their dwarf stature, and the strange suits they wore. The men of his little troop, however, as well as the people in the crowd about them, were not so disinterested. They were looking in eager amazement at these men who had just saved their city, these strange small men with their queer pink skin. And most surprising of all, perhaps, the inner thumb was missing from each hand!

	But soon they had passed beyond the sight of the crowd, which was held in check by a handful of the deep blue uniformed men.

	“Those fellows would never hold such a Terrestrial crowd back if visitors from another planet landed!” remarked Morey wonderingly.

	“How do they know we are visitors from another planet?” Arcot objected. “We suddenly appeared out of nowhere—they don't even know our direction of approach. We might be some strange race of Venerians as far as they know.”

	They walked briskly up to the massive gold and black entrance, and passed through the great doors that seemed made of solid copper, painted with some clear coating that kept the metal lustrous, the rich color shining magnificently. They stood open wide now, as indeed they always were. Even the giant Venerians were dwarfed by these mighty doors as they passed through into an equally vast hall, a tremendous room that must have filled all the front half of the ground floor of the gigantic building, a hall of graceful columns that hid the great supporting members. The stone, they knew, must serve the Venerians as marble serves us, but it was a far more handsome stone. It was a rich green, like the green of thick, heavy grass in summer when the rain is plentiful. The color was very pleasing to the eye, and restful too. There was a checker-board floor of this green stone, alternated with another, a stone of intense blue. They were hard, and the colors made a very striking pattern, pleasingly different from what they had been accustomed to, but common to Venus, as they later learned.

	At last the party had crossed the great hall, and stopped beside a large doorway. The officer halted for a moment, and gestured toward two of his men, who remained, while the others walked quickly away. The diminished party stepped through the doorway into a small room whose walls were lined with copper, and an instant later, as the officer pushed a small button, there was a low hiss of escaping air, and a copper grating sprang quickly up across the opening of the elevator. He touched another button, and there was the familiar sinking feeling as the car rose, a low hum seeming to come from its base.

	The elevator rose swiftly through a very considerable distance—up—up, endlessly.

	“They must have some wonderfully strong cables here on Venus!” Morey exclaimed. “The engineers of Terrestrial buildings have been wondering for some time how to get around the difficulty of shifting elevators. The idea of changing cars doesn't appeal to me, either—but we must have risen a long way!”

	“I should say so—I wonder how they do it. We've been rising for a minute and a half at a very fair clip—there we are; end of the line—I want to look at this car!” Arcot stepped over to the control board, looked at it closely, then stepped out and peered down between the car and the shaft as the copper grating fell, simultaneously pulling down with it the door that had blocked off the hallway.

	“Come here, Morey—simple system at that! It would be so, of course. Look—they have tracks, and a regular trolley system, with cog rails alongside, and the car just winds itself up! They have a motor underneath, I'll bet, and just run it up in that way. They have never done that on Earth because of the cost of running the car up without too much power. I think I see the solution—the car has electro-dynamical brakes, and descending, just slows itself down by pumping power into the line to haul some other car up. This is a mighty clever scheme!”

	As Arcot straightened, the officer beckoned to him to follow, and started down the long corridor which was lined on either side with large doorways, much like a very exotic earthly office building. Passing through a long series of branching corridors they at last reached one that terminated in a large office, into which the young officer led them. Snapping to attention, he spoke briefly and rapidly, saluted and retired with his two men.

	The man before whom the Terrestrians stood was a tall, kindly-faced old gentleman. His straight black hair was tinged with bluish gray, and the kindly face bore the lines of age, but the smiling eyes, and the air of sincere interest gave his countenance an amazingly youthful air. It was warm and friendly despite its disconcerting blueness. He looked curiously, questioningly at the two men before him, looked at their hands, his eyes widening in surprise; then he stepped quickly forward, and extended his hand, at the same time looking toward Arcot.

	Smiling, Arcot extended his own. The Venerian grasped it—then with an exclamation on the part of each, they mutually released each other, Arcot feeling an uncomfortable sensation of heat, just as the Venerian felt a flash of intense cold! Each stared from his hand to the hand of the other in surprise, then a smile curved the blue lips of the Venerian as he very emphatically put his hand at his side. Arcot smiled in turn, and said to Morey in an animated tone:

	“They have a body temperature of at least 170° Fahrenheit. It would naturally be above room temperature, which is 150° here, so that they are most unpleasantly hot to us. Marvelous how nature adapts herself to her surroundings!” He chuckled. “I hope these fellows don't have fevers. They'd be apt to boil over!”

	The Venerian had picked up a small rectangle of black material, smooth and solid. He drew quickly upon it with what appeared to be a pencil of copper. In a moment he handed the tablet to Arcot, who reached out for it, then changed his mind, and motioned that he didn't want to burn his fingers. The old Venerian held it where Arcot could see it.

	“Why, Morey, look here—I didn't think they had developed astronomy to any degree, because of the constant clouds, but look at this. He has a nice little map of the solar system, with Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and all the rest on it. He has drawn in several of the satellites of Jupiter and of Saturn too.”

	The Venerian pointed to Mars and looked inquisitively at them. Arcot shook his head and pointed quickly to Earth. The Venetian seemed a bit surprised at this, then thought a moment and nodded in satisfaction. He looked at Arcot intently. Then to the latter's amazement, there seemed to form in his mind a thought—at first vague, then quickly taking definite form.

	“Man of Earth,” it seemed to say, “we thank you—you have saved our nation. We want to thank you for your quick response to our signals. We had not thought that you could answer us so soon.” The Venerian seemed to relax as the message was finished. It obviously had required great mental effort.

	Arcot looked steadily into his eyes now, and tried to concentrate on a message—on a series of ideas. To him, trained though he was in deep concentration on one idea, the process of visualizing a series of ideas was new, and very difficult. But he soon saw that he was making some progress.

	“We came in response to no signals—exploration only—we saw the battle—and aided because your city seemed doomed, and because it seemed too beautiful to be destroyed.”

	“What's it all about, Arcot?” asked Morey wonderingly, as he watched them staring at each other.

	“Mental telepathy,” Arcot answered briefly. “I'm terribly thick from his point of view, but I just learned that they sent signals to Earth—why, I haven't learned—but I'm making progress. If I don't crack under the strain, I'll find out sooner or later—so wait and see.” He turned again to the Venerian.

	The latter was frowning at him rather dubiously. With sudden decision he turned to his desk, and pulled down a small lever. Then again he looked intently at Arcot.

	“Come with me—the strain of this conversation is too great—I see you do not have thought transference on your world.”

	“Come along, Morey—we're going somewhere. He says this thought transference is too much for us. I wonder what he is going to do?”

	Out into the maze of halls they went again, now led by the kindly seven-foot Venerian. After walking through a long series of halls, they reached a large auditorium, where already there had gathered in the semi-circle of seats a hundred or so of the tall, blue-tinged Venerians. Before them, on a low platform, were two large, deeply-cushioned chairs. To these chairs the two Terrestrians were led.

	“We will try to teach you our language telepathically. We can give you the ideas—you must learn the pronunciation, but this will be very much quicker. Seat yourselves in these chairs and relax.”

	The chairs had been designed for the seven-footers. These men were six feet and six feet six, respectively, yet it seemed to them, as they sank into the cushions, that never had they felt such comfortable chairs. They were designed to put every muscle and every nerve at rest. Luxuriously, almost in spite of themselves, they relaxed.

	Dimly Arcot felt a wave of sleepiness sweep over him; he yawned prodigiously. There was no conscious awareness of his sinking into a deep slumber. It seemed that suddenly visions began to fill his mind—visions that developed with a returning consciousness—up from the dark, into a dream world. He saw a mighty fleet whose individual planes were a mile long, with three-quarters of a mile wingspread—titanic monoplanes, whose droning thunder seemed to roar through all space. Then suddenly they were above him, and from each there spurted a great stream of dazzling brilliance, an intense glow that reached down, and touched the city. An awful concussion blasted his ears. All the world about him erupted in unimaginable brilliance; then darkness fell.

	Another vision filled his mind—a vision of the same fleet hanging over a giant crater of molten rock, a crater that gaped angrily in a plain beside low green hills—a crater that had been a city. The giants of the air circled, turned, and sped over the horizon. Again he was with them—and again he saw a great city fuse in a blazing flash of blinding light—again and yet again—until around all that world he saw smoking ruins of great cities, now blasted crimson craters in a world of fearful desolation.

	The destroyers rode up, up, up—out of the clouds—and he was with them. Out beyond the swirling mists, where the cold of space seemed to reach in at them, and the roaring of the mighty propellers was a thin whine—then suddenly that was gone, and from the tail of each of the titanic machines there burst a great stream of light, a blazing column that roared back, and lit all space for miles around—rocket jets that sent them swiftly across space!

	He saw them approaching another world, a world that shone a dull red, but he saw the markings and knew that it was Earth, not Mars. The great planes began falling now—falling at an awful speed into the upper air of the planet, and in an instant the rocket flares were gone, fading and dying in the dense air. Again there came the roar of the mighty propellers. Then swiftly the fleet of giants swooped down, lower and lower. He became aware of its destination—a spot he knew must be New York—but a strangely distorted New York—a Venerian city, where New York should have been. And again, the bombs rained down. In an instant the gigantic city was a smoking ruin.

	The visions faded, and slowly he opened his eyes, looked about him. He was still in the room of the circle of chairs—he was still on Venus—then with sudden shock, understanding came. He knew the meaning of these visions—the meaning of that strangely distorted New York, of that red Earth. It meant that this was what the Venerians believed was to happen! They were trying to show him the plans of the owners and builders of those gigantic ships! The New York he had seen was New York as these men imagined it.

	Startled, confused, his forehead furrowed, he rose unsteadily to his feet. His head seemed whirling in the throes of a terrific headache. The men about him were looking anxiously at him. He glanced toward Morey. He was sleeping deeply in the seat, his features now and again reflecting his sensations. It was his turn to learn this new language and see the visions.

	The old Venerian who had brought them there walked up to Arcot and spoke to him in a softly musical language, a language that was sibilant and predominated in liquid sounds; there were no gutturals, no nasals; it was a more musical language than Earth men had ever before heard, and now Arcot started in surprise, for he understood it perfectly; the language was as familiar as English.

	“We have taught you our language as quickly as possible—you may have a headache, but you must know what we know as soon as possible. It may well be that the fate of two worlds hangs on your actions. These men have concentrated on you and taught you very rapidly with the massed power of their minds, giving you visions of what we know to be in preparation. You must get back to your wonderful ship as quickly as possible; and yet you must know what has happened here on our world in the last few years, as well as what happened twenty centuries ago.

	“Come with me to my office, and we will talk. When your friend has also learned, you may tell him.”

	Quickly Arcot followed the Venerian down the long corridors of the building. The few people they met seemed intent on their own business, paying little attention to them.

	At last they seated themselves in the office where Arcot had first met his escort; and there he listened to a new history—the history of another planet.

	“My name is Tonlos,” the old man said. “I am a leader of my people—though my title and position are unimportant. To explain would entail a prolonged discussion of our social structure, and there is no time for that. Later, perhaps—but now to our history.

	“Twenty centuries ago,” Tonlos continued, “there were two great rival nations on this planet. The planet Turo is naturally divided so that there would be a tendency toward such division. There are two enormous belts of land around the globe, one running from about 20 degrees north of the equator to about 80 degrees north. This is my country, Lanor. To the south there is a similar great belt of land, of almost identical size, Kaxor. These two nations have existed for many thousands of our years.

	“Two thousand years ago a great crisis arose in the affairs of the world—a great war was in process of starting—but a Lanorian developed a weapon that made it impossible for the Kaxorians to win—and war was averted. The feeling was so strong, however, that laws were passed which stopped all intercourse between the two nations for these thousands of years. By devious ways we've learned that Kaxor has concentrated on the study of physics, perhaps in hopes of finding a weapon with which they could threaten us once more. Lanor has studied the secrets of the human mind and body. We have no disease here any longer; we have no insanity. We are students of chemistry, but physics has been neglected to a great extent. Recently, however, we have again taken up this science, since it alone of the main sciences had not received our study. Only twenty-five years have been spent on these researches, and in that short time we cannot hope to do what the Kaxorians have done in two thousand.

	“The secret of the heat ray, the weapon that prevented the last war, had been almost forgotten. It required diligent research to bring it to life again, for it is a very inefficient machine—or was. Of late, however, we have been able to improve it, and now it is used in commerce to smelt our ores. It was this alone that allowed this city to put up the slight resistance that we did. We were surely doomed. This is the capital of Lanor, Sonor. We—and the nation—would have fallen but for you.

	“We have had some warning that this was coming. We have spies in Kaxor now, for we learned of their intentions when they flew the first of their giant planes over one of our cities and dropped a bomb! We have been trying, since we discovered the awful scope of their plans, to send you a warning if you could not help us. That you should come here at this particular time is almost beyond belief—a practically impossible coincidence—but perhaps there is more than coincidence behind it? Who knows?” He paused briefly; went on with a heavy sigh: “Since you drove that plane away, we can expect a new raid at any moment, and we must be prepared. Is there any way you can signal your planet?”

	“Yes—we can signal easily,” Arcot answered; he struggled with the newly acquired language. “I do not know the word in your tongue—it may be that you do not have it—radio we call it—it is akin to light, but of vastly longer wavelength. Produced electrically, it can be directed like light and sent in a beam by means of a reflection. It can penetrate all substances except metals, and can leak around them, if it be not directional. With it I can talk readily with the men of Earth, and this very night I will.”

	Arcot paused, frowning thoughtfully, then continued, “I know there's definite need for haste, but we can't do anything until Morey has received the knowledge you've given me. While we're waiting here, I might just as well learn all I can about your planet. The more I know, the more intelligently I'll be able to plan for our defense.”

	In the conversation which followed, Arcot gained a general knowledge of the physical makeup of Venus. He learned that iron was an exceedingly rare element on the planet, while platinum was relatively plentiful. Gold, though readily available, was considered a nuisance, since it was of no practical value due to its softness, excessive weight and its affinity for many catalysts. Most of the other metallic elements were present in quantities approximating those of Earth, except for an element called “morlus”. When Tonlos mentioned this, Arcot said:

	“Morlus—I have the word in your language—but I do not know the element. What is it?”

	“Why—here is some!”

	Tonlos handed Arcot a small block of metal that had been used as a weight on a table in one corner of the room. It seemed fairly dense, about as heavy as iron, but it had a remarkably bluish tint. Obviously, it was the element that composed the wings of the airplane they had seen that afternoon. Arcot examined it carefully, handicapped somewhat by its heat. He picked up a small copper rod and tried to scratch it but there was no noticeable effect.

	“You cannot scratch it with copper,” said Tonlos. “It is the second hardest metal we know—it is not as hard as chromium, but far less brittle. It is malleable, ductile, very very strong, very tough, especially when alloyed with iron, but those alloys are used only in very particular work because of iron's rarity.”

	Indicating the bluish block, Arcot said, “I'd like to identify this element. May I take it back to the ship and test it?”

	“You may, by all means. You will have considerable difficulty getting it into solution, however. It is attacked only by boiling selenic acid which, as you must know, dissolves platinum readily. The usual test for the element is to so dissolve it, oxidize it to an acid, then test with radium selenate, when a brilliant greenish blue salt is—”

	“Test with radium selenate!” Arcot exclaimed. “Why, we have no radium salts whatever on Earth that we could use for that purpose. Radium is exceedingly rare!”

	“Radium is by no means plentiful here,” Tonlos replied, “but we seldom have to test for morlus, and we have plenty of radium salts for that purpose. We have never found any other use for radium—it is so active that it combines with water just as sodium does; it is very soft—a useless metal, and dangerous to handle. Our chemists have never been able to understand it—it is always in some kind of reaction no matter what they do, and still it gives off that very light gas, helium, and a heavy gas, niton, and an unaccountable amount of heat.”

	“Your world is vastly different from ours,” Arcot commented. He told Tonlos of the different metals of Earth, the non-metals, and their occurrence. But try as he would, he could not place the metal Tonlos had given him.

	Morey's arrival interrupted their discussion. He looked very tired, and very serious. His head ached from his unwonted mental strain, just as Arcot's had. Briefly Arcot told him what he had learned, concluding with a question as to why Morey thought the two planets, both members of the same solar family, should be so different.

	“I have an idea,” said Morey slowly, “and it doesn't seem too wacky. As you know, by means of solar photography, astronomers have mapped the sun, charting the location of the different elements. We've seen hydrogen, oxygen, silicon and others, and as the sun aged, the elements must have been mixed up more and more thoroughly. Yet we have seen the vast areas of single elements. Some of those areas are so vast that they could easily be the source of an entire world! I wonder if it is not possible that Earth was thrown off from some deposit rich in iron, aluminum and calcium, and poor in gold, radium and those other metals—and particularly poor in one element. We have located in the sun the spectrum of an element we have named coronium—and I think you have a specimen of coronium in your hand there! I'd say Venus came from a coronium-rich region!”

	The discussion ended there, for already the light outside had deepened to a murky twilight. The Terrestrians were led quickly down to the elevator, which dropped them rapidly to the ground. There was still a large crowd about the Solarite, but the way was quickly cleared for them. As the men passed through the crowd, a peculiar sensation struck them very forcibly. It seemed that everyone in the crowd was wishing them the greatest success—the best of good things in every wish.

	“The ultimate in applause! Morey, I'll swear we just received a silent cheer!” exclaimed Arcot, as they stood inside the airlock of the ship once more. It seemed home to them now! In a moment they had taken off the uncomfortable ventilating suits and stepped once more into the room where Wade and Fuller awaited them.

	“Say—what were you fellows doing?” Wade demanded. “We were actually getting ready to do some inquiring about your health!”

	“I know we were gone a long time—but when you hear the reason you'll agree it was worth it. See if you can raise Earth on the radio, Morey, will you, while I tell these fellows what happened? If you succeed, tell them to call in Dad and your father, and to have a couple of tape recorders on the job. We'll want a record of what I have to send. Say that we'll call back in an hour.” Then, while Morey was busy down in the power room sending the signals out across the forty million miles of space that separated them from their home planet, Arcot told Wade and Fuller what they had learned.

	Morey finally succeeded in getting his message through, and returned to say that they would be waiting in one hour. He had had to wait eight minutes after sending his message to get any answer, however, due to time required for radio waves to make the two-way trip.

	“Fuller,” Arcot said, “as chef, suppose you see what you can concoct while Wade and I start on this piece of coronium and see what there is to learn.”

	At the supper table Wade and Arcot reported to the others the curious constants they had discovered for coronium. It was not attacked by any acid except boiling selenic acid, since it formed a tremendous number of insoluble salts. Even the nitrate violated the long-held rule that “all nitrates are soluble”—it wouldn't dissolve. Yet it was chemically more active than gold.

	But its physical constants were the most surprising. It melted at 2800° centigrade, a very high melting point indeed. Very few metals are solid at that temperature. But the tensile strength test made with a standard bar they finally turned out by means of a carbaloy tool, gave a reading of more than one million, three hundred thousand pounds per square inch! It was far stronger than iron—stronger than tungsten, the strongest metal heretofore known. It was twice as strong as the Earth's strongest metal!

	Fuller whistled in awe. “No wonder they can make a plane like that when they have such a metal to work with.” The designing engineer had visions of a machine after his own heart—one in which half the weight was not employed in holding it together!

	It was a little later that they got communication through to Earth, and the men went to the power room. The television screen was struggling to form a clear image despite the handicap of forty million miles of space. In a moment it had cleared, though, and they saw the face of Dr. Arcot. He showed plainly that he was worried about the startling news that had reached him already, sketchy though it was. After brief though warm greetings, his son rapidly outlined to him the full extent of their discoveries, and the force that Earth would have to meet.

	“Dad, these Kaxorians have planes capable of far more than a thousand miles an hour in the air. For some reason the apparatus they use to propel them in space is inoperative in air, but their propellers will drive them forward faster than any plane Earth ever saw. You must start at once on a fleet of these molecular motion planes—and a lot of the gas Wade developed—you know how to make it—the animation suspending gas. They don't have it—and I believe it will be useful. I'll try to develop some new weapons here. If either of us makes any progress along new lines—we'll report to the other. I must stop now—a Lanorian delegation is coming.” After a few words of farewell, Arcot severed connections with the Earth and arose to await the arrival of the visitors.

	Since the return of the Terrestrians to the Solarite, a great crowd of Venerians had gathered around it, awaiting a glimpse of the men, for the news had spread that this ship had come from Earth. Now, the crowd had divided, and a group of men was approaching, clothed in great heavy coats that seemed warm enough to wear in Terrestrial arctic regions!

	“Why—Arcot—what's the idea of the winter regalia?” asked Fuller in surprise.

	“Think a moment—they are going to visit a place whose temperature is seventy degrees colder than their room temperature. In the bargain, Venus never has any seasonal change of temperature, and a heavy bank of clouds that eternally cover the planet keeps the temperature as constant as a thermocouple arrangement could. The slight change from day to night is only appreciable by the nightly rains—see—the crowd is beginning to break up now. It's night already, and there is a heavy dew settling. Soon it will be rain, and the great amount of moisture in the air will supply enough heat, in condensing, to prevent a temperature drop of more than two or three degrees. These men are not used to changes in temperature as we are and hence they must protect themselves far more fully.”

	Three figures now entered the airlock of the Solarite, and muffled in heavy garments as they were, large under any conditions, they had to come through one at a time.

	Much that Arcot showed them was totally new to them. Much he could not explain to them at all, for their physics had not yet reached that stage.

	But there was one thing he could show them, and he did. There were no samples of the liquids he wanted, but their chemistry was developed to a point that permitted the communication of the necessary data and Arcot told them the formula of Wade's gas. Its ability to penetrate any material at ordinary temperatures, combined with its anesthetic properties, gave it obvious advantages as a weapon for rendering the opposing forces defenseless.

	Since it was able to penetrate all substances, there was no means of storing it. Hence it was made in the form of two liquids which reacted spontaneously and produced the gas, which was then projected to the spot where needed.

	Arcot asked now that the Venerian chemists make him a supply of these two liquids; and they promptly agreed. He felt he would have a fighting chance in combatting the enemy if he could but capture one of their flying forts. It seemed a strange task! Capturing so huge a machine with only the tiny Solarite—but Arcot felt there was a good possibility of his doing it if he but had a supply of that gas.

	There was one difficulty—one step in the synthesis required a considerable quantity of chlorine. Since chlorine was rare on Venus, the men were forced to sacrifice most of their salt supply; but this chlorine so generated could be used over and over again.

	It was quite late when the Venerians left, to go again into the scalding hot rain, rain that seemed to them to be a cold drizzle. After they had gone, the Terrestrians turned in for the night, leaving a telephone connection with the armed guard outside.

-

	The dull light of the Venerian day was filtering in through the windows the next morning when the Terrestrians awoke. It was eight o'clock, New York time, but Sonor was working on a twenty-three hour day. It happened that Sonor and New York had been in opposition at midnight two nights ago, which meant that it was now ten o'clock Sonorian time. The result was that Arcot left the car to speak to the officer in charge of the guard about the ship.

	“We need some pure water—water free of copper salts. I think it would be best if you can get me some water that has been distilled. That is, for drinking. Also we need about two tons of water of any kind—the ship's tanks need recharging. I'd like about a ton of the drinking water.” Arcot had to translate the Terrestrian measures into the corresponding Venerian terms, of course, but still the officer seemed puzzled. Such a large amount of water would create a real problem in transportation. After apparently conferring by telepathic means with his superiors, the officer asked if the Solarite could be moved to some more accessible place.

	Arcot agreed to have it moved to a spot just outside the city, where the water could be procured directly from a stream. The drinking water would be ready when he returned to the city.

	The Solarite was moved to the bank of the little river and the electrolysis apparatus was set up beside it. During the previous day, and ever since they had landed on Venus, all their power had been coming from the storage cells, but now that the electrolysis apparatus was to establish such a heavy and constant drain, Arcot started the generator, to both charge the cells, and to do the work needed.

	Throughout the day there could be heard the steady hum of the generator, and the throb-throb-throb of the oxygen pump, as the gas was pumped into the huge tanks. The apparatus they were using produced the gas very rapidly, but it was near nightfall before the huge tanks had again been filled. Even then there was a bit more room for the atomic hydrogen that was simultaneously formed, although twice as much hydrogen as oxygen was produced. Its task completed, the Solarite rose again and sped toward the distant city.

	A soft red glow filled the sky now, for even through the miles of clouds the intense sun was able to force some direct rays, and all the city was lighted with that warm radiance. The floodlights had not yet been turned on, but the great buildings looming high in the ruddy light were wonderfully impressive, the effect being heightened by the planned construction, for there were no individual spires, only a single mass that grew from the ground to tower high in the air, like some man-made mountain.

	Back at the Capital the Solarite again settled into the broad avenue that had been cut off to traffic now, and allotted to it as its resting place. Tonlos met them shortly after they had settled into place, and with him were five men, each carrying two large bottles.

	“Ah-co,” as Tonlos pronounced the Terrestrian name, “we have not been able to make very much of the materials needed for your gas, but before we made any very great amount, we tried it out on an animal, whose blood structure is the same as ours, and found it had the same effect, but that in our case the iodide of potassium is not as effective in awakening the victim as is the sorlus. I do not know whether you have tried that on Terrestrial animals or not. Luckily sorlus is the most plentiful of the halogen groups; we have far more of it than of chlorine, bromine or iodine.”

	“Sorlus? I do not know of it—it must be one of the other elements that we do not have on Earth. What are its properties?”

	“It, too, is much like iodine, but heavier. It is a black solid melting at 570 degrees; it is a metallic looking element, will conduct electricity somewhat, oxidizes in air to form an acidic oxide, and forms strong oxygen acids. It is far less active than iodine, except toward oxygen. It is very slightly soluble in water. It does not react readily with hydrogen, and the acid where formed is not as strong as HI.”

	“I have seen so many new things here, I wonder if it may not be the element that precedes niton. Is it heavier than that?”

	“No,” replied Tonlos; “it is just lighter than that element you call niton. I think you have none of it.”

	“Then,” said Arcot, “it must be the next member of the halogen series, Morey. I'll bet they have a number of those heavier elements.”

	The gas was loaded aboard the Solarite that evening, and when Wade saw the quantity that they had said was “rather disappointingly small” he laughed heartily.

	“Small! They don't know what that gas will do! There's enough stuff there to gas this whole city. Why, with that, we can bring down any ship! But tell them to go on making it, for we can use it on the other ships.”

	Again that night they spoke with Earth, and Morey, Senior, told them that work was already under way on a hundred small ships. They were using all their own ships already, while the Government got ready to act on the idea of danger. It had been difficult to convince them that someone on Venus was getting ready to send a force to Earth to destroy them; but the weight of their scientific reputation had turned the trick. The ships now under construction would be ready in three weeks. They would be unable to go into space, but they would be very fast, and capable of carrying large tanks of the gas-producing chemicals.

	It was near midnight, Venerian time, when they turned in. The following day they planned to start for the Kaxorian construction camp. They had learned from Tonlos that there were but five of the giant planes completed now, but there were fifteen more under construction, to make up the fleet of twenty that was to attack Earth. These fifteen others would be ready in a week—or less. When they were ready, the Solarite would stand small chance. They must capture one of the giants and learn its secrets, and then, if possible, with the weapons and knowledge of two worlds, defeat them. A large order!

	Their opportunity came sooner than they had hoped for—or wanted. It was about three o'clock in the morning when the telephone warning hummed loudly through the ship. Arcot answered.

	Far to the east and south of them the line of scout planes that patrolled all the borders of Lanor had been broken. Instantaneously, it seemed, out of the dark, its lights obscured, the mighty Kaxorian craft had come, striking a tiny scout plane head on, destroying it utterly before the scout had a chance to turn from the path of the titanic ship. But even as the plane spun downward, the pilot had managed to release a magnesium flare, a blindingly brilliant light that floated down on a parachute, and in the blaze of the white light it gave off, the other scouts at a few miles distance had seen the mighty bulk of the Kaxorian plane. At once they had dropped to the ground and then, by telephone lines, had sent their report to far off Sonor.

	In moments the interior of the Solarite became a scene of swift purposeful activity. All day the Terrestrians had been able to do so little in preparation for the conflict they knew must come, the battle for two worlds. They had wanted action, but they had no weapons except their invisibility and the atomic hydrogen. It would not sink a plane. It would only break open its armor, and they hoped, paralyze its crew. And on this alone they must pin their hopes.

-

VI

	ARCOT LIFTED THE Solarite at once high into the air, and started toward the point on the border, where the plane had been seen crossing. In a short time Wade relieved him at the controls while he dressed.

	They had been flying on in silence for about an hour, when suddenly Wade made out in the distance the great bulk of the plane, against the dull gray of the clouds, a mile or so above them. It seemed some monstrous black bat flying there against the sky, but down to the sensitive microphone on the side of the Solarite came the drone of the hundred mighty propellers as the great plane forged swiftly along.

	Just how rapidly these giants moved, Arcot had not appreciated until he attempted to overtake this one. It was going over a mile a second now—a speed that demanded only that it move its own length in about five-eights of a second! It made this tremendous speed by streamlining and through sheer power.

	The Solarite hovered high above the dark ship at length, the roar of the terrific air blast from its propellers below coming up to them as a mighty wave of sound that made their own craft tremble! The hundred gigantic propellers roaring below, however, would distribute their gas perfectly.

	“We're going invisible,” Arcot exclaimed. “Look out!” There was a click as the switch shut, and the Solarite was as transparent as the air above it. Arcot drove his ship swiftly, above and ahead of the mighty colossus, then released the gas. There was a low hiss from the power room, barely detectable despite the vacuum that shut them off from the roar of the Kaxorian plane. The microphone had long since been disconnected. Out of the gas vent streamed a cloud of purplish gas, becoming faintly visible as it left the influence of the invisibility apparatus, but only to those who knew where to look for it. The men in that mighty plane could not see it as their machine bore down into the little cloud of gas.

	Tensely the Terrestrians waited. Moments—and the gigantic plane wobbled! There was a sudden swerve that ended in a nose dive, straight toward Venus seven miles below.

	That the ship should crash into the ground below was not at all Arcot's plan, and he was greatly relieved when it flattened its dive and started to climb, its incalculable mass rapidly absorbing its kinetic energy. Down from its seven mile height it glided, controlling itself perfectly as Arcot released the last of the first four containers of the liquid gas makers, putting to sleep the last man on the ship below.

	In a long glide that carried it over many miles, the great ship descended. It had sunk far, and gone smoothly, but now there loomed ahead of it a range of low hills! It would certainly crash into the rocky cliffs ahead! Nearer and nearer drew the barrier while Arcot and the others watched with rigid attention. It might skim above those low hills at that—just barely escaping ... The watchers cringed as head on, at nearly two thousand miles an hour, the machine crashed into the rocks. Arcot had snapped the loud speaker into the circuit once more, and now as they looked at the sudden crash below, there thundered up to them mighty waves of sound!

	The giant plane had struck about twenty feet from the top of a nearly perpendicular cliff. The terrific crash was felt by seismographs in Sonor nearly two thousand miles away! The mighty armored hull plowed into the rocks like some gigantic meteor, the hundreds of thousands of tons crushing the rocky precipice, grinding it to powder, and shaking the entire hill. The cliff seemed to buckle and crack. In moments the plane had been brought to rest, but it had plowed through twenty feet of rock for nearly an eighth of a mile. For an instant it hung motionless, perched perilously in the air, its tail jutting out over the little valley, then slowly, majestically it sank, to strike with a reverberating crash that shattered the heavy armor plate!

	For another instant the great motors continued turning, the roar of the propellers like some throbbing background to the rending crashes as the titanic wreck came to rest. Suddenly, with a series of roaring explosions, the bank of motors in the left wing blew up with awful force. There was a flash of indescribable brilliance that momentarily blinded the watching Terrestrians; then there came to the microphone such waves of sound as it could not reproduce. From the rock on which rested the fused mass of metal that they knew had been the wing, rose a great cloud of dust. Still the motors on the other side of the ship continued roaring and the giant propellers turned. As the blast of air blew the dust away, the Terrestrians stared in unbounded amazement. Up from the gaping, broken wing lanced a mighty beam of light of such dazzling intensity that Arcot swiftly restored them to visibility that they might shut it out. There was a terrific hissing, crackling roar. The plane seemed to wobble as it lay there, seemingly recoiling from that flaming column. Where it touched the cliff there was intense incandescence that made the rock glow white hot, then flow down in a sluggish rivulet of molten lava! For five minutes longer this terrific spectacle lasted, while Arcot withdrew the Solarite to a safer distance.

	The fifty motors of the remaining wing seemed slowing down now—then suddenly there was such a crash and towering flash of light as no human being had ever seen before! Up—up into the very clouds it shot its mighty flame, a blazing column of light that seemed to reach out into space. The Solarite was hurled back end over end, tumbling, falling. Even the heavy gyroscopes could not hold it for an instant, but quickly the straining motors brought them to rest in air that whirled and whined about them. They were more than twenty miles from the scene of the explosion, but even at that distance they could see the glow of the incandescent rock. Slowly, cautiously they maneuvered the Solarite back to the spot, and looked down on a sea of seething lava!

	Morey broke the awed silence. “Lord—what power that thing carries! No wonder they could support it in the air! But—how can they control such power? What titanic forces!”

	Slowly Arcot sent the Solarite away into the night—into the kindly darkness once more. His voice when he spoke at last was oddly restrained.

	“I wonder what those forces were—they are greater than any man has ever before seen! An entire hill fused to molten, incandescent rock, not to mention the tons and tons of metal that made up that ship.

	“And such awful forces as these are to be released on our Earth!” For an interminable period they sat silent as the panorama of hills glided by at a slow two-hundred miles an hour. Abruptly Arcot exclaimed, “We must capture a ship. We'll try again—we'll either destroy or capture it—and either way we're ahead!”

-

	Aimlessly they continued their leisurely course across a vast plain. There were no great mountains on Venus, for this world had known no such violent upheaval as the making of a moon. The men were lost in thought, each intent on his own ideas. At length Wade stood up, and walked slowly back to the power room.

	Suddenly the men in the control room heard his call:

	“Arcot—quick—the microphone—and rise a mile!”

	The Solarite gave a violent lurch as it shot vertically aloft at tremendous acceleration. Arcot reached over swiftly and snapped the switch of the microphone. There burst in upon them the familiar roaring drone of a hundred huge propellers. No slightest hum of motor, only the vast whining roar of the mighty props.

	“Another one! They must have been following the first by a few minutes. We'll get this one!” Arcot worked swiftly at his switches. “Wade—strap yourself in the seat where you are—don't take time to come up here.”

	They followed the same plan which had worked so well before. Suddenly invisible, the Solarite flashed ahead of the great plane. The titanic wave of rushing sound engulfed them—then again came the little hiss of the gas. Now there were no hills in sight, as far as the eye could see. In the dim light that seemed always to filter through these gray clouds they could see the distant, level horizon.

	Several dragging minutes passed before there was any evident effect; the men from Earth were waiting for that great ship to waver, to wobble from its course. Suddenly Arcot gave a cry of surprise. Startled amazement was written all over his face, as his companions turned in wonderment to see that he was partially visible! The Solarite, too, had become a misty ghost ship about them; they were becoming visible! Then in an instant it was gone—and they saw that the huge black bulk behind them was wavering, turning; the thunderous roar of the propellers fell to a whistling whine; the ship was losing speed! It dipped, and shot down a bit—gained speed, then step by step it glided down—down—down to the surface below. The engines were idling now, the plane running more and more slowly.

	They were near the ground now—and the watchers scarcely breathed. Would this ship, too, crash? It glided to within a half mile of the plain—then it dipped once more, and Arcot breathed his relief as it made a perfect landing, the long series of rollers on the base of the gigantic hull absorbing the shock of the landing. There were small streams in the way—a tree or two, but these were obstacles unnoticed by the gargantuan machine. Its mighty propellers still idling slowly, the huge plane rolled to a standstill.

	Swooping down, the Solarite landed beside it, to be lost in the vast shadows of the mighty metal walls.

	Arcot had left a small radio receiver with Tonlos in Sonor before he started on this trip, and had given him directions on how to tune in on the Solarite. Now he sent a message to him, telling that the plane had been brought down, and asking that a squadron of planes be sent at once.

	Wade and Arcot were elected to make the first inspection of the Kaxorian plane, and clad in their cooling suits, they stepped from the Solarite, each carrying, for emergency use, a small hand torch, burning atomic hydrogen, capable of melting its way through even the heavy armor of the great plane.

	As they stood beside it, looking up at the gigantic wall of metal that rose sheer beside them hundreds of feet straight up, it seemed impossible that this mighty thing could fly, that it could be propelled through the air. In awed silence they gazed at its vast bulk.

	Then, like pygmies beside some mighty prehistoric monster, they made their way along its side, seeking a door. Suddenly Wade stopped short and exclaimed: “Arcot, this is senseless—we can't do this! The machine is so big that it'll take us half an hour of steady walking to go around it. We'll have to use the Solarite to find an entrance!”

	It was well that they followed Wade's plan, for the only entrance, as they later learned, was from the top. There, on the back of the giant, the Solarite landed—its great weight having no slightest effect on the Kaxorian craft. They found a trap-door leading down inside. However, the apparatus for opening it was evidently within the hull, so they had to burn a hole in the door before they could enter.

	What a sight there was for these men of Earth. The low rumble of the idling engines was barely audible as they descended the long ladder.

	There was no resemblance whatever to the interior of a flying machine; rather, it suggested some great power house, where the energies of half a nation were generated. They entered directly into a vast hall that extended for a quarter of a mile back through the great hull, and completely across the fuselage. To the extreme nose it ran, and throughout there were scattered little globes that gave off an intense white light, illuminating all of the interior. Translucent bull's-eyes obscured the few windows.

	All about, among the machines, lay Venerians. Dead they seemed, the illusion intensified by their strangely blue complexions. The two Terrestrians knew, however, that they could readily be restored to life. The great machines they had been operating were humming softly, almost inaudibly. There were two long rows of them, extending to the end of the great hall. They suggested mighty generators twenty feet high. From their tops projected two-feet-thick cylinders of solid fused quartz. From these extended other rods of fused quartz, rods that led down through the floor; but these were less bulky, scarcely over eight inches thick.

	The huge generator-like machines were disc-shaped. From these, too, a quartz rod ran down through the floor. The machines on the further row were in some way different; those in the front half of the row had the tubes leading to the floor below, but had no tubes jutting into the ceiling. Instead, there were many slender rods connected with a vast switchboard that covered all of one side of the great room. But everywhere were the great quartz rods, suggesting some complicated water system. Most of them were painted black, though the main rods leading from the roof above were as clear as crystal.

	Arcot and Wade looked at these gigantic machines in hushed awe. They seemed impossibly huge; it was inconceivable that all this was but the power room of an airplane!

	Without speaking, they descended to the level below, using a quite earthly appearing escalator. Despite the motionless figures everywhere, they felt no fear of their encountering resistance. They knew the effectiveness of Wade's anesthetic.

	The hall they entered was evidently the main room of the plane. It was as long as the one above, and higher, yet all that vast space was taken by one single, titanic coil that stretched from wall to wall! Into it, and from it there led two gigantic columns of fused quartz. That these were rods, such as those smaller ones above was obvious, but each was over eight feet thick!

	Short they were, for they led from one mighty generator such as they had seen above, but magnified on a scale inconceivable! At the end of it, its driving power, its motor, was a great cylindrical case, into which led a single quartz bar ten inches thick. This bar was alive with pulsing, glowing fires, that changed and maneuvered and died out over all its surface and through all its volume. The motor was but five feet in diameter and a scant seven feet long, yet obviously it was driving the great machine, for there came from it a constant low hum, a deep pitched song of awful power. And the huge quartz rod that led from the titanic coil-cylinder was alive with the same glowing fires that played through the motor rod. From one side of the generator, ran two objects that were familiar, copper bus bars. But even these were three feet thick!

	The scores of quartz tubes that come down from the floor above joined, coalesced, and ran down to the great generator, and into it.

	They descended to another level. Here were other quartz tubes, but these led down still further, for this floor contained individual sleeping bunks, most of them unoccupied, unready for occupancy, though some were made up.

	Down another level; again the bunks, the little individual rooms.

	At last they reached the bottom level, and here the great quartz tubes terminated in a hundred smaller ones, each of these leading into some strange mechanism. There were sighting devices on it, and there were ports that opened in the floor. This was evidently the bombing room.

	With an occasional hushed word, the Terrestrians walked through what seemed to be a vast city of the dead, passing sleeping officers, and crewmen by the hundreds. On the third level they came at last to the control room. Here were switchboards, control panels, and dozens of officers, sleeping now, beside their instruments. A sudden dull thudding sound spun Arcot and Wade around, nerves taut. They relaxed and exchanged apologetic smiles. An automatic relay had adjusted some mechanism.

	They noted one man stationed apart from the rest. He sat at the very bow, protected behind eight-inch coronium plates in which were set masses of fused quartz that were nearly as strong as the metal itself. These gave him a view in every direction except directly behind him. Obviously, here was the pilot.

	Returning to the top level, they entered the long passages that led out into the titanic wings. Here, as elsewhere, the ship was brightly lighted. They came to a small room, another bunk room. There were great numbers of these down both sides of the long corridor, and along the two parallel corridors down the wing. In the fourth corridor near the back edge of the wing, there were bunk rooms on one side, and on the other were bombing posts.

	As they continued walking down the first corridor, they came to a small room, whence issued the low hum of one of the motors. Entering, they found the crew sleeping, and the motor idling.

	“Good Lord!” Wade exclaimed. “Look at that motor, Arcot! No bigger than the trunk of a man's body. Yet a battery of these sends the ship along at a mile a second! What power!”

	Slowly they proceeded down the long hall. At each of the fifty engine mountings they found the same conditions. At the end of the hall there was an escalator that led one level higher, into the upper wing. Here they found long rows of the bombing posts and the corresponding quartz rods.

	They returned finally to the control room. Here Arcot spent a long time looking over the many instruments, the controls, and the piloting apparatus.

	“Wade,” he said at last, “I think I can see how this is done. I am going to stop those engines, start them, then accelerate them till the ship rolls a bit!” Arcot stepped quickly over to the pilots seat, lifted the sleeping pilot out, and settled in his place.

	“Now, you go over to that board there—that one—and when I ask you to, please turn on that control—no, the one below—yes—turn it on about one notch at a time.”

	Wade shook his head dubiously, a one-sided grin on his face. “All right, Arcot—just as you say—but when I think of the powers you're playing with—well, a mistake might be unhealthy!”

	“I'm going to stop the motors now,” Arcot announced quietly. All the time they had been on board, they had been aware of the barely inaudible whine of the motors. Now suddenly, it was gone, and the plane was still as death!

	Arcot's voice sounded unnaturally loud. “I did it without blowing the ship up after all! Now we're going to try turning the power on!”

	Suddenly there was a throaty hum; then quickly it became the low whine; then, as Arcot turned on the throttle before him, he heard the tens of thousands of horsepower spring into life—and suddenly the whine was a low roar—the mighty propellers out there had became a blur—then with majestic slowness the huge machine moved off across the field!

	Arcot shut off the motors and rose with a broad, relieved smile, “Easy!” he said. They made their way again up through the ship, up through the room of the tremendous cylinder coil, and then into the power room. Now the machines were quiet, for the motors were no longer working.

	“Arcot, you didn't shut off the biggest machine of all down there. How come?”

	“I couldn't, Wade. It has no shut-off control, and if it did have, I wouldn't use it. I will tell you why when we get back to the Solarite.”

	At last they left the mighty machine; walked once more across its broad metal top. Here and there they now saw the ends of those quartz cylinders. Once more they entered the Solarite, through the air lock, and took off the cumbersome insulating suits.

	As quickly as possible Arcot outlined to the two who had stayed with the Solarite, the things they had seen, and the layout of the great ship.

	“I think I can understand the secret of all that power, and it's not so different from the Solarite, at that. It, too, draws its power from the sun, though in a different way, and it stores it within itself, which the Solarite does not try to do.

	“Light of course, is energy, and therefore, has mass. It exerts pressure, the impact of its moving units of energy—photons. We have electrons and protons of matter, and photons of light. Now we know that the mass of protons and electrons will attract other protons and electrons, and hold them near—as in a stone, or in a solar system. The new idea here is that the photons will attract each other ever more and more powerfully, the closer they get. The Kaxorians have developed a method of getting them so close together, that they will, for a while at least, hold themselves there, and with a little 'pressure', will stay there indefinitely.

	“In that huge coil and cylinder we found there we saw the main power storage tank. That was full of gaseous light-energy held together by its own attraction, plus a little help of the generator!”

	“A little help?” Wade exclaimed. “Quite a little! I'll bet that thing had a million horsepower in its motor!”

	“Yes—but I'll bet they have nearly fifty pounds of light condensed there—so why worry about a little thing like a million horsepower? They have plenty more where that comes from.

	“I think they go up above the clouds in some way and collect the sun's energy. Remember that Venus gets twice as much as Earth. They focus it on those tubes on the roof there, and they, like all quartz tubes, conduct the light down into the condensers where it is first collected. Then it is led to the big condenser downstairs, where the final power is added, and the condensed light is stored.

	“Quartz conducts light just as copper conducts electricity—those are bus bars we saw running around there.

	“The bombs we've been meeting recently are, of course, little knots of this light energy thrown out by that projector mechanism we saw. When they hit anything, the object absorbs their energy—and is very promptly volatilized by the heat of the absorption.

	“Do you remember that column of hissing radiance we saw shooting out of the wrecked plane just before it blew up? That was the motor connection, broken, and discharging free energy. That would ordinarily have supplied all fifty motors at about full speed. Naturally, when it cut loose, it was rather violent.

	“The main generator had been damaged, no doubt, so it stopped working, and the gravitational attraction of the photons wasn't enough, without its influence to hold them bound too long. All those floods of energy were released instantaneously, of course.

	“Look—there come the Lanorians now. I want to go back to Sonor and think over this problem. Perhaps we can find something that will release all that energy—though honestly, I doubt it.”

	Arcot seemed depressed, overawed perhaps, by the sheer magnitude of the force that lay bound up in the Kaxorian ship. It seemed inconceivable that the little Solarite could in any way be effective against the incredible machine.

	The Lanorian planes were landing almost like a flock of birds, on the wings, the fuselage, the ground all about the gigantic ship. Arcot dropped into a chair, gazing moodily into emptiness, his thoughts on the mighty giant, stricken now, but only sleeping. In its vast hulk lay such energies as intelligence had never before controlled; within it he knew there were locked the powers of the sun itself. What could the Solarite do against it?

	“Oh, I almost forgot to mention it.” Arcot spoke slowly, dejectedly. “In the heat of the attack back there it went practically unnoticed. Our only weapon beside the gas is useless now. Do you remember how the ship seemed to lose its invisibility for an instant? I learned why when we investigated the ship. Those men are physicists of the highest order. We must realize the terrible forces, both physical and mental that we are to meet. They've solved the secret of our invisibility, and now they can neutralize it. They began using it a bit too late this time, but they had located the radio-produced interference caused by the ship's invisibility apparatus, and they were sending a beam of interfering radio energy at us. We are invisible only by reason of the vibration of the molecules in response to the radio impressed oscillations. The molecules vibrate in tune, at terrific frequency, and the light can pass perfectly. What will happen, however, if someone locates the source of the radio waves? It'll be simple for them to send out a radio beam and touch our invisible ship with it. The two radio waves impressed on us now will be out of step and the interference will instantly make us visible. We can no longer attack them with our atomic hydrogen blast, or with the gas—both are useless unless we can get close to them, and we can't come within ten miles of them now. Those bombs of theirs are effective at that distance.”

	Again he fell silent, thinking—hoping for an idea that would once more give them a chance to combat the Kaxorians. His three companions, equally depressed and without a workable idea, remained silent. Abruptly Arcot stood up.

	“I'm going to speak with the Commander-in-Field here. Then we can start back for Sonor—and maybe we had better head for home. It looks as though there is little we can do here.”

	Briefly he spoke to the young Venerian officer, and told him what he had learned about the ship. Perhaps they could fly it to Sonor; or it could be left there undestroyed if he would open a certain control just before he left. Arcot showed him which one—it would drain out the power of the great storage tank, throwing it harmlessly against the clouds above. The Kaxorians might destroy the machine if they wanted to—Arcot felt that they would not wish to. They would hope, with reason, they might recapture it! It would be impossible to move that tremendous machine without the power that its “tank” was intended to hold.

-

VII

	SLOWLY THEY CRUISED BACK TO Sonor, Arcot still engrossed in thought. Would it be that Venus would fall before the attack of the mighty planes, that they would sweep out across space, to Earth—to Mars—to other worlds, a cosmic menace? Would the mighty machines soon be circling Earth? Guided missiles with atomic warheads could combat them, perhaps, as could the molecular motion machines. Perhaps these could be armored with twenty-inch steel walls, and driven into the great propellers, or at miles a second, into the ship itself! But these ships would require long hours, days, even weeks to build, and in that time the Kaxorian fleet would be ready. It would attack Earth within six days now! What hope was there to avert incalculable destruction—if not outright defeat?

	In despair Arcot turned and strode quickly down the long hallway of the Solarite. Above him he could hear the smooth, even hum of the sweetly functioning generator, but it only reminded him of the vastly greater energies he had seen controlled that night. The thudding relays in the power room, as Wade maneuvered the ship, seemed some diminutive mockery of the giant relays he had seen in the power room of the Kaxorian plane.

	He sat down in the power room, looking at the stacked apparatus, neatly arranged, as it must be, to get all this apparatus in this small space. Then at last he began to think more calmly. He concentrated on the greatest forces known to man—and there were only two that even occurred to him as great! One was the vast energies he had that very night learned of; the other was the force of the molecules, the force that drove his ship.

	He had had no time to work out the mathematics of the light compression, mathematics that he now knew would give results. There remained only the molecular motion. What could he do with it that he had not done?

	He drew out a small black notebook. In it were symbols, formulas, and page after page of the intricate calculus that had ended finally in the harnessing of this great force that was even now carrying him smoothly along.

	Half an hour later he was still busy—covering page after page with swiftly written formulas. Before him was a great table of multiple integers, the only one like it known to exist in the System, for the multiple calculus was an invention of Arcot's. At last he found the expression he wanted, and carefully he checked his work, excitedly though now, with an expression of eager hope—it seemed logical—it seemed correct—

	“Morey—oh, Morey,” he called, holding his enthusiasm in check, “if you can come here—I want you to check some math for me. I've done it—and I want to see if you get the same result independently!” Morey was a more careful mathematician than he, and it was to him Arcot turned for verification of any new discovery.

	Following the general directions Arcot gave him, Morey went through the long series of calculations—and arrived at the same results. Slowly he looked up from the brief expression with which he had ended.

	It was not the formula that astonished him—it was its physical significance.

	“Arcot—do you think we can make it?”

	There was a new expression in Arcot's eyes, a tightness about his mouth.

	“I hope so, Morey. If we don't, Lanor is lost beyond a doubt—and probably Earth is, too. Wade—come here a minute, will you? Let Fuller take the controls, and tell him to push it. We have to get to work on this.”

	Rapidly Arcot explained their calculations—and the proof he had gotten.

	“Our beam of molecular motion-controlling energy directs all molecular motion to go at right angles to it. The mechanism so far has been a field inside a coil really, but if these figures are right, it means that we can project that field to a considerable distance even in air. It'll be a beam of power that will cause all molecules in its path to move at right angles to it, and in the direction we choose, by reversing the power in the projector. That means that no matter how big the thing is, we can tear it to pieces; we'll use its own powers, its own energies, to rip it, or crush it.

	“Imagine what would happen if we directed this against the side of a mountain—the entire mass of rock would at once fly off at unimaginable speed, crashing ahead with terrific power, as all the molecules suddenly moved in the same direction. Nothing in all the Universe could hold together against it! It's a disintegration ray of a sort—a ray that will tear, or crush, for we can either make one half move away from the other—or we can reverse the power, and make one half drive toward the other with all the terrific power of its molecules! It is omnipotent—hmmm—” Arcot paused, narrowing his eyes in thought.

	“It has one limitation. Will it reach far in the air? In vacuum it should have an infinite range—in the atmosphere all the molecules of the air will be affected, and it will cause a terrific blast of icy wind, a gale at temperatures far below zero! This will be even more effective here on Venus!

	“But we must start designing the thing at once! Take some of the Immorpho and give me some, and we can let the sleep accumulate till we have more time! Look—we're in Sonor already! Land us, Fuller—right where we were, and then come back here. We're going to need you!”

	The gorgeous display of a Venerian dawn was already coloring the east as the great buildings seemed to rise silently about them. The sky, which had been a dull luminous gray, a gray that rapidly grew brighter and brighter, was now like molten silver, through which were filtering the early rays of the intense sun. As the sun rose above the horizon, though invisible for clouds, it still was traceable by the wondrous shell pink that began to suffuse the ten mile layer of vapor. The tiny droplets were, however, breaking the clear light into a million rainbows, and all about the swiftly deepening pink were forming concentric circles of blue, of green, orange, and all the colors of the rainbow, repeated time after time—a wondrous halo of glowing color, which only the doubly intense sun could create.

	“It's almost worth missing the sun all day to see their sunrises and sunsets,” Fuller commented. The men were watching it, despite their need for haste. It was a sight the like of which no Earthman had ever before seen.

	Immediately, then, they plunged into the extremely complex calculation of the electrical apparatus to produce the necessary fields. To get the effect they wanted, they must have two separate fields of the director ray, and a third field of a slightly different nature, which would cause the director ray to move in one direction only. It would be disconcerting, to say the least, if the director ray, by some mistake, should turn upon them!

	The work went on more swiftly than they had considered possible, but there was still much to be done on the theoretical end of the job alone when the streets about them began to fill. They noticed that a large crowd was assembling, and shortly after they had finished, after some of these people had stood there for more than an hour and a half, the crowd had grown to great size.

	“From the looks of that collection, I should say we are about to become the principals in some kind of a celebration that we know nothing about. Well, we're here, and in case they want us, we're ready to come.”

	The guard that always surrounded the Solarite had been doubled, and was maintaining a fairly large clear area about the ship.

	Shortly thereafter they saw one of the high officials of Lanor come down the walk from the governmental building, walking toward the Solarite.

	“Time for us to appear—and it may as well be all of us this time. I'll tell you what they say afterward, Wade. They've evidently gone to considerable trouble to get up this meeting, so let's cooperate. I hate to slow up the work, but we'll try to make it short.”

	The four Terrestrians got into their cooling suits, and stepped outside the ship. The Lanorian dignitary left his guard, walked up to the quartet from Earth with measured tread, and halted before them.

	“Earthmen,” he began in a deep, clear voice, “we have gathered here this morning to greet you and thank you for the tremendous service you have done us. Across the awful void of empty space you have journeyed forty million miles to visit us, only to discover that Venerians were making ready to attack your world. Twice your intervention has saved our city.

	“There is, of course, no adequate reward for this service; we can in no way repay you, but in a measure we may show our appreciation. We have learned from the greatest psychologist of our nation, Tonlos, that in your world aluminum is plentiful, but gold and platinum are rare, and that morlus is unknown. I have had a small token made for you, and your friends. It is a little plaque, a disc of morlus, and on it there is a small map of the Solar System. On the reverse side there is a globe of Venus, with one of Earth beside it, as well as our men could copy the small globe you have given us. The northern hemisphere of each is depicted—America, your nation, and Lanor, ours, thus being shown. We want you, and each of your friends, to accept these. They are symbols of your wonderful flight across space!” The Venerians turned to each of the Terrestrians and presented each with a small metal disc.

	Arcot spoke for the Terrestrians.

	“On behalf of myself and my friends here, two of whom have not had an opportunity to learn your language, I wish to thank you for your great help when we most needed it. You, perhaps, have saved more than a city—you may have made it possible to save a world—our Earth. But the battle here has only begun.

	“There are now in the Kaxorian camp eighteen great ships. They have been badly defeated in the three encounters they have had with the Solarite so far. But no longer will they be vulnerable to our earlier methods of attack. Your spies report that the first plane, the plane which was first attacked by the Solarite, is still undergoing repairs. These will be completed within two days, and then, when they can leave a base guard of two ships, they will attack once more. Furthermore, they will attack with a new weapon. They have destroyed the usefulness of our weapon, invisibility, and in turn, now have it to use against us! We must seek out some new weapon. I hope we are on the right track now, but every moment is precious, and we must get back to the work. This address must be short. Later, when we have completed our preliminary work, we will have to give plans to your workmen, which you will be able to turn into metal, for we lack the materials. With this help we may succeed, despite our handicap.”

	The address was terminated at once. The Lanorians were probably disappointed, but they fully realized the necessity for haste.

	“I wish Terrestrian orators spoke like that,” remarked Morey as they returned to the ship. “He said all there was to say, but he didn't run miles of speech doing it. He was a very forceful speaker, too!”

	“People who speak briefly and to the point generally are,” Arcot said.

	It was nearly noon that day before the theoretical discussion had been reduced to practical terms. They were ready to start work at once, but they had reason to work cheerfully now. Even through air they had found their ray would be able to reach thirty-five miles! They would be well out of the danger zone while attacking the gigantic planes of Kaxor.

	Morey, Wade and Arcot at once set to work constructing the electrical plant that was to give them the necessary power. It was lucky indeed that they had brought the great mass of spare apparatus! They had more than enough to make all the electrical machinery. The tubes, the coils, the condensers, all were there. The generator would easily supply the power, for the terrific forces that were to destroy the Kaxorian ships were to be generated in the plane itself. It was to destroy itself; the Solarite would merely be the detonator to set it off!

-

	While the physicists were busy on this, Fuller was designing the mechanical details of the projector. It must be able to turn through a spherical angle of 180 degrees, and was necessarily controlled electrically from the inside. The details of the projector were worked out by six that evening, and the numerous castings and machined pieces that were to be used were to be made in the Venerian machine shops.

	One difficulty after another arose and was overcome. Night came on, and still they continued work. The Venerian workmen had promised to have the apparatus for them by ten o'clock the next morning—or what corresponded to ten o'clock.

	Shortly after three o'clock that morning they had finished the apparatus, had connected all the controls, and had placed the last of the projector directors. Except for the projector they were ready, and Morey, Wade and Fuller turned in to get what sleep they could. But Arcot, telling them there was something he wished to get, took another dose of Immorpho and stepped out into the steaming rain.

	A few minutes after ten the next morning Arcot came back, followed by half a dozen Venerians, each carrying a large metal cylinder in a cradle. These were attached to the landing gear of the Solarite in such fashion that the fusing of one piece of wire would permit the entire thing to drop free.

	“So that's what you hatched out, eh? What is it?” asked Wade as he entered the ship.

	“Just a thing I want to try out—and I'm going to keep it a deep, dark secret for a while. I think you'll get quite a surprise when you see those bombs in action! They're arranged to be released by turning current into the landing lights. We'll have to forgo lights for the present, but I needed the bombs more.

	“The mechanics have finished working on your projector parts, Fuller, and they'll be over here in a short time. Here comes the little gang I asked to help us. You can direct them.” Arcot paused and scowled with annoyance. “Hang it all—when they drill into the outer wall, we'll lose the vacuum between the two walls, and all that hot air will come in. This place will be roasting in a short time. We have the molecular motion coolers, but I'm afraid they won't be much good. Can't use the generator—it's cut off from the main room by vacuum wall.

	“I think we'd better charge up the gas tanks and the batteries as soon as this is done. Then tonight we'll attack the Kaxorian construction camp. I've just learned that no spy reports have been coming in, and I'm afraid they'll spring a surprise.”

	Somewhat later came the sound of drills, then the whistling roar as the air sucked into the vacuum, told the men inside that the work was under way. It soon became uncomfortably hot as, the vacuum destroyed, the heat came in through all sides. It was more than the little molecular coolers could handle, and the temperature soon rose to about a hundred and fifteen. It was not as bad as the Venerian atmosphere, for the air seemed exceedingly dry, and the men found it possible to get along without cooling suits, if they did not work. Since there was little they could do, they simply relaxed.

	It was nearly dark before the Lanorians had finished their work, and the gas tanks had been recharged. All that time Arcot had spent with Tonlos determining the position of the Kaxorian construction camp. Spy reports and old maps had helped, but it was impossible to do very accurate work by these means.

	It was finally decided that the Kaxorian construction camp was about 10,500 miles to the southwest. The Solarite was to start an hour after dark. Travelling westward at their speed, they hoped to reach the camp just after nightfall.

-

VIII

	THE Solarite SPED SWIFTLY toward the southwest. The sky slowly grew lighter as the miles flashed beneath them. They were catching up with the sun. As they saw the rolling ocean beneath them give way to low plains, they realized they were over Kaxorian land. The Solarite was flying very high, and as they showed no lights, and were not using the invisibility apparatus, they were practically undetectable. Suddenly they saw the lights of a mighty city looming far off to the east.

	“It's Kanor. Pass well to the west of it. That's their capital. We're on course.” Arcot spoke from his position at the projector, telling Wade the directions to follow on his course to the berth of the giant planes.

	The city dropped far behind them in moments, followed by another, and another. At length, veering southward into the dusk, they entered a region of low hills, age-old folds in the crust of the planet, rounded by untold millennia of torrential rains.

	“Easy, Wade. We are near now.” Mile after mile they flashed ahead at about a thousand miles an hour—then suddenly they saw far off to the east a vast glow that reached into the sky, painting itself on the eternal clouds miles above.

	“There it is, Wade. Go high, and take it easy!”

	Swiftly the Solarite climbed, hovering at last on the very rim of the cloud blanket, an invisible mote in a sea of gray mist. Below them they saw a tremendous field carved, it seemed, out of the ancient hills. From this height all sense of proportion was lost. It seemed but an ordinary field, with eighteen ordinary airplanes resting on it. One of these now was moving, and in a moment it rose into the air! But there seemed to be no men on all the great field. They were invisibly small from this height.

	Abruptly Arcot gave a great shout. “That's their surprise! They're ready far ahead of the time we expected! If all that armada gets in the air, we're done! Down, Wade, to within a few hundred feet of the ground, and close to the field!”

	The Solarite flashed down in a power dive—down with a sickening lurch. A sudden tremendous weight seemed to crush them as the ship was brought out of the dive not more than two hundred feet from the ground. Close to blacking out, Wade nevertheless shot it in as close to the field as he dared. Anxiously he called to Arcot, who answered with a brief “Okay!” The planes loomed gigantic now, their true proportions showing clearly against the brilliant light of the field. A tremendous wave of sound burst from the loudspeaker as the planes rolled across the ground to leap gracefully into the air—half a million tons of metal!

	From the Solarite there darted a pale beam of ghostly light, faintly gray, tinged with red and green—the ionized air of the beam. It moved in a swift half circle. In an instant the whirr of the hundreds, thousands of giant propellers was drowned in a terrific roar of air. Great snowflakes fell from the air before them; it was white with the solidified water vapor. Then came a titanic roar and the planet itself seemed to shake! A crash, a snapping and rending as a mighty fountain of soil and rock cascaded skyward, and with it, twisting, turning, hurled in a dozen directions at once, twelve titanic ships reeled drunkenly into the air!

	For a barely perceptible interval there was an oppressive silence as the ray was shut off. Then a bedlam of deafening sound burst forth anew, a mighty deluge of unbearable noise as the millions of tons of pulverized rock, humus and metal fell back. Some of it had ascended for miles; it settled amid a howling blizzard—snow that melted as it touched the madly churned airfield.

	High above there were ten planes flying about uncertainly. Suddenly one of these turned, heading for the ground far below, its wings screaming their protest as the motors roared, ever faster, with the gravity of the planet aiding them. There was a rending, crackling crash as the wings suddenly bent back along the sides. An instant later the fuselage tore free, rocketing downward; the wings followed more slowly—twisting, turning, dipping in mile-long swoops.

	The Solarite shot away from the spot at maximum speed—away and up, with a force that nailed the occupants to the floor. Before they could turn, behind them flared a mighty gout of light that struck to the very clouds above, and all the landscape, for miles about, was visible in the glare of the released energy.

	As they turned, they saw on the plain, below a tremendous crater, in its center a spot that glowed white and bubbled like the top of a huge cauldron.

	Nine great planes were circling in the air; then in an instant they were gone, invisible. As swiftly the Solarite darted away with a speed that defied the aim of any machine.

	High above the planes they went, for with his radar Arcot could trace them. They were circling, searching for the Solarite.

	The tiny machine was invisible in the darkness, but its invisibility was not revealed by the Kaxorian's radio detectors. In the momentary lull, Fuller asked a question.

	“Wade, how is it that those ships can be invisible when they are driven by light, and have the light stored in them? They're perfectly transparent. Why can't we see the light?”

	“They are storing the light. It's bound—it can't escape. You can't see light unless it literally hits you in the eye. Their stored light can't reach you, for it is held by its own attraction and by the special field of the big generators.”

	They seemed to be above one of the Kaxorian planes now. Arcot caught the roar of the invisible propellers.

	“To the left, Wade—faster—hold it—left—ah!” Arcot pushed a button.

	Down from the Solarite there dropped a little canister, one of the bombs that Arcot had prepared the night before. To hit an invisible target is ordinarily difficult, but when that target is far larger than the proverbial side of a barn, it is not very difficult, at that. But now Arcot's companions watched for the crash of the explosion, the flash of light. What sort of bomb was it that Arcot hoped would penetrate that tremendous armor?

	Suddenly they saw a great spot of light, a spot that spread with startling rapidity, a patch of light that ran, and moved. It flew through the air at terrific speed. It was a pallid light, green and wan and ghostly, that seemed to flow and ebb.

	For an instant Morey and the others stared in utter surprise. Then suddenly Morey burst out laughing.

	“Ho—you win, Arcot. That was one they didn't think of, I'll bet! Luminous paint—and by the hundred gallon! Radium paint, I suppose, and no man has ever found how to stop the glow of radium. That plane sticks out like a sore thumb!”

	Indeed, the great luminous splotch made the gigantic plane clearly evident against the gray clouds. Visible or not, that plane was marked.

	Quickly Arcot tried to maneuver the Solarite over another of the great ships, for now the danger was only from those he could not see. Suddenly he had an idea.

	“Morey—go back to the power room and change the adjustment on the meteorite avoider to half a mile!” At once Morey understood his plan, and hastened to put it into effect.

	The illuminated plane was diving, twisting wildly now. The Solarite flashed toward it with sickening speed, then suddenly the gigantic bulk of the plane loomed off to the right of the tiny ship, the great metal hull, visible now, rising in awesome might. They were too near; they shot away to a greater distance—then again that ghostly beam reached out—and for just a fraction of a second it touched the giant plane.

	The titanic engine of destruction seemed suddenly to be in the grip of some vastly greater Colossus—a clutching hand that closed! The plane jumped back with an appalling crash, a roar of rending metal. For an instant there came the sound like a mighty buzz-saw as the giant propellers of one wing cut into the body of the careening plane. In that instant, the great power storage tank split open with an impact like the bursting of a world. The Solarite was hurled back by an explosion that seemed to rend the very atoms of the air, and all about them was a torrid blaze of heat and light that seemed to sear their faces and hands with its intensity.

	Then in a time so brief that it seemed never to have happened, it was gone, and only the distant drone of the other ships' propellers came to them. There was no luminous spot. The radium paint had been destroyed in the only possible way—it was volatilized through all the atmosphere!

	The Terrestrians had known what to expect; had known what would happen; and they had not looked at the great ship in that last instant. But the Kaxorians had naturally been looking at it. They had never seen the sun directly, and now they had been looking at a radiance almost as brilliant. They were temporarily blinded; they could only fly a straight course in response to the quick order of their squadron commander.

	And in that brief moment that they were unable to watch him, Arcot dropped two more bombs in quick succession. Two bright spots formed in the black night. No longer did these planes feel themselves invulnerable, able to meet any foe! In an instant they had put on every last trace of power, and at their top speed they were racing west, away from their tiny opponent—in the only direction that was open to them.

	But it was useless. The Solarite could pick up speed in half the time they could, and in an instant Arcot again trained his beam on the mighty splotch of light that was a fleeing plane.

	Out of the darkness came a ghostly beam, for an instant of time so short that before the explosive shells of the other could be trained on it, the Solarite had moved. Under that touch the mighty plane began crumbling, then it splintered beneath the driving blow of the great wing, as it shot toward the main body of the plane at several miles a second—driving into and through it! The giant plane twisted and turned as it fell swiftly downward into the darkness—and, again there came that world-rocking explosion, and the mighty column of light.

	Again and yet again the Solarite found and destroyed Kaxorian super-planes, protected in the uneven conflict by their diminutive size and the speed of their elusive maneuvering.

	But to remind the men of the Solarite that they were not alone, there came a sudden report just behind them, and they turned to see that one of the energy bombs had barely fallen short! In an instant the comparative midget shot up at top speed, out of danger. It looped and turned, hunting, feeling with its every detector for that other ship. The great planes were spread out now. In every direction they could be located—and all were leaving the scene of the battle. But one by one the Solarite shot after them, and always the speed of the little ship was greater.

	Two escaped. They turned off their useless invisibility apparatus and vanished into the night.

	The Solarite, supported by her vertical lift units, coasted toward a stop. The drone of the fleeing super-planes diminished and was gone, and for a time the thrum of the generator and the tap-dance of relays adjusting circuits was the only sound aboard.

	Wade sighed finally. “Well, gentlemen, now we've got it, what do we do with it?”

	“What do you mean?” Morey asked.

	“Victory. The Jack-pot. Having the devices we just demonstrated, we are now the sole owners, by right of conquest, of one highly disturbed nation of several million people. With that gadget there, we can pick it up and throw it away.

	“Personally, I have a feeling that we've just won the largest white elephant in history. We don't just walk off and leave it, you know. We don't want it. But we've got it.

	“Our friends in Sonor are not going to want the problem either; they just wanted the Kaxorians combed out of their hair.

	“As I say—we've got it, now—but what do we do with it?”

	“It's basically their problem, isn't it?” protested Fuller. Morey looked somewhat stricken, and thoroughly bewildered. “I hadn't considered that aspect very fully; I've been too darned busy trying to stay alive.”

	Wade shook his head. “Look, Fuller—it was their problem before, too, wasn't it? How'd they handle it? If you just let them alone, what do you suppose they'll do with the problem this time?”

	“The same thing they did before,” Arcot groaned. “I'm tired. Let's get some sleep first, anyway.”

	“Sure; that makes good sense,” Wade agreed. “Sleep on it, yes. But go to sleep on it—well, that's what the not-so-bright Sonorans tried doing.

	“And off-hand, I'd say we were elected. The Kaxorians undoubtedly have a nice, two thousand year old hatred for the Sonorans who so snobbishly ignored them, isolated them, and considered them unfit for association. The Sonorans, on the other hand, are now thoroughly scared, and will be feeling correspondingly vindictive. They won this time by a fluke—our coming. I can just see those two peoples getting together and settling any kind of sensible, long-term treaty of mutual cooperation!”

	Arcot and Morey both nodded wearily. “That is so annoyingly correct,” Morey agreed. “And you know blasted well none of us is going to sleep until we have some line of attack on this white elephant disposal problem. Anybody any ideas?”

	Fuller looked at the other three. “You know, in design when two incompatible materials must be structurally united, we tie each to a third material that is compatible with both.

	“Sonor didn't win this fight. Kaxor didn't win it. Earth—in the persona of the Solarite—did. Earth isn't mad at anybody, hasn't been damaged by anybody, and hasn't been knowingly ignoring anybody.

	“The Sonorans want to be let alone; it won't work, but they can learn that. I think if we run the United Nations in on this thing, we may be able to get them to accept our white elephant for us.

	“They'll be making the same mistake Sonor did if they don't—knowingly ignoring the existence of a highly intelligent and competent race. It doesn't seem to work, judging from history both at home and here.”

	The four looked at each other, and found agreement.

	“That's something more than a problem to sleep on,” Morey said. “I'll get in touch with Sonor and tell 'em the shooting is over, so they can get some sleep too.

	“It's obvious a bunch of high-power research teams are going to be needed in both countries. Earth has every reason to respect Sonoran mental sciences as well as Kaxorian light-engineering. And Earth—as we just thoroughly demonstrated—has some science of her own. Obviously, the interaction of the three is to the maximum advantage of each—and will lead to a healing of the breach that now exists.”

	Arcot looked up and yawned. “I'm putting this on autopilot at twenty miles up, and going to sleep. We can kick this around for a month anyway—and this is not the night to start.”

	“The decision is unanimous,” Wade grinned.

-

BOOK THREE - THE BLACK STAR PASSES

PROLOGUE

	TAJ LAMOR GAZED STEADILY down at the vast dim bulk of the ancient city spread out beneath him. In the feeble light of the stars its mighty masses of up-flung metal buildings loomed strangely, like the shells of some vast race of crustacea, long extinct. Slowly he turned, gazing now out across the great plaza, where rested long rows of slender, yet mighty ships. Thoughtfully he stared at their dim, half-seen shapes.

	Taj Lamor was not human. Though he was humanoid, Earth had never seen creatures just like him. His seven foot high figure seemed a bit ungainly by Terrestrial standards, and his strangely white, hairless flesh, suggesting unbaked dough, somehow gave the impression of near-transparency. His eyes were disproportionately large, and the black disc of pupil in the white corneas was intensified by contrast. Yet perhaps his race better deserved the designation homo sapiens than Terrestrians do, for it was wise with the accumulated wisdom of uncounted eons.

	He turned to the other man in the high, cylindrical, dimly lit tower room overlooking the dark metropolis, a man far older than Taj Lamor, his narrow shoulders bent, and his features grayed with his years. His single short, tight-fitting garment of black plastic marked him as one of the Elders. The voice of Taj Lamor was vibrant with feeling:

	“Tordos Gar, at last we are ready to seek a new sun. Life for our race!”

	A quiet, patient, imperturbable smile appeared on the Elder's face and the heavy lids closed over his great eyes.

	“Yes,” he said sadly, “but at what cost in tranquility! The discord, the unrest, the awakening of unnatural ambitions—a dreadful price to pay for a questionable gain. Too great a price, I think.” His eyes opened, and he raised a thin hand to check the younger man's protest. “I know—I know—in this we do not see as one. Yet perhaps some day you will learn even as I have that to rest is better than to engage in an endless struggle. Suns and planets die. Why should races seek to escape the inevitable?” Tordos Gar turned slowly away and gazed fixedly into the night sky.

	Taj Lamor checked an impatient retort and sighed resignedly. It was this attitude that had made his task so difficult. Decadence. A race on an ages-long decline from vast heights of philosophical and scientific learning. Their last external enemy had been defeated millennia in the past; and through easy forgetfulness and lack of strife, ambition had died. Adventure had become a meaningless word.

	Strangely, during the last century a few men had felt the stirrings of long-buried emotion, of ambition, of a craving for adventure. These were throwbacks to those ancestors of the race whose science had built their world. These men, a comparative handful, had been drawn to each other by the unnatural ferment within them; and Taj Lamor had become their leader. They had begun a mighty struggle against the inertia of ages of slow decay, had begun a search for the lost secrets of a hundred-million-year-old science.

	Taj Lamor raised his eyes to the horizon. Through the leaping curve of the crystal clear roof of their world glowed a blazing spot of yellow fire. A star—the brightest object in a sky whose sun had lost its light. A point of radiance that held the last hopes of an incredibly ancient race.

	The quiet voice of Tordos Gar came through the semidarkness of the room, a pensive, dreamlike quality in its tones.

	“You, Taj Lamor, and those young men who have joined you in this futile expedition do not think deeply enough. Your vision is too narrow. You lack perspective. In your youth you cannot think on a cosmic scale.” He paused as though in thought, and when he continued, it seemed almost as though he were speaking to himself.

	“In the far, dim past fifteen planets circled about a small, red sun. They were dead worlds—or rather, worlds that had not yet lived. Perhaps a million years passed before there moved about on three of them the beginnings of life. Then a hundred million years passed, and those first, crawling protoplasmic masses had become animals, and plants, and intermediate growths. And they fought endlessly for survival. Then more millions of years passed, and there appeared a creature which slowly gained ascendancy over the other struggling life forms that fought for the warmth of rays of the hot, red sun.

	“That sun had been old, even as the age of a star is counted, before its planets had been born, and many, many millions of years had passed before those planets cooled, and then more eons sped by before life appeared. Now, as life slowly forced its way upward, that sun was nearly burned out. The animals fought, and bathed in the luxury of its rays, for many millennia were required to produce any noticeable change in its life-giving radiations.

	“At last one animal gained the ascendancy. Our race. But though one species now ruled, there was no peace. Age followed age while semi-barbaric peoples fought among themselves. But even as they fought, they learned.

	“They moved from caves into structures of wood and stone—and engineering had its beginning. With the buildings came little chemical engines to destroy them; warfare was developing. Then came the first crude flying-machines, using clumsy, inefficient engines. Chemical engines! Engines so crude that one could watch the flow of their fuel! One part in one hundred thousand million of the energy of their propellents they released to run the engines, and they carried fuel in such vast quantities that they staggered under its load as they left the ground! And warfare became world-wide. After flight came other machines and other ages. Other scientists began to have visions of the realms beyond, and they sought to tap the vast reservoirs of Nature's energies, the energies of matter.

	“Other ages saw it done—a few thousand years later there passed out into space a machine that forced its way across the void to another planet! And the races of the three living worlds became as one—but there was no peace.

	“Swiftly now, science grew upon itself, building with ever faster steps, like a crystal which, once started, forms with incalculable speed.

	“And while that science grew swiftly greater, other changes took place, changes in our universe itself. Ten million years passed before the first of those changes became important. But slowly, steadily our atmosphere was drifting into space. Through ages this gradually became apparent. Our worlds were losing their air and their water. One planet, less favored than another, fought for its life, and space itself was ablaze with the struggles of wars for survival.

	“Again science helped us. Thousands of years before, men had learned how to change the mass of matter into energy, but now at last the process was reversed, and those ancestors of ours could change energy into matter, any kind of matter they wished. Rock they took, and changed it to energy, then that energy they transmuted to air, to water, to the necessary metals. Their planets took a new lease of life!

	“But even this could not continue forever. They must stop that loss of air. The process they had developed for reformation of matter admitted of a new use. Creation! They were now able to make new elements, elements that had never existed in nature! They designed atoms as, long before, their fathers had designed molecules. At last their problem was solved. They made a new form of matter that was clearer than any crystal, and yet stronger and tougher than any metal known. Since it held out none of the sun's radiations, they could roof their worlds with it and keep their air within!

	“This was a task that could not be done in a year, nor a decade, but all time stretched out unending before them. One by one the three planets became tremendous, roofed-in cities. Only their vast powers, their mighty machines made the task possible, but it was done.”

	The droning voice of Tordos Gar ceased. Taj Lamor, who had listened with a mixture of amusement and impatience to the recital of a history he knew as well as the aged, garrulous narrator, waited out of the inborn respect which every man held for the Elders. At length he exclaimed: “I see no point—”

	“But you will when I finish—or, at least, I hope you will.” Tordos Gar's words and tone were gently reproving. He continued quietly:

	“Slowly the ages drifted on, each marked by greater and greater triumphs of science. But again and again there were wars. Some there were in which the population of a world was halved, and all space for a billion miles about was a vast cauldron of incandescent energy in which tremendous fleets of space ships swirled and fused like ingredients in some cosmic brew. Forces were loosed on the three planets that sent even their mighty masses reeling drunkenly out of their orbits, and space itself seemed to be torn by the awful play of energies.

	“Always peace followed—a futile peace. A few brief centuries or a few millennia, and again war would flame. It would end, and life would continue.

	“But slowly there crept into the struggle a new factor, a darkening cloud, a change that came so gradually that only the records of instruments, made during a period of thousands of years, could show it. Our sun had changed from bright red to a deep, sullen crimson, and ever less and less heat poured from it. It was waning!

	“As the fires of life died down, the people of the three worlds joined in a conflict with the common menace, death from the creeping cold of space. There was no need for great haste; a sun dies slowly. Our ancestors laid their plans and carried them out. The fifteen worlds were encased in shells of crystal. Those that had no atmosphere were given one. Mighty heating plants were built—furnaces that burned matter, designed to warm a world! At last a state of stability had been reached, for never could conditions change—it seemed. All external heat and light came from far-off stars, the thousands of millions of suns that would never fail.

	“Under stress of the Great Change one scarcely noticed, yet almost incredible, transformation had occurred. We had learned to live with each other. We had learned to think, and enjoy thinking. As a species we had passed from youth into maturity. Advancement did not stop; we went on steadily toward the goal of all knowledge. At first there was an underlying hope that we might some day, somehow, escape from these darkened, artificial worlds of ours, but with the passing centuries this grew very dim and at length was forgotten.

	“Gradually as millennia passed, much ancient knowledge was also forgotten. It was not needed. The world was unchanging, there was no strife, and no need of strife. The fifteen worlds were warm, and pleasant, and safe. Without fully realizing it, we had entered a period of rest. And so the ages passed; and there were museums and libraries and laboratories; and the machines of our ancestors did all necessary work. So it was—until less than a generation ago. Our long lives were pleasant, and death, when it came, was a sleep. And then—”

	“And then,” Taj Lamor interrupted, a sharp edge of impatience in his tone, “some of us awakened from our stupor!”

	The Elder sighed resignedly. “You cannot see—you cannot see. You would start that struggle all over again!” His voice continued in what Taj Lamor thought of as a senile drone, but the younger man paid scant attention. His eyes and thoughts were centered on that brilliant yellow star, the brightest object in the heavens. It was that star, noticeably brighter within a few centuries, that had awakened a few men from their mental slumbers.

	They were throwbacks, men who had the divine gift of curiosity; and sparked by their will to know, they had gone to the museums and looked carefully at the ancient directions for the use of the telectroscope, the mighty electrically amplified vision machine, had gazed through it. They had seen a great sun that seemed to fill all the field of the apparatus with blazing fire. A sun to envy! Further observation had revealed that there circled about the sun a series of planets, five, definitely; two more, probably; and possibly two others.

	Taj Lamor had been with that group, a young man then, scarcely more than forty, but they had found him a leader and they had followed him as he set about his investigation of the ancient books on astronomy.

	How many, many hours had he studied those ancient works! How many times had he despaired of ever learning their truths, and gone out to the roof of the museum to stand in silent thought looking out across the awful void to the steady flame of the yellow star! Then quietly he had returned to his self-set task.

	With him as teacher, others had learned, and before he was seventy there were many men who had become true scientists, astronomers. There was much of the ancient knowledge that these men could not understand, for the science of a million centuries is not to be learned in a few brief decades, but they mastered a vast amount of the forgotten lore.

	They knew now that the young, live sun, out there in space, was speeding toward them, their combined velocities equalling more than 100 miles each second. And they knew that there were not seven, but nine planets circling about that sun. There were other facts they discovered; they found that the new sun was far larger than theirs had ever been; indeed, it was a sun well above average in size and brilliance. There were planets, a hot sun—a home! Could they get there?

	When their ancestors had tried to solve the problem of escape they had concentrated their work on the problem of going at speeds greater than that of light. This should be an impossibility, but the fact that the ancients had tried it, seemed proof enough to their descendants that it was possible, at least in theory. In the distant past they had needed speeds exceeding that of light, for they must travel light years; but now this sun was coming toward them, and already was less than two hundred and fifty billion miles away!

	They would pass that other star in about seventy years. That was scarcely more than a third of a man's lifetime. They could make the journey with conceivable speeds—but in that brief period they must prepare to move!

	The swift agitation for action had met with terrific resistance. They were satisfied; why move?

	But, while some men had devoted their time to arousing the people to help, others had begun doing work that had not been done for a long, long time. The laboratories were reopened, and workshops began humming again. They were making things that were new once more, not merely copying old designs.

	Their search had been divided into sections, search for weapons with which to defend themselves in case they were attacked, and search for the basic principles underlying the operation of their space ships. They had machines which they could imitate, but they did not understand them. Success had been theirs on these quests. The third section had been less successful. They had also been searching for secrets of the apparatus their forefathers had used to swing the planets in their orbits, to move worlds about at will. They had wanted to be able to take not only their space ships, but their planets as well, when they went to settle on these other worlds and in this other solar system.

	But the search for this secret had remained unrewarded. The secret of the spaceships they learned readily, and Taj Lamor had designed these mighty ships below there with that knowledge. Their search for weapons had been satisfied; they had found one weapon, one of the deadliest that their ancestors had ever invented. But the one secret in which they were most interested, the mighty force barrage that could swing a world in its flight through space, was lost. They could not find it.

	They knew the principles of the driving apparatus of their ships, and it would seem but a matter of enlargement to drive a planet as a ship, but they knew this was impossible; the terrific forces needed would easily be produced by their apparatus, but there was no way to apply them to a world. If applied in any spot, the planet would be torn asunder by the incalculable strain. They must apply the force equally to the entire planet. Their problem was one of application of power. The rotation of the planet made it impossible to use a series of driving apparatus, even could these be anchored, but again the sheer immensity of the task made it impossible.

	Taj Lamor gazed down again at the great ships in the plaza below. Their mighty bulks seemed to dwarf even the huge buildings about them. Yet these ships were his—for he had learned their secrets and designed them, and now he was to command them as they flew out across space in that flight to the distant star.

	He turned briefly to the Elder, Tordos Gar. “Soon we leave,” he said, a faint edge of triumph in his voice. “We will prove that our way is right.”

	The old man shook his head. “You will learn—” he began, but Taj Lamor did not want to hear.

	He turned, passed through a doorway, and stepped into a little torpedo-shaped car that rested on the metal roof behind him. A moment later the little ship rose, and then slanted smoothly down over the edge of the roof, straight for the largest of the ships below. This was the flagship. Nearly a hundred feet greater was its diameter, and its mile and a quarter length of gleaming metal hull gave it nearly three hundred feet greater length than that of the ships of the line.

	This expedition was an expedition of exploration. They were prepared to meet any conditions on those other worlds—no atmosphere, no water, no heat, or even an atmosphere of poisonous gases they could rectify, for their transmutation apparatus would permit them to change those gases, or modify them; they knew well how to supply heat, but they knew too, that that sun would warm some of its planets sufficiently for their purposes.

	Taj Lamor sent his little machine darting through the great airlock in the side of the gigantic interstellar ship and lowered it gently to the floor. A man stepped forward, opened the door for the leader, saluting him briskly as he stepped out; then the car was run swiftly aside, to be placed with thousands of others like it. Each of these cars was to be used by a separate investigator when they reached those other worlds, and there were men aboard who would use them.

	Taj Lamor made his way to a door in the side of a great metal tube that threaded the length of the huge ship. Opening the door he sat down in another little car that shot swiftly forward as the double door shut softly, with a low hiss of escaping air. For moments the car sped through the tube, then gently it slowed and came to rest opposite another door. Again came the hissing of gas as the twin doors opened, and Taj Lamor stepped out, now well up in the nose of the cruiser. As he stepped out of the car the outer and inner doors closed, and, ready now for other calls, the car remained at this station. On a ship so long, some means of communication faster than walking was essential. This little pneumatic railway was the solution.

	As Taj Lamor stepped out of the tube, a half-dozen men, who had been talking among themselves, snapped quickly to attention. Following the plans of the long-gone armies of their ancestors, the men of the expedition had been trained to strict discipline; and Taj Lamor was their technical leader and the nominal Commander-in-Chief, although another man, Kornal Sorul, was their actual commander.

	Taj Lamor proceeded at once to the Staff Cabin in the very nose of the great ship. Just above him there was another room, walled on all sides by that clear, glass-like material, the control cabin. Here the pilot sat, directing the motions of the mighty ship of space.

	Taj Lamor pushed a small button on his desk and in a moment a gray disc before him glowed dimly, then flashed into life and full, natural color. As though looking through a glass porthole, Taj Lamor saw the interior of the Communications Room. The Communications Officer was gazing at a similar disc in which Taj Lamor's features appeared.

	“Have they reported from Ohmur, Lorsand, and Throlus, yet, Morlus Tal?” asked the commander.

	“They are reporting now, Taj Lamor, and we will be ready within two and one half minutes. The plans are as before; we are to proceed directly toward the Yellow Star, meeting at Point 71?”

	“The plans are as before. Start when ready.”

	The disc faded, the colors died, and it was gray again. Taj Lamor pulled another small lever on the panel before him, and the disc changed, glowed, and was steady; and now he saw the preparations for departure, as from an eye on the top of the great ship. Men streamed swiftly in ordered columns all about and into the huge vessels. In an incredibly short time they were in, and the great doors closed behind them. Suddenly there came a low, dull hum through the disc, and the sound mounted quickly, till all the world seemed humming to that dull note. The warning!

	Abruptly the city around him seemed to blaze in a riot of colored light! The mighty towering bulks of the huge metal buildings were polished and bright, and now, as the millions of lights, every color of the spectrum, flashed over all the city from small machines in the air, on the ground, in windows, their great metal walls glistening with a riot of flowing color. Then there was a trembling through all the frame of the mighty ship. In a moment it was gone, and the titanic mass of glistening metal rose smoothly, quickly to the great roof of their world above them. On an even keel it climbed straight up, then suddenly it leaped forward like some great bird of prey sighting its victim. The ground beneath sped swiftly away, and behind it there came a long line of ships, quickly finding their position in the formation. They were heading toward the giant airlock that would let them out into space. There was but one lock large enough to permit so huge a ship to pass out, and they must circle half their world to reach it.

	On three other worlds there were other giant ships racing thus to meet beyond their solar system. There were fifty ships coming from each planet; two hundred mighty ships in all made up this Armada of Space, two hundred gargantuan interstellar cruisers.

	One by one the giant ships passed through the airlock and out into space. Here they quickly reformed as they moved off together, each ship falling into its place in the mighty cone formation, with the flagship of Taj Lamor at the head. On they rushed through space, their speed ever mounting. Suddenly there seemed to leap out of nowhere another mass of shining machines that flew swiftly beside them. Like some strange, shining ghosts, these ships seemed to materialize instantly beside and behind their fleet. They fell in quickly in their allotted position behind the Flagship's squadron. One—two more fleets appeared thus suddenly in the dark, and together the ships were flashing on through space to their goal of glowing fire ahead!

	Hour after hour, day after day the ships flashed on through the awful void, the utter silence relieved by the communications between themselves and the slowly weakening communications from the far-off home planets.

	But as those signals from home grew steadily weaker, the sun before them grew steadily larger. At last the men began to feel the heat of those rays, to realize the energy that that mighty sea of flame poured forth into space, and steadily they watched it grow nearer.

	Then came a day when they could make out clearly the dim bulk of a planet before them, and for long hours they slowed down the flying speed of the ships. They had mapped the system they were approaching; there were nine planets of varying sizes, some on the near and some on the far side of the sun. There were but three on the near side; one that seemed the outermost of the planets, about 35,000 miles in diameter, was directly in their path, while there were two more much nearer the sun, about 100,000,000 and 70,000,000 miles distant from it, each about seven to eight thousand miles in diameter, but they were on opposite sides of the sun. These more inviting and more accessible worlds were numbers two and three of the planetary system. It was decided to split the expedition into two parts; one part was to go to planet two, and the other to three. Taj Lamor was to lead his group of a hundred ships to the nearer planet at once.

	In a very brief time the great ships slanted down over what seemed to be a mighty globe of water. They were well in the northern hemisphere, and they had come near the planet first over a vast stretch of rolling ocean. The men had looked in wonder at such vast quantities of the fluid. To them it was a precious liquid, that must be made artificially, and was to be conserved, yet here they saw such vast quantities of natural water as seemed impossible. Still, their ancient books had told of such things, and of other strange things, things that must have been wondrously beautiful, though they were so old now, these records, that they were regarded largely as myths.

	Yet here were the strange proofs! They saw great masses of fleecy water vapor, huge billowy things that seemed solid, but were blown lightly in the wind. And natural air! The atmosphere extended for hundreds of miles off into space; and now, as they came closer to the surface of this world the air was dense, and the sky above them was a beautiful blue, not black, even where there were stars. The great sun, so brilliantly incandescent when seen from space, and now a glowing globe of reddish-yellow.

	And as they came near land, they looked in wonder at mighty masses of rock and soil that threw their shaggy heads high above the surrounding terrain, huge masses that rose high, like waves in the water, till they towered in solemn grandeur miles into the air! What a sight for these men of a world so old that age long erosion had washed away the last traces of hills, and filled in all of the valleys!

	In awe they looked down at the mighty rock masses, as they swung low over the mountains, gazing in wonder at the green masses of the strange vegetation; strange, indeed, for they for uncounted ages had grown only mushroom-like cellulose products, and these mainly for ornament, for all their food was artificially made in huge factories.

	Then they came over a little mountain lake, a body of water scarcely large enough to berth one of their huge ships, but high in the clear air of the mountains, fed by the melting of eternal snows. It was a magnificent sapphire in a setting green as emerald, a sparkling lake of clear water, deep as the sea, high in a cleft in the mountains.

	In wonder the men looked down at these strange sights. What a marvelous home!

	Steadily the great machines proceeded, and at last the end of the giant mountain was reached, and they came to a great plain. But that plain was strangely marked off with squares, as regularly as though plotted with a draftsman's square. This world must be inhabited by intelligent beings!

	Suddenly Taj Lamor saw strange specks off in the far horizon to the south, specks that seemed to grow in size with terrific velocity; these must be ships, the ships of these people, coming to defend their home. The strangely pallid face of Taj Lamor tightened into lines of grim resolution. This was a moment he had foreseen and had dreaded. Was he to withdraw and leave these people unmolested, or was he to stand and fight for this world, this wonderfully beautiful home, a home that his race could live in for millions of years to come? He had debated this question many times before in his mind, and he had decided. There would never, never be another chance for his people to gain a new home. They must fight.

	Swiftly he gave his orders. If resistance came, if an attack were made, they were to fight back at once, with every weapon at their disposal.

	The strangers' ships had grown swiftly larger to the eye, but still, though near now, they seemed too small to be dangerous. These giant interstellar cruisers were certainly invulnerable to ships so small; their mere size would give them protection! These ships were scarcely as long as the diameter of the smaller of the interstellar ships—a bare two hundred and fifty feet for the largest.

	The interstellar cruisers halted in their course, and waited for the little ships to approach. They were fast, for they drew alongside quickly, and raced to the front of the flagship. There was one small one that was painted white, and on it there was a large white banner, flapping in the wind of its passage. The rest of the ships drew off as this came forward, and stopped, hanging motionless before the control room of the giant machine. There were men inside—three strange men, short and oddly pink-skinned—but they were gesturing now, motioning that the giant machine settle to the ground beneath. Taj Lamor was considering whether or not to thus parley with the strangers, when suddenly there leaped from the white craft a beam of clear white—a beam that was directed toward the ground, then swung up toward the great cruiser in a swift arc!

	As one, a dozen swift beams of pale red flared out from the giant and bathed the pigmy craft. As they reached it, the white ray that had been sweeping up suddenly vanished, and for an instant the ship hung poised in the air; then it began to swing crazily, like the pendulum of a clock—swung completely over—and with a sickening lurch sped swiftly for the plain nearly five miles below. In moments there came a brief flare, then there remained only a little crater in the soft soil.

	But the red beams had not stopped with the little ship; they had darted out to the other machines, trying to reach them before they could bring those strange white rays into play. The cruisers obviously must win, for they carried dozens of projectors, but they might be damaged, their flight delayed. They must defeat those strangers quickly. The rays of Taj Lamor's ship lashed out swiftly, but almost before they had started, all the other ships, a full hundred, were in action, and the flagship was darting swiftly up and away from the battle. Below, those pale red rays were taking a swift toll of the little ships, and nearly twenty of them rolled suddenly over, and dashed to destruction far below.

	But now the little ships were in swift darting motion. Because of their small size, they were able to avoid the rays of the larger interstellar cruisers, and as their torpedo-shaped hulls flashed about with bewildering speed, they began to fight back. They had been taken utterly by surprise, but now they went into action with an abandon and swiftness that took the initiative away from the gigantic interstellar liners. They were in a dozen places at once, dodging and twisting, unharmed, out of the way of the deadly red beams, and were as hard to hit as so many dancing feathers suspended over an air jet.

	And if the pilots were skillful in avoiding enemy rays, their ray men were as accurate in placing theirs. But then, with a target of such vast size, not so much skill was necessary.

	These smaller vessels were the ships of Earth. The people of the dark star had entered the solar system quite unannounced, except that they had been seen in passing the orbit of Mars, for a ship had been out there in space, moving steadily out toward Neptune, and the great interstellar cruisers, flashing in across space, away from that frigid planet, had not seen the tiny wanderer. But he had seen those mighty hulks, and had sent his message of danger out on the ether, warning the men of Earth. They had relayed it to Venus, and the ships that had gone there had received an equally warm reception, and were even now finding their time fully occupied trying to beat off the Interplanetary Patrol.

	The battle ended as swiftly as it began, for Taj Lamor, in his machine high above, saw that they were outclassed, and ordered them to withdraw at once. Scarcely ten minutes had elapsed, yet they had lost twenty-two of their giant ships.

	The expedition that had gone to Venus reported a similarly active greeting. It was decided at once that they should proceed cautiously to the other planets, to determine which were inhabited and which were not, and to determine the chemical and physical conditions on each.

	The ships formed again out in space, on the other side of the sun, however, and started at once in compact formation for Mercury.

	Their observations were completed without further mishap, and they set out for their distant home, their number depleted by forty-one ships, for nineteen had fallen on Venus.

-

I

	THE TERRESTRIAN AND VENERIAN governments had met in conference, a grim, businesslike discussion with few wasted words. Obviously, this was to be a war of science, a war on a scale never before known on either world. Agreements were immediately drawn up between the two worlds for a concerted, cooperative effort. A fleet of new and vastly more powerful ships must be constructed—but first they must have a complete report on the huge invading craft that had fallen in western Canada, and on Venus, for they might conceivably make their secrets their own.

	They called for the scientists whose work had made possible their successful resistance of the marauders: Arcot, Morey and Wade. They found them working in the Arcot Laboratories.

	“Wade,” called Arcot tensely as he snapped the switch of the televisophone, “bring Morey and meet me at the machine on the roof at once. That was a call from Washington. I'll explain as soon as you get there.”

	On the roof Arcot opened the hangar doors, and entered the five-passenger molecular motion ship inside. Its sleek, streamlined sides spoke of power and speed. This was a special research model, designed for their experiments, and carrying mechanisms not found in commercial crafts. Among these were automatic controls still in the laboratory stage, but permitting higher speed, for no human being could control the ship as accurately as these.

	It took the trio a little less than a quarter of an hour to make the 5,000 mile trip from New York to the battlefield of Canada. As they sped through the air, Arcot told them what had transpired. The three were passed through the lines at once, and they settled to the ground beside one of the huge ships that lay half buried in the ground. The force of the impact had splashed the solid soil as a stone will splash soft mud, and around the ship there was a massive ridge of earth. Arcot looked at the titanic proportions of this ship from space, and turned to his friends:

	“We can investigate that wreck on foot, but I think it'll be far more sensible to see what we can do with the car. This monster is certainly a mile or more long, and we'd spend more time in walking than in investigation. I suggest, we see if there isn't room for the car inside. This beats even those huge Kaxorian planes for size.” Arcot paused, then grinned. “I sure would have liked to mix in the fight they must have had here—nice little things to play with, aren't they?”

	“It would make a nice toy,” agreed Wade as he looked at the rows of wicked-looking projectors along the sides of the metal hull, “and I wonder if there might not be some of the crew alive in there? If there are, the size of the ship would prevent their showing themselves very quickly, and since they can't move the ship, it seems to me that they'll let us know shortly that they're around. Probably, with the engines stopped, their main weapons are useless, but they would doubtless have some sort of guns. I'm highly in favor of using the car. We carry a molecular director ray, so if the way is blocked, we can make a new one.”

	Wade's attention was caught by a sudden flare of light a few miles across the plain. “Look over there—that ship is still flaming—reddish, but almost colorless. Looks like a gas flame, with a bit of calcium in it. Almost as if the air in the ship were combustible. If we should do any exploring in this baby, I suggest we use altitude suits—they can't do any harm in any case.”

	Three or four of the great wrecks, spread over a wide area, were burning now, hurling forth long tongues of colorless, intensely hot flame. Several of the ships had been only slightly damaged; one had been brought down by a beam that had torn free the entire tail of the ship, leaving the bow in good condition. Apparently this machine had not fallen far; perhaps the pilot had retained partial control of the ship, his power failing when he was only a comparatively short distance from Earth. This was rather well to one side of the plain, however, and they decided to investigate it later.

	The ship nearest them had crashed nose first, the point being crushed and shattered. Arcot maneuvered his craft cautiously toward the great hole at the nose of the ship, and they entered the mighty vessel slowly, a powerful spotlight illuminating the interior. Tremendous girders, twisted and broken by the force of impact, thrust up about them. It soon became evident that there was little to fear from any living enemies, and they proceeded more rapidly. Certainly no creature could live after the shock that had broken these huge girders! Several times metal beams blocked their path, and they were forced to use the molecular director ray to bend them out of the way.

	“Man,” said Arcot as they stopped a moment to clear away a huge member that was bent across their path, “but those beams do look as if they were built permanently! I'd hate to ram into one of them! Look at that one—if that has anywhere near the strength of steel, just think of the force it took to bend it!”

	At last they had penetrated to the long tube that led through the length of the ship, the communication tube. This admitted the small ship easily, and they moved swiftly along till they came to what they believed to be about the center of the invader. Here Arcot proposed that they step out and see what there was to be seen.

	The others agreed, and they at once put on their altitude suits of heavy rubberized canvas, designed to be worn outside the ship when at high altitude, or even in space. They were supplied with oxygen tanks that would keep the wearer alive for about six hours. Unless the atmosphere remaining in the alien ship was excessively corrosive, they would be safe. After a brief discussion, they decided that all would go, for if they met opposition, there would be strength in numbers.

	They met their first difficulty in opening the door leading out of the communication tube. It was an automatic door, and resisted their every effort—until finally they were forced to tear it out with a ray. It was impossible to move it in any other way. The door was in what was now the floor, since the ship seemed to have landed on one side rather than on its keel.

	They let themselves through the narrow opening one at a time, and landed on the sloping wall of the corridor beyond.

	“Lucky this wasn't a big room, or we'd have had a nice drop to the far wall!” commented Wade. The suits were equipped with a thin vibrating diaphragm that made speech easy, but Wade's voice came through with a queerly metallic ring.

	Arcot agreed somewhat absently, his attention directed toward their surroundings. His hand light pierced the blackness, finally halting at a gaping opening, apparently the entrance to a corridor. As they examined it, they saw that it slanted steeply downward.

	“It seems to be quite a drop,” said Wade as he turned his light into it, “but the surface seems to be rather rough. I think we can do it. I notice that you brought a rope, Morey; I think it'll help. I'll go first, unless someone else wants the honor.”

	“You go first?” Arcot hesitated briefly. “But I don't know—if we're all going, I guess you had better, at that. It would take two ordinary men to lower a big bulk like you. On the other hand, if anybody is going to stay, you're delegated as elevator boy!

	“Hold everything,” continued Arcot. “I have an idea. I think none of us will need to hold the weight of the others with the rope. Wade, will you get three fairly good-sized pieces of metal, something we can tie a rope to? I think we can get down here without the help of anyone else. Morey, will you cut the rope in three equal pieces while I help Wade tear loose that girder?”

	Arcot refused to reveal his idea till his preparations were complete, but worked quickly and efficiently. With the aid of Wade, he soon had three short members, and taking the rope that Morey had prepared, he tied lengths of cord to the pieces of metal, leaving twenty foot lengths hanging from each. Now he carefully tested his handiwork to make sure the knots would not slip.

	“Now, let's see what we can do.” Arcot put a small loop in one end of a cord, thrust his left wrist through this, and grasped the rope firmly with his hand. Then he drew his ray pistol, and adjusted it carefully for direction of action. The trigger gave him control over power. Finally he turned the ray on the block of metal at the other end of the rope. At once the metal pulled vigorously, drawing the rope taut, and as Arcot increased the power, he was dragged slowly across the floor.

	“Ah—it works.” He grinned broadly over his shoulder. “Come on, boys, hitch your wagon to a star, and we'll go on with the investigation. This is a new, double action parachute. It lets you down easy, and pulls you up easier! I think we can go where we want now.” After a pause he added, “I don't have to tell you that too much power will be very bad!”

	With Arcot's simple brake, they lowered themselves into the corridor below, descending one at a time, to avoid any contact with the ray, since the touch of the beam was fatal.

	The scene that lay before them was one of colossal destruction. They had evidently stumbled upon the engine room. They could not hope to illuminate its vast expanse with their little hand lights, but they could gain some idea of its magnitude, and of its original layout. The floor, now tilted at a steep angle, was torn up in many places, showing great, massive beams, buckled and twisted like so many wires, while the heavy floor plates were crumpled like so much foil. Everywhere the room seemed covered with a film of white silvery metal; it was silver, they decided after a brief examination, spattered broadcast over the walls of the room.

	Suddenly Morey pointed ceilingward with his light. “That's where the silver came from!” he exclaimed. A network of heavy bars ran across the roof, great bars of solid silver fully three feet thick. In one section gaped a ragged hole, suggesting the work of a disintegration ray, a hole that went into the metal roof above, one which had plainly been fused, as had the great silver bars.

	Arcot looked in wonder at the heavy metal bars. “Lord—bus bars three feet thick! What engines they must have! Look at the way those were blown out! They were short circuited by the crash, just before the generator went out, and they were volatilized! Some juice!”

	With the aid of their improvised elevators, the three men attempted to explore the tremendous chamber. They had scarcely begun, when Wade exclaimed:

	“Bodies!”

	They crowded around his gruesome find and caught their first glimpse of the invaders from space. Anatomical details could not be distinguished since the bodies had been caught under a rain of crushing beams, but they saw that they were not too different from both Terrestrians and Venerians—though their blood seemed strangely pallid, and their skin was of a ghastly whiteness. Evidently they had been assembled before an unfamiliar sort of instrument panel when catastrophe struck; Morey indicated the dials and keys.

	“Nice to know what you're fighting,” Arcot observed. “I've a hunch that we'll see some of these critters alive—but not in this ship!”

	They turned away and resumed their examination of the shattered mechanisms.

	A careful examination was impossible; they were wrecks, but Arcot did see that they seemed mainly to be giant electrical machines of standard types, though on a gargantuan scale. There were titanic masses of wrecked metal, iron and silver, for with these men silver seemed to replace copper, though nothing could replace iron and its magnetic uses.

	“They are just electrical machines, I guess,” said Arcot at last. “But what size! Have you seen anything really revolutionary, Wade?”

	Wade frowned and answered. “There are just two things that bother me. Come here.” As Arcot jumped over, nearly suspended by his ray pistol, Wade directed his light on a small machine that had fallen in between the cracks in the giant mass of broken generators. It was a little thing, apparently housed in a glass case. There was only one objection to that assumption. The base of a large generator lay on it, metal fully two feet thick, and that metal was cracked where it rested on the case, and the case, made of material an inch and a half thick, was not dented!

	“Whewww—that's a nice kind of glass to have!” Morey commented. “I'd like to have a specimen for examination. Oh—I wonder—yes, it must be! There's a window in the side up there toward what was the bow that seemed to me to be the same stuff. It's buried about three feet in solid earth, so I imagine it must be.”

	The three made their way at once to where they had seen the window. The frame appeared to be steel, or some such alloy, and it was twisted and bent under the blow, for this was evidently the outer wall, and the impact of landing had flattened the rounded side. But that “glass” window was quite undisturbed! There was, as a further proof, a large granite boulder lying against it on the outside—or what had been a boulder, though it had been shattered by the impact.

	“Say—that's some building material!” Arcot indicated the transparent sheet. “Just look at that granite rock—smashed into sand! Yet the window isn't even scratched! Look how the frame that held it is torn—just torn, not broken. I wonder if we can tear it loose altogether?” He stepped forward, raising his pistol. There was a thud as his metal bar crashed down when the ray was shut off. Then, as the others got out of the way, he stepped toward the window and directed his beam toward it. Gradually he increased the power, till suddenly there was a rending crash, and they saw only a leaping column of earth and sand and broken granite flying up through the hole in the steel shell. There was a sudden violent crash, then a moment later a second equally violent crash as the window, having flown up to the ceiling, came thumping back to the floor.

	After the dust had settled they came forward, looking for the window. They found it, somewhat buried by the rubbish, lying off to one side. Arcot bent down to tilt it and sweep off the dirt; he grasped it with one hand, and pulled. The window remained where it was. He grasped it with both hands and pulled harder. The window remained where it was.

	“Uh—say, lend a hand will you, Wade.” Together the two men pulled, but without results. That window was about three feet by two feet by one inch, making the total volume about one-half a cubic foot, but it certainly was heavy. They could not begin to move it. An equal volume of lead would have weighed about four hundred pounds, but this was decidedly more than four hundred pounds. Indeed, the combined strength of the three men did not do more than rock it.

	“Well—it certainly is no kind of matter we know of!” observed Morey. “Osmium, the heaviest known metal, has a density of twenty-two and a half, which would weigh about 730 pounds. I think we could lift that, so this is heavier than anything we know. At least that's proof of a new system. Between Venus and Earth we have found every element that occurs in the sun. These people must have come from another star!”

	“Either that,” returned Arcot, “or proof of an amazing degree of technological advancement. It's only a guess, of course—but I have an idea where this kind of matter exists in the solar system. I think you have already seen it—in the gaseous state. You remember, of course, that the Kaxorians had great reservoirs for storing light-energy in a bound state in their giant planes. They had bound light, light held by the gravitational attraction for itself, after condensing it in their apparatus, but they had what amounted to a gas—gaseous light. Now suppose that someone makes a light condenser even more powerful than the one the Kaxorians used, a condenser that forces the light so close to itself, increases its density, till the photons hold each other permanently, and the substance becomes solid. It will be matter, matter made of light—light matter—and let us call it a metal. You know that ordinary matter is electricity matter, and electricity matter metals conduct electricity readily. Now why shouldn't our 'light matter' metal conduct light? It would be a wonderful substance for windows.”

	“But now comes the question of moving it,” Wade interposed. “We can't lift it, and we certainly want to examine it. That means we must take it to the laboratory. I believe we're about through here—the place is clearly quite permanently demolished. I think we had better return to the ship and start to that other machine we saw that didn't appear to be so badly damaged. But—how can we move this?”

	“I think a ray may do the trick.” Arcot drew his ray pistol, and stepped back a bit, holding the weapon so the ray would direct the plate straight up. Slowly he applied the power, and as he gradually increased it, the plate stirred, then moved into the air.

	“It works! Now you can use your pistol, Morey, and direct it toward the corridor. I'll send it up, and let it fall outside, where we can pick it up later.” Morey stepped forward, and while Arcot held it in the air with his ray, Morey propelled it slowly with his, till it was directly under the corridor leading upward. Then Arcot gave a sudden increase in power, and the plate moved swiftly upward, sailing out of sight. Arcot shut off his ray, and there came to their ears a sudden crash as the plate fell to the floor above.

	The three men regained their ropes and “double action parachutes” as Arcot called them, and floated up to the next floor. Again they started the process of moving the plate. All went well till they came to the little car itself. They could not use the ray on the car, for fear of damaging the machinery. They had to use some purely mechanical method of hoisting it in.

	Finally they solved the problem by using the molecular director ray to swing a heavy beam into the air, then one man pulled on the far end of it with a rope, and swung it till it was resting on the door of the ship on one end, and the other rested in a hole they had torn in the lining of the tube.

	Now they maneuvered the heavy plate till it was resting on that beam; then they released the plate, and watched it slide down the incline, shooting through the open doorway of the car. In moments the job was done. The plate at last safely stowed, the three men climbed into the car, and prepared to leave.

	The little machine glided swiftly down the tube through the mighty ship, finally coming out through the opening that had admitted them. They rose quickly into the air, and headed for the headquarters of the government ships.

-

II

	A GREAT NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS and military men were already gathered about the headquarters ship. As Arcot's party arrived, they learned that each of the wrecks was being assigned to one group. They further learned that because of their scientific importance, they were to go to the nearly perfect ship lying off to the west. Two Air Patrolmen were to accompany them.

	“Lieutenant Wright and Lieutenant Greer will go with you,” said the Colonel. “In the event of trouble from possible—though unlikely—survivors, they may be able to help. Is there anything further we can do?”

	“These men are armed with the standard sidearms, aren't they?” Arcot asked. “I think we'll all be better off if I arm them with some of the new director-ray pistols. I have several in my boat. It will be all right, I suppose?”

	“Certainly, Dr. Arcot. They are under your command.”

	The party, increased to five now, returned to the ship, where Arcot showed the men the details of the ray pistols, and how to use them. The control for direction of operation was rather intricate in these early models, and required considerable explanation. The theoretical range of even these small hand weapons was infinity in space, but in the atmosphere the energy was rather rapidly absorbed by ionization of the air, and the dispersion of the beam made it ineffective in space over a range of more than thirty-five miles.

	Again entering the little molecular motion car, they went at once to the great hull of the fallen ship. They inspected it cautiously from overhead before going too close, for the dreadnought, obviously, had landed without the terrific concussion that the others had experienced, and there was a possibility that some of the crew had survived the crash. The entire stern of the huge vessel had been torn off, and evidently the ship was unable to rise, but there were lights glowing through the portholes on the side, indicating that power had not failed completely.

	“I think we'd better treat that monster with respect,” remarked Wade, looking down at the lighted windows. “They have power, and the hull is scarcely dented except where the stern was caught by a beam. It's lucky we had those ray projector ships! They've been in service only about four months, haven't they, Lieutenant?”

-

	“Just about that, sir,” the Air Patrolman replied. “They hadn't gotten the hand weapons out in sufficient quantities to be issued to us as yet.”

	Morey scowled at the invader. “I don't like this at all. I wonder why they didn't greet us with some of their beams,” he said in worried tones. It did seem that there should be some of the rays in action now. They were less than a mile from the fallen giant, and moving rather slowly.

	“I've been puzzled about that myself,” commented Arcot, “and I've come to the conclusion that either the ray projectors are fed by a separate system of power distribution, which has been destroyed, or that the creatures from space are all dead.”

	They were to learn later, in their exploration of the ship, that the invaders' ray projectors were fed from a separate generator, which produced a special form of alternating current wave for them. This generator had been damaged beyond use.

	The little machine was well toward the stern of the giant now, and they lowered it till it was on a level with the torn metal. It was plain that the ship had been subjected to some terrific tension. The great girders were stretched and broken, and the huge ribs were bent and twisted. The central tube, which ran the length of the ship, had been drawn down to about three quarters of its original diameter, making it necessary for them to use their ray to enter. In moments their speedster glided into the dark tunnel. The searchlight reaching ahead filled the metal tunnel with a myriad deceptive reflections. The tube was lighted up far ahead of them, and seemed empty. Cautiously they advanced, with Arcot at the controls.

	“Wade—Morey—where will we stop first?” he asked. “The engines? They'll probably be of prime importance. We know their location. What do you say?”

	“I agree,” replied Wade, and Morey nodded his approval.

	They ran their craft down the long tube till they reached the door they knew must be the engine room landing, and stepped out, each wearing an altitude suit. This ship had landed level, and progress would be much easier than in the other one. They waited a moment before opening the door into the engine room, for this led into a narrow corridor where only one could pass. Caution was definitely in order. The Air Patrolmen insisted on leading the way. They had been sent along for the express purpose of protecting the scientists, and it was their duty to lead. After a brief argument Arcot agreed.

	The two officers stepped to the door, and standing off to one side, tore it open with a ray from their pistols. It fell with a clatter to the rounded metal floor of the tube, and lay there vibrating noisily, but no rays of death lanced out from beyond it. Cautiously they peered around the corner of the long corridor, then seeing nothing, entered. Wade came next, then Arcot, followed by Morey.

	The corridor was approximately thirty feet long, opening into the great engine room. Already the men could hear the smooth hum of powerful machines, and could see the rounded backs of vast mechanisms. But there was no sign of life, human or otherwise. They halted finally at the threshold of the engine room.

	“Well,” Arcot said softly. “We haven't seen anyone so far, and I hope no one has seen us. The invaders may be behind one of those big engines, quite unaware of us. If they're there, and they see us, they'll be ready to fight. Now remember, those weapons you have will tear loose anything they hit, so take it easy. You know something about the power of those engines, so don't put them out of commission, and have them splash us all over the landscape.

	“But look out for the crew, and get them if they try to get you!”

	Cautiously but quickly they stepped out into the great room, forming a rough half circle, pistols ready for action. They walked forward stealthily, glancing about them—and simultaneously the enemies caught sight of each other. There were six of the invaders, each about seven feet tall, and surprisingly humanoid. They somewhat resembled Venerians, but they weren't Venerians, for their skin was a strange gray-white, suggesting raw dough. It seemed to Arcot that these strange, pale creatures were advancing at a slow walk, and that he stood still watching them as they slowly raised strange hand weapons. He seemed to notice every detail: their short, tight-fitting suits of some elastic material that didn't hamper their movements, and their strange flesh, which just seemed to escape being transparent. Their eyes were strangely large, and the black spot of the pupil in their white corneas created an unnatural effect.

	Then abruptly their weapons came up—and Arcot responded with a sudden flick of his ray, as he flung himself to one side. Simultaneously his four companions let their beams fly toward the invaders. They glowed strangely red here, but they were still effective. The six beings were suddenly gone—but not before they had released their own beams. And they had taken toll. Lieutenant Wright lay motionless upon the floor.

	The Terrestrians scarcely had a chance to notice this, for immediately there was a terrific rending crash, and clean daylight came pouring in through a wide opening in the wall of the ship. The five rays had not stopped on contact with the enemy, but had touched the wall behind them. An irregular opening now gaped in the smooth metal.

	Suddenly there came a second jarring thud, a dull explosion; then a great sheet of flame filled the hole—a wall of ruddy flame swept rapidly in. Arcot swung up his ray pistol, pointing it at the mass of flaming gas. A mighty column of air came through the narrow corridor from the tube, rushing toward the outside, and taking the flame with it. A roaring mass of gas hovered outside of the ship.

	“Lieutenant,” said Arcot, swiftly, “turn your ray on that hole, and keep it there, blowing that flame outside with it. You'll find you can't put the fire out, but if you keep it outside the ship, I believe we'll be reasonably safe.” The Patrolman obeyed instantly, relieving Arcot.

	Wade and Morey were already bending over the fallen man.

	“I'm afraid there's nothing we can do for him,” the latter said grimly, “and every moment here is dangerous. Let's continue our investigation and carry him back to the ship when we leave.” Arcot nodded silently.

	Solemnly they turned away from the motionless figure on the floor and set out on their investigation.

	“Arcot,” began Morey after a moment, “why is that gas burning like that? Can't we put it out?”

	“Let's get through with this job first,” replied Arcot somewhat tersely. “The discussion comes after.”

	The bodies of the invaders were gone, so they could not examine them now. That was a matter for the doctors and biologists, anyway. The engines were their main interest, huge things which overshadowed everything about them.

	It must have been the concealment afforded by the engines that permitted three of the enemy to get so close. The only warning the Terrestrians had was a faint pink haze as they stepped around the corner of an engine; and a sudden feeling of faintness swept over them. They leaped back, out of sight, peering around the corner with nerves and muscles tensed. There was no sign of movement.

	As they watched, they saw a pallid hand reaching out with a ray gun; and Wade swiftly pointed his own weapon. There came a sudden crash of metal, a groan and quiet. Two other aliens leaped from behind the great engine just as the Terrestrians dodged further back; as swiftly, they too found concealment.

	Arcot swung his ray up, and was about to pull the trigger that would send the huge engine toppling over upon them, when he saw that it was running. He thought of the unknown energies in the machine, the potential destruction, and he shook his head. Cautiously he looked around the edge of the towering mass, waiting—his beam flashed out, and there was a snapping sound as the ray caught a reaching hand and hurled its owner against a mighty transformer of some sort. For an instant the huge mass tottered, then was still. In the low concentration of power that Arcot had used, only a small portion had been touched, and the molecules of this portion had not been enough to tip over its tremendous weight.

	Only one enemy remained; and Arcot learned swiftly that he was still in action, for before he could dodge back there came that now-familiar pink haziness. It touched Arcot's hand, outstretched as it had been when he fired, and a sudden numbness came over it. His pistol hand seemed to lose all feeling of warmth or cold. It was there; he could still feel the weapon's deadened weight. Reflex action hurled him back, his hand out of range of the ray. In seconds feeling began to return, and in less than ten his hand was normal again.

	He turned to the others with a wry grin. “Whew—that was a narrow squeak! I must say their ray is a gentlemenly sort of thing. It either kills you, or doesn't injure you at all. There it goes again!”

	A shaft of pink radiance reached the end of the engine, just grazing it, evidently absorbed by its mass. “Pinning us down,” Wade grated. They certainly couldn't step out into the open space—but they couldn't stay where they were indefinitely, either. Reinforcements might arrive!

	“Look,” Wade pointed with his pistol, “he's under that big metal bar—up there in the roof—see it? I'll pull it down; he may get nervous and come into sight.” Swiftly Arcot sprang forward and caught his arm.

	“Lord—don't do that, Wade—there's too much stuff here that we don't know anything about. Too much chance of your smashing us with him. I'm going to try to get around to the other side of this machine and see what I can do, while you fellows keep him occupied.”

	Arcot disappeared around the black humming giant. Interminably the others waited for something to happen; then suddenly the beam that had been playing at irregular intervals across the end of the machine, swung quickly to the other side; and simultaneously another ray seemed to leap from the machine itself. They met and crossed. There came a momentary crashing arc, then both went dead, as the apparatus that generated them blew out under terrific overload.

	The invader evidently carried a spare, for the watchers saw him dart from concealment, clawing at his pocket pouch. They turned their rays on him, and just as his projector came free, a ray hurled him violently to the left. He crashed into a huge motor, and the result was not nice.

	The projector had been jerked from his hand and lay off to the side. Arcot ran to it and picked it up just as they heard the Lieutenant call an alarmed inquiry.

	“I think we're okay now,” Arcot answered. “I hope there are no more—but by all means stay where you are, and use as little power as possible in blowing that flame outside. It uses up the atmosphere of the ship, and though we don't need it, I think we'd better take things easy. Call us if anything looks odd to you.”

	For several minutes the three scientists looked about them in awe-struck wonder. They were the first men of Earth to see the driving equipment of one of the tremendous Kaxorian planes, and they felt tiny beside its great bulk; but now, as they examined this engine room, they realized that even the huge plane shrank into insignificance beside this interstellar cruiser.

	All about them loomed the great rounded backs of giant electric motor-generators of some sort. Across the roof ran a network of gigantic metal bars, apparently conductors, but so large that they suggested heavy structural members. The machines they ran into loomed fully thirty feet into the air; they were longer than cylinders, thirty feet in diameter, and there was a group of four main machines fully a hundred twenty feet long! There were many smaller mechanisms—yet these smaller ones would easily have constituted a complete power supply for the average big city. Along each wall ran a bank of transformers, cast in the same heroic mold. These seemed connected with the smaller machines, there being four conductors leading into each of the minor units, two intake, and two, apparently, output leads, suggesting rotary converters. The multiple units and the various types and sizes of transformers made it obvious that many different frequencies were needed. Some of the transformers had air cores, and led to machines surrounded with a silvery white metal instead of the usual iron. These, apparently, were generating current at an extremely high frequency.

	“Well,” Morey commented, “they ought to have power enough. But do you notice that those four main units have their leads radiating in different directions? The one on the left there seems to lead to that big power board at the front—or better, bow. I think it would be worth investigating.”

	Arcot nodded. “I had the same idea. You notice that two of the main power units are still working, but that those other two have stopped? Probably the two dead ones have something to do with the motion of the ship. But there's one point I think is of even greater interest. All the machines we have seen, all the conspicuous ones, are secondary power sources. There are no primary sources visible. Notice that those two main conduits lead over to the right, and toward the bow. Let's check where they go to.”

	As they talked they followed the huge conductors back to their point of convergence. Suddenly they rounded one of the huge main power units, and saw before them, at the center of square formed by these machines, a low platform of transparent light-metal. At the exact center of this platform, which was twenty feet in diameter, there was a table, about seven feet across and raised about five feet above the level of the platform on stout light-metal legs. On the table were two huge cubes of solid silver, and into these cubes ran all the conductors they had seen.

	In the space of about six inches left between the blocks of metal, there was a small box constructed of some strange new material. It was the most perfect reflecting surface that any of the men had ever imagined. Indeed, it was so perfect a reflector that they were unable to see it, but could detect its presence only by the mirror images, and the fact that it blotted out objects behind it.

	Now they noticed that through the huge blocks of metal there were two small holes, and two thin wires of this same reflecting material led into those holes. The wires led directly up to the roof, and, suspended on three-foot hangers of the light-metal, continued on toward the bow.

	Could this be the source of power for the entire ship? It seemed impossible, yet there were many other seeming impossible things here, among them that strangely reflecting matter.

	There was a low railing about the central platform, apparently intended to keep observers at a safe distance, so they decided against any more detailed investigation. As they were about to discuss their unusual find, the Lieutenant called that he heard sounds behind him.

	At once the three ran rapidly toward the narrow corridor that had given them entrance. The flaming gas was still shooting through the hole in the wall of the ship, and the rush of air through the corridor made it difficult to hear any sounds there, and exceedingly difficult to walk.

	“Turn on more power, Lieutenant, and see if we can't draw out the enemy,” suggested Arcot, while they braced themselves around the tube exit.

	As the Patrolman increased the power of his beam, the moan of the air through the corridor increased suddenly to a terrific roar, and a cyclonic gale swept through. But none of the invaders were drawn out.

	After the Lieutenant had shut off the blast from his pistol at Arcot's signal, the latter said: “I don't think anything less than a war tank could stand that pressure. It's probable that we'll be attacked if we stay here much longer, though—and we may not be able to get out at all. I think, Lieutenant, I'll ask you to stay here while we go out and get the ship ready to leave.” He paused, grinning. “Be sure to keep that flame outside. You'll be in the position of Hercules after Atlas left him holding the skies on his shoulders. You can't shut off the ray for long or we'll have a first-rate explosion. We'll signal when we're ready by firing a revolver, and you make it to the ship as fast as you can travel.”

	Arcot's expression became solemn. “We'll have to carry Wright back to the ship. He was a brave man, and he certainly deserves burial in the soil of his own world. And, Morey, we'll have to look up his family. Your father's company will have to take care of them if they need help.”

	Slowly the men forced their way back toward their ship, fighting against the roaring column of air, their burden hindering them somewhat; but at last they reached the open tunnel. Even here the air was in violent motion.

	They got into their boat as quickly as possible, and set the controls for reverse flight. Then Wade fired the signal shot. In moments they saw Lieutenant Greer bucking against the current of air, continuing under its own momentum.

	By the time he was in the ship an ominous calm had fallen. Swiftly they sped down the corridor, and had almost reached the open air, when suddenly there was a dull rumble behind them, and they were caught on a wave of pressure that hurled them along at terrific speed. In a flash they sped into the open air, the great tunnel with its thick walls and flared opening acting like a gigantic blunderbus, with the ship as its bullet. Arcot made no attempt to slow down the little craft, but pressed his foot heavily on the vertical accelerator. The ship rocketed up with terrific speed, and the acceleration pinned the men down to their seats with tripled weight.

	Anxiously they watched the huge invader as they sped away from it. At Arcot's direction Morey signaled the other groups of scientists to get out of danger with all speed, warning of the impending blow-up. As the moments sped by the tension mounted. Arcot stared fixedly into the screen before him, keeping the giant space ship in focus. As they sped mile upon miles away from it, he began to relax a bit.

	Not a word was spoken as they watched and waited. Actually, very little time passed before the explosion, but to the watchers the seconds dragged endlessly. Then at twenty-seven miles, the screen flared into a sheet of blinding white radiance. There was a timeless instant—then a tremendous wave of sound, a roaring, stunning concussion smote the ship, shaking it with unrestrained fury—to cease as abruptly as it came.

	Immediately they realized the reason. They were rushing away from the explosion faster than the sound it made, hence could not hear it. After the first intolerable flash, details became visible. The great ship seemed to leap into countless tremendous fragments, each rushing away from the point of the blow-up. They did not go far; the force was not sustained long enough, nor was it great enough to overcome the inertia of so vast a mass for more than moments. Huge masses rained to earth, to bury themselves in the soil.

	There came a momentary lull. Then suddenly, from the mass which evidently held the wrecked engine room, there shot out a beam of intense white light that swept around in a wide, erratic arc. Whatever it touched fused instantly into a brilliantly glowing mass of liquid incandescence. The field itself, fragments of the wreckage, fused and mingled under its fury. The beam began to swing, faster and faster, as the support that was holding it melted; then abruptly it turned upon itself. There came a sudden blast of brilliance to rival that of the sun—and the entire region became a molten lake. Eyes streaming, temporarily blinded, the men turned away from the screen.

	“That,” said Arcot ruefully, “is that! It seems that our visitors don't want to leave any of their secrets lying around for us to investigate. I've an idea that all the other wrecks will go like this one did.” He scowled. “You know, we really didn't learn much. Guess we'd better call the headquarters ship and ask for further instructions. Will you attend to it, Lieutenant Greer?”

-

III

	SWIFTLY ARCOT'S sleek cruiser sped toward New York and the Arcot Laboratories. They had halted briefly at the headquarters ship of the Earth-Venus forces to report on their experience; and alone again, the three scientists were on their way home.

	With their course set, Arcot spoke to the others. “Well, fellows, what are your opinions on—what we've seen? Wade, you're a chemist—tell us what you think of the explosion of the ship, and of the strange color of our molecular ray in their air.”

	Wade shook his head doubtfully. “I've been trying to figure it out, and I can't quite believe my results. Still, I can't see any other explanation. That reddish glow looked like hydrogen ions in the air. The atmosphere was certainly combustible when it met ours, which makes it impossible for me to believe that their air contained any noticeable amount of oxygen, for anything above twenty per cent oxygen and the rest hydrogen would be violently explosive. Apparently the gas had to mix liberally with our air to reach that proportion. That it didn't explode when ionized, showed the absence of hydro-oxygen mixture.

	“All the observed facts except one seem to point to an atmosphere composed largely of hydrogen. That one—there are beings living in it! I can understand how the Venerians might adapt to a different climate, but I can't see how anything approaching human life can live in an atmosphere like that.”

	Arcot nodded. “I have come to similar conclusions. But I don't see too much objection to the thought of beings living in an atmosphere of hydrogen. It's all a question of organic chemistry. Remember that our bodies are just chemical furnaces. We take in fuel and oxidize it, using the heat as our source of power. The invaders live in an atmosphere of hydrogen. They eat oxidizing fuels, and breathe a reducing atmosphere; they have the two fuel components together again, but in a way different from our method. Evidently, it's just as effective. I'm sure that's the secret of the whole thing.”

	“Sounds fairly logical.” Wade agreed. “But now I have a question for you. Where under the sun did these beings come from?”

	Arcot's reply came slowly. “I've been wondering the same thing. And the more I wonder, the less I believe they did come from—under our sun. Let's eliminate all the solar planets—we can do that at one fell swoop. It's perfectly obvious that those ships are by no means the first crude attempts of this race to fly through space. We're dealing with an advanced technology. If they have had those ships even as far away as Pluto, we should certainly have heard from them by now.

	“Hence, we've got to go out into interstellar space. You'll probably want to ram some of my arguments down my throat—I know there is no star near enough for the journey to be made in anything less than a couple of generations by all that's logical; and they'd freeze in the interstellar cold doing it. There is no known star close enough—but how about unknowns?”

	“What have they been doing with the star?” Morey snorted. “Hiding it behind a sun-shade?”

	Arcot grinned. “Yes. A shade of old age. You know a sun can't radiate forever; eventually they die. And a dead sun would be quite black, I'm sure.”

	“And the planets that circle about them are apt to become a wee bit cool too, you know.”

	“Agreed,” said Arcot, “and we wouldn't be able to do much about it. But give these beings credit for a little higher order of intelligence. We saw machines in that space ship that certainly are beyond us! They are undoubtedly heating their planets with the same source of energy with which they are running their ships.

	“I believe I have confirmation of that statement in two things. They are absolutely colorless; they don't even have an opaque white skin. Any living creature exposed to the rays of a sun, which is certain to emit some chemical rays, is subject to coloration as a protection against those rays. The whites, who have always lived where sunlight is weakest, have developed a skin only slightly opaque. The Orientals, who live in more tropical countries, where less clothes and more sun is the motto, have slightly darker skins. In the extreme tropics Nature has found it necessary to use a regular blanket of color to stop the rays. Now extrapolating the other way, were there no such rays, the people would become a pigmentless race. Since most proteins are rather translucent, at least when wet, they would appear much as these beings do. Remember, there are very few colored proteins. Hemoglobin, such as in our blood, and hemocyanin, like that in the blue blood of the Venerians, are practically unique in that respect. For hydrogen absorption, I imagine the blood of these creatures contains a fair proportion of some highly saturated compound, which readily takes on the element, and gives it up later.

	“But we can kick this around some more in the lab.”

	Before starting for New York, Arcot had convinced the officer in charge that it would be wise to destroy the more complete of the invaders' ships at once, lest one of them manage to escape. The fact that none of them had any rays in operation was easily explained; they would have been destroyed by the Patrol if they had made any show of weapons. But they might be getting some ready, to be used in possible escape attempts. The scientists were through with their preliminary investigations. And the dismembered sections would remain for study, anyway.

	The ships had finally been rayed apart, and when the three had left, their burning atmosphere had been sending mighty tongues of flame a mile or more into the air. The light gas of the alien atmosphere tended to rise in a great globular cloud, a ball that quickly burned itself out. It had not taken long for the last of the machines to disintegrate under the rays. There would be no more trouble from them, at any rate!

	Now Morey asked Arcot if he thought that they had learned all they could from the ships; would it not have been wiser to save them, and investigate more fully later, taking a chance on stopping any sudden attack by surviving marauders by keeping a patrol of Air Guards there.

	To which Arcot replied, “I thought quite a bit before I suggested their destruction, and I conferred for a few moments with Forsyth, who's just about tops in biology and bacteriology. He said that they had by no means learned as much as they wished to, but they'd been forced to leave in any event. Remember that pure hydrogen, the atmosphere we were actually living in while on the ship, is quite as inert as pure oxygen—when alone. But the two get very rough when mixed together. The longer those ships lay there the more dangerously explosive they became. If we hadn't destroyed them, they would have wrecked themselves. I still think we followed the only logical course.

	“Dr. Forsyth mentioned the danger of disease. There's a remote possibility that we might be susceptible to their germs. I don't believe we would be, for our chemical constitution is so vastly different. For instance, the Venerians and Terrestrians can visit each other with perfect freedom. The Venerians have diseases, and so do we, of course; but there are things in the blood of Venerians that are absolutely deadly to any Terrestrian organism. We have a similar deadly effect on Venerian germs. It isn't immunity—it's simply that our respective constitutions are so different that we don't need immunity. Similarly, Forsyth thinks we would be completely resistant to all diseases brought by the invaders. However, it's safer to remove the danger, if any, first, and check afterward.”

	The three men sped rapidly back to New York, flying nearly sixty miles above the surface of the Earth, where there would be no interfering traffic, till at length they were above the big city, and dropping swiftly in a vertical traffic lane.

	Shortly thereafter they settled lightly in the landing cradle at the Arcot Laboratories. Arcot's father, and Morey's, were there, anxiously awaiting their return. The elder Arcot had for many years held the reputation of being the nation's greatest physicist, but recently he had lost it—to his son. Morey Senior was the president and chief stockholder in the Transcontinental Air Lines. The Arcots, father and son, had turned all their inventions over to their close friends, the Moreys. For many years the success of the great air lines had been dependent in large part on the inventions of the Arcots; these new discoveries enabled them to keep one step ahead of competition, and as they also made the huge transport machines for other companies, they drew tremendous profits from these mechanisms. The mutual interest, which had begun as a purely financial relationship, had long since become a close personal friendship.

	As Arcot stepped from his speedster, he called immediately to his father, telling of their find, the light-matter plate.

	“I'll need a handling machine to move it. I'll be right back.” He ran to the elevator and dropped quickly to the heavy machinery lab on the lower floor. In a short time he returned with a tractor-like machine equipped with a small derrick, designed to get its power from the electric mains. He ran the machine over to the ship. The others looked up as they heard the rumble and hum of its powerful motor. From the crane dangled a strong electro-magnet.

	“What's that for?” asked Wade, pointing to the magnet. “You don't expect this to be magnetic, do you?”

	“Wait and see!” laughed Arcot, maneuvering the handling machine into position. One of the others made contact with the power line, and the crane reached into the ship, lowering the magnet to the plate of crystal. Then Arcot turned the power into the lifting motor. The hum rose swiftly in volume and pitch till the full load began to strain the cables. The motor whined with full power, the cables vibrating under the tension. The machine pulled steadily, until, to Arcot's surprise, the rear end of the machine rose abruptly from the floor, tipping forward.

	“Well—it was magnetic, but how did you know?” asked the surprised Wade. Since the ship was made of the Venerian metal, coronium, which was only slightly magnetic, the plate was obviously the magnet's only load.

	“Never mind. I'll tell you later. Get an I-beam, say about twenty feet long, and see if you can't help lift that crazy mass. I think we ought to manage it that way.”

	And so it proved. With two of them straddling the I-beam, the leverage was great enough to pull the plate out. Running it over to the elevator, they lowered the heavy mass, disconnected the cable, and rode down to Arcot's laboratory. Again the I-beam and handling machine were brought into play, and the plate was unloaded from the car. The five men gathered around the amazing souvenir from another world.

	“I'm with Wade in wondering how you knew the plate was magnetic, son,” commented the elder Arcot. “I can accept your explanation that the stuff is a kind of matter made of light, but I know you too well to think it was just a lucky guess. How did you know?”

	“It really was pretty much of a guess, Dad, though there was some logic behind the thought. You ought to be able to trace down the idea! How about you, Morey?” Arcot smiled at his friend.

	“I've kept discreetly quiet,” replied Morey, “feeling that in silence I could not betray my ignorance, but since you ask me, I can guess too. I seem to recall that light is affected by a powerful magnet, and I can imagine that that was the basis for your guess. It has been known for many years, as far back as Clerk Maxwell, that polarized light can be rotated by a powerful magnet.”

	“That's it! And now we may as well go over the whole story, and tell Dad and your father all that happened. Perhaps in the telling, we can straighten out our own ideas a bit.”

	For the next hour the three men talked, each telling his story, and trying to explain the whys and wherefores of what he had seen. In the end all agreed on one point: if they were to fight this enemy, they must have ships that could travel though space with speed to match that of the invaders, ships with a self-contained source of power.

	During a brief lull in the conversation, Morey commented rather sarcastically: “I wonder if Arcot will now kindly explain his famous invisible light, or the lost star?” He was a bit nettled by his own failure to remember that a star could go black. “I can't see what connection this has with their sudden attack. If they were there, they must have developed when the star was bright, and as a star requires millions of years to cool down, I can't see how they could suddenly appear in space.”

	Before answering, Arcot reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out an old blackened briar pipe. Methodically he filled it, a thoughtful frown on his face; then carefully lighting it, he leaned back, puffing out a thin column of gray smoke.

	“Those creatures must have developed on their planets before the sun cooled.” He puffed slowly. “They are, then, a race millions of years old—or so I believe. I can't give any scientific reason for this feeling; it's merely a hunch. I just have a feeling that the invaders are old, older than our very planet! This little globe is just about two billion years old. I feel that that race is so very ancient they may well have counted the revolutions of our galaxy as, once every twenty or thirty million years, it swung about its center.

	“When I looked at those great machines, and those comparatively little beings as they handled their projectors, they seemed out of place. Why?” He shrugged. “Again, just a hunch, an impression.” He paused again, and the slow smoke drifted upward.

	“If I'm granted the premise that a black, dead star is approaching the Solar System, then my theorizing may seem more logical. You agree?” The listeners nodded and Arcot continued. “Well—I had an idea—and when I went downstairs for the handling machine, I called the Lunar Observatory.” He couldn't quite keep a note of triumph out of his voice. “Gentlemen—some of the planets have been misbehaving! The outermost planets, and even some of those closer to the sun have not been moving as they should. A celestial body of appreciable mass is approaching the System; though thus far nothing has been seen of the visitor!”

	A hubbub of excited comment followed this startling revelation. Arcot quieted them with an upraised hand. “The only reason you and the world at large haven't heard about this as yet is the fact that the perturbation of the planets is so very slight that the astronomers figured they might have made an error in calculation. They're rechecking now for mistakes.

	“To get back to my visualization—It must have been many millions of years ago that life developed on the planets of the black star, a warm sun then, for it was much younger. It was probably rather dim as suns go even its younger days. Remember, our own sun is well above average in brilliance and heat radiation.

	“In those long-gone ages I can imagine a race much like ours developing, differing chemically, in their atmosphere of hydrogen; but the chemical body is not what makes the race, it's the thought process. They must have developed, and then as their science grew, their sun waned. Dimmer and dimmer it became, until their planets could not maintain life naturally. Then they had to heat them artificially. There is no question as to their source of power; they had to use the energy of matter—so called atomic energy—for no other source would be great enough to do what had to be done. It is probable that their science had developed this long before their great need arose.

	“With this must also have come the process of transmutation, and the process they use in driving their interstellar cruisers. I am sure those machines are driven by material energy.

	“But at last their star was black, a closed star, and their cold, black planets must circle a hot, black sun forever! They were trapped for eternity unless they found a way to escape to some other stellar system. They could not travel as fast as light, and they could escape only if they found some near-by solar system. Their star was dead—black. Let's call it Nigra—the Black One—since like every other star it should have a name. Any objection?”

	There was none, so Arcot continued:

	“Now we come to an impossibly rare coincidence. That two suns in their motion should approach each other is beyond the point of logic. That both suns have a retinue of planets approaches the height of the ridiculous. Yet that is what is happening right now. And the Nigrans—if that's the correct term—have every intention of taking advantage of the coincidence. Since our sun has been visible to them for a long, long time, and the approaching proximity of the suns evident, they had lots of time to prepare.

	“I believe this expedition was just an exploratory one; and if they can send such huge machines and so many of them, for mere exploration, I'm sure they must have quite a fleet to fight with.

	“We know little about their weapons. They have that death ray, but it's not quite as deadly as we might have feared, solely because our ships could outmaneuver them. Next time, logically, they'll bring with them a fleet of little ships, carried in the bellies of those giants, and they'll be a real enemy. We'll have to anticipate their moves and build to circumvent them.

	“As for their ray, I believe I have an idea how it works. You're all familiar with the catalytic effects of light. Hydrogen and chlorine will stand very peacefully in the same jar for a long time, but let a strong light fall on them, and they combine with terrific violence. This is the catalytic effect of a vibration, a wave motion. Then there is such a thing as negative catalysis. In a certain reaction, if a third element or compound is introduced, all reaction is stopped. I believe that's the principle of the Nigran death ray; it's a catalyst that simply stops the chemical reactions of a living body, and these are so delicately balanced that the least resistance will upset them.”

	Arcot halted, and sat puffing furiously for a moment. During his discourse the pipe had died to an ember; with vigorous puffing he tried to restore it. At last he had it going and continued.

	“What other weapons they have we cannot say. The secret of invisibility must be very old to them. But we'll guard against the possibility by equipping our ships against it. The only reason the patrol ships aren't equipped already is that invisibility is useless with modern criminals; they all know the secret and how to fight it.”

	Morey interrupted with a question.

	“Arcot, it's obvious that we have to get out into space to meet the enemy—and we'll have to have freedom of movement there. How are we going to do it? I was wondering if we could use Wade's system of storing the atomic hydrogen in solution. That yields about 100,000 calories for every two grams, and since this is a method of storing heat energy, and your molecular motion director is a method of converting heat into mechanical work with 100 per cent efficiency, why not use that? All we need, really, is a method of storing heat energy for use while we're in space.”

	Arcot exhaled slowly before answering, watching the column of smoke vanish into the air.

	“I thought of that, and I've been trying to think of other, and if possible, better, cheaper, and quicker ways of getting the necessary power.

	“Let's eliminate the known sources one by one. The usual ones, the ones men have been using for centuries, go out at once. The atomic hydrogen reaction stores more energy per gram than any other chemical reaction known. Such things as the storage battery, the electro-static condenser, the induction coil, or plain heat storage, are worthless to us. The only other method of storing energy we know of is the method used by the Kaxorians in driving their huge planes.

	“They use condensed light-energy. This is efficient to the ultimate maximum, something no other method can hope to attain. Yet they need huge reservoirs to store it. The result is still ineffective for our purpose; we want something we can put in a small space; we want to condense the light still further. That will be the ideal form of energy storage, for then we will be able to release it directly as a heat ray, and so use it with utmost efficiency. I think we can absorb the released energy in the usual cavity radiator.”

	A queer little smile appeared on Arcot's face. “Remember—what we want is light in a more condensed form, a form that is naturally stable, and that does not need to be held in a bound state, but actually requires urging to bring about the release of energy. For example—”

	A shout from Wade interrupted him. “That's really rare! Whoo—I have to hand it to you! That takes all the prizes!” He laughed delightedly. In puzzled wonder Morey and the two older men looked at him, and at Arcot who was grinning broadly now.

	“Well, I suppose it must be funny,” Morey began, then hesitated. “Oh—I see—say, that is good!” He turned to his father. “I see now what he's been driving at. It's been right here under our noses all the time.

	“The light-matter windows we found in the wrecked enemy ships contain enough bound light-energy to run all the planes we could make in the next ten years! We're going to have the enemy supply us with power we can't get in any other way. I can't decide, Arcot, whether you deserve a prize for ingenuity, or whether we should receive booby-prizes for our stupidity.”

	Arcot Senior smiled at first, then looked dubiously at his son.

	“There's definitely plenty of the right kind of energy stored there—but as you suggested, the energy will need encouragement to break free. Any ideas?”

	“A couple. I don't know how they'll work, of course; but we can try.” Arcot puffed at his pipe, serious now as he thought of the problems ahead.

	Wade interposed a question. “How do you suppose they condense that light energy in the first place, and, their sun being dead, whence all the light? Back to the atom, I suppose.”

	“You know as much as I do, of course, but I'm sure they must break up matter for its energy. As for the condensation problem, I think I have a possible solution of that too—it's the key to the problem of release. There's a lot we don't know now—but we'll have a bigger store of knowledge before this war is over—if we have anything at all!” he added grimly. “It's possible that man may lose knowledge, life, his planets and sun—but there's still plenty of hope. We're not finished yet.”

	“How do you think they got their energy loose?” asked Wade. “Do you think those big blocks of what appeared to be silver were involved in the energy release?”

	“Yes, I do. Those blocks were probably designed to carry away the power once it was released. How the release was accomplished, though, I don't know. They couldn't use material apparatus to start their release of material energy; the material of the apparatus might 'catch fire' too. They had to have the disintegrating matter held apart from all other matter. This was quite impossible, if you are going to get the energy away by any method other than by the use of fields of force. I don't think that is the method. My guess is that a terrific current of electricity would accomplish it if anything would.

	“How then are we going to get the current to it? The wires will be subject to the same currents. Whatever they do to the matter involved, the currents will do to the apparatus—except in one case. If that apparatus is made of some other kind of matter, then it wouldn't be affected. The solution is obvious. Use some of the light-matter. What will destroy light-matter, won't destroy electricity-matter, and what will destroy electricity-matter, won't disturb light-matter.

	“Do you remember the platform of light-metal, clear as crystal? It must have been an insulating platform. What we started as our assumptions in the case of the light-metal, we can now carry further. We said that electricity-metals carried electricity, so light-metals would carry or conduct light. Now we know that there is no substance which is transparent to light, that will carry electricity by metallic conduction. I mean, of course, that there is no substance transparent to light, and at the same time capable of carrying electricity by electronic transmission. True, we have things like NaCl solutions in ordinary H2O which will carry electricity, but here it's ionic conduction. Even glass will carry electricity very well when hot; when red hot, glass will carry enough electricity to melt it very quickly. But again, glass is not a solid, but a viscous liquid, and it is again carried by ionic conduction. Iron, copper, sodium, silver, lead—all metals carry the current by means of electron drift through the solid material. In such cases we can see that no transparent substance conducts electricity.

	“Similarly, the reverse is true. No substance capable of carrying electricity by metallic conduction is transparent. All are opaque, if in any thickness. Of course, gold is transparent when in leaf form—but when it's that thin it won't conduct very much! The peculiar condition we reach in the case of the invisible ship is different. There the effects are brought about by the high frequency impressed. But you get my point.

	“Do you remember those wires that we saw leading to that little box of the reflecting material? So perfectly reflecting it was that we didn't see it. We only saw where it must be; we saw the light it reflected. That was no doubt light-matter, a non-metal, and as such, non-conductive to light. Like sulphur, an electric non-metal, it reflected the base of which it was formed. Sulphur reflects the base of which it was formed. Sulphur reflects electricity and—in the crystalline form—passes light. This light-non-metal did the same sort of thing; it reflected light and passed electricity. It was a conductor.

	“Now we have the things we need, the matter to disintegrate, and the matter to hold the disintegrating material in. We have two different types of matter. The rest is obvious—but decidedly not easy. They have done it, though; and after the war is over, there should be many of their machines drifting about in space waiting to give up their secrets.”

	Arcot Senior clapped his son on the back. “A fair foundation on which to start, anyway. But I think it's time now that you got working on your problem; and since I'm officially retired, I'm going downstairs. You know I'm working in my lab on a method to increase the range and power of your projector for the molecular motion field. Young Norris is helping me, and he really has ideas. I'll show you our math later.”

	The party broke up, the three younger men staying in their own labs, the older men leaving.

-

IV

	THE THREE IMMEDIATELY SET to work. At Arcot's suggestion, Wade and Morey attacked the plate of crystal in an attempt to tear off a small piece, on which they might work. Arcot himself went into the televisophone room and put through a second call to the Tychos Observatory, the great observatory that had so recently been established on the frigid surface of the Moon. The huge mirror, twenty feet in diameter, allowed an immense magnification, and stellar observations were greatly facilitated, for no one bothered them, and the “seeing” was always perfect.

	However, the great distance was rather a handicap to the ordinary televisophone stations, and all calls put through to the astronomers had to be made through the powerful sending station in St. Louis, where all interplanetary messages were sent and received, while that side of the Earth was facing the station; and from Constantinople, when that city faced the satellite. These stations could bridge the distance readily and clearly.

	For several minutes Arcot waited while connections were being made with the Moon; then for many more minutes he talked earnestly with the observer in this distant station, and at last satisfied, he hung up.

	He had outlined his ideas concerning the black star, based upon the perturbation of the planets; then he had asked them to investigate the possibilities, and see if they could find any blotting out of stars by a lightless mass.

	Finally he returned to Morey and Wade who had been working on the crystal plate. Wade had an expression of exasperation on his face, and Morey was grinning broadly.

	“Hello, Arcot—you missed all the fun! You should have seen Wade's struggle with that plate!” The plate, during his absence, had been twisted and bent, showing that it had undergone some terrific stresses. Now Wade began to make a series of highly forceful comments about the properties of the plate in language that was not exactly scientific. It had value, though, in that it seemed to relieve his pent-up wrath.

	“Why, Wade, you don't seem to like that stuff. Maybe the difficulty lies in your treatment, rather than in the material itself. What have you tried?”

	“Everything! I took a coronium hack saw that will eat through molybdenum steel like so much cheese, and it just wore its teeth off. I tried some of those diamond rotary saws you have, attached to an electric motor, and it wore out the diamonds. That got my goat, so I tried using a little force. I put it in the tension testing machine, and clamped it—the clamp was good for 10,000,000 pounds—but it began to bend, so I had to quit. Then Morey held it with a molecular beam, and I tried twisting it. Believe me, it gave me real pleasure to see that thing yield under the pressure. But it's not brittle; it merely bends.

	“And I can't cut it, or even get some shavings off the darned thing. You said you wanted to make a Jolly balance determination of the specific gravity, but the stuff is so dense you'd need only a tiny scrap—and I can't break it loose!” Wade looked at the plate in thorough disgust.

	Arcot smiled sympathetically; he could understand his feelings, for the stuff certainly was stubborn. “I'm sorry I didn't warn you fellows about what you'd run into, but I was so anxious to get that call through to the Moon that I forgot to tell you how I expected to make it workable. Now, Wade, if you'll get another of those diamond-tooth rotary saws, I'll get something that may help. Put the saw on the air motor. Use the one made of coronium.”

	Wade looked after the rapidly disappearing Arcot with raised eyebrows, then, scratching his head, he turned and did as Arcot had asked.

	Arcot returned in about five minutes with a small handling machine, and a huge magnet. It must have weighed nearly half a ton. This he quickly connected to the heavy duty power lines of the lab. Now, running the handling machine into position, he quickly hoisted the bent and twisted plate to the poles of the magnet, with the aid of the derrick. Then backing the handling machine out of the way, he returned briskly to his waiting associates.

	“Now we'll see what we will see!” With a confident smile Arcot switched on the current of the big magnet. At once a terrific magnetic flux was set up through the light-metal. He took the little compressed-air saw, and applied it to the crystal plate. The smooth hiss of the air deepened to a harsh whine as the load came on it, then the saw made contact with the refractory plate.

	Unbelievingly Wade saw the little diamond-edge saw bite its way slowly but steadily into the plate. In a moment it had cut off a little corner of the light-matter, and this fell with a heavy thud to the magnet pole, drawn down by the attraction of the magnet and by gravity.

	Shutting off the magnet, Arcot picked up a pair of pliers and gripped the little fragment.

	“Whew—light-metal certainly isn't light metal! I'll bet this little scrap weights ten pounds! We'll have to reduce it considerably before we can use it. But that shouldn't be too difficult.”

	By using the magnet and several large diamond faceplates they were able to work the tough material down to a thin sheet; then with a heavy press, they cut some very small fragments, and with these, determined the specific gravity.

	“Arcot,” Wade asked finally, “just how does the magnet make that stuff tractable? I'm not physicist enough to figure out what takes place inside the material.”

	“Magnetism worked as it did,” Arcot explained, “because in this light-matter every photon is affected by the magnetism, and every photon is given a new motion. That stuff can be made to go with the speed of light, you know. It's the only solid that could be so affected. This stuff should be able, with the aid of a molecular motion beam, which will make all the photons move in parallel paths, to move at the full speed of each photon—186,000 miles a second. The tremendous speed of these individual photons is what makes the material so hard. Their kinetic impulse is rather considerable! It's the kinetic blow that the molecules of a metal give that keeps other metal from penetrating it. This simply gives such powerful impulse that even diamonds wouldn't cut it.

	“You know that an iron saw will cut platinum readily, yet if both are heated to say, 1600 degrees, the iron is a liquid, and the platinum very soft—but now the platinum cuts through the iron!

	“Heat probably won't have any effect on this stuff, but the action of the magnet on the individual photons corresponds to the effect of the heat on the individual atoms and molecules. The mass is softened, and we can work it. At least, that's the way I figure it out.

	“But now, Wade, I wish you'd see if you can determine the density of the stuff. You're more used to those determinations and that type of manipulation than we are. When you get through, we may be able to show you some interesting results ourselves!”

	Wade picked up a tiny chip of the light-metal and headed for his own laboratory. Here he set up his Jolly balance, and began to work on the fragment. His results were so amazing that he checked and rechecked his work, but always with the same answer. Finally he returned to the main lab where Arcot and Morey were busy at the construction of a large and complicated electro-static apparatus.

	“What did you find?” called out Arcot, as he saw Wade reenter the room. “Hold your report a second and give us a hand here, will you? I have a laboratory scale apparatus of the type the Kaxorians used in the storage of light. They've known, ever since they began working with them, that their machines would release the energy with more than normal violence, if certain changes were made in them. That is, the light condenser, the device that stored the photons so close to each other, would also serve to urge them apart. I've made the necessary changes, and now I'm trying to set up the apparatus to work on solid light-matter. It was developed for gaseous material, and it's a rather tricky thing to change it over. But I think we've almost got it.

	“Wade, will you connect that to the high frequency oscillator there—no—through that counterbalanced condenser. We may have to change the oscillator frequency quite a bit, but a variable condenser will do that.

	“Now, what results did you get?”

	Wade shook his head doubtfully. “We all know it's amazing stuff—and of course, it must be heavy—but still—well, anyway, I got a density of 103.5!”

	“Whewww—103.5! Lord! That's almost five times as heavy as the heaviest metal hitherto known. There's about half a cubic foot of the material; that would mean about 4000 pounds for the whole mass, or two tons. No wonder we couldn't lift the plate!”

	They stopped their work on the Kaxorian apparatus to discuss the amazing results of the density test, but now they fell to again, rapidly assembling the device, for each was a trained experimenter. With all but the final details completed, Arcot stood back and surveyed their handiwork.

	“I think we'll have enough urge to cause disintegration right here,” he said, “but I want to make sure, and so, before we set up the case over it, I think we may as well put that big magnet in place, and have it there to help in the work of disintegration, if need be.”

	At last the complete apparatus was set up, and the tiny bit of light-matter they were to work on was placed on the table of a powerful Atchinson projector microscope, the field of view being in the exact center of the field of both the magnet and the coil. Carefully, then, step by step, Arcot, Morey and Wade went over their work, checking and rechecking.

	“Well, we're ready,” said Arcot finally, as he placed the projector screen in position and dimmed the lights in the room. A touch of the switch, and the projection screen was illuminated with the greatly enlarged image of the tiny scrap of light-metal.

	With his hand on the switch, Arcot spoke to the other two. “I won't say there's no danger, since we haven't done this before; and if all the energy should be released at once, it'll blow the top out of the building. But I'm reasonably sure that it will work safely. Any objections?”

	Wade shook his head, and Morey said: “I can't see any flaws in our work.”

	Arcot nodded, and unconsciously tensing, he closed the switch. This put the powerful Arcot oscillator tubes into action, and the power was ready for application.

	Slowly he closed the rheostat and put the power into the coil. The little sliver of metal on the slide seemed to throb a bit, and its outline grew hazy; but at last, with full power on, the release was so slow as to be imperceptible.

	“Guess we need the magnet after all; I'll put it on this time.”

	He opened the coil circuit and closed the magnet circuit at half voltage, then again he increased the current through the rheostat. This time the plate throbbed quite violently, it took the appearance of a bit of iodine. Dense vapors began pouring from it, and instantly those vapors became a blindingly brilliant flood of light. Arcot had snapped open the switch the moment he saw this display start, and it had had little time to act, for the instant the circuit was opened, it subsided. But even in that brief time, the light aluminum screen had suddenly become limp and slumped down, molten! The room was unbearably hot, and the men were half blinded by the intensity of the light.

	“It works!” yelled Wade. “It works! That sure was hot, too—it's roasting in here.” He flung open a window. “Let's have some air.”

	Arcot and Morey gripped hands with a broad grin. That display meant that Earth and Venus would have space ships with which to fight space ships. Reason enough for their joy.

	Though they had made an unusual amount of progress already, there was still a great deal of development work to be done. Fuller was needed, Arcot decided, so he called the elder Morey and requested his services if he could be spared from his present work. He could, and would arrive later that day.

	When Fuller appeared about mid-afternoon, he found the three friends already at work on the development of a more compact apparatus than the makeshift hookup used in making that first release mechanism.

	“And so you can see,” said Arcot as he finished his summary of their work to that point, “we still have quite a job ahead of us. I'm now trying to find some data for you to work on, but I can tell you this: We'll need a ship that has plenty of strength and plenty of speed. There will be the usual power plant, of course; the generators, the power-tube board, and the electro-magnetic relays for the regular molecular motion controls. Then, in addition, we must have controls for the ray projector, though that must wait a while, for Dad is working on a method of doubling our range ... Oh yes, the driving units will be inside the ship now, for all our power will come from the energy of the light-matter.”

	They spent the next hour in discussing the manifold details involved in the design of their space ship: the mechanism involved in transferring the light-energy to the drivers; a means of warming the ship in interstellar space; a main horizontal drive for forward and backward motion as well as braking; three smaller vertical power units to give them freedom of direction in climb or descent; other smaller horizontal power units for turning and moving sideways.

	The ships, they decided, must be capable of six or seven thousand miles a second. They would need three types of ships: a small single-man speedster, without bunk or living quarters, simply a little power plant and weapon. Designed for speed and mobility, it would be very hard to hit, and because of its own offensive power would be dangerous to the enemy. They would need a fleet of mother ships—ships that would hold both the speedsters and their pilots—say thirty to a cruiser. There would also be some ten-man scouts, operating in the same manner as the larger cruisers, but with a smaller fleet of speedsters dependent on them.

	“For defense,” Arcot concluded, “we'll have to depend on armor as heavy as we can make and still remain within the bounds of practical construction. I don't believe we'll be able to build up enough mass to insulate against their negative catalysis ray. We'll have to depend on mobility and offense.

	“But now let's get back to work. I think, Fuller, that you might call in the engineers of all the big aircraft and machine tool manufacturers and fabricators, and have them ready to start work at once when the plans are finally drawn up. You'd better get in touch with the Venerian producers, too. Those new works in Sorthol, Kaxor, will certainly be able to help a lot.

	“I suppose the Interplanetary Patrol men will have something to say, so they better be called in. Likewise the Venerian Council. Morey, maybe your dad can handle some of this.”

	As one they arose and set to work on their respective tasks—the planning and building of the Earth-Venus war fleet.

-

V

	DESPITE THEIR UTMOST endeavor and the hard work of the industrial might of two worlds, it was nearly six weeks before the fleet had grown to a thing of importance. The tests to which they subjected the tiny speedsters had been more than satisfactory. They behaved wonderfully, shooting about at terrific speed, and with all the acceleration a pilot could stand. These speedsters were literally piloted projectiles, and their amazing mobility made them a powerful arm of offense.

	There came into being a special corp dubbed, oddly enough, the “Rocket Squad”, a group of men who could stand plenty of “G's”. This “Rocket Squad” was composed solely of Terrestrians, for they were accustomed to the gravity of Earth and could stand greater acceleration strains than could the Venerians. The pick of the Air Patrol formed the nucleus of this new military organization; and in short order, so great is the appeal of the new and novel, the cream of the young men of the planet were competing for a place among the Rocketeers.

	Each ship, both speedster and mother craft, was equipped with an invisibility locator, a sensitive short-wave directional receiver, that would permit the operator to direct his rays at invisible targets. The ships themselves could not be made invisible, since they depended in their very principle on the absorption of light-energy. If the walls of every part of the ship were perfectly transparent, they could absorb no energy at all, and they would still be plainly visible—even more so than before! They must remain visible, but they could also force the enemy to remain visible.

	Each ten-man ship carried an old-fashioned cannon that was equipped to hurl cannisters carrying the luminous paint. They decided that these would have advantages, even if the invaders did not use invisibility, for in space a ship is visible only because it reflects or emits light. For this reason the ships were not equipped with any portholes except in the pilot room and at the observation posts. No light could escape. To reduce the reflection to the absolute minimum, the ships had each been painted with a 99% absorptive black. In space they would be exceedingly difficult targets.

	The heating effect of the sun on the black pigment when near the great star was rather disagreeably intense, and to cool the speedsters they had installed molecular director power units, which absorbed the heat and used the energy to drive the ship. Heaters offset the radiation loss of the black surface when too far from the sun.

	Each of the speedsters was equipped with a small machine-gun shooting luminous paint bullets. One of these, landing on another craft, made it visible for at least two hours, and since they could cover an area of about thirty feet, they were decidedly effective.

	It was found that ray practice was rather complicated. The government had ranges set up in great mountain districts away from any valuable property, but they soon found that spatial warplay could not be carried on on Earth. The rays very quickly demolished the targets, and in a short time made good progress toward demolishing the mountains as well. The problem was solved by using the barren surface of the moon and the asteroid belt beyond Mars as a proving ground.

	The ships were sent out in squadrons as fast as they could be finished and the men could be brought together and trained. They were establishing a great shield of ships across all that section of the system whence the Nigrans had appeared, and they hoped to intercept the next attack before it reached Earth, for they were certain the next attack would be in full force.

	Arcot had gone to the conference held on Venus with the other men who had investigated the great wrecks, and each scientist had related his view of things and had offered suggestions. Arcot's idea of the black star was not very favorably received. As he later told Wade and Morey, who had not gone, there was good reason for their objection to his idea. Though the scientists were willing to admit that the invaders must have come from a great distance, and they agreed that they lived in an atmosphere of hydrogen, and judging from their pale skins, that they were not used to the rays of a sun, they still insisted on the theory of an outer planet of Sol.

	“You remember,” explained Arcot, “several years ago there was considerable discussion about the existence of a planet still further out from the sun than Pluto. It is well known that there are a number of irregularities in the orbits of Neptune and Pluto that can't be caused by known planets, and an outer planet could have the necessary mass and orbit to account for them.

	“This attack from outer space was immediately taken as proof of that theory, and it was very easily supported, too. My one good point that stood for any length of time under their attacks was the fact that those ships weren't developed in a year, nor a century, and that the chemical constitution of the men was so different. There were no new elements discovered, except the light-matter, but they are rather wondering about the great difference of earthly chemical constitution and the constitution of these invaders.

	“They had one argument that was just about enough to throw mine out, though they pointed to the odds against the thing happening. You know, of course, how planets are formed? They are the results of tidal action on two passing suns.

	“You can imagine two mighty stars careening through space and then drawing slowly nearer, till at last they come within a few billion miles of each other, and their gigantic masses reach out and bind them with a mighty chain of gravity. Their titanic masses swing about each other, each trying to pull free, and continue its path about the center of the galactic system. But as their huge bulks come nearer, the chains that bind them become stronger and stronger, and the tremendous pull of the one gargantuan fire ball on the other raises titanic tides of flame. Great streamers of gas shoot out, and all the space about is lighted by the flaming suns. The pull of gravity becomes more and more intense, and as the one circles the other, the tide is pulled up, and the mighty ball of fire, which, for all its existence has been practically motionless as far as rotation goes, begins to acquire a greater and greater rotational speed as the tidal drag urges it on. The flames begin to reach higher and higher, and the tides, now urged from the sun by centrifugal force, rise into an ever greater crest, and as the swinging suns struggle to break loose, the flaming gas is pulled up and up, and becomes a mighty column of fire, a column that reaches out across three—four—a dozen millions of miles of space and joins the two stars at last, as stalactites and stalagmites grow together. A flaming tie of matter joins them, two titanic suns, and a mighty rope of fire binds them, while far mightier chains of gravity hold them together.

	“But now their original velocity reasserts itself, and having spiraled about each other for who can say how long—a year—a million years seems more probable—but still only an instant in the life of a star—they begin to draw apart, and the flaming column is stretched out, and ever thinner it grows, and the two stars at last separate. But now the gas will never fall back into the sun. Like some giant flaming cigar it reaches out into space and it will stay thus, for it has been set in rotation about the sun at such a speed as is needed to form an orbit. The giant mass of gas is, however, too cool to continue to develop energy from matter, for it was only the surface of the sun, and cool. As it cools still further, there appear in it definite condensations, and the beginnings of the planets are there. The great filament that stretched from the sun to sun was cigar-shaped, and so the matter is more plentiful toward the center, and larger planets develop. Thus Jupiter and Saturn are far larger than any of the others. The two ends are tapering, thus Earth is larger than Venus, which is larger than Mercury, and Uranus and Neptune are both smaller than Saturn, Pluto being smaller than either.

	“Mars and the asteroids are hard to explain. Perhaps it is easier to understand when we remember that the planets thus formed must necessarily have been rotating in eccentric orbits when they were first born, and these planets came too near the sun while gaseous, or nearly so, and Mars lost much of its matter, while the other, which now exists only as the asteroids, broke up.

	“But now that other flaming star has retired, wandering on through space. The star has left its traces, for behind it there are planets where none existed before. But remember that it, too, must have planets now.

	“All this happened some 2,000 million years ago.

	“But in order that it might happen, it requires that two stars pass within the relatively short distance of a few billion miles of each other. Space is not overcrowded with matter, you know. The density of the stars has been compared with twenty tennis balls roaming about 8,000-mile sphere that the Earth fills up—twenty tennis balls in some 270 billion cubic miles of space. Now imagine two of those tennis balls—with plenty of room to wander in—passing within a few yards of each other. The chances are about as good as the chances of two stars passing close enough to make planets.

	“Now let us consider another possibility.

	“The Black Star, as I told you, has planets. That means that it must have thus passed close to another star. Now we have it coming close to another sun that has been similarly afflicted. The chances of that happening are inconceivably small. It is one chance in billions that the planets will form. Two stars must pass close to each other, when they have all space to wander about in. Then those afflicted stars separate, and one of them passes close by a new star, which has thus been similarly afflicted with that one chance in billions—well, that is then a chance in billions of billions.

	“So my theory was called impossible. I don't know but what it is. Besides, I thought of an argument the other men didn't throw at me. I'm surprised they didn't, too—the explanation of the strange chemical constitution of these men of a solar system planet would not be so impossible. It is quite possible that they live on a planet revolving about the sun which is, nevertheless, a planet of another star. It is quite conceivable to me that the chemical constitution of Neptune and Pluto will be found to be quite different from that of the rest of our planets. The two filaments drawn out from the suns may not have mingled, though I think they did, but it is quite conceivable that, just before parting, our sun tore one planet, or even two or three, from the other star.

	“And that would explain these strange beings.

	“My other ideas were accepted. The agreed-on plan for the release of energy, and the source of the power.” Arcot puffed on his pipe meditatively for several moments, then stood up and stretched.

	“Ho—I wish they'd let me go on active duty with the space fleet! A scientific reputation can be an awful handicap at times,” he grinned. He had been rejected very emphatically when he had tried to enlist. The Interplanetary governments had stated flatly that he was too important as a scientist to be risked as a pilot of a space ship.

	On two worlds the great construction plants were humming with activity. Civilian production of all but the barest essentials had been put aside for the duration of the emergency. Space ships were being turned out at top speed, getting their fuel from the wrecks of the invaders' cruisers. Each ship needed only a small amount of the light-metal, for the energy content was tremendous. And those ships had been gigantic.

	Already there was a fleet of speedsters and mother ships out there in space, and with every passing hour others left the home planets, always adding to the fighting force that was to engage the attackers deep in space, where no stray ships might filter through to destroy the cities of Earth or Venus. Assembly lines were now turning out ships so rapidly that the training of their operators was the most serious problem. This difficulty had finally been overcome by a very abbreviated training course in the actual manipulation of the controls on the home planets, and subsequent training as the squadrons raced on their outward courses.

	It was soon decided that there must be another service beside that of the ordinary ships. One plant was devoted to making huge interstellar liners. These giants, made on Venus, were nearly a quarter of a mile long, and though diminutive in comparison with the giant Nigran ships, they were still decidedly large. Twelve of these could be completed within the next month, it was found; and one was immediately set aside as an officers' headquarters ship. It was recognized that the officers must be within a few hundred thousand miles of the actual engagements, for decisions would have to be made without too much loss of time in the transmission of reports.

	The ship must not be brought too near the front lest the officers be endangered and the entire engagement lost for want of the organizing central headquarters. The final solution had been the huge central control ship.

	The other large vessels were to be used to carry food and supplies. They were not to enter the engagement, for their huge size would make them as vulnerable to the tiny darting mites of space as the Nigran ships had been to the Interplanetary Patrol. The little ships could not conveniently stock for more than a week of engagement, then drop back to these warehouses of space, and go forward again for action.

	Throughout the long wait the officers of the Solarian forces organized their forces to the limit of their ability, planning each move of their attack. Space had been marked off into a great three-dimensional map, and each ship carried a small replica, the planets moving as they did in their orbits. The space between the planets was divided off into definite points in a series of Cartesian co-ordinates, the sun being the origin, and the plane of the elliptic being the X-Y plane.

	The OX line was taken pointing toward one of the brightest of the fixed stars that was in the plane of the elliptic. The entire solar system was thus marked off as had been the planets long ages before, into a system of three dimensional latitude and longitude. This was imperative, in order to assure the easy location of the point of first attack, and to permit the entire fleet to come into position there. A scattered guard was to remain free, to avoid any false attacks and a later attack from a point millions of miles distant. Earth and Venus were each equipped with gigantic ray projectors, mighty weapons that could destroy anything, even a body as large as the Moon, at a distance of ten thousand miles. Still, a ship might get through, and with the death ray—what fearful toll might be exacted from a vast city such as Chicago—with its thirty millions! Or Karos, on Venus, with its fifteen and one half millions!

	The tension became greater and greater as with each passing day the populace of two worlds awaited the call from the far-flung guard. The main bulk of the fleet had been concentrated in the center of their great spherical shell of ships. They could only wait—and watch—and prepare! Hundreds of miles apart, yet near enough so that no ship except perhaps a one-man craft could pass them undetected; and behind them were ships with delicate apparatus that could detect any foreign body of any size whatever within a hundred thousand miles of them.

	The Solar System was prepared to repel boarders from the vast sea of space!

-

VI

	Taj Lamor gazed down at the tremendous field below him. In it lay close packed a great mass of ships, a concourse of Titans of Space, dreadnoughts that were soon to set out to win—not a nation, not even a world, but to conquer a solar system, and to win for their owners a vast new sun, a sun that would light them and heat them for long ages to come.

	Momentarily Taj Lamor's gaze followed the retreating figure of Tordos Gar, the Elder; a figure with stooped shoulders and bowed head. His quiet yet vibrant parting words still resounded in his ears:

	“Taj Lamor, remember what I tell you. If you win this awful war—you lose. As will our race. Only if you lose will you win.”

	With a frown Taj Lamor stared down at the vast metal hulls glistening softly in the dull light of far-off stars, the single brightly beaming star that was their goal, and the dim artificial lighting system. From the distance came to him the tapping and humming of the working machines below as they strove to put the finishing touches to the great ships.

	He raised his eyes toward the far-off horizon, where a great yellow star flamed brilliantly against the black velvet of space. He thought of that planet where the sky had been blue—an atmosphere of such intensity that it colored the sky!

	Thoughtfully he gazed at the flaming yellow point.

	He had much to consider now. They had met a new race, barbarians in some ways, yet they had not forgotten the lessons they had learned; they were not decadent. Between his eon-old people and their new home stood these strange beings, a race so young that its age could readily be counted in millennia, but withal a strong, intelligent form of life. And to a race that had not known war for so many untold ages, it was an unthinkable thing that they must kill other living, intelligent beings in order that they might live.

	They had no need of moving, Tordos Gar and many others had argued; they could stay where they were forever, and never find any need for leaving their planet. This was the voice of decadence, Taj Lamor told himself; and he had grown to hate that voice.

	There were other men, men who had gone to that other solar system, men who had seen vast oceans of sparkling water, showering from their ruffled surfaces the brilliant light of a great, hot sun. They had seen towering masses of mountains that reached high into the blue sky of a natural atmosphere, their mighty flanks clothed with green growth; natural plants in abundance.

	And best of all, they had fought and seen action, such as no member of their race had known in untold ages. They knew Adventure and Excitement, and they had learned things that no member of their ancient race had known for millennia. They had learned the meaning of advancement and change. They had a new ardor, a new strength, a new emotion to drive them, and those who would have held them back became enthusiasts themselves. Enthusiasm may be contagious, but the spirit of their decadence was rapidly failing before this new urge. Here was their last chance and they must take it; they would!

	They had lost many men in that battle on the strange world, but their race was intelligent; they learned quickly, the small ships had been very hard targets, while their big ships were too easy to strike. They must have small ships, yet they must have large ships for cargo, and for the high speed driving apparatus. The small ships were not able to accelerate to the terrific speed needed. Once their velocity had been brought up to the desired value, it was easy to maintain it with the infinitely small friction of space as the only retarding force; one atom per cubic inch was all they must meet. This would not hold them up, but the great amount of fuel and the power equipment needed to accelerate to the desired speed could not be packed into the small ship. Into the vast holds of the huge ships the smaller ones were packed, long shining rows of little metal projectiles. Tiny they were, but they could dart and twist and turn as swiftly as could the ships they had met on that other world—tiny ships that flashed about with incredible suddenness, a target that seemed impossible to hit. These ships would be a match for those flashing motes of the Yellow Sun. Now it might be that their great transport and battle ships could settle down to those worlds and arrange them for their own people!

	And they had discovered new weapons, too. One of their mightiest was a very old apparatus, one that had been forgotten for countless ages. A model of it was in existence in some forgotten museum on a deserted planet, and with it long forgotten tomes that told of its principles, and of its consequences. Invisibility was now at their command. It was an ancient weapon, but might be exceedingly effective!

	And one other. They had developed a new thing! They had not learned of it in books, it was their invention! They did not doubt that there were other machines like it in their museums, but the idea was original with them. It was a beam of electrical oscillatory waves, projected with tremendous energy, and it would be absorbed by any conductor. They could melt a ship with this!

	And thus that great field had been filled with Giants of Space! And in each of these thousand great warships there nestled three thousand tiny one-man ships.

	Here was a sight to inspire any race!

	Taj Lamor watched as the last of the working machines dragged its slow way out of the great ships. They were finished! The men were already in them, waiting to start, and now there was an enthusiasm and an activity that had not been before; now the men were anxious to get that long journey completed and to be there, in that other system!

	Taj Lamor entered his little special car and shot swiftly down to the giant cruisers. He stepped out of his little craft and walked over to the tube conveyor ready for the trip to the nose of the great vessel. Behind him attendants quickly moved his car to a locked cradle berth beside long rows of similar vehicles.

	A short while later those who were to remain on the dark planet saw the first of the monsters of space rise slowly from the ground and leap swiftly forward; then as methodically as though released by automatic machinery, the others leaped in swift pursuit, rushing across half a world to the tremendous space lock that would let them out into the void. In a long, swift column they rushed on. Then one at a time they passed out into the mighty sea of space. In space they quickly formed and set out.

	As though by magic, far to the left of their flight, there suddenly appeared a similar flight of giant ships, and then to the right, and above them, another seemed to leap out of nothingness as the ships of other planets came into sight. Quickly they formed a vast cone about their leader's ship, a protecting screen, yet a powerful offensive formation.

	Endlessly, it seemed, they sped on through the darkness. Then as the yellow star flamed brighter and brighter before them, they slowed their ships till the small fliers could safely be released into space.

	Like a swarm of insects flying about giant birds of space the little ships circled the mighty masses of the battle cruisers. So huge were they, that in the combined mass of the fleet there rested sufficient gravitational attraction to force the little fliers to form orbits about them. And so they sped on through the void, the vast conical fleet with its slowly circling belt of little ships. A fleet whose counterpart had never entered the Solar System.

	It was well beyond the orbit of Pluto that the first of the Solarian scouts detected the approaching invasion fleet. The tension that had gripped Earth and Venus and their guardian ships for so long a time suddenly snapped; and like a great machine set into sudden motion, or a huge boulder, balanced, given the last push that sends it spinning with destructive violence down a slope, the fleet went into action.

	It was merely a little scout, a ten-man cruiser, that sent in the message of attack, and then, upon receiving headquarters' permission, went into action. Some of the tacticians had wanted to try to get the entire fleet into battle range for a surprise attack in power; but others felt that this could not possibly succeed. Most important, they decided, was the opportunity of learning if the invaders had any new weapons.

	The Nigrans had no warning, for a ten-man cruiser was invisible to them, though the vast bulk of their own ships stood out plainly, lighted by a blazing sun. No need here to make the sun stand still while the battle was finished! There was no change out here in all time! The first intimation of attack that the Nigrans had was the sudden splitting and destruction of the leading ship. Then, before they could realize what was happening, thirty-five other destructive molecular motion beams were tearing through space to meet them! The little ten-man cruiser and its flight of speedsters was in action! Twenty-one great ships crumpled and burst noiselessly in the void, their gases belching out into space in a great shining halo of light as the sun's light struck it.

	Unable to see their tiny enemies, who now were striking as swiftly, as desperately as possible, knowing that death was practically certain, hoping only to destroy a more equal number of the giants, they played their beams of death about them, taking care to miss their own ships as much as possible.

	Another ship silently crumpled, and suddenly one cruiser right in the line of the flight was brought to a sudden halt as all its molecules were reversed. The ships behind it, unable to stop so suddenly, piled up on it in chaotic wreckage! A vast halo of shining gas spread out fifty thousand miles about, blinding further the other ships, the radiance about them making it impossible to see their tiny enemies.

	Now other of the Solarian ships were coming swiftly to the attack. Suddenly a combination of three of the ten-man cruisers stopped another of the great ships instantaneously. There was another soundless crash, and the giant mass of wreckage that heaped suddenly up glowed dully red from the energy of impact.

	But now the little ships of the invaders got into action. They had been delayed by the desperate attempts of the dreadnaughts to wipe out their enemies with the death rays, and they could not cover the great distances without some delay.

	When a battle spreads itself out through a ten-thousand mile cube of space—through a thousand billion cubic miles of space—it is impossible to cover it instantaneously with any machine.

	Already nearly a hundred and fifty of the giant liners had gone into making that colossal mass of junk in space. They must protect the remaining cruisers! And it was that flight of small ships that did protect them. Many of the Solarians went down to death under their rays. The death rays were exceedingly effective, but the heat rays were not able to get quite as long a range, and they were easily detected by the invisibility locators, which meant certain destruction, for a molecular motion ray would be there in moments, once they had been located.

	The main fleet of the Solar System was already on its way, and every moment drew closer to this running battle, for the great ships of the Nigrans had, although they were entering the system cautiously, been going at a very high speed, as interplanetary speeds are measured. The entire battle had been a running encounter between the two forces. The Solarian force, invisible because of its small size, was certainly getting the better of the encounter thus far, but now that the odds were changing, now that the small ships had come into the fray, engaging them at close range, they were not having so easy time of it.

	It would be many hours before the full strength of the Solarian fleet could be brought to bear on the enemy. They were not able to retire and await their arrival, for they must delay the Nigran fleet. If even one of those great ships should safely reach the two planets behind them—!

	But within a half hour of the original signal, the Rocket Squad had thrown itself into the battle with a fervor and abandon that has given that famous division a name that will last forever.

	The small fliers of the Nigrans were beginning to take an appalling toll in the thinning ranks of the Solarians. The coming of the Rocket Squad was welcome indeed! They were able to maneuver as swiftly as the enemy; the speedsters were harder to spot than the Solarian ten-man and thirty-man boats. The Solarian speedsters were even smaller than the comparable Nigran craft, and some of these did a tremendous amount of damage. The heat ray was quite ineffective against the ten-man ships, even when working at full capacity, when produced by the small generators of the Nigran one-man boats. The cruisers could absorb the heat and turn it into power faster than the enemy could supply it. Beams from the monster interstellar liners were another matter, of course.

	But the one-man speedsters had a truly deadly plan of attack against the liners. The plan was officially frowned upon because of the great risks the pilots must take. They directed their boats at one of the monster ships, all the power units on at full drive. As close to target as possible the man jumped from his ship, clothed, of course, in an altitude suit equipped with a radio transmitter and receiver.

	Death rays could not stop the speedsters, and with their momentum, the invaders could not make it less deadly with their heat beam, for, molten, it was still effective. A projectile weighing twenty-two tons, moving a hundred miles a second, can destroy anything man can lift off a planet! Their very speed made it impossible to dodge them, and usually they found their mark. As for the risk, if the Solarian forces were victorious, the pilots could be picked up later, provided too long a time had not elapsed!

	In the midst of the battle, the Solarians began to wonder why the Nigran fleet was decreasing so rapidly—certainly they had not caused all that damage! Then suddenly they found the answer. One of their ships—then another—and another fell victim to a pale red ray that showed up like a ghostly pillar of luminosity coming from nowhere and going nowhere! The answer? The invaders' ships were becoming invisible! The invisibility detectors were being overloaded now, and the hunt was hard, while the Nigrans were slipping past them and silently destroying Solarian ships! The molecular motion rays were quite effective on an invisible ship—once it had been found. They were destroying the Nigrans as rapidly as they were being destroyed, but they were letting some of them slip past! The luminous paint bombs and bullets were now called into play. All enemy ships were shot at with these missiles, and invisibility was forestalled.

	At long last the dark bulk of the main fleet approached, a scarcely visible cloud of tiny darting metal ships. The battle so far had been a preliminary engagement. The huge ships of the Nigrans were forced to stop their attack, and releasing the last of the fliers, to retire to a distance, protected by a screen of small ships, for they were helpless against the Solarian speedsters. Invisibility fell into disfavor, too, now that there were plenty of Solarian ships, for the Nigrans were more conspicuous when invisible than when visible. The radio detector could pick them out at once.

	The entire Nigran fleet was beginning to reveal the disorder and uncertainty that arose from desperation, for they were cornered in the most undesirable position possible. They were outside the Solarian fleet, and their ships were lighted by the glare of the sun. The defenders, on the other hand, were in such a position that the enemy could see only the “night” side of them—the shadowed side—and, as there was no air to diffuse the light, they were exceedingly hard to find. In the bargain, the radium paint was making life for the Nigrans a brief and flitting thing!

	The invaders began to pay an awful toll in this their first real engagement. They lacked the necessary power to cover the entire Solarian fleet with their death rays, and their heat weapons were of little help. The power of the small ships did not count for much—and the big liners could not use their weapons effectively for their small fliers must be between them and their adversary. Despite this, however, the Nigrans so greatly outnumbered the Earth-Venus forces that it looked as though a long and costly war lay ahead.

	At last the Solarian generals tried a ruse, a ruse they hoped would work on these beings; but they who never before had to plan a war in space, were not sure that their opponents had not had experience in the art. True, the Nigrans hadn't revealed any especially striking generalship—had, in fact, committed some inexcusable blunders—but they couldn't be sure. Though they didn't know it, the Solarians had the advantage of thousands of years of planetary warfare to rely on. This stood them in good stead now.

	The Nigrans were rallying rapidly. To their surprise, the forces of the Solarians were dwindling, and no matter how desperately this remnant fought, they could not hold back the entire force of the Nigran fliers. At last it appeared certain that the small ships could completely engage the Solarian fleet!

	Quickly the giant cruisers formed a great dense cone of attack, and at a given signal, the fliers cleared a hole for them through the great disc-shaped shield of the defenders. And with all their rays fanned out in a 100% overlap ahead of them, the Nigran fleet plunged through the disc of ships at close to four hundred miles per second. They broke through—were on their way to the unprotected planets!

	The Solarian ships closed the gap behind them, and eighteen of the giant ships burst into wreckage as powerful beams found them, but for the most part the remnant of the defending forces were far too busy with the fliers to attack the large ships. Now, as the monster engines of destruction raced on toward the planets still approximately two billion miles away, they knew that, far behind them, their fliers were engaging the Solarians. They had left their guard—but the guard was keeping the enemy occupied while they were free to drive in!

	Then from nowhere came the counterattack! Nearly five thousand thirty-man ships of Earth and Venus, invisible in the darkness of space, suddenly leaped into action as the dreadnoughts sped past. Their destroying rays played over the nigh-helpless giants, and the huge ships were crumbling into colossal derelicts. With the last of their guard stripped from them, they fell easy prey to the attackers. Faster than they could keep count they were losing their warships of space!

	The ruse had worked perfectly! Nearly all of the ten-man and one-man ships had been left behind them in the original disc, while all the thirty-man light cruisers, and a few hundred each of the ten-man and one-man crafts sped away to form a great ring twenty thousand miles farther back. The Nigran fleet had flown blindly into the ambush.

	There was only one thing left for them to do. They were defeated. They must return to their far-off black star and leave the Solarians in possession of their worlds. For all battle purposes their great force was nearly wiped out, only the fliers remained in force; and these could no longer be carried in the remnant of the great liners. Swiftly they fell back, passing again through the disc, losing thirty more vessels, then raced swiftly away from the fleet of their enemies.

	The Solarians, however, were not content. Their ships were forming in a giant hollow cylinder, and as the sphere of the Nigrans retreated, their beams playing behind them, the cylinder moved forward until it surrounded them, and they raced together toward the distant lightless sun. The Solar end of the cylinder swiftly closed, blocked by a group of huge ships which had taken no visible part in the battle. The Nigrans had stopped using their rays; and the Solarians followed in armed readiness, not molesting as long as they were not molested.

	Many days this strange flight lasted, till at last the great yellow sun, Sol, had faded in the distance to an unusually brilliant star. Then, suddenly visible out of the darkness, a strange black world loomed ahead, and the Nigran ships settled swiftly toward it. Through the airlocks the great liners settled to their planet. No action was taken so long as the Solarian ships were not menaced, but for eight long months the darting ships hung above the four englobed worlds of Nigra.

	Then at last the astronomers of Earth and Venus sent through the billions of miles of ether their message of safety. The guard could return home, for the sun they had been guarding would soon be too far from Earth or Venus to make any attack logical. Despite this, for years to come the fleet would guard the rim of the System, just to be sure; but it appeared that the suns had passed, never again to meet.

	A strange thing had happened during the passing of the stars. Pluto no longer circled Sol; it had been captured by Nigra! The great fleet returned to a changed Solar system. Sol was still at its center, but there were now ten planets, including two new ones that the sun had captured from Nigra in return for Pluto; and all the planets had shifted a bit in their orbits.

	What the ultimate effect on the planets will be, we cannot say as yet. The change thus far is certainly not very great, though a somewhat warmer climate exists now on Earth, and it is a bit cooler on Venus. The long-range difference, however, will be exceedingly interesting.

	The Solar System has just passed through an experience which is probably unique in all the history of the mighty nebula of which our sun is an infinitesimal part. The chances that one star, surrounded by a system of planets, should pass within a hundred billion miles of another star, similarly accompanied, was one in billions of billions. That both systems should have been inhabited by intelligent races—

-

	It is easy to understand why the scientists could not believe Arcot's theory of attack from another sun until they had actually seen those other worlds.

	In that war between two solar systems we learned much and lost much. Yet, in all probability we gained more than we lost, for those two new-old planets will mean tremendous things to us. Already scientists are at work in the vast museums and ancient laboratories that are on them, and every day new things are being discovered. We lost many men, but we saved our worlds, and we learned many invaluable secrets from the invaders. In addition, we have but scratched the surface of a science that is at least a thousand million years old!

-

EPILOGUE

	TAJ LAMOR LOOKED OUT across the void of space toward a fading point of yellow light. Far in the distance it glowed, and every second moved it many more miles farther from him. They had lost their struggle for life and a new sun, he had thought when he turned back, defeated, from that distant sun. But time had brought new hope.

	They had lost many men in that struggle, and their dwindling resources had been strained to the limit, but now there was hope, for a new spirit had been born in their race. They had fought, and lost, but they had gained a spirit of adventure that had been dormant for millions of years.

	Below him, in the great dim mass that was their city, he knew that many laboratories were in the full swing of active work. Knowledge and its application were being discovered and rediscovered. New uses were being found for old things, and their daily life was changing. It was again a race awake, rejuvenated by a change!

	As the great sea of yellow fire that was that strange sun had faded behind their fleeing ships, leaving their dead planets still circling a dead sun, he had thought their last chance was gone forever. But hope had reawakened, with the birth of new ideas, new ways of doing things.

	Tordos Gar had been right! They had lost—but in the losing, they had won!

	Taj Lamor shifted his gaze to a blazing point of light, where a titanic sea of flame was burning with a brilliance and power that, despite the greater distance, made the remote yellow sun seem pale and dim. The blue-white glow told of a monster star, a star far brighter than the one they had just left. It had become the brightest star in their heavens. On their ancient star charts it was listed as a red giant, named Tongsil-239-e, which meant it was of the fifth magnitude and very distant. But in the long ages that had passed since it was classified, it had become a mighty sun—a star in its prime.

	How were they to reach it? It was eight and one half light years away!

	Their search for the force that would swing a world from its orbit had at last been successful. The knowledge had come too late to aid them in their fight for the yellow sun, but they might yet use it—they might even tear their planets from their orbits, and drive them as free bodies across the void. It would take ages to make the trip—but long ages had already passed as their dark planet swung through the void. What difference would it make if they were or were not accompanied by a dead star?

	True, the star that was now their goal was a double star; their planets could not find orbits about it, but they might remedy that—they could tear one star free and hurl it into space, making the remaining sun suitable for their use.

	But they would escape this dead sun.

The End

Islands of Space
Arcot, Morey and Wade 02
(Ace Books revision - 1958)

PROLOGUE

	IN THE EARLY PART OF THE Twenty Second Century, Dr. Richard Arcot, hailed as "the greatest living physicist", and Robert Morey, his brilliant mathematical assistant, discovered the so-called "molecular motion drive", which utilized the random energy of heat to produce useful motion.

	John Fuller, designing engineer, helped the two men to build a ship which used the drive in order to have a weapon to seek out and capture the mysterious Air Pirate whose robberies were ruining Transcontinental Airways.

	The Pirate, Wade, was a brilliant but neurotic chemist who had discovered, among other things, the secret of invisibility. Cured of his instability by modern psychomedical techniques, he was hired by Arcot to help build an interplanetary vessel to go to Venus.

	The Venusians proved to be a humanoid race of people who used telepathy for communication. Although they were similar to Earthmen, their blue blood and double thumbs made them enough different to have caused distrust and racial friction, had not both planets been drawn together in a common bond of defense by the passing of the Black Star.

	The Black Star, Nigra, was a dead, burned-out sun surrounded by a planetary system very much like our own. But these people had been forced to use their science to produce enough heat and light to stay alive in the cold, black depths of interstellar space. There was nothing evil or menacing in their attack on the Solar System; they simply wanted a star that gave off light and heat. So they attacked, not realizing that they were attacking beings equal in intelligence to themselves.

	They were at another disadvantage, too. The Nigrans had spent long millennia fighting their environment and had had no time to fight among themselves, so they knew nothing of how to wage a war. The Earthmen and Venusians knew only too well, since they had a long history of war on each planet.

	Inevitably, the Nigrans were driven back to the Black Star.

	The war was over. And things became dull. And the taste of adventure still remained on the tongues of Arcot, Wade, and Morey.

-

I

	THREE MEN sat around a table which was littered with graphs, sketches of mathematical functions, and books of tensor formulae. Beside the table stood a Munson-Bradley integraph calculator which one of the men was using to check some of the equations he had already derived. The results they were getting seemed to indicate something well above and beyond what they had expected.

	And anything that surprised the team of Arcot, Wade, and Morey was surprising indeed.

	The intercom buzzed, interrupting their work.

	Dr. Richard Arcot reached over and lifted the switch. "Arcot speaking."

	The face that flashed on the screen was businesslike and determined. "Dr. Arcot, Mr. Fuller is here. My orders are to check with you on all visitors."

	Arcot nodded. "Send him up. But from now on, I'm not in to anyone but my father or the Interplanetary Chairman or the elder Mr. Morey. If they come, don't bother to call, just send 'em up. I will not receive calls for the next ten hours. Got it?"

	"You won't be bothered, Dr. Arcot."

	Arcot cut the circuit and the image collapsed.

	Less than two minutes later, a light flashed above the door. Arcot touched the release, and the door slid aside. He looked at the man entering and said, with mock coldness:

	"If it isn't the late John Fuller. What did you do—take a plane? It took you an hour to get here from Chicago."

	Fuller shook his head sadly. "Most of the time was spent in getting past your guards. Getting to the seventy-fourth floor of the Transcontinental Airways Building is harder than stealing the Taj Mahal." Trying to suppress a grin, Fuller bowed low. "Besides, I think it would do your royal highness good to be kept waiting for a while. You're paid a couple of million a year to putter around in a lab while honest people work for a living. Then, if you happen to stub your toe over some useful gadget, they increase your pay. They call you scientists and spend the resources of two worlds to get you anything you want—and apologize if they don't get it within twenty-four hours.

	"No doubt about it; it will do your majesties good to wait."

	With a superior smile, he seated himself at the table and shuffled calmly through the sheets of equations before him.

	Arcot and Wade were laughing, but not Robert Morey. With a sorrowful expression, he walked to the window and looked out at the hundreds of slim, graceful aircars that floated above the city.

	"My friends," said Morey, almost tearfully, "I give you the great Dr. Arcot. These countless machines we see have come from one idea of his. Just an idea, mind you! And who worked it into mathematical form and made it calculable, and therefore useful? I did!

	"And who worked out the math for the interplanetary ships? I did! Without me they would never have been built!" He turned dramatically, as though he were playing King Lear. "And what do I get for it?" He pointed an accusing finger at Arcot. "What do I get? He is called 'Earth's most brilliant physicist', and I, who did all the hard work, am referred to as 'his mathematical assistant'." He shook his head solemnly. "It's a hard world."

	At the table, Wade frowned, then looked at the ceiling. "If you'd make your quotations more accurate, they'd be more trustworthy. The news said that Arcot was the 'System's most brilliant physicist', and that you were the 'brilliant mathematical assistant who showed great genius in developing the mathematics of Dr. Arcot's new theory'." Having delivered his speech, Wade began stoking his pipe.

	Fuller tapped his fingers on the table. "Come on, you clowns, knock it off and tell me why you called a hard-working man away from his drafting table to come up to this play room of yours. What have you got up your sleeve this time?"

	"Oh, that's too bad," said Arcot, leaning back comfortably in his chair. "We're sorry you're so busy. We were thinking of going out to see what Antares, Betelguese, or Polaris looked like at close range. And, if we don't get too bored, we might run over to the giant model nebula in Andromeda, or one of the others. Tough about your being busy; you might have helped us by designing the ship and earned your board and passage. Tough." Arcot looked at Fuller sadly.

	Fuller's eyes narrowed. He knew Arcot was kidding, but he also knew how far Arcot would go when he was kidding—and this sounded like he meant it. Fuller said: "Look, teacher, a man named Einstein said that the velocity of light was tops over two hundred years ago, and nobody's come up with any counter evidence yet. Has the Lord instituted a new speed law?"

	"Oh, no," said Wade, waving his pipe in a grand gesture of importance. "Arcot just decided he didn't like that law and made a new one himself."

	"Now wait a minute!" said Fuller. "The velocity of light is a property of space!"

	Arcot's bantering smile was gone. "Now you've got it, Fuller. The velocity of light, just as Einstein said, is a property of space. What happens if we change space?"

	Fuller blinked. "Change space? How?"

	Arcot pointed toward a glass of water sitting nearby. "Why do things look distorted through the water? Because the light rays are bent. Why are they bent? Because as each wave front moves from air to water, it slows down. The electromagnetic and gravitational fields between those atoms are strong enough to increase the curvature of the space between them. Now, what happens if we reverse that effect?"

	"Oh," said Fuller softly. "I get it. By changing the curvature of the space surrounding you, you could get any velocity you wanted. But what about acceleration? It would take years to reach those velocities at any acceleration a man could stand."

	Arcot shook his head. "Take a look at the glass of water again. What happens when the light comes out of the water? It speeds up again instantaneously. By changing the space around a spaceship, you instantaneously change the velocity of the ship to a comparable velocity in that space. And since every particle is accelerated at the same rate, you wouldn't feel it, any more than you'd feel the acceleration due to gravity in free fall."

	Fuller nodded slowly. Then, suddenly, a light gleamed in his eyes. "I suppose you've figured out where you're going to get the energy to power a ship like that?"

	"He has," said Morey. "Uncle Arcot isn't the type to forget a little detail like that."

	"Okay, give," said Fuller.

	Arcot grinned and lit up his own pipe, joining Wade in an attempt to fill the room with impenetrable fog.

	"All right," Arcot began, "we needed two things: a tremendous source of power and a way to store it.

	"For the first, ordinary atomic energy wouldn't do. It's not controllable enough and uranium isn't something we could carry by the ton. So I began working with high-density currents.

	"At the temperature of liquid helium, near absolute zero, lead becomes a nearly perfect conductor. Back in nineteen twenty, physicists had succeeded in making a current flow for four hours in a closed circuit. It was just a ring of lead, but the resistance was so low that the current kept on flowing. They even managed to get six hundred amperes through a piece of lead wire no bigger than a pencil lead.

	"I don't know why they didn't go on from there, but they didn't. Possibly it was because they didn't have the insulation necessary to keep down the corona effect; in a high-density current, the electrons tend to push each other sideways out of the wire.

	"At any rate, I tried it, using lux metal as an insulator around the wire."

	"Hold it!" Fuller interrupted. "What, may I ask, is lux metal?"

	"That was Wade's idea," Arcot grinned. "You remember those two substances we found in the Nigran ships during the war?"

	"Sure," said Fuller. "One was transparent and the other was a perfect reflector. You said they were made of light—photons so greatly condensed that they were held together by their gravitational fields."

	"Right. We called them light-metal. But Wade said that was too confusing. With a specific gravity of 103.5, light-metal was certainly not a light metal! So Wade coined a couple of words. Lux is the Latin for light, so he named the transparent one lux and the reflecting one relux."

	"It sounds peculiar," Fuller observed, "but so does every coined word when you first hear it. Go on with your story."

	Arcot relit his pipe and went on. "I put a current of ten thousand amps through a little piece of lead wire, and that gave me a current density of 1010 amps per square inch.

	"Then I started jacking up the voltage, and modified the thing with a double-polarity field somewhat similar to the molecular motion field except that it works on a sub-nucleonic level. As a result, about half of the lead fed into the chamber became contraterrene lead! The atoms just turned themselves inside out, so to speak, giving us an atom with positrons circling a negatively charged nucleus. It even gave the neutrons a reverse spin, converting them into anti-neutrons.

	"Result: total annihilation of matter! When the contraterrene lead atoms met the terrene lead atoms, mutual annihilation resulted, giving us pure energy.

	"Some of this power can be bled off to power the mechanism itself; the rest is useful energy. We've got all the power we need—power, literally by the ton."

	Fuller said nothing; he just looked dazed. He was well beginning to believe that these three men could do the impossible and do it to order.

	"The second thing," Arcot continued, "was, as I said, a way to store the energy so that it could be released as rapidly or as slowly as we needed it.

	"That was Morey's baby. He figured it would be possible to use the space-strain apparatus to store energy. It's an old method; induction coils, condensers, and even gravity itself are storing energy by straining space. But with Morey's apparatus we could store a lot more.

	"A torus-shaped induction coil encloses all its magnetic field within it; the torus, or 'doughnut' coil, has a perfectly enclosed magnetic field. We built an enclosed coil, using Morey's principle, and expected to store a few watts of power in it to see how long we could hold it.

	"Unfortunately, we made the mistake of connecting it to the city power lines, and it cost us a hundred and fifty dollars at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt hour. We blew fuses all over the place. After that, we used the relux plate generator.

	"At any rate, the gadget can store power and plenty of it, and it can put it out the same way."

	Arcot knocked the ashes out of his pipe and smiled at Fuller. "Those are the essentials of what we have to offer. We give you the job of figuring out the stresses and strains involved. We want a ship with a cruising radius of a thousand million light years."

	"Yes, sir! Right away, sir! Do you want a gross or only a dozen?" Fuller asked sarcastically. "You sure believe in big orders! And whence cometh the cold cash for this lovely dream of yours?"

	"That," said Morey darkly, "is where the trouble comes in. We have to convince Dad. As President of Transcontinental Airways, he's my boss, but the trouble is, he's also my father. When he hears that I want to go gallivanting off all over the Universe with you guys, he is very likely to turn thumbs down on the whole deal. Besides, Arcot's dad has a lot of influence around here, too, and I have a healthy hunch he won't like the idea, either."

	"I rather fear he won't," agreed Arcot gloomily.

	A silence hung over the room that felt almost as heavy as the pall of pipe smoke the air conditioners were trying frantically to disperse.

	The elder Mr. Morey had full control of their finances. A ship that would cost easily hundreds of millions of dollars was well beyond anything the four men could get by themselves. Their inventions were the property of Transcontinental, but even if they had not been, not one of the four men would think of selling them to another company.

	Finally, Wade said: "I think we'll stand a much better chance if we show them a big, spectacular exhibition; something really impressive. We'll point out all the advantages and uses of the apparatus. Then we'll show them complete plans for the ship. They might consent."

	"They might," replied Morey smiling. "It's worth a try, anyway. And let's get out of the city to do it. We can go up to my place in Vermont. We can use the lab up there for all we need. We've got everything worked out, so there's no need to stay here.

	"Besides, I've got a lake up there in which we can indulge in a little atavism to the fish stage of evolution."

	"Good enough," Arcot agreed, grinning broadly. "And we'll need that lake, too. Here in the city it's only eighty-five because the aircars are soaking up heat for their molecular drive, but out in the country it'll be in the nineties."

	"To the mountains, then! Let's pack up!"

-

II

	THE MANY BOOKS AND PAPERS they had collected were hastily put into the briefcases, and the four men took the elevator to the landing area on the roof.

	"We'll take my car," Morey said. "The rest of you can just leave yours here. They'll be safe for a few days."

	They all piled in as Morey slid into the driver's seat and turned on the power.

	They rose slowly, looking below them at the traffic of the great city. New York had long since abandoned her rivers as trade routes; they had been covered solidly by steel decks which were used as public landing fields and ground car routes. Around them loomed titanic structures of glistening colored tile. The sunlight reflected brilliantly from them, and the contrasting colors of the buildings seemed to blend together into a great, multicolored painting.

	The darting planes, the traffic of commerce down between the great buildings, and the pleasure cars above, combined to give a series of changing, darting shadows that wove a flickering pattern over the city. The long lines of ships coming in from Chicago, London, Buenos Aires and San Francisco, and the constant flow from across the Pole—from Russia, India, and China, were like mighty black serpents that wound their way into the city.

	Morey cut into a Northbound traffic level, moved into the high-speed lane, and eased in on the accelerator. He held to the traffic pattern for two hundred and fifty miles, until he was well past Boston, then he turned at the first break and fired the ship toward their goal in Vermont.

	Less than forty-five minutes since they had left New York, Morey was dropping the car toward the little mountain lake that offered them a place for seclusion. Gently, he let the ship glide smoothly into the shed where the first molecular motion ship had been built. Arcot jumped out, saying:

	"We're here—unload and get going. I think a swim and some sleep is in order before we start work on this ship. We can begin tomorrow." He looked approvingly at the clear blue water of the little lake.

	Wade climbed out and pushed Arcot to one side. "All right, out of the way, then, little one, and let a man get going." He headed for the house with the briefcases.

	Arcot was six feet two and weighed close to two hundred, but Wade was another two inches taller and weighed a good fifty pounds more. His arms and chest were built on the same general plan as those of a gorilla. He had good reason to call Arcot little.

	Morey, though still taller, was not as heavily formed, and weighed only a few pounds more than Arcot, while Fuller was a bit smaller than Arcot.

	Due to several factors, the size of the average human being had been steadily increasing for several centuries. Only Wade would have been considered a "big" man by the average person, for the average man was over six feet tall.

	They relaxed most of the afternoon, swimming and indulging in a few wrestling matches. At wrestling, Wade consistently proved himself not only built like a gorilla but muscled like one; but Arcot proved that skill was not without merit several times, for he had found that if he could make the match last more than two minutes, Wade's huge muscles would find an insufficient oxygen supply and tire quickly.

	That evening, after dinner, Morey engaged Wade in a fierce battle of chess, with Fuller as an interested spectator. Arcot, too, was watching, but he was saying nothing.

	After several minutes of uneventful play, Morey stopped suddenly and glared at the board. "Now why'd I make that move? I intended to move my queen over there to check your king on the red diagonal."

	"Yeah," replied Wade gloomily, "that's what I wanted you to do. I had a sure checkmate in three moves."

	Arcot smiled quietly.

	They continued play for several moves, then it was Wade who remarked that something seemed to be influencing his play.

	"I had intended to trade queens. I'm glad I didn't, though; I think this leaves me in a better position."

	"It sure does," agreed Morey. "I was due to clean up on the queen trade. You surprised me, too; you usually go in for trades. I'm afraid my position is hopeless now."

	It was. In the next ten moves, Wade spotted the weak points in every attack Morey made; the attack crumbled disastrously and white was forced to resign, his king in a hopeless position.

	Wade rubbed his chin. "You know, Morey, I seemed to know exactly why you made every move, and I saw every possibility involved."

	"Yeah—so I noticed," said Morey with a grin.

	"Come on, Morey, let's try a game," said Fuller, sliding into the chair Wade had vacated.

	Although ordinarily equally matched with Fuller, Morey again went down to disastrous defeat in an amazingly short time. It almost seemed as if Fuller could anticipate every move.

	"Brother, am I off form today," he said, rising from the table. "Come on, Arcot—let's see you try Wade."

	Arcot sat down, and although he had never played chess as extensively as the others, he proceeded to clean Wade out lock, stock, and barrel.

	"Now what's come over you?" asked Morey in astonishment as he saw a very complicated formation working out, a formation he knew was far better than Arcot's usual game. He had just worked it out and felt very proud of it.

	Arcot looked at him and smiled. "That's the answer, Morey!"

	Morey blinked. "What—what's the answer to what?"

	"Yes—I meant it—don't be so surprised—you've seen it done before. I have—no, not under him, but a more experienced teacher. I figured it would come in handy in our explorations."

	Morey's face grew more and more astonished as Arcot's strange monologue continued.

	Finally, Arcot turned to Wade, who was looking at him and Morey in wide-eyed wonder. And this time, it was Wade who began talking in a monologue.

	"You did?" he said in a surprised voice. "When?" There was a long pause, during which Arcot stared at Wade with such intensity that Fuller began to understand what was happening.

	"Well," said Wade, "if you've learned the trick so thoroughly, try it out. Let's see you project your thoughts! Go ahead!"

	Fuller, now understanding fully what was going on, burst out laughing. "He has been projecting his thoughts! He hasn't said a word to you!" Then he looked at Arcot. "As a matter of fact, you've said so little that I don't know how you pulled this telepathic stunt—though I'm quite convinced that you did."

	"I spent three months on Venus a while back," said Arcot, "studying with one of their foremost telepathists. Actually, most of that time was spent on theory; learning how to do it isn't a difficult proposition. It just takes practice.

	"The whole secret is that everyone has the power; it's a very ancient power in the human brain, and most of the lower animals possess it to a greater degree than do humans. When Man developed language, it gave his thoughts more concreteness and permitted a freer and more clearly conceived type of thinking. The result was that telepathy fell into disuse.

	"I'm going to show you how to do it because it will be invaluable if we meet a strange race. By projecting pictures and concepts, you can dispense with going to the trouble of learning the language.

	"After you learn the basics, all you'll need is practice, but watch yourself! Too much practice can give you the great-granddaddy of all headaches! Okay, now to begin with ..."

	Arcot spent the rest of the evening teaching them the Venerian system of telepathy.

-

	They all rose at nine. Arcot got up first, and the others found it expedient to follow his example shortly thereafter. He had brought a large Tesla coil into the bedroom from the lab and succeeded in inducing sufficient voltage in the bedsprings to make very effective, though harmless, sparks.

	"Come on, boys, hit the deck! Wade, as chief chemist, you are to synthesize a little coffee and heat-treat a few eggs for us. We have work ahead today! Rise and shine!" He didn't shut off the coil until he was assured that each of them had gotten a considerable distance from his bed.

	"Ouch!" yelled Morey. "Okay! Shut it off! I want to get my pants! We're all up! You win!"

	After breakfast, they all went into the room they used as a calculating room. Here they had two different types of integraph calculators and plenty of paper and equipment to do their own calculations and draw graphs.

	"To begin with," said Fuller, "let's decide what shape we want to use. As designer, I'd like to point out that a sphere is the strongest, a cube easiest to build, and a torpedo shape the most efficient aerodynamically. However, we intend to use it in space, not air.

	"And remember, we'll need it more as a home than as a ship during the greater part of the trip."

	"We might need an aerodynamically stable hull," Wade interjected. "It came in mighty handy on Venus. They're darned useful in emergencies. What do you think, Arcot?"

	"I favor the torpedo shape. Okay, now we've got a hull. How about some engines to run it? Let's get those, too. I'll name the general things first; facts and figures can come later.

	"First: We must have a powerful mass-energy converter. We could use the cavity radiator and use cosmic rays to warm it, and drive the individual power units that way, or we can have a main electrical power unit and warm them all electrically. Now, which one would be the better?"

	Morey frowned. "I think we'd be safer if we didn't depend on any one plant, but had each as separate as possible. I'm for the individual cavity radiators."

	"Question," interjected Fuller. "How do these cavity radiators work?"

	"They're built like a thermos bottle," Arcot explained. "The inner shell will be of rough relux, which will absorb the heat efficiently, while the outer one will be of polished relux to keep the radiation inside. Between the two we'll run a flow of helium at two tons per square inch pressure to carry the heat to the molecular motion apparatus. The neck of the bottle will contain the atomic generator."

	Fuller still looked puzzled. "See here; with this new space strain drive, why do we have to have the molecular drive at all?"

	"To move around near a heavy mass—in the presence of a strong gravitational field," Arcot said. "A gravitational field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or strain space in the opposite manner. The two would simply cancel each other out and we'd waste a lot of power going nowhere. As a matter of fact, the gravitational field of the sun is so intense that we'll have to go out beyond the orbit of Pluto before we can use the space strain drive effectively."

	"I catch," said Fuller. "Now to get back to the generators. I think the power units would be simpler if they were controlled from one electrical power source, and just as reliable. Anyway, the molecular motion power is controlled, of necessity, from a single generator, so if one is apt to go bad, the other is, too."

	"Very good reasoning," smiled Morey, "but I'm still strong for decentralization. I suggest a compromise. We can have the main power unit and the main verticals, which will be the largest, controlled by individual cosmic ray heaters, and the rest run by electric power units. They'd be just heating coils surrounded by the field."

	"A good idea," said Arcot. "I'm in favor of the compromise. Okay, Fuller? Okay. Now the next problem is weapons. I suggest we use a separate control panel and a separate generating panel for the power tubes we'll want in the molecular beam projectors."

	The molecular beam projector simply projected the field that caused molecular motion to take place as wanted. As weapons, they were terrifically deadly. If half a mountain is suddenly thrown into the air because all the random motion of its molecules becomes concentrated in one direction, it becomes a difficult projectile to fight. Or touch the bow of a ship with the beam; the bow drops to absolute zero and is driven back on the stern, with all the speed of its billions of molecules. The general effect is similar to that produced by two ships having a head-on collision at ten miles per second.

	Anything touched by the beam is broken by its own molecules, twisted by its own strength, and crushed by its own toughness. Nothing can resist it.

	"My idea," Arcot went on, "was that since the same power is used for both the beams and the drive, we'll have two separate power-tube banks to generate it. That way, if one breaks down, we can switch to the other. We can even use both at once on the drive, if necessary; the molecular motion machines will stand it if we make them of relux and anchor them with lux metal beams. The projectors would be able to handle the power, too, using Dad's new system.

	"That will give us more protection, and, at the same time, full power. Since we'll have several projectors, the power needed to operate the ship will be about equal to the power required to operate the projectors.

	"And I also suggest we mount some heat beam projectors."

	"Why?" objected Wade. "They're less effective than the molecular rays. The molecular beams are instantly irresistible, while the heat beams take time to heat up the target. Sure, they're unhealthy to deal with, but no more so than the molecular beam."

	"True enough," Arcot agreed, "but the heat beam is more spectacular, and we may find that a mere spectacular display will accomplish as much as actual destruction. Besides, the heat beams are more local in effect. If we want to kill an enemy and spare his captive, we want a beam that will be deadly where it hits, not for fifty yards around."

	"Hold it a second," said Fuller wearily. "Now it's heat beams. Don't you guys think you ought to explain a little bit to the poor goon who's designing this flying battlewagon? How did you get a heat beam?"

	Arcot grinned. "Simple. We use a small atomic cavity radiator at one end of which is a rough relux parabolic filter. Beyond that is a lux metal lens. The relux heats up tremendously, and since there is no polished relux to reflect it back, the heat is radiated out through the lux metal lens as a powerful heat beam."

	"Okay, fine," said Fuller. "But stop springing new gadgets on me, will you?"

	"I'll try not to," Arcot laughed. "Anyway, let's get on to the main power plant. Remember that our condenser coil is a gadget for storing energy in space; we are therefore obliged to supply it with energy to store. Just forming the drive field alone will require two times ten to the twenty-seventh ergs, or the energy of about two and a half tons of matter. That means a whale of a lot of lead wire will have to be fed into our conversion generators; it would take several hours to charge the coils. We'd better have two big chargers to do the job.

	"The controls we can figure out later. How about it? Any suggestions?"

	"Sounds okay to me," said Morey, and the others agreed.

	"Good enough. Now, as far as air and water go, we can use the standard spacecraft apparatus, Fuller, so you can figure that in any way you want to."

	"We'll need a lab, too," Wade put in. "And a machine shop with plenty of spare parts—everything we can possibly think of. Remember, we may want to build some things out in space."

	"Right. And I wonder—" Arcot looked thoughtful. "How about the invisibility apparatus? It may prove useful, and it won't cost much. Let's put that in, too."

	The apparatus he mentioned was simply a high-frequency oscillator tube of extreme power which caused vibrations approaching light frequency to be set up in the molecules of the ship. As a result, the ship became transparent, since light could easily pass through the vibrating molecules.

	There was only one difficulty; the ship was invisible, all right, but it became a radio sender and could easily be detected by a directional radio. However, if the secret were unknown, it was a very effective method of disappearing. And, since the frequency was so high, a special detector was required to pick it up.

	"Is that all you need?" asked Fuller.

	"Nope," said Arcot, leaning back in his chair. "Now comes the kicker. I suggest that we make the hull of foot-thick lux metal and line it on the inside with relux wherever we want it to be opaque. And we want relux shutters on the windows. Lux is too doggone transparent; if we came too close to a hot star, we'd be badly burned."

	Fuller looked almost goggle-eyed. "A—foot—of—lux! Good Lord, Arcot! This ship would weigh a quarter of a million tons! That stuff is dense!"

	"Sure," agreed Arcot, "but we'll need the protection. With a ship like that, you could run through a planetoid without hurting the hull. We'll make the relux inner wall about an inch thick, with a vacuum between them for protection in a warm atmosphere. And if some tremendous force did manage to crack the outer wall, we wouldn't be left without protection."

	"Okay, you're the boss," Fuller said resignedly. "It's going to have to be a big ship, though. I figure a length of about two hundred feet and a diameter of around thirty feet. The interior I'll furnish with aluminum; it'll be cheaper and lighter. How about an observatory?"

	"Put it in the rear of the ship," Wade suggested. "We'll mount one of the Nigran telectroscopes."

	"Control room in the bow, of course," Morey chipped in.

	"I've got you," Fuller said. "I'll work the thing out and give you a cost estimate and drawings."

	"Fine," said Arcot, standing up. "Meanwhile, the rest of us will work out our little exhibition to impress Mr. Morey and Dad. Come on, lads, let's get back to the lab."

-

III

	IT WAS TWO WEEKS before Dr. Robert Arcot and his old friend Arthur Morey, president of Transcontinental Airways, were invited to see what their sons had been working on.

	The demonstration was to take place in the radiation labs in the basements of the Transcontinental building. Arcot, Wade, Morey, and Fuller had brought the equipment in from the country place in Vermont and set it up in one of the heavily-lined, vault-like chambers that were used for radiation experiments.

	The two older men were seated before a huge eighty-inch three-dimensional television screen several floors above the level where the actual demonstration was going on.

	"There can't be anyone in the room, because of radiation burns," explained Arcot, junior. "We could have surrounded the thing with relux, but then you couldn't have seen what's going on.

	"I'm not going to explain anything beforehand; like magic, they'll be more astounding before the explanation is given."

	He touched a switch. The cameras began to operate, and the screen sprang into life.

	The screen showed a heavy table on which was mounted a small projector that looked something like a searchlight with several heavy cables running into it. In the path of the projector was a large lux metal crucible surrounded by a ring of relux, and a series of points of relux aimed into the crucible. These points and the ring were grounded. Inside the crucible was a small ingot of coronium, the strong, hard, Venerian metal which melted at twenty-five hundred degrees centigrade and boiled at better than four thousand. The crucible was entirely enclosed in a large lux metal case which was lined, on the side away from the projector, with roughened relux.

	Arcot moved a switch on the control panel. Far below them, a heavy relay slammed home, and suddenly a solid beam of brilliant bluish light shot out from the projector, a beam so brilliant that the entire screen was lit by the intense glow, and the spectators thought that they could almost feel the heat.

	It passed through the lux metal case and through the coronium bar, only to be cut off by the relux liner, which, since it was rough, absorbed over ninety-nine percent of the rays that struck it.

	The coronium bar glowed red, orange, yellow, and white in quick succession, then suddenly slumped into a molten mass in the bottom of the crucible.

	The crucible was filled now with a mass of molten metal that glowed intensely white and seethed furiously. The slowly rising vapors told of the rapid boiling, and their settling showed that their temperature was too high to permit them to remain hot—the heat radiated away too fast.

	For perhaps ten seconds this went on, then suddenly a new factor was added to the performance. There was a sudden crashing arc and a blaze of blue flame that swept in a cyclonic twisting motion inside the crucible. The blaze of the arc, the intense brilliance of the incandescent metal, and the weird light of the beam of radiation shifted in a fantastic play of colors. It made a strange and impressive scene.

	Suddenly the relay sounded again; the beam of radiance disappeared as quickly as it had come. In an instant, the blue violet glare of the relux plate had subsided to an angry red. The violent arcing had stopped, and the metal was cooling rapidly. A heavy purplish vapor in the crucible condensed on the walls into black, flakey crystals.

	The elder Arcot was watching the scene in the screen curiously. "I wonder—" he said slowly. "As a physicist, I should say it was impossible, but if it did happen, I should imagine these would be the results." He turned to look at Arcot junior. "Well, go on with your exhibition, son."

	"I want to know your ideas when we're through, though, Dad," said the younger man. "The next on the program is a little more interesting, perhaps. At least it demonstrates a more commercial aspect of the thing."

	The younger Morey was operating the controls of the handling robots. On the screen, a machine rolled in on caterpillar treads, picked up the lux case and its contents, and carried them off.

	A minute later, it reappeared with a large electromagnet and a relux plate, to which were attached a huge pair of silver busbars. The relux plate was set in a stand directly in front of the projector, and the big electromagnet was set up directly behind the relux plate. The magnet leads were connected, and a coil, in the form of two toruses intersecting at right angles enclosed in a form-fitting relux case, had been connected to the heavy terminals of the relux plate. An ammeter and a heavy coil of coronium wire were connected in series with the coil, and a kilovoltmeter was connected across the terminals of the relux plate.

	As soon as the connections were completed, the robot backed swiftly out of the room, and Arcot turned on the magnet and the ray projector. Instantly, there was a sharp deflection of the kilovoltmeter.

	"I haven't yet closed the switch leading into the coil," he explained, "so there's no current." The ammeter needle hadn't moved.

	Despite the fact that the voltmeter seemed to be shorted out by the relux plate, the needle pointed steadily at twenty-two. Arcot changed the current through the magnet, and the reading dropped to twenty.

	The rays had been on at very low power, the air only slightly ionized, but as Arcot turned a rheostat, the intensity increased, and the air in the path of the beam shone with an intense blue. The relux plate, subject now to eddy currents, since there was no other path for the energy to take, began to heat up rapidly.

	"I'm going to close the switch into the coil now," said Arcot. "Watch the meters."

	A relay snapped, and instantly the ammeter jumped to read 4500 amperes. The voltmeter gave a slight kick, then remained steady. The heavy coronium spring grew warm and began to glow dully, while the ammeter dropped slightly because of the increased resistance. The relux plate cooled slightly, and the voltmeter remained steady.

	"The coil you see is storing the energy that is flowing into it," Arcot explained. "Notice that the coronium resistor is increasing its resistance, but otherwise there is little increase in the back E.M.F. The energy is coming from the rays which strike the polarized relux plate to give the current."

	He paused a moment to make slight adjustments in the controls, then turned his attention back to the screen.

	The kilovoltmeter still read twenty.

	"Forty-five hundred amperes at twenty thousand volts," the elder Arcot said softly. "Where is it going?"

	"Take a look at the space within the right angle of the torus coils," said Arcot junior. "It's getting dark in there despite the powerful light shed by the ionized air."

	Indeed, the space within the twin coils was rapidly growing dark; it was darkening the image of the things behind it, oddly blurring their outlines. In a moment, the images were completely wiped out, and the region within the coils was filled with a strangely solid blackness.

	"According to the instruments," young Arcot said, "we have stored fifteen thousand kilowatt hours of energy in that coil and there seems to be no limit to how much power we can get into it. Just from the power it contains, that coil is worth about forty dollars right now, figured at a quarter of a cent per kilowatt hour.

	"I haven't been using anywhere near the power I can get out of this apparatus, either. Watch." He threw another switch which shorted around the coronium resistor and the ammeter, allowing the current to run into the coil directly from the plate.

	"I don't have a direct reading on this," he explained, "but an indirect reading from the magnetic field in that room shows a current of nearly a hundred million amperes!"

	The younger Morey had been watching a panel of meters on the other side of the screen. Suddenly, he shouted: "Cut it, Arcot! The conductors are setting up a secondary field in the plate and causing trouble."

	Instantly, Arcot's hand went to a switch. A relay slammed open, and the ray projector died.

	The power coil still held its field of enigmatic blackness.

	"Watch this," Arcot instructed. Under his expert manipulation, a small robot handler rolled into the room. It had a pair of pliers clutched in one claw. The spectators watched the screen in fascination as the robot drew back its arm and hurled the pliers at the black field with all its might. The pliers struck the blackness and rebounded as if they had hit a rubber wall. Arcot caused the little machine to pick up the pliers and repeat the process.

	Arcot grinned. "I've cut off the power to the coil. Unlike the ordinary induction coil, it isn't necessary to keep supplying power to the thing; it's a static condition.

	"You can see for yourself how much energy it holds. It's a handy little gadget, isn't it?" He shut off the rest of the instruments and the television screen, then turned to his father.

	"The demonstration is over. Got any theories, Dad?"

	The elder Dr. Arcot frowned in thought. "The only thing I can think of that would produce an effect like that is a stream of positrons—or contraterrene nuclei. That would explain not only the heating, but the electrical display.

	"As far as the coil goes, that's easy to understand. Any energy storage device stores energy in the strain in space; here you can actually see the strain in space." Then he smiled at his son. "I see my ex-laboratory assistant has come a long way. You've achieved controlled, usable atomic energy through total annihilation of mass. Right?"

	Arcot smiled back and nodded. "Right, Dad."

	"Son, I wonder if you'd give me your data sheets on that process. I'd like to work out some of the mathematical problems involved."

	"Sure, Dad. But right now—" Arcot turned toward the elder Mr. Morey. "—I'm more interested in the mathematics of finance. We have a proposition to put to you, Mr. Morey, and that proposition, simply stated, is—"

	Perhaps it was simply stated, but it took fully an hour for Arcot, Wade, and Morey to discuss the science of it with the two older men, and Fuller spent another hour over the carefully drawn plans for the ship.

	At last, the elder Mr. Morey settled back and looked vacantly at the ceiling. They were seated now in the conference room of Transcontinental Airways.

	"Well, boys," said Mr. Morey, "as usual, I'm in a position where I'm forced to yield. I might refuse financial backing, but you could sell any one of those gadgets for close to a billion dollars and finance the expedition independently, or you could, with your names, request the money publicly and back it that way." He paused a moment. "I am, however, thinking more in terms of your safety than in terms of money." There was another long pause, then he smiled at the four younger men.

	"I think, however, that we can trust you. Armed with cosmic and molecular rays, you should be able to put up a fair scrap anywhere. Also, I have never detected any signs of feeblemindedness in any of you; I don't think you'll get yourselves in a jam you can't get out of. I'll back you."

	"I hate to interrupt your exuberance," said the elder Dr. Arcot, "but I should like to know the name of this remarkable ship."

	"What?" asked Wade. "Name? Oh, it hasn't any."

	The elder Morey shook his head sadly. "That is indeed an important oversight. If a crew of men can overlook so fundamental a thing, I wonder if they are to be trusted."

	"Well, what are we going to call it, then?" asked Arcot.

	"Solarite II might do," suggested Morey. "It will still be from the Solar System."

	"I think we should be more broadminded," said Arcot. "We aren't going to stay in this system—not even in this galaxy. We might call it the Galaxian."

	"Did you say broadminded?" asked Wade. "Let's really be broad and call it the Universite or something like that. Or, better yet, call it Fluorine! That's everywhere in the universe and the most active element there is. This ship will go everywhere in the universe and be the most active thing that ever existed!"

	"A good name!" said the elder Morey. "That gets my vote!"

	Young Arcot looked thoughtful. "That's mighty good—I like the idea—but it lacks ring." He paused, then, looking up at the ceiling, repeated slowly:

-
 "Alone, alone, all, all alone;
 Alone on a wide, wide sea;
 Nor any saint took pity on
 My soul in agony."
-

	He rose and walked over to the window, looking out where the bright points of light that were the stars of space rode high in the deep violet of the moonlit sky.

	"The sea of all space—the sea of vastness that lies between the far-flung nebulae—the mighty void—alone on a sea, the vastness of which no man can imagine—alone—alone where no other man has been; alone, so far from all matter, from all mankind, that not even light, racing at billions of miles each day, could reach home in less than a million years." Arcot stopped and stood looking out of the window.

	Morey broke the silence. "The Ancient Mariner." He paused. "'Alone' will certainly be right. I think that name takes all the prizes."

	Fuller nodded slowly. "I certainly agree. The Ancient Mariner. It's kind of long, but it is the name."

	It was adopted unanimously.

-

IV

	THE ANCIENT MARINER was built in the big Transcontinental shops in Newark; the power they needed was not available in the smaller shops.

	Working twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, skilled men took two months to finish the hull according to Fuller's specifications. The huge walls of lux metal required great care in construction, for they could not be welded; they had to be formed in position. And they could only be polished under powerful magnets, where the dense magnetic field softened the lux metal enough to allow a diamond polisher to do the job.

	When the hull was finished, there came the laborious work of installing the power plant and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, the circuits to the relays—a thousand complex circuits.

	Much of it was standard: the molecular power tubes, the molecular ray projectors, the power tubes for the invisibility apparatus, and many other parts. All the relays were standard, the gyroscopic stabilizers were standard, and the electromagnetic braking equipment for the gyros was standard.

	But there would be long days of work ahead for Arcot, Wade, and Morey, for only they could install the special equipment; only they could put in the complicated wiring, for no one else on Earth understood the circuits they had to establish.

	During the weeks of waiting, Arcot and his friends worked on auxiliary devices to be used with the ship. They wanted to make some improvements on the old molecular ray pistols, and to develop atomic powered heat projectors for hand use. The primary power they stored in small space-strain coils in the handgrip of the pistol. Despite their small size, the coils were capable of storing power for thirty hours of continuous operation of the rays. The finished weapon was scarcely larger than a standard molecular ray pistol.

	Arcot pointed out that many of the planets they might visit would be larger than Earth, and they lacked any way of getting about readily under high gravity. Since something had to be done about that, Arcot did it. He demonstrated it to his friends one day in the shop yard.

	Morey and Wade had just been in to see Fuller about some details of the ship, and as they came out, Arcot called them over to his work bench. He was wearing a space suit without the helmet.

	The modern space suit is made of woven lux metal wires of extremely small diameter and airproofed with a rubberoid fluorocarbon plastic, and furnished with air and heating units. Made as it was, it offered protection nothing else could offer; it was almost a perfect insulator and was resistant to the attack of any chemical reagent. Not even elemental fluorine could corrode it. And the extreme strength of the lux metal fiber made it stronger, pound for pound, than steel or coronium.

	On Arcot's back was a pack of relux plated metal. It was connected by relux web belts to a broad belt that circled Arcot's waist. One thin cable ran down the right arm to a small relux tube about eight inches long by two inches in diameter.

	"Watch!" Arcot said, grinning.

	He reached to his belt and flipped a little switch.

	"So long! See you later!" He pointed his right arm toward the ceiling and sailed lightly into the air. He lowered the angle of his arm and moved smoothly across the huge hangar, floating toward the shining bulk of the rapidly forming Ancient Mariner. He circled the room, rising and sinking at will, then headed for the open door.

	"Come out and watch me where there's more room," he called.

	Out in the open, he darted high up into the air until he was a mere speck in the sky. Then he suddenly came dropping down and landed lightly before them, swaying on his feet and poised lightly on his toes.

	"Some jump," said Morey, in mock surprise.

	"Yeah," agreed Fuller. "Try again."

	"Or," Wade put in, "give me that weight annihilator and I'll beat you at your own game. What's the secret?"

	"That's a cute gadget. How much load does it carry?" asked Morey, more practically.

	"I can develop about ten tons as far as it goes, but the human body can't take more than five gravities, so we can only visit planets with less than that surface gravity. The principle is easy to see; I'll show you."

	He unhooked the cables and took the power pack from his back. "The main thing is the molecular power unit here, electrically heated and mounted on a small, massive gyroscope. That gyro is necessary, too. I tried leaving it out and almost took a nosedive. I had it coupled directly to the body and leaned forward a little bit when I was in the air. Without a gyro to keep the drive upright, I took a loop and started heading for the ground. I had to do some fancy gymnastics to keep from ending up six feet under—literally.

	"The power is all generated in the pack with a small power plate and several storage coils. I've also got it hooked to these holsters at my belt so we can charge the pistols while we carry them.

	"The control is this secondary power cable running down my arm to my hand. That gives you your direction, and the rheostat here at the belt changes the velocity.

	"I've only made this one so far, but I've ordered six others like it. I thought you guys might like one, too."

	"I think you guessed right!" said Morey, looking inside the power case. "Hey! Why all the extra room in the case?"

	"It's an unperfected invention as yet; we might want to put some more stuff in there for our own private use."

	Each of the men tried out the apparatus and found it quite satisfactory.

	Meanwhile, there was other work to be done.

	Wade had been given the job of gathering the necessary food and anything else in the way of supplies that he might think of. Arcot was collecting the necessary spare parts and apparatus. Morey was gathering a small library and equipping a chemistry laboratory. Fuller was to get together the necessary standard equipment for the ship—tables, seats, bunks, and other furniture.

	It took months of work, and it seemed it would never be finished, but finally, one clear, warm day in August, the ship was completely equipped and ready to go.

	On the last inspection, the elder Dr. Arcot and the elder Mr. Morey went with the four younger men. They stood beside the great intergalactic cruiser, looking up at its shining hull.

	"We came a bit later than we expected, son," said Dr. Arcot, "but we still expect a good show." He paused and frowned, "I understand you don't intend to take any trial trip. What's the idea?"

	Arcot had been afraid his father would be worried about that, so he framed his explanation carefully. "Dad, we figured this ship out to the last decimal place; it's the best we can make it. Remember, the molecular motion drive will get a trial first; we'll give it a trial trip when we leave the sun. If there's any trouble, naturally, we'll return. But the equipment is standard, so we're expecting no trouble.

	"The only part that would require a trial trip is the space-control apparatus, and there's no way to give that a trial trip. Remember, we have to get far enough out from the sun so that the gravitational field will be weak enough for the drive to overcome it. If we tried it this close, we'd just be trying to neutralize the sun's gravity. We'd be pouring out energy, wasting a great deal of it; but out away from the sun, we'll get most of the energy back.

	"On the other hand, when we do get out and get started we will go faster than light, and we'd be hopelessly beyond the range of the molecular motion drive in an instant. In other words, if the space-control drive doesn't work, we can't come back, and if it does work, there's no need to come back.

	"And if anything goes wrong, we're the only ones who could fix it, anyway. If anything goes wrong, I'll radio Earth. You ought to be able to hear from me in about a dozen years." He smiled suddenly. "Say! We might go out and get back here in time to hear ourselves talking!

	"But you can see why we felt that there was little reason for a trial trip. If it's a failure, we'll never be back to say so; if it isn't, we'll be able to continue."

	His father still looked worried, but he nodded in acquiescence. "Perfect logic, son, but I guess we may as well give up the discussion. Personally, I don't like it. Let's see this ship of yours."

	The great hull was two hundred feet long and thirty feet in diameter. The outer wall, one foot of solid lux metal, was separated from the inner, one-inch relux wall by a two inch gap which would be evacuated in space. The two walls were joined in many places by small lux metal cross-braces. The windows consisted of spaces in the relux wall, allowing the occupants to see through the transparent lux hull.

	From the outside, it was difficult to detect the exact outline of the ship, for the clear lux metal was practically invisible and the foot of it that surrounded the more visible part of the ship gave a curious optical illusion. The perfect reflecting ability of the relux made the inner hull difficult to see, too. It was more by absence than presence that one detected it; it blotted out things behind it.

	The great window of the pilot room disclosed the pilot seats and the great switchboard to one side. Each of the windows was equipped with a relux shield that slid into position at the touch of a switch, and these were already in place over the observatory window, so only the long, narrow portholes showed the lighted interior.

	For some minutes, the elder men stood looking at the graceful beauty of the ship.

	"Come on in—see the inside," suggested Fuller.

	They entered through the airlock close to the base of the ship. The heavy lux door was opened by automatic machinery from the inside, but the combination depended on the use of a molecular ray and the knowledge of the correct place, which made it impossible for anyone to open it unless they had the ray and knew where to use it.

	From the airlock, they went directly to the power room. Here they heard the soft purring of a large oscillator tube and the indistinguishable murmur of smoothly running AC generators powered by large contraterrene reactors.

	The elder Dr. Arcot glanced in surprise at the heavy-duty ammeter in a control panel.

	"Half a billion amperes! Good Lord! Where is all that power going?" He looked at his son.

	"Into the storage coils. It's going in at ten kilovolts, so that's a five billion kilowatt supply. It's been going for half an hour and has half an hour to run. It takes two tons of matter to charge the coil to capacity, and we're carrying twenty tons of fuel—enough for ten charges. We shouldn't need more than three tons if all goes well, but 'all' seldom does.

	"See that large black cylinder up there?" Arcot asked, pointing.

	Above them, lying along the roof of the power room, lay a great black cylinder nearly two feet in diameter and extending out through the wall in the rear. It was made integral with two giant lux metal beams that reached to the bow of the ship in a long, sweeping curve. From one of the power switchboards, two heavy cables ran up to the giant cylinder.

	"That's the main horizontal power unit. We can develop an acceleration of ten gravities either forward or backward. In the curve of the ship, on top, sides, and bottom, there are power units for motion in the other two directions.

	"Most of the rest of the stuff in this section is old hat to you, though. Come on into the next room."

	Arcot opened the heavy relux door, leading the way into the next room, which was twice the size of the power room. The center of the floor was occupied by a heavy pedestal of lux metal upon which was a huge, relux-encased, double torus storage coil. There was a large switchboard at the opposite end, while around the room, in ordered groups, stood the familiar double coils, each five feet in diameter. The space within them was already darkening.

	"Well," said Arcot, senior, "that's some battery of power coils, considering the amount of energy one can store. But what's the big one for?"

	"That's the main space control," the younger Arcot answered. "While our power is stored in the smaller ones, we can shoot it into this one, which, you will notice, is constructed slightly differently. Instead of holding the field within it, completely enclosed, the big one will affect all the space about it. We will then be enclosed in what might be called a hyperspace of our own making."

	"I see," said his father. "You go into hyperspace and move at any speed you please. But how will you see where you're going?"

	"We won't, as far as I know. I don't expect to see a thing while we're in that hyperspace. We'll simply aim the ship in the direction we want to go and then go into hyperspace. The only thing we have to avoid is stars; their gravitational fields would drain the energy out of the apparatus and we'd end up in the center of a white-hot star. Meteors and such, we don't have to worry about; their fields aren't strong enough to drain the coils, and since we won't be in normal space, we can't hit them."

	The elder Morey looked worried. "If you can't see your way back you'll get lost! And you can't radio back for help."

	"Worse than that!" said Arcot. "We couldn't receive a signal of any kind after we get more than three hundred light years away; there weren't any radios before that.

	"What we'll do is locate ourselves through the sun's light. We'll take photographs every so often and orient ourselves by them when we come back."

	"That sounds like an excellent method of stellar navigation," agreed Morey senior. "Let's see the rest of the ship." He turned and walked toward the farther door.

	The next room was the laboratory. On one side of the room was a complete physics lab and on the other was a well-stocked and well-equipped chemistry lab. They could perform many experiments here that no man had been able to perform due to lack of power. In this ship they had more generating facilities than all the power stations of Earth combined!

	Arcot opened the next door. "This next room is the physics and chemistry storeroom. Here we have a duplicate—in some cases, six or seven duplicates—of every piece of apparatus on board, and plenty of material to make more. Actually, we have enough equipment to make a new ship out of what we have here. It would be a good deal smaller, but it would work.

	"The greater part of our materials is stored in the curvature of the ship, where it will be easy to get at if necessary. All our water and food is there, and the emergency oxygen tanks.

	"Now let's take the stairway to the upper deck."

	The upper deck was the main living quarters. There were several small rooms on each side of the corridor down the center; at the extreme nose was the control room, and at the extreme stern was the observatory. The observatory was equipped with a small but exceedingly powerful telectroscope, developed from those the Nigrans had left on one of the deserted planets Sol had captured in return for the loss of Pluto to the Black Star. The arc commanded by the instrument was not great, but it was easy to turn the ship about, and most of their observations could be made without trouble.

	Each of the men had a room of his own; there was a small galley and a library equipped with all the books the four men could think of as being useful. The books and all other equipment were clamped in place to keep them from flying around loose when the ship accelerated.

	The control room at the nose was surrounded by a hemisphere of transparent lux metal which enabled them to see in every direction except directly behind, and even that blind spot could be covered by stationing a man in the observatory.

	There were heat projectors and molecular ray projectors, each operated from the control room in the nose. To complete the armament, there were more projectors in the stern, controlled from the observatory, and a set on either side controlled from the library and the galley.

	The ship was provisioned for two years—two years without stops. With the possibility of stopping on other planets, the four men could exist indefinitely in the ship.

	After the two older men had been shown all through the intergalactic vessel, the elder Arcot turned to his old friend. "Morey, it looks as if it was time for us to leave the Ancient Mariner to her pilots!"

	"I guess you're right. Well—I'll just say goodbye—but you all know there's a lot more I could say." Morey senior looked at them and started toward the airlock.

	"Goodbye, son," said the elder Arcot. "Goodbye, men. I'll be expecting you any time within two years. We can have no warning, I suppose; your ship will outrace the radio beam. Goodbye." Dr. Arcot joined his old friend and they went outside.

	The heavy lux metal door slid into place behind them, and the thick plastic cushions sealed the entrance to the airlock.

	The workmen and the other personnel around the ship cleared the area and stood well back from the great hull. The two older men waved to the men inside the ship.

	Suddenly the ship trembled, and rose toward the sky.

-

V

	ARCOT, AT THE CONTROLS of the Ancient Mariner, increased the acceleration as the ship speared up toward interplanetary space. Soon, the deep blue of the sky had given way to an intense violet, and this faded to the utter black of space as the ship drew away from the planet that was its home.

	"That lump of dust there is going to look mighty little when we get back," said Wade softly.

	"But," Arcot reminded him, "that little lump of dust is going to pull us across a distance that our imaginations can't conceive of. And we'll be darned happy to see that pale globe swinging in space when we get back—provided, of course, that we do get back."

	The ship was straining forward now under the pull of its molecular motion power units, accelerating at a steady rate, rapidly increasing the distance between the ship and Earth.

	The cosmic ray power generators were still charging the coils, preventing the use of the space strain drive. Indeed, it would be a good many hours before they would be far enough from the sun to throw the ship into hyperspace.

	In the meantime, Morey was methodically checking every control as Arcot called out the readings on the control panel. Everything was working to perfection. Their every calculation had checked out in practice so far. But the real test was yet to come.

	They were well beyond the orbit of Pluto when they decided they would be safe in using the space strain drive and throwing the ship into hyperspace.

	Morey was in the hyperspace control room, watching the instruments there. They were ready!

	"Hold on!" called Arcot. "Here we go—if at all!" He reached out to the control panel before him and touched the green switch that controlled the molecular motion machines. The big power tubes cut off, and their acceleration ceased. His fingers pushed a brilliant red switch—there was a dull, muffled thud as a huge relay snapped shut.

	Suddenly, a strange tingling feeling of power ran through them—space around them was suddenly black. The lights dimmed for an instant as the titanic current that flowed through the gigantic conductors set up a terrific magnetic field, reacting with the absorption plates. The power seemed to climb rapidly to a maximum—then, quite suddenly, it was gone.

	The ship was quiet. No one spoke. The meters, which had flashed over to their limits, had dropped back to zero once more, except those which indicated the power stored in the giant coil. The stars that had shone brilliantly around them in a myriad of colors were gone. The space around them glowed strangely, and there was a vast cloud of strange, violet or pale green stars before them. Directly ahead was one green star that glowed big and brilliant, then it faded rapidly and shrank to a tiny dot—a distant star. There was a strange tenseness about the men; they seemed held in an odd, compelled silence.

	Arcot reached forward again. "Cutting off power, Morey!" The red tumbler snapped back. Again space seemed to be charged with a vast surplus of energy that rushed in from all around, coursing through their bodies, producing a tingling feeling. Then space rocked in a gray cloud about them; the stars leaped out at them in blazing glory again.

	"Well, it worked once!" breathed Arcot with a sigh of relief. "Lord, I made some errors in calculation, though! I hope I didn't make any more! Morey—how was it? I only used one-sixteenth power."

	"Well, don't use any more, then," said Morey. "We sure traveled! The things worked perfectly. By the way, it's a good thing we had all the relays magnetically shielded; the magnetic field down here was so strong that my pocket kit tried to start running circles around it.

	"According to your magnetic drag meter, the conductors were carrying over fifty billion amperes. The small coils worked perfectly. They're charged again; the power went back into them from the big coil with only a five percent loss of power—about twenty thousand megawatts."

	"Hey, Arcot," Wade said. "I thought you said we wouldn't be able to see the stars."

	Arcot spread his hands. "I did say that, and all my apologies for it. But we're not seeing them by light. The stars all have projections—shadows—in this space because of their intense gravitational fields. There are probably slight fluctuations in the field, perhaps one every minute or so. Since we were approaching them at twenty thousand times the speed of light, the Doppler effect gives us what looks like violet light.

	"We saw the stars in front of us as violet points. The green ones were actually behind us, and the green light was tremendously reduced in frequency. It certainly can't be anything less than gamma rays and probably even of greater frequency.

	"Did you notice there were no stars off to the side? We weren't approaching them, so they didn't give either effect."

	"How did you know which was which?" asked Fuller skeptically.

	"Did you see that green star directly ahead of us?" Arcot asked. "The one that dwindled so rapidly? That could only have been the sun, since the sun was the only star close enough to show up as a disc. Since it was green and I knew it was behind us, I decided that all the green ones were behind us. It isn't proof, but it's a good indication."

	"You win, as usual," admitted Fuller.

	"Well, where are we?" asked Wade. "I think that's more important."

	"I haven't the least idea," confessed Arcot. "Let's see if we can find out. I've got the robot pilot on, so we can leave the ship to itself. Let's take a look at Old Sol from a distance that no man ever reached before!"

	They started for the observatory. Morey joined them and Arcot put the view of Sol and his family on the telectroscope screen. He increased the magnification to maximum, and the four men looked eagerly at the system. The sun glowed brilliantly, and the planets showed plainly.

	"Now, if we wanted to take the trouble, we could calculate when the planets were in that position and determine the distance we have come. However, I notice that Pluto is still in place, so that means we are seeing the Solar System as it was before the passing of the Black Star. We're at least two light years away."

	"More than that," said Morey. He pointed at the screen. "See here, how Mars is placed in relation to Venus and Earth? The planets were in that configuration seven years ago. We're seven light years from Earth."

	"Good enough!" Arcot grinned. "That means we're within two light years of Sirius, since we were headed in that direction. Let's turn the ship so we can take a look at it with the telectroscope."

	Since the power had been cut off, the ship was in free fall, and the men were weightless. Arcot didn't try to walk toward the control room; he simply pushed against the wall with his feet and made a long, slow dive for his destination.

	The others reached for the handgrips in the walls while Arcot swung the ship gently around so that its stern was pointed toward Sirius. Because of its brilliance and relative proximity to Sol, Sirius is the brightest star in the heavens, as seen from Earth. At this much lesser distance, it shone as a brilliant point of light that blazed wonderfully. They turned the telectroscope toward it, but there was little they could see that was not visible from the big observatory on the Moon.

	"I think we may as well go nearer," suggested Morey, "and see what we find on close range observation. Meanwhile, turn the ship back around and I'll take some pictures of the sun and its surrounding star field from this distance. Our only way of getting back is going to be this series of pictures, so I think we had best make it complete. For the first light century, we ought to take a picture every ten light years, and after that one each light century until we reach a point where we are only getting diminishing pictures of the local star cluster. After that, we can wait until we reach the edge of the Galaxy."

	"Sounds all right to me," agreed Arcot. "After all, you're the astronomer, I'm not. To tell you the truth, I'd have to search a while to find Old Sol again. I can't see just where he is. Of course, I could locate him by means of the gyroscope settings, but I'm afraid I wouldn't find him so easily visually."

	"Say! You sure are a fine one to pilot an expedition in space!" cried Wade in mock horror. "I think we ought to demote him for that! Imagine! He plans a trip of a thousand million light years, and then gets us out seven light years and says he doesn't know where he is! Doesn't even know where home is! I'm glad we have a cautious man like Morey along." He shook his head sadly.

	They took a series of six plates of the sun, using different magnifications.

	"These plates will help prove our story, too," said Morey as he looked at the finished plates. "We might have gone only a little way into space, up from the plane of the ecliptic and taken plates through a wide angle camera. But we'd have had to go at least seven years into the past to get a picture like this."

	The new self-developing short-exposure plates, while not in perfect color balance, were more desirable for this work, since they took less time on exposure.

	Morey and the others joined Arcot in the control room and strapped themselves into the cushioned seats. Since the space strain mechanism had proved itself in the first test, they felt they needed no more observations than they could make from the control room meters.

	Arcot gazed out at the spot that was their immediate goal and said slowly: "How much bigger than Sol is that star, Morey?"

	"It all depends on how you measure size," Morey replied. "It is two and a half times as heavy, has four times the volume, and radiates twenty-five times as much light. In other words, one hundred million tons of matter disappear each second in that star.

	"That's for Sirius A, of course. Sirius B, its companion, is a different matter; it's a white dwarf. It has only one one-hundred-twenty-five-thousandths the volume of Sirius A, but it weighs one third as much. It radiates more per square inch than our sun, but, due to its tiny size, it is very faint. That star, though almost as massive as the sun, is only about the size of Earth."

	"You sure have those statistics down pat!" said Fuller, laughing. "But I must say they're interesting. What's that star made of, anyway? Solid lux metal?"

	"Hardly!" Morey replied. "Lux metal has a density of around 103, while this star has a density so high that one cubic inch of its matter would weigh a ton on Earth."

	"Wow!" Wade ejaculated. "I'd hate to drop a baseball on my toe on that star!"

	"It wouldn't hurt you," Arcot said, smiling. "If you could lift the darned thing, you ought to be tough enough to stand dropping it on your toe. Remember, it would weigh about two hundred tons! Think you could handle it?"

	"At any rate, here we go. When we get there, you can get out and try it."

	Again came the shock of the start. The heavens seemed to reel about them; the bright spot of Sirius was a brilliant violet point that swelled like an expanding balloon, spreading out until it filled a large angle.

	Then again the heavens reeled, and they were still. The control room was filled with a dazzling splendor of brilliant blue-white light, and an intense heat beat in upon them.

	"Brother! Feel that heat," said Arcot in awe. "We'd better watch ourselves; that thing is giving off plenty of ultraviolet. We could end up with third-degree sunburns if we're not careful." Suddenly he stopped and looked around in surprise. "Hey! Morey! I thought you said this was a double star! Look over there! That's no white dwarf—it's a planet!"

	"Ridiculous!" snapped Morey. "It's impossible for a planet to be in equilibrium about a double star! But—" He paused, bewildered. "But it is a planet! But—but it can't be! We've made too many measurements on this star to make it possible!"

	"I don't give a hang whether it can or not," Wade said coolly, "the fact remains that it is. Looks as if that shoots a whole flock of holes in that bedtime story you were telling us about a superdense star."

	"I make a motion we look more closely first," said Fuller, quite logically.

	But at first the telectroscope only served to confuse them more. It was most certainly a planet, and they had a strange, vague feeling of having seen it before.

	Arcot mentioned this, and Wade launched into a long, pedantic discussion of how the left and right hemispheres of the brain get out of step at times, causing a sensation of having seen a thing before when it was impossible to have seen it previously.

	Arcot gave Wade a long, withering stare and then pushed himself into the library without saying a word. A moment later, he was back with a large volume entitled: "The Astronomy of the Nigran Invasion," by D. K. Harkness. He opened the volume to a full-page photograph of the third planet of the Black Star as taken from a space cruiser circling the planet. Silently, he pointed to it and to the image swimming on the screen of the telectroscope.

	"Good Lord!" said Wade in astonished surprise. "It's impossible! We came here faster than light, and that planet got here first!"

	"As you so brilliantly remarked a moment ago," Arcot pointed out, "I don't give a hang whether it can or not—it is. How they did it, I don't know, but it does clear up a number of things. According to the records we found, the ancient Nigrans had a force ray that could move planets from their orbits. I wonder if it couldn't be used to break up a double star? Also, we know their scientists were looking for a method of moving faster than light; if we can do it, so could they. They just moved their whole system of planets over here after getting rid of the upsetting influence of the white dwarf."

	"Perfect!" exclaimed Morey enthusiastically. "It explains everything."

	"Except that we saw that companion star when we stopped back there, half an hour ago," said Fuller.

	"Not half an hour ago," Arcot contradicted. "Two years ago. We saw the light that left the companion before it was moved. It's rather like traveling in time."

	"If that's so," asked Fuller, suddenly worried, "what is our time in relation to Earth?"

	"If we moved by the space-strain drive at all times," Arcot explained, "we would return at exactly the same time we left. Time is passing normally on Earth as it is with us right now, but whenever we use the space-strain, we move instantaneously from one point to another as far as Earth and the rest of the universe is concerned. It seems to take time to us because we are within the influence of the field.

	"Suppose we were to take a trip that required a week. In other words, three days traveling in space-strain, a day to look at the destination, and three more days coming back. When we returned to Earth, they would insist we had only been gone one day, the time we spent out of the drive. See?"

	"I catch," said Fuller. "By the way, shouldn't we take some photographs of this system? Otherwise, Earth won't get the news for several years yet."

	"Right," agreed Morey. "And we might as well look for the other planets of the Black Star, too."

	They made several plates, continuing their observations until all the planets had been located, even old Pluto, where crews of Nigran technicians were obviously at work, building giant structures of lux metal. The great cities of the Nigrans were beginning to bloom on the once bleak plains of the planet. The mighty blaze of Sirius had warmed Pluto, vaporizing its atmosphere and thawing its seas. The planet that the Black Star had stolen from the Solar System was warmer than it had been for two billion years.

	"Well, that's it," said Arcot when they had finished taking the necessary photographs. "We can prove we went faster than light easily, now. The astronomers can take up the work of classifying the planets and getting details of the orbits when we get back.

	"Since the Nigrans now have a sun of their own, there should be no reason for hostility between our race and theirs. Perhaps we can start commercial trade with them. Imagine! Commerce over quintillions of miles of space!"

	"And," interrupted Wade, "they can make the trip to this system in less time than it takes to get to Venus!"

	"Meanwhile," said Morey, "let's get on with our own exploration."

	They strapped themselves into the control seats once more and Arcot threw in the molecular drive to take them away from the sun toward which they had been falling.

	When the great, hot disc of Sirius had once more diminished to a tiny white pinhead of light, Arcot turned the ship until old Sol once more showed plainly on the cross-hairs of the aiming telescope in the rear of the vessel.

	"Hold on," Arcot cautioned, "here we go again!"

	Again he threw the little red tumbler that threw a flood of energy into the coils. The space about them seemed to shiver and grow dim.

	Arcot had thrown more power into the coils this time, so the stars ahead of them instead of appearing violet were almost invisible; they were radiating in the ultra-violet now. And the stars behind them, instead of appearing to be green, had subsided to a dull red glow.

	Arcot watched the dull red spark of Sirius become increasingly dimmer. Then, quite suddenly, a pale violet disc in front of them ballooned out of nowhere and slid off to one side.

	The spaceship reeled, perking the men around in the control seats. Heavy safety relays thudded dully; the instruments flickered under a suddenly rising surge of power—then they were calm again. Arcot had snapped over the power switch.

	"That," he said quietly, "is not so good."

	"Threw the gyroscopes, didn't it?" asked Morey, his voice equally as quiet.

	"It did—and I have no idea how far. We're off course and we don't know which direction we're headed."

-

VI

	"WHAT'S THE MATTER?" asked Fuller anxiously.

	Arcot pointed out the window at a red star that blazed in the distance. "We got too near the field of gravity of that young giant and he threw us for a loss. We drained out three-fourths of the energy from our coils and lost our bearings in the bargain. The attraction turned the gyroscopes and threw the ship out of line, so we no longer know where the sun is.

	"Well, come on, Morey; all we can do is start a search. At this distance, we'd best go by Sirius; it's brighter and nearer." He looked at the instrument panel. "I was using the next lowest power and I still couldn't avoid that monster. This ship is just a little too hot to handle."

	Their position was anything but pleasant. They must pick out from the vast star field behind them the one star that was home, not knowing exactly where it was. But they had one tremendous help—the photographs of the star field around Sol that they had taken at the last stop. All they had to do was search for an area that matched their photographs.

	They found the sun at last, after they had spotted Sirius, but they had had to rotate the ship through nearly twenty-five degrees to do it. After establishing their bearings, they took new photographs for their files.

	Meanwhile, Wade had been recharging the coils. When he was finished, he reported the fact to Arcot.

	"Fine," Arcot said. "And from now on, I'm going to use the least possible amount of power. It certainly isn't safe to use more."

	They started for the control room, much relieved. Arcot dived first, with Wade directly behind him. Wade decided suddenly to go into his room and stopped himself by grabbing a handhold. Morey, following close behind, bumped into him and was brought to rest, while Wade was pushed into his room.

	But Fuller, coming last, slammed into Morey, who moved forward with new velocity toward the control room, leaving Fuller hanging at rest in the middle of the corridor.

	"Hey, Morey!" he laughed. "Send me a skyhook! I'm caught!" Isolated as he was in the middle of the corridor, he couldn't push on anything and remained stranded.

	"Go to sleep!" advised Morey. "It's the most comfortable bed you'll find!"

	Wade looked out of his room just then. "Well, if it isn't old Weakmuscles Fuller! Weighs absolutely nothing and is still so weak he can't push himself around."

	"Come on, though, Morey—give me a hand—I got you off dead center." Fuller flailed his hand helplessly.

	"Use your brains, if you have any," said Morey, "and see what you can do. Come on, Wade—we're going."

	Since they were going to use the space control, they would remain in free fall, and Fuller would remain helplessly suspended in mid-air.

	The air of the ship suddenly seemed supercharged with energy as the space around them became gray; then the stars were all before them. The ship was moving forward again.

	"Well, old pals," said Fuller, "at least I have traffic blocked fairly well if I feel like it, so eventually you'd have to help me. However—" He floundered clumsily as he removed one of his foam-rubber space-boots, "—my brains tell me that action is equal and opposite to reaction!" And he threw the boot with all possible velocity toward Morey!

	The reaction of the motion brought him slowly but surely to a handhold in the wall.

	In the meantime, the flying boot caught Morey in the chest with a pronounced smack! as he struggled vainly to avoid it. Handicapped by the lack of friction, his arms were not quite powerful enough to move his mass as quickly as his legs might have done, for his inertia was as great as ever, so he didn't succeed in ducking.

	"Round one!" called Arcot, laughing. "Won by Kid Fuller on a TKO! It appears he has brains and knows how to use them!"

	"You win," laughed Morey. "I concede the battle!"

	Arcot had cut off the space-strain drive by the time Fuller reached the control room, and the men set about making more observations. They took additional photographs and turned on the drive again.

	Time passed monotonously after they had examined a few stars. There was little difference; each was but a scene of flaming matter. There was little interest in this work, and, as Fuller remarked, this was supposed to be a trip of exploration, not observation. They weren't astronomers; they were on a vacation. Why all the hard work? They couldn't do as good a job as an experienced astronomer, so they decided to limit their observations to those necessary to retrace their path to Earth.

	"But we want to investigate for planets to land on, don't we?" asked Morey.

	"Sure," agreed Fuller. "But do we have to hunt at random for them? Can't we look for stars like our own sun? Won't they be more apt to have planets like Sol's?"

	"It's an idea," replied Morey.

	"Well, why not try it then?" Fuller continued logically. "Let's pick out a G-0 type sun and head for it."

	They were now well out toward the edge of the Galaxy, some thirty thousand light years from home. Since they had originally headed out along the narrow diameter of the lens-shaped mass of stars that forms our Island Universe, they would reach the edge soon.

	"We won't have much chance of finding a G-0 this far out," Arcot pointed out. "We're about out of stars. We've left most of the Galaxy behind us."

	"Then let's go on to another of the galactic nebulae," said Morey, looking out into the almost unbroken night of intergalactic space. Only here and there could they see a star, separated from its nearest neighbor by thousands of light years of empty space.

	"You know," said Wade slowly, "I've been wondering about the progress along scientific lines that a race out here might make. I mean, suppose that one of those lonely stars had planets, and suppose intelligent life evolved on one of those planets. I think their progress would be much slower."

	"I see what you mean," Arcot said. "To us, of Earth, the stars are gigantic furnaces a few light years away. They're titanic tests tubes of nature, with automatic reading devices attached, hung in the sky for us to watch. We have learned more about space from the stars than all the experiments of the physicists of Earth ever secured for us. It was in the atoms of the suns that we first counted the rate of revolutions of the electrons about their nuclei."

	"Couldn't they have watched their own sun?" Fuller asked.

	"Sure, but what could they compare it with? They couldn't see a white dwarf from here. They couldn't measure the parallax to the nearest star, so they would have no idea of stellar distances. They wouldn't know how bright S Doradus was. Or how dim Van Maanen's star was."

	"Then," Fuller said speculatively, "they'd have to wait until one of their scientists invented the telectroscope."

	Arcot shook his head. "Without a knowledge of nuclear physics, the invention of the telectroscope is impossible. The lack of opportunity to watch the stars that might teach them something would delay their knowledge of atomic structure. They might learn a great deal about chemistry and Newtonian physics, and go quite a ways with math, but even there they would be handicapped. Morey, for instance, would never have developed the autointegral calculus, to say nothing of tensor and spinor calculus, which were developed two hundred years ago, without the knowledge of the problems of space to develop the need. I'm afraid such a race would be quite a bit behind us in science.

	"Suppose, on the other hand, we visit a race that's far ahead of us. We'd better not stay there long; think what they might do to us. They might decide our ship was too threatening and simply wipe us out. Or they might even be so far advanced that we would mean nothing to them at all—like ants or little squalling babies." Arcot laughed at the thought.

	"That isn't a very complimentary picture," objected Fuller. "With the wonderful advances we've made, there just isn't that much left to be able to say we're so little."

	"Fuller, I'm surprised at you!" Arcot said. "Today, we are only opening our eyes on the world of science. Our race has only a few thousand years behind it and hundreds of millions yet to come. How can any man of today, with his freshly-opened eyes of science, take in the mighty pyramid of knowledge that will be built up in those long, long years of the future? It's too gigantic to grasp; we can't imagine the things that the ever-expanding mind of man will discover."

	Arcot's voice slowed, and a far-off look came in his eyes.

	"You might say there can be no greater energy than that of matter annihilation. I doubt that. I have seen hints of something new—an energy so vast—so transcendently tremendous—that it frightens me. The energies of all the mighty suns of all the galaxies—of the whole cosmos—in the hand of man! The energy of a billion billion billion suns! And every sun pouring out its energy at the rate of quintillions of horsepower every instant!

	"But it's too great for man to have—I am going to forget it, lest man be destroyed by his own might."

	Arcot's halting speech told of his intense thought—of a dream of such awful energies as man had never before conceived. His eyes looked unseeing at the black velvet of space with its few, scattered stars.

	"But we're here to decide which way to go," he added with a sudden briskness as he straightened his shoulders. "Every now and then, I get a new idea and I—I sort of dream. That's when I'm most likely to see the solution. I think I know the solution now, but unless the need arises, I'm never going to use it. It's too dangerous a toy."

	There was silence for a moment, then Morey said, quietly:

	"I've got a course plotted for us. We'll leave this Galaxy at a steep angle—about forty-five degrees from the Galactic plane—to give us a good view of our own Galaxy. And we can head for one of the nebulae in that general area. What do you say?"

	"I say," remarked Fuller, "that some of the great void without seems to have leaked into my own poor self. It's been thirty thousand years since I am going to have a meal this morning—whatever it is I mean—and I want another." He looked meaningfully at Wade, the official cook of the expedition.

	Arcot suddenly burst out laughing. "So that's what I've been wanting!" It had been ten chronometer hours since they had eaten, but since they had been outracing light, they were now thirty thousand years in Earth's past.

	The weightlessness of free fall makes it difficult to recognize normally familiar sensations, and the feeling of hunger is one of them. There was little enough work to be done, so there was no great need for nourishment, but the ordinary sensation of hunger is not caused by lack of nourishment, but an empty stomach.

	Sleep was another problem. A restless body will not permit a tired brain to sleep, and though they had done a great deal of hard mental work, the lack of physical fatigue made sleep difficult. The usual "day" in space was forty hours, with thirty-hour waking periods and ten hours of sleep.

	"Let's eat, then," Arcot decided. "Afterwards, we'll take a few photographs and then throw this ship into high and really make time."

-

	Two hours later, they were again seated at the control board. Arcot reached out and threw the red switch. "I'm going to give her half power for ten seconds." The air about them seemed suddenly snapping with unprecedented power—then it was gone as the coil became fully charged.

	"Lucky we shielded those relays," Arcot muttered. The tremendous surge of current set up a magnetic field that turned knives and forks and, as Wade found to his intense disgust, stopped watches that were not magnetically shielded.

	Space was utterly black about them now; there wasn't the slightest hint of light. The ten seconds that Arcot had allowed dragged slowly. Then at last came the heavy crashing of the huge relays; the current flowed back into the storage coils, and space became normal again. They were alone in the blackness.

	Morey dove swiftly for the observatory. Before them, there was little to see; the dim glow of nebulae millions of light years away was scarcely visible to the naked eye, despite the clarity of space.

	Behind them, like a shining horizon, they saw the mass of the Galaxy for the first time as free observers.

	Morey began to make swift calculations of the distance they had come by measuring the apparent change in diameter of the Galaxy.

	Arcot floated into the room after him and watched as Morey made his observations and began to work swiftly with pencil and paper. "What do you make?" Arcot asked.

	"Mmmmm. Let's see." Morey worked a moment with his slide rule. "We made good time! Twenty-nine light years in ten seconds! You had it on at half power—the velocity goes up as the cube of the power—doubling the power, then, gives us eight times the velocity—Hmmmmmm." He readjusted the slide rule and slid the hairline over a bit. "We can make ten million light years in a little less than five days at full power.

	"But I suggest we make another stop in six hours. That will put us about five radii, or half a million light years from the Galaxy. We'll need to take some more photographs to help us retrace our steps to Earth."

	"All right, Morey," Arcot agreed. "It's up to you. Get your photos here and we'll go on. By the way, I think you ought to watch the instruments in the power room; this will be our first test at full power. We figured we'd make twenty light years per second, and it looks as if it's going to be closer to twenty-four."

	A few minutes later, Arcot seated himself at the control board and flipped on the intercom to the power room. "All ready, Morey? I just happened to think—it might be a good idea to pick out our galaxy now and start toward it."

	"Let's wait," cautioned Morey. "We can't make a very careful choice at this distance, anyway; we're beyond the enlarging power range of the telectroscope here. In another half million light years, we'll have a much better view, and that comparatively short distance won't take us much out of our way."

	"Wait a minute," said Fuller. "You say we're beyond the magnification range of the telectroscope. Then why would half a million light years out of ten million make that much difference?"

	"Because of the limit of amplification in the tubes," Arcot replied. "You can only have so many stages of amplification; after that, you're amplifying noise. The whole principle of the vacuum tube depends on electronic emission; if you get too much amplification, you can hear every single electron striking the plate of the first tube by the time the thing reaches the last amplifying stage! In other words, if your incoming signal is weaker than the minimum noise level on the first amplifying stage, no amount of amplification will give you anything but more noise.

	"The same is true of the telectroscope image. At this distance, the light signal from those galaxies is weaker than the noise level. We'd only get a flickering, blurred image. But if we go on another half million light years, the light signal from the nearer nebulae will be stronger than the base noise level, and full amplification will give us a good image on the screen."

	Fuller nodded. "Okay, then let's go that additional half million light years. I want to take a look at another galaxy."

	"Right." Arcot turned to the intercom. "Ready, Morey?"

	"Anytime you are."

	"Here goes!" said Arcot. He pushed over the little red control.

	At full power, the air filled with the strain of flowing energy and actually broke down in spots with the terrific electrical energy of the charge. There were little snapping sparks in the air, which, though harmless electrically, were hot enough to give slight burns, as Wade found to his sorrow.

	"Yike! Say, why didn't you tell us to bring lightning rods?" he asked indignantly as a small spark snapped its way over his hand.

	"Sorry," grinned Arcot, "but most people know enough to stay out of the way of those things. Seriously, though, I didn't think the electrostatic curvature would be so slow to adjust. You see, when we build up our light-rate distortion field, other curvatures are affected. We get some gravity, some magnetic, and some electrostatic field distortion, too. You can see what happens when they don't leak their energy back into the coil.

	"But we're busy with the instruments; leave the motorman alone!"

	Morey was calling loudly for tests. Although the ship seemed to be behaving perfectly, he wanted check tests to make sure the relays were not being burned, which would keep them from responding properly. By rerouting the current around each relay, Arcot checked them one by one.

	It was just as they had finished testing the last one that Fuller yelled.

	"Hey! Look!" He pointed out the broad viewport in the side of the ship.

	Far off to their left and far to their right, they saw two shining ships paralleling their course. They were shining, sleek ships, their long, longitudinal windows glowing with white light. They seemed to be moving at exactly the same speed, holding grimly to the course of the Ancient Mariner. They bracketed the ship like an official guard, despite the terrific velocity of the Earthmen's ship.

	Arcot stared in amazement, his face suddenly clouded in wonder. Morey, who had come up from the power room, stared in equal wonder.

	Quickly, Wade and Fuller slid into the ray control seats. Their long practice with the rays had made them dead shots, and they had been chosen long before as the ship's official ray operators.

	"Lord," muttered Morey as he looked at the ships, "where can they have come from?"

-

VII

	SILENTLY, THE FOUR MEN watched the two ships, waiting for any hostile movement. There was a long, tense moment, then something happened for which three of them were totally unprepared.

	Arcot burst into sudden laughter.

	"Don't—ho—hoh-ho—oh—don't shoot!" he cried, laughing so hard it was almost impossible to understand him. "Ohoh—space—curved!" he managed to gasp.

	For a moment more, Morey looked puzzled—then he was laughing as hard as Arcot. Helplessly, Wade and Fuller looked at them, then at each other. Then, suddenly, Wade caught the meaning of Arcot's remark and joined the other two in laughter.

	"All right," said Fuller, still mystified, "when you half-witted physicists recover, please let me in on the joke!" He knew it had something to do with the mysterious ships, so he looked closely at them in hopes that he would get the point, too. When he saw it, he blinked in amazement. "Hey! What is this? Those ships are exact duplicates of the Ancient Mariner!"

	"That—that's what I was laughing at," Arcot explained, wiping his eyes. "Four big, brave explorers, scared of their own shadows!"

	"The light from our own ship has come back to us, due to the intense curvature of the space which encloses us. In normal space, a light ray would take hundreds of millions of years to travel all the way around the Universe and return to its point of origin. Theoretically, it would be possible to photograph our own Galaxy as it was thousands of millennia ago by the light which left it then and has traveled all the way around the curvature of space.

	"But our space has such terrific curvature that it only takes a fraction of a second for light to make the trip. It has gone all the way around our little cosmos and come back again.

	"If we'd shot at it, we would have really done ourselves in! The ray beam would go around and hit us from behind!"

	"Say, that is a nice proposition!" laughed Fuller. "Then we'll be accompanied by those ghosts all the way? There goes the spirit 'nine fathoms deep' which moves the ship—the ghosts that work the sails. This will be a real Ancient Mariner trip!"

	It was like that famed voyage in another way, too. The men found little to do as they passed on at high speed through the vast realm of space. The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The six hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days. They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but the soundless continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around, aimlessly. Wade tried to sleep, but after lying strapped in his bunk for half an hour, he gave up in despair.

	Arcot saw that the strain of doing nothing was not going to be good for his little crew and decided to see what could be done about it.

	He went down to the laboratory and looked for inspiration. He found it.

	"Hey! Morey! Wade! Fuller! Come on down here! I've got an idea!" he called.

	They came to find him looking meditatively at the power pack from one of the flying suits he had designed. He had taken the lux metal case off and was looking at the neat apparatus that lay within.

	"These are equipped for use with the space suits, of course," Morey pointed out, "and that gives us protection against gases. But I wonder if we might install protection against mechanical injury—with intent to damage aforethought! In other words, why not equip these suits with a small invisibility apparatus? We have it on the ship, but we might need personal protection, too."

	"Great idea," said Wade, "provided you can find room in that case."

	"I think we can. We won't need to add anything but a few tuning devices, really, and they don't take a whale of a lot of power."

	Arcot pointed out the places where they could be put; also, he replaced some of the old induction coils with one of his new storage cells and got far higher efficiency from the tubes.

	But principally, it was something to do.

	Indeed, it was so thoroughly something to do that the six hours had almost elapsed before they realized it. In a very short time, they returned again to the control room and strapped themselves in.

	Arcot reached toward the little red switch that controlled the titanic energies of the huge coil below and pulled it back a quarter of the way.

	"There go the ghosts!" he said. The images had quickly disappeared, seemingly leaping away from them at terrific speed as the space in which the ship was enclosed opened out more and more and the curvature decreased. They were further away from themselves!

	Easing back a quarter at a time, to prevent sparks again flying about in the atmosphere of the ship, Arcot cut the power to zero, and the ship was standing still once more.

	They hurriedly dived to the observatory and looked eagerly out the window.

	Far, far behind them, floating in the marvelous, soft, utter blackness of space, was a shining disc made up of myriads of glowing points. And it didn't seem to be a huge thing at a great distance, but simply a small glowing object a few feet outside the window.

	So perfectly clear was their view through the lux metal wall and the black, empty space that all sense of distance was lost. It seemed more a miniature model of their universe—a tiny thing that floated close behind them, unwavering, shining with a faint light, a heatless illumination that made everything in the darkened observatory glow very faintly. It was the light of three hundred million suns seen at a distance of three million million million miles! And it seemed small because there was nothing with which to compare it.

	It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny floating disc of light.

	Morey floated over to the cameras and began to take pictures.

	"I'd like to take a color shot of that," he said a few minutes later, "but that would require a direct shot through the reflector telescope and a time exposure. And I can't do that; the ship is moving."

	"Not enough to make any difference," Arcot contradicted. "We're moving away from it in a straight line, and that thing is three quintillion miles away. We're not moving fast enough to cause any measurable contraction in a time exposure. As for having a steady platform, this ship weighs a quarter of a million tons and is held by gyroscopes. We won't shake it."

	While Morey took the time exposure, Arcot looked at the enlarged image in the telectroscope and tried to make angular measurements from the individual stars. This he found impossible. Although he could spot Betelgeuse and Antares because of their tremendous radiation, they were too close together for measurements; the angle subtended was too small.

	Finally, he decided to use the distance between Antares and S Doradus in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one of the two clouds of stars which float as satellites to the Galaxy itself.

	To double-check, he used the radius of the Galaxy as base to calculate the distance. The distances checked. The ship was five hundred thousand light years from home!

	After all the necessary observations were made, they swung the ship on its axis and looked ahead for a landing place.

	The nebulae ahead were still invisible to the naked eye except as points, but the telectroscope finally revealed one as decidedly nearer than the rest. It seemed to be a young Island Universe, for there was still a vast cloud of gas and dust from which stars were yet to be born in the central whorl—a single titanic gas cloud that stretched out through a million billion miles of space.

	"Shall we head for that?" asked Arcot at last, as Morey finished his observations.

	"I think it would be as good as any—there are more stars there than we can hope to visit."

	"Well, then, here we go!"

	Arcot dived for the control room, while Morey shut off the telectroscope and put the latest photographs in the file.

	Suddenly space was snapping about him—they were off again. Another shock of surging energy—another—the ship leaped forward at tremendous speed—still greater—then they were rushing at top speed, and beside them ran the ghost ships of the Ancient Mariner.

	Morey pushed himself into the control room just as Arcot, Wade, and Fuller were getting ready to start for the lab.

	"We're off for quite a while, now," he said. "Our goal is about five days away. I suggest we stop at the end of four days, make more accurate measurements, then plan a closer stop.

	"I think from now on we ought to sleep in relays, so that there will be three of us awake at all times. I'll turn in now for ten hours, and then someone else can sleep. Okay?"

	It was agreed, and in the meantime the three on duty went down to the lab to work.

	Arcot had finished the installation of the invisibility apparatus in his suit at the end of ten hours, much to his disappointment. He tested it, then cast about for something to do while Wade and Morey added the finishing touches to theirs.

	Morey came down, and when Wade had finished his, which took another quarter of an hour, he took the off duty shift.

	Arcot had gone to the library, and Morey was at work down below. Fuller had come up, looking for something to do, and had hit upon the excellent idea of fixing a meal.

	He had just begun his preparations in the kitchen when suddenly the Ancient Mariner gave a violent leap, and the men, not expecting any weight, suddenly fell in different ways with terrific force!

	Fuller fell half the length of the galley and was knocked out by the blow. Wade, asleep in bed, was awakened violently by the shock, and Morey, who had been strapped in his chair, was badly shaken.

	Everyone cried out simultaneously—and Arcot was on his way to the control room. The first shock was but a forerunner of the storm. Suddenly the ship was hurled violently about; the air was shot through with great burning sparks; the snapping hiss of electricity was everywhere, and every pointed metal object was throwing streamers of blue electric flame into the air! The ship rocked, heaved, and cavorted wildly, as though caught in the play of titanic forces!

	Scrambling wildly along the hand-holds, Arcot made his way towards the control room, which was now above, now below, and now to one side of him as the wildly variable acceleration shook the ship. Doggedly, he worked his way up, frequently getting severe burns from the flaming sparks.

	Below, in the power room, the relays were crashing in and out wildly.

	Then, suddenly, a new sound was added just as Arcot pulled himself into the control chair and strapped himself down. The radiation detector buzzed out its screaming warning!

	"COSMIC RAYS!" Arcot yelled. "HIGH CONCENTRATION!"

	He slapped at the switch which shot the heavy relux screens across every window in the ship.

	There was a sudden crash and a fuse went out below—a fuse made of a silver bar two feet thick! In an instant, the flames of the burning sparks flared up and died. The ship cavorted madly, shaking mightily in the titanic, cosmic forces that surrounded it—the forces that made the highest energy form in the universe!

	Arcot knew that nothing could be done with the power coil. It was drained; the circuit was broken. He shifted in the molecular drive, pushing the acceleration to four gravities, as high as the men could stand.

	And still the powerful ship was being tossed about, the plaything of inconceivable forces. They lived only because the forces did not try to turn the ship more violently, not because of the strength of the ship, for nothing could resist the awful power around them.

	As a guide, Arcot used the compass gyroscope, the only one not twisted far out of its original position; with it, he managed to steer a fairly straight course.

	Meanwhile, in the power room, Wade and Morey were working frantically to get the space-strain drive coil recharged. Despite the strength-sapping strain of working under four gravities of acceleration, they managed to get the auxiliary power unit into operation. In a few moments, they had it pouring its energies into the coil-bank so that they could charge up the central drive coil.

	Another silver bar fuse was inserted, and Wade checked the relays to make sure they were in working order.

	Fuller, who had regained consciousness, worked his way laboriously down to the power room carrying three space-suits. He had stopped in the lab to get the power belts, and the three men quickly donned them to help them overcome the four-gravity pull.

	Another half hour sped by as the bucking ship forced its way through the terrific field in space.

	Suddenly they felt a terrific jolt again—then the ship was moving more smoothly, and gradually it was calm. They were through!

	"Have we got power for the space-strain drive yet?" Arcot called through the intercom.

	"Enough," Morey cried. "Try it!"

	Arcot cut off the molecular motion drive, and threw in all the space-control power he had. The ship was suddenly supercharged with energy. It jarred suddenly—then was quiet. He allowed ten minutes to pass, then he cut off the drive and allowed the ship to go into free fall.

	Morey's voice came over the intercom. "Arcot, things are really busted up down here! We had to haywire half the drive together."

	"I'll be right down. Every instrument on the ship seems to be out of kilter!"

	It was a good thing they had plenty of spare parts; some of the smaller relays had burned out completely, and several of the power leads had fused under the load that had been forced through them.

	The space-strain drive had been leaking energy at a terrific rate; without further repair, it could not function much longer.

	In the power room, Arcot surveyed the damage. "Well, boys, we'd better get to work. We're stranded here until we get that drive repaired!"

-

VIII

	FORTY HOURS LATER, Arcot was running the ship smoothly at top speed once again. The four men had gone to bed after more than thirty hours of hard work. That, coupled with the exhaustion of working under four gravities, as they had while the ship was going through the storm, was enough to make them sleep soundly.

	Arcot had awakened before the others and had turned on the drive after resetting their course.

	After that was done, there was little to do, and time began to hang heavily on Arcot's hands. He decided to make a thorough inspection of the hull when the others awoke. The terrific strain might have opened cracks in the lux metal hull that would not be detectable from the inside because the inner wall was separated from the outer envelope.

	Accordingly, he got out the spacesuits, making sure the oxygen tanks were full and all was ready. Then he went into the library, got out some books, and set about some calculations he had in mind.

	When Morey woke, some hours later, he found Arcot still at work on his calculations.

	"Hey!" he said, swinging himself into the chair beside Arcot, "I thought you'd be on the lookout for more cosmic rays!"

	"Curious delusion, wasn't it?" asked Arcot blandly. "As a matter of fact, I've been busy doing some figuring. I think our chance of meeting another such region is about one in a million million million million. Considering those chances, I don't think we need to worry. I don't see how we ever met one—but the chances of hitting one are better than hitting two."

	Just then Fuller stuck his head in the door.

	"Oh," he said, "so you're at it already? Well, I wonder if one of you could tell me just what it was we hit? I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to think."

	"Don't take the chance now, then," grinned Morey. "You might strain your brain."

	"Please!" Fuller pleaded, wincing. "Not before breakfast. Just explain what that storm was."

	"We simply came to a region in space where cosmic rays are created," explained Arcot.

	Fuller frowned. "But there's nothing out here to generate cosmic rays!"

	Arcot nodded. "True. I think I know their real source, but I believe I'll merely say they are created here. I want to do more work on this. My idea for an energy source greater than any other in the universe has been confirmed.

	"At any rate, they are created in that space, a perfect vacuum, and the space there is distorted terrifically by the titanic forces at work. It is bent and twisted far out of the normal, even curvature, and it was that bumpy spot in space that threw us about so.

	"When we first entered, using the space-strain drive, the space around the ship, distorted as it was, conflicted with the region of the cosmic ray generation and the ship lost out. The curvature of space that the ship caused was sometimes reinforced and sometimes cancelled out by the twisted space around it, and the tremendous surges of current back and forth from the main power coil to the storage coils caused the electric discharges that kept burning through the air. I notice we all got a few burns from that. The field was caused by the terrific surges of current, and that magnetic field caused the walls of the ship to heat up due to the generation of electric current in the walls."

	Fuller looked around at the walls of the ship. "Well, the Ancient Mariner sure took a beating."

	"As a matter of fact, I was worried about that," said Arcot. "Strong as that hull is, it might easily have been strained in that field of terrific force. If it happened to hit two 'space waves' at once, it might have given it an acceleration in two different directions at once, which would strain the walls with a force amounting to thousands of tons. I laid out the suits up front, and I think we might reasonably get out there and take a look at the old boat. When Wade gets up—well, well—speak of the devil! My, doesn't he look energetic?"

	Wade's huge body was floating in through the library door. He was yawning sleepily and rubbing his eyes. It was evident he had not yet washed, and his growing beard, which was heavy and black on his cheeks, testified to his need for a shave. The others had shaved before coming into the library.

	"Wade," said Arcot, "we're going outside, and we have to have someone in here to operate the airlock. Suppose you get to work on the hirsute adornment; there's an atomic hydrogen cutting torch down in the lab you can use, if you wish. The rest of us are going outside." Then Arcot's voice became serious. "By the way, don't try any little jokes like starting off with a little acceleration. I don't think you would—you've got good sense—but I like to make certain. If you did, we'd be left behind, and you'd never find us in the vast immensity of intergalactic space."

	It wasn't a pleasant idea to contemplate. Each of the suits had a radio for communication with each other and with the ship, but they would only carry a few hundred miles. A mere step in space!

	Wade shook his head, grinning. "I have no desire to be left all by myself on this ship, thank you. You don't need to worry."

	A few minutes later, Arcot, Morey, and Fuller stepped out of the airlock and set to work, using power flashlights to examine the outer hull for any signs of possible strain.

	The flashlights, equipped as they were with storage coils for power, were actually powerful searchlights, but in the airlessness of space, the rays were absolutely invisible. They could only be seen when they hit the relux inner wall at such an angle that they were reflected directly into the observer's eyes. The lux metal wall, being transparent, was naturally invisible, and the smooth relux, reflecting one hundred percent of the incident light, did not become illuminated, for illumination is the result of the scattering of light.

	It was necessary to look closely and pass the beams over every square inch of the surface. However, a crack would be rough, and hence would scatter light and be even more readily visible than otherwise.

	To their great relief, after an hour and a half of careful inspection, none of them had found any signs of a crack, and they went back into the ship to resume the voyage.

	Again they hurled through space, the twin ghost ships following them closely. Hour after hour the ship went on. Now they had something else to do. They were at work calculating some problems that Arcot had suggested in connection with the velocities of motion that had been observed in the stars at the edge of the island universe they were approaching. Since these stars revolved about the mass of the entire galaxy, it was possible to calculate the mass of the entire universe by averaging the values from several stars. Their results were not exact, but they were reliable enough. They found the universe to have a mass of two hundred and fifty million suns, only a little less than the home Galaxy. It was an average-sized nebula.

	Still the hours dragged as they came gradually nearer their goal—gradually, despite their speed of twenty-four light years per second!

	At the end of the second day after their trouble with the cosmic ray field, they stopped for observation. They were now so near the Island Universe that the stars spread out in a huge disc ahead of them.

	"About three hundred thousand light years distant, I should guess," said Morey.

	"We know our velocity fairly accurately," said Wade. "Why can't we calculate the distance between two of these stars and then go on in?"

	"Good idea," agreed Arcot. "Take the angle, will you, Morey? I'll swing the ship."

	After taking their measurements, they advanced for one hour. Knowing this distance from experience, they were able to calculate the diameter of this galaxy. It turned out to be on the order of ninety thousand light years.

	They were now much closer; they seemed, indeed, on the very edge of the giant universe. The thousands of stars flamed bright below them, stretching across their horizon more and more—a galaxy the eyes of men had never before seen at such close range! This galaxy had not yet condensed entirely to stars, and in its heart there still remained the vast gas cloud that would eventually be stars and planets. The vast misty cloud was plainly visible, glowing with a milky light like some vast frosted light bulb.

	It was impossible to conceive the size of the thing; it looked only like some model, for they were still over a quarter of a million light years from it.

	Morey looked up from his calculations. "I think we should be there in about three hours. Suppose we go at full speed for about two hours and then change to low speed?"

	"You're the astronomical boss, Morey," said Arcot. "Let's go!"

	They swung the ship about once more and started again. As they drew nearer to this new universe, they began to feel more interest in the trip. Things were beginning to happen!

	The ship plunged ahead at full speed for two hours. They could see nothing at that velocity except the two ghost ships that were their ever-present companions. Then they stopped once more.

	About them, they saw great suns shining. One was so close they could see it as a disc with the naked eye. But they could not see clearly; the entire sky was misty and the stars that were not close were blotted out. The room seemed to grow warm.

	"Hey! Your calculations were off!" called Arcot. "We're getting out of here!"

	Suddenly the air snapped and they were traveling at low speed under the drive of the space-strain apparatus. The entire space about them was lit with a dim violet glow. In ten minutes, the glow was gone and Arcot cut the drive.

	They were out in ordinary dark space, with its star-studded blackness.

	"What was the matter with my calculations?" Morey wanted to know.

	"Oh, nothing much," Arcot said casually. "You were only about thirty thousand light years off. We landed right in the middle of the central gas cloud, and we were plowing through it at a relative velocity of around sixteen thousand miles per second! No wonder we got hot!

	"We're lucky we didn't come near any stars in the process; if we had, we could have had to recharge the coil."

	"It's a wonder we didn't burn up at that velocity," said Fuller.

	"The gas wasn't dense enough," Arcot explained. "That gas is a better vacuum than the best pump could give you on Earth; there are fewer molecules per cubic inch than there are in a radio tube.

	"But now that we're out of that, let's see if we can find a planet. No need to take photographs going in; if we want to find the star again, we can take photos as we leave. If we don't want to find it, we would just waste film.

	"I'll leave it to Morey to find the star we want."

	Morey set to work at once with the telescope; trying to find the nearest star of spectral type G-0, as had been agreed upon. He also wanted to find one of the same magnitude, or brilliance. At last, after investigating several such suns, he discovered one which seemed to fulfill all his wishes. The ship was turned, and they started toward the adventure they had really hoped to find.

	As they rushed through space, the distorted stars shining vividly before them, they saw the one which was their goal. A bright, slowly changing violet point on the cross-hairs of the aiming telescope.

	"How far is it?" asked Arcot.

	"About thirty light centuries," replied Morey, watching the star eagerly.

	They drove on in silence. Then, suddenly, Morey cried out: "Look! It's gone!"

	"What happened?" asked Arcot in surprise.

	Morey rubbed his chin in thought. "The star suddenly flared brightly for an instant, then disappeared. Evidently, it was a G-0 giant which had burned up most of the hydrogen that stars normally use for fuel. When that happens, a star begins to collapse, increasing in brilliance due to the heat generated by the gas falling toward the center of the star.

	"Then other nuclear reactions begin to take place, and, due to the increased transparency of the star, a supernova is produced. The star blows away most of its gaseous envelope, leaving only the superdense core. In other words, it leaves a white dwarf." He paused and looked at Arcot. "I wonder if that star did have any planets?"

	They all knew what he meant. What was the probable fate of beings whose sun had suddenly collapsed to a tiny, relatively cold point in the sky?

	Suddenly, there loomed before them the dim bulk of the star, a disc already, and Arcot snapped the ship over to the molecular motion drive at once. He knew they must be close. Before them was the angry disc of the flaming white star.

	Arcot swung the ship a bit to one side, running in close to the flaming star. It was not exceedingly hot, despite the high temperature and intense radiation, for the radiating surface was too small.

	They swung about the star in a parabolic orbit, for, at their velocity, the sun could not hold them in a planetary orbit.

	"Our velocity, relative to this star, is pretty high," Arcot announced. "I'm swinging in close so that I can use the star's attraction as a brake. At this distance, it will be about six gravities, and we can add to that a molecular drive braking of four gravities.

	"Suppose you look around and see if there are any planets. We can break free and head for another star if there aren't."

	Even at ten gravities of deceleration, it took several hours to reduce their speed to a point which would make it possible to head for any planet of the tiny sun.

	Morey went to the observatory and swept the sky with the telectroscope.

	It was difficult to find planets because the reflected light from the weak star was so dim, but he finally found one. He took angular readings on it and on the central sun. A little later, he took more readings. Because of the changing velocity of the ship, the readings were not too accurate, but his calculations showed it to be several hundred million miles out.

	They were decelerating rapidly, and soon their momentum had been reduced to less than four miles a second. When they reached the planet, Arcot threw the ship into an orbit around it and began to spiral down.

	Through the clear lux windows of the control room, the men looked down upon a bleak, frozen world.

-

IX

	BELOW THE SHIP lay the unfamiliar panorama of an unknown world that circled, frozen, around a dim, unknown sun, far out in space. Cold and bleak, the low, rolling hills below were black, bare rock, coated in spots with a white sheen of what appeared to be snow, though each of the men realized it must be frozen air. Here and there ran strange rivers of deep blue which poured into great lakes and seas of blue liquid. There were mighty mountains of deep blue crystal looming high, and in the hollows and cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionless seas of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world. It was a world that lay frozen under a dim, dead sun.

	They continued over the broad sweep of the level, crystalline plain as the bleak rock disappeared behind them. This world was about ten thousand miles in diameter, and its surface gravity about a quarter greater than that of Earth.

	On and on they swept, swinging over the planet at an altitude of less than a thousand feet, viewing the unutterably desolate scene of the cold, dead world.

	Then, ahead of them loomed a bleak, dark mass of rock again. They had crossed the frozen ocean and were coming to land again—a land no more solid than the sea.

	Everywhere lay the deep drifts of snow, and here and there, through valleys, ran the streams of bright blue.

	"Look!" cried Morey in sudden surprise. Far ahead and to their left loomed a strange formation of jutting vertical columns, covered with the white burden of snow. Arcot turned a powerful searchlight on it, and it stood out brightly against the vast snowfield. It was a dead, frozen city.

	As they looked at it, Arcot turned the ship and headed for it without a word.

	It was hard to realize the enormity of the catastrophe that had brought a cold, bleak death to the population of this world—death to an intelligent race.

	Arcot finally spoke. "I'll land the ship. I think it will be safe for us all to leave. Get out the suits and make sure all the tanks are charged and the heaters working. It will be colder here than in space. Out there, we were only cooled by radiation, but those streams are probably liquid nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, and there's a slight atmosphere of hydrogen, helium and neon cooled to about fifty degrees Absolute. We'll be cooled by conduction and convection."

	As the others got the suits ready, he lowered the ship gently to the snowy ground. It sank into nearly ten feet of snow. He turned on the powerful searchlight, and swept it around the ship. Under the warm beams, the frozen gasses evaporated, and in a few moments he had cleared the area around the ship.

	Morey and the others came back with their suits. Arcot donned his, and adjusted his weight to ten pounds with the molecular power unit.

	A short time later, they stepped out of the airlock onto the ice field of the frozen world. High above them glowed the dim, blue-white disc of the tiny sun, looking like little more than a bright star.

	Adjusting the controls on the suits, the four men lifted into the tenuous air and headed toward the city, moving easily about ten feet above the frozen wastes of the snow field.

	"The thing I don't understand," Morey said as they shot toward the city, "is why this planet is here at all. The intense radiation from the sun when it went supernova should have vaporized it!"

	Arcot pointed toward a tall, oddly-shaped antenna that rose from the highest building of the city. "There's your answer. That antenna is similar to those we found on the planets of the Black Star; it's a heat screen. They probably had such antennas all over the planet.

	"Unfortunately, the screen's efficiency goes up as the fourth power of the temperature. It could keep out the terrific heat of a supernova, but couldn't keep in the heat of the planet after the supernova had died. The planet was too cool to make the screen work efficiently!"

	At last they came to the outskirts of the dead city. The vertical walls of the buildings were free of snow, and they could see the blank, staring eyes of the windows, and within, the bleak, empty rooms. They swept on through the frozen streets until they came to one huge building in the center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and through the windows they could see that the room had been piled high with some sort of insulating material, evidently used as a last-ditch attempt to keep out the freezing cold.

	"Shall we break in?" asked Arcot.

	"We may as well," Morey's voice answered over the radio. "There may be some records we could take back to Earth and have deciphered. In a time like this, I imagine they would leave some records, hoping that some race might come and find them."

	They worked with molecular ray pistols for fifteen minutes tearing a way through. It was slow work because they had to use the heat ray pistols to supply the necessary energy for the molecular motion.

	When they finally broke through, they found they had entered on the second floor; the deep snow had buried the first. Before them stretched a long, richly decorated hall, painted with great colored murals.

	The paintings displayed a people dressed in a suit of some soft, white cloth, with blond hair that reached to their shoulders. They were shorter and more heavily built than Earthmen, perhaps, but there was a grace to them that denied the greater gravity of their planet. The murals portrayed a world of warm sunlight, green plants, and tall trees waving in a breeze—a breeze of air that now lay frozen on the stone floors of their buildings.

	Scene after scene they saw—then they came to a great hall. Here they saw hundreds of bodies; people wrapped in heavy cloth blankets. And over the floor of the room lay little crystals of green.

	Wade looked at the little crystals for a long time, and then at the people who lay there, perfectly preserved by the utter cold. They seemed only sleeping—men, women, and children, sleeping under a blanket of soft snow that evaporated and disappeared as the energy of the lights fell on it. There was one little group the men looked at before they left the room of death. There were three in it—a young man, a fair, blonde young woman who seemed scarcely more than a girl, and between them, a little child. They were sleeping, arms about each other, warm in the arms of Death, the kindly Reliever of Pain.

	Arcot turned and rose, flying swiftly down the long corridor toward the door.

	"That was not meant for us," he said. "Let's leave."

	The others followed.

	"But let's see what records they left," he went on. "It may be that they wanted us to know their tragic story. Let's see what sort of civilization they had."

	"Their chemistry was good, at least," said Wade. "Did you notice those green crystals? A quick, painless poison gas to relieve them of the struggle against the cold."

	They went down to the first floor level, where there was a single great court. There were no pillars, only a vast, smooth floor.

	"They had good architecture," said Morey. "No pillars under all the vast load of that building."

	"And the load is even greater under this gravity," remarked Arcot.

	In the center of the room was a great, golden bronze globe resting on a platform of marble. It must have been new when this world froze, for there was no sign of corrosion or oxidation. The men flew over to it and stood beside it, looking at the great sphere, nearly fifteen feet in diameter.

	"A globe of their world," said Fuller, looking at it with interest.

	"Yes," agreed Arcot, "and it was set up after they were sure the cold would come, from the looks of it. Let's take a look at it." He flew up to the top of it and viewed it from above. The whole globe was a carefully chiseled relief map, showing seas, mountains, and continents.

	"Arcot—come here a minute," called Morey. Arcot dropped down to where Morey was looking at the globe. On the edge of one of the continents was a small raised globe, and around the globe, a circle had been etched.

	"I think this is meant to represent this globe," Morey said. "I'm almost certain it represents this very spot. Now look over here." He pointed to a spot which, according to the scale of the globe, was about five thousand miles away. Projecting from the surface of the bronze globe was a little silver tower.

	"They want us to go there," continued Morey. "This was erected only shortly before the catastrophe; they must have put relics there that they want us to get. They must have guessed that eventually intelligent beings would cross space; I imagine they have other maps like this in every large city.

	"I think it's our duty to visit that cairn."

	"I quite agree," assented Arcot. "The chance of other men visiting this world is infinitely small."

	"Then let's leave this City of the Dead!" said Wade.

	It gave them a sense of depression greater than that inspired by the vast loneliness of space. One is never so lonely as when he is with the dead, and the men began to realize that the original Ancient Mariner had been more lonely with strange companions than they had been in the depths of ten million light years of space.

	They went back to the ship, floating through the last remnants of this world's atmosphere, back through the chill of the frozen gases to the cheering, warm interior of the ship.

	It was a contrast that made each of them appreciate more fully the gift that a hot, blazing sun really is. Perhaps that was what made Fuller ask: "If this happened to a star so much like our sun, why couldn't it happen to Sol?"

	"Perhaps it may," said Morey softly. "But the eternal optimism of man keeps us saying: 'It can't happen here.' And besides—" He put a hand on the wall of the ship, "—we don't ever have to worry about anything like that now. Not with ships like this to take us to a new sun—a new planet."

	Arcot lifted the ship and flew over the cold, frozen ground beneath them, following the route indicated on the great globe in the dead city. Mile after mile of frozen ice fields flew by as they shot over it at three miles per second.

	Suddenly, the bleak bulk of a huge mountain loomed gigantic before them. Arcot reversed the power and brought the ship to a stop. With the powerful searchlight, he swept the area, looking for the tower he knew should be here. At last, he made it out, a pyramid rather than a tower, and coated over with ice. They soon thawed out the frozen gasses by playing the energy of three powerful searchlights upon them, and in a few minutes the glint of gold showed through the melting ice and show.

	"It looks," said Wade, "as though they have an outer wall of gold over a strong wall of iron or steel to protect it from corrosion. Certainly gold doesn't have enough tensile strength to hold itself up under this gravity—not in such masses as that."

	Arcot brought the ship down beside the tower and the men once more went out through the airlock into the cold of the almost airless world. They flew across to the pyramid and looked for some means of entrance. In several places, they noticed hieroglyphics carved in great, foot-high characters. They searched in vain for a door until they noticed that the pyramid was not perfect, but truncated, leaving a flat area on top. The only joint in the walls seemed to be there, but there was no handle or visible methods of opening the door.

	Arcot turned his powerful light on the surface and searched carefully for some opening device. He found a bas-relief engraving of a hand pointing to a corner of the door. He looked more closely and found a small jewel-like lens set in the metal.

	Suddenly the men felt a vibration! There was a heavy click, and the door panel began to drop slowly.

	"Get on it!" Arcot cried. "We can always break our way out if we're trapped!"

	The four men leaped on it and sank slowly with it. The massive walls of the tower were nearly five feet thick, and made of some tough, white metal.

	"Pure iron!" diagnosed Wade. "Or perhaps a silicon-iron alloy. Not as strong as steel, but very resistant to corrosion."

	When the elevator stopped, they found themselves in a great chamber that was obviously a museum of the lost race. All around the walls were arranged models, books, and diagrams.

	"We can never hope to take all this in our ship!" said Arcot, looking at the great collection. "Look—there's an old winged airplane! And a steam engine—and that's an electric motor! And that thing looks like some kind of an electric battery."

	"But we can't take all that stuff," objected Fuller.

	"No," Morey agreed. "I think our best bet would be to take all the books we can—making sure we get the introductory ones, so we can read the language.

	"See—over there—they have marked those shelves with a single vertical mark. The ones next to them have two vertical marks, and next ones three. I suggest we load up with those books and take them to the ship."

	The rest agreed, and they began carrying armloads of books, flying out through the top of the pyramid to the ship and back for more.

	Instead of flying back to the pyramid for the last load, Arcot announced that he was going to leave a note for anyone who might come here later. While the others went back for the last load, he worked at drawing the "note".

	"Let's see your masterpiece," said Morey as the three men returned to the ship with the last of the books.

	Arcot had used a piece of tough, heavy plastic which would resist any corrosion the cold, almost airless world might have to offer.

	Near the top, he had drawn a representation of their ship, and beneath it a representation of the route they had taken from universe to universe. The galaxy they were in was represented by a cloud of gas, its main identifying feature. Underneath the dotted line of their route through space, he had printed "200,000,000,000, u".

	Then followed a little table. The numeral "1" followed by a straight bar, then "2" followed by two bars, and so on up to ten. Ten was represented by ten bars and, in addition, an S-shaped sign. Twenty was next, followed by twenty bars and two S-shaped signs. Thus he had worked up to "100".

	The system he used would make it clear to any reasoning creature that he had used a decimal system and that the zeroes meant ten times.

	Next below, he had drawn the planetary system of the frozen world, and the distance from the planet they were on to the central sun he labeled "u". Thus, the finders could reason that they had come a distance of two hundred billion units, where a distance of three hundred million miles was taken as the unit; they had, then, come from another galaxy. Certainly any creature with enough intelligence to reach this frozen world would understand this!

	"Since the year of this planet is approximately eight times our own," Arcot continued, "I am indicating that we came here approximately five hundred years after the catastrophe." He pointed at several of the other drawings.

	They left the message in the tower, and Arcot closed the door, leaving the pyramid exactly as it had been before they had come.

	"Say!" Morey commented, "how did you open and close that door, anyway?"

	Arcot grinned. "Didn't you notice the jewel at the corner? It was the lens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight opened the door. I didn't figure it out; it just worked accidentally."

	Morey raised an eyebrow. "But if the darned thing is so simple, any creature, intelligent or not, might be able to get in and destroy the records!"

	Arcot looked at him. "And where are your savages going to come from? There are none on this planet, and anyone intelligent enough to build a spaceship isn't going to destroy the contents of the tower."

	"Oh." Morey looked a little sheepish.

	They went into the airlock and took off their suits. Then they began packing the precious books in specimen cases that had been brought for the purpose of preserving such things.

	When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to the control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world, thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, and frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly lighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million miles away, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little more heat than it might have received from a small coal fire a mile away.

	So weakly it flared that in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, its little corona glowed about it plainly, and even the stars around it shone brilliantly. The men could see one constellation that grouped itself in the outlines of a dragon, with the sun of this system as its cold, baleful eye.

	Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out into space, they could see the dim frozen plains fall behind. It was as if a load of oppressing loneliness parted from them as they flew out into the vast spaces of the eternal stars.

-

X

	ARCOT LOOKED speculatively at the star field in the great broad window before him. "We'll want to find another G-0 sun, naturally, but I don't think we ought to go directly from here. If we did, we'd have to do a lot of backtracking to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go back to the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out, so that any future investigators can come in directly. It'll only take a few hours."

	"I think you're right," agreed Morey. "Besides, that will give us a wider choice of stars to pick our next G-0 from. Let's get going."

	Arcot moved the red switch, and the ship shot away at half speed. They watched the green image of the white dwarf fade and then suddenly flare up and become bright again as they outraced the light that had left it five centuries before.

	They stopped and took more photographs so that the path could be marked. They stopped every light century until they reached a point where the star was merely a dim point, almost lost in the myriad of stars around it.

	Then out to the edge of the galaxy they went, out toward their own universe.

	"Arcot," Morey called, "let's go out, say one million light years into space, at an angle to this galaxy, and see if we can get both galaxies on one plate. It will make navigation between them easier."

	"Good idea. We can get out and back in one day—and this 'time' won't count back on Earth, anyway." Since they would travel in the space-strain all the time, it would not count as Earth time.

	Arcot pushed the red control all the way forward, and the ship began to move at its top velocity of twenty-four light years per second. The hours dragged heavily, as they had when they were coming in, and Arcot remained alone on watch while the others went to their rooms for some sleep, strapping their weightless bodies securely in the bunks.

	It was hours later when Morey awoke with a sudden premonition of trouble. He looked at the chronometer on the wall—he had slept twelve hours! They had gone beyond the million light year mark! It didn't matter, except it showed that something had happened to Arcot.

	Something had. Arcot was sound asleep in the middle of the library—exactly in the middle, floating in the room ten feet from each wall.

	Morey called out to him, and Arcot awoke with a guilty start. "A fine sentry you make," said Morey caustically. "Can't even keep awake when all you have to do is sit here and see that we don't run into anything. We've gone more than our million light years already, and we're still going strong. Come on—snap out of it!"

	"I'm sorry—I apologize—I know I shouldn't have slept, but it was so perfectly quiet here except for your deep-toned, musical snores that I couldn't help it," grinned Arcot. "Get me down from here and we'll stop."

	"Get you down, nothing!" Morey snapped. "You stay right there while I call the others and we decide what's to be done with a sleeping sentry."

	Morey turned and left to wake the others.

	He had awakened Wade and told him what had happened, and they were on their way to wake up Fuller, when suddenly the air of the ship crackled around them! The space was changing! They were coming out of hyperspace!

	In amazement, Morey and Wade looked at each other. They knew that Arcot was still floating helplessly in the middle of the room, but—

	"Hold on, you brainless apes! We're turning around!" came Arcot's voice, full of suppressed mirth.

	Suddenly they were both plastered against the wall of the ship under four gravities of acceleration! Unable to walk, they could only crawl laboriously toward the control room, calling to Arcot to shut off the power.

	When Morey had left him stranded in the library, Arcot had decided it was high time he got to the floor. Quickly, he looked around for a means of doing so. Near him, floating in the air, was the book he had been reading, but it was out of reach. He had taken off his boots when he started to read, so the Fuller rocket method was out. It seemed hopeless.

	Then, suddenly, came the inspiration! Quickly, he slipped off his shirt and began waving it violently in the air. He developed a velocity of about two inches a second—not very fast, but fast enough. By the time he had put his shirt back on, he had reached the wall.

	After that, it was easy to shoot himself over to the door, out into the corridor and into the control room without being seen by Morey, who was in Wade's room.

	Just as Wade and Morey reached the doorway to the control room, Arcot decided it was time to shut the power off. Both of the men, laboring under more than eight hundred pounds of weight, were suddenly weightless. All the strength of their powerful muscles were expended in hurling them against the far wall.

	The complaints were loud, but they finally simmered down to an earnest demand to know how in the devil Arcot had managed to get off dead center.

	"Why, that was easy," he said airily. "I just turned on a little power; I fell under the influence of the weight and then it was easy to get to the control room."

	"Come on," Wade demanded. "The truth! How did you get here?"

	"Why, I just pushed myself here."

	"Yes; no doubt. But how did you get hold of anything to push?"

	"I just took a handful of air and threw it away and reached the wall."

	"Oh, of course—and how did you hold the air?"

	"I just took some air and threw it away and reached the wall."

	Which was all they could learn. Arcot was going to keep his system secret, it seemed.

	"At any rate," Arcot continued, "I am back in the control room, where I belong, and you are not in the observatory where you belong. Now get out of my territory!"

	Morey pushed himself back to the observatory, and after a few minutes, his voice came over the intercom. "Let's move on a bit more, Arcot. We still can't get both galaxies on the same plate. Let's go on for another hour and take our pictures from that point."

	Fuller had awakened and come in in the meantime, and he wanted to know why they didn't take some pictures from this spot.

	"No point in it," said Morey. "We have the ones we took coming in; what we want is a wide-angle shot."

	Arcot threw on the space-strain drive once more, and they headed on at top speed.

	They were all in the control room, watching the instruments and joking—principally the latter—when it happened. One instant they were moving smoothly, weightlessly along. The next instant, the ship rocked as though it had been struck violently! The air was a snapping inferno of shooting sparks, and there came the sharp crash of the suddenly volatilized silver bar that was their main power fuse. Simultaneously, they were hurled forward with terrific force; the straps that held them in place creaked with the sudden strain, and the men felt weak and faint.

	Consciousness nearly left them; they had been burned in a dozen places by the leaping sparks.

	Then it was over. Except that the ghost ships no longer followed them, the Ancient Mariner seemed unchanged. Around them, they could see the dim glowing of the galaxies.

	"Brother! We came near something!" Arcot cried. "It may be a wandering star! Take a look around, quick!"

	But the dark of space seemed utterly empty around them as they coasted weightless through space. Then Arcot snapped off the lights of the control room, and in a moment his eyes had become accustomed to the dim lights.

	It was dead ahead of them. It was a dull red glow, so dim it was scarcely visible. Arcot realized it was a dead star.

	"There it is, Morey!" he said. "A dead star, directly ahead of us! Good God, how close are we?"

	They were falling straight toward the dim red bulk.

	"How far are we from it?" Fuller asked.

	"At least several million—" Morey began. Then he looked at the distance recorded on the meteor detector. "ARCOT! FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE DO SOMETHING! THAT THING IS ONLY A FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY!"

	"There's only one thing to do," Arcot said tightly. "We can never hope to avoid that thing; we haven't got the power. I'm going to try for an orbit around it. We'll fall toward it and give the ship all the acceleration she'll take. There's no time to calculate—I'll just pile on the speed until we don't fall into it."

	The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves for the acceleration to come.

	If the Ancient Mariner had dropped toward the star from an infinite distance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in a hyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But they had come in on the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before the gravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it was not until the space field had broken that they had started to accelerate toward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form an escape orbit.

	Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into an elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.

	Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured power into the molecular drive. The ship shot forward under an additional five and a half gravities of acceleration. Their velocity had been five thousand miles per second when they entered hyperspace, and they were swiftly adding to their original velocity.

	They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since they were in free fall in its field; they could only feel the five and a half gravities of the molecular drive. Had they been able to experience the pull of the star, they would have been crushed by their own weight.

	Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power of the Ancient Mariner could enable them to escape!

	As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them, Arcot said: "I think we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're going to be awfully close to the surface of that thing!"

	The others were quiet; they merely watched Arcot and the star as Arcot made swift movements with the controls, doing all he could to establish them in an orbit that would be fairly safe.

	It seemed like an eternity—five and a half gravities of acceleration held the men in their chairs almost as well as the straps of the antiacceleration units that bound them. When a man weighs better than half a ton, he doesn't feel like moving much.

	Fuller whispered to Morey out of the corner of his sagging mouth. "What on Earth—I mean, what in Space is that thing? We're within only a few hundred miles, you said, so it must be pretty small. How could it pull us around like this?"

	"It's a dead white dwarf—a 'black dwarf', you might say," Morey replied. "As the density of such matter increases, the volume of the star depends less and less on its temperature. In a dwarf with the mass of the sun, the temperature effect is negligible; it's the action of the forces within the electron-nucleon gas which makes up the star that reigns supreme.

	"It's been shown that if a white dwarf—or a black one—is increased in mass, it begins to decrease sharply in volume after a certain point is reached. In fact, no cold star can exist with a volume greater than about one and a half times the mass of the sun—as the mass increases and the pressure goes up, the star shrinks in volume because of the degenerate matter in it. At a little better than 1.4 times the mass of the sun—our sun, I mean: Old Sol—the star would theoretically collapse to a point.

	"That has almost happened in this case. The actual limit is when the star has reached the density of a neutron, and this star hasn't collapsed that far by a long shot.

	"But that star is only forty kilometers—or less than twenty-five miles in diameter!"

	It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit which Arcot considered reasonably circular.

	And when they finally did, Wade looked at the sky above them and shouted: "Say, look! What are all those streaks?"

	Arcing up from the surface of the dull red plain below them and going over the ship, were several dim streaks of light across the sky. One of them was brighter than the rest, a bright white streak. The streaks didn't move; they seemed to have been painted on the sky overhead, glowing bands of unwavering light.

	"Those," said Arcot, "are the nebulae. That wide streak is the one we just left. The bright streak must be a nearby star.

	"They look like streaks because we're moving so fast in so small an orbit." He pointed to the red star beneath them. "We're less than twenty miles from the center of that thing! We're almost exactly thirty kilometers from its center, or about ten kilometers from its surface! But, because of it's great mass, our orbital velocity is something terrific!

	"We're going around that thing better than three hundred times every second; our 'year' is three milliseconds long! Our orbital velocity is seven hundred thousand kilometers per second!

	"We're moving along at about a fifth of the speed of light!"

	"Are we safe in this orbit?" Fuller asked.

	"Safe enough," said Arcot bitterly. "So damned safe that I don't see how we'll ever break free. We can't pull away with all the power on this ship. We're trapped!

	"Well, I'm worn out from working under all that gravity; let's eat and get some sleep."

	"I don't feel like sleeping," said Fuller. "You may call this safe, but it would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thing there." He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemy whose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre.

	"Well," said Arcot, "falling into it and flying off into space are two things you don't have to worry about. If we started toward it, we'd be falling, and our velocity would increase; as a result, we'd bounce right back out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall into that sun is appalling! The gravitational pull on us now amounts to about five billion tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal force of our orbital velocity. Any tendency to change it would be like trying to bend a spring with that much resistance.

	"We'd require a tremendous force to make us either fall into that star—or get away from it.

	"To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity. That means we'd have to lift about five million tons of mass. As we get farther out, our weight will decrease as the gravitational attraction drops off, but we would need such vast amounts of energy that they are beyond human conception.

	"We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the coils, and are now using another two tons to recharge them again. We need at least four tons to spare, and we only started out with twenty. We simply haven't got fuel enough to break loose from this star's gravitational hold, vast as the energy of matter is. Let's eat, and then we can sleep on the problem."

	Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence, trying to think of some way out of their dilemma. Then they tried to sleep on the problem, as Arcot had suggested, but it was difficult to relax. They were physically tired; they had gone through such great strains, even in the short time that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.

	Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they had tired in one-fifth the time they would have at one gravity, but their brains were still wide awake, trying to think of some way—any way—to get away from the dark sun.

	But at last sleep came.

-

XI

	MOREY THOUGHT he was the first to waken when, seven hours later, he dressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the library. Suddenly, he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation—he heard the low hum of its smoothly working director motors.

	He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot was busy with the telectroscope.

	"What's up, Arcot?" he demanded.

	Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. "I've just been gimmicking up the telectroscope. We're going around this dead dwarf once every three milliseconds, which makes it awfully hard to see the stars around us. So I put in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope off most of the time; it only looks at the sky once every three milliseconds. As a result, we can get a picture of what's going on around us very easily. It won't be a steady picture, but since we're getting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will be better than any moving picture film ever projected as far as accuracy is concerned.

	"I did it because I want to take a look at that bright streak in the sky. I think it'll be the means to our salvation—if there is any."

	Morey nodded. "I see what you mean; if that's another white dwarf—which it most likely is—we can use it to escape. I think I see what you're driving at."

	"If it doesn't work," Arcot said coolly, "we can profit by the example of the people we left back there. Suicide is preferable to dying of cold."

	Morey nodded. "The question is: How helpless are we?"

	"Depends entirely on that star; let's see if we can get a focus on it."

	At the orbital velocity of the ship, focussing on the star was indeed a difficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the image centered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it took even longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them a definite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a streak, but by taking smaller and smaller sections of the streak at the proper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get it bright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fraction of the light, and it had to be amplified greatly to make a visible image.

	When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey gazed steadily at the image. "Now the job is to figure the distance. And we haven't got much parallax to work with."

	"If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite sides of the orbit, I think we can do it," Arcot said.

	They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, they were given work to do—Morey gave them equations to solve without telling them to what the figures applied.

	Finally Arcot said: "Their period about the common center of gravity is thirty-nine hours, as I figure it."

	Morey nodded. "Check. And that gives us a distance of two million miles apart."

	"Just what are you two up to?" asked Fuller. "What good is another star? The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us."

	"No," Arcot corrected, "we're interested in getting away from the one beneath us, which is an entirely different matter. If we were midway between this star and that one, the gravitational effects of the two would be cancelled out, since we would be pulled as hard in one direction as the other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and could escape!

	"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our space strain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot of our energy would be eaten up, but we'd get away.

	"That's our only hope," Arcot concluded.

	"Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is," Wade snorted sarcastically. "How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars when you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?"

	"If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted Arcot, "then the mountain must come to Mahomet."

	"What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation. "Beat Joshua? He made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!"

	"It is," agreed Arcot quietly, "and I intend to throw that star in such a way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape between the hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons of matter crash into each other."

	"And you intend to swing that?" asked Wade in awe as he thought of the spectacle there would be when two suns fell into each other. "Well, I don't want to be around."

	"You haven't any choice," Arcot grinned. Then his face grew serious. "What I want to do is simple. We have the molecular ray. Those stars are hot. They don't fall into each other because they are rotating about each other. Suppose that rotation were stopped—stopped suddenly and completely? The molecular ray acts catalytically; we won't supply the power to stop that star, the star itself will. All we have to do is cause the molecules to move in a direction opposite to the rotation. We'll supply the impulse, and the star will supply the energy!

	"Our job will be to break away when the stars get close enough; we are really going to hitch our wagon to a star!

	"The mechanics of the job are simple. We will have to calculate when and how long to use the power, and when and how quickly to escape. We'll have to use the main power board to generate the ray and project it instead of the little ray units. With luck, we ought to be free of this star in three days!"

	Work was started at once. They had a chance of life in sight, and they had every intention of taking advantage of it! The calculating machines they had brought would certainly prove worth their mass in this one use. The observations were extremely difficult because the ship was rocketing around the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the mass and distance and orbital motion of the other star were therefore very difficult, but the final results looked good.

	The other star and this one formed a binary, the two being of only slightly different mass and rotating about each other at a distance of roughly two million miles.

	The next problem was to calculate the time of fall from that point, assuming that it would stop instantaneously, which would be approximately true.

	The actual fall would take only seven hours under the tremendous acceleration of the two masses! Since the stars would fall toward each other, the ship would be drawn toward the falling mass, and since their orbit around the star took only a fraction of a second to complete, they had to make sure they were in the right position at the halfway point just before collision occurred. Also, their orbit would be greatly perturbed as the star approached, and it was necessary to calculate that in, too.

	Arcot calculated that in twenty-two hours, forty-six minutes, they would be in the most favorable position to start the fall. They could have started sooner, but there were some changes that had to be made in the wiring of the ship before they could start using the molecular ray at full power.

	"Well," said Wade as he finally finished the laborious computations, "I hope we don't make a mistake and get caught between the two! And what happens if we find we haven't stopped the star after all?"

	"If we don't hit it exactly the first time," Morley replied, "we'll have to juggle the ray until we do."

	They set to work at once, installing the heavy leads to the ray projectors, which were on the outside of the hull in countersunk recesses. Morey and Wade had to go outside the ship to help attach the cables.

	Out in space, floating about the ship, they were still weightless, for they, too, were supported by centrifugal force.

	The work of readjusting the projectors for greater power was completed in an hour and a quarter, which still left over twenty hours before they could use them. During the next ten hours, they charged the great storage coils to capacity, leaving the circuits to them open, controlled by the relays only. That would keep the coils charged, ready to start.

	Finally, Wade dusted off his hands and said: "We're all ready to go mechanically, and I think it would be wise if we were ready physically, too. I know we're not very tired, but if we sit around in suspense we'll be as nervous as cats when the time comes. I suggest we take a couple of sleeping tablets and turn in. If we use a mild shock to awaken us, we won't oversleep."

	The others agreed to the plan and prepared for their wait.

	Awakened two hours before the actual moment of action, Wade prepared breakfast, and Morey took observations. He knew just where the star should be according to their calculations, and looked for it there. He breathed a sigh of relief—it was exactly in place! Their mathematics they had been sure of, but on such a rapidly moving machine, it was exceedingly difficult to make good observations.

	The two hours seemed to drag interminably, but at last Arcot signalled for the full power of the molecular rays. They waited, breathlessly, for some response. Nearly twenty seconds later, the other sun went out.

	"We did it!" said Wade in a hushed voice. It was almost a shock to realize that this ship had power enough to extinguish a sun!

	Arcot and Morey weren't awed; they didn't have time. There were other things to do and do fast.

	They had checked the time required for them to see that the white dwarf had gone out. Half of this gave them the distance from the star in light seconds.

	The screen had already been rigged to flash the information into a computer, which in turn gave a time signal to the robot pilot that would turn on the drive at precisely the right instant. There was no time for human error here; the velocities were too great and the time for error too small.

	Then they waited. They had to wait for seven hours spinning dizzily around an improbably tiny star with an equally improbably titanic gravitational field. A star only a couple of dozens of miles across, and yet so dense that it weighed half a million times as much as the Earth! And they had to wait while another star like it, chilled now to absolute zero, fell toward them!

	"I wish we could stay around to see the splash," Arcot said. "It's going to be something to see. All the kinetic energy of those two masses slamming into each other is going to be a blaze of light that will really be something!"

	Wade was looking nervously at the telectroscope plate. "I wish we could see that other sun. I don't like the idea of a thing that big creeping up on us in the dark."

	"Calm down," Morey said quietly. "It's out of our hands now; we took a chance, and it was a chance we had to take. If you want to watch something, watch Junior down there. It's going to start doing some pretty interesting tricks."

	As the dense black sun approached them, Junior, as Morey had called it, did begin to do tricks. At first they seemed to be optical effects, as though the eye itself were playing tricks. The red, glowing ball beneath them began to grow transparent around its surface, leaving an opaque red core which seemed to be shrinking slowly.

	"What's happening?" Fuller asked.

	"Our orbit around the star is becoming more and more elliptical," Arcot replied. "As the other sun pulls us, the star beneath us grows smaller with the distance; then, as we begin to fall back toward it, it grows larger again. Since this is taking place many hundreds of times per second, the visual pictures all seem to blend in together."

	"Watch the clock," Morey said suddenly, pointing.

	The men watched tensely as the hand moved slowly around.

	"Ten—nine—eight—seven—six—five—four—three—two—one—ZERO!"

	A relay slammed home, and almost instantaneously, everyone on the ship was slammed into unconsciousness.

-

XII

	HOURS LATER, Arcot regained consciousness. It was quiet in the ship. He was still strapped in his seat in the control room. The relux screens were in place, and all was perfectly peaceful. He didn't know whether the ship was motionless or racing through space at a speed faster than light, and his first semiconscious impulse was to see.

	He reached out with an arm that seemed to be made of dry dust, ready to crumble; an arm that would not behave. His nerves were jumping wildly. He pulled the switch he was seeking, and the relux screens dropped down as the motors pulled them back.

	They were in hyperspace; beside them rode the twin ghost ships.

	Arcot looked around, trying to decide what to do, but his brain was clogged. He felt tired; he wanted to sleep. Scarcely able to think, he dragged the others to their rooms and strapped them in their bunks. Then he strapped himself in and fell asleep almost at once.

	Still more hours passed, then Arcot was waking slowly to insistent shaking by Morey.

	"Hey! Arcot! Wake up! ARCOT! HEY!"

	Arcot's ears sent the message to his brain, but his brain tried to ignore it. At last he slowly opened his eyes.

	"Huh?" he said in a low, tired voice.

	"Thank God! I didn't know whether you were alive or not. None of us remembered going to bed. We decided you must have carried us there, but you sure looked dead."

	"Uhuh?" came Arcot's unenthusiastic rejoinder.

	"Boy, is he sleepy!" said Wade as he drifted into the room. "Use a wet cloth and some cold water, Morey."

	A brisk application of cold water brought Arcot more nearly awake. He immediately clamored for the wherewithal to fill an aching void that was making itself painfully felt in his midsection.

	"He's all right!" laughed Wade. "His appetite is just as healthy as ever!"

	They had already prepared a meal, and Arcot was promptly hustled to the galley. He strapped himself into the chair so that he could eat comfortably, and then looked around at the others. "Where the devil are we?"

	"That," replied Morey seriously, "was just what we wanted to ask you. We haven't the beginnings of an idea. We slept for two days, all told, and by now we're so far from all the Island Universes that we can't tell one from another. We have no idea where we are.

	"I've stopped the ship; we're just floating. I'm sure I don't know what happened, but I hoped you might have an idea."

	"I have an idea," said Arcot. "I'm hungry! You wait until after I've eaten, and I'll talk." He fell to on the food.

	After eating, he went to the control room and found that every gyroscope in the place had been thrown out of place by the attractions they had passed through. He looked around at the meters and coils.

	It was obvious what had happened. Their attempt to escape had been successful; they had shot out between the stars, into the space. The energy had been drained from the power coil, as they had expected. Then the power plant had automatically cut in, recharging the coils in two hours. Then the drive had come on again, and the ship had flashed on into space. But with the gyroscopes as erratic as they were, there was no way of knowing which direction they had come; they were lost in space!

	"Well, there are lots of galaxies we can go to," said Arcot. "We ought to be able to find a nice one and stay there if we can't get home again."

	"Sure," Wade replied, "but I like Earth! If only we hadn't all passed out! What caused that, Arcot?"

	Arcot shrugged. "I'm sure I don't know. My only theory is that the double gravitational field, plus our own power field, produced a sort of cross-product that effected our brains.

	"At any rate, here we are."

	"We certainly are," agreed Morey. "We can't possibly back track; what we have to do is identify our own universe. What identifying features does it have that will enable us to recognize it?

	"Our Galaxy has two 'satellites', the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds. If we spent ten years photographing and studying and comparing with the photographs we already have, we might find it. We know that system will locate the Galaxy, but we haven't the time. Any other suggestions?"

	"We came out here to visit planets, didn't we?" asked Arcot. "Here's our chance—and our only chance—of getting home, as far as I can see. We can go to any galaxy in the neighborhood—within twenty or thirty million light years—and look for a planet with a high degree of civilization.

	"Then we'll give them the photographs we have, and ask them if they've any knowledge of a galaxy with two such satellites. We just keep trying until we find a race which has learned through their research. I think that's the easiest, quickest, and most satisfactory method. What do you think?"

	It was the obvious choice, and they all agreed. The next proposition was to select a galaxy.

	"We can go to any one we wish," said Morey, "but we're now moving at thirty thousand miles per second; it would take us quite a while to slow down, stop, and go in the other direction. There's a nice, big galactic nebula right in front of us, about three days away—six million light years. Any objections to heading for that?"

	The rest looked at the glowing point of the nebula. Out in space, a star is a hard, brilliant, dimensionless point of light. But a nebula glows with a faint mistiness; they are so far away that they never have any bright glow, such as stars have, but they are so vast, their dimensions so great, that even across millions of light years of space they appear as tiny glowing discs with faint, indistinct edges. As the men looked out of the clear lux metal windows, they saw the tiny blur of light on the soft black curtain of space.

	It was as good a course as any, and the ship's own inertia recommended it; they had only to redirect the ship with greater accuracy.

	Setting the damaged gyroscopes came first, however. There were a number of things about the ship that needed readjustment and replacement after the strain of escaping from the giant star.

	After they had made a thorough inspection Arcot said:

	"I think we'd best make all our repairs out here. That flame that hit us burned off our outside microphone and speaker, and probably did a lot of damage to the ray projectors. I'd rather not land on a planet unarmed; the chances are about fifty-fifty that we'd be greeted with open cannon muzzles instead of open arms."

	The work inside was left to Arcot and Fuller, while Morey and Wade put on spacesuits and went out onto the hull.

	They found surprisingly little damage—far less than they had expected. True, the loudspeaker, the microphone, and all other instruments made of ordinary matter had been burned off clean. They didn't even have to clean out the spaces where they had been recessed into the wall. At a temperature of ten thousand degrees, the metals had all boiled away—even tungsten boils at seven thousand degrees, and all other normal matter boils even more easily.

	The ray projectors, which had been adjusted for the high power necessary to stop a sun in its orbit, were readjusted for normal power, and the heat beams were replaced.

	After nearly four hours work, everything had been checked, from relays and switch points to the instruments and gyroscopes. Stock had been taken, and they found they were running low on replacement parts. If anything more happened, they would have to stop using some of the machinery and break it up for spare parts. Of their original supply of twenty tons of lead fuel, only ten tons of the metal were left, but lead was a common metal which they could easily pick up on any planet they might visit. They could also get a fresh supply of water and refill their air tanks there.

	The ship was in as perfect condition as it had ever been, for every bearing had been put in condition and the generators and gyroscopes were running smoothly.

	They threw the ship into full speed and headed for the galaxy ahead of them.

	"We are going to look for intelligent beings," Arcot reminded the others, "so we'll have to communicate with them. I suggest we all practice the telepathic processes I showed you—we'll need them."

	The time passed rapidly with something to do. They spent a considerable part of it reading the books on telepathy that Arcot had brought, and on practicing it with each other.

	By the end of the second day of the trip, Morey and Fuller, who had peculiarly adaptable minds, were able to converse readily and rapidly, Fuller doing the projecting and Morey the receiving. Wade had divided his time about equally between projecting and reading, with the result that he could do neither well.

	Early on the fourth day, they entered the universe toward which they were heading. They had stopped at about half a million light years and decided that a large local cluster of very brilliant suns promised the best results, since the stars were closer together there, and there were many of the yellow G-0 type for which they were seeking.

	They had penetrated into the galaxy as far as was safe, using half speed; then, at lower speeds, they worked toward the local cluster.

	Arcot cut the drive several light years from the nearest sun. "Well, we're where we wanted to be; now what do we do? Morey, pick us out a G-0 star. We await your royal command to move."

	After a few minutes at the telectroscope, Morey pointed to one of the pinpoints of light that gleamed brightly in the sky. "That one looks like our best bet. It's a G-0 a little brighter than Sol."

	Morey swung the ship about, pointing the axis of the ship in the same direction as its line of flight. The observatory had been leading, but now the ship was turned to its normal position.

	They shot forward, using the space-strain drive, for a full hour at one-sixteenth power. Then Arcot cut the drive, and the disc of the sun was large before them.

	"We're going to have a job cutting down our velocity; we're traveling pretty fast, relative to that sun," Arcot told the others. Their velocity was so great that the sun didn't seem to swerve them greatly as they rushed nearer. Arcot began to use the molecular drive to brake the ship.

	Morey was busy with the telectroscope, although greatly hampered by the fact that it was a feat of strength to hold his arm out at right angles to his body for ten seconds under the heavy acceleration Arcot was applying.

	"This method works!" called Morey suddenly. "The Fuller System For Finding Planets has picked another winner! Circle the sun so that I can get a better look!"

	Arcot was already trying vainly to decrease their velocity to a figure that would permit the attraction of the sun to hold them in its grip and allow them to land on a planet.

	"As I figure it," Arcot said, "we'll need plenty of time to come to rest. What do you think, Morey?"

	Morey punched figures into the calculator. "Wow! Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred days, using all the acceleration that will be safe! At five gravities, reducing our present velocity of twenty-five thousand miles per second to zero will take approximately twenty-four hundred hours—one hundred days! We'll have to use the gravitational attraction of that sun to help us."

	"We'll have to use the space control," said Arcot. "If we move close to the sun by the space control, all the energy of the fall will be used in overcoming the space-strain coil's field, and thus prevent our falling. When we start to move away again, we will be climbing against that gravity, which will aid us in stopping. But even so, it will take us about three days to stop. We wouldn't get anywhere using molecular power; that giant sun was just too damned generous with his energy of fall!"

	They started the cycles, and, as Arcot had predicted, they took a full three days of constant slowing to accomplish their purpose, burning up nearly three tons of matter in doing so. They were constantly oppressed by a load of five gravities except for the short intervals when they stopped to eat and when they were moving in the space control field. Even in sleeping, they were forced to stand the load.

	The massive sun was their principal and most effective brake. At no time did they go more than a few dozen million miles from the primary, for the more intense the gravity, the better effect they got.

	Morey divided his time between piloting the ship while Arcot rested, and observing the system. By the end of the third day, he had made very creditable progress with his map.

	He had located only six planets, but he was certain there were others. For the sake of simplicity, he had assumed circular orbits and calculated their approximate orbital velocities from their distance from the sun. He had determined the mass of the sun from direct weighings aboard their ship. He soon had a fair diagram of the system constructed mathematically, and experimental observation showed it to be a very close approximation.

	The planets were rather more massive than those of Sol. The innermost planet had a third again the diameter of Mercury and was four million miles farther from the primary. He named it Hermes. The next one, which he named Aphrodite, the Greek goddess corresponding to the Roman Venus, was only a little larger than Venus and was some eight million miles farther from its primary—seventy-five million miles from the central sun.

	The next, which Morey called Terra, was very much like Earth. At a distance of a hundred and twenty-four million miles from the sun, it must have received almost the same amount of heat that Earth does, for this sun was considerably brighter than Sol.

	Terra was eight thousand two hundred miles in diameter, with a fairly clear atmosphere and a varying albedo which indicated clouds in the atmosphere. Morey had every reason to believe that it might be inhabited, but he had no proof because his photographs were consistently poor due to the glare of the sun.

	The rest of the planets proved to be of little interest. In the place where, according to Bode's Law, another planet, corresponding to Mars, should have been, there was only a belt of asteroids. Beyond this was still another belt. And on the other side of the double asteroid belt was the fourth planet, a fifty-thousand-mile-in-diameter methane-ammonia giant which Morey named Zeus in honor of Jupiter.

	He had picked up a couple of others on his plates, but he had not been able to tell anything about them as yet. In any case, the planets Aphrodite and Terra were by far the most interesting.

	"I think we picked the right angle to come into this system," said Arcot, looking at Morey's photographs of the wide bands of asteroids. They had come into the planetary group at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic, which had allowed them to miss both asteroid belts.

	They started moving toward the planet Terra, reaching their objective in less than three hours.

	The globe beneath them was lit brightly, for they had approached it from the daylight side. Below them, they could see wide, green plains and gently rolling mountains, and in a great cleft in one of the mountain ranges was a shimmering lake of clearest blue.

	The air of the planet screamed about them as they dropped down, and the roar in the loudspeaker grew to a mighty cataract of sound. Morey turned down the volume.

	The sparkling little lake passed beneath them as they shot on, seventy-five miles above the surface of the planet. When they had first entered the atmosphere, they had the impression of looking down on a vast, inverted bowl whose edge rested on a vast, smooth table of deep violet velvet. But as they dropped and the violet became bluer and bluer, they experienced the strange optical illusion of "flopping" of the scene. The bowl seemed to turn itself inside out, and they were looking down at its inner surface.

	They shot over a mountain range, and a vast plain spread out before them. Here and there, in the far distance, they could see darker spots caused by buckled geological strata.

	Arcot swung the ship around, and they saw the vast horizon swing about them as their sensation of "down" changed with the acceleration of the turn. They felt nearly weightless, for they were lifting again in a high arc.

	Arcot was heading back toward the mountains they had passed over. He dropped the ship again, and the foothills seemed to rise to meet them.

	"I'm heading for that lake," Arcot explained. "It seems absolutely deserted, and there are some things we want to do. I haven't had any decent exercise for the past two weeks, except for straining under high gravity. I want to do some swimming, and we need to distill some water for drink; we need to refill the tanks in case of emergencies. If the atmosphere contains oxygen, fine; if it doesn't, we can get it out of the water by electrolysis.

	"But I hope that air is good to breathe, because I've been wanting a swim and a sun bath for a long time!"

-

XIII

	THE Ancient Mariner hung high in the air, poised twenty-five miles above the surface of the little lake. Wade, as chemist, tested the air while the others readied the distillation and air condensation apparatus. By the time they had finished, Wade was ready with his report.

	"Air pressure about 20 psi at the surface; temperature around ninety-five Fahrenheit. Composition: eighteen percent oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, four-tenths of one percent carbon dioxide, residue—inert gasses. That's not including water vapor, of which there is a fair amount.

	"I put a canary into the air, and the bird liked it, so I imagine it's quite safe except for bacteria, perhaps. Naturally, at this altitude the air is germ-free."

	"Good," said Morey, "then we can take our swim and work without worrying about spacesuits."

	"Just a minute!" Fuller objected. "What about those germs Wade mentioned? If you think I'm going out in my shorts where some flock of bacteria can get at my tender anatomy, you've got another think coming!"

	"I wouldn't worry about it," Wade said. "The chances of organisms developing along the same evolutionary line is quite slim. We may find the inhabitants of the same shape as those of another world, because the human body is fairly well constructed anatomically. The head is in a place where it will be able to see over a wide area and it's in a safe place. The hand is very useful and can be improved upon but little. True, the Venerians have a second thumb, but the principle is the same.

	"But chemically, the bodies are probably very different. The people of Venus are widely different chemically; the bacteria that can make a Venerian deathly ill is killed the instant it enters our body, or else it starves to death because it can't find the kind of chemical food it needs to live. And the same thing happens when a Venerian is attacked by an Earthly microorganism.

	"Even on Earth, evolution has produced such widely varying types of life that an organism that can feed on one is totally incapable of feeding on another. You, for instance, couldn't catch tobacco mosaic virus, and the tobacco plant can't catch the measles virus.

	"You couldn't expect a microorganism to evolve here that was capable of feeding on Earth-type tissues; they would have starved to death long ago."

	"What about bigger animals?" Fuller asked cautiously.

	"That's different. You would probably be indigestible to an alien carnivore, but he'd probably kill you first to find out. If he ate you, it might kill him in the end, but that would be small consolation. That's why we're going to go out armed."

	Arcot dropped the ship swiftly until they were hovering a bare hundred feet over the waters of the lake. There was a little stream winding its way down the mountainside, and another which led the clear overflow away.

	"I doubt if there's anything of great size in that lake," Arcot said slowly and thoughtfully. "Still, even small fish might be deadly. Let's play safe and remove all forms of life, bacterial and otherwise. A little touch of the molecular motion ray, greatly diffused, will do the trick."

	Since the molecular ray directed the motion of the molecules of matter, it prevented chemical reactions from taking place, even when greatly diffused; all the molecules tend to go in the same direction to such an extent that the delicate balance of chemical reactions that is life is upset. It is too delicate a thing to stand any power that upsets the reactions so violently. All things are killed instantly.

	As the light haze of the ionized air below them glowed out in a huge cone, the water of the lake heaved and seemed to move in its depths, but there was no great movement of the waters; they lost only a fraction of their weight. But every living thing in that lake died instantly.

	Arcot turned the ship, and the shining hull glided softly over to one side of the lake where a little sandy beach invited them. There seemed no indication of intelligent life about.

	Each of them took a load of the supplies they had brought, and carried them out under the shade of an immense pine-like tree—a gigantic column of wood that stretched far into the sky to lose its green leaves in a waving sea of foliage. The mottled sunlight of the bright star above them made them feel very much at home. Its color, intensity, and warmth were all exactly the same as on Earth.

	Each of the men wore his power suit to aid in carrying the things they had brought, for the gravity here was a bit higher than that of Earth. The difference in air pressure was so little as to be scarcely noticeable; they even adjusted the interior of the ship to it.

	They had every intention of staying here for awhile. It was pleasant to lie in the warm sun once more; so pleasant that it became difficult to remember that they were countless trillions of long miles from their own home planet. It was hard to realize that the warm, blazing star above them was not Old Sol.

	Arcot was carrying a load of food in a box. He had neutralized his weight until, load and all, he weighed about a hundred pounds. This was necessary in order to permit him to drag a length of hose behind him toward the water, so it could be used as an intake for the pumps.

	Morey, meanwhile, was having trouble. He had been carrying a load of assorted things to use—a few pneumatic pillows, a heavy iron pot for boiling the water, and a number of other things.

	He reached his destination, having floated the hundred or so feet from the ship by using his power suit. He forgot, momentarily, and dropped his load. Immediately, he too began to "drop"—upward! He had a buoyancy of around three hundred pounds, and a weight of only two fifty. In dropping the load, the sudden release had caused the power unit to jerk him upward, and somehow the controlling knob on the power pack was torn loose.

	Morey shot up into the air, showing a fair rate of progress toward his late abode—space! And he had no way to stop himself. His hand power unit was far too weak to overcome the pull of his power-pack, and he was rising faster and faster!

	He realized that his friends could catch him, and laughingly called down: "Arcot! Help! I'm being kidnapped by my power suit! To the rescue!"

	Arcot looked up quickly at Morey's call and realized immediately that his power control had come off. He knew there was twenty miles or so of breathable air above, and long before Morey rose that far, he could catch him in the Ancient Mariner, if necessary.

	He turned on his own power suit, using a lift of a hundred pounds, which gave him double Morey's acceleration. Quickly he gathered speed that shot him up toward his helpless friend, and a moment later, he had caught up with him and passed him. Then he shut off his power and drifted to a halt before he began to drop again. As Morey rose toward him, Arcot adjusted the power in his own suit to match Morey's velocity.

	Arcot grabbed Morey's leg and turned his power down until he had a weight of fifty pounds. Soon they were both falling again, and when their rate of fall amounted to approximately twenty miles per hour, Arcot cut their weight to zero and they continued down through their momentum. Just short of the ground, he leaped free of Morey, who, carried on by momentum, touched the ground a moment later. Wade at once jumped in and held him down.

	"Now, now! Calm yourself," said Wade solicitously. "Don't go up in the air like that over the least little thing."

	"I won't, if you'll get busy and take this damned thing off—or fasten some lead to my feet!" replied Morey, starting to unstrap the mechanism.

	"You'd better hold your horses there," said Arcot. "If you take that off now, we sure will need the Ancient Mariner to catch up with it. It will produce an acceleration that no man could ever stand—something on the order of five thousand gravities, if the tubes could stand it. And since that one is equipped with the invisibility apparatus, you'd be out one good invisibility suit. Restrain yourself, boy, and I'll go get a new knob control.

	"Wade, get the boy a rock to hold him down. Better tie it around his neck so he won't forget it and fly off into space again. It's a nuisance locating so small an object in space and I promised his father I'd bring the body back if there was anything left of it." He released Morey as Wade handed him a large stone.

	A few minutes later, he returned with a new adjustment dial and repaired Morey's apparatus. The strain was released when he turned it, and Morey parted with the rock with relief.

	Morey grunted in relief, and looked at the offending pack.

	"You know, that being stuck with a sky-bound gadget that you can't turn off is the nastiest combination of feeling stupid, helpless, comical, silly and scared I've hit yet. It now—somewhat late—occurs to me that this is powered with a standard power coil, straight off the production line, and that it has a standard overload cut-out for protection of associated equipment. I want to install an emergency cutoff switch, in case a knob, or something else, goes sour. But I want to have the emergency overload where I can decide whether or not an emergency overload is to be accepted. I'd feel a sight more than silly if that overload relay popped while I was a couple thousand feet up.

	"Trouble with all this new stuff of ours is that we simply haven't had time to find out all the 'I never thought of that' things that can go wrong. If the grid resistor on that oscillator went out, for instance, what would it do?"

	Arcot cocked an eye at the power pack, visualizing the circuits. "Full blast, straight up, and no control. But modern printed resistors don't fail."

	"That's what it says in all the books." Wade nodded wisely. "And you should see the stock of replacement units every electronics shop stocks for purposes of replacing infallible units, too. You've got a point, my friend."

	"I can see four ways we can change these things to fail-safe operation, if we add Morey's emergency cut-off switch. If it did go on-full then, you could use intermittent operation and get down," Arcot acknowledged.

	"Anybody know what silly fail-unsafe tricks we overlooked in the Ancient Mariner?" Fuller asked.

	"That," said Wade with a grimace, "is a silly question. The 'I didn't think of that' type of failure occurs because I didn't think of that, and the reason I didn't think of it is because it never occurred to me. If we'd been able to think of 'em, we would have. We'll probably get stuck with a few more yet, before we get back. But at least we can clean up a few bugs in these things now."

	"Forget it for now, Wade, and get that chow on," suggested Fuller. He was lying on his back, clad only in a pair of short trunks, completely relaxed and enjoying life. "We can do that when it's dark here."

	"Fuller has the right idea," said Morey, looking at Fuller with a judicious eye. "I think I'll follow his example."

	"Which makes three in favor and one on the way," said Arcot, as he came out of the ship and sank down on the soft sand of the beach.

	They lay around for a while after lunch, and then decided to swim in the cool waters of the lake. One of them was to stand guard while the others went in swimming. Standing guard consisted of lying on his back on the soft sand, and staring up at the delightful contrast of lush green foliage and deep blue sky.

	It was several hours before they gathered up their things and returned to the ship. They felt more rested than they had before their exercise. They had not been tired before, merely restless, and the physical exercise had made them far more comfortable.

	They gathered again in the control room. All the apparatus had been taken in; the tanks were filled, and the compressed oxygen replenished. They closed the airlock and were ready to start again.

	As they lifted into the air, Arcot looked at the lake that was shrinking below them. "Nice place for a picnic; we'll have to remember that place. It isn't more than twenty million light years from home."

	"Yes," agreed Morey, "it is handy. But suppose we find out where home is first; let's go find the local inhabitants."

	"Excellent idea. Which way do we go to look?" Wade asked.

	"This lake must have an outlet to the sea," Morey answered. "I suggest we follow it. Most rivers of any size have a port near the mouth, and a port usually means a city."

	"Let's go," said Arcot, swinging the shining ship about and heading smoothly down along the line of the little stream that had its beginning at the lake. They moved on across the mountains and over the green foothills until they came to a broad, rolling plain.

	"I wonder if this planet is inhabited," Arcot mused. "None of this land seems to be cultivated."

	Morey had been scanning the horizon with a pair of powerful binoculars. "No, the land isn't cultivated, but take a look over there—see that range of little hills over to the right? Take a look." He handed the binoculars to Arcot.

	Arcot looked long and quietly. At last he lowered the binoculars and handed them to Wade, who sat next to him.

	"It looks like the ruins of a city," Arcot said. "Not the ruins that a storm would make, but the ruins that high explosives would make. I'd say there had been a war and the people who once lived here had been driven off."

	"So would I," rejoined Morey. "I wonder if we could find the conquerors?"

	"Maybe—unless it was mutual annihilation!"

	They rose a bit higher and raised their speed to a thousand miles an hour. On and on they flew, high above the gently rolling plain, mile after mile. The little brooklet became a great river, and the river kept growing more and more. Ahead of them was a range of hills, and they wondered how the river could thread its way among them. They found that it went through a broad pass that twisted tortuously between high mountains.

	A few miles farther on, they came to a great natural basin in the pass, a wide, level bowl. And in almost the exact center, they saw a looming mass of buildings—a great city!

	"Look!" cried Morey. "I told you it was inhabited!"

	Arcot winced. "Yes, but if you shout in my ear like that again, you'll have to write things out for me for ever after." He was just as excited as Morey, nevertheless.

	The great mass of the city was shaped like a titanic cone that stood half mile high and was fully a mile and a half in radius. But the remarkable thing about it was the perfect uniformity with which the buildings and every structure seemed to conform to this plan. It seemed as though an invisible, but very tangible line had been drawn in the air.

	It was as though a sign had been posted: "Here there shall be buildings. Beyond this line, no structure shall extend, nor any vehicle go!"

	The air directly above the city was practically packed with slim, long, needle-like ships of every size—from tiny private ships less than fifteen feet long to giant freighters of six hundred feet and longer. And every one of them conformed to the rule perfectly!

	Only around the base of the city there seemed to be a slight deviation. Where the invisible cone should have touched the ground, there was a series of low buildings made of some dark metal, and all about them the ground appeared scarred and churned.

	"They certainly seem to have some kind of ray screen over that city," Morey commented. "Just look at that perfect cone effect and those low buildings are undoubtedly the projectors."

	Arcot had brought the ship to a halt as he came through the pass in the mountain. The shining hull was in the cleft of the gorge, and was, no doubt, quite hard to see from the city.

	Suddenly, a vagrant ray of the brilliant sun reached down through a break in the overcast of clouds and touched the shining hull of the Ancient Mariner with a finger of gold. Instantly, the ship shone like the polished mirror of a heliograph.

	Almost immediately, a low sound came from the distant city. It was a pulsing drone that came through the microphone in a weird cadence; a low, beating drone, like some wild music. Louder and stronger it grew, rising in pitch slowly, then it suddenly ended in a burst of rising sound—a terrific whoop of alarm.

	As if by magic, every ship in the air above the city shot downward, dropping suddenly out of sight. In seconds, the air was cleared.

	"It seems they've spotted us," said Arcot in a voice he tried to make nonchalant.

	A fleet of great, long ships was suddenly rising from the neighborhood of the central building, the tallest of the group. They went in a compact wedge formation and shot swiftly down along the wall of the invisible cone until they were directly over the low building nearest the Ancient Mariner. There was a sudden shimmer in the air. In an instant, the ships were through and heading toward the Ancient Mariner at a tremendous rate.

	They shot forward with an acceleration that was astonishing to the men in the spaceship. In perfect formation, they darted toward the lone, shining ship from far-off Earth!

-

XIV

	THE FOUR EARTHMEN watched the fleet of alien ships roar through the air toward them.

	"Now how shall we signal them?" asked Morey, also trying to be nonchalant, and failing as badly as Arcot had.

	"Don't try the light beam method," cautioned Arcot. The last time they had tried to use a light beam signal was when they first contacted the Nigrans. The Nigrans thought it was some kind of destruction ray. That had started the terrible destructive war of the Black Star.

	"Let's just hang here peaceably and see what they do," Arcot suggested.

	Motionless, the Ancient Mariner hung before the advancing attack of the great battle fleet. The shining hull was a thing of beauty in the golden sunlight as it waited for the advancing ships.

	The alien ships slowed as they approached and spread out in a great fan-shaped crescent.

	Suddenly, the Ancient Mariner gave a tremendous leap and hurtled toward them at a terrific speed, under an acceleration so great that Arcot was nearly hurled into unconsciousness. He would have been except for the terrific mass of the ship. To produce that acceleration in so great a mass, a tremendous force was needed, a force that even made the enemy fleet reel under its blow!

	But, sudden as it was, Arcot had managed to push the power into reverse, using the force of the molecular drive to counteract the attraction the aliens had brought to bear.

	The whole mighty fabric of the ship creaked as the titanic load came upon it. They were using a force of a million tons!

	The mighty lux beams withstood the stress, however, and the ship came to a halt, then was swiftly backing away from the alien battle fleet.

	"We can give them all they want!" said Arcot grimly. He noticed that Wade and Fuller had been knocked out by the sudden blow, but Morey, though slightly groggy, was still in possession of his senses.

	"Let's not," Morey remonstrated. "We may be able to make friends with them, but not if we kill them off."

	"Right!" replied Arcot, "but we're going to give them a little demonstration of power!"

	The Ancient Mariner leaped suddenly upward with a speed that defied the eyes of the men at the rays of the enemy ships. Then, as they turned to follow the sudden motion of the ship—it was not there!

	The Ancient Mariner had vanished!

	Morey was startled for an instant as the ship and his companions disappeared around him, then he realized what had happened. Arcot had used the invisibility apparatus!

	Arcot turned and raced swiftly far off to one side, behind the strange ships, and hovered over the great cliff that made the edge of the cleft that was the river bed. Then he snapped the ship into full visibility.

	Wade and Fuller had recovered by now, and Arcot started barking out orders. "Wade—Fuller—take the molecular ray, Wade, and tear down that cliff—throw it down into the valley. Fuller, turn the heat beams on with all the power you can get and burn that refuse he tears down into a heap of molten lava!

	"I'm going to show them what we can do! And, Wade—after Fuller gets it melted down, throw the molten lava high in the air!"

	From the ship, a long pencil of rays, faintly violet from the air they ionized, reached out and touched the cliff. In an instant, it had torn down a vast mass of the solid rock, which came raining down into the valley with a roaring thunder and threw the dirt of the valley into the air like splashed mud.

	Then the violet ray died, and two rays of blinding brilliance reached out. The rock was suddenly smoking, steaming. Then it became red, dull at first, then brighter and brighter. Suddenly it collapsed into a great pool of white-hot lava, flowing like water under the influence of the beams from the ship.

	Again the pale violet of the molecular beams touched the rock—which was now bubbling lava. In an instant, the great mass of flaming incandescent rock was flying like a glowing meteor, up into the air. It shot up with terrific speed, broke up in mid-air, and fell back as a rain of red-hot stone.

	The bright rays died out, but the pale fingers of the molecular beams traced across the level ground. As they touched it, the solid soil spouted into the air like some vast fountain, to fall back as frost-covered powder.

	The rays that had swung a sun into destruction were at work! What chance had man, or the works of man against such? What mattered a tiny planet when those rays could hurl one mighty sun into another, to blaze up in an awful conflagration that would light up space for a million light years around with a mighty glare of light!

	As if by a giant plow, the valley was torn and rent in great streaks by the pale violet rays of the molecular force. Wade tore loose a giant boulder and sent it rocketing into the heavens. It came down with a terrific crash minutes later, to bury itself deep in the soil as it splintered into fragments.

	Suddenly the Ancient Mariner was jerked violently again. Evidently undaunted by their display of power, the aliens' rays had gripped the Earthmen's ship again and were drawing it with terrific acceleration. But this time the ship was racing toward the city, caught by the beam of one of the low-built, sturdy buildings that housed the protective ray projectors.

	Again Arcot threw on the mighty power units that drove the ship, bracing them against the pull of the beam.

	"Wade! Use the molecular ray! Stop that beam!" Arcot ordered.

	The ship was stationary, quivering under the titanic forces that struggled for it. The enemy fleet raced toward them, trying to come to the aid of the men in the tower.

	The pale glow of the molecular beam reached out its ghostly finger and touched the heavy-walled ray projector building. There was a sudden flash of discharging energy, and the tower was hurled high in the air, leaving only a gaping hole in the ground.

	Instantly, with the collapse of the beam that held it, the Ancient Mariner shot backward, away from the scene of the battle. Arcot snapped off the drive and turned on the invisibility apparatus. They hung motionless, silent and invisible in the air, awaiting developments.

	In close formation, one group of ships blocked the opening in the wall of rays that the removal of one projector building had caused. Three other ships went to investigate the wreck of the building that had fallen a mile away.

	The rest of the fleet circled the city, darting around, searching frantically for the invisible enemy, fully aware of the danger of collision. The unnerving tension of expecting it every second made them erratic and nervous to the nth degree.

	"They're sticking pretty close to home," said Arcot. "They don't seem to be too anxious to play with us."

	"They don't, do they?" Morey said, looking angry. "They might at least have been willing to see what we wanted. I want to investigate some other cities. Come on!" He had thoroughly enjoyed the rest at the little mountain lake, and he was disappointed that they had been driven away. Had they wanted to, he knew, they could easily have torn the entire city out by the roots!

	"I think we ought to smash them thoroughly," said Wade. "They're certainly inhospitable people!"

	"And I, for one, would like to know what that attraction ray was," said Fuller curiously.

	"The ray is easily understood after you take a look at the wreck it made of some of these instruments," Arcot told him. "It was projected magnetism. I can see how it might be done if you worked on it for a while. The ray simply attracted everything in its path that was magnetic, which included our lux metal hull.

	"Luckily, most of our apparatus is shielded against magnetism. The few things that aren't can be repaired easily. But I'll bet Wade finds his gear in the galley thrown around quite a bit."

	"Where do we go from here, then?" Wade asked.

	"Well, this world is bigger than Earth," said Morey. "Even if they're afraid to go out of their cities to run farms, they must have other cities. The thing that puzzles me, though, is how they do it—I don't see how they can possibly raise enough food for a city in the area they have available!"

	"'People couldn't possibly live in hydrogen instead of oxygen'," Arcot quoted, grinning. "That's what they told me when I made my little announcement at the meeting on the Black Star situation. The only trouble was—they did. That suggestion of yours meets the same fate, Morey!"

	"All right, you win," agreed Morey. "Now let's see if we can find the other nations on this world more friendly."

	Arcot looked at the sun. "We're now well north of the equator. We'll go up where the air is thin, put on some speed, and go into the south temperate zone. We'll see if we can't find some people there who are more peaceably inclined."

	Arcot cut off the invisibility tubes. Instantly, all the enemy ships in the neighborhood turned and darted toward them at top speed. But the shining Ancient Mariner darted into the deep blue vault of the sky, and a moment later was lost to their view.

	"They had a lot of courage," said Arcot, looking down at the city as it sank out of sight. "It doesn't take one-quarter as much courage to fight a known enemy, no matter how deadly, as it does to fight an unknown enemy force—something that can tear down mountains and throw their forts into the air like toys."

	"Oh, they had courage, all right," Morey conceded, "but I wish they hadn't been quite so anxious to display it!"

	They were high above the ground now, accelerating with a force of one gravity. Arcot cut the acceleration down until there was just enough to overcome the air resistance, which, at the height they were flying, was very low. The sky was black above them, and the stars were showing around the blazing sun. They were unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar constellations—the stars of another universe.

	In a very short time, the ship was dropping rapidly downward again, the horizontal power off. The air resistance slowed them rapidly. They drifted high over the south temperate zone. Below them stretched the seemingly endless expanse of a great blue-green ocean.

	"They don't lack for water, do they?" Wade commented.

	"We could pretty well figure on large oceans," Arcot said. "The land is green, and there are plenty of clouds."

	Far ahead, a low mass of solid land appeared above the blue of the horizon. It soon became obvious that it was not a continent they were approaching, but a large island, stretching hundreds of miles north and south.

	Arcot dropped the ship lower; the mountainous terrain had become so broken that it would be impossible to detect a city from thirty miles up.

	The green defiles of the great mountains not only provided good camouflage, but kept any great number of ships from attacking the sides, where the ray stations were. The cities were certainly located with an eye for war! Arcot wondered what sort of conflict had lasted so long that cities were designed for perpetual war. Had they never had peace?

	"Look!" Fuller called. "There's another city!" Below them, situated in a little natural bowl in the mountains, was another of the cone cities.

	Wade and Fuller manned the ray projectors again; Arcot dropped the ship toward the city, one hand on the reverse switch in case the inhabitants tried to use the magnetic beam again.

	At last, they had come quite low. There were no ships in the air, and no people in sight.

	Suddenly, the outside microphone picked up a low, humming sound. A long, cigar-shaped object was heading toward the ship at high speed. It had been painted a dark, mottled green, and was nearly invisible against background of foliage beneath the ship.

	"Wade! Catch that on the ray!" Arcot commanded sharply, moving the ship to one side at the same time. Instantly, the guided missile turned and kept coming toward them.

	Wade triggered the molecular beam, and the missile was suddenly dashing toward the ground with terrific speed. There was a terrific flash of flame and a shock wave of concussion. A great hole gaped in the ground.

	"They sure know their chemistry," remarked Wade, looking down at the great hole the explosion had torn in the ground. "That wasn't atomic, but on the other hand, it wasn't dynamite or TNT, either! I'd like to know what they use!"

	"Personally," said Arcot angrily, "I think that was more or less a gentle hint to move on!" He didn't like the way they were being received; he had wanted to meet these people. Of course, the other planet might be inhabited, but if it wasn't—

	"I wonder—" said Morey thoughtfully. "Arcot, those people were obviously warned against our attack—probably by that other city. Now, we've come nearly halfway around this world; certainly we couldn't have gone much farther away and still be on the planet. And we find this city in league with the other! Since this league goes halfway around the world, and they expected us to do the same, isn't it fair to assume, just on the basis of geographical location, that all this world is in one league?"

	"Hmmm—an interplanetary war," mused Arcot. "That would certainly prove that one of the other planets is inhabited. The question is—which one?"

	"The most probable one is the next inner planet, Aphrodite," replied Morey.

	Arcot fired the ship into the sky. "If your conclusions are correct—and I think they are—I see no reason to stay on this planet. Let's go see if their neighbors are less aggressive!"

	With that, he shot the ship straight up, rotating the axis until it was pointing straight away from the planet. He increased the acceleration until, as they left the outer fringes of the atmosphere, the ship was hitting a full four gravities.

	"I'm going to shorten things up and use the space control," Arcot said. "The gravitational field of the sun will drain a lot of our energy out, but so what? Lead is cheap, and before we're through, we'll have plenty or I'll know the reason why!"

	Dr. Richard Arcot was angry—boiling all the way through!

-

XV

	THERE WAS THE familiar tension in the air as the space field built up and they were hurled suddenly forward; the star-like dot of the planet suddenly expanded as they rushed forward at a speed far greater than that of light. In a moment, it had grown to a disc; Arcot stopped the space control. Again they were moving forward on molecular drive.

	Very shortly, Arcot began to decelerate. Within ten minutes, they were beginning to feel the outermost wisps of the cloud-laden atmosphere. The heat of the blazing sun was intense; the surface of the planet was, no doubt, a far warmer place than Earthmen would find comfortable. They would have been far better suited to remain on the other planet, but they very evidently were not wanted!

	They dropped down through the atmosphere, sinking for miles as the ship slowed to the retarding influence of the air and the molecular power. Down they went, through mile after mile of heavy cloud layer, unable to see the ground beneath them.

	Then, suddenly, the thick, all-enveloping mists that held them were gone. They were flying smoothly along under leaden skies—perpetual, dim, dark clouds. Despite the brightness of the sun above them, the clouds made the light dim and gray. They reflected such an enormous percentage of the light that struck them that the climate was not as hot as they had feared.

	The ground was dark under its somber mantle of clouds; the hills, the rivers that crawled across wide plains, and the oddly stunted forests all looked as though they had been modeled in a great mass of greenish-gray putty. It was a discouraging world.

	"I'm glad we didn't wait for our swim here," remarked Wade. "It sure looks like rain."

	Arcot stopped the ship and held it motionless at ten miles while Wade made his chemical analysis of the air. The report looked favorable; plenty of oxygen and a trace of carbon dioxide mixed with nitrogen.

	"But the water vapor!" Wade said. "The air is saturated with it! It won't be the heat, but the humidity that'll bother us—to coin a phrase."

	Arcot dropped the ship still farther, at the same time moving forward toward a sea he had seen in the distance. Swiftly, the ground sped beneath them. The low plain sloped toward the sea, a vast, level surface of gray, leaden water.

	"Oh, brother, what a pleasant world," said Fuller sarcastically.

	It was certainly not an inspiring scene. The leaden skies, the heavy clouds, the dark land, and the gray-green of the sea, always shaded in perpetual half-light, lest the burning sun heat them beyond endurance. It was a gloomy world.

	They turned and followed the coast. Still no sign of inhabitants was visible. Mile after mile passed beneath them as the shining ship followed up the ragged shore. Small indentations and baylets ran into a shallow, level sea. This world had no moon, so it was tideless, except for the slight solar tides.

	Finally, far ahead of them, and well back from the coast, Arcot spotted a great mountain range.

	"I'm going to head for that," he told the others. "If these people are at war with our very inimical friends of the other planet, chances are they'll put their cities in the mountains, too."

	They had such cities. The Ancient Mariner had penetrated less than a hundred miles along the twisted ranges of the mountains before they saw, far ahead, a great, cone-shaped city. The city was taller, larger than those of the other planet, and the cone ran up farther from the actual city buildings, leaving the aircraft more room.

	Arcot stopped and watched the city a long time through the telescope. It seemed similar to the others in all respects. The same type of needle-like ships floated in the air above it, and the same type of cone ray projectors nestled in the base of the city's invisible protection.

	"We may as well take a chance," said Arcot. He shot the ship forward until they were within a mile of the city, in plain sight of the inhabitants.

	Suddenly, without any warning signal, apparently, all the air traffic went wild—then it was gone. Every ship seemed to have ducked into some unseen place of refuge.

	Within a few minutes, a fleet of battleships was winging its way toward the invisible barrier. Then it was out, and, in a great semi-cylinder a quarter of a mile high, and a quarter of a mile in radius, they advanced toward the Ancient Mariner.

	Arcot kept the ship motionless. He knew that their only weapon was the magnetic ray; otherwise they would have won the war long ago. And he knew he could cope with magnetism.

	Slowly the ships advanced. At last, they halted a quarter of a mile from the Earth ship. A single ship detached itself from the mass and advanced to within a few hundred feet of the Ancient Mariner.

	Quickly, Arcot jumped to his feet. "Morey, take the controls. Evidently they want to parley, not fight. I'm going over there."

	He ran the length of the corridor to his room and put on his power suit. A moment later, he left the airlock and launched himself into space, flying swiftly toward the ship. He had come alone, but armed as he was, he was probably more than a match for anything they could bring to bear on him.

	He went directly toward the broad expanse of glass that marked the control room of the alien ship and looked in curiously.

	The pilot was a man much like Arcot; quite tall, and of tremendous girth, with a huge chest and great powerful arms. His hands, like those of the Venerians, had two thumbs.

	With equal curiosity, the man stared at Arcot, floating in the air without apparent means of support.

	Arcot hung there a moment, then motioned that he wished to enter. The giant alien motioned him around to the side of the ship. Halfway down the length of the ship, Arcot saw a port suddenly open. He flew swiftly forward and entered.

	The man who stood there was a giant as tall as Wade and even more magnificently muscled, with tremendous shoulders and giant chest. His thighs, rounded under a close-fitting gray uniform, were bulging with smooth muscle.

	He was considerably larger than the man in the pilot room, and whereas the other had been a pale yellow in color, this man was burned to a more healthy shade of tan. His features were regular and pleasing; his hair was black and straight; his high forehead denoted a high degree of intelligence, and his clear black eyes, under heavy black eyebrows, seemed curious, but friendly.

	His nose was rather thin, but not sharp, and his mouth was curved in a smile of welcome. His chin was firm and sharp, distinct from his face and neck.

	They looked each other over, and Arcot smiled as their eyes met.

	"Torlos," said the alien, pointing to his great chest.

	"Arcot," replied the Earthman, pointing to himself. Then he pointed to the stranger. "Torlos." He knew he hadn't pronounced it exactly as the alien had, but it would suffice.

	The stranger smiled in approval. "Ahcut," he said, pointing to the Earthman.

	Then he pointed to the comparatively thin arms of the Earthman, and to his own. Then he pointed to Arcot's head and to the mechanism he wore on his back, then to his own head, and went through the motions of walking with great effort.

	Again he pointed at Arcot's head, nodding his own in approval.

	Arcot understood immediately what was meant. The alien had indicated that the Earthman was comparatively weak, but that he had no need of muscle, for he made his head and his machines work for him. And he had decided that the head was better!

	Arcot looked at the man's eyes and concentrated on the idea of friendship, projecting it with all his mental power. The black eyes suddenly widened in surprise, which quickly turned to pleasure as he tried to concentrate on one thought.

	It was difficult for Arcot to interpret the thoughts of the alien; all his concepts were in a different form. At last, he caught the idea of location—but it was location in the interrogative! How was he to interpret that?

	Then it hit him. Torlos was asking: "Where are you from?"

	Arcot pulled a pad of paper and a pencil from his pocket and began to sketch rapidly. First, he drew the local galaxy, with dots for stars, and swept his hand around him. He made one of the dots a little heavier and pointed at the bright blur in the cloudy sky above them. Then he drew a circle around that dot and put another dot on it, at the same time indicating the planet beneath them.

	Torlos showed that he understood.

	Arcot continued. At the other end of the paper, he drew another galaxy, and indicated Earth. Then he drew a dotted line from Earth to the planet they were now on.

	Torlos looked at him in incredulous wonder. Again he indicated his respect for Arcot's brain.

	Arcot smiled and indicated the city. "Can we go there?" he projected into the other's mind.

	Torlos turned and glanced toward the end of the corridor. There was no one in sight, so he shouted an order in a deep, pleasant voice. Instantly, another giant man came striding down the corridor with a lithe softness that indicated tremendous muscular power, excellently controlled. He saluted by placing his left hand over the right side of his chest. Arcot noted that for future reference.

	Torlos spoke to the other alien for a moment. The other left and returned a minute later and said something to Torlos. Torlos turned to Arcot indicating that he should return to his ship and follow them.

	Arcot suddenly turned his eyes and looked directly into the black eyes of the alien. "Torlos," he projected, "will you come with us on our ship?"

	"I am commander of this ship. I can not go without the permission of my chief. I will ask my chief."

	Again he turned and left Arcot. He was back in a few minutes carrying a small handbag. "I can go. This keeps me in communication with my ship."

	Arcot adjusted his weight to zero and floated lightly out the doorway. He rose about six feet above the landing, then indicated to Torlos that he was to grasp Arcot's feet, one in each hand. Torlos closed a grip of steel about each ankle and stepped off the platform.

	At once, they dropped, for the power suit had not been adjusted to the load. Arcot yelped in pain as Torlos, in his surprise at not floating, involuntarily gripped tighter. Quickly, Arcot turned on more power and gasped as he felt the weight mount swiftly. He had estimated Torlos' weight at two hundred seventy or so—and it was more like three hundred and fifty! Soon, however, he had the weight adjusted, and they floated easily up toward the Ancient Mariner.

	They floated in through the door of the ship, and, once inside, Torlos released his hold. Arcot was immediately slammed to the roof with a weight of three hundred and fifty pounds!

	A moment later, he was again back on the floor, rubbing his back. He shook his head and frowned, then smiled and pretended to limp.

	"Don't let go so suddenly," he admonished telepathically.

	"I did not know. I am sorry," Torlos thought contritely.

	"Who's your friend?" asked Wade as he entered the corridor. "He certainly looks husky."

	"He is," Arcot affirmed. "And he must be weighted with lead! I thought he'd pull my legs off. Look at those arms!"

	"I don't want to get him mad at me," Wade grinned. "He looks like he'd make a mean opponent. What's his name?"

	"Torlos," replied Arcot, just as Fuller stepped in.

	Torlos was looking curiously at a crowbar that had been lying in a rack on the wall. He picked it up and flexed it a bit, as a man might flex a rapier to test its material. Then he held it far out in front of him and proceeded to tie a knot in the inch-thick metal bar! Then, still frowning in puzzlement, he untied it, straightened it as best he could, and put it back in the rack.

	The Earthmen were staring in utter astonishment to see the terrific strength the man displayed.

	He smiled as he turned to them again.

	"If he could do that at arm's length," Wade said thoughtfully, "what could he do if he really tried?"

	"Why don't you try and see?" Fuller asked sweetly.

	"I can think of easier—but probably no quicker—ways of committing suicide," Wade replied.

	Arcot laughed and, looking at Torlos, projected the general meaning of the last remarks. Torlos joined them in the laugh.

	"All my people are strong," he thought. "I can not understand why you are not. That was a tool? We could not use it so; it is too weak."

	Wade and the others picked up the thought, and Wade laughed. "I suppose they use old I-beams to tie up their Christmas presents."

	Arcot held a moment of silent consultation with Torlos, then turned to the others. "We are supposed to follow these men to their city to have some kind of an audience with their ruler, according to Torlos. Let's get started; the rest of the fleet is waiting."

	Arcot led Torlos through the main engine room, and was going into the main coil room when Torlos stopped him.

	"Is this all your drive apparatus?" he thought.

	"Yes, it is," Arcot projected.

	"It is smaller than the power equipment of a small private machine!" His thoughts radiated surprise. "How could you make so great a distance?"

	"Power," said Arcot. "Look!" He drew his molecular ray pistol. "This alone is powerful enough to destroy all your battle fleet without any danger on our part. And, despite your strength, you are helpless against me!"

	Arcot touched a switch on his belt and vanished.

	In amazement, Torlos reached out a hand to the spot where Arcot had stood. There was nothing there. Suddenly, he turned, touching the back of his head. Something had tugged at his hair!

	He looked all around him and moved his arms around—to no avail. There was nothing there.

	Then, in the blink of an eye, Arcot was floating in the air before him. "What avails strength against air, Torlos?" he asked, smiling.

	"For safety's sake," Torlos thought, "I want to be your friend!" He grinned widely.

	Arcot led the way on into the control room, where Morey had already started to follow the great fleet toward the city.

	"What are we going to do at the city?" Arcot asked Torlos telepathically.

	"This is the capital of the world, Sator, and here is the commander-of-all-military-and-civil-forces. It is he you will see. He has been summoned," Torlos replied carefully.

	"We visited the third world of this system first," Arcot told the alien, "and they repulsed us. We tried to be friendly, but they attacked us at once. In order to keep from being damaged, we had to destroy one of their city-protecting ray buildings." This last thought was hard to transmit; Arcot had pictured mentally a scene in which the ray building was ripped out of the ground and hurled into the air.

	In sudden anxiety and concern, Torlos stared into Arcot's eyes. And in that look, Arcot read what even telepathy had hidden heretofore.

	"Did you destroy the city?" asked Torlos anxiously. But it was not the question of a man hoping for the destruction of his enemies' cities; Arcot got the mental picture of the city, but with it, he picked up the idea of "home"! Of course, the ideas of "city" and "home" might be synonymous with these people; they never seemed to leave their cities. But why this feeling of worry?

	"No, we didn't want to hurt them," Arcot thought. "We destroyed the ray building only in self defense."

	"I understand." Despite obvious mental efforts, Torlos positively radiated a feeling of relief!

	"Are you at war with that world?" Arcot asked coolly.

	"The two worlds have been at war for many generations," Torlos said, then quickly changed the subject. "You will soon meet the leader of all the forces of Sator. He is all-powerful here. His word must be absolutely obeyed. It would be wise if you did not unnecessarily offend him. I see from what your mind tells me that you have great power, but there are many ships on Sator, more than Nansal can boast.

	"Our commander, Horlan, is a military commander, but since every man is necessarily a soldier, he is a true ruler."

	"I understand," Arcot thought. He turned to Morey and spoke in English, which Torlos could not understand. "Morey, we're going to see the top man here. He rules the army, which runs everything. You and I will go, and leave Wade and Fuller behind as a rear guard. It may not be dangerous, but after being chased off one world, we ought to be as careful as possible.

	"We'll go fully armed, and we'll stay in radio contact at all times. Watch yourselves; we don't want them even to touch this ship until we know what kind of people they are."

	They had followed the Satorian ships toward the city. The giant magnetic ray barrier opened for them, and the Ancient Mariner followed. They were inside the alien city.

-

XVI

	BELOW THE Ancient Mariner, the great buildings of the alien city jutted up in the gray light of this gray world; their massiveness seemed only to accentuate the depressing light.

	On the broad roofs, they saw hundreds of people coming out to watch them as they moved across the city. According to Torlos, they were the first friendly strangers they had ever seen. They had explored all the planets of this system without finding friendly life.

	The buildings sloped up toward the center of the city, and the mass of the great central building loomed before them.

	The fleet that was leading the Earth ship settled down to a wide courtyard that surrounded the building. Arcot dropped the Ancient Mariner down beside them. The men from Torlos' ship formed into two squads as they came out of the airlocks and marched over to the great shining ship of Earth. They formed two neat rows, one on each side of the airlock.

	"Come on, Morey," said Arcot. "We're wanted. Wade, keep the radio going at full amplification; the building may cut out some of the power. I'll try to keep you posted on what's going on, but we'll probably be busy answering questions telepathically."

	Arcot and Morey followed Torlos out into the dim light of the gray sky, walking across the courtyard between the ranks of the soldiers from Torlos' ship.

	Before them was a heavy gate of solid bronze which swung on massive bronze hinges. The building seemed to be made of a dense, gray stone, much like granite, which was depressing in its perfectly unrelieved front. There were no bright spots of color as there were on all Earthly and Venerian structures. Even the lines were grimly utilitarian; there seemed to be no decoration.

	Through the great bronze door they walked, and across a small vestibule. Then they were in a mighty concourse, a giant hallway that went completely through the structure. All around them great granite pillars rose to support the mighty building above. Square cut, they lent but little grace to the huge room, but the floor and walls were made of a hard, light green stone, almost the same color as foliage.

	On one wall there was a giant tablet, a great plaque fifteen feet high, made of a deep violet stone, and inlaid with a series of characters in the language of this world. Like English letters, they seemed to read horizontally, but whether they read from left to right or right to left there was no way of knowing. The letters themselves were made of some red metal which Arcot and Morey didn't recognize.

	Arcot turned to Torlos and projected a thought: "What is that tablet?"

	"Ever since the beginning of the war with the other planet, Nansal, the names of our mighty leaders have been inscribed on that plaque in the rarest metal."

	The term "rarest metal" was definite to Torlos, and Arcot decided to question him further on the meaning of it when time permitted.

	They crossed the great hall and came to what was evidently an elevator. The door slid open, and the two Earthmen followed Torlos and his lieutenant into the cubicle. Torlos pushed a small button. The door slid shut, and a moment later, Arcot and Morey staggered under the sudden terrific load as the car shot upward under an acceleration of at least three gravities!

	It continued just long enough for the Earthmen to get used to it, then it snapped off, and they went flying up toward the ceiling as it continued upward under its own momentum. It slowed under the influence of the planet's gravitation and came to a stop exactly opposite the doorway of a higher floor.

	"Wow! Some elevator!" exclaimed Morey as he stepped out, flexing his knees as he tried to readjust himself. "That's what I call a violent way of getting upstairs! It wasn't designed by a lazy man or a cripple! I prefer to walk, thanks! What I want to know is how the old people get upstairs. Or do they die young from using their elevators?"

	"No," mused Arcot. "That's the funny thing. They don't seem to be bothered by the acceleration. They actually jumped a little off the floor when we started, and didn't seem to experience much difficulty when we stopped." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "You know, when Torlos was bending that crowbar back there in the ship, I picked up a curious thought—I wonder if—" He turned to the giant alien. "Torlos, you once gave me the thought-idea 'bone metal'; what is that?"

	Torlos looked at him in surprise and then pointed mutely to a heavy belt he wore—made of closely woven links of iron wire!

	"I was right, Morey!" Arcot exclaimed. "These men have iron bones! No wonder he could bend that crowbar! It would be as easy as it would for you or me to snap a human arm bone!"

	"But, wait a minute!" Morey objected. "How could iron grow?"

	"How can stone grow?" countered Arcot. "That's what your bones are, essentially—calcium phosphate rock! It's just a matter of different body chemistry. Their body fluids are probably alkaline, and iron won't rust in an alkaline solution." Arcot was talking rapidly as they followed the aliens down the long corridor.

	"The thing that confirms my theory is that elevator. It's merely an iron cage in a magnetic beam, and it's pulled up with a terrific acceleration. With iron bones, these men would be similarly influenced, and they wouldn't notice the acceleration so much."

	Morey grinned. "I'll be willing to bet they don't use cells in their prisons, here! Just magnetize the floor, and the poor guy could never get away!"

	Arcot nodded. "Of course, the bones must be pure iron; their bones evidently don't retain any of the magnetism when they leave the field."

	"We seem to be here," Morey interrupted. "Let's continue the discussion later."

	Their party had stopped just outside a large, elaborately carved door, the first sign of ornamentation the Earthmen had seen. There were four guards armed with pistols, which, they discovered later, were powered by compressed air under terrific pressure. They hurled a small metal slug through a rifled barrel, and were effective over a distance of about a mile, although they could only fire four times without reloading.

	Torlos spoke briefly with the guard, who saluted and opened the door. The two Earthmen followed Torlos into a large room.

	Before them was a large, crescent-shaped table, around which were seated several men. At the center of the crescent curve sat a man in a gray uniform, but he was so bedecked with insignia, medals, ribbons, and decorations that his uniform was scarcely visible.

	The entire assemblage, including the leader, rose as the Earthmen entered. Arcot and Morey, taking the hint, snapped to attention and delivered a precise military salute.

	"We greet you in the name of our planet," said Arcot aloud. "I know you don't understand a word I'm saying, but I hope it sounds impressive enough. We salute you, O High Muckymuck!"

	Morey, successfully keeping a straight face, raised his hand and said sonorously: "That goes double for me, bub."

	In his own language, the leader replied, putting his hands to his hips with a definite motion, and shaking his head from side to side at the same time.

	Arcot watched the man closely while he spoke. He was taller than Torlos, but less heavily built, as were all the others here. It seemed that Torlos was unusually powerful, even for this world.

	When the leader had finished, Arcot smiled and turned to project this thoughts at Torlos.

	"Tell your leader that we come from a planet far away across the vast depths of space. We come in peace, and we will leave in peace, but we would like to ask some favors of him, which we will repay by giving him the secret of our weapons. With them, he can easily conquer Nansal.

	"All we want is some wire made from the element lead and some information from your astronomers."

	Torlos turned and spoke to his leader in a deep, powerful voice.

	Meanwhile, Morey was trying to get in communication with the ship. The walls, however, seemed to be made of metal, and he couldn't get through to Wade.

	"We're cut off from the ship," he said quietly to Arcot.

	"I was afraid of that, but I think it'll be all right. Our proposition is too good for them to turn down."

	Torlos turned back to Arcot when the leader had finished speaking. "The Commanding One asks that you prove the possibilities of your weapons. His scientists tell him that it is impossible to make the trip that you claim to have made."

	"What your scientists say is true, to an extent," Arcot thought. "They have learned that no body can go faster than the speed of light—is that not so?"

	"Yes. Such, they say, is the fact. To have made this trip, you must, of necessity, be not less than twenty million years old!"

	"Tell them that there are some things they do not yet know about space. The velocity of light is a thing that is fixed by the nature of space, right?"

	Torlos consulted with the scientists again, then turned back to Arcot. "They agree that they do not know all the secrets of the Universe, but they agree that the speed of light is fixed by the nature of space."

	"How fast does sound travel?" Arcot asked.

	"They ask in what medium do you mean?"

	"How fast does light travel? In air? In glass? The speed of light is as variable as that of sound. If I can alter the nature of space, so as to make the velocity of light greater, can I not then go faster than in normal space?"

	"They say that this is true," Torlos said, after more conversation with the men at the table, "but they say that space is unalterable, since it is emptiness."

	"Ask them if they know of the curvature of space." Arcot was becoming worried for fear his explanation would be unintelligible; unless they knew his terms, he could not explain, and it would take a long time to teach them.

	"They say," Torlos thought, "that I have misunderstood you. They say space could not possibly be curved, for space is emptiness, and how could empty nothingness be curved."

	Arcot turned to Morey and shrugged his shoulders. "I give up, Morey; it's a bad case. If they insist that space is nothing, and can't be curved, I can't go any further."

	"If they don't know of the curvature of space," said Morey, "ask them how they learned that the velocity of light is the limiting velocity of a moving body."

	Torlos translated and the scientists gave their reply. "They say that you do not know more of space than they, for they know that the speed of light is ultimate. They have tested this with spaceships at high speeds and with experiments with the smallest particles of electricity."

	The scientists were looking at Arcot now in protest; they felt he was trying to foist something off on them.

	Arcot, too, was becoming exasperated. "Well, if they insist that we couldn't have come from another star, where do they think I come from? They have explored this system and found no such people as we, so I must have come from another star. How? If they won't accept my explanations, let them think up a theory of their own to explain the facts!" He paused for Torlos to translate, then went on. "They say I don't know any more than they do. Tell them to watch this."

	He drew his molecular ray pistol and lifted a heavy metal chair into the air. Then Morey drew his heat beam and turned it on the chair. In a few seconds, it was glowing white hot, and then it collapsed into a fiery ball of liquid metal. Morey shut off the heat beam, and Arcot held the ball in the air while it cooled rapidly under the influence of the molecular ray. Then he lowered it to the floor.

	It was obvious that the scientists were impressed, and the Emperor was talking eagerly with the men around him. They talked for several minutes, saying nothing to the Earthmen. Torlos stood quietly, waiting for a message to relay.

	The Emperor called out, and some of the guards moved inside the door.

	Torlos turned to Arcot. "Show no emotion!" came his telepathic warning. "I have been listening to them as they spoke. The Commanding One wants your weapons. Regardless of what his scientists tell him about the possibility of your trip, he knows those weapons work, and he wants them.

	"You see, I am not a Satorian at all. I'm from Nansal, sent here many years ago as a spy. I have served in their fleets for many years, and have gained their trust.

	"I am telling you the truth, as you will soon see.

	"These people are going to follow their usual line of action and take the most direct way toward their end. They are going to attack you, believing that you, despite your weapons, will go down before superior numbers.

	"And you'd better move fast; he's calling the guards already!"

	Arcot turned to Morey, his face calm, his heart beating like a vibrohammer. "Keep your face straight, Morey. Don't look surprised. They're planning to jump us. We'll rip out the right wall and—"

	He stopped. It was too late! The order had been given, and the guards were leaping toward them. Arcot grabbed at his ray pistol, but one of the guards jumped him before he had a chance to draw it.

	Torlos seized the man by one leg and an arm and, tensing his huge muscles, hurled him thirty feet against the Commanding One with such force that both were killed instantly! He turned and grabbed another before his first victim had landed and hurled him toward the advancing guards. Arcot thought fleetingly that here was proof of Torlos' story of being from Nansal; the greater gravity of the third planet made him a great deal stronger than the Satorians!

	One of the guards was trying to reach for Arcot. Acting instinctively, the Earthman lashed out with a hard jab to the point of the Satorian's jaw. The iron bones transmitted the shock beautifully to the delicate brain; the man's head jerked back, and he collapsed to the floor. Arcot's hand felt as though he'd hit it with a hammer, but he was far too busy to pay any attention to the pain.

	Morey, too, had realized the futility of trying to overcome the guards by wrestling. The only thing to do was dodge and punch. The guards were trying to take the Earthmen alive, but, because of their greater weight, they couldn't move quite as fast as Arcot and Morey.

	Torlos was still in action. He had seen the success of the Earthmen who, weak as they were, had been able to knock a man out with a blow to the jaw. Driving his own fists like pistons, he imitated their blows with deadly results; every man he struck went down forever.

	The dead were piling around him, but through the open door he could see reinforcements arriving. Somehow, he had to save these Earthmen; if Sator got their secrets, Nansal would be lost!

	He reached down and grabbed one of the fallen men and hurled him across the room, smashing back the men who struggled to attack. Then he picked up another and followed through with a second projectile. Then a third. With the speed and tirelessness of some giant engine of war, he slammed his macabre ammunition against the oncoming reinforcements with telling results.

	At last Arcot was free for a moment, and that was all he needed. He jerked his molecular ray pistol from its holster and beamed it mercilessly toward the door, hurling the attackers violently backwards. They died instantly, their chilled corpses driving back against their comrades with killing force.

	In a moment, every man in the room was dead except for the two Earthmen and the giant Torlos.

	Outside the room, they could hear shouted orders as more of the Satorian guards were rallied.

	"They'll try to kill us now!" Arcot said. "Come on, we've got to get out of here!"

	"Sure," said Morey, "but which way?"

-

XVII

	"MOREY, PULL DOWN the wall over that door to block their passage," Arcot ordered. "I'll get the other wall."

	Arcot pointed his pistol and triggered it. The outer wall flew outward in an explosion of flying masonry. He switched on his radio and called the Ancient Mariner.

	"Wade! We were cut off because of the metal in the walls! We've been doublecrossed—they tried to jump us. Torlos warned us in time. We've torn out the wall; just hang outside with the airlock open and wait for us. Don't use the rays, because we'll be invisible, and you might hit us."

	Suddenly the room rocked under an explosion, and the debris Morey's ray had torn down over the door was blasted away. A score of men leaped through the gap before the dust had settled. Morey beamed them down mercilessly before they could fire their weapons.

	"In the air, quick!" Arcot yelled. He turned on his power suit and rose into the air, signalling Torlos to grab his ankles as he had done before. Morey slammed another parting shot toward the doorway as he lifted himself toward the ceiling. Then both Earthmen snapped on their invisibility units. Torlos, because of his direct contact with Arcot, also vanished from sight.

	More of the courageous, but foolhardy Satorians leaped through the opening and stared in bewilderment as they saw no one moving. Arcot, Morey, and Torlos were hanging invisible in the air above them.

	Just then, the shining bulk of the Ancient Mariner drifted into view. They drew back behind the wall and sought shelter. One of them began to fire his compressed air gun at it with absolutely no effect; the heavy lux walls might as well have been hit by a mosquito.

	As the airlock swung open, Arcot and Morey headed out through the breach in the wall. A moment later, they were inside the ship. The heavy door hissed closed behind them as they settled to the floor.

	"I'll take the controls," Arcot said. "Morey, head for the rear; you take the moleculars and take Torlos with you to handle the heat beam." He turned and ran toward the control room, where Wade and Fuller were waiting. "Wade, take the forward molecular beams; Fuller, you handle the heat projector."

	Arcot strapped himself into the control chair.

	Suddenly, there was a terrific explosion, and the titanic mass of the ship was rocked by the detonation of a bomb one of the men in the building had fired at the ship.

	Torlos had evidently understood the operation of the heat beam projector quickly; the stabbing beam reached out, and the great tower, from floor to roof, suddenly leaned over and slumped as the entire side of the building was converted into a mass of glowing stone and molten steel. Then it crashed heavily to the ground a half mile below.

	But already there were forty of the great battleships rising to meet them.

	"I think we'd better get moving," Arcot said. "We can't let a magnetic ray touch us now; it would kill Torlos. I'm going to cut in the invisibility units, so don't use the heat beams whatever you do!"

	Arcot snapped the ship into invisibility and darted to one side. The enemy ships suddenly halted in their wild rush and looked around in amazement for their opponent.

	Arcot was heading for the magnetic force field which surrounded the city when Torlos made a mistake. He turned the powerful heat beam downwards and picked off an enemy battleship. It fell, a blazing wreck, but the ray touched a building behind it, and the ionized air established a conducting path between the ship and the planet.

	The apparatus was not designed to make a planet invisible, but it made a noble effort. As a result one of the tubes blew, and the Ancient Mariner was visible again. Arcot had no time to replace the tube; the Satorian fleet kept him too busy.

	Arcot drove the ship, shooting, twisting upward; Wade and Morey kept firing the molecular beams with precision. The pale rays reached out to touch the battleship, and wherever they touched, the ships went down in wreckage, falling to the city below. In spite of the odds against it, the Ancient Mariner was giving a good account of itself.

	And always, Arcot was working the ship toward the magnetic wall and the base of the city.

	Suddenly, giant pneumatic guns from below joined in the battle, hurling huge explosive shells toward the Earth-ship. They managed to hit the Ancient Mariner twice, and each time the ship was staggered by the force of the blast, but the foot-thick armor of lux metal ignored the explosions.

	The magnetic rays touched them a few times, and each time Torlos was thrown violently to the floor, but the ship was in the path of the beams for so short a time that he was not badly injured. He more than made up for his injuries with the ray he used, and Morey was no mean gunner, either, judging from the work he was doing.

	Three ships attempted to commit suicide in their efforts to destroy the Earthmen. They were only semi-successful; they managed to commit suicide. In trying to crash into the ship, they were simply caught by Morey's or Wade's molecular beam and thrown away. Morey actually developed a use for them. He caught them in the beam and used them as bullets to smash the other ships, throwing them about on the molecular ray until they were too cold to move.

	Arcot finally managed to reach the magnetic wall.

	"Wade!" he called. "Get that projector building!"

	A molecular beam reached down, and the black metal dome sailed high into the sky, breaking the solidity of the magnetic wall. An instant later, the Ancient Mariner shot through the gap. In a few moments, they would be far away from the city.

	Torlos seemed to realize this. Moving quickly, he pushed Morey away from the molecular beam projector, taking the controls away from him.

	He did not realize the power of that ray; he did not know that these projectors could move whole suns out of their orbits. He only knew that they were destructive. They were several miles from the city when he turned the projector on it, after twisting the power control up.

	To his amazement, he saw the entire city suddenly leap into the air and flash out into space, a howling meteor that vanished into the cloudbank overhead. Behind it was a deep hole in the planet's surface, a mighty chasm lined with dark granite.

	Torlos stared at it in amazement and horror.

	Arcot turned back slowly, and they sailed over the spot where the city had been. They saw a dozen or so battleships racing away from them to spread the news of the disaster; they were the few which had been fortunate enough to be outside the city when the beam struck.

	Arcot maneuvered the ship directly over the mighty pit and sank slowly down, using the great searchlights to illuminate the dark chasm. Far, far down, he could see the solid rock of the bottom. The thing was miles deep.

	Then Arcot lifted the ship and headed up through the cloud layer and into the bright light of the great yellow sun, above the sea of gray misty clouds.

	Arcot signalled Morey, who had come into the control room, to take over the controls of the ship. "Head out into space, Morey. I want to find out why Torlos pulled that last stunt. Wade, will you put a new tube in the invisibility unit?"

	"Sure," Wade replied. "By the way, what happened back there? We were surprised as the very devil to hear you yelling for help; everything seemed peaceful up to then."

	Arcot flexed his bruised hands and grinned ruefully. "Plenty happened." He went on to explain to Wade and Fuller what had happened in their meeting with the Satorian Commander.

	"Nice bunch of people to deal with," Wade said caustically. "They tried to get everything and lost it all. We would have given them plenty if they'd been decent about it. But what sort of war is this that the people of these two planets are carrying on, anyway?"

	"That's the question I intend to settle," replied Arcot. "We haven't had an opportunity to talk to Torlos yet. He had just admitted to me that he was a spy for Nansal when the fun began, and we've been too busy to ask questions ever since. Come on, let's go into the library."

	Arcot indicated to Torlos that he was to go with him. Wade and Fuller followed.

	When they had all seated themselves, Arcot began the telepathic questioning. "Torlos, why did you force Morey to leave the ray and then destroy the city? You certainly had no reason to kill all the non-combatant women and children in that city, did you? And why, after I told you absolutely not to use the heat beam while we were invisible, did you use the rays on that battleship? You made our invisibility break down and destroyed a tube. Why did you do this?"

	"I am sorry, man of Earth," replied Torlos. "I can only say that I did not fully understand the effect the rays would have. I did not know how long we would remain invisible; the thing has been accomplished in our laboratories, but only for fractions of a second, and I feared we might become visible soon. That was one of their latest battleships, equipped with a new, secret, and very deadly weapon. I do not know exactly what the weapon is, but I knew that ship could be deadly against us, and I wanted to make sure we were not attacked by it. That is why I used the beam while your ship was invisible.

	"And I did not intend to destroy the city. I was only trying to tear up the factory that builds these battleships; I only wanted to destroy their machines. I had no conception of the power of that ray. I was as horrified to see the city disappear as you were; I only wanted to protect my people." Torlos smiled bitterly. "I have lived among these treacherous people for many years, and I cannot say that I had no provocation to destroy their city and everyone in it. But I had no intention of doing it, Earthman."

	Arcot knew he was sincere. There could be no deception when communicating telepathically. He wished he had used it when communicating with the Commanding One of Sator; the trouble would have been stopped quickly!

	"You still do not have any conception of the magnitude of the power of that beam, Torlos," Arcot told him. "With the rays of this ship, we tore a sun from its orbit and threw it into another. What you did to that city, we could do to the whole planet. Do not tamper with forces you do not understand, Torlos.

	"There are forces on this ship that would make the energies of your greatest battleship seem weak and futile. We can race through space a billion times faster than the speed of light; we can tear apart and destroy the atoms of matter; we can rip apart the greatest of planets; we can turn the hurtling stars and send them where we want them; we can curve space as we please; we can put out the fires of a sun, if we wish.

	"Torlos, respect the powers of this ship, and do not release its energies unknowingly; they are too great."

	Torlos looked around him in awe. He had seen the engines—small, apparently futile things, compared with the solid might of the giant engines in his ship—but he had seen explosive charges that he knew would split any ship open from end to end bounce harmlessly from the smooth walls of this ship. He had seen it destroy the fleet of magnetic ships that had formed a supposedly impregnable guard around the mightiest city of Sator.

	Then he himself had touched a button, and the giant city had shot off into space, leaving behind it only a screaming tornado and a vast chasm in the crust of the blasted planet.

	He could not appreciate the full significance of the velocities Arcot had told him about—he only knew that he had made a bad mistake in underrating the powers of this ship! "I will not touch these things again without your permission, Earthman," Torlos promised earnestly.

	The Ancient Mariner drove on through space, rapidly eating up the millions of miles that separated Nansal from Sator. Arcot sat in the control room with Morey discussing their passenger.

	"You know," Arcot mused, "I've been thinking about that man's strength; an iron skeleton doesn't explain it all. He has to have muscles to move that skeleton around."

	"He's got muscles, all right," Morey grinned. "But I see what you mean; muscles that big should tire easily, and his don't seem to. He seems tireless; I watched him throw those men one after another like bullets from a machine gun. He threw the last one as violently as the first—and those men weighed over three hundred pounds! Apparently his muscles felt no fatigue!"

	"There's another thing," pointed out Arcot. "The way he was breathing and the way he seemed to keep so cool. When I got through there, I was dripping with sweat; that hot, moist air was almost too much for me. Our friend? Cool as ever, if not more so.

	"And after the fight, he wasn't even breathing heavily!"

	"No," agreed Morey. "But did you notice him during the fight? He was breathing heavily, deeply, and swiftly—not the shallow, panting breath of a runner, but deep and full, yet faster than I can breathe. I could hear him breathing in spite of all the noise of the battle."

	"I noticed it," Arcot said. "He started breathing before the fight started. A human being can fight very swiftly, and with tremendous vigor, for ten seconds, putting forth his best effort, and only breathe once or twice. For another two minutes, he breathes more heavily than usual. But after that, he can't just slow down back to normal. He has used up the surplus oxygen in his system, and that has to be replaced; he has run into 'oxygen debt'. He has to keep on breathing hard to get back the oxygen surplus his body requires.

	"But not Torlos! No fatigue for him! Why? Because he doesn't use the oxygen of the air to do work, and therefore his body is not a chemical engine!"

	Morey nodded slowly. "I see what you're driving at. His body uses the heat energy of the air! His muscles turn heat energy into motion the same way our molecular beams do!"

	"Exactly—he lives on heat!" Arcot said. "I've noticed that he seems almost cold-blooded; his body is at the temperature of the room at all times. In a sense, he is reptilian, but he's vastly more efficient and greatly different than any reptile Earth ever knew. He eats food, all right, but he only needs it to replace his body cells and to fuel his brain."

	"Oh, brother," said Morey softly. "No wonder he can do the things he did! Why, he could have kept up that fight for hours without getting tired! Fatigue is as unknown to him as cold weather. He'd only need sleep to replace worn parts. His world is warm and upright on its axis, so there are no seasons. He couldn't survive in the Arctic, but he's obviously the ideal form of life for the tropics."

	As the two men found out later, Morey was wrong on that last point. The men of Torlos' race had a small organ, a mass of cells in the lower abdomen which could absorb food from the bloodstream and oxidize it, yielding heat, whenever the temperature of the blood dropped below a certain point. Then they could live very comfortably in the Arctic zones; they carried their own heaters. Their vast strength was limited then, however, and they were forced to eat more and were more subject to fatigue.

	Wade and Fuller had been trying to speak with Torlos telepathically, and had evidently run into difficulty, for Fuller called into the control room: "Hey, Arcot, come here a minute! I thought telepathy was a universal language, but this guy doesn't get our ideas at all! And we can't make out some of his. Just now, he seemed to be thinking of 'nourishment' or 'food', and I found out he was thinking of 'heat'!"

	"I'll be right down," Arcot told him, heading for the library.

	As he entered, Torlos smiled at him; Arcot picked up his thought easily: "Your friends do not seem to understand my thoughts."

	"We are not made as you are," Arcot explained, "and our thought forms are different. To you, 'heat' and 'food' are practically the same thing, but we do not think of them as such."

	He continued, explaining carefully to Torlos the differences between their bodies and their methods of using energy.

	"Stone bones!" Torlos thought in amazement. "And chemical engines for muscles! No wonder you seem so weak. And yet, with your brains, I would hate to have to fight a war with your people!"

	"Which brings me to another point," Arcot continued. "We would like to know how the war between the people of Sator and the people of Nansal began. Has it been going on very long?"

	Torlos nodded. "I will tell you the story. It is a history that began many centuries ago; a history of persecution and rebellion. And yet, for all that, I think it an interesting history.

	"Hundreds of years ago, on Nansal ..."

-

XVIII

	HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO, on Nansal, there had lived a wise and brilliant teacher named Norus. He had developed an ideal, a philosophy of life, a code of ethics. He had taught the principles of nobility without arrogance, pride without stubbornness, and humility without servility.

	About him had gathered a group of men who began to develop and spread his ideals. As the new philosophy spread across the planet, more and more Nansalians adopted it and began to raise their children according to its tenets.

	But no philosophy, however workable, however noble, can hope to convert everyone. There always remains a hard core of men who feel that "the old way is the best way". In this case, it was the men whose lives had been based on cunning, deceit, and treachery.

	One of these men, a brilliant, but warped genius, named Sator, had built the first spaceship, and he and his men had fled Nansal to set up their own government and free themselves from the persecution they believed they suffered at the hands of the believers of Norus.

	They fled to the second planet, where the ship crashed and the builder, Sator, was killed. For hundreds of years, nothing was heard of the emigrants, and the people of Nansal believed them dead. Nansal was at peace.

	But the Satorians managed to live on the alien world, and they built a civilization there, a civilization based on an entirely different system. It was a system of cunning. To them, cunning was right. The man who could plot most cunningly, gain his ends by deceiving his friends best, was the man who most deserved to live. There were a few restrictions; they had loyalty, for one thing—loyalty to their country and their world.

	In time, the Satorians rediscovered the space drive, but by this time, living on the new planet had changed them physically. They were somewhat smaller than the Nansalians, and lighter in color, for their world was always sunless. The warm rays of the sun had tanned the skins of the Nansalians to a darker color.

	When the Satorians first came to Nansal, it was presumably in peace. After so many hundreds of years without war, the Nansalians accepted them, and trade treaties were signed. For years, the Satorians traded peacefully.

	In the meantime, Satorian spies were working to find the strengths and weaknesses of Nansal, searching to discover their secret weapons and processes, if any. And they rigorously guarded their own secrets. They refused to disclose the secrets of the magnetic beam and the magnetic space drive.

	Finally, there were a few of the more suspicious Nansalians who realized the danger in such a situation. There were three men, students in one of the great scientific schools of Nansal, who realized that the situation should be studied. There was no law prohibiting the men of Nansal from going to Sator, but it seemed that Nature had raised a more impenetrable barrier.

	All Nansalians who went to Sator died of a mysterious disease. A method was found whereby a man's body could be sterilized, bacteriologically speaking, so he could not spread the disease, and this was used on all Satorians entering Nansal. But you can't sterilize a whole planet. Nansalians could not go to Sator.

	But these three men had a different idea. They carefully studied the speech and the mannerisms and customs of the Satorians. They learned to imitate the slang and idioms. They went even further; they picked three Satorian spaceship navigators and studied them minutely every time they got a chance, in order to learn their habits and their speech patterns. The three Satorians were exceptionally large men, almost perfect doubles of the three Nansalians—and, one by one, the Nansalians replaced them.

	They had bleached their faces, and surgeons, working from photographs, changed their features so that the three Nansalians were exact doubles of the three astrogators. Then they acted. On three trips, one of the men that went back as navigator was a Nansalian.

	It was six years before they returned to Nansal, but when they finally did, they had learned two things.

	In the first place, the 'disease' which had killed Nansalians who had come in contact with Satorians on Nansal was nothing but a poison which acted on contact with the skin. The Nansalians who had gone to Sator had simply been murdered. There was no disease; it had simply been a Satorian plot to keep Nansalians from going to Sator.

	The second thing they had learned was the secret of the Satorian magnetic space drive.

	It was common knowledge on Sator that their commander would soon lead them across space to conquer Nansal and settle on a world of clear air and cloudless skies, where they could see the stars of space at night. They were waiting only until they could build up a larger fleet and learned all they could from the Nansalians.

	They attacked three years after the three Nansalian spies returned with their information.

	During those three years, Nansal had secretly succeeded in building up a fleet of the magnetic ships, but it went down quickly before the vastly greater fleet of the Satorians. Their magnetic rays were deadly, killing everyone they struck. They could lift the iron-boned Nansalians high into the air, then drop them hundreds of feet to their death.

	The buildings, with their steel and iron frames, went down, crushing hundreds of others. They practically depopulated the whole planet.

	But the warnings of the three spies had been in time. They had enlarged some of the great natural caverns and dug others out of solid rock. Here they had built laboratories, factories, and dwelling places far underground, where the Satorians could never find them.

	Enough men reached the caverns before the disaster struck to carry on. They had been chosen from the strongest, healthiest, and most intelligent that Nansal had. They lived there for over a century, while the planet was overrun by the conquerors and the cities were rebuilt by the Satorians.

	During this century, the magnetic ray shield was developed by the hidden Nansalians. Daring at last to face their conquerors, they built a city on the surface and protected it with the magnetic force screen.

	By the time the Satorians found the city, it was too late. A battle fleet was mobilized and rushed to the spot, but the city was impregnable. The great domed power stations were already in operation, and they were made of nonmagnetic materials, so they could not be pulled from the ground. The magnetic beams were neutralized by the shield, and no ship could pass through it without killing every man aboard.

	That first city was a giant munitions plant. The Nansalians built factories there and laughed while the armies of Sator raged impotently at the magnetic barrier. They tried sending missiles through, but the induction heating in every metal part of the bombs either caused them to explode instantly or to drop harmlessly and burn.

	In the meantime, the men of Nansal were building their fleet. The Satorians stepped up production, too, but the Nansalians had developed a method of projecting the magnetic screen. Any approaching Satorian ship had its magnetic support cut from under it, and it crashed to the ground.

	It took nearly thirty years of hard work and harder fighting for the Nansalians to convince the people of Sator that Nansal and the philosophy of Norus had not only not been wiped out, but was capable of wiping out the Satorians.

	With their screened and protected fleet, the followers of Norus smashed the Satorian cities, and drove their enemy back to Sator.

	There were only three enemy cities left on Nansal when, somehow, they managed to learn the secret of the magnetic screen.

	By this time, the forces of Nansal had increased tremendously, and they developed the next surprise for the Satorians. One after another, the three remaining cities were destroyed by a barrage of poison gas.

	The fleet of Sator tried to retaliate, but the Nansalians were prepared for them. Every building had been sealed and filters had been built into the air conditioning systems.

	Shortly, the men of Nansal were again in control of their planet, and the fleet stood guard over the planet.

	The Satorians, beaten technologically, were still not ready to give up. Falling back on their peculiar philosophy of life, they pulled a trick the Nansalians would never have thought of. They sued for peace.

	The government of Nansal was willing; they had had enough of bloodshed. They permitted a delegation to arrive. The ship was escorted into the city and the parleying began.

	The Satorian delegation asked for absolutely unreasonable terms. They demanded fleet bases on Nansal; they demanded an unreasonable rate of exchange between the two powers, one which would be highly favorable to Sator; they wanted to impose fantastic restrictions on Nansalian travel and none whatsoever on their own.

	Month followed month and months became years as the diplomats of Nansal tried, patiently and logically, to show the Satorians how unreasonable their demands were.

	Not once did they suspect that the Satorians had no intention of trying to get the conditions they asked for. Their sole purpose was to drag the parleying on and on, bickering, quarreling, demanding, and conceding just enough to give the Nansalians hope that a treaty might eventually be consummated.

	And during all that time, the factories of Sator were working furiously to build the greatest fleet that had ever crossed the space between the two planets!

	When they were ready to attack, the Satorian delegation told Nansal frankly that they would not treaty with them. The day the delegation left, the Satorian fleet swept down upon Nansal!

	The Nansalians were again beaten back into their cities, safe behind their magnetic screens, but unable to attack. But the forces of Sator had not won easily—they had, in fact, not won at all. Their supply line was too long and their fleet had suffered greatly at the hands of the defenders of Nansal.

	For a long while, the balance of power was so nearly equal that neither side dared attack.

	Then the balance again swung toward Nansal. A Nansalian scientist discovered a compact method of storing power. Oddly enough, it was similar to the method Dr. Richard Arcot had discovered a hundred thousand light centuries away! It did not store nearly the power, and was inefficient, but it was a great improvement over their older method of generating energy in the ship itself.

	The Nansalian ships could be made smaller, and lighter, and more maneuverable, and at the same time could be equipped with heavier, more powerful magnetic beam generators.

	Very shortly, the Satorians were again at the mercy of Nansal. They could not fight the faster, more powerful ships of the Nansalians, and again they went down in defeat.

	And again they sued for peace.

	This time, Nansal knew better; they went right on developing their fleet while the diplomats of Sator argued.

	But the Satorians weren't fools; they didn't expect Nansal to swallow the same bait a second time. Sator had another ace up her sleeve.

	Ten days after they arrived, every diplomat and courier of the Satorian delegation committed suicide!

	Puzzled, the government of Nansal reported the deaths to Sator at once, expecting an immediate renewal of hostilities; they were quite sure that Sator assumed they had been murdered. Nansal was totally unprepared for what happened; Sator acknowledged the message with respects and said they would send a new commission.

	Two days later, Nansal realized it had been tricked again. A horrible disease broke out and spread like wildfire. The incubation period was twelve days; during that time it gave no sign. Then the flesh began to rot away, and the victim died within hours. No wonder the ambassadors had committed suicide!

	Millions died, including Torlos' own father, during the raging epidemic that followed. But, purely by lucky accident, the Nansalian medical research teams came up with a cure and a preventive inoculation before the disease had spread over the whole planet.

	Sator's delegation had inoculated themselves with the disease and, at the sacrifice of their own lives, had spread it on Nansal. Although the Satorians had developed the horribly virulent strain of virus, they had not found a cure; the diplomats knew they were going to die.

	Having managed to stop the disease before it swept the planet, the Nansalians decided to pull a trick of their own. Radio communication with Sator was cut off in such a way as to lead the Satorian government to believe that Nansal was dying of the disease.

	The scientists of Sator knew that the virus was virulent; in fact, too virulent for its own good. It killed the host every time, and the virus could not live outside a living cell. They knew that shortly after every Nansalian died, the virus, too, would be dead.

	Their fleet started for Nansal six months after radio contact had broken off. Expecting to find Nansal a dead planet, they were totally unprepared to find them alive and ready for the attack. The Satorian fleet, vastly surprised to find a living, vigorous enemy, was totally wiped out.

	Since that time, both planets had remained in a state of armed truce. Neither had developed any weapon which would enable them to gain an advantage over their enemy. Each was so spy-infested that no move could pass undiscovered.

	Stalemate.

-

XIX

	TORLOS SPREAD HIS hands eloquently. "That is the history of our war. Can you wonder that my people were suspicious when your ship appeared? Can you wonder that they drove you away? They were afraid of the men of Sator; when they saw your weapons, they were afraid for their civilization.

	"On the other hand, why should the men of Sator fear? They knew that our code of honor would not permit us to make a treacherous attack.

	"I regret that my people drove you away, but can you blame them?"

	Arcot had to admit that he could not. He turned to Morey. "They were certainly reasonable in driving us from their cities; experience has taught them that it's the safest way. A good offense is always the best defense.

	"But experience has taught me that, unlike Torlos, I have to eat. I wonder if it might not be a good idea to get a little rest too—I'm bushed."

	"Good idea," agreed Morey. "I'll ask Wade to stand guard while we sleep. If Torlos wants company, he can talk to Wade as well as anyone. I'm due for some sleep myself."

	Arcot, Morey, and Fuller went to their rooms for some rest. Arcot and Morey were tired, but after an hour, Fuller rose and went down to the control room where Wade was communicating telepathically with Torlos.

	"Hello," Wade greeted him. "I thought you were going to join the Snoring Chorus."

	"I tried to, but I couldn't get in tune. What have you been doing?"

	"I've been talking with Torlos—and with fair success. I'm getting the trick of thought communication," Wade said enthusiastically. "I asked Torlos if he wanted to sleep, and it seems that they do it regularly, one day in ten. And when they sleep, they sleep soundly. It's more of a coma, something like the hibernation of a bear or a possum.

	"If you want to do business with Mr. John Doe, and he happens to be asleep, your business will have to wait. It takes something really drastic to wake these people up.

	"I remember a remark one of my classmates made while I was going to college. He was totally unconscious of the humor in the thing. He said: 'I've got to go to more lectures. I've been losing a lot of sleep.'

	"He intended them to be totally disconnected thoughts, but the rest of us knew his habits, and we almost knocked ourselves out laughing.

	"I was just wondering what would happen if a Nansalian were to drop off in class. They'd probably have to call an ambulance or something to carry him home!"

	Fuller looked at the giant. "I doubt it. One of his classmates would just tuck him under his arm and take him on home—or to the next lecture. Remember, they only weigh about four hundred pounds on Nansal, which is no more to them than fifty pounds is to us."

	"True enough," Wade agreed. "But you know, I'd hate to have him wrap those arms of his about me. He might get excited, or sneeze or something, and—squish!"

	"You and your morbid imagination." Fuller sat down in one of the seats. "Let's see if we can't get a three-way conversation going; this guy is interesting."

	Arcot and Morey awoke nearly three hours later, and the Earthmen ate their breakfast, much to Torlos' surprise.

	"I can understand that you need far more food than we do," he commented, "but you only ate a few hours ago. It seems like a tremendous amount of food to me. How could you possibly grow enough in your cities?"

	"So that's why they don't have any farms!" Fuller said.

	"Our food is grown out on the plains outside the cities, where there is room," Arcot explained. "It's difficult, but we have machines to help us. We could never have developed the cone type of city you have, however, for we need huge huge quantities of food. If we were to seal ourselves inside our cities as your people have to protect themselves from enemies, we would starve to death very quickly."

	"You know," Morey said, "I'll have to admit that Torlos' people are a higher type of creation than we are. Man, and all other animals on Earth, are parasites of the plant world. We're absolutely incapable of producing our own foods. We can't gather energy for ourselves. We're utterly dependent on plants.

	"But these men aren't—at least not so much so. They at least generate their own muscular energy by extracting heat from the air they breathe. They combine all the best features of plants, reptiles, and mammals. I don't know where they'd be classified biologically!"

	After the meal, they went to the control room and strapped themselves into the control seats. Arcot checked the fuel gauge.

	"We have plenty of lead left," he said to Morey, "and Torlos has assured me that we will be able to get more on Nansal. I suggest we show him how the space control works, so that he can tell the Nansalian scientists about it from personal experience.

	"In this sun's gravitational field, we'll lose a lot of power, but as long as it can be replaced, we're all right."

	Turning to the Nansalian, Arcot pointed out towards the little spark of light that was Torlos' home planet. "Keep your eyes on that, Torlos. Watch it grow when we use our space control drive."

	Arcot pushed the little red switch to the first notch. The air around them pulsed with power for an instant, then space had readjusted itself.

	The point that was Nansal grew to a disc, and then it was swiftly leaping toward them, welling up to meet them, expanding its bulk with awesome speed. Torlos watched it tensely.

	There was a sudden splintering crash, and Arcot jerked open the circuit in alarm. They were almost motionless again as the stars reeled about them.

	Torlos had been nervous. Like any man so effected, he had unconsciously tightened his muscles. His fingers had sunk into the hard plastic of the arm rest on his chair, and crushed it as though it had been put between the jaws of a hydraulic press!

	"I'm glad we weren't holding hands," said Wade, eyeing the broken plastic.

	"I am very sorry," Torlos thought humbly. "I did not intend to do that. I forgot myself when I saw that planet rushing at me so fast." His chagrin was apparent on his face.

	Arcot laughed. "It is nothing, Torlos. We are merely astonished at the terrific strength of your hand. Wade wasn't worried; he was joking!"

	Torlos looked relieved, but he looked at the splintered arm rest and then at his hand. "It is best that I keep my too-strong hands away from your instruments."

	The ship was falling toward Nansal at a relatively slow rate, less than four miles a second. Arcot accelerated toward the planet for two hours, then began to decelerate. Five hundred miles above the planet's surface, their velocity cut the ship into a descending spiral orbit to allow the atmosphere to check their speed.

	The outer lux hull began to heat up, and he closed the relux screens to cut down the radiation from it. When he opened them again, the ship was speeding over the broad plains of the planet.

	Torlos told Arcot that by far the greater percentage of the surface of Nansal was land. There was still plenty of water, for their seas were much deeper than those of Earth. Some of the seas were thirty miles deep over broad areas—hundreds of square miles. As if to compensate, the land surfaces were covered with titanic mountain ranges, some of them over ten miles above sea level.

	Torlos, his eyes shining, directed the Earthmen to his home city, the capital of the world-nation.

	"Is there no traffic between the cities here, Torlos?" Morey asked. "We haven't seen any ships."

	"There's continuous traffic," Torlos replied, "but you have come in far to the north, well away from the regularly scheduled routes. The commerce must be densely populated with warships as well, and both warships and commercial craft are made to look as much alike as possible so that the enemy can not know when ships of war are present and when they are not, and their attacks are more easily beaten off. They are forced to live off our commerce while they are here. Before we invented the magnetic storage device, they were forced to get fuel from our ships in order to make the return journey; they could not carry enough for the round trip."

	Suddenly his smile broadened, and he pointed out the forward window. "Our city is behind that next range of mountains!"

	They were flying at a height of twenty miles, and the range Torlos indicated was far off in the blue distance, almost below the horizon. As they approached them, the mountains seemed to change slowly as their perspective shifted. They seemed to crawl about on one another like living things, growing larger and changing from blue to blue-green, and then to a rich, verdant emerald.

	Soon the ship was rocketing smoothly over them. Ahead and below, in the rocky gorge of the mountains, lay a great cone city, the largest the Earthmen had yet seen. As they approached, they could see another cone behind it—the city was a double cone! They resembled the circus tents of two centuries earlier, connected by a ridge.

	"Ah—home!" smiled Torlos. "See—that twin cone idea is new. It was not thus when I left it, years ago. It is growing, growing—and in that new section! See? They have bright colors on all the buildings! And already they are digging foundations out to the left for a third cone!" He was so excited that it was difficult for Arcot to read his thoughts coherently.

	"But we won't have to build more fortifications," Torlos continued, "if you will give us the secret of the rays you use!

	"But, Arcot, you must hide in the hills now; drop down and deposit me in the hills. I will walk to the city on foot.

	"I will be able to identify myself, and I will soon be inside the city, telling the Supreme Three that I have salvation and peace for them!"

	"I have a better idea," Arcot told him. "It will save you a long walk. We'll make the ship invisible, and take you close to the city. You can drop, say ten feet from the ship to the ground, and continue from there. Will that be all right?"

	Torlos agreed that it would.

	Invisible, the Ancient Mariner dove down toward the city, stopping only a few hundred feet from the base of the magnetic wall, near one of the gigantic beam stations.

	"I will come out in a one-man flier, slowly, and at low altitude, toward that mountain there," Torlos told Arcot, pointing. "Then you may become visible and follow me into the city.

	"You need fear no treachery from my people," he assured them. Then, smiling: "As if you need fear treachery from the hands of any people! You have certainly proven your ability to defend yourselves!

	"Even if my people were treacherously inclined, they would certainly have been convinced by your escape from the Satorians. And they have undoubtedly heard all about it by now through the secret radios of our spies. After all, I was not the only Nansalian spy there, and some of the others must surely have escaped in the ships that ran away after I destroyed the city." Arcot could feel the sadness in his mind as he thought of the fact that his inadvertent destruction of the city had undoubtedly killed some of his own people.

	Torlos paused a moment, then asked: "Is there any message you wish me to give the Supreme Council of Three?"

	"Yes," replied Arcot. "Repeat to them the offer we so foolishly made to the Commanding One of Sator. We will give them the molecular ray which tore the city out of the ground, and, as your people have seen, also tore a mountain down. We will give them our heat beam, which will melt anything except the material of which this ship is made. And we will give them the knowledge to make this material, too.

	"Best of all, we will give them the secret of the most terrific energy source known to mankind; the energy of matter itself. With these in your hands, Sator will soon be peaceful.

	"In return, we ask only two things. They will cost you almost nothing, but they are invaluable to us. We have lost our way. In the vastness of space, we can no longer locate our own galaxy. But our own Island Universe has features which could be distinguished on an astronomical plate, and we have taken photographs of it which your astronomers can compare with their own to help us find our way back.

	"In addition, we need more fuel—lead wire. Our space control drive does not use up energy except in the presence of a strong gravitational field; most of it is drained back into our storage coils, with very little loss. But we have used it several times near a large sun, and the power drainage goes up exponentially. We would not have enough to get back home if we happened to run into any more trouble on the way."

	Arcot paused a moment, considering. "Those two things are all we really need, but we would like to take back more, if your Council is willing. We would like samples of your books and photographs and other artifacts of your civilization to take back home to our own people.

	"That, and peace, are all we ask."

	Torlos nodded. "The things you ask, I am sure the Council will readily agree to. It seems little enough payment for the things you intend to do for us."

	"Very well, then. We will wait for you. Good luck!"

	Torlos turned and jumped out of the airlock. The ship rose high above him as he suddenly became visible on the plain below. He was running toward the city in great leaps of twenty feet—graceful, easy leaps that showed his tremendous power.

	Suddenly, a ship was darting down from the city toward him. As it curved down, Torlos stopped and made certain signals with his arms, then he stood quietly with his hands in the air.

	The ship hovered above him, and two men dropped thirty feet to the ground and questioned him for several minutes.

	Finally, they motioned to the ship, which dropped to ten feet, and the three men leaped lightly to its door and entered. The door snapped shut, and the ship shot toward the city. The magnetic wall opened for a moment, and the ship shot through. Within seconds, if was out of sight, lost in the busy air traffic above the city.

	"Well," said Arcot, "now we go back to the hills and wait."

-

XX

	FOR TWO DAYS, the Ancient Mariner lay hidden in the hills. It was visible all that time, but at least two of the men were watching the sky every hour of the day. Torlos himself was, they knew, perfectly trustworthy, but they did not know whether his people were as honorable as he claimed them to be.

	Arcot and Wade were in the control room on the afternoon of the second day—not Earth days, but the forty-hour Nansalian days—and they had been quietly discussing the biological differences between themselves and the inhabitants of this planet.

	Suddenly, Wade saw a slowly moving speck in the sky.

	"Look, Arcot! There's Torlos!"

	They waited, ready for any hostile action as the tiny ship approached rapidly, circling slowly downward as it came nearer. It landed a few hundred feet away, and Torlos emerged, running rapidly toward the Earth ship. Arcot let him in through the airlock.

	Torlos smiled broadly. "I had difficulty in convincing the Council that my story was true. When I told them that you could go faster than light, they strongly objected. But they had to admit that you had certainly been able to tear down the mountain very effectively, and they had received reports of the destruction of the Satorian capitol.

	"It seems you first visited the city of Thanso when you came here. The people were nearly panic-stricken when they saw you rip that mountain down and uproot the magnetic ray station. No one ship had ever done that before!

	"But the fact that several guards had seen me materialize out of thin air, plus the fact that they knew you could make yourselves invisible, convinced them that my story was true.

	"They want to talk to you, and they say that they will gladly grant your requests. But you must promise them one thing—you must stay away from any of our people, for they are afraid of disease. Bacteria that do not bother you very much might be deadly to us. The Supreme Council of Three is willing to take the risk, but they will not allow anyone else to be exposed."

	"We will keep apart from your people if the Council wishes," Arcot agreed, "but there is no real danger. We are so vastly different from you that it will be impossible for you to get our diseases, or for us to contract yours. However, if the Council wants it, we will do as they ask."

	Torlos at once went back to his ship and headed toward the city.

	Arcot followed in the Ancient Mariner, keeping about three hundred feet to the rear.

	When they reached the magnetic screen of the city, one of the beam stations cut its power for a few moments, leaving a gap for the two ships to glide smoothly through.

	On the roofs of the buildings, men and women were collected, watching the shining, polished hull of the strange ship as it moved silently above them.

	Torlos led them to the great central building and dropped to the huge landing field beside it. All around them, in regular rows, the great hulls of the Nansal battleships were arranged. Arcot landed the Ancient Mariner and shut off the power.

	"I think Wade is the man to go with me this time," Arcot said. "He has learned to communicate with Torlos quite well. We will each carry both pistols and wear our power suits. And we'll be in radio communication with you at all times.

	"I don't think they'll start anything we don't like this time, but I'm not as confident as I was, and I'm not going to take any useless chances. This time I'm going to make arrangements. If I die here, there's going to be a very costly funeral, and these men are going to pay the costs!

	"I'll call you every three minutes, Morey. If I don't, check up on me. If you still don't get an answer, take this place apart because you won't be able to hurt us then.

	"I'm going to tell Torlos about our precautions. If the building shields the radio, I'll be listening for you and I'll retrace my steps until I can contact you again. Right? Then come on, Wade!" Arcot, fully equipped, strode down the corridor to the airlock.

	Torlos was waiting for them with another man, whom Torlos explained was a high-ranking officer of the fleet. Torlos, it seemed, was without official rank. He was a secret service agent without official status, and therefore an officer had been assigned to accompany the Earthmen.

	Torlos seemed to be relaxing in the soft, warm sunlight of his native world. It had been years since he had seen that yellow sun except from the windows of a space flier. Now he could walk around in the clear air of the planet of his birth.

	Arcot explained to him the precautions they had taken against trouble here, and Torlos smiled. "You have certainly learned greater caution. I can't blame you. We certainly seem little different from the men of Sator; we can only stand on trial. But I know you will be safe."

	They walked across the great court, which was covered with a soft, springy turf of green. The hot sun shining down on them, the brilliant colors of the buildings, the towering walls of the magnificent edifice they were approaching, and, behind them, the shining hull of the Ancient Mariner set among the dark, needle-shaped Nansalian ships, all combined to make a picture that would remain in their minds for a long time.

	Here, there were no guards watching them as they were conducted to the meeting of the Supreme Council of Three.

	They went into the main entrance of the towering government building and stepped into the great hall on the ground floor. It was like the interior of an ancient Gothic cathedral, beautiful and dignified. Great pillars of green stone rose in graceful, fluted columns, smoothly curving out like the branches of some stylized tree to meet in arches that rose high in pleasing curves to a point midway between four pillars. The walls were made of a dark green stone as a background; on them had been traced designs in colored tile.

	The whole hall was a thing of colored beauty; the color gave it life, as the yellow sunlight gave life to the trees of the mountains.

	They crossed the great hall and came at last to the elevator. Its door was made of narrow strips of metal, so bound together that the whole made a flexible, but strong sheet. In principle, the doors worked like the cover of an antique roll-top desk. The idea was old, but these men had made their elevator doors very attractive by the addition of color. In no way did they detract from the dignified grace of the magnificent hall.

	Torlos turned to Arcot. "I wonder if it would not be wise to shut off your radio as we enter the elevator. Might not the magnetic force affect it?"

	"Probably," Arcot agreed. He contacted Morey and told him that the radio would be cut off for a short while. "But it won't be more than three minutes," Arcot finished. "If it is—you know what to do."

	As they entered the elevator, Torlos smiled at the two Earthmen. "We will ascend more gradually this time, so that the acceleration won't be so tiring to you." He moved the controls carefully, and by gentle steps they rose to the sixty-third floor of the giant building.

	As they stepped out of the elevator, Torlos pointed toward an open window that stretched widely across one wall. Below them, they could see the Ancient Mariner.

	"Your radio contact should be good," Torlos commented.

	Wade put in a call to Morey, and to his relief, he made contact immediately.

	The officer was leading them down a green stone corridor toward a simple door. He opened it, and they entered the room beyond.

	In the center of the room was a large triangular table. At a place at the center of each side sat one man on a slightly raised chair, while on each side of him sat a number of other men.

	Torlos stopped at the door and saluted. Then he spoke in rapid, liquid syllables to the men sitting at the table, halting once or twice and showing evident embarrassment as he did so.

	He paused, and one of the three men in command replied rapidly in a pleasant voice that had none of the harsh command that Arcot had noticed in the voice of the Satorian Commanding One. Arcot liked the voice and the man.

	Judging by Earth standards, he was past middle age—whatever that might be on Nansal—with crisp black hair that was bleaching slightly. His face showed the signs of worry that the making of momentous decisions always leaves, but although the face was strong with authority, there was a gentleness that comes with a feeling of kindly power.

	Wade was talking rapidly into the radio, describing the scene before them to Morey. He described the great table of dark wood, and the men about it, some in the blue uniform of the military, and some in the loose, soft garments of the civilian. Their colored fabrics, individually in good taste and harmony, were frequently badly out of harmony with the costume of a neighbor, a difficulty accompanying this brightly tinted clothing.

	Torlos turned to Arcot. "The Supreme council asks that you be seated at the table, in the places left for you." He paused, then quickly added: "I have told them of your precautions, and they have said: 'A wise man, having been received treacherously once, will not again be trapped.' They approve of your policy of caution.

	"The men who sit at the raised portions of the table are the Supreme Three; the others are their advisors who know the details of Science, Business, and War. No one man can know all the branches of human endeavor, and this is but a meeting place of those who know best the individual lines. The Supreme Three are elected from the advisors in case of the death of one of the Three, and they act as co-ordinators for the rest.

	"The man of Science is to your left; directly before you is the man of Business, and to your right is the Commander of the Military.

	"To whom do you wish to speak first?"

	Arcot considered for a moment, then: "I must first tell the Scientist what it is I have, then tell the Commander how he can use it, and finally I will tell the Businessman what will be needed."

	Arcot had noticed that the military officers all wore holsters for their pneumatic pistols, but they were conspicuously empty. He was both pleased and embarrassed. What should he do—he, who carried two deadly pistols. He decided on the least conspicuous course and left them where they were.

	Arcot projected his thoughts at Torlos. "We have come a vast distance across space, from another galaxy. Let your astronomer tell them what distance that represents."

	Arcot paused while Torlos put the thoughts into the words of the Nansalian language. A moment later, one of the scientists, a tall, powerfully built man, even for these men of giant strength, rose and spoke to the others. When he was seated, a second rose and spoke also, with an expression of puzzled wonder.

	"He says," Torlos translated, "that his science has taught him that a speed such as you say you have made is impossible, but the fact that you are here proves his science wrong.

	"He reasoned that since your kind live on no planet of this system, you must come from another star. Since his science says that this is just as impossible as coming from another galaxy, he is convinced of the fallacy in the theories."

	Arcot smiled. The sound reasoning was creditable; the man did not label as "impossible" something which was proven by the presence of the two Earthmen.

	Arcot tried to explain the physical concepts behind his space-strain drive, but communication broke down rapidly; Torlos, a warrior, not a scientist, could not comprehend the ideas, and was completely unable to translate them into his own language.

	"The Chief Physicist suggests that you think directly at him," Torlos finally told Arcot. "He suggests that the thoughts might be more familiar to him than to me." He grinned. "And they certainly aren't clear to me!"

	Arcot projected his thoughts directly toward the physicist; to his surprise, the man was a perfect receiver. He had a natural gift for it. Quickly, Arcot outlined the system that had made his intergalactic voyage possible.

	The physicist smiled when Arcot was finished, and tried to reply, but he was not a good transmitter. Torlos aided him.

	"He says that the science of your people is far ahead of us. The conceptions are totally foreign to his mind, and he can only barely grasp the significance of the idea of bent emptiness that you have given him. He says, however, that he can fully appreciate the possibility that you have shown him. He has given your message to the Three, and they are anxious to hear of the weapons you have."

	Arcot drew the molecular pistol, and holding it up for all to see, projected the general theory of its operation toward the physicist.

	To the Chief Physicist of Nansal, the idea of molecular energy was an old one; he had been making use of it all his life, and it was well known that the muscles used the heat of air to do their work. He understood well how it worked, but not until Arcot projected into his mind the mental impression of how the Earthmen had thrown one sun into another did he realize the vast power of the ray.

	Awed, the man translated the idea to his fellows.

	Then Arcot drew the heat pistol and explained how the annihilation of matter within it was converted into pure heat by the relux lens.

	"I will show you how they work," Arcot continued. "Could we have a lump of metal of some kind?"

	The Scientist spoke into an intercom microphone, and within a few minutes, a large lump of iron—a broken casting—was brought in. Arcot suspended it on the molecular beam while Wade melted it with the heat beam. It melted and collapsed into a ball that glowed brilliantly and flamed as its surface burned in the oxygen of the air. Wade cut off his heat ray, and the ball quickly cooled under the influence of the molecular beam until Arcot lowered it to the floor, a perfect sphere crusted with ice and frost.

	Arcot continued for the better part of an hour to explain to the Council exactly what he had, how they could be used, and what materials and processes were needed to make them.

	When he was finished, the Supreme Three conferred for several minutes. Then the Scientist asked, through Torlos: "How can we repay you for these things you have given us?"

	"First, we need lead to fuel our ship." Arcot gave them the exact specifications for the lead wire they needed.

	He received his answer from the man of Business and Manufacturing. "We can give you that easily, for lead is cheap. Indeed, it seems hardly enough to repay you."

	"The second thing we need," Arcot continued, "is information. We became lost in space and are unable to find our way home. I would like to explain the case to the Astronomer."

	The Astronomer proved to be a man of powerful intelligence as well as powerful physique, and was a better transmitter than receiver. It took every bit of Arcot's powerful mind to project his thoughts to the man.

	He explained the dilemma that he and his friends were in, and told him how he could recognize the Galaxy on his plates. The Astronomer said he thought he knew of such a nebula, but he would like to compare his own photographs with Arcot's to make sure.

	"In return," Arcot told him, "we will give you another weapon—a weapon, this time, to defeat the astronomer's greatest enemy, distance. It is an electrical telescope which will permit you to see life on every planet of this system. With it, you can see a man at a distance ten times as great as the distance from Nansal to your sun!"

	Eagerly, the Astronomer questioned Arcot concerning the telectroscope, but others were clamoring for Arcot's attention.

	The Biologist was foremost among the contenders; he seemed worried about the possibility of the alien Earthmen carrying pathogenic bacteria.

	"Torlos has told us that you have an entirely different internal organization. What is it that is different? I can't believe that he has correctly understood you."

	Arcot explained the differences as carefully as possible. By the time he was finished, the Biologist felt sure that any such creature was sufficiently far removed from them to be harmless biologically, but he wanted to study the Man of Earth further.

	Arcot had brought along a collection of medical books as a possible aid in case of accident. He offered to give these to Nansal in exchange for a collection of Nansalian medical texts. The English would have to be worked out with the aid of a dictionary and a primary working aid which Arcot would supply. Arcot also asked for a skeleton to take with him, and the Biologist readily agreed.

	"We'd like to give you one in return," Arcot grinned, "But we only brought four along, and, unfortunately, we are using them at the moment."

	The Biologist smiled back and assured him that they would not think of taking a piece of apparatus so vitally necessary to the Earthmen.

	The Military Leader was the man who demanded attention next. Arcot had a long conference with him, and they decided that the best way for the Military Leader to learn the war potential of the Ancient Mariner was to personally see a demonstration of its powers.

	The Council decided that the Three would go on the trip. The Military Commander picked two of his aides to go, and the Scientist picked the Astronomer and the Physicist. The head of Business and Manufacturing declined to bring any of his advisors.

	"We would learn nothing," he told Arcot, "and would only be in the way. I, myself, am going only because I am one of the Three."

	"Very well," said Arcot. "Let's get started."

-

XXI

	THE PARTY DESCENDED to the ground floor and walked out to the ship. They filed into the airlock, and in the power room they looked in amazement at the tiny machines that ran the ship. The long black cylinder of the main power unit for the molecular drive looked weak and futile compared to the bulky machines that ran their own ships. The power storage coils, with their fields of intense, dead blackness, interested the Physicist immensely.

	The ship was a constant source of wonder to them all. They investigated the laboratory and then went up to the second floor. Morey and Fuller greeted them at the door, and each of the four Earthmen took a group around the ship, explaining as they went.

	The library was a point of great interest, exceeded only by the control room. Arcot found some difficulty in taking care of all his visitors; there were only four chairs in the control room. The Three could sit down, but Arcot needed the fourth chair to pilot the ship. The rest of the party had to hold on as best they could, which was not too difficult for men of such physical strength; they were accustomed to high accelerations in their elevators.

	Morey, Wade, and Fuller strapped themselves into the seats at the ray projectors at the sides and stern.

	Arcot wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ship's armament first, and then the maneuverability. He picked a barren hillside for the first demonstration. It was a great rocky cliff, high above the timber line, towering almost vertically a thousand feet above them.

	Wade triggered his molecular projector, and a pale beam reached out toward the cliff. Instantly, the cliff leaped ten miles into the air, whining and roaring as it shot up through the atmosphere. Then it started to fall. Heated by its motion through the air, it struck the mountaintop as a mass of red hot rock which shattered into fragments with a terrific roar! The rocks rolled and bounced down the mountainside, their path traced by a line of steam clouds.

	Then, at Arcot's order, the heat beams were all turned on the mountain at full power. In less than a minute, the peak began to melt, sending streamers of lava down the sides. The beams began to eat out a crater in the center, where the rock began to boil furiously under the terrific energy of the heat beams.

	Then Arcot shut off the heat beams and turned on the molecular ray.

	The molecules of the molten rock were traveling at high velocities—the heat was terrific. Arcot could see that the rock was boiling quite freely. When the molecular beam hit it, every one of those fast moving molecules shot upward together! With the roar of a meteor, it plunged toward space at five miles a second!

	It had dropped to absolute zero when the beam hit it, but at that speed through the air, it didn't stay cold long! Arcot followed it up in the Ancient Mariner. It was going too slowly for him. The air had slowed it down and heated it up, so Arcot hit it with the molecular ray again, converting the heat back into velocity.

	By the time they reached free space, Arcot had maneuvered the lump of rock into an orbit around the planet.

	"Tharlano," he thought at the Astronomer, "your planet now has a new satellite!"

	"So I perceive!" replied Tharlano. "Now that we are in space, can we use the instrument you told me of?"

	Arcot established the ship in an orbit twenty thousand miles from the planet and led them back to the observatory, where Morey had already trained the telectroscope on the planet below. There wasn't much to see; the amplification showed only the rushing ground moving by so fast that the image blurred.

	He turned it to Sator. It filled the screen as they increased the power, but all they could see was billowing clouds. Another poor subject.

	Morey showed Tharlano, the Astronomer, how to use the controls, and he began to sweep the sky with the instrument, greatly pleased with its resolving ability and tremendous magnification.

	The Military Leader of the Three pointed out that the Satorians still had a weapon that was reported deadly, and they were in imminent danger unless Arcot's inventions were applied at once. All the way back to Nansal, they spent the time discussing the problem in the Ancient Mariner's Library.

	It was finally agreed that the necessary plans and blueprints were to be given to the Nansalians, who could start production at once. The biggest problem was in the supply of lux and relux, which, because of their vast energy-content, required the atomic converters of the Ancient Mariner to make them. The Earthmen agreed to supply the power and the necessary materials to begin operations.

	When the ship landed, a meeting of the manufacturers was called. Fuller distributed prints of the microfilmed plans for the equipment that he had packed in the library, and the factory engineers worked from them to build the necessary equipment.

	The days that followed were busy days for Earthmen and Nansalians alike.

	The Nansalians were fearful of the consequences of the weapon that the Satorians were rumored to have. The results of their investigations through their agents had, so far, resulted only in the death of the secret service men. All that was known was exactly what the Satorians wanted them to know; the instrument was new, and it was deadly.

	On the other hand, the Satorians were not entirely in the dark as to the progress of Nansal, as Arcot and Morey discovered one day.

	After months of work designing and tooling up the Nansalian factories, making the tools to make the tools to make the war material needed, and training the engineers of Nansal all over the planet to produce the equipment needed, Arcot and Morey finally found time to take a few days off.

	Tharlano had begun a systematic search of the known nebulae, comparing them with the photographs the Earthmen had given him, and looking for a galaxy with two satellite star clouds of exactly the right size and distance from the great spiral.

	After months of work, he had finally picked one which filled the bill exactly! He invited Arcot and Morey to the observatory to confirm his findings.

	The observatory was located on the barren peak of a great mountain more than nine miles high. It was almost the perfect place for an astronomical telescope. Here, well above the troposphere, the air was thin and always clear. The solid rock of the mountain was far from disturbing influences which might cause any vibration in the telescope.

	The observatory was accessible only from a spaceship or air flyer, and, at that altitude, had to be pressurized and sealed against the thin, cold air outside. Within, the temperature was kept constant to a fraction of a degree to keep thermal expansion from throwing the mirror out of true.

	Arcot and Morey, accompanied by Tharlano and Torlos, settled the Ancient Mariner to the landing field that had been blasted out of the rock of the towering mountain. They went over to the observatory and were at once admitted to the airlock.

	The floor was of smoothed, solid rock, and in this, the great clock which timed and moved the telescope was set.

	The entire observatory was, of course, surrounded by a magnetic shield, and it was necessary to make sure there were no enemy ships around before using the telescope, because the magnetic field affected the light rays passing through it.

	The mirror for the huge reflecting telescope was nearly three hundred inches in diameter, and was powerful enough to spot a spaceship leaving Sator. Its military usefulness, however, was practically nil, since painting the ships black made them totally invisible.

	There were half a dozen assistants with Tharlano at the observatory at all times, one of them in charge of the great file of plates that were kept on hand. Every plate made was printed in triplicate, to prevent their being destroyed in a raid. The original was kept at the observatory, and copies were sent to two of the largest cities on Nansal. It was from this file that Tharlano had gathered the data necessary to show Arcot his own galaxy.

	Tharlano was proudly explaining the telescope to Arcot, realizing that the telectroscope was far better, but knowing that the Earthmen would appreciate this triumph of mechanical perfection. Arcot and Morey were both intensely interested in the discussion, while Torlos, slightly bored by a subject he knew next to nothing about, was examining the rest of the observatory.

	Suddenly, he cried out in warning, and leaped a full thirty feet over the rock floor to gather Arcot and Morey in his great arms. There was a sharp, distinct snap of a pneumatic pistol, and the thud of a bullet. Arcot and Morey each felt Torlos jerk!

	Quick as a flash, Torlos pushed the two men behind the great tube of the telescope. He leaped over it and across the room, and disappeared into the supply room. There was the noise of a scuffle, another crack from a pneumatic pistol, and the sudden crash and tinkle of broken glass.

	Suddenly, the figure of a man described a wide arc as it flew out of the supply room and landed with a heavy crash on the floor. Instantly, Torlos leaped at him. There was a trickle of blood from his left shoulder, but he gripped the man in his giant arms, pinning him to the floor. The struggle was brief. Torlos simply squeezed the man's chest in his arms. There was the faint creak of metal, and the man's chest began to bend! In a moment, he was unconscious.

	Torlos pulled a heavy leather belt off of the unconscious man and tied his arms with it, wrapping it many times around the wrists, and was picking the man up when Tharlano arrived, followed by Arcot and Morey. Torlos smiled broadly.

	"This is one Satorian spy that won't report. I could have finished him when I got my hold on him, but I wanted to take him before the Council for questioning. He'll be all right; I just dented his chest a little."

	"We owe our lives to you again, Torlos," Arcot told him gravely. "But you certainly risked your life; the bullet might well have penetrated your heart instead of striking a rib, as it seems to have done."

	"Rib? What is a rib?" The thought concept seemed totally unfamiliar to Torlos.

	Arcot looked at him oddly, then reached out and ran an exploratory hand over Torlos' chest. It was smooth and solid!

	"Morey!" Arcot exclaimed. "These men have no ribs! Their chest is as solid as their skulls!"

	"Then how do they breathe?" Morey asked.

	"How do you breathe? I mean most of the time. You use your diaphragm and your abdominal muscles. These people do, too!"

	Morey grinned. "No wonder Torlos jumped in front of that bullet! He didn't have as much to fear as we do—he had a built-in bullet proof vest! You'd have to shoot him in the abdomen to reach any vital organ."

	Arcot turned back to Torlos. "Who is this man?"

	"Undoubtedly a Satorian spy sent to murder you Earthmen. I saw the muzzle of his pistol as he was aiming and jumped in the way of the bullet. There is not much damage done."

	"We'd better get back to the city," Arcot said. "Fuller and Wade might be in danger!"

	They bundled the Satorian spy into the ship, where Morey tied him further with thin strands of lux cable no bigger than a piece of string.

	Torlos looked at it and shook his head. "He will break that as soon as he awakens, without even knowing it. You forget the strength of our people." Morey smiled and wrapped the cord around Torlos' wrists.

	Torlos looked amused and pulled. His smile vanished. He pulled harder. His huge muscles bulged and writhed in great ridges along his arms. The thin cord remained complacently undamaged. Torlos relaxed and grinned sheepishly.

	"You win," he thought. "I'll make no more comments on the things I see you do."

	They returned to the capital at once. Arcot shoved the speed up as high as he dared, for Torlos felt there might be some significance in the attempt to remove Arcot and Morey. Wade and Fuller had already been warned by radio, and had immediately retired to the Council Room of the Three. The members of the Investigation Board joined them to question the prisoner upon his arrival.

	When they arrived, Arcot and Morey went in with Torlos, who was carrying the struggling, shackled spy over his shoulder.

	The Earthmen watched while the expert interrogators of the Investigation Board questioned the prisoner. The philosophy of Norus did not permit torture, even for a vicious enemy, but the questioners were shrewd and ingenious in their methods. For hours, they took turns pounding questions at the prisoner, cajoling, threatening, and arguing.

	They got nowhere. Solidly, the prisoner stuck by his guns. Why had he tried to shoot the Earthmen? He didn't know. What were his orders from Sator? Silence. What were Sator's plans? Silence. Did he know anything of the new weapon? A shrug of the shoulders.

	Finally, Arcot spoke to the Chief Investigation Officer. "May I try my luck? I think I'm powerful enough to use a little combination of hypnosis and telepathy that will get the information out of him." The Investigator agreed to try it.

	Arcot walked over as if to inspect the prisoner. For an instant, the man looked defiantly at Arcot. Arcot glared back. At the same time, his powerful mind reached out and began to work subtly within the prisoner's brain. Slowly, a helpless, blank expression came over the man's face as his eyes remained fixed on Arcot's own. The man was as helplessly bound mentally as the lux cable bound him physically.

	For a full quarter of an hour, the two men, Earthmen and Satorian, stood locked in a frozen tableau, staring into each other's eyes. The onlookers waited in watchful silence.

	Finally, Arcot turned and shook his head, as if to clear it. As he did so, the spy slumped forward in his chair, unconscious.

	Arcot rubbed his own temples and spoke in English to Morey. "Some job! You'll have to tell them what I found out; my head is splitting! With a headache like this, I can't communicate.

	"Torlos was right; they were trying to get rid of all four of us. We're the only ones who can operate the ship, and that ship is the only defense against them.

	"He knows several other spies here in the city, and we can, I think, practically wipe out the Satorian spy system all over the planet with the information he gave me and what we can get from others we arrest.

	"Unfortunately, he doesn't know anything about the new weapon; the higher-ups aren't telling anyone, not even their own men. I get the idea that only those on board the ships using it will know about it before the attack.

	"An attack is planned, and very soon. He didn't know when. We can only lie in readiness and do everything we can to help these people with their work."

	While Morey relayed this information to the Investigating Board and the Council, Wade was talking in low tones to Arcot.

	"They had a lot of workmen bring twenty tons of lead wire on board this evening, and the distilled water tanks are full. The tanks are full of oxygen, and they gave us some synthetic food which we can eat.

	"They have it all over us in the field of chemistry. They've found the secret of catalysis, and can actually synthesize any catalytic agent they want. They can make any possible reaction go in either direction at any rate they desire.

	"They took a slice of flesh from my arm and analyzed it down to the last detail. From that, they were able to predict what sort of food we would need to eat. They can actually synthesize living things!

	"I've tried the food they made, and it has a very good flavor. They guaranteed it would have all the necessary ingredients, right down to the smallest trace element!

	"We're fully stocked for a long trip. The Three said it was their first consideration that we should be able to return to our homes."

	"How about their armament?" Arcot asked. He was holding his head in his hands to ease the throbbing ache within it.

	"Each city has a projector supplied by the regular power station on top of their central building. The molecular ray, of course; they still don't have enough power to run a heat beam.

	"We didn't have time to make more than one for each city, but this one will give the Satorians a nasty time if they come near it. It works nicely through the magnetic screen, so it won't be necessary for them to lower the barrier to shoot."

	Morey had finished telling the Council what Arcot had discovered from the prisoner, and the Councilmen were leaving one by one to go to their duties in preparing for the attack.

	"I think we had best go back to the Ancient Mariner," Arcot said. "I need an aspirin and some sleep."

	"Same here," agreed Fuller. "These men make me feel as though I were lazy. They work for forty or fifty hours and think nothing of it. Then they snooze for five hours and they're ready for another long stretch. I feel like a lounge lizard if I take six hours out of every twenty-four."

	They asked Torlos to stand guard on the ship while they got some much needed sleep, and Torlos consented readily after getting the permission of the Supreme Three. The Earthmen were returned to their ship under heavy guard to prevent further attempts at assassination.

	It was seven hours after they had gone to sleep that it came.

	Through the ship came the low hum that rose quickly to a screeching call of danger—the warning! The city was under attack!

-

XXII

	THE NANSALIAN FLEET was already outside the city and hard at it. The fight was on! But Arcot saw that the fight was one-sided in the extreme. Ship after ship of the Nansalian fleet seemed to burst into sudden, inexplicable flame and fall blazing against another of their own ships! It seemed as though some irresistible attraction drew the ships together and smashed them against each other in a blaze of electric flame, while the ships of Sator did nothing but stay far off to one side and dodge the rays of the Nansalian ships.

	Quickly, Arcot turned to Torlos. "Torlos, go out! Leave the ship! We can work better when you aren't here, since we don't have to worry about exposure to magnetic rays. I don't like to make you miss this, but it's for your world!"

	Torlos showed his disappointment; he wanted to be in this battle. But he realized that what the Earthman said was true. Their weak, stone bones were completely immune to the effects of even the most powerful magnetic ray.

	He nodded. "I'll go. Good Luck! And give them a few shots for me!"

	He turned and ran down the corridor to the airlock. As soon as he was outside, Arcot lifted the ship.

	It had taken less than a minute to get into the air, but in that minute, the Nansalian fleet had taken a terrific beating. Arcot noticed that the few ships of Sator that had been hit smashed into the ground with a terrible blaze of violet light that left nothing but a pile of fused metal.

	"They've got something, all right," Arcot thought to himself as he drove the Ancient Mariner into battle.

	It would be impossible for the Nansalians to lower their magnetic screen, even for a second, so Arcot simply aimed the ship toward it and turned on the power.

	"Hold on!" he called as they struck it. The ship reeled and sank suddenly planetward, then it bounced up and outward. They were through the wall.

	The rooms were suddenly oppressively hot, and the molecular cooler was struggling to lower it. "We made it," Morey said triumphantly, "but the eddy currents sure heated up the hull!"

	They were out of the city now, speeding toward the battle. Following a prearranged system, the Nansalian ships retreated, leaving the Earthmen a free hand. They needed no help!

	Wade, Fuller, and Morey began to lash out with the molecular beams, smashing the Satorian ships in on themselves, crushing them to the ground, where they exploded in violet flame.

	Wade and Fuller began to work together. Wade caught one ship in the molecular ray, and Fuller hit with a heat beam. Like some titanic broom they swept it around at dozens of miles a second, leaping, twisting, smashing ship after ship. Like a snowball, the lump of glowing metal grew with each crash, till a dozen ships had fallen into it. It was a new broom, and it swept clean!

	Then a magnetic beam caught the Ancient Mariner. With a shock, it slowed down at a terrific rate. Then Arcot turned on more power, and simply dragged the other ship along by its own magnetic beam! Wade tore the ship loose with his molecular beam, but the mighty mass of metal that had been his broom was gone, a glowing mass of metal on the ground.

	"We haven't seen that new weapon yet," Morey called.

	"Can't find us!" Arcot replied into the intercom. The sun was setting, and the blazing red star was lighting the ship, making it seem like a ball of fire when still and a flashing streak of red light when in motion.

	Ship after ship of the Satorians was going down before the three beams of the Earth ship; the great fleet was dissolving like a lump of sugar in boiling water.

	Suddenly, just ahead of them, an enemy ship drove toward them with obvious intent to ram; if his magnetic beam caught them, and drew them towards him, there would be a head-on collision.

	Wade caught it with a molecular beam, and it became a blazing wreck on the ground.

	"All rays off!" Arcot called. As soon as they were off, Arcot hit a switch, and the Ancient Mariner vanished.

	Arcot drove the invisible ship high above the battle. Below, the Satorians were searching wildly for the ship. They knew it must be somewhere near, and feared that at any second it might materialize before them with its deadly rays.

	Arcot stayed above them for nearly a minute while the ships below twisted and turned, wildly seeking him. Then they went into formation again and started back for the city.

	"That's what I wanted!" Arcot said grimly. "In formation, they're like sitting ducks!" He dropped the ship like a plummet while the ray operators prepared to sweep the formation with their beams.

	Suddenly the Ancient Mariner was visible again. Simultaneously, three rays leaped down and bathed the formation in their pale radiance. The front ranks vanished, and the line broke, attacking the ship that hung above them now. Four magnetic beams hit the Ancient Mariner at once! Arcot couldn't pull away from all four, and his gunners couldn't tell which ships were holding them.

	All at once, the men felt a violent electrical shock! The air about them was filled with the blue haze of the electric weapon they had seen!

	Instantly, the magnetic beams left them, and they saw behind them a single Satorian ship heading toward them, surrounded by that same bluish halo of light. A suicide ship!

	Arcot accelerated away from it as Fuller hit it with a molecular beam. The ship reeled and stopped, and the Ancient Mariner pulled away from it rapidly. Then, the frost-covered ship of the dead came on, still heading for them!

	Arcot turned and went off to the right, but like a pursuing Nemesis, the strange ship came after them in the shortest, most direct route!

	The molecular beams were useless now; there was no molecular energy left in the frozen hulk that accelerated toward them. Suddenly, the two envelopes of blue light touched and coalesced! A great, blinding arc leaped between the two ships as the speeding Satorian hull smashed violently against the side of the Ancient Mariner! The men ducked automatically, and were hurled against their seat-straps with tremendous force. There was a rending, crashing roar, a sea of flame—and darkness.

	They could only have been unconscious a few seconds, for when the fog went away, they could see the glowing mass of the enemy ship still falling far beneath them. The lux wall where it had hit was still glowing red.

	"Morey!" Arcot called. "You all right? Wade? Fuller?"

	"Okay!" Morey answered.

	So were Wade and Fuller.

	"It was the lux hull that saved us," Arcot said. "It wouldn't break, and the temperature of the arc didn't bother it. And since it wouldn't carry a current, we didn't get the full electrical effect.

	"I'm going to convince those birds that this ship is made of something they can't touch! We'll give them a real show!"

	He dived downward, back into the battle.

	It was a show, all right! It was impossible to fight the Earth ship. The enemy had to concentrate four magnetic rays on it to use their electric weapon, and they could only do that by sheer luck!

	And even that was of little use, for they simply lost one of their own ships without harming the Ancient Mariner in the least.

	Ship after ship crumpled in on itself like crushed tinfoil or hurled itself violently to the ground as the molecular beams touched them. The Satorian fleet was a fleet no longer; it was a small collection of disorganized ships whose commanders had only one thought—to flee!

	The few ships that were left spearheaded out into space, using every bit of acceleration that the tough bodies of the Satorians could stand. With a good head start, they were rapidly escaping.

	"We can't equal that acceleration," said Wade. "We'll lose them!"

	"Nope!" Arcot said grimly. "I want a couple of those ships, and I'm going to get them!"

	At four gravities of acceleration, the Ancient Mariner drove after the fleeing ships of Sator, but the enemy ships soon dropped rapidly from sight.

	Twenty five thousand miles out in space, Arcot cut the acceleration. "We'll catch them now, I think," he said softly. He pushed the little red switch for an instant, then opened it. A moment before, the planet Nansal had been a huge disc behind them. Now it was a tiny thing, a full million miles away.

	It took the Satorian fleet over an hour to reach them. They appeared as dim lights in the telectroscope. They rapidly became larger. Arcot had extinguished the lights, and since they were on the sunward side of the approaching ships, the Ancient Mariner was effectively invisible.

	"They're going to pass us at a pretty good clip," Morey said quietly. "They've been accelerating all this time."

	Arcot nodded in agreement. "We'll have to hit them as they come toward us. We'd never get one in passing."

	As the ships grew rapidly in the plate, Arcot gave the order to fire!

	The molecular rays slashed out toward the onrushing ships, picking them off as fast as the beams could be directed. The rays were invisible in space, so they managed to get several before the Satorians realized what was happening.

	Then, in panic, they scattered all over space, fleeing madly from the impossible ship that was firing on them. They knew they had left it behind, yet here it was, waiting for them!

	"Let them go," Arcot said. "We've got our specimens, and the rest can carry the word back to Sator that the war is over for them."

	It was several hours later that the Ancient Mariner approached Nansal again, bringing with it two Satorian ships. By careful use of the heat beam and the molecular beam, the Earthmen had managed to jockey the two battle cruisers back to Nansal.

	It was nighttime when they landed. The whole area around the city was illuminated by giant searchlights. Men were working recovering the bodies of the dead, aiding those who had survived, and examining the wreckage.

	Arcot settled the two Satorian ships to the ground, and landed the Ancient Mariner.

	Torlos sprinted over the ground toward them as he saw the great silver ship land. He had been helping in the examination of the wrecked enemy ships.

	"Have they attacked anywhere else on the planet?" Arcot asked as he opened the airlock.

	Torlos nodded. "They hit five other cities, but they didn't use as big a fleet as they did here. The plan of battle seems to have been for the ships with the new weapons to hit here first and then hit each of the other cities in turn. They didn't have enough to make a full-scale attack; evidently, your presence here made them desperate.

	"At any rate, the other cities were able to beat off the magnetic beam ships with the projectors of molecular beams."

	"Good," Arcot thought. "Then the Nansal-Sator war is practically over!"

-

XXIII

	RICHARD ARCOT stepped into the open airlock of the Ancient Mariner and walked down the corridor to the library. There, he found Fuller and Wade battling silently over a game of chess and Morey relaxed in a chair with a book in his hands.

	"What a bunch of loafers," Arcot said acidly. "Don't you ever do anything?"

	"Sure," said Fuller. "The three of us have entered into a lifelong pact with each other to refrain from using a certain weapon which would make this war impossible for all time."

	"What war?" Arcot wondered. "And what weapon?"

	"This war," Wade grinned, pointing at the chess board. "We have agreed absolutely never to read each other's minds while playing chess."

	Morey lowered his book and looked at Arcot. "And just what have you been so busy about?"

	"I've been investigating the weapon on board the Satorian ships we captured," Arcot told them. "Quite an interesting effect. The Nansalian scientists and I have been analyzing the equipment for the past three days.

	"The Satorians found a way to cut off and direct an electrostatic field. The energy required was tremendous, but they evidently separated the charges on Sator and carried them along on the ships.

	"You can see what would happen if a ship were charged negatively and the ship next to it were charged positively! The magnitude of electrostatic forces is terrific! If you put two ounces of iron ions, with a positive charge, on the north pole, and an equivalent amount of chlorine ions, negatively charged, on the south pole, the attraction, even across that distance, would be three hundred and sixty tons!

	"They located the negative charges on one ship and the positive charges on the one next to it. Their mutual attraction pulled them toward each other. As they got closer, the charges arced across, heating and fusing the two ships. But they still had enough motion toward each other to crash.

	"They were wrecked by less than a tenth of an ounce of ions which were projected to the ship and held there by an automatic field until the ships got close enough to arc through it.

	"We still haven't been able to analyze that trick field, though."

	"Well, now that we've gotten things straightened out," Fuller said, "let's go home! I'm anxious to leave! We're all ready to go, aren't we?"

	Arcot nodded. "All except for one thing. The Supreme Three want to see us. We've got a meeting with them in an hour, so put on your best Sunday pants."

	In the Council of Three, Arcot was officially invited to remain with them. The fleet of molecular motion ships was nearing completion—the first one was to roll off the assembly line the next day—but they wanted Arcot, Wade, Morey, and Fuller to remain on Nansal.

	"We have a large world here," the Scientist thought at them. "Thanks to you people, we can at last call it our own. We offer you, in the name of the people, your choice of any spot in this world. And we give you—this!" The Scientist came forward. He had a disc-shaped plaque, perhaps three inches in diameter, made of a deep ruby-red metal. In the exact center was a green stone which seemed to shine of its own accord, with a pale, clear, green light; it was transparent and highly refractive. Around it, at the three points of a triangle, were three similar, but smaller stones. Engraved lines ran from each of the stones to the center, and other lines connected the outer three in a triangle. The effect was as though one were looking down at the apex of a regular tetrahedron.

	There were characters in Nansalese at each point of the tetrahedron, and other characters engraved in a circle around it.

	Arcot turned it in his hand. On the back was a representation of the Nansalian planetary system. The center was a pale yellow, highly-faceted stone which represented the sun. Around this were the orbits of planets, and each of the eleven planets was marked by a different colored stone.

	The Scientist was holding in the palm of his hand another such disc, slightly smaller. On it, there were three green stones, one slightly larger than the others.

	"This is my badge of office as Scientist of the Three. The stone marked Science is here larger. Your plaque is new. Henceforth, it shall be the Three and a Coordinator!

	"Your vote shall outweigh all but a unanimous vote of the Three. To you, this world is answerable, for you have saved our civilization. And when you return, as you have promised, you shall be Coordinator of this system!"

	Arcot stood silent for a moment. This was a thing he had never thought of. He was a scientist, and he knew that his ability was limited to that field.

	At last, he smiled and replied: "It is a great honor, and it is a great work. But I can not spend my time here always; I must return to my own planet. I can not be fairly in contact with you.

	"Therefore, I will make my first move in office now, and suggest that this plaque signify, not the Coordinator, and first power of your country, but Counselor and first friend in all things in which I can serve you.

	"The tetrahedron you have chosen; so let it be. The apex is out of the plane of the other points, and I am out of this galaxy. But there is a relationship between the apex and the points of the base, and these lines will exist forever.

	"We have been too busy to think of anything else as yet, but our worlds are large, and your worlds are large. Commerce can develop across the ten million light years of space as readily as it now exists across the little space of our own system. It is a journey of but five days, and later machines will make it in less! Commerce will come, and with it will come close communication.

	"I will accept this plaque with the understanding that I am but your friend and advisor. Too much power in the hands of one man is bad. Even though you trust me completely, there might be an unscrupulous successor.

	"And I must return to my world.

	"Your first ship will be ready tomorrow, and when it is completed, my friends and I will leave your planet.

	"We will return, though. We are ten million light years apart, but the universe is not to be measured in space anymore, but in time. We are five days apart. I will be nearer to you at all times than is Sator!

	"If you wish, others of my race shall come, too. But if you do not want them to come, they will not. I alone have Tharlano's photographs of the route, and I can lose them."

	For a moment, the Three spoke together, then the Scientist was again thinking at Arcot.

	"Perhaps you are right. It is obvious your people know more than we. They have the molecular ray, and they know no wars; they do not destroy each other. They must be a good race, and we have seen excellent examples in you.

	"We can realize your desire to return home, but we ask you to come again. We will remember that you are not ten million light years, but five days, from our planet."

	When the conference was ended, Arcot and his friends returned to their ship. Torlos was waiting for them outside the airlock.

	"Abaout haow saon you laive?" he asked in English.

	"Why—tomorrow," Arcot said, in surprise. "Have you been practicing our language?"

	Torlos reverted to telepathy. "Yes, but that is not what I came to talk to you about. Arcot—can a man of Nansal visit Earth?" Anxiously, hopefully, and hesitatingly, he asked. "I could come back on one of your commercial vessels, or come back when you return. And—and I'm sure I could earn my living on your world! I'm not hard to feed, you know!" He half smiled, but he was too much in earnest to make a perfect success.

	Arcot was amazed that he should ask. It was an idea he would very much like to see fulfilled. The idea of metal-boned men with tremendous strength and strange molecular-motion muscles would inspire no friendship, no feeling of kinship, in the people of Earth. But the man himself—a pleasant, kindly, sincere, intelligent giant—would be a far greater argument for the world of Nansal that the most vivid orator would ever be.

	Arcot asked the others, and the vote was unanimous—let him come!

	The next day, amid great ceremony, the first of the new Nansalian ships came from the factories. When the celebration was over, the four Earthmen and the giant Torlos entered the Ancient Mariner.

	"Ready to go, Torlos?" Arcot grinned.

	"Pearfactly, Ahcut. Tse soonah tse bettah!" he said in his oddly accented English.

	Five hours saw them out of the galaxy. Twelve hours more, and they were heading for home at full speed, well out in space.

	The Home Galaxy was looming large when they next stopped for observation. Old Tharlano had guided them correctly!

	They were going home!

The End

Invaders from the Infinite
Arcot, Morey and Wade 03
(Ace Books revision - 1961)

Chapter I -  INVADERS

	RUSS EVANS, Pilot 3497, Rocket Squad Patrol 34, unsnapped his seat belt, and with a slight push floated "up" into the air inside the weightless ship. He stretched himself, and yawned broadly.

	"Red, how soon do we eat?" he called.

	"Shut up, you'll wake the others," replied a low voice from the rear of the swift little patrol ship. "See anything?"

	"Several million stars," replied Evans in a lower voice. "And—" His tone became suddenly severe. "Assistant Murphy, remember your manners when addressing your superior officer. I've a mind to report you."

	A flaming head of hair topping a grinning face poked around the edge of the door. "Lower your wavelength, lower your wavelength! You may think you're a sun, but you're just a planetoid. But what I'd like to know, Chief Pilot Russ Evans, is why they locate a ship in a forlorn, out of the way place like this—three-quarters of a billion miles, out of planetary plane. No ships ever come out here, no pirates, not a chance to help a wrecked ship. All we can do is sit here and watch the other fellows do the work."

	"Which is exactly why we're here. Watch—and tell the other ships where to go, and when. Is that chow ready?" asked Russ looking at a small clock giving New York time.

	"Uh—think she'll be on time? Come on an' eat."

	Evans took one more look at the telectroscope screen, then snapped it off. A tiny, molecular towing unit in his hand, he pointed toward the door to the combined galley and lunch room, and glided in the wake of Murphy.

	"How much fuel left?" he asked, as he glided into the dizzily spinning room. A cylindrical room, spinning at high speed, causing an artificial "weight" for the foods and materials in it, made eating of food a less difficult task. Expertly, he maneuvered himself to the guide rail near the center of the room, and caught the spiral. Braking himself into motion, he soon glided down its length, and landed on his feet. He bent and flexed his muscles, waiting for the now-busied assistant to get to the floor and reply.

	"They gave us two pounds extra. Lord only knows why. Must expect us to clean up on some fleet. That makes four pound rolls left, untouched, and two thirds of the original pound. We've been here fifteen days, and have six more to go. The main driving power rolls have about the same amount left, and three pound rolls in each reserve bin," replied Red, holding a curiously moving coffee pot that strove to adjust itself to rapidly changing air velocities as it neared the center of the room.

	"Sounds like a fleet's power stock. Martian lead or the terrestrial isotope?" asked Evans, tasting warily a peculiar dish before him. "Say, this is energy food. I thought we didn't get any more till Saturday." The change from the energy-less, flavored pastes that made up the principal bulk of a space-pilot's diet, to prevent over-eating, when no energy was used in walking in the weightless ship, was indeed a welcome change.

	"Uh-huh. I got hungry. Any objections?" grinned the Irishman.

	"None!" replied Evans fervently, pitching in with a will.

	Seated at the controls once more, he snapped the little switch that caused the screen to glow with flashing, swirling colors as the telectroscope apparatus came to life. A thousand tiny points of flame appeared scattered on a black field with a suddenness that made them seem to snap suddenly into being. Points, tiny dimensionless points of light, save one, a tiny disc of blue-white flame, old Sol from a distance of close to one billion miles, and under slight reverse magnification. The skillful hands at the controls were turning adjustments now, and that disc of flame seemed to leap toward him with a hundred light-speeds, growing to a disc as large as a dime in an instant, while the myriad points of the stars seemed to scatter like frightened chickens, fleeing from the growing sun, out of the screen. Other points, heretofore invisible, appeared, grew, and rushed away.

	The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller reddish-green disc came into view—a planet, its atmosphere coloring the light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a world, a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification increased, boundlessly it seemed.

	Finally, New York spread across the screen; New York seen from the air, with a strange lack of perspective. The buildings did not seem all to slant toward some point, but to stand vertical, for, from a distance of a billion miles, the vision lines were practically parallel. Titanic shafts of glowing color in the early summer sun appeared; the hot rays from the sun, now only 82,500,000 miles away, shimmering on the colored metal walls.

	The new Airlines Building, a mile and a half high, supported at various points by actual spaceship driving units, was a riot of shifting, rainbow hues. A new trick in construction had been used here, and Evans smiled at it. Arcot, inventor of the ship that carried him, had suggested it to Fuller, designer of that ship, and of that building. The colored berylium metal of the wall had been ruled with 20,000 lines to the inch, mere scratches, but nevertheless a diffraction grating. The result was amazingly beautiful. The sunlight, split up to its rainbow colors, was reflected in millions of shifting tints.

	In the air, supported by tiny packs strapped to their backs, thousands of people were moving, floating where they wished, in any direction, at any elevation. There were none of the helicopters of even five years ago, now. A molecular power suit was far more convenient, cost nothing to operate, and but $50 to buy. Perfectly safe, requiring no skill, everyone owned them. To the watcher in space, they were mere moving, snaky lines of barely distinguishable dots that shivered and seemed to writhe in the refractions of the air. Passing over them, seeming to pass almost through them in this strange perspectiveless view, were the shadowy forms of giant space liners, titanic streamlined hulls. They were streamlined for no good reason, save that they looked faster and more graceful than the more efficient spherical freighters, just as passenger liners of two centuries earlier, with their steam engines, had carried four funnels and used two. A space liner spent so minute a portion of its journey in the atmosphere that it was really inefficient to streamline them.

	"Won't be long!" muttered Russ, grinning cheerily at the familiar, sunlit city. His eyes darted to the chronometer beside him. The view seemed to be taken from a ship that was suddenly scudding across the heavens like a frightened thing, as it ran across from Manhattan Island, followed the Hudson for a short way, then cut across into New Jersey, swinging over the great woodland area of Kittatiny Park, resting finally on the New Jersey suburb of New York nestled in the Kittatinies, Blairtown. Low apartment buildings, ten or twelve stories high, nestled in the waving green of trees in the old roadways. When ground traffic ceased, the streets had been torn up, and parkways substituted.

	Quickly the view singled out a single apartment, and the great smooth roof was enlarged on the screen to the absolute maximum clarity, till further magnification simply resulted in worse stratospheric distortion. On the broad roof were white strips of some material, making a huge V followed by two I's. Russ watched, his hand on the control steadying the view under the Earth's complicated orbital motion, and rotation, further corrections for the ship's orbital motion making the job one requiring great skill. The view held the center with amazing clarity. Something seemed to be happening to the last of the I's. It crumpled suddenly, rolled in on itself and disappeared.

	"She's there, and on time," grinned Russ happily.

	He tried more magnification. Could he—

	He was tired, terribly, suddenly tired. He took his hands from the viewplate controls, relaxed, and dropped off to sleep.

	"What made me so tired—wonder—GOD!" He straightened with a jerk, and his hands flew to the controls. The view on the machine suddenly retreated, flew back with a velocity inconceivable. Earth dropped away from the ship with an apparent velocity a thousand times that of light; it was a tiny ball, a pinpoint, gone, the sun—a minute disc—gone—then the apparatus was flashing views into focus from the other side of the ship. The assistant did not reply. Evans' hands were growing ineffably heavy, his whole body yearned for sleep. Slowly, clumsily he pawed for a little stud. Somehow his hand found it, and the ship reeled suddenly, little jerks, as the code message was flung out in a beam of such tremendous power that the sheer radiation pressure made it noticeable. Earth would be notified. The system would be warned. But light, slow crawling thing, would take hours to cross the gulf of space, and radio travels no faster.

	Half conscious, fighting for his faculties with all his will, the pilot turned to the screen. A ship! A strange, glistening thing streamlined to the nth degree, every spare corner rounded till the resistance was at the irreducible minimum. But, in the great pilotport of the stranger, the patrol pilot saw faces, and gasped in surprise as he saw them! Terrible faces, blotched, contorted. Patches of white skin, patches of brown, patches of black, blotched and twisted across the faces. Long, lean faces, great wide flat foreheads above, skulls strangely squared, more box-like than man's rounded skull. The ears were large, pointed tips at the top. Their hair was a silky mane that extended low over the forehead, and ran back, spreading above the ears, and down the neck.

	Then, as that emotion of surprise and astonishment weakened his will momentarily, oblivion came, with what seemed a fleeting instant of memories. His life seemed to flash before his mind in serried rank, a file of events, his childhood, his life, his marriage, his wife, an image of smiling comfort, then the years, images of great and near great men, his knowledge of history, pictures of great war of 2074, pictures of the attackers of the Black Star—then calm oblivion, quiet blankness.

	The long, silent ship that had hovered near him turned, and pointed toward the pinhead of matter that glowed brilliantly in the flaming jewel box of the heavens. It was gone in an instant, rushing toward Sun and Earth at a speed that outraced the flying radio message, leaving the ship of the Guard Patrol behind, and leaving the Pilot as he leaves our story.

-

Chapter II -  CANINE PEOPLE

	"AND THAT," said Arcot between puffs, "will certainly be a great boon to the Rocket Patrol, you must admit. They don't like dueling with these space-pirates using the molecular rays, and since molecular rays have such a tremendous commercial value, we can't prohibit the sale of ray apparatus. Now, if you will come into the 'workshop,' Fuller, I'll give a demonstration with friend Morey's help."

	The four friends rose, Morey, Wade and Fuller following Arcot into his laboratory on the thirty-seventh floor of the Arcot Research Building. As they went, Arcot explained to Fuller the results and principles of the latest product of the ingenuity of the "Triumvirate," as Arcot, Morey and Wade had come to be called in the news dispatches.

	"As you know, the molecular rays make all the molecules of any piece of matter they are turned upon move in the desired direction. Since they supply no new energy, but make the body they are turned upon supply its own, using the energy of its own random molecular motion of heat, they are practically impossible to stop. The energy necessary for molecular rays to take effect is so small that the usual type of filter lets enough of it pass. A ship equipped with filters is no better off when attacked than one without. The rays simply drove the front end into the rear, or vice versa, or tore it to pieces as the pirates desired. The Rocket Patrol could kill off the pirates, but they lost so many men in the process, it was a Phyrric victory.

	"For some time Morey and I have been working on something to stop the rays. Obviously it can't be by means of any of the usual metallic energy absorption screens.

	"We finally found a combination of rays, better frequencies, that did what we wanted. I have such an apparatus here. What we want you to do, of course, is the usual job of rearranging the stuff so that the apparatus can be made from dies, and put into quantity production. As the Official Designer for the A.A.L. you ought to do that easily." Arcot grinned as Fuller looked in amazement at the apparatus Arcot had picked up from the bench in the "workshop."

	"Don't get worried," laughed Morey, "that's got a lifting unit combined—just a plain ordinary molecular lift such as you see by the hundreds out there." Morey pointed through the great window where thousands of those lift units were carrying men, women and children through the air, lifting them hundreds, thousands of feet above the streets and through the doors of buildings.

	"Here's an ordinary molecular pistol. I'm going to put the suit on, and rise about five feet off the floor. You can turn the pistol on me, and see what impression it makes on the suit."

	Fuller took the molecular ray pistol, while Wade helped Arcot into the suit. He looked at the pistol dubiously, pointed it at a heavy casting of iron resting in one corner of the room, and turned the ray at low concentration, then pressed the trigger-button. The casting gave out a low, scrunching grind, and slid toward him with a lurch. Instantly he shut off the power. "This isn't any ordinary pistol. It's got seven or eight times the ordinary power!" he exclaimed.

	"Oh yes, I forgot," Morey said. "Instead of the fuel battery that the early pistols used, this has a space-distortion power coil. This pistol has as much power as the usual A-39 power unit for commercial work."

	By the time Morey had explained the changes to Fuller, Arcot had the suit on, and was floating five or six feet in the air, like a grotesque captive balloon. "Ready, Fuller?"

	"I guess so, but I certainly hope that suit is all it is claimed to be. If it isn't—well I'd rather not commit murder."

	"It'll work," said Arcot. "I'll bet my neck on that!" Suddenly he was surrounded by the faintest of auras, a strange, wavering blue light, like the hazy corona about a 400,000-volt power line. "Now try it."

	Fuller pointed the pistol at the floating man and pushed the trigger. The brilliant blue beam of the molecular ray, and the low hum of the air, rushing in the path of the director beam, stabbed out toward Arcot. The faint aura about him was suddenly intensified a million times till he floated in a ball of blue-white fire. Scarcely visible, the air about him blazed with bluish incandescence of ionization.

	"Increase the power," suggested Morey. Fuller turned on more power. The blue halo was shot through with tiny violet sparks, the sharp odor of ozone in the air was stifling; the heat of wasted energy was making the room hotter. The power increased further, and the tiny sparks were waving streamers, that laced across the surface of the blue fire. Little jets of electric flame reached out along the beam of the ray now. Finally, as full power of the molecular ray was reached, the entire halo was buried under a mass of writhing sparks that seemed to leap up into the air above the man's head, wavering up to extinction. The room was unbearably hot, despite the molecular ray coolers absorbing the heat of the air, and blowing cooled air into the room.

	Fuller snapped off the ray, and put the pistol on the table beside him. The halo died, and went out a moment later, and Arcot settled to the floor.

	"This particular suit will stand up against anything the ordinary commercial sets will give. The system now: remember that the rays are short electrical waves. The easiest way to stop them is to interpose a wave of opposite phase, and cause interference. Fine, but try to get in tune with an unknown wave when it is moving in relation to your center of control. It is impossible to do it before you yourself have been rayed out of existence. We must use some system that will automatically, instantly be out of phase.

	"The Hall effect would naturally tend to make the frequency of a wave through a resisting medium change, and lengthen. If we can send out a spherical wave front, and have it lengthen rapidly as it proceeds, we will have a wave front that is, at all points, different. Any entering wave would, sooner or later, meet a wave that was half a phase out, no matter what the motion was, nor what the frequency, as long as it lies within the comparatively narrow molecular wave band. What this apparatus, or ray screen, consists of, is a machine generating a spherical wave front of the nature of a molecular wave, but of just too great a frequency to do anything. A second part generates a condition in space, which opposes that wave. After traveling a certain distance, the wave has lengthened to molecular wave type, but is now beyond the machine which generated it, and no longer affects it, or damages it. However, as it proceeds, it continues to lengthen, till eventually it reaches the length of infra-light, when the air quickly absorbs it, as it reaches one of the absorption bands for air molecular waves, and any molecular wave must find its half-wave complement somewhere in that wedge of waves. It does, and is at once choked off, its energy fighting the energy of the ray screen, of course. In the air, however, the screen is greatly helped by the fact that before the half-wave frequency is met in the ray-wedge, the molecular ray is buried in ions, leaving the ray screen little work to do.

	"Now your job is to design the apparatus in a form that machines can make automatically. We tried doing it ourselves for the fun of it, but we couldn't see how we could make a machine that didn't need at least two humans to supervise."

	"Well," grinned Fuller, "you have it all over me as scientists, but as economic workers—two human supervisors to make one product!"

	"All right—we agree. But no, let's see you—Lord! What was that?" Morey started for the door on the run. The building was still trembling from the shock of a heavy blow, a blow that seemed much as though a machine had been wrecked on the armored roof, and a big machine at that. Arcot, a flying suit already on, was up in the air, and darting past Morey in an instant, streaking for the vertical shaft that would let him out to the roof. The molecular ray pistol was already in his hand, ready to pull any beams off unfortunate victims pinned under them.

	In a moment he had flashed up through the seven stories, and out to the roof. A gigantic silvery machine rested there, streamlined to perfection, its hull dazzingly beautiful in the sunlight. A door opened, and three tall, lean men stepped from it. Already people were collecting about the ship, flying up from below. Air patrolmen floated up in a minute, and seeing Arcot, held the crowd back.

	The strange men were tall, eight feet or more in height. Great, round, soft brown eyes looked in curiosity at the towering multicolored buildings, at the people floating in the air, at the green trees and the blue sky, the yellowish sun.

	Arcot looked at their strangely blotched and mottled heads, faces, arms and hands. Their feet were very long and narrow, their legs long and thin. Their faces were kindly; the mottled skin, brown and white and black, seemed not to make them ugly. It was not a disfigurement; it seemed oddly familiar and natural in some reminiscent way.

	"Lord, Arcot—queer specimens, yet they seem familiar!" said Morey in an undertone.

	"They are. Their race is that of man's first and best friend, the dog! See the brown eyes? The typical teeth? The feet still show the traces of the dog's toe-step. Their nails, not flat like human ones but rounded? The mottled skin, the ears—look, one is advancing."

	One of the strangers walked laboriously forward. A lighter world than Earth was evidently his home. His great brown eyes fixed themselves on Arcot's. Arcot watched them. They seemed to expand, grow larger; they seemed to fill all the sky. Hypnotism! He concentrated his mind, and the eyes suddenly contracted to the normal eyes of the stranger. The man reeled back, as Arcot's telepathic command to sleep came, stronger than his own will. The stranger's friends caught him, shook him, but he slept. One of the others looked at Arcot; his eyes seemed hurt, desperately pleading.

	Arcot strode forward, and quickly brought the man out of the trance. He shook his head, smiled at Arcot, then, with desperate difficulty, he enunciated some words in English, terribly distorted.

	"Ahy wizz tahk. Vokle kohds ron. Tahk by breen."

	Distorted as it was, Arcot recognized the meaning without difficulty. "I wish (to) talk. Vocal cords wrong. Talk by brain." He switched to communication by the Venerian method, telepathically, but without hypnotism.

	"Good enough. When you attempted to hypnotize me, I didn't known what you wanted. It is not necessary to hypnotize to carry on communication by the method of the second world of this system. What brings you to our system? From what system do you come? What do you wish to say?"

	The other, not having learned the Venerian system, had great difficulty in communicating his thoughts, but Arcot learned that they had machines which would make it easier, and the terrestrian invited them into his laboratory, for the crowd was steadily growing.

	The three returned to their ship for a moment, coming out with several peculiar headsets. Almost at once the ship started to rise, going up more and more swiftly, as the people cleared a way for it.

	Then, in the tiniest fraction of a second, the ship was gone; it shrank to a point, and was invisible in the blue vault of the sky.

	"Apparently they intend to stay a while," said Wade. "They are trusting souls, for their line of retreat is cut off. We naturally have no intention of harming them, but they can't know that."

	"I'm not so sure," said Arcot. He turned to the apparent leader of the three and explained that there were several stories to descend, and stairs were harder than a flying unit. "Wrap your arms about my legs, when I rise above you, and hold on till your feet are on the floor again," he concluded.

	The stranger walked a little closer to the edge of the shaft, and looked down. White bulbs illuminated its walls down its length to the ground. The man talked rapidly to his friends, looking with evident distaste at the shaft, and the tiny pack on Arcot's back. Finally, smiling, he evinced his willingness. Arcot rose, the man grasped his legs, and then both rose. Over the shaft, and down to his laboratory was the work of a moment.

	Arcot led them into his "consultation room," where a number of comfortable chairs were arranged, facing each other. He seated them together, and his own friends facing them.

	"Friends of another world," began Arcot, "we do not know your errand here, but you evidently have good reason for coming to this place. It is unlikely that your landing was the result of sheer chance. What brought you? How came you to this point?"

	"It is difficult for me to reply. First we must be en rapport. Our system is not simple as yours, but more effective, for yours depends on thought ideas, not altogether universal. Place these on your heads, for only a moment. I must induce temporary hypnotic coma. Let one try first if you desire." The leader of the visitors held out one of the several headsets they had brought, caplike things, made of laminated metal apparently.

	Arcot hesitated, then with a grin slipped it on.

	"Relax," came a voice in Arcot's head, a low, droning voice, a voice of command. "Sleep," it added. Arcot felt himself floating down an infinite shaft, on some superflying suit that did not pull at him with its straps, just floating down lightly, down and down and down. Suddenly he reached the bottom, and found to his surprise that it led directly into the room again! He was back. "You are awake. Speak!" came the voice.

	Arcot shook himself, and looked about. A new voice spoke now, not the tonelessly melodious voice, but the voice of an individual, yet a mental voice. It was perfectly clear, and perfectly comprehensible. "We have traveled far to find you, and now we have business of the utmost import. Ask these others to let us treat them, for we must do what we can in the least possible time. I will explain when all can understand. I am Zezdon Fentes, First Student of Thought. He who sits on my right is Zezdon Afthen, and he beyond him, is Zezdon Inthel, of Physics and of Chemistry, respectively."

	And now Arcot spoke to his friends.

	"These men have something of the greatest importance to tell us, it seems. They want us all to hear, and they are in a hurry. The treatment isn't at all annoying. Try it. The man on the extreme right, as we face them, is Zezdon Fentes of Thought, Zezdon apparently meaning something like professor, or 'First Student of.' Those next him are Zezdon Afthen of Physics and Zezdon Inthel of Chemistry."

	Zezdon Afthen offered them the headsets, and in a moment everyone present was wearing one. The process of putting them en rapport took very little time, and shortly all were able to communicate with ease.

	"Friends of Earth, we must tell our strange story quickly for the benefit of your world as well as ours, and others, too. We cannot so much as annoy. We are helpless to combat them.

	"Our world lies far out across the galaxy; even with incalculable velocity of the great swift thing that bore us, three long months have we traveled toward your distant worlds, hoping that at last the Invaders might meet their masters.

	"We landed on this roof because we examined mentally the knowledge of a pilot of one of your patrol ships. His mind told us that here we would find the three greatest students of Science of this Solar System. So it was here we came for help.

	"Our race has arisen," he continued, "as you have so surely determined from the race you call canines. It was artificially produced by the Ancient Masters when their hour of need had come. We have lost the great science of the Ancient Ones. But we have developed a different science, a science of the mind."

	"Dogs are far more psychic than are men. They would naturally tend to develop such a civilization," said Arcot judiciously.

-

Chapter III -  A QUARTER OF A MILLION LIGHT YEARS

	"OUR CIVILIZATION," continued Zezdon Afthen, "is built largely on the knowledge of the mind. We cannot have criminals, for the man who plots evil is surely found out by his thoughts. We cannot have lying politicians and unjust rulers.

	"It is a peaceful civilization. The Ancient Masters feared and hated War with a mighty aversion. But they did not make our race cowards, merely peaceful intelligence. Now we must fight for our homes, and my race will fight mightily. But we need weapons.

	"But my story has little to do with our race. I will tell the story of our civilization and of the Ancient Ones later when the time is more auspicious.

	"Four months ago, our mental vibration instruments detected powerful emanations from space. That could only mean that a new, highly intelligent race had suddenly appeared within a billion miles of our world. The directional devices quickly spotted it as emanating from the third planet of our system. Zezdon Fentes, with my aid, set up some special apparatus, which would pick up strong thoughts and make them visible. We had used this before to see not only what an enemy looked upon, but also what he saw in that curious thing, the eye of the mind, the vision of the past and the future. But while the thought-amplification device was powerful, the new emanations were hard to separate from each other.

	"It was done finally, when all but one man slept. That one we were enable to tune sharply to. After that we could reach him at any time. He was the commander. We saw him operate the ship, we saw the ship, saw it glide over the barren, rocky surface of that world. We saw other men come in and go out. They were strange men. Short, squat, bulky men. Their arms were short and stocky. But their strength was enormous, unbelievable. We saw them bend solid bars of steel as thick as my arm. With perfect ease!

	"Their brains were tremendously active, but they were evil, selfishly evil. Nothing that did not benefit them counted. At one time our instruments went dead, and we feared that the commander had detected us, but we saw what happened a little later. The second in command had killed him.

	"We saw them examine the world, working their way across it, wearing heavy suits, yet, for all the terrific gravity of that world, bouncing about like rubber balls, leaping and jumping where they wanted. Their legs would drive out like pistons, and they soared up and through the air.

	"They were tired while they made those examinations, and slept heavily at night.

	"Then one night there was a conference. We saw then what they intended. Before we had tried desperately to signal them. Now we were glad that we had failed.

	"We saw their ship rise (in the thoughts of the second in command) and sail out into space, and rush toward our world. The world grew larger, but it was imperfectly sketched in, for they did not know our world well. Their telescopes did not have great power as your electric telescopes have.

	"We saw them investigate the planet. We saw them plan to destroy any people they found with a ray which was as follows: 'the ray which makes all parts move as one.' We could not understand and could not interpret. Thoughts beyond our knowledge have, of course, no meaning, even when our mental amplifiers get them, and bring them to us."

	"The Molecular ray!" gasped Morey in surprise. "They will be an enemy."

	"You know it! It is familiar to you! You have it? You can fight it?" asked Zezdon Afthen excitedly.

	"We know it, and can fight it, if that is all they have."

	"They have more—much more I fear," replied Zezdon Afthen. "At any rate, we saw what they intended. If our world was inhabited, they would destroy every one on it, and then other men of their race were to float in on their great ships, and settle on that largest of our worlds.

	"We had to stop them so we did what we could. We had powerful machines, which would amplify and broadcast our thoughts. So we broadcast our thought-waves, and implanted in the mind of their leader that it would be wise to land, and learn the extent of the civilization, and the weapons to be met. Also, as the ship drew nearer, we made him decide on a certain spot we had prepared for him.

	"He never guessed that the thoughts were not his own. Only the ideas came to him, seeming to spring from his own mind.

	"He landed—and we used our one weapon. It was a thing left to one group of rulers when the Ancient Masters left us to care for ourselves. What it was, we never knew; we had never used it in the fifteen thousand years since the Great Masters had passed—never had to. But now it was brought out, and concealed behind great piles of rock in a deep canyon where the ship of the enemy would land. When it landed, we turned the beam of the machine on it, and the apparatus rotated it swiftly, and a cone of the beam's ray was formed as the beam was swung through a small circle in the vertical plane. The machine leaped backward, and though it was so massive that a tremendous amount of labor had been required to bring it there, the push of the pencil of force we sent out hurled it back against a rocky cliff behind it as though it were some child's toy. It continued to operate for perhaps a second, perhaps two. In that time two great holes had been cut in the enemy ship, holes fifteen feet across, that ran completely through the hull as though a die had cut through the metal of the ship, cutting out a disc of metal.

	"There was a terrific concussion, and a roar as the air blasted out of the ship. It did not take us long to discover that the enemy were dead. Their terrible, bloated corpses lay everywhere in the ship. Most of the men we were able to recognize, having seen them in the mentovisor. But the colors were distorted, and their forms were peculiar. Indeed, the whole ship seemed strange. The only time that things ever did seem normal about that strange thing, when the angles of it seemed what they were, when the machines did not seem out of proportion, out of shape, twisted, was when on a trial trip we ventured very close to our sun."

	Arcot whistled softly and looked at Morey. Morey nodded. "Probably right. Don't interrupt."

	"That you thought something, I understood, but the thoughts themselves were hopelessly unintelligible to me. You know the explanation?" asked Zezdon Afthen eagerly.

	"We think so. The ship was evidently made on a world of huge size. Those men, their stocky, block legs and arms, their entire build and their desire for the largest of your planets, would indicate that. Their own world was probably even larger—they were forced to wear pressure suits even on that large world, and could jump all over, you said. On so huge a sphere as their native world seems to be, the gravity would be so intense as to distort space. Geometry, such as yours seems to be, and such as ours was, could never be developed, for you assume the existence of a straight line, and of an absolute plane surface. These things cannot exist in space, but on small worlds, far from the central sun's mass, the conditions approach that without sufficient discrepency to make the error obvious. On so huge a globe as their world the space is so curved that it is at once obvious that no straight line exists, and that no plane exists. Their geometry would never be like ours. When you went close to your sun, the attraction was sufficient to curve space into a semblance of the natural conditions on their home planet, then your senses and the ship met a compromise condition which made it seem more or less normal, not so obviously strange to you.

	"But continue." Arcot looked at Afthen interestedly.

	"There were none left in their ship now, and we had been careful in locating the first hole, that it should not damage the propulsive machinery. The second hole was accidental, due to the shift of the machine. The machine itself was wrecked now, crushed by its own reaction. We forgot that any pencil of force powerful enough to do what we wanted, would tear the machine from its moorings unless fastened with great steel bolts into the solid rock.

	"The second hole had been far to the rear, and had, by ill-luck, cut out a portion of the driving apparatus. We could not repair that, though we did succeed at last in lifting the great discs into place. We attempted to cut them, and put them back in sections. Our finest saws and machines did not nick them. Their weight was unbelievable, and yet we finally succeeded in lifting the things into the wall of the ship. The actual missing material did not represent more than a tiny cut, perhaps as wide as one of your credit-discs. You could slip the thin piece of metal in between them, but not so much as your finger.

	"Those slots we welded tight with our best steel, letting a flap hang over on each side of the cut, and as the hot metal cooled, it was drawn against the shining walls with terrific force. The joints were perfectly airtight.

	"The machines proper were repaired to the greatest possible extent. It was a heartbreaking task, for we must only guess at what machines should be connected together. Much damage had been done by the rushing air as it left, for it filled the machines, too, and they were not designed to resist the terrific air pressure that was on them when the pressure in the ship escaped. Many of the machines had been burst open, and these we could repair when we had the necessary elements and knew their construction from the remnants, or could find unbroken duplicates in the stock rooms.

	"Once we connected the wrong things. This will show you what we dealt with. They were the wrong poles—two generators, connected together in the wrong way. There was a terrific crash when the switch was thrown, and huge sheets of electric flame leaped from one of them. Two men were killed, incinerated in an instant, even the odors one might expect were killed in that flash of heat. Everything save the shining metal and clear glass within ten feet of it was instantly wiped out. And there was a fuse link that gave. The generator was ruined. One was left, and several small auxiliary generators.

	"Eventually, we did the job. We made the machine work. And we are here.

	"We have come to warn you, and to ask aid. Your system also has a large planet, slightly smaller than the largest of our system, but yet attractive. There are approximately 50,000 planetary systems in this universe, according to the records of the Invaders. Their world is not of this system. It is the World Thett, sun Antseck, Universe Venone. Where that is, or even what it means, we do not know. Perhaps you understand.

	"But they investigated your world, and its address, according to their records, was World 3769-8482730-3. This, I believe, means, Universe 3769, sun 8482730, world 3. They have been investigating this system now for nearly three centuries. It was close to 200 years ago that they visited your world—two hundred years of your time."

	"This is 2129—which makes it about the year 1929-30 that they floated around here investigating. Why haven't they done anything?" Arcot asked him.

	"They waited for an auspicious time. They are afraid now, for recently they visited your world, and were utterly amazed to find the unbelievable progress your people have made. They intend to make an immediate attack on all worlds known to be intelligently populated. They had made the mistake of letting one race learn too much; they cannot afford to let it happen again.

	"There are only twenty-one inhabited worlds known, and their thousands of scouts have already investigated nearly all the central mass of this universe, and much of the outer rings. They have established a base in this universe. Where I do not know. That, alone, was never mentioned in the records. But of all peoples, they feared only your world.

	"There is one race in the universe far older than yours, but they are a sleeping people. Long ago their culture decayed. Still, now they are not far from you, and perhaps it will be worth the few days needed to learn more about them. We have their location and can take you there. Their world circles a dead star—"

	"Not any more," laughed Morey grimly. "That's another surprise for the enemy. They had a little jog, and they certainly are wide awake now. They are headed for big things, and they are going to do a lot."

	"But how do you know these things? You have ships that can go from planet to planet, I know, but the records of the enemy said you could not leave the system of your sun. They alone knew that secret."

	"Another surprise for them," said Morey. "We can—and we can move faster than your ship, if not faster than they. The people of the dead star have moved to a very live star—Sirius, the brightest in our heavens. And they are as much alive now as their new sun. They can move faster than light, also. We had a little misunderstanding a while back, when their star passed close to ours. They came off second best, and we haven't spoken to them since. But I think we can make valuable allies there."

	For all Morey's jocular manner, he realized the terrible import of this announcement. A race which had been able to cross the vast gulf of intergalactic space in the days when Terrestrians were still developing the airplane—and already they had mapped Jupiter, and planned their colonies! What developments had come? They had molecular rays, cosmic rays, the energy of matter, then—what else had they now? Lux and Relux, the two artificial metals, made of solidified light, far stronger than anything of molecular structure in nature, absolutely infusible, totally inert chemically, one a perfect conductor of light and of all radiation in space, the other a perfect reflector of all radiations—save molecular rays. Made into the condition of reflection by the action of special frequencies in its formation from light, molecular frequencies were, unfortunately, able to convert it into perfectly transparent lux metal, when the protective value was gone.

	They had that. All Earth had, perhaps.

	"There was one other race of some importance, the others were semi-civilized. They rated us in a position between these races and the high races—yours, those of the dead star, and those of world 3769-37:478:326:894-6. Our science had been investigated two hundred or so years ago.

	"This other race was at a great distance from us, greater than yours, and apparently not feared as greatly as yours. They cannot cross to other worlds, save in small ships driven solely by fire, which the Thessians have called a 'hopelessly inefficient and laughably awkward thing to ride in.'"

	"Rockets," grinned Morey. "Our first ship was part rocket."

	Zezdon Fentes smiled. "But that is all. We have brought you warning, and our plea. Can you help us?"

	"We cannot answer that. The Interplanetary Council must act. But I am afraid that it will be all we can do to protect our own world if this enemy attacks soon, and I fear they will. Since they have a base in this universe, it is impossible to believe that all ships did not report back to the home world at stated intervals. That one is missing will soon be discovered, and it will be sought. War will start at once. Three months it took you to reach us—they should come soon.

	"Those men who left will be on their way back from the home world from which they came. What do you call your planet, friend?"

	"Ortol is our home," replied Zezdon Inthel.

	"At any rate, I can only assure you that your world will be given weapons that will permit your people to defend themselves and I will get you to your home within twenty-four hours. Your ship—is it in the system?"

	"It waits on the second satellite of the fourth planet," replied Zezdon Afthen.

	"Signal them, and tell them to land where a beacon of intense light, alternating red and blue, reaches up from—this point on the map." Arcot pointed out the spot in Vermont where their private lake and laboratory were.

	He turned to the others, and in rapid-fire English, explained his plans. "We need the help of these people as much as they need ours. I think Zezdon Fentes will stay here and help you. The others will go with us to their world. There we shall have plenty of work to do, but on the way we are going to stop at Mars and pick up that valuable ship of theirs and make a careful examination for possible new weapons, their system of speed-drive, and their regular space-drive. I'm willing to make a bet right now, that I can guess both. Their regular drive is a molecular drive with lead disintegration apparatus for the energy, cosmic ray absorbers for the heating, and a drive much like ours. Their speed drive is a time distortion apparatus, I'll wager. Time distinction offers an easy solution of speed. All speed is relative—relative to other bodies, but also to time-speed. But we'll see.

	"I'm going to hustle some workmen to installing the biggest spare power board I can get into the storerooms of the Ancient Mariner, and pack in a ray-screen. It will be useful. Let's move."

	"Our ship," said Zezdon Afthen, "will land in three of your hours."

-

Chapter IV -  THE FIRST MOVE

	THE ORTOLIANS were standing on a low, green-clad hill. Below them stretched the green flank of the little rise, and beyond lay ridge after ridge of the broad, smooth carpet of the beautiful Vermont hills.

	"Man of Earth," said Zezdon Afthen, turning at last to Wade, who stood behind him. "It took us three months of constant flight at a speed unthinkable, through space dotted with the titanic gems of the Outer Dark, stars gleaming in red, and blue and orange, some titanic lighthouses of our course, others dim pinpoints of glowing color. It was a scene of unspeakable grandeur, but it was so awesomely mighty in its scope, one was afraid, and his soul shriveled within him as he looked at those inconceivable masses floating forever alone in the silence of the inconceivable nothingness of eternal cold and eternal darkness. One was awed, suppressed by their sheer magnitude. A magnificent spectacle truly, but one no man could love.

	"Now we are at rest on a tiny pinpoint of dust in a tiny bit of a tiny corner of an isolated universe, and the magnitude and stillness is gone. Only the chirpings of those strange birds as they seek rest in darkness, the soft gurgling of the little stream below, and the rustle of countless leaves, break the silence with a satisfying existence, while the loneliness of that great star, your sun, is lost in its tintings of soft color, the fleeciness of the clouds, and the seeming companionship of green hills.

	"The beauty of boundless space is awe-inspiring in its magnitude. The beauty of Earth is something man can love.

	"Man of Earth, you have a home that you may well fight for with all the strength of your arms, all the forces of your brain, and all the energies of Space that you can call forth to aid you. It is a wondrous world." Silently he stood in the gathering dusk, as first Venus winked into being, then one by one the stars came into existence in the deepening color of the sky.

	"Space is awesomely wonderful; this is—lovable." He gazed long at the heavens of this world so strange, so beautiful to him, looking at the unfamiliar heavens, as star after star flashed into the constellations so familiar to terrestrians and to those Venerians who had been above the clouds of Venus' eternal shroud.

	"But somewhere off there in space are other races, and far beyond the power of our eyes to see is the star that is the sun of my world, and around it circles that little globe that is home to me. What is happening there now? Does it still exist? Are there people still living on it? Oh, Man of Earth, let us reach that world quickly, you cannot guess the pangs that attack me, for if it be destroyed, think—forever I am without home—without friends I knew. However kind your people may be to me, I would be forever lonely.

	"I will not think of that—only it is time your ship was ready, is it not?"

	"I think we had better return," replied Wade softly, his English words rousing thoughts in his mind intelligible to the Ortolians.

	The three rose in the air on the molecular suits and drove quickly down toward the blue gem of the lake to the east, nestled among still other green hills. Lights were showing in the great shop, where the Ancient Mariner was being fitted with the ray-shields, and all possible weapons. Men streaming through her were hastily stocking her with vast quantities of foods, stocks of fuel, all the spare parts they could cram into her stock rooms.

	When the men arrived from the hilltop, the work was practically done, and Wade stepped up to Morey, busily checking off a list of required items.

	"Everything you ordered came through?" he asked.

	"Yes—thanks to the pull of a two-billion dollar private fortune. Who says credit-units don't have their value? This expedition never would have gotten through, if it hadn't been for that.

	"But we have the main space distortion power bank, and the new auxiliary coils full. Ten tons of lead aboard for fuel. There's one thing we are afraid of. If the enemy have a system of tubes that is able to handle more power than our last tube—we're sunk. These brilliant people that suggest using more tubes to a ray-power bank forget the last tube has to handle the entire output of all the others, and modulate it correctly. If the enemy has a better tube—it will be too bad for us." Morey was frankly worried.

	"My end is all set, Morey. How soon will you be ready?" Arcot asked.

	"'Bout ten-fifteen minutes." Morey lit a cigarette and watched as the last of the stuff was carried aboard.

	At last they were ready. The Ancient Mariner, originally built for intergalactic exploration, was kept in working condition. New apparatus had been incorporated in it, as their research had led to improvements, and it was constantly in condition, ready for a trip. Many exploration trips to the nearer stars had already been made.

	The ship was backed out from the hangar now, and rested on the great smooth landing field, its tremendous quarter million ton mass of lux and relux sinking a great, smooth depression in the turf of the field. They were waiting now for the arrival of the Ortolian ship. Zezdon Afthen assured them it would be there in a few minutes.

	High in the sky, came the whining whistle of an approaching ship, coming at terrific velocity. It came nearer the field, darting toward the ground at an unheard of speed, flashing down at a speed of well over three thousand miles an hour, and, only in the last fifty feet slowed with a sickening deceleration. Even so it landed with a crash of fully two hundred miles of speed. Arcot gasped at the terrible landing the pilot had made, fully expecting to see the great hull dent somewhat, even though made of solid relux. And certainly the jar would kill every man on board. Yet the hull did not seem harmed by the crash, and even the ground under the ship was but slightly disturbed, though, at a distance of some thirty feet, the entire block of soil was crushed, and cracked by the terrific impact of hundreds of thousands of tons striking with terrific energy.

	"Lord, it's a wonder they didn't kill themselves. I never saw such a rotten landing," exclaimed Morey with disgust.

	"Don't be too sure. I think they landed gently, and at very low speed. Notice how little the soil directly under them was dented?" replied Arcot, walking forward. "They have time control, as I suspected. Ask them. They drifted in gently. Their time rate was speeded up tremendously, so that what was hundreds of miles per hour to us was feet per minute to them. But come on, get the handlers to bring that junk up to the door—they are coming out."

	One of the tall, kindly-faced canine people was standing in the doorway now, the white light streaming out around him into the night, casting a grotesque shadow on the landing field, for all the flood lights bathing in it.

	Zezdon Afthen came up and spoke quickly to the man evidently in command of the ship. The entire party went into the ship, and the cream of their laboratory instruments was brought in.

	For hours Arcot, Morey and Wade worked at the apparatus in the ship, measuring, calculating, following electrical and magnetic and sheer force hook-ups of staggering complexity. They were not trying to find the exact method of construction, only the principles involved, so that they could perform calculations of their own, and duplicate the results of the enemy. Thus they would be far more thoroughly familiar with the machinery when done.

	Little attention was paid to the actual driving plant, for it was a molecular drive with the same type of lead-fuel burner they used in their own ship. The tubes of the power bank were, however, a puzzle to them. They were made of relux, so that it was impossible to see the interior of the tube. To open one was to destroy it, but calculations made from readings of their instruments showed that they were more efficient, and could readily carry nearly half again the load that the best terrestrian tubes could sustain. This meant the enemy could send heavier rays and heavier ray screens.

	But finally they returned to the Ancient Mariner, and as the Ortolian ship whined its way out to space, the Ancient Mariner started, rising faster and faster through the atmosphere till it was in the night of space. Then the molecular power was shut off. The ship suddenly seemed to writhe, space was black and starless about them, then sparkling weirdly distorted stars, all before them. They were moving already. Almost before the Ortolians fully realized what was happening, a dozen stars had swung past the ship, driving on now at better than five light years in every second. At this speed, approximately fourteen hours would be needed to reach Ortol.

	"Now, Arcot, perhaps you will explain to me the secret of this ship," said Zezdon Afthen at last, turning from the great lux pilot's window, to Arcot seated in the pilot's chair. "I know that only the broadest principles will be intelligible to me, for I could not understand that ship we captured, after almost four months of study. Yet it crept through space compared with this ship. Certainly no ship could outdistance this in a race!"

	"As a matter of fact—watch!" Arcot pushed a little metal button along a slide to the extreme end. Again the ship seemed to writhe. Space was no longer black, but faintly gray, and beside them, on either side, floated two exact replicas of their ship! Zezdon Afthen stared. But in another moment, both were gone, and space was black, yet in but a few moments a grayness was showing, and light was appearing from all about, growing gradually in intensity. For three seconds Arcot continued thus, then he pulled the metal button down the slide, and flicked over another that he had pulled to cause the second change. The stars were again before them, their colors changed beyond all recognition at that speed. But the orientation of the stars behind them had been familiar. Now an entirely different set of constellation showed.

	"I merely opened the ship out to her maximum speed for a moment. I was able to see any large star 2000 light years in our path, and there were none. Small stars do not bother us as I will explain. When I put on full power of the main power coils, I drove the ship up to a speed of 30 light years a second. When I turned in the full power of the auxiliary coils as well I doubled the power, and the speed was multiplied by eight. The result was that in the four seconds of racing, we made approximately 1000 light years!"

	Zezdon Afthen gasped. "Two hundred and forty light years per second"! He paused in bewilderment. "Suppose we had struck a small sun, a dark star, even a meteor at that speed? What would have been the result?"

	Arcot smiled. "The chances are excellent that we plowed through more than one meteor, more than one dark star, and more than one small sun.

	"But this is the secret: the ship attains the speed only by going out of space. Nothing in space can attain the speed of light, save radiation. Nothing in normal space. But, we alter space, make space along patterns we choose, and so distort it that the natural speed of radiation is enormously greater. In fact, we so change space that nothing can go slower than a speed we fix.

	"Morey—show Afthen the coils, and explain it all to him. I've got to stay here."

	Morey rose, and diving through the weightless ship, went down to the power room, Zezdon Afthen following. Here, giant pots five feet high were in close packed rows. The "pots" contained specially designed coils storing tremendous energy, the energy of four tons of disintegrated lead, in the only form that energy may be stored, as a strain, or distortion in space. These charged coils distorted only the space within themselves, making a closed field entirely within themselves. But in the exact gravitational center of the quarter of a million ton ship was a single high coil of different design that distorted space around it as well as the space within it. This, as Morey explained, was the control that altered the constants of space to suit. The coils were charged, and the energy stored. Their energy could be pumped into the big coil, and then, when the ship slowed to normal space, could be pumped back to them. The pumping energy, as well as any further energy needed for recharging the coils could be supplied by three huge power generators.

	"These energy-producers," Morey explained, "work on a principle known for hundreds of years on Earth. Lead, when reduced to a temperature approaching absolute zero as closely as, for instance, liquid helium, has no electrical resistance. In other words, no matter how great a current is sent through it, there is no resistance, and no heat is produced to raise the temperature. What we do is to send a powerful current through a lead wire. The wire has a current density so huge that the atoms are destroyed, and the protons and electrons coalesce into pure radiant energy. Relux, under the influence of a magnetic field, converts this directly into electrical potential. Electricity we can convert to the spatial strain in the power coils, and thus the ship is driven." Morey pointed out the huge molecular power cylinder overhead, where the main power drive was located in the inertial center of the ship, or as near as the great space coil would permit.

	The smaller power units for vertical lift, and for steering, were in the side walls, hidden under heavy walls of relux.

	"The projectors for throwing molecular and heat rays are on the outside of course. Both of these projectors are protected. The walls of the ship are made of an outer wall of heavy lux metal, a vacuum between, and an inner wall of heavy relux. The lux is stronger than relux, and is therefore used for an outer shell. The inner shell of relux will reflect any dangerous rays and serve to hold the heat in the ship, since a perfect reflector is a perfect non-radiator. The vacuum wall is to protect the occupants of the ship against any undue heat. If we should get within the atmosphere of a sun, it would be disastrous if the physical conduction of heat were permitted, for though the relux will turn out any radiated heat, it is a conductor of heat, and we would roast almost instantly. These artificial metals are both absolutely infusible and non-volatile. The ship has actually been in the limb of a star tremendously hotter than your sun or mine.

	"Now you see why it is we need not fear a collision with a small sun, meteor or such like. Since we are in our own, artificial space, we are alone, and there is nothing in space to run into. But, if we enter a huge sun, the terrific gravitational field of the mass of matter would be enough to pull the energy of our coil away from us. That actually happened the time we made our first intergalactic exploration. But it is almost impossible to fall into a large star—they are too brilliant. We won't be worrying about it," grinned Morey.

	"But how did the ship we captured operate?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"It was a very ingenious system, very closely related to ours, really.

	"We distort space and change the velocity characteristics; in other words, we distort the rate of motion through distance characteristics of normal space. The Thessian ships work on the principle of distorting the rate of progress through time instead of through space.

	"Velocity is really 'units of travel through space per unit of travel through time.' Now if we make the time unit twice as great, and the units traveled through space are not changed, the velocity is twice as great. That is, if we are moving five light years per second, make the second twice as long and we are moving ten light years per double-second. Make it ten thousand times as long, and we are traveling fifty thousand light years per ten-thousand-seconds. This is the principle—but there is a drawback. We might increase the velocity by slowing time passage, that is, if it takes me a year for one heartbeat, two years to raise my arm thus, and six months to turn, my head, if all my body processes are slowed down in this way, I will be able to live a tremendous length of time, and though it takes me two hundred years to go from one star to another, so low is my time rate that the two hundred years will seem but a few minutes. I can then make a trip to a distant star—one five light years distant, let us say, in three minutes to me. I then will say, looking at my chronometer (which has been similarly slowed) 'I have gone five light years in three minutes, or five thirds light years per minute. I have exceeded the speed of light.'

	"But people back on Earth would say, he has taken two hundred years to go five light years, therefore he has gone at a speed one fortieth of that of light, which would be true—for their time rate.

	"But suppose I can also speed up time. That is, I can live a year in a minute or two. Then everyone else will be exceedingly slow. The ideal thing would be to combine these two effects, arranging that space about your ship will have a very rapid time rate, ten thousand times that of normal space. Then the speed of radiation through that space will be 1,860,000,000 miles per second, and a speed of 1,000,000,000 miles per second would be possible, but still you, too, will be affected, so that though the people back home will say you are going far faster than light, you will say 'No, I am going only 100,000 miles per second.'

	"But now imagine that your ship and surrounding space for one mile is at a time rate 10,000 times normal, and you, in a space of one hundred feet within your ship, are affected by a time rate 1/10,000 that, or normal, due to a second, reversing field. The two fields will not fight, or be mutually antagonistic; they will merely compound their effects. Result: you will agree that you are exceeding the speed of light!

	"Do you understand? That is the principle on which your ship operated. There were two time-fields, overlapping time-fields. Remember the terrible speed with which your ship landed, and yet there was no appreciable jar according to the men? The answer of course was, that their time rate had been speeded enough, due to the fact that one field had been completely shut off, the other had not.

	"That is the principle. The system is so complex, naturally, that we have not yet learned the actual method of working the process. We must do a great deal of mathematical and physical research.

	"Wish we had it done—we could use it now," mused the terrestrian.

	"We have some other weapons, none as important, of course, as the molecular ray and the heat ray. Or none that have been. But, if the enemy have ray shields, then perhaps these others also will be important. There are molecular motion guns, metal tubes, with molecular director apparatus at one end. A metal shell is pulling the power turned on, and the shell leaps out at a speed of about ten miles per second—since it has been super-heated—and is very accurately aimed, as there is no terrific shock of recoil to be taken up by the gun.

	"But a more effective weapon, if these men are as I expect them to be, will be a peculiarly effective magnetic field concentrator device, which will project a magnetic field as a beam for a mile or more. How useful it will be—I don't know. We don't know what the enemy will turn against us!"

-

Chapter V -  ORTOL

	AFTER MOREY'S EXPLANATION of the ship was completed, Wade took Arcot's place at the controls, while Morey and Arcot retired to the calculating room to do some of the needed mathematics on the time-field investigation.

	Their work continued here, while the Ortolians prepared a meal and brought it to them, and to Wade. When at last the sun of Ortol was growing before them, Arcot took over controls from Wade once more. Slowing their speed to less than fifty times that of light, they drove on. The attraction of the giant sun was draining the energy from the coils so rapidly now, that at last Arcot was forced to get into normal space, while the planet was still close to a million miles from them. Morey was showing the Ortolians the operation of the telectroscope and had it trained now on the rapidly approaching planet. The planet was easily enlarged to a point where the features of continents were visible. The magnification was increased till cities were no longer blurs, but truly cities.

	Suddenly, as city after city was brought under the action of the machine, the Ortolians recognizing them with glad exclamations, one swept into view—and as they watched, it leapt into the air, a vast column of dust, then twisting, whirling, it fell back in utter, chaotic ruin.

	Zezdon Fentes staggered back from the screen in horror.

	"Arcot—drive down—increase your speed—the Thessians are there already and have destroyed one city," called Morey sharply. The men secured themselves with heavy belts, as the deep toned hum of the warning echoed through the ship. A moment later they staggered under an acceleration of four gravities. Space was dark for the barest instant of time, and then there was the scream of atmosphere as the ship rocketed through the air of the planet at nearly fifteen hundred miles per second. The outer wall was blazing in incandescence in a moment, and the heavy relux screens seemed to leap into place over the windows as the blasting heat, radiated from the incandescent walls flooded in. The millions of tons pressure of the air on the nose of the ship would have brought it to a stop in an instant, and had it not been that the molecular drive was on at full power, driving the ship against the air resistance, and still losing. The ship slowed swiftly, but was shrieking toward the destroyed city at terrific speed.

	"Hesthis—to the—right and ahead. That would be their next attack," said the Ortolian. Arcot altered the ship's course, and they shot toward the distance city of Hesthis. They were slowing perceptibly, and yet, though the city was half around the world, they reached it in half a minute. Now Arcot's wizardry at the controls came into play, for by altering his space field constants, he succeeded in reaching a condition that slowed the ship almost instantly to a speed of but a mile a second, yet without apparent deceleration.

	High in the white Ortolian sky was a shining point bearing down on the now-visible city. Arcot slanted toward it, and the approaching ship grew like an expanding rubber balloon.

	A ray of intense, blindingly brilliant light flashed out, and a gout of light appeared in the center of the city. A huge flame, bright blue, shot heavenward in roaring heat.

	Seeing that a strange ship had arrived was enough for the Thessians, and they turned, and drove at Arcot instantly. The Thessian ship was built for a heavy world, and for heavy acceleration in consequence, and, as they had found from the captured ship, it was stronger than the Ancient Mariner. Now the Thessians were driving at Arcot with an acceleration and speed that convinced him dodging was useless. Suddenly space was black around them, the sunlit world was gone.

	"Wonder what they thought of that!" grinned Arcot. Wade smiled grimly.

	"It's not what they thought, but what they'll do, that counts."

	Arcot came back to normal space, just in time to see the Thessian ship spin in a quick turn, under an acceleration that would have crushed a human to a pulp. Again the pilot dived at the terrestrian ship. Again it vanished. Twice more he tried these fruitless tactics, seeing the ship loom before him—bracing for the crash—then it was gone instantaneously, and though he sailed through the spot he knew it to have occupied, it was not there. Yet an instant later, as he turned, it was floating, unharmed, exactly where his ship had passed!

	Rushing was useless. He stood, and prepared to give battle. A molecular ray reached out—and disappeared in flaring ions on a shield utterly impenetrable in the ionizing atmosphere.

	Arcot meanwhile watched the instrument of his shield. The Thessian shield would have been impenetrable, but his shield, fed by less efficient tubes, was not, and he knew it. Already the terrific energy of the Thessian ray was noticeably heating the copper plates of the tube. The seal would break soon.

	Another ray reached out, a ray of flaring light. Arcot, watching through the "eyes" of his telectroscope viewplates, saw it for but an instant, then the "eyes" were blasted, and the screen went blank.

	"He won't do anything with that but burn out eyes," muttered the terrestrian. He pushed a small button when his instruments told him the rays were off. Another scanner came into action, and the viewplate was alive again.

	Arcot shot out a cosmic ray himself, and swept the Thessian with it thoroughly. For the instant he needed the enemy ship was blinded. Immediately the Ancient Mariner dove, and the automatic ray-finders could no longer hold the rays on his ship. As soon as he was out of the deadly molecular ray he shut off his screen, and turned on all his molecular rays. The Thessian ship, their own ray on, had been unable to put up their screen, as Arcot was unable to use his ray with the enemy's ray forcing him to cover with a shield.

	Almost at once the relux covering of the Thessian ship shone with characteristic iridescence as it changed swiftly to lux metal. The molecular ray blinked out, and a ray screen flashed out instead. The Thessians were covering up. Their own rays were useless now. Though Arcot could not hope to destroy their ray shield, they could no longer attack his, for their rays were useless, and already they had lost so much of the protective relux, that they would not be so foolhardy as to risk a second attack of the ray.

	Arcot continued to bathe the ship in energy, keeping their "eyes" closed. As long as he could hold his barrage on them, they would not damage him.

	"Morey—get into the power room, strap onto the board. Throw all the power-coil banks into the magnets. I may burn them out, but I have hopes—" Arcot already had the generators going full power, charging the power coils.

	Morey dived. Almost simultaneously the Thessians succeeded in the maneuver they had been attempting for some time. There were a dozen rays flaring wildly from the ship, searching blindly over the sky and ground, hoping to stumble on the enemy ship, while their own ship dived and twisted. Arcot was busily dodging the sweeping rays, but finally one hit his viewplates, and his own ship was blind. Instantly he threw the ray screen out, cutting off his own molecular ray. His own cosmics he set rotating in cones that covered the three dimensions—save below, where the city lay. Immediately the Thessian had retreated to this one segment where Arcot did not dare throw his own rays. The Thessian cosmics continued to make his relux screens necessary, and his ship remained blind.

	His ray screen was showing signs of weakening. The Thessians got a third ray into position for operation, and opened up. Almost at once the tubes heated terrifically. In an instant they would give way. Arcot threw his ship into space, and let the tubes cool under the water jacket. Morey reported the coils ready as soon as he came out of space.

	Arcot cut in the new set of eyes, and put up his molecular ray screen again. Then he cut the energy back to the coils.

	Half a mile below the enemy ship was vainly scurrying around an empty sky. Wade laughed at the strange resemblance to a puppy chasing its tail. The Ancient Mariner was utterly lost to them.

	"Well, here goes the last trick," said Arcot grimly. "If this doesn't work, they'll probably win, for their tubes are better than ours, and they can maneuver faster. By win I mean force us to let them attack Ortol. They can't really attack us; artificial space is a perfect defense."

	Arcot's molecular ray apprized the Thessians of his presence. Their screen flared up once more. Arcot was driving straight toward their ship as they turned. He snapped the relux screens in front of his eyes an instant before the enemy cosmics reached his ship. Immediately the thud of four heavy relays rang through the ship. The quarter of a million ton ship leaped forward under a terrific acceleration, and then, as the four relays cut out again, the acceleration was gone. The screen regained life as Arcot opened the shutters. Before them, still directly in their path, was the huge Thessian ship. But now its screen was down, the relux iridescent in decomposition. It was falling, helplessly falling to the rocky plateau seven miles below. Its rays reached out even yet—and again the Ancient Mariner staggered under the terrific pull of some acceleration. The Thessian ship lurched upward, and a terrific concussion came, and the entire neighborhood of that projector disappeared in a flash of radiation.

	Arcot drove the Ancient Mariner down beneath the Thessian ship in its long fall, and with a powerful molecular beam ripped a mighty chasm in the deserted plateau. The Thessian ship fell into a quarter mile rift in the solid rock, smashing its way through falling débris. A moment later it was buried beneath a quarter mile of broken rock as Arcot swept a molecular beam about with the grace of a mine foreman filling breaks.

	An instant later, a heat ray followed the molecular in dazzling brilliance. A terrific gout of light appeared in the barren rocks. In ten minutes the plateau was a white hot cauldron of molten rocks, glowing now against a darkening sky. Night was falling.

	"That ship," said Arcot with an air of finality, "will never rise again."

-

Chapter VI -  THE SECOND MOVE

	"WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM, THOUGH?" asked Wade, bewildered. "I haven't yet figured it out. He went down in a heap, and he didn't have any power. Of course, if he had his power he could have pulled out again. He could just melt and burn all the excess rock off, and he would be all set. But his rays all went dead. And why the explosion?"

	"The magnetic beam is the answer. In our boat we have everything magnetically shielded, because of the enormous magnetic flux set up by the current flowing from the storage coils to the main coil. But—with so many wires heavily charged with current, what would have happened if they had not been shielded?

	"If a current cuts across a magnetic field, a side thrust is developed. What do you suppose happened when the terrific magnetic field of the beam and the currents in the wires of their power-board were mutually opposed?"

	"Lord, it must have ripped away everything in the ship. It'd tear loose even the lighting wires!" gasped Wade in amazement.

	"But if all the power of the ship was destroyed in this way, how was it that one of their rays was operating as they fell?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"Each ray is a power plant in itself," explained Arcot, "and so it was able to function. I do not know the cause of the explosion, though it might well have been that they had light-bombs such as the Kaxorians of Venus have," he added, thoughtfully.

	They landed, at Zezdon's advice, in the city that their arrival had been able to save. This was Ortol's largest city, and their industrial capital. Here, too, was the University at which Afthen taught.

	They landed, and Arcot, Morey and Wade, with the aid of Zezdon Afthen and Zezdon Fentes worked steadily for two of their days of fifty hours each, teaching men how to make and use the molecular ships, and the rays and screens, heat beams, and relux. But Arcot promised that when he returned he would have some weapon that would bring them certain and easy salvation. In the meantime other terrestrians would follow him.

	They left the morning of their third day on the planet. A huge crowd had come to cheer them on their way as they left, but it was the "silent cheer" of Ortol, a telepathic well-wishing.

	"Now," said Arcot as their ship left the planet behind, "we will have to make the next move. It certainly looks as though that next move would be to the still-unknown race that lives on world 3769-37, 478, 326, 894-6. Evidently we will have to have some weapon they haven't, and I think that I know what it will be. Thanks to our trip out to the Islands of Space."

	"Shall we go?"

	"I think it would be wise," agreed Morey.

	"And I," said Wade. The Ortolians agreed, and so, with the aid of the photographic copies of the Thessian charts that Arcot had made, they started for world 3769-37, 478, 326, 894-6.

	"It will take approximately twenty-two hours, and as we have been putting off our sleep with drugs, I think that we had better catch up. Wade, I wish you'd take the ship again, while Morey and I do a little concentrated sleeping. We have by no means finished that calculation, and I'd very much like to. We'll relieve you in five hours."

	Wade took the ship, and following the course Arcot laid out, they sped through the void at the greatest safe speed. Wade had only to watch the view-screen carefully, and if a star showed as growing rapidly, it was proof that they were near, and nearing rapidly. If large, a touch of a switch, and they dodged to one side, if small, they were suddenly plunged into an instant of unbelievable radiation as they swept through it, in a different space, yet linked to it by radiation, not light, that were permitted in.

	Zezdon Afthen had elected to stay with him, which gave him an opportunity he had been waiting for. "If it's none of my business, just say so," he began. "But that first city we saw the Thessians destroy—it was Zezdon Fentes' home, wasn't it? Did he have a family?"

	The words seemed blunt as he said them, but there was no way out, once he had started. And Zezdon Afthen took the question with complete calm.

	"Fentes had both wives and children," he said quietly. "His loss was great."

	Wade concentrated on the screen for a moment, trying to absorb the shock. Then, fearing Zezdon Afthen might misinterpret his silence, he plunged on. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't realize you were polygamous—most people on Earth aren't, but some groups are. It's probably a good way to improve the race. But ... Blast it, what bothers me is that Zezdon Fentes seemed to recover from the blow so quickly! From a canine race, I'd expect more affection, more loyalty, more...."

	He stopped in dismay. But Zezdon Afthen remained unperturbed. "More unconcealed emotion?" he asked. "No. Affection and loyalty we have—they are characteristic of our race. But affection and loyalty should not be uselessly applied. To forget dead wives and children—that would be insulting to their memory. But to mourn them with senseless loss of health and balance would also be insulting—not only to their memory, but to the entire race.

	"No, we have a better way. Fentes, my very good friend, has not forgotten, no more than you have forgotten the death of your mother, whom you loved. But you no longer mourn her death with a fear and horror of that natural thing, the Eternal Sleep. Time has softened the pain.

	"If we can do the same in five minutes instead of five years, is it not better? That is why Fentes has forgotten".

	"Then you have aged his memory of that event?" asked Wade in surprise.

	"That is one way of stating it," replied Zezdon Afthen seriously.

	Wade was silent for a while, absorbing this. But he could not contain his curiosity completely. Well, to hell with it, he decided. Conventional manners and tact don't have much meaning between two different races. "Are you—married?" he asked.

	"Only three times," Zezdon Afthen told him blandly. "And to forestall your next question—no, our system does not create problems. At least, not those you're thinking of. I know my wives have never had the jealous quarrels I see in your mind pictures."

	"It isn't safe thinking things around you," laughed Wade. "Just the same, all of this has made me even more interested in the 'Ancient Masters' you keep mentioning. Who were they?"

	"The Ancient Ones," began Zezdon Afthen slowly, "were men such as you are. They descended from a primeval omnivorous mammal very closely related to your race. Evidently the tendency of evolution on any planet is approximately the same with given conditions.

	"The race existed as a distinct branch for approximately 1,500,000 of your years before any noticeable culture was developed. Then it existed for a total of 1,525,000 years before extinction. With culture and learning they developed such marvelous means of killing themselves that in twenty-five thousand years they succeeded perfectly. Ten thousand years of barbaric culture—I need not relate it to you, five thousand years of the medieval culture, then five thousand years of developed science culture.

	"They learned to fly through space and nearly populated three worlds; two were fully populated, one was still under colonization when the great war broke out. An interplanetary war is not a long drawn out struggle. The science of any people so far advanced as to have interplanetary lines is too far developed to permit any long duration of war. Selto declared war, and made the first move. They attacked and destroyed the largest city of Ortol of that time. Ortolian ships drove them off, and in turn attacked Selto's largest city. Twenty million intelligences, twenty million lives, each with its aims, its hopes, its loves and its strivings—gone in four days.

	"The war continued to get more and more hateful, till it became evident that neither side would be pacified till the other was totally subjugated. So each laid his plans, and laid them to wipe out the entire world of the other.

	"Ortol developed a ray of light that made things not happen," explained Zezdon Afthen, his confused thoughts clearly indicating his own uncertainty.

	"'A ray of light that made things not happen,'" repeated Wade curiously. "A ray, which prevented things, which caused processes to stop—The Negrian Death Ray!" he exclaimed as he suddenly recognized, in this crude and garbled description of its powers, the Negrian ray of anti-catalysis, a ray which tended to stop the processes of life's chemistry and bring instant, painless death.

	"Ah, you know it, too?" asked the Ortolian eagerly. "Then you will understand what happened. The ray was turned first on Selto, and as the whirling planet spun under it, every square foot of it was wiped clean of every living thing, from gigantic Welsthan to microscopic Ascoptel, and every man, woman and child was killed, painlessly, but instantly.

	"Then Thenten spun under it, and all were killed, but many who had fled the planets were still safe—many?—a few thousand.

	"The day that Thenten spun under that ray, men of Ortol began to complain of disease—men by the thousands, hundreds of thousands. Every man, every woman, every child was afflicted in some way. The diseases did not seem all the same. Some seemingly died of a disease of the lungs, some went insane, some were paralyzed, and lay helplessly inactive. But most of them were afflicted, for it was exceedingly virulent, and the normal serums were helpless. Before any quantity of new serum was made, all but a slender remnant had died, either of starvation through paralysis, none being left to care for them, or from the disease itself, while thousands who had gone mad were painlessly killed.

	"The Seltonians came to Ortol, and the remaining Ortolians, with their aid, tried to rebuild the civilization. But what a sorry thing! The cities were gigantic, stinking, plague-ridden morgues. And the plague broke among those few remaining people. The Ortolians had done everything in their power with the serums—but too late. The Seltonians had been protected with it on landing—but even that was not enough. Again the wild fires of that loathsome disease broke out.

	"Since first those men had developed from their hairy forebears, they had found their eternal friends were the dogs, and to them they turned in their last extremity, breeding them for intelligence, hairlessness, and resemblance to themselves. The Deathless ones alone remained after three generations of my people, but with the aid of certain rays, the rays capable of penetrating lead for a short distance, and most other substances for considerable distances." X-rays, thought Wade. "Great changes had been wrought. Already they had developed startling intelligence, and were able to understand the scheme of their Masters. Their feet and hands were being modified rapidly, and their vocal apparatus was changing. Their jaws shortened, their chins developed, the nose retreated.

	"Generation after generation the process went on, while the Deathless Ancient Ones worked with their helpers, for soon my race was a real helping organization.

	"But it was done. The successful arousing of true love-emotion followed, and the unhappy days were gone. Quickly development followed. In five thousand years the new race had outstripped the Ancient Masters, and they passed, voluntarily, willingly joining in oblivion the millions who had died before.

	"Since then our own race has risen, it has been but a short thousand years, a thousand years of work, and hope, and continuous improvement for us, continual accomplishment on which we can look, and a living hope to which we could look with raised heads, and smiling faces.

	"Then our hope died, as this menace came. Do you see what you and your world was meant to us, Man of Earth?" Zezdon Afthen raised his dark eyes to the terrestrian with a look in their depths that made Wade involuntarily resolve that Thet and all Thessians should be promptly consigned to that limbo of forgotten things where they belonged.

-

Chapter VII -  WORLD 3769-37,478,326,894,6, TALSO

	WADE SAT staring moodily at the screen for some time, while Zezdon Afthen, sunk in his own reveries, continued.

	"Our race was too highly psychic, and too little mechanically curious. We learned too little of the world about, and too much of our own processes. We are a peaceful race, for, while you and the Ancient Masters learned the rule of existence in a world of strife, where only the fittest, the best fighters survived, we learned life in a carefully tended world, where the Ancient Masters taught us to live, where the one whose social instincts were best developed, where he who would most help the others, and the race, was permitted to live. Is it not natural that our race will not fight among themselves? We are careful to suppress tendencies toward criminality and struggle. The criminal and the maniac, or those who are permanently incurable as determined by careful examination, are 'removed' as the Leaders put it. Lethal gas.

	"At any rate, we know so pitiably little of natural science. We were hopelessly helpless against an attacking science."

	"I promise you, Afthen, that if Earth survives, Ortol shall survive, for we have given you all the weapons we know of and we will give your people all the weapons we shall learn of." Morey spoke from the doorway. Arcot was directly behind him.

	They talked for a short while, then Wade retired for some needed sleep, while Morey and Arcot started further work on the time fields.

	Hour after hour the ship sped on through the dark of space, weirdly distorted, glowing spots of light before them, wheeling suns that moved and flashed as their awesome speed whirled them on.

	They had to move slower soon, as the changing stars showed them near the space-marks of certain locating suns. Finally, still moving close to fifteen thousand miles per second, they saw the sun they knew was sun 3769-37,478,-326,894, twice as large as Sol, two and a half times as massive and twenty-six times as brilliant.

	Thirteen major planets they counted as they searched the system with their powerful telectroscope, the outermost more than ten billion miles from the parent sun, while planet six, the one indicated by the world number, was at a distance of five hundred million miles, nearly as far from the sun as Jupiter is from ours, yet the giant sun, giving more than twenty-five times as much heat and light in the blue-white range, heated the planet to approximately the same temperature Earth enjoys. Spectroscopy showed that the atmosphere was well supplied with oxygen, and so the inhabitants were evidently oxygen-breathing men, unlike those of the Negrian people who live in an atmosphere of hydrogen.

	Arcot threw the ship toward the planet, and as it loomed swiftly larger, he shut off the space-control, and set the coils for full charge, while the ship entered the planet's atmosphere in a screaming dive, still at a speed of better than a hundred miles a second. But this speed was quickly damped as the ship shot high over broad oceans to the dull green of land ahead in the daylit zone. Observations made from various distances by means of the space-control, thus going back in time, show that the planet had a day of approximately forty hours, the diameter was nearly nine thousand miles, which would probably mean an inconveniently high gravity for the terrestrians and a distressingly high gravity for the Ortolians, used to their world even smaller than Earth, with scarcely 80 percent of Earth's gravity.

	Wade made some volumetric analysis of the atmosphere, and with the aid of a mouse, pronounced it "Q.A.R." (quite all right) for human beings. It had not killed the mouse, so probably humans would find it quite all right.

	"We'll land at the first city that comes into view," suggested Arcot. "Afthen, you be the spokesman; you have a very considerable ability with the mental communication, and have a better understanding of the physics we need to explain than has Zezdon Fentes."

	They were over land, a rocky coast that shot behind them as great jagged mountains, tipped with snow, rose beneath. Suddenly, a shining apparition appeared from behind one of the neighboring hills, and drove down at them with an unearthly acceleration. Arcot moved just enough to dodge the blow, and turned to meet the ship. Instantly, now that he had a good view of it he was certain it was a Thessian ship. Waiting no longer to determine that it was not a ship of this world, he shot a molecular beam at it. The beam exploded into a coruscating panoply of pyrotechnics on the Thessian shield. The Thessian replied with all beams he had available, including an induction-beam, an intensely brilliant light-beam, and several molecular cannons with shells loaded with an explosive that was very evidently condensed light. This was no exploration ship, but a full-fledged battleship.

	The Ancient Mariner was blinded instantly. None of the occupants were hurt, but the combined pressure of the various beams hurled the ship to one side. The induction beam alone was dangerous. It passed through the outer lux-metal wall unhindered, and the perfectly conducting relux wall absorbed it, and turned it into power. At once, all the metal objects in the ship began to heat up with terrific rapidity. Since there were no metallic conductors on the ship, no damage was done.

	Arcot immediately hid behind his perfect shield—the space-distortion.

	"That's no mild dose," he said in a tense voice, working rapidly. "He's a real-for-sure battleship. Better get down in the power room, Morey."

	In a few moments the ship was ready again. Opening the shield somewhat, Arcot was able to determine that no rays were being played on it, for no energy fields disclosed as distorting the opened field, other than the field of the sun and planet.

	Arcot opened it. The battleship was searching vainly about the mountains, and was now some miles distant. His last view of Arcot's ship had been a suddenly contracting ship, one that vanished in infinite distance, the infinite distance of another space, though he did not know it.

	Arcot turned three powerful heat beams on the Thessian ship, and drove down toward it, accompanying them with molecular rays. The Thessian shield stopped the moleculars, but the heat had already destroyed the eyes of the ship. By some system of magnetic or electrostatic locating devices, the enemy guns and rays replied, and so successfully that Arcot was again blinded.

	He had again been driving in a line straight toward the enemy, and now he threw in the entire power of his huge magnetic field-rays. The induction ray disappeared, and the heat, light and cannons stopped.

	"Worked again," grinned Arcot. A new set of eyes was inserted automatically, and the screen again lighted. The Thessian ship was spinning end over end toward the ground. It landed with a tremendous crash. Simultaneously from the rear of the Ancient Mariner came a terrific crash, an explosion that drove the terrestrian ship forward, as though a giant hand had pushed it from behind.

	The Ancient Mariner spun like a top, facing the direction of the explosion, though still traveling in the direction it had been pursuing, but backward now. Behind them the air was a gigantic pool of ionization. Tremendous fragments of what obviously had been a ship were drifting down, turning end over end. And those fragments of the wall showed them to be fully four feet of solid relux.

	"Enemy got up behind somehow while the eyes were out, and was ready to raise merry hell. Somebody blew them up beautifully. Look at the ground down there—it's red hot. That's from the radiated heat of our recent encounter. Heat rays reflected, light bombs turned off, heat escaping from ions—nice little workout—and it didn't seriously bother our defenses of two-inch relux. Now tell me: what will blow up four-foot relux?" asked Arcot, looking at the fragments. "It seems to me those fellows don't need any help from us; they may decline it with thanks."

	"But they may be willing to help us," replied Afthen, "and we certainly need such help."

	"I didn't expect to come out alive from that battleship there. It was luck. If they knew what we had, they could insulate against it in an hour," added Arcot.

	"Let's finish those fellows over there—look!" From the wreck of the ship they had downed, a stream of men in glistening relux suits were filing. Any men comparable to humans would have been killed by the fall, but not Thessians. They carried peculiar machines, and as they drove out of the ship in dive that looked as though they had been shot from a cannon, they turned and landed on the ground and proceeded to jump back, leaping at a speed that was bewildering, seemingly impossible in any living creature.

	They busied themselves quickly. It took less than thirty seconds, and they had a large relux disc laid under the entire group and machines. Arcot turned a molecular ray down. The rock and soil shot up all about them, even the ship shot up, to fall back into the great pit its ray had formed. But the ionization told of the ray shield over the little group of men. A heat ray reached down, while the men still frantically worked at their stubby projectors. The relux disc now showed its purpose. In an instant the soil about them was white hot, bubbling lava. It was liquid, boiling furiously. But the deep relux disc simply floated on it. The enemy ship began sinking, and in a moment had fallen almost completely beneath the white hot rock.

	A fountain of the melted lava sprung up, and under Arcot's skillful direction, fell in a cloud of molten rock on the men working. The suits protected, and the white hot stuff simply rolled off. But it was sinking their boat. Arcot continued hopefully.

	Meanwhile a signaling machine was frantically calling for help and sending out information of their plight and position.

	Then all was instantly wiped out in a single terrific jolt of the magnetic beam. The machines jumped a little, despite their weight, and the ray shield apparatus slumped suddenly in blazing white heat, the interior mechanism fused. But the men were still active, and rapidly spreading from the spot, each protected by a ray shield pack.

	A brilliant stab of molecular ray shot at each from either of two of the Ancient Mariner's projectors as Morey aided Arcot. Their little packs flared brilliantly for an instant under the thousands of horsepower of energy lashing at the screen, then flashed away, and the opalescent relux yielded a moment later, and the figure went twisting, hurtling away. Meanwhile Wade was busy with the magnetic apparatus, destroying shield after shield, which either Arcot or Morey picked off. The fall from even so much as half a mile seemed not sufficient to seriously bother these supermen, for an instant later they would be up tearing away in great leaps on their own power as their molecular suits, blown out by the magnetic field, failed them.

	It was but a matter of minutes before the last had been chased down either by the rays or the ship. Then, circling back, Arcot slowly settled beside the enemy ship.

	"Wait," called Arcot sharply as Morey started for the door.

	"Don't go out yet. The friends who wrecked that little sweetheart who crept up behind will probably show up. Wait and see what happens." Hardly had he spoken, when a strange apparition rose from behind a rock scarcely a quarter of a mile away. Immediately Arcot intensified the vision screen covering him. He seemed to leap near. There was one man, and he held what was obviously a sword by the blade, above his head, waving it from side to side.

	"There they are—whatever they are. Intelligent all right—what more universally obvious peace sign than a primitive weapon such as a knife held in reverse position? You go with Zezdon Afthen. Try holding a carving knife by the blade."

	Morey grinned as he got into his power suit, on Wade's O.K. of the atmosphere. "They may mistake me for the cook out looking for dinner, and I wouldn't risk my dignity that way. I'll take the baseball bat and hold it wrong way instead."

	Nevertheless, as he stepped from the ship, with Afthen close behind, he held the long knife by the blade, and Afthen, very awkwardly operating his still rather unfamiliar power suit, followed.

	Into the intensely blue sunlight the men stepped. Their skin and clothing took on a peculiar tint under the strange sunlight.

	The single stranger was joined by a second, also holding a reversed weapon, and together they threw them down. Morey and Zezdon Afthen followed suit. The two parties advanced toward each other.

	The strangers advanced with a swift, light step, jumping from rock to rock, while Morey and Afthen flew part way toward them. The men of this world were totally unlike any intelligent race Morey had conceived of. Their head and brain case was so small as to be almost animalish. The nose was small and well formed, the ears more or less cup-shaped with a remarkable power of motion. Their eyes were seemingly huge, probably no larger than a terrestrian's, though in the tiny head they were necessarily closely placed, protected by heavy bony ridges that actually projected from the skull to enclose them. Tiny, childlike chins completed the head, running down to a scrawny neck.

	They were short, scarcely five feet, yet evidently of tremendous strength for their short, heavy arms, the muscle bulging plainly under the tight rubber-like composition garments, and the short legs whose stocky girth proclaimed equal strength were members of a body in keeping with them. The deep, broad chest, wide, square shoulders, heavy broad hips, combined with the tiny head seemed to indicate a perfect incarnation of brainless, brute strength.

	"Strangers from another planet, enemies of our enemies. What brings you here at this time of troubles?" The thoughts came clearly from the stocky individual before them.

	"We seek to aid, and to find aid. The menace that you face, attacks not alone your world, but all this star cluster," replied Zezdon Afthen steadily.

	The stranger shook his head with an evident expression of hopelessness. "The menace is even greater than we feared. It was just fortune that permitted us to have our weapon in workable condition at the time your ship was attacked. It will be a day before the machine will again be capable of successful operation. When in condition for use, it is invincible, but—one blow in thirty hours—you can see we are not of great aid." He shrugged.

	An enemy with evident resources of tremendous power, deadly, unknown rays that wiped out entire cities with a single brief sweep—and no defense save this single weapon, good but once a day! Morey could read the utter despair of the man.

	"What is the difficulty?" asked Morey eagerly.

	"Power, lack of power. Our cities are going without power, while every electric generator on the planet is pouring its output into the accumulators that work these damnable, hopeless things. Invincible with power—helpless without."

	"Ah!" Morey's face shone with delight—invincible weapon—with power. And the Ancient Mariner could generate unthinkable power.

	"What power source do you use—how do you generate your power?"

	"Combining oxidizing agent with reducing agents releases heat. Heat used to boil liquid and the vapor runs turbines."

	"We can give you power. What wattage have you available?"

	Only Morey's thoughts had to translate "watts" to "How many man-weights can you lift through your height per time interval, equal to this." He gave the man some impression of a second, by counting. The man figured rapidly. His answer indicated that approximately a total of two billion kilowatts were available.

	"Then the weapon is invincible hereafter, if what you say is true. Our ship alone can easily generate ten thousand times that power.

	"Come, get in the ship, accompany us to your capital."

	The men turned, and retreated to their position behind the rocks, while Morey and Zezdon Afthen waited for them. Soon they returned, and entered the ship.

	"Our world," explained the leader rapidly, "is a single unified colony. The capital is 'Shesto,' our world we call 'Talso.'" His directions were explicit, and Arcot started for Shesto, on Talso.

-

Chapter VIII -  UNDEFEATABLE OR UNCONTROLLABLE?

	FIFTEEN MINUTES after they started, they came to Shesto. They were forced to land, and explain, for their relux ship was decidedly not the popular Talsonian idea of a life-saver.

	Shesto was defended by two of the machines, and each machine had been equipped with two fully charged accumulators. Their four possible shots were hoped to be sufficient protection, and, so far, had been. The city had been attacked twice, according to Tho Stan Drel, the Talsonian: once by a single ship which had been instantly destroyed, and once by a fleet of six ships. The interval had permitted time to recharge the discharged accumulator, and the fleet had been badly treated. Of the six ships, four had been brought down in rapid succession, and the remaining two ships had fled.

	When the first city had been wiped out, with a loss of life well in the hundreds of thousands, the other cities had, to limit of their abilities, set up the protective apparatus. Apparently the Thessians were holding off for the present.

	"In a way," said Morey seriously, "it was distinctly fortunate that we were attacked almost at once. Their instantaneous system of destruction would have worked for the one shot needed to send the Ancient Mariner to eternal blazes." He laughed, but it was a slightly nervous laugh.

	The terrestrial ship landed in a great grassy court, and out of respect for the parklike smoothness of the turf, Arcot left the ship on its power units, suspended a bit above the surface. Then he, Morey and the Talsonian left the ship. Zezdon Afthen was left with the ship and with Wade in charge, for if some difficulties were encountered, Wade would be able to help them with the ship, and Zezdon Afthen with the tremendous power of his thought locating apparatus, was busy seeking out the Thessian stronghold.

	A party of men of Talso met the terrestrians outside the ship.

	"Welcome, Men of another world, and to you go our thanks for the destruction of one of our enemies." The clear thoughts of the spokesman evinced his ability to concentrate.

	"And to your world must go our thanks for saving of our lives, and more important, our ship," replied Arcot. "For the ship represents a thing of enormous value to this entire star-system."

	"I see—understand—your—thoughts that you wish to learn more of this weapon we use. You understand that it is a question among us as to whether it is undefeatable, uncontrollable or just un-understandable. We have had fair success with it. It is not a weapon, was not developed as such; it was an experiment in the line of electric-waves. How it works, what it is, what happens—we do not know.

	"But men who can create so marvelous a ship as this of yours, capable of destroying a ship of the Thessians with their own weapons must certainly be able to understand any machine we may make—and you have power?" he finished eagerly.

	"Practically infinite power. I will throw into any power line you suggest, all the direct current you wish." Arcot's thoughts were pure reflection, but the Talsonian brightened at once.

	"I feared it might be alternating—but we can handle direct current. All our transmission is done at high voltage direct current. What potential do you generate? Will we have to install changers?"

	"We generate D.C. at any voltage up to fifty million, any power up to that needed to lift ten trillion men through their own height in this time a second." The power represented approximately twenty trillion horsepower.

	The Talsonian's face went blank with amazement as he looked at the ship. "In that tiny thing you generate such power?" he asked in amazement.

	"In that tiny ship we generate more than one million times that power," Arcot said.

	"Our power troubles are over," declared the military man emphatically.

	"Our troubles are not over," replied a civilian who had joined the party, with equal emphasis. "As a matter of fact, they are worse than ever. More tantalizing. What he says means that we have a tremendous power source, but it is in one spot. How are you going to transmit the power? We can't possibly move any power anywhere near that amount. We couldn't touch it to our lines without having them all go up in one instantaneous blaze of glory.

	"We cannot drain such a lake of power through our tiny power pipes of silver."

	"This man is Stel Felso Theu," said Tho Stan Drel. "The greatest of our scientists, the man who has invented this weapon which alone seems to offer us hope. And I am afraid he is right. See, there is the University. For the power requirements of their laboratories, a heavy power line has been installed, and it was hoped that you could carry leads into it." His face showed evident despair greater than ever.

	"We can always feed some power into the lines. Let us see just what hope there is. I think that it would be wiser to investigate the power lines at once," suggested Morey.

	Ten minutes later, with but a single officer now accompanying them, Tho Stan Drel, the terrestrial scientist, and the Talsonian scientist were inspecting the power installation.

	They had entered a large stone building, into which led numerous very heavy silver wires. The insulators were silicate glass. Their height suggested a voltage of well over one hundred thousand, and such heavy cables suggested a very heavy amperage, so that a tremendous load was expected.

	Within the building were a series of gigantic glass tubes, their walls fully three inches thick, and even so, braced with heavy platinum rods. Inside the tubes were tremendous elements such as the tiny tubes of their machine carried. Great cables led into them, and now their heating coils were glowing a somberly deep red.

	Along the walls were the switchboards, dozens of them, all sizes, all types of instruments, strange to the eyes of the terrestrians, and in practically all the light-beam indicator system was used, no metallic pointers, but tiny mirrors directing a very fine line of brilliant light acted as a needle. The system thus had practically no inertia.

	"Are these the changers?" asked Arcot gazing at the gigantic tubes.

	"They are; each tube will handle up to a hundred thousand volts," said Stel Felso Theu.

	"But I fear, Stel Felso Theu, that these tubes will carry power only one way; that is, it would be impossible for power to be pumped from here into the power house, though the process can be reversed," pointed out Arcot. "Radio tubes work only one way, which is why they can act as rectifiers. The same was true of these tubes. They could carry power one way only."

	"True, of tubes in general," replied the Talsonian, "and I see by that that you know the entire theory of our tubes, which is rather abstruse."

	"We use them on the ship, in special form," interrupted Arcot.

	"Then I will only say that the college here has a very complete electric power plant of its own. On special occasions, the power generated here is needed by the city, and so we arranged the tubes with switches which could reverse the flow. At present they are operating to pour power into the city.

	"If your ship can generate such tremendous power, I suspect that it would be wiser to eliminate the tubes from the circuit, for they put certain restrictions on the line. The main power plant in the city has tube banks capable of handling anything the line would. I suggest that your voltage be set at the maximum that the line will carry without breakdown, and the amperage can be made as high as possible without heat loss."

	"Good enough. The line to the city power will stand what pressure?"

	"It is good for the maximum of these tubes," replied the Talsonian.

	"Then get into communication with the city plant and tell them to prepare for every work-unit they can carry. I'll get the generator." Arcot turned, and flew on his power suit to the ship.

	In a few moments he was back, a molecular pistol in one hand, and suspended in front of him on nothing but a ray of ionized air, to all appearances, a cylindrical apparatus, with a small cubical base.

	The cylinder was about four feet long, and the cubical box about eighteen inches on a side.

	"What is that, and what supports it?" asked the Talsonian scientists in surprise.

	"The thing is supported by a ray which directs the molecules of a small bar in the top clamp, driving it up," explained Morey, "and that is the generator."

	"That! Why it is hardly as big as a man!" exclaimed the Talsonian.

	"Nevertheless, it can generate a billion horsepower. But you couldn't get the power away if you did generate it." He turned toward Arcot, and called to him.

	"Arcot—set it down and let her rip on about half a million horsepower for a second or so. Air arc. Won't hurt it—she's made of lux and relux."

	Arcot grinned, and set it on the ground. "Make an awful hole in the ground."

	"Oh—go ahead. It will satisfy this fellow, I think," replied Morey.

	Arcot pulled a very thin lux metal cord from his pocket, and attached one end of a long loop to one tiny switch, and the other to a second. Then he adjusted three small dials. The wire in hand, he retreated to a distance of nearly two hundred feet, while Morey warned the Talsonians back. Arcot pulled one end of his cord.

	Instantly a terrific roar nearly deafened the men, a solid sheet of blinding flame reached in a flaming cone into the air for nearly fifty feet. The screeching roar continued for a moment, then the heat was so intense that Arcot could stand no more, and pulled the cord. The flame died instantly, though a slight ionization clung briefly. In a moment it had cooled to white, and was cooling slowly through orange—red deep—red—

	The grass for thirty feet about was gone, the soil for ten feet about was molten, boiling. The machine itself was in a little crater, half sunk in boiling rock. The Talsonians stared in amazement. Then a sort of sigh escaped them and they started forward. Arcot raised his molecular pistol, a blue green ray reached out, and the rock suddenly was black. It settled swiftly down, and a slight depression was the only evidence of the terrific action.

	Arcot walked over the now cool rock, cooled by the action of the molecular ray. In driving the molecules downward, the work was done by the heat of these molecules. The machine was frozen in the solid lava.

	"Brilliant idea, Morey," said Arcot disgustedly. "It'll be a nice job breaking it loose."

	Morey stuck the lux metal bar in the top clamp, walked off some distance, and snapped on the power. The rock immediately about the machine was molten again. A touch of the molecular pistol to the lux metal bar, and the machine jumped free of the molten rock.

	Morey shut off the power. The machine was perfectly clean, and extremely hot.

	"And your ship is made of that stuff!" exclaimed the Talsonian scientist. "What will destroy it?"

	"Your weapon will, apparently."

	"But do you believe that we have power enough?" asked Morey with a smile.

	"No—it's entirely too much. Can you tone that condensed lightning bolt down to a workable level?"

-

Chapter IX -  THE IRRESISTIBLE AND THE IMMOVABLE

	THE GENERATOR Arcot had brought was one of the two spare generators used for laboratory work. He took it now into the sub-station, and directed the Talsonian students and the scientist in the task of connecting it into the lines; though they knew where it belonged, he knew how it belonged.

	Then the terrestrian turned on the power, and gradually increased it until the power authorities were afraid of breakdowns. The accumulators were charged in the city, and the power was being shipped to other cities whose accumulators were not completely charged.

	But, after giving simple operating instructions to the students, Arcot and Morey went with Stel Felso Theu to his laboratory.

	"Here," Stel Felso Theu explained, "is the original apparatus. All these other machines you see are but replicas of this. How it works, why it works, even what it does, I am not sure of. Perhaps you will understand it. The thing is fully charged now, for it is, in part, one of the defenses of the city. Examine it now, and then I will show its power."

	Arcot looked it over in silence, following the great silver leads with keen interest. Finally he straightened, and returned to the Talsonian. In a moment Morey joined them.

	The Talsonian then threw a switch, and an intense ionization appeared within the tube, then a minute spot of light was visible within the sphere of light. The minute spot of radiance is the real secret of the weapon. The ball of fire around it is merely wasted energy.

	"Now I will bring it out of the tube." There were three dials on the control panel from which he worked, and now he adjusted one of these. The ball of fire moved steadily toward the glass wall of the tube, and with a crash the glass exploded inward. It had been highly evacuated. Instantly the tiny ball of fire about the point of light expanded to a large globe.

	"It is now in the outer air. We make the—thing, in an evacuated glass tube, but as they are cheap, it is not an expensive procedure. The ball will last in its present condition for approximately three hours. Feel the exceedingly intense heat? It is radiating away its vast energy.

	"Now here is the point of greatest interest." Again the Talsonian fell to work on his dials, watching the ball of fire. It seemed far more brilliant in the air now. It moved, and headed toward a great slab of steel off to one side of the laboratory. It shifted about until it was directly over the center of the great slab. The slab rested on a scale of some sort, and as the ball of fire touched it, the scale showed a sudden increase in load. The ball sank into the slab of steel, and the scale showed a steady, enormous load. Evidently the little ball was pressing its way through as though it were a solid body. In a moment it was through the steel slab, and out on the other side.

	"It will pass through any body with equal ease. It seems to answer only these controls, and these it answers perfectly, and without difficulty.

	"One other thing we can do with it. I can increase its rate of energy discharge."

	The Talsonian turned a fourth dial, well off to one side, and the brilliance of the spot increased enormously. The heat was unbearable. Almost at once he shut it off.

	"That is the principle we use in making it a weapon. Watch the actual operation."

	The ball of fire shot toward an open window, out the window, and vanished in the sky above. The Talsonian stopped the rotation of the dials. "It is motionless now, but scarcely visible. I will now release all the energy." He twirled the fourth dial, and instantly there was a flash of light, and a moment later a terrific concussion.

	"It is gone." He left the controls, and went over to his apparatus. He set a heavy silver bladed switch, and placed a new tube in the apparatus. A second switch arced a bit as he drove it home. "Your generator is recharging the accumulators."

	Stel Felso Theu took the backplate of the control cabinet off, and the terrestrians looked at the control with interest.

	"Got it, Morey?" asked Arcot after a time.

	"Think so. Want to try making it up? We can do so out of spare junk about the ship, I think. We won't need the tube if what I believe of it is true."

	Arcot turned to the Talsonian. "We wish you to accompany us to the ship. We have apparatus there which we wish to set up."

	Back to the ship they went. There Arcot, Morey and Wade worked rapidly.

	It was about three-quarters of an hour later when Arcot and his friends called the others to the laboratory. They had a maze of apparatus on the power bench, and the shining relux conductors ran all over the ship apparently. One huge bar ran into the power room itself, and plugged into the huge power-coil power supply.

	They were still working at it, but looked up as the others entered. "Guess it will work," said Arcot with a grin.

	There were four dials, and three huge switches. Arcot set all four dials, and threw one of the switches. Then he started slowly turning the fourth dial. In the center of the room a dim, shining mist a foot in diameter began to appear. It condensed, solidified without shrinking, a solid ball of matter a foot in diameter. It seemed black, but was a perfectly reflective surface—and luminous!

	"Then—then you had already known of this thing? Then why did you not tell me when I tried to show it?" demanded the Talsonian.

	Arcot was sending the globe, now perfectly non-luminous, about the room. It flattened out suddenly, and was a disc. He tossed a small weight on it, and it remained fixed, but began to radiate slightly. Arcot readjusted his dials, and it ceased radiating, held perfectly motionless. The sphere returned, and the weight dropped to the floor. Arcot maneuvered it about for a moment more. Then he placed his friends behind a screen of relux, and increased the radiation of the globe tremendously. The heat became intense, and he stopped the radiation.

	"No, Stel Felso Theu, we do not have this on our world," Arcot said.

	"You do not have it! You look at my apparatus fifteen minutes, and then work for an hour—and you have apparatus far more effective than ours, which required years of development!" exclaimed the Talsonian.

	"Ah, but it was not wholly new to me. This ship is driven by curving space into peculiar coordinates. Even so, we didn't do such a hot job, did we, Morey?"

	"No, we should have—"

	"What—it was not a good job?" interrupted the Talsonian. "You succeeded in creating it in air—in making it stop radiating, in making a ball a foot in diameter, made it change to a disc, made it carry a load—what do you want?"

	"We want the full possibilities, the only thing that can save us in this war," Morey said.

	"What you learned how to do was the reverse of the process we learned. How you did it is a wonder—but you did. Very well—matter is energy—does your physics know that?" asked Arcot.

	"It does; matter contains vast energy," replied the Talsonian.

	"Matter has mass, and energy because of that! Mass is energy. Energy in any known form is a field of force in space. So matter is ordinarily a combination of magnetic, electrostatic and gravitational fields. Your apparatus combined the three, and put them together. The result was—matter!

	"You created matter. We can destroy it but we cannot create it.

	"What we ordinarily call matter is just a marker, a sign that there are those energy-fields. Each bit is surrounded by a gravitational field. The bit is just the marker of that gravitational field.

	"But that seems to be wrong. This artificial matter of yours seems also a sort of knot, for you make all three fields, combine them, and have the matter, but not, very apparently, like normal matter. Normal matter also holds the fields that make it. The artificial matter is surrounded by the right fields, but it is evidently not able to hold the fields, as normal matter does. That was why your matter continually disintegrated to ordinary energy. The energy was not bound properly.

	"But the reason why it would blow up so was obvious. It did not take much to destroy the slight hold that the artificial matter had on its field, and then it instantly proceeded to release all its energy at once. And as you poured millions of horsepower into it all day to fill it, it naturally raised merry hell when it let loose."

	Arcot was speaking eagerly, excitedly.

	"But here is the great fact, the important thing: It is artificially created in a given place. It is made, and exists at the point determined by these three coordinated dials. It is not natural, and can exist only where it is made and nowhere else—obvious, but important. It cannot exist save at the point designated. Then, if that point moves along a line, the artificial matter must follow that moving point and be always at that point. Suppose now that a slab of steel is on that line. The point moves to it—through it. To exist, that artificial matter must follow it through the steel—if not, it is destroyed. Then the steel is attempting to destroy the artificial matter. If the matter has sufficient energy, it will force the steel out of the way, and penetrate. The same is true of any other matter, lux metal or relux—it will penetrate. To continue in existence it must. And it has great energy, and will expend every erg of that energy of existence to continue existence.

	"It is, as long as its energy holds out, absolutely irresistible!

	"But similarly, if it is at a given point, it must stay there, and will expend every erg staying there. It is then immovable! It is either irresistible in motion, or immovable in static condition. It is the irresistible and the immovable!

	"What happens if the irresistible meets the immovable? It can only fight with its energy of existence, and the more energetic prevails."

-

Chapter X -  IMPROVEMENTS AND CALCULATIONS

	"IT IS STILL INCREDIBLE. But you have done it. It is certainly successful!" said the Talsonian scientist with conviction.

	Arcot shook his head. "Far from it—we have not realized a thousandth part of the tremendous possibilities of this invention. We must work and calculate and then invent.

	"Think of the possibilities as a shield—naturally if we can make the matter we should be able to control its properties in any way we like. We should be able to make it opaque, transparent, or any color." Arcot was speaking to Morey now. "Do you remember, when we were caught in that cosmic ray field in space when we first left this universe, that I said that I had an idea for energy so vast that it would be impossible to describe its awful power? I mentioned that I would attempt to liberate it if ever there was need? The need exists. I want to find that secret."

	Stel Felso Theu was looking out through the window at a group of men excitedly beckoning. He called the attention of the others to them, and himself went out. Arcot and Wade joined him in a moment.

	"They tell me that Fellsheh, well to the poleward of here has used four of its eight shots. They are still being attacked," explained the Talsonian gravely.

	"Well, get in," snapped Arcot as he ran back to the ship. Stel Felso hastily followed, and the Ancient Mariner shot into the air, and darted away, poleward, to the Talsonian's directions. The ground fled behind them at a speed that made the scientist grip the hand-rail with a tenseness that showed his nervousness.

	As they approached, a tremendous concussion and a great gout of light in the sky informed them of the early demise of several Thessians. But a real fleet was clustered about the city. Arcot approached low, and was able to get quite close before detection. His ray screen was up and Morey had charged the artificial matter apparatus, small as it was, for operation. He created a ball of substance outside the Ancient Mariner, and thrust it toward the nearest Thessian, just as a molecular hit the Ancient Mariner's ray screen.

	The artificial matter instantly exploded with terrific violence, slightly denting the tremendously strong lux metal walls. The pressure of the light was so great that the inner relux walls were dented inward. The ground below was suddenly, instantaneously fused.

	"Lord—they won't pass a ray screen, obviously," Morey muttered, picking himself from where he had fallen.

	"Hey—easy there. You blinked off the ray screen, and our relux is seriously weakened," called Arcot, a note of worry in his voice.

	"No artificial matter with the ray screen up. I'll use the magnet," called Morey.

	He quickly shut off the apparatus, and went to the huge magnet control. The power room was crowded, and now that the battle was raging in truth, with three ships attacking simultaneously, even the enormous power capacity of the ship's generators was not sufficient, and the storage coils had been thrown into the operation. Morey looked at the instruments a moment. They were all up to capacity, save the ammeter from the coils. That wasn't registering yet. Suddenly it flicked, and the other instrument dropped to zero. They were in artificial space.

	"Come here, will you, Morey," called Arcot. In a moment Morey joined his much worried friend.

	"That artificial matter control won't work through ray screens. The Thessians never had to protect against moleculars here, and didn't have them up—hence the destruction wrought. We can't take our screen down, and we can't use our most deadly weapon with it up. If we had a big outfit, we might throw a screen around the whole ship, and sail right in. But we haven't.

	"We can't stand ten seconds against that fleet. I'm going to find their base, and make them yell for help." Arcot snapped a tiny switch one notch further for the barest instant, then snapped it back. They were several millions miles from the planet. "Quicker," he explained, "to simply follow those ships back home—go back in time."

	With the telectroscope, he took views at various distances, thus quickly tracing them back to their base at the pole of the planet. Instantly Arcot shot down, reaching the pole in less than a second, by carefully maneuvering of the space device.

	A gigantic dome of polished relux rose from rocky, icy plains. The thing was nearly half a mile high, a mighty rounded roof that covered an area almost three-quarters of a mile in diameter. Titanic—that was the only word that described it. About it there was the peculiar shimmer of a molecular ray screen.

	Morey darted to the power room and set his apparatus into operation. He created a ball of matter outside the ship and hurled it instantly at the fort. It exploded with a terrific concussion as it hit the wall of the ray screen. Almost instantly a second one followed. The concussion was terrifically violent, the ground about was fused, and the ray screen was opened for a moment. Arcot threw all his moleculars on the screen, as Morey sent bomb after bomb at it. The coils supplied the energy, cracked the rock beneath. Each energy release disrupted the ray-screen for a moment, and the concentrated fury of the molecular beams poured through the opened screen, and struck the relux behind. It glowed opalescent now in a spot twenty feet across. But the relux was tremendously thick. Thirty bombs Morey hurled, while they held their position without difficulty, pouring their bombs and rays at the fort.

	Arcot threw the ship into space, moved, and reappeared suddenly nearly three hundred yards further on. A snap of the eyes, and he saw that the fleet was approaching now. He went again into space, and retreated. Discretion was the better part of valor. But his plan had worked.

	He waited half an hour, and returned. From a distance the telectroscope told him that one lone ship was patrolling outside the fort. He moved toward it, creeping up behind the icy mountains. His magnetic beam reached out. The ship lurched and fell. The magnetic beam reached out toward the fort, from which a molecular ray had flashed already, tearing up the icy waste which had concealed him. The ray-screen stopped it, while again Morey turned the magnetic beam on—this time against the fort. The ray remained on! Arcot retreated hastily.

	"They found the secret, all right. No use, Morey, come on up," called the pilot. "They evidently put magnetic shielding around the apparatus. That means the magnetic beam is no good to us any more. They will certainly warn every other base, and have them install similar protection."

	"Why didn't you try the magnetic ray on our first attack?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"If it had worked, their sending apparatus would have been destroyed, and no message could have been sent to call their attackers off Fellsheh. By forcing them to recall their fleet I got results I couldn't get by attacking the fleet," Arcot said.

	"I think there is little more I can do here, Stel Felso Theu. I will take you to Shesto, and there make final arrangements till my return, with apparatus capable of overthrowing your enemies. If you wish to accompany me—you may." He glanced around at the others of his party. "And our next move will be to return to Earth with what we have. Then we will investigate the Sirian planets, and learn anything they may have of interest, thence—to the real outer space, the utter void of intergalactic space, and an attempt to learn the secret of that enormous power."

	They returned to Shesto, and there Arcot arranged that the only generator they could spare, the one already in their possession, might be used till other terrestrian ships could bring more. They left for Earth. Hour after hour they fled through the void, till at last old Sol was growing swiftly ahead of them, and finally Earth itself was large on the screens. They changed to a straight molecular drive, and dropped to the Vermont field from which they had taken off.

	During the long voyage, Morey and Arcot had both spent much of the time working on the time-distortion field, which would give them a tremendous control over time, either speeding or slowing their time rate enormously. At last, this finished, they had worked on the artificial matter theory, to the point where they could control the shape of the matter perfectly, though as yet they could not control its exact nature. The possibility of such control was, however, definitely proven by the results the machines had given them. Arcot had been more immediately interested in the control of form. He could control the nature as to opacity or transparency to all vibrations that normal matter is opaque or transparent to. Light would pass, or not as he chose, but cosmics he could not stop nor would radio or moleculars be stopped by any present shield he could make.

	They had signaled, as soon as they slowed outside the atmosphere, and when they settled to the field, Arcot's father and a number of very important scientists had already arrived.

	Arcot senior greeted his son very warmly, but he was tremendously worried, as his son soon saw.

	"What's happened, Dad—won't they believe your statements?"

	"They doubted when I went to Luna for a session with the Interplanetary Council, but before they could say much, they had plenty of proof of my statements," the older man answered. "News came that a fleet of Planetary Guard ships had been wiped out by a fleet of ships from outer space. They were huge things—nearly half a mile in length. The Guard ships went up to them—fifty of them—and tried to signal for a conference. The white ship was instantly wiped out—we don't know how. They didn't have ray screens, but that wasn't it. Whatever it was—slightly luminous ray in space—it simply released the energy of the lux metal and relux of the ship. Being composed of light energy simply bound by photonic attraction, it let go with terrible energy. They can do it almost instantly from a distance. The other Guards at once let loose with all their moleculars and cosmics. The enemy shunted off the moleculars, and wiped out the Guard almost instantly.

	"Of course, I could explain the screen, but not the detonation ray. I am inclined to believe from other casualties that the destruction, though reported as an instantaneous explosion, was not that. Other ships have been destroyed, and they seemed to catch fire, and burn, but with terrific speed, more like gun powder than coal. It seems to start a spreading decomposition, the ship lasts perhaps ten minutes. If it went instantly, the shock of such a tremendous energy release would disrupt the planet.

	"At any rate, the great fleet separated, twelve went to the North Pole of Earth, twelve to the south, and similarly twelve to each pole of Venus. Then one of them turned, and went back to wherever it had come from, to report. Just turned and vanished. Similarly one from Venus turned and vanished. That leaves twelve at each of the four poles, for, as I said, there were an even fifty.

	"They all followed the same tactics on landing, so I'll simply tell what happened in Attica. In the North they had to pick one of the islands a bit to the south of the pole. They melted about a hundred square miles of ice to find one.

	"The ships arranged themselves in a circle around the place, and literally hundreds of men poured out of each and fell to work. In a short time, they had set up a number of machines, the parts coming from the ships. These machines at once set to work, and they built up a relux wall. That wall was at least six feet thick; the floor was lined with thick relux as well as the roof, which is simply a continuation of the wall in a perfect dome. They had so many machines working on it, that within twenty-four hours they had it finished.

	"We attacked twice, once in practically our entire force, with some ray-shield machines. The result was disastrous. The second attack was made with ray shielded machines only, and little damage was done to either side, though the enemy were somewhat impeded by masses of ice hurled into their position. Their relux disintegration ray was conspicuous by its absence.

	"Yesterday—and it seems a lot longer than that, son—they started it again. They'd been unloading it from the ship evidently. We had had ray-shielded machines out, but they simply melted. They went down, and Earth retreated. They're in their fortress now. We don't know how to fight them. Now, for God's sake, tell us you have learned of some weapon, son!"

	The older man's face was lined. His iron gray head showed his fatigue due to hours of concentration on his work.

	"Some," replied Arcot briefly. He glanced around. Other men had arrived, men whom he met in his work. But there were Venerians here, too, in their protective suits, insulated against the cold of Earth, and against its atmosphere.

	"First, though, gentlemen, allow me to introduce Stel Felso Theu of the planet Talso, one of our allies in this struggle, and Zezdon Afthen and Fentes of Ortol, one of our other allies.

	"As to progress, I can say only that it is in a more or less rudimentary stage. We have the basis for great progress, a weapon of inestimable value—but it is only the basis. It must be worked out. I am leaving with you today the completed calculations and equations of the time field, the system used by the Thessian invaders in propelling their ships at a speed greater than that of light. Also, the uncompleted calculations in regard to another matter, a weapon which our ally, Talso, has given us, in exchange for the aid we gave in allowing them the use of one of our generators. Unfortunately the ship could not spare more than the single generator. I strongly advise rushing a number of generators to Talso in intergalactic freighters. They badly need power—power of respectable dimensions.

	"I have stopped on Earth only temporarily, and I want to leave as soon as possible. I intend, however, to attempt an attack on the Arctic base of the Thessians, in strong hopes that they have not armored against one weapon that the Ancient Mariner carries—though I sadly fear that old Earth herself has played us false here. I hope to use the magnetic beam, but Earth's polar magnetism may have forced them to armor, and they may have sufficiently heavy material to block the effects."

	Morey already had a ground crew servicing the ship. He gave designs to machinists on hand to make special control panels for the large artificial matter machines. Arcot and Wade got some badly needed equipment.

	In six hours, Arcot had announced himself ready, and a squadron of Planetary Guard ships were ready to accompany the refitted Ancient Mariner.

	They approached the pole cautiously, and were rewarded by the hiss and roar of ice melting into water which burst into steam under a ray. It was coming from an outpost of the camp, a tiny dome under a great mass of ice. But the dome was of relux. A molecular reached down from a Guard ship—and the Guard ship crumbled suddenly as dozens of moleculars from the points hit it.

	"They know how to fight this kind of a war. That's their biggest advantage," muttered Arcot. Wade merely swore.

	"Ray screens, no moleculars!" snapped Arcot into the transmitter. He was not their leader, but they saw his wisdom, and the squadron commander repeated the advice as an order. In the meantime, another ship had fallen. The dome had its screen up, allowing the multitudes of hidden stations outside to fight for it.

	"Hmm—something to remember when terrestrians have to retire to forts. They will, too, before this war is over. That way the main fort doesn't have to lower its ray screen to fight," commented Arcot. He was watching intensely as a tiny ship swung away from one of the larger machines, and a tremendously powerful molecular started biting at the fort's ray screen. The ship seemed nothing but a flying ray projector, which was what it was.

	As they had hoped, the deadly new ray stabbed out from somewhere on the side of the fort. It was not within the fort.

	"Which means," pointed out Morey, "that they can't make stuff to stand that. Probably the projector would be vulnerable."

	But a barrage of heat rays which immediately followed had no apparent effect. The little radio-controlled molecular beam projector lay on the rock under the melted ice, blazing incandescent with the rapidly released energy of the relux.

	"Now to try the real test we came here for," Morey clambered back to the power room, and turned on the controls of the magnetic beam. The ship was aligned, and then he threw the last switch. The great mass of the machine jerked violently, and plunged forward as the beam attracted the magnetic core of the Earth.

	Morey could not see it, but almost instantly the shimmer of the molecular screen on the fort died out. The deadly ray sprang out from the Thessian projector—and went dead. Frantically the Thessians tried weapon after weapon, and found them dead almost as soon as they were turned on—which was the natural result in the terrific magnetic field.

	And these men had iron bones, their very bones were attracted by the beam; they plunged upward toward the ship as the beam touched them, but, accustomed to the enormous gravitation accelerations of an enormous world, most of them were not killed.

	"Ah—!" exclaimed Arcot. He picked up the transmitter and spoke again to the Squadron Commander. "Squadron Commander Tharnton, what relux thickness does your ship carry?"

	"Inch and a quarter," replied the surprised voice of the commander.

	"Any of the other ships carry heavier?"

	"Yes, the special solar investigator carries five inches. What shall we do?"

	"Tell him to lower his screen, and let loose at once on all operating forts. His relux will stand for the time needed to shut them down for their own screens, unless some genius decides to fight it out. As soon as the other ships can lower their screens, tell them to do so, and tell them to join in. I'll be able to help then. My relux has been burned, and I'm afraid to lower the screen. It's mighty thin already."

	The squadron commander was smiling joyously as he relayed the advice as a command.

	Almost at once a single ship, blunt, an almost perfect cylinder, lowered its screen. In an instant the opalescence of the transformation showed on it, but its dozen ray projectors were at work. Fort after fort glowed opalescent, then flashed into protective ionization of screening. Quickly other ships lowered their screens, and joined in. In a moment more, the forts had been forced to raise their screens for protection.

	A disc of artificial matter ten feet across suddenly appeared beside the Ancient Mariner. It advanced with terrific speed, struck the great dome of the fort, and the dome caved, bent in, bent still more—but would not puncture. The disc retreated, became a sharp cone, and drove in again. This time the point smashed through the relux, and made a small hole. The cone seemed to change gradually, melting into a cylinder of twenty foot diameter, and the hole simply expanded. It continued to expand as the cylinder became a huge disc, a hundred feet across, set in the wall.

	Suddenly it simply dissolved. There was a terrific roar, and a mighty column of white rushed out of the gaping hole. Figures of Thessians caught by the terrific current came rocketing out. The inside was at last visible. The terrific pressure was hurling the outside line of ships about like thistledown. The Ancient Mariner reeled back under the tremendous blast of expanding gas. The snow that fell to the boiling water below was not water, in toto; some was carbon dioxide—and some oxygen chilled in the expansion of the gas. It was snowing within the dome. The falling forms of Thessians were robbed of the life-giving air pressure to which they were accustomed. But all this was visible for but an instant.

	Then a small, thin sheet of artificial matter formed beside the fort, and advanced on the dome. Like a knife cutting open an orange, it simply went around the dome's edge, the great dome lifted like the lid of a teapot under the enormous gas pressure remaining—then dropped under its own weight.

	The artificial matter was again a huge disc. It settled over the exact center of the dome—and went down. The dome caved in. It was crushed under a load utterly inestimable. Then the great disc, like some monstrous tamper, tamped the entire works of the Thessians into the bed-rock of the island. Every ship, every miniature fort, every man was caught under it—and annihilated.

	The disc dissolved. A terrific barrage of heat beams played over the island, and the rock melted, flowed over the ruins, and left only the spumes of steam from the Arctic ice rising from a red-hot: mass of rock, contained a boiling pool.

	The Battle of the Arctic was done.

-

Chapter XI -  "WRITE OFF THE MAGNET"

	"SQUADRON COMMANDER Tharnton speaking: Squadron 73-B of Planetary Guard will follow orders from Dr. Arcot directly. Heading south to Antarctica at maximum speed," droned the communicator. Under the official tone of command was a note of suppressed rage and determination. "And the squadron commander wishes Dr. Arcot every success in wiping out Antarctica as thoroughly and completely as he destroyed the Arctic base."

	The flight of ships headed south at a speed that heated them white in the air, thin as it was at the hundred mile altitude, yet going higher would have taken unnecessary time, and the white heat meant no discomfort. They reached Antarctica in about ten minutes. The Thessian ships were just entering through great locks in the walls of the dome. At first sight of the terrestrial ships they turned, and shot toward the guard-ships. Their screens were down, for, armored as they were with very heavy relux they expected to be able to overcome the terrestrial thin relux before theirs was seriously impaired.

	"Ships will put up screens." Arcot spoke sharply—a new plan had occurred to him. The moleculars of the Thessians Struck glowing screens, and no damage was done. "Ships, in order of number, will lower screen for thirty seconds, and concentrate all moleculars on one ship—the leader. Solar investigator will not join in action."

	The flagship of the squadron lowered its screen, and a tremendous bombardment of rays struck the leading ship practically in one point. The relux glowed, and the opalescence shifted with bewildering, confusing colors. Then the terrestrial ship's screen was up, before the Thessians could concentrate on the one unprotected ship. Immediately another terrestrial ship opened its screen and bombarded the same ship. Two others followed—and then it was forced to use its screen.

	But suddenly a terrestrial ship crashed. Its straining screen had been overworked—and it failed.

	Arcot's magnetic beam went into action. The Thessian ray did not go out—it flickered, dimmed, but was apparently as deadly as ever.

	"Shielded—write off the magnet, Morey. That is one asset we lose."

	Arcot, protected in space, was thinking swiftly. Moleculars—useless. They had to keep their own screens up. Artificial matter—bound in by their own molecular screen! And the magnet had failed them against the protected mechanism of the dome. The ships were not as yet protected, but the dome was.

	"Guess the only place we'd be safe is under the ground—way under!" commented Wade dryly.

	"Under the ground—Wade, you're a genius!" Arcot gave a shout of joy, and told Wade to take over the ship.

	"Take the ship back into normal space, head for the hill over behind the Dome, and drop behind it. It's solid rock, and even their rays will take a moment or so to move it. As soon as you get there, drop to the ground, and turn off the screen. No—here, I'll do it. You just take it there, land on the ground, and shut off the screen. I promise the rest!" Arcot dived for the artificial matter room.

	The ship was suddenly in normal space; its screen up. The dog-fight had been ended. The terrestrial ships had been completely defeated. The Ancient Mariner's appearance was a signal for all the moleculars in sight. Ten huge ships, half a dozen small forts and now the unshielded Dome, joined in. Their screen tubes heated up violently in the brief moment it took to dive behind the hill, a tube fused, and blew out. Automatic devices shunted it, another tube took the load—and heated. But their screen was full of holes before they were safe for the moment behind the hill.

	Instantly Wade dropped the defective screen. Almost as quickly as the screen vanished, a cylinder of artificial matter surrounded the entire ship. The cylinder was tipped by a perfect cone of the same base diameter. The entire system settled into the solid rock. The rock above cracked and filled in behind them. The ship was suddenly pushed by the base of the cylinder behind them, and drove on through the rock, the cone parting the hard granite ahead. They went perhaps half a mile, then stopped. In the light of the ship's windows, they could see the faint mistiness of the inconceivably hard, artificial matter, and beyond the slick, polished surface of the rock it was pushing aside. The cone shape was still there.

	There was a terrific roar behind them, the rock above cracked, shifted and moved about.

	"Raying the spot where we went down," Arcot grinned happily.

	The cone and cylinder merged, shifted together, and became a sphere. The sphere elongated upward and the Ancient Mariner turned in it, till it, too, pointed upward. The sphere became an ellipsoid.

	Suddenly the ship was moving, accelerating terrifically. It plowed through the solid rock, and up—into a burst of light. They were inside the dome. Great ships were berthed about the floor. Huge machines bulked here and there—barracks for men—everything.

	The ellipsoid shrank to a sphere, the sphere grew a protuberance which separated and became a single bar-like cylinder. The cylinder turned, and drove through the great dome wall. A little hole but it whirled rapidly around, sliced the top off neatly and quickly. Again, like a gigantic teapot lid, the whole great structure lifted, settled, and stayed there. Men, scrambling wildly toward ships, suddenly stopped, seemed to blur and their features ran together horribly. They fell—and were dead in an instant as the air disappeared. In another instant they were solid blocks of ice, for the temperature was below the freezing point of carbon dioxide.

	The giant tamper set to work. The Thessian ships went first. They were all crumpled, battered wrecks in a few seconds of work of the terrible disc.

	The dome was destroyed. Arcot tried something else. He put on his control machine the equation of a hyperboloid of two branches, and changed the constants gradually till the two branches came close. Then he forced them against each other. Instantly they fought, fought terribly for existence. A tremendous blast of light and heat exploded into being. The energy of two tons of lead attempted to maintain those two branches. It was not, fortunately, explosive, and it took place over a relux floor. Most of the energy escaped into space. The vast flood of light was visible on Venus, despite the clouds.

	But it fused most of Antarctica. It destroyed the last traces of the camp in Antarctica.

	"Well—the Squadron was wiped out, I see." Arcot's voice was flat as he spoke. The Squadron: twenty ships—four hundred men.

	"Yes—but so is the Arctic camp, and the Antarctic camp, as well," replied Wade.

	"What next, Arcot. Shall we go out to intergalactic space at once?" asked Morey, coming up from the power room.

	"No, we'll go back to Vermont, and have the time-field stuff I ordered installed, then go to Sirius, and see what they have. They moved their planets from the gravitation field of Negra, their dead, black star, to the field of Sirius—and I'd like to know how they did it. Then—Intergalactia." He started the ship toward Vermont, while Morey got into communication with the field, and gave them a brief report.

-

Chapter XII -  SIRIUS

	THEY LAnded about half an hour later, and Arcot simply went into the cottage, and slept—with the aid of a light soporific. Morey and Wade directed the disposition of the machines, but Dr. Arcot senior really finished the job. The machines would be installed in less than ten hours, for the complete plans Arcot and Morey had made, with the modern machines for translating plans to metal and lux had made the actual construction quick, while the large crew of men employed required but little time.

	When Arcot and his friends awoke, the machines were ready.

	"Well, Dad, you have the plans for all the machines we have. I expect to be back in two weeks. In the meantime you might set up a number of ships with very heavy relux walls, walls that will stand rays for a while, and equip them with the rudimentary artificial matter machines you have, and go ahead with the work on the calculations. Thett will land other machines here—or on the moon. Probably they will attempt to ray the whole Earth. They won't have concentration of ray enough to move the planet, or to seriously chill it. But life is a different matter—it's sensitive. It is quite apt to let go even under a mild ray. I think that a few exceedingly powerful ray screen stations might be set up, and the Heavyside Layer used to transmit the vibrations entirely around the Earth. You can see the idea easily enough. If you think it worthwhile—or better, if you can convince the thickheaded politicians of the Interplanatary Defense Commission that it is—

	"Beyond that, I'll see you in about two weeks," Arcot turned, and entered the ship.

	"I'll line up for Sirius and let go." Arcot turned the ship now, for Earth was well behind, and lined it on Sirius, bright in the utter black of space. He pushed his control to "1/2," and the space closed in about them. Arcot held it there while the chronometer moved through six and a half seconds. Sirius was at a distance almost planetary in its magnitude from them. Controlling directly now, he brought the ship closer, till a planet loomed large before them—a large world, its rocky continents, its rolling oceans and jagged valleys white under the enormous energy-flood from the gigantic star of Sirius, twenty-six times more brilliant than the sun they had left.

	"But, Arcot, hadn't you better take it easy?" Wade asked. "They might take us for enemies—which wouldn't be so good."

	"I suppose it would be wise to go slowly. I had planned, as a matter of fact, on looking up a Thessian ship, taking a chance on a fight, and proving our friendship," replied Arcot.

	Morey saw Arcot's logic—then suddenly burst into laughter. "Absolutely—attack a Thessian. But since we don't see any around now, we'll have to make one!"

	Wade was completely mystified, and gave Morey a doubtful, sarcastic look. "Sounds like a good idea, only I wonder if this constant terrific mental strain—"

	"Come along and find out!" Arcot threw the ship into artificial space for safety, holding it motionless. The planet, invisible to them, retreated from their motionless ship.

	In the artificial matter control room, Arcot set to work, and developed a very considerable string of forms on his board, the equations of their formations requiring all the available formation controls.

	"Now," said Arcot at last, "you stay here, Morey, and when I give the signal, create the thing back of the nearest range of hills, raise it, and send it toward us."

	At once they returned to normal space, and darted down toward the now distant planet. They landed again near another city, one which was situated close to a range of mountains ideally suited to their purposes. They settled, while Zezdon Afthen sent out the message of friendship. He finally succeeded in getting some reaction, a sensation of scepticism, of distrust—but of interest. They needed friends, and only hoped that these were friends. Arcot pushed a little signal button, and Morey began his share of the play. From behind a low hill a slim, pointed form emerged, a beautifully streamlined ship, the lines obviously those of a Thessian, the windows streaming light, while the visible ionization about the hull proclaimed its molecular ray screen. Instantly Zezdon Afthen, who had carefully refrained from learning the full nature of their plans, felt the intense emotion of the discovery, called out to the others, while his thoughts were flashed to the Sirians below.

	From the attacking ship, a body shot with tremendous speed, it flashed by, barely missing the Ancient Mariner, and buried itself in the hillside beyond. With a terrific explosion it burst, throwing the soil about in a tremendous crater. The Ancient Mariner spun about, turned toward the other ship, and let loose a tremendous bombardment of molecular and cosmic rays. A great flame of ionized air was the only result. A new ray reached out from the other ship, a fan-like spreading ray. It struck the Ancient Mariner, and did not harm it, though the hillside behind was suddenly withered and blackened, then smoking as the temperature rose.

	Another projectile was launched from the attacking ship, and exploded terrifically but a few hundred feet from the Ancient Mariner. The terrestrial ship rocked and swayed, and even the distant attacker rocked under the explosion.

	A projectile, glowing white, leaped from the Earthship. It darted toward the enemy ship, seemed to barely touch it, then burst into terrific flames that spread, eating the whole ship, spreading glowing flame. In an instant the blazing ship slumped, started to fall, then seemingly evaporated, and before it touched the ground, was completely gone.

	The relief in Zezdon Afthen's mind was genuine, and it was easily obvious to the Sirians that the winning ship was friendly, for, with all its frightful armament, it had downed a ship obviously of Thett. Though not exactly like the others, it had the all too familiar lines.

	"They welcome us now," said Zezdon Afthen's mental message to his companions.

	"Tell them we'll be there—with bells on or thoughts to that effect," grinned Arcot. Morey had appeared in the doorway, smiling broadly.

	"How was the show?" he asked.

	"Terrible—Why didn't you let it fall, and break open?"

	"What would happen to the wreckage as we moved?" he asked sarcastically. "I thought it was a darned good demonstration."

	"It was convincing," laughed Arcot. "They want us now!"

	The great ship circled down, landing gently just outside of the city. Almost at once one of the slim, long Sirian ships shot up from a courtyard of the city, racing out and toward the Ancient Mariner. Scarcely a moment later half a hundred other ships from all over the city were on the way. Sirians seemed quite humanly curious.

	"We'll have to be careful here. We have to use altitude suits, as the Negrians breathe an atmosphere of hydrogen instead of oxygen," explained Arcot rapidly to the Ortolian and the Talsonian who were to accompany him. "We will all want to go, and so, although this suit will be decidedly uncomfortable for you and Zezdon Afthen and Stel Felso Theu, I think it wise that you all wear it. It will be much more convincing to the Sirians if we show that people of no less than three worlds are already interested in this alliance."

	A considerable number of Sirian ships had landed about them, and the tall, slim men of the 100,000,000-year-old race were watching them with their great brown eyes from a slight distance, for a cordon of men with evident authority were holding them back.

	"Who are you, friends?" asked a single man who stood within the cordon. His strongly built frame, a great high brow and broad head designated him a leader at a glance.

	Despite the vast change the light of Sirius had wrought, Arcot recognized in him the original photographs he had seen from the planet old Sol had captured as Negra had swept past. So it was he who answered the thought-question.

	"I am of the third planet of the sun your people sought as a home a few years back in time, Taj Lamor. Because you did not understand us, and because we did not understand you, we fought. We found the records of your race on the planet our sun captured, and we know now what you most wanted. Had we been able to communicate with you then, as we can now, our people would never have fought.

	"At last you have reached that sun you so needed, thanks, no doubt, to the genius that was with you.

	"But now, in your new-found peace comes a new enemy, one who wants not only yours, but every sun in this galaxy.

	"You have tried your ray of death, the anti-catalyst? And it but sputters harmlessly on their screens? You have been swept by their terrible rays that fuse mountains, then hurl them into space? Our world and the world of each of these men is similarly menaced.

	"See, here is Zezdon Afthen, from Ortol, far on the other side of the galaxy, and here is Stel Felso Theu, of Talso. Their worlds, as well as yours and mine have been attacked by this menace from a distant galaxy, from Thett, of the sun Ansteck, of the galaxy Venone.

	"Now we must form an alliance of far wider scope than ever has existed before.

	"To you we have come, for your race is older by far than any race of our alliance. Your science has advanced far higher. What weapons have you discovered among those ancient documents, Taj Lamor? We have one weapon that you no doubt need; a screen, which will stop the rays of the molecule director apparatus. What have you to offer us?"

	"We need your help badly," was the reply. "We have been able to keep them from landing on our planets, but it has cost us much. They have landed on a planet we brought with us when we left the black star, but it is not inhabited. From this as a base they have made attacks on us. We tried throwing the planet into Sirius. They merely left the planet hurriedly as it fell toward the star, and broke free from our attractive ray."

	"The attractive ray! Then you have uncovered that secret?" asked Arcot eagerly.

	Taj Lamor had some of his men bring an attractive ray projector to the ship. The apparatus turned out to be nearly a thousand tons in weight, and some twenty feet long, ten feet wide and approximately twelve feet high. It was impossible to load the huge machine into the Ancient Mariner, so an examination was conducted on the spot, with instruments whose reading was intelligible to the terrestrians operating it. Its principal fault lay in the fact that, despite the enormous energy of matter given out, the machine still gobbled up such titanic amounts of energy before the attraction could be established, that a very large machine was needed. The ray, so long as maintained, used no more power than was actually expended in moving the planet or other body. The power used while the ray was in action corresponded to the work done, but a tremendous power was needed to establish it, and this power could never be recovered.

	Further, no reaction was produced in the machine, no matter what body it was turned upon. In swinging a planet then, a spaceship could be used as the base for the reaction was not exerted on the machine.

	From such meager clues, and the instruments, Arcot got the hints that led him to the solution of the problem, for the documents, from which Taj Lamor had gotten his information, had been disastrously wiped out, when one of their cities fell, and Taj Lamor had but copied the machines of his ancestors.

	The immense value of these machines was evident, for they would permit Arcot to do many things that would have been impossible without them. The explanation as he gave it to Stel Felso Theu, foretold the uses to which it might be put.

	"As a weapon," he pointed out, "its most serious fault is that it takes a considerable time to pump in the power needed. It has here, practically the same fault which the artificial matter had on your world.

	"As I see it, the ray is actually a directed gravitational field.

	"Now here is one thing that makes it more interesting, and more useful. It seems to defy the laws of mechanics. It acts, but there is no apparent reaction! A small ship can swing a world! Remember, the field that generates the attraction is an integral, interwoven part of the mesh of Space. It is created by something outside of itself. Like the artificial matter, it exists there, and there alone. There is reaction on that attractive field, but it is created in Space at that given point, and the reaction is taken by all Space. No wonder it won't move.

	"The work considerations are fairly obvious. The field is built up. That takes energy. The beam is focused on a body, the body falls nearer, and immediately absorbs the energy in acquiring a velocity. The machine replenishes the energy, because it is set to maintain a certain energy-level in the field. Therefore the machine must do the work of moving the ship, just as though it were a driving apparatus. After the beam has done what is wanted, it may be shut off, and the energy in the field is now available for any work needed. It may be drained back into power coils such as ours for instance, or one might just spend that last iota of power on the job.

	"As a driving device it might be set to pull the entire ship along, and still not have any acceleration detectable to the occupants.

	"I think we'll use that on our big ship," he finished, his eyes far away on some future idea.

	"Natural gravity of natural matter is, luckily, not selective. It goes in all directions. But this artificial gravity is controlled so that it does not spread, and the result is that the mass-attraction of a mass of matter does not fall off as the inverse square of the distance, but like the ray from the parallel beam spotlight, continues undiminished.

	"Actually, they create an exceedingly intense, exceedingly small gravitational field, and direct it in a straight line. The building up of this field is what takes time."

	Zezdon Afthen, who had a question which was troubling him, looked anxiously at his friends. Finally he broke into their thoughts which had been too cryptically abbreviated for him to follow, like the work of a professor solving some problem, his steps taken so swiftly and so abbreviated that their following was impossible to his students.

	"But how is it that the machine is not moved when exerting such force on some other body?" he asked at last.

	"Oh, the ray concentrates the gravitational force, and projects it. The actual strain is in space. It is space that takes the strain, but in normal cases, unless the masses are very large, no considerable acceleration is produced over any great distance. That law operates in the case of the pulled body; it pulls the gravitational field as a normal field, the inverse-square law applying.

	"But on the other hand, the gravity-beam pulls with a constant force.

	"It might be likened to the light-pressure effects of a spotlight and a star. The spotlight would push the sun with a force that was constant; no matter what the distance, while the light pressure of the sun would vary as the inverse square of the distance.

	"But remember, it is not a body that pulls another body, but a gravitational field that pulls another. The field is in space. A normal field is necessarily attached to the matter that it represents, or that represents it as you prefer, but this artificial field has no connection in the form of matter. It is a product of a machine, and exists only as a strain in space. To move it you must move all space, since it, like artificial matter, exists only where it is created in space.

	"Do you see now why the law of action and reaction is apparently flouted? Actually the reaction is taken up by space."

	Arcot rose, and stretched. Morey and Wade had been looking at him, and now they asked when he intended leaving for the intergalactic spaces.

	"Now, I think. We have a lot of work to do. At present we have the mathematics of the artificial matter to carry on, and the math of the artificial gravity to develop. We gave the Sirians all we had on artificial matter and on moleculars.

	"They gave us all they had—which wasn't much beyond the artificial gravity, and a lot of work. At any rate, let's go!"

-

Chapter XIII -  ATTACKED

	THE ANCIENT MARINER stirred, and rose lightly from its place beside the city. Visible over the horizon now, and coming at terrific speed, was a fleet of seven Thessian ships.

	They must do their best to protect that city. Arcot turned the ship and called his decision to Morey. As he did so, one of the Thessian ships suddenly swerved violently, and plunged downward. The attractive ray was in action. It struck the rocks of Neptune, and plunged in. Half buried, it stopped. Stopped—and backed out! The tremendously strong relux and lux had withstood the blow, and these strange, inhumanly powerful men had not been injured!

	Two of the ships darted toward him simultaneously, flashing out molecular rays. The rays glanced off of Arcot's screen already in place, but the tubes were showing almost at once that this could not be sustained. It was evident that the swiftly approaching ships would soon break down the shields. Arcot turned the ship and drove to one side. His eyes went dead.

	He cut into artificial space, waited ten seconds, then cut back. The scene before him changed. It seemed a different world. The light was very dim, so dim he could scarcely see the images on the view plate. They were so deep a red that they were very near to black. Even Sirius, the flaming blue-white star was red. The darting Thessian ships were moving quite slowly now, moving at a speed that was easy to follow. Their rays, before ionizing the air brilliantly red, were now dark. The instruments showed that the screen was no longer encountering serious loading, and, further, the load was coming in at a frequency harmlessly far down the radio spectrum!

	Arcot stared in wide-eyed amazement. What could the Thessians have done that caused this change? He reached up and increased the amplification on the eyes to a point that made even the dim illumination sufficient. Wade was staring in amazement, too.

	"Lord! What an idea!" suddenly exclaimed Arcot.

	Wade was staring at Arcot in equally great amazement. "What's the secret?" he asked.

	"Time, man, time! We are in an advanced time plane, living faster than they, our atoms of fuel are destroyed faster, our second is shorter. In one second of our earthly time our generators do the same amount of work as usual, but they do many, many times more work in one second, of the time we were in! We are under the advanced time field."

	Wade could see it all. The red light—normal light seen through eyes enormously speeded in all perceptions. The change, the dimness—dim because less energy reached them per second of their time. Then came this blue light, as they reached the X-ray spectrum of Sirius, and saw X-rays as normal light—shielded, tremendously shielded by the atmosphere, but the enormous amplification of the eyes made up for it.

	The remaining Thessians seemed to get the idea simultaneously, and started for Arcot in his own time field. The Thessian ship appeared to be actually leaping at him. Suddenly, his speed increased inconceivably. Simultaneously, Arcot's hand, already started toward the space-control switch, reached it, and pushed it to the point that threw the ship into artificial Space. The last glimmer of light died suddenly, as the Thessian ship's bow loomed huge beside the Ancient Mariner.

	There was a terrific shock that hurled the ship violently to one side, threw the men about inside the ship. Simultaneously the lights blinked out.

	Light returned as the automatic emergency incandescent lights in the room, fed from an energy store coil, flashed on abruptly. The men were white-faced, tense in their positions. Swiftly Morey was looking over the indicators on his remote-reading panel, while Arcot stared at the few dials before the actual control board.

	"There's an air pressure outside the ship!" he cried out in surprise. "High oxygen, very little nitrogen, breathable apparently, provided there are no poisons. Temperature ten below zero C."

	"Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.

	"Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen. "It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work."

	"Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too.

	"Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste a little air on some smokes."

	Morey rose and went to the door that led through the main passage to the galley. "Heck of a job—no weight at all," he muttered. "There is air in the passage, anyway." He opened the door, and the air rushed from the control room to the passage till the pressure was equalized. The door to the power room was shut, but it was bulged, despite its two-inch lux metal, and through its clear material he could see the wreckage of the power room.

	"Arcot," he called. "Come here and look at the power room. Quintillions of miles from home, we can't shut off this field now."

	Arcot was with him in a moment. The tremendous mass of the nose of the Thessian ship had caught them full amid-ship, and the powerful ram had driven through the room. Their lux walls had not been touched; only a sledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, let alone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator was split wide open. And the mechanical damage was awful. The prow of the ship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was a wreck.

	"And," pointed out Morey, "we can't handle a job like that. It will take a tremendous amount of machinery back on a planet to work that stuff, and we couldn't bend that bar, let alone fix it."

	"Get the coffee, will you please, Morey? I have an idea that's bound to work," said Arcot looking fixedly at the machinery.

	Morey turned and went to the galley.

	Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small plastic balloons with coffee in them.

	They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about, the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsonian satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which Zezdon Afthen introduced.

	"Well, we have a lot more to do," Arcot said. "The air-apparatus stopped working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while the air in the storage tanks is used up. Did you notice our friends, the enemy?" Through the great pilot's window the bulk of the Thessian ship's bow could be seen. It was cut across with an exactitude of mathematical certainty.

	"Easy to guess what happened," Morey grinned. "They may have wrecked us, but we sure wrecked them. They got half in and half out of our space field. Result—the half that was in, stayed in. The half that was out stayed out. The two halves were instantaneously a billion miles apart, and that beautifully exact surface represents the point our space cut across.

	"That being decided, the next question is how to fix this poor old wreck." Morey grinned a bit. "Better, how to get out of here, and down to old Neptune."

	"Fix it!" replied Arcot. "Come on; you get in your space suit, take the portable telectroscope and set it up in space, motionless, in such a position that it views both our ship and the nose of the Thessian machine, will you, Wade? Tune it to—seven-seven-three." Morey rose with Arcot, and followed him, somewhat mystified, down the passage. At the airlock Wade put on his space suit, and the Ortolian helped him with it. In a moment the other three men appeared bearing the machine. It was practically weightless, though it would fall slowly if left to itself, for the mass of the Ancient Mariner and the front end of the Thessian ship made a considerable attractive field. But it was clumsy, and needed guiding here in the ship.

	Wade took it into the airlock, and a moment later into space with him. His hand molecular-driving unit pulling him, he towed the machine into place, and with some difficulty got it practically motionless with respect of the two bodies, which were now lying against each other.

	"Turn it a bit, Wade, so that the Ancient Mariner is just in its range," came Arcot's thoughts. Wade did so. "Come on back and watch the fun."

	Wade returned. Arcot and the others were busy placing a heavy emergency lead from the storeroom in the place of one of the broken leads. In five minutes they had it fixed where they wanted it.

	Into the control room went Arcot, and started the power-room teleview plate. Connected into the system of view plates, the scene was visible now on all the plates in the ship. Well off to one side of the room, prepared for such emergencies, and equipped with individual power storage coils that would run it for several days, the view plate functioned smoothly.

	"Now, we are ready," said Arcot. The Talsonian proved he understood Arcot's intentions by preceding him to the laboratory.

	Arcot had two viewplates operating here. One was covering the scene as shown by the machine outside, and the other showed the power room.

	Arcot stepped over to the artificial-matter machine, and worked swiftly on it. In a moment the power from the storage coils of the ship was flowing through the new cable, and into the machine. A huge ring appeared about the nose of the Thessian ship, fitting snugly over it. A terrific wrench—and it was free of the Ancient Mariner. The ring contracted and formed a chunk of the stuff free of the broken nose of the ship.

	It was carried over to the wall of the Ancient Mariner, a smaller piece snipped off as before, and carried inside. A piece of perhaps half a ton mass. "I hope they use good stuff," grinned Arcot. The piece was deposited on the floor of the ship, and a disc formed of artificial matter plugged the hole in its side. Another took a piece of the relux from the broken Thessian ship, pushed it into the hole on the ship. The space about the scene of operation was a crackling inferno of energy breaking down into heat and light. Arcot dematerialized his tremendous tools, and the wall of the Ancient Mariner was neatly patched with relux smoothed over as perfectly as before. A second time, using some of the relux he had brought within the ship, and the inner wall was rebuilt. The job was absolutely perfect, save that now, where there had been lux, there was an outer wall of relux.

	The main generator was crumpled up, and torn out. The auxiliary generators would have to carry the load. The great cables were swiftly repaired in the same manner, a perfect cylinder forming about them, and a piece of relux from the store Arcot had sliced from the enemy ship, welding them perfectly under enormous pressure, pressure that made them flow perfectly into one another as heat alone could not.

	In less than half an hour the ship was patched up, the power room generally repaired, save for a few minor things that had to be replaced from the stores. The main generator was gone, but that was not an essential. The door was straightened and the job done.

	In an hour they were ready to proceed.

-

Chapter XIV -  INTERGALACTIC SPACE

	"Well, Sirius has retreated a bit," observed Arcot. The star was indeed several trillions of miles away. Evidently they had not been motionless as they had thought, but the interference of the Thessian ship had thrown their machine off.

	"Shall we go back, or go on?" asked Morey.

	"The ship works. Why return?" asked Wade. "I vote we go on."

	"Seconded," added Arcot.

	"If they who know most of the ship vote for a continuance of the journey, then assuredly we who know so little can only abide by their judgment. Let us continue," said Zezdon Afthen gravely.

	Space was suddenly black about them. Sirius was gone, all the jewels of the heavens were gone in the black of swift flight. Ten seconds later Arcot lowered the space-control. Black behind them the night of space was pricked by points of light, the infinite multitude of the stars. Before them lay—nothing. The utter emptiness of space between the galaxies.

	"Thlek Styrs! What happened?" asked Morey in amazement, his pet Venerian phrase rolling out in his astonishment.

	"Tried an experiment, and it was overly successful," replied Arcot, a worried look on his face. "I tried combining the Thessian high speed time distortion with our high speed space distortion—both on low power. 'There ain't no sich animals,' as the old agriculturist remarked of the giraffe. God knows what speed we hit, but it was plenty. We must be ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy."

	"That's a fine way to start the trip. You have the old star maps to get back however, have you not?" asked Wade.

	"Yes, the maps we made on our first trip out this way are in the cabinet. Look 'em up, will you, and see how far we have to go before we reach the cosmic fields?"

	Arcot was busy with his instruments, making a more accurate determination of their distance from the "edge" of the galaxy. He adopted the figure of twelve thousand five hundred light years as the probable best result. Wade was back in a moment with the information that the fields lay about sixteen thousand light years out. Arcot went on, at a rate that would reach the fields in two hours.

	Several hours more were spent in measurements, till at last Arcot announced himself satisfied.

	"Good enough—back we go." Again in the control room, he threw on the drive, and shot through the twenty-seven thousand light years of cosmic ray fields, and then more leisurely returned to the galaxy. The star maps were strangely off. They could follow them, but only with difficulty as the general configuration of the constellations that were their guides were visibly altered to the naked eye.

	"Morey," said Arcot softly, looking at the constellation at which they were then aiming, and at the map before him, "there is something very, very rotten. The Universe either 'ain't what it used to be' or we have traveled in more than space."

	"I know it, and I agree with you. Obviously, from the degree of alteration off the constellations, we are off by about 100,000 years. Question: how come? Question: what are we going to do about it?"

	"Answer one: remembering what we observed in re Sirius, I suspect that the interference of that Thessian ship, with its time-field opposing our space-field did things to our time-frame. We were probably thrown off then.

	"As to the second question, we have to determine number one first. Then we can plan our actions."

	With Wade's help, and by coming to rest near several of the stars, then observing their actual motions, they were able to determine their time-status. The estimate they made finally was of the order of eighty thousand years in the past! The Thessian ship had thrown them that much out of their time.

	"This isn't all to the bad," said Morey with a sigh. "We at least have all the time we could possibly use to determine the things we want for this fight. We might even do a lot of exploring for the archeologists of Earth and Venus and Ortol and Talso. As to getting back—that's a question."

	"Which is," added Arcot, "easy to answer now, thank the good Lord. All we have to do is wait for our time to catch up with us. If we just wait eighty thousand years, eight hundred centuries, we will be in our own time."

	"Oh, I think waiting so long would be boring," said Wade sarcastically. "What do you suggest we do in the intervening eighty millenniums? Play cards?"

	"Oh, cards or chess. Something like that," grinned Arcot. "Play cards, calculate our fields—and turn on the time rate control."

	"Oh—I take it back. You win! Take all! I forgot all about that," Wade smiled at his friend. "That will save a little waiting, won't it."

	"The exploring of our worlds would without doubt be of infinite benefit to science, but I wonder if it would not be of more direct benefit if we were to get back to our own time, alive and well. Accidents always happen, and for all our weapons, we might easily meet some animal which would put an abrupt and tragic finish to our explorations. Is it not so?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	"Your point is good, Stel Felso Theu. I agree with you. We will do no more exploring than is necessary, or safe."

	"We might just as well travel slowly on the time retarder, and work on the way. I think the thing to do is to go back to Earth, or better, the solar system, and follow the sun in its path."

	They returned, and the desolation that the sun in its journey passes through is nothing to the utter, oppressive desolation of empty space between the stars, for it has its family of planets—and it has no conscious thought.

	The Sun was far from the point that it had occupied when the travelers had left it, billions on billions of miles further on its journey around the gravitational center of our galactic universe, and in the eighty millenniums that they must wait, it would go far.

	They did not go to the planets now, for, as Arcot said in reply to Stel Felso Theu's suggestion that they determine more accurately their position in time, life had not developed to an extent that would enable them to determine the year according to our calendar.

	So for thirty thousand years they hung motionless as the sun moved on, and the little spots of light, that were worlds, hurled about it in a mad race. Even Pluto, in its three-hundred-year-long track seemed madly gyrating beneath them; Mercury was a line of light, as it swirled about the swiftly moving sun.

	But that thirty thousand years was thirty days to the men of the ship. Their time rate immensely retarded, they worked on their calculations. At the end of that month Arcot had, with the help of Morey and Wade, worked out the last of the formulas of artificial matter, and the machines had turned out the last graphical function of the last branch of research that they could discover. It was a time of labor for them, and they worked almost constantly, stopping occasionally for a game of some sort to relax the nervous tension.

	At the end of that month they decided that they would go to Earth.

	They speeded their time rate now, and flashed toward Earth at enormous speed that brought them within the atmosphere in minutes. They had landed in the valley of the Nile. Arcot had suggested this as a means of determining the advancement of life of man. Man had evidently established some of his earliest civilizations in this valley where water and sun for his food plants were assured.

	"Look—there are men here!" exclaimed Wade. Indeed, below them were villages, of crude huts made of timber and stone and mud. Rubble work walls, for they needed little shelter here, and the people were but savages.

	"Shall we land?" asked Arcot, his voice a bit unsteady with suppressed excitement.

	"Of course!" replied Morey without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in the air above them.

	"Does every one agree that we land?" asked Arcot.

	There were no dissenting voices, and the ship sank gently toward a road below and to the left. A little knot of watchers broke, and they fled in terror as the great machine approached, crying out to their friends, casting affrighted glances at the huge, shining monster behind them.

	Without a jar the mighty weight of the ship touched the soil of its native planet, touched it fifty millenniums before it was made, five hundred centuries before it left!

	Arcot's brow furrowed. "There is one thing puzzles me—I can't see how we can come back. Don't you see, Morey, we have disturbed the lives of those people. We have affected history. This must be written into the history that exists.

	"This seems to banish the idea of free thought. We have changed history, yet history is that which is already done!

	"Had I never been born, had—but I was already—I existed fifty-eighty thousand years before I was born!"

	"Let's go out and think about that later. We'll go to a psych hospital, if we don't stop thinking about problems of space and time for a little while. We need some kind of relaxation."

	"I suggest that we take our weapons with us. These men may have weapons of chemical nature, such as poisons injected into the flesh on small sticks hurled either by a spring device or by pneumatic pressure of the lungs," said Stel Felso Theu as he rose from his seat unstrapping himself.

	"Arrows and blow-guns we call 'em. But it's a good idea, Stel Felso, and I think we will," replied Arcot. "Let's not all go out at once, and the first group to go out goes out on foot, so they won't be scared off by our flying around."

	Arcot, Wade, Zezdon Afthen, and Stel Felso Theu went out. The natives had retreated to a respectful distance, and were now standing about, looking on, chattering to themselves. They were edging nearer.

	"Growing bold," grinned Wade.

	"It is the characteristic of intelligent races manifesting itself—curiosity," pointed out Stel Felso Theu.

	"Are these the type of men still living in this valley, or who will be living there in fifty thousand years?" asked Zezdon Afthen.

	"I'd say they weren't Egyptians as we know them, but typical Neolithic men. It seems they have brains fully as large as some of the men I see on the streets of New York. I wonder if they have the ability to learn as much as the average man of—say about 1950?"

	The Neolithic men were warming up. There was an orator among them, and his grunts, growls, snorts and gestures were evidently affecting them. They had sent the women back (by the simple and direct process of sweeping them up in one arm and heaving them in the general direction of home). The men were brandishing polished stone knives and axes, various instruments of war and peace. One favorite seemed to be a large club.

	"Let's forestall trouble," suggested Arcot. He drew his ray pistol, and turned it on the ground directly in front of them, and about halfway between them and the Neoliths. A streak of the soil about two feet wide flashed into intense radiation under the impact of millions on millions of horsepower of radiant energy. Further, it was fused to a depth of twenty feet or more, and intensely hot still deeper. The Neoliths took a single look at it, then turned, and raced for home.

	"Didn't like our looks. Let's go back."

	They wandered about the world, investigating various peoples, and proved to their own satisfaction that there was no Atlantis, not at this time at any rate. But they were interested in seeing that the polar caps extended much farther toward the equator; they had not retreated at that time to the extent that they had by the opening of history.

	They secured some fresh game, an innovation in their larder, and a welcome one. Then the entire ship was swept out with fresh, clean air, their water tanks filled with water from the cold streams of the melting glaciers. The air apparatus was given a new stock to work over.

	Their supplies in a large measure restored, thousands of aerial photographic maps made, they returned once more to space to wait.

	Their time was taken up for the most part by actual work on the enormous mass of calculation necessary. It is inconceivable to the layman what tremendous labor is involved in the development of a single mathematical hypothesis, and a concrete illustration of it was the long time, with tremendously advanced calculating machines, that was required in their present work.

	They had worked out the problem of the time-field, but there they had been aided by the actual apparatus, and the possibilities of making direct tests on machines already set up. The problem of artificial matter, at length fully solved, was a different matter. This had required within a few days of a month (by their clocks; close to thirty thousand years of Earth's time), for they had really been forced to develop it all from the beginning. In the small improvements Arcot had instituted in Stel Felso Theu's device, he had really merely followed the particular branch that Stel Felso Theu had stumbled upon. Hence it was impossible to determine with any great variety, the type of matter created. Now, however, Arcot could make any known kind of matter, and many unknown kinds.

	But now came the greatest problem of all. They were ready to start work on the data they had collected in space.

	"What," asked Zezdon Afthen, as he watched the three terrestrians begin their work, "is the nature of the thing you are attempting to harness?"

	"In a word, energy," replied Arcot, pausing.

	"We are attempting to harness energy in its primeval form, in the form of a space-field. Remember, mass is a measure of energy. Two centuries ago a scientist of our world proposed the idea that energy could be measured by mass, and proceeded to prove that the relationship was the now firmly intrenched formula E=Mc2.

	"The sun is giving off energy. It is giving off mass, then, in the form of light photons. The field of the sun's gravity must be constantly decreasing as its mass decreases. It is a collapsing field. It is true, the sun's gravitational field does decrease, by a minute amount, despite the fact that our sun loses a thousand million tons of matter every four minutes. The percentage change is minute, but the energy released is—immeasurable.

	"But, I am going to invent a new power unit, Afthen. I will call it the 'sol,' the power of a sun. One sol is the rating of our sun. And I will measure the energy I use in terms of sun-powers, not horsepower. That may tell you of its magnitude!"

	"But," Zezdon Afthen asked, "while you men of Earth work on this problem, what is there for us? We have no problems, save the problem of the fate of our world, still fifty thousand years of your time in the future. It is terrible to wait, wait, wait and think of what may be happening in that other time. Is there nothing we can do to help? I know our hopeless ignorance of your science. Stel Felso Theu can scarcely understand the thoughts you use, and I can scarcely understand his explanations! I cannot help you there, with your calculations, but is there nothing I can do?"

	"There is, Ortolian, decidedly. We badly need your help, and as Stel Felso Theu cannot aid us here as much as he can by working with you, I will ask him to do so. I want your knowledge of psycho-mechanical devices to help us. Will you make a machine controlled by mental impulses? I want to see such a system and know how it is done that I may control machines by such a system."

	"Gladly. It will take time, for I am not the expert worker that you are, and I must make many pieces of apparatus, but I will do what I can," exclaimed Zezdon Afthen eagerly.

	So, while Arcot and his group continued their work of determining the constants of the space-energy field, the others were working on the mental control apparatus.

-

Chapter XV -  ALL-POWERFUL GODS

	AGAIN THERE WAS a period of intense labor, while the ship drifted through time, following Earth in its mad careening about the sun, and the sun as it rushed headlong through space. At the end of a thirty-day period, they had reached no definite position in their calculations, and the Talsonian reported, as a medium between the two parties of scientists, that the work of the Ortolian had not reached a level that would make a scientific understanding possible.

	As the ship needed no replenishing, they determined to finish their present work before landing, and it was nearly forty thousand years after their first arrival that they again landed on Earth.

	It was changed now; the ice caps had retreated visibly, the Nile delta was far longer, far more prominent, and cities showed on the Earth here and there.

	Greece, they decided would be the next stop, and to Greece they went, landing on a mountain side. Below was a village, a small village, a small thing of huts and hovels. But the villagers attacked, swarming up the hillside furiously, shouting and shrieking warnings of their terrible prowess to these men who came from the "shining house," ordering them to flee from them and turn over their possession to them.

	"What'll we do?" asked Morey. He and Arcot had come out alone this time.

	"Take one of these fellows back with us, and question him. We had best get a more or less definite idea of what time-age we are in, hadn't we? We don't want to overshoot by a few centuries, you know!"

	The villagers were swarming up the side of the hill, armed with weapons of bronze and wood. The bronze implements of murder were rare, and evidently costly, for those that had them were obviously leaders, and better dressed than the others.

	"Hang it all, I have only a molecular pistol. Can't use that, it would be a plain massacre!" exclaimed Arcot.

	But suddenly several others, who had come up from one side, appeared from behind a rock. The scientists were wearing their power suits, and had them on at low power, leaving a weight of about fifty pounds. Morey, with his normal weight well over two hundred, jumped far to one side of a clumsy rush of a peasant, leaped back, and caught him from behind. Lifting the smaller man above his head, he hurled him at two others following. The three went down in a heap.

	Most of the men were about five feet tall, and rather lightly built. The "Greek God" had not yet materialized among them. They were probably poorly fed, and heavily worked. Only the leaders appeared to be in good physical condition, and the men could not develop to large stature. Arcot and Morey were giants among them, and with their greater skill, tremendous jumping ability, and far greater strength, easily overcame the few who had come by the side. One of the leaders was picked up, and trussed quickly in a rope a fellow had carried.

	"Look out," called Wade from above. Suddenly he was standing beside them, having flown down on the power suit. "Caught your thoughts—rather Zezdon Afthen did." He handed Arcot a ray pistol. The rest of the Greeks were near now, crying in amazement, and running more slowly. They didn't seem so anxious to attack. Arcot turned the ray pistol to one side.

	"Wait!" called Morey. A face peered from around the rock toward which Arcot had aimed his pistol. It was that of a girl, about fifteen years old in appearance, but hard work had probably aged her face. Morey bent over, heaved on a small boulder, about two hundred pounds of rock, and rolled it free of the depression it rested in, then caught it on a molecular ray, hurled it up. Arcot turned his heat ray on it for an instant, and it was white hot. Then the molecular ray threw it over toward the great rock, and crushed it against it. Three children shrieked and ran out from the rock, scurrying down the hillside.

	The soldiers had stopped. They looked at Morey. Then they looked at the great rock, three hundred yards from him. They looked at the rock fragments.

	"They think you threw it," grinned Arcot.

	"What else—they saw me pick it up, saw me roll it, and it flew. What else could they think?"

	Arcot's heat ray hissed out, and the rocks sputtered and cracked, then glowed white. There was a dull explosion, and chips of rock flew up. Water, imprisoned, had been turned into steam. In a moment the whistle and crackle of combined heat and molecular rays stabbing out from Arcot's hands had built a barrier of fused rocks.

	Leisurely Arcot and Morey carried their now revived prisoner back to the ship, while Wade flew ahead to open the locks.

	Half an hour later the prisoner was discharged, much to his surprise, and the ship rose. They had been able to learn nothing from him. Even the Greek Gods, Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, all the later Greek gods, were unknown, or so greatly changed that Arcot could not recognize them.

	"Well," he said at length, "it seems all we know is that they came before any historical Greeks we know of. That puts them back quite a bit, but I don't know how far. Shall we go see the Egyptians?"

	They tried Egypt, a few moments across the Mediterranean, landing close to the mouth of the Nile. The people of a village near by immediately set out after them. Better prepared this time, Arcot flew out to meet them with Zezdon Afthen and Stel Felso Theu. Surely, he felt, the sight of the strange men would be no more terrifying than the ship or the men flying. And that did not seem to deter their attack. Apparently the proverb that "Discretion is the better part of valor," had not been invented.

	Arcot landed near the head of the column, and cut off two or three men from the rest with the aid of his ray pistol. Zezdon Afthen quickly searched his mind, and with Arcot's aid they determined he did not know any of the Gods that Arcot suggested.

	Finally they had to return to the ship, disappointed. They had had the slight satisfaction of finding that the Sun God was Ralz, the later Egyptian Ra might well have been an evolved form of that name.

	They restocked the ship, fresh game and fruits again appearing on the menu, then once again they launched forth into space to wait for their own time.

	"It seems to me that we must have produced some effect by our visit," said Arcot, shaking his head solemnly.

	"We did, Arcot," replied Morey softly. "We left an impress in history, an impress that still is, and an impress that affected countless thousands.

	"Meet the Egyptian Gods with their heads strange to terrestrians, the Gods who fly through the air without wings, come from a shining house that flies, whose look, whose pointed finger melts the desert sands, and the moist soil!" he continued softly, nodding toward the Ortolian and the Talsonian.

	"Their 'impossible' Gods existed, and visited them. Indubitably some genius saw that here was a chance for fame and fortune and sold 'charms' against the 'Gods.' Result: we are carrying with us some of the oldest deities. Again, we did leave our imprint in history."

	"And," cried Wade excitedly, "meet the great Hercules, who threw men about. I always knew that Morey was a brainless brute, but I never realized the marvelous divining powers of those Greeks so perfectly—now, the Incarnation of Dumb Power!" Dramatically Wade pointed to Morey, unable even now to refrain from some unnecessary comments.

	"All right, Mercury, the messenger of the Gods speaks. The little flaps on Wade's flying shoes must indeed have looked like the winged shoes of legend. Wade was Mercury, too brainless for anything but carrying the words of wisdom uttered by others.

	"And Arcot," continued Morey, releasing Wade from his condescending stare, "is Jove, hurling the rockfusing, destroying thunderbolts!"

	"The Gods that my friends have been talking of," explained Arcot to the curious Ortolians, "are legendary deities of Earth. I can see now that we did leave an imprint on history in the only way we could—as Gods, for surely no other explanation could have occurred to those men."

	The days passed swiftly in the ship, as their work approached completion. Finally, when the last of the equation of Time, artificial matter, and the most awful of their weapons, the unlimited Cosmic Power, had been calculated, they fell to the last stage of the work. The actual appliances were designed. Then the completed apparatus that the Ortolian and the Talsonian had been working on, was carefully investigated by the terrestrial physicists, and its mechanism studied. Arcot had great plans for this, and now it was incorporated in their control apparatus.

	The one remaining problem was their exact location in time. Already their progress had brought them well up to the nineteenth century, but, as Morey sadly remarked, they couldn't tell what date, for they were sadly lacking in history. Had they known the real date, for instance, of the famous battle of Bull Run, they could have watched it in the telectroscope, and so determined their time. As it was, they knew only that it was one of the periods of the first half of the decade of 1860.

	"As historians, we're a bunch of first-class kitchen mechanics. Looks like we're due for another landing to locate the exact date," agreed Arcot.

	"Why land now? Let's wait until we are nearer the time to which we belong, so we won't have to watch so carefully and so long," suggested Wade.

	They argued this question for about two hundred years as a matter of fact. After that, it was academic anyway.

-

Chapter XVI -  HOME AGAIN

	They were getting very near their own time, Arcot felt. Indeed, they must already exist on Earth. "One thing that puzzles me," he commented, "is what would happen if we were to go down now, and see ourselves."

	"Either we can't or we don't want to do it," pointed out Morey, "because we didn't."

	"I think the answer is that nothing can exist two times at the same time-rate," said Arcot. "As long as we were in a different time-rate we could exist at two times. When we tried to exist simultaneously, we could not, and we were forced to slip through time to a time wherein we either did not exist or wherein we had not yet been. Since we were nearer the time when we last existed in normal time, than we were to the time of our birth, we went to the time we left. I suspect that we will find we have just left Earth. Shall we investigate?"

	"Absolutely, Arcot, and here's hoping we didn't overshoot the mark by much." As Morey intimated, had they gone much beyond the time they left Earth, they might find conditions very serious, indeed. But now they went at once toward Earth on the time control. As they neared, they looked anxiously for signs of the invasion. Arcot spotted the only evident signs, however; two large spheres, tiny points in appearance on the telectroscope screen, were circling Earth, one at about 1,000 miles, moving from east to west, the other about 1,200 miles moving from north to south.

	"It seems the enemy have retreated to space to do their fighting. I wonder how long we were away."

	As they swept down at a speed greater than light, they were invisible till Arcot slowed down near the atmosphere. Instantly half a dozen fast ships darted toward them, but the ship was very evidently unlike the Thessian ships, and no attack was made. First the occupants would have an opportunity to prove their friendliness.

	"Terrestrians Arcot, Morey and Wade reporting back from exploration in space, with two friends. All have been on Earth with us previously," said Arcot into the radio vision apparatus.

	"Very well, Dr. Arcot. You are going to New York or Vermont?" asked the Patrol commander.

	"Vermont."

	"Yes, Sir. I'll see that you aren't stopped again."

	And, thanks to the message thus sent ahead, they were not, and in less than half an hour they landed once more in Vermont, on the field from which they had started.

	The group of scientists who had been here on their last call had gone, which seemed natural enough to them, who had been working for three months in the interval of their trip, but to Dr. Arcot senior, as he saw them, it was a misfortune.

	"Now I never will get straight all you'll have ready, and I didn't expect you back till next week. The men have all gone back to their laboratories, since that permits of better work on the part of each, but we can call them here in half an hour. I'm sure they'll want to come. What did you learn, Son, or haven't you done any calculating on your data as yet?"

	"We learned plenty, and I feel quite sure that a hint of what we have would bring all those learning-hounds around us pretty quickly, Dad," laughed Arcot junior, "and believe it or not, we've been calculating on this stuff for three months since we left yesterday!"

	"What!"

	"Yes, it's true! We were on our time field, and turned on the space control—and a Thessian ship picked that moment to run into us. We cut the ship in half as neatly as you please, but it threw us eighty thousand years into the past. We have been coasting through time on retarded rate while Earth caught up with itself, so to speak. In the meantime—three months in a day!

	"But don't call those men. Let them come to the appointment, while we do some work, and we have plenty of work to do, I assure you. We have a list of things to order from the standard supply houses, and I think you better get them for us, Dad." Arcot's manner became serious now. "We haven't gotten our Government Expense Research Cards yet, and you have. Order the stuff, and get it out here, while we get ready for it. Honestly, I believe that a few ships such as this apparatus will permit, will be enough in themselves to do the job. It really is a pity that the other men didn't have the opportunity we had for crowding much work into little time!

	"But then, I wouldn't want to take that road to concentration again myself!

	"Have the enemy amused you in my absence? Come on, let's sit down in the house instead of standing here in the sun."

	They started toward the house, as Arcot senior explained what had happened in the short time they had been away.

	"There is a friend of yours here, whom you haven't seen in some time, Son. He came with some allies."

	As they entered the house, they could hear the boards creak under some heavy weight that moved across the floor, soundlessly and light of motion in itself. A shadow fell across the hall floor, and in the doorway a tremendously powerfully-built figure stood.

	He seemed to overflow the doorway, nearly six and a half feet tall, and fully as wide as the door. His rugged, bronzed face was smiling pleasantly, and his deep-set eyes seemed to flash; a living force flowed from them.

	"Torlos! By the Nine Planets! Torlos of Nansal! Say, I didn't expect you here, and I will not put my hand in that meatgrinder of yours," grinned Arcot happily, as Torlos stretched forth a friendly, but quite too powerful hand.

	Torlos of Nansal, that planet Arcot had discovered on his first voyage across space, far in another Island of Space, another Island Universe, was not constructed as are human beings of Earth, nor of Venus, Talso, or Ortol, but most nearly resembled, save in size, the Thessians. Their framework, instead of being stone, as is ours, was iron, their bones were pure metallic iron, far stronger than bone. On these far stronger bones were great muscles of an entirely different sort, a muscle that used heat of the body as its fuel, a muscle that was utterly tireless, and unbelievably powerful. Not a chemical engine, but a molecular motion engine, it had no chemical fatigue-products that would tire it, and needed only the constant heat supply the body sucked from the air to work indefinitely. Unlimited by waste-carrying considerations, the strength was enormous.

	It was one of the commercial space freighters plying between Nansal, Sator, Earth and Venus that had brought the news of this war to him, Torlos explained, and he, as the new Trade Coordinator and Fourth of the Four who now ruled Nansal, had suggested that they go to the aid of the man who had so aided them in their great war with Sator. It was Arcot's gift of the secret of the molecular ray and the molecular ship that had enabled them to overcome their enemy of centuries, and force upon them an unwelcome peace.

	Now, with a fleet of fifty interstellar, or better, intergalactic battleships, Nansal was coming to Earth's aid.

	The battleships were now on patrol with all of Earth's and Venus' fleet. But the Nansalian ships were all equipped with the enormously rapid space distortion system of travel, of course, and were a shock troop in the patrol. The Terrestrian and Venerian patrols were not so equipped in full.

	"And Arcot, from what I have learned from your father, it seems that I can be of real assistance," finished Torlos.

	"But now, I think, I should know what the enemy has done. I see they built some forts."

	"Yes," replied Arcot senior, "they did. They decided that the system used on the forts of North and South poles was too effective. They moved to space, and cut off slices of Luna, pulled it over on their molecular rays, and used some of the most magnificent apparatus you ever dreamed of. I have just started working on the mathematics of it.

	"We sent out a fleet to do some investigating, but they attacked, and stopped work in the meantime. Whatever the ray is that can destroy matter at a distance, they are afraid that we could find its secret too easily, and block it, for they don't think it is a weapon, and it is evidently slow in action."

	"Then it isn't what I thought it was," muttered Arcot.

	"What did you think it was?" asked his father.

	"Er—tell you later. Go on with the account."

	"Well, to continue. We have not been idle. Following your suggestion, we built up a large ray screen apparatus, in fact, several of them, and carried them in ships to different parts of the world. Also some of the planets, lest they start dropping worlds on us. They are already in operation, sending their defensive waves against the Heaviside layer. Radio is poor, over any distance, and we can't call Venus from inside the layer now. However, we tested the protection, and it works—far more efficiently than we calculated, due to the amazing conductivity of the layer.

	"If they intend to attack in that way, I suspect that it will be soon, for they are ready now, as we discovered. An attack on their fort was met with a ray screen from the fort.

	"They fight with a wild viciousness now. They won't let a ship get near them. They destroy everything on sight. They seem tremendously afraid of that apparatus of yours. Too bad we had no more."

	"We will have—if you will let me get to work."

	They went to the ship, and entered it. Arcot senior did not follow, but the others waited, while the ship left Earth once more, and floated in space. Immediately they went into the time-field.

	They worked steadily, sleeping when necessary, and the giant strength of Torlos was frequently as great an asset as his indefatigable work. He was learning rapidly, and was able to do a great deal of the work without direction. He was not a scientist, and the thing was new to him, but his position as one of the best of the secret intelligence force of Nansal had proven his brains, and he did his share.

	The others, scientists all, found the operations difficult, for work had been allotted to each according to his utmost capabilities.

	It was still nearly a week of their time before the apparatus was completed to the extent possible, less than a minute of normal time passing.

	Finally the unassembled, but completed apparatus, was carried to the laboratory of the cottage, and word was sent to all the men of Earth that Arcot was going to give a demonstration of the apparatus he hoped would save them. The scientists from all over Earth and Venus were interested, and those of Earth came, for there was no time for the men of Venus to arrive to inspect the results.

-

Chapter XVII -  POWER OF MIND

	IT WAS NIGHT. The stars visible through the laboratory windows winked violently in the disturbed air of the Heaviside layer, for the molecular ray screen was still up.

	The laboratory was dimly lighted now, all save the front of the room. There, a mass of compact boxes were piled one on another, and interconnected in various and indeterminate ways. And one table lay in a brilliant path of illumination. Behind it stood Arcot. He was talking to the dim white group of faces beyond the table, the scientists of Earth assembled.

	"I have explained our power. It is the power of all the universe—Cosmic Power—which is necessarily vaster than all others combined.

	"I cannot explain the control in the time I have at my disposal but the mathematics of it, worked out in two months of constant effort, you can follow from the printed work which will appear soon.

	"The second thing, which some of you have seen before, has already been partly explained. It is, in brief, artificially created matter. The two important things to remember about it are that it is, that it does exist, and that it exists only where it is determined to exist by the control there, and nowhere else.

	"These are all coordinated under the new mental relay control. Some of you will doubt this last, but think of it under this light. Will, thought, concentration—they are efforts, they require energy. Then they can exert energy! That is the key to the whole thing.

	"But now for the demonstration."

	Arcot looked toward Morey, who stood off to one side. There was a heavy thud as Morey pushed a small button. The relay had closed. Arcot's mind was now connected with the controls.

	A globe of cloudiness appeared. It increased in density, and was a solid, opalescent sphere.

	"There is a sphere, a foot in diameter, ten feet from me," droned Arcot. The sphere was there. "It is moving to the left." The sphere moved to the left at Arcot's thought. "It is rising." The sphere rose. "It is changing to a disc two feet across." The sphere seemed to flow, and was a disc two feet across as Arcot's toneless voice of concentration continued.

	"It is changing into a hand, like a human hand." The disc changed into a human hand, the fingers slightly bent, the soft, white fingers of a woman with the pink of the flesh and the wrinkles at the knuckles visible. The wrist seemed to fade gradually into nothingness, the end of the hand was as indeterminate as are things in a dream, but the hand was definite.

	"The hand is reaching for the bar of lux metal on the floor." The soft, little hand moved, and reached down and grasped the half ton bar of lux metal, wrapped dainty fingers about it and lifted it smoothly and effortlessly to the table, and laid it there.

	A mistiness suddenly solidified to another hand. The second hand joined the first, and fell to work on the bar, and pulled. The bar stretched finally under an enormous load. One hand let go, and the thud of the highly elastic lux metal bar's return to its original shape echoed through the soundless room. These men of the twenty-second century knew what relux and lux metals were, and knew their enormous strength. Yet it was putty under these hands. The hands that looked like a woman's!

	The bar was again placed on the table, and the hands disappeared. There was a thud, and the relay had opened.

	"I can't demonstrate the power I have. It is impossible. The power is so enormous that nothing short of a sun could serve as a demonstration-hall. It is utterly beyond comprehension under any conditions. I have demonstrated artificial matter, and control by mental action.

	"I'm now going to show you some other things we have learned. Remember, I can control perfectly the properties of artificial matter, by determining the structure it shall have.

	"Watch."

	Morey closed the relay. Arcot again set to work. A heavy ingot of iron was raised by a clamp that fastened itself upon it, coming from nowhere. The iron moved, and settled over the table. As it approached, a mistiness that formed became a crucible. The crucible showed the gray of pure iron, but it was artificial matter. The iron settled in the crucible, and a strange process of flowing began. The crucible became a ball, and colors flowed across its surface, till finally it was glowing richly silvery. The ball opened, and a great lump of silvery stuff was within it. It settled to the floor, and the ball disappeared, but the silvery metal did not.

	"Platinum," said Morey softly. A gasp came from the audience. "Only platinum could exist there, and the matter had to rearrange itself as platinum." He could rearrange it in any form he chose, either absorbing or supplying energy of existence and energy of formation.

	The mistiness again appeared in the air, and became a globe, a globe of brown. But it changed, and disappeared. Morey recognized the signal. "He will now make the artificial matter into all the elements, and many nonexistent elements, unstable, atomic figures." There followed a long series of changes.

	The material shifted again, and again. Finally the last of the natural elements was left behind, all 104 elements known to man were shown, and many others.

	"We will skip now. This is element of atomic weight 7000."

	It was a lump of soft, oozy blackness. One could tell from the way that Arcot's mind handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly cold. Morey explained:

	"It is very soft, for its atom is so large that it is soft in the molecular state. It is tremendously photoe-lectric, losing electrons very readily, and since its atom has so enormous a volume, its electrons are very far from the nucleus in the outer rings, and they absorb rays of very great length; even radio and some shorter audio waves seem to affect it. That accounts for its blackness, and the softness as Arcot has truly depicted it. Also, since it absorbs heat waves and changes them to electrical charges, it tends to become cold, as the frost Arcot has shown indicates. Remember, that that is infinitely hard as you see it, for it is artificial matter, but Arcot has seen natural matter forced into this exceedingly explosive atomic figuration.

	"It is so heavily charged in the nucleus that its X-ray spectrum is well toward the gamma! The inner electrons can scarcely vibrate."

	Again the substance changed—and was gone.

	"Too far—atom of weight 20,000 becomes invisible and nonexistent as space closes in about it—perhaps the origin of our space. Atoms of this weight, if breaking up, would form two or more atoms that would exist in our space, then these would be unstable, and break down further into normal atoms. We don't know.

	"And one more substance," continued Morey as he opened the relay once more. Arcot sat down and rested his head in his hands. He was not accustomed to this strain, and though his mind was one of the most powerful on Earth, it was very hard for him.

	"We have a substance of commercial and practical use now. Cosmium. Arcot will show one method of making it."

	Arcot resumed his work, seated now. A formation reached out, and grasped the lump of platinum still on the floor. Other bars of iron were brought over from the stack of material laid ready, and piled on a broad sheet that had formed in the air, tons of it, tens of tons. Finally he stopped. There was enough. The sheet wrapped itself into a sphere, and contracted, slowly, steadily. It was rampant with energy, energy flowed from it, and the air about was glowing with ionization. There was a feeling of awful power that seeped into the minds of the watchers, and held them spellbound before the glowing, opalescent sphere. The tons of matter were compressed now to a tiny ball! Suddenly the energy flared out violently, a terrific burst of energy, ionizing the air in the entire room, and shooting it with tiny, burning sparks. Then it was over. The ball split, and became two planes. Between them was a small ball of a glistening solid. The planes moved slowly together, and the ball flattened, and flowed. It was a sheet.

	A clamp of artificial matter took it, and held the paper-thin sheet, many feet square, in the air. It seemed it must bend under its own enormous weight of tons, but thin as it was it did not.

	"Cosmium," said Morey softly.

	Arcot crumpled it, and pressed it once more between artificial matter tools. It was a plate, thick as heavy cardboard, and two feet on a side. He set it in a holder of artificial matter, a sort of frame, and caused the controls to lock.

	Taking off the headpiece he had worn, he explained, "As Morey said, Cosmium. Briefly, density, 5007.89. Tensile strength, about two hundred thousand times that of good steel!" The audience gasped. That seems little to men who do not realize what it meant. An inch of this stuff would be harder to penetrate than three miles of steel!

	"Our new ship," continued Arcot, "will carry six-inch armor. Six inches would be the equivalent of eighteen miles of solid steel, with the enormous improvement that it will be concentrated, and so will have far greater resistance than any amount of steel. Its tensile strength would be the equivalent of an eighteen-mile wall of steel.

	"But its most important properties are that it reflects everything we know of. Cosmics, light, and even moleculars! It is made of cosmic ray photons, as lux is made of light photons, but the inexpressibly tighter bond makes the strength enormous. It cannot be handled by any means save by artificial matter tools.

	"And now I am going to give a demonstration of the theatrical possibilities of this new agent. Hardly scientific—but amusing."

	But it wasn't exactly amusing.

	Arcot again donned the headpiece. "I think," he continued, "that a manifestation of the super-natural will be most interesting. Remember that all you see is real, and all effects are produced by artificial matter generated by the cosmic energy, as I have explained, and are controlled by my mind."

	Arcot had chosen to give this demonstration with definite reason. Apparently a bit of scientific playfulness, yet he knew that nothing is so impressive, nor so lastingly remembered as a theatrical demonstration of science. The greatest scientist likes to play with his science.

	But Arcot's experiment now—it was on a level of its own!

	From behind the table, apparently crawling up the leg came a thing! It was a hand. A horrible, disjointed hand. It was withered and incarmined with blood, for it was severed from its wrist, and as it hunched itself along, moving by a ghastly twitching of fingers and thumb, it left a trail of red behind it. The papers to be distributed rustled as it passed, scurrying suddenly across the table, down the leg, and racing toward the light switch! By some process of writhing jerks it reached it, and suddenly the room was plunged into half-light as the lights winked out. Light filtering over the transom of the door from the hall alone illuminated the hall, but the hand glowed! It glowed, and scurried away with an awful rustling, scuttling into some unseen hole in the wall. The quiet of the hall was the quiet of tenseness.

	From the wall, coming through it, came a mistiness that solidified as it flowed across. It was far to the right, a bent stooped figure, a figure half glimpsed, but fully known, for it carried in its bony, glowing hand a great, nicked scythe. Its rattling tread echoed hollowly on the floor. Stooping walk, shuffling gait, the great metal scythe scraping on the floor, half seen as the gray, luminous cloak blew open in some unfelt breeze of its ephemeral world, revealing bone; dry, gray bone. Only the scythe seemed to know Life, and it was red with that Life. Slow running, sticky lifestuff.

	Death paused, and raised his awful head. The hood fell back from the cavernous eyesockets, and they flamed with a greenish radiance that made every strained face in the room assume the same deathly pallor.

	"The Scythe, the Scythe of Death," grated the rusty Voice. "The Scythe is slow, too slow. I bring new things," it cackled in its cracked voice, "new things of my tools. See!" The clutching bones dropped the rattling Scythe, and the handle broke as it fell, and rotted before their eyes. "Heh, heh," the Thing cackled as it watched. "Heh—what Death touches, rots as he leaves it." The grinning, blackened skull grinned wider, in an awful, leering cavity, rotting, twisted teeth showed. But from under his flapping robe, the skeletal hands drew something—ray pistols!

	"These—these are swifter!" The Thing turned, and with a single leering glance behind, flowed once more through the wall.

	A gasp, a stifled, groaning gasp ran through the hall, a half sob.

	But far, far away they could hear something clanking, dragging its slow way along. Spellbound they turned to the farthest corner—and looked down the long, long road that twined off in distance. A lone, luminous figure plodded slowly along it, his half human shamble bringing him rapidly nearer.

	Larger and larger he loomed, clearer and clearer became the figure, and his burden. Broken, twisted steel, or metal of some sort, twisted and blackened.

	"It's over—it's over—and my toys are here. I win, I always win. For I am the spawn of Mars, of War, and of Hate, the sister of War, and my toys are the things they leave behind." It gesticulated, waving the twisted stuff and now through the haze, they could see them—buildings. The framework of buildings and twisted liners, broken weapons.

	It loomed nearer, the cavernous, glowing eyes under low, shaggy brows, became clear, the awful brutal hate, the lust of Death, the rotting flesh of Disease—all seemed stamped on the Horror that approached.

	"Ah!" It had seen them! "Ahh!" It dropped the buildings, the broken things, and shuffled into a run, toward them! Its face changed, the lips drew back from broken, stained teeth, the curling, cruel lips, and the rotting flesh of the face wrinkled into a grin of lust and hatred. The shaggy mop of its hair seemed to writhe and twist, the long, thin fingers grasped spasmodically as it neared. The torn, broken fingernails were visible—nearer—nearer—nearer—

	"Oh, God—stop it!" A voice shrieked out of the dark as someone leaped suddenly to his feet.

	Simultaneously with the cry the Thing puffed into nothingness of energy from which it had sprung, and a great ball of clear, white glowing light came into being in the center of the room, flooding it with a light that dazzled the eyes, but calmed broken nerves.

-

Chapter XVIII -  EARTH'S DEFENSES

	"I AM SORRY, ARCOT. I did not know, for I see I might have helped, but to me, with my ideas of horror, it was as you said, amusement," said Torlos. They were sitting now in Arcot's study at the cottage; Arcot, his father, Morey, Wade, Torlos, the three Ortolians and the Talsonian.

	"I know, Torlos. You see, where I made my mistake, as I have said, was in forgetting that in doing as I did, picturing horror, like a snowball rolling, it would grow greater. The idea of horror, started, my mind pictured one, and it inspired greater horror, which in turn reacted on my all too reactive apparatus. As you said, the things changed as you watched, molding themselves constantly as my mind changed them, under its own initiative and the concentrated thoughts of all those others. It was a very foolish thing to do, for that last Thing—well, remember it was, it existed, and the idea of hate and lust it portrayed was caused by my mind, but my mind could picture what it would do, if such were its emotions, and it would do them because my mind pictured them! And nothing could resist it!" Arcot's face was white once more as he thought of the danger he had run, of the terrible consequences possible of that 'amusement.'

	"I think we had best start on the ship. I'll go get some sleep now, and then we can go."

	Arcot led the way to the ship, while Torlos, Morey and Wade and Stel Felso Theu accompanied him. The Ortolians were to work on Earth, aiding in the detection of attacks by means of their mental investigation of the enemy.

	"Well—good-bye, Dad. Don't know when I'll be back. Maybe twenty-five thousand years from now, or twenty-five thousand years ago. But we'll get back somehow. And we'll clean out the Thessians!"

	He entered the ship, and rose into space.

	"Where are you going, Arcot?" asked Morey.

	"Eros," replied Arcot laconically.

	"Not if my mind is working right," cried Wade suddenly. All the others were tense, listening for inaudible sounds.

	"I quite agree," replied Arcot. The ship turned about, and dived toward New York, a hundred thousand miles behind now, at a speed many times that of light as Arcot snapped into time. Across the void, Zezdon Fentes' call had come—New York was to be attacked by the Thessians, New York and Chicago next. New York because the orbits of their two forts were converging over that city in a few minutes!

	They were in the atmosphere, screaming through it as their relux glowed instantaneously in the Heaviside layer, then was through before damage could be done. The screen was up.

	Scarcely a minute after they passed, the entire heavens blazed into light, the roar of tremendous thunders crashing above them, great lightning bolts rent the upper air for miles as enormous energies clashed.

	"Ah—they are sending everything they have against that screen, and it's hot. We have ten of our biggest tube stations working on it, and more coming in, to our total of thirty, but they have two forts, and Lord knows how many ships.

	"I think me I'm going to cause them some worrying."

	Arcot turned the ship, and drove up again, now at a speed very low to them but as they had the time-field up, very great. They passed the screen, and a tremendous bolt struck the ship. Everything in it was shielded, but the static was still great enough to cause them some trouble as the time-field and electric field fought. But the time-field, because of its very nature, could work faster, and they won through undamaged, though the enormous current seemed flowing for many minutes as they drifted slowly past it. Slowly—at fifty miles a second.

	Out in space, free of the atmosphere, Arcot shot out to the point where the Thessians were congregating. The shining dots of their ships and the discs of the forts were visible from Earth save for the air's distortion.

	They seemed a miniature Milky Way, their deadly beams concentrated on Earth.

	Then the Thessians discovered that the terrestrial fleet was in action. A ship glowed with the ray, the opalescence of relux under moleculars visible on its walls. It simply searched for its opponent while its relux slowly yielded. It found it in time, and the terrestrial ship put up its screen.

	The terrestrial fleet set to work, everything they had flying at the Thessian giants, but the Thessians had heavier ships, and heavier tubes. More power was winning for them. Inevitably, when the Sun's interference somewhat weakened the ray shield—

	About that time Arcot arrived. The nearest fort dived toward the further with an acceleration that smashed it against no less than ten of its own ships before they could so much as move.

	When the way was clear to the other fort—and that fort had moved, the berserk fort started off a new tack—and garnered six more wrecks on its side.

	Then Thett's emissaries located Arcot. The screen was up, and the Negrian attractive ray apparatus which Arcot had used was working through it. The screen flashed here and there and collapsed under the full barrage of half the Thessian fleet, as Arcot had suspected it would. But the same force that made it collapse operated a relay that turned on the space control, and Thett's molecular ray energy steamed off to outer space.

	"We worried them, then dug our hole and dragged it in after us, as usual, but damn it, we can't hurt them!" said Arcot disgustedly. "All we can do is tease them, then go hide where it's perfectly safe, in artificial—" Arcot stopped in amazement. The ship had been held under such space control that space was shut in about them, and they were motionless. The dials had reached a steady point, the current flow had become zero, and they hung there with only the very slow drain of the Sun's gravitational field and that of the planet's field pulling on the ship. Suddenly the current had leaped, and the dials giving the charge in the various coil banks had moved them down toward zero.

	"Hey—they've got a wedge in here and are breaking out our hole. Turn on all the generators, Morey." Arcot was all action now. Somehow, inconceivable though it was, the Thessians had spotted them, and got some means of attacking them, despite their invulnerable position in another space!

	The generators were on, pouring enormous power into the coils, and the dials surged, stopped, and climbed ever so slowly. They should have jumped back under that charge, ordinarily dangerously heavy. For perhaps thirty seconds they climbed, then they started down at full speed!

	Arcot's hand darted to the time field, and switched it on full. The dial jerked, swung, then swung back, and started falling in unison with the dials, stopped, and climbed. All climbed swiftly, gaining ever more rapidly. With what seemed a jerk, the time dial flew over, and back, as Arcot opened the switch. They were free, and the dial on the space control coils was climbing normally now.

	"By the Nine Planets, did they drink out our energy! The energy of six tons of lead just like that!"

	"How'd they do it?" asked Wade.

	Torlos kept silent, and helped Morey replace the coils of lead wire with others from stock.

	"Same way we tickled them," replied Arcot, carefully studying the control instruments, "with the gravity ray! We knew all along that gravitational fields drank out the energy—they simply pulled it out faster than we could pump it in, and used four different rays on us doing it. Which speaks well for a little ship! But they burned off the relux on one room here, and it's a wreck. The molecs hit everything in it. Looks like something bad," called Arcot. The room was Morey's, but he'd find that out himself. "In the meantime, see if you can tell where we are. I got loose from their rays by going on both the high speed time-field and the space control at full, with all generators going full blast. Man, they had a stranglehold on us that time! But wait till we get that new ship turned out!"

	With the telectroscope they could see what was happening. The terrific bombardment of rays was continuing, and the fleets were locked now in a struggle, the combined fleets of Earth and Venus and of Nansal, far across the void. Many of the terrestrian, or better, Solarian ships, were equipped with space distortion apparatus, now, and had some measure of safety in that the attractive rays of the Thessians could not be so concentrated on them. In numbers was safety; Arcot had been endangered because he was practically alone at the time they attacked.

	But it was obvious that the Solarian fleet was losing. They could not compete with the heavier ships, and now the frequent flaming bursts of light that told of a ship caught in the new deadly ray showed another danger.

	"I think Earth is lost if you cannot aid it soon, Arcot, for other Thessian ships are coming," said Stel Felso Theu softly.

	From out of the plane of the planetary orbits they were coming, across space from some other world, a fleet of dozens of them. They were visible as one after another leapt into normal time-rates.

	"Why don't they fight in advanced time?" asked Morey, half aloud.

	"Because the genius that designed that apparatus didn't think of it. Remember, Morey, those ships have their time apparatus connected with their power apparatus so that the power has to feed the time continuously. They have no coils like ours. When they advance their time, they're weakened every other way.

	"We need that new ship. Are we going to make it?" demanded Arcot.

	"Take weeks at best. What chance?" asked Morey.

	"Plenty; watch." As he spoke, Arcot pulled open the time controls, and spun the ship about. They headed off toward a tiny point of light far beyond. It rushed toward them, grew with the swiftness of an exploding bomb, and was suddenly a great, rough fragment of a planet hanging before them, miles in extent.

	"Eros," explained Wade laconically to Torlos. "Part of an ancient planet that was destroyed before the time of man, or life on Earth. The planet got too near the sun when its orbit was irregular, and old Sol pulled it to pieces. This is one of the pieces. The other asteroids are the rest. All planetary surfaces are made up of great blocks; they aren't continuous, you know. Like blocks of concrete in a building, they can slide a bit on each other, but friction holds them till they slip with a jar and we have earthquakes. This is one of the planetary blocks. We see Eros from Earth intermittently, for when this thing turns broadside it reflects a lot of light; edge on it does not reflect so much."

	It was a desolate bit of rock. Bare, airless, waterless rock, of enormous extent. It was contorted and twisted, but there were no great cracks in it for it was a single planetary block.

	Arcot dropped the ship to the barren surface, and anchored it with an attractive ray at low concentration. There was no gravity of consequence on this bit of rock.

	"Come on, get to work. Space suits, and rush all the apparatus out," snapped Arcot. He was on his feet, the power of the ship in neutral now. Only the attractor was on. In the shortest possible time they got into their suits, and under Arcot's direction set up the apparatus on the rocky soil as fast as it was brought out. In all, less than fifteen minutes were needed, yet Arcot was hurrying them more and more. Torlos' tremendous strength helped, even on this gravitationless world, for he could accelerate more quickly with his burdens.

	At last it was up for operation. The artificial matter apparatus was operated by cosmic power, and controlled by mental operation, or by mathematical formula as they pleased. Immediately Arcot set to work. A giant hollow cylinder drilled a great hole completely through the thin, curved surface of the ancient planetary block, through twelve miles of solid rock—a cylinder of artificial matter created on a scale possible only to cosmic power. The cylinder, half a mile across, contained a huge plug of matter. Then the artificial matter contracted swiftly, compressing the matter, and simultaneously treating it with the tremendous fields that changed its energy form. In seconds it was a tremendous mass of cosmium.

	A second smaller cylinder bored a plug from the rock, and worked on it. A huge mass of relux resulted. Now other artificial matter tools set to work at Arcot's bidding, and cut pieces from his huge masses of raw materials, and literally, quick as thought, built a great framework of them, anchored in the solid rock of the planetoid.

	Then a tremendous plane of matter formed, and neatly bisected the planetoid, two great flat pieces of rock were left where one had been—miles across, miles thick—planetary chips.

	On the great framework that had been constructed, four tall shafts of cosmium appeared, and each was a hollow tube, up the center of which ran a huge cable of relux. At the peak of each mile-high shaft was a great globe. Now in the framework below things were materializing as Arcot's flying thoughts arranged them—great tubes of cosmium with relux element—huge coils of relux conductors, insulated with microscopic but impenetrable layers of cosmium.

	Still, for all his swiftness of mind and accuracy of thought, he had to correct two mistakes in all his work. It was nearly an hour before the thing was finished. Then, two hundred feet long, a hundred wide, and fifty in height, the great mechanism was completed, the tall columns rising from four corners of the greater framework that supported it.

	Then, into it, Arcot turned the powers of the cosmos. The stars in the airless space wavered and danced as though seen through a thick atmosphere. Tingling power ran through them as it flowed into the tremendous coils. For thirty seconds—then the heavens were as before.

	At last Arcot spoke. Through the radio communicators, and through the thought-channels, his ideas came as he took off the headpiece. "It's done now, and we can rest." There was a tremendous crash from within the apparatus. The heavens reeled before them, and shifted, then were still, but the stars were changed. The sun shone weirdly, and the stars were altered.

	"That is a time shifting apparatus on a slightly larger scale," replied Arcot to Torlos' question, "and is designed to give us a chance to work. Come on, let's sleep. A week here should be a few minutes of Earthtime."

	"You sleep, Arcot. I'll prepare the materials for you," suggested Morey. So Arcot and Wade went to sleep, while Morey and the Talsonian and Torlos worked. First Morey bound the Ancient Mariner to the frame of the time apparatus, safely away from the four luminous balls, broadcasters of the time field. Then he shut off the attractive ray, and bound himself in the operator's seat of the apparatus of the artificial matter machine.

	A plane of artificial matter formed, and a stretch of rock rose under its lift as it cleft the rock apart. A great cleared, level space resulted. Other artificial matter enclosed the rock, and the fragments cut free were treated under tremendous pressure. In a few moments a second enormous mass of cosmium was formed.

	For three hours Morey worked steadily, building a tremendous reserve of materials. Lux metal he did not make, but relux, the infusible, perfect conductor, and cosmium in tremendous masses, he did make. And he made some great blocks of oxygen from the rock, transmuting the atoms, and stored it frozen on the plane, with liquid hydrogen in huge tanks, and some metals that would be needed. Then he slept while they waited for Arcot.

	Eight hours after he had lain down, Arcot was up, and ate his breakfast. He set to work at once with the machine. It didn't suit him, it seemed, and first he made a new tool, a small ship that could move about, propelled by a piece of artificial matter, and the entire ship was a tremendously greater artificial matter machine, with a greater power than before!

	His thoughts, far faster than hands could move, built up the gigantic hull of the new ship, and put in the rooms, and the brace members in less than twelve hours. A titanic shell of eight-inch cosmium, a space, with braces of the same nonconductor of heat, cosmium, and a two inch inner hull. A tiny space in the gigantic hull, a space less than one thousand cubic feet in dimension was the control and living quarters.

	It was held now on great cosmium springs, but Arcot was not by any means through. One man must do all the work, for one brain must design it, and though he received the constant advice and help of Morey and the others, it was his brain that pictured the thing that was built.

	At last the hull was completed. A single, glistening tube, of enormous bulk, a mile in length, a thousand feet in diameter. Yet nearly all of that great bulk would be used immediately. Some room would be left for additional apparatus they might care to install. Spare parts they did not have to carry—they could make their own from the energy abounding in space.

	The enormous, shining hull was a thing of beauty through stark grandeur now, but obviously incomplete. The ray projectors were not mounted, but they were to be ray projectors of a type never before possible. Space is the transmitter of all rays, and it is in space that those energy forms exist. Arcot had merely to transfer the enormously high energy level of the space-curvature to any form of energy he wanted, and now, with the complete statistics on it, he was able to do that directly. No tubes, no generators, only fields that changed the energy already there—the immeasurable energy available!

	The next period of work he started the space distortion apparatus. That must go at the exact center of the ship. One tremendous coil, big enough for the Ancient Mariner to lie in easily! Minutes, and flying thoughts had made it—then came thousands of the individual coils, by thinking of one, and picturing it many times! In ranks, rows, and columns they were piled into a great block, for power must be stored for use of this tremendous machine, while in the artificial space when its normal power was not available, and that power source must be tremendous.

	Then the time apparatus, and after that the driving apparatus. Not the molecular drive now, but an attraction ray focused on their own ship, with projectors scattered about the ship that it might move effortlessly in every direction. And provision was made for a force-drive by means of artificial matter, planes of it pushing the ship where it was wanted. But with the attraction-drive they would be able to land safely, without fear of being crushed by their own weight on Thett, for all its enormous gravity.

	The control was now suspended finally, with a series of attraction drives about it, locking it immovably in place, while smaller attraction devices stimulated gravity for the occupants.

	Then finally the main apparatus—the power plant—was installed. The enormous coils which handled, or better, caused space to handle as they directed, powers so great that whole suns could be blasted instantaneously, were put in place, and the field generators that would make and direct their rays, their ray screen if need be, and handle their artificial matter. Everything was installed, and all but a rather small space was occupied.

	It had been six weeks of continuous work for them, for the mind of each was aiding in this work, indirectly or directly, and it neared completion now.

	"But, we need one more thing, Arcot. That could never land on any planet smaller than Jupiter. What is its mass?" suggested Morey.

	"Don't know, I'm sure, but it is of the order of a billion tons. I know you are right. What are we going to do?"

	"Put on a tender."

	"Why not the Ancient Mariner?" asked Wade.

	"It isn't fitting. It was designed for individual use anyway," replied Morey. "I suggest something more like this on a small scale. We won't have much work on that, merely think of every detail of the big ship on a small scale, with the exception of the control cube furnishings. Instead of the numerous decks, swimming pool and so forth, have a large, single room."

	"Good enough," replied Arcot.

	As if by magic, a machine appeared, a "small" machine of two-hundred-foot length, modified slightly in some parts, its bottom flattened, and equipped with an attractor anchor. Then they were ready.

	"We will leave the Mariner here, and get it later. This apparatus won't be needed any longer, and we don't want the enemy to get it. Our trial trip will be a fight!" called Arcot as he leaped from his seat. The mass of the giant ship pulled him, and he fell slowly toward it.

	Into its open port he flew, the others behind him, their suits still on. The door shut behind them as Arcot, at the controls, closed it. As yet they had not released the air supplies. It was airless.

	Now the hiss of air, and the quickening of heat crept through it. The water in the tanks thawed as the heat came, soaking through from the great heaters. In minutes the air and heat were normal throughout the great bulk. There was air in power compartments, though no one was expected to go there, for the control room alone need be occupied; vision-screens here viewed every part of the ship, and all about it.

	The eyes of the new ship were set in recesses of the tremendously strong cosmium wall, and over them, protecting them, was an infinitely thin, but infinitely strong wall of artificial matter, permanently maintained. It was opaque to all forms of radiation known from the longest Hertzian to the shortest cosmics, save for the very narrow band of visible light. Whether this protection would stop the Thessian beam that was so deadly to lux and relux was not, of course, known. But Arcot hoped it would, and, if that beam was radiant energy, or material particles, it would.

	"We'll destroy our station here now, and leave the Ancient Mariner where it is. Of course we are a long way out of the orbit this planetoid followed, due to the effect of the time apparatus, but we can note where it is, and we'll be able to find it when we want it," said Arcot, seated at the great control board now. There were no buttons now, or visible controls; all was mental.

	A tiny sphere of artificial matter formed, and shot toward the control board of the time machine outside. It depressed the main switch, and space about them shifted, twisted, and returned to normal. The time apparatus was off for the first time in six weeks.

	"Can't fuse that, and we can't crush it. It's made of cosmium, and trying to crush it against the rock would just drive it into it. We'll see what we can do though," muttered Arcot. A plane of artificial matter formed just beneath it, and sheared it from its bed on the planetoid, cutting through the heavy cosmium anchors. The framework lifted, and the apparatus with it. A series of planes, a gigantic honeycomb formed, and the apparatus was cut across again and again, till only small fragments were left of it. Then these were rolled into a ball, and crushed by a sphere of artificial matter beyond all repair. The enemy would never learn their secret.

	A huge cylinder of artificial matter cut a great gouge from the plane that was left where the apparatus had been, and a clamp of the same material picked up the Ancient Mariner, deposited it there, then covered it with rubble and broken rock. A cosmic flashed on the rock for an instant, and it was glowing, incandescent lava. The Ancient Mariner was buried under a hundred feet of rapidly solidifying rock, but rock which could be fused away from its infusible walls when the time came.

	"We're ready to go now—get to work with the radio, Morey, when we get to Earth."

	The gravity seemed normal here as they walked about, no accelerations affected them as the ship darted forward, for all its inconceivably great mass, like an arrow, then flashed forward under time control. The sun was far distant now, for six weeks they had been traveling with the section of Eros under time control. But with their tremendous time control plant, and the space control, they reached the solar system in very little time.

	It seemed impossible to them that that battle could still be waging, but it was. The ships of Earth and Venus, battling now as a last, hopeless stand, over Chicago, were attempting to stop the press of a great Thessian fleet. Thin, long Negrian, or Sirian ships had joined them in the hour of Earth time that the men had been working. Still, despite the reinforcements, they were falling back.

-

Chapter XIX -  THE BATTLE OF EARTH

	IT HAD BEEN an anxious hour for the forces of the Solar System.

	They were in the last fine stages of Earth's defense when the general staff received notice that a radio message of tremendous power had penetrated the ray screen, with advice for them. It was signed "Arcot."

	"Bringing new weapon. Draw all ships within the atmosphere when I start action, and drive Thessians back into space. Retire as soon as a distance of ten thousand miles is reached. I will then handle the fleet," was the message.

	"Gentlemen: We are losing. The move suggested would be eminently poor tactics unless we are sure of being able to drive them. If we don't, we are lost in any event. I trust Arcot. How vote you?" asked General Hetsar Sthel.

	The message was relayed to the ships. Scarcely a moment after the message had been relayed, a tremendous battleship appeared in space, just beyond the battle. It shot forward, and planted itself directly in the midst of the battle, brushing aside two huge Thessians in its progress. The Thessian ships bounced off its sides, and reeled away. It lay waiting, making no move. All the Thessian ships above poured the full concentration of their moleculars into its tremendous bulk. A diffused glow of opalescence ran over every ship—save the giant. The moleculars were being reflected from its sides, and their diffused energy attacked the very ships that were sending them!

	A fort moved up, and the deadly beam of destruction reached out, luminous even in space.

	"Now," muttered Morey, "we shall see what cosmium will stand."

	A huge spot on the side of the ship had become incandescent. A vapor, a strange puff of smokiness exploded from it, and disappeared instantly. Another came and faster and faster they followed each other. The cosmium was disintegrating under the ray, but very slowly, breaking first into gaseous cosmic rays, then free, and spreading.

	"We will not fight," muttered Morey happily as he saw Arcot shift in his seat.

	Arcot picked the moleculars. They reached out, touched the heavy relux of the fort, and it exploded into opalescence that was hazily white, the colors shifted so quickly. A screen sprang into being, and the ray was chopped off. The screen was a mass of darting flames as energies of stupendous magnitude clashed.

	Arcot used a bit more of his inconceivable power. The ray struck the screen, and it flashed once—then died into blackness. The fort suddenly crumpled in like a dented can, and rolled clumsily away. The other fort was near now, and started an attack of its own. Arcot chose the artificial matter this time. He was not watching the many attacking ships.

	The great ship careened suddenly, fell over heavily to one side. "Foolish of me," said Arcot. "They tried crashing us."

	A mass of crumpled, broken relux and lux surrounded by a haze of gas lying against a slight scratch on the great sides, told the story. Eight inches of cosmium does not give way.

	Yet another ship tried it. But it stopped several feet away from the real wall of the ship. It struck a wall even more unyielding—artificial matter.

	But now Arcot was using this major weapon—artificial matter. Ship after ship, whether fleeing or attacking, was surrounded suddenly by a great sphere of it, a sudden terrific blaze of energy as the sphere struck the ray shield, the control forces now backed by the energy of all the millions of stars of space shattered it in an instant. Then came the inexorable crush of the artificial matter, and a ball of matter alone remained.

	But the pressing disc of the battle-front which had been lowering on Chicago, greatest of Earth's metropolises, was lifted. This disc-front was staggering back now as Arcot's mighty ship weakened its strength, and destroyed its morale, under the steady drive of the now hopeful Solarians.

	The other gigantic fort moved up now, with twenty of the largest battleships. The fort turned loose its destructive ray—and Arcot tried his new "magnet." It was not a true magnet, but a transformed space field, a field created by the energy of all the universe.

	The fort was gigantic. Even Arcot's mighty ship was a small thing beside it, but suddenly it seemed warped and twisted as space curved visibly in a magnetic field of such terrific intensity as to be immeasurable.

	Arcot's armory was tested and found not wanting.

	Suddenly every Thessian ship in sight ceased to exist. They disappeared. Instantly Arcot threw on all time power, and darted toward Venus. The Thessians were already nearing the planet, and no possible rays could overtake them. An instantaneous touch of the space control, and the mighty ship was within hundreds of miles of the atmosphere.

	Space twisted about them, reeled, and was firm. The Thessian fleet was before them in a moment, visible now as they slowed to normal speed. Startled, no doubt, to find before them the ship they had fled, they charged on for a space. Then, as though by some magic, they stopped and exploded in gouts of light.

	When space had twisted, seconds before, it was because Arcot had drawn on the enormous power of space to an extent that had been appreciable even to it—ten sols. That was forty million tons of matter a second, and for a hundredth part of a second it had flowed. Before them, in a vast plane, had been created an infinitesimally thin film of artificial matter, four hundred thousand tons of it, and into this invisible, infinitely hard barrier, the Thessian fleet had rammed. And it was gone.

	"I think," said Arcot softly, as he took off his headpiece, "that the beginning of the end is in sight."

	"And I," said Morey, "think it is now out of sight. Half a dozen ships stopped. And they are gone now, to warn the others."

	"What warning? What can they tell? Only that their ships were destroyed by something they couldn't see." Arcot smiled. "I'm going home."

-

Chapter XX -  DESTRUCTION

	SOME TIME LATER, Arcot spoke. "I have just received a message from Zezdon Fentes that he has an important communication to make, so I will go down to New York instead of to Chicago, if you gentlemen do not mind. Morey will take you to Chicago in the tender, and I can find Zezdon Fentes."

	Zezdon Fentes' message was brief. He had discovered from the minds of several who had been killed by the magnetic field Arcot had used, and not destroyed, that they had a base in this universe. Thett's base was somewhere near the center of the galaxy, on a system of unusually large planets, circling a rather small star. But what star their minds had not revealed.

	"It's up to us then to locate said star," said Arcot, after listening to Zezdon Fentes' account: "I think the easiest way will be to follow them home. We can go to your world, Zezdon Fentes, and see what they are doing there, and drive them off. Then to yours, Stel Felso. I place your world second as it is far better able to defend itself than is Ortol. It is agreeable?"

	It was, and the ship which had been hanging in the atmosphere over New York, where Zezdon Afthen, Fentes and Inthel had come to it in a taxi-ship, signaled for the crowd to clear away above. The enormous bulk of the shining machine, the savior of Earth, had attracted a very great amount of attention, naturally, and thousands on thousands of hardy souls had braved the cold of the fifteen mile height with altitude suits or in small ships. Now they cleared away, and as the ship slowly rose, the tremendous concentrated mental well-wishing of the thousands reached the men within the ship. "That," observed Morley, "is one thing cosmium won't stop. In some ways I wish it would—because the mental power that could be wielded by any great number of those highly advanced Thessians, if they know its possibilities, is not a thing to neglect."

	"I can answer that, terrestrian," thought Zezdon Afthen. "Our instruments show great mental powers, and great ability to concentrate the will in mental processes, but they indicate a very slight development of these abilities. Our race, despite the fact that our mental powers are much less than those of such men as Arcot and yourself, have done, and can do many things your greater minds cannot, for we have learned the direction of the will. We need not fear the will of the Thessians. I feel confident of that!"

	The ship was in space now, and as Arcot directed it toward Ortol, far far across the Island, he threw on, for the moment, the combined power of space distortion and time fields. Instantly the sun vanished, and when, less than a second later, he cut off the space field, and left only the time, the constellations were instantly recognizable. They were within a dozen light years of Ortol.

	"Morey, may I ask what you call this machine?" asked Torlos.

	"You may, but I can't answer," laughed Morey. "We were so anxious to get it going that we didn't name it. Any suggestions?"

	For a moment none of them made any suggestions, then slowly came Arcot's thoughts, clear and sharp, the thoughts of carefully weighed decision.

	"The swiftest thing that ever was thought! The most irresistible thing, thought, for nothing can stop its progress. The most destructive thing, thought. Thought, the greatest constructor, the greatest destroyer, the product of mind, and producer of powers, the greatest of powers. Thought is controlled by the mind. Let us call it Thought!"

	"Excellent, Arcot, excellent. The Thought, the controller of the powers of the cosmos!" cried Morey.

	"But the Thought has not been christened, save in battle, and then it had no name. Let us emblazen its name on it now," suggested Wade.

	Stopping their motion through space, but maintaining a time field that permitted them to work without consuming precious time, Arcot formed some more cosmium, but now he subjected it to a special type of converted field, and into the cosmium, he forced some light photons, half bound, half free. The fixture he formed into the letters, and welded forever on the gigantic prow of the ship, and on its huge sides. Thought, it stood in letters ten feet high, made of clear transparent cosmium, and the golden light photons, imprisoned in it, the slowly disintegrating lux metal, would cause those letters to shine for countless aeons with the steady golden light they now had.

	The Thought continued on now, and as they slowed their progress for Ortol, they saw that messengers of Thett had barely arrived. The fort here too had been razed to the ground, and now they were concentrating over the largest city of Ortol. Their rays were beating down on the great ray screen that terrestrial engineers had set up, protecting the city, as Earth had been protected. But the fleet that stood guard was small, and was rapidly being destroyed. A fort broke free, and plunged at last for the ray screen. Its relux walls glowed a thousand colors as the tremendous energy of the ray-screen struck them—but it was through!

	A molecular ray reached down for the city—and stopped halfway in a tremendous coruscating burst of light and energy. Yet there was none of the sheen of the ray screen. Merely light.

	The fort was still driving downward. Then suddenly it stopped, and the side dented in like the side of a can some one has stepped on, and it came to sudden rest against an invisible, impenetrable barrier. A molecular reached down from somewhere in space, hit the ray screen of Ortol, which the Thessians had attacked for hours, and the screen flashed into sudden brilliance, and disappeared. The ray struck the Thessian fort, and the fort burst into tremendous opalescence, while the invisible barrier the ray had struck was suddenly a great sheet of flaming light. In less than half a second the opalescence was gone, the fort shuddered, and shrieked out of the planet's atmosphere, a mass of lux now, and susceptible to the moleculars. And everything that lived within that fort had died instantly and painlessly.

	The fleet which had been preparing to follow the leading fort was suddenly stopped; it halted indecisively.

	Then the Thought became visible as its great golden letters showed suddenly, streaking up from distant space. Every ship turned cosmic and moleculars on it. The cosmic rebounded from the cosmium walls, and from the artificial matter that protected the eyes. The moleculars did not affect either, but the invisible protective sheet that the Thought was maintaining in the Ortolian atmosphere became misty as it fought the slight molecular rebounds.

	The Thought went into action. The fort which remained was the point of attack. The fort had turned its destructive ray on the cosmium ship with the result that, as before, the cosmium slowly disintegrated into puffs of cosmic rays. The vapor seemed to boil out, puff suddenly, then was gone. Arcot put up a wall of artificial matter to test the effect. The ray went right through the matter, without so much as affecting it. He tried a sheet of pure energy, an electro-magnetic energy stream of tremendous power. The ray bent sharply to one side. But in a moment the Thessians had realigned it.

	"It's a photonic stream, but of some type that doesn't affect ordinary matter, but only artificial matter such as lux, relux, or cosmium. If the artificial matter would only fight it, I'd be all right." The thought running through Arcot's mind reached the others.

	A tremendous burst of light energy to the rear announced the fact that a Thessian had crashed against the artificial matter wall that surrounded the ship. Arcot was throwing the Thessian destructive beam from side to side now, and twice succeeded in misdirecting it so that it hit the enemy machines.

	The Thought sent out its terrific beam of magnetic energy. The ray was suddenly killed, and the fort cruised helplessly on. Its driving apparatus was dead. The diffused cosmic reached out, and as the magnetic field, the relux and the cosmics interacted, the great fort was suddenly blue-white—then instantly a dust that scattered before an enormous blast of air.

	From the Thought a great shell of artificial matter went, a visible, misty wall, that curled forward, and wrapped itself around the Thessian ships with a motion of tremendous speed, yet deceptive, for it seemed to billow and flow.

	A Thessian warship decided to brush it away—and plowed into inconceivable strength. The ship crumpled to a mass of broken relux.

	The greater part of the Thessian fleet had already fled, but there remained half a hundred great battleships. And now, within half a million miles of the planet, there began a battle so weird that astronomers who watched could not believe it.

	From behind the Thought, where it hung motionless beyond the misty wall, a Thing came.

	The Thessian ships had realized now that the misty sphere that walled them in was impenetrable, and their rays were off, for none they now had would penetrate it. The forts were gone.

	But the Thing that came behind the Thought was a ship, a little ship of the same misty white, and it flowed into, and through the wall, and was within their prison. The Thessian ships turned their rays toward it, and waited. What was this thing?

	The ovaloid ship which drifted so slowly toward them suddenly seemed to jerk, and from it reached pseudopods! An amoeba on a titanic scale! It writhed its way purposefully toward the nearest ship, and while that ship waited, a pseudopod reached out, and suddenly drove through the four foot relux armor! A second pseudopod followed with lightning rapidity, and in an instant the ship had been split from end to end!

	Now a hundred rays were leaping toward the thing, and the rays burst into fire and gouts of light, blackened, burned pseudopods seemed to fall from the thing and hastily it retreated from the enclosure, flowing once more through the wall that stopped their rays.

	But another Thing came. It was enormous, a mile long, a great, shining scaly thing, a dragon, and on its mighty neck was mounted an enormous, distorted head, with great flat nose and huge flapping nostrils. It was a Thessian head! The mouth, fifty feet across, wrinkled into an horrific grin, and broken, stained teeth of iron showed in the mouth. Great talons upraised, it rent the misty wall that bound them, and writhed its awful length in. The swish of its scales seemed to come to the watchers, as it chased after a great battleship whose pilot fled in terror. Faster than the mighty spaceship the awful Thing caught it in mighty talons that ripped through solid relux. Scratching, fluttering enormous, blood-red wings, the silvery claws tore away great masses of relux, sending them flying into space.

	Again rays struck at it. Cosmic and moleculars with blinding pencils of light. For now in the close space of the Wall was an atmosphere, the air of two great warships, and though the space was great, the air in the ships was dense.

	The rays struck its awful face. The face burst into light, and black, greasy smoke steamed up, as the thing writhed and twisted horribly, awful screams ringing out. Then it was free, and half the face was burned away, and a grinning, bleeding, half-cooked face writhed and screamed in anger at them. It darted at the nearest ship, and ripped out that ray that burned it—and quivered into death. It quivered, then quickly faded into mist, a haze, and was gone!

	A last awful thing—a thing they had not noticed as all eyes watched that Thing—was standing by the rent in the Sphere now, the gigantic Thessian, with leering, bestial jaws, enormous, squat limbs, the webbed fingers and toes, and the heavy torso of his race, grinning at them. In one hand was a thing—and his jaws munched. Thett's men stared in horror as they recognized that thing in his hand—a Thessian body! He grinned happily and reached for a battleship—a ray burned him. He howled, and leaped into their midst.

	Then the Thessians went mad. All fought, and they fought each other, rays of all sorts, their moleculars and their cosmics, while in their midst the Giant howled his glee, and laughed and laughed—

	Eventually it was over, and the last limping Thessian ship drove itself crazily against the wreck of its last enemy. And only wreckage was left.

	"Lord, Arcot! Why in the Universe did you do that—and how did you conceive those horrors?" asked Morey, more than a little amazed at the tactics Arcot had displayed.

	Arcot shook himself, and disconnected his controls. "Why—why I don't know. I don't know what made me do that, I'm sure. I never imagined anything like that dragon thing—how did—"

	His keen eyes fixed themselves suddenly on Zezdon Fentes, and their tremendous hypnotic power beat down the resistance of the Ortolian's trained mind. Arcot's mind opened for the others the thoughts of Zezdon Fentes.

	He had acted as a medium between the minds of the Thessians, and Arcot. Taking the horror-ideas of the Thessians, he had imprinted them on Arcot's mind while Arcot was at work with the controls. In Arcot's mind, they had acted exactly as had the ideas that night on Earth, only here the demonstration had been carried to the limit, and the horror ideas were compounded to the utmost. The Thessians, highly developed minds though they were, were not resistant and they had broken. The Allies, with their different horror-ideas, had been but slightly affected.

	"We will leave you on Ortol, Zezdon Fentes. We know you have done much, and perhaps your own mind has given a bit. We hope you recover. I think you agree with me, Zezdon Afthen and Inthel?" thought Arcot.

	"We do, heartily, and are heartily sorry that one of our race has acted in this way. Let us proceed to Talso, as soon as possible. You might send Fentes down in a shell of artificial matter," suggested Zezdon Afthen.

	"Which," said Arcot, after this had been done, and they were on their way to Talso, "shows the danger of a mad Thought!"

-

Chapter XXI -  THE POWER OF "THE THOUGHT"

	BUT IT SEEMED, or must have seemed to any infinite being capable of watching it as it moved now, that the Thought was a mad thought. With the time control opened to the limit, and a touch of the space control, it fled across the Universe at a velocity such as no other thing was capable of.

	One star—it flashed to a disc, loomed enormous—overpowering—then suddenly they were flashing through it! The enormous coils fed their current into the space-coils and the time field, and the ship seemed to twist and writhe in distorted space as the gravitational field of a giant star, and a giant ship's space field fought for a fraction of time so short as to be utterly below measurement. Then the ship was gone—and behind it a star, the center of which had suddenly been hurled into another space forever, as the counteracting, gravitational field of the outer layers was removed for a moment, and only its own enormous density affected space, writhed and collapsed upon itself, to explode into a mighty sea of flames. Planets it formed, we know, by a process such as can happen when only this man-made accident happens.

	But the ship fled on, its great coils partly discharged, but still far more charged than need be.

	It was minutes to Talso where it had been hours with the Ancient Mariner, but now they traveled with the speed of Thought!

	Talso too was the scene of a battle, and more of a battle than Ortol had been, for here where more powerful defensive forces had been active, the Thessians had been more vengeful. All their remaining ships seemed concentrated here. And the great molecular screen that terrestrian engineers had flung up here had already fallen. Great holes had opened in it, as two great forts, and a thousand ships, some mighty battleships of the intergalactic spaces, some little scout cruisers, had turned their rays on the struggling defensive machines. It had held for hours, thanks to the tremendous tubes that Talso had in their power-distribution stations, but in the end had fallen, but not before many of their largest cities had been similarly defended, and the people of the others had scattered broadcast.

	True, wherever they might be, a diffused molecular would find them and destroy all life save under the few screens, but if the Thessians once diffused their rays, without entering the atmosphere, the broken screen would once more be able to hold.

	No fleet had kept the Thessian forces out of this atmosphere, but dozens of more adequately powered artificial matter bomb stations had taught Thett respect for Talso. But Talso's own ray screen had stopped their bombs. They could only send their bombs as high as the screen. They did not have Arcot's tremendous control power to maintain the matter without difficulty even beyond a screen.

	At last the screen had fallen, and the Thessian ships, a hole once made, were able to move, and kept that hole always under them, though if it once were closed, they would again have the struggle to open it.

	Exploding matter bombs had twice caused such spatial strains and ionized conditions as to come near closing it, but finally the Thessian fleet had arranged a ring of ships about the hole, and opened a cylinder of rays that reached down to the planet.

	Like some gigantic plow the rays tore up mountains, oceans, glaciers and land. Tremendous chasms opened in straight lines as it plowed along. Unprotected cities flashed into fountains of rock and soil and steel that leaped upwards as the rays touched, and were gone. Protected cities, their screens blazing briefly under the enormous ray concentrations as the ships moved on, unheeding, stood safe on islands of safety amidst the destruction. Here in the lower air, where ions would be so plentiful, Thett did not try to break down the screens, for the air would aid the defenders.

	Finally, as Thett's forces had planned, they came to one of the ionized layer ray-screen stations that was still projecting its cone of protective screening to the layer above. Every available ray was turned on that station, and, designed as it was for protecting part of a world, the station was itself protected, but slowly, slowly as its already heated tubes weakened their electronic emission, the disc of ions retreated more and more toward the station, as, like some splashing stream, the Thessian rays played upon it forcing it back. A rapidly accelerating retreat, faster and faster, as the disc changed from the dull red of normal defense to the higher and bluer quanta of failing, less complete defense, the disc of interference retreated.

	Then, with a flash of light, and a roar as the soil below spouted up, the station was gone. It had failed.

	Instantly the ring of ships expanded as the great screen was weakened by the withdrawal of this support. Wider was the path of destruction now as the forces moved on.

	But high, high in the sky, far out of sight of the naked eye, was a tiny spot that was in reality a giant ship. It was flashing forward, and in moments it was visible. Then, as another deserted city vanished, it was above the Thessian fleet.

	Their rays were directed downward through a hole that was even larger. A second station had gone with that city. But, as by magic, the hole closed up, and chopped their rays off with a decisiveness that startled them. The interference was so sharp now that not even the dullest of reds showed where their beams touched. The close interference was giving off only radio! In amazement they looked for this new station of such enormous power that their combined rays did not noticeably affect it. A world had been fighting their rays unsuccessfully. What single station could do this, if the many stations of the world could not? There was but one they knew of, and they turned now to search for the ship they knew must be there.

	"No horrors this time; just clean, burning energy," muttered Arcot.

	It was clean, and it was burning. In an instant one of the forts was a mass of opalescence that shifted so swiftly it was purest white, then rocketed away, lifeless, and no longer relux.

	The other fort had its screen up, though its power, designed to withstand the attack of a fleet of enormous intergalactic, matter-driven, fighting ships lasted but an instant under the driving power of half a million million suns, concentrated in one enormous ray of energy. The sheer energy of the ray itself, molecular ray though it was, heated the material it struck to blinding incandescence even as it hurled it at a velocity close to that of light into outer space. With little sparkling flashes battleships of the void after giant cruisers flashed into lux, and vanished under the ray.

	A tremendous combined ray of magnetism and cosmic ray energy replaced the molecular, and the ships exploded into a dust as fine as the primeval gas from which came all matter.

	Sweeping energy, so enormous that the defenses of the ships did not even operate against it, shattered ship after ship, till the few that remained turned, and, faster than the pursuing energies could race through space, faster than light, headed for their base.

	"That was fair fight; energy against energy," said Arcot delightedly, for his new toy, which made playthings of suns and fed on the cosmic energy of a universe, was behaving nicely, "and as I said, Stel Felso Theu, at the beginning of this war, the greater Power wins, always. And in our island here, I have five hundred thousand million separate power plants, each generating at the rate of decillions of ergs a second, backing this ship.

	"Your world will be safe now, and we will head for our last embattled ally, Sirius." The titanic ship turned, and disappeared from the view of the madly rejoicing billions of Talso below, as it sped, far faster than light, across a universe to relieve another sorely tried civilization.

	Knowing their cause was lost, hopeless in the knowledge that nothing known to them could battle that enormous force concentrated in one ship, the Thought, the Thessians had but one aim now, to do all the damage in their power before leaving.

	Already their tremendous, unarmed and unarmored transports were departing with their hundreds of thousands from that base system for the far-off Island of Space from which they had come. Their battlefleets were engaged in destroying all the cities of the allies, and those other helpless races of our system that they could. Those other inhabited worlds, many of which were completely wiped out because Arcot had no knowledge of them, were relieved only when the general call for retreat to protect the mother planet was sent out.

	But Sirius was looming enormous before them. And its planets, heavily defended now by the combined Sirian, Terrestrial and Venerian fleets and great ray screens as well as a few matter-bomb stations, were suffering losses none the less. For the old Sixth of Negra, the Third here, had fallen. Slipping in on the night side of the planet, all power off, and so sending forth no warning impulses till it actually fell through the ray screen, a small fleet of scouts had entered. Falling still under simple gravity, they had been missed by the rays till they had fallen to so small a distance, that no humans or men of our allied systems could have stopped, but only their enormous iron boned strength permitted them to resist the acceleration they used to avert collision with the planet. Then scattering swiftly, they had blasted the great protective screen stations by attacking on the sides, where the ray screen projectors were not mounted. Designed to protect above, they had no side armor, and the Sixth was opened to attack.

	Two and one-half billion people lost their lives painlessly and instantaneously as tremendous diffused moleculars played on the revolving planet.

	Arcot arrived soon after this catastrophe. The Thessians left almost immediately, after the loss of three hundred or more ships. One hundred and fifty wrecks were found. The rest were so blasted by the forces which attacked them, that no traces could be found, and no count made.

	But as those ships fled back to their base, Arcot, with the wonderfully delicate mental control of his ship, was able to watch them, and follow them; for, invisible under normal conditions, by twisting space in the same manner that they did he was able to see them flee, and follow.

	Light year after light year they raced toward the distant base. They reached it in two hours, and Arcot saw them from a distance sink to the various worlds. There were twelve gigantic worlds, each far larger than Jupiter of Sol, and larger than Stwall of Talso's sun, Renl.

	"I think," said Arcot as he stopped the ship at a third of a light year, "that we had best destroy those planets. We may kill many men, and innocent non-combatants, but they have killed many of our races, and it is necessary. There are, no doubt, other worlds of this Universe here that we do not know of that have felt the vengeance of Thett, and if we can cause such trouble to them by destroying these worlds, and putting the fear of our attacking their mother world into them, they will call off those other fleets. I could have been invisible to Thett's ships as we followed them here, and for the greater part of the way I was, for I was sufficiently out of their time-rate, so that they were visible only by the short ultra-violet, which would have put in their infra-red, and, no photo-electric cell will work on quanta of such low energy. When at last I was sure of the sun for which they were heading, I let them see us, and they know we are aware of their base, and that we can follow them.

	"I will destroy one of these worlds, and follow a fleet as it starts for their home nebula. Gradually, as they run, I will fade into invisibility, and they will not know that I have dropped back here to complete the work, but will think I am still following. Probably they will run to some other nebula in an effort to throw me off, but they will most certainly send back a ship to call the fleets here to the defense of Thett.

	"I think that is the best plan. Do you agree?"

	"Arcot," asked Morey slowly, "if this race attempts to settle another Universe, what would that indicate of their own?"

	"Hmmm—that it was either populated by their own race or that another race held the parts they did not, and that the other race was stronger," replied Arcot. "The thought idea in their minds has always been a single world, single solar system as their home, however."

	"And single solar systems cannot originate in this Space," replied Morey, referring to the fact that in the primeval gas from which all matter in this Universe and all others came, no condensation of mass less than thousands of millions of times that of a sun could form and continue.

	"We can only investigate—and hope that they do not inhabit the whole system, for I am determined that, unpleasant as the idea may be, there is one race that we cannot afford to have visiting us, and it is going to be permanently restrained in one way or another. I will first have a conference with their leaders and if they will not be peaceful—the Thought can destroy or make a Universe! But I think that a second race holds part of that Universe, for several times we have read in their minds the thought of the 'Mighty Warless Ones of Venone.'"

	"And how do you plan to destroy so large a planet as these are?" asked Morey, indicating the telectroscope screen.

	"Watch and see!" said Arcot.

	They shot suddenly toward the distant sun, and as it expanded, planets came into view. Moving ever slower on the time control, Arcot drove the ship toward a gigantic planet at a distance of approximately 300,000,000 miles from its primary, the sun of this system.

	Arcot fell into step with the planet as it moved about in its orbit, and watched the speed indicator carefully.

	"What's the orbital speed, Morey?" asked Arcot.

	"About twelve and a half miles per second," replied the somewhat mystified Morey.

	"Excellent, my dear Watson," replied Arcot. "And now does my dear friend know the average molecular velocity of ordinary air?"

	"Why, about one-third of a mile a second, average."

	"And if that planet as a whole should stop moving, and the individual molecules be given the entire energy, what would their average velocity be? And what temperature would that represent?" asked Arcot.

	"Good—Why, they would have to have the same kinetic energy as individuals as they now have as a whole, and that would be an average molecular velocity in random motion of 12.5 miles a second—giving about—about—about—twelve thousand degrees centigrade!" exclaimed Morey in surprise. "That would put it in the far blue-white region!"

	"Perfect. Now watch." Arcot donned the headpiece he had removed, and once more took charge. He was very far from the planet, as distances go, and they could not see his ship. But he wanted to be seen. So he moved closer, and hung off to the sunward side of the planet, then moved to the night side, but stayed in the light. In seconds, a battlefleet was out attempting to destroy him.

	Surrounding the ship with a wall of artificial matter, lest they annoy him, he set to work.

	Directly in the orbit of the planet, a faint mistiness appeared, and rapidly solidified to a titanic cup, directly in the path of the planet.

	Arcot was pouring energy into the making of that matter at such a rate that space was twisted now about them. The meter before them, which had not registered previously, was registering now, and had moved over to three. Three sols—and was still climbing. It stopped when ten were reached. Ten times the energy of our sun was pouring into that condensation, and it solidified quickly.

	The Thessians had seen the danger now. It was less than ten minutes away from their planet, and now great numbers of ships of all sorts started up from the planet, swarming out like rats from a sinking vessel.

	Majestically the great world moved on in its orbit toward the thin wall of infinite strength and infinite toughness. Already Thessian battleships were tearing at that wall with rays of all types, and the wall sputtered back little gouts of light, and remained. The meters on the Thought were no longer registering. The wall was built, and now Arcot had all the giant power of the ship holding it there. Any attempt to move it or destroy it, and all the energy of the Universe would rush to its defense!

	The atmosphere of the planet reached the wall. Instantly, as the pressure of that enormous mass of air touched it, the wall fought, and burst into a blaze of energy. It was fighting now, and the meter that measured sun-powers ran steadily, swiftly up the scale. But the men were not watching the meter; they were watching the awesome sight of Man stopping a world in its course! Turning a world from its path!

	But the meter climbed suddenly, and the world was suddenly a tremendous blaze of light. The solid rock had struck the giant cup, 110,000 miles in diameter. It was silent, as a world pitted its enormous kinetic energy against the combined forces of a universe. Soundless—and as hopeless. Its strength was nothing, its energy pitted unnoticed against the energy of five hundred thousand million suns—as vain as those futile attempts of the Thessian battleships on the invulnerable walls of the Thought.

	What use is there to attempt description of that scene as 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of rock and metal and matter crashed against a wall of energy, immovable and inconceivable. The planet crumpled, and split wide. A thousand pieces, and suddenly there was a further mistiness about it, and the whole enormous mass, seeming but a toy, as it was from this distance in space, and as it was in this ship, was enclosed in that same, immovable, unalterable wall of energy.

	The ship was as quiet and noiseless, as without indication of strain as when it hummed its way through empty space. But the planet crumpled and twirled, and great seas of energy flashed about it.

	The world, seeming tiny, was dashed helpless against a wall that stopped it, but the wall flared into equal and opposite energy, so that matter was raised not to the twelve thousand Morey had estimated but nearer twenty-four thousand degrees. It was over in less than half an hour, and a broken, misshapen mass of blue incandescence floated in space. It would fall now, toward the sun, and it would, because it was motionless and the sun moved, take an eccentric orbit about that sun. Eventually, perhaps, it would wipe out the four inferior planets, or perhaps it would be broken as it came within the Roches limit of that sun. But the planet was now a miniature sun, and not so very small, at that.

	And from every planet of the system was pouring an assorted stream of ships, great and small, and they all set panic-stricken across the void in the same direction. They had seen the power of the Thought, and did not contest any longer its right to this system.

-

Chapter XXII -  THETT

	THROUGH THE UTTER VOID of intergalactic space sped a tiny shell, a wee mite of a ship. Scarcely twenty feet long, it was one single power plant. The man who sat alone in it, as it tore through the void at the maximum speed that even its tiny mass was capable of, when every last twist possible had been given to the distorted time fields, watched a far, far galaxy ahead that seemed unchanging.

	Hours, days sped by, and he did not move from his position in the ship. But the ship had crossed the great gulf, and was speeding through the galaxy now. He was near the end. At a reckless speed, he sat motionless before the controls, save for slight movements of supple fingers that directed the ship at a mad pace about some gigantic sun and its family of planets. Suns flashed, grew to discs, and were left behind in the briefest instant.

	The ship slowed, the terrific pace it had been holding fell, and dull whine of overworked generators fell to a contented hum. A star was looming, expanding before it. The great sun glowed the characteristic red of a giant as the ship slowed to less than a light-speed, and turned toward a gigantic planet that circled the red sun. The planet was very close to 50,000 miles in diameter, and it revolved at a distance of four and one half billions of miles from the surface of its sun, which made the distance to the center of the titanic primary four billion, eight hundred million miles, in round figures, for the sun's diameter was close to six hundred and fifty million miles! Greater even than Antares, whose diameter is close to four hundred million miles, was this star of another universe, and even from the billions of miles of distance that its planet revolved, the disc was enormous, a titanic disc of dull red flame. But so low was its surface temperature, that even that enormous disc did not overheat the giant planet.

	The planet's atmosphere stretched out tens of thousands of miles into space, and under the enormous gravitational acceleration of the tremendous mass of that planet, it was near the surface a blanket dense as water. There was no temperature change upon it, though its night was one hundred hours long, and its day the same. The centrifugal force of the rapid rotation of this enormous body had flattened it when still liquid till it seemed now more of the shape of a pumpkin than of an orange. It was really a double planet, for its satellite was a world of one hundred thousand miles diameter, yet smaller in comparison to its giant primary than is Luna in comparison to Earth. It revolved at a distance of five million miles from its primary's center, and it, too, was swarming with its people.

	But the racing ship sped directly toward the great planet, and shrieked its way down through the atmosphere, till its outer shell was radiating far in the violet.

	Straight it flew to where a gigantic city sprawled in the heaped, somber masonry, but in some order yet, for on closer inspection the appearance of interlaced circles came over the edge of the giant cities. Ray screens were circular and the city was protected by dozens of stations.

	The scout was going well under the speed of light now, and a message, imperative and commanding, sped ahead of him. Half a dozen patrol boats flashed up, and fell in beside him, and with him raced to a gigantic building that reared its somber head from the center of the city.

	Under a white sky they proceeded to it, and landed on its roof. From the little machine the single man came out. Using the webbed hands and feet that had led the Allied scientists to think them an aquatic race, he swam upward, and through the water-dense atmosphere of the planet toward the door.

	Trees overtopped the building, for it had but four stories, above ground, though it was the tallest in the city. The trees, like seaweed, floated most of their enormous weight in the dense air, but the buildings under the gravitational acceleration, which was more than one hundred times Earth's gravity, could not be built very high ere they crumple under their own weight. Though one of these men weighed approximately two hundred pounds on Earth, for all their short stature, on this planet their weight was more than ten tons! Only the enormously dense atmosphere permitted them to move.

	And such an atmosphere! At a temperature of almost exactly 360 degrees centigrade, there was no liquid water on the planet, naturally. At that temperature water cannot be a liquid, no matter what the pressure, and it was a gas. In their own bodies there was liquid water, but only because they lived on heat, their muscles absorbed their energy for work from the heat of the air. They carried in their own muscles refrigeration, and, with that aid, were able to keep liquid water for their life processes. With death, the water evaporated. Almost the entire atmosphere was made up of oxygen, with but a trace of nitrogen, and some amount of carbon dioxide.

	Here their enormous strength was not needed, as Arcot had supposed, to move their own bodies, but to enable them to perform the ordinary tasks of life. The mere act of lifting a thing weighing perhaps ten pounds on Earth, here required a lifting force of more than half a ton! No wonder enormous strength had been developed! Such things as a man might carry with him, perhaps a ray pistol, would weigh half a ton; his money would weigh near to a hundred pounds!

	But—there were no guns on this world. A man could throw a stone perhaps a short distance, but when a gravitational acceleration of more than a half a mile per second acted on it, and it was hurled through an atmosphere dense as water—what chance was there for a long range?

	But these little men of enormous strength did not know other schemes of existence, save in the abstract, and as things of comical peculiarity. To them life on a planet like Earth was as life to a terrestrian on a planetoid such as Ceres, Juno or Eros would have seemed. Even on Thettsost, the satellite planet of Thett, life was strange, and they used lux roofs over their cities, though their weight there was four tons!

	As the scout swam through the dense atmosphere of his world toward the entrance way to the building, guards stopped him, and examined his credentials. Then he was led through long halls, and down a shaft ten stories below the planet's surface, to where a great table occupied a part of a low ceilinged, wide room. This room was shielded, interference screens of all known kinds lined the hollow walls, no rays could reach through it to the men within. The guard changed, and new men examined the scout's credentials, and he was led still deeper into the bowels of the planet. Once more the guard changed, and he entered a room guarded not by single shields but by triple, and walled with six foot relux, and ceiled with the same strong material. But here, under the enormous gravity, even its great strength required aid in the form of pillars.

	A giant of his race sat before a low table. The table ran half the length of the room, and beside it sat four other men. But there were places for more than two dozen.

	"A scout from the colony? What news?" demanded the leader. His voice was a growl, deep and throaty.

	"Oh mighty Sthanto, I bring news of resistance. We waited too long, in our explorations, and those men of World 3769-8482730-3 have learned too much. We were wrong. They had found the secret of exceeding the speed of light, and can travel through space fully as rapidly as we can, and now, since by some means we cannot fathom, they have learned to combine both our own system and theirs, they have one enormous engine of destruction that travels across their huge universe in less time than it takes us to travel across a planetary system.

	"Our cause is lost, which is by far the least of our troubles. Thett is in danger. We cannot hope to combat that ship."

	"Thalt—what means have we. Can we not better them?" demanded Sthanto of his chief scientist.

	"Great Sthanto, we know that such a substance can be made when pressure can be brought to bear on cosmic rays under the influence of field 24-7649-321, but that field cannot be produced, because no sufficient concentration of energy is available. Energy cannot be released rapidly enough to replace the losses when the field is developing. The fact that they have that material indicates their possession of an unguessed and terrific energy source. I would have said that there was no energy greater than the energy of matter, but we know the properties of this material and that the triple ray which has at last been perfected, can be produced providing your order for all energy sources is given, will release its energy at a speed comparable to the rate of energy relux in a twin ray, but that the release takes place only in the path of the ray."

	"What more, Scout?" asked Sthanto smoothly.

	"The ship first appeared in connection with our general attack on world 3769-8482730-3. The attack was near success, their screens were already failing. They have devised a new and very ionized layer as a conductor. It was exceedingly difficult to break, and since their sun had been similarly screened, we could not throw masses of that matter upon them.

	"In another sthan of time, we would have destroyed their world. Then the ship appeared. It has molecular rays, magnetic beams and cosmic rays, and a fourth weapon we know nothing of. It has molecular screens, we suspect, but has not had occasion to use them.

	"Our heaviest molecular screens flash under their molecular rays. Ordinary screens fall instantly without momentary defense. The ray power is incalculable.

	"Their magnetic beams are used in conjunction with cosmics. The action of the two causes the relux to induce current, and due to reaction of currents on the magnetic field—"

	"And the resistance due to the relux, the relux is first heated to incandescence and then the ship opens out as the air pressure bends the magnetically softened relux?" finished Thalt.

	"No, the effect is even more terrific. It explodes into powder," replied the scout.

	"And what happens to worlds that the magnetic ray touches?" inquired the scientist.

	"A corner of it touched the world we fought over, and the world shook," replied the colonist.

	"And the last weapon?" asked Sthanto, his voice soft now.

	"It seems a ghost. It is a mistiness that comes into existence like a cloud, and what it touches is crushed, what it rams is shattered. It surrounds the great ship, and machines crashing into it at a speed of more than six times that of light are completely destroyed, without in the slightest injuring the shield.

	"Then—what caused my departure from the colony—it showed once more its unutterable power. The mistiness formed in the path of our colonial world, number 3769-1-5, and the planet swept against that wall of mistiness, and was shattered, and turned in less than five sthan to a ball of blue-white fire. The wall stopped the planet in its motion. We could not fight that machine, and we left the worlds. The others are coming," finished the scout.

	The ruler turned his slightly smiling face to the commander of his armies, who sat beside him.

	"Give orders," he said softly, almost gently, "that a triple ray station be set up under the direction of Thalt, and further notice that all power be made instantly available to it. Add that the colonists are returning defeated, and bringing danger at their heels. The triple ray will destroy each ship as it enters the system." His hand under the table pushed an invisible protuberance, and from the perfectly conducting relux floor to the equally perfectly conducting ceiling, and between four pillars grouped around the spot where the scout stood, terrific arcs suddenly came into being. They lasted for the thousandth part of a second, and when they suddenly died away, as swiftly as they had come, there was not even ash where the scout had been.

	"Have you any suggestions, Thalt?" he asked of the scientist, his voice as soft as before.

	"I quite agree with your conduct so far, but the future conduct you had planned is quite unsatisfactory," replied the scientist. The ruler sat motionless in his great seat, staring fixedly at the scientist. "I think it is time I take your place, therefore." The place where the ruler had been was suddenly seen as through a dark cloud, then the cloud was gone, and with it the king, only his relux chair, and the bits of lux or relux that had been about his garments remained.

	"He was a fool," said the scientist softly, as he rose, "to plan on removing his scientist. Are there any who object to my succession?"

	"No one objects," said Faslar, the ex-king's Prime Minister and councilor.

	"Then I think, Phantal, Commander of planetary forces, that you had best see Ranstud, my assistant, and follow out the plan outlined by my predecessor. And you Tastal, Commander of Fleets, had best bring your fleets near the planets for protection. Go."

	"May I suggest, mighty Thalt," said Faslar after the others had left, "that my knowledge will be exceedingly useful to you. You have two commanders, neither of whom loves you, and neither of whom is highly capable. The family of Thadstil would be glad to learn who removed that honored gentleman, and the family of Datstir would gladly support him who brought the remover of their head to them.

	"This would remove two unwelcome menaces, and open places for such as Ranstud and your son Warrtil.

	"And," he said hastily as he saw a slight shift in Thalt's eyes, "I might say further that the bereaved ones of Parthel would find great interest in certain of my papers, which are only protected by my personal constant watchfulness."

	"Ah, so? And what of Kelston Faln, Faslar?" smiled the new Sthanta.

	Thalt's hand relaxed and they started a conversation and discussion on means of defense.

-

Chapter XXIII -  VENONE

	UP FROM EARTH, out of its clear blue sky, and into the glare and dark of space and near a sun the ship soared. They had been holding it motionless over New York, and now as it rose, hundreds of tiny craft, and a few large excursion ships followed it until it was out of Earth's atmosphere. Then—it was gone. Gone across space, racing toward that far Universe at a speed no other thing could equal. In minutes the great disc of the Universe had taken form behind them, as they took their route photographs to find their way back to Earth after the battle, if still they could come.

	Then into the stillness of the Intergalactic spaces.

	"This will be our first opportunity to test the full speed of this ship. We have never tried its velocity, and we should measure it now. Take a sight on the diameter of the Island, as seen from here, Morey. Then we will travel ten seconds, and look again."

	Half a million light years from the center of the Island now, the great disc spread out over the vast space behind them, apparently the size of a dinner plate at about thirty inches distance, it was more than two hundred and fifty thousand light years across. Checking carefully, Morey read their distance as just shy of five hundred thousand light years.

	"Hold on—here we go," called Arcot. Space was suddenly black, and beside them ran the twin ghost ships that follow always when space is closed to the smallest compass, for light leaving, goes around a space whose radius is measured in miles, instead of light centuries and returns. There was no sound, no slightest vibration, only Torlos' iron bones felt a slight shock as the inconceivable currents flowed into the gigantic space distortion coil from the storage fields, their shielded magnetic flux leaking by in some slight degree.

	For ten seconds that seemed minutes Arcot held the ship on the course under the maximum combined powers of space distortion and time field distortion. Then he released both simultaneously.

	The velvet black of space was about them as before, but now the disc of the Nebula was tiny behind them! So tiny was it, that these men, who knew its magnitude, gasped in sudden wonder. None of them had been able to conceive of such a velocity as this ship had shown! In seconds, Morey announced a moment later, they had traveled one million, one hundred thousand light years! Their velocity was six hundred and sixty quadrillion miles per second!

	"Then it will take us only a little over one thousand seconds to travel the hundred and fifty million light years, at 110,000 light years per second—that's about the radius of our galaxy, isn't it!" exclaimed Wade.

	They started on now, and one thousand and ten seconds, or a little more than eighteen minutes later, they stopped again. So far behind them now as to be almost lost in the far scattered universes, lay their own Island, and carefully they photographed the Universe that now lay less than twenty million light years ahead. Still, it was further, even after crossing this enormous gulf, than are many of those nebulae we see from Earth, many of which lie within that distance. They must proceed cautiously now, for they did not know the exact distance to the Nebula. Carefully, running forward in jumps of five million light years, forty-five second drives, they worked nearer.

	Then finally they entered the Island, and drove toward the denser center.

	"Good Lord, Arcot, look at those suns!" exclaimed Morey in amazement. For the first time they were seeing the suns of this system at a range that permitted observation, and Arcot had stopped to observe. The first one they had chosen had been a blue-white giant of enormous mass, nearly one hundred and fifty times as heavy as our own sun, and all the enormous surface was radiating power into space at a rate of nearly thirty thousand horsepower per square inch! No planets circled it, however, in its journey through space.

	"I've been noticing the number of giants here. Look around."

	The Thought moved on, on to other suns. They must find one that was inhabited.

	They stopped at last near a great orange giant, and examined it. It had indeed planets, and as Arcot watched, he saw in the telectroscope a line of gigantic freighters rise from the world, and whisk off to nothingness as they exceeded the speed of light! Instantly he started the Thought searching in time fields for the freighters. He found them, and followed them as they raced across the void. He knew he was visible to them, and as he suspected, they soon stopped, slowing down and signaling to him.

	"Morey—take the Thought. I'm going to visit them in the Banderlog as I think we shall name the tender," called Arcot, stripping off the headset, and leaving the control seat. The other fleet of ships was now less than a hundred thousand miles away, clearly visible in the telectroscope. They were still signaling, and Arcot had set an automatic signaling device flashing an enormously powerful searchlight toward them in a succession of dots and dashes, an obvious signal, though also, obviously unintelligible to those others.

	"Is it safe, Arcot?" asked Torlos anxiously. To approach those enormous ships in the relatively tiny Banderlog seemed unwise.

	"Far safer than they'll believe. Remember, only the Thought could stand up against such weapons as even the Banderlog carries, run as they are by cosmic energy," replied Arcot, diving down toward the little tender.

	In a moment it was out through the lock, and sped away from them like a bullet, reaching the distant stranger fleet in less than ten seconds.

	"They are communicating by thought!" announced Zezdon Afthen presently. "But I cannot understand them, for the impulses are too weak to be intelligently received."

	For nearly an hour the Banderlog hung beside the fleet, then it turned about, and raced once more to the Thought. Inside the lock, and a moment later Arcot appeared again on the threshold of the door. He looked immensely relieved.

	"Well, I have some good news," he said and smiled, sitting down. "Follow that bunch, Morey, and I'll tell you about it. Set it and she'll hold nicely. We have a long way to go, and those are slow freighters, accompanied by one Cruiser.

	"Those men," he began, "are men of Venone. You remember Thett's records said something of the Mighty Warless Ones of Venone? Those are they. They inhabit most of this universe, leaving the Thessians but four planets of a minor sun, way off in one corner. It seems the Thessians are their undesirable exiles, those who have, from generation to generation, been either forced to go there, or who wanted to go there.

	"They did not like the easier and more effective method of disposing of undesirables, the instantaneous death chamber they now use. Thett was their prison world. No one ever returned and his family could go with him if they desired, but if they did not, they were carefully watched for outcroppings of undesirable traits—murder, crime of any sort, any habitual tendency to injustice.

	"About six hundred years ago of our time, Thett revolted. There were scientists there, and their scientists had discovered a thing that they had been seeking for generations—the Twin-ray. I don't know what it is, and the Venonians don't either. It is the ray that destroys relux and lux, however, and can be carried only on a machine the size of their forts, due to some limitations. Just what those limitations are the Venonians don't know. Other than that ray they had no new weapons.

	"But it was enough. Their guard ships which had circled the worlds of the prison system, Antseck, were suddenly destroyed, so suddenly that Venone received no word of it till a consignment ship, bringing prisoners, discovered their absence. The consignment ship returned without landing. Thett was now independent. But they were bound to their system, for although they had the molecular ships, they had never been permitted to have time apparatus, nor to see it, nor was any one who knew its principles ever consigned there. The result was that they were as isolated as ever.

	"This was for two centuries. Two centuries later it was worked out by one of their scientists, and the Warless Ones had a War of defense. Their small fleet of cruisers, designed for rescue work and for clearing space lanes of wrecks and asteroids, was destroyed instantly, their world was protected only by the ray screen, which the Thessians did not have, and by the fact that they could build more cruisers. In less than a year Thett was defeated, and beaten back to her world, though Venone could not overcome Thett, now, for around their planets they had so many forts projecting the deadly rays, that no ship could approach.

	"Then Thett learned how to make the screen, and came again. Venone had planetoid stations, that projected molecular rays of an intensity I wonder at, with their system of projecting. It seems these people have force-power feeds that operate through space, by which an entire solar system can tie in for power, and they fed these stations in that way. Lord only knows what tubes they had, but the Thessians couldn't get the power to fight.

	"They've been let alone since then, they did not know why. I told them what their dear friends had been doing in that time, and the Venonians were immensely surprised, and very evidently sorry. They begged my pardon for letting loose such a menace, quite sincerely feeling that it was their fault. They offered any help they could give, and I told them that a chart of this system would be of the greatest use. They are going now to Venone, and we are to go with them, and see what they have to offer. Also, they want a demonstration of this 'remarkable ship that can defeat whole fleets of Thessians, and destroy or make planets at will,'" concluded Arcot.

	"I do not in the least blame them for wanting to see this ship in operation, Arcot, but they are, very evidently, a much older race than yours," said Torlos, his thoughts coming clear and sharp, as those of a man who has thought over what he says carefully. "Are you not running danger that their minds may be more powerful than yours, that this story they have told you is but a ruse to get this ship on their world where thousand, millions can concentrate their will against you and capture the ship by mind where they cannot capture it by force?"

	"That," agreed Arcot, "is where 'the rub' comes in as an ancient poet of Earth put it. I don't know and I did not have a chance to see. Wherefore I am about to do some work. Let me have the controls, Morey, will you?"

	Arcot made a new ship. It was made entirely, perforce, of cosmium, lux and relux, for those were the only forms of matter he could create in space permanently from energy. It was equipped with gravity drive, and time distortion speed apparatus, and his far better trained mind finished this smaller ship with his titanic tools in less than the two days that it took them to reach Venone. In the meantime, the Venonian cruiser had drawn close, and watched in amazement as the ship was fashioned from the energy of space, became a thing of glistening matter, materializing from the absolute void of space, and forming under titanic tools such as the commander could not visualize.

	Now, this move was partly the reason for this construction, for while the Venonian was busy, absorbed in watching the miraculous construction, his mind was not shielded, and it was open for observation of two such wonderfully trained minds as those of Zezdon Afthen and Zezdon Inthel. With their instruments and wonderfully developed mind-science, aided at times by Morey's less skillful, but more powerful mind of his older race, and powerful too, both because of long concentration and training, and because of his individual inheritance, they examined the minds of many of the officers of the ship without their awareness.

	As a final test, Arcot, having finished the ship, suggested that the Venonian officer and one of the men of his ship have a trial of mental powers.

	Zezdon Afthen tried first, and between the two ships, racing along side by side at a speed unthinkable, the two men struggled with those forces of will.

	Quickly Zezdon Afthen told Arcot what he had learned.

	The sun of Venone was close, now, and Arcot prepared to use as he intended the little space machine he had made. Morey took it, and went away from the Thought flying on its time field. The ship had been stocked with lead fuel for its matter-burning generators from the supply that had been brought on the Thought for emergencies, and the air had come from the Thought's great tanks. Morey was going to Venone ahead of the Thought to scout—"to see many of the important men of Venone and find out from them what I can of the relationship between Venone and Thett."

	Hours later Morey returned with a favorable report. He had seen many of the important men of Venone, and conversed with them mentally from the safety of his ship, where the specially installed gravity apparatus had protected him and the ship against the enormous gravity of this gigantic world. He did not describe Venone; he wanted them to see it as he had first seen it.

	So the little ship, which had served its purpose now, was destroyed, nearly a light year from Venone, and left a crushed wreck when two plates of artificial matter had closed upon it, destroying the apparatus, lest some unwelcome finder use it. There was little about it, the gravity apparatus alone perhaps, that might have been of use to Thett, and Thett already had the ray—but why take needless risk?

	Then once more they were racing toward Venone. Soon the giant star of which it was a planet loomed enormous. Then, at Morey's direction, they swung, and before them loomed a planet. Large as Thett, near a half million miles in diameter, its mass was very closely equal to that of our sun. Yet it was but the burned-out sweepings of the outermost photospheric layers of this giant sun, and the radioactive atoms that made a sun active were not here; it was a cold planet. But its density was far, far higher than that of our sun, for our sun is but slightly denser than ordinary sea water. This world was dense as copper, for with the deeper sweepings of the tidal strains that had formed it, more of the heavier atoms had gone into its making, and its core was denser than that of Earth.

	About it swept two gigantic satellite Worlds, each larger than Jupiter, but satellites of a satellite here! And Venone itself was inhabited by countless millions, yet their low, green tile and metal cities were invisible in the aspect of rolling lands with tiny hillocks, dwarfed by gigantic bulbous trees that floated their enormous weight in the water-dense atmosphere.

	Here, too, there were no seas, for the temperature was above the critical temperature of water, and only in the self-cooling bodies of these men and in the trees which similarly cooled themselves, could there be liquid.

	The sun of the world was another of the giant red stars, close to three hundred and fifty times the mass of our sun. It was circled by but three giant planets. Its enormous disc was almost invisible from the surface of the world as the Thought sank slowly through fifteen thousand miles of air, due to the screening effect on light passing through so much air. Earth could have rested on this planet and not extended beyond its atmosphere! Had Earth been situated at this planet's center, the Moon could have revolved about it, and would not have been beyond the planet's surface!

	In silent wonder the terrestrians watched the titanic world as they sank, and their friends looked on amazed, comprehending even less of the significance of what they saw. Already within the titanic gravitational field, they could see that indescribable effects were being produced on them, and on the ship. Arcot alone could know the enormous gravitation, and his accelerometer told him now that he was subject to a gravitational acceleration of three thousand four hundred and eighty-seven feet per second, or almost exactly one hundred and nine times Earth's pull.

	"The Thought weighs one billion, two hundred and six million, five hundred thousand tons, with tender, on Earth. Here it weighs approximately one hundred and twenty-one billion tons," said Arcot softly.

	"Can you set it down? It may crush under this load if the gravity drive isn't supporting it," asked Torlos anxiously.

	"Eight inches cosmium, and everything else supported by cosmium. I made this thing to stand any conceivable strain. Watch—if the planet's surface will take the load," replied Arcot.

	They were still sinking, and now a number of small marvelously streamlined ships were clustered around the slowly settling giant. In a few moments more people, hundreds, thousands of men were flying through the air up to the ship.

	A cruiser had appeared, and was very evidently intent on leading them somewhere, and Arcot followed it as it streaked through the dense air. "No wonder they streamline," he muttered as he saw the enormous force it took to drive the gigantic ship through this air. The air pressure outside their ship now was so great, that the sheer crushing effect of the air pressure alone was enormous. The pressure was well over nine tons to the square inch, on the surface of that enormous ship!

	They landed approximately fifty miles from a large city which was the capital. The land seemed absolutely level, and the horizon faded off in distance in an atmosphere absolutely clear. There was no dust in the air at their height of nearly three hundred feet, for dust was too heavy on this world. There were no clouds. The mountains of this enormous world were not large, could not be large, for their sheer weight would tear them down, but what mountains there were were jagged, tortured rock, exceedingly sharp in outline.

	"No rain—no temperature change to break them down," said Wade looking at them. "The zone of fracture can't be deep here."

	"What, Wade, is the zone of fracture?" asked Torles.

	"Rock has weight. Any substance, no matter how brittle, will flow if sufficient pressure is brought to bear from all sides. A thing which can flow will not break or fracture. You can't imagine the pressure to which the rock three hundred feet down is subject to. There is the enormous mass of atmosphere, the tremendous mass of rock above, and all forced down by this gravitation. By the time you get down half a mile, the rock is under such an inconceivably great pressure that it will flow like mud. The rock there cannot break; it merely flows under pressure. Above, the rock can break, instead of flowing. That is the zone of fracture. On Earth the zone of fracture is ten miles deep. Here it must be of the order of only five hundred feet! And the planetary blocks that made a planet's surface float on the zone of flowage—they determine the zone of fracture."

	The gigantic ship had been sinking, and now, suddenly it gave a very unexpected demonstration of Wade's words. It had landed, and Arcot shut off the power. There was a roaring, and the giant ship trembled, rocked, and rolled along a bit. Instantly Arcot drove it into the air.

	"Whoa—can't do it. The ship will stand it, and won't bend under the load—but the planet won't. We caused a Venone-quake. One of those planetary blocks Wade was talking about slipped under the added strain."

	Quickly Wade explained that all the planetary blocks were floating, truly floating, and in equilibrium just as a boat must be. The added load had been sufficiently great, so that, with an already extant overload on this particular planetary block, this "boat" had sunk a bit further into the flowage zone, till it was once more at rest and balanced.

	"They wish us to come out that they may see us, strangers and friends from another Island," interrupted Zezdon Afthen.

	"Tell them they'd have to scrape us up off the ground, if we attempted it. We come from a world where we weigh about as much as a pebble here," said Wade, grinning at the thought of terrestrians trying to walk on this world.

	"Don't—tell them we'll be right out," said Arcot sharply. "All of us."

	Morey and the others all stared at Arcot in amazement. It was utterly impossible!

	But Zezdon Afthen did as Arcot had asked. Almost immediately, another Morey stepped out of the airlock wearing what was obviously a pressure suit. Behind him came another Wade, Torlos, Stel Felso Theu, and indeed all the members of their party save Arcot himself! The Galactians stared in wonder—then comprehended and laughed together. Arcot had sent artificial matter images of them all!

	Their images stepped out, and the Venonian crowd which had collected, stared in wonder at the giants, looming twice their height above them.

	"You see not us, but images of us. We cannot withstand your gravity nor your air pressure, save in the protection of our ship. But these images are true images of us."

	For some time then they communicated, and finally Arcot agreed to give a demonstration of their power. At the suggestion of the cruiser commander who had seen the construction of a spaceship from the emptiness of space, Arcot rapidly constructed a small, very simple, molecular drive machine of pure cosmium, making it entirely from energy. It required but minutes, and the Venonians stared in wonder as Arcot's unbelievable tools created the machine before their eyes. The completed ship Arcot gave to an official of the city who had appeared. The Venonian looked at the thing skeptically, and half expecting it to vanish like the tools that made it, gingerly entered the port. Powered as it was by lead burning cosmic ray generators, the lead alone having been made by transmutation of natural matter, it was powerful, and speedy. The official entered it, and finding it still existing, tried it out. Much to his amazement it flew, and operated perfectly.

	Nearly ten hours Arcot and his friends stayed at Venone, and before they left, the Venonians, for all their vast differences of structure, had proven themselves true, kindly honest men, and a race that our Alliance has since found every reason to respect and honor. Our commerce with them, though carried on under difficulties, is none the less a bond of genuine friendship.

-

Chapter XXIV -  THETT PREPARES

	STREAKING THROUGH THE VOID toward Thett was again a tiny scout ship. It carried but a single man, and with all the power of the machine he was darting toward distant Thett, at a speed insanely reckless, but he knew that he must maintain such a speed if his mission were to be successful.

	Again a tiny ship entered Thett's far-flung atmosphere, and slowed to less than a light speed, and sent its signal call ahead. In moments the patrol ship, less than three hundred miles away, had reached it, and together they streaked through the dense air in a screaming dive toward Shatnsoma, the capital city. It was directly beneath, and it was not long before they had reached the great palace grounds, and settled on the upper roof. Then the scout leaped out of his tiny craft, and dove for the door. Flashing his credentials, he dove down, and into the first shielded room. Here precious seconds were wasted while a check was made of the credentials the man carried, then he was sent through to the Council Room. And he, too, stood on that exact spot where the other scout, but a few weeks before, had stood—and vanished. Waiting, it seemed, were four councilors and the new Sthanto, Thalt.

	"What news, Scout?" asked the Sthanto.

	"They have arrived in the Universe to Venone, and gone to the planet Venone. They were on the planet when I left. None of our scouts were able to approach the place, as there were innumerable Venonian watchers who would have recognized our deeper skin-color, and destroyed us. Two scouts were rayed, though the Galactians did not see this. Finally we captured two Venonians who had seen it, and attempted to force the information we needed from them. A young man and his chosen mate.

	"The man would tell nothing, and we were hurried. So we turned to the girl. These accursed Venonians are courageous for all their pacifism. We were hurried, and yet it was long before we forced her to tell what we needed to know so vitally. She had been one of the notetakers for the Venonian government. We got most of their conversation, but she died of burns before she finished.

	"The Galactians know nothing of the twin-ray beyond its action, and that it is an electro-magnetic phenomenon, though they have been able to distort it by using a sheet of pure energy. But their walls are impregnable to it, and their power of creating matter from the pure energy of space, as we saw from a distance, would enable them to easily defeat it, were it not that the twin-ray passes through matter without harming it. Any ray which will destroy matter of the natural electrical types, will be stopped.

	"The girl was damnably clever, for she gave us only the things we already knew, and but few new facts; knowing that she would inevitably die soon, she talked—but it was empty talk. The one thing of import we have learned is that they burn no fuel, use no fuel of any sort but in some inconceivable manner get their energy from the radiations of the suns of space. This could not be great—but we know she told the truth, and we know their power is great. She told the truth, for we could determine when she lied, by mental action, of course.

	"But more we could not learn. The man died without telling anything, merely cursing. He knew nothing anyway, as we already had determined," concluded the scout.

	Silently the Sthanto sat in thought for some moments. Then he raised his head, and looked at the scout once more.

	"You have done well. You secured some information of import, which was more than we had dared hope for. But you managed things poorly. The woman should not have died so soon. We can only guess.

	"The radiation of the suns of space—hmmm—" Sthanto Thalt's brow wrinkled in thought. "The radiation of the suns of space. Were his power derived from the sun near which he is operating, he would not have said suns. It was more than one?"

	"It was, oh Sthanto," replied the scout positively.

	"His power is unreasonable. I doubt that he gave the true explanation. It may well have been that he did not trust the Venonians. I would not, for all their warless ways. But surely the suns of space give very little power at any given point at random. Else space would not be cold.

	"But go, Scout, and you will be assigned a position in the fleet. The Colonial fleet, the remains of it, have arrived, and the colonists been removed. They failed. We will use their ships. You will be assigned." The scout left, and was indeed assigned to a ship of the colonists. The incoming colonial transports had been met at the outposts of the system, and rayed out of existence at once—failures, and bringing danger at their heels. Besides—there was no room for them on Thett without Thessians being crowded uncomfortably.

	As their battleships arrived they were conducted to one of the satellites, and each man was "fumigated," lest he bring disease to the mother planet. Men entered, men apparently emerged. But they were different men.

	"It seems," said the Sthanto softly, after the scout had left, "that we will have little difficulty, for they are, we know, vulnerable to the triple ray. And if we can but once destroy their driving units they will be helpless on our world. I doubt that wild tale of their using no fuel. Even if that be true they will be helpless with their power apparatus destroyed, and—if we miss the first time, we can seek it out, or drive them off!

	"All of which is dependent on the fact that they attack at a point where we have a triple ray station to meet them. There are but three of these, actually, but I have had dummy stations, apparently identical with our other real stations, set up in many places.

	"This gibberish we hear of creating matter—it is impossible, and surely unsuitable as a weapon. Their misty wall—that may be a force plane, but I know of no such possibility. The artificial substance though—why should any one make it? It but consumes energy, and once made is no more dangerous than ordinary matter, save that there is the possibility of creating it in dangerous position. Remember, we have heard already of the mental suggestions planes—mere force planes—plus a wonderfully developed power of suggestion. They do most of their damage by mental impression. Remember, we have heard already of the mental suggestions of horrible things that drove one fleet of the weak-minded colonists mad.

	"And that, I think, we will use to protect ourselves. If we can, with the apparatus which you, my son, have developed, cause them to believe that all the other forts are equally dangerous, and that this one on Thett is the best point of attack—It will be easy. Can you do it?"

	"I can, Oh Sthanto, if but a sufficient number of powerful minds may be brought to aid me," replied the youngest of the four councilmen.

	"And you, Ranstud, are the stations ready?" asked the ruler.

	"We are ready."

-

Chapter XXV -  WITH GALAXIES IN THE BALANCE

	THE Thought arose from Venone after long hours, and at Arcot's suggestion, they assumed an orbit about the world, at a distance of two million miles, and all on board slept, save Torlos, the tireless molecular motion machine of flesh and iron. He acted as guard, and as he had slept but four days before, he explained there was really no reason for him to sleep as yet.

	But the terrestrians would feel the greatest strain of the coming encounter, especially Arcot and Morey, for Morey was to help by repairing any damage done, by working from the control board of the Banderlog. The little tender had sufficient power to take care of any damage that Thett might inflict, they felt sure.

	For they had not learned of the triple ray.

	It was hours later that, rested and refreshed, they started for Thett. Following the great space-chart that they had been given by the Venonians, a series of blocks of clear lux metal, with tiny points of slowly disintegrating lux, such as had been used to illuminate the letters of the Thought's name representing suns, the colors and relative intensity being shown. Then there was a more manageable guide in the form of photographs, marked for route by constellations formations as well, which would be their actual guide.

	At the maximum speed of the time apparatus, for thus they could better follow the constellations, the Thought plunged along in the wake of the tiny scout ship that had already landed on Thett. And, hours later, they saw the giant red sun of Antseck, the star of Thett and its system.

	"We're about there," said Arcot, a peculiar tenseness showing in his thoughts. "Shall we barge right in, or wait and investigate?"

	"Well have to chance it. Where is their main fort here?"

	"From the direction, I should say it was to the left and ahead of our position," replied Zezdon Afthen.

	The ship moved ahead, while about it the tremendous Thessian battlefleet buzzed like flies, thousands of ships now, and more coming with each second.

	In a few moments the titanic ship had crossed a great plain, and came to a region of bare, rocky hills several hundred feet high. Set in those hills, surrounded by them, was a huge sphere, resting on the ground. As though by magic the Thessian fleet cleared away from the Thought. The last one had not left, when Arcot shot a terrific cosmic ray toward the sphere. It was relux, and he knew it, but he knew what would happen when that cosmic ray hit it. The solometer flickered and steadied at three as that inconceivable ray flashed out.

	Instantly there was a terrific explosion. The soil exploded into hydrogen atoms, and expanded under heat that lashed it to more than a million degrees in the tiniest fraction of a second. The terrific recoil of the ray-pressure was taken by all space, for it was generated in space itself, but the direct pressure struck the planet, and that titanic planet reeled! A tremendous fissure opened, and the section that had been struck by the ray smashed its way suddenly far into the planet, and a geyser of fluid rock rolled over it, twenty miles deep in that world. The relux sphere had been struck by the ray, and had turned it, with the result that it was pushed doubly hard. The enormously thick relux strained and dented, then shot down as a whole, into the incandescent rock.

	For miles the vaporized rock was boiling off. Then the fort sent out a ray, and that ray blasted the rock that had flowed over it as Arcot's titanic ray snapped out. In moments the fort was at the surface again—and a molecular hit it. The molecular did not have the energy the cosmic had carried, but it was a single concentrated beam of destruction ten feet across. It struck the fort—and the fort recoiled under its energy. The marvelous new tubes that ran its ray screen flashed instantly to a temperature inconceivable, and, so long as the elements embedded in the infusible relux remained the metals they were, those tubes could not fail. But they were being lashed by the energy of half a sun. The tubes failed. The elements heated to that enormous temperature when elements cannot exist—and broke to other elements that did not resist. The relux flashed into blinding iridescence—

	And from the fort came a beam of pure silvery light. It struck the Thought just behind the bow, for the operator was aiming for the point where he knew the control room and pilot must be. But Arcot had designed the ship for mental control, which the enemy operator could not guess. The beam was a flat beam, perhaps an inch thick, but it fanned out to fifty feet width. And where it touched the Thought, there was a terrific explosion, and inconceivably violent energy lashed out as the cosmium instantaneously liberated its energy.

	A hundred feet of the nose was torn off the ship, and the enormously dense air of Thett rushed in. But that beam had cut through the very edge of one of the ray projectors, or better, one of the ray feed apparatus. And the ray feed released it without control; it released all the energy it could suck in from space about it, as one single beam of cosmic energy, somewhat lower than the regular cosmics, and it flashed out in a beam as solid matter.

	There was air about the ship, and the air instantly exploded into atoms of a different sort, threw off their electrons, and were raised to the temperature at which no atom can exist, and became protons and electrons. But so rapidly was that coil sucking energy from space that space tended to close in about it, and in enormous spurts the energy flooded out. It was directed almost straight up, and but one ship was caught in its beam. It was made of relux, but the relux was powdered under the inconceivable blow that countless quintillions of cosmic ray photons struck it. That ray was in fact, a solid mass of cosmium moving with the velocity of light. And it was headed for that satellite of Thett, which it would reach in a few hours time.

	The Thought, due to the spatial strains of the wounded coil, was constantly rushing away to an almost infinite distance, as the ship approached that other space toward which the coil tended with its load, and rushing back, as the coil, reaching a spatial condition which supplied no energy, fell back. In a hundredth of a second it had reached equilibrium, and they were in a weirdly, terribly distorted space. But the triple-ray of the Thessians seemed to sheer off, and miss, no matter how it was directed. And it was painfully weak, for the coil sucked up the energy of whatsoever matter disintegrated in the neighborhood.

	Then suddenly the performance was over. And they plunged into artificial space that was black and clean, and not a thing of wavering, struggling energies. Morey, from his control in the Banderlog, had succeeded in getting sufficient energy, by using his space distortion coils, to destroy the great projector mechanism. Instantly Arcot, now able to create the artificial space without the destruction of the coils by the struggling ray-feed coil, had thrown them to comparative safety.

	Space writhed before they could so much as turn from the instruments. The Thessians had located their artificial space, and reached it with an attraction ray. They already had been withstanding the drain of the enormous fields of the giant planet and the giant sun; the attractive ray was an added strain. Arcot looked at his instruments, and with a grim smile set a single dial. The space about them became black again.

	"Pulling our energy—merely let 'em pull. They're pulling on an ocean, not a lake this time. I don't think they'll drain those coils very quickly." He looked at his instruments. "Good for two and a half hours at this rate.

	"Morey, you sure did your job then. I was helpless. The controls wouldn't answer, of course, with that titanic thing flopping its wings, so to speak. What are we going to do?"

	Morey stood in the doorway, and from his pocket drew a cigarette, handed it to Arcot, another to each of the others who smoked, and lit them, and his own. "Smoke," he said, and puffed. "Smoke and think. From our last experience with a minor tragedy, it helps."

	"But—this is no minor tragedy, they have burst open the wall of this invulnerable ship, destroyed one of those enormous coils, and can do it again," exclaimed Zezdon Afthen, exceedingly nervous, so nervous that the normal courage of the man was gone. His too-psychic breeding was against him as a warrior.

	"Afthen," replied Stel Felso Theu calmly, "when our friends have smoked, and thought, the Thought will be repaired perfectly, and it will be made invulnerable to that weapon."

	"I hope so, Stel Felso Theu," smiled Arcot. He was feeling better already. "But do you know what that weapon is, Morey?"

	"Got some readings on it with the Banderlog's instruments, and I think I do. Twin-ray is right," replied Morey.

	"Hm-hm—so I think. It's a super-photon. What they do is to use a field somewhat similar to the field we use in making cosmium, except that in theirs, instead of the photons lying side by side, they slide into one another, compounding. They evidently get three photons to go into one. Now, as we know, that size photon doesn't exist for the excellent reason that it can't in this space. Space closes in about it. Therefore they have a projected field to accompany it that tends to open out space—and they are using that, not the attractive ray, on us now. The result is that for a distance not too great, the triple-ray exists in normal space—then goes into another. Now the question is how can we stop it? I have an idea—have you any?"

	"Yes, but my idea can't exist in this space either," grinned Morey.

	"I think it can. If it's what I think, remember it will have a terrific electric field."

	"It's what you think, then. Come on." Arcot and Morey went to the calculating room, while Wade took over the ship. But one of the ray-feeds had been destroyed, and they had three more in action, as well as their most important weapon, artificial matter. Wade threw on the time field, and started the emergency lead burner working to recharge the coils that the Thessians were constantly draining. Being in their own peculiar space, they could not draw energy from the stars, and Arcot didn't want to return to normal space to discharge them, unless necessary.

	"How's the air pressure in the rest of the ship?" asked Wade.

	"Triple normal," replied Morey. "The Thessian atmosphere leaked in and sent it up terrifically, but when we went into our own space, at the halfway point, a lot leaked out. But the ship is full of water now. It was a bit difficult coming up from the Banderlog, and I didn't want to breathe the air I wasn't sure of. But let's work."

	They worked. For eight hours of the time they were now in they continued to work. The supply of lead metal gave out before the end of the fourth hour, and the coils were nearing the end of their resistance. It would soon be necessary for Arcot to return to normal space. So they stopped, their calculations very nearly complete. Throwing all the remaining energy into the coils, they a little more than held the space about them, and moved away from Thett at a speed of about twice that of light. For an hour more Arcot worked, while the ship plowed on. Then they were ready.

	As Arcot took over the controls, space reeled once more, and they were alone, far from Thett. The suns of this space were flashing and glowing about them, and the unlimited energy of a universe was at Arcot's command. But all the remaining atmosphere in the ship had either gone instantaneously in the vacuum, or solidified as the chill of expansion froze it.

	To the amazement of the extra-terrestrians, Arcot's first move was to create a titanic plane of artificial matter, and neatly bisect the Thought at the middle! He had thrown all of the controls thus interrupted into neutral, and in the little more than half of the ship which contained the control cabin, was also the artificial matter control. It was busy now. With bewildering speed, with the speed of thought trained to construct, enormous masses of cosmium were appearing beside them in space as Arcot created them from pure energy. Cosmium, relux and some clear cosmium-like lux metal. Ordinary cosmium was reflective, and he wanted something with cosmium's strength, and the clearness of lux.

	In seconds, under Arcot's flying thought manipulation, a great tube had been welded to the original hull, and the already gigantic ship lengthened by more than five hundred feet! Immediately great artificial matter tools gripped the broken nose-section, clamped it into place, and welded it with cosmium flowing under the inconceivable pressure till it was again a single great hull.

	Then the Thessian fleet found them. The coils were charged now, and they could have escaped, but Arcot had to work. The Thessians were attacked with moleculars, cosmics, and a great twin-ray. Arcot could not use his magnet, for it had been among those things severed from the control. He had two ray feeds, and the artificial matter. There were nearly three thousand ships attacking him with a barrage of energy that was inconceivably great, but the cosmium walls merely turned it aside. It took Arcot less than ten seconds to wipe out that fleet of ships! He created a wall of artificial matter at twenty feet from the ship—and another at twenty thousand miles. It was thin, yet it was utterly impenetrable. He swept the two walls together, and forced them against each other until his instruments told him only free energy remained between them. Then he released the outer wall, and a terrific flood of energy swept out.

	"I don't think we'll be attacked again," said Morey softly. They were not. Thett had only one other fleet, and had no intention of losing the powers of their generators at this time when they so badly needed them. The strange ship had retired for repairs—very well, they could attack again—and maybe—

	Arcot was busy. In the great empty space that had been left, he installed a second collector coil as gigantic as the main artificial matter generator. Then he repaired the broken ray feed, and it, and the companion coil which, with it, had been in the severed nose section, were now in the same relative position to the new collector coil that they had had with relation to the artificial matter coil. Next Arcot built two more ray feeds. Now in the gigantic central power room there loomed two tremendous power collectors, and six smaller ray feed collectors.

	His next work was to reconnect the severed connectors and controls. Then he began work on the really new apparatus. Nothing he had constructed so far was more than a duplicate of existing apparatus, and he had been able to do it almost instantly, from memory. Now he must vision something new to his experience, and something that was forced to exist in part in this space, and partly in another. He tried four times before the apparatus had been completed correctly, and the work occupied ten hours. But at last it was done. The Thought was ready now for the battle.

	"Got it right at last?" asked Wade. "I hope so."

	"It's right—tried it a little. I don't think you noticed it. I'm going down now to give them a nice little dose," said Arcot grimly. His ship was repaired—but they had caused him plenty of trouble.

	"How long have we been out here, their time?" asked Wade.

	"About an hour and a half." The Thought had been on the time field at all times save when the Thessian fleet attacked.

	"I think, Earthman, that you are tired, and should rest, lest you make a tired thought and do great harm," suggested Zezdon Afthen.

	"I want to finish it!" replied Arcot, sharply. He was tired.

	In seconds the Thought was once more over that fortified station in the mountains—and the triple-ray reached out—and suddenly, about the ship, was a wall of absolute, utter blackness. The triple-ray touched it, and exploded into coruscating, blinding energy. It could not penetrate it. More energy lashed at the wall of blackness as the operators within the sphere-fort turned in the energy of all the generators under their control. The ground about the fort was a great lake of dazzling lava as far as the eye could see, for the triple-ray was releasing its energy, and the wall of black was releasing an equal, and opposing energy!

	"Stopped!" cried Arcot happily. "Now here is where we give them something to think about. The magnet and the heat!"

	He turned the two enormous forces simultaneously on the point where he knew the fort was, though it was invisible behind the wall of black that protected him. From his side, the energy of the spot where all the system of Thett was throwing its forces, was invisible.

	Then he released them. Instantly there was a terrific gout of light on that wall of blackness. The ship trembled, and space turned gray about them. The black wall dissolved into grayness in one spot, as a flood of energy beyond comprehension exploded from it. The enormously strong cosmium wall dented as the pressure of the escaping radiation struck it, and turned X-ray hot under the minute percentage it absorbed. The triple-ray bent away, and faded to black as the cosmic force playing about it, actually twisted space beyond all power of its mechanism to overcome. Then, in the tiniest fraction of a second it was over, and again there was blackness and only the brilliant, blinding blue of the cosmium wall testified to its enormous temperature, cooling now far more slowly through green to red.

	"Lord—you're right, Zezdon Afthen. I'm going to sleep," called Arcot. And the ship was suddenly far, far away from Thett. Morey took over, and Arcot slept. First Morey straightened the uninjured wall and ironed out the dents.

	"What, Morey, is the wall of Blackness?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	"It's solid matter. A thing that you never saw before. That wall of matter is made of a double layer of protons lying one against the other. It absorbs absolutely every and all radiation, and because it is solid matter, not tiny sprinklings of matter in empty space, as is the matter of even the densest star, it stops the triple-ray. That matter is nothing but protons; there are no electrons there, and the positive electrical field is inconceivably great, but it is artificial matter, and that electrical field exerts its strain not in pulling and electrifying other bodies, but in holding space open, in keeping it from closing in about that concentrated matter, just as it does about a single proton, except that here the entire field energy is so absorbed.

	"Arcot was tired, and forgot. He turned his magnet and his heat against it. The heat fought the solid matter with the same energy that created it, and with an energy that had resources as great. The magnet curved space about it, and about us. The result was the terrific energy release you saw, and the hole in the wall. All Thett couldn't make any impression on it. One of the rays blasted a hole in it," said Morey with a laugh. For he, too, loved this mighty thing, the almost living ideas of his friend's brain.

	"But it is as bad as the space defense. It works both ways. We can't send through it but neither can they. Any thing we use that attacks them, attacks it, and so destroys it—and it fights."

	"We're worse off than ever!" said Morey gloomily.

	"My friend, you, too, are tired. Sleep, sleep soundly, sleep till I call—sleep!" And Morey slept under Zezdon Afthen's will, till Torlos carried him gently to his room. Then Afthen let the sleep relax to a natural one. Wade decided he might as well follow under his own power, for now he knew he was tired, and could not overcome Zezdon Afthen, who was not.

-

	On Thett, the fort was undestroyed, and now floating on its power units in a sea of blazing lava. Within, men were working quickly to install a second set of the new tubes in the molecular motion ray screen, and other men were transmitting the orders of the Sthanto who had come here as the place of actually greatest safety.

	"Order all battleships to the nearest power-feed station, and command that all power available be transmitted to the station attacked. I believe it will be this one. There is no limit on the power transmission lines, and we need all possible power," he commanded his son, now in charge of all land and spatial forces.

	"And Ranstud, what happened to that molecular ray screen?"

	"I do not know. I cannot understand such power.

	"But what most worries me is his wall of darkness," said Ranstud seriously.

	"But he was forced to retire for all his wall of darkness, as you saw.

	"He can maintain it but a short time, and it was full of holes when he fled."

	"Old Sthanto is much too confident, I believe," said an assistant working at one of the great boards in the enemy's fort, to one of his friends. "And I think he has lost his science-knowledge. Any power-man could tell what happened. They tried to use their own big rays against us, and their screen stopped them from going out, just as it stopped ours on the way in. Ours had been working at it for seconds, and hadn't bothered them. Then for a bare instant their ray touched it—and they retired. That shield of blackness is absolutely new."

	"They have many men on that ship of theirs," replied his friend, helping to lift the three hundred ton load of a vacuum tube into place, "for it is evident that they built new apparatus, and it is evident their ship was increased in size to contain it. Also the nose was repaired. They probably worked under a time field, for they accomplished an impossible amount of work in the period they were gone."

	Ranstud had come up behind them, and overheard the later part of this conversation. "And what," he asked suddenly, "did your meters tell you when our ray opened his ship?"

	"Councilor of Science-wisdom, they told us that our power diminished, and our generators gave off but little power when his power was exceedingly little, we still had much."

	"Have you heard the myth of the source of his power, in the story that he gets it from all the stars of the Island?"

	"We have, Great Councilor. And I for one believe it, for he sucked the power from our generators. So might he suck the power from the inconceivably greater generators of the Suns. I believe that we should treat with them, for if they be like the peace-loving fools of Venone, we might win a respite in which to learn their secret."

	Ranstud walked away slowly. He agreed, in his heart, but he loved life too well to tell the Sthanto what to do, and he had no intention of sacrificing himself for the possible good of the race.

	So they prepared for another attack of the Thought, and waited.

-

Chapter XXVI -  MAN, CREATOR AND DESTROYER

	"WHAT WE MUST FIND," said Arcot, between contented puffs, for he had slept well, and his breakfast had been good, "is some weapon which will attack them, but won't attack us. The question is, what is it? And I think, I think—I know." His eyes were dreamy, his thoughts so cryptically abbreviated that not even Morey could follow them.

	"Fine—what is it?" asked Morey after vainly striving to deduce some sense from the formulas that were chasing through Arcot's thoughts. Here and there he recognized them: Einstein's energy formula, Planck's quantum formulas, Nitsu Thansi's electron interference formulas, Stebkowfski's proton interference, Williamson's electric field, and his own formulas appeared, and others so abbreviated he could not recognize them.

	"Do you remember what Dad said about the way the Thessians made the giant forts out in space—hauled matter from the moon and transformed it to lux and relux. Remember, I said then I thought it might be a ray—but found it wasn't what I thought? I want to to use the ray I was thinking of. The only question in my mind is—what is going to happen to us when I use it?"

	"What's the ray?"

	"Why is it, Morey, that an electron falls through the different quantum energy levels, falls successively lower and lower till it reaches its 'lowest energy level,' and can radiate no more. Why can't it fill another step, and reach the proton? Why has it no more quanta to release? We know that electrons tend to fall always to lower energy level orbits. Why do they stop?"

	"And," said Morey, his own eyes dreamily bright now, "what would happen if it did? If it fell all the way?"

	"I cannot follow your thoughts, Earthmen, beyond a glimpse of an explosion. And it seems it is Thett that is exploding, and that Thett is exploding itself. Can you explain?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

	"Perhaps—you know that electrons in their planetary orbits, so called, tend to fall away to orbits of lower energy, till they reach the lowest energy orbit, and remain fixed till more energy comes and is absorbed, driving them out again. Now we want to know why they don't fall lower, fall all the way? As a matter of fact, thanks to some work I did last year with disintegrating lead, we do know. And thanks to the absolute stability of artificial matter, we can handle such a condition.

	"The thing we are interested in is this: Artificial matter has no tendency to radiate, its electrons have no tendency to fall into the proton, for the matter is created, and remains as it was created. But natural matter does have a tendency to let the electron fall into the proton. A force, the 'lowest energy wall,' over which no electron can jump, caused by the enormous space distorting of the proton's mass and electrical attraction, prevents it. What we want to do is to remove that force, iron it out. Requires inconceivable power to do so in a mass the size of Thett-but then—!

	"And here's what will happen: Our wall of protonic material won't be affected by it in the least, because it has no tendency to collapse, as has normal matter, but Thett, beyond the wall, has that tendency, and the ray will release the energy of every planetary electron on Thett, and every planetary electron will take with it the energy of one proton. And it will take about one one-hundred-millionth of a second. Thett will disappear in one instantaneous flash of radiation, radiation in the high cosmics!

	"Here's the trouble: Thett represents a mass as great as our sun. And our sun can throw off energy at the present rate of one sol for a period of some ten million million years, three and a half million tons of matter a second for ten million years. If all of that went up in one one-hundred-millionth of a second, how many sols?" asked Morey.

	"Too many, is all I can say. Even this ship couldn't maintain its walls of energy against that!" declared Stel Felso Theu, awed by the thought.

	"But that same power would be backing this ship, and helping it to support its wall. We would operate from—half a million miles."

	"We will. If we are destroyed—so is Thett, and all the worlds of Thett. Let that flood of energy get loose, and everything within a dozen light years will be destroyed. We will have to warn the Venonians, that their people on nearby worlds may escape in the time before the energy reaches them," said Arcot slowly.

	The Thought started toward one of the nearer suns, and as it went, Arcot and Morey were busy with the calculators. They finished their work, and started back from that world, having given their message of warning, with the artificial matter constructors. When they reached Thett, less than a quarter of an hour of Thessian time had passed. But, before they reached Thett, Arcot's viewplates were blinded for an instant as a terrific flood of energy struck the artificial matter protectors, and caused them to flame into defense. Thett's satellite was sending its message of instantaneous destruction. That terrific ray had reached it, touched it, and left it a shattered, glowing ball of hydrogen.

	"There won't be even that left when we get through with Thett!" said Arcot grimly. The apparatus was finished, and once more they were over the now fiery-red lava sea that had been mountains. The fort was still in action. Arcot had cut a sheet of sheer energy now, and as the triple-ray struck it, he knew what would happen. It did. The triple-ray shunted off at an angle of forty-five degrees in the energy field, and spread instantly to a diffused beam of blackness. Arcot's molecular reached out. The lava was instantly black, and mountains of ice were forming over the struggling defenses of the fort. The molecular screen was working.

	"I'd like to know how they make tubes that'll stand that, Morey," said Arcot, pointing to an instrument that read .01 millisols. "They have tubes now, that would have wiped us out in minutes, seconds before this."

	The triple-ray snapped off. They were realigning it to hit the ship now, correcting for the shield. Arcot threw out his protonic shield, and retreated to half a million miles, as he had said.

	"Here goes." But before even his thoughts could send Theft to radiation, the entire side of the planet blazed suddenly incandescent. Thett was learning what had happened when their ray had wounded the Thought.

	And then, in the barest instant of time, there was no Thett. There was an instant of intolerable radiation, then momentary blackness, and then the stars were shining where Thett had been. Thett was utterly gone.

	But Arcot did not see this. About him there was a tremendous roar, titanic generator-converters that had not so much as hummed under the impact of Thett's greatest weapons, whined and shuddered now. The two enormous generators, the blackness of the protonic shield, and the great artificial matter generator, throwing an inner shield impervious to the cosmics Thett gave off as it vanished, both were whining. And the six smaller machines, which Arcot had succeeded in interconnecting with the protonic generator, were whining too. Space was weirdly distorted, glowing gray about them, the great generators struggling to maintain the various walls of protecting power against the surge of energy as Thett, a world of matter, disintegrated.

	But the Very energy that fought to destroy those walls was absorbed in defending it, and by that much the attacking energy was lessened. Still, it seemed hours, days that the battle of forces continued.

	Then it was over, and the skies were clear once more as Arcot lowered the protonic screen silently. The white sky of Thett was gone, and only the black starriness of space remained.

	"It's gone!" gasped Torlos. He had been expecting it—still, the disappearance of a world—

	"We will have to do no more. No ships had time to escape, and the risk we run is too great," said Morey slowly. "The escaping energy from that world will destroy the others of this system as completely, and it will probably cause the sun itself to blow up—perhaps to form new planets, and so the process repeats itself. But Venone knows better now, and their criminals will not populate more worlds.

	"And we can go—home. To our little dust specks."

	"But they're wonderfully welcome dust specks, and utterly important to us, Earthman," reminded Zezdon Afthen.

	"Let us go then," said Arcot.

-

	It was dusk, and the rose tints of the recently-set sun still hung on the clouds that floated like white bits of cotton in the darkening blue sky. The dark waters of the little lake, and the shadowy tree-clad hills seemed very beautiful. And there was a little group of buildings down there, and a broad cleared field. On the field rested a shining, slim shape, seventy-five feet long, ten feet in diameter.

	But all, the lake, the mountains even, were dwarfed by the silent, glistening ruby of a gigantic machine that settled very, very slowly, and very, very gently downward. It touched the rippled surface of the lake with scarcely a splash, then hung, a quarter submerged in that lake.

	Lights were showing in the few windows the huge bulk had, and lights showed now in the buildings on the shore. Through an open door light was streaming, casting silhouettes of two men. And now a tiny door opened in the enormous bulk that occupied the lake, and from it came five figures, that floated up, and away, and toward the cottage.

	"Hello, Son. You have been gone long," said Arcot, senior, gravely, as his son landed lightly before him.

	"I thought so. Earth has moved in her orbit. More than six months?"

	His father smiled a bit wryly. "Yes. Two years and three months. You got caught in another time field and thrown the other way this time?"

	"Time and force. Do you know the story yet?"

	"Part of it—Venone sent a ship to us within a month of the time you left, and said that all Thett's system had disappeared save for one tremendous gas cloud—mostly hydrogen. Their ships were met by such a blast of cosmic rays as they came toward Thett that the radiation pressure made it almost impossible to advance. There were two distinct waves. One was rather slighter, and was more in the gamma range, so they suspected that two bodies had been directly destroyed; one small one, and one large one were reduced completely to cosmics. Your warning to Sentfenn was taken seriously, and they have vacated all planets near. It was the force field created when you destroyed Thett that threw you forward? Where are the others?"

	"Zezdon Afthen and Zezdon Inthel we took home, and dropped in their power suits, without landing. Stel Felso Theu as well. We will visit them later."

	"Have you eaten? Then let us eat, and after supper we'll tell you what little there is to tell."

	"But Arcot," said Morey slowly, "I understand that Dad will be here soon, so let us wait. And I have something of which I have not spoken to you as yet. Worked it out and made it on the back trip. Installed in the Thought with the Banderlog's controls. It is—well, will you look?—Fuller! Come and see the new toy you designers are going to have to work on!"

	They had all been depressed by the thought of their long absence, by the scenes of destruction they had witnessed so recently. They were beginning to feel better.

	"Watch." Morey's thoughts concentrated. The Thought outside had been left on locked controls, but the apparatus Morey had installed responded to his thoughts from this distance.

	Before them in the room appeared a cube that was obviously copper. It stayed there but a moment, beaming brightly, then there was a snapping of energies about them—and it dropped to the floor and rang with the impact!

	"It was not created from the air," said Morey simply.

	"And now," said Arcot, looking at it, "Man can do what never before was possible. From the nothingness of Space he can make anything.

	"Man alone in this space is Creator and Destroyer.

	"It is a high place.

	"May he henceforth live up to it."

	And he looked out toward the mighty starlit hull that had destroyed a solar system—and could create another.

The End

The Idealists
(1954)*

	"HAL ... GAY! THE DUKE KILLED ISHTOCK!" CARL SEAMAN pounded into the companion-way the instant the inner lock door opened. "The Duke and half a dozen of his men hauled him out of his shop, talked to him for about five minutes, tied him up, and the Duke cut off his head with that two-handed scimitar he carries around." Carl's dark, thin face was taut with anger; the skin around his lips and nostrils was white and trembling slightly.

	"One," said "Bull" Bowman. He shrugged slightly. "What did the Duke accuse him of?"

	"That damned, self-centered, egotistical, hidebound bastitch!" Blackie Turner pounded his left fist into his right hand and stared out the bubble dome toward the town and castle prostrate across the bald, rocky hill. "The ruddy-minded old feudal baron! Now what'll we do?"

	Captain Hal Wainwright heaved himself up from the computer keyboard. His intense, dark eyes were nearly shut. "What was the charge, Carl?"

	"Oh, magic, of course! Unorthodoxy! Hoosenany flapdoodle! What the hell difference does it make? The real charge was that Ishtock had a new idea, and the damned Duke isn't going to allow anybody to have any ideas that don't support his iron-handed authority. God, I hate people who can't stand a new idea!" He turned savagely toward Bowman, his eyes hurt and angry. "And that sometimes includes you, Bull. So somebody did get hurt; so you did say the Duke would kill Ishtock. Dammit, then, what the hell can we do to break the hard-crusted, rockbound, dough-headed feudalism they've got here? Wait for it to die of old age? God Almighty! It's been going on here for at least twenty-five hundred of our years already! What do you want? It's a damned sight easier to stand back and say, 'Well, it won't work,' than to get up and say what will! What will work, then? Leaving them to stew in their own blood and juice and squalor for another twenty-five hundred years—or another twenty-five thousand?"

	Gay Firestone rose rigidly out of the bucket seat. "Carl, had Ishtock had a chance to teach any of the others?"

	Carl shook himself rather than his head. "I don't know; I was going to see him. I was too far away to do anything; by the time I got there it was too late to do anything. The Paradans just melted away from around me, as usual. I started running as soon as I heard the shot—Ishtock used the gun once, anyway—but the whole thing was over before I got close enough to be able to use the neurodamper. Ishtock was lying there in that filthy sewer they call a street, with the local equivalent of flies at him already.

	"There wasn't one single thing I could do but turn around and come back here. I couldn't even bury the poor guy. The one guy in that stinking town who showed some signs of trying to learn something new. What'll we do?"

	Gay Firestone's face retained the professionally trained calm of the psychophysician, but her eyes were deeply angry. "No problem is without a solution; we just haven't found it yet. We'll train someone else. Someone the Duke can't or won't kill until he's trained someone else. If we can't work with honest men of this culture, we'll see if we can find some bandits or the like; they will at least know how to protect themselves against the Duke while they get started.

	"The important thing is to introduce into this rotten feudalism some force that will make the society respect the individual—whether they like him or not. When a society is itself insane, then those rated criminal or insane within it must include some who are truly sane, like Ishtock. In a society so given to murder and 'off with his head,' a bandit is better adjusted to the realities than a scholar like Ishtock."

	"They're at least rebelling against the stasis of the place," Carl agreed. "But I don't know of any bandits—except the neighboring Duke and his henchmen. And they're just as thickheaded as this Duke Stonehill here!"

	He looked out at the town again. From the bubble dome of the control cabin of the little interstellar exploration ship, the view was excellent. Parado's sun was an enormously intense blue-white giant and very remote—but the light it cast here had the brilliant, pinpoint harshness that brought out in pitiless detail the squalor of the town. The local vegetation ran to yellows and oranges, rather than to greens and reds; around the bald, rocky hill on which the castle squatted, the fields sloped away in gentle swales.

	The castle had been built, originally, of fitted basaltic rock, a dense, black stone. But that had been nearly two thousand years ago—nearly five of this planet's long years. Since then repairs had been made, and the castle walls were a crazy mixture of granites, different-hued basalts, flints, and assorted field-stones. Lichens, mosses, and algaelike things that grew in the slops casually dumped down its walls had stained them purple and orange and streaky rust and a virulent green. The place looked diseased—and probably was.

	The town itself was equally uncared for; it slumped on the hill, rather than lying on it. Its crazy streets wandered around houses and buildings without plan. There were mud-and-thatch huts, and wooden buildings, and a few stone quasi-mansions. Some were almost new, with startling chalk-white patches of new lumber mixed with the salvaged bones of predecessors that had collapsed.

	The whole five-man crew of the Seeker could smell the stench of the place in memory. The alien biochemistry of the Paradan humanoids made some difference—but rotting garbage and sewage are a stench in any race's terms.

	"We can not lift them out of that rut by main strength or patience; we can't stay here that long," Wainwright said angrily. "They've got to learn themselves!"

	"And at this stage of development," Gay replied, "the whole direction of their culture is toward suppression of any new learning—and the inviolable maintenance of everything that's old. Including things like today's murder and the idea that the serf or commoner is somewhat less valuable to the noble than is a domesticated animal."

	"It looks like there are no bandits around," Blackie Turner scratched his head thoughtfully, "because a successful bandit is called a Duke or something, and an unsuccessful one is dead. So ... what do we do?"

	A highly complex, mixed expression was growing on Carl Seaman's face, compounded partly of dawning conviction, partly of diabolic intent. "I think I've got it! We've got to teach somebody whom the Duke won't or can't kill, and who will learn. Well, the old tyrant has three sons and seven daughters. Number One is, of course, all set to become the next Duke; Number Three is bound for the priesthood. But Number Two, having been kicked out of the temple for misbehavior, having been cursed out by the priest, and being ineligible for the succession, is currently engaged in being a Grade A hellion.

	"He's mean and ornery and no good—but he's smart. He's technically a sort of captain of a crew of men, the local guardsmen. The Duke, damn him, won't kill this boy out of hand; the kid is wild, but he's smart ... and he'd just love to set up as a bandit on his own!"

	"He won't teach anybody," Bowman sighed. "He'll keep it as his own trade secret—the secret-weapon idea will appeal mightily to him.

	"And I still believe you've got the Duke placed wrong."

	Blackie Turner exploded a short, hard sound from his chest. "Dammit, Bull, you're as bad as the Duke. Politicians have, age after age, reported how 'it can't be done,' and kept other people from even trying it! Now what do you suggest, for God's sake?"

	Bowman looked around the group of angry faces. "The thing you are not showing ... patience. You can't change a culture in a day; we have no authority to do any such thing anyway. We're here to observe, to gather data, and the fact that there was a planet here at all is purely an accident. We aren't even supposed to have landed. We're not getting the data that we were sent to get—we're supposed to be studying that sun—and Wake effects."

	"I've got all the data I can get on the Wake," Wainwright snapped. "Mulling the same readings over for twenty-five hundred years isn't the usual scientific procedure. There's a Wake here all right; Carl and I have also gathered all the data on the star that we can. We're now gathering data on the planetary system."

	"In your technical field, I acknowledge your competence and judgment. But none of us is competent as a cultural engineer; Gay is a psychophysician and has done a lot of studying in sociology—such as we have. But she is not an authority on the subject, even in the limited terms of what we know as the subject. Actually, our sociology is extremely limited. This is only the second time that Bureau of Exploration ships have found intelligent aliens—and the first people they found were barely able to use fire.

	"Carl, you're an astrophysicist. How much astrophysics would we have if we'd studied only our own sun and never seen any other star?"

	"Bull, you remind me painfully of the Duke. If we don't do something now, it may be half a century before any other expedition gets out here. How can we do something? Not how can we get tangled up in higher authority, red tape, political maneuverings, and general buck-passing." Gay turned decisively and coldly away from Bowman, and continued to Carl Seaman.

	"Carl, can you teach Second Stonehill? Will he learn?"

	"He's a crazy kid; in some ways he'll be easier than Ishtock and in some ways, of course, a lot harder. The language difficulty remains. I can't explain the whole science of chemistry, because they don't have the faintest beginnings of the idea. They have magic potions, which is about as close as they come. So, we teach him to make a magic potion that goes boom. Blackie Magic," he grinned toward Blackie Turner, the ship's biochemist who'd worked out a rudimentary technique for producing a highly unreliable but usable gunpowder from the local materials.

	Bowman turned to look out the bubble dome. The Paradan equivalent of a horse, tiny in the distance, was dragging a corpse out of the squalid town. Ishtock, no doubt.

	"We'll have difficulty reaching Second Stonehill at first," said Gay carefully. "We'll have to plan something; nobody in the town will have anything to do with us. They'll probably be even more skittish now that Ishtock's been killed.

	"It's the old, old business of 'The Gods forbid it; if you do it, you will have bad luck, and the Gods will punish.' Then when somebody does do the tabooed, the tribe punishes the taboo-breaker, and they say to each other, 'See, it is even as the authorities said. He broke the taboo, and see what bad luck he had. Proves the taboo is right.'

	"Well, the Duke has proven the taboo is right." 

	Bowman turned quietly and went down the companionway. The lock door cycled, and presently they saw him walking off across the plain toward the town.

	Carl looked after him suspiciously. "Now what's that damned politician going to do?"

	"Oh, forget him," Wainwright snapped. "He won't do anything; he doesn't have Higher Authorization to do it."

	"Hal, the guy isn't stupid. He's worked out some sort of pidgin language with these people; I can't make heads or tails of his talk with them—it isn't Paradan, or anything else—but they apparently can."

	"He's probably busy studying their politics. The one thing that bothers him is that we don't give a damn that his uncle is the political head of the Exploration Bureau. Since none of us will ever go on an expedition again, to hell with him. Let's get to work.

	"Gay, what would that young Second want? What bait can we offer? And doesn't he have a name other than 'Second'?" Wainright asked.

	"His local name is Blu't. It means 'second,' however, and is pretty much of a title rather than a name. There's a hierarchy system; the Duke, then the First of Stonehill Castle-town, then Second, of course, and finally Third of Stonehill. If they have other names, we haven't gotten 'em. The daughters, of course, and the Duke's five wives, don't count in their society," Gay said with suppressed anger. "One of the basic faults with this civilization is that the women have no voice in affairs; it's just another aspect of suppression of the individual. They won't have a sound society until there is sexual equality."

	Carl stirred somewhat uneasily. "But what can we use for baiting Second? That's the immediate problem." Privately, he was somewhat unsure of Gay's good judgment on that particular subject—particularly in view of the fact that the Paradan humanoids had, as Gay well knew, a two-to-one ratio of female to male births. Polygamy, which Gay violently hated, was something that would be a little difficult to eliminate—unless half of all female babies were slaughtered at birth.

	"Blackie, maybe you could answer that better? Psychological bait works only after contact has somehow been established. Can we make some jewels?" Gay asked.

	"Hmmm. That's a thought! Those we found locally included diamonds, which we can't make, but also rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. A little impure fused alumina—a little cutting on the mineralogical polishing bench ... you're right, Gay! I go to counterfeit some jewels!" Blackie grinned widely and rubbed his hands. His heavy black eyebrows and round, full face contrasted oddly with each other, and with the diabolic gleam of plotting as he started for the after part of the ship. "Rubies, emeralds, sapphires ... coming right up! Have a king's ransom for you in half an hour!"

	Gay smiled tightly. "Now there's a move Bull Bowman could understand ... old-fashioned bribery!"

-

	The Duke of Stonehill was, in more accurate translation, "The Defender of the People of Stonehill." He was a broad, stocky man, past the middle of his people's life span, which averaged about one eighth of Parado's long year. The quasi-hair, quasi-feathering on his round head was gray, and broken by scars in two places. The dense, hard leather of the Paradan armor helmets was not always quite adequate to turn the blow of a heavy sword; the helmet, which at the moment jogged at the side of the saddle of his horselike mount, bore a strong resemblance to a crudely stitched crash helmet. An affair somewhat resembling a split stovepipe could be attached to the shoulders of his armor, and the helmet sat firmly on that when the Duke was in full battle array.

	His face was heavy and immobile, deeply furrowed, with tiny creases around the gray-black eyes. He rode his mount easily and alertly. Though well along in life, his body was hard and muscular; the young guardsmen who rode along behind him seemed no straighter than he. He was a hard master, a vigorous and alert master—and master, also, of himself.

	The stench of open sewers, slops spilled in the dirty streets, and thoroughly unwashed people did not bother him; an efficient living entity learns to detect and react to the unexpected. The known and expected can be ignored. The common citizens of Stonehill-town drew aside respectfully, holding their hands together above their heads in salute as the Duke rode by.

	The Duke looked straight ahead, his eyes alone betraying to the most observant that he was a deeply worried man. His craggy face and rigidly erect body were seemingly those of a determined and fearless warrior, sure and experienced, who knew where he was going and what he would do when he got there.

	Down the twisting street the little retinue went, to stop before the Temple. The Duke's hand went up, swept horizontally, and crisply pointed directly downward. The guardsmen, without a word, spread out in front of the Temple, dismounted, and stood to their mounts.

	The Duke dismounted and, alone, entered the worn gray granite building. Just within the doorway he halted, laid aside the ceremonial dagger and the efficient sword he wore, stood silently for a moment with bowed head, then put his hands together above his head and stood erect. "I would seek the favor of a word with you, oh my Mother's Older Brother!" he said softly.

	"Enter, then, my Nephew," the hidden priest answered.

	The Duke walked forward, pushed aside a hanging drape, and entered a second room. Dim light entered through slabs of an alabaster-like stone, cut and polished to translucent thinness. The Duke, stopping for a moment, leaned down and rested his hands in deep depressions worn by the friction of the hands of worshipers of two thousand years. The hard granite was hollowed out four inches deep; so it had been for all the Duke's life—so, therefore, it must always have been, and so must it always be. These things, like the stars, never changed; and from Parado's surface, the stars did not change in all a man's lifetime. There was no procession of the equinox that they could experience; their year was too long.

	The Duke stood again and entered the priest's inner chamber. The man who stood to greet him was clothed in a simple pair of white shorts; his head was frosted with sparse growth. The eyes were old but keenly alert.

	The Duke stood straight, with his hands together above his head. "I salute you, Protector of the Wisdoms."

	The priest duplicated the gesture of greeting and said, "I salute you, Defender of the People." His thin old arms came down and he gestured to the Duke to be seated on one of the mats on the stone floor. "How may Wisdom serve you?"

	The Duke seated himself and looked at the old priest for some moments in troubled silence. "I am afraid, Uncle, for none of the Laws or the Customs I know can help me and I do not think that there is Wisdom that can help me.

	"Today I ended the work of Ishtock, the Smith." The Duke reached into a pouch at his side and produced a crudely forged single-barreled, single-shot flintlock pistol. "He had made a thing which was not a thing-to-be-made. It is not a thing which is a not-to-be-made, according to any Law or Custom. But it seems to me that this should be a thing-not-to-be-made, and because he made a thing which was not within any classification of Law or Custom, and without consultation with you, Uncle, or with me, I ended his work.

	"Now I ask for Wisdom's help."

	The priest looked at the crude pistol. "What is this thing?"

	"Ishtock was shown the making of it by the Star People. There is a potion they taught him, which is Star Fire. Some of this potion is put in the hole; a small lump of lead wrapped in grease-smeared cloth is pushed in on top. When this device is worked, the Star Fire potion coughs most loudly and expels the leaden lump. The lump is hurled farther than my strongest bowman can send a shaft. It can penetrate the strongest armor. This is a thing I do not like, but I do not find that there is either Law or Custom that forbids it."

	The old philosopher-priest turned it over in his hands silently for some time. The Duke waited quietly as the old man thought about this strange and difficult problem. Finally the Uncle sighed and lifted his head decisively.

	"This, I think, is a thing-not-to-be-made, and these are my reasons for so holding. Consider them, Nephew, and if I be wrong, help me find Wisdom, for Wisdom is not the possession of one." There was a slight slurring to the cadence as he spoke the last sentence, the mechanical tone of repeating an old and familiar invocation. Silently the Duke nodded.

	"This is a thing unlike the things our own people use; this is a very strange and difficult idea we must consider, one I find very hard to speak about, even in words we know. This is a thing-that-does-things; it is not a thing-that-is. It is not like a sword, or a bow, or a hammer or a saw; those are tools that men well skilled and well trained can use. A man who has patience, and values and respects his efforts and the work which is his life, can devote time and effort to practice and learn to use well the tools he lives with. A man who is lazy, or unwilling to spend hours in practice, cannot use those tools well.

	"But this is a strange thing; a fool, a child, a lout who does not respect his own efforts and work, and hence has no respect for the worth of one who has expended effort and time in learning to accomplish, can use this thing. This is a strange device that has skill and strength built into it; an infant can pull this bow to destroy the strongest and wisest man. Here is strength a man need not earn, so that men lose respect for strength and the effort of gaining skill and power.

	"Here is strength gained without self-discipline, self-training, and self-control.

	"But here, also—and this troubles me—is an idea I have never before encountered. It is not in this thing itself but what lies behind it and beyond it. It is the idea of"—the old man shook his head, as though to clear it—"I cannot clearly say it, and I'm not sure I have an idea or a delusion. But the idea occurs to me, seeing this and considering it, of things that do actions without there being thought. These have never before seemed separable; now I wonder. It is very hard to say."

	For a man whose thinking was in a language almost totally lacking in the words to express this new meaning, who had never before encountered anything vaguely approximating his concept, the old Uncle was doing very well indeed. Vaguely, he had found the root concept that lay behind the robot, the self-guiding and self-controlling ship, the automatic lathe: that doing can be separate from knowing-understanding; that a machine can exist that is more than a tool, but is a tool-that-uses-tools.

	The Duke looked troubled and uncertain, and respectful. The situation was one that primitive people know well and have learned to live with. There are mysteries in their cosmos; there are things that are, and cannot be understood and so must be feared—but such people live with fear and are not shaken. Death is a mystery they must live with and accept as a personal end. Storms and fire are mysteries; one lives with them, accepting their existence, and accepting one's own ignorance.

	So the Duke accepted that the old philosopher-priest saw here a mystery which he himself did not see. For him, the pistol was a weapon; the implication of machines and machine-concepts he did not see. In the society of his people he did not need to. The philosopher-priest did not need to meet in battle with the attackers with weapons, and he did not need to battle with ideas.

	The old Uncle shook himself again. "I think that idea is real, and I think it can be made to be a good and wise idea. But this thing is not the way.

	"So I hold that this is a thing-not-to-be-made.

	"You did well in ending Ishtock's work."

	The Duke nodded slowly. "Ishtock was a good man and a worthy workman. It is the Star People who corrupted him."

	The old Uncle rose to his feet and began to pace slowly back and forth, his head bowed, and his hands knit together behind his back. "That is the major problem, my Nephew. Properly, it is my problem, not yours—but now we must acknowledge that it is ours, for this is a very great problem indeed.

	"God is necessary to all peoples of intelligence; God is All-Truth, and therefore there is and there can be but one God in all the universe. I now know that until these Star People came, I had no notion of the extent of that universe—yet the fundamentals apply. There is and can be but one All-Truth. But God has many names and many attributes; each people will know some of His attributes, and some of His Names. We are greater than the animals, for we know more of His attributes. The Star People are in some respects greater than we—but in some respects they are, clearly, less than we. Had they been aware of all the attributes of All-Truth we know, they would not have corrupted Ishtock, for that was an evil thing.

	"My Nephew," the old philosopher stopped his pacing and looked directly at the Duke, "I cannot give you an answer now. I do not understand the attributes of All-Truth they understand or what they believe. Until I do, I cannot give you Wisdom with which to work. Therefore, there is only the Wisdom that it is never wise to act without plan; action cannot be undone—but plans can be remade.

	"Since you have ended the work of Ishtock, others of the people will not be willing to listen easily to the Star People. We have some time for study.

	"The only danger of too hasty action lies with those of Stonehill-town who have no respect for Custom and Law and Wisdom." The old Uncle looked levelly into the Duke's eyes.

	The Duke stirred uneasily and dropped his eyes to the stone flooring. "I am not always wise, oh my Mother's Older Brother," he said hesitantly. "Second is a very great problem to me. There is a good mind there, but a wildness I cannot understand. If he will but be patient, in a few more periods he will be a good man."

	"I have agreed with you on this, my Nephew—but we are now in a season where the pressure of a rising storm makes patience a thing to be studied and watched most carefully."

	The Duke remained silent for a moment. "Very well, Uncle. I serve the people and the Wisdom.

	"Now, there is one other thing. There is one of the Star People who troubles me greatly, more than the others, for there is about him a mystery. This is the one who, I am told, is called by a name meaning Bow-man. The children call him 'He who speaks strangely,' and he has talked almost solely with the children. Yet this is the strange thing; no one seems able to fear him or to be angered at him. He ... is different."

	"He is a very powerful man," said the old priest musingly.

	The Duke shrugged. "His other name, I am told, means 'Bull,' and he is stronger than any bull. The first day he was here, one of the Star People wanted a strathul bush for some reason—the tall, round-faced, black-haired one. Bow-man plucked it for him."

	The old philosopher started. "Plucked a strathul bush!" 

	The strathul bush was proverbial on Parado; Blackie Turner had had no idea what he was asking for. The bush was equipped with a root system that penetrated some six to eight feet, spreading in thousands of individual, wire-tough rootlets; it was Parado's epitomization of stubborn, tenacious, and immovable anchoring.

	The Duke brushed his hand through the air, as though waving away gnats or cobwebs. "That is unimportant; the others have weapons that make physical strength have no meaning. That is not the power I fear; it is a different kind of thing."

	The Uncle seated himself again, and was very still for a moment, eyes closed, gently rocking himself, while the Duke, too, remained silent and watchful.

	Finally the old priest shook himself and appeared to waken. He looked intensely uneasy. "He is powerful, and he is different. I ... cannot feel his life-being. But I ken that he will come here to me, when he is ready—and that somehow we need not fear him, or his power. Nor can we look for help from him.

	"I must think and study, my Nephew. Go in Wisdom," the old priest said gently.

-

	Carl Seaman slumped into the bucket seat with a weary sigh, grinned, and shook his head. He rubbed vigorously at the pressure marks where his respirator had pressed against the skin of head and face. "That's worse than working out a ten-place solution of a five-body problem in phase-space," he yawned. "But we're getting somewhere, I guess."

	"Can I help any, Carl?" Wainwright gave him a long, steady look. "You look pretty beat, and I've gone about as far on the field problems here as I can without your help. We've got to get this job done, too."

	Carl groaned and looked at Gay. The psychophysician shook her head and sighed too. "No one can help him, Hal. These primitives here have a powerful xenophobia, and one of us is all they can stand at once, if they are to maintain any concentration. God knows Second hasn't much of that ability to spare, and Carl's the one who's a somewhat familiar face."

	Carl accepted a drink Blackie Turner had prepared, sipped it, and looked up at Gay suddenly. "The one who could help won't. I'll be damned if I know how Bowman overcomes that xenophobia, but he does somehow. When I left, he was still sitting on a rock, with a dozen kids watching him from a slight, but not too darned great, distance. Did you know he was a sculptor?"

	"Sculptor?" said Blackie in surprise. "I didn't know he could do anything with his hands."

	Carl grinned. "Son of a gun's carving little toys out of chunks of the local wood. Had a clever little gimmick, too— that's what's got the kids. A little horse with its four legs hung on piece of wire in such a way that when you put it on a sloping board, it walks downhill! A clown on a hemisphere so it always rights itself seems to be new here."

	"He would know how to kiss the babies," said Gay bitingly. "But he wouldn't help on anything serious without Higher Authorization."

	Wainwright looked thoughtfully at Gay for a moment. "You know, we ought to admit that he does seem to understand how to deal with these people."

	"Certainly; if you accept everything they say, and agree with them and don't try to teach them anything at all, but simply pamper them, you can get along with anybody. That's routine treatment for extremely disturbed patients—sedation and agreement. So long as you let them stay in their fantasy world, they don't mind your presence; it's only when you try to make them face the real world that they become hard to deal with."

	"There, my dear woman, you hit the target dead-center," said Carl feelingly. "Second wants magic; nothing but magic, and no nonsense about having to do something physical. He wants the magic wand that makes magic wands. He wants the incantation that makes jewels, and the incantation that makes gunpowder. The violence of his resentment at having to do something physical allows me to guarantee for sure and certain that he will indeed teach someone else.

	"You have no idea how deeply he resents the discovery that there's work in magic, even."

	Gay nodded wearily. "I know ... it's a characteristic of the feudal culture. The noble accomplishes everything with a mere "Let it be done!' order—slaves and serfs are the oldest kind of magic intelligent beings know of. That's why magic always has to do with demons and gods and spirits ... there has to be some slave to do the process. It wouldn't be magic if the magician had to do anything himself.

	"The feudal noble is the closest approach to being a magician-in-fact that has been invented yet. No wonder Second doesn't like science!"

	"He's the most hopeless, stubborn, noncooperative student I ever tried to teach—and in an alien, inadequate language at that," Carl complained bitterly. "In a language and concept system that doesn't have a word for 'truth' as we know it, and to whom 'natural law' has a completely wrong meaning. It means, approximately, 'the decree of the gods,' because 'law' means 'according to custom, usage, and decrees of the nobility.' So he insists that if I were a real magician, I'd get the gods to change the decree and thus avoid all that messy work with dunghills."

	Blackie Turner handed Carl a fresh-mixed drink and frowned slightly. "I can give you a culture of that nitrate-fixing bacteria, and he can use ordinary food scraps."

	Gay shook her head. "No difference—it's still work. That's what he objects to. And if we did that, the fool would lose the culture, sure as fate, and have no way left to get his nitrates."

	Carl sipped the drink, leaned back, and said judiciously, "I would describe Second, if I were back at the university, as a student lacking in manners, good sense, desire to learn, desire to cooperate, ability to apply his intelligence, and several other abilities essential to successful living. I'd also describe him, more privately, as a brat who should be killed out of hand for the benefit of my soul and the surrounding populace. I hate him most cordially. Since he discovered I work for my magic, he has reclassified me as a sort of slightly higher-level slave or serf and treats me accordingly."

	Turner nodded. "I've had students of that general nature. The only ones who feel they shouldn't be extinguished quietly, quickly, and conveniently are their doting parents and the police. The combination happens to be precisely what we need here—his father is both the doting parent, though I don't quite know how he manages it, and the local police. Second's the best student in all Stonehill, consequently."

	"Well," Carl paused for a heavy pull at the glass, "I intend to keep at it. But I can't do my proper work here while I'm working with him. I suffer from acute brain weariness. Dull and resistant students are bad enough but when working in an alien and utterly inadequate language, totally lacking in the necessary terms ..." He shook his head, and turned to Wainwright.

	"How's it going, Hal? Any preliminary results?"

	Wainwright picked up a batch of computer tapes and nodded silently as he handed them to Carl. "Need your higher math though, old man. Those are approximations, assuming simple monocurved space so I could reduce it to something I could handle."

	Carl scanned the tapes rapidly. His eyebrow shot up, then down. He looked up at Hal Wainwright. "Hit a Wake, didn't we?"

	Wainwright nodded. "Nice one, too. Hit it on a long tangent, and got plenty-good readings on it. We might even learn something from the damn thing."

	Blackie put down his drink and asked, "What's with this 'Wake' business? I've heard about it generally, but how about you experts giving with information?"

	Wainwright pointed at the tapes. "That's about all we know about it. Symbols of a something. We haven't spread the word too much, because it's a sort of futile process to discuss it. When we first got hyperlight drive, about fifty years ago, we discovered that the passage of a ship at hyperlight speed created a wake phenomonon in space. It takes a discussion in terms of nonenumerable phase-spaces to make the thing even partly clear, so let's let that ride. It does a something; the something in turn causes atoms in ordinary space to start moving. The result is a burst of cosmic rays, among a number of other things.

	"We later discovered that some cosmic rays are natural—but that some are hyperlight shipwakes.

	"Study of our own shipwakes gave us some math on the characteristic phenomena. And when we started pushing out from home a bit, various ships hit some Wakes—with a capital letter—which are now known as the Wakes of the Wake-makers.

	"The one we hit coming over here shows the typical phenomena. We can calculate the approximate age of a Wake—plus or minus about ten per cent. The ones found so far have ranged from about one hundred twenty thousand years to about sixty thousand years old. None newer than that.

	"Now this bit we could understand and duplicate. The bothersome thing is the magnitude of the Wakes. They show a fairly constant factor of ten to the two-fifty-sixth or -seventh. That magnitude factor is a complex product of ship speed and ship mass.

	"And that order of magnitude means either that a ship of about ten million tons mass crossed at such a speed as to go from one end of the galaxy to the other in about 0.3 seconds—or someone's been shifting planets around."

	"Planets?" said Gay with a slight start.

	"Planets," repeated Carl. "You know—worlds for people to live on. Very nice engineering job, too—the speed factor even then indicates something we haven't hit yet. Say three days to two weeks to cross the galaxy from end to end."

	"But—but why would anybody move planets?"

	Carl gestured out the bubble port. "I don't like that light—and you know what it does to your skin if you don't wear protective dye. Let's move Parado to a sun more like our own, where we'll be more comfortable, huh?"

	"I didn't know it was quite that bad," Blackie said somewhat shakily. "Somebody really got here ahead of us. What happens if we meet them?"

	"The Wake-makers?" Wainwright put the computer tapes down with elaborate gentleness. "We start saying, Yes, Mr. God. Certainly, Mr. God.'"

	Gay Firestone shook herself slightly and said in a recalling-from-memory tone, "The rate of development of a cultural system is exponential, with strong indications that there is an exponential-exponent involved. My God. A hundred and twenty thousand years ago, they were moving planets?"

	"And sixty thousand years ago—they stopped." Wainwright nodded. "Wars that killed them off? Degeneration? Decay and senescence of the race? But no Wake less than sixty thousand years old has been encountered. Something stopped them; all we have to do is find their ruins."

	"Maybe," said Blackie, "but maybe they found a better way of doing things. Maybe they don't move planets any more. If I knew enough biology, I might find it more satisfying to be able to adapt myself to any planetary system I encountered. I might find that more stimulating, like vacationing in the North when you live in the tropics, and in the tropics when you live in the North. Then there wouldn't be any planet Wakes."

	Carl looked at Turner for a moment. Finally he said, "You, sir, are a nasty man, and I don't like your ideas. They've been safely gone for sixty thousand years, and let's leave 'em that way.

	"No," said Gay Firestone sharply. "Culturally impossible, psychologically impossible. The entire development of higher forms is in the direction of learning to control their environment, to make it adaptable to their needs. Only lower life forms adapt to their environment. Lower mammals, in the arctic, develop extra-warm fur; man develops central heating and uses detachable furs.

	"If they did as Blackie suggests, then they must have resigned their effort to control the environment; they were starting down the road of degeneration. It would, in fact, lead inevitably to conflicts within the race, because of progressive and massive subgroup differentiations. There would rapidly develop intragroup hatreds, tearing the race apart and almost certainly leading to annihilation by mutual strife." Gay smiled triumphantly.

	Blackie considered the point, while Carl and Wainwright watched interestedly. "I guess that does make sense, Gay. But it's still possible they found a better means of moving planets than any we can guess at now."

	Wainwright shrugged. "Yes—and maybe they found time-travel or how to live on an electron, using it as a world, or maybe they turned into pure intelligence without body, and maybe they developed a mutant that could live on a star, or maybe ... There's always an unlimited number of maybe's available. The evidence is, they aren't around."

	The lock mechanism started cycling. "Bull," said Carl irritatedly. "Let's go get ready for dinner. I want to wash the stink off—the guy can cook."

	Duke Stonehill strode stiffly down the stone-walled corridor. The blue-white, harshly brilliant light of the sun made sharp-lined patterns on the dusty-dark stone of the floor; the corridor echoed to the thud of his feet and those of the three men accompanying him.

	He turned sharply before a massive, iron-studded, wooden door, made three quick hand gestures to the men, and rapped sharply on the door.

	A tall young guardsman opened to his knock, saluted briefly, and said formally, "The Defender is always welcome. What service may I give you?"

	"Where is Second, Lieutenant?"

	The guardsman stepped aside. "If you will enter, my lord ..."

	The Duke strode in, with a sharp hand signal to his men to remain at their posts outside the door. To the guardsman who had admitted him he said, "I thank you, Lieutenant. Notify Second that I wish to speak with him alone."

	Thirty seconds later, Second stepped into the room, while the lieutenant remained in an adjoining room. "Yes, my lord?" said Second. His tone was insolent, and his ambling walk equally an insult. He was a tall, thin, bitter-faced young man, his basically good face tautened into a built-in sneer. His costume of shorts and embroidered crimson jacket was decorated with the customary ceremonial dagger—and a quite uncustomary twin holster.

	The Duke's lips compressed further. "You have at your waist, my son, certain devices which have been declared things-not-to-be-made. You have had dealings with certain of the Star People. This was expressly forbidden to all of the Defender's Household, so that the people of Stonehill might know it was deemed unwise by the Preservers of the Laws, although no Custom or Law existed concerning the matter.

	"You are, therefore, in violation of the Laws, the Customs, and military orders.

	"What have you to say for yourself?"

	Second looked at his father angrily, shrugged his shoulders, and half laughed. "There is no Custom forbidding contact with such as the Star People, but there is a Custom that holds that a noble seek to gain what Wisdom he can. So I found they had some—very useful Wisdom, too."

	"My son," said the Duke levelly, "you are a fool, and a braggart fool at that. You do not know Wisdom, but only impatience. You are a child and do not know it. I am a child and do know it. Most assuredly the Star People have Wisdom— they have Wisdom that would, no doubt, burst that obstinate skull of yours if it were poured into it. You, however, are incapable of recognizing your own incompetence to absorb or understand that Wisdom; you are a vain and stupid child— and the people of the starship are stupid children also, for all their Wisdom."

	Second's face was gradually mottling with rising, rebellious rage. "You call them stupid!"

	"Certainly. They, too, are young. A baby is one of the stupidest creatures on all Parado—however great its Wisdom may be when it grows. They are young, and their understandings are full of the impatience of youth—as are yours.

	"Now hearken, for I speak," the Duke's voice took on the customary roll and cadence of the official Defender's pronouncements, "I, the Defender of the People, do strip you of your rank of Captain of the Guards for a period of four months.

	"You will spend these four months with the Uncle at the Temple, joining Third in his studies.

	"Before you are turned over to him, I shall administer twenty lashes for your breach of military orders.

	"I have determined that none of your guardsmen accompanied you to the Star People, and they shall not, therefore, be punished.

	"Do you hear and acknowledge?"

	Second's face was knotted with bursting anger, his body trembling with violence. "I hear and acknowledge—you bull-headed old fool! You stubborn old protector of outworn customs and ancient rules! You would not learn, you would not look on any new thing for fear one of your precious customs might be found wrong!

	"Well, I will. I have! Twenty lashes? Try, you stupid relic of the past! Try!" Second snatched the pistols from his holsters and laughed—or sobbed—at his father. "Look! These are new things, things that don't exist in the Customs. But they're faster and more powerful than any bow. See if your customs can stop them!

	"Customs! Rules! The Laws! Because First by some quirk of fate was born sooner, he is to be Duke after you—he who is a scroll-grubbing student, and practices with sword and bow and armor with all the enthusiasm of an ox pulling a plow. First, who has no juice in his bones, no blood in his veins, and no joy in his soul—and no courage in his heart! Because Custom decrees it, he who has not one thing that makes a man would be Duke, while I would be ... what?

	"No, thanks to the Star People, and some ingenuity of my own, that won't happen. Stop! If you move again, you are a dead man!"

	The Duke took another step forward, quite calmly. "You cannot be permitted to complete your work; you are more than the fool I thought. You are a Twisted.

	"There is no weapon that has mind of its own, to direct itself to kill enemies and preserve friends; that is for the skilled and trained mind of a man. I know you, Second; you would not have the patience to learn the handling of any weapon well. You cannot use those Star Weapons."

	The Duke strode steadily forward. Second's left-hand pistol roared. The Duke barely started and walked into the cloud of gray-black smoke as the second pistol roared. He staggered back a half-step, his face grimaced, and he came on again. The ball had passed through the flesh of his right arm.

	Second's face became gradually blank and white as his magic weapons failed him. Then with a shriek of rage and desperation he drew his dagger and hurled himself at the Duke.

	The Duke did not bother to draw his. Four quick movements of his highly trained and thoroughly experienced body were adequate. The dagger flew from Second's broken hand; Second himself spun, half falling, past the older man—and dropped to twitch only slightly, his neck broken by a powerful chopping blow from the Duke's heavily muscled left forearm.

	The Duke straightened slowly with bitter eyes. He pulled a rolled strip of white cloth from a pouch at his waist and skillfully bandaged the bleeding slash in his right arm. That done, he looked once more at his dead son, and called out, "Lieutenant!"

	The white-faced guardsman came from the adjoining room. "My lord?"

	"Second was executed for betrayal of the Customs and for disobedience of military orders. You will arrange for the proper disposal of his body and begin preparations for a nonmilitary funeral.

	"Lieutenant Smith's-son will be your new captain; I shall notify him at once.

	"If there is any need to consult me, wait my return; I must go to the Temple.

	"Do you hear and acknowledge?"

	"I hear and acknowledge, my lord." The lieutenant saluted hesitantly.

	The Duke nodded curtly, turned, and left the room. Quick hand signals picked up the men who had awaited him in drawn-faced silence. Behind him, the young guardsman, shuddering slightly, looked down at the still faintly smoking pistols on the floor, then toward the corridor where the retreating footsteps of the Duke echoed firmly as he marched toward the castle courtyard.

	Another young guardsman slipped into the room. "They— they didn't work?" he asked, shaken.

	The lieutenant shook his head. "They worked—but not against a man like our Defender. He walked right into that demon-smoke, and the awful things did no more than scratch him." He looked down at the pistols. He was silent for a minute or two. Then he picked them up carelessly and threw them into a corner of the room. "I guess there's no magic weapon that can meet a real man's courage.

	"Help me move him to the couch in the room there."

	The old priest met the Duke in the fountain room this time. "I greet you, my Nephew, and I sorrow with you," he said.

	The Duke bowed his head slightly. "I thank you, Uncle, but it is not in mourning I have come. For mourning I have no time." He did not ask how the priest knew of Second's death. " 'The dead we do not mourn while the sword is swinging'," he quoted. "There is a problem beyond that of Second."

	"Come with me, my Nephew." The old priest led him into the inner room and gestured to him to seat himself on the cushions. "The problem of the Star People is not so simple as the attacks of Duke Bluelake or Duke Stonebridge. Here we have no Customs, no Laws, no Rules."

	The Duke rested his forehead in his hands and rocked slowly from side to side, seated tailor-fashion on the cushions. "They have a feel of being children, Uncle. I do not know, now, whether they are vicious and twisted children, as Second was—what twisted him, my Uncle? What twisted him, oh God?—or whether they are good children, playing with people as our children play with toys. They are smart, they are immensely smarter than we are. Yet they are not wise, Uncle. And they have such mighty magic! How can they be so unwise and yet in some ways so supernally wise? How many life-works of wisdom-search must it have taken to devise so much as the door of that starship, the door that closes itself with a humming whisper, and no man's hand on it?

	"Yet the best they see is to destroy the life-works of a thousand generations! Why, Uncle, why?"

	The old man shook his head slowly. "I am not God, my Nephew, and I do not know all of God's attributes. I cannot understand the attributes of God they worship, and so I cannot reach them in that way. I have tried; that you know.

	"There is no problem that does not have a solution; some are known only to God, however. This problem, though, you and I, who are not God, must solve. And we must do it in a human way, for never can we do it in the way of things and weapons; they are immeasurably our superiors in that. We cannot do it in the way of magic; that is God's way, and for reasons we do not know, He has brought them to us.

	"But we are intelligent entities, and they are intelligent entities; there must be the path by which we reach solution.

	"If they are twisted, if they are vicious, then our case is near-hopeless—we must scatter our people and attack them howsoever we can, by night and in stealth, defying all Customs because no Custom can be trusted with the Twisted.

	"I do not think they are twisted; I think they are unwise and somewhat unheeding children, as do you. Then it is so we must meet them."

	The Duke slowly straightened. "Then that is for me to do, alone."

	The old man nodded. "If they strive themselves—and no people devises such a vehicle without a mighty effort—then they must respect striving, however blunted its effort may be. Otherwise, their own striving is a futile thing, not worthy of their own respect, of no value, and no satisfaction to them.

	"If they make valiant efforts against great danger, they must respect valiant efforts against great danger. And even they must face some danger in their incredible ship, when they sail the heavens.

	"And no man who will give his life for a cause he believes good can demean the cause of another man who will give his life for a cause he believes good."

	The Duke stood up slowly. "Uncle, is First a good man?"

	"Yes, nephew. He is sound; he knows he is not wise."

	"Good," said the Duke, tightening his belt slightly. "Then I must die."

	"Good-by, son of my well-loved sister," said the priest. 

	"Good-by, Protector of Wisdom." The Duke bowed formally, turned, and strode out of the room.

-

	"Hey, gang! Here comes the Duke and three of his men!" Blackie called from the control room. "A formal visit?"

	Wainwright and Carl Seaman came from the computer room, Gay Firestone from the communications room where she'd been working on some recordings of native speech. Bowman clattered up from the lower level where the compact machine shop was.

	"I don't like this," said Gay. "It's contrary to their Customs, and if he violates his Customs, something's happened. What should we do?"

	Blackie and Carl shrugged and answered by strapping on neurodampers and starting for the door.

	"What's up?" asked Bowman.

	"The Duke's paying a call," Wainwright nodded toward the bubble dome. "Gay says he wouldn't do that according to his Customs."

	Bowman looked out silently for a moment. "He's leaving his three men behind. Gay, do they have combat-of-champions in their local Customs?"

	"Why—yes but, but why ..."

	"Two," said Bull sourly. "Betcha we've just killed another man."

	Wainwright spun and faced him. "What do you mean, Bowman?"

	"That I have a nasty hunch the Duke is coming to settle a score. That he has now killed his son, in defense of the things he believes in-—even if you folks don't—and has come to challenge us to single combat. He wants us to move out; he wants to make it emphatic.

	"What would you do, Hal, if the Wake-makers you were talking about came in with equipment you couldn't even imagine, and you most earnestly wanted them to move out?

	"The poor old boy's really got himself a problem, with us here, and not being a field-force physicist, he has to handle it in the only terms possible to him."

	Gay was gnawing at her lip. "Hal ... he ... he may be right. We'd better do something."

	Bull sighed. "I'll go out with Carl; maybe there's something we can do. If he insists on private combat, maybe I could get him to agree to a wrestling match. Sometimes the more-muscle-than-brains business can come in handy; I'm fairly good at judo, and we might be able to settle things afterward."

	"No," snapped Wainwright. "No chances. God knows what sort of tricks they might consider good business in the mayhem-and-murder line here. We don't do things that way, and I don't think we should. But go ahead and see if you can work out something. Damn—I don't like this."

	Carl was silently standing by the lock. As Bull joined him he glanced at him with a worried and uncertain frown. "I don't either. And Bull ... I don't know what the score is, I guess. You ... hell, if you're right on this, and that's why the Duke's coming ..."

	"Stow it. We got work to do." Bowman punched the lock controls.

	Duke Stonehill stood waiting some twenty yards from the lock. His three men sat their horses, holding the Duke's mount, some fifty yards further out.

	His blocky, powerful figure remained motionless as they descended the lock ramp. Then he strode two paces forward, looked from one to the other, and spoke. "You are the one called Bow-man.

	"Hear and acknowledge! This day I have killed my son, because he became twisted through dealing with you of the Star People. He turned against me, his father, and sought to end my work, using his magic weapons.

	"Twelve days past I was forced to execute Ishtock, the smith, who was a good man and a good worker, because of the corruption of his contact with you, the Star People.

	"Therefore I, the Defender of the People of Stonehill, demand that you pay indemnity to the Temple of Stonehill, for the damages you have done, and that you leave forthwith to your proper realm of the Stars.

	"And I do declare that I shall forbid any one of the Star People entry into Stonehill or onto the . fields of Stonehill, after the rising of the next sun. Your ship must be gone!

	"The indemnity to be paid the Temple shall be settled with the Protector of Wisdom; that is not my affair.

	"If any of you seek to deny this ruling, I stand challenged!" The Duke drew his sword and held it vertically in front of him, his legs planted wide and solidly.

	"Well, Carl? Do we leave?" Bowman asked. "Do we pay indemnity?"

	"We don't leave," said Gay's voice, sharply, from the top of the ramp, "and we don't pay indemnity. We didn't kill those men; it was his bull-headed refusal to allow any progress that killed them, damn him!"

	"Defender of the People," Carl answered, "we have harmed no one; you, not we, have killed two good men.

	"By your refusal to allow us to teach anything of science to your people, you are hindering their progress. By murdering the students who did try to learn, you, not we, are causing harm!"

	"I stand challenged!" snapped the Duke. He swung the sword to horizontal position, pointed directly at Carl. "I demand satisfaction."

	"Defender, we do not fight over disagreements; we have grown beyond that, and we refuse to do so. No one of us will battle you ..."

	The Duke started forward, his sword aimed directly for the center of Carl's chest. "Hah! We shall see!"

	Suddenly his entire body jerked, his arms flying up, his body twisting in a violent paroxysm—then he fell limply to the ground. Gay holstered the neurodamper. "I'm quite accurate with these things; I had lots of practice on violent patients. He's acting like any other violent case that's been deprived of his dream world. Eventually, they learn they cannot get anywhere with violence, and start behaving."

	She ran lightly down the ramp, walked over to the Duke, and examined him briefly. "He'll be out of it in thirty minutes, if he's anything like our own people. Have his men take him home."

	Bowman picked up the fallen Duke, after thrusting his dropped sword into its scabbard, and carried him over to where the three men were standing, white-faced and restless. They grew more tense as Bowman approached.

	From the ramp, Gay and Carl watched intently, with neurodampers ready-aimed.

	"The Duke is well," Bowman explained carefully. "He has been made to sleep for a little time. In half an hour or so, he will awaken, feeling a little dazed and with a little headache. This will pass in a few hours.

	"Tell him, then, that Bow-man suggested that he has time and a chance to think again of what he does."

	Bowman carefully lifted the Duke into his saddle, as easily as though he weighed no more than a child, while two of the guardsmen lashed him to his saddle with an expertness that bespoke practice.

	Bowman waited till they rode off before turning back to the ship. At the foot of the ramp he made a slight mock bow. "Two," he repeated.

	"He's a violent-minded old pirate!" snapped Gay. "He killed his own son rather than consider any progress for his people!"

	"I've got to admit," said Carl ruefully, "that that particular son needed killing, if ever I saw one that did. But what do we do now? Give it up as a bad job?"

	"I won't be stopped by that stubborn fool." Gay spoke sharply. "He is an extreme rigidity case, utterly unable to consider his own delusional pattern. And because he has his people so cowed, we can't get any of them to do any thinking of their own."

	Bowman looked at her thoughtfully. "Er, Gay, some people can't think for themselves. They really can't. Any more than you can acknowledge that your refusal to soar off across the countryside is due to stubbornness on your part. How do you know the Paradans can think for themselves yet?"

	"Any race that can build up even a feudal culture obviously thinks!" she replied. "What in the world makes you ask such a question?"

	Bowman shrugged. "My experience, I guess. The race doesn't think, as far as I can make out; people do. Individuals. Geniuses. But geniuses have a bad tendency to think in terms of 'I am a person. I think, therefore, I exist. Other people exist, also. Therefore they think, too.'" Bowman shook his head slowly. "I think the race just knows, and only some of the individuals think. Really."

	"I can't believe that the Paradans are that stupid," Gay said stubbornly, as she turned back into the ship. "Even the Duke ought to be bright enough to know he won't get anywhere attacking us."

	Carl followed her, rubbing at his chin thoughtfully.

	"I wonder what happened between the Duke and Second? The kid had two loaded pistols, I know," Carl said as they entered the control room again.

	"How much practice had he had shooting them?" Blackie asked.

	"Hmm—that's a thought. He'd fired them about twenty times, but mostly to get used to the noise they made. If he fired while the Duke was fifty yards off ..."

	"Oh, he probably became hysterical when his father started threatening him, and shot them off in all directions," Gay plunked herself heavily on the chart table. "These Paradans either have no drive at all or turn out to be so stubbornly one-track-minded that they refuse to learn."

	"Maybe we should try teaching the Duke himself?" Bowman asked.

	"Impossible!" Gay snapped. "He has what he wants, and absolutely refuses to budge. It would take three or four years of patient humoring and gradual persuasion to get anywhere with that man."

	"Maybe if we just went back home and put in a report, a contact group could be sent out to work on a longer-term basis, and get somewhere," Bowman suggested.

	Gay Firestone was tapping her foot against the floor, her head bent back, looking up at the star-field chart set in the ceiling. "I wonder ... what we really need is a student, a young man genuinely interested in learning. I've been wondering about the Temple acolytes. If we got one who was not too deeply indoctrinated but was basically oriented toward understanding, and if we could protect him for a while ..."

	"Anybody would be a better student than Second was," Carl said, "But I hate the thought of going through that business again."

	"Maybe your ex-students did, too—but they won't be going through it again." Bowman commented. "Is there any bag-limit on this expedition, or do we just keep it up till we run out of Paradans?"

	Gay looked at him with hate in her eyes.

-

	"You know, Mr. Bowman, it occurs to me that you are the only member of this expedition who did not take the orientation tests, the only one whose personality orientation has not been tested." Gay paused a moment. "As a matter of fact, I believe that, since you graduated from college, you have never had anything but political appointment jobs."

	Bowman leaned against the door frame and shook his head slowly. "No, Dr. Firestone, that's not quite correct; there are two of us who have not had their personalities tested by the psychological examinations."

	"Two?" she snapped, standing straighter suddenly. "Who else hasn't?"

	"You, Dr. Firestone." Bowman glanced toward the three other men. "You took the examinations, of course, but you are a highly trained and highly skilled psychologist yourself. For you, who know well the methods of constructing psychological examinations, the theories behind the test structures, the tests could only test your knowledge of psychological theory—not your personality. You know too much about test structure in that field and would naturally solve the test on the basis of that knowledge.

	"Wainwright, here, when he took the tests, had to pass or fail on the basis of his personality. You simply took another test on your understanding of theory.

	"Now if Wainwright took a test of physics, he'd answer according to the theories his examiner expected him to use—even if some of his own private research had led him to original discoveries tending to disprove standard theory. You pass tests not on that-which-is-true, but on the degree to which your answers match what-the-examiners-hold-to-be-true.

	"The Duke has certain beliefs he believes to be true; you have others which exclude his. If you took an examination prepared by his people, I suspect you would get an appallingly poor mark. You'd fail the test. Whether your answers are correct-in-fact or not has very little to do with the score one makes on a test, you know."

	Gay looked at him with a complexly blended mixture of anger, surprise, confusion, embarrassment, and professional defensiveness. "You know nothing about psychological testing procedures!" she finally blurted out.

	Bowman nodded. "I know I don't, Dr. Firestone. A political career is a peculiar sort of thing—it requires a maximum willingness to admit ignorance of other people's business, and a maximum willingness to learn. Basically, a politician must rely on the votes of many people; to him, psychological theory is a very uncertain thing indeed, because it doesn't succeed in getting votes. But most politicians I've worked with seem to feel that the ultimate test of psychology is whether people actually act as the theory predicts they will.

	"My own feeling is that I know very little about psychology.

	"As to taking political appointments—yes. Since I left college, that's all I've done. It's my postgraduate work. Haven't you been working on fellowships to which you were appointed? I believe Carl and Blackie have, also.

	"Political 'fellowships' are somewhat the same, I feel."

	Blackie looked somewhat startled. "You've got a point, fella!"

	Bowman grinned. "We get beat about the ears a good bit —but we're trying to do a job of work too, you know. We're sort of sociological craftsmen. We're still flying by the seat of our pants, using rules of thumb, and making a lot of crash landings. I'm strictly an apprentice at the trade; it's my very genuine conviction of my own incompetence that makes me feel like hell about those two men who got caught in the gears of progress. I'd like someone older and more experienced to look this deal over before we get any more people hurt."

	Gay's face was set in stubborn lines. "I think we should talk this over further tomorrow. We can each think about it tonight."

	The others nodded agreement slowly. Bowman acquiesced. It was perfectly clear that Gay intended to talk to the others when Bowman was not around to interfere.

-

	But there was little opportunity for Gay or anyone else to talk it over the next day. Bowman had roused first and had been keeping a speculative eye on the fields toward Stonehill, while organizing things for the new day. Quite as he expected, Duke Stonehill and three of his men started out across the fields with the sunlight streaming long, low rays down the hillside. There was a heavy dew on the grasses, and the early-morning haze softened the usually bitingly harsh light of the distant electric-arc sun. The Duke and his men, in colorful, highly decorated armor, the leading guardsman carrying the Duke's pennon, with the ancient Castle-town in the background, made a picture-book scene.

	Bowman looked silently, his face for a moment showing strong, deep lines of sadness. He knew with immense precision what was going to happen, and he also knew precisely how to stop it, in any of several thousand ways. But he also knew—which none of the others here could—precisely why he had to refrain from stopping it. A little longer, though—just a little while now—and he could put these jobs off on someone else.

	He was aware simultaneously of the Duke and his men, of the soft sleep sounds of the crew, of the control room, and the papers where Wainwright and Seaman had been working hard on the field-force calculations. A faint smile twitched his lips as he glanced over their results. The "Wake-makers"! It was definitely a good name for them—they'd stirred up quite a few Wakes, trying to rearrange the galaxy to suit themselves.

	He sighed, amused at himself as he did so, and turned toward the companionway. "Up and out! Up and out! Boarders approaching to starboard," he called.

	The sleep sounds stopped abruptly.

	"Huh?" came from Wainwright's cabin. "Boarders?"

	"Is he back again?" called Gay's irritated voice. "I'll be out in a minute."

	"What do you mean, "boarders'?" Blackie called. He and Seaman were stirring, and Blackie's round face, sleepy-eyed and black-beard-stubbled, stock out the door.

	Wainwright was out, zipping his tunic, his eyes still slightly bleary with sleep, but rapidly becoming alert. "The Duke?" he asked. "What's he coming back for?"

	Gay bustled out of the Medic department; there was a curious impression of a humming swarm of bees about her. "We already know that man doesn't learn easily or willingly. I don't know what he expects to accomplish, but whatever it is, he won't. Let's go out and see what he wants."

	They gathered at the outer lock as the Duke and his men rode closer. Again the men stopped about fifty paces away, and the Duke came on alone. Wainwright and Seaman went down the ramp to meet him, with Bowman somewhat behind them. Gay stationed herself at the head of the ramp.

	The Duke drew himself up some ten paces from Wainwright and Seaman. "I stand challenged," he said heavily. He drew his sword slowly and held it vertically before his face. "It is not honorable or proper to ignore the protest and the challenge of any man. There shall be combat!"

	"There can be no combat, Duke Stonehill," Carl protested. "It is contrary to our customs; let us determine then what should be done."

	"There shall be combat, for there has been combat, though you deny it! Two of my people are slain by your corruption!" The Duke, the day before, had held his sword pointing directly at Carl; this morning he swung it from the vertical position into a horizontal position, held in his left hand and at throat height, pointing across his body toward his right, as he started forward.

	"Tell him to stop!" Gay cried.

	"Stop, Defender!" Carl called, retreating, his face suddenly worried. Wainwright, too, began to retreat. "Stop and let us discuss ... stop!"

	The Duke, his face completely immobile, walked straight on. "There shall be combat!" he repeated. Suddenly he leaped forward.

	"Oh my God!" Gay cried and triggered her neurodamper.

	Again, the Duke's powerful body jerked in the initial spasm of the neurodamper. But, as he had known when he advanced, there was a difference. The instantaneous spasm of his muscles jerked the sharp, heavy sword against his throat, nearly severing his head from his body.

	The body dropped limply to the ground, less than two feet from Wainwright's feet. Unfamiliarly pinkish blood welled out in a pool, and Wainwright stepped back quickly. He looked down at the fallen Duke, his massive, blocky body sprawled on the dew-wet grass. He looked up to where the three men were standing beside the four horselike animals.

	Finally he sighed heavily. "All right, gang, let's pack up the show."

	"The fool," said Gay shakenly, "the damned, stubborn fool!" 

	Wainwright looked from the fallen Duke to where she stood in the doorway, the neurodamper hanging from her fingers. "Gay, I can no longer accept that he was an egotistical aristocrat simply trying to keep his nest feathered. You were quite wrong on that, and so were we. You'd better go back aboard. We'll have to do what we can to clean up this mess." He gestured toward the three men still standing by their horses.

	"He knew exactly what would happen," said Carl quietly.

	Blackie came down the ramp and joined them. He looked at the Duke's face, still stern and determined in death. He touched his forehead and said softly, "My respects, sir, and my apologies." He turned to Wainwright. "What do we do—besides packing out of here?"

	Wainwright shrugged and turned to Bowman apologetically. "I'm afraid that, as is usual when people have somehow gotten fanatical and not figured things too straight, we'll have to turn to the politicians and statesmen to get us out again. Will you take over, Bull?" he waved toward the Duke's men.

	Bowman nodded. "I'll see what sort of peace I can make with—oh, let's face it—what sort of peace I can make with our own consciences ... in the guise of the Paradans.

	"I'll have to see the Temple Priest, from what I can make of their Customs, since it is he who shares the actual rule with the reigning Duke.

	"You'd better go back aboard; since the Duke undoubtedly ordered his men to stay out of this, I'll have no trouble alone."

	"As you say, Bull." Wainwright picked up the others with his eyes and went aboard. At the head of the inner lock Gay was standing very nervously watching Wainwright. The Captain was unconsciously rubbing his hands against his tunic, as though trying to clean them.

	"I—I'm sorry, Hal," Gay said, "I ..."

	"So are we all, Gay. Better leave it to Bull. He seems to feel he can handle it." Wainwright walked on into the control room.

	Outside, Bowman gently picked up the Duke's body and carried it toward the waiting men. One of them started toward him, leading the Duke's horse.

	"He died a good and brave man," said Bowman quietly. "He has forced us to leave this place; take him to the Temple, as is fitting a brave warrior. I go to make our settlement with the Uncle."

	"Aye. The Last Stonehill was a brave man; he feared no magic." The guardsmen expertly tied the Duke onto his horse and started slowly across the field. The Duke's pennon waved in the light morning air; it was carried in his saddle-boot now.

	The Duke was coming home dead, but with his pennon flying.

	Bowman walked with them till they crossed a slight swale of ground. Then he said, "I will go to the Uncle." The ship was out of sight from this spot—and Bowman vanished.

	By a very simple method—one so simple it had taken the Wake-makers seventy thousand years of immense research to perfect it—Bowman's mind triggered certain spatial laws into action.

	The old Temple priest looked up with widened eyes, as Bowman suddenly was in front of him.

	"The Star People will leave, Nephew," said Bowman.

	"I—felt the Duke die. But you—you are not of the Star People, yet you are a Star Man, too!" The old priest rose and looked at Bowman in confusion.

	"They do not know that, Nephew. It is not wise for them to know that, nor will it be wise for your people to know it in a little while longer. I am of another Star People, a people who came among the stars a great while ago; we are truly Star People now and have been for more than two hundred thousand years."

	"Do these Star People here know your people exist?"

	"Long ago, my people left certain traces in the heavens when they moved worlds from one star to another; these traces are known to the Star People, but they believe my people are gone. They, like your people, believe that a race must be all alike to be able to work together—which is not true. Is not your muscle different from your brain, your lungs different from your bones? Are not all these differences part of you, and are these differences not essential to your living?

	"We came, once, from a single planet called Earth ... a long time ago. Now some, like myself, are adapted to planets like this, where water is very near to boiling; others prefer planets where water is a kind of stone. We are very different—-and we are therefore more essential to each other. Between peoples who are just alike, there can be only competition. Where there is difference, there can be the harmony of complementation, but there can be no competition.

	"Now, my Nephew, we must discuss the errors that have been made; I will see that the Star People understand their errors, also, but I must go with them.

	"The Duke is dead; death is solely and always the result of accumulation of mistakes."

	"Old age ..." said the priest doubtfully.

	"The accumulation of the errors of living. This is so; I know this by experience, and your people will learn. I have lived some twenty thousand years, and I will spend a few more centuries on Therlem, the planet of your Star People, before I go home. But there need be no end to life.

	"The Duke died because he made mistakes, and he died a brave and good man because he faced the penalty of his mistakes and thereby balanced them.

	"The Star People are a good people. They are young, and they are not wise—but they are not childish. They are, instead, an adolescent people, idealistic, sure of themselves and their mission (which is as it should be for the adolescent!), and very difficult to live with." Bowman smiled ruefully. "You have, perhaps, some experience with the nature of the adolescent?"

	"Yes," said the priest. "I—believe I understand a little."

	"I have lived with them some thousand years now, I and a few friends, and the Therlem people are nearly approaching adult stage now. This experience has been very good, but very, very painful, to four of their finest people. My friends and I selected some of their most effective individuals for this trip.

	"They are good, they are not vicious, and they are not twisted. You spoke truly with the Duke on that.

	"But the Duke, and you yourself, are paying with unhappiness and loss, because you sought to use the humanity, the understanding and fellow-feeling of these four youngsters as a weapon to drive them away. You have succeeded despite the power of their ship—and this you could not imagine, for you have not the experience, but they could turn half this world into a bubbling lake of boiling rock with the powers that ship carries!—still, the Duke has lashed them and is sending them home with their tails between their legs.

	"But this was because you knew the depth and power of human things and human forces." Bowman looked steadily at the old man. "Now tell me wherein you were wrong, and why, therefore, the Duke died—and you face years of loneliness."

	The old man trembled and sat down unsteadily. "I—I see, and the fault is mine. We acknowledged that they were good and understanding people when we sought to hurt them and drive them away, but we did not acknowledge that they were good and understanding people when they came to us. 'He who would push, must be pushed.' "

	"When the Duke refused to allow understanding or to admit that understanding could grow between your two peoples, he established an unbalance.

	"Very wise adults could have re-established the balance without the Duke's death; but these are the adolescents of an adolescent race. They could not."

	"You ...?" the priest half asked.

	"I," said Bowman, "could make you believe I was a pink dragon with three heads and six legs—or that the sun did not go around Parado, but that Parado went around the sun, spinning like a top. I could make you believe anything I chose to insert in your mind.

	"Many times on Therlem and other planets where I have studied, I have wanted very much to use this power. It would have saved me so much time and trouble.

	"But doing that can only make a mind a pale imitation of a part of me, leaving nothing of itself at all. I can make you believe anything—but only by destroying forever that which is you—the originality that you yourself have built and are building.

	"Certainly I could have stopped all this trouble. I could have stopped it a thousand years ago. But then there would have been no Therlem and no Paradans. There would only have been puppets, living contented, peaceful, ordered lives.

	"We learn by pain; I, too, must accept pain and not protect either you or myself in the easy way of avoiding lessons. Not more than a dozen times have I destroyed a mind, and then only because of the danger of destruction of a world if I did not. There is nothing more appallingly dangerous than an adolescent with Godlike powers. Our own young are a particularly difficult problem, naturally.

	"I did not stop the thing, because it is your life you must lead, not one I construct for you, however placid and pretty it might be.

	"I can take from you all memory of the Duke; then there will be no sorrow over his loss. Do you wish that?"

	The old man shook his head. "No, Uncle. But—will you or one of you be near us when there is great trouble?"

	Bowman smiled slowly and shook his head. "Tell me why we will not."

	The priest sighed. "I have trouble making my students work through their own problems; they would rather borrow the answers from someone else, not taking the hard way of learning to work out the answers. And if a child knows his father stands by to catch him if he falls, he will be careless indeed.

	"Very well, my Uncle, I have learned much—and I will seek faithfully to learn more, and to teach what I can. Only so can the sacrifice of the Duke be other than futile."

	"Good. I will return to the ship; they, too, have lessons to learn; and they know very well that they have been hurt, but cannot yet understand why. Patience is very hard for the adolescent to learn, but until he learns it, he is not adult."

	Bowman faded from the priest's view and, aware that none of the ship's crew was watching out the bubble dome, was instantaneously walking up the lock ramp.

	Wainwright met him at the inner lock door, his face considerably more lined than it had been when Bowman left a bare hour before. "How goes it, Bull? You look beat."

	Bowman shrugged. "It goes. Nothing much we can do, of course; we have nothing they want—which was the source of the whole trouble—and they are not stupid; they know they can do nothing to us. Except make us damned unhappy. I— well—call it 'apologized' and promised we would leave at once." Bowman paused to look at Wainwright again. "You look sort of beat, too."

	Captain Wainwright nodded. "It's Gay. She's feeling awful. Her whole life seems to have come apart at the seams. Blackie prescribed a sedative, and she counterprescribed full consciousness so she could—'clean her dirty mind,' to use her phrase.

	"She's decided psychology and sociology are blind and stupid and a few other things.

	"The poor girl's having a hell of a time."

	Bowman sighed. "I don't suppose she'd want to see me at all, now."

	Wainwright shook his head. "Wrong. She does. She wants to apologize. Better go see her, Bull; God knows you've had a morning already, but we'll all appreciate it."

	"Sure, Hal. I'll try to help—it's a business with us politicians."

The End

Marooned
(1976)*

I

	In August 2133, Robert Randall discovered synthium. He announced simply that he had created element 101, which had, according to his modest report, "unusually interesting properties". Since civilization has been based on metals for the past seven thousand years, and synthium's "unusually interesting properties" included such things as its unheard of (and, because they had no machines at the time capable of determining it) undeterminedly great tensile strength, and its crystalline, transparent allotropic form with a strength only slightly less, Randall was most unnecessarily modest in his claims.

	That was several years after the last expedition to Jupiter had been destroyed by the customary meteor, and the last of Stephenson's three ships was tastefully draped over an asteroid. Naturally there were half a dozen expeditions trying to get the Interplanetary Committee's consent to a new expedition. Bar Corliss had been trying patiently for four and a half years. Jimmie Mattorn had been trying to get permission for-four of their "Explorer" type ships. They'd been turned down regularly and with punctuality by the Committee, because parium was the latest word in strong materials at the time—something like two and a quarter million pounds to the square inch. Good, but not good enough to stop a really determined meteor, of course—and most of those found out Jupiter's way were very determined.

	Then too, parium fuel tanks had a nasty habit of "failing" when one of the overanxious explorers loaded a twenty-ton tank with thirty-seven tons.

	All in all, Jupiter kept pretty much to himself. Only one ship got past the asteroid belt—they couldn't dodge out of the plane of the ecliptic in those days, because that meant taking more fuel for the dodging. Erickson did it He fell back into the Minor Orbits some six years later, and the bodies of the crew were retrieved by the tow-cruiser "Maximum," which pleased the widows to some extent.

	But Randall's mild "unusual properties" hid a world of high-explosive punch. Since all of the explorer's gang was looking for the slightest thing in that line, undoubtedly they all read the line. Somewhere or other, though, Bar Corliss had met Randall. He read the thing, and he suddenly got a mental picture of Randall: a little sandy-haired man with pale-blue eyes and a pale-sandy mustache, rather moth-eaten in appearance, slightly stained by weather and his favorite pipe, wearing clothes apparently made by the American Packaging Bag company, fitted by the oldest of tailors, Guess and Gosh, and dyed by Laboratory Fumes. And he remembered him as the discoverer of triconite—familiarly known as "tricky-nite" and described by him as a "rather powerful explosive."

	So Corliss wandered down to Pittsburgh and American Metals. Randall had a piece of the stuff, paper thin and impossibly strong. Corliss looked at it, and grunted. It was the early product, not the refined stuff they turn out today, and it looked like a poorly tanned pig's hide with the measles. Randall went into one of his quiet raptures about it, and tried to demonstrate its strength. He was rather handicapped, because he'd already broken most of the testing machines trying it out, and they hadn't built a new one yet. But Corliss wasn't slow in getting the possibilities. Corliss had more money than he could spend then anyway, so he found out what American Metal's total possible production of synthium would be, and ordered it for the next six months.

	Jimmie Mattorn got there two days later, and Norddeutscher Rakete, two and a half later—they couldn't get in touch with their American representative. So Corliss wasn't without competition on the thing. Norddeutscher, finding they couldn't get more than a scrap of synthium from American Metals, bought German rights to the stuff, and wanted to start making it, and get a rocket under way.

	Corliss was already moving.

	That was probably why the things happened as they did. When Corliss built that ship, he hadn't the faintest idea of the strength he put in it, because he didn't have the ghost of an idea of the strength of synthium. Besides, he had carefully drawn plans for a parium ship—four of them actually—and so he just made them out of synthium instead. He did make a test tank, and broke down his pumps trying to break the tank. That was all he cared about though, so he let it go. He was in too much of a hurry.

	He'd probably have forgotten something in the rush if he hadn't planned on his parium ships for so long. If he'd known how long he'd have for planning afterwards, he'd probably have spent less before. He certainly wouldn't have backed out.

	You can weld synthium—they could then. But you can't cut it with any saw, or tool. So the "Mercury" was slapped together in a remarkable hurry. The synthium plates had to be cast and heat-treated because Corliss wouldn't wait while rolls and machines were built of it to bend and work it. So he allowed a little extra size over his original parium blueprints—he found out two years later that cast and heat-treated synthium was stronger than rolled—and plowed ahead.

	The Germans were at his heels all the way. But his crew—with plenty of money and no budget—got four ships together in slightly less time than the German crew did. They loaded them up so fast that they had to get some of their supplies at the terrific rates prevailing on old Luna.

	But the Committee didn't know that; they saw four new ships, of a very strong metal, with very strong fuel tanks of unusual capacity, and a remarkably different course laid out that would take men around the asteroid belt—and the plans were stamped.

	Automatically, they turned down the Norddeutscher people when they applied "until the success or failure of the present expedition has been determined". The Norddeutscher people had a long wait. And then, of course, when Corliss' fate was settled they couldn't get approval of their ships, or, for that matter, any Jupiter-bound ships. Corliss settled that for once and for all with the result of his expedition. They couldn't have gotten men anyway, probably, for none had the desire to have their ship christened "Mahomet's Coffin" for so excellent a reason.

	Corliss got off Earth in May 2134. The Corliss Jupiter Expedition was underway. A fleet of four tiny ships, each of five-thousand-ton mass, each looking, with their raw, unpainted synthium, like a farmer-boy's unsuccessful effort toward a home-grown and tanned football, mottled with green and yellow and pink.

	They were remarkable looking things, stubby, thick-bellied, and quite hideous, with their weirdly-shaped wing-attachments sticking out forlornly at a broken angle.

	But they lifted off at ten a.m., May 17, 2134.

-

II

	Bar Corliss looked at Brad Warren, second in command, with a sour, exaggerated grimace. "Great gang of planners we are," he commented.

	Brad Warren grinned back at him. "Forget something, Bar?"

	"Only a few minor things—like soap, and coffee extract and antiseptics. Nothing really important of course—" Bar chuckled. "Wouldn't the Norddeutscher crowd like to know that!"

	Brad gestured out the port toward the blinding light and the- sharp shadows of Luna. Half a mile distant loomed the dome of Lunar Metals and Mines No. 3. "When do we break loose?"

	"Don't say the words," moaned Corliss. "Break loose, I mean. That's what the clerk in the L.M. and M. keeps saying. And, dear God, has he been breaking me loose. I've got to have the stuff. It's my own fault we haven't got it—and is he 'breaking me loose' from plenty of cash. Only 22.50 a pound for coffee extract. Only a dollar a cake for five-cent laundry soap. And as for the water we've got to have for fuel—!" Bar shook his head and looked piously upward. "May God bless him—nobody else ever will."

	Brad grinned without sympathy. "You knew it was coming on that score; how else could you get away from old Earth? Even when the famous 'Irrelevant' disproved the law of conservation of energy in interplanetary work, she didn't disprove the fact that you needed a lot of kick to climb away from Earth. We've still got to climb out most of the way from Earth, so far as gravity goes."

	"Uhmmm—but considering they generate power here directly from sunlight in the Davison photocells, get their water by cooking out the water of crystallization of the deeper rocks, and have plenty, you'd think they could sell it for less than thirty-two cents a gallon.

	"What's the latest figures on water at Phobos? Interplanetary Minerals sent anything yet?"

	"Uhm," said Brad. "It's down. It seems they found it wasn't selling well. Three and a half a gallon on Mars, and seventeen and a quarter on Phobos."

	"That's not so stiff. It'll change, though, by the time we get there. And we need tens of thousands of gallons of it!"

	"Well, you still won't be broke," grinned Brad, "and you know damn well the kick you get out of this is worth it. Anyway—we lift off here any time you say now. We're loaded with everything, I guess."

	"Make it two hours then. That is—two hours and whatever more is needed for aligning of orbits and so forth. How long did you say we'd have to wait on Phobos?"

	"Randall was very timely in his invention. Jupiter and Mars will be right, in about three months. If we take off as you say, we ought to wait about three months, three days and four hours."

	"It could be worse," sighed Bar.

-

	Two hours, forty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds later, the "Mercury" and her escorting squadron of three ships got underway. Pale-blue flames flared for a few seconds as they trembled, soundless in the vacuum of Moon's surface; then they rose in slow sweeps, rocketing upward, and away. They were visible to the men watching in the protecting glass and steel of the L.M. and M. company. But finally, they were lost in the haze of stars that obscured almost all the heavens, flaring brightly despite the glaring yellow sun.

	The steady drone of the great rocket tubes of infusible tungovan grumbled and echoed and murmured to itself in the metal shells of the ships. The rockets were marvelously well-designed. There was little wasted energy here, and therefore, little noise. Noise is the audible warning of waste energy. They could not afford wastage of the precious burden of fuel, so there was almost no noise, only the smooth, carefully engineered flow of gases rushing through ground, honed and polished rocket tubes, designed as nearly as possible for absolute stream flow.

	To all new spacers, rocket tubes are flimsy-looking things. The metal is less than an eighth of an inch thick, flimsy, tinny in appearance. It would seem that those incredibly powerful and light engines, rocket engines, would certainly burst anything so slight. That again illustrates the refinements of rocket engineering. It is a well-known fact that the greater the velocity of a fluid stream, the less the side-pressure. Those tubes were designed for the greatest possible velocity, naturally, and since that meant almost no side-pressure, tons of metal could be shaved from the rocket tubes. Only the great pressure blocks seemed, and were, capable of resisting strain bracing the egg-shaped combustion chambers.

-

	Hour after hour the tubes moaned and droned. They were running almost white hot, but they were polished more carefully than the finest telescope mirrors, and they were in vacuum jackets equally polished, so that almost no heat escaped from them—for heat, where it isn't wanted, is not only a nuisance, but a warning of inefficiency.

	Presently, the song of the fuel pumps started. They had been feeding the tubes on the original pressure in the tanks at first, but now this was falling. Pure hydrogen and oxygen were being taken from the tanks at seven tons, pressure, and stepped up to the necessary eight for efficient running in the tubes. It was a gas—but under that pressure, denser than water.

	That might have warned them, had they stopped to think then. But it was a hastily conceived and carried out thing, throughout. They'd raced against time all the way. When, after seven days they landed on Mars North City field with wings spread and the parachute air-brake spread to stop them, the ships needed repair and final adjustment, so much so that the three-month wait on Mars was no ordeal of monotony. There were plenty of trained mechanicians at Mars North City to help them, and still it was more of an ordeal of labor. And still there wasn't any time for recalculation that might have stopped the expedition then and there.

	They loaded up with water-fuel—that is, hydrogen and oxygen gases, at Mars North City where the gases were cheap, and pulled out to Phobos running heavy. They replaced the burned fuel there, and at last the "Mercury" and her companions pulled out on the real trip.

	So far they had gone. This trip out to Mars and her moons was old, charted and laid out by a pair of generations and more of space travel. Over a hundred and fifty years of exploration, over seventy years of commercial exploitation of the Minor Planets, and still no human being had passed beyond the magic ring of the Planetoids.

	You have seen a scale map of our system. You know the dimensions. Forty, seventy, one hundred and one hundred-forty millions of miles are the orbits of the Minor Planets. Then—the Great Gulf. It's five hundred million to Jupiter, nine hundred million to Saturn, a billion and three quarters to Uranus. When the Lord made this system, he used two scales. Maybe he started out with one, and didn't like the looks of the dinky little system he got—planets with diameters measured in thousands of miles, orbits with diameters measured in millions. Maybe he threw that scale away, and decided to start all over with something worthwhile. The dust specks he had, he just forgot, and worked with a scale reading in billions instead of millions for the orbits, and he used tens of thousands of miles for planet diameters.

	At any rate, there are two systems really, the Inner System, and the Outer System, and they're as different as two entirely strange systems might be. Four, seven, ten and fourteen tens of millions for the Inner System. Four, eight, seventeen, twenty-eight hundreds of millions for the Outer System.

	The "Mercury" was trying to be the Messenger of the Gods, from the Lesser Gods to Mighty Jove. And she was the first ship that really stood a chance of crossing that gulf.

	That's quite a hill, there between the Inner and Outer systems. Nearly four hundred million miles—and every blasted mile of it uphill—with old Sol dragging, dragging, dragging on the other end. Four hundred million miles of uphill climb had stopped exploration for a hundred and fifty years and more.

	The "Mercury" lifted off Phobos, with her train of three service ships, distinctly heavy. She staggered as she pulled loose of Mar's gravity. Then she shifted into high for the climb. Hour after hour the tubes moaned. Then day after day they coasted, slowing their pace steadily as Sol pulled with his infinitely untiring grip to stop them. Then for more hours, the tubes droned and hummed, and then they began to spit and bark unevenly, and the ships lurched and staggered like mad motes in a beam of light, skittering and dancing lest some unheeding, trundling rock, weighing perhaps a thousand quadrillion tons, brush them along with it.

	And all day long and all night long, though the only night here was the nose of the ugly foot-ball thing they called a ship, there was a steady rain of terrific, sharp pings as tiny, invisibly small planetoids crashed against the synthium wall. They were going at almost the same speed—as space speeds go—so the incredible, never-tested strength of synthium turned those shocks. They were going at almost the same speed—there wasn't much more difference in their speed than the speed the mightiest shells of Man's armory attained, about a mile and a half a second. But they were made of only plain, high-grade nickel-steel armor-plating, the natural alloy of meteors, and the ships were made of synthium.

	So somehow, after three horrible days in there, the men took off their space-armor suits again, and gobbled a little food (they couldn't eat with those suits on, of course) and then flopped down to rest.

	And through the ships the steady, peaceful thrum and drone of the smoothly working tubes made sweet music to them. The soft regular chuck-shug-pssiii of the air circulators and the fuel pumps sounded steady and sweet.

	For the "Mercury" was through the Magic Ring, and cruised at last in that terra incognita, the no-man's-land beyond the Inner System.

	When sleep had restored them, their watches were sharp, sharper than ever before. For they began to sense the difference. This space was different—it was the Great Space, the space where things the size of Mars were satellites, and gravitative control-fields of planets reached out thirty million miles. It was the Space of the Giants.

	And day by day, the Sun dwindled, grew tinier. And day by day they saw the pinpoint of Jupiter sweeping into position. Jupiter was huge—but this was the Great Space. It was still a pinpoint to their eyes.

	They let a bit of hydrogen into the vacuum surrounding the rocket tubes now, so the shields weren't such good insulators, and they put a special soft black paint on the outside sheath, so radiation was better, and the ships began to warm up a bit.

	And the sun dwindled four hundreds of millions of miles behind, and Jupiter became a respectable disc, an unchanging disc.

	They shut off their rocket tubes then, because most of the fuel was gone. In fact, they had enough left to permit a landing on one of Jupiter's little satellites, and, by putting all the fuel in one ship, the smallest, enough to fall back to Earth safely. But the ships began to get cold. Out there, a planet like Earth would have a temperature in the neighborhood of two-hundred and thirty degrees below zero. Those ships were well insulated—but they had to burn a good bit of fuel to permit life in them, even so.

-

III

	"Yes, I agree that Ganymede has an atmosphere," Bar argued tensely, "and that it may be thick enough to permit us to halt almost entirely by atmospheric friction instead of by rocket power—highly important saving of fuel of course. But—Ganymede's only six hundred and sixty thousand from the surface of the blasted planet, and with the gravitative field Jup's got, that's no distance. If we go in so far before we stop, we might not be able to get back at all, if we can't find water there."

	"But, Bar, we can save enough fuel by air-braking to a stop to permit us to pull out from that close approach with our little ship, if necessary."

	"Uhmmmmm—maybe. I suppose we'd better. I know there's no real chance of collecting water on that chunk of rock called Number Nine, fifteen million miles out from Jupiter though it is." Then in sudden decisiveness, after a moment of thought, he said, "Shift 'er over."

	Brad turned to his calculated data, and presently the rocket tubes on one side moaned loudly, a driving acceleration came again as the weight-warning bell echoed dully through the ship. Bar Corliss was calling off figures into the microphone, sending instructions to the three other ships, now within ten thousand miles of the "Mercury."

	The Mercury turned, and the great disc of Jupiter shifted till it was more nearly straight ahead once more; almost directly before them, the tiny disc of Ganymede, three thousand two hundred miles in diameter, loomed. It was ringed with a fat, bright ring, the halo of an atmosphere.

	"That atmosphere must be pure hydrogen," said Corliss thoughtfully. "It's cold as the hinges of hades out there."

	"Hydrogen, hell. That planet's too light to hold pure hydrogen with the tug and cross tug of old Jupiter down there. It's more likely something heavy and useless like nitrogen."

	"We'll know quick enough. We ought to get there in eighteen hours the way Jup's pulling us now."

	The rockets were silent, yet the ships were moving faster and faster. Mighty Jupiter was dragging at them. Slowly their course bent, and Ganymede shifted across the windows till it was directly under the nose of the ship. It was enlarging swiftly now—more and more swiftly. Slowly, slowly Jupiter's pull dragged the ship over till Ganymede passed the center spot of the windows, and hung off to the other side. The ship seemed destined to pass between Ganymede and Jupiter. Then, the throw hesitated, as Ganymede began to loom; a great round moon, dimly silvered, it hung for a moment as it grew swiftly, and abruptly the ship was being pulled to the satellite. Ganymede's gravity was greater than Jupiter's at last!

	The thin bright ring of atmosphere expanded, the satellite grew till it seemed evident the ship would touch the atmospheric rim, and plow on.

	"Wings," called Corliss at last. Motors hummed into action, and a slow grating squeal of gears and racks sounded in the ship. The rocket trembled to the push of the motors. It was rotating slowly as the powerful collapsible wings thrust out.

	"Put her on high-lift angles, and throw out the airbrakes," suggested Brad. "I think we're a bit high. We'll need a lot of resistance in the first passage to cut our speed to an orbital velocity."

	For an instant the rockets flared again, pushing the ships back into a path closer to the satellite. Then, soon, there came a thin high scream, the first sound to penetrate the walls of the ship from the outside since the asteroids had been passed, a scream so thin and cold and shrill the sleeping men woke and joined the active watch. There was a new acceleration now, an acceleration due not to the rockets, but to the great metal wings, spread and screaming in the thin air outside, an acceleration actually that thrust them to the side away from the planet, for the wings, cutting the thin, thin air at more than three miles a second, were helping to hold the ship down to the planet where there was air to stop them, while behind, the great air-brake was tugging, tugging to stop them.

	They couldn't hold the planet the first circle, and swung up, away again, falling out of the atmosphere as their grip on the thinning air weakened, weakened, and finally broke.

	But they'd broken their hyperbolic orbit to an extended ellipse, and turned the ship so their momentum fought not only Ganymede's strain, but mighty Jupiter's as well. They were back in Ganymede's atmosphere in two days, screaming through the thin fringes again, deeper this time, till the strain on the wings became almost unbearable, and their angle of incidence was decreased to nothing, and the air-brake cable screamed in thin-noted protest. Then, their parabola rounding again, they started up—out toward space.

	"Cut the wings in again," called Bar. The screaming of the air changed once more, and "weight" returned to them as the wings began the attempt to turn the ship to the planet. Still the tremendous throw of their orbital speed was hurling them up—up—

	"If we don't hold it this time," said Brad, "we'll have to stop on rockets. The orbit's so broken now we'd fall right on into Jupiter. If we stop on rockets, we'll have to find water to get back home."

	"Do you hear that creaking?" asked Bar softly. "We had to use steel gears and racks, you know. We couldn't cut synthium gearing. If we add another degree to the angle of those wings they'll break those racks off."

	The ships reeled slowly, they seemed to be turning, the "Mercury" echoed to a still thinner howl of air. Corliss advanced the angle of the wings a bit more, let a bit more of the air-brake come into play. There was a terrific resistance back there—and a limit to what strain the ship could endure.

	Suddenly Brad was making observations again. Swiftly he ran the figures into a calculator. "Bar—Bar," he called, "she's turning in now."

	They couldn't fly an hour later, at less than 2,000 miles an hour, at their high level, so they descended with the air-brake pulled in again. Gradually, the rockets glided around the little world, around again, and slowly they settled to the northern pole, landing finally at almost dead-rest on the rocket blasts.

	The cold started to creep in then. The rockets were off. Ganymede they'd seen as a white planet, covered with barren, cold black rocks and shadows of deepest black, for the air was cold, colder than anything earth knew, and there was a thin atmosphere but not enough for real diffusion. And there were fields of unbroken whiteness, with a strange blue tint in them.

	It was the air, what had once been, perhaps, a dense atmosphere long since frozen. When they had settled down on that field of frozen cold, the ship had hissed, and vapor rose in spurting streams. The ship chilled swiftly. Before it had been heated by the air friction. Now they began to know cold—real cold.

	In an hour they were sleeping, all save a few on watch. Two hours later they waked to the roar of the rockets as one of the companion ships landed nearby. Then, one after the other, the two others landed. The Corliss Expedition was encamped. Three of those ships were loaded almost solely with photocell equipment. Only the "Mercury" was really an expedition ship. Work was to begin now.

	It was strange, the people who had applied for membership back on Earth, and the qualifications they listed. A professional "strong-man," because he could stand the heavy weight on Jupiter; another man, "because he loved adventure," and a professional guide in Africa and South America, "because he understood wild country."

	Tad Martin was one chosen, a little man with a heavy body, and fingers as long and slim and sensitive as a surgeon's, a ready grin and slightly-faded thatch of thin hair. Tad Martin was chosen because he had a sound constitution, an extremely cheerful personality; he was a born optimist, and he handled a monkey wrench and a pair of pliers with the genius Fritz Kreisler once used with a bow and a wooden box known as a violin.

	Tad Martin was a super-mechanic. His type is known as a mechanician, not a mechanic, and calls itself "tinkerer."

	Karl Thrumann went because he was a born optimist, and a chemist. He could play half a dozen different instruments, was a fairly good actor, and an excellent raconteur.

	That's the type it takes in an expedition bound to be away from all humanity for at least two years. Every one was an optimist. They had to be. But—expeditions aren't adventure. They represent an unexampled amount of extraordinarily hard, dreary work with the wrong tools in the wrong places under unfavorable conditions. Expeditions are largely made up of fine chemists peeling potatoes and expert physicists washing clothes, of trained mechanicians fixing the plumbing, which never could be made right anyway, and, most of all, sitting and waiting. Sitting and waiting to do something, anything at all.

	It wasn't hard to find something to do at first. There were the great cells packed in the "Corliss I," "II," "III" and the "Mercury" to be set up. The sun was weak here, and it was inconceivably cold, far far colder than night on the Moon, or even on Phobos or Deimos-. Not because the sun was so much weaker, though that of course counted, but because there was not merely a lack of heat coming in, but an actual withdrawal of heat by the cold substances, the frozen gases, the almost-frozen atmosphere. Cold? No human had ever before known the like. Why, on Luna, elsewhere in empty, shadowed space they used rubber suits. Here, a bit of rubber exposed to that air was as hard and brittle as so much glass in twenty seconds. They used storage batteries to heat the suits on old Luna. Storage batteries!

	Men had to go out the first day of landing. They divided the time into "days" and "weeks." Weeks was a sensible division, a natural one, because Ganymede revolves around Jupiter in almost exactly a week—seven days, three hours and forty-two point two minutes to be exact. They set one of the chronometers to mark that week into sevenths, and worked on that basis. They had three and a half "days" of sunlight, and three and a half of darkness, except that, having landed on the Jupiter face of the satellite, their days were broken by the great shadow of the Titan of the System.

	But explorers had to go out, and they went out in the special suits provided for them. They were made of woven asbestos, because that was both an insulator against heat loss, and flexible. They were padded with powdered asbestos fibers, and covered finally by an inner lining of airtight, finest rubber, impregnated in tough canvas. But between the layers of asbestos padding were heated coils, not powered by any mere storage battery, but by the main power lines of the ship, run by the powerful, light steam engines on board her.

	Those engines were designed. The flames of hydrogen and oxygen gases, taken from the fuel tanks, ran the steam engines, by boiling water. They were one hundred percent efficient, because the energy that wasn't used in generating electric power couldn't escape save as heat that warmed the vessels. The condensers were nothing but radiators.

	So there was plenty of electric power generated while the ships rested on that cold, cold world.

	They went out first to set up the sun-power cells. They were wonderfully light things—they weighed scarcely an ounce apiece because they were made of that transparent form of synthium, the transparent allotropic form. Like all transparent solids, synthium-beta, as it was known, was an insulator to electric current. And they were wonderfully rugged and strong, despite the ten-thousandth of an inch thickness of their walls.

	Rack after rack of them appeared, set in chronometer-driven frames mat kept them always pointed toward the sun. The sun was weak here, horribly weak, yet still it had power, and they had a great, great deal of area exposed. "Corliss I," "II" and "III" had been loaded almost exclusively with them. Those three ships were never intended to go back to Earth, nor to leave this system of Jupiter's.

-

	It took a week to set them up. In the meantime, the chemist and geologic parties had been at work. They found some gypsum here, but didn't need its water of crystallization. They found water, ice. Ganymede was very light to have much water, yet it had nearly as much as Mars had, for it was so very, very cold here the water never got a chance to escape. And it was overlaid almost everywhere by great masses of carbon dioxide.

	Corliss stared when he saw their find. A great, rugged mountain of glistening, beautiful blue and faintly green, transparent, beautifully clear solid. "Is that—solid carbon dioxide?" he gasped into the transmitter.

	"It sure is," laughed Karl Thrumann. "It's clear, because it's lain there for half a billion years, just slowly packing, and, under the direct sun, melting ever so little till it packed solid. There's a white snow on top, where the pressure couldn't solidify it, crystallize it thoroughly into a whole block. We're looking at a side where something broke it off.

	"The lower vein there is hydrogen oxide. I think that's a better name for it than water, considering."

	"It is," agreed Corliss. "I've seen glaciers—but they didn't look like that."

	"No—that's because they weren't really cold. They melted at the base, where all the millions of tons of weight rested on them. Ice will melt at a fairly low temperature if you press it hard, remember. That's how a glacier flows. The bottom melts under the pressure—heat runs out as liquid water, escapes the pressure, and instantly re-freezes, because without the pressure it's solid at that temperature. Here, the temperature is so low even the pressure won't do it."

	"Uhmm—suppose we have glaciers of CO2 here?"

	"No, not carbon dioxide. Water, remember, is a wonderful substance. Unique in a thousand ways. Dissolves more different things than almost any other single solvent, absorbs more heat in melting and boiling than almost anything else, holds more heat per pound-degree of mass and temperature than any other thing save hydrogen. And—it contracts on changing from ice to liquid water, and then further contracts as the temperature rises to four degrees centigrade. Unique, really. And because it expands on solidifying, pressure liquefies it because it occupies less room then. That's not true of CO2. Therefore you can't get moving glaciers."

	"Ummm—but it's cold enough for them. How much more cable have we, Ben?"

	Back in the ship, Ben Riley, the electrical engineer-electrician-mechanician- radio-expert-physicist-electronics engineer, answered over the telephone sets, "About five hundred feet, Bar. Then unless you want to run without beaters, you'd better stop."

	"May the good Lord preserve us from any such situation. We'll stop. I'm half-frozen with the heaters. Can't you send any more juice?"

	"No—not without danger of burning them out altogether. It's your own cock-eyed calculations that said you'd lose only five horsepower of heat out there."

	"All right!" laughed Corliss. "I admit it. How many are we drawing?"

	"Ten right now, if you want to know. What are you doing? Rolling in the snow? I can't figure where it's all going myself."

	"I can't either," said Thrumann sourly. "You'd never guess it from here.

	"But that's all right. There's plenty of water here, so we can set up a quarry and get our fuel. How much power coming in from the cells?"

	"Five thousand horse—and we need one and a half to warm these blamed ships. We can break down some water for you though. They've got the cells set up in Two."

	"Check. We'll bring in a load now. I brought some cotton along."

	"Cotton?" asked Corliss, mildly surprised. "What for?"

	Thrumann chuckled. "I didn't trust your explosives in this temperature any too much. Wait and see."

	Thrumann had an electric drill with him, and Tad Martin had some other apparatus, as well as the sledge they'd hauled over. In five minutes, the electric drill was humming almost inaudibly in the thin air, and cutting swiftly into the brittle ice. In five more, a series of ten holes had been drilled, slanting into the clear "rock" of this world. Carefully Thrumann packed plain cotton batting into them with a little rod. Then Martin produced his flask. "Oh," said Corliss grinning. "We're well below the critical temperature here, aren't we?"

	"Brrr—" said Thrumann. "I'm not, but I'm damn near it. It certainly is outside." From the flask he poured a stream of clear blue liquid into the holes, generously. Then he inserted caps in each, and the party backed off. The clear liquid oxygen they had poured in was thoroughly soaked up in the cotton in ten seconds. In thirty the thing was quite ready. In forty-five, Thrumann sent the current through the caps and wires—and a thousand tons of the rock-hard ice shattered off. There was an explosive born of cold and as safe in this temperature as in the coal mines of Earth where it had originated two centuries before.

	The sledge was loaded with a will—and consequent warming work—and hauled to "Corliss II." The lumps of ice were hurled into the lock, and the door closed once more. The men went back for another load of ice. They passed the laboratory ship—"Corliss I." The research laboratories had been set up in this ship, now that the cells had been placed outside. Corliss hesitated as he passed, and asked Ben to connect him with Porter, in the lab.

	"Hello, Bar," came Porter's voice finally. "What is it?"

	"Got the air analyzed yet?"

	"On, yes. Some time ago, we finally got the last constituents. Nothing new. No helium to speak of, but it was all rare gas. Mostly argon, neon and Xenon. There's one tenth of one percent oxygen, and a detectable trace of water vapor even at this temperature. The rest, as Thrumann told you, is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, a fraction of one percent chlorine, and lots of rare gases. Everything else seems combined with something to make a solid.

	"That chlorine had us going for a while; still I guess it's as logical as the trace of oxygen. There's no life here of course—probably never was, and when you consider how active oxygen is, it's no wonder so little of it is free, and probably the combination of the oxygen meant some chlorine couldn't find a partner."

	"You're wrong in saying it combined to a solid," said Corliss. "I saw a nice little river back a way. Know what it was? Just a nice, cool swimming pool of Xenon, so Thrumann says."

	Porter whistled softly. "Nice planet. No wonder we found so much Xenon in the air."

	The work was started then. They quarried for their water, and, of course, for their air. But they were mighty glad to have that work. To Bar Corliss it meant that the millions he had sunk in this expedition were not lost. For the whole success of the thing depended on finding a source of water—hydrogen and oxygen for fuel—on this satellite, or on Callisto. Hurling the rockets across space had required all but the last dregs of fuel. No ship could be designed which would have been otherwise. The sheer work of lifting the fuel across the four hundred million miles of space against the sun's pull prevented that. They had to find water—or return at once, immediately, before those last dregs of fuel were used in heating. Not even two months could have been spent investigating after all those millions of miles of travel and those millions of dollars spent.

	That was most of the expedition, that. That was the adventure of exploring the planets, digging and working and sweating even in that cold, to dig out the water they must have, and the slow, slow waiting while the electrolysers took the electric power obtained from the sun and converted the water to hydrogen and oxygen fuel. That and cleaning, polishing, selecting, weighing, repairing, cooking. Cooking, and living in the air that was already heavy with the odors of meals a month past, for the rectifiers would not remove those last faint traces which the unhappy sensitivity of the human nose detected.

-

IV

	"It would be an immense advantage—" sighed Bar. He looked across at "Two." There were two feet of "snow" on it now, and the light that shone on it was weak and dun and red, the light of enormous, magnificent Jupiter, mighty in the sky, almost full. For six months they had waited here while the fuel tanks of the ships filled slowly—so slowly. They were nearly full now. The men for the last dash had been selected, the trip planned to almost the last detail—as though the years on Earth had not been calculation time enough for this particular feature—but now Brad proposed to change it.

	"It can be done. Refueling in space has never been done—but I think it can be done if we do as I suggest. To do it would mean the 'Mercury' could land on Jupiter with tanks completely full, not nearly full. The original plan to establish a fuel depot on satellite Five, tiny though it is, and close to Jupiter, still means some fuel would be needed in escaping its pull. We have fuel enough on hand now, and it would save twelve hours wear on your tubes, and on the tubes of Two' and Three' to do it. Also, it would save the work of gathering that much fuel again."

	Bar stood looking out of the port. They had had a "cold snap" two weeks before. It had snowed Xenon, a wind had sprung up in the thin air to howl with horrific threats about the ships and their apparatus. The cell frames had been well anchored, and resisted till the blizzard had covered them over, and banked snow two feet deep over them, and made drifts ten feet deep on the windward side of the ships. It was a strange scene now; it had an air of permanence, of stability.

	Finally Corliss spoke. "I don't like the idea of using those magnets. We don't think they'll disturb any instruments. But we don't know. Still—I suppose we may as well."

	The men cheered. "Attaboy, Bar. We start tomorrow then?" asked Brad.

	"Uhm—I guess so."

	There was no sleeping that "night." They were preparing. Goodbyes. So-longs. And hungrily gazing at the ship that was to make the crossing. There were thirty-two men in the expedition. And there were just five who were on the "Mercury" when she took off the next day, and shook off her burden of snow, to sail out again into space. Five men.

	No more, because every man breathed precious air, and ate heavy food; and on Jupiter that would represent another five hundred pounds of force to be overcome in climbing up. They had to calculate close on this trip. Then: fuel would just about make it. And even so, the other ships, "Two" and "Three," would have to be sacrificed to pull them free. Satellite Five revolved at only 112,000 miles from Jupiter's center, and only 70,000 from his surface. On Five, "Corliss II" and "III" were to wait, with fuel for the "Mercury" as she climbed up from Jupiter's cloud-wrapped atmosphere. And they would never leave Five.

	No less, because it took two men to operate the ship, and they needed—a spare. Dr. Louis Lombard was their physician, and spare. He was a Doctor of Medicine by vocation, but an expert geologist and paleontologist by avocation, and camp-chief and mechanic by necessity. Rather an unusually useful man? Every man in that ultra-select group had to be, had to be in deadly earnest. He was small, too. He weighed only 135 pounds, all bone and muscle, because weight was important—and incidentally, appetite was, too. They'd have to learn to get over wanting food when their stomachs were empty, because they would always be nearly empty. Concentrated, ashless food had to be used, and it wasn't either tasty or filling.

	Ben Riley was going along, because he was another handy man, an electrical engineer, and radio engineer among other things, with an avocation as an artist and photographer. These five had to be a dozen things in one. And he weighed 137 pounds.

	Karl Thrumann was going. He was the chemist—among other things, and Tad Martin, artist of the monkey wrench and lathe.

	Only Bar Corliss didn't belong, really. Not because he wasn't versatile. He was the mathematician, the physicist, the rocket engineer. But he was big, and powerful. He weighed 197 pounds—all muscle and bone. He tried to make it 195, and couldn't.

	They were the selected five. Brad didn't go, because he was second in command, the most thankless position of all. He had to remain in charge of the group on Ganymede, so he couldn't leave. The others didn't quite equal these five.

	For all the good it did them, Corliss might as well have taken the whole crew. They didn't stand a bit better chance of returning because they took only five, and shaved the weight by taking no razors, since shaving equipment meant weight, but they didn't know it then.

	So the "Mercury" took off from Ganymede with five aboard. She plowed her way up through space, and toward Jupiter, behind her trailing her faithful escort diminished by one, "One" remaining on the satellite. They went on, the blue flames of her rockets trailing out, till the ship was well away from Ganymede, and falling freely to Jupiter. Then the rockets of the "Mercury" stopped, and as she fell, the other two ships maneuvered and twisted to approach the falling ship. Presently a black, snaky cable reached out with a great round lump on the end of it. The two ships were moving slowly relative to each other, and presently the round lump began to accelerate of itself toward the "Mercury." It struck with a thump and a jar that the men aboard the ship felt to their bones, and clung.

	The magnet was on. Slowly, those aboard the "Two" reeled in on the braked winch, braking their relative speed. Twice the magnet pulled loose, to jump back as the strain was released on the cable. It took an hour of maneuvering before the feed pipe could be sent across. Then the "Three" made fast by the same laborious process. Two hours later, the "Mercury," her fuel tanks full, was falling all alone through space. Far behind her, two dots of blue flame marked the "Two" and the "Three" returning to Ganymede. The Great Adventure had really begun—the final dash for which they had spent five years in preparation.

	Alone, a dust mote in infinity, the mottled football of synthium dropped. Bar Corliss was about to learn something of the strength of the wonderful stuff Bob Randall had invented.

	It didn't take very long. They reached Jupiter's outer fringes of atmosphere in only eleven hours, on a long, long slant. They were forty-five degrees removed from the Red Spot, and forty-five degrees south of the north pole. Before they slowed to a stop, relative to Jupiter, they would be ninety degrees removed from the danger that might lurk in the Red Spot. They were more interested in learning something of Jupiter and returning with it than in learning all—and not returning.

	The shriek of air sounded again in the spread vanes on the wings, high and shrill and thin. The "Mercury" was going more swiftly now than it had been when it touched Ganymede's atmosphere. But there was unlimited room to maneuver in this atmosphere. There was no fear of darting out of it again.

	Five thousand miles they shrilled through that air, their speed slowly dying, the friction warming the ship. They weren't falling any more, no longer a free fall, and they didn't have orbital speed any more, so the wings began to support them against Jupiter's pull.

	Corliss looked at Lombard, standing beside him, looking anxiously over the pilot's shoulders, through the ports. There was a vast darkness, and below, a vast sheet of sheening clouds, scudding, racing. There was no horizon. It was level, just a distant point so far no eyes could see it. Jupiter was too huge.

	"Doc," said Corliss softly, "do you feel the way I do?" 

	"I don't know, Bar. I don't know how you feel, but I feel awfully tired."

	"I think Jupiter's taking hold of us, Doc." Bar looked solemnly at the accelerometer. It stood at one point two. Only twenty percent greater than Earth's pull—and they were feeling it. "Six months on that pebble out there didn't prepare us for this, exactly, did it" 

	"Not exactly."

	"She's not obeying the controls too well, Bar," said Tad Martin, piloting now, as the most expert of them. "I think we're getting in to wind."

	There was a different note in the squeal of the air now, a deeper note, a throaty cry, and a pulsing howl was coming in, a gustiness to replace the steady-high-noted fluting of the air as they split through it at twenty-seven thousand miles an hour. Their speed had dropped to about six thousand miles an hour now, and it was falling rapidly, more rapidly than the airplaning rocketship.

	There were pushes now, little jabs and jerks. They were getting out of the clear, straight streaming of the uppermost air levels into something slightly turbulent. Only thirty miles below them now lay the cloud level.

	At that particular moment, the "Mercury" could have pulled out. Fifteen minutes later, it was tossing, jumping, leaping wildly, horribly in a screaming tornado.

	"I can't do a thing," snapped Martin, struggling with the controls. "They don't affect her—she's too heavy for them, and the wind's too much." 

	"Can they stand the strain?" asked Corliss anxiously. "They're synthium. They won't break, but—" As if in answer to his words came the harsh grind of the control racks, racks of molded parium, not a tenth as strong as the synthium wings. It was a harsh, grating squeal of tortured metal.

	Corliss dragged himself back. It was labor, for the terrific accelerations of the wind's force, doubling and tripling Earth's gravity, made him near helpless. Finally his voice called out. "The main rack's sprung half an inch. If it gives another half it'll strip the teeth on the left pinion, and break the shaft on the right pinion."

	The "Mercury" was heavy, very heavy, and the winds were terrific. The ship was still traveling close to five hundred miles into the atmosphere since detecting the first faint screams of air. It approximated stratospheric density, and the wings gripped well and solidly in this air.

	Almost abruptly they descended from what we know as the "supersphere" of comparatively calm air into the stratosphere of Jupiter. Jupiter's stratosphere isn't like ours. There are clouds in it for one thing. And it has winds. The "Mercury" was now in forty-five degrees north, and so unfortunate as to be right near one of the junctures between neighboring "belts."

	Martin had a chance to look for a second. Below, off to the left, he saw the clouds tumbling, tossing, rolling by him at terrific speed, nearly seven hundred kilometers per second. On the other side, off to the right and below, he saw them racing back in the opposite direction at nearly two hundred. And right in between was a vortex effect.

	Martin's face turned white as he suddenly jammed borne the firing lever. The rockets thundered deafening defiance; for an instant the "Mercury" righted herself, and steadied, then started slowly to climb upward.

	From somewhere, Jupiter thrust up a giant hand. The flea that had been buzzing around him apparently planned to leave. The mighty hand smacked the flea on the back; there was a horrible rending shriek of torn metal, the grinding bumping thump of broken beams thrashing about Martin turned owlishly to look out of the ports. A great broad flat thing went skating down the wind, turning over and over. Presently another one joined it. Simultaneously the rockets stopped operating as the fuel pumps gave up trying to operate in the wildly pitching accelerations aboard the ship.

	Ten seconds later the men were relieved of the weight that had been crushing them down, and some fifteen later the great broad flat things were flapping dismally upward past the ship. They were dropping much more rapidly than the wings.

	"Happy landings," said Corliss grimly. "I wonder if synthium bounces?"

	"We won't know, I'm afraid," sighed Martin. "I'd like to leave this place but—well."

	Abruptly they had fallen through the area of terrific winds. The clouds that still wrapped them seemed less turbulent, save where their rapidly mounting speed tossed the vessel. The ship seemed calm and almost motionless; only an almost-earth-normal gravity affected them. "We're approaching stability," said Corliss. There was a limit to how fast the football-shaped ship would fall—though Corliss knew it was a very high limit, for the ship was streamlined.

	"Is the air-brake out?"

	Martin snorted. "The cable snapped like a thread when the wings went. The rudder's off too. I don't know how much the airspeedometer means, but it says we're making about two thousand an hour. Still climbing, I see." There was heavy silence for some seconds, age-long seconds. Then a soft laugh from Martin broke it. "We're thirty thousand feet below sea-level according to the barometer." He reached over and closed the synthium valve connecting it to outside pressure. They were fortunate it was welded synthium, really. It would have been so easy to make those tubes of brass, or steel.

	They began to feel again the sudden heavy weight of Jupiter. The ship had reached its maximum speed, and was going down now at a constant velocity. "Stability," said Corliss. "Does the radio work?"

	"No," replied Riley. "It quit shortly after the storm began. I guess we passed the reflective layer. The waves bounce back, and we can't reach out, nor they in."

	"Too bad—we could have told them not to send the rescue ship in six months. They'll wait six months now."

	"Hasn't most of it gone already?" asked Thrumann, slightly green. "It seems that way."

	"The air must be—we've hit!" gasped Corliss. Then he realized he was wrong. There was a steady, terrific bombardment, a shattering, bone-jarring series of colossal smashes. "Hail!" he gurgled ten seconds later. "My God—everything's on a giant scale here!"

	"They sound like asteroids, they may puncture us—"

	"Let's hope not, and thank God for transparent synthium ports!"

	As suddenly as it had started, the hail stopped. And the clouds vanished. They were out of the clouds. And outside was only a tremendous, driving sheet of rain. It washed back across the ship with a driving, thudding, thundering wash of water. For an instant, they thought they had struck, by chance, in a great ocean.

	"We're slowing still. I wonder—will we strike so terribly hard?" Corliss labored nearer the instrument panel under more than three Earth-gravities, crawling on hands and knees.

	Martin looked at the airspeedometer. It showed now, only two hundred and fifty miles per hour—for what that might mean.

	"I wonder how far we've fallen now, and how deep the air is?" he asked.

	"Only God knows how far we've fallen now, or how deep the atmosphere actually is." Corliss sighed. "We must be near bottom, though. Well, boys, it was a grand fall, while it lasted."

	"It lasts too long," moaned Thrumann. "I—I can't bear the suspense—the waiting for the inevitable."

	"It won't last much longer," said Martin bleakly. "We've slowed to one-seventy-nine now."

	A strange look came over Corliss's face. He looked out. The rain seemed to have stopped, momentarily; they were no longer rushing through it. There was something else out there, though. Suddenly the ship jarred slightly, and a great, sprawled thing hung limp and brown across the ports—obscuring the view. Corliss looked at it thoughtfully for the instant before it was ripped away by the air streaming past.

	There was a new sound, growing slowly. The howl of torn air was growing deeper in tone now, heavy and thick, almost a groan. And—intermingled with it a slow, heavy creak and groan, a straining settling, a slow, jarring vibration through all the ship. The fabric of the ship was creaking with the colossal strain upon it. Corliss was first to recognize it.

	"Martin—Martin—" he said softly. "Open the barometer valve—just a trifle—let a little air in." Silently, Martin did it. The needle crept over on the gage—over and over and over. It struck the stop pin at five times atmospheric pressure. Some fifteen seconds later there was a dull explosion; the barometer shattered, and a roaring, terrific thunder of incoming gas sounded from the synthium valve. Martin closed it as the ship's atmosphere became permeated with a thick, heavy smell of musty plants, and cold dankness.

	"What's the air-speed, Martin? Have you noticed? I did, just now. It's almost zero—thirty-five according to that instrument. We've almost—God!" They saw it too then. They had been watching and listening to Corliss, but now they saw the horizon-reaching water-surface!

	It seemed ages the ship fell—fell—fell toward it. Then—a bone-cracking jar as they struck if. It seemed to splash about the ship in thin, airy froth; then they were plowing slowly through it. "We'll float," groaned Corliss. "My arm—but our density's only .94, thanks to synthium."

	Martin suddenly yelled; he yelled in horror, amazement, sudden fear of the impossible and unknown. They had penetrated the water and were on the underside. Below them was air, just clean air, except—perhaps fifteen miles down—they saw rocks, great boulders, stones, and pebbles, a little higher there was dust. And the boulders, the rocks, and the pebbles were floating in the air.

	Corliss spoke. His voice was very calm and disassociated. "We've stopped falling, haven't we, Martin? Yes? I thought so. We'll rise now, presently. You see—this is Mahomet's Coffin. The ground won't take us, and we can't reach the sky, so we will float, float just as those boulders and the water do—in the air.

	"You see—we were too hurried. We didn't make our investigations properly, because we knew that Norddeutscher would be on our heels in six months; the Interplanetary Commission knew synthium ships could cross the Asteroid Belt.

	"So we didn't make the observations we should have. If we had, we'd have learned quickly enough from the elasticity and the gravitational vectors what the atmosphere was like. How deep it was.

	"We've come down nearly eight hundred and fifty miles. I wonder how far the atmosphere does extend? It can't go very much further, or it would become terribly dense. See—in some ten miles more it is dense enough to float rocks.

	"The upper part must be less dense than Earth's. You know even under Earth's light gravity, the air pressure doubles in three and a half miles. And at the surface of Earth, the atmosphere is 1/800th as dense as water. You have to double it only a few times—let's see—it mounts so rapidly—2;4;8;16;32;64;128;256;512; and then 1024. That's ten doublings. If Earth's atmosphere were just thirty-five miles deeper—it would be denser than water. If it were fifty-five miles deep, it would float anything known—platinum, iridium, mercury.

	"You see we didn't consider that. The atmosphere here—ah, that's the hydrosphere again. We'll rise through it slowly this time. We'll float above it somewhere—a few hundred feet. The atmosphere right here is as dense as water. Water—good lord—it must be warm here!"

	Martin stared blankly at the instruments for several seconds, then shook himself like a dog emerging from a swim. "It's—it's three degrees above zero, centigrade."

	"Yes—it would be. The air blanket. What is the composition of this air, I wonder. We can't really test it, you see, because the test bottles wouldn't stand it. And—try the rockets, Martin, ever so gently."

	"My arm hurts. Look at it, will you, Lombard?"

	Martin touched the rocket feed control. There was a soft thud, then a very muffled, heavy, laborious whoosh. The ship stumbled slightly, and moved under a very, very faint acceleration. They were out of the hydrosphere now, and again in the air above. Martin looked at his gauges.

	"Impossible," he sighed. "They won't work at all."

	"Oooh—I was afraid they wouldn't. You have only eight tons pressure in the fuel tanks, the atmospheric pressure must be close to that. You can't get any rocket kick that way—and we aren't equipped with propellers. Propellers would work fine in this stuff." He jerked slightly as Lombard felt his shoulder gently.

	"It's dislocated," said the doctor. "I'll have to splint it and wrap it a bit. I wonder what effect this gravity will have on it."

	"I don't know. We're oscillating now, aren't we, Martin?"

	"Yes—going down again, slowly now."

	"We'll reach rest rather quickly—and rise and fall with the barometric pressure. But I think we're—parked."

	"Can't we get out?" asked Thrumann softly.

	"Well—the rockets don't work, and the wings are gone, and we haven't a propeller."

	"Can't we—can't we make one?"

	"Difficult, Karl. I really don't know what kind of a diving suit we'd use. They never made a suit—or a submarine for that matter—that could get down to the bottom of the Six Mile Deep of Japan—and that's no worse than this is. We have some idea of the strength of synthium, anyhow. Remarkable stuff. I'll have to calculate the stress on those beams—" Corliss looked up at the great cross-girders in the ceiling of the room. They'd been made heavy—intended to resist the shock of meteor and asteroid impacts. They'd groaned under the awful load when the air pressure hit them, but—somehow they'd held.

	Probably, had those early explorers had any real idea of the immense strength of the stuff they worked with, the "Mercury" would never have gotten so far as the hydrosphere layer. They wouldn't have used such heavy stuff. But there were two-inch plates of welded synthium as a hull, and immense girders in that ship. The old "Mercury" would look enormously clumsy and heavy to us today, like the old twenty-by-twenty solid oak beams they used to use in the old settler's homes for reef-trees when America was settled. Vast, unnecessary strength.

	Well, it served them well. The "Mercury" hung, still a mottled, bloated football of metal, stuck on dead center in Jupiter's impossibly dense atmosphere. Even the rockets couldn't build up much more pressure than that atmosphere had. There simply wasn't any discharge velocity—the gases drifted out slowly from the center of burning—and the ship stuck where she was.

	An hour later, Corliss was in bed, sleeping under a mild opiate, his arm bandaged and- reset. Martin was looking at his controls, only half intelligently. He was trying to accept that they couldn't move.

	He knew they couldn't. He'd always known that someday he'd die, too. But dying is an act always performed by someone else; no conscious person ever performed the act—so it remains the unexpected, a rather mythical thing you believe in; you agree it will happen—but not now. And since all time is only a succession, of nows, Man never really believes in Death.

	Martin had always come back, he'd never been stuck, hopelessly, utterly, eternally stuck. So he was trying to realize simultaneously the two unrealizables—personal catastrophe and personal death. Because Death was at hand now, actually this particular now. There was a limit to the food. There was a limit to the air. But there wasn't any limit to time. Time would just go on, in its usual way. Only he wouldn't be part of it He'd be gone. He'd be gone because he couldn't go.

	Martin was too much of a mechanist to hope to move. He knew there wasn't a hope of working on the outside of the ship, of getting out for even an instant. And of course they couldn't do a thing from inside.

	Ben Riley had given up that angle. He was fussing with the radio apparatus. He was timing echoes now. The echoes were sharp, and definite. The reflecting layer was turning back everything he sent. He couldn't get a note through that layer. And there was a terrific, washing static, like ocean breakers snarling on a rocky coast. He tried timing the cycles of the interference, began to plow it carefully, found its wavelength of maximum intensity. Riley had settled to more or less routine work.

	Thrumann was in the laboratory. The reagents were limited, and he didn't have enough of any of them. Reagents were heavy. But the gyroscopes were working now, holding the ship in position. They were too light and small to resist the turning, bouncing winds up above, but they held the "Mercury" nicely now, and Thrumann began setting up his laboratory. Presently he began looking at the sample bottles. Quietly he put one with a trip-seal in the special test-lock. He opened the outer valve and watched through the clear synthium port as the outside air came in. There was a barometer connected with the lock, and suddenly it exploded. Thick, dank, foul-smelling air rushed into the room as Thrumann shut off the intake valve.- The trip valve was closed on his test bottle however. Then—suddenly it exploded too.

	Thrumann went to work. Under the heavy gravity he laboriously removed the wrecked barometer and put a heavy brass cap over the tube. He fished out the wrecked test bottle, and put in another, empty one. Carefully he ran the pressure up inside the little lock, till he felt he had enough. Then he started the pump that would force the excess air back into the outside atmosphere, and permit him to let in the ship's air, without contaminating it further. For a few moments the pump chugged heavily—then it stopped at the lower end of a stroke. It couldn't handle the difference in pressure now.

	Thrumann valved the air into the ship. But he got his test sample, and began checks on it.

	Monotony set in that day. Within three hours of their final coming to rest, they had seen all there was to see from the ports. Below, the vast sheet of floating water, extending infinitely into the distance. Above, the murky, clouded air, and finally the clouds. A very long twilight came, and the dark grey clouds turned darker, till they were only a luminous belt in the utter, unbelievable black of Jupiter's night. The light of nine moons and a billion stars was falling on them—and stopping there.

	At about the same tune, the cold set in. It was just a very little above freezing outside, and slowly the cold crept through the hull of the ship, and into the insulated rooms. It was a persistent cold, a dankness rather than anything else, because there was an enormously dense atmosphere outside to drink out the heat, and the metal insisted on getting down to that temperature and staying there. Naturally, a spaceship uses vacuum heat insulation because it is obviously the lightest. The "Mercury" did. But while she could maintain that vacuum nicely between her hulls on Earth, no matter how perfectly metal is joined, even if it is synthium, it leaks a little. The vacuum, originally obtained by exhaustion into space through the usual bilge-valves of a spaceship, was breaking down. Air was leaking in. The vacuum gage mounted on the instrument board was slowly falling toward zero. And when the insulation went, the walls grew cold, and colder. Presently the inner hull began to show beads of moisture, and the heating of the ship had to be increased.

	The chill leaked in. The air temperature showed -94° and the men put on heavy sweaters, because the cold metal walls soaked up the radiated heat from their bodies and didn't return it. There was no way to heat those walls satisfactorily, and the hot air cooled on them, and ran down in puddles of cold air on the floor, so their feet felt frozen.

	They started electric fans to stir it up.

	Corliss woke after twenty-four hours of sleep, and looked about him. There were heavy blankets over him, and the room was cold, for they had shut off the heat in his cabin bunk. He joined them presently in the motors room. They were watching an exhaust pump, designed to clear the inter-hull insulation when needed, and mainly to clear the locks. It had a seventy horsepower motor to drive it, and three cylinders, one of steel, one of parium and one of molded synthium. It was laboring terrifically, thudding horribly with every stroke, and the heavy steel of the first stage cylinder was bending visibly outward against the pressure.

	It worked for some five minutes as he watched silently, unnoticed. Then there was a rending crack, and the crankshaft of the pump broke off. The synthium piston slammed down against the lower head of the cylinder, and started all the studs. Air whistled through the gasket. But the synthium valves and pipe lines held when they closed off the pump.

	"Have we any spare synthium plates?" asked Corliss softly. They turned to look at him.

	"Oh—hello, Bar. How's the arm?" asked Riley. "We have plenty of synthium stock, I guess, but we haven't any bigger motors so it wouldn't do much good to make it. I suppose you were thinking of a synthium pump?"

	"Yes. We'll have to make it. A little one, so that motor can handle it. Because if the vacuum has been broken in the inter-hull, the pressure there will build up till it teaks into the inner hull here. And we can't live under any such pressure. We've got to make an exhaust pump that will keep the pressure here down. It's cold as blazes here. The heaters on?'

	"Uhmm—full. The steam engine won't handle any more. We could rig burners, of course—but the fuel won't last indefinitely. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to be cold, and have the fuel last as long as we do?"

	"Why?" asked Martin glumly. "I'd rather be warm for a while, anyway, instead of half-frozen all the time."

	Riley gestured out of the port. It was raining now. At least, what passed for raining. There was evidently a slight current in the dense air, too, for the water surface below was passing under them. They could see that in the light from the ports, for it was night, and utterly black outside. Great rounded globules of water drifted slowly, slowly downward past the windows. "We need electricity for things other than warmth. Hot coffee tastes damn good."

	"We should have used asbestos insulation, or something like that," muttered Martin.

	"It wouldn't have done any good. That air's too dense. If we'd used cork, the stuff would have been pounded flat under that pressure, and the air in between the asbestos fibers would have carried heat almost as well as so much cold water."

	"Could we pump that inter-hull vacuum back with a stronger pump, instead of using it inside here?" asked Corliss.

	"I doubt it," replied Riley. "The leakage is too fast. If we pump the inside, we have two slow-leaking dams between us and the outside pressure. If we pump the inter-hull, there will be faster leakage, though it would of course keep the pressure down in here just as effectively. It'll be a hell of a job making a pump work on that pressure. I'll use a cam instead of a crankshaft, and make it a radial pump. I'll have to start right away, if we don't want to get squeezed first. The pressure here's up a pound and a half."

	"Yes, but some of that I'm afraid I let in," admitted Thrumann. "I got a sample of the air out there though. It has nearly one percent oxygen. And a hundredth of one percent carbon dioxide. There must be lots of plants here. The rest of the air is water, mostly."

	"Huh—the rest of the air is water," quoted Martin. "Is that how you say it in German?"

	"No, stupid. The rest of the air-pressure is due to water vapor, largely, and most of the water vapor seems actually to be liquid water droplets. There's lots of nitrogen and helium and some hydrogen and lots of rare gases. But most of it is nitrogen and water."

	"One percent oxygen—that'll do us a hell of a lot of good," grunted Martin. "A louse might live on it."

	"A louse does. I tried it, only it was a fly rather than a louse, and so does a mouse—for a while. There is one hundred and twenty pounds pressure of oxygen in this air—forty times Earth's oxygen pressure. I think I can get it out. By solubilities. If I can just get pumps that will handle it." He looked at Riley, and the engineer groaned.

	"How?" he asked. "We have only one seventy horse motor, and the next is the thirty horse on the hydrogen fuel pump. Then there's a twenty on the oxygen fuel pump, and a pair of twenties on the fuel-tank charging motors. And the main power plant won't handle any more than 175 horsepower."

	"Have you got plenty of synthium stock?" asked the chemist.

	"No. I haven't got such a heck of a lot. Remember we had to shave weight."

	"Could you tear out some partitions?"

	"Not a chance. Those partitions are probably bearing a few thousand tons of load right now—helping to hold out the walls of the ship. I wouldn't touch them. I might consider the inner lock door, if it was absolutely necessary. The lock doors aren't leaking, by the way. There's a rubber gasket around them, you know, then a machined steel seat. Well, under the pressure, the rubber got hard, and the steel flowed, so that it is the gasket now, confined between rubber on one side, and the synthium plates on the others. That's the tightest joint in the ship."

	"I thought we might make a water pump that would kick the water out into the little chemistry test-lock, throw it up in a stream, then let it come in again, and work a water-motor on the in trip that would help push the pump that boosted it out. To overcome losses in that system we wouldn't need more than a few horsepower."

	"Lord—" said Corliss, and fell silent, thinking swiftly. Finally he spoke again. "Thrumann, do you remember how heat-operated refrigerators work? The kind that freeze by heat? They circulate a liquid in a balanced-pressure system, with vapor-pressure on one side, and absolute pressure on the other side of a pool of liquid ammonia, or rather, a U-tube of ammonia, in liquid form. I wonder if you could use a similar system with water? Somehow have an absolute pressure of oxygen and nitrogen on the outside balanced by a pure nitrogen pressure on the inside, and circulate it, taking out the oxygen on the inside. What we need is some kind of a valve that would let oxygen through, but not nitrogen."

	"Ahhh—I see what you mean—yes, and then we would need less than half a horsepower to keep the liquid moving, and agitate it thoroughly on both sides! I think it could be done—I must see—not a valve—a metal plate, permeable to oxygen, and impermeable, or almost so, to nitrogen. I must work—"

	So Thrumann had his work. Riley had his, and Martin had to help him. And Corliss had only the responsibility of the expedition, and a dislocated arm.

	Martin and Riley had no cinch, the task of making a pump that would handle a pressure of over six tons. It had to be synthium, and they couldn't machine the stuff, so they had to cast it. They had available a flame that would melt it, but they didn't have casting beds, nor the materials to make them. So they did the next best thing, they cut them out of blocks with their flames, and smoothed them with delicate welding, and final polish on a synthium disc, roughened and abrasive, driven by an electric motor.

	It took them two weeks, and then the air pressure was up to two atmospheres, and the air was rank and musty and foul, and the men couldn't eat because they were sickened by it. Finally, though, they had a two-stage radial pump of synthium, and they welded the tubes on to the broken tubes leading from the old exhaust pump, for these were synthium, fortunately, and they started the contraption. It wasn't quite true, and the bearings squeaked, no matter how much oil they put on them, but it ran. They didn't know how much it would have pounded on a normal load, with a synthium-on-synthium bearing, but it thudded terrifically on this load—but it worked. In twelve hours the pressure inside was down again, and Thrumann, with his deodorizers and perfumes had the air smelling breathable again. They had to run the pump a good deal, and they couldn't sleep while it ran, and it was cold all the tune, which made sleep uncomfortable anyway, till Riley rigged some electric blankets out of a cut-up space suit. Then they could sleep, but when they were awake, their fingers and their feet were frozen, and it was hard to work.

	Then Thrumann announced he had found that a silver alloy would pass oxygen, and not nitrogen, but it had two difficulties. They didn't have a pound of silver on the ship, and even if they had, silver could never have withstood the pressure, save if they used a series of at least ten silver-walled chambers. That would have needed at least half a ton of the metal. Thrumann had known silver "blisters" were formed by the solvent action of melted silver on oxygen, and had worked in part from the idea of that selective action.

	The air kept getting bad, and the cold drained them, for only near the heaters was it at all warm, so most of the time they had to sit near the heaters, and think. Only Thrumann had anything to do now, and his task seemed hopeless. When the pump worked, they couldn't stay in the same room, and that was the only room that was comfortable, so they froze most of the time, with the motors room door closed to stop some of the noise, the clanking and pounding and thudding.

	They were beginning to get used to that horrible, monotonous life at the end of a month. Then, apparently, Jupiter entered another season. The weather changed. It had been rainy most of the time, and now it rained all the time. Day and night great round gloves of shining water drifted slowly, slowly past the window, and they sat and watched them drifting by in the light from the ports. They glowed and sparkled like gigantic jewels at night, and by day they were lusterless, dim miniatures of the leaden black sky above and the leaden black water below, and the leaden, limitless view beyond. For two weeks that continued, for fourteen endless periods of twenty-four hours. Then a change came. The air grew rough. The sea below began to heave gently first; then they realized the ship was beginning to move. It heaved gently up, then fell gently down. Like a giant breathing. The balls of rain, big as basketballs, heaved up and down too. The motion grew worse as the "season" advanced. In another month they were continuously seasick from the queer, choppy motion. The ship heaved and pitched and rolled. Then—slowly it eased off. The motion grew less, as the men slowly regained some strength.

	They began to be active enough to be moody and quick-tempered. They were optimists, chosen for even tempers, smooth dispositions and perfect agreement of temperaments. But they began to snarl at each other. Thrumann cursed Riley for not building the pumps he needed, or even trying to. Riley cursed Thrumann as a fool for thinking of an idea so insanely impossible, for his false-hope silver plate.

	And Thrumann—found the answer. He finally found a way of imparting silver's selective absorption to a synthium allotrope, the clear, transparent type.

	Instantly, tempers changed. A new hope had come. They could, perhaps, get air indefinitely, it was something to do at least, and the remaining pitching motion was dying. They guessed, wrongly as they learned, that the "season" had changed. There never had been a season. They'd drifted over the equator.

	But they set to work with a will, while Thrumann made more of his plates, bigger ones, more of them. Finally, better ones, and then started all over again. With 120 pounds of oxygen pressure on one side, he could get seven and a quarter pounds of oxygen pressure on the inside, and a flow of half a pint per square inch at three pounds oxygen pressure. Nitrogen pressure didn't affect it in the least.

	The laboratory test-lock was opened from the inside, the inner door dismantled, and the apparatus set up in the lock. Then the synthium retorts in the lab were connected to the apparatus in the lock, and a new door fitted in the inner lock-seats. And the apparatus was ready to function just three weeks after the start of the work. There were two washing retorts, where outside Jovian air entered, was washed, and the pure gases dissolved in the water; the water was agitated so that it passed under a partition that dipped into it, and into a second chamber, where the dissolved gases came out, as the apparatus was slowly brought up to working pressure. Nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide. Presently the pressure on both sides was equalized, and outside pressure was the norm. The apparatus held. And—a soft, gentle breeze of pure, cold, odorless oxygen gas swept into the room. There were twenty of the rectifier plates, evolving gas so swiftly a steady breeze of the intensely invigorating gas passed in.

	They ran the oxygen concentration up in celebration, delighted that there was no odor leaking through the plates and the water solution system. A reserve water system was available for use while the main one was cleaned.

	And Thrumann grew inspired by his success. He tried using both systems at once. Rapidly the oxygen concentration built up to a dangerously high point, and an over-exhilaration was produced among them. The seven and a half pound limit was reached, for the oxygen supply from the fuel tanks was cut off, and the process stopped. Thrumann set up new apparatus, and collected oxygen from his second apparatus. Three days later he pointed with swelling pride as the pumps forced new oxygen supplies into the fuel tanks. Oxygen stolen from the atmosphere of Jupiter!

	Martin deflated him. "We can't burn oxygen though. It's no good without hydrogen."

	Thrumann glowered at him, and swore he'd produce that too! "We shall escape! We shall get so much fuel we can escape anyway. There is hydrogen in this atmosphere—a minute trace, as in all atmospheres, but some. We shall isolate it till we can go!"

	"I'm afraid we can't, Karl, even then. The rockets just won't work well, and unless you could isolate your fuels faster than the rockets burn it—"

	It was manifestly impossible, so Thrumann returned disconsolate to his laboratory. He had hoped for an hour they might break free.

	Thrumann was asleep when the last disappointment came. Riley was on the useless watch, and stared somewhat as he noticed the rain start—and it was not rain. Then he thought it was hail, and for some minutes it was. He looked at the thermometer outside, and read with surprise that the temperature had fallen to five degrees below zero, centigrade. In amazement he looked out—and in utter astonishment he rose from his seat and glared through the port. Very, very slowly, skating back and forth like a bit of dropped paper, a great, white hexagonal thing dropped gently past the window. It was night, and it shone like a marvelous jewel in the light of the window. It was two feet across, a thing of wonderful fairy-land beauty. A snowflake, six-sided, wonderful crystal of water. Another dropped into sight, and another. It was snowing heavily in half an hour, and Riley called the others. Flakes as big as dinner plates, all magnificent, perfect hexagons dropped past, all different, all alike. There were always hexagons, but some were like fish-bone patterns, like the vertebrae of a herring, and some were solid pale plates, and some were two crystals united.

	It was snowing on Jupiter. And it was colder, noticeably colder.

	Day came later, and it was the brightest day they had known, for the air was full of whiteness. And not until then did they notice the air was growing stale and thick in the room. They had been fascinated by this miracle of beauty.

	Thrumann guessed the cause instantly. The water in his apparatus was frozen, solid, and the little agitator motor was humming and smoking hot. He shut it off, and looked blankly while the others gathered. "Can't you just set your plates directly in the wall of the ship—wouldn't they pass the oxygen directly that way?" asked Corliss.

	"I tried them that way. They will—till they get clogged with organic products. The water was the best. I can still work that, and I will, for a while. We must heat the water and melt it. Then we can add calcium chloride. That will be all right, because synthium is very inert. But I am afraid. We will see, however. But first—the flames."

	They worked on it, and forgot the miracle of the snow-flakes. The flames roared, and slowly the stubborn apparatus heated, and the water thawed. They had shut off the pipes leading in, and presently the pressure was released on both sides, and the tanks opened. The whole supply of calcium chloride was added to them, when they had been flushed and cleaned, and the stench killed. "The chloride will kill the plant-life forms that have infested the water, and it will be even cleaner now—I hope," said Thrumann.

	All day they worked, and the next they finished it, and the apparatus was ready for working again. They opened the valves, and after a single heavy clank, the pressure came up to normal. Presently clean oxygen was pouring into the room from both machines. Thrumann worked them at full power, anxiously it seemed, and kept the pump working on the one machine that was charging oxygen into the fuel tanks; so much so that the output fell off, as all the oxygen was drained to the other apparatus, Where the pressure on the room side of the plate was less than a tenth of an ounce.

	Twenty-two hours later, the snowstorm was still going on, and the biting cold had grown more intense, more unendurable. And twenty-two hours later the apparatus stopped again. The tanks were not frozen this time, the inlet pipes were. Moisture had collected in them, and blocked the flow of gases. They probably had been frozen before, but when the full difference of pressure between Jupiter's atmosphere, and that of the ship rested on it, the ice broke down, naturally. Now there was only the difference of oxygen pressure on them.

	They thawed them out this time by sending an electric current through them. But it was getting colder. Thrumann started pumping on both tanks, so that he got the maximum rate of flow, for he knew that soon this would be impossible. It was getting colder.

	The snowflakes got smaller, smaller and smaller till they were no larger than flakes on Earth or Mars. But still they drifted in majestic slowness past the window. The beads of moisture on the walls of the ship froze that day. The walls were below freezing. And the men were colder. The heaters were working at full capacity, but Corliss ordered them turned off, and the men put on the electrically heated suits. They could not move about so much now, but it was warm, and they needed less heating power. They had to put heating coils in the water tank.

	What happened next came so slowly, they did not realize it at first. The snowflakes were melting slightly on the ship, because it was heated somewhat. They melted and froze, and more came and froze on. It built up a layer over the ports so smooth and transparent that, where nothing but a uniform whiteness was to be seen, they did not notice it at first. Air and all about was white suddenly—and the ship was ice. The oxygen apparatus was plugged up, and no amount of thawing the tubes would clear them. The ice was outside.

	That was how they found the ice. Day after day passed, and the ice remained. A week went by, and the uniform whiteness was all there was outside. Two weeks went by—a month.

	Corliss guessed it finally, and ordered a slight trial of the rockets under very low power. There was a sudden explosion, the roar of a ruptured rocket tube. "Turn it off, Martin. It's no good. We're stuck more than ever. I wonder—how thick is it?" He looked out of the port.

	"How thick is What?" asked Riley blankly.

	"The ice, Ben, the ice. We're the center of a block of ice, and we probably always will be. I think I know what happened. You know we figured that Jupiter was above freezing because the blanket of atmosphere was so deep that the sun's heat and light that got in "as short-wavelength light never got out because it was turned into long-wave heat, and stopped, held prisoner on Jupiter. That keeps the equator and temperate zones warm. We're in the arctic zone. The temperature's forty-two below, centigrade. We were carried here by the air drift probably. And the snow settled and froze on us, and more froze on us, and more, till so thick a shell was formed we sank, due to increase in density. We probably sank till now we're resting on the great polar icesheet. We thought it was just that the snowing kept up. It may have, at that. Probably it stops sometimes. But we're stopped always, because we're stuck on the polar ice sheet, and can't drift away to warmer climates where the rain would melt this ice off. Oh, probably there is some motion of the ice, but too little to do us any good. Maybe in a million years it will reach the tropics again.

	"That does not matter. We are here—forever. The rockets can't melt us out, because they are plugged, and will simply explode, and unless we had an engine more than one hundred percent efficient we can't melt the mass of ice around us with our limited supply of fuel."

	"Always—here! No more air—" Martin said it very softly, and sighed. "That engine would have to be more than ten thousand percent efficient, I guess, to get us loose now."

	"No—just 101% would be enough—because we would get back what we started with every time. But there ain't no such animal," said Corliss. And stopped. Because he'd suddenly remembered there was one—a rocket ship I Then he shrugged his shoulders, and sighed, for this rocket ship would never again be even one percent efficient.

	"But the air-lines are plugged. We'll never get any more air," protested Martin.

	"Martin, there is not one single thing we can do about it. They're plugged. What of it? What good did they ever do? You knew that eventually we'd run out of food, and there always was more air than food."

	"It's cold," said Riley. "We'll need a lot of fuel for warmth—if we never get back where it's warm."

	"We won't," sighed Corliss. "You can depend on that." There was a resigned hopelessness in his lean, seamed face. "But we've been here a good while now. Can you tell whether or not you can send a radio message?"

	"Yes, I can tell—and we can. I've been fussing with the set for days. There being nothing else to do."

	Nothing else to do. That was the situation of the Corliss Jupiter Expedition. Days followed days, and merged into months. Thrumann puttered and read and sulked and tried to think of chemical schemes. He converted all the excess paper and cloth into sugar, and ran out of reagents. The men wouldn't touch his results, but he ate it, and seemed to wax fat and happy, or at least fat.

	They grew strong. The eternal crushing weight seemed to affect them less as they grew accustomed to it. And the ship was stable now, very stable. It was anchored by unknown millions of tons of ice. The ship had merely served as a nucleus for a gigantic hailstone, and now, here on the floating ice mass in the air, it grew heavier. Day and night grew to have less and less differentiation. The layers of ice, translucent though they were, finally blocked all light, and the ship lay in a mass of dark, light-less ice, with only the glow of her lights showing what lay beyond. The temperature never varied; it hung at forty-two degrees below zero week after week, for they never moved, and Jupiter's air is too massive to change rapidly in temperature as Earth's does.

	Riley watched the calendar, and played with the radio, and Corliss watched the calendar, and worried. The six months was rapidly dwindling to a matter of days. There was nothing they could do about it. The "relief" ship would come. That was inevitable. But they might be able to stop it before it got so far down into the atmosphere that retreat was impossible.

	And, deep in Corliss's mind, a single thought began to rankle, the thought that went with those words he had spoken hastily when he first realized they were forever imprisoned in the icy floating continent of Jupiter.

	Corliss was sleeping; he woke with difficulty to the shaking of Riley's hand on his shoulder. "Bar—Bar—wake up. Brad's calling."

	Corliss sat up with a start. "Brad? Brad's on Ganymede!"

	"He's not any more. He's on Jupiter," said Riley grimly. Corliss was up in a second. In another he was in the radio room. The speaker was rattling to a human voice for the first time in all the months they had been here. There was the background wash of static;—but there was a human voice.

	"Riley—Riley—hey, what's up?"

	"O.K., Brad—I went to get Bar. He's here. Now listen. Have you stopped?"

	"No, I haven't. I'm going to bring you out somehow. You may have had tough luck but—"

	"Brad," said Corliss slowly and calmly, "if you haven't reached the region of storms, turn on all your power, and get out. You haven't a chance, and we know it better than you do. If you have passed the first layers of the storms, fold your wings at once, and let it fall freely till you pass them. You'll hit the thick air, and slow enough to partly open the wings again. Ours ripped off. But go back. The air is denser than water. We've floated in it for months."

	The speaker rattled softly as Brad's voice came through. "God," he said aloud, then, "they've gone mad," softly, as though he had turned away from the microphone to speak.

	Bar laughed softly. "It won't do any good, I see. You won't believe me. But fold your wings, and you will be that much better off. When you get down, let us know. And watch out for the hydrosphere. It isn't very thick, but it may strain your plates to the breaking point. Close off all barometers, too. They'll explode."

	The voice of Brad suddenly became jumpy. They had reached the level of the storms. An order rang out sharply: "Level off, if you can, and shut off the gyroscopes before they break a mounting. Are you using full lift on the wings?" A moment pause. Then: "Good—then take a straight dive. This storm area isn't very deep evidently. And you might cut the wing-lift down, for now."'

	"Why not do as I say, and fold them, Brad? I'm not nuts, even if I do say funny things. The air is denser than water. The rocks float in it down a little lower. We're frozen in- a hailstone now, and can't break loose. But if you aren't going to use the wings, why not fold them?" Corliss spoke ironically. There was no answer. Finally he spoke again. "All right, go ahead. But close off the barometers when they start exploding. Synthium's the only stuff that can stand the pressure."

	"That pitching's pretty severe—God—that pinion gear is strained. Pull in the wings!"

	"They won't move now, sir," a faint voice replied. "The rack's—" The voice was drowned in a rending, crashing thunder.

	Silence returned in a few seconds. "The wings go off?" asked Corliss sweetly. "Ours did too. Right about where you are. Will you order the barometers closed off now? And don't try to fire your rockets when you get any lower because the air's too dense. It will burst the tubes, and if you melt a hole in the synthium rocket-housing, you'll die in a thousandth of a second, and we would like someone to talk to."

	"Close all barometer valves," conceded Brad's voice at last. "Where are you, Bar? I thought you must be mad." 

	"We're frozen in a hailstone about a mile thick, I guess. We're on the south polar ice cap. Where are you?"

	"Forty-five degrees north. It doesn't matter because we're falling freely, and we'll smash when we hit."

	"No you won't. The air's too thick. If you just had your wings, you could stop like landing in a featherbed. You'll float as it is. Take my advice and drop some kind of an anchor in the hydrosphere. What ship are you in?" 

	"Two," replied the radio voice. "But we haven't any anchor."

	"Heave out that magnet if you've still got it. It might do some good, though I doubt it. But stay north. The equator is a region of storms—bounces and heaves. It will make you sick. If you get in the snow regions, use the rockets to push out. But you won't hit. You'll float in the air."

	Two hours later the "Corliss II" was bobbing slowly in Jupiter's atmosphere, in just about the position the "Mercury" had occupied. And there she stuck.

	"Isn't there anything we can do, Bar?" asked Brad, from the "Corliss II."

	"Well, maybe you can, but we spent six months and didn't get far. Our food, by the way, will give out in about a month. Not that it will make much difference."

	"But there must be some way out?"

	"Straight up," said Corliss ironically. "But don't use your rockets. They'll burst, as ours did. Thrumann has a system for getting the oxygen out of the air if you're interested. Personally, I don't think it's worth while. I've got something rankling in my head, and I'm going to start working on it to pass the time. It's impossible of course, so it's just the sort of thing to get us out of this impossible situation on this impossible planet. It's so impossible I'm going to work on it. Goodbye. Talk to Riley for a while. Personally, I'm rather disgusted with you for being a rather complete nitwit, and for disobeying the orders I gave you. You knew we must be wrecked; you might at least have waited till we gave you the details. Then, if you didn't believe us, you could come on in, with some reason."

	Corliss turned disgustedly from the microphone and looked slowly at the men around him. "Don't get all hot and pepped up about what I said. It's impossible to begin with; it's impossible to do any work here because we haven't anything to work with, and I think it would still be impossible to get out if I made what I want to."

	Corliss retreated to the motors room, and locked the door. Then he sat down and started calculating, and playing with a pencil and paper, and drawing diagrams. Gradually, as hours went by, the diagrams started to become modifications of one general pattern. Ten hours later there was one, finely finished little diagram, with pages of notes explaining each little arrowed and numbered part. Corliss had seen daylight—and was beginning to dissolve the word impossible out of his vocabulary.

	He ate finally, having locked everybody else out of the motors room, and went to sleep. When he got up, he ate again, and returned to the motors room. The men in the radio-corner were carrying on a lengthy talk with the "Corliss II," giving advice. Aboard the "Two" they were building a pump now to force the leakage out again. Riley and Martin were trying to explain just how it was made, but they couldn't give diagrams, and they couldn't point with their fingers, and they had to develop a whole new nomenclature. There was too strong a tendency to use the words "this," "that," and "gadget." They were well occupied all the morning.

	And Corliss worked in the motor room, looking up data and working the calculators. About four hours after he went hi, he stuck his head out of the door, and spoke for the first time that "day." There was a broad grin on his face.

	"Riley—come here will you? I think—well, come here anyway." Riley came. And the door was locked again. Martin looked after them sourly, then spoke into the microphone.

	"Bar's hauled Riley in with him now. (He had a grin on his blasted face, but he won't share whatever it is with us. Maybe he's inventing more ways to use that pet 'impossible' of his."

	He wasn't though. He and Riley were discussing actively, swiftly, their words clicking out like the clash of rapiers. And two hours later, a group of apparatus was being set up, the machines were turning out new pieces, and the room was being warmed so that they could work without clumsy heated suits.

	The super-efficient engine wasn't really complex. It was simply the science that led to it, that had stopped all men who went before. Man had already defied the law of conservation of energy in one way, on a grand scale which was still a small scale. They had learned to defy it on a small scale which was actually a grand scale!

	Whoever had first discovered the principle that made rocket ships possible had overlooked the fact that they were irrelevant, relative to nothing in the universe. Since the work they did was the product of the distance traveled times the force applied, a formula known to physics for a thousand years, nearly, it worked out in the rocket peculiarly. The first second it might travel 1,000 feet, and use t force of 1,000 tons. That would be a million foot-tons of work. But later, when it reached a speed of 10,000 feet a second, it would do ten million foot-tons of work, and yet burn the same quantity of fuel. This led sooner or later, by the steady building up of this mathematics, to a condition where the ship was getting more work out of the fuel than was originally in it.

	It had originally been shown to the physicists of Earth in this form: A ship moving one mile a second relative to Earth is, at the same time, moving ten miles a second relative to Mars. It accelerates at a velocity of one mile a second, and so moves two miles a second relative to Earth, and eleven miles a second relative to Mars. How much work has it done? They knew how to calculate kinetic energy: K E =1/2 MV2. But if they calculated the work with respect to Earth, it was three units, while calculated with respect to Mars, the ship had done twenty-one units of work!

	In hopeless mathematical confusion, they were forced to admit that the rocket cannot be justly related to anything, until it actually comes in contact with it. Then, and then only, can it be calculated on.

	So rockets had sailed through space, super-efficient engines landing with more energy than they began with.

	And Corliss, remembering that rankling statement of his that they needed an engine more than 100% efficient—had built one! The first Corliss Energy Generator. In principal it replaced Earth with one electrode, where power was fed in the rocket ship by a charged atom that dissipated its charge in propelling itself, and Mars with a second electrode that absorbed the kinetic energy of the moving atom to electric power.

	The first engine wasn't completed till nearly nightfall of the third Jovian day, twenty-four hours after they started. They had swallowed a few tablets and cubes of the compressed food, and worked steadily.

	They opened the locked door finally, and called the others in. Corliss was laughing, almost insanely. Riley was standing with blurry eyes looking at it and shaking his head. Neither one would talk sensibly. The others came in and stared and wondered what the thing was all about, and looked at the roaring three-inch arc that thundered and thudded and threw out heat that warmed the whole room. Corliss actually told more in his laughter than Riley in his dumb incomprehension of his own handiwork.

	"It's super-efficient—super-efficient!" Corliss chortled.

	"The dry-cell there is running it—a thousand amperes at twenty thousand volts from a six-volt dry cell! The current goes in, and it is multiplied, because the thing's more than 100% efficient; then it is sent in again, and through again, and each time, because this model is 198% efficient, it gets nearly twice as powerful—and finally it's that!"

	Lombard gave Corliss some amytaline to make him sleep, and Riley got some more, and the others sat and stared at the instrument, afraid to shut it off, and afraid to let it run, for fear it would burn itself out, so it ran on, and thundered and roared, and they sat and gaped at it. Presently they took off their heated suits because it was getting too warm! And the beads of ice on the walls had accumulated till they became a layer of clear slippery ice a half inch thick, and a wet, dank layer on the floor, began to melt and run down. And the flame roared on and on.

	They called the "Corliss Two," and told them about the flame, and worried, and ran around helplessly because they were afraid the power would be used up! The inexhaustible, everlasting, infinite power of the first Corliss Energy Generator!

	Corliss Woke finally, to a ship that was stifling hot, and stank with the sharp, biting tang of ozone. He woke, forgetful of what had happened the previous "day," and heard the roar of the arc, and almost ran to the motors room. The arc roared on, the terminals glowing almost white hot, a fearful heat flooding out, for the tungovan terminals were radiating at a temperature close to that of the sun's surface.

	"Thank God—Bar!" said Martin. "Can you shut it off?"

	"Certainly," said Bar, remembering suddenly. And he opened the circuit to the little dry cell. Instantly the arc stopped, and their ears, deafened by hours of the noise, rang in the silence that followed. "The battery ran it," he explained. Then, slowly, as the enormous thought of it came home to him. "The battery—ran that! How long?"

	"Thirteen and a half hours, Bar," said Lombard softly. "The ice outside the ship is melted for two feet around."

	"We'll melt it!" Corliss almost shouted. "We'll melt it for a thousand feet around—we'll drill our way out of here!"

	"Can we, Bar," begged Martin, "can we? We can't work outside. Even with power, we can't work outside."

	"We will, now. Somehow we will," said Corliss. "But first we've got to make a bigger generator. By Great Jupiter, it is a generator—the first, for it generates energy!"

	Martin and Riley and Corliss started making it, and they started telling the men in "Corliss Two" how to make one, and in five more days, they had it finished. They ripped out the old steam "generating" plant, and cut it up to make the-new power plant. Then they connected it, one great lead to the stern rocket tube, and one great lead to the nose of the ship. One million amperes they pounded through it, till the leads turned dull red, and the skin of the ship grew warm to the touch.

	And the power came from a storage battery! They charged the battery from the power lines, and Corliss roared in laughter as he saw the impossible being done! They charged a storage battery from the power it generated, and heated the whole ship so hot, the water outside melted the ice. And they ran the pump as fast as they could, with two motors, and pumped out the biter-hull. They lightened the ship by that much, and slowly it floated up, up, up through the ice and water.

	In two days it worked its way through the ice ball that held it, and rose slowly, grandly, nearly two hundred feet till it struck a balance again. They were free! Free—and with power unlimited, and infinite.

	"We'll work the rockets—gently, very gently—oh so inefficiently—and we won't give one single little hoot in all Hades how inefficient they may be! And we'll reach the Two!"

	"And in the meantime, damned if I can't work out some way to use the power we've got now." Corliss laughed in vast triumph as he looked at the little twelve-volt storage battery that was emergency power for the radio set—turning out a power that fused a great block of ice, and raised the ship—running a hundred and fifty horsepower of motors as a minor job.

	Oxygen was pouring in again from Thrumann's apparatus. Corliss walked slowly through the ship, looking vaguely about him, seeking, seeking, seeking ... an inspiration. Riley watched him steadily, saying nothing. Corliss looked, and finally spoke, half to himself. "We could get out—we could make a diving bell—or rather sphere—like the famous bathyspheres before they used parium submarines. Synthium—we've got enough now, since we cut up the power plant. But how—how to work. A propeller would do fine down in this air—but we haven't any wings, and we'd get into thinner air pretty quickly. But—how to work out of the thing—it will require mechanism—outside mechanism controlled from within—somehow.

	"But—what to use—what to use—Are we no better off now?" Corliss stood looking at the greater generator they had made, working only lightly now, discharging to some extent at high voltage. A switch stood open, and the knife-blades were brushed with little blue fuzz, luminous blue like iron filings hanging stiffly onto a magnet. And then Bar Corliss saw the whole, complete answer, and laughed softly. It was so beautifully simple, effective—and inefficient. But he didn't mind that.

	He just went on laughing when Riley asked for the secret, and showed him what he needed for the diving sphere. Riley and Martin started making it, and the men in the "Corliss Two" announced then- generator was working, and started on a diving sphere too.

	That took nearly two weeks, with all the magnets and motors and little gears and grips and welding arc apparatus. And Corliss made experiments in Thrumann's laboratory air-lock. The big lock was full of diving sphere. Riley wasn't too sure they could open that lock, with the steel gasket that had run like warm tar.

	They sent the diving sphere out alone, first. It was more mobile than the ship itself! It had the little Corliss Generator and a dry cell for a power plant, and four motors and propellers for mobility, and it was made of solid synthium. They could open the lock—and the diving sphere resisted the pressure safely.

	So they were ready for the things Riley had been cutting out of synthium at Corliss' directions, little Venturi tubes a foot long and three inches in maximum diameter, with electrical connections. He was making hundreds of them, making them till the synthium stock was gone, and then he cut up the furniture—made of synthium because synthium was stronger per pound than anything else ever began to be—and when that was gone, he cut up an empty water tank, and used that. Finally he had to stop. But he had a lot of the little things made. Corliss was working still on Thrumann's lock—to the German's disappointment, because all his oxygen apparatus had been torn out.

	Martin and Riley had the job, and they hated it. In that bubble of metal, steadied somewhat by a motor used as a gyroscope, driven by four little propellers, they had to maneuver around, and with a queer thing Corliss called a "mechanical hand," place the Venturi tubes as Corliss had directed, weld them onto the synthium wall with a sudden spot of energy (they had let the entire pressure of the outside atmosphere into the inter-hull again, so that the outer wall was bearing little strain) and place them correctly. Then—the leads, power leads of copper wire supported in synthium beta insulators, welded finally through the synthium-beta port in Thrumann's air-lock, into the ship itself. Then—they were done.

	That was all.

	It was rather difficult, the last few days. Because there wasn't any food at all left now, not even one of the cubes of concentrated nourishment.

	It took them a month to do the final modifications, because the thing was incredibly difficult, working in a bubble of metal that turned and spun and jiggled un-predictably, no matter how they anchored it magnetically. Magnets on the end of mechanically jointed arms held the things they wanted to weld, and the electrodes always bobbed the other way, and when they were in the right position, the Venturi had twisted in the wrong orientation. By the time they had two of them in place, they had to go back to the ship, and have their leaky bubble re-exhausted, as the pressure crept up.

	It was misery those last days, slowly starring.

	They did it though, and the "Mercury" was ready. The ship turned around at 11:30 p.m., 221 days after she first touched Jupiter's atmosphere—under her own power now. At nearly thirty miles an hour she started on her long trek north. Two days later, the "Corliss Two" started south to meet her, also under her own power, and moving nicely. And behind each ship they'd spun long streamers of electric fire. They glowed beautifully. The "Two" reached the Equator first, and had the pleasure of plowing through the "heaves and bounces." It was not so bad though, because it made good time, and had some control.

	They joined in about ten days, because they rose soon, out of the exceedingly dense lower atmosphere to a greater height where the air was not so dense. They had no wings to add drag, so they made good time—180 miles an hour up there.

	That was speed. On Earth, they'd have circled the planet in less than seventy hours at their combined speed of 360 miles an hour—yet they spent 240 hours en route—and those in the "Mercury" were very near dead when the two ships joined, and food could be obtained. Then Lombard and Corner from the "Two" worked together, and in three days, the men were well again.

	And then—in all the little Venturi tubes, the electric flares started again—the little brush discharges that Corliss had visualized as he watched the brush discharges from the knife switch—that day long called, at times, the "electric breeze," never before used. But now the electric breeze started again, grew in power as the inexhaustible energy of the Corliss Energy Generator flowed stronger, and the two ships swung slowly upward, then faster and faster as they left the thicker air, faster and faster ...

	The region of storms had little terror for them now—they had control. They pounded up, at rising speed, for the electric breeze, a drive less than one percent efficient; but what matter, it was capable of thousands of miles an hour.

	It was as good as a rocket, really, while a trace of atmosphere removed, for as they reached the last thin traces of Jupiter's atmosphere, the electric breeze became a terrific electric tornado from the electro-static discharge points, the ionized molecules flying out at thousands of miles a second.

	The "Two" reached Satellite Five in ten hours. The "Mercury," with one burst tube, took twelve.

	But they worried little about that. They made it, and Ganymede too.

	Corliss looked out of the ports. Jupiter hung gigantic, steamy above them. Outside, terrific cold prevailed. Jupiter hung giant—and still mysterious.

	"I'm going to go back there," said Corliss, "and it won't be the last thing I do. I can move there now, and by Great Jupiter, I will! I'm going back to Earth now—for a good ship.

	"But that's all right, Jupe," he laughed, "the score's even! You knocked me about a bit—but you taught me.

	"Brad—this expedition cost me thirty-seven million, five hundred and forty-two thousand, and several hundred. Brad—what do you think an energy generator's worth to the world?"

The End

All
(1976)*

I

	John Reid rose slowly as the radio clicked into silence under Grant's fingers. The nine other men at the table moved restlessly. John Reid the younger snubbed out a cigarette with a grinding, heavy persistence, slow and inexorable.

	"It is done," said old John Reid slowly. "America, last to fall, is fallen to Asia." He shook his massive white head slowly. "And by Fate's unkindest mockery, we reach our goal, reach it at the end of a course as difficult and as long as the course Asia's Nijihua led her men to reach their goal—the Asian World, simultaneous in birth with America's death.

	"Our goal is reached, Scientists. Before you the atom burns to silver light, silver energy, so safely, so controllably, so irresistibly when we choose. The world needs it, needs it infinitely for peace as America needed it for war.

	"Now—shall we sell it to Nijihua—and the world? Give it to the world—and Nijihua?"

	Young John Reid rose slowly. His face was keen and his eyes intense; there was in his slowness of movement not the slowness of defeat and age and despair. His was of absolute determination, and known power. Blue eyes, young and strong, starred in the silver star-flecked light of the golden lamp, looked down the table to blue eyes under silver hair, thin and silky. "No," he said, soft and cold, "we will not sell, we will not give. At the crook of our finger, at the whisper of a word Nijihua would heap honor, power, on the one who mentioned the secret of the Atom to him. But Asians will come. They will find us here, even here. But it will be months, three months, six; for this Research Department 7-A was chosen by the American Government not unwisely, not without secrecy. We will have time before they find this lone, lost canyon. And when they come this will not be American Research Department 7-A. It will be something very, very different. And that we must work out. For we have tools, we have machines, and we have that Lamp of the Atoms, which is not a lamp alone. Inadequate they are to strike direct at Nijihua and the Asian World we know, and useless when the spirit of America's unity is crushed.

	"One thing we have done, we have lighted the lamp. Two things we must do; rebuild America into a unit, and strike at Nijihua. Now for this we have a tool, and the lamp we have lighted lights unguessed caverns of knowledge. Three days it has burned for us, and in that time we have seen lead melt to gold, raw rock to flaming radium, seen tearing bolts that shattered rock and metal. But does any man know this infinitely important thing; Why, three days ago, when Warren Lewellyn first lit that lamp, seven of us died in sudden silent rigidity while we eleven, who stood beside and among them, are here this hour?

	"I know, radiations, radiations we have stopped by brute shielding, and brute ignorance. But we did not die, and they did. We know nothing of the thing we have found. But—I have thoughts on that.

	"We will do much invention in these three months, and some will be artistic and some will be fantastic, some will be—the exploration of the caverns the light of the lamp reveals.

	"We must have men, men of our own race to back us and aid us and hold what we conquer for them. And we must have something that will withstand the might of Nijihua's armies, and nothing will do that. Therefore we must deflect their fury until the time comes that we are ready.

	"Now we would build a firm-knit political union of our people, and Nijihua would build a firm-knit union of all peoples for the benefit of his own. To do this, Nijihua has taken a leaf from the ancient books, and from Rome he has learned and from Persia, from Macedonia and Egypt who ruled world-girdling empires. All these have taught him many things, and the first of these is this: it is not swords which hold or overthrow empires, nor mighty leaders alone, but emotions and mobs and mass. It is the race, not the man. A well-fed and sheltered slave is a safer companion than the freest of starving wretches. The freedom man wants, is freedom to work and eat and live and think as he wills. To rule an empire then, each man must have his way in those things that matter no whit to the empire, and matter so much to the man. You have read the promises of the Emperor. What does he say?"

	"To each man a home, a wife, a living, and peace to enjoy these things. To each man the right to learn, to think, to live, to worship as he will, so only he does not disturb the peace of the Emperor," old John Reid quoted slowly.

	"To worship as we please! That, and that alone I shall demand!"

	The nine men looked from father to son in puzzlement John Reid the younger pointed to the star-flecked silver lance of light that leapt in frozen grace from the golden lamp, and slowly their eyes deepened, and their faces set in a grim, sure knowledge.

	"We want no converts of an alien race," said David Muir slowly. "How, John, do we turn them away?"

	"If my guess be more than guess, though he come in skin-dyed white as ours, with hair like golden grain and eyes blue as liquid air, set straight and true across his face, though we make him gladly welcome, still no convert shall slip through to spy and warn and reveal!" said John Reid. "We have a thousand thousand inventions yet to make, and a hundred days to make them."

	"Whom do we worship?" asked big, slow Tornsen.

	"And that is not the least of our inventions," answered John Reid. "Let it be—All, Lord of Things that Are and Are to Be!"

	"We build, then, the shrine of All, in whom everything that is, is." Old John Reid nodded slowly. "And All is manifest in the Flame. Yes. We must invent the Service of All. Which will be the Service of America.

	"The Temple will be built."

	"But not too swiftly, not too swiftly," said young Reid softly, leaning forward. "We must study All. All has many faces, and His star-flecked flame is but one. By the lightest touch we show another phase of All—Lord of Destruction!" His long, slim fingers touched the base of the lamp, and in the instant the lancing flame darkened, shown iridescent, and was abruptly twin-forked, snake-tongued, crimson as new-let blood, so the dimmed cavern was washed with red that dripped from every rock and puddled on the great table, and the gold of the lamp itself was dark and red with it. The cavern was a place of terror, scarlet and black, for what would not reflect that angry terror-stirring red, must needs be black, for there was no other light save that to reflect. And every shining surface threw back the snake-tongued flame that moved and waved so slow, so slow, so sinuous there, to some strange breeze unfelt by man, feeling never the stirring of the air in the great chamber.

	"And," said Reid as the lithe, white fingers moved again, "All—Lord of Wisdom!"

	And his color was blue, blue as the purest sapphire, cold and clear and gemlike, a tetrahedral flame, perfect as a mathematician's formula, straight-ruled as a clear, clear crystal of light. And the cavern walls were cold and blue as vast antarctic ice-caves, and black as spatial night, and every polished thing gave back the tetrahedral flame of blue, the flame of All, Lord of Wisdom.

-

II

	Major Nashiki halted—in surprise mat did not show on his hard-lined, immobile face. "Halt!" he snapped softly. Then he advanced over the low ridge of rock before him, scoured, beaten sandstone, red as the dust of Mars. A great gash in the hide of Earth fell away below him, red as the stone he trod, blue as distant hills, yellow as sea-sand and riotous with cloud and sun and shadow. Three quarters of a mile it dropped to some forgotten riverbed, deserted aeons since when a mighty slide had dammed the stream that carved that gash. But the bottom ringed by Titan columns of jutting rock—isolated island-pillars half a mile tall—was sand as smooth-and-white as silver-dust.

	And that had not halted him. Country such as this, in miniature, he and his scouting party had traversed for three long weeks. But he halted, for on the farther wall, half a mile to his left, was a great patch of the rock wall that was not rock, but threw back the long rays of the sun in blinding light, white as salt. And in it were glints of purest raying color, blue, green, pearl and somber scarlet.

	"Captain Tiashi, bring the American scout."

	A trimly uniformed captain, a weary, dirty American in tattered rags, light chains on his arms, came forward.

	"Tucker, what is that?" demanded the major.

	Tucker looked silently for a long time. He answered slowly at length. "It's new to me." He folded his long legs, and settled down wearily. The small major, glared at him.

	"Dog, what is it?" His hand struck out like a flash of light; the echo of the slap died out in infinite space.

	The American looked at him through narrowed eyes, his face unmoving. "If I did know, I might and I might not tell you. As it happens I don't, and I can't. If you want real bad to know, I'll show you how to get down there. But you'll have to take these gee-gaws off, because you get down there with your fingernails, and you pull your ears in so you don't blow off. Or you use wings."

	"Captain, remove those irons. We will go down. Captain Tiashi, you will make camp here, and remain with your men. Shurimi, Hitsali, Kushkiani; you will come."

	Five men started down. The American went first, long arms, long legs reaching for known holds, the little brown Orientals silently stretching themselves impossibly to reach holds easy for the lank American. Tucker led them a merry chase.

	Far below, they struck an angling shelf that led down and down, then a short climb down bare, crumbling rock. Then a great slide, a terraced pillar. They walked the fine, white sand of the floor. Tucker looked about slowly, and moved on.

	They were three miles from the dazzling whiteness of the strange wall; the sun was setting now, and in this deep canyon the dusk was coming. But there was light across there, silvery light that streamed through door and great carved windows. Tucker slogged wearily along. Behind, the others marched, the slipping sand making their instinctively assumed rhythm uneven.

	A half mile from the great doors, the major halted. The intense sheen of the white wall had abated, and he saw now it was a perfect square of white. The square was edged with five-foot bands of crystal, crystal above that shone like a mighty sapphire, five hundred feet long, five feet wide; at the right, green as new-grown leaves. Light in it was swiftly growing, softly lambently gleaming. At the left, a vast, luminous and softly pulsing light like an acre of pearls. But across all the bottom was red, not ruby, but deeper, sullen crimson.

	Nashiki pushed on. The light died in the canyon, and by hand torches they plodded on across the silver sands, while dim stars showed the mighty, black walls, and ahead the great crystals pulsed, and the whole vast face of the wall was faintly luminous, as though bright light shone within. The great doors stood open, and silvery light cascaded down the majestic steps.

	Boldly Nashiki started up the great stairway, and it rang to his tread like mighty bells, deep and slumberous. Half up their fifty-foot climb he was, he and his little troop, when a figure appeared at the peak.

	"Who comes?" The voice of the silhouette was deep as the voice of the stair.

	"Major Nashiki of the World Imperial Army, Scouting Division. Who are you, and what is this place?" he snapped.

	"This is the Temple of All. If you be of Oriental blood, stop at the last step. It is the way of All, Lord of Life."

	"The Temple of All? What sect is this? I do not know it."

	"All is Lord of Life, and his phases are Dis, Lord of Death; and Mens, Lord of Wisdom; Tal, Lord of Peace; and Shan, Lord of Fulfillment. And his phases make All, Lord of Life."

	Steadily Nashiki mounted the Singing Stair, and as he mounted, his troop behind him, the song became a welling melody. "It is new to me. This property lies in the Province of Colorado, and is unregistered. Why has it not been listed as the Emperor commands?"

	"All, Lord of Life, alone commands. Nashiki, you have reached the top. Halt, for the Lord All admits none to his Temple save those of All."

	"I shall enter," snapped Nashiki viciously. "The wrath of the Emperor shall be upon you if any interferes with my way." He strode forward.

	The man loomed before him, enormous. A cloak of silver lined with a strange cloth of woven metallic threads, blue and red, silver and green, wrapped him. A strange headdress, set with a one-inch ornament of crystal, diamond-clear, sapphire, pearl and sullen crimson and green that held a bound silver cloth, gleamed in the light of the Temple. In his hand he carried a curious staff, wrought of silvery metal, three feet long and tapering from one inch upward to the four-inch cubed crystal at its head set flush with its sides, a strange crystal that glowed with sparkling light, silvery with star-flecks at the top, sullen red and iridescent pearl, green and sapphire on its sides. The man stood massive and unmoving, six feet three in height, as Nashiki halted to inspect him.

	"Who are you?" demanded the Oriental.

	"Tornsen, Server of All," said the man quietly. "No man shall halt you. But there is death in the air of the Temple of All for all save the People of All."

	As he spoke, the staff in his hands glowed brighter. The silvery flame leapt in the crystal's crest a foot tall, silvery with bursting stars that floated and vanished in an instant, and from the glowing side of sullen red a vaguely seen, vaguely stirring snake-tongued flame of deep crimson wavered and died as the brighter silver waned again.

	Nashiki laughed softly. "So no man touches me, I have no great fear of Gods," he said. He strode forward again.

	The giant blocked his way by a slow step. "It is Death," he said. And Nashiki looked through the great doors. Before him was a great cubed chamber of light. Five hundred feet on a side, it was, and the far wall was dark jet, against which stood a great graven altar, a mighty staff of gold, fifteen feet thick and topped by a Titan's crystal such as the man carried, cubed as his, colored as his. And from its peak lanced a silver flame, sparkling, coruscating. The right wall was green as the crystal's light, the left a vast pearl, the roof more luminously blue than a summer sky. And the floor was a sea of waving blood.

	For a moment the sight had stopped Nashiki. He stepped forward again. "That is gold," he said. "All gold is the property of the Emperor, alloys are to be used for decoration."

	Again the man was in front of him. "That is Death," he answered slowly. "That gold is the property of the Lord of Life."

	Nashiki stepped back, and his movement was swift as the darting tongue of a chameleon; his revolver was in his hand. "Stand aside," he said. Tornsen stood away, his head bent slightly.

	Nashiki stepped forward, across the threshold, to the sea of blood.

	And fell dead.

	He uttered no cry as he fell, nor did he twist; in all the Temple there was no sound nor change, save only that on the floor was a lax, empty sack, discarded by life.

	His little troop started forward, rifles suddenly raised, and their voices were high and sharp with anger. Tornsen spoke again, his staff upraised. "Hold! I did not touch him. Dis, Lord of Death has destroyed him. I will bring him to you, for it is death for you to cross the threshold."

	A man was thrust forward suddenly, a disheveled, ragged man, weary and emaciated. Three rifles pressed his back.

	Tucker looked up into the broad calm face of Tornsen. "Is that—true?" he asked slowly. "I can cross."

	"So you are American, All welcomes you," said Tornsen.

	Slowly, reluctantly, Tucker crossed the line, his eyes fixed on the great cubed crystal of the altar. He crossed, stepped over the dead Oriental, and walked down the broad floor to the mighty crystal.

	Tornsen stepped behind him. At twenty feet from the great crystal Tucker halted, and turned to look at the man behind him.

	"All—All—" he said, "I never heard—"

	"All, Lord of Life, one weary, worn stands' before your altar. All, Lord of Life, cleanse him with your flame, give him of your life! Tal, Lord of Peace, one distressed stands before your altar. Bring Life, Lord of Life. Bring Peace, oh Tal."

	The motionless, silver flame washed higher, till, like a great fountain, it spilled over and fell in soft-glowing stars of light about them. The crystal turned with a vast majesty till the green facet shown toward them. As the silver died, green washed and spun within the crystal, soft green, restful emerald that reached out and through and about the two, and returned to the crystal.

	In a moment Tucker turned, very slowly. His face was clear, his eyes bright with new life, new hope; his weary body stood straighter now, stronger. "All—All—" he said. Slowly he knelt before the softly glowing green of the crystal. "I have hope again—hope—something I thought gone for all time. Oh, God—let me stay, let me stay—"

	The green washed out in a sudden whirling fire that wrapped him, and very slowly he sank to the floor, arranging himself comfortably.

	Tornsen turned to the door. The Orientals stood staring, rifles lowered. But suddenly they lifted them. "We are coming, we are coming, for there is no death—some weapon—"

	"It is Death for you," repeated Tornsen steadily.

	"Come here," snapped one, "we will see! You will stand beside me, close to me—"

	Together, side by side, they stepped across the line. Soundlessly, the smaller man sank to the floor.

	"It is Dis, Lord of Death," said Tornsen again. "I will bring them to you, and you must believe, for to not believe is Death. Tell me, then, what man can kill as these men died? Look at their eyes, look at their flesh."

	He picked up the limp Nashiki, and bore him across the threshold. The two remaining Japanese bent over him quickly, with little half-smothered twitterings; they examined his eyes, the eyes of a long-dead fish; they examined his flesh, and it was like boiled flesh, stiff and strangely white. They backed away suddenly, twittering more intensely. Then abruptly their rifles were flung to their shoulders, centered on the white-robed man. Behind him, abruptly, the great crystal whirled noiselessly, instantaneously, and from its sullen red, a monstrous flame licked like a great rope of congealed, luminous blood, a snake-tongue of death that wrapped suddenly about the nearer Japanese, and flamed about Tornsen.

	It flicked back, and the second Japanese stood frozen as his companion wilted slowly. Tornsen, bathed in the heart of the red flame, stood calm, unmoving.

	"I thank Thee, Dis," the Server said as he bowed his head slightly.

	He raised his eyes to look at the remaining Japanese. "Go," he said. "Bring your companions, and take these bodies."

	"I cannot leave," wailed the Oriental suddenly, "I cannot. I know no trail, he—the American—led us. It is night, I do not know the way."

	Tornsen looked at the broken man. "Where are your companions? I will take you to them."

	"No—no—I will not betray them—"

	"We hurt no man. We serve All, Lord of Life. Those who trespass against All, beware. I would help you."

	The Oriental looked up at Tornsen's broad, calm face. "They are at the top of that great cliff. There—their fire—"

	"Oh Tal—bring peace!" Tornsen called softly. The staff in his hand spun, and the small man screamed as the green face glowed, a lapping green reached toward him. He tried to run down the steps, but the great song of the stair echoed in his ears as lethargy overcame him. He slept.

	He woke. His captain was shaking him, looking at him with angry eyes. "Shurimi, answer! How are you back? Where is your officer?"

	Shurimi leapt to his feet. Hard red sandstone, age-old, lay beneath his feet, the great canyon swept out to the left. "Dead—" he gasped. "Dead, in the Temple of All!"

	Sunlight, still faintly red with dawn, fell on the camp.

-

III

	Three vast feathers falling silent through the blue sky, great wings turning slow through still air, they settled vertically to silver sand between vast upflung walls of rioting color, sullen reds and slate blues, dull golds that shifted infinitely with shifting, lancing sunlight and cloud. Three great helicopters, the striking dragon of the Asian World flung bold across their sides. They touched and halted; slowly a stream of men came out to look across the gorge to the salt-white Temple of All with the bordering blue of Mens, the Green of Tal, the shifting pearl of Shan, and the sullen scarlet of Dis, Lord of Death.

	The Commanding Officer came out a moment later, and behind him came thirty women in shabby clothes, torn and patched, half a dozen ragged children with them. He spoke swift orders to the men, then presently Lieutenant-General Hitsohi started up the mighty silver treads of the Singing Stair, glinting lancing light under the sun. The great treads echoed slumberously to his steps, a growing carillon as the eight men under Captain Chu Li followed, and a private, one Shurimi. And finally the American women came, and the peal of the Stair became a mighty chant that echoed infinitely through the rock-walled gorge.

	At the top, Hitsohi halted as before him loomed the majestic figure of Tornsen, Server of All.

	The Oriental turned to Shurimi. "This is the man?" he snapped.

	"Yes, General."

	"You brought about the deaths of Major Nashiki, and three men of the World Imperial Army?" he demanded, turning again to the giant.

	"All, Lord of Life brought their deaths, Warrior. This is the Temple of All, and before the Cubed Crystal of All only ours may stand, for such is the will of All. No man may sway the will of God, Warrior."

	"Never yet have I seen a God that killed, save through the hands of men. Further, there is report that aside from the violation of the Registration Edict, you have metallic gold stored here, against the will of the Emperor and the laws of the Empire. Is this too, true?"

	"Such is the base of the Cubed Crystal. All wills it. It will remain," said Tornsen simply. "Now I warn you, as I warned Nashiki, there is death on the Scarlet Floor of Dis. You do not believe, but believe me thus, that you, ignorant, cannot safely venture within the domain of mighty forces unknown to you, be they such things as man may understand or those things forever beyond man's finite mind, the will of Lord All."

	Hitsohi stared cynically. "You are violating the Edicts of the Emperor, and you and your companions are under arrest for these, things, and for the assassination of Major Nashiki. The mighty forces of the Empire, priest, are within the limits of any man's finite mind!"

	"We violate no Edicts. This is the Temple of All, and so reads the Edict of Nijihua; that any temple or major religious edifice, not saleable, is not to be Registered or taxed. This is the Temple of All, eternal, unchanging. Never can it be sold. So it is not to be registered.

	"And so reads the Edict of Nijihua; that any man or organization may retain and use gold for such purposes as gold alone may serve.

	"We violate no Edict."

	"You need gold because no other will serve! That is not true, you will use alloys, alloys which have the brilliance, the color, the incorruptible beauty of gold. No nobler metal is needed for ornament."

	"Give me then, some bit of metal, Warrior. I will show wherefore the Temple of All uses gold."

	"Shurimi, your bayonet. Pass it to him."

	Reluctantly the man walked forward and handed the bayonet to the white-robed giant at arm's length. Tornsen took the metal, wrapped one end in a fold of his cloak and held up his cubed-tipped staff.

	"All, Lord of Life, let thy flame play upon this metal, test Thou its baseness!"

	The silver flame of the staff leapt and died, lanced upward eighteen inches and burned clear and cold, the dying stars of silver light tinkling very soft, tiny crystals shattering.

	Tornsen drew the metal of the bayonet through the flame, and it washed about it, through it. He handed the weapon back to its owner.

	"This is the way of All, Lord of Life. Test your blade, Warrior."

	Reluctantly Shurimi received it back. In his hands he twisted it. With a note high and sharp, the death cry of shining crystals, the metal vanished, gone, a powder settling very slowly from the air.

	In the silence the Server spoke. "The Edict says: "Man may retain and use gold for such purposes as gold alone may serve.'"

	Shurimi slowly opened his hands, and a rain of finest dust fell downward, sparkling silver rain in lancing sun-rays. Hitsohi looked askance at the fear-struck private, then at the Server.

	"Your staff is silver," snapped the Oriental suddenly. "Then gold is not irreplaceable."

	"My staff is of iridium and platinum," Tornsen answered. "Gladly we shall relinquish our gold if platinum, iridium, osmium or rhodium or other noble metals be given us. None others long endure the Flame of All, and even swifter is their vanishment beneath the snake-tongued flame of Dis, Lord of Destruction and Death.

	"We violate no edicts, we obey only the command of Nijihua, the Emperor; that every man worship as seems good to him, and fitting."

	"You are guilty of the assassination of Major Nashiki," insisted Hitsohi, but his voice was softer and less harsh. "For this the Temple must be confiscated."

	"I am not guilty, I warned Nashiki as I warned you that Death lies on the floor of Dis, and in the flame of All for all save the people of All. I laid no hand on him, but under the threat of his weapon I was ordered to admit him. He did not know the powers of All, and being ignorant entered, as would the savage to the mighty power-plant of the civilized engineer, not believing in death he could not see. I have no guilt."

	Hitsohi's gaze was cynical. "So," he smiled, "so will you be forced to admit me. And my troop. But we guard against hidden members of your priesthood.

	"Captain Chu Li, place the squad as ordered."

	The pattern shifted like running sand. The thirty American women stood dull-eyed, hopeless in a rough circle about the Oriental troops, a living shield, shoulder to shoulder, through which no weapon could reach.

	Hitsohi looked at the Server, and a tight smile crossed his thin lips. "Forward," he ordered.

	They crossed the slate-white threshold and entered to the sullen crimson floor of Dis, Lord of Death. Three steps the women took before Captain Chu Li, in the lead of the Orientals, reached the Barrier of the Threshold. He stepped across, and soundlessly, so soundless they scarcely noticed, he slipped to the floor and rolled to his back, so his eyes stared up, white and dead, the eyes of a long-dead fish. Two men behind stepped over, and died before the others could halt.

	Dull-faced, hopeless beyond caring, the women walked on unharmed, unhalted, unnoticing.

	"It is death," the Server spoke soft in the hush. "There be powers here man may not understand, the will of AD, Lord of Life. But it is the will of All that the woman cross and it is not his will that you should cross."

	The women crossed the threshold, stood silent, looking at the crystal with faces strangely peaceful and calm after the long months of agony, the years of terror the war had brought.

	Tornsen stood beside them. "Tal, Lord of Peace brings strength again and refreshment"

	A woman spoke, low and tense. "Can—can this All bring—health to the sick?" She held up her son, a six-year-old with spindly legs, scrawny neck and arms, his head a boney case far too large for his weakened body. "It—it is tuberculosis, brought on by the war-gas."

	"All is Lord of Life. Come forward, woman." The silver fountain sparkled, silent and steady as Tornsen led her around a great crystal to a flight of golden stairs that chimed soft and deep to each tread, till they were on a level with the top of the crystal and it lay a vast sheet of diamond-clear light below them.

	Tornsen took the child in his arms, a frightened child that clung to the strength of his great arms. "Lie here," said the Server gently, and the boy lay amidst the pulsing silver light, breathing in the shining star-bursts. "All, Lord of Life, one weak and enfrailed by the wastage of disease lies on your crystal, bathed in your flame. Let Thy great forces play through him, let health return!"

	The silver flame rushed up and through him, soundless beauty of light, till the boy was hidden in its shining sheath. Then it was gone, and the boy sat up slowly.

	"Mother," he said, "Mother, take me down! I'm—I'm hungry—" He began to cry softly.

	The woman looked at Tornsen half afraid, half worshipful, as she took the boy back in her arms. "All brings health, he brings strength and refreshment. Carron, Lord of Time, who is another phase of All, brings full healing." The crystal in his hands spun till the shifting, swelling pearly light of Shan, Lord of Fulfillment and Happiness faced the mother, reached out to her and bathed her. Suddenly her tired face broke into lines of relief; she laughed.

	"He—he's well. He's hungry again!"

	The Server smiled. "The child is healed. Come closer, women of All, that the Flame of All may bring you strength."

	Slowly the women came forward as the great silvery flame gushed up to fall in star-sprinkled spray over and through them. A new strength came to them, weariness dropped from them as water from the swimmer's back as he reaches the farther shore.

	Tornsen went toward the gateway of the Temple, and the Japanese woke to life from their brooding melancholy as Tornsen stood before them, the blue flame of Mens pulsing in his staff.

	Hitsohi stared suddenly, and his revolver whipped up. "What weapon is that you bear?" he demanded. "Give me that crystal."

	"It is the Crystal of All. To you, it would be the Crystal of Death."

	"Give me that crystal," snapped the Japanese. His revolver muzzle trained on Tornsen's eyes, steady as the rocks of the canyon.

	Tornsen smiled. "Fire, Warrior. No shot can reach the bearer of the Staff of All."

	Hitsohi fired. The Server stood unmoved. Again the Japanese fired, and again. The men behind him muttered and pointed. Hitsohi looked, and saw at Tornsen's feet three leaden pellets, rolling slowly, unharmed, undented, moving lightly on the salt-white stone.

	"The crystal is Death," said Tornsen quietly. "I tell you this, and because you insist, I will hand it to one of your men, for you must report this thing in truth. Therefore I hand it not to you, but this I tell you; not five full seconds will he hold it in safety."

	"Shurimi, take the crystal," snapped the officer after an instant's pause.

	"He speaks true—it is a God—a God—" wailed the man, turning away, pleading.

	Hitsohi's revolver spoke again. Shurimi spun, rolled, and the Singing Stair echoed and spoke softly as his body rolled from tread to tread till the whole great stair sang its carillon song of mourning.

	"Tashritu, take the crystal," said Hitsohi softly.

	The man stepped forward as though to death, and took from Tornsen's hand the flaming crystal. The staff was warm in his hand, and heavy, very heavy. It seemed to hum softly, a growing, echoing hum that soothed and was music, soft and deadening like heavy smoke of the poppy, till his arm grew numb and his legs, and his eyes were heavy—heavy—heavy—

	Tornsen tore the staff from the man's grip as he fell to the threshold. "It would be Death, he has not died, for not two seconds did he hold it, and it may be that I can revive him."

	The Crystal of All in his hands flamed silvery, and its filaments writhed and twisted to the man. He twitched and writhed with them, and rose suddenly crying in pain and terror, crying out in his native tongue and rolling on the salt-white stone.

	"The radiance of All burns those not of our race, and even at best is painful. But it heals for all that. The pain will go in a day, and the healing will last," said Tornsen slowly.

	"Now go, and may Mens, Lord of Reason, bring you wisdom."

	The staff in his hands spun till the cold blue of Mens' tetrahedral flame looked into Hitsohi's eyes and its radiance bathed him. Very clear seemed all things to Hitsohi, and he caught a glimpse of an infinite understanding, so that the Temple was transparent to his mind, and within it mighty beings moved, and their bodies were streamers and flames of unguessed force, immense and irresistible, and the vast Temple was too small for them, looming, thousand-foot Titans who watched over it and its men.

	And to his understanding, the patterns of the atoms were clear and precise, and the workings of men, and the meaning of radiation. And he was infinite and all-understanding, watching this scene from afar. And the thoughts of his men and the calm assurance of this man before him were known. All Earth, all Infinity was a well-laid pattern, clear to his mind. And he knew that All was space itself, in whom all things that are, or are to be, have their being.

	He turned without word or backward glance and marched down the Singing Stair and the men behind followed him slowly, so that the gorge rang to the melody of the Stair.

-

IV

	Nishaki looked blandly upon Lieutenant General Hitsohi, and smiled. "The report is interesting, General Hitsohi. But it is quite meaningless. The details you have given me are of no interest, their hypnotic methods do not in the slightest interest the World Empire. You will answer, please, accurately and concisely three questions? Yes?

	"The edifice is a major religious building, not to be sold, and hence not taxable, nor registerable?"

	"Yes," said Hitsohi, softly. "That is true."

	"They have gold ornaments, but the nature of their use is such that under Section twelve-B of the Edict of July, the gold is irreplaceable by alloy?"

	"Such would be my report, made, perhaps under hypnosis, as you suggest. But the metal was dust, and it floated in the air. The gold was claimed under the Edict's exception; the investigator is satisfied."

	"Is the investigator satisfied that the deaths in the building do not make the edifice confiscate under the World Empire's laws?"

	Hitsohi stood before the Council, and he was silent, his face motionless as weathered stone. The stone-walled room grew silent, and the men stared steadily at the testifier. At length he spoke, and his words were audible only for the stillness of the place.

	"No hand of man, or weapon of man that is known or conceivable to the investigator brought their deaths. They crossed the threshold and—died. Beside them crossed the Americans, and—lived. And they that died, died without sound or move, and their tissues were as though boiled. The science department has reported every nerve and cell and tissue coagulated. The investigator believes—no man brought about their deaths. Is the investigator's report complete to the best of his poor ability?"

	"The report is complete," said Nishaki pleasantly. "The Council does not accept nor approve the report. The investigator is dismissed."

	Hitsohi bowed stiffly, straightened and walked from the room. In his barracks office, he did as the Council expected of a Japanese officer under the circumstances, and he died with fear and sorrow in his heart, for All was very real, and not for him or his race, as he had known and understood in the Flame of Mens, Lord of Wisdom.

-

V

	Tornsen, the Server, stood upon the great Crystal of All, and the silver Flame of All washed up and through and about him. His voice was deep, and rolled softly in the great Temple, "In the Temple of All, only the sworn servants of All may remain. This, then, I must bid you. Who will, may enter the Temple. Whom All wills may remain in the Temple for his prayer. Them, he will welcome to his Temple, and to their prayers he will listen, though not always will he answer them in full, nor ever is this to be hoped, for the plans of All and the judgments of All must remain true to the judgment of His phase, Carron, Lord of Infinite Time. The good of the moment, and the good of the man, All will not uphold if it be the sacrifice of the Infinite Time, and the race.

	"They who enter the Temple must go forth again. Always there is refreshment and sanctuary and healing, All will bring you health, Tal, Lord of Peace shall bring you comfort.

	"But now you are refreshed. Tal has brought hope again to your eyes and hearts, and All has brought strength to your limbs. Return now. Amos Tucker will guide you, and the trails are smooth and the way easy. For this night and the next and the next, this Crystal of All I give you will glow, but on the fourth night the crystal will be dark, and its flames will die. Leave it then, for on the sixth night it will shatter and blaze fiercely as Dis the Destroyer takes leave of it.

	"Go now, to your homes. All be with you."

	"We—we can return, Server?" a woman's clear, anxious voice echoed in the Temple.

	Slowly the great crystal on which the Server stood rotated, the green face of Tal turned past, and the red face of Dis, the pearly light of Shan, till the sapphire light of Mens, Lord of Wisdom faced them.

	"The temple of All, and Mens is ever open to you," said Tornsen, and the crystal glowed till all the temple was cold, and every detail lined with a certainty and clearness unearthy. The assembled company breathed quickly once—and the blue of Mens, Lord of Wisdom and Understanding died.

	Slowly, silently they turned and made their way from the Temple, each bearing with her a little pack of silvery metal threads, and in each pack were half a hundred tiny rounded nuggets of very heavy, very beautiful metal, for gold was forbidden the people, though the other noble metals were not Tucker, lean and rangy, browned in the sun and wind stood alone and last in the Temple. Alone before the mighty, glowing crystal.

	"Tucker," said Tornsen softly, so that the great room whispered in his voice, "you will lead them?"

	"I will lead them, Server."

	"You will protect them with your life?"

	"I will protect them with my life, Server."

	"To you I will give the crystal. Though, if it should that you and the others must die, the crystal of All must not fall into the hands of the enemy. It would explode with deadly flame. And this more I tell you. If danger threatens you cannot overcome, hold the crystal so that the eye of Dis faces this danger, and call unto Dis that he may protect you, saying only, 'Protect thy people, Lord Dis!' and Dis shall serve you then five times.

	"When the sun sinks, the silver light of All shall rise to guide you and light you for two hours yet, and for the dark hours his warmth shall beat forth so that cold night nor dark shall oppress you. Remember these things then, and that on the coming of the sixth night, the crystal shall disintegrate. Do you remember this, Amos Tucker?"

	"I shall remember, Server. I—I may return? Bring others here? The weak and the ailing, the tired-of-life?"

	"So they be of All's people, they shall be welcome. You may go your way, Amos Tucker."

	From the platform of gold beside the crystal of AD, Tornsen, the Server, lifted a crystal, cubed, four inches on a side, silver and sapphire, pearl and green and sullen scarlet, resting on a graven base of silvery metal. It was lifeless now, but as he held it in the star-fire of All he spoke low words over it and the fire of All leapt in a mighty tongue of lancing light, and as it died, the crystal in his hands glowed with life of its own. He handed it down to Tucker and stood silent, watching the man across the sullen scarlet of the Temple floor.

	"They have gone, John Reid," he said softly at last. The cubed crystal sank to a faint glow, the shining walls of Temple faded till a vari-colored dusk crept in, and the blue of Mens across the ceiling became a midnight sky, crystal clear. From a scarcely visible doorway in the wall of jet, John Reid the elder came in a robe of sapphire blue with cloak of azure metal threads, his silver hair hidden under a headdress similar to that which Tornsen, Server of All, wore save that it too was of blue metal, and the tiny, cubed crystal set in it was the five-faced cube of All, changed only in that the sapphire tetrahedral flame of Mens, Lord of Wisdom shone directly forward, blue as the steadfast eyes in the lined old face. Behind came the green-clad figure of Robert Blake, Tal, Lord of Peace. Tall as Tornsen himself, but leaner, and the face under his headdress was lined and graven with the thousand marks of Carron, Lord of Time, cut deep and sharp with a chisel that Tammar, Lady of Mercy, had tempered and guided. His deep-set eyes were green as the cloak he wore, with a glow of human understanding behind them.

	Young John Reid entered, his bronze hair hidden under the sullen color of Dis, Lord of Destruction, his stern, determined face gave warning of the character of the man, just to the ultimate but lacking somewhat in understanding of human failure. To him, where success belonged by all law of science and probability, no excuse of human weakness was sound. A man himself unlimited in endurance and determination willing, ready to drive his iron-muscled, iron-nerved body beyond human endurance in a cause he found just, he looked in others for the same, and catalogued it weakness when they failed.

	John Reid wore the scarlet of Dis.

	Behind him the others entered in the costumes of Temple Servers, simple robes with cape and headdress of spun metal. They wore the cubed crystals of All in their headdress, but their robes were of a simple white cloth.

	"There were none satisfactory, Tal?" asked Tornsen, turning to Robert Blake.

	Slowly the psychologist shook his head. "None, there will be others who come within the week."

	"I suggested to none of them that they spread word of Temple of All."

	"Wherefore the word will spread more swiftly, if that may be. And the lad, Charles Sherman went away healed, active. The simple cold men have disregarded too long to note as a miracle the cure that made three small girls stop coughing in five minutes time. But tuberculosis they know and dread, the aftereffects of the gas! There are many who suffer that and will seek this temple with all speed when Charles Sherman returns."

	"They will scoff."

	"And come that they may see through the trickery, and thus scoff louder. We need yet a Tammar, Lady of Mercy and Shan, Lord of Fulfillment Grant Murray of the Station is dead, dead in the mob that felled America at last, or Shan would be with us today.

	"But it is not wise to make hasty choice."

	"We are fortunate to find four who fitted so well," said old John quietly.

	"We are fortunate, we built the Gods." Blake looked toward the old man, smiling. "We built to fit two patterns, a pattern of men and a pattern of forces, but there are limits to our molding. We will not lack for choice soon, I swear that."

	"That is the need that created the gods," old John sighed. "Let they who come be strong, though, if we would do our work well and quickly."

-

VI

	The sun was warmer when they came, not the strong, but the weak, for the strong of America were gone, or imprisoned workers rebuilding wrecked factories and drowned mines. They came down the dry gash of many colors along the silver sands as the sun sank and deep shadows crossed the gorge. Before them the shining crystal front shone, a mighty beacon, and the Singing Stair was a silvery cascade that shone in the light from the great doors of the Temple of All. Multicolored shadows lay on the sands, shadows in blue and green and pearly light.

	Amos Tucker led them, a poor straggling of blasted men and broken women, and weary women with racked children in their arms or crying at their sides. These, the weak, believed, for it was hope, the only hope there was for them. The medicine of the World Empire was not for them yet. Their own medical men were gone, dead at war or concentrated in the hospitals of the workers by the World Empire's will and Nijihua's. There was no help for them, save here, and they did not truly believe it could be even here. But they would try.

	The Singing Stair rang again to the tread of Amos Tucker, and the men behind him, and the women with them. Tornsen stood at the threshold and welcomed them as they entered. The Crystal of Shan, Lord of Hope and Fulfillment faced the entrance as they entered and their hearts lifted to its glow. As they entered their shoulders straightened, and the load of fatigue fell from them. In the empty air in the center of the great Cube Temple sound began to vibrate, soft, scarce audible minor notes that rose and rose from key to key, became joyful trumpetings with a vast chorus of half-understood voices shouting their joys. And where the music sang its crystal notes a light grew and increased as the music, a light pure green, green as fresh spring forests, and it waxed and waned slowly in the empty air as the people watched, quiet and untroubled.

	From the jet wall, merging through it seemingly, Tal himself came, tall and clad in green, sparkling clear, and his crystal glowed with his cool green light as he stepped up to the high altar, up the golden stair that sang, a great golden xylophone to his tread till he stood on the crystal in the silver of All, and the silvery light tinged slightly to the green of Tal, Lord of Peace.

	Tornsen, the Server joined him, and as he stepped to the silvery light, the jet wall faded behind the sapphire blue shape of Mens, Lord of Wisdom. Slowly he climbed the stair, till he too stood on the Crystal of All. The music of the air became crystalline, precise movements of notes that marched and countermarched in ordered ranks in the air, precise and perfect as the immutable laws of Truth. The Temple glowed in the blue light of Mens, and the blue crystal face shot out a tetrahedral crystal of light in salute to its Lord.

	From the top of the crystal, Mens lowered his staff till the tetrahedral flame pointed toward the people on the Temple floor, and the blue light swept over them.

	And in their minds came the understanding of the infinite Lord of Infinity, All, Lord of Life. They glimpsed the myriad worlds of infinity, and understood them, and they understood in that instant their own longings, their own needs, and the infinite justice of All.

	And the Flame of Mens died, and they were content in their understanding. The Server spoke.

	"Amos Tucker has led ye here?"

	"I led them, Server," the man bowed his head slightly.

	"It is a long road for many. Have ye food?"

	"We have food, enough for now. But there is no water, nor any we could find. Server of All, is there water for our many?"

	Tornsen raised his staff slowly. "There shall be water. Amos, there are sick and crippled amongst these who have come?"

	"Many, Server, and many more who would come, could they make this journey."

	"Let those ailing of disease come forward first."

	Eagerly a man who stood apart from the others hobbled forward, and the crowd made way hastily to his approach, his filthy rags flapping about his scarecrow frame. "Is there—is there hope for—even me?"

	Tornsen looked down at him slowly, and smiled so his broad face welcomed the hideous outcast. "Not hope, Leper, health. In ten seconds your horror shall be done with, and in ten days the sound flesh shall grow again. Come up, Leper, to the Crystal of All."

	The man came forward, up the stair, faltering and afraid at the last, till Tornsen reached down and took the hideous, rotting thing that served the man for hand, and helped him up. All's light flamed silver, and the sparkling stars seemed angry as they beat at the man, and little tinkling vibrations of sound rang through his body. He sank to his knees, then rose as the Flame retreated.

	"You are healed, Leper," said Tornsen. "Go down now, and join your fellow men. In a score of days, come once again to the Temple, and if the new flesh has not filled in those scars that make you a monster, All will aid you further. Go."

	Half uncertain, half doubting, the man went down and as he reached the base of the stair, walked away. Tal, Lord of Peace turned his staff upon him and the green glow pierced him. Gently he sank to sleep on the crimson Temple floor.

	A woman called out, her hands at her breast. "I came to be healed of cancer, Server—and the pain left me between my crossing of the threshold, and my standing here. Am I—will I have life?"

	"All, Lord of Life, has destroyed your cancer, woman. You can go home to your family now, if you so will, and never will cancer bother you."

	So they came, and in the Temple of All were healed of disease, or the Crystal the Flame of All washed them and they lived again. Three hours they came, till all the diseased were gone forth again, whole or healing once more, and only the crippled remained.

	Through the wall of jet they went, one by one, and behind the wall came to a chamber walled complete with the silvery crystal of All, and to two clad in the silvery cloth of All, carrying staffs like that of the Server, save that theirs were smaller, lighter. As one ailing entered the room, the green of Tal bathed him, and he slept deep, deep beyond all pain.

	Then very swiftly, without mask or glove, with only clean, shining scalpels and instruments the two worked, cutting tissue and bone and sinew and re-arranging it as was right, and from the silvery walls of All came silvery light that tinkled and rustled eerily in the whispering silence of the chamber. Then the staffs in their hands glowed with strange lights, violet and amethyst, rose and pale amber that played and interplayed on the tissues. Before their eyes the life-stuff grew, the stretched bone thrust out swift new cells that knitted and built firm incredibly. New flesh grew on severed muscles, white threads of nerves shot out and lengthened under soft-glowing amethyst.

	Half an hour, and the crippled walked out, straight and strong, rejoicing. Thin white scars, silvery sands outside they made camp, a full hundred of them, then two hundred, and little fires glowed; they spread blankets as the chill night crept through the valley on soft wind-rustled feet.

	The Server came down the Stair, his Staff in his hands. Amos Tucker rose at his coming, and stepped forward to meet him. "They have had food, but there is no water?" asked the Server.

	"They have had food, but no water. But they miss it not greatly. For each who came, ailed and is whole. They will not sleep this night for they must talk."

	Tornsen looked about him, at the silver sands, and where a low, rounded shoulder of grey-green sandstone thrust a rugged mass upwards, he looked. "They shall have water," said Tornsen. He walked to the sandstone and climbed its three-foot dome. Fifty feet across it was, lowly rounded.

	"Lord Dis, lend thy strength. Let there be a vessel that thy people may drink!" The sullen scarlet face of his staff brightened, murmurous light washed through it, then leapt out in a fifty-foot snake-tongued flame that hissed like monstrous serpents. The tongue split to many, many that circled and swirled, hissing spitefully, redly brilliant. The rock boiled upward in blue-shining luminescence, pulled softly and licked higher in hot, almost invisible blue flame. Softly the flames hissed, swirling and licking, and the rock glowed brilliant red and violet. Then abruptly the flames died. A soft sigh escaped the watching people, for in the sandstone mass was a hemispherical cup, smooth-walled, clean-cut, ten feet deep, ten feet across. Amos Tucker started forward.

	"Hold," said the Server. "It would leak, thus, and it is not filled." Then soft words he spoke to the crystal, murmurous words they could not hear. Again the crystal glowed, but now but a single tongue of flame leapt forth, needle-fine, a thread of intense, sullen scarlet. And its end crashed against the rock with shrieking lightning that swirled and circled in to dance over all the surface of the cup till it glowed white with the heat of the lightning. The flame died, and the white light of the cup died. It was a greenish milky cup of glass now, deep and smooth, very clear and clean.

	"The cup is made, Lord Dis. Lord Mens, Lord of Knowledge and Wisdom, fill for us this cup!" The staff in Tornsen's hands seemed to leap of its own volition, spinning abruptly till the crystal of Mens faced the cup. Cold was his flame, cold and blue, and the soft radiance that spread from its tetrahedral crystalline faces crackled in the air suddenly chilled to an arctic cold. The people shivered in the chill that swept them, shivering in their light clothing. The air grew blue misty, and the hot glow of the cup faded abruptly. Very slowly a mathematically precise line extended itself from the apex of Mens' tetrahedron and bent a mathematically exact image to strike the geometric center of the cup. It rustled softly as it extended itself through the glassy wall, through the hard, age-old sandstone, down and down. Abruptly a new rustling came and the flame of Mens died. A soft, gurgling rustling that whistled a note higher and keener, stronger growing constantly—till it jetted clear water up and out, over the cup, till it was filled.

	And a little stream led away down the silver sands, to sink presently in its dry thirstiness.

	They camped there that night, and the next morning those who had families, those who felt their friends must know, went back. But many stayed. The next day more came, and more. In three days, the men came bearing the tents, and shelters, and behind them old, half-wrecked ammunition service cars, their tractor treads skimming over the sand. But they were loaded with food and materials. Fuel, too. But they threw out the fuel, save the gasoline they carried, for by the Cup of All stood a Crystal of Dis, Lord of Destruction—and fire. It glowed with sullen scarlet, warm and red at the top, but cool as the desert night at the sides, and the women cooked their food on that, and warmed the water and as night came on it glowed very dull over all its sides, so the entire gorge was faintly warmed and comfortable.

	And more came in other trucks, and the needy went away with metal nuggets that brought them food, and health that brought them strength to earn. Only once might any man be helped with gifts of wealth by All, but health was ever ready for him who asked.

	They came to ask, and more, till the Gorge of All held a small city, served by the ancient ammunition service cars. Then Amos Tucker came before the Crystal again, with seven men of the little community.

	"Server, we ask aid of All, gifts of platinum and precious metals."

	"Once may men ask that of All, Amos Tucker. You, All has already helped, these seven who come with you may ask and receive."

	"Server of All, we ask it not for ourselves, nor in amount that buys food and shelter till work is found. We ask twenty pounds of metal that roads may be built and trucks purchased that more may know All and reach Him and be healed. Americans have no wealth left, Server, and can earn it but slowly. The Empire favors the Emperor's race, and they may earn more swiftly, and have capital. We have no capital, for it is gone in the defense of America.

	"We would bring more to All, those who cannot walk, or ride the rough trucks we have been able to buy and run."

	The Server nodded slowly. "For that, All grants capital. It is a loan, and must be repaid to All's people. As He helps those who have fallen to regain their feet, but will not carry strong men in His arms, so All will help enterprise to its feet, but will not carry it in His arms. Those who have must help those who have not. The loan shall be repaid in this way; that they who have not and cannot reach the Temple shall be carried here; they that have shall give to aid the others. It is understood?"

	"Yes, Server. We thank All that this thing can be." Tucker nodded.

	From the jet wall came blue-clad Mens, Lord of Wisdom, and in his -old arms an iridescently beautiful bar of metal, small and very heavy. This he gave to Amos Tucker, who saluted him with bowed head and took it.

	"The roads shall come, and many who need the help of All," promised Tucker. "We thank Thee."

	And they left.

	It was three months before the first cars rolled hi, bearing freight of paralyzed and sick; and some that came died, for All had so decreed in his infinite understanding of what must be. "Change is the order of All, for as the pool that has no inlet nor outlet grows to a stinking slime, so would the race that had neither inlet of birth nor outlet of death. All may not let all live, for that way lies stagnation and rot. The pool that has inlet but no outlet grows salt and bitter and becomes sterile so no worthwhile thing may grow there.

	"There must be birth; Shan, Lord of Fulfillment is a phase of All, Lord of Life. For these things are the Filler and the Emptier of Life, lest Life grow stagnant and bitter.

	"Thy Father lives on, Son, in thee, and shall live on in thy children, as in you lives the First Father of all life, passed on an undying torch whose fire is elder brother to the mountains which come and pass as must men, yea, not even the mountains are so eternal as life, nor is their shifting less rapid, for as surely as Death must empty thy own vessel of life eventually, so surely must this rocky gorge pass on to form new valleys of green and fertile land that life may continue its way, a thing more constant than the hills, and more immortal. Change is the order of All's universe, for All himself is Lord of Life and Change."

	The City of All grew, and its fame spread among the people of All, so that many came and were healed. Five months after his first coming to the Temple of All, Amos Tucker entered it in the Service of All, and did not return to the city, and the people of the city did not see him for three months longer. Then Tucker appeared in the White of All's novitiate, beside some dozen others who had joined the Temple, some five women and seven men. Tucker's face was more kindly, yet more stern, and in its graven lines was a far deeper understanding and a strong light of resolve in his eyes.

	Amos Tucker had been introduced to the Mysteries of All, and knew All for more, and yet less. And on the pearly throne of Tammar, Lady of Mercy, there sat a woman now, some twenty-seven years of age, yet possessed of that ageless beauty of face and feature suffering can sometimes bring.

	Her hair was glass wool, purely white, but live and sparkling in the golden light of Tammar, Lady of Mercy. Doris Shane had come to the Temple in one of the first of the motor ambulances, -pain-racked, tortured through seven long years, paralyzed beyond possibility of hope, so the doctors found, by a flying needle of metal from a bursting bomb. Seven years of agony had turned gold to silver, had lined and softened her face, had forced upon her and into her soul an understanding and a human philosophy that made her—Tammar, Lady of Mercy.

	Thus was the Fourth Lord come to All; so they sat when Amos Tucker saw them. They were five now, the Five Lords, and the Server of All. Old John Reid, Mens, Lord of Wisdom. Robert Blake, Tal, Lord of Peace. John Reid the younger, Dis, Lord of Death. Doris Shane, Tammar, Lady of Mercy. And Grant Loman was Shan, Lord of Fulfillment.

	They were the Five.

	And they were Six, for the Dread Lord, Barmak, the Black Lord of Nothingness was there, ever beside the Five, invisible, unmentioned, unknown even save to the Five Lords and to Tornsen, the Server.

	Grant Loman had come an old man, nearing seventy, his sparse hair grey and stiff, his face lined and seamed with a half-century of winters in the high ranges, a staunch old man who followed the trail Amos Tucker had carved out first seeking this fabled Temple of healing. It promised things he had ever hoped one day to see, healing all diseases and banishment of crippling ailments. Half a century he had worked among the lonely people of the high ranges, an apprentice doctor learning as they did before medical schools had been invented, from his father before him. Then medical colleges had brought him some new skills, but there was no science then of drawing back from Death those whom no chemical or drug could aid. So he had known better than all the schools and had healed, he and his high ranges and his God, Nature. He'd seen the souls of men stripped bare by calamity and death, and healed those wounds too. Half a century he worked with the souls and bodies of his people, and longed for such things as the Temple of All had shown.

	Grant Loman sat on the throne of Shan, and the Lords were Five to the people.

-

VII

	Chu Liang nodded slightly to his pilot, and the ship began to settle slowly, vertically downward. Li Tsang spoke softly as the ship neared the settlement below. "The Americans seem to believe at any rate, Dr. Chu."

	"Yes. There is probably some reason. The reports we received are unscientific in the highest degree, but I think I can trace a semblance of a highly ingenious plan. Obviously, any such organization must have political meaning, since the Asiatic Empire has conquered these people so recently. I think perhaps there exists some weapon which is aimed from above. From the condition of the bodies, I have hypothesized a radio-frequency heat-beam, an explanation of such startling simplicity that, of course, the warriors overlooked it completely. Undoubtedly the threshold is so equipped."

	"I had thought of such a possibility. It is for this reason you brought the three condemned deserters?"

	"Yes, and further experimentation. There will be Americans enough here. We will go out. Li T'sang, you will bring the recording instruments, I think. Pie Chan, the direct reading instruments. Captain Shikani, if you will see that the prisoners are brought under guard—"

	Chu Liang stepped out to the silver sands, and looked across at the great Temple front. A score of Americans from the city of All were watching narrowly, and followed at a little distance as they crossed to the Singing Stair. Bright sun dimmed the glory of the Temple somewhat, but the flashing light on the great stairs was near blinding. Chu Liang looked upward to the giant form of the Server, wrapped in robe of silver cloth and silver cloak, his crystal staff gleaming slightly, lambent flame playing about it.

	Chu Liang halted at the head of the stair, and looked through the mighty doorway of the Temple.

	"All holds no welcome for your race, Scientists," said the Server softly. "That you know. You cannot analyze All, for reason as basic as that which prevents experimental measuring of the contraction of matter at extreme speed. All is part of your instruments, as your instruments are part of All. You cannot measure the contraction, for your measuring stick contracts with it So it is here. You will find nothing, nothing save Death for such of your men as cross to the crystal floor of Dis, Lord of Death."

	Chu Liang looked silently into the Temple, and his breath whistled softly over his teeth. "Your edifice is truly magnificent, Server, for so I understand you to be. Your lighting effects are exquisite. I am very stupid and lack finer understanding; I cannot believe in Gods, for such is the mind of science that always it must feel in some way to believe; that is the necessary basework of science. If I feel nothing, it proves nothing. If I can feel this God, then will I believe wholly. If it so be that it is compatible with the will of your Deity, I would make certain tests here, for even though the Deity enter into our instruments' construction, still it may be possible to discover his presence, as iron compass discovers hidden iron."

	"Halt!" snapped the captain's voice. The ringing of the great Stair quieted slowly to a rolling echo as the tread of the little squad ceased. "This is the place you choose, Dr. Chu Liang?"

	"If it may be?" asked the Chinese softly, indicating the spot he preferred his assistants to set up the instruments. The Server nodded slowly. "All may give you some sign of His presence, Scientist; I know little of your instruments. Upon the Singing Stair, all men are welcome, and to all it is sanctuary. But All welcomes none save His own within the Temple."

	Chu Liang looked within the temple, and the multicolored dusk of scarlet and blue and pearl and blue was very cool and very restful. The great Crystal flamed softly, and the stars that winked and lived and died in the Flame of All caught his eye, and his mind. From the wall of jet the Five emerged, slowly, and mounted the golden stair to the face of All's Crystal, to stand silent.

	Dr. Chu Liang turned back to his assistants, and spoke softly to them as their instruments were unpacked and assembled on the salt-white stone at the peak of the Singing Stair.

	"There is radio-activity here," said Li Tsang softly.

	"That may have something to do with the reported feeling of increased well-being. It is known that radio-active waters bring temporary feeling of health, before the blood-building tissues are destroyed."

	"All the rock, I know, is radio-active. Sandstones are not normally so. It surprises me, yet the radio-activity cannot explain either the deaths of our Army Officers, nor the cures of disease. It is a surprising development. But not, I think, an answer. Try the radiation bolometer."

	The younger man adjusted his instrument carefully, and set a small motor humming very softly. On a strip of white paper, a thin black line stretched out, rising and falling and shaping itself as the intensity of the varying wavelengths radiated varied".

	Chu Liang looked at it silently for a moment, till, finally the snaking line dipped, reached zero, and remained. "It is interesting, Li T'sang. Focus the instrument on the floor nearby, that no light reach it from other sources."

	Again the line traced, remaining on zero for long, then rising suddenly to a great peak, and falling as sharply. Then again it rose to a waving line at an extreme range.

	"The red light is monochromatic," said Li Tsang in some interest. "I would expect more spectral lines. Only in the red and in the ultra-violet are there lines. There is strong ultra-violet, which may explain the healthy tan of the Americans here. But it neither cures nor kills save in vast concentration, where normal light would be near as effective, killing by sheer energy alone."

	"It interests me, Li T'sang, that I have spent weary hours adjusting apparatus that I might receive a beam of monochromatic energy. The blue is pure, and the green is pure. The Line is confused by the radiation of the white wall and the white light of the top crystal." He turned to Tornsen slowly.

	"Server, we have heard of this Flame of Dis that is said to bring death. How may we see this, then?"

	Tornsen's face became stern. "Lord All does not parade his might in vain display. If you would see the Flame of Dis, attack the works of All, and it shall play, and play unhindered, unstayed, thru any screen or instrument you may turn upon it."

	The Chinese consulted quietly, and looked upon the records of their instruments. The captain joined them, and Chu Liang spoke to him. "There is no ray or radiation of death here. Let the prisoners earn their freedom as was ordained, and let two children of the Americans be brought, that they may be carried, as was ordained."

	The captain moved. A score of Americans stood on the Singing Stair, quiet and watchful, a half-dozen children watched, intent-eyed.

	The captain's orders were spoken in Japanese, and his men turned instantly to obey. The Americans roared in anger and stepped forward menacingly as the troops seized two small children. The Server called out once, a strong, sharp syllable of command, and they halted, Oriental and American alike.

	"To the people of All, I promise that the children will not be harmed or even frightened, for see, they shall be at peace." As he spoke, Tal, Lord of Peace, raised his staff on the distant Crystal of All, and green radiance shone over the group, so that a feeling of lethargy stilled them, while suddenly the children slept in the arms of the troops. Chu Liang's voice was soft and intense as his assistants worked swiftly to mark the recording instruments.

	The Server spoke again. "To the people of the World Empire, I promise also that the children will not be harmed, for the Lord of Life guards his own, whether he appear in his phase of Dis, Lord of Death, or Tal, Lord of Peace. But no act of yours shall harm the children."

	The Chinese bowed slightly. "So let it be. Two men shall carry them. That is all."

	The prisoners took the children in their arms, two sleeping children, and held them above their heads. At a snapped order they stepped forward. Tornsen stepped forward to meet them, staff upraised. "It is Death," he said softly. "All permits no enemy to cross to the Crystal Floor of Dis."

	The Chinese said, "Unfortunately, it is death for them outside, a death they understand very well, and do not desire. They will enter, for they are condemned, and inside lies their only hope of life."

	Tornsen looked at the two silently. "Carry the children, then, less high, for the fall might injure them."

	Chu Liang felt in his heart a sudden triumph, as he knew his guess was true. "They carry them high or die!"

	"Let the two put down the children, for there is Sanctuary upon the Singing Stair for all men," cried Tammar, Lady of Mercy. "They shall be free upon the Stair, and none there shall hurt them."

	The strong, deep voice of old Mens, Lord of Wisdom spoke. "Such is the law, for those who seek sanctuary for justice. These two have sought justice, and justice finds them condemned. They be not seekers of justice, but refugees from it. The Sanctuary of the Stairs is not for them, Lady Tammar."

	Tammar bowed her head. "Aye, Lord of Wisdom."

	"Step forward, and if you would live, carry the children high, for the weapon that kills is above!" cried Chu Liang. And the two stepped forward as the Server stepped to meet them. They stepped across the threshold, so that the sullen scarlet of Dis lay beneath their feet—and died. From their lax hands, softened suddenly by Dis, Lord of Death, the Server caught the children in his great hands, and lowered them to the floor.

	"Lady Tammar, bring awakening," called the Server, and the golden staff, tipped with amber light that was the staff of Tammar, Lady of Mercy dipped, a lancing flame of golden light touched the children. They rose, and hurried, frightened, away and down the Stair to their homes.

	"There is death in the Temple for all save All's people."

	Chu Liang bowed his head slightly. "Yes," he said softly. "We go now. Give us those we cannot reach, if such be the will of your Deity."

	Two Americans stepped forward into the Temple at the Server's gesture, and the troops of the World Empire carried the lax bodies down the Stair in the thrumming silence. Chu Liang and his assistants packed the instruments into their cases and marked them carefully.

	"It is quite useless," said Chu Liang quietly as the great stair sang its triumph in their ears and through the gorge. "I do not in any way understand, but this I know; there is a god there, and a much greater god then ours. We have a god. It is Science. Theirs is a greater god."

	Li T'sang looked at him thoughtfully. "A greater Science you mean, Dr. Chu?"

	"I did not say," Chu Liang replied softly. "We will examine the bodies of the men at once, upon reaching the plane. Li T'sang will perform microscopic sectioning work on the tissue of the muscles, skin, hair and such cells as have the lowest forms of life. I will examine and test the muscles for galvanic effects. There remains physical examination of the bodies, which Pie Chan will perform."

	"Will you not examine the recording instruments?" asked Li T'sang in some disappointment.

	Old Chu Liang shook his head. "Science is our god, Li Tsang, and gods have infinity to work. Their work must not, then, be hurried and spoiled by their hurry. Our recorded films must be developed under optimum conditions, which we do not obtain on our laboratory plane, complete as its facilities are. The body of the smaller one, you may take to your laboratory, Li T'sang."

	"Yes, Master." The younger man signaled to the two warriors who carried the body and followed them to his laboratory. Presently he brought Chu Liang certain muscles, very white-seeming, cold and yet with the appearance of freshly boiled tissues, completely coagulated. He returned silently.

	Chu Liang entered his laboratory some time later, as the helicopter rode smoothly east to the American Department Capital at Chicago. Li Tsang looked up at the elder man and shook his head blankly. "It is very peculiar, Master. There is no living cell in all the body, neither skin, nor muscle, nor even lowest hair cell. And that is perhaps understandable. But in all the body there is no living thing! The bacteria of mouth and nose and intestine are dead, the bacteria of skin and feet are dead. Only a few very small colonies on the surface of the body live, implanted perhaps by the hands of those who carried the body here. But I think that as it lay on the temple floor it was more sterile than any surgical instrument."

	Chu Liang looked silently through the microscope at the slides his assistant had prepared. "Not even in the tartar from the teeth is there any living thing. Man needs certain bacteria for healthy existence. You know this better than I, Li T'sang. Tell me then, were all living organisms save those human organisms that make up and defend the body, the corpuscles of blood and tissue, the cells of nerve and muscle and brain, were all save those destroyed, could man long survive?"

	Li T'sang looked thoughtfully at the microscope for many seconds then his voice came hesitant and thoughtful. "If in all the world this were done, man could not live, for there are many non-human organisms needed, the many life-forms in the intestine that break down the foodstuff we eat but cannot digest, to a form we can digest. There are very many others. But if only the individual man were so completely sterilized, he would quickly regain his natural balance thru inevitable ingestion of these bacteria, as must the new-born infant. Man enters this world near sterile, yet within hours the baby has gathered those necessary, bacterial colonies. Probably no man would even know that this, sterilization of his body had taken place, were it possible. But it is not, for any chemical strong enough to destroy the bacteria would destroy man as well, unless a degree of specificity almost never attained were possible for an almost infinite horde of invaders, while leaving the body untouched. We have but three species of this type, one furnished -by nature's accident, quinine, which is hundreds of times more poisonous to the malarial parasite than to human tissue, one by the blind experimenting of man, salvarsan, hundreds of times more poisonous to the syphilis organism than to man, and one developed by years of laborious analysis of the human antibodies, kappasol which is vastly poisonous to typhoid fever, but harmless to man. And these are one third the gift of nature, one third imitation of nature, and one third blind and infinitely laborious research. Now in the centuries of chemical medicine, if but three have been found, how then, could man find the specifics for thousands, and compound them in half a decade?"

	"But there exist, then, chemicals which have the property of destroying only non-human life-forms?"

	"No, only those three, an exception as unimportant as oxygen of atomic weight 17. Oxygen atoms have a weight of sixteen, save for one in millions."

	"But the principle is vastly important. What man has done once, man may do not only again, but many times. Even, perhaps, improve to such an extent that specifics that differentiate between native Americans and Asians might be found. Is it not so?"

	"In a thousand centuries, yes. But even if analysis of all the anti-bodies were achieved, which is not the work of a man, but a thing to be done in an historical era, and the vaster task of synthesis as well, there is no anti-body which destroys Orientals but not Westerners, And even if this be so, no anti-body produces the effects we have witnessed. It may poison, it may dissolve, but it does not fry. The explanation of the Temple is' not there, Chu Liang, I fear."

	"There is a greater god than ours, Li T'sang, and the day will come when our god can understand the God All. Our report to the Science Committee will be as unsatisfactory as the report of General Hitsobi's to the Rebellious Activities Control Commission."

	"But of what importance is this temple to the government of the World State? To science its meaning may be profound, since we have no understanding of observable results, but of what importance is it to the State, this hidden temple in the wildest mountains of the American Province? There are hidden temples in the high passes of the Himalayas, the temples of the Tibetans, we do not investigate."

	"There are hidden temples on all the Earth the Empire rules, but they are old beyond memory of man. This is not old. These other temples do not regularly make cures of hopeless paralysis by operations incredible and impossible, with healing in a day that cannot take place in a year. These temples do not regularly cure cancer in the last, hopeless stage, nor tuberculosis of lung and bone.

	"That is something of it. But this is more important. Few temples of the world forbid entrance to Asiatics. This temple not only refuses, but brings mysterious death. This you do not know, nor do the people of that temple city. Kimishti, one of the Empire's best men, has circulated freely through Occidental countries as an operative of the Asian State through all the years of the war. He has behind him respected standing of home and family, all standing. By operations, by hard work, he had become Occidental, his skin pink as an Englishman's, his eyes blue, his hair blonde and curled. He entered the Temple, suffering as he showed, from scarlet fever, feeling safe in their welcome. He was accepted and brought up to the place by one of their ambulances. He died as he was carried across the threshold by a temple novitiate.

	"I had thought he was recognized secretly perhaps, and executed. I know that the god All knew his difference and exacted toll of Death. The members of the Temple prayed over him, and read over him the Service of Dis and Shan, their burial service, and he was buried as an Occidental dead of heart disease, the after-effect of scarlet fever. The Server there knew him for Oriental though, since his tissues were—coagulated.

	"And that is something more of it. It is a temple of death, with a god of power who acts. A god who does things so indisputably has never been since the world began, and was not expected when the Edict of Free Worship was given forth by Emperor Nijihua.

	"But there is yet more in this: Nijihua seeks to make a true universal state, wherein all men recognize a common destiny and a common center of interest and leadership, the World State, in which each sees his only nationality. Nationalism of the most intense he desires, patriotism of the highest—but toward the World State. It is not oppression which will bring this, for that brings only revolt. Only common leadership, respected and honored, can unite men. Whether Oriental or Occidental, the leadership of the World State must be the leadership, the only common reality which men can form themselves about.

	"Half he has succeeded. All Orientals today recognize him, and many Occidentals. And—in all the world today, there lives not one Occidental capable of political leadership. Every man with such abilities was killed in the general uprising of the mobs that brought the wars to an end, or he has died of cholera. The only leaders Nijihua has allowed are the leaders of the World Empire, since men generally must have leaders to be happy—the only leaders there are are the World Empire.

	"The Temple of All has arisen. To it Occidentals turn for health and advice, comfort in life and death. It becomes more and more a center of man's many interests, and a center of Occidental interest, perforce not common to both Oriental and Occidental. It makes them separate peoples, divided by All, a God of power who acts positively for the benefit of his people, who favors them. Inevitably then there is crystallization of the loose, leaderless mass of Occidentals about this new god, and his priests. Yet, they do not realize that they are being led, being separated from the World Empire, a race and a class apart. But they are! They are soaking in the pleasant idea that they are superior, god-chosen.

	"Nijihua must act. He has acted. The Empire needs money. In a day and a day now, the World Empire issues a new Edict, the Edict of New Worshipers. It is a tax of one thousand dollars on each new worshiper to a religious faith—and must be paid in metal!"

	Li Tsang nodded slowly. "The Temple of All will gain no new worshipers. No American can gain metal. In America alone has this new religion gained power, thus none of the rest of the Empire will greatly revolt, since growing families can, I imagine, enter their children to their church untaxed."

	"That is right. The Temple of All will be deserted in a week."

-

VIII

	The Lords sat on their high thrones, the sapphire of Mens in the center, the golden of Tammar on his right, and Shan on his left, the rich deep scarlet of Dis beyond pearly Shan; beyond Tammar the cool, freshening green of Tal, Lord of Peace. And unseen, below and in front of their semi-circle, visible only to the eyes of the Lords and the Server, sat Dread Barmak, the Black Lord on his lightless, rayless throne of black deeper than the night of Space itself.

	For this was the inner Chamber of the Lords. Mens spoke, his voice deep and low in the multi-colored dusk of the Chamber. "This Edict is a weapon at the throat of All. For the people of All are oppressed and poor. All is possessed of vast treasures, and it comes to me that it were better that All disdain the collections of the tax, and give of his treasures to meet this imposition."

	"Aye," said the Lords softly. "The treasures of All are infinite as is AH himself. Let this be the rule."

	Shan, Lord of Fulfillment spoke. "This is the rule then, but let it be thus applied; the people of All who have wealth and ability to pay, shall pay, lest the infinitude of All's treasures be measured and beget covetousness in the heart of Nijihua.

	"Now further, it seems the Emperor, wishing a healthy subject people, has decreed that only those who attend more than five times in the course of the year are true members of any temple. But he who speaks with the Server of a temple is not a member thereby unless he attend that temple. Thus we shall apply it; that there shall be Servers who go forth, and the members of the temple shall be selected by the Lord that they be good, else they pay the tax of their own ability. Thus shall the doors be open to all, and yet be closed to those of the people of All whom we don't find worthy."

	Tornsen spoke, and his voice rumbled in the small, cubed, crystal chamber of the Lord. "The Edict harms All little thus, and All pays the tax from the infinite resources of the earth. The impost collector comes on the morrow, and the Lords shall assemble then on the crystal, and the Server and the Novitiate shall bear to him the impost for the eighty and nine members who have joined the Temple."

	The next day brought the plane of the World Empire, glowing golden, with scarlet dragons in the sun, as it lighted on the silver sands, and the Collector of Imposts mounted the Singing Stair before a squad of armed men.

	"Halt there, man of the World Empire, for the Temple of All is closed to you. The tax shall be brought out."

	"What is the roll of your temple?" snapped the Oriental.

	"The roll is one hundred and three, and of these are the Five Lords and the Server, and certain others who have been here long. But there be eighty-and-nine for whom the tax is to be paid. There be many who have not joined, and cannot. But for the eighty-and-nine, tax shall be paid."

	The Oriental looked at the man a bit surprised. "It must be paid in metal," he said warningly. "No goods save precious metals."

	"And the metals shall be rhodium and palladium, which are in the Empire Catalog of precious metals."

	"Bring them forth, then," said the Collector, and on the salt-white stone his servant set up the small case which opened out to a work bench and a pair of scales. The Server brought to him the first ingot, two inches square and a foot long. The man looked at it, weighed it in his hand, for its mass was great, and spread upon the stair-top a sheet of fine-woven silk, then with a small saw he cut it through in six places and gathered the dust. The dust he dropped into a small tray and two pinches he tested with his reagents. Then with a tiny spectroscope of high power he examined the lines of the metal. Softly he drew in his breath.

	"Your metal is pure, pure within the limits of the spectroscope, which is very pure indeed. While the metals are exceeding difficult to separate, the weight is such that four such bars exactly meet the tax."

	Silently three of the Novitiate came forward bearing in their hands bars of metal of absolute purity and great weight. The tax impost collector gave to the Server a small sheet of paper bearing the crest of Nijihua and the quick brush-strokes of his signature.

	"The impost is met, and so must be met with each new member of the Temple, Server. This you will remember under the penalties of Nijihua's Empire." 

	"Aye," said the Server, "we understand." And the Collector left to go to another Temple, for such was his duty and not the understanding of the tensions that built about those four bars of utterly pure precious metal so readily supplied. Chu Liang understood, for to him came the metal for analysis, and he analyzed the ingots to one sole element each, and he fused the two elements together, nor all his science could draw the rhodium from the palladium with utter purity. For the metals were exceedingly intractable. And he frowned somewhat, for rhodium, in which the greater part of the payment was made was not as useful to Turn as was palladium, platinum.

-

IX

	His silver robes shimmered in the sun and wind like the ruffled surface of a clear lake under slanting evening sun, his turban-like headdress gleaming. In his hands he carried a Staff of All, silvery and intricately chased, mounted by the softly-glowing cubed crystal, greater mate to the crystal of his headdress.

	The ambulance driver looked at him in some doubt and awe. "Then the Servants of All are going to leave the Valley?"

	"Certain of them, the Teachers, that the people of the cities, unable to reach All, may be able to have his help. There will always be the Five Lords and the Server to aid All's people at the Temple. But the impost makes it needful that certain ones of us go out."

	"Amos Tucker, where will you go?"

	"Amos Tucker no more; a Teacher of All. I go by foot that more may know, first to the city whence you came, then on to the coast, probably to San Francisco. It is not determined by the Lords, since each is sent on his mission. But delay no longer, Driver, since those who ride behind go in need of help. Stay, I will bring a moment's peace to them; then you must go your way, and I mine. Farewell, in the grace of All."

	The Teacher stopped a moment more to step inside the low ambulance body and let the green crystal of Tal shed its rays on the sick. Their harsh breathing relaxed and the soft moan of one died way in deep sleep. Then he stepped out and the vehicle moved on.

	As it disappeared from sight, the Teacher raised his staff to his lips and spoke softly. "Sick come, seeking aid, Server."

	The Crystal whispered reply. "We are ready for All. You are well."

	"Yes, scarcely a day's journey out. I will reach the city by evening, however."

	"Good. All aid you." The Crystal's slight hum died, and the Teacher strode on easily with the long lope of a trained desert man. The endless sand over which the road ran glared in the sun, and presently the Teacher rested for a moment. The staff in his hand sent out a licking tongue of ruby flame and a patch of sand two feet across fused in blinding heat, sinking to a slight depression. The Teacher scooped a bit of sand into it, and the flame of All licked at it with shrieking, crashing star-dust. The depression boiled with white vapor-fumes, hissing and bubbling. For some seconds it continued, then burst into sharp blue flames, while the flame of All changed strangely violet. Instantly the rolling vapor vanished and the flames licked slowly and seemed to struggle against an opposing force. Presently they died and a moment later the Teacher knelt beside his cup and drank his fill of cold, clear and somewhat tasteless water. Then with a rested body he started on his way.

	Toward evening the natural desolation gave way to man-made desolation, torn and racked, the deep craters in the sand stained with red of iron and black of smoke, green virulent stains of exploded XR-78 gas-shells. More cars passed him now, and curious hybrids; an automobile chassis stripped to four wheels and a frame with weather-stained broken planks as a body, drawn by a decrepit horse, or a slow-moving ox. Tires too old and weak for automobiles shod them, tires in the last stages of decay, as with all the country. Broken buildings appeared and here and there a light, tinnily shiny, factory-made dwelling.

	The Ranchers were filtering back, such as lived, or their women and children. Chinese and Japanese lived here now, they lived in the broken houses and farmed a few acres in their immemorial way. To them, no vision of the infinitude of rolling land brought relief from pressure, still they farmed to the fence-posts, and planted beans to climb the posts themselves. There was vast plenty, to them, and in their old way they ate the plenty, making no reserve against the time it might vanish. The men worked, and the women pulled the crude plows while the children set out seed. Other gangs of men worked at clearing the irrigation ditches for the water that would come when the engineers finished the restoration of war-blasted dams.

	The Orientals paid no attention to the curiously garbed stranger, the Americans little. They looked, and then looked back to the work that engaged them, wearily.

	America had no reserves, and they must compete with the Oriental mode of life. They used better tools, better methods. But the Oriental called the American's direst poverty vast prosperity.

	The Teacher went on, into the city where more people looked at him. An Oriental policeman pacing his beat eyed him narrowly, and passed on; a few Americans turned to stare, and an expression of interest and sudden remembrance stirred in their eyes. Finally one stopped, turned and came to him.

	"Server—" he cried.

	"No, not the Server, John Graham. I am a Teacher of All. You are well?"

	"Well and able, Teacher. The tuberculosis is gone from my lungs and my bones. I have been better and stronger than ever in my life before I stood in All's Temple. But—I did not know the servants of All left his Valley."

	"Never have they, before. But the impost makes this necessary to the best good of All, so the Teachers go forth. I am the first. Many more will follow me across this road, till the robes of All become a familiar sight in the city here."

	"It is near evening, Teacher. Can you—have you made arrangement for the night? Can you stay with me—and my wife?"

	"My only arrangement was that I find some man who knew All and might take me in. Gladly then, I accept your offer."

	"Come then," said the man eagerly, "It is but a block or two—I was just leaving my store for the evening—"

	The man's wife greeted the Teacher timidly, uncertainly. "We have little for tonight—even among the merchants it is hard to get enough, but what we have we are glad indeed to share, for all we have we owe to John's health, which All gave him. I—I—I scarcely know how to address you—Your—But come in, come in and rest at any rate, for I am tired myself, and you who have been walking in the heat all day."

	The Teacher smiled, and with his smile the pearly light of Shan waxed in his crystal, and the green of Tal. The women stood surprised for a second, then a stiffness went from her body, and a brighter light came to her eyes. "Oh—oh—" she cried. "There was truth in what John said. I could not believe, myself, despite John's health. I feel—feel as though I'd slept for hours!"

	"The Peace of Tal and the Fulfillment of Shan be on your house, John Graham. The Powers of All and the Phases of All are not easily credible, I know, Mrs. Graham. But they are more real than even John Graham who lived through them believes.

	"But let us go in. I am not weary, for All goes with me." He smiled, raising his Staff slightly. "But I am a Teacher of All. Address me only as Teacher."

	"I did not know, Teacher. Will you be with us long?"

	"Not long, for I must go on."

	And in the morning, when they woke, he was gone, and in his place they found a little cube of silvery metal, very heavy and very beautifully iridescent in the morning sun. And amazingly heavy, more than twice as heavy as lead.

	John Graham took it that morning to the little office of the Real Estate agent, John Mackenburg, who spent half his time interviewing those who would make the trip to All's Temple, and to him he gave the cube of metal, explaining how he came by it.

	The Teacher stayed that night, and another and another at the homes of people who had heard of All or had reason to bless All's Temple; and the fourth evening he came to San Francisco. It was not so badly ruined La appearance, rising now as an Oriental city from the ashes of the blasted city they had captured in the early years of the war. The busy city paid no attention to the Teacher as he wandered about, but evening found him staying in the home of a man who marveled still that he walked on two legs of flesh and bone where but one had been left him when he left the hospital of the American Army Medical Corps.

	The next day he went down to the Empire building in the heart of new San Francisco and attended an auction that was going on, the selling of certain lands in the neighborhood of Golden Gate Park. And some of his friends went too, and purchased plots of land.

	In two weeks the land was as level as it had been before the great shells of the Empire Fleet had reduced it to churned rubble. Five men seeded it and planted it, and a sixth walked about in curious robes bearing a curious staff of crystal. In two weeks, foliage more green, more luxurious than San Francisco had ever seen grew there, and curious people stopped to look at it. And more curious Orientals examined the grass and the soil, and did not understand.

	A building appeared, of white marble and red granite and curious blue, intensely blue stone that came from hitherto unknown quarries along with an intensely green stone. A great crated mass, five feet on an edge. Men came too, and set the stone and the crystal mass on a golden column that had come, and other thin crystal plates and curious lighting devices.

	In six months, the House of All was built, and shone white and sapphire and emerald on the broad sweep of landscaped lawn. At first a few curious ones came. Then the sick, and then more ailing in streams, till every Westerner in San Francisco had visited it, and come out well and strong, and the Orientals complained slightly. But the Orientals who were in power took no notice of it, being too intelligent to be deluded by faith healers, and since their people were not a race used to complaining, but oppressed for countless generations by a dull drudgery, they merely looked on with envious dull eyes as the Occidental crippled limped in, and returned whole, and the pallid, feverish were carried in to walk out, eyes shining.

	But the rulers were intelligent and paid little attention to faith healers, being far too busy attempting to establish a very new political control over a vast area.

	And their work was not to complain and object to a religion that obeyed the Edicts of the Emperor in every way, and turned in nearly two hundred and forty thousand dollars of precious metal in the course of six months from the House of All in San Francisco. And those originally interested lost interest as time passed, and nothing new or startling developed, save amazingly good revenues.

	Another House of All rose under the direction of the First Teacher in Denver, and another in Seattle. And hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid, while tens of thousands of sick were healed. The stores of precious metals in Nijihua's treasury were augmented by the receipts from nearly seven hundred members of the House of All, in that year.

-

X

	The Server stood before the Lords, and the First Teacher stood beside him.

	"Lords, you have heard the tale. Eleven Houses have been established in these two years, and the First Teacher has worked fairly and well, these two years. Now he grows weary of this work, and would, if it meets the approval of the Five Lords, rest in the House of All in Chicago as the Server of All."

	Mens, Lord of Wisdom spoke from his great, crystal throne. "The First Teacher has done well, and no one of his sending has been excluded from the Works of All, whereby is shown his wisdom of human understanding. The Lord of Wisdom is pleased."

	Tammar, Lady of Mercy spoke. "Many he has helped, and through his spreading of All's houses, many have learned of All's works. Tammar, Lady of Mercy is pleased."

	Shan, Lord of Fulfillment spoke: "In no way has he failed in his words given us, the Lords of All. The Lord of Fulfillment is content."

	So they spoke, and agreeing, Amos Tucker, the First Teacher, was made Server of All in Chicago, the American Capital of the World Empire.

	Lord Mens spoke again. "Your work, Server, must not cease, for you must instruct many and introduce them to the Mysteries of All. You have shown complete competence in the handling of these things which a Server of All must understand. But every man of our race whom you believe competent must be sent here for final education in All's Mysteries. We have but two Houses east of the Mississippi, and you, who have done so much of this work must aid others in the work, not by your presence but by your constant advice. The Crystal of the Server reaches to every Crystal of All, and speaks with it at will. This remember, and aid in every way, as we know you will. Your work has been exceedingly good."

	The Second Server bowed to the Lords. "I cannot understand fully these mysteries, as I know better even than you. But to the utmost of my abilities I will apply the knowledge and understanding of the human mysteries, to the betterment of All.

	"I go now to Chicago, but I will pause at Denver, where the Seventh Teacher is setting out soon for Boston that a new House of All may be built. He has purchased, through his agents, Corey Hill, which overlooks all Boston. I find his plans good."

	The Lords nodded agreement. "I know the city," spoke Tammar, Lady of Mercy. "It is an excellent position."

	The First Server stepped forward again. "Now there comes to me that a more pressing business yet demands attention. For a year and a year we have escaped great notice from the Empire, the work of consolidation being very great for them, and their need of revenue being very pressing."

	"They sought to destroy us with their tax," said Lord Mens softly, "which was not the way of wisdom, with All of infinite resource, and they have sold themselves for a bribe instead. They fear to harm us now, who have in two years brought them eight and one third millions of dollars in precious metal, metals very rare and difficult to collect. This year we build our membership by eleven thousand men and women. They will not quickly destroy the bringer of so much revenue, nor the source of so much excellent health and good-nature among the people of the country they own.

	"But therefore I say this: The work of consolidation nears its end, and the need of our revenue becomes less pressing as normal industry swells, and its revenues swell, and some measure of prosperity returns. This third year, therefore, let us expand to the limit Lord All may permit us.

	"The Council of Lords is ended?"

	"Aye," said the Lords.

	And now Amos Tucker raised his new Staff of the Server, and held it before his eyes, by chance, and he started back, his face frozen in sudden surprise. There was a Sixth Lord! The Black Lord, Dread Barmak, a silhouette of utter jet that seemed to stare straight to his heart, and dip slowly his massive head in greeting to the new Server of All.

	Frozen fingers gripped the heart of the Second Server as he turned stiffly to the First Server. Tornsen smiled gravely, and for an instant Tucker caught a fleeting twinkle in the kindly old eyes of Shan, Lord of Fulfillment ere he filed away with the others to his chamber.

	"Come," said Tornsen, "there are further things that the Server of All should understand."

	"Aye—Aye, indeed," sighed Amos Tucker unsteadily.

-

XI

	Chu Liang sat with unmoving face as the Shaman of the Western District bored in upon the curiously garbed witness in the Testifier's Stand. There had been little result of the Shaman's persistent questionings.

	The Shaman's voice was growing sharper. "How old, though, is this sect, Server?"

	"A religion, Shaman, is ageless. A deity is everlasting, without knowable beginning, without knowable end. These exist in the mist of creation and the mist of the ultimate dissolution."

	"The religion is not older than men, for without man there is no religion. This is not as old as man, and therefore I ask its earliest inception, Server."

	"The earliest inception began about three thousand years ago in Greece. It developed very slowly, till this day came when the better understanding of All, and his message to men, the great need of his race all combined to make his understanding of man and man's understanding of him better."

	"The active spread of the religion is but three years old though, Amos Tucker?"

	"I have no name, save that of Server, Shaman. It has become my title and my name. The great growth of All's Initiate has taken place in these three years of stress, but his understanding has increased greatly and steadily over the period of a hundred years, since the year 1890 of the old calendar."

	"Eleven thousand, nine hundred and eighty-seven members have joined the church during this year, and paid the initiate tax of one thousand dollars. It is said this tax is paid in large part by the Temple, yet no known source of revenue is in evidence. How then, has this revenue been gathered, this sum of over eleven millions of dollars, and the greater sums spent in the construction of the Temples, thirty-seven this year, and investment not less than seventy millions of dollars I am told."

	"The resources of All are infinite. I am of the Server class, and such is not within my province. I cannot answer you that, Shaman."

	"Who then is responsible for this thing?" 

	"That is the province of Mens, Lord of Wisdom." 

	"He is forbidden by the religion's laws to leave the valley?"

	"Yes. He does not leave the Temple." The Shaman's face was not so smoothly impassive as it had been. "We have heard the testimony of Chu Liang upon the destruction of life within the temple, and upon the complete sterilization of the bodies."

	The Second Server interrupted smoothly and gravely. "The works of Dis, Lord of Death are not understood by men. As the people of All are welcomed within the Temple, unfortunately the other peoples are not. That is the will of All, which I serve, but do not influence."

	"The Hindus have entered, an Oriental people, dark of skin," said the Shaman softly.

	"The understanding of All's will is not to men." 

	"You understand sufficiently to make efficient use of the Crystal of Life, and the Staff which you bear with you so constantly."

	"That is an achievement attained after three thousand years of study and thought and deepest sincerity of purpose. The day may come when the entire will of All is understood. To us, these things are greatly valued, and not to be cast aside, for in them, in the crystals, resides something of the living All, The Infinite, perceptible in his living flame."

	And as he spoke, the silver Flame of All lanced upward, the dying stars coruscating and vanishing.

	"You and your people have been consistent in your refusal to part with this symbol of All."

	"Only once, under the order of an officer of the Empire has any man of All parted with his staff. The report has been read in this room that All whispered in the crystal, and the man dropped dying saved only by the beneficial effects of All's crystal in the hands of its owner, Tornsen the Server. All is not a destroyer needlessly, and the people of All attempt to prevent such suffering as the release of the Staff brings. Such is the will of All."

	The Shaman tried for long hours, and at the close of the long day's session dismissed the Server, who had appeared voluntarily, and exasperatedly watched him leave the room, to be joined by a dozen Novitiates of the House of All. A dozen others appeared around him, calling softly. Gently his voice floated back, clear and sharp. "It is not wise that the Flame be used here, since there are those other than All's who would suffer by it. The House of All is open to all men of his race, and the Teachers of All will come at any man's call if need be." And the Shaman spoke softly to his colleagues. "I am informed that the Council of American Military Affairs wishes us to cease inquiry at this time," he said.

	Chu Liang went quietly from the room to the building at the other end of the Empire Park, and into the small room where two dozen men sat quietly supping. Dark fell presently and they sat talking softly of many things. And a man came in quietly, his face very white and his eyes seeming glazed and unseeing. He was guided by the hands of two who stood on either side of him, uniformed guards, and he was not alone in his paleness. The two at his side saluted, but he in the center stared only ahead, dull-eyed.

	"Yokishi, you report?" asked Commander Torisuti.

	"Yokishi, yes. Yes, I report Commander. The thing was done, and I am done."

	"You apprehended the Teacher who went out?"

	"Yes, yes, we apprehended the Teacher. From the Singing Stair of the House of All he went down, to the call of the one who demanded aid, as was ordained, and Lieutenant Tsi Chian accompanied me to the mean dark streets of the American Section. The darkness closed in as we closed in, as noiseless as we. The lights of the street grew further apart, and the houses more cramped and decayed, and the Teacher continued but about him shone light, for the Staff he carried glowed with silver light and green, and sapphire blue and pearl, and was very beautiful to look on, but tore at the nerves and deadened them. Lieutenant Tsi Chian went forward as was agreed, and with the silent pistol fired at him, but as was known the Teacher was not stayed nor hurt nor even aware of the firing. So then did I advance with the apparatus Chu Liang had designed for me, and did as he had directed in the starting of it, and as he directed I tried its power on a dog that appeared slinking through the alleys, and he died as was told to me, lying down without a sound.

	"I advanced upon the Teacher, and trained the projector upon him, and the tubes glowed properly, and the meters were correctly set upon the base of the weapon. Then I depressed the contact, and the Teacher before me did not stumble or halt, nor even seem aware, for behind him, directly between him and the weapon I bore, appeared a soft glow of violet that seemed a wavering disc of light, and slightly brighter the Flame of All glowed on his staff. The sparks were sharp and hot in my hands, so I was forced to drop the thing."

	"The clatter warned him, for he turned slowly, and we stood revealed in the silver light. Lieutenant Tsi Chian made to dart away as did I, hoping to escape recognition in the foul clothes we wore, but from the staff he carried green light reached out, and we were overcome by a lethargy and a paralysis such as made us slump to the ground while he came back to us. He smiled as he saw the weapon I had carried, and from his staff a snake-tongue of scarlet lanced to touch the thing Chu Liang had fashioned. It touched it, and it was gone, only an instantaneous glow of intense violet light lingered for a moment to mark its passage, and a shallow depression in the hardpacked earth of the roadway."

	" 'All protects his people, Warrior' he said quietly, looking upon us. 'It was not the will of All that your weapon should injure me, so it did not. Go now, back to Commander Torisuti who awaits you in the room of Decisions in the Hall of War.'

	"He pointed his staff upon us, and the pearly light touched us, so we rose and darted into the shadows. He walked on."

	"That is your report?" asked the Commander silkily. "No, that is not my report, Commander, for we knew then that his diligence would be at low ebb, having overcome one attack, and would not be strong to aid him. We followed him then to the house of the ailing one, and the Teacher was inside for half an hour. Then we knew, as he came out, his Staff must be at low ebb also, and no protection against material things since he must move through the narrow doorway of the squalid place.

	"His silver light came before him, bright upon the darkness of the place. As he followed through, Lieutenant Tsi Chian stood upon the right, and I upon the left, and Tsi Chian had a section of heavy metal he had found, and I a broken beam, hoping that great mass might accomplish on his weakened screen what no bullet might.

	"Tsi Chian struck, and his metal bar shot lightnings, so that he was hurled to one side, writhing. My wooden beam was slowed, as though striking water a foot from his head, and ran aside, but so great was its mass that it moved still, and struck him upon the shoulder.

	"He fell to his knees, dropping the Staff of All, but it dropped not swiftly, but slowly to the ground as though feather-light. I leapt upon the Teacher as he kneeled, half stunned while Tsi Chian leapt upon the Staff. Tsi Chian grasped it, and I rose to follow as he went swiftly down the roadway to a place of safety, for there are many Americans in the Section. I was close behind him when he stumbled to the ground, turned over—and slept with the staff beside him.

	"I grasped it and ran on, but a numbness came into my arms as I ran, a great numbness so that presently I felt my feet as those of another, and it seemed I ran on for, many hours while a single house dropped back. And for many more hours till, weary, I stumbled as Tsi Chian had, and lay with the numbing creeping from my arm to my heart and my eyes. The silver light grew dimmer to my eyes, then vanished, and suddenly a searing, unbearable pain shot through my arm, so my eyes opened again. All the Staff glowed violet, and the Crystal was shattered.

	"Lightning gushed from the end of the staff, so that the ground fused, and the air rocked at the roarings of them. The crystal was gone, and as I watched, helpless to move, the Staff glowed more intensely violet, then blue flames rushed up from it and the heat seared me and my hand. But the hand felt no pain now, nor did my side presently, and the lack of pain was spreading, while the blue flames rushed higher—and then were gone. Commander, it had vanished utterly, so that no scrap of metal or ash rested in my hand."

	"That is your report?" asked the Commander again.

	"That is my report, Commander, save that presently the Teacher came again, and stood over me. He spoke again and said: 'Your hands, and the release of the Spirit of All within the Staff, which is the Spirit of the Lord of Life, brought a false life to you. You are dead, Warrior. Now I will give you the peace of Tal, that you may endure to reach your commander. But it is not the will of All that you, who have attacked a Teacher of All, shall live, nor can any of us of All bring life to you, into whom the Fire of All has penetrated.'

	"And as he spoke, the fire was eating at me, so that my body burned, and all of me from my skin to my innermost part flamed with the agony of it, like the Death of a Thousand Cuts, so that I groaned. From the crystal of his headdress, a pencil of green light reached down, and touched my head so that the fire died there, and in a moment I felt no fire, or any other thing in all my body. 'Now the fire is not dead, but your senses are dead,' he said softly, 'nor will they ever return. Your eyes see, and your ears hear, but neither touch, nor taste, nor smell is with you. For an hour and at most another hour, the Fire of All will leak from you, then when it is gone you will be dead indeed. Now for those who speak with you, know this; when the Fire of All is gone from you, and you die, there yet remains an hour while the Fire of All is within the atoms of your body. Then this fire too returns to All, who is the essence of the Infinity, so that it be best your body be far from men. Go now, to your commander.'

	"And now he turned on me a ray of red, such as that that had licked at the weapon of Chu Liang. The ground beneath me hissed to it, and shrieked; it dissolved so that I felt myself sinking, and the snake-tongued flame wrapped about me and clung like the cocoon of the silkmaker. Then blue fire licked from my body, and fought with it, and presently I felt strength come to me again, save in the arm and the side where the staff had lain and touched. Then blue flame and red, snaked-tongued ray died together, and I stood up and came swiftly away. I ran, and was tireless. A fence was before me, and I grasped its top with the hand which would act to my will, and lightly flew over it to the strain of my muscles, while the planking dented between my fingers.

	"Now look, and say you whether I am as before." The young Oriental grasped the oaken door-frame, and between his fingers it splintered as though in the grip of a vise. Suddenly they knew he was shining over all his body, with iridescent whirling rainbows, luminous oil on water.

	"The strength is going from me, and I know that All, Lord of Life, is leaving me. Oh, All, Mighty Lord—I believe—I understand—let me—take me—"

	And the men of the Council started abruptly to their feet as his body stiffened suddenly, with a curious crystalinity as the light burst out in eye-searing brilliance, and—-died. A voice spoke, slumberous and deep, in the language he had used, as perfect in enunciation, in phrasing, in accent as his own, but it spoke, not from his lips, but from all his body.

	"There is no place for you, nor your people with All and the people of All."

	The man beside him recoiled suddenly, and body swayed slightly, slipped and shattered to a thousand pieces that cried out in brittle anguish.

	Chu Liang bowed his head. "It is an infinitely greater god than ours. Lest we regret a decision, let his body and all parts of it to the tiniest scrap, be found and carried out to the center of the great court, and a guard be established for two hours at range of two hundred yards."

	"You advise this, Chu Liang? Then, guard, let that be an order, and see that it is obeyed." The two saluted, and went away hurriedly. They were not among those who came to pick up the scattered fragments.

	Torisuti turned again to Chu Liang. "What was your weapon?"

	"An efficient and effective short-wave radio projector of unequaled power. It was very deadly. It was the best our science could offer."

	"Their God seems peculiarly real. I—I cannot understand such a god."

	Chu Liang smiled slowly. "The unwritten definition of a god includes the phrase, in every mind, that a god is one who promises, but never acts, and if he acts is not a God. There is no room in our civilization for a being above the known laws of cause and effect. We are unfortunate to meet one. Particularly one selectively opposed to our race, and one selectively helpful to theirs."

	"Has your science nothing to offer which is selectively opposed to their race?" snapped Commander Torisuti.

	Chu Liang shook his head slowly, then paused suddenly, as a thought came to his mind. "There may be, on second thought. But be it remembered that our science is in no way to be compared with the powers that their God has displayed."

	"What then? The radio-weapon, perhaps. I do not understand that, but perhaps you may make it tune in on them, which is a thought my mind may grasp."

	"No, the radio weapon is merely heat, excessive heat. That miniature set the man who has just been carried was a power unequaled in any hand-portable set in our science or, I would have said, in any science. For it gen atom and four hydrogens that act in many ways as killed nearly seven hundred horsepower, truly a vast amount to train upon an animal body, a disruptive power. Yet we know now that this must certainly have doubled, since the weapon burned out, and in all probability, trebled. Hence we say that the Staff of Life born by the Teachers is capable of generating two thousand horsepower, for the one who reported stated that the Flame of All increased but slightly."

	"No meaning. The staff was damaged, and disintegrated within the hour. Tell me, too, how this may be?"

	"I can suggest, but no more, and this is what my mind makes credible: that the staff is made, not of pure metal, but of an alloy, and the alloy is not one I can duplicate. There is a compound, ammonium, consisting of one nitrogen atom and four hydrogens that act in many way as a metal, silvery in color and very light. Now it may be formed in mercury to make an amalgam, which is very soft, but solid and, at low temperatures, somewhat stable. This staff then, may have been an alloy of platinum and ammonium, intended that we may not have the thing to analyze and investigate. Now when certain conditions were fulfilled, or certain tune elapsed, or a hidden stud of the carving was not depressed, the stuff became unstable, and the ammonium freed itself as gas. The gas of ammonium in the presence of finely divided platinum burns with a blue light in air to a gas. If this be true, then the platinum would be dust finer than the motes in sunlight beams, and would cause the burning, while the metal would glow with red heat, and the blue names with the red glow would be violet light.

	"Thus it would be if it were science. But, Commander, we deal with a god, who is beyond laws as we know them, and may have destroyed the platinum. This, I suggest, for neither ammonium nor platinum, nor the gases released turn men to crystal that shatters, nor make the hands of men to crush solid, oaken beams." He nodded slowly to the crushed doorframe.

	"Enough of that. It is, evidently, beyond your science, and I am beginning to fear that this thing is in truth a god, which is not good for the cause of the World Empire. Tell me though, what is that thing you mentioned, which attacks the Westerners, but not us?"

	"I hesitate for two reasons; it attacks not the whites alone, but both, races, though to a far greater degree the whites. However, many of our people will die. The other, that it will divide the whites from the Empire forever, if we point out that there is a god which protects and favors the Asiatic races."

	"What is this thing?" demanded the Commander.

	"Cholera. Asiatic Cholera. The white races are twenty times more susceptible, and if an epidemic of mild cholera be spread, nine tenths of the whites shall die, and one hundredth of our people."

	"And those of ours who do die, I believe, will be the weakest of the race," said the Commander softly.

	"Yes," said Chu Liang.

-

XII

	The Four Servers stood before the thrones of the Five in the Temple of All, their faces grave and careworn. The First Server spoke. "The Lords know well the thousands who have besieged this Temple and been healed, till their five visits of the year are gone. And still they are sick, nor have they the thousand dollars to pay the Initiate Impost. So many as we will, we can heal, and so many as the Teachers can reach can be healed, so that cholera does not take them. But this brings trouble: that the healing by the Flame of All is not permanent, but merely a destruction of the disease as it exists, leaving the man open again to its dread attack.

	"And the Empire is spreading and allowing the spread of the disease, while their people laugh at it, for having lived with it a thousand generations. We have not Teachers to reach every home in the time needed; we must accept as members the seventy-three thousand that are on our lists, and are capable of being made Teachers and of proven worth."

	Lord Mens spoke. "This we could do, for the Impost could be met from the infinite resources of All, yet this would mean a payment of seventy-three millions of dollars, many tons of metal, and the Empire would notice quickly. There are now in this country, some thirty-five million people of All, and due to the tenets of the Empire, there are neither feeble-minded nor insane nor recurrently criminal among them, though many are stupid drawers of waters and hewers of wood. Yet we must save them. So the Impost shall be met, and the Teachers shall join. But let them not all be Teachers, but only Members, whose Staffs are of the Sixth Order, capable of healing, but not of generation of All's powers, their powers dying with the day. Thus faulty members shall not lay open the mysteries of All to the Empire.

	"And in this emergency the Flame of All shall burn at the Eighth Magnitude in all the Houses of All, day and night both. Now be it known also, to the Servers, that the Staffs of the Lords can bring life to the dead, and under the Staffs of the Lords, Lord Dis relinquishes his claim, if the body of the dead one be in condition to be again life's vessel, and not a thing of horror. So too, shall the Staff of the First Server be, and as soon as may be, the Staffs of the Four Servers, though the staffs of the Servers, save the First Server, are of a degree lower than the Staffs of the Masters.

	"Now I, Lord of Wisdom, do find it time fitting, that the Servers and the First Teachers of the Houses know the full might of Dis, Lord of Death. Take thou, Dis, Lord of Death, these Servers, to the Crystal of All and teach them full the Services of Dis."

	"Aye," said the Lords.

	Lord Dis rose in a burning cloak of scarlet, and his staff flamed and licked with angry snake-tongues of fire; tiny crystalline trumpetings resounded from its lightnings as he led the way to the great Crystal of All. For the first time, the doors of the Temple swung shut, while the Lords themselves stood without, bringing health to the hundreds who climbed the mighty Singing Stair. Its song was a song of dread to the City of All now, for it rang day and night to the tread of hundreds afflicted with the cholera.

	Lord Dis stood on the high altar of the Crystal of All, and to the Four Servers repeated the full service of Dis. The great crystal shimmered, and the blue of Mens and the Green of Tal faded as his voice rolled on, then the pearl of Shan, and even the silver starburst of All grew dim, and the sullen scarlet of Dis spread all the great crystal while trumpeting lightnings licked and danced about the altar and the crystal and the man. The scarlet floor wove and danced to foot-long streamers that writhed and muttered in angry murmur, and the long Service of Dis reached near its end.

	And Lord Dis stopped. "Thus is the Service of Dis," he said, and his voice rolled in the Temple, powerful and deep. "But that is not the ending. Now these are the words of the ending, and they must be learned. I continue not the Service of Dis now, for the powers of Dis in his full might are- not lightly to be summoned. Remember this, and remember too, that only in the ultimate extreme are the full words of the Service of Dis to ring in the chamber of the Crystal. Remember this, for their power is mighty beyond any powers of Earth, for All, in his phase of Dis, strikes then with all his might, and it is not given that men should behold this thing lightly, nor much. And these are the final words, for the Service is broken now, and the Mighty Lord has retreated for the time."

	As he had spoken the flames of Dis had died lower, • and the floor of Dis was quiescent, flaming softly, and the silver and blue and green and pearl were returned to the crystal, tinged still with the angry scarlet of Dis.

	Lord Dis spoke again. "The enemy attack, Lord Dis, and the walls resound to their march. Lord Dis, mightiest of the Lords, give answer now, to their threats, thrust forth thy banners, and thy flames of Death, snake-tongued to pierce our enemies, in the name of All, Lord of Life, strike, Lord Dis!"

	The Service was broken, and not full in its power, but as his voice roared still in the stone-walled Temple, the light vanished, swallowed in rolling thunders of blackness, till only scarlet gloom remained, pierced and shattered with Titan lashes of scarlet fire, cold, the awful cold of the Dread Black Lord, Barmak, the Unseen, the Unmentioned, swept through the Temple, and the air was night, stabbed through by sunset rays of scarlet Dis, whirling, shrieking, trumpeting mad crystalline destruction.

	And they died. White-faced the Servers stood; silence came at length, and Lord Dis spoke again from the altar. "Now these are the powers of Dis," he said very softly, so his voice was barely audible, and the silver of All crept in, and the blue and green and pearl. "The Lord Dis protects his own, but when the might of Dis is so great, the lives of even his people are as ants in the path of a warring God. Know this, then; within the Temple, when the full might of Dis is loose, let no man attempt to stand, save he be clothed in the scarlet robe of Dis, and wear the scarlet crystal of Dis. His staff must glow with the anger of Dis. Beyond the Temple walls, men of Western blood may stand, but if there be admixture of Oriental, his death is not less certain than the death of Oriental on that floor now.

	"But this you must remember; let not these forces loose till there hovers danger above, men without, and enemies on every side, and that enemy attacks. For when the might of Dis is loose, nor All himself, nor Tal, the Lord of Peace may stay that anger. Only Tammar, Lady of Mercy, has power then, and her power extends not infinitely ...

	"Now remember these things, and let the Teachers of each House of All and Dis know them well."

	"Aye, Lord," said the Servers faintly.

-

XIII

	"Your metal is pure, pure indeed, too pure. Server, we, the examiners of the World Empire, demand knowledge of this thing, and further, we demand admittance to this Temple in safety and peace!"

	"That cannot be," the Server spoke sternly. "Lord All denies you admittance, and men cannot sway the will of All. The metal is good, so be it good, where is your complaint?"

	"Then, Server, listen well. Emperor Nijihua himself takes notice of your Temple, having come to America this day, and this is his Edict; that any temple growing in membership more than ten thousand men in the last year shall pay an Impost of one million dollars for each member!"

	The Server stood white-faced, his face stern as the mighty mountain ridges ringing the Temple. Finally Tornsen spoke again. His voice was soft and very low. "Return to your royal master and tell him then, this. That at each House of All, there must be a vehicle within twelve hours capable of bearing twenty tons of metal, and at this house a greater vehicle. Go."

	The Oriental went, dazed and knowing not what to say, for in all the world, there was not eighty-four billions of dollars in hard metal.

	The vehicles appeared as was ordained, and there were fourteen great freight planes in the City of All in the Valley of All.

	Nijihua had not been troubled for he slept, it being night now, and only the collection service had been impressed. Uncomprehending men going in answer to an order. The Valley flamed with dull and ominous scarlet, hot with the warmth of the great fire-shot crystal of Dis, by the Cup of All.

	The Collector came to the Singing Stair and mounted it, behind him the squad of laborers. The Temple flamed with the light of All, mighty and bright, a lance-flame that reached full hundred feet, steady and motionless with bursting stars of light, shattering crystals of light that gave forth a low, ominous rumble of grinding sound. The floor of Dis wavered with a thousand thousand snake-tongued flames of angry scarlet.

	The Collector halted, for on the great crystal floor were stacked ingots of metal. They were foot-thick bars, square of" end and six feet long, and they lay rank on rank, three hundred feet they stretched, side by side, six feet long, and they towered twenty feet into the air, a mighty wall of precious metal such as man never conceived, all down one side of the great Temple. And down all the other wall of the Temple they stacked, save only at the far end, where men came now guiding other mighty bars, men in long lines, one behind another, and more behind, while another file returned empty-handed. One man moved those bars, those four-tone bars, and in his hand glowed the Flame of All, and the mighty ingots rested on it and floated, glowing faint with crimson light. The Collector stopped, dumb-struck at the threshold. And shrieked, leaping back as the great Cubed Crystal spun savagely and the snake-tongued flame of Dis crashed a bolt of scarlet, licking lightning, to shatter in roaring crystalline wrath at the Barrier of the Threshold.

	"Stop there!" ordered the Server. The Five Lords emerged through the jet wall, and their crystals flamed angrily, the Staff of Lord Dis crackling and shouting crystalline wrath, his robes and cloak shimmering under their angry licking.

	"No further, Oriental," Tornsen rumbled. "It is Death, for the Lord Dis is angry this night. The ingots will be brought to you, and these ingots stand that you may see the infinite resources of All, Lord of Life. Beneath this floor lie the vaults of All, and they stretch a thousand and a thousand feet into the Earth, and a thousand and a thousand feet on every side. Now these are the metals of All, the Creator, and more he creates at will as he created those few scraps the world has known. These be osmium, osmium all. And in the vaults lie indium and platinum, palladium and rhodium in vaster amounts, and there are all the metals of earth in what quantity we would.

	"Now look you, the Flame of All is the essence of the Lord of Life, the Creator, and it is greater than any manifestation of his works, such as matter, or gravity, which it dissipates so that one man carries in his hands the great ingot. One of these ingots you may test."

	The Server moved, and his Staff pointed toward the great wall of ingots, the Flame of All shot out, lancing, and a pencil line of intense violet pierced it through, leading it so it touched an ingot and the ingot burst into crimson, lifted and floated down the Flame. Tornsen turned his Staff, and the mighty ingot followed till it crossed the Barrier and hung above the salt-white stone outside. With a booming clang it dropped.

	"Test that, Collector," snapped the Server.

	The Collector moved swiftly and his tiny saw gnawed at the mighty thing, and a scrap came free. Swiftly with spectroscope and reagent he tested it. "It is purest osmium," he said at length. "Weigh it I cannot, for its mass is far beyond my scales."

	"Then watch, Collector," snapped the Server. The crimson crystal of Dis glowed on his staff, and the forked tongue was keen as a knife's edge. It traced a line, and the ingot shrieked in tortured anguish, and—and became two, four, eight, sixteen pieces.

	The Collector stared dumbly, and started forward. "Stop," said the Server. "What metal would your royal master have?"

	"Gold—" said the Collector. "Gold—he has much platinum but men like better yellow gold."

	"Stand back, Oriental, for All speaks his will, and he is Lord of All Things as well as Men."

	The Flame of All lashed out from his crystal in mighty clashing discord, and struck the ingot and retired. The Collector looked at it dully, for it was yellow, yellow as butter of cows in lush pasture. And as he cut at it, it gummed his saw, so soft it was. With his knife he pared a great strip off.

	Two ingots he loaded in the planes, and went away—the planes staggering with the concentrated load of mighty blocks of yellow buttery metal. The Server stood at the peak of the Singing Stair, and stared after them, while in the Valley, the Crystal of Dis pulsed mad scarlet flames that chimed and chattered and crashed angrily, and the clouding sky reflected their angry glory.

	In two-score cities that night, two-score collectors looked upon vast treasures, while the Emperor slept.

	He woke in the morning, and the clamour of his officers brought him out The city, his city, roared and murmured with strange, riotous sounds, shrieks and howls and crying mobs of men. Careworn and brightened were his officers as he emerged.

	"Lord Nijihua—Your Highness—The Temple of All—"

	"What," snapped the Emperor in clipped syllables. "General Torisuti, report."

	"Lord Nijihua the Temple of All replied that they would meet the impost—"

	Nijihua started. "Would meet it! Impossible! For in the world, save in my treasury, such treasure does not exist."

	Torisuti giggled softly. "Your Highness, they met it. They paid it with ingots of gold, platinum and palladium and rhodium, and the ingots were six feet by one foot by one foot, solid metal and pure. The Collectors returned with eyes dazed and blank, and they told of walls of metal in each Temple that stretched end to end and made of tens of thousands of such ingots! That—"

	"There is not such metal on earth," Nijihua snapped. "They were plated base metals. What is the howling of this mob that disturbed my sleep?"

	"It is the army and the citizens and the peasants, Highness. There may not have been such metal, but—look." Nijihua stared through the window of the corridor. The American Provincial Treasury building stood beyond, and it gleamed and glowed in the sun, like yellow butter, and its roof was fallen in, its mighty pillars slumped under their own weight. A half melted building of butter.

	A score of men were fighting and howling and shrieking as they struggled to bear away a statue, curiously lifelike statue of metal, scarcely twenty inches high, made of yellow, yellow metal. But its concentrated mass was immense, and they fought savagely over it. A soldier came and his rifle blazed. They fell, or ran, and another shot the soldier down to draw away the statuette. And over all, the mad melody of the treasure-mad city howled.

	"That thing was a treasury guard last night," said Commander Torisuti. "The Building is gold, purest gold, and they howl and fight to hack it away with knives and axes. And the soldiers fight with them for it. The War Department buildings are of iridium, pure and strong, too hard to cut, so they howl about it and cannot cut it away. The streets are bordered by curbstones of gold, and the bridges are sinking under their golden weight. The forts outside the city are lead, and the war-planes slump in ruin of leaden softness. The great coast defense guns at San Francisco and the bridges of New York run in liquid streams of mercury. The battleships anchored in the harbor burned last night with mighty tongues of violet flame and exploded in flaming ruin, and their solid metal ran liquid, hissing, burning on the water. All America is a mad joke on an insane, prankster god!

	"And at dawn, when people woke to see the golden splendors a mighty voice roared over all the city, and commanded them to fight and slay and squabble for useless gold, for there were infinite resources in the treasuries of All. Over all the Province the cities are golden and platinum, and the weapons are leaden and mercury. Great forts slump like yellow, melted butter under their own weight."

	The howling savagery of the city welled in at the windows, and shrieked about their ears. "Commanders, gather your forces. The Temples of All must be destroyed instantly. Are there any great guns and planes, remaining?"

	"A score in the city, of planes, a half dozen mobile guns, with these we can attack—"

	"Go, destroy the Temples, and every Teacher and Server in them." Nijihua sat in the windows of his palace, and stared at the city. Fire smoke climbed leaden into the sky, while the howls of the hunting packs drifted across the city. The city was no city, for a city is the center of an organized society, and Nijihua's heart was cold as he understood suddenly the powers of this mad god. His city was mad—mad as a lunatic howling his fury to the full moon.

	Half a thousand men swept about the corner, a dozen trucks in their midst, armed soldiers. They opened fire as they reached the Great Court, and before they neared the Treasury Building, their numbers halved and none lived before them. They swept on howling, to the Treasury. A dozen power-saws squealed, and gunned down in the soft, clinging stuff. A hundred men loaded blocks and masses of yellow metal in the trucks. Then suddenly one collapsed under the vast load, and they distributed the loading better. But they could not stop. A wild mob of citizens, ten thousand strong, swept in from all sides with ax and saw and knife and pistol. There were gas shells there, and the soldiers died beneath hacking knife and ax. The peasant citizens swarmed over the trucks and loaded them further. They crunched and fell under the spilled yellow stuff.

	Nijihua rose. An ordered roaring was coming from one end of the city. Presently he saw far down the Avenue of Nijihua the march of the organized troops coming, and because they were ordered strength, the peasant citizens were fighting them, fighting for the golden pavements and the golden houses with their golden people. But the troops wore masks and they were bathed in paralyzing-gas that stopped the citizens.

	At the Palace, Nijihua joined them and went to the airfield. Planes drooped, lead color, like tired things on the field with broken wings, snapped stay wires, crushed landing gear and fallen engines. A score of saved planes turned over steadily with dull booming of death. Bombs lay in nestled racks beneath them. Mobile gas units were lined up. A strong guard surrounded the field.

	And to the field came a Teacher, in silver cloak and gleaming headdress. The guards surrounded him in an instant, and brought him before the Emperor, smiling faintly.

	"Well, man of All, what have you to say to your Emperor?"

	The Teacher smiled slowly. His voice was easy and deep as he answered: "You are not my Emperor, Nijihua, for I obey but one ruler, All, Lord of Life. Now look you; All Lord of Life takes back this country for his people. It were best your men leave. You are greedy for the treasures of All, so in fullest measure he has given of them, to surfeiting and beyond, so that your people kill themselves for them and your army is disrupted by them."

	"And," said Nijihua softly, "he has made them quite, quite worthless through their plenty. Aye, your God is a wise God, but I should like to know how this trick is done."

	"It is done by All Things. It is not within the understanding of man. Now these things are done, and that is enough. Let your people withdraw, for this is the land of the people of All."

	"In a day and a day," said Nijihua quietly, "there will be neither All nor people of All. So much I promise for the things you and your priests have done. Is that well within the understanding of man, such a man as you?" asked Nijihua.

	"It is not to be. Lord Dis, Lord of Death, stands ready to defend his people, Nijihua. I will go now, and when you would speak again with All's men, seek the Temple of All in the Valley of All. The Five Lords await you. I go."

	He turned to walk away. "No," snapped Nijihua. "You stay. Take him, guard!" The guards reached forward—and stopped. For the man was gone. In an instant he vanished from their sight, leaping upward slightly, and though they ringed their hands and closed in where he had been, he was gone. A voice spoke from the air and Nijihua stood calm.

	"The Lord All protects his people, which is to be remembered, and engraved in the scroll of your memory, Nijihua."

	Nijihua turned to Commander Torisuti. "You will see that the planes take off at once."

-

XIV

	"The planes come overhead, Server," said the Novice, returning from the threshold. His face was tense, and white with fright.

	The Server nodded, grave of face and scarcely less firm within his heart. He stood in scarlet robes of Dis, and his crystal flamed with the red of Dis, as did the crystals of the Teachers within the Temple.

	"Now go, John Kempson, and wait without, and see to that none attempts entry of the gates. For I summon Lord Dis in all his might"

	The Novice closed the great gates behind him, looking back at the Server, who stood now on the golden altar of All and spoke in slow, rolling syllables. The air of the Temple was darkening, and red licked the flames of Dis about the Server's body.

	John Kempson stood with seven of the Novitiate on the Singing Stair of the Temple facing the crowd of white-faced Americans below. "The Server summons Lord Dis," he cried out, "wait ye hear in safety. Lord All has maddened the Orientals with his gold and precious metals as he warned you, he has destroyed the fleet of the Emperor as was told you. Now the last weapons and the soldiers shall be destroyed, as was promised."

	Behind him, the Temple glowed scarlet on all its faces, and the sapphire and emerald and pearl were gone. Only flaming angry scarlet remained and spread. Strange cold, like polar wastes, washed down from the Temple, and the sky grew dark, clouding swiftly. The clouds glared sullen in the light of the Temple, as it grew, and grew. The howling of the mob stilled over all the city, and the cold grew greater. Swiftly the black rolled up the sky, swifter and swifter, till all light was blotted out in rolling ink. Wave on wave of jet was rolling from the Temple, and it drank the light from all the city. The Crystals in the hands of the Novitiate were dulled and dim, and only the intense scarlet of the Temple pierced the jet that settled as Dis and Dread Barmak, Lord of Nothingness gained sway. The jet waves pushed out and the snake-tongues of Dis rolled and curled about the Temple. The great piling of the clouds above pressed lower and the cold of the Black Lord washed out in deadening waves that paralyzed heart and mind.

	Abruptly, within, the last words of the Service of the Summoning of Dis were done. Thunderous trumpetings of angry sound washed in from all Infinity—and a mighty Being snapped into existence.

	Dis, Lord Dis towered above them, scarlet in his cloak, a mighty Titan God, looming a thousand feet, dwarfing the great towers of the Empire's buildings, the vast cloak flapping in heart-chilling breezes of another world. In his hands flamed a mighty staff of red metal, tipped by a snake-tongued crystal that washed and sprayed the frightful flame of Dis. They roared through the heavens, sunset rays of Death. Ten thousand feet crashed out to the mighty bombers of the Emperor. The ships vanished in unbearable wash of scarlet flame piercing even the utter jet of Barmak's veil that held the city.

	That day, Dis stalked a thousand feet high, his mighty flames roared down and the buildings of the Empire flared and vanished and boiled hot in the black and cold. The bombers vanished from the air and Nijihua's weapons crumbled on the ground; and thousand-foot Dis roared out his warning, "All, Lord of Life, defends his own, and I am Dis, Lord of Death, defender of All. Ye die, this day, invaders, and the country returns to the people of All, for All in his might, is angry. Now this is thy death!"

	Mighty Dis thrust out the blazing crystal, and the flames from it rained down in hissing streams that rent the air, the rocks, the very waters. And as suddenly ceased. Stopped by a great glow of amber light.

	Tammar, Lady of Mercy, stood before him, thousand foot high as he, in robes of gold, and about her wavered golden light that drove back the jet and scarlet of Dis and Barmak, Lord of Nothingness, who took much to him that day. Tammar spoke, and her voice rolled softly over the city. "Stop, Lord Dis. They shall go, for such is the will of All, but they need not go to the Black Lord. It be better and wiser and more just if they go to their own place, and their own gods. Cease thy wrath, and come again to the place of the Lords."

	The jet and scarlet broke, and Mens, Lord of Wisdom, came blue as sapphire. "Aye, Lord Dis. It is wisdom. I cannot halt ye, I have no power to stay ye, nor has any, save the Golden Lady. Come then, for it is wise as well as merciful."

	Lord Dis' angry face calmed slowly. "Aye, I will go. And they will go. For if I be summoned by my people once again, I whip this land with the Flames of Dis till no thing lives save the people of All, and by my side shall walk the Black Lord, fully visible! By Mighty All I swear that, not shall Lady Tammar nor Lord Mens again stay our hands."

	Thousand-foot Dis vanished, and the jet clouds that were with him vanished, rolling up before wave on wave of blissful heat, warmth God-sent. The jet vanished with the scarlet tongues of Dis. The sun broke through, so people were half blinded. And the city moaned, over all its streets and parks it moaned; then slowly the howl grew, and the shrieks of men that sought to escape on foot, in cars, in planes, in every way. For they dreaded death less than Thousand-foot Dis, of the scarlet lightnings, and the Unseen One of the black and cold.

-

XV

	The great, golden plane of Nijihua settled to the landing sands at the City of All, among the mighty cliffs of the valley. The Temple glowed with the sapphire of Mens and the emerald of Tal, the pearl of Shan and, faintly the scarlet of Dis.

	Nijihua dismounted from his plane, and a score of Teachers of All, in their robes of silver, bearing the crystal staffs, came down the Singing Stair that boomed softly in the great gorge, to their tread. Nijihua stood on the sands by the plane, only seven elderly men beside him, his Council. The first Teacher of the Temple advanced toward him, and spoke softly. "Nijihua, you seek audience of the Five Lords?"

	"Yes, Teacher of All. I must make some peace for my people in this continent. They destroy themselves in their mad rush for safety, and my army is more disorganized than the people squabbling over useless metal, so it is impossible for me to save them and their goods."

	"The Lords shall meet, and shall judge you, Nijihua. Come thou, then, to the Temple of All."

	Nijihua and his seven councilors followed, eight elderly men, upright and straight in their robes of state, come to enact what peace they might. They mounted the Singing Stair, and halted at the peak on the salt-white stone of the threshold. Before them gleamed the mighty Crystal of All, such as they had never seen. And on its top stood the Five Lords before their Five thrones. The glory of the Temple impressed itself upon the Oriental, its beauty of simplicity and lighting. Gradually something of its peace seeped into him.

	The Server stood before him, huge and straight. "You have come to audience with the Five Lords, Nijihua, and Tammar, Lady of Mercy has made promise for you."

	Tammar spoke, and her golden voice rolled softly through the Temple. "It is death to Oriental who crosses the Barrier, but that these men may be truly and justly judged, it is best they be near to us. Wherefore, I do promise them safety within the Temple for this time. Follow, Nijihua, in the golden light."

	A star burst golden in the air of the room, a pinpoint of exploding light that expanded suddenly as it fell to a thirty-foot globe of golden radiance, settling light as a great bubble to the crimson floor, and halfway through it, till it was a hemispherical dome of golden radiance. Within its circle, the floor of Dis was dark black crystal, at the edge it shot tiny blue lightnings and over all the surface of the globe, blue lightnings played with a hissing crackle almost noiseless.

	Nijihua and his Council were within it and they crossed the barrier, and walked a floor no Oriental foot had trod, till they stood near the great Crystal. The Five Lords seated themselves as the Server stood before the eight men.

	"Now this is the peace with your people," said Mens, Lord of Wisdom. "That they leave this country with such things as they brought, and no more of goods, save only that they may take whatever quantities of gold and platinum and other precious metals as may delight them or be useful to them.

	"But every man of your people shall leave, save those who have been in this country more than fifteen years. That is the peace with your people. All, Lord of Life needs no guarantee of non-aggression, no indemnity of materials for his resources are infinite, and no indemnity of goods, since it were better the people of All earn. The lives you have taken cannot be returned. That is the peace of All, Lord of Life, with your people.

	"But All, Lord of Life, has further justice with you, Nijihua. Say first, Emperor and Council, are these terms with the people acceptable?"

	Nijihua sighed softly. "Yes, Lord, these terms are acceptable, but what is this demand of Justice upon me?"

	Dis, Lord of Death rose in his scarlet robes, and Nijihua shrank back. "Lord Dis!" he said softly.

	"Lord Dis," answered the towering figure in scarlet. "I make this demand of justice. Without you and your council your people were good and earnest workers. With you, they became a deadly unnatural menace, a flowing ooze that crushed the nations of the Earth. Your life is forfeit for the many it has cost through heedless ambition."

	The crystal staff in his hands dipped, and from it, snake-tongued flame lashed downward at the recoiling Emperor—and shattered on the golden globe about him.

	Angry-browed Lord Dis turned to Tammar, Golden Lady of Mercy. "Tammar, ye builded better than I knew in this golden bubble. Shatter it, for his life is forfeit!"

	Lady Tammar spoke then. "Nay, for as Mens has said, no taking of lives can return lives. It is not his life that brings trouble to the world, but his ambition. Now I say with you, that this menace to peace and happiness shall be, and must be, removed. But this I say; that it need not be his life. Let it be his ambition."

	Shan, Lord Shan of the pearly robes turned to the Golden Lady grave-faced and sorrowful. "That too is a stricture great in its weight. Let the man choose which he would have, for it may be that he would choose the death Lord Dis advises."

	"Aye," said the Lords.

	"Then choose, Nijihua," said Shan, softly. "And re-, member in your choosing that these are the choices, and there is no alternate. You die without knowing, on the floor of Dis, or you be robbed of emotion, of ambition, lost to you then is both hate and love, both ambition and despair, and intellect alone remains unimpaired and undirected by any ambition, any desire, any emotion whatsoever. And these are for these and your Council to decide."

	"Lady Tammar promised safety," called out one of the Councilors.

	"Safety to cross the barrier and win fair judgment," the Golden Lady replied gravely. "This you have. Choose."

	Nijihua giggled softly. "Naturally if this thing you promise be done, I would choose—intellectual freedom."

	"So be it," sighed the Lords.

	And from the air above the Crystal, from the Silver Flame of All itself, a blackness condensed. A Sixth appeared, the Sixth Lord, the Invisible Lord, Barmak, Lord of Nothingness. His throne was black, blacker than jet, for no ray, no sparkling returned from it, no faintest glint of light. It was the blackness of Barmak. Lord of Blackness and Lack, the Unmentioned Lord of Despair. He was robed in blackness, not black. He was blackness, having no face nor visible feature, only black form that was all essence of nothingness and annihilation. But from the blackness, a voice spoke, and from the utter night of this throne, Dread Barmak rose, towering tall, a hole of utter dark in the silver of All's flame, unillumined by even this flame.

	"So be it!" His voice was a~ great rumble that echoed mournful through the Temple suddenly chilled by his presence. His staff of blackness tipped downward, and from it lanced a bar of solid blackness that touched and curled about the man, lancing through and swallowing the golden flame of the Lady of Mercy.

	Shrill rang Nijihua's scream. "Ai—ai—ai—the cold—ai—" And the Emperor of the World lay stretched on the blackened crystal floor.

	And the flame of All was whole; Dread Barmak, power of Nothingness was gone.

	Lord Mens rose again. His blue staff gleamed, and its tetrahedral flame reached out a glow that penetrated and mingled with Lady Tammar's globe. And Nijihua stirred, and rose.

	Nijihua spoke again, and his voice was clear and precise, utterly exact, as perfect as a perfect machine. "Very well. The thing is done then."

	"Aye, it is done, Nijihua. Now say, Councilors, what choose ye?" demanded the Server. "Life—life—"

	"So be it," the Lords echoed soft. And the heart of All's bright flame froze, and congealed in the cold and dark of Dread Barmak, the utter absence nodded its awful head and spoke. "So be it," and the cold dead ray of the Black Lord's staff lanced out, and the councilors fell crying with cold, and rose again as the Black Lord vanished and Mens' blue flame touched them.

	"You will hold to the covenant of your word, Nijihua?" Lord Men's voice was low and grave.

	"I will hold to the covenant of my word, and the people shall move out so swiftly as may be; what more, what other, can man do, before the powers of the living, eternal Gods? I dreamt I fought men, and the Gods walked and lived and acted. I am done. My kind is done. We go."

	"This I say to you now, under seal of secrecy you cannot break, by intent or other," said Lord Mens, rising from his sapphire throne, "for I tell you under the Flame of Mens, and the channels of the brain that make this understanding expressible are forever closed. So always you will know, and understand, but never will you speak of it, nor write of it nor ever act by reason of it.

	"Chu Liang who stands here now as your Councilor of Science said once that the God he fought was a greater god than his, his God of Science. That is true. The science of a knowledge of atoms and radiation undreamed before its discovery. Here in this vault we released the flame of matter, the flame of All Things, as America died.

	"We learned its secrets, and one of its secrets is this: that radiation can be specific, even as chemicals can be. Close you came in your guess of specific chemicals and anti-bodies, but it was specific radiation. And under the crudest of these, Chu Liang, the plane-polarized light of the Moon, the mad grow madder. You tested, Chu Liang, and you found only ultra-violet in the Flames of the Lords, and never did you guess of their infinite variation of wave form and polarizations of unguessed types. For these no instrument you knew could detect, so safe you called them—and died. A thousand-thousand we know, for where drug must follow drug in difficult laborious synthesis, with the Flame of All Things, combination followed combination of polarization, hyperbolic and parabolic, and strange wave form as swift as control may be turned.

	"Not unique are these specific radiations we use, for there are men who send powerfully, the powerful personality, the natural healer who by his steady gaze alone draws up the fires of life to fight again. In man these radiations form every nerve ending, and they bring unease or death to every other animal or living thing. So it is the dog looks not long in the eye of man, for man's radiation is powerful, and nerve-racking to all other creatures.

	"Infinite power of them have we here, so that, specific to Western man, it sterilizes them of every living thing, and leaves only the man alive, uplifted by friendly, sympathetic vibrations. There be rays that speed tissue growth, and rays that stimulate heart and glands. These bring peace or sleep, joy or sorrow or death as we may choose.

	"Such are the Flames of the Lords. And the Flame of the Black Lord brings death to the nerves that stimulate the glands, and death to all feeling of emotion!

	"So, Nijihua, is All more and yet less than he seemed?"

	"More," said Nijihua, "for his power is real and infinite, the power of all things.

	"And—Less," said Nijihua, "for he obeys the Laws of Cause and Effect. Yet therein is his greatness, for all becomes dependable and understandable as Science, where he is whimsy and intractable as a self-will being."

	"Dis—Lord Dis—the thousand foot—" said Chu Liang softly.

	"By projection, projection of such forces as heard your innermost councils, they threw the image of Lord Dis of the Temple and Lady Tammar thousand-foot over Chicago. Remember, then, this too; in all the world there is no hiding from the sight of the Lords.

	"So, go, Nijihua, and remember your covenant to keep it. For All is God, and more than God!" Lord Mens' Flame died and Nijihua shuddered slightly. His mouth opened, and sounds came forth, but no speech.

	"You cannot speak of the knowledge, Nijihua, for the time of its revealing is not yet. Go, and remember in thy soul!"

	Nijihua turned, and the Golden Bubble of Tammar followed him to the Barrier of the Threshold and burst in golden crystals that clamored soft in their extinction. The Singing Stair sang to his tread, and he went steadily, without emotion of despair, or regret, to turn the great organizing abilities of his perfect, unemotional intellect to the mighty task of evacuating America, the Land of All and the people of All.

	For locked in his mind was the understanding that All was a god for all Lord Mens might say, and a mightier God than the man Nijihua who had entered that Temple had ever guessed.

	Beside him walked his Councilors, seven elderly men, locked in silence of intellectual despair of questions that to them must ever be unanswered, unexpressed—microcosms of knowledge, forever incommunicable.

-

The Space Beyond
(1976)*

1

	James Atkill stirred softly on the metal plates of the floor, and floated up some feet into the air. His face showed pale violet in color, his lips brilliant violet. His woven rubber jacket, which had once fitted him like a blue skin, was orange. His trousers were a nauseous green, his jet black hair an extremely deep green; his eyes alone remained black.

	They opened now, and consciousness began to struggle up behind them. They opened wide with a jerk and his body whirled wildly in the air. A groan of pain escaped him, and a look of dawning, amazed understanding came over his weirdly colored face.

	This feeling of falling meant he was weightless in the space ship they had stolen from Nestor's men. Weightlessness here simply meant they were not accelerating. With a rush the situation returned to him. The fight over New York City, the destruction of Nestor's four ships there, the sudden burst of violet flame from the last that had spelled doom to New York by atomic burning if it were not destroyed—his ship had caught the flaming wreckage, and carried it on a plane of pure force out to sea. The Release Flame, the flame that told of the utter destruction of matter to pure energy, had begun to eat at that plane, which no matter could penetrate, like a corrosive acid. Again he heard the cries of his criminal crew as their own -Release Flame flared up, then died down under the lead even the energy of matter could not support—when it was controlled.

	Then—something had happened, an awful wrench that tore each separate atom and electron of his body in a different direction, utter blankness—now awakening.

	Instantly the quick mind missed the soft purr of the swirling iron atoms feeding into the release flame as they swept up in a miniature silvery whirlwind from the iron block. The Eternal Flame was out.

	"That's one way to put it out anyway," he muttered. He struggled vainly for a minute to turn about in the air. He was facing the great control room window, and the roof. Weightless, with nothing to grip, he could not move.

	Suddenly his eyes fixed sharply on the view from the window. The keen eyes narrowed abruptly, a low whistle sounded.

	"Hello—now what does that mean!" He brushed his hand across his eyes, then stared at it astonished. Violet! His hand was pale violet.

	"Good God! By the crawling worms of Luna! Where are we!" Abruptly he stopped moving his arms and legs aimlessly, and applied his knowledge of physics. In a moment, by intelligent manipulation of his arms he was facing the floor of the control room. A monstrosity that experience could never have named for him lay there, half under a seat. It was shaped like a man, but there was something horribly wrong with it. It might have been a man a long time ago, but from appearances it had been dead in the sun for a long time. Atkill shuddered and called.

	"Tex—Texas, you long-eared jack-rabbit, come out of it." The long, narrow thing on the floor proved to be alive. It moved. In a moment it sat up, looked up, and its mouth fell open to reveal a set of broad pale, robins-egg blue teeth with dark blue trim in a deep violet-cavity.

	"My God, Tex, close that chasm. I'll forget you're human if I look at those teeth long. You look a lot like I did. Snap out of it and pull me down."

	Texas hooked a large foot under the seat, reached up a long arm, and dragged Atkill down.

	"Tex, I'm going to be busy. Do you burn?"

	"Huh? Do I burn? Yuh got me wrong, hombre, I ain't no match."

	"Does your skin hurt, is it sunburned?"

	"Oh—it does. Say, that's right funny. I never felt this way since I was a two-year-old."

	"Urn. I thought so. Tex, there are seven others aboard here. They'll wake soon. They were all nearer the flame than we were, but they'll be waking. They've got guns, Tex, and they may try to use them if they're scared when they wake. Collect them, will you?"

	Atkill turned to the window, and stared out for a long time, his trained mind taking in data and converting it to conclusions on which to base action.

	The window opened onto a region of space such as he had never imagined.

	It was scattered with stars as thickly as the Milky Way. But they weren't the stars of the Milky Way. They were stars so bright Sirius would have been dull and dim by comparison! They shone with a solid brilliance that was brighter than the full moon, a brilliant plate of blue-white, white, green and orange suns. The stars here were so obviously suns it was hard to look at them. And yet there were some that outshone all others. A half dozen perhaps, brighter than any star Atkill had ever imagined. And one lone star that shone as a tiny, blue-violet disc, an unwinking eye of impossible brilliance.

	Atkill gasped. "Spectral class O or I'm a mackerel! Must be less than a light year distant. There are a dozen others must be Class B or O. Every doggoned one of them a class C supergiant! Sweet orbits, what a collection! Those darned things are so bright I bet I'm just not seeing a couple thousand little candles like our sun! That big one must be half a million times as bright as old Sol. And surface temperature around 30,000 degrees.

	"A globular cluster—must be! Right in the middle of a globular cluster. And what a gang of big boys!" He stared silently for a few seconds. "We're turning," he muttered. "What's on the other end?"

	The ship was indeed slowly turning about. The swelling of the midsection hid what might be behind them now, but in a few minutes it would be visible.

	No wonder he had not missed the lights—with that vast congregation of giant stars flooding all this space with light. A globular cluster—perhaps 20,000,000 stars grouped in so dense a swarm, they averaged less than a light year apart!

	A voice sounded behind him—a cry of horror.

	"Jesus Christ—Holy Mary—what is it—what is it! He's dead! Take it away—it's dead!" There was terror in the scream.

	Suddenly it mounted to an ear-piercing shriek. "He's dead—he can't move—he can't move when he's dead—Mother of God—stop him—he's dead." The shriek ended with a dull thonk and a sigh.

	"It's all right, guy. You look the same, so don't get hot about it," said Tex's calm voice. "Take care of that guy over there. Hold his eyes shut till he's awake enough to get it all. Tell him first—everybody looks this way. That fire done it when it did a fade-out."

	Presently more voices joined in, gasps of astonishment, and terror, then curses. Men began to filter up from the back. Joe Keller, the leader of his gangster-friends, showed up presently. He looked at Atkill out of the corner of his eyes and shuddered. He probably was the equivalent of very pale. He looked down at his bright blue-green shoe, and looked hastily away.

	"Where'n 'ell are we, Atty?" he asked in a shaken voice.

	Atkill grinned. "You may be right about that. It may be hell, but my answer is where Warren went, I guess. 'Member we caught a message from him just before we blew up? He was back again—said he'd been in 'another space'. That's where we are."

	"Yeah, maybe—but fer the love of gawd, what's wrong with everything—this place ain't right—the whole damn thing ain't right—I ain't right. Why's your face purple?"

	"Remember the tricks that Release Flame could play, Joe? Well we're in a place where similar things are natural, that's all. The flame brought us here—it can take us back, just as it did Warren, I guess."

	"Well fer Gawd's sake hurry. This is awful."

	"I've got to start the Release first, Joe. Come on."

	Atkill wasn't any too sure he could get back even if he did have the Release. In fact he knew he couldn't do it right away. He cursed the fact that he had left all the calculating machines in the laboratory when he set out to that battle. It would take days and days to do calculations those machines did in minutes. And he had no assistant. The gangsters were unintelligent, and useless. Texas, a strange human misfit, would be more help. Tex had just never been able to settle down to real work—he wanted adventure. Educated as he had been, he was a real "maldito hombre." His curse was a need for excitement and action as strong as a doper's need for his drug.

	Now he alone of the gang was calm.

	Atkill stopped on his way back to get some instruments out of the cabinet. He looked at them doubtfully, and went on. In the engine room, among the massed apparatus, he felt more keenly the reality of the situation. The Eternal Flame was out. The massive iron block, a raw ingot of pitted rough iron, stood cold and lifeless in the midst of the mechanisms. The white globe of flame he had come to associate with it was missing. The top was a brilliant concave mirror of unbelievable polish. The Flame had eaten it smooth.

	He looked at it for a minute while the half-dozen gangsters watched him closely. Finally he stepped forward to a cabinet in the side of the engine room and took out a square metal box. Carefully he lifted the lid. Inside was a miniature engine room with tiny apparatus set about a tiny block of iron. In the top of the block of iron was a concave, incredibly polished mirror—and nothing more! Atkill gasped. "It's out!" Even this was out. He sat down heavily on a massive metal brace.

	"It must have generated the quench field Warren mentioned—it wasn't just an overload that killed it," he muttered.

	"Ey, wat'sa matter?" demanded Joe Keller.

	"It's out," said Atkill simply showing him the inside of the box. "It went out with the big Flame. We haven't any flame left."

	"Well, ya knew that didncha?"

	Atkill shook his head heavily. "The big one—I knew that was out. But I thought these little ones would be going. They aren't The fire's out, Joe, and we haven't any matches."

	"What do you mean, Atkill? Can't yuh start that-air tiling again?" asked Tex softly. Again Atkill shook his head. "Yuh started it once, back on Earth?"

	"Twice," nodded the physicist. "Once with an eighteen mega-volt, 18 million volts that is, discharge between certain apparatus, and once with another Flame. With a Flame I could start it now. With an 18 million volt discharge and a week's work I could start it."

	"Well, why can't yuh do the work, and make the discharge like yuh did before?"

	"No room," said Atkill grimly. "Eighteen million volts needs a hell of a lot of elbow room—at least forty feet."

	"This-here ship must be a hundred and fifty."

	"Long, yes. But it's got metal walls. It's only thirty feet in diameter. I can't possibly get more than a thirty-foot gap. I can't get that because my towers have to be fifteen feet in diameter, which would leave only about seven feet between the walls. The men that designed this damn ship didn't put in an airlock. We haven't any space suits. If we did have we couldn't get out of the ship without letting all the air out, and we can't replace it.

	"When the Flame went out the air apparatus stopped working. The air is being used up now, and not renewed. I can fix that for about two months—I loaded on supplies for about a month when we took off.

	"We're stuck."

-

2

	"B—But how'll we git back?" Keller whimpered.

	"We don't," said Atkill promptly. "That's an easy question to answer."

	"We—we can't never go back?"

	"This ship is like a car without an engine. It won't move. Only there's this difference. You can't walk home either, and there's nobody to give you a tow. In words of one syllable: we can not move, we can not get home, we are stuck right here now and so far from home they could not find us if they knew it back home."

	A little man with bright green hair and two orange teeth, dressed in a neat, well-tailored suit of a nauseous yellow-green, began to shake. His face went several shades lighter in color, till it looked like sheets someone had used too much bluing on. He stopped trembling suddenly and went rigid. His face changed suddenly to a flushed violet, his reddish eyes narrowed to slits, and seemed to shine with a deadly light. "Killer" Hiney was suddenly stark, raving mad. He picked up a heavy monkey wrench, dug his toes into a joint between two heavy braces, and dived at Atkill mouthing something.

	Atkill moved so swiftly no one saw just what happened, but Hiney dropped to the floor dead. Atkill left the room instantly, and went to the control room again. He barred the metal door, and sat down to think. He looked up as the light in the room became suddenly intensely bright. A thin streak of light was falling through the corner of one window, and hitting the opposite wall. The spot glowed with an incredible brilliance, so bright it hurt Atkill's eyes to look at it. It was a knife-edge of light that struck it, light of a deep blue that was almost violet. It was widening very slowly as the ship continued to creep slowly around.

	"The color of radiated light doesn't seem to be changed much here." said Atkill to himself, looking at the light through narrowed eyes. "That means that the weird color effects are due not to the effect on light of this different space, but the effect on the coloring arrangements of dyes and colored substances. Then that is blue-violet light. To produce light of that color would require a temperature of at least 40,000 degrees. Now what kind of a star would give that light? That must be so loaded with ultra violet that it bakes a man to death in minutes. Uh—I feel it already." Atkill moved. The light-strip was an inch wide, and the cabin flooded with an illumination painfully brilliant. Further, the temperature was rising.

	"Ah—that's not going to be so nice." The back end of the ship was windowless, practically, save for a few tiny peepholes for directing the deadly projector rays. The outside of the ship was polished steel that reflected the light like a mirror. As the ship turned the light came in the window, and instead of being reflected was heating the ship.

	Atkill moved swiftly. He gathered every piece of paper, every bit of cloth, and everything that he could move which might be injured by the light, and moved them out of the room. A low panicky rumble of voices came from behind. He carefully closed the door of the control room, and went to his own cabin. This was equipped with a small porthole. Here he set up a spectroscope from his luggage, and examined the light that was pouring in.

	Then he starting making examinations and measurements with many other stars, using little sodium flames for comparison spectra. He had no assistant, and it was hard work. But eventually he began to get rough results.

	He looked at his results in unbelieving silence when he was through, and shook his head. "Must be wrong. There isn't any such class of star. It's something bigger and hotter than O. Mass must be about 400 times that of the sun. That's almost impossible to believe. It's radiation is, according to this, at least two and a half million times that of the sun. And I'm now some 75,000,000,000 miles out—and roasting under the heat Good God what a star!"

	He started to check his readings. In an hour he blew up over them. The radiation was half again greater than before! And had shifted further toward the violet!

	He threw down his apparatus and went back to the men. There was something they'd be more interested in that he had to tell them now. Something he'd discovered shortly before he stopped his observation.

	They looked up sullenly at his approach. They'd found the bullet hole in Hiney's breast soon after he left. Texas had a gun. Atkill had one. They had none.

	"Come on men, let's eat. We eat cold, but we can eat."

	"Aw, t'hell wit it. I ain't hungry. But Tex says you won' let us have nuh booze and nuh smokes. How cum?"

	"I didn't say that—but Tex is right. I should have.

	You can't have booze, because it will drive you mad. You can't smoke because the air is too thick already. I'm going to start working on it in a little while. In the meantime we can eat. And there won't ever be any smoking until—or unless—we get out of this. You can chew a crumb of tobacco. That will help."

	Curtly he turned to the food locker. Two cans of corned beef, a couple of baked beans, a loaf of bread, and chocolate. Water to drink. And no heat.

	They ate, most of them, because they were hungry. Atkill ate because he had an excellent appetite, and was most anxious to go back to his observations.

	But after eating he started work on the air apparatus. The ship had been equipped with batteries. Ordinary Teril dry storage batteries. That was the work of the Power men, Nestor's men, who had built the ship. They had never heard of a power plant without some sort of reserve—they thought these batteries would be a reserve power perhaps? For replacing the titanic power of the Flame they were nothing, but their thousands of stored kilowatt hours would give the men air to breathe now. In three hours the physicist had proved himself chemist enough to rig an electrolyser apparatus that was turning out a steady stream of oxygen, and releasing hydrogen into space. To get rid of carbon dioxide he would use a physical method. It would have to accumulate till the air showed five or six per cent. That would not be fatal, by any means. Then a blower would force the air through chilled water. The CO2 would be absorbed. When the sun's heat warmed the water the CO2 would be driven off again, and could be released into space. He could afford no power for effective, constant-control apparatus. His batteries would last scarcely a month as it was. They had only one chance in a hundred billion at the best—but there was no reason for reducing that.

	"There are," said Atkill when he returned to the power room, after demonstrating the oxygen apparatus to the quite un-understanding men, "at least four planets. Two are on this side of the sun, and at approximately the same distance from the sun as we are. One about 70,000,000,000 miles, the other about 80,000,000,000. One of them might, by one chance in about 100,000,000 be inhabited. By one chance in another ten million or so, the inhabitant might have a ship capable of crossing space. By a perfectly impossible chance they might see us. Then by a similar chance they might be interested enough to investigate.

	"That's our only chance. I'm going back and observe what happens about us." He stepped out, but stuck his head in a moment later. "Don't look at the sun. It will blind you instantly. Don't let the light fall on your flesh, it will cook it in five seconds."

	He went to sleep soon, listening to the loud, tense voices of the men behind. They were quarreling and cursing. Their nerves were strung to the breaking point already. As he drifted off to sleep Atkill realized two things: His own death was certain, but he would certainly have a month, and probably as much as six months for observations; the men with him would not die of starvation either of food or air. They would all die violently, and they would all die insane—with the single possible exception of Texas. These city-bred gangsters, used to bright lights and moving, living crowds, used to conditions that left them full play of their own wishes, and utterly unused to amusing themselves or each other, would go mad as surely as they must die. Their minds were unaccustomed alike to loneliness and thought. Thought might have dispelled the loneliness, for him, study would make that six months of life all too short.

	Of course, no one would know what he learned, no eye ever see his results, no meeting vote him acclaim. But he would know. He would solve mysteries no other man had ever solved.

	When he woke the violent light was shining in once more. It reminded him of the investigation he had made the—night?—before. The light of that sun simply wasn't understandable. There were muttering, angry voices, drunken voices back of him now. Atkill's lips curled in disgust as he stuck his head into the room. Joe Keller and Texas sat playing cards slowly and carefully. Three of the others were sleeping drunkenly on the floor. The remaining three were quarrelling over a pair of dice.

	"Lishen yuh blankety son of a show and show—thas my fi' dollur. Yush a li'r."

	Atkill laughed softly. His five dollars. A five cent can of beans would be a lot more valuable soon. The physicist called Tex, and told him to go on to sleep. Tex slouched off to his bunk, and lay down with his gun in his holster. The westerner had substituted a hip holster for the neat shoulder device he had been wearing under his coat. He felt more at home with this style. His hand rested on the butt of the gun lovingly in sleep a moment later.

	Atkill had gone back to the little machine room he had set up in the back of the ship. Nestor had originally meant this for a bomb-storage room. Atkill had thrown out the bomb-racks, and arranged the present machine-shop before he left Earth. There were three tiny slits in the walls here, and through two of these light was streaming like a fluid squirting from a nozzle in a physical stream. Atkill looked at them a moment, smiled, and stepped out to return in a few moments with a can of beans and a pot of water. The pot was tightly closed by a pressure lid for steam cooking, and so held the water in this weightless space. The physicist took a knife and ripped off the label from the bean can, smeared the shiny label with a mixture of graphite and grease, which was blacker than coal, and hung it in the beam of sunlight. He started to stick his hand in, but before the fingers had more than entered he snatched them back. Almost instantly he had felt the terrific ultra-violet of this light. He took a stick and a fan, and carefully pushed and blew the can into place. The grease melted in a few seconds, but stuck in place.

	Next he got the water out of the pot. That was difficult, and he got wet doing it, but he succeeded, and blew it into a sphere in the path of light.

	He set to work with his machines, and the pressure cooker. He changed the pan considerably, and added a small air pump to it. He used power in doing it, but he was willing to now. He knew he could restore it.

	By the time the water was near boiling point he captured it in the rebuilt pressure cooker, added some tea leaves and let it brew. The beans were hot too, after he wiped the grease off. With the aid of the pump he was able to force out his tea when he wished. He gave up hope of making observations that day. Instead he made an apparatus. It consisted of a heavy fly-wheel (taken from one of the larger lathes) mounted on a shaft of a small electric motor. It was so supported that it could be turned in any desired direction.

	In two hours he finished it, and moved into the power room with it. The men had left the room, and six heavy snores and two light ones from the tiers of bunks explained it.

	Atkill set up his crude gyroscope-motor, and began operations. He had to tie the motor down with pieces of rope. It was slow, laborious work, but at the end of several hours he knew that the ship would have stopped its rotation, and would always face the sun with one side and the back.

	He left the device in operation, and returned to the machine-shop.

	In the course of the day he finished his very simple device. He had taken the motor from one of the power-presses that he no longer could afford to run, readjusted it, and connected it with a small four-cylinder air-pump. One of the smaller air-tanks was next worked over, and a quantity of heavy copper tubing. It ended up as a four-cylinder steam engine running an electric generator. The air-tank boiler was painted black above, and silvered below. A flat, closely wound spiral of copper tubing three feet across was similarly painted. The exhaust from the engine was led to a long copper tube simply laid down the dark side of the engine room, and emptying into a small tank.

	The system was simplicity itself. The sun heated the tank and the coiled pipe. The steam turned the motor as a generator. The current could be led off to charge the batteries. He had to charge them half at a tune, for the voltage given wasn't high enough, of course, to charge the whole bank. But—he had an unending supply of electric power within the limits of his needs for immediate life. Air at least they could have.

	The men had re-awakened, and again were playing cards. They bothered him very little, for Texas and Joe Keller kept them away from him. The apparatus was sufficiently powerful to supply the necessary oxygen, and have power to spare. But it raised the temperature of the ship a little.

	Atkill ate, and went to sleep again.

	The next day he began his observations. He continued them the next. The first day he discovered the secret of the giant sun that seemed to vary in its power. It did. It was a gigantic Cepheid Variable, with a period of little more than a few hours.

	The days passed swiftly for him. Monotonously for the gangsters. A week went by. The eternal glaring sun in one spot, the eternal night in others. The knowledge that they were waiting for certain death, the weird coloring of the things and the men about them. And above all the monotony. The grinding steady monotony on men who has never learned to be self-contained.

	"Whitey" Moran went mad the fifth day. He shot and killed Tim Farrell, and wounded Joe Keller before Texas shot him through the ear. He had stolen the revolver from Joe with consummate cunning.

	Keller became delirious from his wound two days later and his mumbling incoherent talk gave a final push to the tottering reason of "Gink" Castonti. Castonti succeeded in killing him with a table-knife. Texas prevented his further murdering. There were only four men left now. Within a week, as Atkill had predicted, they were reduced to two—Atkill and Texas.

	Texas helped Atkill when he could. He helped him with the gruesome work of disposing of the bodies. There was a refuse lock on the ship. It was meant for garbage and such waste—and it was six inches in diameter and eighteen inches long. They had to dispose of the bodies.

	The second week Atkill called Texas with a sudden shout that echoed through the soundless ship in rattling clamour.

	"Tex! Come here, Tex!" He had seen something that meant their chances of life were multiplied a thousandfold. And more. In the three-inch telescope on board Texas saw the dim twilight region of a spinning world flashing with sparkling lights like a miniature lightning storm on a miniature world. "Uh—storm ain't it?" Tex was speaking less and less now. He was growing accustomed again to silence. The silence such as he had known before in open plains.

	"No, Tex, it isn't. Dear lad, think a bit. That world is so far away you can't realize the distance. What kind of lightning would make that big a full? That's a battle, a battle so big you couldn't even begin to understand it. It's the size battle half a dozen of these ships would make if they were real angry—and knew all the things there are to know. Any race that can have a battle that big has space ships! All we have to do is wait."

	"Uh. We've, waited a bit now."

	"We're coming nearer to them now. And—every day we're becoming more visible. We have a gigantic tail now. Hydrogen gas I've released in making our oxygen is showing up behind us like a comet's tail. They'll investigate if they've got ships, I swear they must have! That battle is too big."

	And curiously, from that time Atkill's observations became fewer and fewer. He spent all his time in the machine shop now. Making something. Texas watched quietly, and played cards. It was evidently a release-flame apparatus—but a tiny thing. Scarcely larger than a book.

	"Be any power in that when you get through?" he asked once.

	"Not unless I can get it started somehow after we are picked up. Then about thirty thousand horsepower. The Flame could give more. A million or so. The apparatus wouldn't handle it."

	Atkill worked on, refining and adding to the tiny mechanism, calculating fields and effects and building it into the apparatus. He changed the entire apparatus finally, and made it almost hemispherical, with a depression on the flat side. On one side however seven tiny openings appeared, and one cup-shaped device the size of a quarter-dollar. Nine thin wires dangled from it to a broad, thick bracelet of silver, set with a score of brilliant-colored bits of stone cut with infinite pains on a device he set up himself. The rings and stickpins of the dead gangsters had furnished those stones. His own magnificent emerald stickpin had gone into it too. And also several synthetic stones he made by fusing aluminum oxide and adding minute traces of various materials—chromium, nickel, cobalt—

	He smiled to himself as he worked and hummed a tune softly. Week followed week as he worked lovingly over his little mechanism. He seemed to expect great things of it.

-

3

	"I admit it," said Randolph Warren, "I admit it unreservedly and without compunction. It is, beyond doubt, the wildest, most hopelessly insane scheme I ever put forth. But, Putt, you've got to admit that one ground for making the try is valid. Hoping to find Atkill I have to admit is not much of a hope. But hoping to learn something about that other space that's worth knowing is a worthwhile hope. Particularly as we have learned so much more about our machine—and since that speed idea does work."

	"That speed thing," groaned Putney, "lord, I wish you hadn't thought of it. Ran, I thought I was just about as good as you were till you made that thing. Faster than light. Einstein said it was wrong. Richie added to the statement in 1940. Moorehead proved Richie was right—so you go out and make the trip to Sirius and back over the week-end."

	Warren laughed. "Hardly that, Putt, hardly that. We spent one of the most instructive months ever spent out there, as you know as well as I. It's perfectly obvious, though. We don't go faster than light in our own frame of reference. It's just that we go fast, and then slow up time more or less, with the result that we seem to go faster than light."

	"Seem—blazes, we do! 'If A and B are two Flat-landers'," quoted Putney," 'living on the surface of a sphere, they will say the sphere is a plane. If the sphere rotates slowly, they move slowly and steadily into the third dimension, which appears to their consciousness as time. Time passes, they say. A is at the north pole, and recognizes two dimensions right and left, back and forth. Lines parallel to the axis of the sphere are time to him. If B is on the equator, he recognizes two dimensions, right and left, back and forth. Lines at right angles to the axis are Time lines to him. Now A and B agree that one of their two dimensions is a space dimension, but while A can walk at right angles to the axis, B can not, and thinks that is time. B however can walk parallel to the axis, which A cannot, for A thinks that is time. Then, if A moves, in whatever direction, save exactly around the sphere toward B, he walks through time to a certain extent, so far as B is concerned. This time-motion multiplies A's proper space motion to B's understanding. The same, in reverse, applies to B in A's conceptions.

	" 'In Four dimensional space we have an example in the enormous velocities of recession exhibited by distant nebulae. Their motions are enormously amplified by their time motion. The further around the hyper-sphere of space they are, the more nearly they come to moving exactly at right angles to our three dimensions, and the more their velocity is amplified.

	"This is the basis of my speed-device. Ran, I have heard that simple lesson so many times I'm sick of it. I know it almost word for word. Word for word—but not thought for thought. The fourth dimension-time idea remains only time, and not an idea to me.

	"However, I admit that does give you an enormous advantage in exploring that other space. You still won't find Atkill though. That space is larger than ours even."

	"You're wrong, Putt." said Warren softly. "I've been holding back something. Atkill I know was sent through! I know it, I don't merely believe it. I made some experiments for data, and calculations on the data.

	"Remember that Release Flame, when it went wild, gave off surges of gravity-fields, and certain other phenomena. I explored the thing before it finally burned itself out two weeks ago, and learned a number of things about it. I made experiments on a miniature scale and learned three important things: the reaction of a force-plane on the Flame is to produce a quench-field, and at the same time to throw any matter within the field into another space; the matter so thrown over is not thrown to the nearest part of the nearest other space, as we were by our field that time—but to the nearest, greatest center of mass in the nearest other space.

	"Imagine yourself some super-being with a five dimensional consciousness. Looking about you would see an enormous number of four-dimensional spaces, looking like rough, dented globes whirling in space. A dent would be where there was little or no matter in the four-dimensional sphere. A protuberance would be where there was a particularly large concentration of mass.

	"In the space between spaces there is no time, no dimension, no existence. That's why our Flame can destroy matter—it forces it into that timeless, dimension-less existence, and yet holds it bound to this space. When we were thrown across we were cut entirely free from this space, even repelled by the field we had momentarily set up. We fell to that other space.

	"Atkill was similarly thrown across. Whereas we were simply thrown to the nearest point of the nearest space, which happened to be almost starless, he has been thrown to the nearest center of mass.

	"There is one more point. Every one of the Flames he carried was extinguished.

	"What do you think he would do?" Putney had a mind that could analyze a situation with uncanny accuracy, weight the factors of character, and give an answer to the question of how the given man would behave under given conditions that was apt to be remarkably correct.

	He thought silently for nearly ten minutes, puffing slowly at his pipe. Finally he spoke. "Hmm—nearest center of mass. A single star doesn't mean a thing. It would take a galaxy to produce a noticeably center of mass. That means he's near the center of a galaxy. But he's apt to be near a sun for several reasons. Near the center of a galaxy the star-density is higher, and once somewhere near stopping in that other space, the general region picked out in other words, a single massive star would attract him. I'll bet he's fairly near a monster star. In all probability a super-giant. They are apt to occur near the center of a galaxy. They are massive.

	"There's always the possibility that he not only landed near it—but in it. That we'll—"

	"No," interrupted Warren, "he didn't. The effect of the terrific concentration of matter in the center of a star, particularly a large one, with its unbelievable fields of force, make the approach from the fifth dimension impossible. He would land near but not in it."

	"Then," continued Putney, "he has no power. He was moving slowly—only about twenty miles a second—no—he had the additional velocity of the sun's motion at that time. About thirty miles per second. A super-giant would take him in in all probability. He has no Flames. His release generators are dead and useless. He can't start them because all his flames are out, and he can't get the necessary eighteen mega-volt shock, for his ship is only thirty feet in diameter, and has no air lock so that he could work outside.

	"He's in an ugly position. Air—hmmm—Nestor, the old fool, put batteries in the ships for some unknown reason. We never did. They'd be useless, of course, if the Flame couldn't save us. But they may save Atkill. He can use them to generate oxygen. His water supply ought to last several months, they were using it for ballast I remember.

	"His food supply I don't know anything about. His men—gangsters—city types—poor minds—bet they all go mad. They may kill him, but Atkill will expect madness and may poison them, or may just shoot them or let them shoot each other.

	"If he's near enough to that sun to get any power, he'll use solar energy for generating electricity, and have air almost indefinitely."

	Warren smiled and shook his head in wonder. "I'd be willing to lay money on that, Putt. We can about know his position then. Now, you see, it isn't by any means impossible to find him. I can guide the ship to the same position he is in."

	"As you say, Ran. You know I'll be glad to come along. How about the men?"

	"Wild to go. I asked them."

	Putney smiled. "They would be. We will need but four. When do we start?"

	"In just three days, Putt. Got the business straightened out?"

	"No. No one ever will. Not for a century at least. Men don't know how to handle the power. Fortunate that we gave them only the knowledge of electric power to use. They've developed even that into weapons of a sort. Sooner or later some scientist will turn renegade for money and sell his brains and ability, and there will be a war with other weapons. Earth will need several centuries to learn she mustn't play with matches that can set fire to the universe.

	"As a business of course—just a money-maker—it doesn't need straightening out. You could have a firm of shyster crooks for lawyers, a bunch of embezzlers for accountants, and racketeers for executives, and the thing would still make money. The income is going to be so big this first year that the government will have to cut income taxes so the revenue won't be unholily great." 

	"I guess you can leave it for a while, Putt!" laughed Warren.

-

4

	The Prometheus was a glistening, iridescent hull of pure berylo-tungsten alloy fitted with the most powerful engine ever known to man. The magnificent streamlined ship rested lightly in her cradle in the hanger built for her in northern New Jersey hills. She was stocked now for the trip she was to make into inconceivable space and inexpressible time. In her power-locker she carried 140 rough iron ingots, her fuel supply. They were arranged in racks that would automatically feed them into the power-room and the Eternal Flame as fast as they were consumed. Or as slowly as they were consumed, for the titanic energy of matter they contained was the energy they released as they burned.

	In the power-room, set in the exact center of the ship, was a rough iron ingot now half used. Above it hung a globe of pure white light, like a globe of luminescent white quartz crystal. It seemed to be resting on a whirling, iridescent funnel of silvery atoms that spun upward from the iron mass with a gentle sighing. As the iridescent silver whirlwind touched the surface of the Release Flame tiny glowing sparks picked out the edge, like the display of pyrophoric iron dropped from a tube. They shone for an instant, then disappeared.

	About the room were arranged solid, chunky-looking pieces of apparatus, squat and powerful things. From the Flame to three of these pieces stretched glowing, pulsing fingers of light that snickered softly as the air was alternately blasted out and let in again. Warren was here with Putney, working steadily on the controls, adjusting with a minute precision the things that would presently throw them through that fifth dimensional timeless infinity.

	"To do the job we don't need that eighteen megavolt shock so much as the concentration of energy it means," Warren was explaining to MacLaurin, the Scots mechanic-physicist. He was a capable physicist in his own right, but above that he had the genius for constructing the apparatus of physics that is far rarer than the ability of the physicist. "Remember that in following Atkill, we have to use the same method he discovered; unintentionally, it is true, but a method none the less. In doing that the Flames will be extinguished as certainly as ever the quench field could. That would leave us powerless in an unknown space—as he is now. But while we can't get that enormous concentration of electrical energy inside the ship, we can store magnetic energy. It will leak, but by storing 100 times the needed power, we can be sure of having enough when we get there. Further, I'm going to attempt to carry that little Flame over there wrapped up in its own insulating jacket of force that may possibly protect it. If it protects it it may keep it from going through, but I don't think so. I'm just making sure.

	"At any rate, any sufficient concentration of available energy will do the trick. The Flame will start another Flame simply because it has the maximum possible energy concentration. We'll be ready soon."

	Warren checked once more the settings, then went to the control room. The ship rose with the gentleness of a dirigible, backed soundlessly out of the hangar, pointed her nose straight for the zenith of the night sky, and shot upward with an acceleration that carried her howling out of the atmosphere in less than a second. Inside, in the acceleration-compensated ship, no slightest sigh of this terrific acceleration was noticeable. Only in the power-room where the sighing of the whirling iron atoms rose to a gentle hum, and the sparkling lights became a clear sheet of glowing light, did it show. That, and the dozen beams of radiance that stabbed to the heart of the Flame from various pieces of apparatus.

	Behind the ship trailed a, heavy ingot of iron, riding in a sphere of pure force similar to the envelope that had protected the weak metal walls of the ship as she crashed through the atmosphere that had resisted her passage like a solid body.

	A million miles from Earth Warren stopped, and the forces suddenly fell to work on the iron ingot. In a second it was a sphere. A moment later it suddenly seemed a misty illusion, something twisted about it till the stars of space behind shifted and moved about like live things in pain. Then a spark of dazzling brilliance appeared, grew with incredible swiftness, and turned to a violet Flame that swelled and fattened on the matter of the ingot. In three seconds it was fifty feet across. And simultaneously the ship began to lurch slightly to waving tugs of attraction as the Flame began to pulse. More and more rapidly it pulsed. It attracted the ship with a force that strained the titanic energies of the Release Flame in the power-room. The flame began to edge with, red, and red crept to the heart of it. The whirlwind of iron atoms was a screaming tortured tornado, the sparks of contact were becoming a solid flame.

	Then something wrenched violently about them, the Flame flared up for a single instant in blood-red light—and darkness and nothingness descended on them.

	Slowly Warren opened his eyes, then clutched wildly about him in the absolute darkness. He struggled violently for a second, then as full consciousness returned he stopped, and listened. He was weightless only because the Flame had gone out, the artificial gravity was off. The blackness meant that the metal shutters had snapped down as they should have with the failure of the Flame. Someone else suddenly moved, and there was the thump _ of a fist hitting metal, a sharp exclamation of pain, and a curse.

	"Don't be petulant, Putt. Only while it was a brilliant idea no doubt to have those shutters in case we stopped too near a giant star for safety, I might have thought of a flashlight."

	Putney's chuckle answered him. Then a beam of brilliant white light stabbed up at him. "I did," said Putney quietly. "You are colored like the gayest bird of the air. You wave there in the air like the clumsiest walrus of the sea. Your teeth are blue, and your lips are violet. You have a most unhealthy color. Your ears are something to behold with awe and amazement. Your pants are the most virulent, shrieking red -that 'twas ever my privilege to view. I'll have to censor your wardrobe."

	Warren grinned. "I see you're in good health and spirits, my friend. Why not turn the light on your own raiment. I know just what your face will look like. I fain would comment on your dress."

	Putney laughed outright this time, and did so. Warren sighed. "You would think of that. Black and white. All color and no color. The only things that can't change. You think of everything don't you?" Suddenly he burst out laughing. "Putt—I never told you and you never asked—how are we going to find our way back?"

	Putney chuckled. "The Flames on Earth. They'll guide you back quite nicely. They operate through to this timelessness."

	"Foiled," groaned Warren. "Come on—haul me down and we'll start the Flame again. This condition of weightlessness is ghastly."

	Putney reached up a hand and pulled him down. Together they dived for the rear of the ship. Most of the crew lay in the bunk-room. Some of the men were stirring now; the light wakened them. As they entered at one end of the bunk-room, a light shone through from the power room, and in the stillness they heard a switch click. "Mac thought of the flashlight idea too," smiled Putney. Mac had a large incandescent bulb burning in the power-room. Before they reached the door more lights flashed on till the room was quite well lighted.

	"The old son of a gun," grinned Warren. "I may be long on the theory of space, but he's got me beat when it comes to the theories of the behavior of light. Such things as the fact that it won't penetrate a three-inch metal shutter."

	"Wait—" Putney grasped his friend's arm. They stood „ motionless, then Putney let out a gasp. "Whew—feel that heat!" He was right. Warren felt it now—heat beating in on him from the shutter over the bunk-room window. The greater part of the ship had double walls—three-inch inner coating that was merely a wall for the rooms. An outer wall of eight-inch berylo-tungsten alloy. The two-inch space between was a vacuum, so as yet heat had not come through the wall, but the solid shutter was sending out absorbed heat already. "Ran, do you realize that we couldn't live in that heat. If Atkill came that close, they must have passed out from the heat."

	"Uh—mat is wicked. We must be within fifty million miles of the sun. Let's start that flame."

	They went rapidly to the engine room. The ingot of iron stood cold and lifeless under the light of the incandescents. "Looks wrong," smiled Warren. "Come on, men." In minutes the trained crew of scientist-adventurers had gathered. No makeshift crew was this. Every man was a genius in his own right: Carl Korbes, the astrophysicist; MacLaurin, the Scots mechanic-physicist; Paul Wearing, the chemist; and David Miller, the electronics engineer.

	"Magnetic energy's here, Ran." reported Putney.

	"Don't need it. The shielded Flame came through all in good order. Hook on control field R-M 583 intensity energy concentration—oh, about 1500 megs per mu. Ready? Coming through."

	The power room was suddenly filled with a shining sigh, the surface of the iron ingot began to shimmer, glow, and in the air above it a sphere of half-visible light appeared, strained, and space writhed about it, the corners of the room twisted and strained, then with a sudden sigh, the globe of light solidified into a glowing field of energy, the familiar crystalized light glowed and sparkled before them. Instantly the incandescents were drowned out in the flood of light from the glow tubes. Simultaneously the mechanisms about the room began to come to life.

	"She moves—all right, Putt. Start setting up that field to reflect energy—here it is—23IX—45-a-32-Y—"

	In a moment the field of force was set up. Putney pushed the button that raised the screens from the windows. Absolute darkness beyond—all the energy was being turned back. Putney looked at his meters sourly. "That field's a good idea, but not very useful. The energy striking it is about six times as intense as sunlight—and we are using just three thousand times as much power to maintain that field at the present level."

	"Oh well, give it a break. It's doing what we want. You might cut that field down gradually so we can see what we can see."

	Putney began reducing the intensity of the field, and within a few seconds they were able to see the star that was shining on them. It was a dim disc of blue-violet light. Warren turned to Putney with a look of surprise. Putney was looking at him, and Korbes was looking at both.

	"Ouch," said Putney, "it's hot."

	"I don't know what spectral class that is!" said the young astrophysicist excitedly. "That blue-violet color is something I never heard of! That means a surface temperature of about 40-50 thousands! The radiation would be terrific. No wonder the ship was heating! How far are we from it?"

	Putney went to the control room, while Warren set a few of the engine-room controls for more efficient operations under the present conditions. When he reached the control room Putney and Korbes were feeding the data of the various instruments into the calculating machines.

	Presently Putney let out a gasp of amazement. "By the Gods of Space! That can't be! Forty billion miles distant! Forty billion miles! Jumping orbits! Forty billion miles and that thing's a disc! Not only a disc—but a blue violet disc six times as hot as our sun! That's a new spectral type for you, Carl. Spectral Class scXO. If Class cOo is the hottest thing and the c stands for super-giant, tack in that sc to stand for super-super-giant. That thing would make S-Doradus look like a class M in the far red for heat, makes Antares look like a red dwarf for size—and it would take some million suns to give that heat! It would take a whole galaxy of suns to radiate like that! Forty billion miles! How big is the thing, Carl?"

	"Seven hundred million miles in diameter, approximately! Has the mass of about 1000 suns rolled into one! Good God, that must be the left-over matter of a whole galactic center condensed into a single sun."

	"If we take down that reflection field," Warren said softly, "the ultra-violet in that light would cook you to a nicely browned roast in about three seconds. If we leave it up we can't see the rest of the sky. Let's retreat. I'm going to use the speed drive device. In a space the size that sun works on, you need it. Do you realize that to be habitable a planet would have to be about eighty billion miles out? That a year of such a planet would be approximately' 1000 of our years, despite the enormous gravitative pull of that monster?"

	Warren took his place at the controls, and presently the space around them seemed to strain, change, and with a curious suddenness, the disc of the mighty sun began shrinking. It shrank visibly till a few moments later, it seemed, they were so far out that Putney said the radiation was bearable. Again the transient feeling of strain and change, and they were motionless again. They had come nearly fifty billion miles, far faster than light, and now they could lower the protecting field. As Warren threw the release switch, the men stared in amazement.

	The heavens were like nothing they had dreamt of. A Milky Way of super-giant stars, suns every one of which seemed brighter than Sirius, far brighter.

	"Sweet orbits! A globular cluster! What a center of mass that must make. It must have fifty million of those giant stars, and I'll bet right now we're looking at a lot of suns the size of ours and just not seeing them. What a mass that system must have—that whole cluster. Look—over there—you can just see it out of the window. Turn the ship a bit."

	The ship rotated slowly, and came to rest in such a position that they could see another blue-violet star, a star so bright that they could see it was casting shadows in the brightly lighted control room.

	"Whew—another one of the Class scXO stars or I'm a sinner. Carl, see if you can get readings on that with the instruments here."

	Korbes got to work, taking readings on the delicate gravitation and space distortion instruments that would tell him just what distortion of space the distant star was producing.

	"About three-fourths of a light-year distant." he announced at last. "Dr. Warren, this trip is going to produce more information that any research ever conducted before. I have just noticed something else. Look at the intensity-curve of the light from that star we're near now."

	The two friends looked at it. Putney grunted in surprise, Warren whistled softly. "Cepheid Variable—arid what a variable. With that luminosity the period luminosity law would suggest a period of less than three hours.

	"Well," he chuckled, "we can be pretty sure there aren't any planets here. To produce planets requires that a sun larger than the sun in question passes close-by. There ain't no such thing as a larger sun."

	Korbes suddenly laughed softly. "Too broad a statement that time, Dr. Warren. I've detected five planets already! The instruments here show at least five major planets, circled by more or fewer satellites. I was—ah, here's another one. Big fellow too—about 100,000 miles in diameter. It's about 30,000,000,000 miles from us, 80000,000,000 or so from the sun. Uh—nother one. Nearly 100,000,000,000 miles from the sun. It ought to be habitable. Size I can't determine, mass about .94 Earth's. One—two—three—four—I think there are four large satellites and one or more little fellows too small to more than jiggle the instruments at this distance. Dr. Warren, these field-detector instru—for the love of heaven, what was that!" He stared hard at the instruments. "Whoa—say, come here quick, will you! Something's throwing these field-detectors all over the dial!"

	Warren and Putney hastened to his side. The needles of the four field-detector dials were jiggling and jumping, moving erratically and powerfully. "Good lord—from those motions you'd think someone was creating and destroying a planet the size of Jupiter every few seconds. Fifty-three—eighteen—back to sixty-two—Now what in blazes—" Warren jumped to his own instrument board, and quickly set up a tremendously wide-spread detection field, and connected it to the four necessary instruments. He waited for a maximum, then pressed a stud. The meters held rigidly steady as they were clamped in position. Rapidly he noted the readings, set four dials on a small mechanism beside him—and read the result. "From the dimensions of that field it is some kind of an electromagnetic field—the dimensions of both magnetic and electric fields occur, but in a peculiar way. As a magnetic field it has power enough way over here to effect a sensitive compass.

	"I'm going fishing again." Again he released the instruments, waited for a minimum and read. "Just the planet that time. Try again." After some time they decided that there were, in operation, a titanic magnetic field combined with an equal electric field, the field of the planet itself, and some sort of force-field that was far weaker, so buried in the mass of the planet, magnetic, and electric fields as to be unrecognizable.

	In about fifteen minutes the whole thing stopped, and peace reigned once more. "There's somebody there all right." said Warren with decision, "and they're no pikers. I couldn't set up a magnetic field that powerful myself. Personally I can't see why it doesn't wreck the planet."

	Putney had been examining the instruments and data carefully. "I think you misunderstand the problem. It's not a spherical field. It's a ray—a beam."

	Warren stared. "A beam. But, man, you can't beam a field!"

	Putney grinned. "But, man, you can't make a field that strong!"

	"Let's go look-see," suggested Warren. "Maybe our friends will want to look-see what we look like turned inside out," suggested Putney. "Whether that's beam or field, it's super-potent medicine. What are you thinking of doing to it?"

	"Use field T-549. That'll twist it through ninety degrees and send it back as a lightning bolt. The magnetic part anyway. The electric part will twist into a gravity field and pull us to the planet, and them to us. We can stay off the planet all right."

	"All right, I would like to see what's happening."

	Korbes interrupted them. "Something coming toward us. Strange body—small—density about that of water, little more. Moving about fifty miles a second. About 2000 miles away." A moment later. "Weight only about thirty pounds. Funny kind of meteorite. Let's rake it in."

	Warren was willing. A density of only one—most meteors are either stony or metal, far greater than one.

	They raked it in, and when it came, Warren shuddered, and went pale. Putney looked slightly sick, Korbes ran for his room, It was a mutilated human trunk. There were no arms, no legs, and the head was missing. But it had on the remains of a suitcoat. The coat was a dirty white now, for the glaring ultra-violet of the sun had bleached it and the exposed flesh was cooked.

	"Human—good god—Earthy human. Atkill—Atkill was here. That—it came from the wreck of his ship. Without his force shields a meteor or something must have hit him and wrecked him completely. There's more coming. I'll throw out a field and see what I can gather." It gathered unpleasant things. Thrown out for nearly a quarter of a millions miles in every direction, and then dragged slowly inwards, it brought a collection of the debris of space. Meteors, pieces of crushed and broken metal beams, obviously pieces of a ship, and—three heads, once human, four more trunks, several horribly mutilated legs and arms—

	Warren closed them in a small shell of force, made the shell self-maintaining, then gave it a tremendous push toward the giant sun. The bodies of Atkill's crew would be cremated in the most gigantic furnace ever known.

	"Well," said Warren sadly, "we found them, anyway.

	The first part of our mission is done. Something wrecked their ship with a completeness almost unbelievable. Those scraps of metal were so broken and twisted they were almost unrecognizable as beams and plates. They must have hit an asteroid-like body at a speed of over 100 miles per second. It's a wonder the men weren't even more completely demolished."

	"Uh—it was bad enough. I had no desire to examine them any closer. You saw the shoulder-holster still on that one fellow. Evidently my prophecy of their end didn't work out right. I didn't take that into account."

	"Let's go on toward that planet."

-

5

	Even while they approached from a distance they had seen the great, glowing red spot. Their instruments soon told them that the rock and soil was red hot. The size of the spot told them the terrific fury of the battle that must have produced it, and they circled downward toward the world with due caution.

	Yet, though they rapidly drew nearer, they saw no slightest sign of a city on the surface. Putney grunted. "Don't like that. That means some forces we have to contend with. They must have their cities so far underground that they are protected by sheer mass of dirt and rock against heat rays. But—even so one of them must have been destroyed."

	A low soft whine began to mount in the loudspeakers of the Prometheus. She was entering an atmosphere. Slowly and cautiously she descended. "They must be watching," said Warren, "so they must be waiting for us with their whole armory. I'm putting out all the shields I can think of." Still the ship sank unhindered toward the glowing spot below. No sign of life either on ground or in the air had been observed. Even the instruments showed only a complete lack of activity.

	Then the meters jumped off their scales, and simultaneously the Prometheus reeled to a terrific pull, a solid sheet of blue electric flame cascaded from her to strike at the bank of clouds off to one side like a jagged sword of light. The clouds split open to reveal a flight of winged ships. A hundred beams glimmered in the air as they stabbed toward the Prometheus. An instant later the force-shield rippled with light under titanic concussions.

	The winged ships were suddenly spinning wildly, twisting as though out of control, rolling over on their backs, and yet falling upward toward the Prometheus, added to the attractive force that was drawing the planes upward, and then put some light into the invisible force plane so it became visible. The planes struggled in vain. Warren was adding a powerful magnetic field of his own, and increasing it. As the enormous field-strength built up, it acted as a tremendously resistant medium to all moving metal. The planes began to behave erratically. The glimmering beams of light began to curve this way and that as they bent under the magnetic field Warren was producing. Shells were exploding in midair as they too were stopped and heated by their resisted passage through the magnetic field. Warren stepped up his attractive field, and the planes moved more rapidly toward his plane of force. Presently most of them had landed. There was no visible propelling mechanism about them, only the wings for lift, but whatever it was, it didn't function, evidently, under the conditions Warren had imposed.

	"Now we could just crush them with another force plane, but I think they had reason to attack. Evidently they have just gotten through with one attack on their city, and tried to destroy us before we did any damage." Warren began some difficult manipulations. In a moment a single, small plane came through a hole in the force plane, and rode toward the Prometheus. The other planes had stopped struggling now, and all had landed on the force-plane. The little plane was brought nearer, till Warren and Putney looked into its cabin. Two beings sat in there. They looked quite human. Their eyes alone seemed least human. With disconcerting ease they looked in different directions simultaneously. The left eyes looked at Warren, while the right eyes were traveling leisurely up and down Putney.

	Almost at once the men appeared excited. One of them reached over and turned a small knob. A projector on the side of his plane turned, till it pointed down to one of the largest ships landed on the force-plane below. The projector began to wink rapidly and irregularly. "Signaling we aren't the enemy. We must look different," suggested Putney.

	The second occupant of the ship had turned toward the Terrestrians. He had a device that looked like a flashlight with a bottle stuck on it by the neck. It was short about eighteen inches long, and apparently light, for he handled it easily. The air was evidently too rare up here for him to open a window, but he threw the thing somewhere behind him in the craft, and held out his empty hands. "Pax vobiscum," murmurred Putney. "What shall I heave away?"

	"One of your shoes? That would be big enough to convince him it was a deadly weapon. Or if that suggestion doesn't suit, throw away a butcher knife. Anyone would know a knife was a weapon."

	Putney did. Communications had evidently been established with the fleet of ships below, for they were flashing lights madly among themselves now, and the large ship was flashing a spotlight on the tiny ship before them with terrific speed.

	Rapidly Warren eased off the attractive field that had held the fleet helpless, as they one by one fluttered a moment in the re-asserted gravity of the planet, and righted, he released the magnetic field entirely, and the last of the gravity field.

	The little ship still held in their force-fields, Warren drew flat against the Prometheus, then with a terrific acceleration ship and attached plane dove toward the planet, passing the planes as though they were motionless. Five miles above the planet the ship slowed, at a mile they halted, and Wearing started a rapid analysis of the atmosphere.

	"Inert gases, including nitrogen, 64%, oxygen 32%, carbon dioxide and water vapor the remainder. Rather dry air. Harmless to life, so far as a mouse and a tomato plant are concerned. By the way, I found out why the terrific ultra-violet from the sun doesn't destroy everything here. The upper reaches of the atmosphere have a tremendous amount of ozone in them that smashes that ultra-violet down to something bearable."

	Warren nodded. "Good enough. I rather suspected something of that sort. In so far as the ozone went, that's understandable surely. The air is dry because there are few real seas, only great lakes here and there. Most of this planet is arid. "Go let in your friends, Putt." Putney went back to the lock, opened the inner chamber, closed the door behind him, and cautiously opened the outer door. A breath of their own air swept out, to be replaced in a moment by a dry, but invigoratingly cool breeze of this other atmosphere. As he glanced out he saw that the two men in the plane had already opened their door, and were coming out. They were walking along unconcernedly head down along the wing of the ship, which was equipped with a rail of some sort, evidently for this purpose. Their feet were bare, and equipped with a broad calloused palm, a strong, long and supple great toe, and the four lesser toes were all well developed and highly flexible.

	To Putney's amazement one of the men let go with one foot, reached into his pocket with a contortionist motion that seemed easy and perfectly simple, and took out a heavy clip. In the meantime his hands had been busy unwinding a thin, strong line from his waist. The clip was fixed to one end of the line with the aid of one hand and one foot, while the other foot was engaged in holding him up, and the other hand adjusted the leather belt to which the other end of the line was fastened. Then with a single motion the man restored his foot to the rail, leapt, and landed lightly and safely on the threshold of the Prometheus' lock. He straightened up, and smiled engagingly.

	"Praeul, threuw. hie Kwaer reen!"

	The sounds were strange, but pleasant to Putney's ears, completely unlike English sounds. They could not be expressed as English sounds.

	"Decide we didn't need killing?" said Putney, smiling. The second man landed as lightly as the first, and by the same means. Both looked Putney over carefully, paying particular attention to his feet and eyes. They shook their heads in wonderment. Then finally the larger of the two large men took something from his pocket. It was a device about the size of a large book. Pushing a catch on one side the lid flew up, and a three-foot telescoping column of metal stabbed upward. Simultaneously a little light began to glow through red to white. When it reached white the man spoke into it briefly. A voice responded from it in a moment, a voice with a tone of command.

	The stranger answered, pushed the telescoping column back down, and caught the lid down once more. Then he smiled and handed it to Putney.

	The Terrestrian shook his head and handed it back. From a rack in the lock he lifted a set they had made for use with space suits. It was twice the size, and equipped with a small funnel opening on one side. The Flame that would power it was out now, but Putney started it in a moment from the power-lead in the wall of the lock. The Flame glowed white and clear, half an inch in diameter in the center of the cabinet, under a heavy glass.

	Putney pointed to a grating in one side, spoke into it, while pointing the funnel in the direction of the large plane that had by now descended to their level. At his words a dim haze of light appeared in the funnel, a haze that vibrated with the tones of his voice.

	He put it back on the rack, pointed to himself and said "Putney." He repeated it twice, while the two looked on intently.

	"Boed Nay," said the one.

	"Bood Nee," decided the other.

	"Bud," said Putney with a laugh.

	"Who?" he asked pointing to them in turn.

	"Moerkel," replied the smaller, and "Thaen," replied the other.

	Something buzzed softly in Thaen's pocket, and he brought out the receiver. As the antenna snapped up, the speaker began droning softly. Three times Putney heard the name Thaen, twice Moerkel. The two conferred for a moment, then with inimitable grace Moerkel leapt back to his plane. He tried to start it, but it was still bound to the side of the Prometheus.

	"Let him go, Ran, the High Muckamuck called him," said Putney in a conversational tone. Something hummed softly in the ship, and the flier fell away to soar up and toward the huge flagship.

	"Come," Putney beckoned Thaen on, and through the locked door to the interior of the ship. As the inner door opened Thaen entered the power room and stopped in amazement. He was staring with both mobile eyes at the ten-foot Flame, a perfect sphere on which sparkled little winking lights. He listened to the soft sigh of the swirling, iridescent iron atoms. MacLaurin was looking at him interestedly.

	"A queer body. His toes are long."

	"Uses them for fingers. I envy him. He can untie knots with them or run four-dimensional controls all at the same time. And you don't know the half of it. He can move his eyes independently like a monkey—only he can see well out of both simultaneously."

	"Hey, Putt—the ships are moving, they seem to want us to come along," said Warren's voice from a speaker. One of Thaen's eyes looked up, the other was wandering around the room excitedly. MacLaurin started. "Wall eyed! Now he's cross-eyed! Now he's like no man ever was! I dinna like those eyes."

	Suddenly Warren started the ship forward, and as the load came to the Flame it became a trifle more solid in appearance, the sigh of the glinting iron atoms increased to a low hum. Thaen looked at it with astonishment. The brilliant light was cold, cold and steady as though it were in truth a solid. No motion was apparent here, for there was no apparent acceleration.

	Putney led Thaen forward, into the control room.

	"If any one should ask, you might say those planes can move!" said Warren as they entered. "The air-speed must be close to what the meter says, though the air here isn't quite like Earth's, and it says 1000 miles per hour. That's moving with a capital m for an airplane. And I'd like to know how they drive them."

	The area of red-hot rock was left far behind already, and barren, arid sand-hills were scudding backwards as the flight of planes roared along. Presently the character of the land changed. Hills began to grow taller, and rocks appeared in the distance, it grew higher, and they saw occasional snow-capped peaks, glinting strangely in the light of the tiny, blue disc of the sun—100,000,000,000 miles distant. Here and there they saw other cross-shadows, shadows cast by that other enormous and enormously brilliant star three quarters of a light year distant. It was plainly and brilliantly visible in full daylight. Several other stars were visible in the brilliant deep-violet sky. One of the four major moons rode high in the sky, another was low on the horizon, rising.

	"They certainly must have a magnificent view here at night—four brilliant moons, one dim one, and that tremendous star outshining all the other brilliant suns. Guess they don't see it often though, if they live under ground," commented Warren.

	"Ran—look! They didn't always! Look—in that valley ruined city!"

	"Lord—you're right! And those aren't crumbling ruins! Look there—see how they've been fused! They were driven underground by that other race!"

	They swung high over the mountains, and the ruins of the city disappeared behind. Thaen had been watching them intently with one eye, while the other roamed restlessly about the room.

	Now, as they passed the mountain range, the character of the country changed entirely. It was brilliantly blue, overlaid with growing plants. Streams appeared here and there, and wandering erratically back and forth across their path was a great river, growing constantly as tributaries joined it. From the foothills of the mountains they crossed a vast rolling plain that leveled slowly and the river became broader, and meandered in great bends, like a giant Mississippi. Then on the horizon beyond appeared a stretch of water that grew as they approached, wider and wider, and always extending beyond the horizon.

	"That big sea," said Warren briefly. "There's a city under it!" exclaimed Putney. "That's the place for a city! No heat rays would ever reach them there, no bombs even. Why aren't all the cities under water?"

	"Not enough room probably. Also not all their eggs in one basket. This is probably the capital."

	The planes were slowing now, and as they neared a low range of mountains that ran down to the lake, they stopped. They hovered in tight circles above the mountains for a few moments, then suddenly one entire hill, nearly a half-thousand feet in height, and fully 1000 long, slid serenely out into the lake, seemingly floating on the water. Beneath it was a vast cavern opening. The giant ships sank into it three abreast, while the smaller ships sank down whole fleets side by side.

	"Shall we walk into their parlor, asked the fly?" misquoted Warren.

	"Um—I think so. If this ship be a fly, it must be a Tartar fly. I suggest seven different ways of escape. One, blow up the whole planet; two, escape by going into the other space; three, construct a force shield like a cone and plow out through the rock; four set up the transmutation field and transmute everything in the way to hydrogen or oxygen and fly out; five, let loose a little heat, and melt a way out; six, use the absolute zero field, freeze the rock till it's hard and brittle and watch it crumble under its own weight; and seven, use the oscillating field and crumble it to dust. This ship is a bit hard to stop or to hold."

	Warren was already in the cavern. It led straight down for half a mile, turned back toward the lake for a mile, then straight down for another mile. At the bottom were titanic lock gates of solid metal at least fifty feet thick set in great grooves cut in the living rock. The surface toward the city did not, at present, touch the surface of the grooves. Both were lined with thick layers of some dark substance, evidently similar to rubber. A quarter of a mile further on was a similar titanic set of gates. And with the first gates the lighting began. Heretofore great searchlights on the ships had illuminated the passages, for scarcely had they passed the mouth of the cavern when the mountain began moving back into place.

	"There's one sure thing—these fellows have some source of power that beats anything earth had two years ago. Earth could never have dug this channel, they could never have moved that mountain around, and they'd have been plumb out of luck if anything like those ships came after them. Wonder what it is?"

	"Efficient solar power? That sun would give plenty—even a hundred billion miles out. Maybe atomic power. We have the energy of matter, which is of course far greater, but even the energy of smashed atoms is enormous."

	"Atomic is my bet," said Putney. "Look at those lights." The lights were growing more frequent now as mile after mile of the huge tunnel moved back. Lighted windows appeared in the walls. The lights were globes of pure radiance suspended in the air of the tunnel. They glowed with a brilliant, harsh blue light. "White to these men, I suspect. Our lights probably look red to Thaen." Thaen's left eye swung abruptly, and disconcertingly to Putney as he said this.

	"Uh—those eyes," said Warren. "They must be darned handy things but they give me the creeps. Ever tried playing deck tennis with a cross-eyed man? Looks one way and sees the other? That's the way those eyes impress me."

	Putney chuckled. "They get me a bit too—but I envy him. He'd be a darned bad man to fight in a ship of his own size. Be able to look all ways at once. His feet too—how handy they'd be with controls!"

	The ships ahead began slowing to an even lower rate, turned an abrupt corner, and the Terrestrians suddenly came into a blaze of brilliant lights. A huge cavern widened out from the tunnel, a gigantic place with a dozen levels of metal floors on which, one by one, the planes began to settle. Thaen touched Warren's shoulder and pointed to the topmost one. "Yuarn," he said.

	Warren nodded. "I don't see why this doesn't fall in on them."

	"I'm beginning to. Don't go near those columns of light. I think the light just marks out the beam of force—yes, look at that magnetometer. A powerful beam. Probably they have projectors on the cavern floor, and on the various floors, and on the roof, that distribute the pressure. Look—see how that beam there widens at the middle—I'll be willing to bet anything that's how they drive their ships. Nasty weapon it would make too, if you didn't have any magnetic defense field. Just touch one of those beams with a weak field and see what happens."

	Warren set some controls, and pulled a lever back gently. The surrounding columns of light swayed gently away from the ship, then gently toward him, bending at the joints. "Magnetic," he nodded.

	Gently he landed his ship on the topmost level, beside the flagship of the fleet he had been following, and simultaneously rose from his seat. "Take over for a minute. Set up the zero field in a disc about fifty feet in front of us. I've an idea." He was gone only a minute, to come back with a small but powerful movie projector, which he set up in the control room window. Putney turned a little power into the zero field, and added to it till a cloud of white vapor collected before them. Men were coming toward the ship now, but fell back away from the space as the cold, damp fog rolled slowly down from the field. Almost at once pictures began to appear on the screen.

	It was a field on Earth, with mountains rising behind green against a blue sky. In the center of the field was a huge, shining building. The Prometheus' hangar.

	Suddenly field and background sank rapidly away, the horizon retreated mile on mile, till the whole world seemed laid out before them, and the blue sky changed to black. The lights of the cavern dimmed suddenly, and the scene on the screen became clearer. The bowl of the Earth inverted suddenly to the rounded swelling of a planet. It fell rapidly away, shrinking with amazing speed, and turning slightly reddish as it did so. It became a great round pumpkin floating in space, and occasional stars swam into view, then the moon, looking like a dull orange. The planet and its satellite swung, and the sun shown blazing on the screen. It too began to retreat, becoming redder and redder as it shrank swiftly, became finally so red it vanished. Utter blankness filled the screen.

	Warren worked swiftly. He changed the projector, a pinpoint of violet light appeared, expanded swiftly, grew greater and greater—it was the sun of this world.

	Thaen, beside them, gasped in amazement. The sun shrank again, and finally this world appeared, its four satellites visible. Then the picture broke off. The screen of mist began to fade as Putney cut off the power. But before it was gone, pictures began to appear once more, and Putney, in surprise, cut the power back. A projector outside was working.

-

6

	A picture of an arid, dry plain swam into being on the screen of mist. Unlike an earthly moving picture it grew swiftly from a spiral till it filled the entire screen with a round picture with a peculiar suggestion of depth.

	There was nothing but the level plain, and the clear violet sky with occasional clouds floating high in it. But somewhere a faint, heavy hum began to come into being; it grew till it was a majestic, full-throated roar echoing through all space.

	As they watched, a fleet of giant battle planes swam into view from somewhere behind, moving onward and upward at an unbelievable speed. They climbed at an angle of forty-five degrees, yet their wings tilted back no more than thirty degrees. Some force other than pure air-lift was raising them. So swiftly they mounted that in moments they were out of sight.

	Suddenly the ground cracked, broke, and a ring of squat, hemispherical metal domes pushed their way up through the sand. Several seconds passed, then from one, then another, broke a great flare of electric-blue fire that reached fanshaped to the sky, bent, and intermingled in a dome of solid fire above all. It fluctuated, wavered, twisted, and then steadied after a moment to a solid, motionless sheet. A constant, steady hum echoed through the great cavern.

	Something materialized on the screen, a black dot high, high in the violet sky. It grew with accelerating speed, expanding rapidly to a torpedo-shaped body ten feet long, three in diameter, ending in a finned tail that kept it whirling with terrific speed, a gyroscopic missile that would maintain its orientation against any deflecting force.

	Half a mile from the ground a stream of fire issued from it, and the giant bomb leapt forward with speed that must have reached miles a second.

	At the last instant it swerved violently, landing finally in the exact center of the dome of blue fire. A single stupendous flash of light, a titanic explosion sharp as the crack of a rifle, and it was gone.

	It was merely a sighting shot. A hundred black dots appeared magically, and as they came into being, and grew from somewhere in the far reaches of that violet sky, blue-glowing cones of dim radiance reached up to them. They staggered, twisted in their paths as the beams touched them. Some jerked violently aside. All slowed visibly, and became red, many released their explosive energies harmlessly on the air, but a majority rained down on the protecting dome of fire.

	Strangely, none seemed directed at the center of the dome, the force beams seemed engaged in directing them there. Most fell toward the edge of the protecting ring.

	Other dots were appearing far above now. The planes were descending again, and now accompanied with long, slim ships, shaped like pencils pointed at each end. Lashing beams smashed out between them. The faintly glowing force-beams from the ships, long tubes of hazy light, some other beam, twin pipes of brilliant light that started from each other, and curved inward to meet at their object in a constant, terrific display of lightning. A dozen planes attacked each ship, the ships seemed content to sink slowly downward, dropping their gigantic bombs, and firing tiny, explosive shells toward the dodging planes.

	The planes were not dodging successfully apparently, for a constant and growing rain of broken metal began to fall. From each of the hundred pencil-ships a ray reached out presently, something dim and half seen that exploded into a point of incredible incandescence if it touched a plane.

	As at a signal, the giant attacking planes winged over suddenly, pointed their noses toward the planet, and descended in a terrific, shrieking power drive that must have raised their speed to nearly a mile a second. Their wings were folded into the ships in some manner, till only a knife edge projected from the fuselage. The great planes twisted and weaved as they shot downward, avoiding rays that sliced after them. They turned, leveled off, and streaked across the plain in a dodging course at a rate that carried them beyond the horizon in seconds.

	The pencil-ships were not left to come on unhindered, for each great plane ship had spewed forth a great fleet of tiny midges that swarmed in darting, flitting motion about the ships, discharging brief bursts of that twin explosive electric ray. But somehow the ray always seemed to explode just short of the ships, leaving them unscathed.

	Some signal was given. The hundreds of tiny ships all darted suddenly toward one of the pencil-ships, every ray burst forth simultaneously in a single blinding sheet of flame—and the pencil-ship was falling, white-hot wreckage. The midges scattered themselves as though fragments of an exploding bomb. Vengeful heat-rays lashed across the sky where they had been seconds before. The score must have been half a hundred—but by far the greater number escaped.

	The battle was progressing on a level now, nearly fifty miles above the city evidently, for some telescopic device had been attached to the camera. Ships and midges circled steadily for the advantage.

	Again the concerted rush—again white-hot wreckage descended streaming from the pencil-ship, and two score more of the midges followed it.

	"The ships have some sort of screen—if the planes can get enough power over, the screen fails—when the ships don't have to use power for their screen, they can work those heat-rays," said Warren hastily.

	"The ships will win—too many."

	There was a sudden shift in the position of the pencil-ships. One rose half a mile above the rest, while the others set up a barrage of their heat rays about it, protecting it. The midges seemed suddenly to concentrate on attacking that ship, for fully a third of them rose to it, and poured their weapons against it—most of them to fall mangled wreckage.

	For an instant the ship seemed unguarded. Then, from bow and stern, broke two new rays. They moved in a curve if the ship spun rapidly, their range was less than a quarter of a mile, but they seemed to stretch a web of force between them and around them that swept the midges from the sky like some gigantic broom. Only near the enemy ships were the planes safe, from this weapon, and there the heat-rays reached them.

	The midges folded their wings and, like the giant planes, shot planet-ward with terrific speed. Not a full hundred reached the surface. The pencil-ships descended in massed, close-packed formation, majestically and slowly, toward the glowing dome of fire. At ten miles the forts went into action. For a single second, every one of the fan beams snapped out, to snap on as concentrated pipes of radiance smashing their way to the massed enemy ships. A wave of fire washed over the formation, it flowed like some squirted liquid, striking a solid glass plate. But it was like an acid, for it began eating holes that showed red against the blue flame, holes that expanded as some half dozen beams concentrated instantly on it—and a ship disappeared in flaming destruction beyond.

	But presently this eating of holes stopped, the holes grew fewer, and smaller, ships avoided them in the meantime, and they hung motionless over the city.

	Hours must have passed. The scene was at night, suddenly, and the ships showed brilliantly outlined by the wash of electric fire, the heavens were illuminated by the great, bright stars of this world, but they were overcast now, clouds were gathering.

	The ships were no longer massed, their formation was a circle with a hub and spokes. But only half the ships were so engaged. The rest seemed moving about freely behind this shield. They began to concentrate above the hub, and the ships of the hub rose to join them. Blue beams began to reach from one to another, till all the ships were linked in a single network of power beams.

	The center ship hovered over the center of the shield. A mistiness grew suddenly before it, a spinning misty globe of blue light. It attained size, then suddenly broke free, and went spinning erratically downward. It ate a hole through the shield. It drank up the blue electric flame on the other side, and grew fat on it. It jerked its way down and to one side. It acted like a light ball suspended in a jet of air. Suddenly a particularly violent jerk led it into one of the great beams. Instantly, with the speed of light, it followed that beam back to its source, puffed softly as it struck the dome-fort, and bounced aloft. The fort was a heap of powdery ash.

	Frantic magnetic beams were jerking at it; they could deflect it when it moved, but only served to make its erratic motion more so. And another sphere was falling, jerking about like the first.

	In minutes the last of the forts were gone. The enemy ships came slowly downward, cautiously. The spheres teemed repelled by them, and rolled swiftly away, out across the plane, moving erratically as ever, and every touch left a great, powdery scar, but every touch made diem smaller.

	The ships were pouring their heat beams into the rock. It was day once more, and a cauldron of molten rock half a mile across bubbled gently. It was night again—the cauldron of rock was three miles across. Day found it fully four, and bubbling gently.

	The scene on the screen of mist vanished. It was replaced by a scene in a great subterranean city. Men, women, and children were hurrying about on moving ways, suspended on spidery bridges that spanned the great lighted tunnels. Each wall of the tunnel here was a great apartment house, and the great tunnels must have been a hundred and fifty feet tall, and fifty wide. The scene was at a "cube"—the three-dimensional equivalent of a city square, where four great tunnels intersected. Everyone seemed to be leaving. The reason was obvious. Above the spider-work bridges, above the glowing magnetic columns that supported the rock pressure above, a slow smoke was originating, and falling downward. The rock became dull red while they watched. The last hurrying people looked back over their shoulders with frightened faces.

	Suddenly one of the great magnetic columns began to wobble erratically. It twisted, the upper section broadened, and seemed to be trying to slide off the lower. It did, its beam a cone that sharply deflected the four surrounding beams till they too began to wobble. The dull red rock was brightening. The beams were all spreading now; the first to fail suddenly went out as an explosion wrecked the projector. A great crack appeared in the rock, and with a terrific roar of sound the whole roof split wide. A river of molten rock came pouring through. The spider-work bridges and ways vanished in a puff of smoke and a brief sparkle of fire. A wall of white-hot rock moved rapidly toward the screen. The camera swayed, the picture went out of focus, and suddenly a flame obscured the screen.

	An instant later the camera was looking down the tunnel from a distant station. The wave of rock was moving more slowly, cooled by surrounding rock, and the great refrigerating plants that must have been cooling the city. A huge line of pipe had been hastily laid, and was spouting a sparkling blue liquid that hissed instantly into invisibility as it struck the rock which cooled it. A dike was being built, a dike of frozen rock.

	It was useless. The roof of the tunnel itself began to glow, and the pipes were turned on it. The Niagara of lava still flowing in from the original break overflowed the dike, and rolled on.

	The city was doomed.

	The screen went blank in a burst of flame at that moment, and stayed blank.

	"Television—to another city," said Putney softly.

	"So that's how it happened—that's what that pool of red-hot rock was," said Warren with a cold, deadly voice.

	Thaen touched his arm. He pointed about him to the ship, the controls. He pointed at the screen.

	"Naer liu muool raeneu?" he asked.

	"I can guess what you asked. We will, Thaen," promised Warren soberly.

-

7

	"Tex—Tex!" Atkill called softly. Texas woke from sleep with a start. Atkill was bending over his telescope, watching something with an expression of unholy joy on his face. "Come here, Tex, and look—we have visitors «t last. I knew they'd come eventually. Three ships!"

	Three thin pencil-ships floated in space, tiny things glinting in the harsh light of the great sun. Atkill watched them carefully, calculating their course accurately. They should reach him in a short three hours at their present velocity. He set to work rapidly.

	In an hour he had set the controls in the power-room for starting the Flame, and had set up the little piece of apparatus he had made in the garbage-lock, with a long, thin tube of aluminum held in place by strings of insulators. The rod projected some twenty feet from fee side of the ship. Along with the little apparatus he had made, there were three powerful magnets he had been making, and a little spark-gap of chrome-nickel blocks between the long aluminum tube and a heavy lead that grounded to the ship. Atkill had plans.

	"Tex, sweet lad, we are about to be saved. The mere coming of our friends gives us once more, power, light and life! I can start the Flame!"

	"Uhm—that's right good news. How come? Yuh couldn't before. They may decide to wipe us out instead of helping."

	Atkill laughed cheerfully. "They've got to help. The sun's been doing the necessary work for the last three months! All they have to do is come near—and they will. Remember, Tex, the late unpleasantness we watched from space here that they were having on that planet? War. They want weapons—science. We've got it. We're a strange ship, a ship of neither their world or the enemy world. We are, apparently, a dead ship. They see in us a possibility of help. They will investigate."

	"Uhm—but how come they'll have to help?"

	"For three months that sun has been deluging our ship with ejected electrons. We've built up a tremendous charge. We haven't lost a bit of it. Those ships, just come from a planet, have a much smaller charge. We'll discharge to them, my lad, with a smash of about eighteen mega-volts—an extra two million. Really I need only sixteen or so. I said eighteen for safety—and I'll have it. My starting apparatus for the Flame is weak on magnetism and gravitational fields, but the extra electric will make it up, I suspect."

	Atkill was busy with something else now. A robe he had made. It was made of the thick, strong silk sheets he had brought with him. They were pure white, beautifully clear, and the robe was made with a surprising skill. It draped about his powerful figure gracefully, caught at arms and shoulder with three clasps of highly polished stainless steel, set with more of the magnificent gems he had synthesized, and cut.

	On one side lay a turban-like head-dress he had made, wound of silk dyed with a slightly fluorescent dye, with the result that in the light of this sun, rich as it was in ultra-violet, it shone of its own accord with a rich, brilliant scarlet. It was a magnificent headpiece.

	Finally a sash was added, one of magnificent, deep purple, clasped with a metal device shaped like twin crocodile heads, their eyes four gleaming stones as deep in color as the sash, touched with a trace of pomegranate.

	"I heard some sky-pilot say that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like this-here guy. I don't know who this Solomon was right well, but you sure got him beat," grinned Texas. "That what you been working on so hard?"

	Atkill looked at him pityingly. "It's a shame to disturb his mind. Tex, brace yourself. You've got to wear a rig like this too."

	"Me? Me wear that? Hombre, you got wrong ideas," affirmed Texas.

	"Tex, if you don't wear one of these, we are extremely apt to die promptly and unpleasantly. I'd rather convince the populace that we are strange and wonderful gods than have them believe us strange and delectable foods, perhaps. You know, they may have a domestic animal that looks something like us, and is considered a delicacy—like chicken or something. In that case we would be in an unpleasant situation unless we could change their opinions.

	"So stimulate that thing you call your ability to reason, and don these garments." Atkill extended a similar turban and robe to Texas, but these were made of fine linen instead of silk. The turban was not-unpleasant green, and the sash black as night, held with a stainless steel clasp set with a single blood-red stone.

	"Take off your shirt, and put "em on. You can keep your pants, and shift that hardware to the shoulder-holster. I've rigged this so you can reach it more easily. Put this pouch on over your chest. You can carry matches, tobacco, a flashlight and so forth in that." 

	"Uh—all right if I got tub. But what all's the idea?" Atkill smiled and turned back to his telescope while Texas dressed. The ships were slowing now, approaching cautiously. They were less than fifty miles away now. Atkill could see them clearly with the naked eye now as dots of light. He went back to the power-room and started the gyroscope device. It had been improved in the months that had passed, and was now a quite efficient machine for swinging the ship as he wished.

	Anxiously he watched the ships approach. Finally a lone, small ship came out of one of the three greater spaceships, and approached slowly. It circled the earth ship at a distance of a few hundred yards, then finally came toward them. A long metal arm reached out from the ship, and the machine came gently directly toward the out-jutting terminal Atkill had arranged.

	"Tex—get set as I showed you at the controls—one, two and five switches closed, four and six open, three at the midpoint. When the Flame starts, snap the dial seven to 458-23. Got it?" 

	"Uh."

	Atkill was working at the single, tiny lock. He closed a switch and the magnets ground slightly in their supports, pressing away from each other. Swiftly he made several further adjustments, and watched the ship. Absolute space—an almost perfect insulator. Would the discharge-shock be sudden enough to give the result he so desperately needed? Or would it be a slow leaking that would be perfectly useless?

	The discharge rods were less than a foot apart. Slowly the pilot of the stranger ship maneuvered them skillfully together. There was a terrific strain out there now—enough to have started his Flame if he had been in position to use it.

	They came within an inch—then suddenly they touched. A blinding, roaring smash of electric energy crashed across the gap between Atkill's discharge points. Less than two inches of separation, creating an electric field of terrific intensity. Atkill could feel the charge leak suddenly from his body—and cried out in exultant triumph as the clear white of the Release Flame suddenly sprang into being on his little block of iron. A tiny flame no larger than a flashlight bulb, a dazzling white point of light that pulsed for an instant, steadied, and glowed as it would glow for hundreds of millennia if left undisturbed.

	Atkill yanked open the lock with a single calculated motion, whirled about, dashed to the engine-room, and snapped five ready leads into place.

	"Ready!" Tex applied the switches as he had been directed. A haze of light accumulated over the great master Flame, the block of iron was stirring to life. A rustling of whirling atoms mounted; they became iridescent and whined softly as they reached the glowing haze of light; some began to sparkle. "Seven to 540—49," ordered Atkill. The haze suddenly intensified, the little glowing spot of flame in the tiny apparatus dimmed to reddish, and a protesting whine came from it.

	A dull thud that did not originate in the room, but in space, answered; the haze of light crystallized in an instant of time to a solid glow, and about the ship the lights sprang up. The chuckle of the air apparatus working once more suddenly laughed in their ears familiarly. The motor-generator that had been charging the batteries was working madly, pumping air into the boiler.

	A broad grin split Texas' face. Atkill straightened instantly, ripped off the five leads, dropped them into a box, and ran to his room—dove, rather, for the ship was still weightless. In an incredibly short time he had fixed his little rounded mechanism to clamps in the framework of the turban, snapped the lead-wires into their jacks, concealed the wires in his loose sleeve, and donned the jeweled bracelet.

	Then he was at the control room window. The other ship had retreated suddenly to some miles distant, fearful of the sudden reawakening of the ship. Atkill stood at the window, his arms raised above his head in a welcoming gesture.

	He was a magnificent figure of a man, the white robe, the brilliant turban glowing softly with scarlet light, his tall, powerful body erect and commanding. His features were powerful and rugged, his black eyes snapping with life and energy. Slowly he lowered his arms and -beckoned to the strange ship.

	The little machine moved cautiously toward him. Atkill smiled at the creature he saw in the little ship, a queer, slim man-like form, with arms four feet long possessed of two elbow joints. The head was supported on a neck at least eighteen inches long, supple and graceful as a swan's, and almost as thin. The head seemed far too heavy for the slim neck, a head possessed of two eyes, capable of moving independently, a slim, bony nose, a tiny round mouth whose lips could protrude and retract as much as an inch. The whole face was tiny, set into the lower part of the skull, rather than forming the front of the head. The eyes themselves were set into the skull as something entirely separate from the face below them. The ears were curiously cup-shaped, and protruded noticeably from the head on short necks, muscular material that permitted them to turn and swing about like those devices used for locating sounds of planes high in the air. They were wondrously and disconcertingly mobile, as were the eyes.

	"Now what in hell is that thing?" demanded the horrified Tex.

	"That is our new friend," replied, Atkill calmly. "He saved your life—course he didn't mean to, but he did. Now remember what your mother told you, Tex, never stare at freaks. Be grateful to the little—monstrosity, shall we say? He did you a good turn, and I plan to be the high Muckamuck among them presently. You are about to see the powers of my new head-dress. Never learned what it was for, did you? Watch!"

	Atkill folded his powerful arms across his chest, and scowled. He scowled at a chair that was clamped to the floor near him. About his head a misty, bluish light appeared; it projected forward somewhat—but hung close to his head. And suddenly—half the chair puffed away into nothingness! "Now that-thair's a right cute trick," said Texas in admiration. "If I didn't know the secret it shore would take me in. Got any more?"

	Atkill's face relaxed, his arms fell to his sides, and he laughed. "Lots, Tex, lots. It will work a lot quicker when I want it to. And there are a number of other things. I have another little thing I'm going to start when I've time. Now—we follow our friend."

	The ship, motionless, drifting helpless for so long, started slowly, turned, and began following the slow motion of the little ship. The scout turned abruptly and started back toward the home ship in haste. Atkill followed slowly, having first applied a number of protective devices. He approached the three waiting ships, and drifted motionless.

	Nothing happened for a number of minutes. Finally Atkill turned his ship and headed for the second of the two planets he had seen, the home of these ships, as he knew. He went slowly. The three ships passed him instantly and fell into step, one before, one behind, and one above him. Together they went along smoothly.

	Atkill accelerated slowly and steadily, and finally gave Texas charge of the ship while he went back to the machine shop. He returned carrying a bulky pistol with a stubby barrel of polished steel, and a heavy chamber mounted in a synthetic rubber grip. He looked at it lovingly and handed it to Texas.

	"Throw away that hardware, and carry this. There are two studs on it. The one on the left side will take the starch out of anything living. The one on the right will take the starch out of anything—but don't use it anywhere near yourself. The left throws a concentrated pencil of invisible ultra-violet energy. It will of course heat, and isn't as easily reflected as infra-red. The other throws a similar pencil of radiation something like cosmic rays, only a little longer. It will penetrate anything to a depth of from 100 to 1000 feet, depending on the substance, and still be fatal. It will destroy the atoms in its path. And it will let loose so much secondary radiation that it will kill anything within fifty feet of what it hits. Don't use that unless you are more than 200 feet from your target—the ultra-violet is bad enough. Look." Atkill aimed it at the surviving half of the ruined chair. A blinding spot of incandescence appeared on the metal frame and flashed for an instant before it spurted away in vapor.

	The pistol was shut off instantly, but a red-hot groove lay along the floor.

	"There's an energy center—a Flame—in the chamber here. Feeds on the iron of the pistol itself. Good for about 1000 years of continuous operation I believe. If they attempt to disarm you—push this red stud in the base of the butt. It will fuse the weapon two seconds after you push it, and release the energy center. The center will burn for from half an hour to three hours afterward, but won't do any particular damage if no one tries to tame it. If anything but iron is shoved into it, it will simply knock it through into another space. If iron is supplied, both iron and Flame will move through." 

	"Oh," said Tex, and took the deadly thing unhappily. He was used to powder and lead, not these things. He stowed the heavy revolver he loved in his pouch and bolstered the strange pistol.

	Hours later, as the planet neared, the formation of ships about them was joined by a fleet of twenty or more, evidently called in from space.

	The pencil-ships settled rapidly through the atmosphere, toward a small city with a huge spaceship cradle. The cradle consisted of huge metal beams protected by some form of buffers shaped like a semi-cylinder, the two ends of the semi-cylinder being closed by huge iron blocks. The whole apparatus was set on gigantic springs and pneumatic cushions. Atkill mentally noted that the ships must have exceedingly poor control on landing.

	They did. One after another landed with a terrific jar, all power being cut off just before they entered the cradle. About half the fleet did not land however, but hovered nervously about the Terrestrian ship. The cradle was clear, men were waiting down there for them.

	Atkill lowered his ship in a swift dive, then turned abruptly and landed like a feather just beside the cradle. Instantly a troop of guards arranged themselves about the ship, a small party of higher officers in resplendent clothes marched forward.

	Atkill was busy. He was testing the atmosphere. He had few and poor reagents for this purpose, but he finally decided it contained sufficient oxygen, and no other known poisonous substances. Cautiously he opened the door. Air hissed out, for the pressure outside was some four pounds lower than within. The gravity on this planet was only about three quarters that of earth.

	The air was breathable. "Tex—take charge, and keep an eye on me. If anything goes wrong, just push that stud I showed you, and you'll be half a million miles away before you know it."

	Atkill drew himself up, and stepped out lightly. The blazing sun made the air uncomfortably warm; it was a blue disc in a violet sky, but there was little or no ultraviolet here, for the thick layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere absorbed nearly all of it.

	The guards moved up quickly, stepped up beside him, and two prepared to march beside him to the officers. Two more stood on either side of the floor. Atkill walked calmly ahead.

	"I greet you, High Rulers, but greet me, for I am Atkill!"

	The officers looked at him skeptically, their eyes wandering over him disconcertingly. Their long, flexible necks craned in a way that required all Atkill's control to prevent laughter.

	Atkill looked back at the ship suddenly. An officer of some sort was headed for the still open door.

	"Stop!" roared Atkill. His voice was a deep, powerful bass, and the tone of command brought the man to a sliding stop. Atkill walked angrily forward. "Away!" he ordered, and waved the man away. The officer hesitated. A ring of guards had hastily drawn up around Atkill. The man seemed to make up his mind, for he bowed his long neck several times and started firmly forward.

	Atkill folded his arms and scowled at the man's back. A glow sprang suddenly into being about his head, flashed bright for an instant—and died. The officer slumped slowly and gently to the ground without a sound. There was a sudden movement among the guards as they sprang toward him calling. Atkill merely swept his glance around them and they fell like ripe grain, to lie motionless where they had fallen.

	Weapons were appearing now in the hands of guards further away, but now the officer, first affected, moved, rolled over, and jumped suddenly to his feet. Atkill waved him away with calm assurance and walked back to the assembled generals.

	He had scarcely moved when a score of men rushed him from behind the curve of the ship. Their soft feet were almost soundless on the smooth metal. Atkill turned and scowled again, pointing his left hand at them in anger. They hesitated, slowed and vanished! A slight shimmer in the sunlight, a few sparkling dots of light, and the clink of metal objects that had been' in their pockets was all that remained.

	The physicist turned once more and walked toward the officers. The richly garbed men were fleeing rapidly toward the nearest ship.

	"Halt!" roared Atkill. The men turned, jerking weapons from their pockets, and simultaneously a dozen crackling explosions sounded. Atkill had stopped with folded arms. He smiled, and waited. The air before him was suddenly filled with bright explosive flame, and smoke. It blew away and left him standing with eyes closed, his brows contracted in concentration.

	The officers returned slowly at his gesture now. Frightened and worried. They came hesitantly before him. "Down!" snapped Atkill, pointing. They sank on their flexible, double-jointed legs, and looked up at him.

	"I am Atkill!" he roared at them.

	"Ahut-Kuhl!" they whistled uncertainly.

-

8

	Warren looked at Thaen skeptically. The other evidently wanted the Terrestrian to come out. Warren looked at Putney, who finally shook his head.

	"No. We stay right here till we can talk with them somehow. I wish to heck we knew some one of these wonderful systems of telepathy they talk about in stories. I can understand why the author uses them all right. Here we are in a situation that evidently requires immediate action. We don't know how to act, nor what to act against until we can communicate with these people. And in the meantime the enemy continues to operate unhindered. Till I know what this is all about, I'm not moving. They may have richly deserved to have that city wiped out, though somehow, looking at Thaen, I don't believe it. Nevertheless, I'm staying till we can communicate. That's the trouble with languages. They have to be learned, and before a complex situation can be understood, they must be learned rather completely. Months, perhaps, wasted. Nothing else to do.

	"We'll have to investigate the language here, and find out how it works. If they go in for innumerable irregularities, passive, vocative and indicative voices, singular, dual and plural forms, nouns declined in singular dual and plural through eight or nine cases, we'll learn something else—or they can learn English. If theirs is easier than ours, all well and good."

	Warren shook his head, folded his arms, and sat down firmly. He smiled up at Thaen. "When we can talk, we move," he said firmly.

	Thaen looked at him in a puzzled way, and finally started back to the air-lock. Warren went with him and helped him open both doors. Thaen stood on the outer threshold and talked rapidly with some men below for several minutes. They looked worried and asked many questions. Thaen shrugged his massive shoulders finally, and looked at Warren questioningly, uncertain.

	Warren beckoned him in and pointed down his throat, then looked questioningly at Thaen and asked, "Eat with us?" He led the strange man to the tiny dining room. First table was up, and the leaders were seated now; there was not room for all at once.

	Thaen looked dubiously at the food, and sat down gingerly. He relaxed presently, and tried a bit of the grapefruit cocktail gingerly. Then he tried a little more. Then he drained his glass with a broad grin. Eish was next, and it puzzled him evidently. He watched the others manipulate knife and fork, then tried some of the food himself. This did not seem to please him as much. Potatoes he was not interested in. Beets seemed to fill a long-felt want in him. He devoured them endlessly. But the sweet acid pineapple that served as dessert seemed to throw him into ecstasies. Putney limited the quantity, however, as it might have disagreed with him violently.

	Halfway through the meal a man of this world came up to the air-lock, where Korbes was standing guard, and started to climb in. Korbes called Thaen, and Thaen went and spoke to the newcomer. Thaen evidently didn't want him in just yet. The other went away. About half an hour after the meal he reappeared with two others. Looking at Warren, Thaen beckoned them in. Warren nodded. One of the men carried a good-sized pad of thin sheets of some material, and a stylus of some sort. There was an air about one of the others that somehow suggested an actor. The serious mien of the third, and a slight baldness at the top of his head, made Warren burst out laughing. "Putt—come here. Take one look, and I'll ask you who they are."

	Putney looked and smiled. "They understand our difficulties. An actor, and an artist and a professor, or I'm unwound." He turned to Thaen and nodded vigorously. Thaen beamed as they set out extra folding chairs in the study or chart-room, as Warren called it.

	Presently, as the three newcomers were settled, a fourth man came with a device that was evidently one of the magnetic-ribbon type phonographs with a stock of ribbon-records. He set it up at the professor's direction and left. Thaen settled himself beside it and the lesson began.

	In half an hour Putney realized that this language they were being taught was no new language, and that the method employed in teaching it was very evidently a carefully prepared method. The records were graduated carefully. In that half hour they had begun to understand, from the artist's rapid sketches, and the actor's clever impersonations, the basis of the language. A simple system of twenty phonetic symbols constituted the written language, and a small dictionary printed on a tough, thin metallic foil was given them, three copies in fact. But amazingly it contained little more than two thousand words.

	The sounds of this language seemed entirely different from those Thaen had first employed, and did not at all fit in with the names of the men. Their teacher, Haelieu; kept saying the word that meant full or complete in the dictionary, and after an hour Putney grasped the idea.

	"Ran—no wonder this is so easy—it's a specially constructed language. It's simplified to the uttermost. Take their verb 'ascend.' It isn't that. It's made like the German verb 'abgehen'. Gehen, to. Ab, up. They have taken a few dozen root verb ideas like to, be, see, talk, and made compounds with prefixes and such. They don't say descend, ascend, accelerate or decelerate. They simply say go down, go up, go faster, go slower and so forth.

	"Further, the sounds are simplified for others to learn. They aren't like their own sounds. This was meant to be taught to other races."

	"They've completely left out all sign of declension, thing, things. Big, bigger, biggest. That's about the only sign of change in nouns and adjectives. Not quite like some of Earth's languages, German for instance, with its der-des-den-dem, die-der-der-die for 'the' and so on for every single adjective in the language. No gender here, either. And their verbs! Two modals, two principal parts. Then you know the whole story, absolutely no irregularities. We can learn it in a day."

	They did, practically. All that day their tutors worked with them, helping them, teaching them. Rapidly they advanced, till they could speak the language rapidly and readily. They listened to the records, which grew more and more complex, progressively. By night they could understand almost any sentence.

	The language lacked nothing save beauty. It was terribly monotonous, for one "went up from the chair and went across the room, and went out the door and went down the stairs, and went through the corridor and went—everything," as Warren complained.

	"Hmmm—maybe it does, Ran, but what we're most interested in is in learning their situation—and this makes it possible."

	But not till the next day. Thaen, the professor, the actor and artist withdrew, leaving a collection of books for them to study if they wished. They did not—they wished sleep.

	The day of the planet was some thirty-two hours, and the men were accustomed to about ten hours sleep, so it was nearly twelve hours later when Thaen showed up again. Haelieu was with him, and a third man, evidently another professor of some sort.

	They began the business with a vengeance. First they wanted some idea of where the Terrestrians came from. To their surprise, Putney and Warren found they could not make them understand the idea of "another space." "World," not "space" the professor kept correcting them. "Yes, we know that, of course, but where?"

	Finally Putney gave it up as a bad job, and explained that they had come a distance that was absolutely immeasurable. There was no measure. They could travel faster than light, indeed, but this was not how they came. These men had no idea whatsoever of space as Terrestrians knew it, a fabric made of mighty, titanic space-strains, the pulls and counterpulls of incomprehensible millions of tons of matter. "Space" to them meant "room" or "emptiness between stars and planets." Warren groaned and sent immediately for a scientist of this world, their greatest physicist.

	The other professor, it appeared, was an historian. "You," explained Warren, "can no more understand what I must say than can a babe unborn." Thaen seemed a bit annoyed. It appeared that he was a physicist himself.

	"While the scientist is coming, tell me your story," suggested Putney.

	It was a simple story, in fact, made up of but three great elements, and one of these overshadowed their lives completely. Their great cities were not built underground to escape the enemies from other worlds.

	"They, we could perhaps drive off or settle with in some manner were it not for the Great Catastrophe to Come," Thaen explained.

	"Half a circuit ago (he meant half a year—their year was nearly five hundred earth years) we learned for the first time of the Catastrophe. Our sun is a changeable sun. It pulses with floods of light, and then dies down greatly. You must have seen that yourselves. But that is nothing. That we have known for all time, ever since man first understood the sun did not swing about our tiny world. At the time I speak of, once every day the sun flared up, and sank back, and flared up. A period of fifteen hours. Then suddenly it began to change. It has changed swiftly—for a sun. Now its period is but one fifth of that. It is rapidly shortening. Within a quarter of a circuit, it will flare up once more—in the Great Catastrophe. What it will do then, we do not accurately know. We have with our telescopes seen other stars flare up thus. New stars, they are called. Then gradually they sink back to nearly normal, to flare up once more in the course of half a circuit or more. We believe that eventually it will reach a stable condition not so bright as at present.

	"About a tenth of a circuit after the first understanding of what was to come, the first of the Bay-Raonii came. It was a little ship. The mere nose of the huge machine that had started nearly a raeth (about seven months) before. It was driven by fire. These Bay-Raonii were welcomed. They had crossed space, a thing our people had been striving for since first we saw what was to come. They too knew of the Great Catastrophe, and were seeking escape. Their planet revolved far nearer the sun than ours. They had calculated that their own planet would be fused at the surface, red hot to a depth of ten miles. Ours would be red-hot at the surface, but cooling systems could be devised to keep the cities far below the surface livable. We had guessed that, and our cities were not being built up any longer, while the brains of our scientist struggled to find a means of drilling the hard rock swiftly and surely.

	"The Bay-Raonii were merely explorers, and emissaries. They worked with our people till this language, Anlo-Raonii was invented. They cannot produce such sounds as we can, nor can we produce all their sounds. See, this is a picture of one of the Bay-Raonii."

	Warren and Putney stared at the monstrosity depicted. A queer, skinny creature, with a neck like a giraffe. "So Anlo-Raonii was invented. They wanted room here. In exchange they offered certain things we had never had. One was the power of electricity. That was new to us.

	Steam was new to us then. We accepted it. Their first ship was followed by more. Swiftly they improved their machines, till finally they could travel both ways. Before, a ship could come, but never return. Soon both trips were possible, if refueling was accomplished here. Their fuel was simply the active gas of air—oxygen, and the liquid fuel they compounded. It was made largely from water. We never learned how.

	"They built a city. On the surface. It was an Anlonian who first devised the crumbier, nearly a fifth of a circuit later. Anything within five times my length crumbles to dust in its path. It is like our radio sets in many ways, but the wave goes in one way only. It breaks rock swiftly as a man walks, and powerful suction machines were used to carry it out, and blow it into the air. It settled as dust over all the world. In six months it was merely soil, broken by plants, and used for food by them.

	"The first problem was solved. The cities moved underground. Further and further, till such cities as Pan-Lor here were built. Then we had no mountains over our doors, they were not needed.

	"The Bay-Raonii rose. They attempted to destroy us. There were nearly a million of their people here then, and many young had been born, for they breed like rodents, very swiftly, as many as six young to one couple. On their own world strict control of this terrific fecundity was applied. Here they had bred swiftly, and it was our request that this be limited that finally caused them to start the war.

	"Many, many of our cities were destroyed. We had but ten underground, and those alone remained, for terrible gases of death rained from their rocket ships and destroyed our people. All their cities were underground. We devised machines that settled noiselessly on parachutes onto their cities, and ate their way through the rock to the city below. Hundreds were dropped. If not destroyed within half an hour, they were beyond approach. Most were destroyed. But this was war, and more were made. Their cities were riddled by these, till they leaked in a thousand places. Then, like rats in a trap (he used a different expression), they were caught. We returned their gases. Some survived, not many. These were forced to flee in ships, and warned never to return.

	"They did not, for nearly ten raenth. Then great battle-rockets appeared with the heat-ray. They started down our tunnels, and blasted our defenses as they came to them. Gas-dam after gas-dam fell, and they bored on despite our heaviest guns, for the shells were crumbled by terrific power even as they approached the ships. Some got through, of course, but not enough to damage the great armor plates on the nose of each ship.

	"A chemist, one Rgiolin, saved us that time. Five miles of the roof of our cavern were blasted down with explosives, and at the head of the fallen part a terrific explosive charge was placed. Three more were buried on the way. The Bay-Raonii ships came on and started to crumble the rock away. The explosive charges shot them backward like shells from a gun. Most of the ships were destroyed in those first four attacks on cities. Some persisted with small ships sent on ahead which set off the charges, wrecking themselves in the process. The second charge in each city block destroyed the big ships which attempted to drill on.

	"Our air was being derived from the rocks themselves by Rgiolin's process, and that was what permitted us to do this.

	"After their losses, our own ships were able to beat off the rockets.

	"All our cities moved underground. Their next attack found us prepared with the heat ray, which made it impossible for them to attack through the tunnels. They did not have enough power available to drill the entire distance themselves at that time.

	"Raeth followed raeth, and they attacked again and again. They must have this planet. So must we. That is the situation. During this period they discovered the secret of the atom, but we learned it also from a ship of theirs we captured with a loss of nearly five thousand men.

	"On their next appearance they met a terrific reverse. We were attacked by a huge fleet of nearly 100 great space-battleships, and nearly 1,000 lesser craft. We had stolen their atomic power—and attached a weapon of our own. See—this pistol here contains the basic discovery, this the modification. Examine them, and these diagrams."

	Thaen handed the Terrestrians two pistols. They examined them carefully, and then Thaen went outside and demonstrated the first. It was a strange device, with a barrel like two ice cream cones stuck together mouth to mouth, and the two tips cut off leaving an opening of half an inch diameter at each end. One end was the business end. The other was set into a sphere some four inches in diameter, the whole mounted on a stock that made it balance easily in the hand. It was light, and manageable. The double-cone was made of a bluish, translucent material, the waffling made by bars of silvery metal, buried in the insulating substance. The sphere was a globe of thicker insulation that gleamed faintly with an internal light.

	Thaen pressed the trigger and a tiny ball of blue light sped out in a straight line toward the opposite wall of the cavern, nearly three hundred feet away. It struck it with a gentle hiss and the tiny globe expanded to a plane of lashing electric flame five feet across.

	"Wicked little thing," said Warren.

	"That is the first shot," said Thaen. "There are ten. The fifth and sixth are the most powerful, the ninth and tenth weakest. The tenth will barely kill a man. The fifth will kill fifty. Then the weapon is deadliest. After the tenth the weapon must be recharged. After the eighth, it should be recharged."

	He took the other pistol, and raised it. It was a stock, surmounted by a sphere, glowing as the other, but the barrel here was a curious thing, a straight tube of the insulating material, with metal ribs running lengthwise, but surrounded by toroidal coils set at progressively changing angles. The barrel was nearly two feet long. This was a shoulder weapon, and a harness of stout leather belts bound it to the shoulder, as though a pull rather than a kick were expected.

	Further, the sphere here was nearly eight inches in diameter, and set low, below the barrel. Thaen pointed it toward a block of iron that must have weighed some ten pounds, resting on a bench some other men had set up. He pressed the release button, and from the inch-wide muzzle a stream of blue-glowing rings sprang, rushed swiftly to the iron, and bathed it in soft light. Instantly the iron jumped, Thaen stiffened, and the weight leaped from the table toward the gun. As it reached the edge it fell, and the gun was dragged downward with it. It struck the floor, and traveled swiftly toward the weapon. In five seconds it was at Thaen's feet, and he shut off the device. The rings died out, the iron slid to a stop.

	"A magnetic projector!" gasped Warren. "Jumping Je-hosophat, I thought that was impossible, you remember. I begin to commence to start to understand. Are those boys clever! Get it, Putt?"

	Putney shook his head. "Can't say I do."

	"What was that first thing?"

	"Ball lightning on a small scale," answered Putney at once.

	"And that second one?"

	"Thought it was the same with modifications at first—oh—it is! I get it—ring lightning instead of ball, and the rings are spinning about their common axis! A charge moving in a circle, makes a magnetic field—solenoid effect—with a long, long coil."

	"How long will that operate?" asked Warren in Anlo-Raonii.

	"About ten minutes on maximum load," replied Thaen.

	"What if there is no iron?"

	Thaen pointed his device at the wall of stone, and pressed the release. A sheet of blue flame appeared, and spread in widening ripples, some ten feet across. The wall began to smoke slightly.

	"Pure electricity when the magnetic field isn't needed," said Putney.

	"What range?" asked Warren.

	"About a quarter of a mile in air, for this. Nearly twenty miles in space, but it isn't very effective against a man more than four miles off. The rings spread too much.

	"The other is effective half a mile in air, and fully effective up to nearly a thousand in space. It re-condenses on striking its objective. The big weapons are effective nearly 100 miles in space. But the electricity is not very useful, unless it can be discharged destructively to some other object."

	"How do you store that energy?" asked Warren.

	Thaen shrugged. "We do not know. Only we know that under certain conditions, which we can achieve, metal plates can be put up against each other, and packed under enormous pressure, and yet they are insulated so that even thousands of volts will not discharge during weeks of time. A gas is first forced in under pressure. The metal plates put in position carefully, free of holes and cracks and lumps, and great pressure is applied. After that they will hold several horsepower-hours. Great batteries of these drive our ships. The magnetic beams are used to pull them through space, since planets are magnetic. In air, tiny points along the edges of the wings throw the electricity off, and drive the ship forward, or backward, or hold it in the air."

	"What a gang! They must have some sweet condensers, Putt. Think of getting condenser plates so close together—perhaps only one or two molecules apart—and still have a dielectric strength capable of resisting thousands of volts! There are things in heaven and earth—! Horatio, and so forth. I never dreamt of a condenser like that—condensers capable of running those huge ships at thousands of miles an hour." He turned to Thaen. "Have the enemy these storage-devices?"

	"No," smiled Thaen. "They have no spies, so cannot learn how they are made. To take them apart, at once destroys them, and all trace of their manufacturing processes. The gas escapes. They have analyzed it, but find only hydrogen and helium mixed. That is all we find. A scientist stumbled on the device by accident. It ruined his experiment, because he put hundreds of horsepower into a furnace, trying to make the two gases combine between the metal plates, due to a terrific arc. The power went in. Little heat developed. He thought he was successful, and the gas had absorbed the energy. He was very much afraid to break the circuit, for he feared the gas was unstable, and would blow up. He broke it from a long distance—and nothing happened. So he went back to investigate. Luckily he had used a voltage of but a few hundred, and the discharge through his body merely curled him up in a corner." Warren grinned. It probably did, he thought. "And then," Thaen continued, "he published his discovery. We also make bombs of them. You saw in the picture. Charged condensers are hurled as shells. When the plates are broken apart, they burst with stupendous force."

	"Oh—they would," said Warren. "You have atomic energy?" asked Putney. "How is it derived?"

	Thaen scowled in disgust. "It is a disappointment. We had known of it for many raenth. Knew it existed. Vast energy. When we learned the Bay-Raonii had it, we trembled. It is worthless, for it is no better than coal, or oil. It simply burns atoms, and they give off terrific heat. The apparatus weighs tons. The heat is generated inside a great spherical boiler containing mercury which stops the rays and the flying particles swiftly, and is boiled. The heat runs turbines and generates power. The mercury is gradually transformed to heavy, useless gold, which dissolves in the mercury, and then is gradually built up till the stuff clogs the boilers and apparatus dismally, and must be scraped out laboriously, for the blasted stuff won't dissolve in acids. Usually the mercury is distilled off, and the boiler thrown away. Our mercury supplies are being used up all too rapidly. In ten raeth we will be helpless, unless we use gigantic boilers and empty zinc. Mercury atoms are heavy, and stop the radiation quickly. Other elements would allow it to pass and injure men. It is bad enough as it is."

	Warren smiled in amusement. "Putt—that's rather good. Hear him cuss that gold? It is useless. Melts easily; soft, heavy, clinging." He turned to Thaen. "What do you use it for, if at all—the gold I mean."

	"Oh, it does have one use. Other substances are as good, however. It can be made into very thin sheets, and is an excellent conductor. For condensers where weight does not matter, we use it. Aluminum works better for airplanes and hand-weapons, however, for it is far lighter."

	"Thaen, have a great quantity of stuff brought—rock, scrap metal—even discarded boilers and old gold—and piled there." He pointed to a spot in the cavern floor.

	Thaen departed instantly. In a few seconds Warren was in the control room. A set of forces set to work, and in thirty seconds, a hollow ten feet deep and twenty across appeared in the rocky floor of the cavern. The first load of scrap appeared within two minutes, on a large truck-plane. Warren lifted it with forces, closed an opaque wall of force about it, and set certain field-controls. The Flame behind him whirred gently, and a small hole opened in the bottom of the sphere of force. For an instant a terrible glare beat out that illuminated the vast cavern with a harsh glare. Then a spurting, tumbling stream of white-glowing vapor shot out to meet a cloudy patch of mist, and from the mist a steady, beating rain of shining liquid globules fell to collect rapidly in a pool in the hollow he had made. Warren set some more controls carefully, and went outside. A crowd of men had gathered already, more were streaming in swiftly from barracks about the hangar cavern. Thaen met him as he stepped from the ship.

	"But—but, Wah-ran, you are making tons of mercury—that requires far vaster energy than we have ever possessed. Yet your machine is small. How can you get more energy than the energy of the atom?"

	Warren smiled. "I will tell you later. Now see—that slanting plane of colored light? It is like a funnel. Tell that truck-ship to dump his load of scrap there."

	Thaen snapped something to a man nearby, who ran off toward the circling truck-ship, and shouted to the pilot. The pilot looked doubtfully about, then maneuvered over cautiously. He dumped his load of scrap metal and rock cautiously. It landed on the plane of force, slipped swiftly toward the sphere of energies, and—through the wall. As it passed, each piece seemed to tear a hole in the wall, and for that instant an intolerable glare of awful violet light beat out. The pilot threw his hands over his eyes with a cry of pain and rocked back and forth.

	"Oh lord!" gasped Warren, "I forgot that!"

	But there were no more accidents, and the mercury continued to rain down in a steady stream till the pool was near overflowing, while pipe-lines were rapidly laid to carry it away.

-

9

	That day Warren and Putney held a conference. Rejoicing men were swiftly draining away tons of mercury, while the great iron ingot beneath the Flame was slowly consumed. Warren looked at it a moment, and turned to Putney. "I think we can let these people have the Flame, don't you? It will mean life to them. They seemed honest, and likable."

	Putney stood thinking long and silently. Finally he turned to his friend and spoke slowly.

	"We give them the Flame. They will at once build a fleet of ships and attack the first enemy invasion with such effect it will be instantly and totally wiped out. Then scouts will come carefully and investigate. They will next lay a trap. How I don't know, but I do know that—say a thousand enemy ships—could capture even this if they went about it right.

	"They would do that. Then both sides have the Flame—and this whole planet would probably be wiped out.

	"Dozens of the ships would be sent through into that other space one way or another. I don't want that. I won't risk this ship of course. But they have atomic energy under control. I know how we can improve that for them in all probability, and have something nowhere near as deadly as this would be, and still give them mastery of the situation. Further, many of the weapons this ship carries would be suitable to that use. And I'll give them power for a magnetic beam that could pull that other planet out of position—and atomic energy that won't be so damned disappointing as Thaen said.

	"The great advantage would be that the enemy would never find out how the trick was done."

	Warren nodded silently. "You are, as usual, right. What's the scheme?"

	"Lithium-beryllium alloy. They already have atomic energy under control, remember?"

	Warren started. "Lord—sweet. But can they handle that?"

	"Let's see. Lithium protons—or particles, I've forgot	ten, but it doesn't matter, when bombarded by alpha particles or protons, one or the other, but the opposite anyway. Alpha particles it is I believe. It gives off alpha particles when bombarded by protons. Beryllium, when bombarded with alpha particles, gives off protons. Mix the two, and you have a self-maintaining atomic explosion. But it's almost purely electrical in nature. And you'll have a potential of hundreds of millions of volts; if you want it. They can improve that magnetic beam. They can do things with their electrical weapon. They can add to their armament atomic bombs—using the lithium-beryllium mixture—and some of our things. We can make them an absolute zero field for instance, which will protect them against those enemy heat rays. And we can use this ship at least a few times."

	Thaen appeared, with him a number of obviously important dignitaries. The ruling council of Anlo.

	They were genuinely wise men. They listened to Warren, and they listened to Putney, and they agreed that this secret of the Flame was too dangerous. They would not accept it. But this secret of a greater atomic power? The scientist the Terrestrians had asked for had arrived. Would the Terrestrians accompany them to their laboratories and power stations?

	Warren and Putney went, while the rest of the crew remained in charge of the ship. Down through the marvelous underground city, along spider-like bridges between the great tunnel walls, along moving walks that followed the main tunnel walls at one or more levels. The business district of shops and offices, then on out into the residential district. The tunnels were smaller here at first, with apartments lining the walls, lighted windows in the rocky walls looking cheerfully outward. On out, while their guides explained everything to them. These were the homes of the middle-class people, the people who worked in offices and shops, or owned small businesses. Young people, men with perhaps only one or two wives.

	Polygamy was the rule here, for good reason. The men were the warriors, and were killed all too rapidly. For years monogamy had been "maintained." But it was not, for the women inevitably outnumbered the men, and the race would have dwindled swiftly. Polygamy had come; the fighting men were expected to marry; it was encouraged. These were the apartments where lower-rank men lived. Then beyond that the walk carried them to the low-roofed, broad "suburban" caverns. These were some hundred feet in height, but nearly three hundred and fifty wide. Stone homes, left standing quite separate from the walls appeared, surrounded by low-cropped lawns and shrubbery growing luxuriously in the artificial sunlight of the great globes. These were extinguished every evening, turned to a low, soft glow. Children played here, climbing through the trees in a way that made the Terrestrians stare, for their long, prehensile toes made them seem like monkeys.

	Further still were the great estates, each in its own cavern, cut from the living rock, with half-lit tunnels that led to swimming pools, or planted grottoes.

	Thaen led them to his own estate, to show them what was possible, and for the first time they realized that Thaen was no ordinary army man. They had picked the ship he rode as the most obvious of the smaller machines. It had been obvious because he, as a scientist, had drawn nearer to investigate. He had been called out to investigate the new weapon the enemy had displayed, he was the head of the Scientific Weapons Division of the Anlonian forces.

	He had a beautiful house of carefully cut stone, set among trees nearly fifty feet tall. The main cavern was wide and large, and instead of the usual globes of light, a wavering curtain of bluish light hung over the entire roof. "It is something new- -we are just trying it out, and it is not public as yet," he explained. Dozens of tunnels led to pleasant little grottoes set with trees. Somewhere near ran an underground river. Thaen had tapped it for his swimming pool, flowing water, clear and cool on this hot planet.

	With wonderful skill these people had learned to advance all the pleasant aspects of subterranean life, and hide the difficulties.

	At the house Thaen introduced his five wives, and twelve children—two were sleeping. But he led the Terrestrians presently to a large tunnel that ran back far beyond the house, nearly half a mile into the native rock. A series of laboratories opened from it, but at the last and largest they stopped. Apparatus banked the walls, a desk set in one corner, and a large bookcase. In the center of the room was a small atomic power-plant.

	Thaen had been working on this, seeking to improve it. Quickly Warren and Putney examined everything. Finally Warren shook his head.

	"They beat me. With all their science, mathematics seems way behind. Look, they haven't got a calculating machine of any sort. I wonder if they have even developed tensors?"

	"What of it? You can laugh at their ignorance now—but they've had atomic energy for half a century—and you learned the control of space only a year ago."

	"What indeed. Let's show them that lithium-aluminum though."

	Warren had not come empty-handed. He had with him a small Flame apparatus, which he set up at once, and called for any matter. Thaen brought him half a dozen ingots of gold, nearly two hundred pounds. Warren looked at it, and laughed. He had to explain his laughter to Thaen, who laughed in turn. A world where gold had been used as money! A world where still, despite the fact that Warren's transmutation apparatus had made every element equally plentiful, people still persisted in hoarding all the gold that they could get!

	Warren set to work. In a few minutes one of the ingots was a mass of pure aluminum. The other was changed to lithium, which promptly covered over with a coat of oxide. The next step was to alloy them. Warren mixed them in about the proportions he thought would work best, then fused them instantly in a large crucible Thaen had supplied. The next step was harder. He wanted a fine powder. They solved it finally by powdering the metals fairly well, burning them, and collecting the oxides. The fused, glass-like result, was cooled, then ground as nothing before ever was, between two force-planes that reduced it to a powder each grain less than one ten millionth of an inch in diameter. The needed elements were there. The fact that oxygen was in combination made no difference.

	In the meantime, Thaen and his men had been setting up an atomic apparatus under Warren's direction in one of the laboratories. It was mounted on blocks of insulators ten feet high. Three feet from it was a solid silver shield a foot thick that completely surrounded it. This was suspended by insulators from the ceiling. A long, thin silver pipe led from a silver tankwell, and similarly insulated to the platform of foot-thick gold where the reaction was to take place. Here a standard atomic burner of very low power had been set up.

	The silver tank was filled with the aluminum-lithium fuel, the tiny valve adjusted, and a minute stream of power, so fine it flowed like a liquid, fell freely onto the gold, directly in the path of the atomic burner.

	Another, exactly similar system of fuel-feed was arranged, and a device added that let a stream of fuel into one feed, then cut off the supply when it was still nearly a foot short of reaching the scene of action. At once the other feed would start. Alternately, the two streams would supply it, so that if the Flame did try to strike back up the stream, it would not go far, nor -release much energy.

	Then they retired to safety. The television apparatus showed the young man calmly setting about his business. First he made the necessary adjustments on the regular atomic burner. Then, following instructions, he brought a pair of heavy carbon blocks within three inches of each other, and retired behind a lead screen. He started his atomic burner. A glare of blue ionization lit the room weirdly. Next he turned a small knob, and the aluminum-lithium combination began to feed. For perhaps a second nothing happened. Then with startling suddenness, an awful flame of ionization sprang up that blinded the television with its intensity; an earth-rocking roar came from the laboratory such that the rocks about them trembled. For five full seconds it lasted, and a blast of scorching heat reached down the corridor, then quiet resumed.

	"Good God! There isn't any lower power for that thing! What happened?" demanded Putney.

	"Forgot!" Warren was running. He leapt into the room, and behind the lead screen. He lifted the young assistant, and carried him out. A moment assured him the fellow was safe, only unconscious. The Release Flame cooled the room and the great silver screen in minutes. The silver screen looked tired. It drooped like a wilted flower, with down-hanging petals. The atomic burner was fused, and only a little puddle of glowing atoms revealed that the reaction was maintaining itself. Warren put that out with a force field generated by his Flame apparatus.

	"The answer is, Thaen, that the ionization made the current better able to leap the foot gap to the silver screen than the three-inch gap across the carbons. I had forgotten that. The heat released in the enclosed furnace there, melted the apparatus. I know how to make it now. But the plan must be vastly different."

	It was. For one thing, the entire apparatus was set up in a vacuum. Next it was arranged to work at a potential of nearly twenty-million volts. That eliminated the effects of the smashing speed of the protons and alpha particles thrown off. The voltage stopped them, leaving only the tremendous charge.

	Thaen made the next improvement. The apparatus was reduced to a size that a normal space ship could contain, by use of some of Anlo's wonderful insulating materials. In the end it was scarcely fifteen feet in cubic dimension, and capable of generating power at a rate truly comparable to the Prometheus'.

	Work was started at once on the ships. They were to be powered by this apparatus, the voltage being reduced to workable levels by means of a system of Anlonian condensers, charged in series and discharged in parallel. Curiously, within wide limits, no matter what power was wanted from the generator, it had the same cubic dimensions, for here it was the tremendous voltage that required elbow-room.

	The remodeling progressed rapidly—but not rapidly enough. A week later, Bay-Raonii attacked again.

	The Terrestrians were sleeping aboard the Prometheus that night, when the powerful, reverberating hum of the alarm signal sounded through the city. It was the low steady beat-beat-beat which meant a distant city was being attacked, not the roar of sound that would mean they were themselves attacked.

	Warren leaped to his feet, to meet Putney's startled eyes. They dressed quickly.

	"For one thing," Warren said, "we've got to know what it is the enemy have. I'm calling Thaen."

	He picked up a Anlonian radio and snapped out the call for Thaen. Presently the rolling bass of Thaen responded. "I come."

	Warren set to work. He had the ship in order, ready to lift when Thaen appeared. The Commander-in-Chief, Tepalor, was with him. The main fleet from the city had already gone.

	"It is Twar Peuowl. You know the way out. The locks are cleared for you," said Thaen.

	"Commander Tepalor, will you order that no Anlonian engage in the battle within ten miles of us? We wish to use weapons of much greater power than you have yet seen. We have never shown you our offensive weapons," said Warren. His fingers were busy directing the ship. He had established a resilient force-field about them, and was moving down the great entrance tunnel at a speed of nearly half a mile a second. As he finished his speech, he slowed, and shot abruptly upward and out. The stars of this world were beating down in wondrous multitude that lit the ground below them as the mountain slid silently behind.

	Silently Thaen pointed. Tepalor was using his radio. The Prometheus leapt forward under an acceleration of nearly half a mile a second. In five seconds Warren shut down the power, for the world was rocketing by them at an enormous speed. Five minutes later they passed the fleet that had left before them. "Are you through?" asked Warren presently. Tepalor nodded, and Warren threw three switches. Putney was busy setting up fields at his board. Thaen pointed again, but Warren shook his head, and pointed to the instruments.

	"Something is wrong," he said. "This shows a far greater disturbance over there." The ship had turned suddenly and was fleeing like a frightened thing.

	"Stud 15 is the cold, Ran 1 is the pure force shield, 2 the radiation mirror. I'll analyze, and set up anything you need. Also work rays, of course."

	Far ahead a glow appeared, the dawn-horizon. They rocketed across into light and shot around the world. The enemy came into sight, and they saw something huge and round and black that sat on the ground, a segment of a sphere, a black greyness with stars of illumination in it.

	"An absorption field—energy drain. That city couldn't signal. Meanwhile they are trying to break them up, most of their ships are under that I'll bet."

	Warren grinned, and moved the Prometheus into position. He was small, and close to the ground, and the enemy far above did not see him. "Putt, will you just pour a bit of energy into that field, and see if we can't open something up. They've probably got their apparatus radiating heat into space. Just pour so blasted much heat in there it will blow up, will you. Put two force-planes right in the field itself, and push 'em together. Use all the power the Flame will carry safely."

	Putney smiled, and set up his constants skillfully. He pushed a little button. Behind him half a dozen relays clicked, and suddenly the Flame was whirring in deep-throated protest. Before them, the black dome, of the energy-absorption field suddenly became a shining incandescent surface of light over its entire surface, and simultaneously the half-dozen ships far above all burst into instantaneous incandescence. The dome disappeared and two sheets of wavering, intolerable radiance fluttered where it had been.

	"Oh, oh, naughty boy got his wrist smacked that time," said Warren cheerfully.

	Very hard. The Bay-Raonii were getting along nicely, and everything had been going their way. They had put the blanket down while they were still so far away the men of the city had not detected them. After that they simply came over, and sat down on the city. The forts stuck their noses up through the sand, a terrific blast of electric fire stabbed right down through the Anlonian static sheet, and blew them up. That was something newer still. Further, their usual screens were protecting them against rays of all sorts with the usual effectiveness, simply sending the ray back where it came from. The Bay-Raonii heat rays had started work early, and were going at it hopefully by the time Warren arrived on the scene.

	Then their screen evaporated in a flash of astonishing incandescence, and the planes out there that had been supporting it simply evaporated so quickly they never guessed that trouble was coming.

	The Bay-Raonii weren't long locating Warren. Three huge ships started for him with everything they had. They opened with their heat ray, which simply disappeared silently somewhere in between the two ships (Warren had a cold field, which was simply an energy absorption field of an improved type), followed that with a few hundred high explosive shells, which stopped abruptly halfway between the two forces, and started back on their course with mathematical exactness, having been bounced from a force-wall like a sheet of the finest rubber.

	The Bay-Raonii began to take notice of that impudent little ship. Maybe there was a connection between the sudden and complete collapse of the force-wall and the appearance of the newcomer.

	At about that moment Warren settled into his chair, snapped over a tumbler which locked his controls to hold him in position temporarily, and got to work. First he set up a sphere of pure force about two miles in diameter, then he maintained it and simply contracted it. One of the Bay-Raonii ships suddenly dented in like a broken can, tumbled end over end, and blew up in a terrific explosion. Three others followed it in rapid succession, and then all the enemy ships turned on Warren with all the unpleasantness they had in stock. Half a dozen simply redirected their heat rays; most of them shifted to the flare of electric flame that had wiped out the forts.

	"What is that?" asked Warren as the electric flare turned sharply aside, and bent off a screen Warren had set up.

	"Protons," snapped Putney. "Twenty-mega-volt at that!" Warren immediately altered the constants of the force-sphere he had built around the Bay-Raonii, and it closed in rapidly, almost instantaneously. But nearly two hundred smaller ships were left! Though fully as many battered, crushed wrecks fell downward when he released it, the others floated quite unharmed!

	"Putt—they weren't touched!" gasped Warren. Instantly he set up a plane that should have neatly bisected the nearest of the Bay-Raonii. The plane was given a faint blue luminescence, and it was quite visible. It was an absolutely flat disc half a mile in diameter. It ran exactly on a plane through the long axis of the ship—but it was not where the ship was. There was just a peculiar hole in the plane.

	"Good lord, what does that mean?" Putney demanded. Warren was busy. He was setting up a test field, exactly in the center of that ship—or it should have been. His test field reported absolutely and completely nothing. Its very negativeness was a report. It showed that it was beyond time, and space. It had, in some mysterious manner, been cast into that fifth dimension, timelessness.

	"That's that. But that just means our forces don't work. Uh. Say, Putt, do you notice we are getting warm? They've been slinging everything they had at us for the last five minutes, and now that heat is beginning to get through. Build up that field a little, will you?"

	Putney looked at instruments and shook his head. "Can't. To absorb a certain amount of energy, that isn't too great, that field's fine. But under a concentrated beam of thousands of horsepower, it just won't carry power without losing its characteristics. Apparatus just won't handle it. Remember that is generated by mechanical apparatus, not by the Flame itself. Those ships are bigger, and carry bigger apparatus. We can't compete there."

	"Those screens worry me. I wonder what will go through them? I'm going to try," said Warren.

	Now there were five projectors on the nose of the Prometheus for the sole purpose of sending rays. Two were run by the great Flame in the power room. They were the lesser projectors, for they projected rays controlled by apparatus. But three were run by individual flames. Warren's fingers moved like lightning, and five terrific blasting streams of energy shot forth, five different beams. One was a cosmic ray concentrated in a pencil of atom-smashing power. It struck a giant Bay-Raonii battle-ship, and the vessel screamed in tortured agony; it shivered over its entire length as the awful stabbing tongue of cosmic energy washed through it. The atoms smashed into individual tortured protons and electrons under flooding billions of horsepower that smashed through their force-mirror as though it were not there. It crumbled to atomic powder, the atoms smashed to individual protons and electrons, and all reunited in a single intolerable burst of ultra-violet radiation.

	And one beam was a beam of pure radio-frequency energy, not generated by apparatus, but in space itself, by a Flame that hurled nearly half an ounce of iron into pure energy. That lashed at the screen in a concentrated needle of searing power that blasted its way through simply because only 99.98 percent of incident energy was reflected. It struck the ship beyond, and in an instant there was an incandescent hole drilled through it. The shield fell, and the machine burst into white-hot gas.

	The third beam was a strange thing. It was like the evil arm of a great, green octopus. It reached out slowly, drifting outward, and touched a ship's screen. It spread adhesively over the screen like a running glue, and ate through it to the ship behind. The ship glowed softly in green light, darted away, and escaped the beam; but the clinging radiance hung, and like rotting flesh the green spread and grew brighter, until the ship was torn open and fell a green-glowing rotten fruit to the ground ten miles below.

	And the fourth beam alone did not have effect, for it was a pure heat beam that struck a ship's screen, and was nearly all reflected; and what leaked through the screen was reflected from metal walls.

	The fifth beam was a true disintegration ray. It did not glow with the harsh, solid brilliance of a lash of cosmic force, nor with the sticky green of the other beam, but with a soft green-blue light that passed through the force-mirror with a slight sputtering and struck the ship. And the instant it touched, a stupendous explosion echoed that blew that ship, and two ships within two hundred yards of it to tiny fragments. The beam had released the molecular bonds that had held the steel of its walls as a solid, and the steel became a gas under a pressure equal to its strength, which was sixty tons per square inch. When nearly a thousand tons of gas under a pressure of that order is released suddenly, the results are awesome.

	Bay-Raonii had had enough. The ships turned and fled into space with all possible acceleration. And the Prometheus followed easily, without a sign of strain. A great spaceship suddenly swerved from its path and crashed in a flash of light against its neighbor, and then suddenly all the ships darted upward far faster, toward a common point. They reached it with astounding speed, for the attractive field Warren was using caused an acceleration nearly fifty times as great as that of the enemy ships. In less than ten seconds a single great mass of smashed steel was falling to the planet nearly forty miles below.

	Thaen was staring with wide eyes throughout. Tepalor sat stunned in his seat. Slowly he gasped as they descended gently to the city far below. For the first time Warren noticed that for miles around the ground was blasted and bare. Smoking grasses alone remained. Directly below the ground were glowing dull red, little tongues of flame licked up some five miles away.

	Tepalor shook himself. "Grr—men of another world, we want no such thing as this. Urr. That was no battle. That was the loosing of the thunderbolt on the field of grain. Death reaping with his scythe. You fought them, and smashed them, and the waste energy has set the ground smoking for miles about, the diluted, reflected rays. That green ray—it ate like a blighting rot. It was unholy. This thing we cannot have. It is not meant for our people. With such, a world could be wiped out and left as nothing, as wholly vanished as the ship that hard, bright blue ray touched. A tongue of flame—and gone completely.

	"And that other—a terrific blast, and only dust so fine it was not to be seen, mere dancing specks in the light of the sun, and glowing motes that were mighty atomic engines. Their shields fought, and crumpled as the strength of the ant before the tread of the unheeding man."

	"Put very well, Commander of Anlo. That is the true case. As the insect is to the man, are those ships to us. Our power is as much greater, as the power of the man."

	"I would look at this engine that has done this," said Tepalor.

	MacLaurin showed him his engine-room. It was clean, and shining, and noiseless save for the ceaseless soft whirr of the glinting iridescent whirlwind of atoms vanishing forever. Tepalor stared for minutes. "This is the same block of fuel that I saw when first you came to this planet?" he asked quietly.

	"Aye." said MacLaurin, and nodded. It was scarcely half gone. It seemed to have been just thus when the ship landed.

	"Did you use all your power?"

	"Far from that, Sir. Perhaps one thousandth."

	The commander shuddered, looked at the smoking ground and heaped wreckage below, and went away. The air pumps chuckled contentedly, and the Flame burned softly, steadily, with a gentle sighing and a myriad whirling glinting sparks.

-

10

	Back in the city once more, work on the new ships of Anlo was pressed forward. Meanwhile Warren was holding numerous conferences with the men of the Protective Science department.

	Having seen Warren's terrible weapons in action, Thaen thought far less of their own weapons now. But he said, with reason, that he wanted none of Warren's weapons for which Warren could show him no defense.

	"For were one of our ships to be captured, and the secrets learned, then those same terrible weapons would fight back at us, and there would be no defense."

	Warren nodded his understanding. "Quite reasonable, Thaen. Now for the cosmic ray I showed you, I can give you no defense that purely atomic engines can develop. The power of a cosmic ray is so great it penetrates every atom and any screen of force within the strength of atomic engines. For the three weapons I think you can best use, I will show you defenses. These three are: the green ray of atomic instability. It is a sort of transmutation ray. It starts the process of transmutation, and the thing spreads swiftly. The atoms transmit it one to another, but the widening sphere soon loses power, and in a short time it stops, for there are always many atoms nearby to drink the power loosed in the transmutation of others. In iron, nickel and cobalt it is very slow and dies out almost at once. In heavy atoms it spreads swiftly and is hard to stop. In uranium, it is almost explosively violent and cannot be quenched by any force you have before the fuel is gone. In steel walls, the heavy atoms of tungsten, molybdenum and other metals supply the fuel. In atoms lighter than atomic weight 50 it will not maintain itself, for their energy is consumed.

	"I will show you a simple screen which merely converts the transmutation—projectiles—into harmless electric charges. The beam is actually a stream of peculiarly warped space fields, or charges. They are, one might say, deceased electrons. I will show you a simple force-field that converts them to harmless things.

	"The radio-energy heat ray you can use, of course, and no reflector of metal will stop that, for it penetrates the metal. A screen is easily built. Your power is greater now than the Bay-Raonii, and you can readily drive their screens to pieces with your power.

	"Next and last of the three I now have, is the explosion ray. I will show you the secret of that, and I will show you how to screen. But do not put screening apparatus in your ships this first time. Not until they have actually been captured in some way, not until the enemy has samples of your weapons, are you to screen against them. Else you give him both weapon and defense simultaneously." Thaen nodded in approval.

	"Now one more thing I have to say. You do not yet know how you can protect your homes against the heat of the exploding sun during the Great Catastrophe. I will show you. I will give you a means of making the field of absolute zero, and before I leave, I will give you the Flame to run it."

	"No. We do not want the Flame." said Thaen. "It is too powerful."

	Warren frowned in thought. "I will give each city a Flame which will supply all the power needs for fifty millennia of earth time, for one hundred of your years. These Flames will maintain the Cold Field. They will maintain your supply of any element you need. They will protect your entire city with force fields that nothing on this planet could crush.

	"At the end of that time the sun will have settled to stability. You can emerge in safety surely. The Flames will go out, for want of fuel. And I shall arrange it that no man may reach the Flame, nor the mechanism of the Flame, nor the mechanisms that the Flames support, save with the aid of a second Flame, until the fuel has gone, and the Flame has died. Will that be good?"

	"How is such a thing possible? For one full hundred years! So vast a time?"

	"In each city a great tower of solid iron will be built, half a mile in height. At the peak the Flame shall float, supporting about it on a plane of Force the apparatus that controls it. As the circuits roll on, the Flame will slowly eat its way downward, till it passes one after another of the marks we shall put on the tower, and at last reaches the floor of the cavern. When the last iron goes, the dying energy of the Flame will destroy the apparatus that has controlled it through the ages."

	"That is good." Thaen nodded.

	In less than three weeks' time the fleet of the new Anlonian battle craft were ready. One from each of the ten major cities.

	Ten huge ships that dwarfed even the greatest of their old machines, and each enormous in power. Their great new atomic engines gave until now undreamed of power. And each was equipped with the deadly beams Warren had made for them, and with small, rapid-firing guns that hurled shells some three inches in diameter that would, on striking any body, or having travelled a full ten seconds, release a horrific hell of blasting electrical energy, the energy of blasting atoms, pounds of atoms. One of these shells would blast a hole half a mile across in solid rock.

	They were prepared now to resist any attack from Bay-Raonii.

-

11

	Atkill turned a withering gaze on Texas in the privacy of their ship. He had made it their headquarters, and with reason. The Bay-Raonii had accepted him as a superhuman, a being capable of destroying men and materials with a mere glance and a concentration of his will. But Texas was not living up to his part too well. He lacked the harshness Atkill demanded.

	"Tex, will you please, dear lad, remember that you are not their friend. We aren't friends. We are masters. Don't even pretend to learn their language. They must learn ours. I have learned theirs, both their own Bay-Raonii, and that Anlo-Raonii thing. I understand everything they say—though they don't know it—but I never speak to them in anything but English. We won't condescend to speak with them in any language but the language of the gods."

	"Uh. Right good idea, but I do like to talk now an then, yuh know," said Texas sourly. "Anyway, what's the plan?"

	"I told you their situation. They want—have to have—that planet Anlo, but the fools out there are stubborn, and they haven't been able to drive them off. Just after we came, remember, we got reports of the very complete destruction of one of their fleets by some new weapon the Anlo had discovered. Now I'm going to be the Lord High Muckamuck. And to do it, I've got to give them someplace to live. So we're taking Anlo. I've got them started on the Flame ships now. I'm giving them only some of the weapons, but enough—more than enough. Meanwhile, I'm working out some stuff for this ship. And they are building me another. It will be nearly one thousand feet long. Fifty skilled workmen will be employed to install the private weapons. And those men will never tell what they installed, for—they will vanish."

	Tex wrinkled in annoyance. "I don't mind that there heat thing so much, nor the knock-out thing. But that thing that makes a man burn like a barrel of gas gets me, and that thing that makes 'em just go poof and they ain't gets me, it makes my belly wiggle."

	Atkill smiled. "Get over it. We are' gods. The gods do as they will, and are not disputed. The knock-out is just a paralysis ray—and quite harmless. It is a warning. The thing that makes them burn is a cosmic that turns them into hydrogen and they burn. The other is just a simple transmutation field. I could make them change to hydrogen with that if I wished, but I usually change them to oxygen."

	Tex looked unhappy. "What th' hell did yuh do to that guy that tried to stab yuh yesterday? Uh—he just turned stiff, and then went all brown, and glowed—and just blew away like a brown gas, and stank."

	"That," said Atkill sharply, "was a warning. That was the tenth assassin I had after me that one day, and I was getting peeved. I have a little electro-static balance in the apparatus you know—an idea borrowed from Warren by the way—that tells me when some one comes near. So when that fellow tried creeping up on me, I got peevish, and turned him into bromine."

	Atkill suddenly stiffened as a red light began to glow on the panel before him. "Damn!" he muttered. He snapped on a screen, that glowed in dark, somber red, and black. Three strange long-necked Bay-Raonii were training some sort of a weapon on the ship. Atkill stepped to the open lock and through it, and looked toward the men. He could not see them in the dark, but suddenly they began to glow in weird, greenish colors. Their startled faces looked up stupidly.

	"Your masters are stupid," said Atkill calmly, in perfect Bay-Raonii. "I am Atkill."

	The figures of the men began to glow more vividly. They stiffened suddenly immobile. The one on the left began to shake violently; his outline grew hazy and a scream rang out from his open mouth. Presently it stopped, and he slumped suddenly downward; but as he fell, the light that shone from him grew brilliant, and the clothes he wore, and the flesh of his body, melted like snow in the path of a heat-ray, and a skeleton fell to the ground surrounded by bits of metal and glass and crystal.

	The one on the right shrieked, trembled, and melted as had the first, till a bare skeleton fell to the ground.

	"Go, and tell your masters I am Atkill!" roared the Terrestrian. Something gripped the remaining Bay-Raonii in a vise of force and hurled him half a mile away, to land dripping in a small lake.

	Atkill returned calmly. "They will never learn," he said shaking his head. "Sometimes I doubt whether even I can teach them."

	"They don't seem bright," Texas said, and started toward his room.

	But Atkill was at the works early the next morning, superintending the construction of his giant ship. He did a great deal of the work himself with the aid of a Flame he had started. At night the Flame was protected by a force-screen only he, equipped with another Flame, could enter. The great hull was shaping up quickly; it was a skeleton now, coated in places with heavy armor of six-inch beryllium plates, hardened with several other elements, all light in weight. He knew the power and results of the green beam of atomic decay that he would give his forces to use. The beryllium of which this ship was made he had transmuted for himself and no other ship would be so constructed.

	That day saw the hull Finished, and the next the control apparatus was being installed. The second night Atkill and Texas had moved into the new ship, and their crew of workers were locked in the ship. Those fifty workers would never leave.

	A fleet of twenty giant Flame-powered battleships was being constructed by the Bay-Raonii, under Atkill's distant supervision. These Bay-Raonii, like the Anlonians, had never conceived of space as Terrestrians had learned it. While Atkill had learned this quickly enough, he had made not the slightest effort to enlighten them. He had merely shown them how to make the necessary controls for their ships. They were being given only the lesser weapons possible to the Flame, and small flame apparatus, for Atkill had no intention of letting them even approach his ship in power.

	In a month the fleet was completed, and Atkill's great cruiser was finished as well. And the great fleet of ships assembled near Forn-Karno, the capital of Bay-Raonii. The Emperor held court here, and his magnificent entourage appeared outside the palace to greet the ships. They sank gently to the ground in the great Pallada Nuriol before the palace. They formed a giant square of ships, about the reviewing stand that had been set up in the exact center of the Nuriol. The Emperor's party was already assembled there, and as the crews of the ships stepped smartly to the ground beside their charges, the Emperor raised the ancient Ye-Raonii in salute. This was a shaft of pure, crystallized light, a wondrous shining thing of golden radiance, capped by an enormous ruby-colored stone, set in claws of pure iridium. The metal had been scratched with thousands of tiny lines, so that the surface gleamed with shifting, glowing colors.

	The crews bowed down before the Ye-Raonii, and a great chant went up from the thousands of people congregated about.

	Then from far above in space, a thin, ghostly radiance settled down on all the square, and the Ye-Raonii flamed suddenly with great shooting flames of golden light; it the entourage of Harum Dichir in glowing waves. A cry of entourage of Harum Dichir in glowing waves. A cry of wonder and anger rolled up from the assembled Bay-Raonii.

	And out of the sky came Atkill's great ship. A plane of glowing golden force picked up the platform of Harum Dichir, and carried it through the air till it hung above the broad steps of the palace. In the exact center of the Pallada Nuriol there was a vacant square nearly two thousand feet across. In the exact center of that space, a structure of glowing forces appeared, forces glowing red, and gold and green and blue. A titanic dome a thousand feet high, mounted on a great base fifteen hundred feet across shaped as a regular octagon. A single great arch one hundred feet in height was left as an opening to the dome fifty feet above the ground as it opened onto the great base.

	The sky that had been white with the eternal mists of Bay-Raonii suddenly was darkening over; a chill wing sprang into being, and in the space between the inner and outer force-walls of the Dome, a fierce glow was materializing, and a dark grey cloudiness. The wind increased, and roared shrilly about the palace and the great ships, and across the vast open space of the Pallada Nuriol. Rolling thunders and great jagged flashes of lightning tore from cloud to cloud far above, and the hot, damp air of Bay-Raonii was chill as the damp mist increased.

	A thin shining layer was forming on the surface of the ground under the great octagonal base. Swiftly it swirled thicker, as a snow of dark metal fell to it, and welded under unseen forces. More and more rapidly it grew, and the shrill of the winds howled louder. Jagged lightning slashed downward in protest at the glowing gold of the giant force-dome. Where it touched, the gold of the dome glowed brighter, and the lightning was swallowed unheeded. A steady black snow of metal fell to the octagon base, and it built up swiftly to shining metal, silvery and bright. The clouds above were black now, sweeping in swift circles, a gigantic cyclonic whirlpool of clouds. A great black stem was reaching down from the clouds, reaching like the stem of a maelstrom for the very peak of the dome. With a shriek and roar it touched and held, and as the blackness sucked in, it vanished momentarily in a soft glow that shifted to black raining metal.

	The whirlpool of energies grew, and the metal base was finished while now a shining layer of metal was filling the walls of the dome itself.

	Swiftly this filled higher and higher, till the dome was completed, a shiny dome of solid, silvery metal resting on a great metal base.

	And in an instant the whole great structure blazed white-hot, yet no heat reached out to the watching people. As swiftly as it had heated, it cooled once more and the metal was firm and smooth and shone with a soft, lustrous surface like velvet metal.

	The colored forces vanished in a twinkling, and other forces set to work, forces that left shining, brilliant surfaces in their path. Swift forces that painted scenes and pictures on the walls with a gigantic brush. And over the arched entrance appeared gigantic, radiant characters, strange to the Bay-Raonii, that spelled out ATKILL.

	And now those who were placed that they might see what went on within the Dome, saw a great solid ring of fully shining grey metal materialize on the smooth metal of the base, a ring a hundred feet in diameter.

	And a giant voice rang out that could be heard over all the vast Pallada Nuriol. In perfect Bay-Raonii it spoke. "This is the place of Atkill. Those who seek me, shall find me here."

	The great ship sank slowly, and settled to the metal base beside the dome, and a wall of jet blackness descended over both ship and Dome.

	Behind that wall, Atkill and the fifty workers were busy. Great panels of apparatus were swiftly moved to the floor within the ring of iron Atkill had laid down on the surface of the metal base. In half an hour the apparatus was ready and connected. In fifteen, more forces had cut a clean plug of the fifty-foot thick metal out of the base and left a slanting tunnel ten feet in diameter that led down into the solid metal base. More apparatus was installed in the room that was cut out at the end of this sloping tunnel.

	And a change was made in the ring of iron. It was lifted and a well sunk that it would fit in exactly, a well fifty feet deep that led down through the entire thickness of the base. The iron ring was built up until it was a hollow cylinder that slipped snugly and smoothly into this well, leaving some six inches projecting above the surface, and fifty feet below. A piston of force would support it and feed it upward as needed.

	The apparatus in the center of the ring was covered over by a metal dais that rose in tiers. On the peak a throne of resilient forces that glowed deep violet would soon be established. The next step was completing the living quarters below the surface of the base, deep in the metal. The disposal of the great quantities of metal was not difficult; it was simply re-transmuted to oxygen, and escaped.

	At last the Flame was established. Over the top of the entire great ring of iron, the Flame burned, arching in a roof of crystallized light a hundred feet above the dais. Reaching the control from the hidden branch passage below the metal surface, a slanting passage that, fifteen feet below the surface, cut through the iron cylinder that fed the Flame, Atkill came to set up the Force structures he wanted. First were the deep violet resilient forces of the Throne. Next was a throne, but was outside the Flame. This was the throne of Harum Dichir. And then two lesser seats, one blacker than space itself, one of continually pulsing golden light.

	Then a wall of force to support the great dome, for the metal alone could never have borne the strain. And from the peak of the dome a giant beam of deep crimson light stabbed upward. Now it was lost in the black of the screening field that hid their operations, but soon it would be a beacon visible for a billion miles in space.

	From the floor of the dome to the roof, two great columns reached, one an angry crimson, and one of pulsing yellow. One was Death, and one was Life, a beam of stimulating, lifting radiation.

	The dome was ready. Seated within that circle of the Flame, no conceivable force or thing could reach him. No heat and no cold could reach through, no beam nor ray, and no particle of matter. Atkill was ready, and the screen of black dropped away. A slow chant sprang up outside, and Harum Dichir came with his party up the great broad steps that Atkill had cut in the metal of the base.

	"This is the place of Judgement and of Life and of Death," Atkill said through the great amplifier he had installed, and his Bay-Raonii was perfect. Not for nothing had he studied some fifteen languages on Earth. "Harum Dichir shall judge ye, with Bartir Kenlar and with Preylu Thilam. And they shall direct ye to Life or to Death, and if their judgment be good, and I concur, so shall ye go."

	Harum Dichir was lifted suddenly in a mantle of white light that carried him swiftly to the great white throne, and the two other men, the Counselors of Justice, were whirled each to his throne, Bartir Kenlor, the prosecutor to his black throne, and Preylu Thilam to his pulsing bench of gold, whence he would argue in defense of the accused.

	That day Pryd Wranlor, the Commander of Bay-Raonii's forces, was summoned, and the order for attack on Anlo was given. That night, when Anlo rose in the sky above Forn-Karno, the great fleet set out into space, two thousand great ships powered by the Flame.

	And one more ship powered by a greater Flame, and with vastly greater weapons. Atkill was going to make sure the attack would be a success.

-

12

	Warren was aroused suddenly by the steady throb of the great alarms sounding through the city. Putney was already swinging his feet to the floor as the hum of the Anlonian radio told them Thaen was calling.

	"Yes?" Warren picked up the set with a single motion as he jumped from his bunk.

	"They have not reached Anlo yet. Your detector field flung a hundred million miles into space detected them; our telescopes spotted them. They are coming slowly. They are like no previous Bay-Raonii ships; they are larger, and we can find no evidences of magnetic driving rays."

	Warren was in the control room in a moment, setting up fields. In thirty seconds he located the direction of the ships, and Putney had joined him. In twenty more his face was pale and Putney was staring at meters. In that time they had learned one thing that told the whole secret.

	"Thaen—Thaen—I gave you plans for the screen mechanism, you made it up and had it made ready to install?"

	"Yes."

	"Order no ship to leave the ground without it!"

	Thaen was puzzled but he sent the order at once, then cut back to Warren. "Why?"

	"The Bay-Raonii have the Flame!" Warren shouted. "How they got it I cannot guess—yes—by the Lord, I can! They have small Flames, their Flames are not as good as ours, but they are terrible none the less. Your ships must use all the power they dare on their screens, they must above all leave the magnetic beam alone! It will be more dangerous to them than to the Bay-Raonii now. Come, for I am going at once."

	Thaen came within five minutes. The Anlonian fleet had not moved but men were swarming about the ships, cursing, struggling, working with bulky, powerful apparatus ready to install and which needed only three connections, but which was heavy and required time.

	The Prometheus rocketed out the tunnel and into the open air at terrific speed. The ship shot out into space instantly, straight for the fleet, and when speed had been attained, Warren shut off the driving power and coasted outward.

	From a million miles he explored the fleet. It did not take him long to learn that two thousand ships were weakly powered, for Flame ships, and that one was a giant of power. It had not the power of the Prometheus, for Atkill had not had time to experiment with the Flame, and had not learned the trick of control that permitted Warren to get nearly fifty times as much power from a given Flame. But Atkill's ship was larger. Warren began to explore that larger ship. He had a television screen set up before him, and now there appeared on it pictures as of a glass ship, wherein the walls were bare, dim shadows, save where it was focused, and there perfect vision was obtained. Only about the neighborhood of the Flame was the device inoperative. Where, nothing showed beyond strange, distorted shadows. Atkill was in the control room at the bow. "He escaped!" gasped Warren.

	"I know it. I see where I was wrong—and right," nodded Putney. "The men with him went mad as I said. I should have had more confidence in my beliefs. They were dead. Atkill had to dispose of them. There was no lock on his ship, save the little garbage lock. The men had to be pushed out through that. The Bay-Raonii must have given him power to start again. Those fragments of broken ship that fooled US were fragments of Bay-Raonii ships. By some ill-chance we never got a piece of a Bay-Raonii. Or perhaps all Bay-Raonii dead had been collected by their own men.

	"And he's given the Bay-Raonii the Flame—but a mighty weak one, I wonder why?"

	Warren had been watching. Several Bay-Raonii were about, and he had seen their attitude toward Atkill. "He's set himself up as over-lord. He could, with the Flame. But he's not giving them anything free. And he's making sure they don't turn on him by only giving them half power." Atkill had been manipulating instruments with sudden interest. Putney watched his a moment. "He's spotted us. Look—he's shocked. He realizes an Anlonian ship has him spotted—and has the Flame." Atkill was making more tests. Putney watched his instruments. "Examining the size and power of our Flame. Doesn't like it does he?" Atkill was pursing his lips thoughtfully. Suddenly dawning understanding spread over his face, and a wide grin split his features. His lips moved silently. "By God—Warren," quoted Putney, reading his moving lips.

	Atkill was suddenly laughing, and turned to a radio set beside him. Warren snapped a tumbler that put his receiver in operation.

	"Warren—Warren—Warren—James Atkill calling Warren—" Atkill's voice came through.

	"Looking at you now, Atty," said Warren quietly. Atkill jumped, and looked around him annoyed.

	"Don't jump, Atty, we won't bite you yet."

	"Hmmm—you are watching me, aren't you. Warren, you are a good man. I don't see how you do it. I haven't spotted anything that will look through metal yet. Well—let's try this." Atkill's hand reached for a tumbler and through it. His image blurred, dimmed, and was scarcely visible. Warren increased his power a trifle, and the image was clear again. Atkill solemnly winked his left eye.

	"The left," said Warren, slightly bored. "We call that field X-394-21. It won't stop this, though it will stop most radiation. Atkill, what are you doing out here now?"

	"Going after some stubborn people that won't let these friends of mine land."

	"Why—they were once allowed to land and they tried to kill off their hosts. That's not polite, so the Anlonians haven't asked 'em back. We are here trying to help the Anlonians."

	"Oh, that's too bad, Warren. You know we have two thousand ships—besides this. You'd better hang off while we settle it, because that one ship of yours can't overcome my two thousand, and further, the Anlonians won't stand a chance now. I see they haven't the Flame. I've detected only one little one on Anlo. And the old atomic engines won't stand the chance of a cake of ice in a star's center."

	"Call off your dogs, Atkill, and I'll show you how to get home. You'll never find out without calculating machines, which I see you haven't got," said Putney quietly.

	"I have a home back on the planet. I've left my friends back there."

	"Friend, Atty, friend?" asked Putney. "His name, I believe is Texas. You didn't leave the calculating machines there, because you'd want those right under your wings, you know."

	Atkill shrugged and grinned. "You're right, little man. That bluff didn't work. But here's one that isn't bluff. In the next five or ten years I can make calculating machines, and learn how to get home. In the meantime, I've got a darned nice time here, high Muckamuck stuff you know. I've always wanted to be a big frog in a little pond when I found I couldn't be the big frog in the big pond. I like it here, and when the Bay-Raonii move out here, everything will be fine."

	"They won't," said Warren. "We're going to stop that." Atkill laughed, and shut off his radio. "I don't like that," said Putney.

	"Do I?" asked Warren annoyed. He continued to watch Atkill, and signaled Thaen to call the Anlonian fleet. The fleet was not entirely ready yet, but some quarter of the ships were ready, and started. Warren told Thaen the best plan would be to have them wait in the atmosphere for the others. The Bay-Raonii were coming only slowly now.

	In ten minutes the entire fleet reported ready, and were waiting directly below the Bay-Raonii fleet.

	"Good," said Putney. "Have them maneuver laboriously and act as much as possible like only slightly modified atomic ships. Atkill knows we haven't given them the Flame. He has evidently warned the Bay-Raonii to watch out, however."

	The Bay-Raonii entered the atmosphere scarcely five minutes later. They started for the Anlonian fleet, leaving Warren and Putney dangerously alone. Atkill hung on the outskirts of the battle, and sent his rays down. Warren and Putney were kept busy at first stopping those rays.

	"Terrestrian or not, he's going home!" snapped Warren finally. The Prometheus withdrew suddenly the screen h had maintained to stop Atkill's rays, and turned everything it could muster into a driving, searing cosmic ray. It struck a screen that flamed into instantaneous fire half a mile in diameter. It was radiating so much pure heat that all the screens of the battling ships below flamed in defense. But it stopped the cosmic.

	Warren sent a flat wall of force at the ship with a velocity slightly less than that of light. It crashed into a sphere of force around Atkill's ship, and exploded into a blast of energy that half-fused the rock of the planet below. Momentarily both fleets below were forced to give up their battle, while the giants above clashed, for their own defense screens were required in full to protect against the waste energy of the greater struggle.

	Warren's fingers were living lightning playing on an organ of cosmic forces. He tried his beam of radio frequency energy, but it was stopped in a terrific cascade of flying energy; he shifted finally to the simplest means of attack. He started all three self-powered bow reflectors on the radio-frequency energy and ran them straight up the spectrum. They reached infra-heat and slipped through Atkill's interference shield only to be bounced from a screen of pure reflection that coated his ship itself. The waste heat that leaked through was absorbed by a cold field. The ship and its crew were temporarily blinded with light. Ultra-violet light was absorbed by the metal a bit better than the infra-heat, but not too well. Next came X-rays, and they rebounded from the reflection-screen. Gamma-rays followed with the same result.

	Warren snapped out a curse. "We've got his beams tied in there while he's defending himself, but we can't open his shell."

	Atkill opened it long enough to send out a stabbing cosmic that made the Flame in the power room grumble, and exploded the thin traces of the atmosphere about them into a sea of ions and blue hydrogen flame. Then Atkill tried a little heat. Their cold field had been out, but it went through that in a sputter of blasted energy and struck the reflection screen Putney had been setting up. Simultaneously, the leaking energy that got through the reflection heated the metal walls through red heat so rapidly they were yellowish before Putney set up another cold field in them and chilled them once more.

	Atkill went through the same performance on his own account. Warren smiled, and called to Korbes. "The repeater." A moment later faint shocks shook the ship, and simultaneously a seething hell developed around Atkill's ship, a blasting electric fire that reached out mile-long arms of fire. Atkill's rays stopped abruptly. Dimly, through the various layers of fire, they could see that his outer shield was being rapidly disintegrated. The force-wall did not like that blasting electric-field strain that was pulling it to pieces. Warren sent the hottest radio beam he could get down the channel of the terrific stream of atomic bombs the three-inch repeating rifle was sending. The lace-work in the screen became a distinct hole. The energy absorption screen behind it was sputtering violently, and beyond that white-hot metal began to drip off.

	Atkill started to move. He went hurriedly at his best acceleration, and Warren followed. But even he could easily outdo Atkill's best acceleration, since the Prometheus was equipped with the artificial gravity acceleration, which Atkill did not know of, they could not use their repeater, since the shells were rapidly outdistanced. Warren set up a force shield in front of Atkill and put in plenty of power. Atkill simply blasted at it with all the energy he had, and succeeded in breaking through.

	But it slowed him down—and a shell caught up with him. The rear of his ship was not completely protected, since his power was, necessarily, being used in blasting a hole in the force wall before him. A stream of some ten shells. The first eight or nine lashed out with their colossal electric and atomic fire, with the result that a hole was cut through the force-screen protecting the ship. The tenth got through successfully, weakened, but still there. It melted off about one third of Atkill's ship.

	Atkill tried a last weapon. It was a half-ton block of iron mounted with a Flame—AND NO CONTROL! It came hurtling back toward the Prometheus, blazing higher in a terrible crescendo of escaping energy. Wild, free Flame of utter destruction of matter, releasing a stupendous flood of cosmic rays.

	Atkill's crippled ship could still move. It moved quickly back toward Bay-Raonii, leaving Warren the pleasant task of taming that half-ton of wild material energy flame.

	It was pulsing now, and had built up the fatal acceleration field that warned Warren it was preparing for an instantaneous complete release. Putney was establishing the quench field, which alone could handle it. But now, having knowledge of the results, he did not attempt to suddenly and completely quench it. He brought it under control first, letting it radiate at a stupendous rate in the pure heat range. Then he closed down his quench field. The Flame behind them turned angrily orange and roared in furious protest. The wild Flame before them turned violet and grew smaller. As it shrank the ship's Flame grew white and the roaring ceased. In a minute and a half there was only an incandescent cloud of iron vapor where the wild Flame had been.

	"Hmmm—like the glass lizard. He left a wiggling tail for us to chase while he escaped," said Warren. "We tickled him anyway, and I don't think he knows just what those bombs were. He's afraid to use that wild Flame unless he himself is in mortal danger. Don't blame him. Bet he thought we couldn't handle it either."

	"Our fleet—" said Thaen anxiously. "If they are fighting those Flame ships—"

	The Prometheus was already streaking back toward Anlo. "I don't know how bad they'll be, Thaen. Those ships weren't powered with Flames as great as mine, and as the Flame of that other ship. Atkill set the control finer, and the Bay-Raonii I'll bet don't know how to handle the thing yet.

	"A gun firing powder can send a bullet with greater power than a bow and arrow can develop. So a Flame ship can send more power than an atomic engine ship. But—a small gun cannot hit as hard as a giant catapult with huge steel springs. Those Flame ships have small Flames, and your ships—have gigantic atomic flares."

	The fleets were in sight now. The two thousand ships of Bay-Raonii, armed with the Flame, were rapidly overcoming the atomic powered Anlonian ships.

	Then Warren got in the center of things. At Thaen's order every Anlonian ship dived suddenly and simultaneously under their greatest power toward Anlo. When all were somewhat below the Bay-Raonii Warren established a disc of pure force between the two. The disc lasted for about ten seconds before the accumulation of Bay-Raonii ships blasted holes in it. In the meantime over one hundred giant space-cruisers became crumpled metal cans. The Bay-Raonii, seeing they could overcome at least one weapon of the Prometheus, started toward it Warren released a flock of his terrible explosive shells. Nearly a hundred of them struck targets. Perhaps two score succeeded in blasting down the defensive screens by sheer concentration of explosively released energy. There is more power in a quart of gasoline than in a stick of dynamite—but the dynamite will do a lot more damage.

	In the meantime Warren was trying out his five different projector rays. The cosmic blasted holes in five ships that go in line with it. The green ray of atomic rot ate through a screen, but Warren saw instantly that the screen was designed for it, and had simply fallen before superior power. The radio ray, and the steel explosion ray acted exactly the same. All successful—but all battled by the correct screen.

	, This took scarcely five seconds, and in that time the Anlonian ships were back. They fought easily on an equal if not superior footing with the Flame-powered ships of the Bay-Raonii. But the Bay-Raonii ships had cosmics, for which the Anlonian ships had no defense save speed, and the thick press of other ships. In return the Anlonian atomic bombs were deadly to the Bay-Raonii. With Warren's help it would have been a fairly easy victory. But the Bay-Raonii evidently got a signal from Atkill out in space. At least two hundred giant Bay-Raonii turned their enormously powerful heat rays on Warren. Not the radio-heat which he could have fought with his screen, and no doubt conquered, but the plain infra-heat ray. The reflective force-field turned about 99.9 percent. The cold field would absorb an enormous amount of energy. But when three hundred huge Flame-powered ships strike at once, even though they be weakly powered for a Flame-ship, no force-mirror will suffice. Warren had to retreat hurriedly, with red-hot walls. The flow of energy was so great he was not able to destroy sufficient enemy ships to relieve himself before his own metal walls would melt away.

	He retired, to come back a moment later. Instantly three or four hundred more ships attacked him again. He retreated more hastily this time.

	"That," said Putney, "is that! They've got to keep an eye on us, but they can keep us away while they do things to the Anlonian fleet. Further, our walls don't like that. But—we can do something." Putney was setting up a field. Presently he had it determined properly, and Warren smiled.

	"What is that, Warren?" asked Thaen.

	"It is a field which will disturb any Flame near it, acting as a damping control, cutting down their power. It has a greater effect than our own power would permit, since we are fighting their Flames in a highly efficient manner, while their Flames must fight back in an inefficient way. Let's try it. We can operate from some distance, and while it will cut down the Flames of the Bay-Raonii, it won't touch the Anlonian atomics."

	Warren nodded. Behind them suddenly the great Flame growled and a shrill whine of torn atoms whirled into it. The Flame went from pure white to deep orange; it expanded nearly two feet, and a curious distortion of space about them became evident, as even space itself strained under the terrible, lashing force of the giant generator.

	The effect on the Bay-Raonii a hundred miles below was' evident. Their screens which had been colorless under the power of the Anlonian ships were suddenly orange, their beams which had been stabbing out at the atomic-powered ships were snapped off instantly, and all their power converted for use on the now straining screens. And—immediately the Anlonian fleet poured all their energy into smashing the under-powered screens. That put a further strain on the half-smothered Flames. The Flame of the Prometheus shuddered unevenly, groaning and wrenching at space.

	"Mon—ye've burned two tons o' iron!" roared the Scot in the power room. "Ye can see the block move!"

	A steady orange glare was beating out of the power-room to the control room. The Anlonian fleet was aiding the weakening process now—for half a dozen ships had failed and fallen as flaming wreckage. Their Flames snuffed out in a moment, and relieved the strain on the Prometheus by so much.

	Down below in a thousand Bay-Raonii ships the frightened, uncomprehending men saw their two-foot Flames shrinking steadily, and turning from white to violet, and watched their power failing rapidly. They had almost no beams out now, and still their screens were turning to flaming, inefficient interference; holes were appearing, and waste heat leaking through. Their cold fields that had been protecting them were horribly inefficient anyway, and now, under-powered, were not absorbing energy as they should. All the ships were heating.

	In desperation the Bay-Raonii flag-ship sent the signal to retreat. They could at least outrun these Anlonian ships which had so suddenly acquired deadly power.

	They fled, gaining speed only slowly however, for the Anlonian fleet pursued them while pouring in their deadly rays, forcing the Bay-Raonii to maintain their own, power-drinking screens.

	For two seconds Putney released the straining damping field, and threw the Prometheus' entire power into creating two sheets of force, and pushing them against each other in the center of the fleeing Bay-Raonii fleet. Quintillions of kilowatts of energy flamed into instantaneous heat radiation. The surface of the planet 150 miles below flared red-hot to the horizon—and nearly a third of the Bay-Raonii ships turned white-hot and flowed together in molten globules. The Anlonian fleet, some five miles behind, had put up screens at Thaen's order, and yet two of them had flared dull red. Almost instantly Warren cut off his flaring force-walls and restored the damping field. The Bay-Raonii were taking no more chances. They dropped half their fields, released the energy-wasting cold field, and fled under all the acceleration they could stand. They were out of accurate or effective beam range in ten seconds, fleeing wildly.

-

13

	"We won, Thaen, but it was a costly victory, and a near defeat. You must have the Flame now."

	Thaen nodded grimly. "We must, Warren. Who was the other Earth-man?"

	"Atkill. A scientist of Earth who once before attempted to steal my invention from me, failed, and finally proved himself a man, even though not quite a moral man. He saved his country, and sacrificed himself. He was in a battle, and was thrown through to your world—your system, by the Flame of one of the ships he fought."

	"Then he knows all the weapons you know, and will equip the Bay-Raonii accordingly?"

	"Not everything we know." Putney shook his head. "And he has no calculating machines to help him. But therein lies our greatest advantage, Ran. We've got to get something absolutely new, even to us."

	"So's he," Warren replied.

	"Well—let's get to work. I have an idea for getting real power. Our greatest trouble is that we can't run that Flame as fast as it wants to go. We have to keep it half smothered. Isn't there some way we can let it run completely wild for as long as we want it to, and still direct the energies it releases? Perhaps the best way to stop it after it has run wild a while would be to overload it and quench it in the X-49 field then."

	Warren grunted. "I can picture you. You can't control the energy it releases. How would you send it anywhere—you couldn't direct it."

	"We'd not make the ship like this one—I'm thinking of a new ship, Ran. We'd have a couple dozen major flames. One for a driving engine, like our present Flame. That would also take care of the maintenance operations such as the ordinary force-field lock in the atoms of the walls that make them meteor proof, the air and light, that type of work, and our acceleration compensation. It would be a normal flame like our present one. The one semi-controlled flame to act as our screening. It would be easy to get it to throw a perfectly spherical field of any of the types we know. Then—one or two dozen projector flames. We could have semi-controlled flames mounted for projectors. Normally they'd be just ordinary fully controlled flames, but when we wanted we could release them from control completely, yet keep them from running completely wild and consuming the ship by using power from our third main flame to direct their, operations. So load them that they wouldn't have power to completely escape control—along development 586 that would be. That would give us at least 10,000 times our present maximum. They'd be a little slow starting, naturally, but once started they'd burn iron like a fire burns magnesium tape. And God help what got in the way." 

	"Ummm—we'll have to do some calculation." They did. Within a day they saw it was possible, and the forces of Anlo were turned to building the monster ship they would need. It was to be nearly two thousand feet long, so big and so lightly built that speed might be made, that would make it incapable of supporting itself entirely; permanent Flames were built into its very structure, Flames that created a force-field within the metal of the walls and beams and made them stronger than any metal could ever have been. Without them, the great structure could not have borne its own enormous weight on a planet. With them, nothing less than a planet falling on it could crush it.

	Week after week the Terrestrians worked. And the Anlonian workmen built not only this giant ship, but hundreds of replicas of the Prometheus, save for the speed device, which would have enabled them to exceed the speed of light, for that Thaen's men could not understand, and could not reproduce even with the model before them. It was beyond the power of their minds to comprehend.

	In building the great new ship, Warren and Putney and the Terrestrian crew had to install the necessary apparatus for this work. But most of the apparatus was built, installed, and set up by the Anlonians. One other thing Thaen refused to handle, and that was the wonderfully delicate apparatus that would control the half-mad Flames of the projector.

	Week followed week, and no sign came from the Bay-Raonii. When Warren installed the tremendously more powerful penetrating television apparatus, he found that while he could reach to the surface of Thinal-Ren itself, the white-hot mass of boiling matter that circled the great sun at a distance of barely half a billion miles, and could look across 180,000,000,000 miles of space to Quaren-Ren, the third planet in, the nearest planet, Bay-Raonii always shied away from his apparatus in some way. Atkill had learned how to deflect the device.

	Korbes brought them news one day. He had been working with the astronomers of Anlo, and had learned that they were convinced that Paarool, the giant class scA-4, the huge star that glowed like a second sun to this world only three-quarters of a light year away, was circled by planets. He had set up some apparatus from the Prometheus far from any of the cities, and had been projecting outward for days a gigantic detector field. The dimensions of the field and its characteristics had finally been measured with the minutest care, when it covered an area whose diameter was nearly a light-month. Then smaller fields were set up, and their dimensions carefully determined, and redetermined when all the effects of the planets of the system were known, and the irregularities caused by the works of the Bay-Raonii and the Anlonians in particular were accounted for. The result was that they knew now that at least five major planets revolved about Paarool, and further, that one was inhabited by a highly advanced race, for their instruments had shown powerful force-field effects that could not be natural. The sun itself, of course, caused some effects, but these could be determined fairly easily by using a far smaller field, one not sensitive to the minute disturbances of the artificial force-fields.

	"That's not all," Korbes had finished. "They also show that—somebody or something is coming! Artificial force-fields of varying strength, and of those peculiar dimensions typical of Flames, are being set up somewhere between Paarool and us, and they are coming toward us at a tremendous speed, near that of light!"

	Thaen looked unhappy. "Let us hope they are friendly," he said at last.

	"We'll know in about one raeth," said Korbes. "They are not far off now." After a pause he added, "There must be nearly 1000 ships—and they are huge ships to affect the field from that distance!"

	Thaen looked at his friends in despair. "No friend comes to greet us with a thousand gigantic ships such as these must be."

	Putney looked mystified, and he seemed to be thinking intently. "That race has lived in this space, and near this star for thousands of generations. They have built up a science that discovered the Flame. They know all about the variable status of this star, must have investigated it as intensely as you, probably more intensely. They have the power of the Flame to aid them in understanding the workings of the forces within the star, and you have not had it. Their detector fields told them long ago that your planets were here, probably that your people were here, for your atomic engines produce fields of force measure-able from that distance if a spaceship observatory is used as the base for a detector screen fifty billion miles across. They must know that we are here with Flames by now—no, wait, the strains travel only with the speed of light.

	"Knowing this is a variable star, and knowing what it consists of, they know it will explode. They are not coming to conquer your planets. They would not want to. Why they are coming I do not know. It may well be they are coming to make sure you don't try to conquer theirs."

	"Whatever may be their purpose, Putney, they are just one more factor thrown into our already overcrowded battle front," groaned Thaen. "New science—new weapons—"

	"Sorry, Thaen—we have more to give you too. I think I know all the weapons Atkill can have, but he may develop more. I made a fairly thorough examination of his ship, but the worst of it is that the power-room, where the apparatus would be, was absolutely unreachable. The Flame acted as a deflecting force."

	"And we have some more weapons for you. I'm going to give you everything the old Prometheus had. Some of the things we have now you couldn't run. Not power enough."

	Thaen smiled slightly. "At any rate the Bay-Raonii will get an unpleasant surprise!"

	As a matter of fact, the Bay-Raonii had gotten an unpleasant and angering surprise last time. They had been driven off with terrific losses. Their tremendously powerful ships, more powerful than anything they had ever dreamt of had been unable to defeat the suddenly reinforced Anlonian fleet. Further, Atkill, the Atkill, had told them that Anlo had no Flame fleet—but they had certainly shown power enough for it and the terrible bombs they had had—

	Atkill saw, even as he fled back to Bay-Raonii that he would have to act instantly and with decision. The Bay-Raonii were not going to respect their super-human for long if he came back with a badly crippled ship, and their fleet came in badly beaten. He watched anxiously as he fled, and saw that Warren and Putney had decidedly done things to the Flame power of his ship.

	But at that moment he was more interested in analyzing the multitude of forces at work. He retired hastily about ten million miles, stopped, set up a detector screen, and began analysis work while his crew busied themselves fixing up the leaking ship. Unfortunately, he learned only two things. One was the dimensions and nature of the damping field Warren was using. That was so terrifically powerful that even at a distance of ten million miles it was noticeably affecting his own Flames. Further he learned the peculiar twist-field Warren had developed which turned any field through ninety degrees of space-time, and changed its entire nature. The result was evident, but no further results were. Warren's two fields simply smashed out every other type of field around, save for the momentary burst of terrific electric fields with hints of a magnetic nature. His instruments wouldn't stand the strain of a detector field more than three centimeters in diameter, so his energy pickup was small, so small he could not analyze accurately.

	"Hmmm—the boy is, as I have said, clever. Arty, my lad, calculators are in order. Evidently those are atomic bombs of some sort. They give off tremendous energy too—and they don't stop easily. They went through that energy absorption field of mine and just wiped it out till it wasn't. Now what might they be? I don't know—but I can guess."

	Atkill stopped where he was, and started to work. With his little turban-wrapped Flame he transmuted some scrap metal to aluminum and lithium, and ejected about a pound of the mixture. Then with his Flame in the ship, he started the reaction. As he expected, he got a terrific burst of free flaming atomic energy.

	"That," he said to himself, "would certainly do the trick—and several more for that matter.

	"Now I wonder—could something else of an opposite nature be made?"

	It took him nearly all the rest of the trip back to Bay-Raonii to work out the system of manufacture for his new idea, but eventually he got about half a pound of something that was absolutely black, the blackness of utter nonreflection—and weirdly, everything within two feet of it was darkened, and things beyond it were distorted in their outlines.

	He threw it out into space, and pushed a small tumbler. It was floating about a mile away, visible only as blackness against the disc of Bay-Raonii. They were but half a million miles from the planet now. As he pushed the tumbler a ray of stupendous energy lashed out at the sheet of blackness. The black irregular sheet suddenly spun crazily away, and end over. Atkill caught it between some force planes, and held it. Nearly ten billion horsepower lashed at it, driving stupendous energy into it. Nothing whatsoever seemed to happen. For minutes he continued to burn it with his ray of concentrated destruction and nothing happened. He shifted to a cosmic. Nothing happened. He started down through the scale, and ended with long hertzian waves. Nothing whatsoever seemed to have happened.

	He threw one of his new lithium-aluminum bombs at it, and set that off. There was a slight glow of dull red light. And the sheet of blackness was still there!

	Atkill smiled like a contented cat and turned the most powerful ray of pure infra-heat he could get into it. He continued that for nearly five minutes, and at last a very faint glow began to appear. Instantly Atkill shut off his ray and turned visible light of a much lower intensity into it. It remained absolutely black. Minute after minute passed, then quite abruptly it turned grey. Atkill snapped off his ray. With astonishing rapidity the blackness faded through grey to a bright metallic glint, remained bright all over with shifting, whirling colors for an instant—then blasted suddenly with a stupendous violet flare of light that rocked the half-wrecked spaceship, and flared at the screens with a terrific shock. The screens were out, and the Flame in the ship shuddered once with a terrific thump.

	Atkill looked startled for a moment, then his face settled to a look of thought. "That is not so good. As protective layer it would be fine—till it soaked up all it would hold. Well—"

	The returning fleet was met sadly. Atkill was already back in the Dome. The Emperor, and various commanders of ships came to him there, angrily demanding explanations.

	"Among the Gods," said Atkill slowly, "there are great Gods and lesser Gods, but for that they are yet gods, and greater than Man. I am great in my own world. I am so far greater than you that you do not understand the mechanism I make for you. But in my own world there was one who was as great as I. We quarreled. Through his vast powers he threw me and my friend from that world beyond what you know as the end of nothing, to this place. He thought he had destroyed me forever, but I saved myself to this extent: he hoped I should be destroyed as the iron that feeds the Eternal Flame. I was not. By forces he did not then know, I was able to escape to this space. For a year he believed he had destroyed me forever. In that time I have gathered strength to return and defeat him. Now he has followed me here. He has helped the Anlonians.

	"You saw his ship attack me. He again tried to crush me, destroy me. This time I was stronger than before, though still he was somewhat the greater, for though he destroyed part of my ship, he did not harm me seriously, and he did not force me into that otherness. And I have learned another of his secrets. Bring me a small Eternal Flame."

	A man hastened out, to return in a few minutes with a small Flame mounted on a little block of iron protruding from a single gigantic crystal of ruby that Atkill had made for the Emperor.

	Atkill looked at it and nodded. "That is good. Put it on the stand." He turned to the assembled Bay-Raonii leaders. They were less angry now, somewhat more thoroughly awed. A battle of the Gods! Their God and the God of the Anlonians!

	"I have learned to quench the Eternal Flame—see!" Atkill stood upright, his eyes staring at the little pinpoint of white flame over the gigantic ruby. An aura of faint violet light built up about his head as his brows drew together, and his chest heaved. His breath came harshly (to cover the slight sound of the straining Flame within his turban) and his cheeks paled. The aura of violet light intensified; it seemed to lengthen from him toward the little Flame, and grew reddish, while suddenly the tiny Flame was mounting through white to blue-white, to blue-violet—violet—and with a sudden sobbing wrench of space, it was gone!

	The Bay-Raonii stood suddenly upright as the blue glow appeared about Atkill's head, then disappeared as he slumped suddenly in his seat.

	"It is done. I can make apparatus which will do much the same thing. That is why the power of your ships failed you.

	"I said the Anlonians had no Flames, but you, fools, say they must have. Their power was terrific? It was. Too great for atomic engines to produce, for apparatus to handle? Such as you know, yes. This War-Ran, the Great One who opposes me always, did not give them the Flame because he knew something else that approached it in power.

	"He felt the Anlos not fit for it. He gave them a greater atomic power than ever you dreamt of. You have not the metal whose number on the atomic table is three have you? Neither has Anlo. But War-Ran could make it—as I can—and he did, and with it he made a new atomic engine that gives terrific electric power instead of more heat.

	"Those terrible bombs—bombs so powerful they succeeded in penetrating to me, are made of this new atomic power, which I will give you.

	"But I will give you something else he has never thought of. It is a substance through which no ray can go, no energy can penetrate. It will soak up energy as a sponge soaks water.

	"Each ship shall be coated with it, and no ray, even such rays as the Eternal Flame generates, can penetrate.

	"But this I must tell you: it will not stop the damping energy which chills to lifelessness the Eternal Flame. It will not stop magnetic energy, and it will not stop electric energy. But it will soak them up if they appear as heat 

	"You can coat your ships with this. See!"

	And he demonstrated to them the terrific absorbing qualities of his new blackness.

	And while all Anlo strained to build giant Flame ships, Bay-Raonii built similar great Flame ships, freed now, however, of the restrictions Atkill had imposed on their Flames, and—their outer walls were solid sheets of the utterly black energy sponge. They would need no screens to protect against most of the rays!

	That meant that while they could drive rays at the Anlonian ships, they need not worry about their own defense—for their ships were invulnerable!

	The sponge material was made of iron—but iron that had been treated in a peculiar type of Flame. The Flame released the energy of the iron not as in an ordinary Flame, but it worked on all the iron. When the iron had been about two thirds destroyed, the Flame was quenched. The remaining iron was also there—but yet not all there. It was a skeleton of iron atoms from which most of the energy had been extracted. Any entering energy was simply soaked up to restore the iron to true iron once more—and the instant the entire atom was complete, the artificially strained and tortured iron atom released all its terrific energy. As Atkill had seen. To protect against this happening the ships were being coated with two-inch shells of this weird material. None of it became saturated until all was, so they had hundreds of tons in all to be converted before any would fail. In the meantime they were free to use all their power for deadly rays, while the Anlonian ships divided theirs, and finally would be forced to use all theirs in defending themselves. Then—Atkill expected that a steady rain of his huge lithium-aluminum bombs would break the walls of force protecting the Anlo ships!

	"Only if their power is vastly greater than ours, need ye fear, for otherwise in the end we will prevail. Under no circumstances can you lose greatly, only another retreat may be necessary.

	"And with the vastly more powerful Flame your ships are now equipped with, you will easily overcome any atomic ships that may attack. As soon as your new fleet is ready, we must attack," Atkill had said.

	He left them to the work of reconstructing their ships, and his, while he calculated. He had glimpsed something else—and finally he saw the derivation in the equations his crude machines had given him that he must follow. It took a week of almost continuous work to derive the equation, and hours to convert it to terms his apparatus could handle. In the end he used the little flame in his turban—and suddenly he was wrapped in a dense cloud of utter blackness that extended around him in a sphere. And when Texas turned one of the great projectors of his ship on him, even then he was protected, for the terrible ray seemed to bore harmlessly into the blackness and vanish. It was a strange field that concentrated all energy entering it on the spot at its center where rested a half-pound block of the partly disintegrated iron, and all energy was absorbed harmlessly by it.

	In his ship the half-pound block was replaced by a huge ingot that had weighed nearly fifty tons. Nothing he felt, would ever reach him now.

-

14

	Warren looked down on the new ship that Thaen had had constructed for him. It had been built in a special pocket of the great entrance tunnel, for it was too large for any hangar in the city.

	"It is finished—all we can do," said Thaen. "I have been working on it too, with my men. We have everything installed. And—several new pieces of apparatus. We have borrowed something from your strange ball-lightning device, Thaen, and we have something now that will be very unpleasant. We are prepared. I am going to test it today."

	"I will accompany you, as you asked," said Thaen. Together the two men entered the huge ship. The control room was in the exact center of the ship. There was a huge cubical space here, and at the center of the cube floated the control compartment. It was supported on solid planes and bars of force, and half a dozen great snaky cables led from it to the apparatus ranged around the gigantic power room.

	No single Flame dominated this room. There were four Flames. One burned quietly now above them on a gigantic ingot weighing close to a hundred tons. Automatic forces would keep a steady supply of those gigantic blocks of energy, while others would feed fifty-ton ingots to the three smaller Flames on the floor of the room below them.

	The control room was equipped only with television devices. No direct sight to the outside was possible—but if one set of apparatus was burned out there were a dozen more to take up the load.

	Putney was in the control room now, the Scottish engineer with him.

	"Okay, Mac—Ran's here. Go on below and watch over your pets—they are a bit less tame now, you know." 

	"Aye. That they are." 

	"Ready, Putt?" asked Warren.

	"All set—all the Flames started. Everything set for operation. Going to Il-Anlo?"

	"That's—yes, that's moon five, isn't it? That's what I was thinking."

	"Good enough. Take over."

	Warren seated himself at the vastly greater control board, and Putney seated himself beside his friend, Warren glanced over the instruments swiftly and gingerly applied the power. The walls outside moved slowly across the television screen. There were seven screens so arranged that Warren could see what was happening exactly as though he were actually looking through glass windows. "She's sensitive," he said. The ship suddenly shot forward, turned abruptly, and rose rocket-like through the open tube to free air outside.

	The sun was shining with blighting blue light; it was at a maximum and at noon, but it sank swiftly as Warren headed his gigantic ship out to Il-Anlo. Presently the little moon appeared before them, suddenly expanded swiftly, and a soft hum came from below. As quickly it whirled to a side port, then was suddenly shrinking in the rear-vision screen. It was a point of light in seconds as one of the great Flames roared angry protest to the terrific acceleration. They were accelerating under about fifty thousand earth gravities—yet no one could feel it here in the force-shielded control room.

	Abruptly the moon stopped shrinking, whirled crazily, and was before them, and expanding. In fifteen seconds they were cruising gently over the surface of the tiny planet—scarcely 100 miles in diameter.

	"Going up the scale on projector 27," said Warren. He started in long radio, and the rock below was suddenly a boiling inferno. The incandescence spread to a white-hot pool ten miles across in five seconds, and Warren snapped off the projector.

	"That," he said softly, "was one tenth power. I'm trying the full power of projector one on Cosmic. One is our biggest gun." His flying fingers set up three protective screens, lest rebound rays damage them.

	Then he threw a tumbler, and simultaneously pushed a little slide to the extreme end position. He just barely reached the end before he snapped it back. The television screen had flared violet and winked out in blackness. The side screens showed a terrific glare and a rushing cloud of bright violet gas. Warren retreated half a million miles and set up a new television sender by touching a stud.

	A globe of blue-violet gas was expanding swiftly in all directions, some two hundred miles in diameter now. It was the remains of the moon. Thaen gasped, Warren whistled softly, and Putney nodded gently. He looked at a dial before him. "Five pounds of iron, Warren. I expected that. Fix it up again."

	Warren grinned, and set his new machine to work. Humming whines came from the Flames beneath and around them as a great wall of force condensed around the moon—nearly three hundred miles in diameter now. It was cooling swiftly both by reason of its enormous radiation and because of its expansion. Warren cooled it even more swiftly creating a cold field that sucked out the energy of the five pounds of iron he had thrown into it. In ten minutes the moon was a perfect sphere of mathematical regularity, and at a temperature of absolute zero. Thirty pounds of iron had been consumed.

	"Let's make it look like a normal moon," said Warren. A slowly reaching finger of green touched it, and a bright green light flared from it, and spread like a foul disease across the surface. It lasted perhaps three minutes, and a great cavity of dust was there. The "Anlo" as the ship had been named, rocked to a sudden explosion as a single hundred-pound atomic bomb smashed toward the moon. A titanic flare raised half the surface to a red temperature.

	"That's the old ones—try the new ones." Twelve hours later the Anlo settled back in the berth under perfect, gentle control, and with shining eyes Thaen stepped from her to report to the council—

	The council also had something to report. A scout ship Anlo had sent out—the first they had ever been able to send out—had vanished suddenly that day in a single sudden sparkling of light as reported by the television screen. And it had been a Flame ship!

	"That means an invasion is on its way," said Putney slowly. "I suggest we prepare. Evidently both sides have been preparing to fight with the utmost speed. Bay-Raonii had to rebuild her fleet, but had hundreds of new craft to train her new men. We had to build new ships, and train men. Apparently we have been successful at least in equaling their speed."

	"They were powerful last time, thanks to the Atkill."

	"What if they now have even more?" asked Paernol, the Coordinator of Anlo.

	"What indeed?" Putney shrugged. "There is nothing to be done now. I do not think they have, for we have calculating machines, which are, Paernol, a vaster weapon than any ray or any Flame, for from them came the Flame and all rays. And Atkill has none."

	But Atkill did have some, crude to be sure, but sufficient for his purpose. They had shown him one last trick-Far in the night of space, the probing television of the Anlo found the Bay-Raonii fleet. It did not take long to find that every ship was powered with the greatest possible Flame, and that they were all equipped with some field of force that stopped the television dead at their jet-black outer coating. But it was evident that they too were relying on indirect television viewing now, for no windows or ports of any nature broke the smooth, black walls, save for tiny lens-holes.

	Atkill's greater ship was equipped with ports and windows, as well as television lenses, and there were black metal shutters hung before them. His walls too were impervious to the probing beam.

	Putney looked worried. "I don't like that, Ran. There isn't the effect of the deflecting field there. It looks more as though that wall were opaque to this beam, and yet we know that no matter can be opaque to it!" 

	"I want to go out there and make some tests." The Anlo was already out of the atmosphere now, on its way toward the fleet. The Anlonian ships were waiting back in the atmosphere, where defensive screens were more effective. Warren was forced to parallel the Bay-Raonii and Atkill's ship at a distance of ten million miles. Nearer he did not dare to go, lest Atkill throw out detector-deflectors and prevent his study.

	Something seemed to be preventing it anyway. Time and again Putney built up a minute, delicate field and maneuvered it toward one of the Bay-Raonii, and time after time it entered the wall unharmed, but the instant he tried to change the field in any way to get useful readings, the entire field collapsed instantly and completely. More and more worried, he turned to Warren. Warren was grinning, watching with entranced interest.

	"The old son of a gun! That boy is good. He's got something I never thought of—and will it raise hob for Thaen's boys! Don't you see what that is? It's a sort of half-destroyed matter that can re-absorb all the energy it's lost. Remember that for the last weeks Bay-Raonii has been deluging Anlo with tremendous rays, rays that were absolutely useless and perfectly ineffectual—representing thousands of tons of iron, and we wondered why they were using them, and not making tight, mildly annoying rays that would have required defense? They've been throwing off energy and that was how they got rid of it. That half-destroyed iron will drink energy like space itself, till it's all rebuilt. Then of course—of—mmmmmm—I'll be, it blows up all the energy!"

	Warren turned suddenly to his notebook, and began reading rapidly and carefully. Finally he reached out a hand blindly to a stud, and threw it over. "Thaen—Thaen—Thaen—"

	"Thaen speaking,"

	"All the ships have those big accumulator stacks they used with atomic engines still in place, haven't they?"

	"Yes—I believe so. It wasn't considered necessary to remove them."

	"Listen carefully, and take this data down. Field 589-634. X-754, Y-34-92-1, Z-583-21, T-4 to T-27. Have every ship set that up in spherical shell about them, by means of the C5 auxiliary Flame. With the C6 auxiliary set up field 935-B8. You know that one. Place tap apparatus from the atomic generators in position to collect and feed power to the accumulator banks. That field will protect you against any radiated energy attack so long as the accumulators will take it, and that would be about fifteen seconds if no load is put on them. On the other hand, if you load them with the various electrical devices you have for everything you can, you'll find the first field will absorb any radiated energy attacking, and will release it inside the ship—directly in the Flame that makes it—as an oscillating electric field. The second field will convert it to magnetic to rectify it, and give it off as direct current your—Good Lord! Putt—listen—how about using only that first field, and tapping it with the magnetic semi-inverter field, and then re-inverting that! You'd get your oscillating electric field split into two halves, then back again, and would arrive just half-phase off—and at the same center! Result: two bright lights make a great darkness! Within wide limits, it would require very little power, because the ray-energy would kill itself!

	"Thaen—get that? Set up that first field in your A-2 Flame. Your A-l you need for driving and acceleration compensation. Your A-2 can handle that collector field. That keeps both your main Flames busy. Then you have six class B Flames. You had best use B-l for the field I'm giving you now—"

	Rapidly the men of Thaen's fleet were setting up the field Warren called for. One of the greatest advantages of the Flame ships was that the Flame required only control apparatus of one sort to perform any desired function in the realm of space-fields. It was the knowledge of these space fields, and what control would produce them, that hid the complete knowledge of the Flame.

	Warren was himself setting up such a control field, but he was using two class scA flames, two of those half-tamed Flames, and felt no ray could penetrate.

	"Ran—Atkill's been listening to you," said Putney presently.

	"Uh-hu—expected that. That's not helping him any, just telling him we have a means of defeating any ray he sends before it starts, and that we have his own absorbing material beaten for protective power. Ours won't get soaked and explode."

	"But you gave him hints, even if he doesn't know your control code."

	Warren shrugged. "Had to tell Thaen."

	The Bay-Raonii fleet had turned slightly, and was heading for Warren. He estimated a fleet of no less than three thousand huge ships nearly one thousand feet long! The Flame had certainly been at work in constructing those monsters. Detector fields could pick up little sign of activity outside the walls of absorbing material, but from the windows of Atkill's ship more signs were detectable. Atkill's machine at least carried ten full-powered Flames.

	"Thank you, but I do not mind running just now," said Warren firmly, putting the Anlo into reverse, so that she moved away from the Bay-Raonii and maintained their separation. The Bay-Raonii came on steadily. "We may have ten thousand times the power we had," said Warren, "but that doesn't say we can fight a couple hundred of those babies."

	The radio buzzed sharply, and automatically switched itself on. "Warren—Warren—we are coming out into space since our screening need no longer worry us. These weapons are too great to use near a planet in safety."

	The Anlonian fleet was shooting swiftly out toward the Bay-Raonii—and using a terrific acceleration. They would arrive in a matter of minutes. The Bay-Raonii were shifting about wildly into battle order, and several score suddenly leapt forward under what must have been a crushing acceleration to come to grips with the Anlo. Atkill was not among them. He refrained temporarily! Warren retreated easily in his acceleration-compensated ship, and in doing so laid a few hundred hundred-pound atomic bombs equipped with a simple rocket drive that would drive them toward any force screen in the neighborhood. As a second line of unpleasantness he dropped several hundred fifty-pound material energy Flame bombs that would automatically escape control and become centers of unbearable attraction at the moment a force screen touched them.

	The Bay-Raonii ran into the first line of defense, and an intolerable sheet of atomic flame suddenly sprang up as the protective force-screens met them at head-long speed. The bombs, their concentrated energy suddenly released, ate huge holes in the screens; the great ships plowed into them—and the bombs went out like snuffed candles, leaving only a faint murky glow on the wall of the ships.

	"Jumping orbits—what stuff that energy sponges it! It soaked up those atomic bombs like thirsty sand drinking water! Let's see what happens when—ah!" The first of the Flame bombs had felt the touch of a force-plane, and went off. Instantly the entire Bay-Raonii fleet heeled sharply, the Anlo even stopped abruptly and reversed its motion. No tangible acceleration was produced, for everything was affected similarly, men and machines alike. For perhaps a tenth of a second the acceleration endured, before a ship hit the bomb. The bomb went out as quickly and as quietly as the atomic bomb; only a dull blue glow flowed over the wall of the ship that struck it. Instantly it seemed half a dozen more bombs started action.

	Some half dozen ships were wrecked slightly by their mutual collisions, then no more bombs went off. "Quench field killed 'em," said Putney. "He's learned that."

	Warren shifted in his seat. "A bit of action, brothers."

	The Anlo darted toward the leading Bay-Raonii under her full acceleration, and was among them in an instant. The force-plane that had attempted to stop her had flared in one instantaneous coruscating flame of light, and vanished as the half wild Flame in the Anlo gave a single heavy thump that shook space, then quieted.

	Warren started with ten cosmic rays concentrated on one small spot of one ship. All the near hundred Bay-Raonii had instantly poured their entire power into him, with the result that their rays died abruptly some two hundred feet from the walls of his ship, and the screen Flame whined slightly. The energy of the rays was fighting itself now.

	The ten cosmic projectors each consumed about thirty pounds of iron a second, a total of three hundred pounds of metal. Now there was one effect Atkill had forgotten in his calculation of the resistance of his absorbing material, for such rays as Warren was using were not beyond the power of a big ship using normal controlled Flames. And this was the fact that cosmic rays have mass, real mass, and when three hundred pounds of cosmic rays, traveling at 186,000 miles a second strike any wall—though that wall may be able to drink up the energy—it must take care of the momentum! No material could withstand the blow of those rays, rays like solid streams of liquid. The projectors on the Anlo were anchored by force planes and bars. The walls of the Bay-Raonii were punctured as though by a white-hot needle. A hole appeared as though by magic, and a terrific flood of cosmic rays entered the ship, battered for an instant of time at the opposite wall, and went out—leaving a white-hot wreck wrapped in a shell of utterly black, utterly absorbing half destroyed matter.

	Warren smiled firmly, and turned his terrible pencil of rays on another Bay-Raonii. The second ship crumpled like the first. Two more followed it—and then Atkill appeared, while the Bay-Raonii retreated hastily.

	Warren turned his terrific knife on Atkill's ship. Nothing happened, save that the rays disappeared somewhere between the two ships, and the attacked ship lumbered away gently. She was feeling that terrific push, but standing up to it.

	"He doesn't depend on his walls," said Warren.

	Atkill tried a few Cosmics on Warren. He sent over fifteen pencil-rays, which were promptly absorbed and defeated by their own powers. He tried half a dozen material energy bombs. Warren smiled dreamily as the first struck, and ate at a force screen.

	He pushed a stud and something like a deformed sphere grew suddenly on the side of the Anlo. It moved outward with deceptive appearance of slowness, and as it moved two long, pale-blue arms reached out and enveloped the nearest four or five Flame bombs—and the bombs were gone, and the strange deep-blue thing moved on—toward Atkill. It reached out for his ship; it felt the screen that had drunk in the energy of the cosmic rays; and ultra-thin streamer reached out, seeming to seep through the screen while a pale violet light emanated from it constantly.

	Atkill had sat frozen in amazement. With a cry he gave an order, and an instant later a thudding echoed through the ship. A stream of black lumps struck into that weird blue thing, and they drank in its blue life—and it died. Half a dozen more were starting, and a terrific solid bar from all twenty of the Anlo's projectors. It was a solid bar of ultra-violet heat energy. It faded out abruptly ten feet from the wall of Atkill's ship, but there was a hazy mist of light for ten feet about it that outlined the thin film of the screen.

	Almost simultaneously from Atkill's ship there came a crushing force-wall that closed suddenly on the Anlo. It crushed down, and smashed through the Anlo's great force-screen as though it were a tissue paper wrapping. It crashed into the actual wall of the ship itself, and the two hundred and eighty-five separate Flames that locked the atoms of the metal wall immovably suddenly shrilled menacingly, and turned a deep red. An awful wall of pure energy was flaming outward where the two forces conflicted.

	Automatically and instantly the protecting, energy-absorbing field had rushed in to drink out the waste energy and to cool the metal. In the infinitesimal fraction of an instant before it acted, the metal walls became invisible, save for a very dull violet glow. There was an inner wall of metal, and this too became white-hot, although the cold field was maintained in it. The third and innermost wall of metal was smoking; the men felt a sudden beating wave of heat. And Warren acted. He sent out a field of force that would break down the control of any force-wall, cut it off. It was a circular disc a mile across, and instantly it was a mass of flame, as the awful vice of force released its hold on the Anlo, and she quieted once more as screaming Flames died down. His fingers like the pistons of some marvelous engine, Warren set up the outer force-screen, and put one of the scA class flames behind it. Then he released his failing control damping field, and Atkill's force instantly attempted to return. It failed this time. Warren's face was pale as he adjusted a tiny dial off to one side. As a projector up on the front of the ship strained at its mooring forces, a driving beam shot out that devoured the iron that fed into it at a rate nearly a hundred times as great as before. It was increasing. Warren cut back the dial to zero. The beam fluctuated slightly, and increased once more.

	The Flame that ran it was completely wild! In an instant Warren had cut off its fuels supply, and at the present rate the 100-pound bar of iron it fed on was exhausted in a fifth of a second.

	"His power increased till it easily equaled ours!" said Putney.

	"We're feeding him!" gasped Warren. "The sweetest little thing yet. I make him stop his own rays—and he turns mine around and sends 'em back with his compliments! Let's try forces—"

-

	The projectors snapped off. The load on Warren's force screen fell to practically nothing, scarcely more than a few thousand tons to the square inch. Warren ran the force screen back by sending out one of his own. He started closing his in. At ten feet from Atkill's ship the screen stopped dead, and Warren failed to push it nearer. But Atkill suddenly blossomed forth with a projected magnetic oscillation that passed Warren's screen because it was not radiation. It heated the walls with tremendous speed, and Warren pulled his force shell off with burned fingers.

	"That's a better screen than we've got!" said Warren. "I'll have to—"

	A great green snake, some two feet in diameter, and a thousand feet long issued from the Anlo like smoke coming out of a hole. It writhed gently, and undulated a moment before it began to break up in a thousand little sections, each about ten feet long, and a few inches thick.

	Each was headed by a speck of white light, and each began to glow faintly. They all started rapidly toward Atkill's ship. They fluoresced slightly when they struck Atkill's screen, and stiffened into rigidity—but they went through. Like a flock of pigeons alighting, they nestled on Atkill's ship—and sank into the metal. Instantly the deadly green atomic rot set in where they were, and spread.

	Another snake had issued from the Anlo. Atkill was busy trying to stop the atomic rot the first had started, by adjusting his screen to work in the walls. The atomic rot screen was a sphere, and the ship was not. He could not reach all parts at once. The second crop of the green terrors was on its way, and Atkill wisely started out to stop that. His screen failed to work on the seed of the rot. They glided unharmed through that screen too. He sent out his black shells—and the snaky filaments glided through them—and the shells glowed green! Atkill looked unhappy. He was unhappy, for if these shells could not stop it—

	Half a dozen of the green monsters swam out. A deep violet globe appeared shortly after the last of these, and it started toward Atkill's ship with a business-like efficiency. It hit the energy absorption screen, bounced, hit again, and broke into millions of minute specks of violet light that filtered through the screen unharmed—and joined once more on the other side! It settled on the wall of the rotting ship, and—the Flame broke out! It was actually the heavy metal behind the half-disintegrated shell that was going, and it was the damping effect of the black shell that made it possible for him to quench the Flame. Dozens of the violet globes leaked through, and frantically Atkill set up his quench field and maintained it. The atomic rot he could not control, till his ship became a sphere, so he had set up his field, and pressed it rapidly outward, till it just included the outerwalls at the greatest diameter of his ship.

	The ship was rapidly crumbling away, leaving only a useless dust held in place by force-planes. Grimly Atkill reminded himself that the force-walls were the real walls of the ship. Though the metal vanished, the strength the walls was there.

	The violet globes stopped appearing, and fearfully Atkill groaned. "That ship isn't natural—those things aren't weapons—they're diseases. What more has he got?"

	The new thing was small; it looked like a small cup, some three inches across, a hollow hemisphere. It was almost invisible, individually, but after the first one floated out, thousands sailed forth. All were rotating rapidly so that alternately their closed and opened sides faced the ship. They reached the screen like a swarm of buck-shot spreading, and they touched the screen, Atkill sighed. They vanished. Then he groaned. They were taking bites out of the screen, and vanishing, while- a peculiar shimmer appeared that the cups seemed to enter easily, and safely. The screen itself was scarcely two feet in actual depth, and it was mere seconds before the cups had carved a hole through it, leaving a channel of curiously shimmering light. Atkill drove a tremendous cosmic down that path, followed it with a complete gamut of frequencies, tried an atomic bomb, and watched the cups eat the bomb before it went off. He could destroy the cups momentarily by his beams, but invariably, the instant the beam was off, they all appeared—each with a cupful of cosmic rays!

	Atkill turned his ship and ran for home. A whole flock of those deadly cups, all that had been near him, clung about him, and thousands more were trailing after him at their best speed, each faithfully rotating. Those behind presently wandered erratically and fell away. Those actually within the screen, several hundred of them, began to eat at the walls of the ship. They swallowed the black half-disintegrated matter and disappeared as rapidly as they had eaten the screen. They ate out the force wall behind the material wall, and—he could not replace the force at that point.

	Warren was smiling tensely. "I should have started with that. How's the fleet getting on?"

	"About even. They have slightly better ships. And they've been using the individual fields of the atomic rot successfully. But the Bay-Raonii are more numerous. They've all been handicapped by having to look out for your beams."

	Warren placed the Anlo suddenly in the midst of a group of Bay-Raonii, while the far more mobile Anlonians retired. Instantly, from five great ports, a great stream of the green atomic rot fields shot out, the great snakey fields breaking down into smaller force-fields quickly, fields like the ball-lightning of the Anlonian weapons, which-carried their power locked within them, not loose as in a beam, with the result that a screen would not stop them.

	The concentrated energy of the Flame fields, the violet spheres that reached out and set the Eternal Flame to any iron spouted forth, then the "cups"—hemispheres of concentrated space strain where the strain was so great that when any additional strain, such as the space-strains of matter, or of a powerful shield, came within their compass, they were precipitated half through to that fifth-dimensionless timelessness. But only half. The other half clung stubbornly to this space with exactly the energy of the space-field the cup enclosed.

	Warren dropped a tremendous group of these strange bombs, and of the pale-blue glowing field of force that, when it touched matter, transmuted it instantly to hydrogen.

	Entirely released of control now, they repelled each other, each its kind, violently, particularly the cups; but each was attracted violently by matter—and the forces opposing, each sought a ship, and to avoid its kind. Occasionally two would meet, two different types. A soundless explosion, or a sudden flickering, and they were gone.

	Ship after ship of the Bay-Raonii was suddenly burdened with these flying, searching, indestructible things, and disappeared in tattered, torn metal. Only the Flame itself could consume them all. Only Warren and the Anlonians could control them at all, and then only by making such a concentration of them as to send them away by mutual repulsion.

	The Bay-Raonii were beaten not by beams and screens, but by devouring, individual space fields, each a separate, individual enemy, which, multiplied by the tens of millions, ate their fleet.

The End

Sleipnir  
 06/08/2012